Hue, Saturation, and the Unbearable Lightness of Being
Ben came on the 27th. As always that’s hard. It went somewhat better than I expected in person. It went as well as I remember afterward. He doesn’t like the way I know him, and doesn’t want to imagine the disabilities he had before his body stopped working. When I notice he smells an attack and kicks and shoves to get away from me. It’s sad that this is a thing I have to protect myself from. It’s sad that we were pushed into this place to start with.
So that disrupted my weekend a bit. He sleeps even more poorly than I do, and came for a 26 hour period starting at 5 PM. Other bits are going well. When I was sufficiently high yesterday I considered an ambitious plan about unions at F5. I don’t want to run a union, but I’d like other people to think about it, and advocating for labor organization feels like a thing that would volunteer me for the next set of layoffs. And I bet I can get some people to share their pay information.
Today I went out with Shanda and L. It went really well. It’s not quite as ambitious as the snow activities I had hoped for, but it did most of the parts I wanted. It got L out of the house. Got them here to meet Dog (to some anxiety) and preview the pendant (and pick a chain). They got fancy gloves (that they wore all day) and bought themselves a pretty, soft scarf (I liked the scarves too but would never wear one). We all got buoyant baby bears (or elephants or dinosaurs) and stopped for doughnuts and fries and blinking bulb beverages. We toured a sizeable collection of lights and earned a candy cane and raced on the escalators. We rode bus and a tinsy bus and an even smaller train.
I advanced the plot of the safety of here and the plot about coats and hats. Shanda actually liked being out with me at a place, which is not always easy to achieve. L seemed to enjoy several bits and only had to put up with moderatre bickering from their old person. They also got to stand alone on the bus and hide alone on the train and run away for a minute in the lights; I hope some of those moments feel like a break from codependency without feeling like a loss of support.
Got the Gemma M0 up and running and the cycle code ported over. I’m glad I spent a minute making it go – it’s well worth the upgrade. The capacitive touch hardware, the real USB hardware, the usable serial interface, the on board lights. I’m also excited to try the SPI hack to drive Neopixels as DMA. But the CircuitPython interface really intrigues me for my upcoming art heist. It will make the project much more accessible and hopefully let people experiment more directly. I’m also going to rewrite the pendant there, even though it’s slower, in the hope that maybe L will plug it into their computer some day.
Writing is still on the hard side. Despite efforts at regulation there is still a lot of tension in the household. It’s not a problem – it’s work worth doing and it’s pointed at relief these days – but it is a factor in the amount of spoons I have available. Let’s keep on it, to be sure we get burn the rest off before life finds a new way to pile it on. We won’t ever be done but we can find ways to make the struggle bearable.
Watched all of The Expanse (Amazon Studios) S4 in the past few days. Do watch. It’s not perfect, and there’s less amazing hair than previous seasons, but it gets a lot of things right, and lines up pieces for a more coherent S5 than was possible this time around. But I think the show played to its strengths eventually, giving us complicated characters in settings with no good answers.
Watched another episode of Euphoria (HBO). Even the children on that show have such good makeup. It makes me want to paint my face the way Deadwood made me want to drink. I also like that it wants me to notice the way it gives attention – the way it lies to our eyes – as an element of story. It’s also super sad, so I’d particularly recommend it for people who could use some help feeling their own sads.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
