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We are currently in that week in spring when everything has just started to put out leaves
Been keeping busy! My boss and I have been grinding away at a paper revision for our big project of the last few years. I spent a week and a half being very frustrated with the code to fine-tune one of our models in response to a reviewer comment... and it made no significant difference in the results in the end. Ah, well, it turns out like that sometimes. Also I learned that even our most technical person barely knows how to Git, so I now feel less bad that I can hardly muddle through anything more complicated than a basic commit.
In March, I went to skating Worlds with my mom and had a blast (at least with the skating - the organization was bad enough that I never want to go back to TD Garden again, and any events run by SKOB are on thin ice), will try to write up my impressions properly at some point. In terms of my personal skating, it turns out that I do need to get new boots AGAIN because I was right about being fit poorly, sigh, and probably at least semi-customs like I kept asking the fitter about. I've been putting off getting the process started because it's a lot of money, and at this point, it's hard not to worry that they are still not going to fit properly. But in better news, I just passed the Canasta Tango dance test and have signed up for my club's spring show. Several other people from my group lessons are going to be there, too, so we can cheer each other on :)
Z and I began house hunting because our lease is up soon and our landlord is putting where we live now up for sale, and we thought it would be nicer to have a place of our own if we could find one (and renting can start to feel like throwing money into a hole). After an intense few weeks of looking, we have found a place. It's close to where we live now! I can probably walk to the local library branch! The view from the front is amazing! We even got it under asking price when a few other places we looked at got bids way above the price and also way out of our budget! ...because we agreed to take on the expensive septic repairs in exchange for paying less. There's always something. We just had the inspection, and while it is a little depressing and nerve-wracking to hear all the things wrong with a house you're trying to buy given how much they cost, our inspector was very nice about explaining a lot of things for us.
During the trip to/from Boston and all the rides to houses (since Z was driving), I made it through a couple of library books. The first was the second book in Jonathon Stroud's latest series, The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, which I quite enjoyed even though it's been ages since I read the first, and the other was Prairie Fires, an extremely detailed biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's very good if you are the kind of person who wants to read an extremely detailed biography of her, although at a certain point it becomes a biography of her daughter as well, and eventually I started to wish that the author would shut up about her because the hateboner was a lot. I also think that Lane sounds like a horrible person, but around the fifth time you're going after someone for her shitty writing practices or being terrible with money in a biography about her mother, I think you should maybe consider whether the comments need to be there. But there was a lot of information there; I liked the parts that gave greater context to her life, starting before she was born with the Dakota peoples and the families of her parents, and as a writer, I also found the discussion of how various events were treated differently in different manuscripts and drafts to be interesting.
And on the computer, I've gotten as far as Gongaga in FF7R - really lovely area, and I like how the music isn't the stereotypical 'jungle' music - but put that on pause because Oblivion Remaster came out of nowhere for the rest of this year's game budget 😅 Once I figured out the performance issues in the outdoor areas by getting the mod that force-disables the raytracing out there, it runs fine and looks beautiful. The autumnal area between Bruma and Chorrol in particular is gorgeous, especially when it's foggy and the sun is setting. I definitely have some things I would change further (let the women wear pants and men skirts, you cowards) but I appreciate the tweaks to the mini-game UIs and things like the Altmer being more golden-skinned rather than weirdly pink.
Might get one of the mods that evens out the level scaling, but I'm still pretty low-level and haven't felt the need yet. And judging by some of the comments on my Morrowind WIP, I think the release is making people think of the other TES games as well :) Need to keep hacking away at that... I expected that a small fandom wouldn't have a lot of people reading, but there's more enthusiasm for this ship than I had been hoping for! I'm hoping I can stick the landing on it since it's a slowburn fic, and I know those can sometimes get kind of frustrating if the burn stops going anywhere.
In March, I went to skating Worlds with my mom and had a blast (at least with the skating - the organization was bad enough that I never want to go back to TD Garden again, and any events run by SKOB are on thin ice), will try to write up my impressions properly at some point. In terms of my personal skating, it turns out that I do need to get new boots AGAIN because I was right about being fit poorly, sigh, and probably at least semi-customs like I kept asking the fitter about. I've been putting off getting the process started because it's a lot of money, and at this point, it's hard not to worry that they are still not going to fit properly. But in better news, I just passed the Canasta Tango dance test and have signed up for my club's spring show. Several other people from my group lessons are going to be there, too, so we can cheer each other on :)
Z and I began house hunting because our lease is up soon and our landlord is putting where we live now up for sale, and we thought it would be nicer to have a place of our own if we could find one (and renting can start to feel like throwing money into a hole). After an intense few weeks of looking, we have found a place. It's close to where we live now! I can probably walk to the local library branch! The view from the front is amazing! We even got it under asking price when a few other places we looked at got bids way above the price and also way out of our budget! ...because we agreed to take on the expensive septic repairs in exchange for paying less. There's always something. We just had the inspection, and while it is a little depressing and nerve-wracking to hear all the things wrong with a house you're trying to buy given how much they cost, our inspector was very nice about explaining a lot of things for us.
During the trip to/from Boston and all the rides to houses (since Z was driving), I made it through a couple of library books. The first was the second book in Jonathon Stroud's latest series, The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, which I quite enjoyed even though it's been ages since I read the first, and the other was Prairie Fires, an extremely detailed biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's very good if you are the kind of person who wants to read an extremely detailed biography of her, although at a certain point it becomes a biography of her daughter as well, and eventually I started to wish that the author would shut up about her because the hateboner was a lot. I also think that Lane sounds like a horrible person, but around the fifth time you're going after someone for her shitty writing practices or being terrible with money in a biography about her mother, I think you should maybe consider whether the comments need to be there. But there was a lot of information there; I liked the parts that gave greater context to her life, starting before she was born with the Dakota peoples and the families of her parents, and as a writer, I also found the discussion of how various events were treated differently in different manuscripts and drafts to be interesting.
And on the computer, I've gotten as far as Gongaga in FF7R - really lovely area, and I like how the music isn't the stereotypical 'jungle' music - but put that on pause because Oblivion Remaster came out of nowhere for the rest of this year's game budget 😅 Once I figured out the performance issues in the outdoor areas by getting the mod that force-disables the raytracing out there, it runs fine and looks beautiful. The autumnal area between Bruma and Chorrol in particular is gorgeous, especially when it's foggy and the sun is setting. I definitely have some things I would change further (let the women wear pants and men skirts, you cowards) but I appreciate the tweaks to the mini-game UIs and things like the Altmer being more golden-skinned rather than weirdly pink.
Might get one of the mods that evens out the level scaling, but I'm still pretty low-level and haven't felt the need yet. And judging by some of the comments on my Morrowind WIP, I think the release is making people think of the other TES games as well :) Need to keep hacking away at that... I expected that a small fandom wouldn't have a lot of people reading, but there's more enthusiasm for this ship than I had been hoping for! I'm hoping I can stick the landing on it since it's a slowburn fic, and I know those can sometimes get kind of frustrating if the burn stops going anywhere.