Trismegistus

Wednesday evening Irish step resumed after the summer break. But instead of 10 am on Saturday, class is now at 7:30 pm on Wednesdays. As someone who's usually in bed by 9:00 I was a bit concerned about whether I'd have the energy for this, but having slept through almost the entire day (more on this later) I certainly did.

About half of the core group from the previous three sessions is back and it was great to see everyone again. There are a lot of new people who also seem very cool, so that's nice. I had not been practicing as frequently as I should have been (especially toward the end of the break) but previously tricky stuff came more easily; it's good to know that my brain had been consolidating everything we learned during the break instead of forgetting it all.

Tuesday evening was Weird Al Yankovic, which, it goes without saying, was fabulous. As a bonus he performed at a venue that lets lawn ticket holders bring their own food and drinks, and I cannot tell you how wonderful this is. You can get to the venue before doors, grab a good spot once you're in, and just relax and enjoy a massive picnic until the show starts instead of going hungry and thirsty for 2+ hours or cursing the world because they're somehow charging $40 for a 12 ounce can of the shittiest domestic "beer" and heat lamp tater tots.

We went with M.O., a party member from Oldest D&D Game (alas his wife stayed home with a recovering kiddo), and two of the Geek BBQ crew (a third had a seat in the arena, so we never managed to catch up him) and spent the time between doors and the opener chatting D&D and Assassin's Creed Shadows.

The opener was Puddles Pity Party, who we were vaguely aware of as a previous opening act for Primus. He was very entertaining and I would definitely see him again. He has stage presence, a great voice, and a wickedly sly sense of musical humor. For instance, he added little musical quotes from Disturbed's The Sickness to his cover of Little Roger and the Goosebumps' Stairway to Gilligan's Island...but you had to already know Disturbed to catch them; he did not point out what they were. There were a bunch of other moments like that, too, and I just really appreciate people with the confidence to trust that the audience will either get the punch line without rubbing their nose in it, or enjoy the performance without realizing there was a joke at all. I'm sure there were a bunch of other musical references I did miss, and I enjoyed the show anyway.

And then, holy crap, Weird Al. This was the third time we've seen him live and he just gets better. He is so talented, and such a consummate performer, and you can tell he is having the time of his life on stage. He opened with Tacky--a personal favorite--and things just got better from there. I was really hoping he'd play Foil, which I've never seen live but thought there was a good chance would be on the set list as Lorde has a new album out. But alas, it was not to be. (Maybe it's too expensive to perform now that Lorde has a new album out?) But he did do Mission Statement, Party in the CIA, Smells Like Nirvana, and Dare To Be Stupid, which I loved given that Devo were local heroes when I was growing up. Then he performed Fat, complete with the costume, at which point the GC turned to me and said, "...This has not aged well, has it?"

And no, it hasn't. I know it's historically one of your biggest hits, dude, but maybe retire it?

Anyway, after that he played eBay, Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me, White & Nerdy (for which I popped), and Amish Paradise. The encore included Yoda and The Saga Begins (for which the Geek BBQ crewmembers popped). And then it was time to go home.

We got back to the car and out of the venue in under 15 minutes--record time, compared to the hour+ it's taken us after previous shows we've seen there. We drove M.O. to congenial place to grab an uber sans surge pricing and then headed home, congratulating ourselves on how early it all was.

( Haha. )

Which was why I slept through most of Wednesday. So that was a bit of a damper on an otherwise fabulous show, but at least we ended up waiting somewhere relatively safe and came out of it having lost nothing more than several hours out of of our lives and a good night's sleep.

これで以上です。

...with June's falling on this weekend. It was grand. There were four of us at final count; we sat down to read at 11:30 and didn't stop until 6:15 pm. The only time anyone spoke was when one of us got up to get more tea and asked if anyone else wanted any, too. I love that I can do this, and that I know multiple people who are also happy to spend their weekends doing this. (And it's even better now because having those other people with me means that when I sit down to read a book, I actually read the book, instead of pushing through a page or two and then picking up my phone "for just a minute" and doomscrolling updates about things I have no ability to affect for hours on end.)

I finished Kara Cooney's When Women Ruled the World, which was an incredibly frustrating book and Maggie O'Farrel's Hamnet, which was an incredibly good one (but which left me as melancholy as if I had doomscrolled the news for hours on end).

Afterwards we popped over to Near BBQ and introduced one of the SSRers to one of the employees, a Geek BBQ alum whom we hadn't seen in ages and with whom it was great to catch up. Then we walked SSRer A to the metro, with a short interlude to kill 30+ lanternfly nymphs on the way.( Read more... )

All in all, a pretty good weekend.

これで以上です。

To slightly misquote John Oliver, ( It has been a busy three weeks. )I also got some reading in.

What I Finished Reading This Week

The Bee Sting – Paul Murray
This is an outstanding book with a horrifically bad ending. I am hard pressed to think of another book with such incredibly incisive characterizations: Murray writes sympathetic, flawed, and utterly believable characters. And I mean all of them—not just the main characters, or the male characters, or the preteen characters, or the educated characters—all of them. The motivations are spot on. The actions and reactions are spot on. The dialogue is spot on. The inner monologues are spot on. The humor is sly and wickedly funny, the sad parts are tragic, and the tension in the tense scenes is through the roof.

But oh my god, the ending. ( Read more... )

I am still incredibly glad I read this book. It is 99 percent excellent, one of the consistently best novels I have read. But oh, if only that last 1 percent had been different.


What I Finished Reading Two Weeks Ago

Gardener’s Magic and Other Old Wives’ Lore – Bridget Boland
So this is absolutely a novelty book, essentially the pre-Internet equivalent of a listicle or low-calorie trivia article. But as I have an enduring interest in the subject matter, it’s attractively illustrated and typeset on high-quality paper, and I enjoy the pre-social media version of "lighthearted and breezy voice" that Boland writes in, it worked quite well for me.


What I Finished Reading Three Weeks Ago

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – Lindsay Gibson
Overall, this was a pretty good book. I very much appreciated that unlike other psychology/self-help authors, Gibson does not belabor her points. She’ll state a fact or observation once, in plain language, and that’s it. There’s almost no bloat here, and it’s refreshing and lovely.

Additionally, I found Gibson’s insights pretty sound, especially in the latter five of the book’s 10 chapters, which deal with how to set boundaries, rethink your relationship with emotionally immature parents, avoid falling into old patterns—both with your internal narratives and with your interactions with parents, and how to ride out extinction events (although Gibson herself does not refer to them as such).

It’s not a perfect book; the first few chapters in particular are a little too “You, wounded reader, are without blemish” to my eye; there’s affirming the reader's experience and there’s writing as though the reader can do no wrong and their parents no right, and that's a little too black-and-white to be realistic to my eye.

In general, the early chapters would have benefited from more intellectual rigor. ( Read more... ) This is frustrating—doubly so, given how insightful the latter half of the book is—but overall, the book's strengths outweigh its weaknesses and I'm glad I read it.


What I Am Currently Reading

Tomb of Dragons – Katherine Addison
On the one hand, I am stoked to read this. On the other hand, once I read this, the trilogy will be over.

Milkman - Anna Burns
I’m just shy of 60 percent of the way through, and it’s been consistently excellent.

The Legend of Robin Goodfellow – Phineas Cricket
I will finish this book tonight.

The Year in Ireland – Kevin Danaher
I read up to the section on Easter.

Scotland’s Forgotten Past – Alastair Moffat
I read the first of this book’s 80 chapters on said forgotten past, which deals with the geological and tectonic developments that created the Scottish landmass.

Winters in the World – Eleanor Parker
I read up to the section on Easter in this volume too.

Sex and Marriage in Ancient Ireland – Patrick Power
I’ll finish this volume today as well.


What I’ve Also Been Reading Over The Past Three Weeks

Irish Tin Whistle Tutorial vol. I – Mary Bergin
I continued revising the first seven or so chapters.

The Mars House – Natasha Pulley
I read a few more chapters, but ultimately put this one on hold to concentrate on The Bee Sting and Milkman.

How Computers Work – Ron White
I finished the chapters on databases and disc drives.


What I’m Reading Next

This week I acquired Katherine Addison's Tomb of Dragons, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Francine Oomen’s Hoe overleef ik Alles Wat ik Niemand Vertel, Patrick Power’s Sex and Marriage in Ancient Ireland, and Robert Vuijsje’s Alleen Maar Mette Mensen.

Last week I acquired Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone, Michael Hultquit's The Spicy Food Lovers' Cookbook, John Mansfield Thomson's The Cambridge Companion to the Recorder, and Biggest Book of Slow Cooker Recipes (no author credited).

Three weeks ago I acquired 이국종's 골든아워1 and 골든아워2 (Lee Gukjeong's Golden Hour vols. 1 & 2).


これで以上です。

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Alas, Saturday’s snow turned out to be an utter bust, in that zero of the predicted 1-2 inches actually fell. Cloudless + cold is the absolute worst way for weather to do winter and I will never acclimate to it.

Sunday, combined session 0/1 with newest D&D group went really well! The campaign is a soft reboot for the DM, who’d lost most of her original players to scheduling conflicts. The GC and I came onboard because the DM’s good friend is one of the players in the TTOS campaign and extended the invite to us. This one looks like it will be incredible fun: the DM is new but has done her homework and ran a really excellent session 0 in terms of setting out group dynamics, expectations, redlines, and backstory. All of the five players (half of whom are new to the game) seem really cool and the group had good cohesion from the get-go. We’re tentatively scheduled to play every other week, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this campaign develops.

Even cooler: I mentioned during introductions that I play Irish flute. TTOS Player did a literal double take and said “No way, I’m a fiddler!” We’ve both been playing since we were kids, she plays now with a local contra dance group, and is going to make introductions so that I can play with them too. As most of the local sessions here either died during covid or moved their communication and organizing to facebook (and sorry, nope, not even ITM can convince me to sign up to use that garbage) getting an in-person intro to a group is huge. Plus, someone I already considered very awesome shares not one but two niche interests with me, which is pretty great. 🥳

Longest D&D campaign had a session Monday, following a two-week hiatus. We got some major world and character backstory explanation in, which was a nice change following the previous two sessions of grueling combat.

AEW Collision this week was great fun, in no small part because the GC’s best and oldest friend had ringside seats, so we got to watch him watch the matches, in a mirror image of him watching us watch the matches at Dynamite last year.

Yesterday’s snow actually managed a respectable amount of accumulation. (Of course, opm bungled its response both yesterday and today, once more screwing employees who don't have telework authorization). I took a long walk in it after work, and was virtually the only person outside, so the atmosphere was lovely. I'm going to take at least one more hike today before the predicted rain melts it all away.

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The promised heat has reliably arrived when promised; the promised rain, alas, rarely has. (But when it has, it's reliably been when I'm out and about trying to do something and not when I'm at home armed with a book and a chair on the balcony ready to enjoy it.)

Despite uncooperative weather, though, we've been up to a fair amount recently:

And So I Watch You From Afar & Caspian: We had tickets to see Caspian and Maserati in 2024, but then, you know, the world ended. So we were very happy not only to get a chance to actually see Caspian, but see them with ASIWYFA, who are one of the post rock greats mainstays I never thought I'd have a chance to see live, given that they're based in Belfast.( Read more... ) Just a really great show all around.

July Crab Feast with the standard GBBQ suspects. Intended to be outdoors, but reliably, it rained. So we crammed into a GBBQ member's garage, and ate a ton.

GBBQ Dinner Intended to be outdoors, but reliably, it rained. So we crammed into Host's apartment and ate a ton of seven pepper steaks, swordfish, greens, corn, you name it (although pan fried, alas, not grilled). Also excellent was discovering that Host is a huge post metal fan. Also also excellent was discovering that Other Guest, who all already knew was a metal fan, is also into tarot; he recced me a book on A.E. Waite that I hadn't know about yet.

In gaming news, I am really enjoying:

MtG Bloomburrow is probably my favorite set in...I don't know how long. The art is my mental images of Redwall, Wind in the Willows, and Beatrix Potter all rolled up onto physical cards and I love it. Forget playing with this set, I just want to look at it. Seriously guys, these cards are a mood.

Xadia Yes to all the Dragon Prince content, please. The graphics are good, the production is good, and I love spending more time with all these characters...now if it would just stop being so buggy...


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Job continues to be awesome; it's a mark of just how awesome that the commute only started to wear on my this week. (But wear it has. On top of spending hours in the car, I see anywhere from one to four wrecks a day.) But at least it inspires me to do stuff on the weekends, because barring any special events, I'm pretty much coming home, making dinner, and going to bed most weekdays.

Geek BBQ: Last Saturday was lovely and rainy, and then obliged by letting up in the evening so we could walk to Geek BBQ and do the collage-making event one of the regulars was hosting. The last time I collaged was *mumblemumble* decades ago, when I started an (as yet unfinished) deck of Tarot cards, so it was a lot of fun to return to after so long. I ended up doing a double-sided 10x10 inch square with a mixture of nature imagery, Babylonian ruins, and bits and pieces of Phlegm murals.

Concerts: We missed actual Geek BBQ night to go see a show instead, namely Sleater-Kinney. I cannot overstate how excited I was about this show. I had to jump through hoops to buy my first Sleater-Kinney album back in the day, because no one within a four-hour drive would carry it. A Sleater-Kinney t-shirt was—no joke—the second thing I ever bought on the World Wide Web. (I had to go to the bank, buy a cashier's check, put it in the actual postal mail, and then wait for said mail to get to Oregon, for whoever ran Sleater-Kinney's website to cash the check and mail my t-shirt to me, without really knowing if and when I'd get it. Insane compared to the situation today.)

Anyway, the plan was to walk the four-odd miles to the venue's neighborhood, get dinner at another nearby venue, and then head over to the show itself ( but it didn't exactly work out that way. ) Such a great show and I was on an endorphin high from it for a day.

D&D: Another session with Oldest D&D Group this week. We had a pretty intense battle in which I got to play around with some fun warlock capabilities. And I think we might have unleashed a lich into the wild. ...Oops? (I'm sure this will in no way come back to haunt us. DX)

St. Paddy's Day (Observed) We didn't participate in the parade this year because: scheduling conflict, but as a consolation prize Aslin released a limited edition imperial stout—Special Flute—today. (And with a name like that, how could I not try it.) I got two (because the GC knocked my first glass over) and it was very good. It's very close to Padrino (in fact, I suspect it's almost exactly the same thing). Afterward we grabbed some ingredients for the session with Second Oldest D&D Group tomorrow, and I bought a button fern, because.

Building Bullshit: Downstairs woke us up twice at 2 am this week having their regularly scheduled fights. I came downstairs this morning to find Overnight Security Guard and Day Concierge dropping more F-bombs than I've ever heard packed into a discrete amount of seconds (and I say this as a frequent F-bomb dropper myself).

Choice quote:

"These are motherfucking adults and the fucking management company expects us to fucking baby-fucking-sit their motherfucking asses."

Both plan to quit, which would mark the third pair to do so in the last five? six? weeks.

The anger and disgust were apparently occasioned by several individuals who, ( after being banned from the building earlier this week ... )

So the Tenants Association Board had office hours downstairs this morning, and the GC and I, and a bunch of other people went down to talk to them about this stuff and everything else that's been going on. More than one person was advocating for better treatment for the day and overnight personnel, so hopefully something comes of it, because said people deserve it.

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Job stuff! February found me commuting to a new worksite that requires 2+ hours in the car each day, which has significantly cut down on the leisure time things I'm able to do in a day. That said, the work is awesome, and I'm having a blast doing it while I'm onsite.

Concerts! This time, Falling in Reverse and Disturbed.

I knew more about the drama surrounding Falling in Reverse (even predating the Paige/Suraya connection) than I did their music, which turned out to be...fine. It wasn't bad in a concert venue setting but also wasn't anything distinguished enough that I'd seek it out again on my own. What did distinguish the band was the lead singer publicly berating a member of his stage crew, at length and by name, after something apparently went wrong toward the end of the show. Like, dude, you have just generated a lot of sympathy from me for someone, and it isn't you. Super gross and unnecessary, particularly when it became clear the lead singer wasn't even capable of generating entry-level stage patter to fill the silence after he'd finished dropping f-bombs on the stage hand.

Disturbed, on the other hand, was excellent as ever. We'd seen them live last summer (with Jinjer and Breaking Benjamin), so the stage set and much of the set list were pretty familiar, but man they put on a good show. Just a ton of energy and excitement, which is exactly what I wanted from the experience. The audience energy was great: people were as into it as we were.

Side note: the Baltimore concert tee bootleggers' game is fabulous. Por ejemplo: they didn't even bother to photoshop out the vendor "low tix" warning icons out of screencap they used for the dates on their Disturbed bootleg tee. These guys dngaf and it's great.

Bonus beer: We had dinner at The Brewer's Art, whose Resurrection abbey brown ale I'm a big fan of. The food was great and so were the other beers, particularly their GPT green peppercorn trippel and Daytrip to Yorkshire English old ale.

Building Bullshit! Has been so egregious and frequent I've stopped posting about it as it happens. Suffice to say that the building was on fire three times in February, the upstairs tenants flooded our kitchen and closet again when they got high and failed to turn off the faucet in their kitchen again, and our bathroom flooded again after the management company failed to fix the crumbling pipes in our again. We called maintenance at 3:00 in the afternoon when we came home and discovered the problem, but wouldn't you know? The maintenance number listed on the building website and provided to the concierge and answering service was wrong—as has been the case since January when the building manager was first notified of the issue.

But wait! There's more!

On top of that, the management company erroneously sent out notices informing tenants that we hadn't paid rent and that the management company was going to initiate eviction proceedings, again. (Seriously, this is the third time this has happened in the last six months, and the notices to go pretty much everyone in the building, including people like us who religiously pay rent on the 1st of each month.)

This is especially ironic given that the management company didn't think to position the cameras they finally agreed to install in the lobby in such a way as to cover the rent drop box, which was robbed. (Following the robbery, the management company helpfully sent letters to tenants saying that we were responsible for making sure management company received our rent on time, would need to submit payment again if our payments were among those stolen from the rent drop box, and that tenants were responsible for assuming any costs associated with cancelling checks that had been stolen from the rent drop box, which management suggested that we do.

TL;DR—you would think that after this, the management company would reposition the cameras to cover the rent drop box.

WELL. THEY DID NOT.

And it was robbed again. Rinse, repeat. Following this, the management company informed tenants that they were doing away with the rent drop box and that everyone would have to submit payments electronically in the future. This is fine for us, but not for other folks in the building, for specific reasons. Following intervention from the Tenants' Association and city authorities, the management company has informed us that they will be installing a new rent drop box behind the concierge desk. Hopefully they don't put it in a camera blindspot this time.

D&D! Season Three of Oldest D&D Group's homebrew campaign reconvened. The party continues to be as ineptfective as ever. Por ejemplo: across two sessions, we somehow ended up guarding a caravan, ambushed the brigands who were trying to ambush us and defeated them by, among other things, conjuring octopi to drop on their heads, lost half the caravan to hobgoblin raiders, and then ended up with twice as many wagons after we raided the raiders, in a process that happened to involve polymorphing various party members into horses and setting a lot of things on fire.

Second Oldest D&D Group's Saltmarsh campaign reconvened, with a marathon seven-hour battle session that honestly was a bit of a slog, at least for me. (I'm the only player in the group who doesn't use my phone during sessions. In a bid to get the others to pay attention, the DM gave them four additional units to control. This did not lead to less phone usage but resulted in my having one attack per the other players' three to nine, each turn. Ugh.) Things picked up in the following sessions, however, once the DM rebalanced the play mechanics. Subsequent sessions have featured a lot of great combats against some pretty tough critters, as well as the chance use do outside-the-box tactics to defeat them.

D&D Pt. II! We randomly ran into two of the players from Third Oldest D&D Group while out preparing for Geek BBQ Mardi Gras (for which, see below). This group's campaign has been on hiatus since last summer, but will be starting back up again. That was welcome news. Furthermore, as it's an online campaign, I hadn't actually seen these guys in the flesh since the Beforetimes, so it was delightful to have run into them.

D&D Pt. III! Boy, I was not in the headspace to handle BG3 last summer. Last month, I jettisoned my previous games and started fresh. I am definitely in the headspace for it now. I'm really enjoying the tie-ins to Escape from Avernus, and wondering whether any of the Shar/Selûne stuff that's being hinted at ties back in any way to Shar/Selûne developments in BG/BG2 EE. Also, holy crap, this is a great game.

Deadpool 3 Trailer Release Party! Which also apparently involved some sort of major sporting event? IDEK. 😛 At any rate, the food and company were fabulous. I brought a ginger carrot miso dip that people seemed to really like, and people really liked the Aslin sour—Durango Doug—we brought.

Bonus beer: I also picked up a four-pack of Aslin's Orchid imperial stout + vanilla that may be one of my favorite things they've done since Padrino.)

Gaelg! The mid-February holiday meant I was actually able to join in to an online speaking thing. It was exceptionally fun, especially because this is one of the nichest of my niche interests. (Prior to a few years ago, I figured this was a language I would never actually get to, you know, speak to anyone with.) It's weirdly one of the languages I find most intuitive, and I was able to make some decently complex sentences. I got complements on my accent, too. And again, it's just a bunch of fun to be actively using it.

Geek BBQ! Following on the heels of Geek BBQ Friendsgiving, Geek BBQ whiskey white elephant, and Geek BBQ dessert potluck, Geek BBQ put together a Mardi Gras potluck. The music was excellent, the decorations were excellent, and I probably ate my body weight in homemade jambalaya and gumbo. Very good stuff with a very good group of people.

Ice Skating 2.No! Geek BBQ friend called out of the blue one morning to invite us to a free skate at the ice complex. We were skeptical we'd be able to make it in time but were ultimately won over by friend's enthusiasm. Fast forward a hectic 40 minutes later when friend called back to say that they + friend 3 weren't going after all. Luckily, we had not actually paid for the skate yet. We had, however, jettisoned our lazy day in to trek out to the suburbs. What to do? We ended up having brunch at a favorite old venue, which happened to be showing a Scotland vs. Wales rugby match to a probable majority of the area's very enthusiastic fans. It was great energy and a lot of fun.

Karaoke! We decided to eat dinner at a newly opened Thai place before going to Geek BBQ. The food was excellent. We were the only people in the place aside from the server and the manager, who coincidentally happened to be there. Which was amazingly fortuitous and cool, because they invited us into the basement, which they had converted into a karaoke bar, and we got to sing. For free. Whatever and for as long as we wanted. I knocked out a significant portion of Roxette's back catalogue and it was spectacular.

LNY! We went out for dim sum with second oldest D&D group. Our intended destination was a bust (pro tip: do not try to go eat somewhere in a busy shopping center during a major holiday where the parking lot has been converted into stages, seating, and booths). Luckily, we knew of a second dim sum place nearby with really great food, went there, and ate ourselves silly.

What's my language progress look like?

This month I primarily blew through the supplementary hangeul lessons. These are surprisingly useful because I learned Korean directly through hangeul, which means that I never actually learned how to romanize it.

• Chinese — 1/5 through Unit 5; legendary through Unit 2
• Dutch — 4/5 through Unit 3; legendary through Unit 1
• Gaelic — 4/5 through Unit 6; legendary through Unit 3
• Hindi — 1/2 through Unit 2; backburnered until I wrap up a physical textbook
• Indonesian — 1/5 through Unit 11; legendary through Unit 6
• Japanese — 1/5 through Unit 21; legendary through Unit 16
• Korean — 1/2 through Unit 8; legendary through Unit 5
• Latin — 4/5 through Unit 2; legendary through Unit 1
• Welsh — 1/2 through Unit 1; backburnered in favor of a physical textbook

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...because it was the 24th and we weren't there for it. (Apparently this one was cooking-related and the firefighters put it out before it could spread to any other units.)

Today I was just wrapping up my evening walk when the GC called me. "Don't bother coming home," he said. ( Read more... )

これで以上です。

Barely a week passed between the festival and our next live music outing: ( Bully, Franz Ferdinand, and Pixies. )

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I was getting ready to go to bed last night when I heard a sound like water pouring from a tap into a bathtub. It was coming from my microwave.

Needless to say, this is not a sound my microwave typically makes. We unplugged it and pulled it out from the wall. The noise continued. I set about emptying items from the adjoining cupboard while the GC went around the island (the microwave is set into an interior wall) to check out the closet on the other side.

"Did you hear anything?" I asked.

"No," came the reply.

So I went around for a look myself. Not only did I definitely hear the something, but...

( Well. )

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