it's been about a week and a half since i started house/dog sitting, and i've got a few days left before i pack up to return to my own house. there are some upsides and downsides to the current situation. i will start with the pros:
- the house i'm staying in is in a forested area and under tree cover that keeps temperatures cool and feels cozy and natural. (it's still the suburbs — the woods don't extend far — but it's enough to give the appearance of nature, at least.)
- the ambient sounds of the nighttime are accordingly very loud. i assume it's mostly crickets, other insects, and frogs, but they kind of blend together into a harmonious buzz that i find very calming. i think i also sleep better than in my own area of residence, which is more urban.
- i got to usurp my friend's CSA share, so i now have huge amounts of amazingly fresh vegetables.
- although i don't eat many eggs, the few i have eaten from the chickens here were very good. they make grocery store eggs look pathetic (which, let's be honest, they usually are anyway).
- since my friend whose house i'm in is a neighbor of the art studio where i work, i can walk to work.
- i have a lot of alone time, which is a nice change of pace.
and for the sake of completeness, i will also list the downsides. however, i am being paid to stay here and care for the animals, so i'm not complaining at all; more just noticing and recording.
- there are a fuck ton of mosquitoes here, which make it nigh impossible to be outside for long without repellent.
- caring for animals can be tiring. even if you yourself have had an exhausting day, or just want to sleep in, they always have their needs which are non-optional. also, sometimes they are very annoying (i still love them, but it's true).
- i miss my own house, my ergonomic desks, and my partner's cooking.
- one of the chickens actually died this past weekend. apparently she was quite old, so it was natural, but i had to transport her to a place where she could return to the food web without being in range of any dogs.
- despite the relaxing forest atmosphere and the nighttime forest sounds, i've been sleeping oddly. i'm guessing it's related to the change of environment, but i've had some strange dreams that have left me feeling out of sorts, which sometimes translates to a weird mood in the morning and feeling a little bit more stressed out than i normally do.
i've also been juggling a few different things, between the animals, my job (in which i'm working on some things which are a little more complicated than usual), and finishing the latest digital snippet for av club by the end of the month. so it's not just because of one thing. but i'm not normally very stressed out or moody (at least most of the time), so i would like to just feel normal please! perhaps getting some extra sleep will help.
anyway, yes, i finished and published the second digital snippet for av club yesterday! a good chunk of the post is publicly accessible, so you can check it out even if you are not a member: avclub.palomakop.tv/freqPhaseMod i made a demo video for it, which i just finished over the weekend, and involved a bunch of recording and editing. i put it off for a while because i wasn't really sure how to execute it, but now that i've done it once i think it will be easier in the future, if i ever make more things that require a demo video. the web demo and touchDesigner component were both finished a while ago, but the video and putting it all together was a significant chunk of effort. i am happy with the results though!
in between working on that, i also hung out with my partner (who's still staying over at our apartment), went hiking next to a lush stream and waterfall, and visited some nice friends who invited us to dinner at their house. the first three photos below are from our hike; the last photo is of a flower that randomly showed up in my backyard (i guess it somehow grew in between the two fences and just decided to poke out and say hello).
one more thing: i mentioned in my last post that i learned more about email at work and was able to apply it to my own setup. well, i actually surprisingly ended up learning even more about email since then, and now i'm running a self-hosted DMARC monitoring tool and getting live updates on the authentication status of a handful of sending domains, and i'm well on my way to fearlessly setting a p=reject policy. from being afraid to move off gmail years ago because my messages might go to spam, i have officially become a self-declared Email Power User. this is after already having a pretty good setup for a while... but i've learned things that i didn't know were there to learn, and now things that seemed mysterious no longer seem so. ask me about DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, POP, headers, spoofing, reputation, bounces... and i will answer you! not to brag. in the end, email is just more complicated than i expected, and not something i set out to become "good" at, or thought required a separate skill from systems administration and web stuff in general.
ok, that's enough of ranting about email. i think i've about covered everything that's going on. which i guess has been kind of a lot. time to start getting ready for an early bedtime. bye for now...
