Reading

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weird power outage, and knee update

We had a *weird* power outage today: most but not all of the apartment lost power. Mercifully, we did not lose power to the study, where I've been sitting quietly in the air conditioning all day (the high was 35C/95F). Our first thought was that something weird had happened to our apartment's power. Cattitude spent some time on the phone with the management company, which sent a technician. The technician looked things over and told us to call Eversource.

Some piece of their equipment broke, leaving 37 customers without power, according to the outage map, including us and our upstairs neighbors who also had power in part of each apartment. It took them several hours to fix, but fortunately we got our lights back before it was entirely dark out. The oddest-feeling bit of this was realizing that I could plug my phone in to charge, in the middle of a power outage.

I have been doing almost nothing today, to avoid straining my knee*. It's feel better now than last night, but still not great, and I'm having trouble using the quad cane correctly: even moving slowly, my foot and the cane are landing with one an inch or so ahead of the other (sometimes the foot is forward, sometimes it's behind). Tomorrow is supposed to be a lot cooler, but I'm still planning to stay home, and hopefully do some stretching.

* Yes, I buried the lede in yesterday's post, because the googly-eyed train was more interesting.

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semi-recent reading

Since my last reading post:

Nobody Cares, by H. J. Breedlove. This one is good, but dark: it's dedicated this to Black Lives Matter, and fairly early on I got to the first mention of Missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. It's also book 3 in the Talkeetna series, with further developments in the friendship-turning-romance of Dace and Paul.

The Disappearing Spoon, by Dan Kean: a history of the periodic table, with a bit about each of the currently-known elements and the people, or groups of people who discovered them. Someone recommended this after I mentioned liking Consider the Fork, but the two books have almost nothing in common.

The Electricity of Every Living Thing, by Katherine May: a memoir, about walking and what happens after the writer hears a radio program about Asperger's and thinks "but that's me." (I don't remember where I saw this recommended

Return to Gone-Away, by Elizabeth Enright: read-aloud, and a reread of a book I read years ago. Sweet, a family's low-key adventures in an obscure corner of upstate New York. As the title implies, this is a sequel; read Gone-Away Lake first.

Beautiful Yetta, the Yiddish Chicken, by Daniel Pinkwater, a short picture book that we read aloud after Adrian and I realized Cattitude hadn't read it before. Conversation in three languages, with translations (and transliterations) for the Yiddish and Spanish. Not Pinkwater's best, but fun.

Thimble Summer, by Elizabeth Enright, because I enjoyed rereading the Gone-Away Lake books. Several months of a girl's life with her family on a farm. The plot and adventures are relatively low-key. I liked it, and am glad I got it from the library.

Also, it looks as though I didn't post about the summer reading thing here. It started June 1, and the bingo card has a mix of kinds of books, like books in translation, published this year, or with an indigenous author; some squares with things like "read outside" and "recommend a book"; and some that go further afield, like "learn a word in a new language" and "try a new recipe." Plus the ever-popular "book with a green cover." (OK, last year it was "book with a red cover.") I do a lot of my reading on a black-and-white kindle, so I don't know what color the covers might be. Therefore, I walked into a library yesterday, looked at their summer reading suggestions, and grabbed a book with a green cover.

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Sinners

I didn't think I was going to get to see Sinners before it left theaters, but D has found like one showing an evening this week so he and I went today! Sadly V wasn't feeling up to coming along, but otherwise it was great.

I enjoyed the hell out of the movie, if not as much as I would have at like 16 when I was obsessed with that music.

All the performances were so good, and I loved the soundtrack and it was just a joy to watch.

I told V that if they were up to it I'd happily go see it again with them tomorrow. I so badly want to Check on some things. (Also I saw it with no audio description so I'm certain I missed a ton of what's actually on the screen.)

Current Mood: sore

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(no subject)

Two minor amusing things from a trip downtown this morning:

I saw (and rode) one of the googly-eyed trolleys for the first time.

And on the way back, an ad in a subway car for some AI thing. The headline is something like "offload the busy work." The steps given below that are "AI drafts brief" and "brief accepted." Almost anything would have been a better example, after repeated news stories about lawyers getting in trouble for submitting impressively flawed AI-drafted legal briefs.

The trip was to try on sandals at the Clark's store. There was one that was slightly two big, so I have ordered a pair in my usual style, to be delivered to the store, so I can try them on there and return them if they don't fit.

I stopped to grab some lunch at the Quincy Market food court, and then wrenched my knee while sitting down on some stairs in order to eat it. The trip home was not fun, but I came home, sat down for a couple of minutes, then got out last fall's cane and went into the kitchen to make tea.

Sleep band

As someone who, 99% of the time, has to listen to something (usually a familiar audiobook or podcast) to fall asleep, I am finally trying one of these Bluetooth sleep headband things that always get advertised to me.

My needs (or expectations) are not great here. Back in the days of rigid Walkman headphones with scratchy foam over the earphones I would fall asleep lying on my side with them digging in to my head.

But even so, this has been a success the last few nights. If a little warm for my hot head.

It's funny: it's clearly meant to be an eye mask too, but I can't stand not being able to see at least a little light when I open my eyes, so I actively dislike this. I'll wear it at an awkward angle, I don't mind! I hate the dark so much.

Unexpected benefit of this contraption is I can continue my habit of listening to a podcast (to get my hit of extrovert energy) while I'm getting dressed in the morning, without disturbing my sleeping boyfriend still in bed. (I know this would be true of any Bluetooth headset but I'm not used to them, plus the fabric fits the soft and cozy gentle start to the day that I'm always aiming for.)

My bedroom is even close enough to the bathroom that I can leave my phone next to my bed, go brush my teeth, and no interruption in me hearing strangers chat about baseball or whatever.

Current Mood: hopeful

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It's how you use it

I browsed a few AI prompt engineering courses on Coursera (Im still a freeloader, without access to graded assignments). Learned some new and exciting stuff, but it's impossible to listen to these lectures word by word without skipping, because there's so much verbosity, hype and trivial common-sense advice, and because a lot of examples are so mundane and corporate, created by adults for adults: summarize spreadsheets, summarize documentation, write reports, create time schedules, draft HR interview sessions and such. And I was rolling my eyes at meta tasks like asking AI to write prompts for you.

But after a nice chat with Gemini for an ungraded assignment, where instead of some tedious project management task, I asked for a motivational boost for game development, I suddenly got an idea that it would be cool to generate a daily motivational email from a LLM in the same vein. (Using a set of predefined quotes is really boring, as well as getting generic motivational quotes from the Internet.)

So I went meta and asked it to write the appropriate prompt. And the AI rose to the task like a morning star :) It gave me a badass system prompt of ~30 lines (based on the info I shared with it in the current session), and how to incorporate it in the Python litellm script (that was the template from another course, currently on hold, it uses OpenAI API), and later (after subsequent discussion) how to make it even more personalized by reading my latest git commits (via Bitbucket API) and comment on them, and how to send email over ssh (which I will try later), so that was also practicing the "iteration" concept which I didn't bother to do much in the course assignments.

Everything is so cool and fascinating! It makes so much difference when you work on something you're really excited about.

(Wow, such a deep thought, worthy of an AI...)

Btw I'm really warming up to Gemini - never used it often until recently when it was recommended for the assignments in these series of courses from Google. (Maybe that was their main goal...) In the motivation script, I use ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini).

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Exercise victories

Can't tell if my biggest exercise achievement this evening is

1) the (new, temporary) instructor saying "that's the strongest plank ever!" about mine (plank is usually a weakness, all I normally hear is "Erik get your hips up!")
or
2) me absolutely booking it out of there the second our cooldown finished, knowing I only had a chance to make the bus if I hustled -- effectively addring ten minutes of cardio on top of the hour-long circuits session! -- and getting to the stop just as the bus did.

I was so wrecked by the time I got home though. Especially because the bus driver didn't let me off at the stop I wanted (I guess I stood up too late and despite getting to the front of the bus just after another person exited the bus and the doors were still open, he insisted on ignoring me!).

I was so tired that, when I went to eat the lovely dinner that my lovely boyfriend had made for us while I was out, I had to consciously think it's time to open my mouth, muscles! once my hand had brought the spoon full of chili and rice to my lips.

Current Mood: relieved

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celiac test is negative

My GI doctor says the celiac test is negative. This is both unsurprising and a relief: the doctor ordered the test because of comorbidities, not because there were any signs of celiac, but celiac is common enough in people with collagenous colitis that it was worth checking.

I do still need to contact her office tomorrow and ask about that follow-up appointment.

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Milestones of a sort

I did my split squats today and didn't hate them!

Split squats always get a groan when our trainer tells us to do them, no one likes them, but I've found them a particular trial during ankle recovery. They've so good for me that lunges (which are similar) were a formal part of my physiotherapy. But that also meant they were hard, no fun, and not terribly rewarding!

I've always been fortunate that my recovery hasn't featured a lot of pain, but that almost made it more difficult to monitor, and cope with, the intense weakness in that ankle (and the knock-on effects, like my already-atrocious balance somehow got (and remains) even worse?!).

Feeling okay until my leg just didn't hold me up properly can be unsettling!

I've patiently stuck with it, doing regular bodyweight lunges in circuits when other people are doing walking lunges with the biggest dumbbells available to us there (not very big, but still!) and having to tuck myself into the squat cage for split squats at lift club so I could hang on to the bars to keep my balance.

And now I can do (very slow, increasingly wobbly) walking lunges, and I can do split squats without hanging on to anything -- except a little kettlebell! And I might have to go up to the second-smallest size of kettlebell next time actually, I was thinking today.

It's nice to feel like I'm at about the level where I would have been starting if I hadn't broken my ankle almost immediately into taking up exercise as a hobby. I mean yes it'd be nice if it hadn't taken me a year and a half to get that far, but as with so many of the other changes in my body in the past year and a half, I try not to get caught up in what-ifs and wistful regret, and I think I am doing okay at that.

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Hie thee thither!

Sir Ian McKellen to open historic all-trans and nonbinary production of Twelfth Night

What's this, a trans reading of my favorite Shakespeare play, fundraising for my favorite trans charity (the one that brings me that "trans gym" thing I'm always talking about)?

And there's a livestream so I can stay covid-safe? And you can watch from anywhere (for two weeks after the live performance)?

I've already got my ticket!

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a complicated goblin

This morning, a friend shared a screenshot of a social media post that says

i am a simple goblin

all i want is for someone to pet my head

and feed me whatever i want for dinner

without having to figure out what that is

forever ✨

I read this, and thought D's gonna say "oh look it Erik" isn't he (he's convinced I'm a goblin; I don't get it), and before I could even type anything, he said "Oh you found Erik's alt."

I laughed and said "Actually I require many more things than this. I am a needy goblin."

I mean yes those things would be nice -- though lately I've been very particular about what I can eat for dinner, sigh - but I was stuck on "all I want." So I added, "My counselor keeps asking me what it'd take to make things feel less overwhelming/burnouty for me, and I have a big list." Which is true! It's a mental list, but only because I'm scared to write it down.

D asked "Are any of them actionable?"

I laughed differently and much more bitterly at this. The unfeasibility is why I'm scared to write any of it down.

Current Mood: excited

For the vibe of it

Via

thankfulthursday.

Grateful for the accessibility of the AI technology and learning. Recently I got hooked on Coursera's prompt engineering courses. I've always despised this concept, thinking that any "programming" that doesn't involve coding in actual programming languages is inferior and beneath me, and what could I possibly learn about how to ask questions in English? But oh boy, I was so naive, it appears there are so many tricks about AI prompts I wasn't aware of! And it even doesn't have to be entirely coding-free, there are advanced courses that teach how to add scripts to AI to make autonomous agents, but that's for later.

I'm not planning to switch jobs, but seeing how the industry is gravitating to AI-first approach, these skills might even turn out useful someday. But currently it's just curiosity and personal goals. And I'm grateful to Coursera for the option to audit courses for free. (I might consider Coursera Plus in the future if I find enough value in graded assignments and certificates.)

blood draw, etc.

I'm fine, as far as I know everyone's fine, but my trip to get blood drawn was more exciting than anticipated: the bus driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid either a bicycle or a pedestrian crossing in mid-block. She did that, checked to make sure that everyone on the bus was OK, then drove to the next corner, pulled over, and asked again if everyone was sure they were OK.

A few stops after that, someone asked me where he should get off the bus to get to "the little mall with Trader Joe's and MicroCenter." It took me a moment to figure out what he meant, because the bus we were on doesn't go there. So first I told him I wasn't sure, because this bus didn't go there, and then I started thinking about the problem. He said he wasn't good at directions, so I suggested a route that involved more walking but less chance of getting lost. I wound up signaling for his bus stop, and then telling him I was sorry, I'd forgotten they'd moved the bus stop, so [revised directions]. I should note, he didn't ask me for most of this, just what bus stop to use, and I was in the mood to do the extra bits.

The rest of the trip to Mt. Auburn to get blood drawn went smoothly. Once I got there, I had very little wait, and the phlebotomist did a very good job; I made a point of telling him so. On the way back, I stopped in Harvard Square to put more money on my Charlie card; buy and eat a slice of Otto's mashed potato and bacon pizza; and then went to Lizzy's to get Adrian a pint of non-dairy chocolate ice cream.

I was going to withdraw some cash from the ATM at the 7-11 at Comm Ave and Harvard Ave, but when I got there the screen said "windows 7. Press ctrl-alt-del to log in," which was literally impossible with the numeric keypad, so I just came home.

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This is what happens when we go to the gym unsupervised

I can never remember which one's "adductor" and which one's "abductor," but now one of those is the machine in the gym that's for practicing to crush a watermelon between your thighs, and I think after I described it thusly to him tonight, that's what diffrentcolours and I are gonna be calling it from now on.

After that I started explaining all the machines in terms of watermelons. "This one's lifting watermelons, this one's punching watermelons..."

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wiscon,
wiscon 2025

Wiscon report

This year's Wiscon was all-online, and billed as a "gap year," with fewer program items than I'm used to, and no dealers room.

I went to two program items--a "US immigration law and worldwide fandom roundtable" and a panel on "the wild world of modern agtech and why isn't it showing up in current SF."

The roundtable was about as cheerful as you'd expect, with a lot of discussion of both past and feared legal difficulties in traveling to cons, and alternatives like smaller gatherings and online cons. Most of us thought that online wasn't as good as in person, but that it's significantly better than nothing. (There may be some selection bias here: people who didn't think an online con was better than nothing wouldn't bother attending.) And a couple of people noted that their choice has been online or nothing at least since 2020, for reasons like disability or budge that don't have much to do with Trump.

The panel on current and future agriculture was fun. Some of the "what SF is getting wrong" was about TV and movies, showing a garden plot that's much too small for the population it's allegedly feeding, and that the fictional future is even worse/stupider about monoculture than the real world today.

Other than that, I hung out on the Discord server. Most if not all of the program items were recorded, and will be available to convention members for a week after the end of the con, but I may not get around to watching any of them, even less interactive things like readings and the guest of honor speeches.

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Stress bucket

I introduced my counselor to the "stress bucket" metaphor today.

Some of you may remember it was a Gary thing. I described it here:

The stress bucket is a metaphor about a bucket with a little hole in the bottom. Stress fills up the bucket. The little hole gradually empties it. We learned about what things are good for emptying a dog's stress bucket quicker and also how long the effects of an overflowing stress bucket can hang around.

It immediately made sense to me as someone with chronic anxiety, so while we carried on using it about Gary (it was always so useful), I apply it to myself too. And when my counselor was getting tangled in some other metaphors that reminded me of this, I told it to her. She seemed to really like it and extending the metaphor was useful for us during the whole conversation.

My good little dog, still helping out my brain even now.

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A fan

I need a desk fan for the room I work in. V is kind enough to use their skills in online shopping for me, and ordered one the other day to arrive today.

So this afternoon they said "Oh, Erik, I think your fan is on the way," and I presume they got a text about it or whatever.

But a visiting friend heard this, no context, and said she thought they meant, like, an admirer of mine.

It'd be so funny if someone came around just because they liked me.

Meanwhile, I'm so unbelievably tempted to write "A fan of Erik" on the fan. It's in a room full of sharpies. I could so easily do this.

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Rough day

Today I had to ask the other two for help about something that's been making me shut down.

It went well and needed to happen so I'm glad I did it!

But even talking around it gave me a little panic attack.

Soon after, a combination of a crumb at the back of my throat and putting my mask on to go into Aldi, left me coughing and hyperventilating. The panic came right back. I had to stand in the aisle and wheeze for a bit

It has left my throat feeling sore and raw...and my brain is of course too.

Current Mood: frustrated

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I think I've seen this film before and I didn't like the ending

It’s been a rough couple of weeks, pain-wise. My hip and knee have both been swollen and aching, and despite my usual strategy of “ignore it and hope it stops,” Li finally dragged me to the doctor on Thursday. (She was right. She’s always right. It’s annoying.)

Diagnosis? Bursitis in both my right knee and hip. A delightful throwback to a few years ago when I had trochanteric bursitis and it took six whole months to heal. So yes, I'm a little rattled. Also, because the universe loves to keep things spicy, none of my old scans or X-rays have transferred from my previous GP, so I’ve now got fresh knee and pelvic X-rays booked for next month. Living the dream.

Emotionally, I’ve been processing all of this with a very Taylor Swift-heavy week, and my most-played track was exile.

Watch on YouTube

It’s always been a favourite, but this week it hit especially hard. That Bon Iver verse? Like being gently bludgeoned with a velvet piano. Perfect soundtrack for limping around dramatically and sighing at nothing in particular

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The best way to watch a baseball game

Short version:

snuggling in bed with my lovely boyfriend, being the little spoon, holding my phone up for both of us to watch

( Long version: )

watching the Twins win and getting to kiss my lovely boyfriend in celebration