MOOP!

Today was, by and large, a pretty good day for me, in terms of working on my little projects. It was an MCAS day, and the way things worked out, I saw two students the entire day. So...yeah. I had a lot of time to work on aforementioned little projects!

On my secretish one of them, I did 1/122 of the work, which is not a whole lot, but at the same time is an excellent start (this is a project that I have not touched since 2022, so that's still good stuff. And back then I only got through like...4/122 of the work, so this is good progress. RADICAL ACCEPTANCE OF INCREMENTAL PROGRESS, OKAY!?)

((Seriously, I keep that phrase on a sticky note posted above my desk. It's important to me. It's right next to the one that says "you can always start again". The only other pithy reminders I have are a couple of NancyButtons attached with magnets to my filing cabinet --one says "If the muse doesn't show up, start without her" and the other "you can't revise nothing". You have now determined most of my philosophy.))

On the other one...well the other one I've been public about, it's my email sorting project. I'm at about 7,600 unread emails and about 25,700 total in my inbox. Before you make snide comments, when I got serious about this project in mid-March, it was 13,600 and 32,800. Incremental progress.

(I mean hell, the start of May was about 11,900 and 31,000. My little graph is _plummeting_ in a most delightful way, and having reached "about 25,000" I was able to reward myself with more goofy data analysis.)

My third little digital project is Going Through And Sorting All My Photos and I have made zero progress on it in this batch (although I have done about 1600 from the earlier batch. I have no idea how many total photos it will be, my very rough initial guess is "I dunno, 50k?"). I kept trying to do some while babysitting Baby earlier this week (when Baby was sleeping, natch, not trying to balance both a child and a laptop) but I did not make much progress. Maybe I will do a little more tonight? This one suffers because I can't do it at work --my photos are not sorted enough between what is and isn't appropriate to have on the screen of my work laptop. That's one of the goals of this project, yanno?

Tomorrow I have actual work, which is a deep and abiding bummer, although we're at the part of the year where things are actually just humming along with end-of-year projects and the like. So maybe I will be able to do some amount of little projects as well. And before too long I'll be off to Pinewoods, and everything will fall apart again (I don't have any data on "number of unread/unarchived emails by month" but I think July will probably have an outsized percentage.)

I hope you are well and have nice things in your life.

~Sor
MOOP!

Hullo friends! I have been writing lots of accomplishment posts, but I don't think I have written very much regular posts recently. Here are some disconnected random things about me right now!

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Somewhere in the very recent past, I decided that Now That I'm Thirty¹, I no longer give a shit whether Those Dudes think I'm a bitch or not. This has involved me speaking up a little more in various places, and then wandering off as soon as I get bored, because unlike some dudes, I have sufficient self-control to not keep showing off my ass to the entire damn world. It's *great*. Not caring if Those Dudes think I'm rude is the *best* and I highly recommend it.

It is all made better by the presence of my trusted Partner in Petty, my darling baby sister who gets all the screencaps I think are too hilarious not to share. Anyways, if you're worried about incurring my wrath, it's pretty easy not to: if someone calls you out for doing something iffy, suppress whatever your knee-jerk reaction is, go somewhere else, think for a while, and then come back. Sure, sometimes they might be Objectively Wrong. But we all benefit from more time to consciously think before posting.

***

I've wandered back into doing Highland on the semi-reg, which is working out pretty damn well for me. It turns out Serious Aerobic Exercise Wot Gets Your Heart Going is good for a body and soul. Even if I remain terrible at it and it is very frustrating.

Possibly related to the point above, I have been getting better at saying to Robert "hey, you need to teach this differently for me to learn it" (which almost always is "much more slowly please", and occasionally is just "no I don't have questions, I just literally need to practice it thirty times in a row please and thanks".)

ANYways, I've almost got most of Bonnie Dundee, as long as you ignore the arms entirely. And tonight! TONIGHT WE STARTED THE JIG! Okay, so like, there's a very small number of actual "Highland" dances that get done in competition and stuff. Then there's a whole bunch of "National" dances. I'm not very good at remembering which are which beside the really obvious ones.

There are two competition dances that you don't get to do AT ALL as a beginner, because they are Too Hard. They are the Hornpipe and the Jig and they basically are the two MOST AWESOME Highland dances. They have very different feels to everything else (Jig especially, which is meant as a giant angry Irish stereotype and all the movement is so precise) and if we're gonna be working on Jig in the near future I'm gonna pull out all the stops to actually make it to practice!

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My bike has a big fucking hole in the tyre, such that you can see the big fucking hole in the toob. No one likes this, least of all me. I need to figure out how to get my bicycle to quadbikes, which is all the fuck in Harvard. Everything is Very Sad And Dramatic.

On the plus side, I saw Neil the other night at dance (!!!!!!!) and he mentioned they still have my other bike, which I left there like a year ago and thought I'd lost to the ADHD tax. So that's exciting! Just have to get my shit together! Big time shit together!!!

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In general, Becoming Effective is possibly working in a very small way? I just described it to Dragon as "it's slow but it is going" and that's pretty accurate.

The accomplishment posts are probably really good for me, although they feel cluttery on the page. Maybe I will revitalize my old "SorSpeaksWords" guilt-free spam-journal. Or at least start putting them under cuts? I dunno.

I hate everything about progress, apparently. Also the sleep part is absolute crap. This week I'm pretending that if I focus instead on drinking enough water it won't matter.

Hope you are well!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I am older than 29.5, I can start rounding! Although seriously, mostly due to my distaste with societal pressure for people (especially women) to lie about their age and "29" being the age to quote, I have been going with "almost thirty" the entire year, because I'm much more into that.