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update: health and settling in and short trip

Wow okay, I knew I hadn't updated in a while but not since the sprint tri??? Oops.

Turns out that my foot really hasn't been okay since the sprint tri, walking has been more or less painful since then and it's caused a bit of a mood slump (can't easily work out either). Work is still very uncertain, though my first stock grant vesting cliff happened today (and two colleagues announced Friday is their last day, no surprise). I can't sell them until the blackout period is over in a couple weeks, but they're mine now. Just crossing fingers that the quarterly earnings report is positive so the price stays reasonable. My company's direct competitor here in YYC declared bankruptcy last month so that's not a good sign (they had a creditor call in a big debt payable immediately).

Health stuff:( Read more... )

I talked to a financial planner and need to follow up with Canada Revenue to see what I'm eligible for as a returning citizen - I might not be allowed to contribute to an RRSP this year since the cap is based on your last tax return, which I don't have cause I made $0 here (will be fined for invalid contributions, yikes). Trying to get through is a chore though, the auto system I keep getting routed to if the wait times are more than 30 mins can't process my request due to not having that filed tax return. The stock grant stocks don't show up in my account for a little bit, but they have vested. I have to file a form still since they're US stocks and I'm a non resident now, that's on next week's todo list, I have until Aug 8 before I can do anything with them. The price is doing well right now at least but not counting on it staying steady as it's double the lowest it has been over the last year. Sadly but understandably, two more pre acquisition colleagues are resigning this week. We're waiting on the CTO and new head of Safety to make org changes, at least they held off past the year cliff.

The week after the sprint tri I went to a queer prom with a gothic glam theme and made a new friend. I sat down next to another person going stag and we started chatting and then hung out all night and have been texting since then finding more and more in common. She's going to help me with dry walling and I'll help with plumbing at her place. :-) Though I did fail to fix my toilet trickle issue - I was one more DIY attempt from getting it (had the wrong sized replacement gasket for between tank and bowl). I had ordered a new toilet for the plumber I ended up calling to install (they estimated it was going to be the same amount of labour to fix vs install new, and I'd get a fancy new dual flush one), but it's got the wrong mounting bolt placement so back it goes. Turns out the guest bathroom has a 10 inch rough in, the master has 12, and I ordered a 12. Tempted to install it in the master, but that's already the newer toilet. He was able to fix the old toilet and the shut off valve (needed soldering). Turns out there's no in unit off for the master bedroom water though so I have to wait on fixing that shower until the water is turned off on the whole building (!).

Then my sister and BIL were away for Stampeded and after driving her to the airport I borrowed their car to go to Vulcan Porchfest - wow, what a step down from Somerville! Each band got a 45 min sequential slot, I caught three of the nine bands and gave up, not my style. I went back to their place to water the newly seeded lawn the next weekend but otherwise we've had enough rain for it to survive. I ended up having to get my dining room chairs delivered since when I used their car to check out a furniture store, the warehouse had closed and I couldn't pick up that day. I figured it wasn't worth it to spend another few hours to bus to the car to drive to the store then downtown and back to drop the car then bus home. Seems like the car share I signed up for doesn't have a lot fo SUVs so that wasn't an option. Then it took me far too long to get them assembled because one seat back + legs combo was just enough out of alignment to not go together (but swapping them with another chair worked, yay shoddy manufacturing). So now I'm planning dinner + housewarming party and having new friends over so it was ultimately worth it.

I was not prepared for how much Stampede took over the city despite being warned. Cowboy cosplay all over the place! I did the contemporary art museum pancake breakfast and the queer club's Brokeback Saloon drag show (with two Canada's Drag Race contestants) as well as the grandstand show and called it good. :-) I saw so many cowboy hats on sale but resisted despite finally unpacking my hat collection and seeing the glaring omission. :-)

Last week I took a class with Two Wheel View on mechanical disc brakes since my new bike is the first one I've had with it. Super good and inclusive class and I made two new friends who live near me and are also working on job stuff - we're going to get together next week to work on resumes and applications. I was in a foul mood to start and the one of the couple just kept being sunshine and niceness and wore me down. :-)

Then it was a whirlwind trip to Edmonton, ostensibly for the comedy festival. I just wanted to see one performer, Matteo Lane and it turned out the Sunday afternoon show was all queer, with Karla Marx and the dj from the queer prom in Edmonton. The evening show displayed various things wrong with comedy these days though I appreciated how hard Martin Short worked - singing, dancing, outfit changes and doing bits from the years of his career. The best part was him having audience members up on stage to do the Three Amigos dance with him, they were super into it. I ended up leaving early. Saturday was all rain all the time, though I finally bought a clear umbrella like I've wanted since I was a kid, I was walking all over with wet feet. Did the indigenous art garden, the botanical conservatory, the art gallery and the museum and also found a few good cocktail bars. Stayed at a hostel international site in a private room and it worked out great, except for the shared bathroom situation. My aging bladder needs easy access to bathrooms in the middle of the night and in this case it was downstairs and always out of soap. I had a sink in my room at least and the bed was comfortable.

Yesterday I met a photographer that I won a thirty minute session with via a raffle and we hit it off so much it extended to 1.5 hours. I had asked for a lesson rather than a photoshoot (we'd talked about that option at the art show) and she did so much work doing a mini critique of some of my photos and giving me tips on how to shoot and how to narrow down picks from the bulk of the shots I take. We're making plans to go to a drag show together at some point. :-)

Today my friend M is arriving from Boston for the Terminus festival and city and mountain shenanigans, I need to take a nap after I set up the guest room after being up for my retina appointment at 5:30 this morning. We're going hiking tomorrow before the first night of the festival (it's gonna be a lot of long nights, doors are at 5 or 6 every night), Friday is a city day then festival, Saturday is the Norquay Via Ferrata with five of us (my sister and her two best friends are also doing it with us) and probably missing the first band, then he leaves Sunday and I still have one more night of music to get through.

Next week is work on teeth, eyes, resume, and a Calgary Fringe one man show by a guy from Somerville MA. :-)

Flettner Rotor

https://xkcd.com/3119/

"And in maritime news, the Coast Guard is on the scene today after an apparent collision between two lighthouses."

https://xkcd.com/3119/

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On How We Respond to Ex-MAGA [curr ev, pols/Ω, p/a/s, morality/ethics]

I think this is important, and really insightful. Video and slightly excerpted transcript below.

Of note, Parkrose Permaculture is a crunchy secular leftist who is, herself, an ex-evangelical, and speaks with some personal authority about the world-view and culture.

2025 July 17: ParkrosePermaculture on YT: "MAGA mom apologizes for supporting Trump. Regrets her vote. How do we respond?" [9 min 43 sec]:

Watch on YouTube

[0:00] Can we talk about that viral video of that young woman who got on here and was like, "Y'all, I'm really sorry that I voted for Trump. I'm really sorry that I was MAGA. I realize now that I was wrong"? This this video:

[0:12] [stitched video, white woman speaking to camera, with title "Official apology: I voted for Trump"]
I voted for Trump and I'm sorry. I am uneducated. I grew up in, um, public school system. I believed anything a teacher and a principal told me, and I didn't question it. And I walked in a straight line and I didn't use critical thinking skills, okay? I didn't read Project 2025, I have a disabled child, I'm a single mom of three. I believed what he said in his campaigns and I fucked up. And I'm sorry, okay?
I find the responses to that video on social media quite interesting, because on one hand you have folks who are like, I don't forgive you. And I understand that. People are angry. Trumpers did incredible damage to this country. Getting Trump and Elon Musk put in positions of power in the United States is killing millions of people, right? We know that just the cancellations to USAID are going to kill 14 million people according to a new piece out in the Lancet. Trump and Steven Miller are now freely enacting an ethnic cleansing in the United States. People have a right to be really, really angry about those things.

[1:21] I've also seen a lot of other creators who have my complexion [i.e. white -- S.] and most of them are women, who have said, "It's okay, girlfriend. We all make mistakes. We all have been hoodwinkedked in the past. Yeah, people in America are very much indoctrinated. And we forgive you. We forgive you."

[1:38] And I guess I, I disagree fundamentally with both of those takes. And here's why.

We need to give Trumpers a place to land as they are deconstructing. Maybe the Epstein files [...] [2:14] And so everybody's going to have– everybody who ends up walking away from MAGA is going to have the beginning of that journey. [...] Not everybody starts from the same baseline. I guarantee you for folks watching that woman, if you wanted to judge her, then you probably didn't start with the same level of intense indoctrination, you're probably not from the same kind of subculture that she's from. And you didn't start from the same place that she's starting at. Every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And you've got to give her space to take that step.

[3:02] So, I, I do want to give her all of the praise for getting online with her real face and doing something that's very hard to do. She was willing to swallow her pride in a culture where we very much center the self and we're not good at taking responsibility. We are not good at eating crow. We're not good at facing the music, right? She did that. [...] She deserves all the praise for that. I don't want to in any way minimize the work, the risk that she undertook in being willing to own it and being willing to say, "I was deeply wrong." Again, especially because we live in a culture where people taking accountability is not something that we are particularly good at or used to.

[4:04] And so I very much appreciate the other creators who are saying, "Come over here with us," – Right? – "I'll be a safe landing spot for you. It is never too late to admit that you were wrong."

But I also think when we're looking at MAGA, who has caused tremendous, tremendous harm in this country, right? They have contributed to the rise of fascism. They have supported the takeover of this nation by a fascist dictator. I understand a lot of them were ignorant. They chose to be willfully ignorant. I understand a lot of them come from a background where they are taught to deny their own intuition, to subvert their own will, to listen to and unconditionally obey what an authority figure is telling them. I know that so many of these folks go to churches that are telling them that Donald Trump is God's anointed, that he has God's favor, that he is doing the Lord's work. I understand the heaviness, the intense pressure, the hard sell of the subcultures that these folks belong to, and I understand the strength of character that it takes in that context to admit that you were wrong and say, "I shouldn't have done this, and I'm sorry."

[5:11] But I would encourage all of those mostly white women creators who are telling this young woman, "It's okay, girl. We forgive you. Everybody makes mistakes": this was not a mistake. And it doesn't really matter that there were extenduating circumstances and indoctrination. Doesn't matter that somebody caused great harm without understanding the full depth and breadth of the trauma and the suffering they would inflict by supporting this regime.

I know I have brought it up many times since the election and it continues to be one of the most relevant books when we are discussing people leaving MAGA, when we are discussing people deconstructing from Trumperism, when we are discussing how it is that we fold these folks back into society, and that book is called The Sunflower by Simon Visenthal. It is an incredibly important and relevant book in these times.

The subtitle of the book is "On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness." It is a book about a young Nazi soldier who is dying and he wants to be forgiven the sins that he committed in the Holocaust. But he is asking forgiveness of somebody who is not his victim. And the question that is being posed to all kinds of faith leaders and philosophers in this book is who has the right to extend forgiveness, and what does it mean to extend forgiveness and what does it mean to ask for forgiveness?

[6:35] And I know I've said this in other videos and I just I think it's so important to continue to reiterate it when we're looking at ex-Maga. I appreciate their apology. I appreciate their contrition. I appreciate that they have realized how much harm they've caused and that they want people to know they no longer support the things that they once voted for. Really important.

But at the same time, if we are not the injured party, do we have a right to forgive? And also, there's so much more to earning forgiveness, working to be forgiven, than just saying, "I'm sorry."

[7:12] I know in evangelical Christian culture it's like if somebody says "I'm sorry", it's like, "oh, we forgive you! That's what Jesus would do!" Other religions don't view it that way. But also I personally think if somebody is truly truly sorry for what they've done, they need to work to repair the harm that they've inflicted.

If somebody voted for Donald Trump and they now realize that they were wrong, [if] they now are asking you to forgive them, they need to demonstrate changed behavior. They need to now go volunteer for a Democratic campaign in the midterms. They need to commit to evangelizing on behalf of democracy and against the fascist regime of Donald Trump to all of the people in their subculture, in their community, all of the MAGA that they know. They need to go actively work for immigrants rights. They need to contribute financially to organizations like the ACLU, to progressive Democrats in the midterms, to organizations that are engaged in mutual aid for all of the people who are suffering because of what MAGA has done.

[8:27] It takes a measure of risk to get on the internet and say, "I'm so sorry. I regret my vote for Donald Trump." Yeah. And we want to acknowledge that they have taken that risk. We want to acknowledge the work that is done. We want to acknowledge how hard it is to take that first step on that journey. Absolutely true. But at the same time, they need to put their money where their mouth is.

They need to work to repair the harm that they have done. They need to work now. They need to sacrifice now. They need to demonstrate changed behavior because at the end of the day, words are cheap. People are suffering and dying. Now, if you truly understand the ramifications of what you have supported and what you have done, you must work to fix it.

[9:10] So, to that young woman and any other person who has left MAGA, who has taken that first step on your deconstruction journey: I applaud you. That's wonderful, that's wonderful. If your conscience is eating you up? If you have loads of regrets? The best way you can work to find peace in your heart, to find peace with the people you have harmed, is to get to work – fixing it. Because there's so much work for everybody to do. Join the resistance. Yep, come join the party. Yeah, we'll take you. We are a safe landing spot. We have lots of work for you to do here.