it’s probably obvious from this past week on here that i don’t have patience for disingenuous or otherwise completely out of touch comments and views. apologies on if the related and ensuing drama was a bit much…
…small acts of resistance:
- team who reports to me, all members, PTO requests currently blanket approved. (note that team performance is well past “good”, and I have a team where people have immediate relatives in puerto rico, taiwan, or israel)
- purchased a rather nice folding saw which ive used before to facilitate trail maintenance work this summer - planning to get use out of it on urban trails around here and in the more “real” wilderness.
- monetary donations to certain nonprofits important to me
- emailing and calling my state senators and local house reps
not quite sure what else to do tbh.
Thank you.
I seem to operate at a species-wide level of thinking and even increasingly actions - nurturing all of the local, family, and friends-level stuff cannot fall by the wayside. Including simple "thank you"s!
You're doing all ya can do for now.
Thank you.
a thanks really does go a long way! i can’t think at a global scale this days, it’s too much of a bummer for me.
In the famous words of Angela on 90 day, regarding eggs: "I can tote it."
My niece has a birthday tomorrow. I texted my sister for ideas and discovered that my mother - whom I haven't spoken to since the invasion of Ukraine - has decided to tap out. She's incontinent, she's throwing clots, her husband is deeply, aggressively demented (with a diagnosis this time!) and it's maybe time to look at long-term care.
My sister took charge this time, which means she's the bad guy. It's been interesting watching her figure that out.
I'm mostly sanguine about it. It's not my problem. They're worse off, they have fewer options, and things are shittier now than they were three years ago, when I was moving heaven and earth to provide a soft landing. That's all been squandered. And I'm mostly counseling her to let his son get eaten alive by this bullshit, not just because the son was the one who caused the plug to be pulled on everything I'd set up. But because having him killed and eaten means he can't interfere when the rubber hits the road.
But I'm very angry that if she'd backed me up three years ago we wouldn't be here.
I was supposed to have a lunch date with a friend I haven't spent nearly enough time with. He's dying of cancer right now. Not really in a place to see anyone. We have a mutual friend who is closer who keeps me apprised. And the guy who made my chess board is busy dying of cancer right now. Brain tumor first, then loss of short-term memory, now loss of continence.
And my mother and her husband deserve so much more suffering than these people.
I'm doing better than most anyone I know and I'm doing poorly. It's humbling. I wish we still lived on a planet where people cared about each other but I'd best get the mote out of mine own eye, right?
I almost did.
But I can't.
Dude.
The amount of emotional energy needed to interpret and navigate that set of circumstances with your mother - even though estranged, and even through the intermediary of your sister - at the same time as:
- being a father
- owning and running a birthing clinic
- drawing down on your finances hard to preserve your house
- watching the world as we know eat its own head
is going to be beyond brutal. I hope you're being kind to yourself.
Like I said. I got friends with hella worse. But yeah. Emotionally I'm pretty sure I'll be long dead before this house is habitable; it's the only logical outcome. The only thing that balances the scales.
The house is being paid for with crypto, BTW. I don't know if you've noticed what a nasty bunch of jerks they've become. It's like watching the arc from the Whole Earth Catalog to Pump.Fun as a four-year speedrun, except they used to be your tweeps.
My sister was pretty shell-shocked by the whole affair. She's now acclimated to the ocean which means 7000ft high desert in February gave her a sore throat, burning lungs and bleeding mucosa... which basically puts her on par with the rest of us. Four days in Albuquerque left her with laryngitis. It also - obviously - nearly curtailed her daughter's first teenage birthday so she decided to splurge and buy the kid a DSLR, which means I got to advise on the DSLR (and buy the kid a Gorillapod; I hope she thrives).
I opted not to tell my sister my "my first camera" story because it would be sour grapes. But I'll tell you guys.
It's actually my "my second camera" story because I had asked for a camera in 6th grade, expecting maybe some $30 Kodak point'n'shoot. Instead my father saddled me with a Zenit Automat. On the one hand? it was before Iran-Contra so having a Soviet camera was fuckin' badass. On the other hand? It was a primitive piece of USSR junk with wretched build quality, a go-nogo gauge for a light meter (that ran on Soviet batteries so... no light meter) and the nasty tendency to cause UFO trails across my pictures from a poorly-clearanced shutter mechanism. That, combined with the need to bike four miles round trip to get film developed proved an insurmountable challenge for learning photography.
But when I was about to graduate college, my (manic) mother decided that she wanted to get me a camera, I should pick one out. Knowing her generosity wasn't boundless I settled on a used Canon for $400 that looked pretty bitchin'. I let her know. She (depressed) told me that not only would she disown me if I ever used a Canon, she would disown me if I said the word, because she had a Canon microscope that she hated, apparently. So I went and looked at Nikons, which had much shittier ergonomics, but were apparently acceptable, and she goaded me into looking at better and better cameras until I'd picked out a $1200 combo. That was acceptable. So I put it on my credit card and waited - waited for the camera store to actually ship it (they took long enough that I missed every summer flower) and waited for my mother to pay me back.
She never did. Her graduation present was $1280 of debt at 18.9% APR.
A year later my mother (manic) informed me that my sister had taken up photography, and following the advice of the camera store they had bought her a Canon. Unfortunately it was a broken Canon, so they had paid $700 for the camera, $400 to get it fixed, and then $900 for another Canon because the first one was un-fixable, and then my sister had lost it (sold it for drugs). When I asked her what happened to her fatwa against Canon she assured me that the camera shop -run by a guy she was sweet on - knew best. And when I asked if she ever intended to pay me back for the camera she said "well but yo'uve already paid for it, haven't you."
I didn't mention any of this to my sister. I just told her she was doing a good job supporting her daughter in her artistic pursuits. I figure that's about the maturity called for, and adheres to my "whatever you do, don't fuck shit up for your sister's kids" mantra, which kept me from jumping off a cliff in 1992.
I am glad we talk. Looking forward to it next time.
turning to everyone hey everyone! we talk!! wooooo
Hello friends. Amid all the shit unfolding in the world, some good news from me. We've upgraded from being slightly indebted to pay off an apartment to being in even greater debt to pay off a house. Which is to say, we bought a house last Saturday. It's only 10 minutes' walk from where we currently live, so we still get all the benefits of Collingwood.
Thinking about you all during these very parlous times. You're the first people I check in on every morning I arrive at my office at work.
I'm going to task my sister, who contracts for your city government as an urban planner, with giving me a breakdown of your neighborhood.
Best of luck.
^^ minor comedy
But also, 'grats on the house. Now when you look at kleinbl00's water damage restoration project, you can feel terrible new things, as a homeowner!
No kidding? Your sister is an urban planner for Melbourne City Council? There's a non zero chance she's a colleague of a friend of mine.
Yep, no kidding! Nothing would surprise me less than finding out our circles meet pretty quick in that network. Play a game of find-the-Texan. edit: Kindly requesting, please don't name her here, if you find her. But I will tell you, and this is true, her secret codename is "Betsy"
I will certainly not identify your sister if I learn of or encounter her. Is she actually living in the boundaries of the City of Melbourne LGA? I hope she's staying away from the Docklands.
She's got an apartment somewhere in a mid-town-like area, not urban center, but probably not far. Definitely far within any city limits. She recently got permission to have a dog, which is not easy while working on a visa, but she's been there about a decade now and is on the path to citizenship.
My wife and I are planning on getting divorced, my wife will marry my sister while claiming me as a dependent and we'll all be Australian! Should work perfectly. This paragraph is a joke, don't worry.
At some point you should come visit her. Melbourne - and particularly Collingwood - has excellent bars and I'm something of an expert guide.
Oh, I will! It's to my shame that I haven't made it there yet. I wish my main work project had a group somewhere on the continent, I'd have been there by now. edit: It's not that I value work over my sister, but since she comes back here every year or so to visit her entire past, the impetus for me getting there is lower. I do miss her. But me visiting Melbourne proper will probably be two or three years at the most from today, provided it's possible.
Would love to make hubski meetups international (again?).
If you get to Toronto this autumn, I'm going to visit my aunt and uncle there, that'd do it to cement the trip. That's a promise.
Stay well. edi(c)t: and don't say that, dude, jesus
p2p meatspace buff.
What do we call it? It should be a meaningless amalgamation. (decent word)
So the best wordthing I came up with (maybe) was about a decade ago and it was hyper-meta-pan-omni-ism but that was before Facebook did "meta". And I named a bunch of wrapper scripts "meta_" as a prefix before Facebook did "meta". I don't know how the people who got the scripts perceive that nowadays, I've never asked.
We are doing the latin thread here now.!
My sister gets cagey after a few days with me, you'll never make it, I'll get you out of here, after making you want to desperately get out of here.
- We are doing the latin thread here now.!
OK, and like all Latin users throughout history, let's actually talk about Greek.
Well, 'hyper' usually means over or beyond or across with the genitive and about a bazillion things when with accusative: exceeding the measure, over a place, higher-or-equal than, preceeding... It's like overcomplicated Latin super, which usually means 'above' regardless of context.
Meta, as a prefix with short e, can mean 'concerning a set (like community or herd or tools)', 'behind', or - because classical languages hate consistency - 'ahead of'. It's one of those "just keeps getting more contextual meanings with every text" words. EDIT: I think it can also mean 'about'? Both as in "let's talk about it" and "about yey big", like latin circa.
Omni is just a nice Latin adjective, means 'everything', 'whole' or 'all', depending if joined singular or plural/collective noun. It's similar to Greek pan, which has an added meaning of all-encompassing or combining quality.
Unless I got confused by my own word salad, which is likely, 'beyond of all combined everythings, ahead before everythings over all' would therefore be hyper-meta-pan-omni, hyper-meta-omni-pan-omni
EDIT2: Thanks, I really needed some impromptu fun today.
this is one of the best places on the internet.
and that's other peoples' bad.
Hubski has "the best, greatest people, frankly", people are saying (me). sorry, I treat posts like a marble volume that I'll chisel at for a few minutes, mostly to not check the news. Blob probably inspired the sculpting analogy.
What is “Adult Day Centre” from the street sign image on that page? I can’t determine if it’s a social housing program thing or a bar!
Congrats on the house!
I think it's one of those social centre places where elderly can go during the day to stay part of the community. Think child care except the opposite end of the age spectrum and they're going there voluntarily. There's no shortage of bars for them to visit on the way, though.
im glad they also have the bars as an option! man do we really have anything like that here in the states? not sure if there’s a 1:1, that’s cool that yall have that.
The really cool thing is Men's Sheds. There's one in every country town.
INCREDIBLE. I don’t think Trump/MAGA happens if we had a system like that.
Been spending lots of time setting up the new place, it's been rewarding! I've been struggling a little lately. Objectively my life is going good but I'm a littl too stressed at work and low energy to do the things I want after. I still do them, but everything feels like a chore, even basic things. And by the time I'm done with life maintenance stuff I don't always have the energy for the things I'm looking forward to.
It feels like I'm spending all my time in a car, trying to get somewhere instead of in the world. But the road is rough, it's taking too long and I'm missing out on enjoying the journey. I don't know if it means that I need to slow down and enjoy things, take a different road or power through to get to the smoother road faster.
Not quite sure if this metaphor works, but I just spent one week in Costa Rica with some buddies and that was my literal experience. Our communal mansion was far from everything and I wanted to fit in many activities. In the end I spent a lot of my vacation behind the wheel when I could have chilled by the pool. But had I spent the time by the pool, I might have been unhappy with not doing much. Maybe the overall feeling of dissatisfaction is the problem. Or maybe I just needed a longer vacation.
I got myself a wax kit and brought back my old cross country skis from the cabin. There's been record level snow here and I now live a 5 min walk from the mount royal mountain that has groomed trails! Hoping the exercise will help, looking forward to my first outing today!
Finding it exceptionally hard to focus at work. Unplugging for the weekend helped immensely, but the world goes on. Had a LOT of travel plans already set up for this year, re-thinking some of the destinations/modes of travel.
I do have good news to lighten things up, 'cuz goddamn.
1. Planning on getting engaged this year, but thinking sooner than later. Not sure if we want to elope or have a small ceremony. After talking about it over Valentines more, I've found myself excited at the prospect in a way I wasn't expecting.
2. Attended a protest. My paranoia is a bit much afterwards, so I'll re-evaluate as others come up. Also in the boat of 'not sure what else to do'. Have found controlled breathing to be imperative to keeping blood-pressure down throughout the day.
3. Bought some DVDs, and boy it feels good to just own digital media. Of the stash, got a Shrek movie bundle. Apparently some of the translations are damn hilarious.
Would like to get into a house again soon. Given events, missing being on the hairy edge of rural.
Interest rates say wait a while.
Hang in there, anon. Thanks for protesting. And congrats on the engagement! Hearing stories of people with their heads in the right places carrying on with their lives (b/c whatcha gonna do?? We have to live) always makes me feel a little better.
Thanks! Went perusing for rings for the first time today. Seeing the S/O try one on was special form of clarifying excitement.
As for carrying on… yes, it’s a level of “we have to live”. On the best days, having happy moments are good to rebuild a sense of bearing. On the worst days, carrying on is as most others do in already-worse scenarios. Somewhere in the middle provides room for thinking about responses to “what-if” scenarios.
Thank you! And I appreciate you linking that conversation. It’s really damn clever. Brought it up with the S/O and if we’re still looking local within the next year, that avenue dovetails really well into our plans for getting a multifamily housing situation where their parents and potentially some friends could stay as well. Unfortunately, the parents would have been relying on Social Security to both live and pay a significantly reduced amount into the mortgage, yet that might not be viable soon.
She got in! No word on funding/stipend yet, but she did it!
Environmental health/environmental epidemiology. She'll be looking at indoor air quality with gas vs electric/induction stoves and ovens. Hence funding has been a big concern lately but the school guarantees funding so that's good!