Friday
Traffic is the worst today. I’ve been waiting for 11 minutes to get out of Magnolia, and now I’m waiting for the Ballard bridge. It’s always crazy on Fridays but usually a car is faster than walking. I can’t wait until the train station at Northgate finally gets done so I don’t have to deal with this just to get to robots.
Talked with Shanda about our recent interactions. It still seems pretty tenuous to her, the idea that anything in our lives has been difficult, other than the parts I ruin by talking about it. Or that anything in her life might impact me at all. Or that mood and behavior might have a pattern longer than a few hours. It’s still a complaint about how I’m always taking about her feelings and never mine. I feel like her subscription to The Screed would provide evidence to the contrary even if I never talked to her at all, but evidence is unlikely to help me when defensiveness is the only mode. I know my feelings are hard for her to understand when she’s angry, but it would sure be nice if there was a way past the anger other than days of silence interspersed with malicious attacks. She says it’s for my protection but it sure seems to be a punishment. For both of us.
But I should be patient. The idea is newer to hee than to me, and the most significant factor in how I feel about the schedule is how long I waited before acting decisively. I am always tempted to wait in the hope that something will change for the better without my intervention. Often it does, which is good because I only have bad ideas on how to make it happen. When it doesn’t I eventually convince myself that a bad idea is better than no idea and make it happen. But there’s no reason to wait until I’m at wit’s end for that – it would probably be easier for me if I didn’t. Though it always weighs on my soul to choose pain.
Still didn’t accomplish any real work today, but last night I got all the things this week demanded done or kicked down the road. I should send try to kill that old PHP SR tomorrow night while Shanda is out, but nobody is kicking down my door. And my boss sent two happy emails before he took off today, so he should remember me fondly for the next couple of weeks while he’s away, so long as I don’t leave anything hanging around for when he gets back.
Robots went well today, though there was little programming. Lots of interest in the shirts though. I suspect that’s in part because folks are worried about the rules changes and shirt design offers a distraction, but motives don’t matter – it’s engagement either way. S sepculated that the rules change could have been intentional, but I sure hope it’s not because that seems hugely disrespectful to me*. I did got the USB camera connected and figured out how to address it, though I didn’t have a chance to code anything for it. And I (mostly) refactored the wheel motor code to understand the run and braking modes globally. I hope we can get to writing motion code next week.
Opon opposite observation, 1280 ounces of oral opportunities was a obvious oversight for my opal ornithological operations. Still I’ve got it mostly cubed away already, and it doesn’t fly until late this month.
Let’s see if I can find a balance of doing and not doing this weekend. Something to help me keep my household and robots and Melissa rolling along and doesn’t make me want to skip 4 days of work next week.
ZiB
*Presumably S does not understand the issue this way, but I can’t stomach the idea that it helps people to abuse and lie to them by claiming a thing is important and unquestionable and demanding compliance, then changing it anyway and demanding new compliance. But it’s a thing often done to powerless people, and in particular to young people, when someone wants to teach them a lesson§ about the “real world”**.
**Specifically the world of pain and control as imagined by asshats who think intentional suffering improves civilization, and that their pain is worth sharing but their control is not.
§And that’s why you always leave a note.
—
Sent from a phone.
