One Monkey, Seventeen Years

We've just come home from the Edinburgh Christmas Market. It's much diminished from what we remember in 2019, but it was still a fun trip. Sichuan House was lovely Chinese food and we can't get its like in Inverness. We may need to learn to make rice noodles. The Museum of Childhood is still good and we spent a couple of hours there. The Wyrd Shop, a local witchy shop (http://wyrdshop.com/home.htm) is fun too.

We're about to start the vigorous December baking. We have an advent calendar with one baking-or-similar project every day until the winter solstice (longnight), when we'll do our usual slow-motion feast as we wait for dawn. My mother sent 80 kg (!) of flour of various kinds, so the neighbours are going to be receiving a lot of bread for awhile, plus some cookies, etc.

It's been great being home more. I'm really enjoying being around for more of what's happening with the kids. Some things are up and down, but overall, life's pretty good.

I'm sorry you're gone.

Your memory is, and will be, a blessing.

I didn't appreciate you as you deserved in life. That's generally how that works - time and attention are finite. And each and every one of us could say, truthfully, that we neither gave nor received what we deserved.

Like us all, you were a wonderful and irreplaceable. And as we all will be, you're gone.

I'm a snarky bastard too. If we can't appreciate each other, who will?

Filing taxes in two countries remains a project. Luckily as a living-outside-the-US-ian we get a free automatic two-month extension, which brings the two tax years kinda-sorta into alignment. I still have to calculate all the income and expenses and stuff for two different tax years for deductions and non-job income and so on.

My arm is much better. Definitely not 100%, but I'm mostly recovered for dexterity tasks like typing and piano. I can't lift a ton of weight yet and I get tired a bit more quickly. Still, not doing badly at all. "Tendon damage" sounds much more ominous than how it's been day-to-day.

Mostly life is just life. I have the big list of tasks I'm burning through, slowly. As I recover, I go through it faster.

Shopify is still basically good. The larger economic climate isn't great there, like everywhere. We had a second round of layoffs recently, but I kept my job. In theory there will be no more big layoffs, just like after the last round.

Krissy is getting the land she'd hoped to buy from a neighbour at a price that is expensive, but not as utterly ridiculous as his initial asking price. It's gonna take time to pay off that and the roof and so on. "And so on" is about to include our septic tank needing a full rebuild and replacement, because houses. I need to be thinking about whether I can find ways to make extra money here and there. But mostly it's just going to take time, fewer vacations and so on. We're not in bad shape, but I really enjoyed being basically debt-free. We are no longer basically debt-free. We have switched back to "we have a small mortgage." Which is fine, but feels quite different.

I've been putting a lot of time into trying to make a tech-social community happen here, mostly centred around the web meetup I now organise. It's a small community for that at the best of times, and these aren't the best of times. Still, I'm learning a lot about what people are looking for, giving some local talks, meeting the local organisers and generally doing useful stuff. I think longer-term it'll work out fine.

I'm off to run this morning with my wonderful wife, as I've been doing occasionally for awhile here. Say a couple of times a week on average? I rode to town and back on the bike yesterday, so I'm basically back on that after the wrist surgery. We eat well. In some sense my health is as good as it's been in a very long time. Then again, I'm also nearly 47. So, mixed.

I'm on Mastodon as ruby.social/@codefolio

No promises it'll become a regularly-checked thing. But that's where a lot of folks are heading, as Twitter becomes a larger and more obvious dumpster fire.

In a better world we would have serious, hard-eyed women and men who stood above, carrying a stick, and had no patience for my capering or my bashful-eyed denials and "I tried"s.

In a better world, saying, "this is what I did" would hold no weight, and they would correct my poor conclusions and make sure no listener was misled.

They would look on my mistakes of forty, thirty, twenty, ten, five years of working at one thing and another and let me know, there is a proper way to do it all. And the right way is not obvious, which is why we must learn it. And the result of the right way is good, and my results are not, not yet.

Here I am, standing in this poor world with forty bare years of experience draped across my nakedness, like trousers frayed thin, saying, "I was here for this little time -- I am sorry that this knowledge is all I could find."

My stubbornness is strong. With my frayed years and my apologies, I will do all I can to build a better world. Someday our world will have serious-eyed people who can tell the real truth, the truth I am too weak and too early and -- now -- too old to ever find. If you ever see a hard glint of real truth in my poor offerings, understand that I can see the hard-eyed people, far in the distance. Perhaps the very smallest picture of them flickers, a distortion reflected in my eyes.

Even Oldest Kid, who has already had Covid *and* two vaccinations. Oof.

We are hit by Covid again. Pretty common lately, all over :-/ This time Middle Kid has a positive test, plus the gastrointestinal side of the symptoms, which hit while we were down South in England. That's presumably where we picked it up.

Youngest Kid doesn't have a positive Covid test yet, but we're assuming she has it too. She's sleeping in lots, coughing and complaining of stomach pain. That last bit is pretty common - she's trying hard not to eat real food, with some level of success. We started trying to isolate Middle Kid, but if Youngest has it then there's not much reason to -- it's just gonna circulate through the house. Krissy and I and Oldest Kid are already vaccinated, for what it's worth, and Oldest Kid has had it before.

Other than that things are fine. I got myself a nice little digital piano, one with 88 weighted keys, a pedal and the other basics that allow one to play songs roughly as they were meant to be played. It's a lovely step up. I'm still practicing vigorously, in the hope that I'll get good enough to justify it over time.

Work is still fine. I enjoy working on the JIT for Ruby a lot. Shopify's stock price is way, way down so in effect I have taken a big pay cut and that's very annoying. But we're still fine - we treated the stock as a nice bonus, not something required for day-to-day life. That was apparently an excellent decision.

I found a local music teacher who's accepting new students. This is harder than it sounds. So I'm basically starting from zero (level one, British style) in music, but also I have somebody who notices when (e.g.) my timing on notes is terrible. This is a step up: YouTube is pretty bad at that. Also: it turns out they don't have quarter notes, half notes, etc, in the UK. There's a whole other set of names for note durations like "crotchet" and "minim." This sounds like the kind of thing I'd make up, but it's true.

Work is good. We're in a bit of a period of disruption - got our next Bit Thing (tm) done, and we're kind of regrouping and figuring out what the next Big Thing will be. So: successful, but a bit disrupted.

Of course, a big chunk of my compensation was in Shopify stock. Shopify stock has been doing *extremely* poorly. I'm checking with the accountants to make sure that there's no hideous dot-com-crash-style tax consequences, since the stock hasn't actually been granted yet. I don't *think* so, but I'm also very much not a UK tax accountant, so I'm asking somebody who is.

The kids are all healthy and doing age-appropriate things. This is occasionally very annoying, but otherwise fine.

So I have a bit of time to think and novel stimulus.

Though I've been "on" around people a lot, so I'm also more than slightly stunned.

Inverness has been a lot of being disconnected from everybody outside my family. It's not that I *never* see anybody else, but mostly I'm unplugged from the world except for occasional Zoom calls with random folks. Which are good, and I appreciate them, but still.

( More thoughts on people, motivation, energy and whatnot... )

My grandmother is in hospice care. So we're headed to Texas. We'll see if we get there in time.

British Airways is *not* making the whole thing any easier. Neither are U.S. covid-test requirements.

We'll see if we make our connection in Phoenix to Houston. This was not our original booking to Houston, after going through not our original booking out of Inverness. We started going at 6am British time this morning, sorta launched from the hotel, and we just haven't gotten a chance to stop all day with all the airport chaos and stuff going wrong. Though I guess I'm in hour six of a ten-hour flight right now, so it's more of a "forward-planning for what we already know is wrong" kind of restful.

Krissy has been awesome, as always. She's really good at travel, even when the travel is really not cooperating. The kids have been troopers, especially about just how many hours of go-go-go we're requiring from them.

It's a little bit exhilarating, in a "let's not do this again any time soon" sort of way. Krissy's already looking forward to getting home so we can not do this for another 2.5-3 years. I'll be travelling a bit more (London in April, Helsinki in October) for conferences. But it's hard to be all that enthused about it, right now or in general. Being somewhere is cool. Travel has never been an activity I enjoyed for its own sake.

I am, however, posting this from an airplane. So that feels a little bit magical.