Work, IPL, window blinds, green line
Mar. 27th, 2023 12:07 amA week much like last week, which is to say that a 2-week work binge is now being brought to an end. My body got annoyed and my mind got jittery. Still, while it was going I managed to not only have fun but catch myself having fun, with work even! A definite accomplishment in the internal milieu. The next couple of weeks are full of deadlines, so I hope I can keep a bit of the feeling going even as the binge ends. I'll be shifting my work hours for a few weeks, as an experiment, to see how it works for me to have half-days on Tuesday and Friday; this will get me a bit more overlap with the mothership in total, and set up both Tuesday and Friday to have a nice structure of "long workout, then half-day of work, then date."
Small things: we finished building Starry Night and it's gorgeous. A different "we" sent in the final application to the town of the squirrel, to let us rent out the cottage there as a studio apartment. I organized a "leaf party" for picking up leaves from my yard, on Tuesday, and it's ridiculous that this took most of the winter but it's done now. And I finished listening to Sea of Tranquility, which I liked quite a lot; it had a really original overlap of two standard SF tropes, in which one led to the other really cleanly and intuitively. The author wrote some really good moon colonies into it, casually, in passing; I'd be happy to read more stories set there.
The squirrel's mother is visiting for a couple of weeks and arrived on Tuesday. She likes to give rectangles of fabric to people, and this time she gave out lushly populated, very colorful scarves. She had the squirrel give mine to me privately and apparently she said "here, the one with the black background, that's for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
flexagon right?" I'm super tickled to know that there is a sweet old Indian lady who not only thinks of me and recognizes my style to some extent, but thinks a multi-colored animal-covered scarf is goth. (That. Is. Adorable.)
On Friday I got some long delayed self-care, with a badly-needed hair trim and then the face IPL. The latter hurt more than it did on my shoulders and had one surprising effect, which is that the little red capillaries around my nose are gone (!). Apparently they collapse pretty instantly upon being zapped, and the esthetician can watch it happen, which I hadn't known to expect. Those particular zaps were especially painful, but worth it, and in 10-14 days I'll also have less sun damage.
Saturday I spent a few hours replacing the cords of three window blinds with new cord from fixmyblinds.com (with a moment of femme vindication when my super-pointy eyebrow tweezers turned out to be the right tool for part of the job). It felt good to do something tangible, to dig physically into some of the machinery of the house and fix it. I'd never done window blinds before. I followed up by installing seven more sets of cord winders / cord cleats to hold both new and old cords up out of the kitten's reach.
Now to just get back into workouts. Yikes. I hate the result of rest weeks. I'm trying to start a new set of Perth-coach workouts, and on Friday I did all but handstands because my body was just too baffled. Sunday I then missed my handstands AGAIN because a pointy part of the kitten met the fleshy part of my hand and now I'm antibiotics again and arrrrgh. But anyway. Back to it as soon as the swelling goes down. At least she didn't bite me this time.
Sunday, also, I went in to Boston to meet up with Helios for dinner, and Google Maps advised me to walk north and take the Green Line extension into town so I did. It was weird and really fun to find a T station where there had been none before, and to go flying so fast on new tracks, at the same time my usual line has new "slow zones" due to its old awful tracks. So that was my little adventure. We went to Saltie Girl where I had a delicious prickly pear drink and a ridiculous amount of crab meat, plus a U6 shrimp, and nobody else sat too close to our table for comfort. We talked about some social messes plus wealth, class, gender etc, and made a lot of juvenile jokes about nuts. I sure like that squirrel a lot.
I've been playing with Bard as well as ChatGPT, but don't worry -- they didn't write this post.
Small things: we finished building Starry Night and it's gorgeous. A different "we" sent in the final application to the town of the squirrel, to let us rent out the cottage there as a studio apartment. I organized a "leaf party" for picking up leaves from my yard, on Tuesday, and it's ridiculous that this took most of the winter but it's done now. And I finished listening to Sea of Tranquility, which I liked quite a lot; it had a really original overlap of two standard SF tropes, in which one led to the other really cleanly and intuitively. The author wrote some really good moon colonies into it, casually, in passing; I'd be happy to read more stories set there.
The squirrel's mother is visiting for a couple of weeks and arrived on Tuesday. She likes to give rectangles of fabric to people, and this time she gave out lushly populated, very colorful scarves. She had the squirrel give mine to me privately and apparently she said "here, the one with the black background, that's for
flexagon right?" I'm super tickled to know that there is a sweet old Indian lady who not only thinks of me and recognizes my style to some extent, but thinks a multi-colored animal-covered scarf is goth. (That. Is. Adorable.)On Friday I got some long delayed self-care, with a badly-needed hair trim and then the face IPL. The latter hurt more than it did on my shoulders and had one surprising effect, which is that the little red capillaries around my nose are gone (!). Apparently they collapse pretty instantly upon being zapped, and the esthetician can watch it happen, which I hadn't known to expect. Those particular zaps were especially painful, but worth it, and in 10-14 days I'll also have less sun damage.
Saturday I spent a few hours replacing the cords of three window blinds with new cord from fixmyblinds.com (with a moment of femme vindication when my super-pointy eyebrow tweezers turned out to be the right tool for part of the job). It felt good to do something tangible, to dig physically into some of the machinery of the house and fix it. I'd never done window blinds before. I followed up by installing seven more sets of cord winders / cord cleats to hold both new and old cords up out of the kitten's reach.
Now to just get back into workouts. Yikes. I hate the result of rest weeks. I'm trying to start a new set of Perth-coach workouts, and on Friday I did all but handstands because my body was just too baffled. Sunday I then missed my handstands AGAIN because a pointy part of the kitten met the fleshy part of my hand and now I'm antibiotics again and arrrrgh. But anyway. Back to it as soon as the swelling goes down. At least she didn't bite me this time.
Sunday, also, I went in to Boston to meet up with Helios for dinner, and Google Maps advised me to walk north and take the Green Line extension into town so I did. It was weird and really fun to find a T station where there had been none before, and to go flying so fast on new tracks, at the same time my usual line has new "slow zones" due to its old awful tracks. So that was my little adventure. We went to Saltie Girl where I had a delicious prickly pear drink and a ridiculous amount of crab meat, plus a U6 shrimp, and nobody else sat too close to our table for comfort. We talked about some social messes plus wealth, class, gender etc, and made a lot of juvenile jokes about nuts. I sure like that squirrel a lot.
I've been playing with Bard as well as ChatGPT, but don't worry -- they didn't write this post.
