Words are inadequate

I left Blacksburg before I learned to hate it, though it was a close thing. DC ... I was never in any real danger of hating DC. DC was first the golden land of childhood from which I was rudely snatched, then a safe haven for high-school me to start learning who I was, and finally my material just desserts for dragging myself across the finish line of university and into The Real World. I never spent enough time in DC to get a real sense of who it is. I hated the heat, and I hated the traffic, and that was enough to convince me to leave.

I fell in love with Vancouver the first time I visited in 2009. I was lonely as hell when I moved here but I figured that was just me having trouble finding people. I still loved the city.

When I started spending time with Erin in 2016/17, I didn't understand the anger and vitriol she had for this place. From listening to her, I started to understand it. I began to see how the city doesn't care about its residents, how every year it squeezes you tighter, how much of what I loved was surface.

It's not only the money, of course. Turns out I am a houseplant and I don't do well when there's no sunlight for eight months of the year. Too, I blew up my social circle in the last half of the last decade, and haven't really been able to put it back together. It's not entirely fair to lay the blame for that on Vancouver... but it's not wholly unfair either.

This past six months or so has been a pleasant reminder of the city I fell in love with. Downtown on a sunny day, The Drop (one of my favourite pieces of public art) and Douglas Coupland's lego orca. The Cinematheque. Farmers markets. Mountains and water, and whatever it is about the sunlight out here that just feels brighter and more vibrant than anywhere else. Touristing with Steph, Granville island market and Queen Elizabeth park, revisiting places I've forgotten how much I liked.

I'll miss the Wednesday night sessions at Hynes. I'll miss a handful of people, probably more of them than I think I will. I still don't belong here, though.

It's time to move on
It's time to get going
What lies ahead
I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, babe
The grass is growing
Yeah, it's time to move on
It's time to get going

Snapped the violin's E string a few days ago. This was a good reminder that the over-tight strings on the viola are probably not good for it. So, in celebration for selling the condo and also because I sold a couple of expensive SubPress books, I went ahead and ordered proper tenor strings. The one guy in the States is now directing people straight to the French manufacturer to buy them, because he's sick of dealing with stupid US tariffs. Hopefully those will arrive soon. I've ordered them to Mya's address in case they turn up after I move, in which event I will get them from her somehow.

Based on a very limited sample (cokes, bananas, trash bags), stateside groceries are the same price as groceries in Vancouver. By dollar amount. Not accounting for currency conversion. This is bad. I knew it was bad, I've known it was bad since January when Steph and I went out to eat and the restaurant prices in Bellingham were indistinguishable from prices in Vancouver, but this is Bad. On the bright side I can just copy over my budget spreadsheet and won't have to change the numbers.

The apartment complex I was looking at most seriously in Mpls turns out to have lied to me. When I talked to them a couple of months ago the guy said that having money in the bank would suffice to get approved for an apartment. Now they're telling me I have to show sufficient income, or get a co-signer. Bah.

I've been doing some internet poking-around and have determined that I'd like my next car to be a BMW i3. This is a zippy little city runabout with more passenger and cargo space than one expects. I used to say that Straylight, my late lamented Saturn three-door coupe, was more car than I wanted but as much car as I needed; I suspect an i3 would be similar. ("As much car as I wanted" would have been a Smart. Or a Saturn Sky / Pontiac Solstice, a fancy roadster whose trunk space I once heard described as "you could fit a two-four in there, if you poured it out.") The fact that the i3 also has trick backwards-mounted back doors just like the Saturn is, I'm sure, entirely coincidental. What can I say. I have an affection for small quirky zippy-looking cars.

The i3s are hard to find, especially ones from 2018-2021 when the bugs were mostly out of the design and the battery got beefed up. Not unattainable, though. Will see what shakes out. And of course if I don't get the NG job I'm not buying a new car, either.

Ugh, I don't know. Feeling restless and mildly discontented. At least there's sun today.

A week and a half ago I located my spare viola strings (leftover from the last time I changed strings, whenever that was), picked up a 1/8-size cello G, and restrung my viola to a tenor. I'm liking it an awful lot. It's certainly harder to play. I've switched to my cello bow, which is heavier than the viola bow, and it still requires significant deliberate pressure to get a halfway decent sound. Left-hand work feels slower too. Might be a result of the higher tension on the strings making them harder to press down, I guess?

But: I like it. I like the way it sounds, I like the way it feels to play. I find myself in the position of actively wanting to practice. I'm doing something that I enjoy and calls to me, and that I'm happy about afterwards. It's been a really long time since I had something like that. I suspect the social aspect helps. I took it out to the session last Wednesday and it blended in well: not drowning anyone out, not getting drowned out. I need a great deal of practice but that's no surprise. And fixable.

When I have money (cue bitter laughter) I may look into getting a proper tenor viola, instead of hoping the higher tension on the strings doesn't cause damage. There's this guy in Georgia who makes them, and he's put a decent amount of effort into the design. His tenor/octave violas have thicker bodies, and are fatter at the bottom ('a wide lower bout') but not at the top, so you get a bigger resonance chamber and can still get your left arm around to reach the neck.

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Two weeks ago the movers cleared out half my stuff. Unsurprisingly the place looks much bigger and brighter. It's nice to have more light, granted... but it's just so empty. Hm. Likely affecting my mood.

I'd like to have my books back, too. I don't require them to be visible at all times, I'd be happy with a separate library room, but I do want them accessible. Good information to have. I probably could cut ruthlessly but there's no need, not immediately anyway.

Rhonda the realtor came by last week and took some reference photos. She emailed me today to say that the real photographer can come on Friday and we can list on Monday. Works for me. Gives me a few more days to finish moving extraneous stuff to the storage unit, now that I know I've got a little more room in there than I was afraid of. Still no idea what the market will be like; guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks.

Still in a holding pattern, but I can see the beginnings of what might be movement.

The Pattern Recognition TV series? I have no idea. Awhile ago I called my Hollywood agent -- who was Harlan Ellison's Hollywood agent, to give you an idea how long he's been in the business -- and asked him about it. He said, "Well, it's starting to look almost exactly like something does right before it goes into production." And I got excited and said, "Really?" and he said, "Yeah... it's weird."

--William Gibson, c.2013

I made English muffins ("or, as they say in the UK, muffins") yesterday, so I can make more frozen breakfast sammiches. Today I decided to have a proper Eggs Halifax, which is like a Benedict but with smoked salmon instead of back bacon. In the event the hollandaise broke. This has been the usual fate of my attempts at hollandaise for the last N years. It's frustrating because it -used- to work. Still tasted okay but the texture was way off.

Since making tricky food was going so well I decided to turn the egg whites from the hollandaise into divinity. (If you're not from the South, divinity is the answer to the question "what if meringues were candy?" It is somewhat nougat-like and somewhat fluffy and usually involves pecans, though I haven't had much in the way of pecans since the death of my great-uncle who had a pecan orchard.) This involves cooking a bunch of sugar to hard-ball / 260F and then adding it into a running mixer with whipped egg whites. After an hour my sugar was stubbornly refusing to go over 245F. I turned up the heat a little more and the sugar boiled over. Thankfully I grabbed the pot so it did not boil over onto the burner, just onto the stove top, but while I was salvaging that the sugar crystallized. I swore and tried again: added more water and some additional sugar and stuck it back on the burner to re-dissolve and re-cook. This time careful additions of heat got it up to 250F and more threatened boiling over, so I called it good and poured it into the mixer. Adding injury to insult: while scraping the last quarter or so of the sugar into the mixer I managed to splash some of it onto my hand. Molten sugar is a nasty business: it glues itself to your skin and keeps burning. Thankfully my mixer is right next to the sink. No permanent damage done but I ended up with several blisters, some of which had the tops ripped off when I tried to remove the sugar.

I used to hate and avoid dealing with candy-making / molten sugar. Now I seem to have reached a point where it is my nemesis, and I will conquer it or get really annoyed and minorly scorched trying. Anyway, the divinity is in its pan and setting; should be edible sometime tomorrow.

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Twenty-seven and a half boxes of books (down one and a half from last time), and what looks to be about twenty-five boxes of games (down three or so from last time). Plus one box of CDs and two-plus of DVDs. My obsession with the Arrowverse means that DVDs no longer fit neatly into two boxes. Oh well.

Now to pack up all the random miscellaneous stuff that doesn't need to be out while the place is on the market, which will take probably less than ten boxes and probably twice the time. At least I have plenty of time: my preferred movers aren't available until early-mid March.

I move a lot. I was an Army brat, that's expected. But I've moved more since becoming an adult. As an Army brat I moved about once every two and a half years; as an adult, it's one move every twenty months.

I feel like I am in a good position to declare that moving sucks.

However. I've been remarkably stable lately. The three and a half years I've been at Corvaric are now the longest I've lived in a single place as an adult, and the third-longest in my life. (Four years in a townhouse outside of DC for high school, preceded by the five worst years of my life in Fayetteville NC in late elementary and junior high.) I was in the same apartment complex for the almost-five years I lived in northern Virginia right after college, but I changed apartments to move in with Emily halfway through that.

This also pushes my total time in the lower mainland (the Vancouver area) above the eleven years I spent in Blacksburg VA. (The longest I've spent in any one locale is still northern Virginia, at not quite twelve years, spread across three separate occasions.)

Sure, I'd rather stay in the same place, put down roots, all that. Just never seems to quite come together for me. There's always a good reason to move: money, or job, or relationship, or just "this place is terrible." This time I'm betting it'll be money, though it might be any of the above.

No real point to this. I'm not moving imminently. It's just interesting to look back at where I've been, and for how short a time.

Although moving DOES suck.

Back in September 2020 I was getting annoyed by my thrift-store dining room table. So I figured I'd solve the Table Problem once and for all.

In the event I bought two tables for way too much money. The first, a Transformer Table, showed up maybe a month later. It's plain and blocky, but it gets the job done: it came with a half-dozen (!) leaves and can expand to I think ten feet long. It also came with a coffee table / end table that doubles as leaf storage. It is well designed but not as well constructed as I'd like for the ridiculous amount of money I spent on it. Also my terrible movers banged it up a bit in transit.

It's served me well for coming on four years as my main table. I usually have one leaf in it to make it a square, and on Wednesday nights for RPG I add another so we can fit all five of us around it.

So, if the plan was to have the transformer table as my main table, what's with this other table?

Well. I couldn't decide, at the time. Fancy boardgaming tables had just started to become A Thing, and I still had dreams of being a fancy boardgamer. A table with removable leaves on top covering a thin-padded surface, one where you could just put the top back on it and leave the game set up, seemed like a neat thing. And a lot of them had attachments for the sides of the table, things like cupholders or game-piece-holders or writing surfaces. That would be really nice to have. But having an expandable table for larger games, or larger gatherings, would also be good.

Then I found a company that was making a fancy boardgaming table that could convert to a (square) coffee table. At which point my master plan settled in: use the fancy boardgaming table as a coffee table, unless I was having people over for games, and then just ("just") put the leg extensions back on. Brilliant.

There were two problems with this. The second was that this plan required substantially more space than I have in my current apartment. (It also required there not be a plague on that makes me less comfortable with hosting larger boardgaming get-togethers.)

The first problem was that the table wasn't shipping for another year at minimum.

But, whatever, it's not like I had people to come over for boardgaming while I was living in Fort. This was about planning for the kind of life I wanted to have at some point. So I ordered the transformer table, and put money down on the "Megan X" table from Geeknson. And as noted the transformer arrived in a reasonable timeframe, and my old table went to Erin where it is still in use as a Flat Surface Holding Things, a job at which it excels.

And I waited. And waited. And October 2021, the initial projected ship date, came and went. Tables slowly started trickling out to people in Europe (where the company's based), then in the USA.

In February 2022 I got a call from DHL saying they had a big package for me. This seemed promising. It ... was not. This was a large package containing ... all the cupholders and game-piece-holders and writing-surfaces and such miscellaneous accessories. Less useful without a table. I started a long email conversation with the people at Geeknson, and later with the people at DHL who had apparently lost the other boxes that should have gone with that one.

In the middle of this I moved back to the lower mainland. I am in retrospect glad I didn't have my expensive fancy gaming table, as there's a nonzero chance those assholes at 2 Burley Men would have broken it.

In late April I got another DHL delivery. This one included the legs for the table, the leaves for the top of the table, and a box to hold the leaves when they're not on the table. Notably missing: the actual table itself. Also one of the leaves had been sufficiently damaged in transit as to be unusable, and one of the legs had gotten dinged up.

So I went several more rounds with Geeknson and DHL, and eventually Geeknson wrote the table off as entirely lost and offered to make me a new one, and a replacement leg and leaf as well. This, they said, would take 5-6 months.

It finally shipped three weeks ago. There was further nonsense with trying to get the shipping company to deliver here instead of to my apartment in Fort, but long story short ("TOO LATE!") my tabletop arrived shortly before 7:30 this morning. I spent about an hour trying to attach the legs, which are really not designed to be at all easy to attach, particularly if you have short stubby Shackelford fingers like I do.

But: it's up, and it's very pretty.

Remember point 2 above, though? Honestly this table is a bit big for the space it's in; the transformer in square shape is about six inches shorter on each side. And now I have two tables, in a 500sqft apartment.

Luckily the transformer collapses down to side-table-sized when it has zero leaves in it, and I do have a space under the bar for it to hang out and be mostly unobtrusive. Still a bit silly to have two tables, but whaddaya gonna do. (I could put it in my storage unit but I would have to rearrange a great many things in the storage unit, and it fits alright here.) All the miscellaneous accessories fit in the well under the table leaves, which is great until I want to use my nice gaming table; I'll need to get a box to put them in, and find a place for them.

But at least I have my table. And a reminder that life usually doesn't look like what I expect it will three years later.

(Hoping to have Rainbow House over for a test run this weekend.)

I have made it to Niagara for the Gathering, a week-plus of gaming. Also of sleeping in a real bed. I slept for ten hours last night, more or less, and it was wonderful.

My stuff did in fact arrive Friday morning. A couple of things were minorly damaged. Four bookcases (of eight) were completely destroyed and the backs of the other four came off and were probably damaged. I have begun the process of talking to the claims department (aka "Cheryl") about that. I am not optimistic; the paper I signed explicitly says they're not responsible for damage to particleboard furniture. If I had known that ... well, I probably still would have gone with them, because seriously, I've used four professional moving companies and three of them were careful and didn't break anything (the fourth broke one and a half bookcases out of fifteen, which is a high but acceptable attrition rate). Bah. Soon this will be only a bad memory.

Anyway, everything technically fits into the apartment. I'm in Niagara for a week now, and when I get back I will attempt to make the kitchen work and see what if any repairs can be made to the surviving bookcases. Then it's buying and building replacements and playing Rush Hour with the living room to get the bookcases into place and the contents on the shelves.

"April to move in, May to settle in" feels doable.

Also, as with last year I have acquired several boxes of frosted brown sugar/cinnamon Pop-tarts, which are inexplicably unavailable in Canada. Most of them are to go home; some are for breakfast while I'm here. I have no toaster in the room, so I eat them raw. Or, for the cultured, Pop-tartare.

After I found out that the movers weren't coming today I called Erin, who talked me down and through it. Which was very much appreciated. I'm glad I still have Erin.

Aspects exists. I just got an email saying that my ebook preorder has dropped, and my hard copy is en route. (Should be here mid-next-week, so, either it arrives while I'm in Niagara or I have a long-awaited book to read instead.) I am holding off on reading it in ebook; for some reason I want to read it in hard copy first. That seems important. Also I lack the brain and emotional resilience right now to read The Last Of Mike Ford. (mrissa has some impressions of it. I am very much looking forward to this.)

Back in I guess November, when Kelsey came to visit, Erin rediscovered and introduced me to Bengal Spice Tea. Cinnamon and cloves and yum. So now I have a tasty thing to drink in the evenings. And I have my travel hot-water-pot, and the travel mug that my ex-company sent me a couple of years ago when they handed out swag in lieu of paying bonuses. So I have tea.

Laundry two doors down is not the same as laundry in the apartment, but it's a sight better than "laundry at the end of the hall and down a flight of stairs" or "laundry a twelve-minute drive away," which were the last two places I lived. (Technically the last one was "laundry at the end of the hall, also costing $4/load payable only in loonies," which is why it was a twelve-minute drive away instead.)

I went out this evening and bought myself a chair for the porch and a tray-table-thing, so now I have some furniture. The bar stool is good for perching on but no good for actually trying to work or anything. And sitting on the floor was getting old.

On Thursday morning my electric razor popped open and I lost one of the blades. I could order more, and will, but like Aspects they'd get here next week at the earliest. I could buy a new razor but I did that once already, my spare razor is packed and I don't need a third one. I could use an actual bladed razor but that is just an invitation to a whole lot of blood. So I'm experimenting with beardedness. It itches less than last time, at least so far. I doubt I'll keep it but it's nice to change things up from time to time.

The Indian place around the corner does a decent korma. The poutine place over the skytrain (less than a half-mile walk, though coming back is up a Significant flight of stairs) still has a delicious buffalo chicken poutine. River Market exists and I'll get down there eventually and have some barbecue from Re-Up, the only good barbecue I've had north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I have pots and pans. Mya, who came by to check on the place once a week while I wasn't there, found a decent set on Craigslist and left them in the apartment. I've also got an assortment of utensils: cheap measuring cups and spoons, a couple of forks from takeout, some misc stuff from the thrift store. So I can make breakfasts at least, and whenever I go grocery shopping for real I'll be able to make a few other things as well.

I don't like my situation at all, but it is not the worst situation I've been in.

Well. Actually I write this sitting in the living room on the floor, back against the wall, next to where the couch will eventually be set.

My stuff is not here, due to the movers arbitrarily deciding to reschedule my delivery. I was surprised and displeased when I called them on Friday morning to see what time they'd get here and was told "Monday." I'm mostly calmed down about it now. It would be nice to have furniture, though.

(In a nice change of pace, the internet install that was also scheduled for Friday morning went quickly and smoothly.)

I still like this condo. The dishwasher is Really Loud but it's, you know, a dishwasher, which is an improvement. I'm still nervous that I won't be able to fit the bookcases in, and more nervous that I won't be able to fit the kitchenstuff in. I have also developed a fear that the bookcases will be destroyed in transit: the move-out movers were pretty skeptical that they'd survive. They're Ikea flat-pack particle-board and they've already made it through seven moves, so they're certainly beyond life expectancy, but still.

Erin rode down with me, through the fire- and flood-scarred landscape. I am genuinely impressed at the civil engineering done to reopen the highway through the Fraser Canyon after last November's flooding. They have entirely rerouted several sections of highway, including at least one railway underpass, and put in a temporary bridge that seems to be holding up well.

And now Erin's flown back north, and I spend my first night on my own in the new place. On an air mattress on the floor, same as the last couple of nights. It will all normalise eventually.

Only the margins left to write in now. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Boardgames easily fit into the twenty-three-ish bankers' boxes they came in, with I think two leftover boxes, so that's nice. (The counting's a little weird for games: three of the boxes are not quite twice as long as standard bankers' boxes, one game [OGRE Designer's Edition] comes in its own packing box, and there's still a couple of large-but-not-OGRE-large games to be packed somehow.)

My game library's been shrinking for years. I'm getting pickier about what I keep, and what I might want to play, and what I'm willing to teach over and over again. A few years ago Joe Huber wrote something to the effect of "these days I ask myself 'Why should I keep this only Pretty Good game' instead of 'Why should I get rid of this Pretty Good game,'" and that's an attitude that's stood me in good stead.

So: boardgames fit onto two full-size Billys with an extra shelf, and there's still a bit of room for more. I'm pretty happy with that number / volume of games, I think. It's generally speaking the ones I actively want to play.

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I am slowly adjusting to new-work. It helps that India doesn't observe DST, so starting this week and lasting another, what, eight months?, my early-morning meetings will start no earlier than 7AM instead of no earlier than 6AM. (DST is still the devil, though. Blargh rant timechange rant blargh.)

Not that I'm doing any actual "work," it's all training and HR and such. That may change this week with the team meeting tomorrow; I guess we shall see.

In other news, my previous workplace paid me a full paycheck for my last pay period there. The payroll guy is not responding to me or to the HR person who I initially contacted about it. I suppose it's possible that my leftover vacation just happened to exactly be the number of hours to make up a full pay period but I suspect someone screwed up. At least I didn't get paid by them for this most recent pay period.

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Sound of Music was mostly good and I want to write more about that but my brain has been mush.