meeeeedialog!

Okay! It has been a chunk of time and also I am in desperate need of some wordcount! That makes conditions right for a book log, something I did not successfully do at any point in December, whoops! Luckily (?) I have not read an unmanageable amount of books since then. Maybe I put a frowny face here? I should get back to reading more, it might be good for me. ANYWAYS.

( It's a long one, so behind a cut! )

Have a nice week, I hope you are reading good things.

~Sor
MOOP!

Computerrrrr

Here is more new-computer talk. You can safely skip the rest of the entry if you don't care about that, and go ahead and read the next entry I write if you wanna know what I'm actually on about today.

First day writing the words on my NEW COMPUTER!

I am finding the mouse to be a wee bit irritating (well, trackpad) --it would work very very well if I was willing to have tapclick turned on, but is a little jumpy when I am using actual real click. (It's fine when I'm using the clickbuttons, but that's a slightly different hand position). This entry is my attempt to find out how I feel about the keyoard overall!

Mostly good! Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs. Other good stuff like that (every pangram I've ever written has been way _way_ more characters than were offered to the good citizens of Nollop.¹)

I'm already finding that I'm doing a lot more keyoard shortcuts than I have in the past, possibly because they're a little more intuitive/findable, possibly because of the aforementioned irritations with the mouse. Possibly because I am just simply _reveling_ in having a keyoard that does not currently have Forbidden Keys². Which, like, I've got the external keyoard which works _great_ but dang, it is also really nice to just...have a keyoard attached to the laptop.

I waffled several times on whether or not to do the music Properly And With Organization or just fuck around with the hellish piles of bullshit folders stacked from OS to OS (seriously, this music library really did originate on Dmitri, although at least it moved over to iTunes before it moved to a mac). Ultimately I decided I am going to do it properly, and what's more, given that I have nearly a TB of hard drive, I'm going to do it properly _stored on this actual computer_ instead of keeping it exclusively on the external like I had been doing for Kela. I am not sure how much space my music folder is, but 60GB is well less than the space I've got.

Hm. 114gb is well less than the space I got, but that's spookier. TBF, the folder says that many gigs is like 26k items and Quod Libet says something like 19k tracks, so THAT'S WHY WE'RE ORGANIZING THINGS. And also so I can maybe not have duplicate copies of everything. ANYWAYS.

I've swapped from xubuntu to regular type ubuntu. The workspaces are Worse, but I've fixed the first biggest problem (that they didn't _wrap_ what the fuck) and I've turned off "dynamic" in favour of knowing exactly how many spaces there are so they can just continue their assignments. Gosh I miss the many many years ago grid of them from some MacOS, having all my workspaces in a line continues to be a drag, even if I've been making it work for at least a half decade. Computers are very irritating and fixing them is incredibly frustrating, but I at least started a todo list to hack away at whenever I have some free time and energy.

I downloaded Steam and Signal and Discord and Kagi and logged into all of them. I have not yet done The Reading Of The Morning Comix, so that's going to be a fun teaching of the URLs I want to work. I'm in a new browser for the first time in forever --I don't remember WHEN I switched to Chrome, and my sense is that Firefox is not, like, a huge moral improvement but it's certainly not worse. Moving our dependencies off google seems like a good project, yanno?

Anyways, I have other stuff to write about but I'm going to make that a separate entry, so people who don't care about computers don't have to slog to find it. Ta!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I am referencing, of course, the extremely good epistolary novel Ella Minnow Pea, which I highly recommend reading once (but found oddly disappointing on the second time through).

2: Yes I recognize the irony in this statement, but I _choose_ to spell it like that. It's an old old Pie Shop bit --the punchline is "Erika's is roken"

A return to existance

This morning I tested negative for covid!

I'm very happy about it --it was almost exactly ten days positivity (nine confirmed, since I hadn't tested since Thursday evening)-- and I've begun to like...exist in the world again. Got to eat a meal downstairs with my roommates, which was lovely, and has not occurred since....probably December 19th? 20th? They went out of town for the Solstice, then I went out of town before they returned, then when I was returned it was In Quarantine.

Being locked in my room 24/7 (okay, okay, I went down to the bathroom or to fetch food 4-6 times a day) for ten days straight was Not My Favourite Thing I've Ever Done. I did a couple of good things, like reading one Vorkosigan book and one non-Vorkosigan book, and putting together a big LEGO set and getting my computer set up. I also did many days of just.....absolutely nothing. I am reminding myself that I was subscribing to the idea of Radical Rest, and it is okay to have spent a day (or several) playing phone games and watching the complete archive of Let's Game It Out videos, but gossssshhhhhhhhh I would like to (slowly! carefully! no rush!) return to a functional life. More functional, at least.

I did celebrate by _actually going outside_ something I hadn't done in ages. I don't have hard data on this, but it was probably the longest span of time I've spent consecutively indoors in pretty much forever --I got my paxlovid on the 2nd, ran an errand on maybe the 4th, and then spent literally six days without leaving the house for even a moment. Blech. But I had a very nice little walk in the snow, just down the path a bit and back. Very peaceful, and I took a lot of pictures of pretty snow-covered things.

The bonus celebration is Austin coming over to visit, which half my brain is like "noooooo too soonnn" and the other half my brain is like "whatever, it's his decision too". I finally finished reading him The Pushcart War, which ends with a very good little happily ever after, and somehow feels unbelievably timely for a book published three years after my mother was born.

Tomorrow I am still not going to bells --half because of covid recovery/still minimizing risk of infecting others, and half because ten days of isolation has made me weird and feral and I need to ease my way out. Of course, Monday I'm going to go to work and slam back into full-tilt Doing Things, but that's fine, honestly.

I feel like I should try and figure out some specific Things to Do tomorrow. I did pretty well with my little #AccountabilityClub list for today though, and I also think I earned a die for the first time this calendar year (and set up the Dailies sheet to show that!). To be fair, I have had covid, so I am in no way mad at myself for like, not earning dice for the first ten days of the year. Let's move forward and earn lots and lots though? It would be nice to have a dailies sheet more consistently filled in.

I am happy to be feeling better, and happy to be testing negative and happy to be moving forward into a world that is Big Time Falling Apart. I'm gonna keep doing little happy things as much and as often as possible, and see if I can at least help my tiniest corner of the world feel joy. I love you, and hope you're doing well this year.

~Sor
MOOP!