Summary: I'm buying everything I can think of wanting. Seattle is shutting down, some things will be shut for good when this is all over. I'm lucky on so many fronts, and I worry about everybody who isn't.
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Good night, everyone.
( Read more... )
Good night, everyone.
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Things are moving fast around here, I'm not sure if I can appropriately get everything, but summary:
Many of my friends are now work from home by company policy, including my husband and I. Traffic is very light, normally crowded places are less crowded.
Another friend cancelled her upcoming trip to visit me midMarch last Sunday; she can't afford to catch it with her preexisting conditions. Events are being cancelled left and right; ECCC went from no refund to refunding exhibitors and attendees to postponing until the summer. The music concert a friend and I were going to on the 8th is cancelled. Our flagship public university stopped having in person classes until the end of the month. Some schools in the area have shut down in response to a positive case. Most universities are stopping in person classes until the end of the quarter.
One of our local research is starting to do trials for a potential vaccine attempt. Our local blood bank is sorely hit and needs donors.
The president of the country is actively mad at the governor of my state and calling him a snake, maybe because our state is one of ones actually trying to figure out who's sick or because Inslee ran in the presidential primary and said some meanie pants things in the past about our big boy president. But I guess Pence's visit was okay overall and I read about us getting some federal assistance this point with supplies which can only help because health service providers are already rationing those.
( Day by Day )
Many of my friends are now work from home by company policy, including my husband and I. Traffic is very light, normally crowded places are less crowded.
Another friend cancelled her upcoming trip to visit me midMarch last Sunday; she can't afford to catch it with her preexisting conditions. Events are being cancelled left and right; ECCC went from no refund to refunding exhibitors and attendees to postponing until the summer. The music concert a friend and I were going to on the 8th is cancelled. Our flagship public university stopped having in person classes until the end of the month. Some schools in the area have shut down in response to a positive case. Most universities are stopping in person classes until the end of the quarter.
One of our local research is starting to do trials for a potential vaccine attempt. Our local blood bank is sorely hit and needs donors.
The president of the country is actively mad at the governor of my state and calling him a snake, maybe because our state is one of ones actually trying to figure out who's sick or because Inslee ran in the presidential primary and said some meanie pants things in the past about our big boy president. But I guess Pence's visit was okay overall and I read about us getting some federal assistance this point with supplies which can only help because health service providers are already rationing those.
( Day by Day )
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Gonna start journalling about this business, since I'm in the middle of one of the developing epicenters in the US, and because I want to be able to look back in the future on what happened when. I'll probably be editing this particular entry over the next few days as I look back and see what happened when before today.
( Situation: 6 weeks in )
( Situation: 6 weeks in )
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My partner and I bought a house a couple years ago and then got married, in that order, despite planning to do the opposite.
I work for a nonprofit instead of a university lab now...but it's the same job with overall the same people. Like, I literally
We lost one of our cats from a sudden onset of cancer, then gained (through fostering too many cats) a little mama siamese tortie cat who bossily wants to be loved that partner named Zeta. We've been fostering and socializing one last foster cat to make up for my guilt for stealing little mama cat from her potential adoptees, and it might end up being two foster cats because they think they found his lost bonded brother and are trying to recapture him. There's no guarantee they'll still get along but it's worth a try.
Last May I caught a Camponotus modoc queen and plunged right into antkeeping. She and her brood now live in a fancy formicarium from Tarheel Ants and I just bought a wine fridge to give her and her twenty something workers a proper diapause in. This year I hope to catch more ant queens!
We had a roommate for six months last year, the boyfriend of a coworker, and he was pretty dang perfect.
In September I took the plunge and joined a nearby kettlebell gym alongside with partner, and we've kept it up more or less though the past month has been difficult between illness, injury, and travel.
I have been grimly and steadily reducing the number of clutter objects in the house.
I’m about to take a woodworking class at the local community college, starting tonight! Partner is switching jobs, which for various reasons means we’ll likely have a fancy laser cutter soon.
Look out for an upcoming post about how I accidentally became my backyard neighbor's Uber.
I work for a nonprofit instead of a university lab now...but it's the same job with overall the same people. Like, I literally
We lost one of our cats from a sudden onset of cancer, then gained (through fostering too many cats) a little mama siamese tortie cat who bossily wants to be loved that partner named Zeta. We've been fostering and socializing one last foster cat to make up for my guilt for stealing little mama cat from her potential adoptees, and it might end up being two foster cats because they think they found his lost bonded brother and are trying to recapture him. There's no guarantee they'll still get along but it's worth a try.
Last May I caught a Camponotus modoc queen and plunged right into antkeeping. She and her brood now live in a fancy formicarium from Tarheel Ants and I just bought a wine fridge to give her and her twenty something workers a proper diapause in. This year I hope to catch more ant queens!
We had a roommate for six months last year, the boyfriend of a coworker, and he was pretty dang perfect.
In September I took the plunge and joined a nearby kettlebell gym alongside with partner, and we've kept it up more or less though the past month has been difficult between illness, injury, and travel.
I have been grimly and steadily reducing the number of clutter objects in the house.
I’m about to take a woodworking class at the local community college, starting tonight! Partner is switching jobs, which for various reasons means we’ll likely have a fancy laser cutter soon.
Look out for an upcoming post about how I accidentally became my backyard neighbor's Uber.
I was the child of diplomats given over to the robot nannies of the mechtopia as assurance for my parents' good behavior.
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"those are the more bread and butter cancers of the kidney"
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Last night I couldn't enter my apartment through the front door because there was a spider in the keyhole. I tried to blow on it to scare it off but that only made it retreat even futher, ensuring there was no way to unlock the door without being some obscure means spider murderer, and I had to slink to the back door to come in. I'm not sure what I would have done if we didn't have a back entrance.
Late last night I was driving towards Seattle on the freeway. It was frighteningly foggy and I couldn't see very far in front of me. I'd slowed down even though cars around me had not. I noticed a van in the left lane towing a small high walled trailer containing an arbor made from thick wooden beams. I remember briefly thinking that maybe it'd be better if they were in the right lane, as I'm pretty sure that's the proper thing to do when you have a trailer, and they had finished passing me.
A few minutes after they had disappeared into the mist, I noticed a large dark hulking shape in the left lane. An audible "oh my god" escaped as I realized the arbor had fallen out of its trailer and was sprawled on the lane beside me. If that van had been driving in the right lane like they should have been, I might have ended up running into those solid 4x4 wood beams given the conditions.
When I got home I tried to figure out who to call to notify about the problem, but I couldn't find anything and was reluctant to just start dialing numbers at 1am. I hope everything ended up okay!
A few minutes after they had disappeared into the mist, I noticed a large dark hulking shape in the left lane. An audible "oh my god" escaped as I realized the arbor had fallen out of its trailer and was sprawled on the lane beside me. If that van had been driving in the right lane like they should have been, I might have ended up running into those solid 4x4 wood beams given the conditions.
When I got home I tried to figure out who to call to notify about the problem, but I couldn't find anything and was reluctant to just start dialing numbers at 1am. I hope everything ended up okay!
There are currently three days left on the IndieGoGo fundraiser for The Seattle Attic and we've been very successful! We're trying to make some stretch goals now, which would help fantastically to get more cool equipment into the space. The more cool equipment we have, the more people in the space can do cool things with it, and the more people might come by and join us until we form some kind of awesome Seattle singularity.
Some good things about my makerspace:
* Feminist! Gay and trans inclusive!
* Accessible! One can get to our space with ramps and elevators.
* Friendly to a lot of feminine-coded disciplines, like fiber work and sewing
If you want to learn more, our website is at Seattle Attic and we have a community blog at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
seattleattic.
Remember earlier when I posted about being involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters? The Attic is a place where I can go take my Little to go hang out with really cool people where she can chat about her plans to build a robot spider.
So! This fundraiser would be a cool thing to support if you have some spare dollars and:
* You want more spaces that can support women in tech
* You're in the Seattle area and think this is a cool thing to have around (Portland and San Francisco both have feminist makerspaces--so should we!) and might also want to come by during our weekly open houses and potentially imbibe in baked goods
Some good things about my makerspace:
* Feminist! Gay and trans inclusive!
* Accessible! One can get to our space with ramps and elevators.
* Friendly to a lot of feminine-coded disciplines, like fiber work and sewing
If you want to learn more, our website is at Seattle Attic and we have a community blog at
seattleattic.Remember earlier when I posted about being involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters? The Attic is a place where I can go take my Little to go hang out with really cool people where she can chat about her plans to build a robot spider.
So! This fundraiser would be a cool thing to support if you have some spare dollars and:
* You want more spaces that can support women in tech
* You're in the Seattle area and think this is a cool thing to have around (Portland and San Francisco both have feminist makerspaces--so should we!) and might also want to come by during our weekly open houses and potentially imbibe in baked goods
Last night I dreamed that cookie zombies were after me, and I escaped by climbing a chain link fence into a university's cattle stables to confuse my scent with all the manure.
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Today, I went and saw Margaret Atwood give a reading. Then on the way home, I was bitten by a goat in a charming fashion! Did you know goats don't have upper teeth? Because I do now!
Around this time is the two year anniversary of the first time I woke up next to my boyfriend, and we've been living together now for about a year.
Last night I was really grumpy, for a bunch of combined reasons that culminated in being really frustrated at how messy our apartment had gotten while I was checked out of cleaning for a week. I was drowning my sorrows in endless turns of Civ 5 and really didn't feel like going to be when he did around midnight.
I feel what I should do in situations like these is just stay out and sleep in the guest bed, so he can get the sleep he so desperately needs, but he insists he prefers that I come in. When I finally decided I was done it was some ungodly hour and I did my best to sneak quietly into the room so as not to get him up. He bolted straight up in bed as soon as I was through the door, murmuring about how I was here! and very excited and happy and snuggly when I crawled into bed.
I'm not sure how I got so lucky, but I really hope it lasts!
Last night I was really grumpy, for a bunch of combined reasons that culminated in being really frustrated at how messy our apartment had gotten while I was checked out of cleaning for a week. I was drowning my sorrows in endless turns of Civ 5 and really didn't feel like going to be when he did around midnight.
I feel what I should do in situations like these is just stay out and sleep in the guest bed, so he can get the sleep he so desperately needs, but he insists he prefers that I come in. When I finally decided I was done it was some ungodly hour and I did my best to sneak quietly into the room so as not to get him up. He bolted straight up in bed as soon as I was through the door, murmuring about how I was here! and very excited and happy and snuggly when I crawled into bed.
I'm not sure how I got so lucky, but I really hope it lasts!
Recently I decided to get an album (M83 - Hurry Up We're Dreaming) since the psychedelic music videos got stuck in my head.
I'm pretty much a digital music listener at this point, and usually buy the files from Amazon. For some reason, though, buying the CD was a whopping $0.50 cheaper than getting the MP3s, even though the AutoRip feature means that ordering the CD automatically gives me the MP3s in Amazon's cloud immediately on purchase. I figured I might as well order the CDs since they were cheaper and the stereo in my car is a bit antiquated, having just a radio, CD player, and cassette tape deck. Having some more CDs to play in there wouldn't be a bad thing! The tape deck doesn't work any more for an AUX import, and when I walked into Car Toys on a whim asking if they had a cleaner for it, they just laughed at me.
Flash forward a month and I've budgeted for a new car stereo so I can do AUX in finally with my devices and access all my music and audiobooks in the car. I'm pretty excited about it for shallow reasons, because it can change light colors, which is silly, but it means it can match the red lights of my car's dash. It wasn't easy finding a double-DIN car stereo with red lights--I wanted one with actual buttons, not a touch screen with a clumsy interface and a GPS obsolete before it even got to me. So now I don't have to keep a whole stack of CDs to keep my ears occupied with music while I'm driving.
Then I ended up on that album's Amazon page again today for random reasons and noticed: Amazon will give me $3.45 as a gift card if I send back the album, which I haven't even opened yet. In practice that makes ordering the CD set nearly $4 cheaper, despite being shipped around twice. I wonder what sort of weird awkward licensing details combine to make that happen, I bet part of it is M83 being a non-US band.
I'm pretty much a digital music listener at this point, and usually buy the files from Amazon. For some reason, though, buying the CD was a whopping $0.50 cheaper than getting the MP3s, even though the AutoRip feature means that ordering the CD automatically gives me the MP3s in Amazon's cloud immediately on purchase. I figured I might as well order the CDs since they were cheaper and the stereo in my car is a bit antiquated, having just a radio, CD player, and cassette tape deck. Having some more CDs to play in there wouldn't be a bad thing! The tape deck doesn't work any more for an AUX import, and when I walked into Car Toys on a whim asking if they had a cleaner for it, they just laughed at me.
Flash forward a month and I've budgeted for a new car stereo so I can do AUX in finally with my devices and access all my music and audiobooks in the car. I'm pretty excited about it for shallow reasons, because it can change light colors, which is silly, but it means it can match the red lights of my car's dash. It wasn't easy finding a double-DIN car stereo with red lights--I wanted one with actual buttons, not a touch screen with a clumsy interface and a GPS obsolete before it even got to me. So now I don't have to keep a whole stack of CDs to keep my ears occupied with music while I'm driving.
Then I ended up on that album's Amazon page again today for random reasons and noticed: Amazon will give me $3.45 as a gift card if I send back the album, which I haven't even opened yet. In practice that makes ordering the CD set nearly $4 cheaper, despite being shipped around twice. I wonder what sort of weird awkward licensing details combine to make that happen, I bet part of it is M83 being a non-US band.
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So, late last year I started the process of applying to Big Brothers Big Sisters and Monday I got to find out about a potential match for me, and it sounds like a really good one even if I have to drive a bit more than I'd like to see her. She's seventeen, which is a older than usual for a Little, but she had a previous Big and really really loved the program so they're trying to match her with someone else.
She loves animals...and they think she has rats and I just about died. (Longtime readers know I love rats to bits, and used to keep them, but I cannot have them due to common apartment restrictions.) She likes music and photography and computers. She's even taking a programming class at school she could use some help with--OH WAIT I DO THAT FOR A LIVING yesssssss. And she would like to do active things, too, so I'm pretty sure we will have loads and loads to do.
Anyway, Itentatively meet with her next Monday</> meet with her next Wednesday and I'm excited to pieces.
She loves animals...and they think she has rats and I just about died. (Longtime readers know I love rats to bits, and used to keep them, but I cannot have them due to common apartment restrictions.) She likes music and photography and computers. She's even taking a programming class at school she could use some help with--OH WAIT I DO THAT FOR A LIVING yesssssss. And she would like to do active things, too, so I'm pretty sure we will have loads and loads to do.
Anyway, I
Tonight I was lazy and not feeling well, so for dinner I put some prepackaged quasi-baked local bakery rosemary bread in the oven for ten minutes, then slathered slices still warm and steaming with goat cheese and sprinkled kalamata olives on top.
IT WAS SO FANTASTIC.
IT WAS SO FANTASTIC.
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I'm stealing this meme from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
smeddley!
(In other news, this is the first Halloween since I've come to Seattle that I've had trick'or'treaters, since I live in a duplex with an external door, and I'm stoked. I totally have candy to give them, too.)
smeddley!In honor of All Hallow's Eve, I'm inviting trick-or-treaters to my 'door.' Comment "Trick or Treat" to this post and... well, you know the drill. Treats can be anything that strikes my fancy. The more "houses" to visit the more fun it'll be, so go ahead, open your journal and help spread the fun!
(In other news, this is the first Halloween since I've come to Seattle that I've had trick'or'treaters, since I live in a duplex with an external door, and I'm stoked. I totally have candy to give them, too.)
I'm so worn out that I read the entry
Another Call For Abolishing Patents, This One From the St. Louis Fed » Slashdotin my RSS reader as
Another Call for Abolishing Parentsand got very confused because the only place I've seen that happen is science fiction.
