po8crg

I did so many things again!

(I was thinking, after the four-day work weeks the last two weeks, how rough it's gonna be getting through five days this week. And both of these first two have felt like a few days each.)

I woke up at about six, and wasn't getting back to sleep, so I did what I often do between April and September (well, July at least): started watching the previous night's Twins game on my phone.

This time, that really woke me up: they (against another exceptionally good pitcher!) scored eleven runs in the first two innings! Garrett Crochet only got five outs before they sent him to the showers. It was wild. So fun to watch. I was giddy afterwards.

By seven, I'd gotten bored of telling myself I'd get up and go to the gym before work, a special skill only available to me in the lighter half of the year so I haven't done it yet this year.

It's so much quicker if I can ride my bike than if I have to walk, but my bike tires needed inflating first and I've never managed it on my own, but D did talk me through the process the other day so I figured it was worth a shot... And I did it! Went very smoothly. (My front tire was so low that hardly registered as having air pressure at all when I attached the pump, aww....)

I opened the door into a cool sunny morning, that smelled like burnt sugar. If the wind is just right, we can just about catch the delicious scents from the McVities factory. It felt like a magical way to start the day.

I went to the gym, didn't stay long, got home and showered and dressed for work by a time at which I've been just waking up on some weekdays lately. I had an okay work day, a lot of meetings to slog through, but with a nice one at the end of the day where someone I rarely speak to wanted my advice specifically about something to do with internal communications. She's so fun to talk to, and she was really flattering my ego with this "you were the first person I thought of to ask about this..." And I got a really adorable rendition of her plans to go to the gym herself after work, her upcoming holiday to Cornwall for a family gathering...so that was a fun way to end the work day.

Then, for the second day in a row, I walked both Teddy and Lizzy. It was kinda miserable today though: Lizzy was so intent on going a certain way that was too much work for me, that she refused the walk she's specifically demanded the last few days, and all I could do was drag her and Teddy up and down next to the A-road which she kept trying to dive into every few steps because she really wanted to be on the other side of it and only let me walk her along it because she was convinced at every point we'd be crossing the road.

Then just as we got back, the Tesco delivery showed up half an hour early (I'd actually seen the van stop on a nearby road when I was out with the dogs, and figured there was no way we weren't next on the list, so I wasn't as surprised as I might have been!), such that poor D had to choose between dealing with the groceries and returning the dogs to their home down the street. He took the dogs, and luckily they were good (they can pull a bit when they're near home, like a lot of dogs do I think, because they're excited to get there). I'm glad he chose that because I got the minimally-helpful driver, and spent much more time bending and reaching and lifting than I do if they're a little more careful where they put the crates and less staring-at-their-phone.

It was fine, everything got in the house, but with that right after the dog walk I was surprisingly tired! So I was glad when D did most of making dinner, he managed to find a good use for something we keep being sent as substitutes that isn't really suitable for us.

Last night, D and I started watching a documentary about why the Expos left Montreal, and it's so fucking depressing and so similar to Oakland and the A's! Also, knowing what I know now about, like, how most ownership groups are cashing in on their teams, and how bullshit it is to make taxes pay for rich people's stadiums...Stuff that happened when I was a naive kid (12 during the strike in 1994, for example), I now see in such a different light!

I thought I spent the whole thing making grumpy gloomy comments about the greed of billionaires and the doom of consigning civic institutions like sports teams to them. But when I tapped out halfway through -- I had a headache and thought I should sleep -- I told D to watch the rest without me and he said it wouldn't be as fun without me going "oooh, Ian Baseball!" I've passed along Andrew's old habit of referring to abstract or hypothetical entities having the first name Ian, so in this case, the Ians Baseball were, like Andre Dawson and Marquis Grissom. I've taught him about the joy of Remembering Some Guys, and apparently it works even secondhand! I did worry that the Guy Remembering was over by the halfway point of the doc, and indeed tonight's half was just depressing stuff, including David Samson who could hardly be more cartoonishly The Rich Bad Guy from a movie (assuming that the original prototype for that, Donald Trump, wasn't chosen): even his voice sounds evil. It was very touching to see so many old Québécois men weep openly though. I like baseball because it's so low-stakes, until it's not.

And then I was D's unglamorous assistant as he climbed up a ladder with multiple flashlights to take pictures of our loft (for solar panel purposes) and now I'm looking forward to going to bed!

I can see a little, so I do care a lot about light and contrast and things, so I'm not in the exact situation that a Blind online acquaintance describes here, but so much of this resonates with me. Especially as we're under increasing pressure to have cameras-on internal meetings at work.

"I am an unwilling cameraman, shooting an obscure documentary about my own face" resonated so hard with me!

My own parents are the even worse about this, though. As per entries passim, I talk to them every week. The only comment I've heard them make about my visual appearance is excessively unkind to say the least if not overtly transphobic, so it's not as if I'm motivated to share my face with them. Yet recently when my webcam was broken for a couple of weeks, my mom could barely carry on a conversation because of how distracted she was by this.

And her language is so telling. It's not "We can't see you" it's "We don't have you." It makes me feel so trapped -- pinned, like a bug in a collection.

It's the same as Robert describes his friend: ""Oh, You're gone! Where did you go?" I don't go anywhere! My mom says "Are you there???" even while I'm already talking. Like he says, " I didn’t go anywhere. I am right here. I did not teleport. I am still in the same spot I was just a few seconds ago."

My new webcam is a nightmare. It doesn't even show my whole head on the screen if I have the monitor as close to me as I otherwise went it. It has way too high a resolution: I've never seen all my facial features this sharply, and I'm very distressed to start now!

Being able to see a little means I am aware of how I look, and you know how people hate the sound of their own voice on recordings because that's not how it sounds to them? I feel like that about seeing myself on video calls. (I actually mostly love the way my voice sounds on recordings, heh.)

"As we prepare to go out of radio communication, we're still able to feel your love from Earth," pilot Victor Glover said. "And to all of you down there on Earth, and around Earth, we love you from the Moon."

Artemis is just so wildly different from previous moon missions. I love it.

I got that quote from this lovely piece on why we go to space.

NASA's budget is not the reason gas costs $6 a gallon, or why we don't have universal healthcare or pre-K. We don't have those because those in charge, and the people who voted for them, have chosen for us not to have those. It is a false binary that we even have to choose at all. The U.S. is the richest polity that has ever existed; there is more than enough money to go around to satisfy basic human services while still funding spaceflight. The people denying us those basic services would very much like for you to identify NASA as the culprit for its $24.4 billion budget, which represents 0.35 percent of all government spending, at the same time a pointless and purposeless war costs us a billion dollars a day, and the government seeks a $1.5 trillion defense budget.

I am always surprised, though I guess I shouldn't be, that even blind people who have never driven can be so car-brained.

But it disappoints me nevertheless.

Today at work I watched a video where the head of a U.S. blind org, in his first Waymo, exclaimed something like "this is the first time in history that blind people can travel long distances independently without inconveniencing anybody else!"

I mean...I regularly travel hundreds of miles independently, on trains. I have traveled thousands of miles independently, on planes!

I have a whole rant about what people even mean by "independent."

I might have to add "what do crips mean by inconveniencing someone."

Not only do I not think that I'm inconveniencing assistance staff by "making" them help me get on a train or plane.

I also think that private cars do inconvenience a lot of other people! (Waymos (or other self-driving cars) arguably more than the human-driven cars.) Cars just outsource most of the inconvenience to people you don't know!

Earlier this week, I read the headlines of the Ipsos Mobility survey, and one has been haunting me ever since:

For many, having a car is an essential part of their life.
Forty-three per cent of drivers across 31 countries feel it would be impossible for them to live without their car. This feeling is highest in the US (65%), France (64%) and Canada (59%). Forty-three per cent of drivers say they could live without their car, but would prefer not to.

They would prefer not to because car-centric design ensures that everything is easiest, makes most sense, or sometimes is only possible for people in private cars. Cars end up being an essential part of people's lives when they're essential to everything you might want to do: work, school, shopping, errands, fun stuff... I know it's asking a lot for people to see that a bunch of systemic changes will address this better and more thoroughly than their individualistic solution of just getting another car, or a bigger car, or a car with brighter headlights, or an electric car, or a self-driving car...

I got through the latest meeting with my manager this afternoon! I was good and brave and he's happy with how it went.

It's the usual thing he's doing lately where he's like "what DO you do anyway Erik" but this time with an added dose of "and what should you do for the next few months, when both our internal ways of working and the external legislative environment will be different".

Right after this, I got an email that says that as a result of this year's pay ballot my pay has gone up 2.69% (nice). I really can't complain. I'm so glad I'm able to send money to Gaza and Minneapolis and Black trans pals all over the place and whatnot.

And despite being very tired, after I finished work I prepped some dinner, because I wanted to go to the gym and I knew if I didn't do food first it wouldn't happen and I'm very clearly still The One With The Spoon in our household for the second day in a row. (I haven't been doing as ridiculously well since Tuesday, but I'm still feeling that good longer-days energy!)

And then, despite being even more tired, I did actually get changed and go to the gym. It would've been so easy to just flop down on my bed. I'm so proud of myself that I didn't.

Not before breakfast, but also I felt like I was doing the impossible things, not just thinking them...

Work was a lot; I had meetings all afternoon, overrunning into each other, beset by people missing the point. I think another way the power dynamic of people with no (disclosed) disabilities who have to consult disabled people for their work... sometimes someone missed a crucial bit -- we're not just ranking these on their effectiveness but also their difficulty of implementation -- and sometimes one person thinks we need every detail of the specific symbols on the Berlin U-bahn and/or S-bahn maps (this is a breach of the maxim of quantity: as much information as is needed, and no more).

That latter person talked so much at the end that I missed the first train home that I wanted.

And as these meetings were going on, I also had to get something to my manager (artificial sense of urgency!) which I was really unsure of, something I've never done before and am not sure I'm doing right, so that was stressful. I almost think it was easier trying to do it at the same time as the meetings, since it kept me from being able to get too anxious about it; I just had to go "good enough!" and send him the documents at some point.

By the time of the second one, V had put dinner in the oven which meant I didn't have to cook, which was nice (we keep frozen meals around for precisely this kind of day; D was sleeping and V had already used a lot of spoons they didn't really have today and I wasn't home yet).

I just had time to eat that and watch the first inning or so of the Tigers-Twins game (which I didn't have high hopes for because it was a Skubal start, but it apparently went well! (has something happened to the Tigers?? silveradept, you doin' okay?)) before it was time to go help angelofthenorth get two heavy pieces of furniture down two flights of stairs.

I figured it was the kind of thing that would either be pretty quick or pretty grueling, and it was pretty quick. We didn't break anything, including ourselves. I rehydrated a little and walked home because buses are disappointing that time of night; the walk was actually nice: it was still warm even after dark (I'm not used to that yet!), it was clear and quiet, and the exercise was probably good for my muscles. I still struggled to even get myself into the shower when I got home though, heh.

And now painkillers and bed!

Very sad to realize that I have to start caring about bedtime again.

I've had a pretty great bank holiday weekend though.

• Tried to skive off work a bit early to go for a drink with D in the sunshine. It ended up not being that sunny by then, but we had a nice time. And I got us ice-cream cones from an ice-cream van as we walked home!
• We did indeed go out for Best Friday, which was lovely if slightly overdoing it for D
• I made it to transgym, sent good wishes back and forth between D and the gymgoers, and got my gloves back that I accidentally left in a friend's car when they gave me a lift home...and then proceeded not to see said friend for the last couple of months. I've been thinking about those gloves every so often: I got them in Stornoway so they're nice and warm, fair-isle type colorwork, and most important for me fingerless. I don't need them now but it's very nice to have them back!
• our friends Alex and Ian came over that evening, yay. It was so so lovely to see them. We got pizza.
• We were invited for afternoon tea at angelofthenorth's yesterday. Little sandwiches and sweets and many pots of tea (and I had coffee), beautifully showed off her new table and chairs!
• We bought some more plants, and when we got home I did some dad chores: added air to the car tires that needed it, cut back a tree that's overhanging from the neighbor's yard, started in on the ivy that has already claimed a couple of fence panels, and then sat outside with a book and a cold beer, in shorts and sandals (it's only about 60F, but thanks to testosterone I've become the guy who needs to wear a sleeveless top and sandals and shorts when it's 60F...)

Storm Dave aside, we had good weather this weekend, even great today -- and this is the opposite of what bank holiday Mondays are usually like. And it's not even dark at 8pm now; I'm so relieved.

haggis and her 5-year-old visited briefly this afternoon. The kid sat right down with her paper and markers to draw a picture of Gary, and write a story about Gary.

The previous time she was here, I think I wasn't around but both V and D separately told me that she'd talked to them about Gary, she recognized his photo above the couch. She said "He was in the corner [we put his little fence up when the toddler was visiting, of course] and I was very little."

She was very little! The last time she saw Gary, she'd have been 3.

I cannot tell you how heartwarming it is that, even now, such a significant fraction of her life later, apparently our place is just "Gary's house" to her.

So now, on our fridge, is her drawing of Gary: a kind of trapezoid with eyes, pointy ears, spots (I think; Gary had black spots on his back), and a smiley mouth.

(Incidentally, it's held on to our fridge with magnets including a tractor and a Minnesota one; you can tell these happen to belong to me, right? Both were gifts! The tractor was a gift from V and D, found on their travels back before we all lived in the same house.)

Well, as I'm always saying at work -- and I learned this from trans activists, if you don't have access to public toilets, you don't have access to public life.

This article, no doubt among others, points out that if we don't have access to space toilets, we don't really have access to space.

It’s very funny, because toilets are funny, but I also find it touching because it’s so relatably human. Space missions are filled with impossibly genius men and women achieving scientific feats far beyond our intelligence, discussing them with indecipherable jargon and initialisms, and then they’re talking about toilets. Hey! Toilets! I use those things too. Everyone needs toilets. ...

It took NASA six years and $23 million to design the Universal Waste Management System, and it was first installed on the International Space Station in 2020. The UWMS—invariably referred to by everyone at NASA as simply "the toilet"—uses suction to keep waste from escaping, and captures and filters the urine it collects to return to the craft's water supply. Just as importantly, it is capable of handling what NASA calls "dual ops—when they’re doing both defecation and urination at the same time,” said Melissa McKinley, the toilet's project manager.

I'm charmed that the toilet status is right at the top of this pleasing website where you can track the mission.

Before the crew settled in for their first sleep, ahead of a perigee burn Thursday morning, Koch called down with a question: The astronauts would like to pee before bed. Are you sure this thing is safe to use? Houston offered reassurance. "Christina, you are good to use toilet all night."

It's so lovely go to bed knowing that the toilet is there for you, any time you need it.