Signed the lease for the new place on Sunday, started moving boxes and furniture Monday, the truck and muscle comes for the big stuff on Saturday and effective 9/1, I've got me a place to live that is more than adequate. Off to move more boxes, cheers.
I started George Kennan's Campaigning in Cuba last night. It's his firsthand account of the US invasion of Cuba in the Spanish American War, published in 1899. I'd previously read his Tent Life in Siberia, and it's well worth it. I think I'm done with this one. It's the closest I've come to high fantasy. Frederic Church and George Inness inspired me to get a bit crazier with light. I'm fairly satisfied with the result, and learned a lot; but I did some work this afternoon at the cafe at the DIA, and then stood in front of Church's Cotopaxi and Inness's The Lonely Pine. Mother fuckers.
The pattern repeats again. A friend begins posting much more prolifically on social media. Lots of selfies. Doing things with the kid(s). Lunch/dinner with friends. Within a week, the absence of their Significant Other from the photos and posts becomes conspicuous. This continues for 2-3 months. Then the email comes... "Friends, it is with heavy hearts, and much love, that ______ and I have decided to end our marriage/relationship, and go our own ways..." The pattern has been 100% accurate so far. Just got the latest email yesterday. I'm counting the days before the next two announcements come out. They are both due. All of these splits are couples that have been married/together - usually with kids - for more than 10 years. ---- A friend had her baby yesterday at home, in a tub in the middle of her living room, with no pain killers, in about 5 hours. Another friend is due. And a lovely couple I know from the Burningman community just became grandparents. Life: It goes on.
The pattern is the same, do you think that the reasoning is the same or similar when these splits occur?The pattern has been 100% accurate so far.
Hmm. There has to be a reason leading into the first part of that pattern, right? This is interesting, because I see a lot of behavior in myself on a much shorter scale. But it's not elimination so much as inability to include from the get go.
Yeah, there is definitely other stuff going on ... ... the individual feeling like they aren't getting the appreciation/attention they deserve from their spouse, so they go fishing for compliments on social media... ... the individual feeling "trapped" in their relationship, so suddenly they are doing all kinds of Activities and Adventures (without their spouse)... ... the individual setting themselves up in people's minds as an individual and not part of a couple... Etc.
Yeah. My social circle spans multiple generations, and all found each other long after the normal friend-gathering-periods of high school and college. So there are people with 20 year marriages, 10 year poly relationships, dating, 2-year marriages, and couples with kids and no kids. It really is a cross-section. If you social circle was largely developed in the high school/college phase of life, I'd expect people to go through life changes and cycles at largely similar times. My friend group is from a more diverse age range, and background. So it is less expected to see these patterns form so rigidly.
25 days to go. I started the summer with a 38-book backlog in my Audible. I've added 8 books to that since. There are 8 books unread in my library now, 7 if you exclude the one I'm reading. About 1am tonight I'm going to cross 9,000 miles on that bike. A friend asked me if I'd ever weighed it, gack and all so I got on the scale with it. Everything off the bike that doesn't require a wrench? 30.1 lbs. Ready to go to work? 50.1 lbs. I mentioned that I needed new brake pads. "Well yeah," he said. Your bike weighs fifty fuckin pounds." I'm starting to realize that I'm... dense. Said friend is an inch taller than me, has a pot belly and weighs 185. My stomach is flat and in shorts and a t-shirt I outweigh him by 50 lbs. I'm starting to be okay with it because my daughter is also dense. She's far, far heavier than you'd expect but she's certainly not fat. Perhaps this is me making peace with it. Realizing that my rig weighs three times what the weenies who blitz by me without waving are riding is also good for my self-esteem. Soon there will come soft rains. The air will be brisk, the coffee will be fresh and I will sleep in my own bed. My days will be filled with CAD and cutting fluid and things that tick.
Fellow dense person here. I was 175 lbs in high school, wearing 28-inch waist jeans. Every new doctor is perplexed when they weigh me. I can't count the number of times a doctor has weighed me, had me step off the scale, weighed me again, had me step off the scale again, weigh themselves, then weigh me again. They then shake their head, and write down the number, and tell me that the obesity charts and measurements do not apply to me. I'm currently 230, and am mistaken for <200 usually. I can wear the same pants that my sub-200 friends wear (38-inch waist). A lot of people try to transmogrify their fat into "heavy bone density", or some such bullshit. The reality is that some of us weigh more. Some less. Welcome to the club.
I wouldn't care so much except for the fact that every time I see a doctor for anything they weigh me, calculate BMI and then go "have you considered losing some weight?" We literally had to have blood tests to get the loan on the business because our bank required life insurance to cover it in case me or my wife died. So some fat slob burnout Russian smelling of old cigarettes came by and said "you are fat. You lose weight." I was 187 at the time, a good 50lbs lighter than I am now. Same pants, by the way. At one point I went to the goddamn doctor and said "if you guys are going to raise my rates because you think I'm fat you're fuckin' duty bound to help me lose weight." So they sent me to a nutritionist who told me to double my caloric input to 4000 calories a day. I got down to 135 in high school through a grueling and uncompromising application of starvation and exercise bulimia. I looked like a concentration camp victim. But then, that was when I had the best self-image. Which is where you begin to recognize that you have an unhealthy relationship with food. And then you go try to talk to a psychologist about it and they hear "eating disorder" and explain that there isn't a mental health professional in the land that will treat you outpatient for insurance reasons. Want to feel better about sharing a BMI with Dennis Rodman? Yeah, that'll be a 28-day stay with teenaged girls.
I have heard a nutritionist lament that her employer did not have such facilities on-site or in-plan and inform me that if I wished to spend $250 out-of-pocket she could make inquiries. This would not, of course, have any impact on the "I see that you're fat. Do you feel properly ashamed?" dialogue that opens all health discussions. I went to the Bastyr clinic once with foot pain when running. The student, an earnest young lady, took down a bunch of notes about exercise and diet. Her supervisor, an instructor, walked in a half hour later, glanced at my chart and said "Huh. You're about 50lbs overweight. Try diet and exercise" and walked out without so much as looking me in the eye. The next time I came in I brought the pedal I had broken off the exercise bike at the health club (RIP Mieko's you cheap piece of shit) to ask if she had any other suggestions. She refused to see me and insisted I transfer care. Bummer for the student.
Also fuck Sunlite. I had a damn innertube, like, give up this week; they totally go from 85 psi to like 80 in the course of 30 miles but this one went to 40 because it's too busy being emo or some shit. I go through an innertube every thousand miles. Like, I literally change the fuckers more often than I replace my deodorant and when you bike 150 miles a week through the goddamn desert and shower 2-3 times a day you burn through some deodorant.
Jesus god I logged on here thinking today was Wednesday. Please allow me to vent about two things going on in my life right now. these are things i'm trying not to talk to a lot of people IRL about because, well, the first one is pretty dramatic and kind of shocking and also a little private. and the second one is a scenario i need to navigate by myself somehow as an adult, without poisoning all my friends with my griping. 1) my aunt was murdered last week. my cousins are using this as an opportunity to set up a gofundme asking for $15k from, well, whoever on facebook is a sucker enough for their very long sad heartstringy post about how she's a veteran who was cruelly ripped from life. this upsets me. i guess this could sound like a kind of reasonable thing to do, maybe, to an outsider. turns out there's all sorts of nifty things you learn once you have a family member who's been murdered, which includes the fact that in general, states have Victims Funds which are designed to pay out money when, you know, someone gets homicided. And did i mention my aunt was a veteran? which means she also qualifies for VA funeral benefits which includes the cost of a plot and money towards transporting the body to the funeral. i don't want to get into numbers but I know for a fact that several thousand dollars, enough to cover the (significant) majority cost of an average funeral, has already been put towards my aunt's internment from those funds. generally life insurance covers homicide. my cousins have a history of being grifters, and one of them has a history of pill addiction which extended to breaking into her own siblings' homes and stealing from them to buy drugs. guess which cousin has posted this memorial fund. it bothers me. 2) my sister seems to think that because we are sisters, i should do for her whatever she wants. for instance, this week she asked me to pick her up from a house which was walking distance from our apartment. i did, immediately. she told me she was hungover. she got in the car and picked a fight. about my "tone." i told her she could get out of the car if she didn't like my tone. this, by the way, is at least the 3rd last minute ride she's asked me for in the past year. i really don't mind going and picking her up from somewhere once in a while if it's an emergency. what i mind is she needed a ride because she had taken an uber to that house last night and left her car at our apartment. like what was her plan for getting back the whole time? and why couldn't she walk less than a mile on a sunny, 80 degree day? well, yesterday she asked to use my laptop for school related stuff for the second time in two days. she has a laptop. do you know where it is? it's at her boyfriend's house because 4 months ago his laptop stopped working and she wanted to help him out. when i told her i'd prefer she not use my laptop because i let her do it yesterday, she has her own, and i didn't want to establish a precedent of her getting to use my laptop for whatever whenever she wants, she told me that she felt, because we were SISTERS, if she had a laptop, and she wasn't actively using it at the moment, she would let me use her laptop whenever with no questions asked. that's just what sisters do. it's so convenient that the only reason she doesn't have a laptop is because she chose to give it away to someone else. did i mention i bought my laptop with my own money and she got hers from our parents? i feel like maybe things would be different if she had to pay for her own. but who knows. devil's advocate. edited to add oh also. did i mention? today's august 30th. she still owes me $52 for August rent. _________________- Don't get me wrong. A lot is going good in my life. I'm going camping this weekend with some friends (away from my sister) and really looking forward to it. I'm about to pay off my car note early. i'm on track to be promoted at work EOY. i'm planning an adventure trip to centralia. my brother set a date for his wedding. I'm reading my 5th john irving book this year, i'm knitting a sock, etc etc. unfortunately this morning i am just also very hung over.
Hey so first off I'm sorry about your aunt and the horrible behavior of your cousins. Second of all your anecdote about living with a sibling terrifies me. My new pad has two spare bedrooms and my dad has been intimating that it might be a good idea to have one or two of the bums living with him to come live with me instead. I'm petrified to be honest. I know my brothers, they keep weird hours and that may literally, not figuratively be the death of me. Keep on living your best life. Take a weekend in the fall to come to Ann Arbor and tailgate with me.
Pros: Learning more and more and more about what I think I need of a partner. Cons: Learning by experience means a lot of difficult conversations this year, apparently. Pros: This year has turned into more of a transitory year than I could have imagined when I picked up Freedom of the Hills, Volume 8 for Christmas. Cons: There are, obviously, a lot of things I haven't done "right" this year during the process. Pros: I have a lot of interesting invites for things in the near future (do I go to Joshua Tree in October???) Cons: This is not conducive to most types of relationships. Pros: I'm part of a really awesome community (well, multiple at this point). Cons: ???
Been out forever cause I was in summer training and then right into classes. Still a piece of shit on paper but I've been taking charge and leading my unit in the absence of lazy/dismissive leadership and senior leadership has taken notice. Too much too long ago to write about, might make a trip report later. Hope you guys are killing it in your respective endeavors. If you need me this weekend message me before or after the hours of my alcohol-induced coma.
Car shopping time. My gf’s Saab 9-3, which is nearly identical to mine, had the water pump/thermostat eat shit, and the repair bill is bordering 1k. She’s looking at a certified pre-owned Hyundai Sonata from ‘15-16. If she gets a cheaper one, she may repair the Saab anyways and keep it as a spare, cause god knows if my car hits the same snag I’m SOL. I just passed 200k too. Either way I’m totally stealing her cup holder to replace my broken one. 
Things are going well enough that I consider myself lucky. Work is fulfilling and challenging, without becoming too stressful. Coworker of mine took up most of his holiday days so he's gone for six weeks. Which means I'm helming the data analysis ship on my own for a while. So far I've been able to parry everything without a hitch. I rolled a new DnD character. My housemate and friend is having a go at serious DMing, so I'm having my second DnD session of the week tomorrow. I also gifted him the DM Manual for his birthday - no self-respecting DM is without one. I love crafting a character, it's a lot of fun trying to make a character come alive. (I created a thunderstruck Goliath Cleric in case anyone was wondering. ) The swimming pool near me is finally open again! It's been weeks since I last had a swim. Definitely noticably out of shape. But that's okay - I care more about swimming than about swimming well. Looking forward to the weekend - the girl and I have a movie night planned.
Really depends on the kind of game that's played, too. My main campaign puts a lot of emphasis on good storytelling and fun gameplay, as opposed to for example a more harsh rule-bound game. It's not just a practical gift - the book is also beautiful to leaf through for inspiration, and a subtle gesture of supportiveness.
I'm only a 12, but I used to wear boots exclusively. Timberlands, Docs, etc. I used to do the same shoe-cycling you do, to keep the wear down, keep them fresh, and keep my feet from getting nasty diseases. I took a close look at my life about 3 or 4 years ago, and realized I need one EXCELLENT pair of boots to wear when I actually need them, and lighter-weight shoes for the rest of my life. I have, like, 4 or 5 pairs of shoes like this, now: https://www.amazon.com/Crocs-Santa-Slip-Loafer-Khaki/dp/B01HCB9TYM I wear them most days for a couple of reasons: 1. They are much lighter weight. 2. They don't get stinky. 3. No ankle-rolling because they are basically flat. There's nothing to fall off of. 4. The bursitis in my knee has basically gone away, now that I am not lugging around 5 lbs of shoe with every goddamn step. --- For the days when I need an actual BOOT, I go with Danner: https://www.danner.com/men/work/bull-run-moc-toe-6-brown.html For your size 14 skis, I have no idea if any of this is helpful, but this is my experience moving away from the "I must wear boots every day" mentality, and the benefits I gained from it. (Of course, if you work in a blacksmith shop on concrete floors 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, you can ignore this post... :-)
Why are you buying your 7-hole Docs from Timberland? My feet are tiny. However, a whole bunch of running-related injuries went away when I got some custom orthotics from a podiatrist. You might also roll your ankles less if you stop wearing a heel. I've always found it hilarious that the only people who wear high heels are strippers, bikers and cowboys.
Start with the podiatrist. Don't let him cut any tendons or give you any injections. They tend to go extreme. A decent pair of carbon fiber orthotics are a revelation. Trust me on this. You do what you do except now you don't need to stop. Make sure they fit, though. The last pair I bought, I went running and finished with blisters the size of Oxy pads. Those suckas went back and they refitted.I'm probably going to have to nut up and go to a podiatrist and a therapist and relearn how to walk and not fuck up my feet.
I went for a 1.7 mile run on Saturday. It went ok. I think I feel my glute doing a lot more. My hamstring seems to still be healing, but it does seem to be healing. I'll run the same route tonight after work. I still have a long way to go. I have next week off with no specific plans. I'll hike some, I'm sure, but is there anything else I should do? I never take time off without it being part of some trip. This is new for me. I might take a drive past a piece of land for sale. It's an hour from town but is in a really pretty area a couple miles from a superb (but popular) state park. If I bought it, it would be a part of a two-plus decade plan to move there. It's the closest one can get to living in the mountains here, part of a 1.5 billion year old mountain range that was heavily eroded and buried.
Technology is a fickle thing. Some good news, I resolved the file sync issues I complained about here. The iOS Nextcloud client just decided to start working, so that was cool. It's a great setup, and given the ongoing concern with privacy issues these days, it's nice to have a little more control over stuff. I generated the SSL certificate myself, and the files are encrypted on the server, so within reason even the host doesn't have access. (I know it's not foolproof, but nothing is.) Meanwhile, there's been a big bruhaha online (I've mainly seen it on reddit) about VPN providers potentially being shady. Now, I've seen evidence (on hubski included) of Private Internet Access doing some shady stuff to try to discredit its competitors. I'm doing a separate post about this, but the tl;dr is that a company suing Tesonet, a company based in Lithuania that is involved in data-mining, claims that NordVPN is actually Tesonet's. It's still unclear, but to be safe I decided to switch VPN providers (since I was in my 30-day window for a refund). The denial Nord posted a few hours ago is too vague to satisfy me, but I acknowledge that it's not definitive. Still, Nord is run by a shell company based in Panama, and there's enough going on that I figure we're in the "where there's smoke there may be fire" category. I also found a new one that is more transparent, doesn't dump as much money into advertising and affiliates, and so far has been faster. In other news, I'm finally sitting down and giving honest-to-God writing a shot. It's fun so far! (This was part of the reason I was looking for a good file sync setup: to move a file from my tablet to whatever computer I happen to be in front of at a given moment.) It's been a trial finding apps I like, since I tend to be really particular about text editors for some reason. I'm very into the aesthetics of the printed word, and so really like things to look just so. (It's also a way to procrastinate, I'm learning.) I found iA Writer for iOS is perfect: minimalist without being drab (or feeling amateur...they even developed their own font variant), saves wherever I want (so Nextcloud syncing is automatic), and has some great Markdown shortcuts. Plus, their blog is legit one of the most thoughtful tech-related blogs I've ever seen. On desktop, FocusWriter is my jam. Open source, cross-platform, customizeable out the ass, good aesthetics (recognizes markdown, does typographer's quotes, etc.), and saves to basic text so iA Writer can read them too. For each style, you pick a background image and then customize the text box that sits on it (size, background and foreground colors, whether it blurs the text underneath, where it sits on the screen, etc.). I have a few different ones that I switch between depending on my mood. It's basically perfect. My next quest, so to speak, is to find a good app for journaling. There are some nice-looking ones on iOS (which is where I'd like to have it thanks to the portability element), but none are really that trustworthy to me. A couple require subscriptions, and even the ones that don't are not particularly open about where your data actually ends up. At best they may sync to iCloud, which I don't want. For now I'm thinking I'll probably just use iA Writer and a Nextcloud folder, but that's not ideal.
IA Writer really is brilliant. Focusing on the words, and not their presentation, is such an important step to moving from "casual" to "professional" writing. I used to use FocusWriter, too, but eliminated that step eventually. Now I go straight from IA Writer into Scrivener, Word, or InDesign.
Sure, that makes sense. For me, FocusWriter is the composition step on the PC, so there's no intermediary :)
Oooh, I hadn't noticed iA Writer for Windows got out of beta! I too prefer their app for mobile Markdown editing. I messed around with Typora for a long time, but it is just slightly too cumbersome to customize IMO. I currently use Visual Studio Code for my notes, which is not as unsuitable as it sounds. But I really dig the iA's Focus mode, so I'm gonna probably buy software again like it's 2011. My journaling is part of my Markdown notes system - I wrote a small Python script to generate one .md file for each month of this year, with a date-formatted header for every day in that month.
Yeah, I liked Typora at first, but it's kind of shady from a licensing standpoint (it's free until it's not), and Electron makes stuff clunky as fuck. A text editor shouldn't take 150MB of RAM. I haven't touched the iA desktop apps. It seems like they could be nice, but honestly there are a lot of free programs that do at least as much (if not more). Check out FocusWriter and WriteMonkey (the old version, not the beta, which uses Electron).
MY BABY BROTHER IS OFFICIALLY A MARINE!! News came in from Parris Island this morning, he has passed the Crucible! We leave to see him graduate boot in about 2 weeks. Those poor kids have been awake, active and harassed for 54 hours straight at this point. They get steak and eggs for breakfast then they have a REGULAR GODDAMN DAY OF TRAINING AFTER. I'm a lil nervous to see what the Marines did to my brother. The few pictures we have seen have depicted a lean, mean, steely eyed killing machine and I'm not sure if I'm ready to see my former jellyroll of a baby brother as a warrior just yet. Before he left for boot I was already surprised to see him leaned out to the point of having intense arm veins and noticeably raised traps. Oohrah!
The Kalalau Trail Is Hands Down The Most Incredible Hike In America August 2018 Update: Nāpali Coast State Wilderness Park (including the Kalalau Trail) on Kauai are still closed due to flood damage as well as the highway and bridges which access the parks. sorry
I didn't get there, but my dad swears by the Waimea canyon hike in Kauai. It might be a good alternative if you can't get on Kalalau, which is as good or better than you imagine it to be. There's also a hike (can't remember the trail name) up to the waterfall on the big mountain that is visible from the north side of the island. On Maui I would recommend the Hoapili trail in Makena. It's a hike over a lava field, and one of the few places on the island where there aren't very many people, because (a) it's a bunch of sharp rocks, and (b) it's a pain in the ass to get to. Other than that any of the side trails I've been on around Hana highway are worth exploring.