hwesta | Recent Entries

It's the end of the year, so as appropriate a time as any to look back on what I did. I like tracking things, so I have numbers!

I'm overall happy with my Japanese studies. I logged 156 hours, which is about 3 hours a week. That's less than I aspire to but more than 2022 and 2021 together (71 and 65 hours respectively) so I can't complain! I read my first novel in Japanese! また、同じ夢を見ていた, which was 130 or 304 pages long depending on what source I looked at (I have no idea why the discrepancy) and took about 40 hours to finish. I read a bunch of manga too - よつばと！(Yotsuba&) 12-15 and チェンソーマン (Chainsaw Man) 1-4. Overall, success!

I went to Japan! I didn't log any language-learning time there because I was too busy and not sure how to count being surrounded by Japanese all the time, but I tried to read basically every piece of text that passed in front of my eyeballs, to the point of being nerd-sniped into slowing down and stopping randomly on the sidewalk trying to read random signs. I was pleasantly surprised with how familiar and un-intimidating it felt to be surrounded by Japanese. I also had several conversations with folks in Japanese, thanks to the patience of strangers with my broken speaking skills, which was fun.

I read 50 books, which is a good number and in line with previous years. (As with everything, I wish I had more time and could read more books). "Books" is a bit of a misnomer, since it includes everything that can be logged including short stories, but close enough. I read about a quarter as audiobooks, something that still surprises me but shows that my audiobook obsession from 2021 (48% of books read!) has stuck around. Print is way up at 12%, mostly due most of the manga I read being in paper. Ebook is my default for the rest. I apparently spent more time reading too - 10,400 pages and 85 hours (audiobook) vs last year's 6600 pages & 83 hours, and the stats for book length support that. Last year it was a lot of Seanan McGuire, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Lois McMaster Bujold. This year was Laurie Marks and Rosemary Kirstien, as I (re)read their series. All fiction - I didn't finish my one-nonfiction-book-a-year, but probably will in January. Guess I'll have to read two nonfiction books in 2024!

For birds, after 1698 days and a flight crossing the international date line, I finally let my bird-checklist-a-day streak lapse. It was fun, but was starting to feel like a chore and the Japan trip made a good excuse. 193 birds this year, 131 locally, which is average-to-low but that's fine.

I don't think there's any interesting stats for board games. Lots of Spirit Island since the new expansion came out. New neighbour board game friends that I'm excited about!

I want to say something about biking here but I don't log that anywhere. Maybe I'll have to start.

Here's to 2024 being better than the last 7 years, or at least not worse.

I'm making an effort to go though my enormous backlog of open tabs (~80 each on desktop and mobile) and actually read/look into/otherwise process the link. Some are easy (huh that's a dead link now) others are longer (looking at you, hour long keynote videos).

Backbone is a post-noir narrative adventure. Become raccoon private eye Howard Lotor as you uncover a deeply personal story of change and transformation, and explore dystopian Vancouver, BC inhabited by animals.

Backbone (video game) - I played the demo and it was cute and very atmospheric. Got stuck in a couple places - had to retry a section a dozen times, and looked up the solution to another puzzle - but overall good.

There are many kinds of princess, and all of them have stories. There are princesses in ice, and they are wise, but they have uncalloused hands; they cannot climb a mighty pine. There are princesses in fire, and they are clever, but their hands are hot; they would set the branches burning. There are princesses in lands where the sun has never set, and they are beautiful, but they have narrow shoulders and slender arms; they cannot pull themselves, hand over hand, until their foreheads brush the sky. This princess was a princess of trees, of tall places and implacable challenges, and she climbed until the sun went down, and there was her old friend moon, shining silver in the darkness.

Seanan fairy tale collection - this link led me to a half dozen original fairy tales. Wonderful, charming, several apparently in the same universe. I loved the little references to the other stories, and how perfectly fairy tale they felt.

Reading: Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch is amazing. I'm only halfway through and I feel so seen. The meme section was intensely nostalgic. The explanation of why emoji caught on so quickly and the different generations of Internet people are also great. I've never highlighted so many sections in a book.

I also started The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin in audiobook. It's a weird book, but good so far, and I like the audiobook. I started it because it was recommended as scratching the same itch as Rivers of London. I firmly disagree on that point, but it's still a good book

Finished: I blitzed my way through the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch in audiobook. The narrator (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) is amazing, and does a wondreful job with the many different accents and characters. The series itself is an urban fantasy magic police procedural. Peter Grant is snarky and scientifically minded, much to the amusement of his reserved very-British mentor Nightingale. Many characters to love, and a wonderfully diverse cast. My only regret is that there isn't more.

Next: I have so many options! I just downloaded the Hugo packet and there's two dozen books on my to-read list in there, plus books already pending on my to-read list: Ruin of Angels (Max Gladstone), The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Becky Chambers), Middlegame (Seanan McGuire)

In the world of Terms of Service & copyright licenses, it's amazing how much difference a couple words can mean. I read several Terms of Service trying to figure out which was least-bad for uploading photos to, including Dreamwidth, Flickr, Twitter & Facebook.

Dreamwidth (https://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/tos)

By submitting Content to us for inclusion on the Website, you grant us a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content, solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the contents of your account, including through downloadable clients and external feeds.

Flickr, owned by SmugMug (https://www.flickr.com/help/terms)

You retain all intellectual property rights in and to any User Content you post .... [You] grant SmugMug a perpetual, nonexclusive and royalty-free right to use the User Content ... as is reasonably necessary in order to do the following: (1) provide the Services, including to display the User Content on the Services (2) ...

Twitter (https://twitter.com/en/tos)

You retain your rights to any Content you submit .... [Y]ou grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).

Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/terms.php)

You own the intellectual property rights ... in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and the other Facebook Company Products you use. .... [W]hen you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content

Some of these are reasonable or expected:

"worldwide" = the internet is everywhere
"non-exclusive" = you can still grant licenses to other people or companies
"royalty-free" = they're not paying you for the photos
"to use, copy, host, distribute" etc = they need to store & display the photos to run the service

Others are a lot worse:

"transferable" = company can give the license that you gave to the company to someone else, and you have no say in it
"sub-licensable" = company can license your content to another person or company, including charging money for it, and you have no say or right to the money

Of these three, Flickr & Dreamwidth are the best, with the smallest rights and strong limitations on them. Twitter has the 'sublicense' clause, and Facebook has both 'transferable' and 'sub-licensable', both of which are pretty bad.

This doesn't surprise me - Flickr is about photo sharing from people that might want to sell their photos and Facebook is rife with other problems - but still interesting to see that reflected in the ToS.

I ended up continuing to upload my photos to Flickr, licensing them as CC BC-SA-NC, and linking them from Facebook, relying on the preview functionality to actually display them on Facebook (because I know fewer people will follow a link).

I stopped doing Arnis about two years ago, and have been vaguely looking for another exercise to replace it with. I did a couple sessions of Valkyrie Martial Arts (which I highly recommend, as a women-run queer-friendly western martial arts space), but never seem to make time for it in my schedule. Maybe I need a regular friend to go with? Or maybe the fencing isn't the weapons work I enjoy.

I discovered contra dancing via a first date, since she enjoyed contra (sadly, I haven't heard from her since, but I guess that's the nature of online dating). I really enjoy that style of dance, where you don't need to know anything to start, live music, switching partners and lively, but it's only fortnightly and is a long way from where I live. I'll probably get back to it, but I've been travelling or otherwise busy when it's been running.

My latest attempt is picking up heavy things and putting them back down again aka barbell weightlifting. It's pretty fun so far, where fun means tiring but also progress. I like making numbers go up (what can I say, I'm a gamer nerd) and I also like feeling stronger. I've gone three times, and the empty bar was too heavy for me the first time, and this time I felt like I had the wrong bar because it was too light. Newbie gains are great.

It's also pretty gratifying, since I apparently skipped a bunch of the common newbie mistakes. I guess doing Arnis for 8 years gave me a decent body sense, and my body isn't as bad at doing things as I always feel it is. Feels good to start of doing ok, and have decent instincts for improving.

I can only imagine how unpleasant this would have been if I wasn't going with a friend I felt comfortable asking every stupid question that came into my head, though. It would be much less fun if I was worried about impressing someone, or didn't feel comfortable asking about safety or proper form or any number of other things.

Maybe I'll take before pics (so when I have after pics I have something to compare them to). Instead, my newbie lifts:

Squat: 85 lbs
Deadlift: 115 lbs
Standing overhead press: 30lbs
Lat pull-downs: 53 lbs

Current Mood: tired

When I encounter a word I don’t know in Japanese, one of my techniques is to use google.jp to image search for it. The goal is to keep from translating the word into English and to get a sense of what it mean in Japanese instead.

The other day I came across 邪魔じゃま and googled it.

Screenshot of a google image search. Most results are cats sitting on keyboards or mice, one is of a board game named "Saboteur"

Thought process: Hmm, what does this mean? Something about cats sitting on keyboards? That doesn’t seem right from the source context. What’s that in the bottom right? I recognize that board game, it’s Saboteur!

So 邪魔じゃま might mean sabotage or obstruct or hinder, but it’s apparently quintessentially cat-on-keyboard!

I decided to switch hollybecker.net from a handful of HTML & CSS pages to a static site generator, Jekyll. When deploying it to my webserver, I ran into some locale problems with SASS generation and thought someone else can learn from my pain.

I’ve never used Jekyll before and I haven’t really used Ruby so I had a few problems installing gems into the right places that I sorted out with Misty’s help. Jekyll, Bundler & SASS all recommend gem install. Jekyll uses Bundler for project dependencies. However, I later ran into what I think were conflicts between the gems installed in my user directory and the gems installed by Bundler for my project. My solution was to install Bundler & SASS at the system level (pacman -S ruby ruby-bundle ruby-sass), use Bundler for project dependencies, and use bundle exec jekyll for any Jekyll commands I needed. The rm -rf ~/.gem to delete user directory gems was very cathartic.

The conversion to Jekyll was pretty easy and I was ready to deploy it to my webserver. When trying to generate the site on the webserver I ran into this problem:

$ bundle exec jekyll build
Configuration file: /home/holly/hollybecker.net/_config.yml
            Source: /home/holly/hollybecker.net
       Destination: /home/holly/hollybecker.net/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating... 
  Conversion error: Jekyll::Converters::Scss encountered an error while converting 'css/main.scss':
                    Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2" on line 2
jekyll 3.6.0 | Error:  Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2" on line 2

Huh?

\xE2 is â but I don’t have any of those in my project. It’s definitely not on line 2 of css/main.scss since that’s the second line of the empty YAML frontmatter needed so Jekyll parses the file. Also, this command works on my desktop and another Arch Linux server. The versions of SASS, Jekyll and Bundler are the same. The webserver is 32-bit, but a 32-bit VM Arch Linux VM didn’t have this issue either.

Google led me to a Jekyll issue with the same problem I was having which was quite useful. It suggested specifying the encoding in several places, none of which worked. It also helped track down that the problem wasn’t in css/main.scss but in the imports and provided a neat tip on how to grep for non-ASCII with grep --color='auto' -P -n "[\x80-\xFF]" file.xml

A-ha! Grepping for non-ASCII on the webserver found a lot of comments with en-dashes instead of hyphens. An en-dash is \xe2\x80\x93, hence the misleading \XE2 in the error earlier. However, the same grep command on my desktop didn’t find anything.

Now I had a workaround - I could replace the en-dashes with hyphens - but I was curious what’s going on.

I narrowed it down to a more minimal test case using the pre-Jekyll master branch. The problem was just with SASS, not Jekyll or Bundler. I hadn’t run into it previously because I ran SASS on my desktop and committed the results, instead of generating the site on the webserver.

$ sass sass/main.scss css/main.css 
Error: Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2"
        on line 2 of sass/base/_variables.scss
        from line 14 of sass/main.scss
  Use --trace for backtrace.

This is clearly an encoding problem, so I looked at the locale related environment variables. My desktop looks fine:

holly@desktop$ env | grep LANG
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en_GB

But the webserver is very suspicious:

holly@webserver$ env | grep LANG
LANG=C

The C locale is aimed at computers over people and doesn’t understand UTF-8. However, setting the locale to something with UTF-8 support (export LANG=en_CA.UTF-8) didn’t fix the problem.

I didn’t realize this until the next morning, but I’d forgotten to check which locales were actually generated. Neither en_US.UTF-8 nor en_CA.UTF-8 actually existed on the system and it was probably falling back to the only locale it knew about: C.

To fix this I generated the en_US.UTF-8 locale (uncommented en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 in /etc/locale.gen and ran locale-gen) and confirmed it worked by listing all generated locales (locale -a). I set the system locale in /etc/locale.conf to LANG=en_US.UTF-8, though once the locale was generated, I could have set the LANG in the terminal I was using as well.

After all this, it worked! Jekyll & SASS ran and correctly generated the CSS, even with unicode characters involved.

As for why this happened, this webserver had been installed in 2009 before Arch changed the default locale to one with UTF-8 support. All the other servers I checked on had been installed more recently or had been updated to a UTF-8 locale and didn’t have this problem.

Summary

When generating SASS, I had the error:

$ sass sass/main.scss css/main.css
Error: Invalid US-ASCII character "\xE2"
        on line 2 of sass/base/_variables.scss
        from line 14 of sass/main.scss
  Use --trace for backtrace.

The fix was to generate UTF-8 system locale and set it.

Check if locale exists: locale -a
If not, generate locale: Uncomment locale name in /etc/locale.gen and run sudo locale-gen
Set locale for the system: Edit /etc/locale.conf and log in again for it to take effect
Or set locale for the terminal
- bash: export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
- fish: set -xg LANG en_US.UTF-8

Crossposted from http://hollybecker.net/blog/2017-10-22-til-sass-locale-gen/

Today was my last day of work at Artefactual. I'm still processing how I feel about it.

On one hand, I'm sad to go. It's been a big part of my life for nearly four years. I've learned a lot about software development, professionalism, mentoring, communication and learning. I've also made a big impact on Archivematica - I was half the development team for most of the time, and senior person for the last year, and had a lot of creative and technical sway. It's hard to realize that the project I've cared about and nurtured will be going a direction without my input. I didn't realize how much influence I'd had on the culture too, but from discussions I've fostered a focus on code quality & improvement. I'm really proud of the work and the changes I did, both to the code and the team. I also really like my coworkers. Basically no office politics, cared about the project, flexible, friendly, good at what they did.

On the other hand, I'm really happy to be done. I'd been there almost four years, and it was definitely time to move on. I'd stopped caring about some of the structural problems the codebase had. I want other senior people to learn from. I'm looking forward to better pay and paid vacation. Mostly, my depression mostly lifted once I gave notice. I've been so much happier in the past month, it's like night and day, and I was completely blindsided by that. If I'd realized what a difference it would make, I'd have given notice much earlier. Ideally I'll be not working until September, but I'm not sure that will work out.

I'm looking forward to focusing on personal projects include Japanese, birdwatching, learning to cook, and figuring out a fitness plan, along with a bunch of smaller projects around the house. We'll see how that works out, considering Mass Effect: Andromeda came out recently....

Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/26712.html

My other big success recently was teaching an intermediate level git tutorial for PyLadies.

I've been attending Vancouver's PyLadies pretty much since it started, because I like Python & other lady programmers. When the original co-organizer stepped down after a year, I (and several other ladies) became Co- and Assistant Organizers. During a planning meeting someone asked for a git tutorial and I said I'd run it, thinking it was weeks out and I'd have lots of time to prepare.

Of course, I then a) decided not to use an existing git tutorial (because I hadn't looked very hard or found one I liked) and b) procrastinated making my own until the weekend before I was supposed to present. Fortunately I had recruited Z to help with merge & Windows based questions, and he helped me put together the presentation & repo and agonize over wording.

The tutorial itself went pretty well. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, and I think everyone learned something, even if it wasn't what I was trying to teach necessarily, or everything I was trying to teach. I certainly learned lots about teaching and how every lesson plan goes wrong on first contact with learners.

Specific things I'd change:

Explaining that switching branches changes files on disk
Diagrams! More than one!
Details on what to expect from playing around with a visualizer
Figure out how to deal with learners of different levels - I think I spent too much time on the lagging people and left the learners that didn't have trouble bored
Ask better questions at the beginning on what everyone's status is

More interestingly to me has been all the stuff on how to teach I read to prepare. There's a ton of pedagogy (and CS pedagogy specifically) that's all new to me and completely fascinating. In particular, Software Carpentry has been trying to teach basic CS to scientists for over a decade, and has a lot of great resources not only on teaching specific tech things, but also on how to train their teachers.

Even the things that aren't surprising to someone with an education background are fascinating to me. The structure of multiple choice questions - that the non-correct answers are (should be) probing for incorrect mental models, rather that noise, is something that I'd never really thought about before.

I'm thinking about contacting a former professor of mine that I particularly enjoyed, Greg Baker, and asking him about his teaching philosophies and experiences. I also did an undergrad project with Greg Wilson, the founder of Software Carpentry, and I might be able to reopen that connection and ask about computing science pedagogy.

Definitely have lots of new things on my to-read list!

Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/26491.html

やった！ I finally finished RTK-mod!

RTK is Remember the Kanji, a common textbook for learning meanings and how to write the 2042 kanji needed to be literate in Japanese. RTK-mod is a truncated deck that removes a bunch of the uncommon/useless kanji, leaving ~1780.

I started trying to learn the kanji through RTK about 5 years ago, and have had a very on-and-off relationship with it. About a year ago I got back into studying Japanese seriously, and went from around kanji 800 to today.

The chart of success. Unseen = 0! (Suspended are RTK3 and some uncommon cards cards)

You can really see when I started working on this seriously:

And it's working long term! 80% recollection on cards with an interval over 21 days.

I get two more kanji celebrations too: for finishing RTK3-mod, and for all the uncommon kanji I skipped in this pass.

I still haven't decide on what my big celebration is going to be for this!

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/26326.html

More pixels have been spilled talking about the election than should have been, and I'm going to add to it.

I don't know how to feel about it. My sentiments on it waffle between "This is the worst thing ever and the more I learn the worse it is" and "Surely it can't be that bad, there's checks and balances for a reason" and "We should reach out to the moderates on the other side because all moderates are getting hammered" and "This is just awful for everyone". Mostly it's been frustrating and upsetting for people I know, both online and offline.

I've been trying to withdraw for social media because it's awful for my mental health, but it's hard to break the boredom-habit that draws me to twitter, even after I replaced the icon on my home screen with Neko Atsume.

One of my favorite authors & people online, whom I liked enough to support on Patreon, has disappeared from the internet, and gone out of their way to hide or disable their social media presence. They no longer feel safe online. They identified as conservative, but rarely discussed politics online, and was the most consistent voice of joy and happiness I knew. I'm upset they're gone, but also have more complicated feelings around divisiveness and moderates needing to pick a side (or not) and the need to re-evaluate your position that I don't know what to do with.

I also want to know if it's possible to donate to US charities and get a Canadian tax break (or, more likely, if any of the charities I'm interested in have Canadian branches, and if that money goes to the US branch). Charities I'm interested in include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Planned Parenthood.

I want to go back to 2015 and skip this year.

Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/25940.html

I had a delightful if perhaps over-busy weekend.

Friday was games, with the somewhat awkward number of six - too big for most games, but too small to want to split into groups. We ended up with two groups of three, my table playing Istanbul with coffee (which I thoroughly lost) and the other table playing King of Siam (and I was mildly jealous, because that game is the best). After a couple of extra lively rounds of Codenames and approaching midnight I meant to wrap things up, but we ended up chatting until nearly 1AM, mostly about animated shows aimed at younger audiences, and lots of discussion of Avatar: the last Airbender contrasted with Legend of Korra. Both are fantastic, but there was some good discussion about the flaws and different approaches in the two that I hadn't considered.

Saturday I attended the Vancouver Tea festival with a group of friends and had a fantastic time. I was introduced to a delicious Chinese restaurant, New Town Bakery (& Restaurant). I don't normally like Chinese food, but this was delicious and cheap. The tea festival was at the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Chinese gardens, which are lovely in any weather. Next door, in Chinese cultural center, were perhaps 40 vendors. On registration, they gave me a tiny tea cup, which was well needed since every vendor had half a dozen to a dozen teas available to sample. I drank *so much* tea, I nearly floated away. Especially because there was a friendly fellow with a table sharing his personal collection of tea and telling stories. I stayed for two and a half teas, and each tea had about 6 brewings, and that was more tea than I realized at the time.

Afterwards, I wandered around downtown with Misty and Zee and enjoyed a chocolate tea donut at Cartem's, before deciding it was time to go home, which ended up going to Zee's for dinner. We had a delicious dinner and some delightful and thought-provoking chats.

Sunday my much-delayed Mouse Guard campaign finally started! I play Aspen, a compassionate and generous mother of grown children who is the cook and healer of the group. I know, she's not much like me, but that's the fun of roleplaying, right? Our DM had set up a Halloween ghost themed intro mission, which was much required since we were still figuring out the rules as a group. I enjoyed it, and it's inherently a cute setting, but I'm noticing serious differences in tabletop playing styles. Apparently my previous (D&D Eberron) group was pretty focused, with all of us interested in the stories and the characters with little tabletop chatter. The chatter and sidetracking at MG seemed excessive to me, but others said it was less that previous groups. I find this frustrating, as well as when a player appeared to mentally check out during the last hour. I'm planning on finding a way to tactfully bring this up. I enjoyed it though, and definitely need to re-read the rules!

Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/25665.html

Gramma's funeral was on Sunday, almost a week ago now.

The ceremony itself was really well done. Both my grandparents were deeply involved with the local Baptist church, so it was held there and had a strong religious bent that I mostly ignored. Several people, including my cousins and aunt, got up and shared touching and humorous stories. The one that stuck with me was a discussion of Gramma's consistently loving and service oriented behaviour, and that she reaped the rewards of that in the outpouring of love and support from those she helped, especially at the end. My cousin noted that comes from being kind to others, even when you're cranky or impatient. Since I tend to be stingy and self-focused, I think that's something I want to aspire towards.

Since my family isn't so much into public speaking, they put together a slideshow of Gramma photos from infancy through her college and early marriage years, my dad's childhood, my childhood, and recent events. That, more than any of the stories, was the hard-hitting part for me.

On the other hand, I can see why funerals end up as a bit of a party. While most of the attendees were people I didn't know, several were people I hadn't seen in a while and it was nice to catch up with them.

I'm concerned about my brother. He's normally very phlegmatic about things and it's disconcerting and upsetting to see him so upset. I think he was the closest of the cousins to Gramma, and I don't think he has the same support network I do.

It certainly feels like more than two weeks since she passed, and I've mostly lost track of time (what do you mean Halloween's past?). I took Monday off so I could have an actual relaxing 'weekend day' and I'm glad I did, but it's certainly contributing to my confused sense of time.

I'm still not sure if it feels real, but I definitely got some closure from the funeral.

Current Music: I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing) by Heather Dale
Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/25481.html

Gramma died yesterday evening. I had phoned my parents to chat that afternoon and had planned on sending them a list of times this week when I'd be home and available for 'the call', and Dale and I were halfway through watching a particularly good episode of DS9 ("The Die is Cast") when my phone rang.

I don't know how I feel. I was more upset yesterday afternoon when my aunt emailed saying this would probably be Gramma's last day. It feels surreal, it doesn't feel real, like I could go to Delta and visit her in the house she lived in all my life and hasn't lived in for several months and everything would be the way it was. I don't know if it will feel real until the funeral on Sunday.

I'm glad I visited last weekend. I'm glad we had a last family dinner together on Thanksgiving. I'm glad she had a long life full of family she loved and trips around the world, and had a high quality of life until the very end. I'm glad it wasn't on dad's birthday.

And now I'm trying to deal with the mundanities of finding clothing appropriate to wear to a funeral and scheduling (or rescheduling) time with friends next weekend. The routine of work and Japananese study was a better distraction.

Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/25141.html

I visited Gramma this weekend in hospice, where she'd been moved on Friday. Fortunately, with the move most of the family drama seems to have subsided (or maybe the problematic member was just away that day). I'm glad I went - I got to see Gramma again and have a chance to say any last words, though I struggled to come up with any besides "I love you" and "I'll miss you". Reminisced a little about good times with her - gardening, baking, boating, family gatherings, making jam.

Dad's birthday is on Tuesday, so we had a little celebration with cake. We were going to have a little party with Gramma, but she wasn't really up to it. I did have a number of good conversations with my parents and brother while I was out visiting though, which I really enjoyed. I'm glad I get along so well with my family; even if we sometimes have ups and downs we're still all there for each other.

It's kind of surreal how sudden this all is, how dramatically different the timelines seem to be every time I visit. Three weeks ago I felt like Gramma would live forever, two weeks ago it felt like 2-4 weeks, a week ago it felt like November was likely, and now I'm expecting a phone call any day. I just really hope it doesn't happen on Dad's birthday.

I keep telling myself I had a good weekend - nice chats with family, board games and pumpkin carving with friends, enjoying watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 with Dale, but it doesn't really feel that way. At least I have these two adorable mini-pumpkins from the Pumpkin Party on Friday to cheer me up.

Two tiny pumpkins with jack-o'-lantern faces drawn on in Sharpie.

Two tiny pumpkins with jack-o'-lantern faces drawn on in Sharpie.

Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/24889.html

I'm pretty excited that two of my favorite authors are starting serials within a month of each other. Ursula Vernon is writing (well, wrote and is posting chapter-by-chapter) Summer in Orcus, a fascinating fairy tale with an overprotected girl and Baba Yaga and I haven't read far enough to find out what else. M.C.A. Hogarth is writing Kherishdar's Exception book 2 (er, 4? Do the 2 books of flash-fiction count?) in my favorite of her worlds, an exploration of what a working and positive caste-based society would look like. Something exciting to look forward to every week!

And, some great articles I found recently:

English is not normal
Crucially, [the Celtic languages] were quite unlike English. ... But also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: they used it to form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker - as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones.

What 80% Comprehension Feels Like
“Bingle for help!” you shout. “This loopity is dying!” You put your fingers on her neck. Nothing. Her flid is not weafling. You take out your joople and bingle 119, the emergency number in Japan. There’s no answer! Then you muchy that you have a new befourn assengle. ....

In fact, it goes a long way toward explaining that intermediate plateau, as you slog from an average of 60% comprehension or so to closer to 90%. That’s why you’re learning so much but don’t feel the breakthrough.

Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/24772.html

Life has been a little nuts lately.

Gramma (dad's mom), who 18 months ago was riding elephants in Africa and a month ago was in Portland visiting family, was diagnosed with cancer about two weeks ago. (She had cancer about 3 years ago, but it was treated and she went back to normal.) I found out about this a week Friday ago, which was the first day of VCon and the day she had a stroke. Lasting damage of the stroke appears to be mostly impaired vision and poor memory, though at 87 her memory was already not great and they have her on end-of-life level painkillers so I'm not sure how much that's affecting it. Remaining lifespan estimates are highly varied, but probably don't include Christmas.

Gramma is my last surviving grandparent, and easily the one I knew best. Mamaw (mom's mom) died before I was born. Papaw (mom's dad) died when I was in high school and he lived in Louisiana so I only saw him once a year. Grandad (dad's dad) was not very family-oriented or social with grandkids, and I was sheltered from his Alzheimer's because I was busy with school.

There's also been a pile of frustrating and unnecessary family drama about Gramma's care that I don't feel like rehashing, culminating in the 24-hour nurse service withdrawing service and leaving the problematic family member to organize and provide all the care. I am Not Pleased, and other immediate family members are furious.

I'm also frustrated because just prior to this all happening I had been feeling much less depressed. I left work for lunch happy, I could have discussions about work and future without dissolving into anger or tears. Dale commented on the improvement. I can't tell if it's still here under the mishmash of grief and uncertainty about my feelings in the last week.

On the upside, we had a lovely family dinner for Thanksgiving with Gramma at her place. Even my cousins came, Gramma ate more than she had any other time that week, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy our company. I'm glad we got one last major family holiday in with Gramma. I also introduced Lanterns to my family, and it went over well, so there's some hope for variety from the Ticket to Ride monopoly.

Current Music: I See Fire - Peter Hollens
Crossposts: http://hwestaa.livejournal.com/24481.html

I'm not sure if I'll post here any more than I did on LiveJournal but at least this gives me a clean start? (Plus I need a post here so I can properly explore/fiddle around with settings)