I'm now officially in a relationship! It took us a while to get to this point, but we wanted to do things slowly. My mom can't wait to meet her, I've been testing her patience for a looong time now. I'm seeing her family this weekend and I've already asked her to join my family weekend later this year. It feels great to finally be able to say 'my girlfriend'. :) -- Had a feedback session the other day. It was a 360-degree feedback thingy for the young professionals training my company has. Basically, it ended up being a two hour long, unexpectedly open-hearted session with other colleagues that started working here this year. I found it super interesting to hear all the different problems that my peers are struggling with, from time management to reputation to communication issues. Turns out that everyone has their own battles to fight. On the one hand, no shit, but on the other hand we're good enough at hiding those problems away that it often passes by unnoticed. One that I think is doing great talked about her struggle with insecurity, for example, despite always presenting herself as confident Reminded me of thenewgreen's duck on the pond: I talked about how I care a disproportionately large amount about the commitments I make, and how much effort I try to pour into understanding someone else's point of view. How I always want to do things perfect, effective and full of energy but that I should be watchful not efface myself too much in the process. The exercise made me realize that most of my motivation comes from desparately avoiding failure - not all failure, but only the failure that disappoints to the people I care about. I constantly worry that the good things I try to do can be negated by a single failure, despite knowing better than that. It may have felt true in high school, but it isn't now.
Hey ski. I’m thinking about moving to Virginia. Any of you guys live near there? Any thoughts? I wouldn’t move til May 19 or later - because I’m looking to buy and have a current lease and so on. I love it at my current bank company. There’s an opportunity coming up on my team which has been earmarked for me. Long term I want to get into audit (a very related line of work to my current job) and I think it could only help me to be able to be physically present at company HQ. also, the social scene in my current city/state has started to feel really stale. I’m a big fan of change. I’m really thinking about this seriously and leaning towards it. Housing markets around where I’d live (Richmond area) are at least as good as in DE where I am, if not more favorable to me. Man. I guess Frodo does leave the Shire eventually. Even if I’m still in love with it. :)
I started adding a tree to my most recent painting, which was a bit daunting. It still needs leaves. I'm thinking about adding BAT to Hubski. It supports the typed of Web that I'd like to see, and it seems like the first effort that has a chance. I've been using Brave exclusively for a few weeks now, and I am not missing Chrome or Safari at all. Also, Stripe has turned off our cc processing because our TIN or something doesn't match some records or something. Hopefully, I can figure out what the issue is. I'm tired of credit cards.
Had an awesome first experience last weekend that’s not suited for sharing on the internet. But it was awesome and I hope to do it again sometime. My hair is now a crazy shade of purple. I’ve been talking about doing something like that for ages so it was time to just go for it. I’m curious how it’s going to affect my interactions with other people. I guess I’ll see if it makes any difference on my speakeasy tour tonight :) Speaking of which, I’ve been trying to find someone that can run the tour from time to time and it’s been surprisingly hard. All my friends I consider qualified are too busy. I also need someone super reliable, sociable, that knows the city well (and preferably grew up here). The pay is great, the work is fun but maybe I’m just too picky. Getting good reviews is essential - they blacklist your listing if you get three 2 stars reviews. Going to a pop up truck party thing on Saturday. I roped my friends into setting up a coffee shop/ shisha lounge chill space. But it looks like I’ll only show up to the end of the party since I have my tour on that day. Helping organize the regional burning man decomp and it looks like we’re going with the cool warehouse space I found :) super proud of that. But we just voted yesterday to move the party to February because time is tight. So it looks like we’ll be in India and not able to attend. What’s the deal with me organizing all kind of fun things I can’t go to!?
I had the exact same problem. Here's what I (and the owner of the tours) did: 1. Document all the stories and locations 2. Put them into a binder 3. Find local actors to audition for the part as tour guide 4. Let them sort through the binder of stories, and pick the 4-5 that "vibed" with them 5. Let the actor create their own tour path, with a stop at each story 6. Let the actor refine the story, so it flows more comfortably for them (but is still accurate) 7. Pay the actor's a flat fee per tour - plus tips! - to run tours. Here's why it is a win: 1. Actors are REALLY GOOD at engaging an audience 2. Actors are REALLY GOOD at storytelling 3. Actors are usually available during the hours/times when nobody else is available 4. Actors can pick up tours on a moment's notice, and fill in for each other 5. Actors need regular part-time work, to fill out their schedule and make some money 6. Actors like tips. A lot. Every city has a bajillion actors available, all the time. If you give them a binder with the source material (or a "digital binder" of some sort), and a video of you giving a tour, they can craft something REALLY GOOD to present to the tour attendees. This model is extensible. One actor may innovate and bring up ideas for other tours... food tours... history tours focused on architecture, or plants, or bars, or whatever. (One I liked to do was the Seattle LUST Tour, where I told stories of Seattle's dirty sexy history. It was the same route as the Ghost Tour, but different content.) If a tour is $15 per person, give the actor $10 + any tips. That way you get $5/person to go off, spend time in the city's archives, get to know the city's historian(s), the city's old businesses/residents on your tour route, etc., and add new stories to your binder. FINAL BENEFIT: Return visits. When a local comes on the tour with their out-of-town friend, they will hear one group of stories, told in a certain way, by one tour guide. Then, next month, when their in-laws come and visit, they take them on the tour AGAIN, and get a different guide... with a (mostly) different set of stories, told in their own unique way. This creates return business, and ensures that each visitor gets something new/interesting, even if they have taken the same tour before. (As a tour guide, I would get bored with my tour. So I'd open the binder, read a few other stories, figure out how to weave them into my tour, and freshen it up for myself. This also means that I would see the same people on my tour multiple times, and each time they'd tell me how much they liked the new/different story!) Have fun!! "...Speaking of which, I’ve been trying to find someone that can run the tour from time to time and it’s been surprisingly hard. ..."
Thanks! Getting actors is an awesome idea :) On top of that, my tour is super easy to run. It's a lot more about listening to people and being aware of how everything's going than having set "talking points". I have a couple bits about food, montreal, speakeasies etc but I find people are looking primarily for a good time over a highly informative tour. And even when I whip out the knowledge, only about half the people really hear since it's so loud in the bar. People love to hear "opinions" about how I feel about living here, more than any "fun facts". I may or may not have gone on passionate rants about why our bagels are better in presence of New Yorkers a couple times and it's been a hit. I'll definitely look into expanding the empire next summer when the tourism picks up again.
I don't think I've ever played Trivial Pursuit, but if I do you can bet I won't be taking about it on the internet.
It has been an eventful week. On Saturday I was on a 22.5 hour date. We met at a used book shop, went to a cafe, then the city park, and then I was at her place until 2:30 the next day :) She had said she was only looking for something casual, which didn't really seem to match up with "hey we just spent 22.5 hours together, and a large portion of it was like cuddling and talking about our families" Soo I wrote her, and we talked about it, and she stayed pretty set that she wasn't looking for anything serious. So (and this is where I'm proud of my progress), I said, if we're not looking for the same thing, we should probably break things off. She said wait, she just doesn't know how she feels. Let's talk personally. So, yesterday. We met at the park by her place to talk. Basically, I told her that it's fine if she doesn't want to immediately go into something super-serious (that's also not how relationships work), my problem is just if she says from the beginning that anything serious is off the table. Which she was actually mostly fine with, to my surprise. She just told me how she had had a FWB thing with her best friend that had ended really badly, so she's worried about something like that happening again. Basically, I asked her to trust me, and said that we can go slowly. She seemed to really want to try, and we agreed to take it slow but try properly dating. We got lunch today and it was really nice :) -- Starting class tomorrow! So excited. Doing a couple cultural studies seminars (ugh), couple linguistics courses (nice) and a literature class. Looking forward to getting back into the swing of the semester :)
Storytime: Last Saturday afternoon I went on a run on a path by the creek. As I was walking to the path I saw movement from the corner of my eye. It was a hawk with one foot possessively on a dead songbird. It gave me the stink eye a few seconds and flew off with its lunch. We had heavy rain that morning and the creek was almost 10 ft higher than usual. It was about 65 degrees and 95% humidity. I ate too much pizza for lunch so to avoid pizza burps I kept running slower and slower until a mile in I was joking slower than a fast walk. For the next hour almost I just jogged occasionally and stared at the creek mostly. The sky cleared for a few minutes, and if I had my phone I would have taken a picture for the reflections photo thread -- blue sky and white clouds reflected off muddy water. The rain last week caused a higher flood, I saw a 2X4 dangling from a tree, way above Saturday's flood. I saw at least a hundred squirrels. After a while I wandered onto a dirt path through the bushes that overlooked some rapids. It had a small clearing full of beer bottles. After watching a few minutes a guy walked up the path behind me and was startled to see anyone there. He was wearing a blue button down shirt and matching purple velvet pants and shoes and he reeked of weed. After some comments about the rain and flood I guess he decided a sweaty runner wandering through the bushes was probably harmless and lit a joint.
Work Turns out I'm going to Atlanta on Sunday for a work conference. Very excited over that, travelling is fun even if it makes me feel a little dissociated from myself. Some of that, I think, is caused by my travel mostly being almost always last minute. At least for work travel. Performance reviews are coming up, I expect they will be positive for me. Not Work Ankle is doing okay, it's kind of plateaued with the swelling. Went climbing last night and got about 30 minutes in before it started to swell up, and called it good at that. Daily strength and mobility exercises, but I expect ~8 months before full healing and return to previous state strength. At least I'm back to active recovery but holy fuck is it frustrating. Also Not Work Single again and thinking I'm going to stay this way for a while. I'm not a great partner, well, I start off as one and then slowly lose passion or interest in the relationship and discard it. That's kind of where I'm at, though there are many other reasons. Haven't felt love for a person in almost five years, that's probably worth exploring further. What does it take for me to love another person.
this happened to me like four or six times and eventually i just gave upSingle again and thinking I'm going to stay this way for a while. I'm not a great partner, well, I start off as one and then slowly lose passion or interest in the relationship and discard it. That's kind of where I'm at, though there are many other reasons. Haven't felt love for a person in almost five years, that's probably worth exploring further. What does it take for me to love another person.
The flu/cold/whatever that has been stalking me for a month got me last week. I spent last weekend doing very, very little which put me behind in many ways. Then, of course, CNC classes have been about manual threading old school on crunchy old lathes which takes bloody forever, especially when that chunk of well-sized "this is mild steel, right, instructor?" metal turns out to be tool steel. This rankles in particular when my whole point of doing this shit is to get better at programming CNC and the CAM software we're using is so ghetto and awful that it won't even talk to any of the machines I'm going to have to work with. Got some really great results with copper etching. Probably going to be greater with enamel. We'll see this afternoon. If this is a win I might drop $400 on an electro-etching/electroforming rig from Rio Grande. It's hilarious. Jewelers freak the fuck out about buying expensive things - "ZOMG you're using silver? That's like $14 worth of silver!" which, if you're a redneck with a Lapua is like five rounds. My instructor sharpens number 11 blades. I bought a pair of Fisso magic arms on eBay for $170 each 'cuz they're usually $370 and all they do is hold my travel indicators. But they hold them really goddamn well. I might buy some movements, buy some cases, etch some silver and put together a handful of watches just to fuckin' do it. In the meantime I have to do a project with chain and decided I'ma do Milanese. Wanna see how you make Milanese? Unfortunately this violates the spirit of the assignment (and costs $17k - I asked over the summer). So here's your other option: I'll say this. Attempting this in 26ga copper is enough to make you glad you didn't attempt it in 26ga silver. We'll try 16ga copper, which will look manly as fuck, but might actually succeed.
Jewelry's a lot of fun. Interesting discovery: the classes are about 90% women, which I believe is the reason any critiques are overwhelmingly supportive and personal. There are some people in there making genuinely ugly shit but the culture is one of "bend over backward to find something nice to say" which is not at all the way the 98% male CNC class goes ("dog your own shit as hard as you can before someone else beats you to it"). I'm cognizant of the fact that the watch industry is fundamentally white men making things for white men and while I'm not going to be in a position to do much about that initially, I'm keenly interested in doing something about it long-term.
I'll just take a soda water with some lime. I've been signing NDAs, so I can't tell y'all, but I'll tell y'all. I'm doing Hollywood. I'm trying to grow as a person. I get a car later this week. I've gotten a laptop. Also, I am listening to a lot of music.
Just attended a 2-day marketing conference (the Seattle Sports Marketing Conference) ... that had no hashtag, no social presence, and no wifi... the irony was palpable. Despite light attendance, and a failure to execute on the things every one of the speakers talked about (leveraging social networks, creating unique and timely content, etc.), there were a couple of really good sessions with interesting people. And hey ... I got to hang out in a building that I got to work on the design of, a little over 30 years ago! (The WA State Convention Center. I was a draftsman and model builder for the architectural firm - Danadjieva & Koenig Associates - while I was in high school.)
Monday I was expecting a package and actually home. The Postal Service didn't even try to deliver it and just put a "nobody available to sign" slip in my box. If I still had Twitter, I'd have bitched about it. But I don't, so I didn't, and I picked my package up Tuesday morning no problem. I think it's healthier for me not having social media to post bad stuff on. It forces me to accept it and move on without dragging friends down and without then dealing with either being ignored or having to talk about it. Swimming is good. I think I'm going to get a membership at the local YMCA to swim but also take some of their other classes. I'm not good at swimming but I'm already better than I was. My exercise and diet balance is a bit of a mess lately, but I feel good and strong so I'm not stressing on it. I walked/hiked about twelve miles today, and I could feel my glute working the whole time. It's still a bit of a conscious effort, but it's good. I'm optimistic I'll get past this hump. My longest run lately is six miles, but I'm going to try 7.5 this week.
this happened to me once so i called their dispatcher, was told the driver was currently in a neighborhood ~20 minutes away with only one exit, so i camped at the front, got in his way and got my package he didn't mind, said it happened a lot. so that was a little confusing. but hey, it's an option
I have arrived back in the states from Japan. I'm not quite as broke as I expected to be. Hooray for affordable food and drinks in Japan. One of the souvenirs I brought back was japanese bird flu. I think I'm mostly better though. I'll put together a trip report soon. I swapped out the coolant tank in my Saab because the old one broke on Monday. Tuesday it threw a check engine light. This morning I had it checked out and it's all good. It was probably just a bad ignition coil, and I had a pile of spare ones in the trunk from the last time one went bad. I may also need a new battery though. It's about time to get another #scificlub thread going.
Breaking personal records day after day on the bike. Three days on, one day off seems to maintain my best stride. I can regularly put up 100+ miles in a week after just, deciding to do more. Somehow I am able to do miles and miles on a bike inside but the second I try and take a walk up to the pastures and fields down the road I am wheezing and shaky after a few hundred yards of normal pace. Confusing. Wings level.