Mamihlapinatapai

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.