fred_mouse

I had a swathe of things I was hoping to do this morning, but each one I do takes longer than I was anticipating. One of the things I'm abandoning off the list is a well thought out blog post.

In other news,

Middlest is getting married.

At the Zoo.

In about 3 hours

And it is raining (it most likely won't be by then, but now I'm in a tizz about which trousers to wear to go with which jacket because I had not planned for 'dammit, I'll get cold'. I've already hemmed one pair of trousers, going to have to do another. very much appreciating magical hemming tape)

I've not been posting, because life has been exhausting. Some paperwork, some attempting to get the house under control with a different deadline than previous, some house-guest G, visiting from Canberra. They arrived Tuesday. Wednesday they had sorted to go out with a friend, and I spent much of the afternoon scanning SwanCon history stuff. Thursday we went to the Shipwrecks Museum and talked about what I know of Fremantle history; had a very mediocre lunch at a cafe that wasn't as good as I remembered from a couple of years ago; failed to go to the library; and went and watched Thunderbolts (I have opinions, but I haven't attempted to articulate them much). Today, we did a potted tour of the hills, going up Crystal Brook Road, stopping at the lookout at the junction of that and Welshpool Road; lunch at the Kalamunda Dome; G learning that gum nut babies (of May Gibbs fame) are actually based on real gum nuts and that May Gibbs is claimed as a local; a detour to the car park at Lesmurdie Falls and discovering that the path is short but too many stairs for G to see the Falls; wandering out to Mundaring Weir; taking a random set of roads that seem like home to me and meant that we could see the cut of the ZigZag down the hill; not doing a stack of things that would have been good due to limited time and energy. And then a small dinner party where we half arsed a range of things, but the food was tasty and the friends were fabulous.

and having written that out, I don't have the oomph to edit into more coherent and less run on sentences.

• Middlest and friends have acquired a rental; they'll be moving on or just after the 7th February. Logistics have not been much discussed with me. This speeds up the 'empty the storage locker' timeline; once that room is empty then Youngest decides what they are doing, and we move a stack of stuff in whichever room they aren't in.
• We are still stripping fruit from trees. I haven't done an audit; that will hopefully be Saturday. Yesterday I got a bucket of figs, with not quite a dozen ripe. The day before I got a half bucket of feijoas - at no point have I felt that we are on top of the feijoa situation. No wonder my thinning hasn't been very successful in previous years, there are so many more fruit than I'd been allowing for.
• Hopefully I've upset muscles around the right hip; alt is that the amount of very sharp pain that keeps happening is the joint, and I'm not wanting to go back to living that life.
• yesterday, investigated new-to-me GF bakery in ?Wembly. I ate a cheesymite scroll and a sticky date pudding for lunch; these are possibly things I'm regretting, but not much. There were very large muffins, with a small range on savoury; there were also vegan options. There were no vegan and savoury options. Also labelled as to whether they were soy free, nut free, something else I'm forgetting.
• Got up and spent about half an hour around 7am fussing over Youngest who was having minor health issues that were making them miserable. They managed to go back to bed and nap, and then got up and did something then nap again. I slept until 11am.

I'm sure there are other things, but I have no spoons. It has been hot, life is complicated, bleargh. It is nearly 10pm, I am attempting to do 17 things, several of which have just been added to my planned list by me thinking of them in the last ten minutes, and very few of which I'm going to achieve. Off to attempt to at least write them down!

• chiropractor appointment this morning; not as out of sorts as expected given a week solid of driving
• in house gift 2024 annual giving day in lieu of christmas; I have some shiny shiny books, an interesting fortified wine, viola earrings, a copy of the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie (found on ebay), a pretty wooden jigsaw, a cleaner for the bass recorder (apparently a saxophone one, but we are not complaining). Artisanat got a lot of chocolate. W got a lot of lego flowers. Youngest bought people earrings and interestingly jointed plastic dragons that might be 3D printed. Everyone got a lot of books. There is one gift left because ariaflame was clever enough to give me one yesterday, but I wasn't clever enough to remember that there was one in my stash for them. Aria, this is your note that I have at least two things for you, as your bag of tent and sleeping bags needs to be returned.
• took a photo of five 'offspring' in the lounge this morning; am highly amused that this might be the first time I've been in a position to get all of them at once (the three that live here, W, and R, who 'lives' here when their home is too noisy).
• visited with T, talked about what help I can give while they are sorting out their mother's estate and possibly selling the house (the right size for three adults is really depressing when you are the last one left). They are having ongoing paperwork issues. They are also attempting to work out what the next stage in their life is, now that they aren't an inhouse carer any more.

• I no longer have teenagers - Youngest turned 20 this year. Sadly, they won't make it to SwanCon, so their sequence of being just younger than the number of such cons they have attended has ended (they were four days old at their first con; we went for one day)
• I have made a baked custard for the first time in literal decades (Youngest is mildly egg allergic) and I'm pleased that it worked out near perfect to my memory. I whisked slightly enthusiasically / was too lazy to strain, so there are some bubbles. But the texture is smooth, and there is not of the slight liquid that happens when the egg/milk ratio is out (or the eggs are old). To be fair, I did use six eggs, because we have a slight surplus.
• I have joined a recorder playing group. Which, when I heard on of the names of the group, I thought "how many of that name + age group are there in Perth"? And the answer might be >1, but it is indeed the one I knew 40+ years ago, when I was in primary school, so there was a bit of 'That Fred!'. There were two moments of slight discomfort - they asked after my mother (ah, yeah), and it turns out that their offspring, who was of an age with me, passed away at least five years ago. So, someone I played with, presumably. There were three of us there today, there are two other members. One was grandchild sitting (and I got to hear about the relationship ups and downs of another kid of the folk community), and I will be very very happy to catch up with them. The other I didn't know
• and further in the being Perthed part of the discussion -- we worked through a set of names, to see who I might know from the Early Music Society (which I had been peripherally associated with in the mid 90s) and they brought up one person with an unusual last name, to which I said 'no but I do know ...' who turns out to be their ex-wife. And then one of the few younger individuals we knew in common, who I tried to remember how I met them, and realised it was probably through a trans friend whose dead name I could remember, but not their actual name.
• Last night, went to a special school holiday adult skating clinic (I guess because it is for the adults who do learn to skate, which is term based?) and got to improve some of my turns (not spins) and edges. Very worth $35 for an hour with a whole six people (including coach) on the ice. There was a follow on class that I decided against because of how late it went, and there are also repeats on Monday that I'm wishing I could get to because it was a surprising amount of improvement in a very short time, and I learned a few things that I hadn't previously twigged about how some things work (I'm aware that it is physics. Unfortunately, I stopped learning about physics as soon as it was an option, and really only understand some of the bits that are clearly derived from math).
• Have made intermittent progress on one craft project, and only because it is portable. The 'I want that one done' is not getting done because it requires the sewing room to be less chaos.

• It rains! This is very exciting. So far, we've had 1.2 mm (in about 2 hours). The season, it is a changing! update: in the time it took to post this, another bit came through, and now we have had 2.5 mm!
• Spent a couple (or more) days this week with proto-migraine - vague, dodgy language, weird visual gumph in right eye. However, it came good yesterday, without ever having the full on migraine. Win.
• crafting - I have been sewing. Actual patchwork. I decided to go back to basics, and make up a quilt based on 5" squares, and not care about anything. Turns out one of the four packs of squares I had was all ballet themed and pink, which didn't go wonderfully with the rest, so I've made a 5*5 block, and I'm going to give it to co-worker's kid, who is the right age to be ballet obsessed in the way that would appreciate this. Have taken a 'just one seam' (each day) approach. Tomorrow's task is finding backing (polar fleece)
• Three of the board gaming group risked an in person catch up, with masks for those of us at the table (we had all been relatively low risk through the week, me WFH making it better)
• WFH has been challenging. Certain individuals have not yet learned not to be a bloody nuisance. Had a three hour zoom meeting that I was listening in on for most of it (got a few bits that I had relevant to say, but mostly it was me learning a whole lot of stuff, and being kept in the loop) and at the end of it I was shouting at other members of the house about keeping it down.
• Youngest turned 18, and for that they got a 6am start for today's shift, rather than an 8am. They are so tired. We have failed to get them an federal election, but at least it can't be before they are old enough to vote :). Gift wise, they suggested a range of small things, so we just went all in and got the lot (which probably added up to about what we spent on the older two).
• Youngest made a wail of despair this afternoon, on getting home from work and sitting down at their desk. Turned out that the group work member who needed to do a bit more work on the poster they all presented on Monday has covid and hasn't been well enough. On the plus side, the assignment was submittable, and Youngest tested negative on a RAT (they were presenting side by side on Monday, and while Youngest's mask wearing is reasonably good, I have no faith in the majority of people)
• pretty pretty dresses ordered from Nerdy Keppie arrived. Just in time for it to be too cool to wear them (although Middlest is wearing one of theirs to board gaming this evening , and asked me to take photos)

Work went back on Tuesday, and as such, progress around the house kind of flopped to a halt -- I still have books all over the games room floor, and the swing lounge still needs that last coat of paint (but at least I have both paint and brush now, and it is on the drop cloth, so maybe this weekend)

However, there has been significant progress at work. I still have three projects that I'm cycling around, poking at and trying to work out where the holes are, or where the opportunities for maximum benefit are. I'm still at the opening more documents and reading more things and having more thoughts and asking more questions and making more mess phase of all the projects, but at least I reckon I could get in a discussion with someone and say 'ah, well, the possibilities here are ...' for two out of the three projects (the third I need someone to come back and Give Me The D*** Files Already).

In addition, I have learnt the basics of accessing (and working with) GitLab repositories in a Windows environment; much more than I expected to about how to create R packages with devtools and roxygen and something else I've forgotten; and more about how various government agencies collect, collate, clean, and distribute weather data. I may also have spotted an issue with the way that some of the containerisation is working, but if I'm right, it isn't relevant, because the web interface needs a different set of data, so the fact that the same approach is required in three different places won't mean that you have to know this and thus fix any issues in all those places.

As to the rest of life:

The younger two kids have been doing VacSwim -- middlest is doing Bronze Medallion, Youngest is in level 12 (of 16). Middlest came home on Wednesday (the first day) and reported that they were unlikely to pass, as they weren't going to be able to do the 400m in under the required time. Thursday, they reported that they had passed that, but that they were going to have to do a timed 50m tow, and that that wasn't going to happen. Today they reported that they had passed that with 0 seconds to spare, but that if they had known that they could do standard crawl instead of polo crawl so that they could watch their rescued person, they would have been faster. I haven't heard what the next thing they aren't going to pass is. Youngest has made no comment at all, other than a complaint about a sore shoulder. Given that one of the goals of having them in VacSwim is that youngest will do enough dynamic strength requiring work with their shoulders to put on some necessary muscle, I'm calling that a tentative win.

Other than that, I'm not aware of my kids having been doing much other than taking advantage of school holidays with no parents around -- reading, failing to do housework, watching movies. I believe that Eldest is working steadily on their uni entrance course, but I haven't had an opportunity to have a quiet word with them in the last few days, so I'm taking it on faith (I have to find an opportunity this weekend. I really do).

Reading for the judging that I'm doing is reaching the 'there must be an end in sight' point. I really really wanted to have it all done before work went back; now I desperately want it done before the end of the weekend. I'm having this evening off and reading assorted Stuff (including my dwircle), and bookmarking and recommended fic that people have posted about post-Yuletide, as a promise that if I can get at least all the short stories (rather than 'and the novellas') done tomorrow, and made progress on the novellas, then I can read whatever on Sunday night. As I have a potentially unworkable number of errands to run this weekend, I'm suspecting that that fic will be sitting in my reading list for rather a long time.

And we are having a bit of an issue with appliances. We've already replaced the microwave, but both the oven and the fridge are being flaky. Oven won't heat with the fan-forced setting on; fridge has started freezing things. So getting those looked at has been bumped higher on the eternal list of 'some-day, one-day', with the sincere hope that neither of them necessitates actual replacement. I'm hoping that it is a replacement part and a regassing required respectively, but I'm not actually all that hopeful at present.

Oh, and I've been playing music! I picked up a viol* the other day, and my fingers were not as out of practice as I expected. And I am doing a bit of piano playing, but mostly just finger exercises (because there is an issue with one or more of the fingers of my right hand, and I really need a bit of strength before I try much more. I'm assuming the difference has to do with the viol* playing, because different types of strength are needed for the two hands, and the strength needed on the fingerboard is more similar to the piano keyboard than that needed to balance a bow).

And I have got Quite Waffly, so that will have to do for now!

[backdated post from offline notes]

The good

• rode to work [3/40]
• still a tired and cranky mouse, but have survived another year of annual updates.
• dealt with youngest’s choir stuff, including donating the old trousers, rather than find a new home for them; ordered new trousers and shorts
• managed a breakthrough on where to source the info youngest needs for the family history project, given that zie decided that my nonna was the person of choice.

The bad

• house is a disaster and stressing me out.
• work is stressing me out.
• not getting any craft done
• getting further behind on the coursera courses I’m doing, even though I’m Really Interested in theory.
• one step removed clan member J is failing healthwise, and prognosis is poor.

paraphrasing for the entertainment value:

fred_mouse : thank you for the chocolates. But I didn't think we did Valentines?
artisanat : every second year, we take turns.
fred_mouse : no, that's our anniversary.
artisanat : we do stuff for our anniversary?

conclusion: it would appear that we approximately alternate, with me buying chocolates for our anniversary one year, and artisanat  buying chocolates for Valentines.

embarrasingly, this comes hot on the heels of a conversation with chaosmanor , where I blithely claimed that Valentine's day is something I completely ignore.  Ah well, I guess I'll be buying two lots of anniversary chocolates this year!