Bertha continues to be a very good houseguest. She's putting on weight despite the occasional setback, so I continue to be optimistic. She tries her hardest to be a human: in the morning, she stands in the bathroom with me and preens while I do my routine; when it is time to do things around the house, she walks around enjoying sunny spots and scratching for crumbs; when it is time to eat, you bet she is there begging for food or perched on my shoulder trying to steal it from my mouth; when it is time to relax on the couch, she snuggles in my lap. I got a baofeng finally since I got my technician's license a few weeks back. So far all I've done is listen to the NOAA weather radio. My wife has finally hired and trained some new people so she is not the sole person doing everything in her department. She's still really busy, but she has a bit more energy when she's off the clock. It's nice to have her back.
Hubski's interest in Bertha is one of my favorite things about this site right now. Glad to hear she's doing well!
Birds and People Who Love Them I went on a Wikimedia bird binge recently and bookmarked a ton of beauties. This is a Gray/Canada Jay and while it's nothing exotic, it's quite lovely. I wanted to share this picture in particular, because its authors are Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren and they've put a ton of content on Wikimedia. I run across their names constantly on that site and I'm really starting to appreciate the amount of work they must be putting in. It wasn't until recently though that I discovered that they also have a Youtube Channel too. At this rate, I wouldn't be too surprised to find out they have an iNaturalist account. Speaking of iNaturalist and bird watchers and such, that site is chock full of people worth looking at. One person in particular though, Greg Lasley, I wanna bring attention to. He has over 35,000 observations in seven years. The man clearly loves doing this stuff. He impresses me raw numbers wise, but there are so many awesome people on that site from all over the world, from the occasionally curious, to hobbyists, to hardcore photographers, to researchers, to public workers. The site blows my mind and I'm so glad Dala showed it to me. Also, I straight up love this photo. It's cute. Early morning Hubski is best Hubski. You're all beautiful. I'm gonna get me some coffee and cuddle that dog of mine.
Just a heads up, iNaturalist now has a new app out called Seek - looks like a simplified and more gamified version of the original - I haven’t tried it out yet but here’s a link in case anyone is interested: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app Another fun app for bird people is Audubon. It’s great for when you saw a bird but couldn’t get it on camera, you can filter by size and color(s) and the app will suggest birds you might have seen based on where you are. You can also track your bird sightings in the app as well if you want, and it tells you about the birds’ ranges, feeding, breeding, etc, and has calls you can listen to.
I've been getting a few calls a month asking if I carry "White Coffee," which I don't and have no curiosity about. I'm sure it's a coffee fad that will mostly be forgotten in a few years. A guy comes in the shop today with super excited eyes and asks if I have "White Coffee!" "Nope, this is a traditional shop that eschews coffee fadism." "Well I brought my own! Will you prepare it for me?" I'd never seen it or tasted it, so what the fuck "I guess so." He hands me a bag that looks like a bag of Bob's Red Mill white cornmeal, it smells like rancid coffee and something else that I still can't identify. I make it pourover. It absorbs no water, it doesn't de-gass in anyway at all. I make sure to over extract it a bit to have a little left over to taste. I chat with the guy a bit "I hate regular coffee, but I love this." Normally when someone says "I hate coffee!" I respond with "Well, you've come to the wrong place!" but I've had just about the shittiest week and didn't have it in me. It smelled worse extracting than it does just sitting there. The flavor was acrid and grassy. "I'm never doing this for you again sir, I don't ever want to smell this smell again." I refused payment but suggested that if wanted he could drop a dollar in the jar. Is "White Coffee" as bad as it seems? I love coffee but really hate fad bullshit coffee, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't like the legendary good "White Coffee," but who knows.
Yeah white coffee is a load of shit. It’s just barely roasted or in some cases baked beans that fuck up grinders because the beans are still way too hard and dense. But there’s more caffeine!!! Shut up there’s maybe a 5% v/v difference and unless you’re already sensitive to caffeine you’re not going to notice that. But there’s more antioxidants! Okay cool and that gets you what, exactly? White coffee is a marketing label for people looking to swing the pendulum as far away from their perception of coffee (see: Starbucks level of bean roast) as possible.
I'm very stressed at work, so clearly the solution is to take twenty minutes and update y'all on my life. Current source of stress at work: basically, I've been employed under work-study for the past year, but I found out the job that I do is legally required to be performed under a union contract, even if a student does it. This would make me significantly more expensive and get me more benefits, but to get there, I have to have an intense conversation with my bosses and potentially work with the union to sue for the extra money they owe me from the past 6 months. I'm also concerned that if I get more expensive, they may just decide to fire me, so I asked the union about that too. Waiting on their answer. German labor law is intimidating, but I think pretty protective. I've been depressed for a week or two so I missed a lot of class, but I don't think I've failed anything yet. Have been behind pretty much all semester anyway - shoutout to Quatrarius who is also still alive. Hopefully I can catch up in the next couple weeks. Intrigue continues to develop with the girl with the (now ex-) boyfriend. She isn't ready for a relationship, but on the other hand, she's also in Dublin for the next month or so anyway. Trying not to develop too much hope, too many expectations for the future. Things are really nice right now, I dunno. I miss her. I bought a longboard! I still suck at riding it, but I suck substantially less than I did four days ago. I also discovered that I can just ride around with headphones on and dance when I'm stressed, which is The Shit. Spanish course is also going well. Believe it or not, I'm actually learning quite a bit these days. Despite how stupid many of my classes are.
My best friend is getting married in March. He knew her briefly in 2003, he knows her vehemently in 2019. I saw her twice in 2003, I've seen her once in 2019. She was a bitch then, she's a bitch now. The difference is she's been through AA, she's been through therapy, she's on a half-dozen antipsychotics, she has a health maintenance regimen as if she were going to the Crazy Bitch Olympics and she lives in Singapore. The wedding is in Singapore. I was all set to go because yeah, it's a fuckin' 20 hour flight but I was digging around coming up with awesome music-on-hold trax by ripping them through Audio Hijack and I went to download Audio Hijack and discovered I already had it installed on this computer because I used it two years ago to do post on that project where he totally burned me and I realized just how fucking mad I still am. Because for 30 years, I have been advising this guy and for 30 years, he has been soliciting my advice, questioning my advice, ignoring my advice, complaining about the results and then grudgingly acknowledging that he should have taken my advice and it gets so fucking tiresome. And for 30 years, he has never been there when I needed him but he's needed me and I've always been there. And because he fucked me so. BADLY last time that he knows better than to ask my fucking advice so he's full-speed-ahead with this relationship to a Korean national living as a resident alien in Singapore and he's 100% gung ho about walking her through the citizenship process in Trump's America on a tenuous lifestyle that costs him $150k to maintain. She came out for six weeks. They bought a cat together. Then she went back to Singapore. All of his friends suck, including myself, no doubt. I don't know how many of them will be there. The guy he fucked me over for probably will be. The last time I was overseas with him I pilloried him over his contempt for the sarari class because he had no understanding as a freelancer. Within three months he was working in the worst office environment I've ever observed and he's been there ever since. Like twelve years. Meanwhile I became a freelancer and I'm effectively retired seven months a year, whereas when we were in Thailand I was burning 90 hours a week doing bullshit in an office. There's some schadenfreude there. I think he's attracted to how badly she wants to be married without understanding that he's an accessory, not the centerpiece. I know another guy who was in that trap for 19 years. He got left as he was recovering from kidney replacement. He's a bitter, bitter man but at least he was divorced by 42. And I think their families are gung-ho about this because they thought marriage would never happen for either of them and since neither of them has spent much time with each others' families they're entirely about the abstract without any concrete. But does any of that really fucking matter? I'm faced with having to say "no I'm not burning a week in Singapore arranging your wedding as the only adult in the room because I don't want you to have my endorsement on this, asshole, and because you are asking entirely too goddamn much of our friendship considering just how heavily you fucked me the last time you had to deal with any conflict." And if they were getting married in California I wouldn't have to say any of this shit.
I lost a very good friend to a Russian bride mill, back in the late 1990's. He was a programmer at Apple, and targeted for all the earliest web scams. Lonely, divorced, British, and a workaholic, he had no game at all. So when a pretty Russian girl began chatting him up online, he fell head over heels. Then came the medical issues that prevented her from flying. Once she got those sorted out, then she'd be able to come visit him in Silicon Valley and they could consummate their virtual love. The complications from the surgery weren't bad, but she didn't have the money to deal with it properly... you know how it is in Russia, everybody wants their under-the-table bribe to make sure you get the right meds, or the room with a window, or the right doctor... But she recovered quickly, thankfully. She was ready to travel, once she got her passport and visa situation taken care of. Which ... wow ... these cost a lot of money! I had no idea! And the wait list is soooo long! It'll be MONTHS before I get my visa... Fortunately, my cousin works at the passport office, and can bribe the right person to get mine to the top of the pile... buuuut... I haven't been working, due to a little relapse that has me in bed again. Sooooo.... This went on and on for 2 years, or so. They planned the wedding and everything. My last message to him - before I was blocked - was something along the lines of, "So, have you seen her in person yet?" He never told me the exact numbers, but I think he was in for around $100k. I suspect he is still single today.
I've had a few friends catfished. One it was pretty obvious. He was stoked for us to meet her (he hadn't) and she was flying out. I cleared my schedule. About 3pm he called me in tears because she had to cancel. Me and my then-girlfriend came up to basically peel him off the walls for about eight hours. I walked him slowly through all the warning signs that he'd been completely catfished. It was a good three, four-hour conversation. We left in the morning and he was in a better place. The next time I saw him he revealed all the stuff he'd dug up on her about her insane catfishing and evidence that he was hardly the first. He had a good laugh. About four months later he said "You know, I've been meaning to ask but why, if you knew all along she wasn't real, you waited until I was in a crisis to tell me?" I said "because once you've decided you're in love with someone the only thing you'll listen to is people telling you why you should be. It isn't until you're questioning that love that your friends can say anything. Otherwise we just have to sit by and hope it doesn't hurt too badly because otherwise we'll lose you as a friend." He nodded thoughtfully. And still didn't ever let me in that closely ever again.
Just arrived in my hotel in Belgium. There's a two day conference starting tomorrow that I'm also speaking at, and I'm pretty stoked about it. Someone said that a conferences' value is almost entirely based on its ability to bring together interesting peopke, and so far this may be the best conference I've attended in that regard. Relatively small crowd (160 ish), and every attendee must have contributed an essay so it's only those who really care who attend. Bytheway - if one ever needs public speaking tips, I found this neat overview. Saw Vampire Weekend yesterday. They were pretty baller, the show went in a bunch of interesting directions, from hard rock to punk to a love song, all with a sense of fun that's hard to explain.
On the idea of fairness in transportation. The benefits of transportation are not always distributed fairly over people and places. The way we plan transportation has inherent flaws and assumptions that lead to structural injustices if not properly counterbalanced. It's normal to think of fairness when we're talking about healthcare, or education, or other public goods, but transporation is traditionally spared from such concerns.
It was maybe the most enjoyable conference I have attended? Small-scale, quite a lot of familiar faces, and the biggest congregation of people who think about this topic I've seen yet. I was one talk in a series of six about the topic. It was all in drunk Germ-...I mean, Dutch though. Would be hard to understand for you...
In about 10 days, I'll be done with the plastic project i've been helping on and I'll have about 2 week of free time in europe. Right now, I have exactly zero plans. I really don't want to spend much money and hostels are kind of expensive in northern europe, so wherever i find a free place to crash is top of the list. Thinking of exploring around Belgium/Netherlands/Germany? Really drawn to Berlin, as usual. But maybe i'll cave and go to the UK. I don't really like London honestly, but I know so many people there I might suck up my dislike of the city in favour of seing some friends. Maybe I'm just in a crappy mood today, but the prospect of going through a touristy checklist of sights in the cold and without much budget sounds really unappealing right now. I need to find some purpose or direction to make this travel time more enjoyable.
If you can find a cheap flight I would highly suggest Riga. It's by far one of my favorite cities in Europe and fairly cheap. Staying closer to where you are, I've really enjoyed visiting Maastricht. The old town is incredibly charming and it has a wonderful jazz scene due to the music conservatory. There are a couple cool churches converted into modern amenities, my personal favorite being this bookstore. Eben-Emael is also pretty interesting to check out if you're into WWII history. I would highly suggest against going to Stuttgart, but if for some reason you find yourself coming this way you are more than welcome to crash on my couch.
Zagreb, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, Sarajevo. All fantastic cities, cheap, with vibrant youth culture, art, music, and a genuine passion for making foreigners feel welcome. I'd bet you could find someone to crash with there in about 2 days, and have a wonderful time. They are also beautiful in winter. And they support the slower pace of life, too... the "cafe culture"... maybe instead of blasting around the world to different sites, it would be good to nest somewhere for the winter. Maybe get a job in a coffee shop or art gallery, to keep the pennies coming in, while you just chill and dig in to the local culture and scene. Damn.... maybe I'll quit my job today and go do that myself! :-) (Except, my old dog is getting down to her last few months, and I need to be here for her... and for my wife, when our dog passes.)
Check out Romania for me and let me know how it is. Have heard it's cheap and beautiful there but maybe not?
I was there in not winter some years ago and Bucharest was really cool. But my most memorable moments there were due to the people hosting us on couchsurfing being some super cool street artists that took us with them when they went to do some graffiti at this abandoned place. The south-eastern part of europe holds a special place in my heart - it was my first real travel experience without my parents and we hitchhiked with my boyfriend across many countries. And how affordable it is is a nice bonus.
You travel more than most, but I'm sure the idea of a city's depth hasn't been lost on you: You can live in the same place for decades and still discover new things by going out of your comfort zone. If you end up going to London, is there some aspect of it you could go out on a limb to sample? Maybe a subculture you'd like to engage? You could pick something super obscure about northern europe and chase it to its fullest extent for no reason. Maybe some old cathedrals or local delicacies? Break into some abandoned buildings? I don't know. It's honestly tough for me to empathize with not wanting to go through a touristy checklist of sights in the cold and without much budget.
Howdy! No life updates this week: My leg is still broken, I'm still dealing with a bad breakup, and I'm still The New Guy (tm) at work. Things are easier to bear because I'm now used to bearing them. C'est la vie. applewood and I have been DM'ing back and forth about hosting an Arts & Crafts thread. I keep promising him I'm going to make it, but then I think about all the crafts I haven't been doing and I end up not pulling the trigger. Sorry, applewood! I've been thinking about what an ongoing thread like that would actually look like, though, and I think I've been inspired by all the time spent not reading Ursula Le Guin (but feeling like I really should read some Ursula Le Guin): I like the idea of a less frequent Hubski Crafts Show thread with regularly scheduled update threads, e.g. a weekly thread for talking progress, and a monthly thread for showing finished products. Consider this an interest survey! Would this format encourage you to start new crafts? Would you be interested in participating in such a series of threads? Do you like my proposed format, or would you prefer something else?
i turned 20 a couple weeks ago so now that i've made all the old people feel bad let me tell you about my life i watched the debate tonight and was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining it was - gabbs and biden got naenaed a little but it mostly felt like what a debate should be like i've been a very bad student lately but through luck i'm skating by: 例えば there was a group presentation i contributed nothing to that i managed to go unpunished for thanks to the gracious understanding of the other people involved as well as the fact that there were already far too many presenters i'm working a little around Thanksgiving but i should be able to go home for about 3 days if i organize well i'm behind in a great deal of work and frankly that's been the case since midseptember so i guess it isn't news - shoutout to galen who is also still alive like i said before mostly i'm just sleeping and wasting money on fast food and waiting for the semester to be over so i can quit my job and end most of the assblasting i've been getting from all sides, or at least sleep for an even greater percentage of the day the thing about living in filth is that it's a lot harder to tolerate when you've been away from it - my boyfriend's room is messy and desperately needs a vacuum and laundrydoing but i walked into my room earlier for the first time in 4 days or so and choked, it stank like instant ramen and mold which makes sense because that was what was on the dresser, so i took out the trash while my roommate vaped so i guess we all have our own problems
Saw my new med provider a little over a week ago, and she thinks anxiety (which I used to have but hadn't been noticing for the last few years) is a bigger deal than I'd been realizing. She put me on Lexapro to try to address that and my mood. So far it's making me feel fairly flat and unmotivated, but this may be a good thing. I'm definitely feeling less inclined to bounce, and feel like I can change task more easily. I don't get excited about doing something the way I used to, but I'm beginning to wonder if what I read as excitement was actually something else. So all this may just mean a lot of re-learning needs to happen. I have decided to use my newfound improvement in frustration tolerance to get back into drawing. My oldest kung fu student is currently in the hospital with a massive infection that has gotten into several organs. He probably had a heart attack last week sometime (before going to the hospital), and was on dialysis on Monday at least. Since then they've basically been keeping him unconscious while they try to figure out where the worst of the infection is. I think he may need heart surgery/a procedure of some kind, but they're waiting to get the infection sorted before that happens. I'm trying to be in touch with his wife periodically without being a bother. Nothing else much going on. Just waiting for the holidays, trying to help my daughter be less talkative in class, and slowly fixing up my home office.
Forgot to mention: work kinda screwed me at evaluation time, basically dinging me for something that (by their own admission) I had no control over. That's bureaucracy for you. But it's also made it abundantly clear that I'm not going to go anywhere, so I've embraced not going above and beyond. Also, we came very close to losing our ability to work from home, but the Federal Service Impasse Panel stopped it (as management couldn't actually say why they wanted to change it).
My boss basically told me that I'm going to just idle for the rest of the year. He's got me lined up for a new position that will be coming along in Q1 of next year, and I hit all my goals and targets for this year, so he said I should just work on some personal development projects... whatever interests me... So, yay! Fun! In other news, my wife, brother, and sister-in-law and I are planning our trip to the UK next year. It's a fun exercise, since they haven't been there before, but my wife and I both have. We are putting together a rough agenda, and have a couple of things nailed down (staying in a castle in Scotland!) to plan the rest of the trip around. Facebook Mostly have weaned myself off Facebook at this point. It is amazing how quick and easy it was, once I removed the app from my phone. Turns out that accessing the site from a mobile web browser is absolute shit, works terribly, and many features just fail on mobile. Makes it a lot easier to not use it. I spent some time the other night scrolling through my newsfeed and notifications to see if I missed anything about it, and ... nope. Nothing. I do miss posting photos of my dog. I think her face makes people happy, and .... well, I'll let my wife post photos of my dog to FB now. Yoga Began my yoga journey yesterday. I'm an old stiff guy, who doesn't work out or stretch or anything. But, after losing a bunch of weight, I'm kinda jazzed about my body, and want it to work better. I also really enjoy the meditative nature of yoga, and that you can literally do it your entire life. So. Last night I went to my first class. I'm figuring twice a week for 3 weeks in this special "Yin" class they have, where there are only about 5 or 6 poses, but you hold them for up to 5 minutes at a time. With my stiffness, normal yoga classes move too quickly between poses... my muscles finally start loosening up, and they switch to a new position. With this Yin class each pose is held for a long time, so you can breathe into it, and let those muscles and joints stretch slowly. I was goddamn transformed when I got home last night... I was in a different state of mind... it was amazing. I'm all-in on this shit, man!
Had a rough time with girlfriend recently but things have cleared up and are going much better, due in part some good advice from kleinbl00 so thank you for that. Funny in that in most prior relationships I would likely have just ended things, but not this time around. Maybe a mark of some sort of maturity, or just caring more about this girl. Did have a separate but related weird moment that really isn't important in the scheme of things but did cause me to freak out for a good ten minutes. The college ex-girlfriend like some photos I posted from a hike I did this past weekend. Which so, so, so doesn't matter but it's the first sort of acknowledgment one of us has given the other in about 5 years and she's still the only person I've, to date, been with for what I would call a considerable amount of time and also been "in love" with. Rocked my boat just a bit. Looks like I'm going to Mexico for at least a week at the end of next year! Not sure exactly where yet, but it should be fun!