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.

I received an email from the city that was much more exciting than the usual: they're reopening the city rink soon! It's been closed almost since I moved here, and I didn't know that they were still working on renovating it. It's still not a walk down the block for me, but it will be much easier for me to get to, and they already have a schedule up with skating hours every day. Looking forward to trying it out!

Apparently I haven't done this for a couple of years, but here's a year-end fic writing meme.
( Cut for length of the fic meme )

I went to visit my parents for my birthday. My present was, unexpected, a board game (Botany, which Z and I have played and enjoyed). We went for several walks while I was there, since the weather was so nice, and I helped them eat some of the delicious fruits and veggies from their CSA box. They also sent me back with some Filipino snacks and other nostalgic food gifts for Z.

I brought them a few of my eggplants, which they rated as 'okay, for an eggplant', but a few days after I came back, I did a more thorough search through my garden patch for fruit, and, well:

Z and I have almost entirely made it through that. I thought maybe twelve plants would be a bit too much even for me, but we're managing! I really like this variety and am going to try to save seeds for next year.

And last weekend, I went down to the city for new skates, finally. I spent over two hours trying on skates, and though I did buy some (and new blades... my wallet was not happy that day), I am wondering if I shouldn't have gotten semi-customs after all. The fitter kept telling me that it's normal for the heels to lift when you put your weight on the toepicks and focused instead on whether they lifted when I bent my knees, and I am still not convinced; if my heels lift when I do that, then they feel wrong when I so much as point my toe in them during forward stroking, and I just don't believe that everyone's heels move around when they jump. Once I've worn them a few more hours, I am going to get them punched out up front and see if I can get the heels pinched in any, and I'm still trying different ways to lace them to try and lock my heels in for real. They are definitely better than my old skates, but given how much money and effort goes into these things, it's disappointing to feel like the fitter isn't taking your biggest issue as seriously as you.

(The figure skate color gender binary is also very real, so they wouldn't let me try on skates with the "wrong" color because they kept said it would be a worse fit in the heels. I bought skate tape and am still thinking of how I want to decorate them once they've been punched out. So far, I'm leaning towards mostly covering them but cutting out some little star shapes from the tape to show through.)

Hi, everyone! I've been a bit absent from DW (and other places like Discord) for a while - for some reason, for a few months there, I just lost any desire to start any social interactions. I did begin going to skating lessons again, so I was talking to people and leaving the house, but I didn't feel like going to board game nights or opening my Discord. Still not sure if anything in particular caused it - I also lost a lot of interest in writing at the same time - but I've been trying to start getting back into things and catching up on the comments I never replied to on AO3 and all that.

The skating lessons have been going well. I'm not going to the current session of group lessons, because right now they just start too early, but I'll probably start going again during summer when it shifts to a little later, and I'll be doing private lessons still. My spins are slowly getting less bad, and I can sometimes kind of sort of do the world's smallest waltz jump, something I've had a real mental block on. And I also finally figured out how to actually train my turnout muscles, so I can do a t-stop on my bad side now! I even had a hastily put-together solo in the local Christmas Holiday Skating Show after we learned I could have one a month ahead of time :D I didn't do perfectly, but I had fun. Just need to figure out how to cool down the adrenaline a little, because about two-thirds of the way through, I noticed that my hands were 100% pins and needles, so I couldn't feel them at all.

I visited my parents for Thanksgiving, and Z and I visited for Christmas as well. Z has now seen about all of the [local extremely rich family] houses that are now museums, so next time I promised we'd do something different xD I made some carrot jam with rosewater and cardamom for my parents and a folding double-sided organizer for Z, who has been on an organizing kick these last few months. Z got me a set of Avatar Nation-themed tea cups (they come with cute little bamboo covers to help keep your tea warm!), and we shared a lot of chocolate and other treats.

While we were there, I also got a new camera, spurred by my desire to take better photos at Worlds and a lot of very, very helpful advice from R, who is a professional photographer. I used it to take some photos at one of the museums, and while I still need to learn a lot about how to use it, I'm already pretty happy with it. My mom is now saying she needs me to bring it along to document her next field trip. She just needs to figures out where she wants to go now that China is no longer a very good option (I am personally rooting for Bhutan I get to tag along).

My mom and I also binged a lot of Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty over both of those visits and will probably watch some more when she comes over before we head to Worlds in Montreal. I definitely recommend what I've seen so far if 'mystery-solving officials in the Tang dynasty with good character development' sounds like a fun time.

Happy new year to everyone; I hope it's a good one. And happy public domain day as well, which Z and I celebrated by watching Steamboat Willie.

(I mean, it's also only fun on the internet when it's actually 'drama' and not something serious, and this is not 'drama' drama.)

Today, I went to the rink, got out my skates, got them on to my feet, and had just started lacing up when my coach burst into the lobby very upset about something. One of the adults helped calm him down while he was talking with the rink guys, and then he got on the phone with the rink manager; he started threatening to call the police, and then he actually did so. I pieced together that he was saying that Other Coach had body-checked him into the boards.

Soooo obviously I did not get a lesson today. I did end up skating a bit since I'd already gone there and forked over the money for the session, but I didn't have a ton of things I wanted to practice and my heart wasn't in it, so I got maybe 45 minutes in. (My blades are also in need of sharpening, I think.)

My coach said that there was CCTV backing up his claims (we don't have Livebarn or anything). When I was checking some dance steps on my phone, a group of coaches and teenage girls seemed to be saying that there was no physical contact and that Other Coach had just cut him off the same way he'd cut off one of Other Coach's students. Even if all of that was the case - and fallibility of memory on all sides around, someone who was part of the event probably has a better idea of what was happening than someone who was likely focusing on their own skating/lesson until shouting began - that is the most elementary-school excuse. I could not believe that I was hearing adult coaches affirming that this was an acceptable response to another skater getting in their way, and it made me feel very uncomfortable to be around them. If Other Coach thought that someone was cutting off his students, he had options to resolve that conflict that were not 'well, I'll do the same back to you!!' because he is capable of talking to people, communicating, and escalating to management if needed like an adult.

My own bias towards my coach aside, I do not like Other Coach because I have seen him behaving badly before, so while I didn't see what happened myself and don't know what the truth is, I don't find the allegation totally unbelievable. This is apparently the same coach who walked out on the ice in sneakers to scream at R in Russian as a first reaction to thinking R was getting in the way of one of his students. While he does often act normally, there have also been incidents where I didn't think he was treating his students well (nothing over the line of reportable).

The police did show up and talk to a bunch of people, and presumably ask for the CCTV footage, so I guess we'll see what comes of it and if we'll have to change our lesson times. (Unfortunately, it's hard to completely avoid people when there's only a few rinks in the area; everybody coaches everywhere.)

I sacrificed my wallet to Skate Canada and the ISU to get Worlds tickets for next season. I'm going with my mom :) I remember looking at the prices for the canceled 2020 version and being sad that there was no way I could afford to go, but now that I have my job... it's still a lot of money, but not completely unreasonable anymore. (And the train tickets will be cheap.)

I also contacted my coach to start lessons again now that I think I have my boot issues 90% sorted and my schedule is a little more stable. Possible bonus to the heel bumpers I am using: might help with the blisters I keep getting in my hiking shoes? Z and I are going to test it out on a short trail.

Garden updates:

• The eggplants have finally started to take off a little in the past few days. I remember one year I bought some from the farmer's market and they barely grew for a month with our weather.


• The daikon all bolted instead of growing roots. Ah well, worth a shot, and the greens taste good. And hey, they did way better than the carrots, which are at a 0% success rate. Will try again in the fall.


• It's been interesting watching the tomatoes because they're all planted in the same area and started off fairly similar in size and apparent health, but they've diverged rapidly since going in the ground. Some of the plants have tripled in size already; a couple of them have been slow but have gradually turned greener; one of them has looked limp and sad since transplanting no matter how much or how little it's been watered. It seems to have turned a corner these past couple of days, but I'll keep an eye on it.


• I like slugs, but not when they're munching on my basil :|


• Half my edamame has come up! I replanted the other half in case they don't. Absolutely none of the mizuna has sprouted, though - I was promised it was an easy plant! No idea what happened, so I just threw more seeds in the ground in the hopes that second try's the charm.


• Second round of lemongrass is looking nice and doing quite well. Second round of garlic chives had a zero percent success rate. Ah, well. I have one plant of it that's been growing slowly.


• I'm giving away some extra seedlings to grad students from my former department tomorrow. Hope the plants grow well for them.

Been a busy March for me! I traveled down to give a presentation for work with my boss at a university we collab with a lot - it's a bit weird to now be the outside speaker at the grad student seminar instead of the grad student who didn't really want to be there 95% of the time, haha. We had a good reception to the talk and the students asked good questions, so I think it went well :) Also saw my parents and went to work in-person for a couple of days, then came home juuust in time for a bunch of snow!

A lot of my work time this past month has consisted of me bashing my head against code for a new project - I had to do some things which were not documented very well and then spent two weeks trying to figure out an error code/waiting for someone to be free to help me figure out my error. But now that it's finally solved, I'm making good progress. I have to use R rather than my fave Python, and I haven't used it for ages, so everything seems a little bit backward.

I also finally had my ENT visit to get my vocal cords looked at. I can't say I really enjoyed the experience - the office was huge and very Corporate, they repeatedly emailed me to ask me to fill out a bunch of forms beforehand only to then ask me in the office for information I had already filled in two or three times because nothing talks to each other and they can't actually see anything I filled in, and everyone seemed very rushed. The doctor outright told me that she didn't have time to read anything, so she had no idea what problem I was there for. (When I told her, she then asked why I hadn't seen anyone for my voice problems before now if I'd had them for so long. I almost laughed in her face. Maybe it seems like a medical problem if you're an ENT! Everyone else just thinks you're not trying hard enough.)

Also, I found out that having a tube down your nose sucks :( They did give me a numbing spray, but it still hurt a lot, even though that's apparently not supposed to happen? I guess I should have told her. Notes for next time. At least my vocal cords didn't have anything obviously wrong with them. They have scheduled me for another test as well, but I need to check with the speech pathologist to see if I need that done or not.

Watching skating Worlds this week was pretty fun. I'm happy KanaDai didn't fall over this time, and for the most part, the men's and women's events were pretty good, despite some heartbreaks. Seeing Katya going from :D to ??:(?? at her scores in the FS was rough, but it's not like she hasn't struggled with rotation for a while, so I can't say I was super surprised and I hope she can work on that. I'm pleased for the women's podium, especially for Kaori for hanging on after the popped flip to add a 3T and Loena for hanging on in general and committing to her performance despite the mistakes. And Kazuki did great despite his falls, even if he ended up improvising his step sequence in the FS (good job, Kazuks).

I liked having Belinda on the world feed during the Olympics, and she and Mark made a great team with good rapport. It really came across how much they enjoy watching good skating and keep up with it. They were positive without being blandly uncritical or simplifying technical critique down to nothing, and it was also pretty clear that they were happy to have full-grown adults vying for medals in the women's category. Would love to hear them team up some more :)

It warmed up a little here, and I've been enjoying reading outside some afternoons with a pot of tea before it gets too dark to see. Some of our trees are bare now, but others are still losing their color. The crows are certainly out in full force every evening; you can watch hundreds of them go by overhead, all going CAW CAW CAW in what seems to be a giant conversation. I have finished all my recent book purchases!

Here's more Skate America thoughts from Saturday! Hopefully, I will get them finished before another event goes by 😅 Been distracted by work - having some frustrating issues with a remote server - watching gymnastics Worlds between skating (still not over the 'ehhh water on the balance beam is fine, right?' incident), and playing and I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. I've already put 60 hours into that game, and I'm probably going to do at least one more playthrough. And maybe write fic? I want so much fic for it, guys.
( Two GP events later... )

Like half of the northern hemisphere, it's been very hot here this week. Thankfully, the basement in our new rental stays lovely and cool with no AC all day, so I've been living there for the past few days. Z is gone this weekend, so it's just me and kitty.

Despite the heat, I attempted to donate blood yesterday despite it being about 100/38. The walk there was actually not that bad since the clouds came out and I was going downhill. I paused in the shade to drink some water (don't want to get rejected for having a high temperature!) and get my mask on, and walked in, and...

Nobody was there. Apparently they changed the blood drive time and shortened it by half a day. I understand if they needed to shorten it due to the heat or staffing shortages, but they both texted and called to confirm my appointment the day beforehand, so surely their system should have been able to let me know that it was cancelled?

Anyway, I will see if I can schedule with the nonprofit blood bank in my hometown when I visit my parents next month. I didn't want to waste the walk, so I went to a nearby cafe I've been wanting to try but keep managing to catch when they're closed. I got a croissant (good) and a slice of chocolate raspberry cake (very good), which were nice to eat after I got home and cooled off. I want to try one of their sandwiches when walking there is a nicer trip.

In less-hot thoughts - I couldn't sleep the night Yuzuru had his press conference, so I watched the first few minutes of it live. I'm a little sad that he's finally retired, but at the same time, kind of content? It wasn't like when Zhenya retired (although to be fair, she was my absolute favorite, so of course it made me more upset) because her body was so badly damaged, although I'm sure his ankle will do better without a full training load. And obviously I don't know Yuzu, but it was sad to hear him say he didn't enjoy competing at the Olympics, and it sounded like he had a lonely time training post-Covid - sorry, guys, I don't buy this claim that he didn't need a coach when he's talking about hitting his head in training; then at the gala and in the show clips I've seen, he looked like he was having the time of his life. So it sounds as though he was ready to move on to something else. It's not the same, but we're a similar age, and it made me think of how I did school and more school and even more school, and how ready I was to be done with grad school and get a job by the end of it. Good for him for reaching that point and being able to move on at his own time instead of being forced out by his body breaking down.

I hope he enjoys his shows and gets to try anything he's wanted to but hasn't been able to do in competition - he can get lifted in every show if he wants to, lol - and is able to have more privacy now.

Lots of retirements - Satton (poor woman never received the PCS she deserved, but at least she got away from Hamada), Yuzu, Rin Nitataya, Jason is probably only doing one more season, Mariah is ???. Assignments came out today, though, and it's exciting to see a wider variety of skaters. Natasha McKay and Arlet Levandi both have GP assignments! People I haven't even heard of have them! So I'm looking forward to that next season. Other than Misha, I'm not going to miss the Russians.

Also, I'm going to Skate America with my mom. Every lineup is looking pretty good, but I'm really happy with ours! I get to see Kana/Dai IN PERSON!!! I'm even kind of excited for pairs, my least favorite discipline, because I only recognize one of them. My flag bag is ready :D

I made it home safely, though I was pretty stressed to be on the train, and my 'I should start skating lessons again!' plan has been derailed for, like, the fourth time. Thanks, Covid.

US/Canada Nats probably should've been derailed by Covid, but I did enjoy watching what I could. So happy for CG/L's win - they are a lovely and well-matched pair and one of the few I keep up on, and it's also so cool to me that Leduc is probably going to be the first out nonbinary athlete at the winter Olympics! Jason was also great despite the ??? hours he spent in transit.

I am not confused by the hate Mariah got for winning over Karen despite the fact that Karen was off her music for most of the free skate and some of her jumps being visibly not rotated in real time (liked her SP, though), but I would love if someone on Mariah's team would edit the music for her SP. The performance has improved a lot - when I first saw it, all it made me feel was the urge to watch Zhenya's program instead - but that musical transition is so bad. Please. Don't make her skate that at the Olympics.

On the other hand, I was a little confused about the rending of garments over Ilia, someone I've haven't seen talked about as even a dark horse outside shot candidate for the Olympic team, not being prioritized over Jason on the basis of a clean Nats and inconsistent rest of his season (though personally I'd still consider kicking Vincent off for him anyway). But then those people started sounding a lot like Yags (QUAD QUAD QUAD never mind that Ilia's body movement and SS and choreo are still underdeveloped because he is, you know, seventeen and his FS was basically just jumping, to be fair he has amazing jumps QUAD) and I suspect the answer in some cases is homophobia, so. Still, it's hilarious when people are insisting that one set of clean performances at a national competition with inflated scores for a junior = solid medal candidate we are leaving behind and he needs to switch countries.

...well, at least Jason and Zhenya will both be present at the Olympics in some form, even if she may not be allowed to physically be there 💔

Anyway, now onto the writing meme. Apparently, I forgot to do this last year for 2020! Well, I wrote my thesis, that was the important thing.
( Cut for length of the fic meme )