rodo's journal

It’s official: it’s winter. Like, for real, for the first time in years. We had a snowstorm (well, what passes for one in these parts), public transport broke down completely for two days and I had to go out three times in one day to shovel snow. It was like thirty centimetres total, maybe forty, but the snowdrifts were a lot. Also, thirty centimetres is quite a bit when two are enough to bring everything to a standstill. Of course, our heating broke that Sunday, at -15°C. (Thank God for speedy emergency repair services, even if they're pricey.)

For tomorrow, it’s supposed to be ten centimetres, and my boss was nice enough to tell me to work from home. Not that the chances of me making it to work are high: I had to stay home two days last week because the trains were so late I would have missed my meetings.

Also, another tanka, this time even with a serviceable translation.

Ein Chor aus Kratzen		A choir of scratches
erklingt am kalten Morgen		echoes one cold morning, in
bei stetem Rieseln.		a steady flurry.
Schlappe Gestalten schaufeln		Tired figures shovel snow,
endlos Schnee, Sisyphus gleich.		ceaselessly, like Sisyphus.

I had such great plans for Yuletide. I’m so inspired, I can’t even decide which story I want to write for my recipient and which for myself. Canon review was awesome, I started writing to get into the groove and really felt like that first scene came together on Monday like nothing I’ve written in months did. I was so looking forward to the scene I’d planned to write next, on Tuesday. I love it when writing feels like that. I wanted to write all the novellas and treats…

Then Tuesday hit. Instead of the regular two and a half hours of commute, it was five. And until the last couple of hundred meters, I wasn’t sure if I’d make it. Like, when the train finally started, the train driver told us he didn’t know if we’d make it to the end. It was a broken interlocking system. You know, the brand new one that went online last month… In the end, I crashed so badly, physically and mentally, I would have had to call in sick if it hadn’t been for my boss mercifully granting me home office for the rest of the week after I told him my usual train wouldn’t run for the rest of the week and I’d have to take an earlier one. It took me all three working days and two pain pills to regain a semblance of functionality.

Oh, and then I found out that my usual train won’t run for another month, because absolutely nobody understands the train company’s emergency schedules, myself included. So, yeah, I think that was it as far as my grand Yuletide plans are concerned. Especially since I’ve already been through more than half the trains not running for a month once, and the ones that do run… well. I expect a few more Tuesdays, and hardly any free time.

In other news: I think I’ve finally got my first slightly wanky programming opinion. Usually I’m the person who says do whatever works for you, but even I have my breaking point. If you’re going to type anything slightly challenging any, why are you even using TypeScript? JavaScript is right there and there’s nothing wrong with it! (Guess who’s had to delint somebody else’s codebase this week...)

► After over six months, job searching really did a number on me, in part because the constant rejections and pressure on all sides is just not conductive to proper mental health, even if you aren’t predisposed to mental problems. It doesn’t help that it doesn’t seem as if the authorities take that into account at all, even though it’s going to pose a great hurdle to getting people into jobs. But of course, now that that might be on the verge of changing, my brain is basically playing Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now at me.

► I think I’ve lost my oldest friend to their executive dysfunction/whatever shit they’ve got going on. We’ve been at this point before until I sat them down to tell them the way they treated me wasn’t okay, and they got better after. But that was twenty years ago, and I’m no longer as patient as I used to be, plus I’ve got my own shit going on (see above). I can’t manage someone else’s life on top of it, especially when they live half a country away and do their level best to ignore anything that distracts from their hyperfocus of the day. Still, it’s kind of sad. We met when we were 14/13. That was almost thirty years ago.

► Spam on the AO3 is getting out of hand. It’s weird, but I think we might be getting to the point where, from an author’s perspective, ff.net might be more usable because all I have to do is click the Report button next to a spam comment and type a couple of sentences (or words, even), and after a couple of very dire months, reaction has become quite swift as well. AI truly has brought great technological advancement to the world – if you’re a spammer, at least. If things keep moving at this pace, the internet is slowly going to become completely unusable.

► I signed up for fandomgiftbasket again – and hope to have a lot of fun. It’s happening late this year and I don’t know how much writing I can squeeze in between Yuletide and (hopefully) a new job, but since it’s not mandatory to create something, I decided to risk it. I still want to have fun, after all!

► Still looking for a job. Had my first proper interview and I was so happy I got rejected after. I was not a good fit for them and they were not a good fit for me, even though they were perfectly nice. But I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get anywhere…

► Taking a break from the garden because of the birches. Allergies suck. But, I managed to sow all the seeds, and we’ve managed to score Sieglinde potatoes this year. Hopefully the drought doesn’t ruin our harvest because Sieglinde are the best potatoes (you can try to fight me, but you haven’t lived until you’ve had Sieglinde grown in bog soil). The strawberry harvest was already ruined because the neighbour’s bunny ate all the leaves. (Neighbour sucks at keeping her caged and this is not her first summer in our garden. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrBEFrbLlqM&feature=youtu.be )

► My mother got the all-clear on Monday. The hip replacement surgery went about as well as one can (minus the rocky recovery due to auto-immune disease) and I no longer have to drive her everywhere. She’s pretty happy to have her independence back too, as you can probably imagine. She’s also noticeably more active when it comes to the little things, like carrying everything out to the verandah so we can have coffee in the garden – she didn’t manage that once last year.

► And lastly: I wrote a haiku (in German), even if I usually prefer tankas:

Zank im Apfelbaum.

Zwei Amseln wettern. Es fällt:

ein Blütenregen.

Happy Labour Day, everyone!

So, that break has yet to fully materialize, but I’m getting better, bit by bit. Got my grade – excellent (just barely, but hey, I just wanted to pass) – so at least all the stress and literal stomach aches were more than worth it. I am now officially a computer science expert for software development and I’ve got a piece of paper that proves it. Still feel like a complete n00b who can barely manage an if statement, though.

► The quick fix for the car didn’t last, predictably, so it broke down again while my mother was in the hospital, leaving me to deal with it. I swear, this car hates me. The last time it broke down, my mum was stuck in Poland with Covid.

► My mum’s surgery went well (despite the unexpected general anaesthesia). The recovery, not so much. Because of the wound healing she wasn’t allowed to take the meds against her auto-immune disease, leading to a flare-up. The symptom: excruciating pain in hips, back and shoulders that pain meds don’t work on (getting doctors to take it seriously is always fun, especially with orthopaedists).

► We got the water bill for the year while my mother was in the hospital and it was unreasonably high. My mother couldn’t cope, so we didn’t deal with it until she got back. Only found the potential cause yesterday (faulty faucet for the garden hose), but in the meantime, we “used” 25 litres and hour while no water was being used by us.

► While all that was going on, I actually managed to do candyheartsex – and I had fun, like always. I even managed to write a last minute treat this time, which I hadn’t managed since chocolateboxcomm ran.

► I finally got around to editing my travelogue some, so I hope I will manage to post it sometime in the near future. It might be of no interest to any of you, but I like how the act of writing and re-reading them every now and again helps me remember my travels, since I barely get to leave the country.

So, if it takes me a little longer to get around to my gift(s), it's because I got a cold just in time for the holidays today (yay). No idea yet how bad it's going to end up being and how it'll interact with my general exhaustion from exams and other current health issues etc., but I thought I'd warn you just in case, since my colds can get pretty bad.

Yeah, so last week didn't go as planned. I got gastritis. Yay me. Just what you need when you're already stressed enough as it is...

... but then fandomgiftbasket revealed and I was happy to get some nice gifts!. As for what I made, I'll repost it in the next days, but here's a first taste: a tanka for resurrectfeeling:

Scraggly pines bow low
under the weight of sharp light
cutting through white clouds.
Time flies by as seasons change,
yet my heavy hope persists…

So, as the title says. Yeah. Not the best time. My sociophobia has been acting up for months, and now my general anxiety level is picking up too, since it’s time for exam registrations etc and there’s Too Many Unknowns, which my brain hates, leading to it convincing itself that I’m going to fail miserably. The next four months are going to be fun, so don’t worry if I’m getting a bit more quiet than usual. I wish people would come up with better ways to assess skill.

But, on a more positive note, my vacation in Gdansk went well! I wrote a travelogue, which I’m probably going to post here when I’ve polished it a little. It’s not the best, since I haven’t written one in a while nor read one in ages, but feel free to read it if you’re interested. I mostly write those for myself, since my memory is not the best due to the reasons expressed by the title.

Also, since I am not going to make my getyourwordsout goal for exam reasons, I’d set myself a very modest one in its place: 25k, or a third of my original pledge, which I’d struggled to meet outside of NaNoWriMo last year. But this year, I didn’t struggle. I hit it this month! I’m almost up to 30k, finished the first draft of a ficlet for fandomgiftbasket yesterday and am generally pretty happy with how my writing has been going this year.

Apart from that: currently drowning in blueberries from our neighbour, managing my mum’s new toy (camera for animals – if you’re interested in grainy hedgehog footage, I can post the links here as well), finally managed to acquire wool but haven’t started on a project yet, and tried rowing for the first time last week for work-reasons (first impression: fun!)

So, I kind of fell off the face of the internet there, didn’t I? Long story short: I am not good with important exams to a worrying degree. Explains some things about the burnout that triggered my downwards spiral that lasted for over ten years, in retrospect.

The slightly longer version is I had the first part of the final exam at the end of February and spent the entire month learning for it (and even booked a hotel room because public transport can be a tad unreliable here). So far so good. Took lorazepam for the exam itself (because I wasn’t taking any chances after two panic-related breakdowns in earlier exams). Thought it went okay. Then, half an hour later, I realised I got most of the calculations wrong, because exam brain. Plus, it was mostly sysadmin stuff (with a dash of business stuff), because this exam was for like five different jobs. Usually, there’s a lot of programmer-related questions, but this time there were none. Then, once the stress finally levelled off in the evening, I just started doom-spiralling, badly. Got convinced I got less then a passing grade, etc. Lessons resumed the next day, so there was no time to process anything properly. The mental low-pressure area continued to haunt me for weeks. What I needed to put it all behind me was the result, which I finally received on Friday, after seven weeks and two days (result: okay). And during all that time, my internship started and during my brief Easter holiday I had a minor health scare (posterior vitreous detachment – so far harmless) and a family reunion to deal with, so extra stress.

This taught me a valuable lesson for November, though. I already plan on not meeting my getyourwordsout target and I’m not going to do NaNo, because parts two and three of the final exam are going to be at the end of November, and there’s going to be a lot of stress regarding the documentation and project work (part four) around that time as well. But I do want to do yuletide. This means I’ll likely offer movies and other short canons instead of my usual slate of dramas, and I’ll adjust my expectations regarding the length of the fic I’ll write.

It is January, which means it’s time for the Snowflake Challenge – and time for my yearly reminder to update my profiles. There wasn’t really much to update for me, profile-wise, so I’m going to write a bit of an update on what’s going on with me, since I’ve been rather silent in the last couple of months:

► Zumi still isn’t hybernating reliably. She slept a couple of days after Christmas, finally, but apparently decided that she really wanted to show sevilemar her lovely snout when she visited, and then there was New Year’s…

► I had a big exam in December (results pending, but I didn’t have time to study at all and it showed…), and there are a couple more (even more important ones) coming up this year that I am not looking forward to. The first is in late February, and it’s already stressing all of us out.

► I won NaNo (despite the hell that was our SQL teacher driving me mad – we ended up rebelling, since I wasn’t the only one whose misophonia was triggered), and managed to make my getyourwordsout target by the skin of my teeth and writing on Christmas Eve, after unwrapping presents. I signed up again, but with giving myself permission to fail terribly this time because of the exams.

► I got some lovely gifts from fandom this year, including paid time and holiday cards from holiday_wishes (thank you, everyone!) and a wonderful Yuletide gift that was exactly what I was craving after season 3:

Silent Yet Silver-Tongued (1312 words) by voleuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Warrior (TV 2019)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ah Toy/Nellie Davenport
Characters: Ah Toy, Ah Sahm, Nellie Davenport, Mai Ling
Additional Tags: Episode: s03e10 A Window of F-cking Opportunity
Summary:

In this life I have worshipped so many lies.
As the power shifts in Chinatown, our heroes take stock of what's left.