paloma's journal

today, on my way to work, i saw the biggest snapping turtle i have ever seen in my life. it was midway through crossing the road as i passed. luckily it was large enough to be noticeable from a distance, so everyone was stopping and waiting for it to finish. it looked like it was about two feet long and probably weighed as much as a medium to large dog!

we continued working on the framing of the shed — i am putting a photo of the progress below. today we added the roof rafters.

after work, i headed to the yoga studio, to work the front desk and then join a class. the yoga felt great. after that, i tried to catch the tail end of a music performance at the library, but it was already over when i got there, so i just went home. andrei made an excellent dinner with lots of veggies and then we watched a nature show.

also, i had a dream last night that i and whoever i was living with in this fictional scenario had allowed 3-5 feral cats to move into our house. they were kind of cute but also kind of dirty. i did not want to touch any of them. they caused chaos and it was entertaining at times and annoying at times. in my dream i was mentally designing a little duplex "cat apartment building" (a series of small, padded cubes) for them to hang out in, and planning how i would build it.

i am allergic to cats, so i would never consider adopting one in real life, but i've dreamed about it multiple times.

it's late and i'm tired, but i want to keep up this journaling habit, so i will write briefly...

today was rainy, so we couldn't make too much progress on the shed. but i worked on the parts i could do indoors. i started off the day cutting "birds mouth" cuts into the roof joists with a jigsaw. i had to do basically the same cut 16 times, and when i did the last ones, they came out perfect. you could not tell they were cut with a handheld saw at all!

later on, it stopped raining, so i spent a little bit of the end of the day screwing the floor joists in. my knees got covered in mud; i probably shouldn't have worked outside at all but i was oddly determined.

on my way home, i stopped by the gym for the first time to try it out. i didn't want to overdo it, because i was doing physical work all day and i have yoga class tomorrow, but i tried out some of the various machines. i like the place; the facilities are nice and i like that they don't play any music or television out loud. (the muzak that my old gym in manhattan played in the locker room actually caused me to rage quit my membership.)

i self diagnosed my foot pain as plantar fasciitis. i talked to my mom on the phone and she said that she and my dad have both have had it too at times, and she gave me some tips.

andrei was visiting their sister, and came back with groceries. i made some food for my next two lunches. udon noodles, tofu, and veggies with szechuan style sauce. it came out pretty good.

andrei also did all of our laundry at nora's house, so my new thrift store purchases have entered circulation in my wardrobe. i am very pleased with my haul!

well, this ended up not being very brief after all. anyways, it's bedtime.

at work today, we continued working on the shed. most of the day was occupied by identifying and cutting recycled wood for the rafters.

on my way back home, i stopped by a community center i've been meaning to check out. they have a gym, pool, and saunas, so i thought it would be a good place to exercise and relax after work, since i pass right by it anyway. i signed up for a monthly membership.

we got a really sweet care package in the mail from a friend. i will need to find some things to send over to them :)

before bedtime, i finished setting up cross-posting to mastodon from this journal. so now i have the option to automatically post the link to my journal entry when i publish or edit it!

(i will probably only do this for specific journal entries that i want to share... most of my entries here are just notes for myself. not private, but not necessarily the most exciting to others.)

p.s. i shouldn't work on things like this right before bed, it's like an invitation to lose track of time.

today i did a float tank for the first time. i have been interested in trying it for a long time, and someone who works at my yoga studio also works at a float place nearby, and she gave me a voucher for a free session. i liked it! the water has lots of epsom salts (magnesium) in it, so it makes you very buoyant, and the float chamber is also insulated from any outside sound or light. i was in there for 90 minutes, and when i came back out, it felt like all of my senses were amplified.

other things i did today:

• published a blog post about friday's show, including a full recording of our set
• i made a logotype of our band name for the header of that blog post, and it came out cool, so i ordered some stickers of it
• did a little coding to fix opengraph (social preview) images on my blog and this journal

last night we watched a movie called the usual suspects.

it's getting late, but i still need to do a bit of cooking to prep some lunches for the week. then hopefully, if there's time, we can watch an episode of a vintage david attenborough nature show.

the show went super well last night! it was at a diy space in greenpoint, on the top floor of an industrial building. the people who ran the space were nice and gave us tamales. also the people organizing and working the show were friends and fellow artists and nice people. a bunch of our friends came and there was plenty of time to hang out and chat on the roof while we waited for the sun to go down enough for the projections to look good.

our set went pretty well, though andrei said they had a technical hiccup, i don't think anyone could tell. i used my same setup with my modular video synth, resolume, and custom mapped controllers that i have used for the past few shows i've done, but it's quite a versatile system so i found some fun new things i could do with it. our friend jonathan kindly managed our camera during the set so that we could get a full length video of the set, though it doesn't really do justice to the actual thing.

i watched MSHR's set while laying down on one of the pads right up front by the projection screen, which was excellent. i often wish i could watch performances while lying down, but usually the venue does not provide that option. needless to say, their performance was amazing. they had a series of short vignettes where each one had a 3D scene and an audio patch with linked parameters, so the video and sound would change together. they were using blender to render real-time visuals, which i didn't even know was possible (apparently there is a plugin for this). all of the scenes had complex, abstract imagery, and created a unique space to explore. some were also quite funny and cartoonish, especially with the sound effects. i probably would not have driven all the way to the city to attend this performance if i hadn't been playing as well, so i feel extra glad that i had the opportunity to catch it.

we drove back home to new haven the same night, and got back around 2am, but we still woke up at the same time as usual, which is probably a good thing for maintaining our sleep schedules. the day after a show, for me, is ideally a very lazy day. i did some cleaning and coding, and then we went to the thrift store and the eastern european grocery store. i got a bunch of clothes that i am OK with getting paint on for my new job. the thrift store did not have a dressing room (ugh) so i stood in a less popular section of the store and tried everything on over my clothes. which actually worked out fine because i like my clothing to be quite loose and comfy.

i'm writing this in the car as andrei drives us toward brooklyn and the venue where we are playing tonight. it's another hot day — normally i like that our apartment gets a lot of light, but today i drew all the blinds, partly so i could see my preview screen while practicing for the show, and partly because the direct sunlight was making our living room into a literal greenhouse. i may use some excess material i got for my car windows to make some insulating window coverings to use on days like this...

we did a bit more playing around with our gear this morning before packing it up, eating some lunch, and heading out. i'm looking forward to checking out a new venue, seeing some friends, and seeing MSHR's video performance. hopefully i can remember to take some photos.

it was quite hot today! i worked outside only briefly, but became covered in sweat regardless.

when i got back from work today, i discovered that my internet was down. because this journal is hosted on a raspberry pi in my house, it was still accessible inside my home network, but not from the outside world. in a way, it's kind of nice to have a website that goes down when my home internet is down, because it makes the web feel more personal. but usually my internet service is pretty reliable, so it will probably be pretty rare anyway. it's also cool that my ISP offers the option of a static IP address, which makes hosting things from home very easy.

now the internet is back up! i need to peel myself away from my book because i have some more preparation to do for tomorrow's show... also looking forward to sleeping in a bit tomorrow morning.

i finished my book this morning, and started a new one: the second and third books in the divine cities trilogy, respectively. i am really enjoying those books.

at work today, among other days, we did some color verification. this is where we match digital colors to physical paint swatches. i had never done this before, and it involved a lot of carefully calibrated equipment.

after work i went to the yoga studio where i do work trade. it was unusually busy; i received three phone calls while sitting at the desk, compared to the usual number of zero. but i was very glad to get a yoga session in for the first time in a while. it was challenging but felt great.

later on, at home, i started setting up my equipment for the show on friday, where i'm performing live video as part of my collaboration with andrei, who is doing music. i forgot that one of my fancy video converters had broken, and tried troubleshooting it all over again before finally remembering that i already established that it was broken a couple months ago. (this time i will definitely either label it or throw it away...) luckily i have a cheapo converter (about $10) that actually seems to work better than any of the ones that cost an order of magnitude more. that seems like it should be a metaphor of some kind...

this morning, as i sat at my desk reading over breakfast, a wide ray of sunshine streamed into my window onto my modular synths. this was particularly notable because my office room basically faces north, so for most of the year, i get basically no direct sunlight coming into my windows. now that we are nearing the summer solstice, i get direct sunlight in both the northeast and northwest facing windows for a short time if it's sunny out.

at work today we worked outside all day preparing the footings for the shed. we are just using natural stones so we had to dig some holes and move some big rocks around to create a level base. it was sunny and hot out and quite tiring.

after work i started building a "links" page for my website. this is something i've been meaning to do for a while, and now i have the page layout done.

andrei made a really amazing peach cobbler! then we watched half of a detective dee movie (a chinese film series that follows a mystery-solving official in ancient china).

back to work today. we worked on paintings and then started preparing to build a storage shed behind the studio where i work.

it was nice to work outside in the sun. it was warm out but there was a cool breeze.

after work i went to a grocery store in a small town near where i work. the way back home from there was a series of small, windy roads through the woods. i drove with the windows down with music playing.

andrei is at the makerspace doing their volunteer hours. when i got back home, i spent some time reading in the hammock in my backyard, but as soon as the sun set, it instantly got cold.

spent the morning reading and catching up on my RSS feeds. i hadn't looked at them much over the past week so i had a lot of articles and blog posts and such saved up. now i'm back at "rss zero."

had a nice coffee chat with shenai from recurse center. we talked about personal websites and our approaches to updating them, organizing, curating, discovering, etc. online and in life in general. shenai has a really cool page called secret where they put small thoughts, and it also displays recent pins from their are.na channel, which is nifty. also, today i learned that are.na channels have RSS feeds.

i did a lot of chores and cooking for the week and now i'm tired!

today was saturday, so i didn't have to work. it was supposed to rain, but the weather has actually been pretty nice.

after some tea and reading, i dove into some coding to improve this journal. here is what i did:

• add ability to have multiple images for each post
• added a lightbox image viewer
• added opengraph image and description
• increased file size limits
• made stuff look nice
• set up automatic backups and unattended-upgrades
• updated the readme

i like the idea of being able to share more images on here. for example, i took five photos that i liked on yesterday's hike, so i was disappointed that i could only put up one before. now i've gone back and added the rest!

i watered my plants and repotted one of my ornamental-leafed begonias, did some housework, talked to my dad on the phone.

andrei made falafels for dinner. then we watched a fairly ridiculous hong kong movie.

the weather was nicer today, and i had a good day at work. i did some fabrication work and some 3D modeling for a building project.

while i was working, and andrei was home, apparently some kid was shooting an air gun in the backyards in the center of our block, and one of the small round metal bb pellets hit our window and punched a hole right through it. luckily, the window is double paned and the bb only punched through one layer, but it will be fun to try to convince our landlords that this was not our fault.

in the evening we hiked up west rock ridge. the view up there is pretty good and we could see the graveyard next to our house and, farther out, the long island sound.

we also saw a copperhead snake!

today was the first day of my new job as an artist / fabrication assistant. it is only 8 miles from my house, but it's far enough out of this small city that it almost feels rural. i worked with the two artists to learn some of their processes for making paintings (they have some unusual and highly technical methods, hence the need for assistance). we also discussed plans for building a storage shed and then i coated a bunch of panels with gel acrylic medium.

my plans to head to the yoga studio after work were foiled by my car deciding to make a strange noise on the way there. it seems fine now but i was too late to make it there in time to work the desk (i do work trade there) so i just went home, took a nap, and made some stir fry.

last night i set up a raspberry pi plugged into an ethernet jack, which i want to set up to host this journal online. for now, i'm just running it locally, but it seems to be working well and i'm already enjoying the process of writing in it.

i worked on the code for this journal a bunch earlier today. i think i will be able to put it on the "public internet" soon!

we got groceries and then andrei made a very good soup. brenna and birch (who we saw play yesterday at the noise show) came over for dinner and we hung out for a while. it was nice to have guests over and chill for a bit.