yep, it's the job

Jul. 9th, 2025 04:56 pm
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[personal profile] mellowtigger

During our daily stand-up meeting online yesterday, before the meeting got started, our newest addition (still in training) to the team mentioned closing their eyes after work "for just a few seconds" then suddenly it was a few hours later. And they still had no problem getting back to sleep on schedule later.

Some voice (I'm not sure who) in the meeting responded with those 5 magic words that I keep using too. "This job is a lot."

It's not just me being old or inflexible. It's definitely the job that's stressful and tiring.

Trip report, pt. 2

Jul. 9th, 2025 12:08 am
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[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Today's adventure was visiting friends and family: an old friend of my mom's, who lives in one of those all-inclusive retirement/assisted living communities in Marin County, and my stepfather's great-granddaughter, who is also estranged from the family, though for completely different reasons. She's the same age as my kids, and kind of got handed a tough lot in life by being born to a flaky teenage mother. Eventually she got raised by her grandmother (the ex of one of my stepfather's sons), which was a better choice, and she seems to be turning out really well. Unfortunately, her grandmother (who is only a little older than me) had a stroke recently. We visited her in the facility that she's in. She is, understandably, worried about her future and her chances for recovery and returning home, which the granddaughter says are not good. She needs too much care to be at home, and there's really only the granddaughter to help. I've been helping them a little financially, and they seem to be okay, but I'm worried about what's going to happen when the Medicaid cuts go on.

In the "nobody knows how bad the big horrible bill is" department, I told my mom's friend that Ken's funding had been cut by NSF, and he wasn't sure what was going to happen, especially to his graduate students, she was like "but they were only going to cut fluff" and I said "oh they cut a lot more than just fluff" which seemed to be news to her. She probably voted for Trump.

On the way back from Marin, I stopped in San Francisco at the beach, dipped my toes in, and watched surfers. It was lovely, even though chilly.

trip report

Jul. 8th, 2025 12:42 am
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[personal profile] nosrednayduj
I went to the International Gay Square Dance Convention over Fourth of July weekend. They had over 800 attendees! Not all of them were gay; many were allies or some other form of queer. And many of them were excellent dancers (not all, but enough). And I had an awesome time. Next year's is in Montréal. I'm sad about the timing of this convention, because it interferes with seeing Fourth of July fireworks. (Third of July in my town.) I did not go see fireworks in San Francisco, because it would've been quite the trek, taking a bus up to pier 39. So instead, before I left I discovered that there were some July 2 fireworks near my house, but the place you viewed them from was an extremely well lit parking lot, which kind of washed them out. I took a couple of pictures but they are pretty lame. And next year's convention is July 1-5, so I don't know. Maybe there will be fireworks for Canada Day? (Maybe I should decide that fireworks are bad for the planet?)

San Francisco has gotten to be as expensive as New York! I was glad I had brought little instant oatmeal packets and an immersion heater; it torques me to pay $20 for breakfast.

Today I rented a car and drove down to San Jose to hang out with some people from work. That was fun, meeting people who I only ever seen over WebEx. I didn't actually do any work; there had been some thought that I would, but it didn't happen.

The car rental is kind of annoying; I had reserved an electric car, but when I got there "they are all being charged". I was like "okay, how fully charged are they? Because I don't need them to be 100% charged today". So the agent called back, but was told to call a different station, and nobody answered at that different station and we waited a little while, meanwhile he went ahead and completed the rental process for a gas car; I had said I wanted the smallest one possible, and I got a Nissan Versa, which isn't exactly tiny, and my guess is it will get the usual 30 mpg that pretty much every car gets these days. Anyway, at some point I decided to stop waiting, so I could proceed down to San Jose and have my lunch date. The agent had said "we are required to provide electric cars", which must mean there's some California law about that. But I guess they don't need to provide them in a timely fashion, or at the time that your reservation starts.

After I was done in San Jose, I drove back up to Millbrae for my next hotel reservation, and as I was passing signs for Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, I decided on a lark to drive up it, since that had been the access road to our house in Los Altos Hills. And then I continued up it and drove down Skyline Boulevard and looked at the view of the ocean and the bay from the crest. So I wasted some gas, because it wasn't exactly efficient, driving up a 2000 foot elevation gain. It's hard to believe that I used to bicycle up that hill. I don't know if I could do it today. 2000 feet gain in 11 miles.

Pretty, though, and I got to drive through some microclimate bits where there were tall pine trees that got good foggy watering and various other different vegetation things that must happen with different amounts of water, being a nice contrast from the brown hills dotted with live oaks.

Now that I am in a much cheaper accommodation, of course they provide free breakfast. And free Internet. (The convention had arranged for free Internet, but it's not the default in those expensive hotels.)

feelings are weird

Jul. 3rd, 2025 10:40 pm
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[personal profile] mellowtigger

I logged in on my work computer this afternoon long enough to apply for a promotion at my current job, becoming more of a Lead support technician. I was on the proverbial fence for several days. The money would be a few thousand more per year than I make now. Money never hurts, but it's not enough to make a huge difference. Money seems so meaningless these days, and it doesn't go far. I'm not motivated by money anyway, or prestige.

What finally tipped my decision in favor was more consideration of what my supervisor said during our biweekly 1-on-1 meetings this week. They're considering the possibility of creating an A.I. subject expert on our team to coordinate answers we give from across departments to our users. They were curious if I'd be interested, "even though that role usually goes to leads". Subtle. Very subtle. Yes, of course, I'm interested in that. LOL.

I applied to the job. I don't have strong feelings about it, though, which seems weird. I've applied to other jobs in the past that I wanted very much more than this one.

I'm also experiencing an odd emotional state about tomorrow's holiday in the USA. It's not the feelings I usually associate with the day.

Free power!

Jun. 30th, 2025 07:42 pm
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[personal profile] nosrednayduj
We just had some more solar panels stuck on our roof, since the original set is not keeping up with our demands, now that we have two electric cars and heat pumps. Last time when we got the solar panels completed, we had to wait until they were inspected before they could be turned on, and so until that happened, on sunny days we were just sad.

This set has inverters which are smart enough to know how much power they are making and to not give any to the grid, which we are not yet allowed to do. So, we get to use the power, as long as we don't push any to the grid. This is very strange, because on a sunny day it makes more than we generally use unless using the air conditioner. Usually we are pretty conservative about when we use the air conditioner. But now, as long as the sun is shining on the new panels, "it's completely free", because the excess electricity would otherwise be wasted. So we are doing things like waiting to charge the car until it's morning, so as to use the free electricity, and keeping the house cooler. This must be how people who are fully off the grid live all the time. If your battery is full, you'd better use the power in some way.

Hopefully this silliness will come to an end shortly. One inspection is scheduled for Wednesday, and then there some other thing that we hope will be fast, because we don't actually need them to replace the electric meter with a bidirectional meter; we already have one. But, they might be stupid and decide they need to replace our current meter with a different one.

Then we will go back to our normal conservative ways, where we minimize our use and push our excess to the grid where it would offset somebody else's usage and thus delay the need for a dirty peaker plant, and bank the extra for winter cost offsets. (Net metering is kind of a scam. A nice homeowner-centric scam. Thanks, MA, you did one right.)

LARP comes to the USA!

Jun. 30th, 2025 04:32 pm
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[personal profile] davidlevine

If you've been reading this blog, you will have seen me raving about my Live Action Role Play experiences in Europe in the past few years. Well, suddenly the European LARP experience is coming to the United States!

I'm aware of the following LARP events in the US in the next year. Many of these are being run in cooperation with a European LARP organizer. Some of them are still provisional; others are already sold out (though there is usually a waiting list). Check the websites for details and contact the organizers if you have any questions. And feel free to bookmark my public LARP spreadsheet, which I try to keep updated with every LARP I hear about that's of interest to me. (Which excludes vampire and boffer LARPs, for example.)

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

1001

Jun. 29th, 2025 04:36 pm
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[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Rode my 1000th mile for the year today. In fact, ended at 1001. Just about halfway through the year so that's about right; fortunately summer is longer than winter (that pesky February), so I shouldn't be concerned about making 2000, even though I'm about to have 8 days with no bicycling due to travel.

Getting ready for my trip to the International Gay Square Dance Convention in San Francisco on July 3. Which means that I will miss fireworks here. I vaguely clicked on fireworks in San Francisco and it looks like I will have to travel some distance to see them. I'll have to look at the schedule and decide whether or not I would prefer to see fireworks or dance at 9:30 on the fourth. (They don't have the caller schedule on the website yet.)

Annoyingly, I have to get some money back from Dollar rent a car; they weren't able to just add my loyalty number on the website, so they canceled my reservation and remade it with the loyalty number. And they said they would refund it. It's now been like six weeks, and I've made like three calls. It's like ridiculous but I guess I have to call them again.

just how tired?

Jun. 29th, 2025 06:40 am
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[personal profile] mellowtigger

Ever since starting this job, I've commented about how exhausting it is. It's hard to quantify it. Just how tiring is it? Yesterday was unusually busy for a Saturday. No common thread to the issues, just an unusual amount of everything. I avoided yard work afterward (as usual) and just watched television until bedtime instead.

Last night, there was a Minneapolis tornado warning. I didn't know until I woke up this morning and saw the news headlines. I saw on Reddit how people reacted to the phone alert, some local electrical outages, the thunder-rattled windows, some video of the lightning (even this plane), and especially this commemorative t-shirt ("I survived the 1am tornado scare").

I slept through it. I didn't hear the tornado sirens blare. I didn't hear the phone alarm beeps. I didn't hear the thunder. I just slept through it all. That's how brain-tired I was.

today's adventure

Jun. 28th, 2025 10:00 pm
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[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Today's adventure was a tour of the town's water system. Valerie had won a bid on this as a church fundraiser – a member of the town water oversight board is also a member of the church and offered such a tour.

The town's first large communal well was dug in the late 1800s as a private enterprise for people in the town center area. The operation was sold to the town some 15-20 years later and has been municipal ever since. Originally, there was no water metering; you paid based on expected usage by counting the number of people in the home and acreage and what you were doing with that acreage. Now we have metering. There are 6 different wells that the town uses in different parts of town, and they have different qualities and so some of them are only run at high summer when there's great demand, because there's a lot of iron and manganese in the earth, and that ends up giving discolored water, which people don't like. The town uses about a million gallons a day in winter and about two million gallons a day on the hottest summer days.

There is an old historic building which was used for the original pumphouse that was recently restored and is now being used as offices and labs. They did a beautiful job on the restoration, saving old rolltop desks and original blueprints and pressure meters, some for decoration, some for actual use. Then for some of the extras, like they needed a large table, so they actually built one out of wood so it would look nice with the historic desks rather than getting some Formica crap.

We then walked over to the construction site of the new PFAS removal plant so we could talk about what it was going to look like, and where the giant tanks for this and that would be. The site is also where the current pumphouse is for one of the wells, so we got to go in, and there was some handwaving of where the pipes go and how they go through a temporary PFAS removal station and then return to have chlorine etc. added. The chlorine tank was not huge, maybe three times as big as my water heater, but I guess you just don't put that much in.

I neglected to take pictures in the pumphouse or of the construction site. But I did take pictures of our next stop, which was down the road a ways, of the newest water tower. On the outside it's just a cylinder; on the inside it's also just a cylinder with a flat ceiling pretty high up. The water is above that ceiling. Hope it doesn't crash down upon us while we are standing inside it! It's fiberglass lined, and has an 18-inch concrete slab as its base. Perry was surprised that there was such a high ceiling and that the water was all the way up there; he expected more volume to be used for storage. But it's really all about water pressure and you need height for that. All of the water towers are targets for cell phone companies to put antennas; the steel ones get antenna bases welded to them, which the water guy was underwhelmed about. The new one has cell phone antenna mounts built in. Which means that they can't add any more beyond the 3-4 that they've got.

The water guy was seemingly thrilled to spend a Saturday afternoon leading people around town, answering all kinds of questions we had, volunteering all kinds of information. Apparently they are having a labor shortage problem because there's some certifications that you need to get in order to work on or supervise water systems, and people aren't getting those certifications. Hopefully they'll be able to hire some more folks soon. They have reqs out.

The big pump at the bottom of the water tower.
A machine consisting of a white cube with a 2-foot pipe coming in on the left going through it and back out on the right. On the right, the pipe splits into a shallow U shape in front of the cube and goes back into the pipe on the left. There is a 90° junction on the far right and the pipe narrows and goes straight up. There are some red things wrapped in plastic in the foreground on the left (I don't know what they're for), and some monitoring equipment mounted on the concrete wall behind.

The big pipe going up to the top of the water tower.
A curved concrete wall with a 12-15 inch diameter white pipe going up at least 50 feet to a metal ceiling with black girders. The back of a white man's bald head is visible at the bottom along with part of the pumping apparatus.

More summer

Jun. 26th, 2025 09:57 pm
nosrednayduj: pink hair (Default)
[personal profile] nosrednayduj
Now that we are in the season of sandals, we should have elegant toes!

A pair of white persons feet on a scratched hardwood floor, with dark red/maroon nail polish.
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