paloma's journal

it's been a quiet week with the house to myself. i didn't really celebrate thanksgiving, beyond catching up with family over the phone. i spent most of the actual holiday at the makerspace, working on stuff for zine club, which, if i'm honest, is kind of an ideal way to spend a holiday. as much as i like my family, longer periods of time off work are precious, and i often prefer to spend them at home, working on my own stuff and chilling out.

i have been feeling a bit anxious lately, and i've noticed that positive things in my life can sometimes feel like they fade into the background, while points of friction and difficult things continue to come to the foreground and be more noticed. i'm usually a fairly optimistic person, but recently i've been observing more of that "negativity bias" thing, which i've read about and know is fairly common. frankly, i think thanksgiving is kind of a bullshit holiday, and i'm wary of the potential for gratitude practices to become exercises in toxic positivity. but with those caveats, i decided to make a list of things that i am grateful for, so that i can look at it when i feel like my mind is fixating too much on the negative. but since i also don't want to avoid my problems, i included a list of things that frustrate me as well. i guess i'm hoping that acknowledging both the things i'm happy about and the things that frustrate me about my life right now will help give me a more balanced perspective. and having lists of things that i update over time can sometimes make me more aware of things, because i'm subconsciously looking for stuff to add to my list.

i'm not gonna share my lists here, as they are a bit personal, but i thought i'd share the idea of the practice. reading about how other people process and organize their thoughts is interesting to me, so i'm doing the same.

tomorrow i'm picking andrei up from the airport, and the next day i'll be back at work, so my mini-vacation (which i've somewhat ironically spent working just as hard as usual) is coming to an end soon. today, i'm planning to pack and prepare this new batch of mystery objects for shipping. (they came out really nice, i'm excited to send them out.) i might watch some battlestar galactica while doing some of the more rote tasks. and maybe i'll have some time to play video games if i finish the whole thing up before too late in the day.

my boss gave me an old pair of insulated carhartt overalls that had been sitting in his basement for a while. they were very dirty, the shoulder straps were worn out, and the legs were far too long for me. so that was my excuse to spend several hours watching battlestar galactica while hemming and repairing them.

i sew by hand, which for this task was difficult due to the thick layers of tough canvas, but i eventually managed to take in the legs, hem them, and replace the straps with fresh elastic. i also dyed them dark gray, which helped a lot with making them not look super stained. now they just look a little bit stained which is actually a huge improvement; i didn't take a before picture, but they were beige, so you can probably imagine. also they match the rest of my clothing better now.

i should probably do the badge process to get access to some of the sewing machines at the local makerspace. they have a sailrite machine there, which would have made quick work of these bibs. but then i would have had to leave my house and not watch battlestar galactica...

i've mostly been hibernating because of the cold weather and spending 4 days last week doing construction work. andrei is traveling to visit family, so i've spent the past couple days enjoying the quiet and warmth of my apartment, playing video games, and doing some prep work for some art/object-making projects i have coming up soon.

i have to leave my house again to work again tomorrow, so i'm mentally preparing to go back out into the cold. at least now i have more insulated pants options...

we started prepping to pour the concrete slab at work today. i found out that:

1. i can lift an 80 lb bag of concrete mix (well over half my own body weight)
2. i probably won't feel great afterwards though

my work peeps gave me some of their old stuff including a pair of insulated carhartt overalls. they could use a bit of repair but now i have 3 pairs of good outdoor work bottoms for cold weather, yay!

hmm, it's been another week or so! it's sunday night, so i'm getting ready to go back to work tomorrow. this weekend has been somewhat chill, mostly compared to last weekend, when our friend from out of town came to play a show and we stayed up late every night and also had a dinner party.

side note: thankfully, someone came and fixed our leaky ceiling before we were planning to host, so we didn't have to cancel our plans.

i went to a new eye doctor for the first time last monday, and they scanned my corneas and told me that i had the most extreme astigmatism they had ever seen. i already knew that my corneas were mis-shaped, but that fact coming from an opthamologist impressed me. thankfully, my vision is surprisingly good given this, and i got what i needed treatment wise, but i also got a referral to a specialist and some colorful print-outs of the current state of my eyeballs. (see below for an image of one of the scans; for reference, most people's eyes look much more like a circle...)

on friday, we went to a show at ely center that our local friends were playing. they did a really cool collaborative performance about exoplanets, including live analog video, guitar, and spoken word. normally, i'm not a big spoken word person, but the performance was really well done (the person spoke like a retro computer-generated voice) and the content was fun (a story about an exobiologist encountering an organism, which reminded me a bit of solaris).

today we met up with some family and went to a museum. it was very cold and windy, and after coming back inside it felt like all my mana had been drained.

let's see... what else has happened?

• andrei put up some dichroic film in the windows in our apartment, and it does cool things when it catches the sunlight (see photos).

• i made a blog post about my mystery objects for zine club! this also involved taking photos of all of the objects. and i have begun work on the next object...

• i started playing cyberpunk 2077 and set up a comfy video game area in my studio. i like to play open world rpgs when the weather gets cold and dark (last year i played baldur's gate 3).

• we watched the first half of david lynch's mulholland drive last night, and will likely watch the rest of it tonight.

• i finished reading cryptonomicon last week. i liked it a lot overall but the ending was a bit underwhelming. i still haven't started another book yet... thinking of starting gene wolfe's book of the new sun series.

• it's cold and the leaves have almost all fallen down. it's also been windy and sometimes rainy. it feels like a good time to stay inside, but i will probably have to do some outdoor work for my job this week (we are pouring a concrete slab for some equipment to sit on). luckily i thrifted a bunch of sweaters and scarves, and i got some new insulated work pants and work boots.

ok, that's all for now. see ya...

the title is sarcasm.

as if things haven't been eventful enough lately, this past sunday, a whole bucket's worth of water started pouring out if the ceiling of my bathroom, right while i was in the middle of taking a shower. eventually we figured out that the top floor unit shower drain pipe started leaking suddenly and profusely, so every time they took a shower, we and the second floor neigbor also received the same shower non-consensually through the walls. our building is very old, so this was not the most unusual thing to happen. due to the complicated logistics of the multi tenant situation, it took a couple days for communication to propagate and repairs to be made, but it seems to be fixed now. (knock on wood.)

when i was living in a studio apartment in brooklyn a few years ago, i had a situation where my bathroom ceiling was leaking for an extended period of time, and i eventually had to move out because it seemed like they weren't going to truly address it. they just kept sending hapless maintenance people who weren't actually plumbers and never actually did anything helpful. so i was really stressed out and worried that this would be a repeat of that situation, and i really do not want to move in the near future. crisis averted, for now.

other than that, it's been a normal week so far. at work we have a deadline to provide paintings for a show next week, so we are doing a big push and i will likely work an extra day this week. i also went to the gym a couple days ago and did yoga class today. my muscles feel sore but good. the weather has been typical autumn; at its nicest, in the afternoons, it is cold but clear and warm in the sun.

i am still reading cryptonomicon. i seem to be 3/4 of the way through. it's very long and meandering, and i'm enjoying it.

all right, time to go to bed.

it's been a month since my last entry, and it's been kind of a nonstop hectic time since i got sick. usually, after i am sick, it takes some time for me to catch up on stuff and resume business as usual... but this time, so much happened directly afterwards that it's taken me until now to start to feel like i'm back to my normal busy schedule as opposed to having a pile of stuff to do that's disproportionately larger than my available time.

ok, so i'll try to back up and gather this past month's events into a semi-coherent narrative. a lot of it is simultaneously complicated and mundane, but i should be able to convey a sense of the overall vibe. this is probably going to be a long post, but hopefully after i catch up with the present, my future journal entries will be shorter and sweeter.

when i left off last time, i was just beginning to recover from being extremely sick for about a week, and had taken off of work to recover. the following weekend, despite not being quite back to 100%, i decided to go through with my previously planned trip to upstate new york, for two reasons.

1. there was a memorial service on sunday for a close friend of mine from grad school who recently passed away; it felt important to make it to this for emotional closure
2. due to complicated family logistics, we needed to arrange to transport a very old and shitty extra car to my house, to be stored in my driveway while some of my family are in mexico for the winter

as mentioned, the logistics of the family car situation were complicated, but in addition to saving my younger sibling from having to manage street parking an extra car, this car was supposed to provide me with backup transportation since my own car, a 2005 subaru, seemed to be having some mechanical issues.

the first leg of this trip involved meeting my sibling halfway between our homes (we live 2 hours apart). andrei, my partner, really wanted to go to this georgian restaurant in westchester, so we met there, had an excellent meal, and then andrei drove the shitty family car back to our house in new haven while i drove my sibling back to their house in kingston in my subaru.

the subaru made it through the first two legs of the trip fine, so the next day, i continued west towards alfred, ny, the town where i went to grad school and the location of the memorial. along the way, i stopped at an outdoor poetry book fair in a random patch of grass in a rural town where my friends brigid and sparrow were doing a performance as their collab project, ball of fire. brigid was one of my closest friends when i was living upstate last year, so i was really excited to hang out with her. and i've also known sparrow since i was a kid, so it was fun to reconnect with him as well. we sat in the grass in the shade of a very wide maple tree, amidst piles of fallen leaves.

after getting lunch from a food vendor at the book fair, i resumed my journey. my gas tank was empty, and there was no cell service to load gps directions, so i stopped at the next random local gas station i passed while following whatever roads i came across that seemed to lead west. i had been trying to be selective about where i got gas, because i was concerned that my car's recent issues were related to a bad tank of gas that i got the previous month, but this seemed to be my only option as i had no idea where the next gas station would be.

well, sure enough, after i filled it up, my car's engine started knocking again. well, i was more than halfway to my friend max's house in alfred, and the memorial was the next day, and i really didn't want to miss it, and the engine knock was not extreme. so i pressed on, while trying to drive as gently as i could and stopping occasionally to let my car cool off. the knocking was happening on and off, but more and more on as the drive progressed, despite me topping off the tank with high octane gas and adding a gas tank additive. i finally arrived at max's late at night, three hours after my original estimate. luckily, max is a night owl, so we jumped in his truck and went to wegman's, a grocery store that is also open late, to get some food to cook for dinner.

max is my old roommate from brooklyn, who coincidentally started the art program at alfred university a few years after i finished my mfa there. it is always excellent to get to see him. being back in alfred was a bit weird for me. i've only been back a few times since spring 2020, which was my final semester, in which the whole campus shut down and i had to finish my thesis work quarantined in my tiny off-campus apartment, where i lived alone, and saw no one for weeks at a time. so when i finally moved back to civilization, i left that place like a bat out of hell. also, my friend leslie, who passed away, was my closest friend throughout my time there, so it was sad to feel his absence and the regret that i didn't get to visit him more since we finished the program together, and he stayed there working as a professor and technician.

the next day, max and i went to the diner and met up with my friend izzy, who also did the same electronic arts mfa program as me and leslie, overlapping with us for one year. izzy brought their partner too, who we hadn't met before but who is very into bicycling and helps run a bike co-op in providence, rhode island, where the two of them live now. it was an unseasonably warm day for october in the finger lakes region, so we ended up going to the swimming hole and hanging out there for several hours.

despite not having brought a proper bathing suit, i impulsively jumped into the freezing cold stream and then alternated between dipping into the water and drying off on sun-heated rocks. i'm not sure if this was the best idea as i was still a little bit sick, but it was very beautiful to see the fall colors on the trees and feel the elements. i thought about leslie a lot because he was a big nature guy.

the actual memorial event was brief, sweet, and kind of awkward. i saw a bunch of people i haven't seen in a long time and they planted a ginko tree on campus in leslie's memory. then afterwards a group of us went to the old mill, and sat outside on their deck and shared conversations around a propane fire pit thing, which warded off the first few hours of cold after the sun went down.

i had initially planned to drive home that night and work tomorrow, but after experiencing the state of my car on the way there, i called out of work for monday and spent that day crawling back home slowly in the subaru. the engine situation wasn't getting better, so i decided to engage the "backup" vehicle when i finally resumed work on tuesday. unfortunately, the shitty extra vehicle owned by my family turned out to be... well, shitty. the whole front end felt loose, so i brought it into the shop and they gave me a repair bill that exceeded the monetary value of the vehicle itself to redo the front suspension system. considering the overall terrible condition of the vehicle, my family declared it scrap.

in between commuting to work in our 1988 camper van, i also brought my sad subaru into the shop for them to check it out. they basically said, all we can do is put fresh 10W-30 in it and hope for the best. well, i didn't have high hopes for that engine, and having a giant van as the sole vehicle owned by me and my partner wasn't an option. i needed to get a new car.

for my adult life, my strategy has been to drive very old cars that i bought for cash or got for free, and maintain them as best i can until it no longer makes financial sense to do so. well, the last two cars i bought — the 2005 subaru, and a 2002 volvo station wagon that died in like 2019 — both ended up being particularly bad investments, lasting me a year or less despite pouring money into repairs.

well, i decided to change my strategy and try to get a newer car this time. for me, this meant joining the large segment of society that has to make payments each month on a car loan. i had a strong aversion to taking on this type of debt, but on paper, the math made sense — if the vehicle was reliable, the monthly payments would have been cheaper than the random, unpredictable repair bills for the old subaru anyway.

so began my quest to figure out how all of this car loan stuff works and managing all of the surrounding logistics. unfortunately, this was very time consuming and required me to take more time off work. i am very thankful to my bosses for their understanding and flexibility during this time!

i'll spare you the details, as they are quite boring, but i became the proud owner of a 2018 honda hr-v. since it seems like station wagons are no longer a thing, this was the closest car i could find to the form factor of my subaru (which i really liked), while also having much better ratings for reliability.

after succeeding in obtaining a new vehicle, which took a little over a week, i immediately shifted focus to clearing out my driveway by selling the subaru and the shitty family car on facebook marketplace for cash. my family's car, a toyota, turned out to be a hot commodity in the overseas parts export market, and sold almost immediately. the subaru went a few days later to a pair of older fellows, who seemed to have a hobby of collecting random vehicles (one of them said he owned 20 cars?!) sadly, i received a call about a week later that the subaru's engine had died. well, i felt kind of bad about that, but i did sell it at a significant discount and with full transparency of the potential engine issues. and i'm pretty sure the guy just kept driving it as-is without addressing the issue. yikes...

that whole car saga really occupied a large portion of my mental energy for the entire month of october! i'm glad it seems to be resolved for now. i wish that my current lifestyle did not require me to even own a vehicle, but the art studio i work for is about 8 miles outside of town in an area completely inaccessible by public transit. and i really like my job.

however, there are a few other things to report that don't have to do with cars or funerals. andrei and i did a short livestream performance for the internet archive's virtual staff meeting, which was very fun. i also made a new section of my website, called notes, which gives me a different way to gather certain pages that i don't want to fall into obscurity with time (like a blog post does when it gets pushed to page 2 or 3 in the feed).

the reason i wanted to make a notes section was that i wanted to write about an art project i've been working on. i started it when i was sick and home from work, and then the whole thing kind of got pushed forward until this past week, when i finally had time to finish some illustrations and gather my notes into a format for others to read. i already described it in depth on my website so i won't go into it here, but here's the link if you want to check it out: palomakop.tv/notes/runicon-cypher

with the completion of my font project and the accompanying e-zine, i finally had something to share with the zine club people, who had been waiting patiently with no updates for me all month. zine club is kind of organized so that each new thing i send out feels kind of like a surprise, so hopefully no one was like, actively waiting and frustrated, but i felt bad about it regardless and i hate missing deadlines. now that i've at least delivered something cool for people to check out, that's weighing on me less. i hope to be back to business as usual with zine club next month, because it seems like these recent hectic events were outliers, and i should have more time to devote to making weird art in the coming month. (knock on wood!) i also hope to reconnect with my online communities more as i've been kind of MIA since all this started. maybe i need to do a new newsletter soon too.

other things that happened since my last entry:

• i went to open studios at erector square, a cool building complex that rents out studio space for artists here in new haven
• met some new people irl from a local tech workers' online chat group
• went to an art opening in hartford that a friend organized and other friend had work in (a cool video sculpture with a fresnel lens)
• co-hosted the first meeting of "music club" at a local library
• continued volunteering on wednesday nights at the yoga studio in exchange for free yoga, and also finally managed to resume going to the gym after taking an extended break when i was sick
• had dinner at a friend's apartment, which is in a building that literally looks like a spaceship
• didn't go out for halloween because i wasn't feeling well and wanted to stay home and work on my zine, but i did go to a dinner party and an art show the next day
• had an incident at my apartment where the upstairs neighbor flooded their bathroom, and ours below (still kind of dealing with this)
• went to thrift stores for fun with andrei, and also when i was upstate i stopped by a very special surplus store that always has the most random old things
• watched the tv show firefly and read the book annihilation and started reading the book cryptonomicon
• today: hiked up west rock (see last 2 photos)

here is some miscellaneous photographic evidence from the past month as well. i think that about covers it. so consider this journal fully up to date (maybe too much so). until next time...

welp, i knew this month was going to be busy, and i did my best to handle it with aplomb. but the result of doing too much in too little time was that i ended up getting very sick (sicker than i have been in a year or more).

perhaps it was inevitable. everywhere i went last week, various people were complaining of various ailments. i guess the changing weather and everyone going back to school, etc. created a perfect situation for people to get sick. i felt a bit crappy last week, but i thought i'd avoided getting really sick... but then on monday morning i woke up with a sore throat that felt like a golf ball and i knew i would be down for the count. i've been off work since then, and it's looking like i might miss the whole week.

last week, i worked three days at my art/fabrication job, then another three days doing event production/video tech in greenwich, CT and brooklyn. it's the tail end of the busy season for the latter job, and working three gigs in a row was a feat of stamina because it's a very physically demanding job. on the last day, i drank a double shot of espresso (they have it in cans for free at the job). my normal amount of daily coffee is zero, so that might not have been a healthy choice. but what's done is done! sometimes you can't just keep that energy level up indefinitely without consequences. but sometimes you can! it was a gamble.

although the last couple days of being sick have passed in a blur, my brain is starting to come back out of the fog, so i'm optimistic that i'll be back to normal in just a few days. in the meantime, i've been watching firefly, drawing, and working on a secret project in between naps.

today, after getting restless legs from lying down too much, i decided to try and take a walk in the park with andrei. we found a huge cluster of chicken of the woods mushrooms. we took some, but there must have been 20+ times that amount still there on the fallen tree it was growing on. i was tired after the walk but it felt really good to get back outside.

what else has happened since the last time i wrote in this journal? let's see...

• i read the book moonbound by robin sloan and enjoyed it. just started annihilation by jeff vandermeer. (i read vandermeer's ambergris trilogy about a year and a half ago, and really liked it but it was extremely dense so i took a long break from his work after that.)
• i got my timing belt replaced. also front brake pads. cautiously; i am hoping that this car keeps going long enough to be well worth that investment.
• i am working on a really fun project for zine club that i can't share yet, but i will very soon. it's been a good distraction from being sick when watching TV isn't enough to occupy my mind.
• my parents flew to puerto rico to begin their travels in latin america for the fall and winter.

other than that, it's just been a lot of work and short breaks in between. i am really looking forward to my schedule taking a more relaxed turn in about a week or so. i guess it will really make me value actually having days when i'm neither working, nor physically incapacitated.

we went for a walk today in edgewood park, which is close to our house. things i saw there included:

• a young swan (a cygnet?) that still had its brownish coat
• blooming goldenrod
• an egret (pictured — i got pretty close to it and saw that it was actually a lot smaller than i imagined)
• cool light reflections under a bridge

i'm still recovering from my red eye commute home the other night after my AV gig in manhattan. luckily, there is not much i need to do today. i want to play a video game, but first i must make more progress on the e-zine i'm working on this month for zine club. also i must go to bed at a reasonable hour.

i am writing this post at dusk in central park, during a 6 hour break between two AV gigs. i was planning to stay in the city all weekend, but the friend i was going to stay with is sick so i'm catching the red eye commuter train home tonight.

i have books to read and music and podcasts to listen to, but i haven't really felt like engaging with any of it. i've been kind of overstimulated lately, with each day mostly filled with one or more things i have to do, almost back to back. i guess my nervous system saw an opportunity for a break and said, let's just sit in the grass and watch lights turn on in all the buildings.

here are some things i observed today:

• baby rats hopping and frolicking in the grass. they were so spritely and springy!
• a busking man singing 1920s or 30s lounge music, karaoke style. he had the voice of a professional singer, perhaps that was his job once? he had all of the right vibrato accents and everything. except he looked like a really normal guy with long white hair and a beard and a baseball cap. if you asked me to picture the person who that voice was coming out of, i would have thought of that hologram character from star trek: deep space nine.
• a guy sitting nestled in a crook between large stones, so he was mostly hidden from view, playing a harmonica to himself.
• yucca trees blooming.

well, i guess for a journal entry, i usually write about current life events, so here are some of those.

we played a show last week, locally in new haven! it took me about a week, but i got a blog post up about it, with some documentation!

i have been doing more random gigs during what are usually my three days off per week. last weekend, i helped dog sit thor (the studio dog at my work) while my employers took their kid to his "school of rock" recital concert, which ended with me staying late because there was a bonfire after. i ate a very withered boca burger (apparently a type of veggie burger).

i went to see bread and puppet by myself yesterday because andrei is in maine with family. it was fun but i was feeling a bit under the weather so that part was not fun. and i was dealing with last minute work arrangements due to my weekend plans getting canceled, so i had to look at my phone a few times during the beginning to respond to things. i felt really bad because normally i would never look at my phone during a live performance. it was a large crowd so i don't think anyone was offended but when i see people on their phones at shows i judge them hard. maybe they all have work emergencies too and i should give them the benefit of the doubt. at least until i see an tiktok video or something on there.

i discovered that some of the fabrication orders that were done for my work before i started there had some errors in them. that was a bit stressful because i have barely had this job long enough to learn the technical processes they use for making artworks, and i'm already shifting to developing and improving those processes. this is a bit vague but it's really complicated to try to explain what we actually do at my job. to try to describe it quickly, it's a bit like silkscreen printing but 3d, with four foot long toothed aluminum trowels that apply layers of paint that get sanded down through each other to generate patterns. and the metal trowels sometimes get attached to a 10 foot tall mechanical jig that moves across the painting in various waveforms. in a weird way, it's similar to video synthesis. so i feel like i'm in a unique position to understand and help with the process, and i do enjoy it, but it also requires a lot of brain usage and sometimes that leaves me feeling quite drained.

despite seeming to have little mental energy left after work, i somehow got obsessively sucked into this project of getting the audio from my computer to play in multiple rooms of my house, as closely synced with each other as possible, using raspberry pi computers. and also to not break anything the pi's were already doing audio-wise (i use them as remote controllable media players). this sounds simple but it took me two evenings. i learned some new stuff though (example: audio works differently on raspbian lite vs the version with gui tools installed!)

i questioned whether it was worth replacing the timing belt on my car (a model from 2005) for the second time. after seeing the prices of newer vehicles right now (even ones up to 10 years old!), i decided to go ahead with it. hopefully my decision will turn out to be good and i can keep this car running a bit longer with no major problems! i hope that within a few years i'll be able to afford a hybrid, but for now, tough guy (my subaru outback station wagon): i'm counting on you!

i've got one more AV gig this week, and three(!) next week. then, i think my busy september will be over. when i don't have time for more frequent updates here, they turn into these long rants. oh well! till next time...

photo is of the set for the bread and puppet show.

it's the weekend, and here are some notes about what's going on right now.

✷ i set up a zigbee network in our house! i only recently became aware of zigbee as a cool, power-efficient mesh-networked open radio communication standard. i guess i assumed it was some proprietary thing. anyway, to bridge between my local network and zigbee, i needed a "coordinator" device, which i ordered from a small DIY maker called tubeszb (see photo). i also got a bunch of random little zigbee buttons and controllers from aliexpress. once i got everything i was able to connect my home assistant instance to the coordinator using the ZHA integration, and it is working pretty well overall! (not all of the devices i got on aliexpress were compatible, but they were inexpensive and i expected some trial and error.) the two things i really like about the setup are:

• zigbee devices are incredibly low power so even a tiny button battery cell can last for a year or more.
• it is very fun to bridge the physical world and the computer world by placing small, wireless objects around that can make things do other things. feels much more magical than tapping a toggle on a touch screen.

i set up some controllers to make the lights, speakers, and media players in our house do various things, and in order to make them more useful to my partner as well, i tacked little notes up next to them with instructions on how to use them. not sure what anyone else will think about this if they see them while visiting. (definitely would depend on the person!)

✷ i made a new links page on my website! then later that night i realized that auto columns (a feature of CSS i used) was really wonky in safari. but i resisted the urge to fix it immediately, and instead went to bed like a responsible person and then fixed it in the morning. this is kind of huge as i've been working on resisting the manic urge to keep working on projects all night.

✷ i have a live show coming up in less than a week, so i need to prepare for that. especially since today and tomorrow are the only days i'm not working between now and the show. i am thinking of trying to shoot some new source footage for my live video stuff but i also don't want to overcomplicate things. will see how it works out... at least it's a local show.

✷ we made homemade pizza yesterday and it came out pretty good! also watched a classic wuxia movie.

✷ tonight we are going to a potluck/gallery show at someone's house. one of the people who is doing an installation there also had one in our basement in brooklyn so that's at least 1 person we kind of know.

✷ my gig in the city earlier this week went very smoothly. i helped disassemble two big hanging LED walls and got back home in time for a reasonable bedtime. i have 4 more video tech event gigs coming up this month on top of my other work and appointments, so i hope they all go as well. one thing that was cool is that i often will buy expensive fancy caffeinated chocolate-protein drinks for extra energy during this kind of work, but this time i brought my own that i made with black tea and cacao and protein and oat powders, in a thermos and some ice cubes. it was both tastier and cheaper so that made me very happy.

✷ this falls into "things that seem maybe too boring to even mention" but: i organized my personal budgets in a new way and it worked even better than i expected, and now i am really glad i decided to change it.

✷ i've been practicing meditation more lately in the mornings, and i am developing a newfound excitement around it, probably related to finally getting to go on retreat again this winter. also, i am doing a "demo" on friday to possibly start teaching a weekly meditation at the yoga studio where i do work-trade.

✷ i'm a couple of months into getting my gym membership and exercising more, and i feel like i've made significant progress.

✷ i had a review with my employers at my new studio assistant job and received positive feedback.

the overall pattern right now is: busy but things are going pretty well. i knew from the start that this month will be busier than usual, so if i can make it through the rest of it unscathed, i can chill on my laurels a bit afterwards. i've been front-loading effort by streamlining my workflows and organization systems, so i'm hoping that will pay off and help me feel more confident that i can keep track of everything. and i also hope that i will have enough down time here and there between other things that it won't be too draining.

right now i'm on a train to do a gig in nyc, but i wanted to share some photos i took over the weekend while hiking with andrei's sister and her kids. when you're hiking around big rocky bluffs, but it's not quite climbing, they call it "rock scrambling," a phrase that i find very funny.

september is probably going to be quite busy for me, but i'm pretty satisfied that my organizational systems are functioning well after recent overhauls. so that makes being "busy" feel much more manageable.

the meditation retreat center i go to in massachusetts either just opened registration for their retreats for early next year, or i just failed to notice the "2026" button last time. either way, i am now registered for a week-long silent retreat in february! i have to figure what number this is. i think it's my fifth retreat, and the fourth one at that center.

i got the latest mystery object sent out for zine club! i have Big Ideas for what i want to do for the next quarterly e-zine this month. i hope they aren't Too Big to complete in time. hah, i guess we'll see...

it's been a nice, chill day. the almost-autumn weather continues to be perfect, though the plants outside could use a little more rain.

this morning, i did a little bit of digging around in the yard and made a very clearly delineated garden bed. apparently my previous attempt at landscaping was a bit too au naturel and fell to an errant weedwhacker. (i thought it was a very intentional looking pile of rocks, but...)

unfortunately the plant i got for the space before is showing no signs of life, so the only plant i had to put into the new garden was a single, small, lonely prickly pear cactus cutting. so it's sitting in the very center of a rather large area of mulch relative to its own size. it's an amusingly contrived diorama, but at least i'm pretty sure the landlord's workers won't weedwhack it. i hope!!!

also, in addition to the lonely cactus, we had a number of cool rocks to display in the area. so i guess it's mostly a rock garden for now.

some friends stopped through town on their way north for a vacation, so we biked over to meet up with them at one of the famed "new haven style pizza" restaurants. it was a nice bike ride. honestly i don't really like pizza that much which some people are upset by because new haven is supposed to have some kind of special pizza thing going on. and because i live here, i am supposed to have some kind of opinion about what type of pizza is better? but i really don't care.

i also went to the art supply store, to try to get more paper refills for my notepad, but they were out. ah well! they said they should be back in stock soon.

i got a lot of boring (but important!) administrative work done and finalized my design for the next mystery object, which i am making at home. can't say too much about it, since this is a public internet page and it's supposed to be a secret! but i'm looking forward to working on them more tomorrow.

p.s. the mystery sprouts have grown a new leaf.

the big news in our house is that as of yesterday, andrei is back from their long voyage! after almost a month, i am finally no longer the sole inhabitant of this house. not a moment too soon, as the bachelor lifestyle was getting old.

it's also a four day weekend, since memorial day is on monday (and i already don't work on fridays)! i spent much of today reorganizing my to-do lists and project docs, something i have been planning to do for a couple weeks.

previously, i was using two different applications: a sort of checklist app called "things" for current to-do list items, and obsidian, a text editor of interlinked documents, for longer term project planning. now, i'm consolidating the "current to-do items" and most of the project planning into a single task management application called "ticktick" that is also more cross-platform and is more customizable, so i don't have to shoehorn as much to make it fit ny needs. i will still use obsidian for documents and reference info, but my main project outlines will no longer live there.

i spent a lot of time both doing this and thinking about how it should be done, and it feels really good to both leave behind the manual syncing of my tasks/next steps between two applications, and also be more intentional. i could have used a refresh sooner if i'd thought about it... in any case, it probably isn't of that much interest to anyone besides me. but it makes a big difference to my day-to-day life as i mostly rely on external lists to remember everything.

just a little before sunset, we biked up east rock! in new haven, there are two big "rocks" (really more like cliffs) and we live close to west rock. you can see each rock from the top of the other, so if you look at the photos you can imagine i'm shooting them from a similar land formation to the one that can be seen in the background.

there is a cool pavilion at the top of east rock that is shaped like an equilateral triangle and has picnic tables in it that are also shaped like smaller equilateral triangles that fit perfectly into the angles of the structure. on one of the tables was a pile of all kinds of different bibles: leather-bound, hebrew, spanish, etc.

the late august weather has been so perfect lately. warm sun and a cool breeze. i hope to do some work outside in my backyard tomorrow.

it's almost bedtime, and i've been trying to go to bed earlier, so this will be a short post.

i didn't get as much sleep as i wanted to last night, partly because i was working on updates to this journal! nothing that will affect anyone besides me, but i'll be less likely to lose a post mid-draft due to accidentally refreshing the page, and i won't have to log in as often. that's nice. it seemed worth it to make these little improvements since i've actually been using the journal and i enjoy writing here, and using it as a place to put photos i've taken.

truth be told, if i had stopped after finishing that last night and went to bed, i would have gotten enough sleep. but then i started another small coding/templating project that took very slightly longer than expected, and then it was, as someone on mastodon recently said, a "real-life game over."

today was pretty chill. worked on stuff at work, worked out at the gym, worked on organizing my budgets back at home (somewhat overdue). wow, that sounds boring! but it was actually a nice day.

oh, and i finished sewing my shorts! they were weird before, now they are weird in a different way. but it's a weird i like slightly more, so i'll take it. (they are really comfortable, so they can get away with a lot.)

today i helped out with repairing things for the "repair fair" event at the makerspace. it wasn't too busy, but i repaired or diagnosed several electronic things, including an adorable solar-powered decorative lamp. i brought an unnecessarily large number of tools with me, especially considering that i was going to a space that's literally filled with tools, but sometimes it's just easier to have and work with your own tools.

• camera cleaning kit (filled with useful little bits that can also be used on other objects)
• isopropyl alcohol
• helping hands
• microscope
• loupe
• e-repair tools
• bike lube
• wd-40
• Q-tips
• 2 bags heat shrink tubing
• soldering station
• gerber multi-tool
• klein ratcheting screwdriver
• snips
• husky screwdriver
• vice grip
• allen keys
• klein voltage sniffer
• flux
• electrical tape
• outlet watt meter
• battery tester
• wire strippers
• headlamp
• hot glue gun w/ glue
• pliers
• fiskars
• klein outlet tester
• 4 rolls solid wire
• solder wire
• multimeter

i also brought my sewing kit and worked on taking in a pair of shorts during in-between moments. i almost finished them.

back at home, i repotted some plants and ate some dinner. i have a few goals but i also want to make sure i get to bed early enough to be well rested for work tomorrow.