how's your week going, Beehaw

Probably commented the same before but; the horrors persist, yet so do I. Everything is different and difficult. I am tired of living in interesting times. I want boring back.

Getting into the second week of my new job after a mostly relaxing weekend. The first week was fine, mostly tiring because there were a lot of impressions, but I'm really happy with the soft landing my new colleagues arranged for me.

Yesterday (Sunday) I finally got to run the 10k I've been training for since July. It was my main motivator to get out of the house and stay busy while I was looking for a new job, so the timing couldn't have been better. Last week I didn't run at all because of the new job, but I didn't need to anyway. All went well and I'm very happy to say I ran a new personal record at 47:30 mins :)

Don't really know yet if I'll try to keep in shape for future races but for now I'm definitely resting my legs, hehe.

been offering moral support for a friend who is (was?) renting a house in black mountain (western NC). they still have no power or water, and they can't get their cars down from the mountain because the road is still blocked by a ton of trees. they were able to get a friend to pick them up at the end of their road at the bottom of the mountain at least.

got to see zach galifianakis and josh stein (NC governor candidate) on saturday which was neat.

ordered an oak tree that is going to replace the maple we had to cut down in the front yard last year. picking that up on saturday.

echo is currently going through an online scent work class which has been fun. loki and jean started agility lessons back up now that the weather is a smidge cooler.

I got a new tattoo yesterday of a couple of mourning doves. The artist working on me was working around some ticklish areas. I kept jumping at all the light touches when she was wiping away excess ink from the area so I asked her to use a bit more pressure when she was working there. She laughed and said no one has ever asked her to be more rough but I was twitching a whole lot less after I asked. Other than that, it was nice to have a quiet mind for a few hours. Getting a tattoo is the closest thing to meditation I'll ever get.

Also, I'm going to a party this weekend and am both excited and anxious. I think it might be a techno party but the organizers of the party host events for queer people to meet each other. It's going to be loud which is awful for me when trying to talk to others. I usually go dance by myself because I'm there for the music but this time I'll have to try and meet some people. I'm hoping since the event is for meeting new people that things will work itself out. We'll see how the night goes.

Still rough. I know I've talked a lot about walking away from a toxic friend group. I stayed in touch with one guy and we've been joined at the hip. Well, we got into a fight that felt (to me) sudden and unfair. I thought I could make peace because I know we're both under a lot of stress and don't actually want to fight, but he stopped talking to me. It's been a little over a week and I'm not really at 100%, still getting used to being lonely.

I have a hangout planned with my niece so that should be fun at least. If anyone knows any good crafts for a second grader, let me know! She wants to be an artist so the more room for creativity, the better.

I'm starting to think I would be happier in a different relationship than I am in. Not with anyone in particular, we just fight a lot and maybe it's time to stop

My parents live south of Tampa Bay, so it's been a couple days of watching the radars and checking up on them. All went ok luckily!

In other news this weekend is (Canadian) Thanksgiving with my partners family and her suddenly(?) transphobic brother so that'll be possibly fine, possibly a shitshow, we'll see.

My week is going well, I was watching a Veritasium video about QR codes. About 20 minutes in he talks about some sort of complicated maths that I do not understand but the idea behind QR codes is cool. It actually got me thinking about how archive.org went down and how cool it would be to have a code that holds lots of information for preservation. I was thinking each square could represent a single character based on its hex colour once all characters are used other hex colours could be used to store combinations of characters. Idk how practical it would be but if the size of the .png/.webp size can get smaller than the size of the information stored it would be really useful for data preservation.

I watched "the boy and the heron" and after the final scenes I couldn't stop crying, which really surprised me. Since then I am regularly more emotional, that movie seemed to have kicked something loose for me..

It's only Monday, but so far things are going really well on multiple fronts. The last couple of weeks have been pretty stressful, and I'm finally feeling like I can catch my breath and relax a bit. I have a four day weekend coming up, during which some friends will be in town staying at our place. And the big news is that my partner accepted a fully remote job offer, which means we'll be moving after this school year ends. It will definitely be bittersweet, but I'm looking forward to being closer to family.

Today happened someyhing unexpected.

I can't understand why people continue to live in such a treacherous region of the States. They should have learned by now to leave that hurricane hellscape...