A Song in the Trees

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 :)

May ended up being a busy month for me! I went to visit my workplace in-person again (riiiight before Covid cases creeped up enough that they started telling us to cancel in-person meetings, lucky me) for three days, and I visited my parents while I was at it. We went on some nice nature walks - that was still when the greenery was lagging a bit up here, so it was nice to just see all the brilliantly green trees and grass after what felt like an extra three months of winter. My mom and I also binged the first season of Let's Make a Mug, Too, which is a Cute Girls Doing Cute Things Please Come Tourist in Our Town and Spend Money There Show Please show, but the Cute Thing is pottery and my mom was interested in that. And the tourism sections 100% worked on her lol. So maybe we will go there one day and I'll get asked to play translator :)

Unfortunately, my dad got sick the last morning - not with The Plague, thankfully - but he was feeling better by the end of the day.

That week at work ended up feeling like one of those video game levels that are meant to teach you a new gameplay concept. For instance, I ended up having to write a SQL query (can I SQL? Yes. Am I good at SQL? No) with some help to pull data from the database, process it to strip out sensitive data, and then finish processing it with my existing analysis code. Not my easiest work week, but I learned a lot, and now I'm set up to pull more data and deal with it whenever we receive an update.

Between all the travel time and the nothing to do in the hotel at night, I ended up reading three books in a week, including one academic nonfiction and one easy literary fiction. I am coming to the conclusion that I don't like literary fiction that much.

My Memorial Day weekend was pretty slow; I catsat for Z, as he went to go visit a friend a couple states over. Did some writing, some Creatures modding, figured out what I wanted to bid on for Sunflower Auction, played a couple of games I had downloaded (they were not good and I gave up on both pretty soon), and stayed up too late watching a very legal stream of FAOI. I also thought about going skating, but we're down to one accessible rink this time of year, and it turns out that on weekends it's a 2.5 hour bus ride one way, and did I feel like spending five hours on/waiting for buses to go skating that day? I did not. So I just fiddled some more with my skates instead. Maybe this week.

Bad news is that I now have no idea when we are moving. Apparently there is some issue for the people who are vacating our new place, and now we are moving 'sometime in June, who knows when', so I'm glad I hadn't scheduled movers to haul the furniture I'm taking. Looks like I'm not going to be planting much this year, though :/ Luckily for me, the new management company has once again forgotten I exist, so they haven't asked me about showing the place or when I'm moving for weeks now. You'd think after all the fussing about how they needed me to sign a lease so they could show it to the bank, they'd... at least have given me a lease to sign. IDK what they're spending their time doing, because they sure don't seem to like to spend it on their tenants.

Fortunately, my company laptop arrived! Unfortunately, I have yet to be able to get the VPN working or even log in to the computer because I need to call IT first, which I haven't had a chance to because...

Fortunately, someone from HR called me about my benefits issue! Though it took a while to hear back from her (she didn't pick up when I called back a couple of hours after she said she would, but she did call again after 5), and though the problem still isn't fixed, she did assure me that the deadline to sign up for insurance and whatnot will be extended. I am still curious as to what the issue is that is apparently so hard to resolve, but at least progress seems to be being made.

I also called my property manager because of a problem with my rent, and nobody picked up at either the new phone number I was emailed or the old one. I ended up texting him about it, so maybe he will see it at some point. (The thermostat is still a bit fucked, which I will relay if I can ever get anyone to talk to me. You'd think if anyone was answering the new number, they would've returned my voicemail where I said my hot water had frozen to make sure it unfroze - it did - but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

In conclusion, I hate playing phone tag. At least tomorrow I am free to call IT and get the laptop set up.

I also couldn't get convolutional layers to work in RKeras today, but that's just R because hard like usual, and Tumblr won't show my most recent post in the tag, but that's Tumblr being Tumblr because it's a descriptive list of links to FS stuff, and we all know that links = bad.

In happier news, I also discovered a last-minute Olympics-themed event for YOI (here!), which looks fun! I might try to put something out for it. And also the snow-covered hills outside my window are very pretty, and it's expected to be warmer this week than last. And I may (or may not, we'll see) have a project at work soon :)

My first three days of work have been a success, despite some administrative hiccups. Apparently neither I nor my supervisor got all the info we needed to get me a systems account and then get me onto the network, but it's been ironed out, and today I finally got into my email!

Monday and Tuesday I went in person, and I mostly spent the time getting shuffled around meeting people. Sometimes we talked about Organization stuff, one asked me a lot about my research, one didn't know what to talk about so I asked him about his research... so far everyone seems very nice and welcoming! Many of them have also been there for 15+ years, which seems like a good sign.

Starting yesterday, I was able to begin going through all the mandatory self-paced trainings, which I finished today after sitting in on a couple of group meetings that I'll probably be contributing to in the future. I think the trainings were supposed to take me longer, judging by all the estimated times, but I guess I read fast, and most of them weren't tied to audio. For some reason, they make the non-clinical staff take a lot of medical safety stuff, too, so I can now tell you how to properly dispose of sharps, even though I will never be legally allowed to stick a needle in anyone.

There's live video training next week, but until then, I'm not sure what else there is to do! Or even what I'll do after that and before the data structure training I'll be taking in February. Will see if Supervisor has anything else I should be starting, or if I'll end up spending the time working on a paper or something.

Read: I finished Queen of the Damned in the days after Christmas, my last book of 2021. I think I might have enjoyed it more than the second book? I could have used less of Lestat being Super Special for no particular reason (the first vampire Akasha becomes obsessed with him because... what?), and Akasha's death was underwhelming and didn't make a lot of sense, but the narrated flashbacks were more bearable this time, being more broken up and also more interesting. All I remember from the ones in the other book were skimming because I was so bored I couldn't focus on the words. They should have still been shorter, but this time the story of the red-haired twins was built up for most of the book and intriguing, so it was nice to finally get the payoff of the full tale.

I also enjoyed how the first section of the book was focused on different side characters - I mostly found them interesting, and they had distinct voices. The scene at the end between Lestat and Louis was sweet, too - as long as it's been since I read the other books, I spent the whole time waiting for them to have a real scene together. It was nice good-bye for them to have together to the events of Interview. (Despite some of her nastiness, I have to appreciate that Rice unapologetically wrote so many queer characters and thought trans people were wonderful.)

My first book of 2022 was Radium Girls, a book I had heard a lot of hype about at some point. It's a nonfiction novel about the girls and young women who were poisoned by radium used to make glow-in-the-dark dials and watches. It's a fascinating read, albeit horrific at the same time. I kept having to put it down for a moment after reading about one of the awful things that happened to the poor women and then pick it up again to keep reading. The author made each of the women focused on really come to life; the details of their immense suffering were hard to read, and it was hard not to hope over and over again that this one somehow pulled through and lived a full life, or perhaps this one.

That said, I did find that author's voice intrusive and repetitive at points. What bothered me the most was how she keeps coming back to the idea of corpses being 'unheard' until doctors dug them up; there was one section that just felt gross to me where she details a woman's jawless skull as 'screaming for justice' and 'staring accusingly' when its image was developed on x-ray film.

Reading: Far From the Tree, a book about what the author calls 'horizontal identities', which are identities that in many cases are not shared between parents and children and are often learned from outside communities, as when children are born deaf or with dwarfism or transgender, or who go on to become criminals. The first chapter was disorganized, but the second and third are a variety of perspectives from families who dealt with their new situations in different ways, usually including perspectives from both parent and child. Chapter two, which deals with deaf/Deafness, covered an impressive range of people and opinions, so although I only just started chapter three, I am curious to see where it goes.