liminal

Apr. 26th, 2026 03:13 pm
jazzfish: A small grey Totoro, turning around. (Totoro)
[personal profile] jazzfish
I want to be reading What We Are Seeking (Cameron Reed's new book). It is extremely brain-intensive, though. After a week of gaming and not-sleeping-super-well on a hotel pillow, I am just not there.

Midway, aka Not O'Hare, is a perfectly decent little airport. I seem to be the only person I know without at least one O'Hare horror story, but then it's been over a decade since I've gone through there. Regardless, Midway's probably nicer. Also it seems that all airport wifi now has "watch a thirty-second ad before we let you connect," which both irritates me and makes me a little sad. And the glory of the world is less than it once was.

My iPad's charging port is dead yet again. The Enter key on my keyboard is failing to register sometimes. Bah, technology.



I'm in Midway for another couple of hours and then I fly to Minneapolis for a week. And on Friday I have an interview for a "document analyst" position, which sounds like "tech writer with extra steps." The interview is in-person, which I wasn't expecting; I'm just glad it's coming at a halfway convenient time. Sometime this week I shall have to go out and acquire Interview Clothes. This is less annoying than it might be since I don't actually own much in the way of Interview Clothes, at least not that fit.

I'm trying not to think too much about the interview. Not til I'm someplace where I can relax a bit more, anyway. It's with the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council, so it's an In to Local Government which is where I'd like to be. Per the job description it's got some GIS-esque stuff going on; and by my back-of-envelope calculations it pays enough to live on and save a bit. It would be nice, I think. It would certainly be nice to have one of my two Big Immediate Problems solved.



My fingers have been vaguely itchy for the viola the last several days. This is... it's new. I'm enjoying it. I left my violin at Steph's last time so I'll have some outlet / ability to practise, at least, and I've got a flashcard app so I can see how many tunes I can actually remember.

I wish I'd realised sooner how... how good musicking is for me? How it's something that can actually call to me? Something like that. I'm honestly a bit startled that anything does, let alone music. I'd just sort of assumed that Feeling Drawn To A Thing was yet another thing about me that doesn't work like everyone else.

And I don't know how I could have possibly gotten here, not just from where I was but from any plausible diversion from that. If my folks had let me take bass instead of cello, like I wanted to, I'd probably wind up playing bass guitar, which would be pretty cool but not really the same. If one of my early cello teachers had offered something outside of Standard Classical Repertoire... I might have gone somewhere with that? I really don't know. Water under the bridge, regardless. I wish I'd gotten to "here" sooner; I'm pretty happy with where I've gotten to.

Ann C--, a violinist who shared a teacher with me for several years in Fayetteville, pinged me last month to let me know that our teacher had died. I'd been vaguely intending to reach out to Dr Boyce and let her know that I'd picked up viola, but never got around to it. Every so often I try to look up Ms West née Wiley, the bassist/cellist that Dr Boyce handed me off to once I'd gotten past her level of expertise on cello, and I never manage to find anything on her. Tegen, my pre-plague viola teacher, has gotten married, moved down south, and started cranking out babies, Jesus aphorisms, and MLM crap, which is disappointing but not surprising. Musicians: just as human as everyone else. (Ann, incidentally, is also Jesusy, but she appears to at least be the kind of Jesusy that's appalled by the current mask-off Republican party.)



No real resolution to this, which seems fitting for something written in a liminal space. I think I shall go and try to find some tea, and sit and think and zone out for awhile.
My centre is collapsing,
my right is in retreat.
Impossible to manoeuvre.
Situation excellent.
I am attacking.

--Marshal Ferdinand Foch, First Battle of the Marne

slowly i turned

Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:56 pm
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
[personal profile] jazzfish
Being at the Gathering is helping my mental state for sure. Being around people, being away from my condo (which is both a refuge and a source of stress at the moment), having a tonne of distractions so I don't end up dwelling on money and future and all.

The welcome gift this year was a copy of Dice Realms, a game that involves customizing largeish dice by popping little plates on and off for the sides. Specifically it comes with several hundred of these little plates. I spent a couple hours on ... Saturday? evening playing "sorting my copy of Dice Realms" and that was a nice low-key way to unwind.

I've played (and, startlingly, won) a game of Princes of Florence, one of my longtime favourites, against serious competition, and had a good time with various 18xx games and even more various other games. Two nights ago we played Sextet, a six-handed version of Bridge. The deck has two extra suits, partners sit alternating, there are two dummies. As Eric observed, "In Sextet you can say 'my centre-hand opponent' in a non-derogatory way."[1] It was fairly ridiculous.

[1] 'Centre-hand opponent' in Bridge is generally reserved for when one's partner, who sits across, has made a particularly boneheaded play or bid.

I've seen the falls, I've chatted and gamed with a number of folks. This evening I hit the pool and hot tub and am now decompressing in my room with decaf tea and Cameron Reed's new book.

I don't think I'm doing well, but I'm doing alright.

Search maintenance

Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:19 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

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