jeliza

Life continues sludging along. I'm sure some things have happened, but I can't really remember what.

D injured his back somehow, and time between diagnosis and first available PT appoint is over 3 weeks, while the pain meds/muscle relaxer prescriptions ran out in 1. Yay.  He's taken the first steps in going back to school, but taking assessment tests for the first time in ages while in acute pain was exceedingly difficult, and he is as a result disappointed by a result that I was pleased with even before finding out how much of the test he missed due to pain. Luckily, for everything forward, the IEP/504 plans should be applicable.

The program for O to get back to school is much less communicative (they are too old for the other), so that ball is more rocking back and forth than rolling.

My notebook of new box, tray, useful things, etc designs continues to grow, but I continue to get nowhere with the new laser, which is gone from frustrating to terrifying, because WorldCon is imminent and I have nothing I am pleased with and am blocked in 3 out of 4 classes of work due to the bloody laser not working. Even the boxes I outsourced the cutting of are not presentable because apparently they used a weird wood? And none of the normal finishing methods are working. Basically, this is feeling like a horribly expensive mistake and that I should give up and go get a bookkeeping certificate or something.

S is in Chicago on business; there has been a bit more travel with the new gig than I think either of us was expecting, but it isn't onerous yet.  Just odd, and requiring of hiring dog walkers. My feet may have finally healed, but the rest of me is not currently capable of  half-hour+ walks with a frisky 30 pound dog.

There is finally enough distance from the stupid infinity cycle MCU movies that I can read Marvel fic again, though I am being excessively choosy, mostly sticking to Fraction-ish Hawkeye or extremely AU, and mostly re-reading at that.  

My favorite fics I've read/reread lately are To the Stars, which is about a Lina Lamont that becomes obsessed with space, The Food Cart Job which is a sweet leverage case fic, and a work in progress (ready) to live, which is a potter-verse do-over fic that is completely unhinged and funny except when it's intense. And I'm rereading LeGuin's Earthsea books when I have more of an available brain.

 I'm trying really hard not to panic, but it's been two weeks and I still haven't gotten the new laser working. We never managed to have a glowforge, though it was replaced twice, that wasn't lemon-scented, but at least setup was easy as hell.

I have a show to ship in a week, and need to not only make the new boxes but translate the designs from glowforge to light burn and do materials testing first. And while I finally got it to turn on, it then just makes the gantry jitter and nothing else. 

This only increases my desire to learn woodworking hand tools, but that would both take months to be able to make boxes of decent quality and cutting the inlays is beyond my fine motor control. 

Maybe I should have stayed a photographer, somehow.

Update: it's closer to working yay,  the manualsucks and there was a sneaky piece of packing material, actual testing should happen tomorrow

The thing that sucks about slow cooker pot roast is it starts smelling good hours before it is ready.

As has become usual, my efforts making stock for the upcoming Arisia are getting frequently interrupted by A) hating everything I paint, which is a me problem and can be mentally worked through and B) things that are substantially made on the laser failing during the lasering stage. Not a me problem.

So. I am not selling enough stuff made with a laser to easily justify getting a new laser cutter, especially given the difference between the amounts of money in my bank account and the amount the most obvious replacement costs. However, the glowforge is getting more and more unreliable, which limits how much I can make and increases my material costs, because the primary way it fails is alignment issues, so issue #2, not cutting through, on a better functioning machine, is fixable by just putting the board back in the same place and doing a second pass. No one sane would give me a business loan, but online quasi-bank places like paypal would. Gah.

Damnit.

At this point, I have no idea what my panel is actually going to look like.

I also planned to e doing some self-reflection on what my personal goals for the next year should be, but, well, stressing out over business is still far less stressful than plumbing my own emotional depths.

 It's not the most festive way to go, but given the available energy and funds, I thought setting intentions was a good idea, and it actually feels a bit more significant than some previous cake-stravaganzas.

I've been going hardcore on adulting the past few days, getting R's move back to Shoreline complete and cooking more etc and then I attempted to learn a simple CAD program so when I want to design a new complex box I'm not dependent on S who is working a fuckton of hours or torturing the output of automated box generators in Illustrator to try and make it work

I've been using graphics programs for decades. I used to write software manuals. 

Even with a well written companion book I can't wrap my brain around fusion360. I could actually feel a headache start and get progressively worse with every chapter or tutorial I attempted. 

Gah.

 My brain has suddenly decided that most of my drawing issues would be solved with a fountain pen. I do not know this to be true, but am starting to think it is worth a try - I dislike markers for how they *feel* as they draw, both in how it feels to my hand and the drag of the ink across the paper, and the regularity of the line. In the drawing class where we used ink, I loved working with a really thin brush or reed and pot of ink (which is too messy for working portably.)

Brush pens seem like the easy solution but in practice I start getting painterly with them immediately, and I want a comfortable way to work with line. 

So. Have any of you used a fountain pen? How do they compare, action wise, to something like a good ball point?

 I decided to symbolically deal with the train wreck of 2022 with a small banishing ritual. I'm still not in the right mindset to find a UU fellowship  so instead I'm going to make a concerted effort to get my Witch on to support my goals of increased clarity and momentum. Blessed be, everybody. 

Family life continues to be a cluster fuck of kid health/school issues and being in the middle of S/R breakup issues, that I do not care to detail.  Continuing to be glad that the emotion chip in my robot body continues to be only semi-connected. Whee.

I'm doing Pancakes and Booze this Saturday, and Cascade K8 Winterfest on the 3rd, which is at least forcing me to paint. It's been so long that I have forgotten what order to layer the persnickity metallic inks in, but I will make it work, because I always do.

There is TV I keep intending to watch, including finishing Owl House with D, and Sandman, and Ms. Marvel, but all I've managed is weekly Bake-Off simulwatching with Tamera. This is both an attention span and a flashy bright lights hurt my eyes issue.

I've been in a very Harry Potter mood, fanfic-wise, but no way in hell am I watching any of those movies and supporting Rowling financially.

The number of new HP fics that have found a way to include trans characters, even if just in passing, as a "fuck you" to Rowling, is quite pleasant. It's getting to be a bit like the feel of people working in the Cthulu mythos, which is to say, everyone acknowledges that the original material & author is a hot yucky mess, but what new eyes can make riffing off it is fabulous.