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A long December, and there’s reason to believe…

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On January 1, 2013

In Blog

…maybe this year will be better than the last.

To be honest, 2012 wasn’t a bad year, as such. It was a slow and frustrating year. It was the year of holding still, the year of planning, the year of being restless and unable to proceed. And now, having run in place for so long, things are about to move very quickly, indeed.

As of today, I am a professional hobo. At least, for a time. I will be aggressively looking for new employment as soon as we get to Seattle, which we will do within the month, but for now, I am an agent without portfolio for the first time since 1996. I have no words to describe how utterly weird that is to me. Yesterday, I went out to lunch with my manager and those of my team who were in the office that day. I’m going to miss working with them (though I have a suspicion they will miss working with me more).

Over the next week, my primary focus will be on packing and shifting things to the storage unit, and planning how to pack what we’re bringing with us. Because of the financial uncertainty brought about by not having our income locked down, we’re choosing to leave most of what we’ll eventually move in a storage unit here in Georgia, to be sent for when we know the money won’t be needed for rent and food and such. After that, it’s crunch time for Gafilk, and I have plenty to do in the leadup for that to keep me busy until we actually have the con and then we’ll hit the road.

One of the things I’d like to try and do in the new year is write more, and in particular write more in this journal. For a variety of reasons, I stopped posting much a few years ago; primarily, it was because what was mostly on my mind at the time wasn’t really for public reading, and then I fell out of the habit. But when I go back and re-read my journal from 1999-2006, I like how so much of what was going in my life was documented there, and I dislike the big empty silent place my journal turns into. Of course, it’s harder due to the fact that fewer and fewer people are participating here, and I’m a comment-driven writer to a certain extent, but since I’m mostly writing for myself, I should be able to get up a regular schedule. Expect to see my prattle on a bit in the common weeks, and possibly live-blog our drive across country.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful turning of the year, and may your 2013 be full of health, magic, and prosperity.

RIP Dayna (1998-2012)

By

On December 6, 2012

In Blog

Nearly fifteen years ago, shortly after our apartment burned down and we had moved into a townhouse in Norcross, our neighbor asked a_blue_moon_cat and I if we’d be willing to adopt a couple of kittens. She’d rescued the mother from the parking lot of her workplace, and she had two that she’d been unable to find homes for. We already had two cats at the time, but the kittens were adorable, and we decided to take them on. We named them Tarrant and Dayna, continuing the Blake’s Seven theme our other two cats shared.

When a_blue_moon_cat and I split up a few years later, she kept all four cats, but a couple of years after that asked me if I’d take one of them, as she was about to move and didn’t think she could find a rental that would let her bring in four cats. We agreed to take Dayna.

Dayna was a neurotic cat even by feline standards. Wild-eyed and curious, she loved sounds, and would frequently rattle blinds or scratch the sides of boxes just to hear the sound they made. She was convinced the knowledge of mankind could be hers if only she could eat enough magazines, and any periodical left within her grasp soon looked like it had been attacked by a confetti punch.

She was often shy about attention, but she always liked being near people, if not quite within arms reach. In recent years, and especially since our other cat Jenna passed away she’d become much friendlier, and spent many a night curled up between [personal profile] kitanzi and me while we watched television, and she slept many nights on the bed with us, purring contently to be near.

As we prepared to make the move to Seattle, the question of how best to move Dayna was discussed. She had become older and frailer as her years advanced, and she’d lost some weight recently which concerned us. We took her to the Cat Clinic in Roswell, which had been her vets her entire life, and they checked her over and found some early kidney disease, but otherwise found her to be in good health for a cat her age. They gave her some meds to help with that and to clear up a small infection, and said she should be fine. As we got closer to Thanksgiving, I again raised concern to the vet, and they even did an ultrasound to rule out any early cancers. The vet cleared her for travel, saying our only concern was finding something she liked to eat to get her up to a healthier weight.

She flew back to Seattle with runnerwolf, who would take good care of her and help get her settled into our new home. But it quickly became obvious that she was continuing to fade. Tonight, Beth called me, a couple of hours ago, and said “I don’t think she’s going to last much longer.” We discussed her condition, and I asked her to put the phone down where Dayna could hear me. I said “Dayna….we love you. If you need to go, it’s okay. We understand.” Beth says that when I spoke to her, she flicked her ears a couple of times, and a few moments later peacefully slipped away.

In her last days, as in all her life, she was pampered and loved by those around her. She had a long and full life, and in the end her suffering was minimal. I wasn’t ready for this, and I will miss her more than I have any words for…she’s been a constant presence in my life for 15 years, and you are never really prepared to say goodbye.

Farewell, Dayna-cat. I love you, always.

Gafilk announces 2013 Super Secret Guest: Larry Niven

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On December 1, 2012

In Blog

Author Larry Niven has won Hugos (five of them) and a Nebula, and various other awards for his stories, including Ringworld and 50 other books. He co-authored The Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer, and edited the Man-Kzin War series. He also loves filk music. He goes out of his way to attend filk conventions on the west coast, not seeking any attention, not asking for any of the perks that authors usually expect like readings and signings. He goes to filk cons because he wants to hear this music.

Misty Lackey even created a game around Larry’s love of filk called “Make Larry Cry”. It’s not very hard to do. You just write a beautiful melody and fill it with poignant, compelling lyrics…and make sure that the science is at the very least plausible, and sing it to Larry. (Ask Bill Sutton about his humbling attempt to win the contest with Pilot’s Eyes.)

Mendel’s Rules do apply, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that there are other filkers in the Niven closet. In fact, you’ll be enjoying the song styling of Larry’s filking nephew, Tim Griffin, at the ConCom’s Choice concert. (Who knew!?!) Larry Niven is very approachable, enjoys a good conversation, and contributes to the circle in his own delightful ways. We’re extremely happy to have him as Super Secret Guest for GAFilk 2013.

You can get more information (and buy your membership!) at http://www.gafilk.org/

Now Why Would I Ever Stop Doing This?

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On November 15, 2012

In Blog

Actual conversations at my house:

Me: “So, sure, lots of people know that’s called a ball-peen hammer, but they may not know that it’s called that because the peen of the hammer is shaped like a ball, rather than it just being a weird name for a hammer.
Her: “Right, it could have been invented by Joe Ballpeen.”
Me: “A claw hammer is technically a claw-peen hammer. All hammers have a peen”
Her: “True, true.”
Me: “All boy hammers do, at least.”
Her: “What would a girl hammer look like?”

Sleeping on a planter at the Port Authority…

By

On October 24, 2012

In Blog

I’m often amused to see what Twitter bots follow you based on what you post there. All manner of random commercial enterprises have suddenly followed me after a casual(and often completely devoid of context) reference to a product, place, or activity. Tourism sites, personal trainers, rap DJs…its like a bizarre form of bingo where no one ever wins anything.

This happens to a lesser degree on Livejournal, particularly if you haven’t disabled anonymous comments. But it’s fairly uncommon, at least enough so that I never really gave it a lot of thought, until this particular post began to attract the spambots. I’ve deleted at least five in the last couple of weeks.

I wonder what there is about my amusing but inconsequential exchange with a drugstore clerk has attracted so much interest from the sub-sentient crawlers of the blogosphere? Most of them seem to be trying to sell me knock-off designer clothing or boots, which makes me suspect it was the paragraph about looking for vests. But their persistence is puzzling.

So I Turned Myself To Face Me

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On October 23, 2012

In Blog

Sometimes, you realise something about yourself so fundamentally obvious in hindsight that you’re not sure how it took you so long for it to occur to you.

I’ve been struggling a bit with my depression in recent weeks. Given the amount of slow-motion change in my life right now, that’s hardly surprising, but today, while thinking about a comment thread yesterday in osewalrus‘s Facebook page, something clicked in my brain that clarified to me why I’ve felt so unsettled.

I have two strong behavioural methods for temporarily punching up my mood: eating and buying things.

Neither of which I can really do right now.

I’m trying hard to get back on my fitness plan, which means I have a careful budget with regards to what and how much I can eat in a given day.

I’m saving up money to move across country in 3 months and need to be prepared to weather out a period of unemployment, so I can’t really shop for much of anything I don’t actually require.

It could be argued that neither of this are strictly healthy ways of dealing with stress and depression, but I’ve been me for a long time, and I know they both work, at least in the short term. And right now, for a variety for reasons, I’m denied their outlet.

Not sure what to do with this information presently, but there you have it.

Guess I got distracted, but hey at least I tried

By

On October 15, 2012

In Blog

This weekend involved a great deal of unproductive productivity brought on by having a better idea after having already implemented the not-as-good-idea.

See, in addition to a great number of books, we have a great many DVDs. I like movies and TV and over the years I’ve accumulated a great many of these, and while it makes for a really cool shelf look, they take up a lot of space. Because there’s no way we were going to watch the great majority of these between now and moving day, they were (along with the bulk of the library) the first things to get boxed up and moved into storage.

But then I got to thinking — we don’t know how long those are gonna have to stay in storage. And who knows what we’ll want to watch once we’re settled in. For at least a while, our entertainment options are going to be necessarily limited to cheap things, and “watching movies you already own” is as cheap as it gets.

So over the weekend, I initiated Project Recovery, which involved going to the storage unit, shifting through all the boxes to find the ones with DVDs in them. (Yes, it would have been helpful to have labelled them in the first place. Thanks for pointing that out.) My original plan was to go through each one there in the unit and move the actual discs into a very large binder I’d bought for the purpose. After one box of this, I decided this was a dumb idea, and loaded the remaining boxes of DVDs into the car and brought them home to complete this task in the air conditioning.

I still suspect there’s a few discs floating about, since I can’t find my dvd of “The Quantum of Solace” anywhere. But the vast majority of the DVDs have now been reduced from several banker-boxes worth of space into two enormous binders which together take up about the same amount of space as a piece of carry-on luggage. This will make it relatively trivial to bring all of them with us when we drive out in January.

(I also took the occasion to weed out some duplicates, including “Firefly” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, both of which have been upgraded to BluRay, and the first two seasons of M*A*S*H, made redundant when I gave kitanzi the “Medicine and Martinis” box set for Christmas a few years ago. I passed these on to Matt and Mary when they were here for dinner on Saturday.)

This is, I’m afraid, the limit of my useful productivity for the weekend, but I think it will reward us in a few months when we’re wishing our movie collection was closer to hand. 🙂

Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes…

By

On October 1, 2012

In Blog

While we’ve not made a secret of them, neither had either kitanzi and I made any general announcement of our upcoming plans. Part of this was due to a great number of open questions that made it difficult to make concrete plans, but as we approach the launching of the expidition, things are starting to fall into place. So here, in convenient FAQ form, is an announcement.

In January, we are moving to Seattle.

Wait…what?

Washington state, that is. Space needle…Eddie Vedder…[end gratuitous Todd Snider shoutout]

Why?

Well, that’s a complicated question with a complicated answer. The truth is…Atlanta isn’t the place I’d have chosen to live if I’d made an actual choice. I just sort of ended up here. I moved to Georgia originally to be closer to a_blue_moon_cat, who I was dating at the time. That relationship ended over ten years ago. As early as then I was evaluating whether I wanted to stay in Georgia for the long term. Then [personal profile] kitanzi moved down and we both had good jobs and it settled into a stasis.

But the truth is, I don’t really like Georgia. I like a lot of the people here, but the actual place I don’t like very much at all. So, in recent years, I started to think hard about where I’d rather be. Larissa only moved to Atlanta to move in with me, so she has no deep ties to the place, either. I had a list of cities that, based on my research, talking to people who lived there and my own travels, I felt would suit me better than here. And finally, after much deliberation and a lot of thought, we’ve decided where it is we want to live, and we’re going to make that happen.

This is all so sudden…

It probably seems so, if you’re learning about this from this post. But this is actually a decision several years in the making, and many months in the planning to actually go.

So, why Seattle?

It meets all my criteria for a place I’d want to live. It has a better climate to my tastes. (No, really.) It as an active filk and fannish community. The culture there is much more agreeable to us. And, as a bonus, it puts us substantially closer to a great many people we’d like to be substantially closer to. (It also puts us farther away from some people we’d rather not be farther away from, but that would be true of anywhere we moved, or even if we stood still. The algebra of our interpersonal relationships defies simple equations.)

Seattle was always in the top four or five places on our list. It moved to the top for a variety of reasons, but the simplest answer is, having visited on many occasions now, we just like the place, and it’s the sort of place I can see myself living on purpose, rather than by accident.

Do you have jobs lined up?

Nothing firm, as yet, though there are irons being placed into fires. But we’ve been saving the last year, putting aside funds to allow us to pull ups stakes and move and weather a period of unemployment. I feel confident we’ll be able to find something on the other side. (If you’re in the area or have contacts in the area who might be looking for a good unix sysadmin with superb customer service skills, drop me a line.)

Are you insane?

Almost certainly.

But if you move, what happens to Gafilk?

Nothing happens to it. I will continue to chair the convention, and Larissa will continue to be the treasurer. I have people I trust that are here to handle such tasks that require a local person, and we have a fabulous relationship with our host hotel, so we don’t need to scout new venues. There may come a time down the road where I hand off the reins to someone prepared to oversee Gafilk’s third decade and settle into the same emeritus role that bedlamhouse currently enjoys, but that won’t be soon, and in the meantime I plan to keep putting on the same con that we’ve all enjoyed for the last 15 years for as long as everyone keeps wanting to come to it.

So what’s the plan?

The plan, currently, is that I will end my current employment at the end of the year, and we
will stay through Gafilk. Once Gafilk is wrapped up, we drive west. Most of our things are in storage, and the rest will be by the time the con happens. [personal profile] runnerwolf, who will be our housemate once we move, is coming for Thanksgiving, and will take the cat back with her. We are driving across country, likely taking the southern route and up the coast to avoid crossing the high plains and mountains in the middle of winter, and plan to arrive in Seattle just in time for Conflikt.

I don’t know what will unfold over the first few months of 2013. I know it will be an adventure, and I’m looking forward to what the future will bring.

So….that’s what’s new with us.

When You’re Up On The Stage, It’s So Unbelievable

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On September 12, 2012

In Blog

Between 2005 and 2009, I didn’t play a lot of music in public. It wasn’t a decision I made to withdraw from the stage. It started because of struggles with depression that caused me to withdraw from a lot of social spheres, and then after I came out the other side of that particular emotional valley, I just…didn’t. No one was asking me if I wanted to, and I wasn’t volunteering, and the longer it went on, the more it just became…normal. This wasn’t just not doing concert sets or one shots; many have noted that I absented myself from open filk, preferring instead to spend my con time socialising or lurking around the edges.

The last couple of years, I’ve been making an effort to get back to playing public, because…I enjoy it. So I’ve made an effort at cons to make itto at least a little bit of open filk, if only to justify having brought my guitar. And when [livejournal.com profile] mrgoodwraith asked me at OVFF a couple of yearsago if I’d like to come play a short set at Confluence in 2011, I eagerly agreed. Unfortunately, just before I was to book my flight, [livejournal.com profile] kitanzi unexpectedly lost her job, and I couldn’t justify the expense. Randy understood, and extended an invitation to come up in 2012 instead.

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Jackie sits back, collects his thoughts for the moment…

By

On September 6, 2012

In Blog

“You know that feeling you get when you’re leaning back in a chair, and you lean back a little too far, and you start to tip over but then at the last minute you catch yourself?

I’m like that all the time.”
–Stephen Wright

It’s been an eventful summer. Not that you’d know that from following this journal, but it has. So I’ve got a few posts to make about recent events and future plans. If you’re still reading, you can expect them over the next few days.

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