ice water and ocicats

I had mood swings this week, more than usual, enough to be notable. First I felt bad about handstands and acro, and couldn't shake it all day Monday despite doing all the mood-shaking self-care things. Moods are just part of the human condition, and I try not to overthink them, but that was a sticky one. Tuesday I played DDR and had lunch with friends and a) that was it for the mood, b) I maybe want to get DDR set up at home now? The game thought I was awful but who caaaaares.

Vaguely related: Singing Carrots looks like a lot of fun. Gamified vocal training? It really looks like something I envisioned when I first did the singing for Rock Band.

• Vigilance continues: I did indeed draw up a little graph of how my income works these days, or will start working soon, and somehow noticed that my automatic COBRA payments had increased in January without any notice that I can remember (though I must once have noticed that they vary by calendar year). So I had to pass along half that cost to the poor bug. Also Adobe is charging me for something monthly? And like, why? And like, don't.


• Futher vigilance: started weighing myself every day, mostly to see whether I can actually do that without forming any unhealthy behavior around it. What have I learned so far? Well, the day I ate a bunch of salt, I was 1lb heavier the next morning, and back to normal the day after that. Also, pooping is an effective and quick weight-loss technique.


• Reading someone's sewing tutorial, and she wrote "I hope you will pick a simple shape with not too many sharp corners, if you are a beginner." That's so kind, compared to the usual "I'd recommend" that you'd have seen in most American tutorials.


• The Olympics are so brutal. I woke up a few mornings ago to read about Lindsay Vonn's catastrophic fall in Alpine skiing, and today to read about Ilia "The Quad God" Malanin folding under pressure. He's calm in his interviews, and discusses a feeling of losing time during physical motions that I understand all too well.


• Understanding something better: I had a little breakthrough on understanding a circus move, and that circus move is a press. This would take a lot of words to describe properly, but, improperly: pressing into a forearm stand, from a forearm backbend. Feet up on a surface because I'm not THAT bendy. And it suddenly made sense to me that I could hold a shape with my body/legs, shift my shoulders enough to hover the shape, and then roll the unchanging shape as my shoulders came back to a more sustainable position. So I suddenly did three in a row, without cramping up my hamstrings like usual. It's on video and you can clearly see how the second rep is way smoother and looks easier than the first. It was only later that I realized all these same words, especially about rolling and staying rounded, are the ones my coaches use for a forward handstand press. The shape looks pretty different but the idea -- at least the way Spring teaches it -- is the same. Whoa.


• Finished watching Season 1 of The Leftovers (TV show), as well as finishing the book, which I'd started reading in order to better understand the show. Then we looked at the summaries/blurbs for the next two seasons, and... nah. It seems to go in weird directions I'm not going to follow. I like the idea of picking up a story a few years after some world-shaking event, but When We Were Real does it better and without falling into misery porn.

And let me not forget! On Wednesday I got an acceptance letter from a crossword I submitted to NYT Games! Gonna be published, baby. And yes, I am very happy about that. :D

Not a lot to report this week. I did a lot of shoveling on Monday and Tuesday -- I'm particularly proud of remembering about our street drains, and finding them and making sure there are paths to them for the eventual meltwater. Not that anything has thawed yet; we're still buried in piles of white. I did a little reverse applique on a tank top, just to try out some techniques. Cooked dinner for my polycule as planned, and finished Winter Burrow. After that, I was felled by a classic rhinovirus and nothing else happened. My acro class was also cancelled on Monday due to the snow, so I've now missed a full week of acro practice and I am hating that to pieces.

I did still get handstands and contortion in, and with a couple of interesting "aha" moments in each handstand class. Spring keeps leveling up my press drills, and there's a new one I haven't quite managed to do yet where I get support just on my arms, and just for the first part of the press, after which I'm supposed to come off the support and actually balance myself like a grownup. SIGH. I have a much younger friend who's going to be way better than me in two years but is currently right around where I am -- and she's just starting the same exercise, too. The friendly competition is good for me, in that it gives me some kind of faith: if she can do that, then I probably can too. For now, anyway.

I navigated a tricky situation involving the hemming of a kid's pants, which I think I handled pretty well in the end. My own parents used to clash with me on how my clothes fit, so I was not very on board with doing an undesired hem, and I told the kid I wasn't going to put needle to fabric unless/until they were okay with the proposed change. Who knows whether they believed me -- I meant it though. Mercifully, after some pinning and re-pinning we found a pants length that everyone seems cheerful about.

Called my congress critters. It feels ridiculous to tell Elizabeth Warren what I think she should do about ICE or anything else, when she has political opinions more nuanced and on more issues than I ever will. But if it helps her to say she's hearing from constituents, then very well, I'm in.

Now, back to paying some kind of Weirdo Tax -- yet another insurance company is saying they won't cover me anymore (this time, just part of my real estate, because I don't own it with "household members"). I really don't like how messy my insurance situation is. I haven't done anything wrong, but my finances don't quite look like the average American's, and "unusual" is expensive because it means "hard to assess". I strongly respect insurance companies for being data-driven in the face of all political pressure, but sometimes they piss me off for the exact same thing.

What's next? Well, I got past my low-buy January, so I can buy fabrics and shirts for further sewing adventures. I've also signed up for Flash Fiction February through storytellingcollective.com, which is something I wanted to do / tried to do last year but couldn't because of work. So, assuming I can avoid getting sick, I guess I'm planning a month of creative output to go along with my handstand drills. Wish me luck. My nose says I'm still only at 90%, but improving.

This week was so much, I really wish I'd written separate posts about some of these things. It is troublesome how much good stuff and bad stuff happens at the same time -- and usually far too quickly for me to absorb, metabolize and think over the last experience before there's another.

I said last time that I hoped to have a couple of days in which to get more creative. So let's start there -- I got them! I finished my exercise video, and also got on with various sewing repair/alteration projects. That's been amazing because having a serger is amazing. The way it cuts as well as making a seam means I don't have to be very precise at all about cutting out pieces, as long as I'm precise when feeding fabric into the machine. So among other things, I 100% finished the project I thought would be the most daunting: adding size to a T-shirt by opening the side seams and adding racing stripes. And I got a little artsy with another one, where I was trimming down a loose dress and decided to try out some reverse applique with the leftover pieces of fabric. That was surprisingly fun, and came out very cool too. I asked Perse to draw on the dress, and went home and stitched around the drawing before snipping it out with scissors, and none of it required measurements or much planning. (Am I getting more punk, here in my middle years? Yes.) I enlarged the arm holes of a tunic, and am turning another tunic into a T-shirt, and am generally having a great time. Once the repairs are done, I'm going to maybe get into reverse applique in earnest. Blank T-shirts are cheap.

Circus continues to be good or great. We got our first standing hand-to-hand completely away from the safety mats, on Monday, and quite a few more on Friday.

The new condo: I got overconfident, and maybe a little bit antsy, and decided to get an official lead inspection. I thought the odds of finding lead were approximately zero, given the recent gut renovations to that house, but I didn't realize that the inspector would also look at the exterior of the building; yup, we've got some lead on exterior basement window sills, and now we have to disclose that to tenants and I'll have to find a deleading place. And I will get on that tomorrow, because for the rest of the week I was busy with the next things. It should all come out okay in the end, since there's a $3000 tax credit for bringing a unit into lead compliance, but in the meantime what a pain.

Pasta?? Yes pasta, I attended a fresh pasta cooking class at Dave's Fresh Pasta with the squirrel and it was a good time. We actually made pasta from eggs and durum flour, rolled it, and cut it into spaghetti and fettuccini. They fed us a lot of snacks plus salad, sandwiches, and our own newly made spaghetti, and the squirrel had a marvelous time. I forgot all about the idea of Dry January, and had a couple tiny glasses of the nice white wine they were serving; so much for my dedication to sobriety.

Cat. This was the worst. Early in the week Caltrop, the impetuous 3-year-old cat, simply and abruptly stopped eating. This took a while to notice and be sure of, especially since I usually feed the cats their wet food while heisenbug usually feeds them dry food. So on Monday she got her annual checkup and I said everything was great, but she'd actually already stopped eating, and on Thursday I was back for an urgent set of X-rays and fluids and anti-nausea and appetite stimulant. Ugh. Which barely worked, and also she freaked out and decided her brother was a stranger and we had to separate the cats and it was all a giant pain, so on Friday we went back for bloodwork too, but after that she started eating a bit. Dry food only so far. But it's been more every day, and today I found a couple of "moist" meaty options she will also eat. A vast improvement. I'm not sure if I just spent $1000 for nothing, or if we just saved her life, or something in between; or if she had acute-onset pancreatitis (which the blood test might still tell us) or a Mysterious Cat Thing. She still won't eat her normal wet food.

Metamour. Overlapping this, on Friday, Perse had her third abdominal surgery in four years. So Friday was just the squirrel and me sending worried text messages back and forth about our creatures. We gave up on saying "Everything is okay" and settled on the more plaintive, but more accurate, "Some things are okay... so far." But her surgery went well. We were planning to visit her in the hospital on Saturday, but as we drove there we found out they were discharging her early (!), so the "visit" turned into picking her up and taking her home! Discombobulating, given that they said 2-4 days initially, but positive.

Tenant? For the third time, I have someone halfway through signing an 18-month lease on my new condo. Hopefully this one will finish signing.

In the meantime I'm just tired. And glad that my cat is eating. And also tired.

So that was it; that was the Jupiter splash. I'm on an airplane back toward home, after the usual 3-4 day slumber party with the bug's oldest friends, and it's a new year! (I uh, could live without this morning's US strikes on Venezuela, but right now I'm just going to write about my small and low-stakes trip.)

I flew out late on Tuesday, which gave me time to clean up the house and have a bit of a day at home but might have ended up being worse for jet lag (no West Coast daylight after the flight?). I didn't think to bring melotonin, or ask the bug whether he had any, and was miserably lagged for about two days before finally getting the long, resetting night of sleep that I needed to shift.

On the way out, a nonstop, I read Katabasis nearly cover to cover -- it was entertaining, a light read with RF Kuang for once not blowing the ending. It did an excellent job of skewering academia, or, more broadly, the whole notion that an association with glitzy famous brainy institutions is the thing to live for. And, with two GFBIs in my own rear-view mirror, I appreciated that. I thought I might nap, but there was only the reading, and the steady counting of how many vodka "nip" bottles my seatmate was consuming (five, by the time we landed). There was a cat behind me who didn't enjoy the flight even a little, which made me miss my own cats.

In the gift exchange I picked up Legends and Lattes, which I promptly also read. That was another light read, about a middle-aged badass orc lady who was retiring from fighting to open a coffee shop. Readers, I think I have a type right now when it comes to protagonists. Along with that there was grocery shopping, a barley-and-beef soup that I meant to get the recipe for, the new music we can always count on our Seattle friend to provide, and two longish bright-green walks in the mossy parks of the Pacific Northwest. The guys humored me by stopping briefly on our 12/31 walk to get a quick, bad outdoor handstand picture, completing last year's new year's resolution. And then we went to a party at a friend-of-friend's house, which I was far too tired to appreciate. Later we also had dinner with a friend who I think is now best described as the bug's comet; he flew out early on Tuesday, to spend some time with her before I came out, and she gave me an off-the-ground acro hug and it was lovely to catch up with her. There was also a brunch with Seattle friend's mother, who was sharp and fun at almost 80. The group isn't always so social! But this year it was, and it also somehow made time for a couple of traditional good-bad movies (Butt Boy and Good Boy, because I just know you care).

This year, maybe just with the perspective of my own big 2025 changes, I saw a bit of stuckness in the friends we visited. There's the one who thinks 2026 will be a shit-show, and entirely because of work, while being pretty sure he has enough to retire but not being willing to even run the numbers to see. Then there's the one who's rented the same packed, one-bedroom apartment for 25 years, and has a shelf full of very obsolete books over his desk computer (I'm talking Office 98, HTML 4, PalmPilot). He uses our visits as motivation to deep-clean every 3 years, and I would have happily spent 30 minutes helping him sort out those books, but... that stuckness isn't mine to un-stick. For someone who lets things get messy in between guests, he's anxious enough about little things being done just right that I suspect he has a lot of anxiety about changes to his physical space. Though he puts up with guests okay.

I loved the very dense fog we encountered late on NYE. It gave the air a volume and texture that we only ever get during snowstorms on the East Coast. I'm realizing that dense atmosphere like this has something in common with the spiderwebby "structure in the air" stuff that I don't like, as indeed do things like drone shows, but I am excited by it instead of bothered. See also the difference between wall sculpture and painting -- or am I reaching now? The third dimension; it matters, and there's more to explore there.

As always, there was much trading of video game suggestions, and when I get back I'm totally going to play Winter Burrow with the squirrel.

When did you feel the most joyful and carefree?

Probably when I was in Cedar Point with the bug, nothing much on my mind besides which roller coasters were open. There were some good day trips this summer, too. And Christmas. And laughing over nothing with my squirrel. Basically having semi-structured but open-ended fun with in groups of 2 or 3 people.

What gave you energy -- and what drained it?

Backbend lessons, and also handstand lessons with Tiny Person.

As for draining, can anything really beat promo discussions at Zillian? And the miserable dragged-out countdown to quitting? I think not. Oh wait, except for watching that orange fuckface take office again and immediately set to work doing terrible things.

What seemed impossible -- but you did it anyway?

Successfully argued for two L6 promotions on my way out the door of Zillian, even though I should have been a lame duck.

What habit, if you did it more consistently, would have a positive effect on your life?

There are probably a few of these. The big thing I'm aware of falling down on is... email. Haha. Personal email used to be the easy one, compared to work email, but now that I don't have scheduled time to just be on computers I haven't been regularly sweeping through my stars there, either. If I don't get better at it soon, I'm going to have to start putting it on my calendar as a task.

What did you try to control that was actually outside your control?

The purchasing schedule for the condo I bought. I suppose that when renters show up (and actually sign their lease) is outside my control, as well.

Is there anyone you need to forgive in 2026?

Nah, fam. My grudge list is sleek, aerodynamic and fine-tuned.

This week was a little less heavily scheduled. I've fallen out of the habit of recording daily snippets, and I wonder if that's part of why I had meaner voices in my head this week. The voices are adaptive and can keep up with whatever I do or don't do. Lately they are super harping on the idea that I can't work a corporate job anymore -- which, if that's even true, is true because I don't want to anymore, and obviously wanting to is a pretty solid precondition for doing it. As someone kindly said to me, Michael Phelps can't do another Olympics either, and so what? But I'm no Phelps, I'm just another crispy critter from the burnout zone that is tech. Sometimes that's scary, and sometimes I think recovery/pivots are going just fine.

Satisfying continuations on last week's stuff: I used the serger to make a cover for the serger, out of scrap denim, which felt right and proper. One thread still has a tension issue I haven't solved. And we bought a new dining table, a very beautiful refurbished teak table that will take weeks to get to us but which will probably be Our Table for the rest of our table-owning lives. I fed the new squirrel tenants every morning.

I had two catch-ups with old friends, outside of my usuals: one helping to unpack a new kitchen, and the other one playing in the friend's home gym. The friend has an aerial point with some straps, and spoke temptingly enough of straps as cross-training for handstands that I tried to sign up for straps 101 at circus school next session. Failed, but I just confirmed I can do the one cool exercise she taught me on my monkey bars in my home gym. Shrug.

Words I looked up: AIXI, philippic, sapid, abreactive, Blahaj, colliery.

Things I learned about: population axiology (not that I've finished the whole paper), gooners and gooning (those wankers are just the kind of bizarre subculture I love to read about), environmental causes of Parkinson's disease. Money quote from that last one: “The Human Genome Project was a $3 billion investment, and what did we find out? Five percent of all disease is purely genetic. Less than 40 percent of diseases even have a genetic component.” Oooof.

And just because it is the season, we now have a tree in our living room. Not decorated yet, but it smells nice.

Two pieces of good news, one expected and one not:

• I have tenants for the new condo! Nothing's signed yet but everyone wants to sign. I had two options, and I picked the pair of people who had a) lived together before and b) had owned a home before. Ex-homeowners make the best tenants. It's also the case that the ones I chose are the ones who're definitely going to use the back yard (for their small, middle-aged dog), and there's some petty pleasure in that, given how hard I pushed for a commonly-owned yard. Oh and one of them is a mechanical engineer who likes to learn how things work, but there was actually a mechanical engineer in each of my possible pairs of tenants so that wasn't a decider. (ETA: these folks flew home, measured their furniture and got a whole lot less excited. So oops, and maybe there'll be better news later.)


• I have tenants in my SQUIRREL NESTING BOX, omg, squeeeee! I saw one go into it yesterday morning, carrying leaves, and immediately got very excited and ran off to get wool and alpaca roving from apfelsingail. This morning, more activity between about 9AM and 10AM, with the one Very Responsible Grownup continuing to carry up batches of leaves. Then, incredibly, a juvenile reappeared, one that we'd seen a few days ago but not since, and it went into the box too, and we got pictures of all this. Then a third squirrel went in there at 10 and so they have remained. (Or actually -- the young'un just poked its nose out -- but mostly.) The warm fuzzies could not get any more literal! I've been hoping for this ever since installing the box in spring, and I guess it appeals more when the temperature drops, because there they are now. Curled up inside, with straw and leaves.
  

Creating environments and then watching them get used is absolutely and 100% my jam. Even when it involves talking to HVAC people more than I'd usually choose to, but that's for another post.

A gentle week in most ways, although workouts were un-gentle: three private handstand lessons on three days in a row, followed by three days in a row with backbends. And yes this is more than I care to be asking of my hands and wrists, so today in open studio I took it pretty easy and avoided handstands. The sixth of those days was my last -- for now -- private walkover lesson with the tumbling coach, yesterday. I still don't have an unspotted walkover, but I'm within spitting distance again on the back one, and she taught me some cool drills for active splits and for shoulder stretching. No regrets.

On Tuesday I managed to watch Episode 3 of Pluribus with both the bug and the squirrel, making it the only episode I haven't seen twice. I wish more people were watching this show so I could talk about it more. I think I would want to join the hive mind; I'd be ragingly curious, and also afraid it wouldn't last (and I wouldn't want to miss out on the experience). But thus far I'm the only one; neither of my partners would want to.

Thursday I met a leak detection specialist over at the rental cottage, and we searched for any evidence of the leak our tenant was worried about. There was no such evidence found, but we did get locked out, so the whole thing involved a locksmith at the same time(!), followed by doorknob shopping and installation. The dead doorknob was some kind of commercial version very rarely used in residential settings, so the locksmith had to be pretty destructive to remove it.

Overall, I feel I'm preparing for the winter season in a very primal way. Laying in supplies. Looking for things I'm running out of, and buying new batches of them (lip balm, underwear, food storage containers, soap, earplugs). I took my deep-winter clothes out of storage, and stored my high-summer stuff instead, and bought two cheap pairs of joggers that feel strange -- but admittedly soft and comfy -- on my legs. The smart thing to do would be to prepare more for Christmas, but no, my body only cares that it's dark outside and feels that some kind of hibernation is in order.

Not sure if I've mentioned it here before, but I fully intend to enter a sewing phase once the condo project is fully settled down. I've been looking around at sergers and coverstitch machines, and learning a bit about things like blunt-tipped needles for sewing jersey. Somewhat amazingly, it seems there's a serger at my local library that patrons can use! So I intend to trot on over there, see if it's real and try it out before buying anything.

Still very happy. Just living my little life. Birdie's other dad visited this weekend and had lunch with us, and he burst out that he loved me and is so glad I am around and being in Birdie's life. SO CUTE. Granted he was well into the 2nd cocktail at that moment, but still.

Like many circus students, my sense of what's typical/standard in terms of fitness and body type is skewed by my surroundings -- and this is perhaps made even more so since I started taking more private lessons in the daytime, although I still see my fellow students around too. I am, in short, surrounded by professional circus teachers, all of whom are strong and capable. If I log on to Instagram, I see yoga teachers and mobility bros and handstand teachers doing highlight-reel stuff, and these are all beautiful and strong and capable.

Sometimes this can indeed make me feel a little bit sub-par, not in a self-hating way but just matter-of-factly. Then I go out on the street and remember what "average" is, or someone compliments me at the gym, and I'm like: oh yeah. I'm actually super athletic and not-a-beginner.

But you know what's funny? I like living in my curated world where many beautiful people can do these difficult, gravity-defying things, and where I get to watch them. I like how many of them are sharing, whether it's the beautiful things themselves or the drills that helped them get the skills. It makes me feel like people are awesome, and keeps me inspired.

Does it help that I am looking at things I could theoretically learn, rather than at things one basically has to be born with? Or is this just being in my 40s, not my teens? I know that Instagram and the like can make people feel truly awful, and that there are real dangers to the comparison game.

(I had a nice handstand lesson this morning, in which Spring and I worked on my jumps. My jumps, truly, lag behind the rest of my skills, but we were able to slow them down and regress, and work with my new understanding of the rib cage. And they started to feel better! We also did a lot of very detailed ab work, inverted on the shoulderstand device, which has generally not felt helpful but which did feel helpful today. I have hope. All of that predated the thoughts above, which came about when I was practicing acro with my partner and we talked about Instagram.)

A fairly happy week of bouncing back and forth between the new condo, my usual condo, and the squirrel's place. The new condo now has blinds in the windows (except the bathroom window where there's translucent film instead), coat hooks in the hallway, and protective bumpers installed in lots of places where a door would otherwise hit a wall. Tomorrow I'll work more on installing a couple of hinge pin door stops, putting protective drawer liner on all the drawers and shelves, and calling a locksmith to get a combo lock put on the door. I also spent a productive couple of hours installing towel rods for the new 2nd floor owner over there, who is obviously a good person to form an alliance with. All of it had to go in with drywall anchors (bleh, give me a stud!), but it went fine and she didn't have to hire a handyman.

Body stuff continues to be interesting. I held a 75-second straight handstand, by my coach's timer, on Wednesday, and he doesn't press the button until a person is up and balanced so you know that's really real. I shrugged it off, only mildly pleased, and he made a big point of telling me it's really good and quite an achievement, etc. So -- all right! I think it is a new record for a straight hold. I also discovered a big asymmetry in my chinup strength by experimenting with mixed-grip chinups, and did well in my press lessons but with no single big thing to report. Did my TGUs with 55lb again, and that made me happy.

Halloween occurred, and with it a very good circus show in which I got to see Tiny Person being insanely awesome in two excellent acts. In one she was a kind of undead Barbie-ish character, and in the other she was a sleeper who was awakened by (and thrown around, and stacked upon) two demons. So good. My enthusiasm was only somewhat dampened by getting gum on the train of my Morticia Addams gown -- heated white vinegar and a toothbrush did pretty well for undoing that, this evening, but what a pain.

My squirrel is leaving his big company for real in a few months; the exit papers are signed.

Following a good video call with my new collaborator, a new crossword puzzle is almost ready to send in. I ran it through several test solvers this week, and I think it's good! A couple of tweaks, especially to the theme "revealer" clue, and it will be good to go.

Winter is coming -- DST ended today. We are plunged into the dahk-ness. I bought a new coat on Wednesday (a puffer coat this year), and Birdie went to the Fluevog store and bought some of the same boots I have. So I suppose we are prepared enough. I'm daydreaming about sewing, and making mulled apple cider, and hosting craft nights and, most especially, sleeping a lot. Speaking of which... good night, internet.