paloma's journal

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.

it's been an active day off work for me today.

i took out my compost this morning and when i opened the container, i saw that a bunch of seeds from some food i put in there had sprouted. they could be lemon seeds, or squash, or something else, but they seemed to be loving the moist, hot environment in there. i pulled a couple of them out and put them in some soil to see what they turn into.

yesterday i got some new speakers and spent way longer than expected getting them integrated into my setup. i am using them in a slightly weird way, because i have two different desks with 2 speakers on them each, and i also have a middle station with the modular synth, which i wanted to be able to monitor from as well by using the two inner speakers to create a third stereo pair. i was trying to use a passive matrix mixer for the routing, but it was unbalanced, which is a problem in my veritable hive of buzzing electronics.

but i have a motu audio interface with an internal matrix routing system! only, it's a little bit annoying to change the routing in the web browser UI that you have to use to control it. well, i ended up going down a slight rabbit hole because i sniffed the traffic from that web app and figured out what network requests to send directly to my interface, so now i can switch between several monitoring modes with a simple script that can be triggered from my home assistant instance. i made a quick shortcut to select between them, but since it's on home assistant i could set up a zigbee (low power radio controller) button or some other physical control, which would be nicer to use while working on music.

that wasn't the most difficult or important thing i did today, but it was the one that brought me the most joy. going from "i have no idea if this is going to work" to "hot damn, i have reverse engineered my audio interface's system controls" is the kind of thing that scratches an itch in my brain in the best way.

i also did other things! here are some of them:

• you wouldn't believe what a mess i made yesterday, but i cleaned it up
• i put sound damping blankets on the walls, it honestly looks weird but it sounds better
• tested out another video converter i got on ebay, yay it worked
• reorganized the bins on my storage shelves and labeled them all with the label maker
• set up another raspberry pi media player (the other one is for movies, this one is for music!) and integrated it with home assistant for controls
• came up with an idea for the next mystery object because i ran out of time for my original idea (will still do that one next time)

i still have the house to myself, so i've been a little chaotic, with no one around to reel in my shiny-object approach to projects. but my partner is on the last leg of their travels, so i'm looking forward to their return soon.

i am writing this post past midnight on a work night. oops, i stayed up late. oh well, i was working on some projects that i am excited about. mostly redoing my office/studio/computer setup. now there is a fun matrix mixing thing happening with 4 matching speakers, and there are two computer stations. why does one person need two computer stations? well, i use them for different things. it's complicated!

no photos of the new setup because, while all the major pieces are now in place, the surrounding area is covered with detritus and mess. i will finish / clean up tomorrow probably. what's the point of having the house to myself if i don't explode it a little?

another thing that happened today was that, while i was accompanying my boss to pick up a compost tumbler from an internet person, they had an extra one and sold it to me for really cheap. so now we can compost in our backyard! i've never been wild about incorporating large plastic containers into my composting process, but it has been correctly pointed out to me that in the urban area where i live, open piles are not an option. in any case, i will be happy to save all of my food scraps from the main trash, and to have some good nutrients for the foliage around my yard. (everything is basically half dead right now from the heat and dry weather, so it can use all the help it can get.)

i am back in my house in new haven. it feels great to be back in my own space. earlier today, i had tamales for lunch at the farmers' market with my family. then in the afternoon, i helped a family friend shoot video of a live performance with a percussionist on a metal sound sculpture. then i drove back home, and managed to make it back before it was fully dark. when i stopped by the grocery store near my house, there was a nice, dramatic, dusky sky to behold. i always see the best skies in strip malls for some reason.

i think i got some watery gas the other week, and was hoping that my little road trip would burn through the bad stuff in my tank, but i'm still hearing some engine pinging when i put my foot on the gas pedal at certain speeds. i might have to look into more things to try this week if it keeps up.

tomorrow, i'm back to work, with a busy week ahead. even being away for one weekend makes me feel like there is so much i want to do but so little time. i'm glad to not have any plans for the next one.

i am upstate visiting my family. i drove up here yesterday evening after spending most of the day doing various house related projects.

today, i got to spend a fun afternoon with my younger sibling. we walked into town and visited the cafe where their partner works. i also brought broom corn and we crafted some hand brooms together. now i'm watching a nature documentary with my parents.

this evening after work we biked downtown and went to a szechuan restaurant called "taste of china." we had assumed it was not authentic due to the english name but someone recommended it so we checked it out. turns out it was indeed pretty delicious! we got a lot of food and we have lots of leftovers now. i have a headlight on my bike now so that helped me today because we biked back in the dark.

i also worked a bit more on the kobo dashboard. it looks way better now and i even have custom fonts set up. i want to make a nice background drawing for both the day and night modes and then i will take another picture of it.

for now, here's a photo of the brutalist hotel in the ikea parking lot from sunday.

it's been a nice weekend, despite getting mild food poisoning (?) that kept me up with stomach cramps and nausea the other night. even though i didn't get much sleep on friday night because of that, i still managed to muster enough energy to join andrei on a local bike trail that runs for many miles north along an old canal. the weather was perfect for biking, yet the path wasn't crowded at all.

today, we met up with a new friend to explore the strange waterfront area of new haven, from a massive brutalist hotel in the parking lot of an ikea, to a stale, semi-defunct gambling arena among looming oil storage tanks, to a seagull-ridden pier between the highway and the industrial port that hosts a long line of latin american food trucks.

after the explorations, i could not resist a stop at ikea to gather some storage containers and other home goods. i have kind of down a rabbit hole of working on improvements around our apartment for the past few weeks, from the raspberry pi movie watching and speaker setups in the living room, to the new countertop, and the kobo "dashboard" and home assistant stuff, which i worked on more this weekend, and now coming up, to revamp my office a bit and maybe build another wooden shelf with the remaining plywood i have left over. i'm not sure when it will all be "done" but i've been enjoying it. it's nice to have a home that i like enough and, though it's not permanent, feels long-term enough that it's worth investing effort into making it nicer and work well.

i took a bunch of photos from the wharf and such today, but i haven't had a chance to look through them yet, and now we're about to watch a movie. perhaps i will follow up and post some of them on here another day soon.