Five Things Make a Post
Oct. 1st, 2017 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther1. Among the things I was not expecting to happen this month: finding Irn Bru on sale in the supermarket. It turns out it's fairly similar in taste and texture to a drink we have in Australia, but a much more interesting colour. (Although I have now read up on it, and apparently Australian Irn Bru isn't quite the same thing as Scottish Irn Bru, in the same way that Australian Mountain Dew, which I also remember finding less exotic than I'd expected, isn't quite the same thing as American Mountain Dew. Australia has some strict rules about what you're allowed to put in soft drinks, particularly when it comes to caffeine.)
2. Have been continuing the process of identifying sources of stress, or activities that I wasn't enjoying enough to justify the time I was spending on them, and letting them go so I have more time and energy for the activities I do value. I was worried for a while that I might find I didn't have anything left, but my enthusiasm for the Rep Club is undiminished, and although there are aspects of the band that I'm not enjoying, on the whole I think it's in the way that makes me want to stick around and try to fix them.
One thing I'm going to have to keep putting up with is my job, which I don't enjoy much and occasionally find myself explicitly thinking of as time taken away from doing something useful, but I don't have anything to replace it with. (For one thing, I am not sure, and don't know how to find out, whether the problem is this particular employer and set of working conditions, or this occupation, or me; so I don't know whether it could be fixed by finding a different employer, or a different occupation, or if I'm going to feel like this about any other job I might get.)
3. Speaking of the Rep Club, the long form improv show went well. It ended up being less ambitious than I pictured when I first heard about it: rather than improvising a single full-length play, we improvised a few short plays, about 15-20 minutes long each, and filled the rest of the evening with the more usual sort of one-scene improv games. Which is probably just as well, in retrospect; making up a full-length play as you go along is the kind of thing you need to work up to gradually. Anyway, we enjoyed it, and the audience enjoyed it, and the improv group is going to keep meeting and will maybe do another show next year.
4. The performing arts festival is over for another year. The instrumental music weekend went well, and included a massed band workshop where all the musicians who played on the weekend and any other interested local musicians were invited to come and play in one big band together. (I enjoyed it a lot, which apart from being good in itself was useful at a time when I was feeling down about playing in our local brass band, and trying to figure out whether it was that I'd lost interest or it was the band that wasn't doing it for me. I wish more of the people from the brass band had made it to the workshop.) The drama evening was good again, although some of the teenagers' self-devised pieces got a bit intense, with domestic abuse and murder and so on. Apparently, there's an actual project they do which involves delving into mental health issues and stuff, so they're not just leaping to these subjects on their own initiative; after some of the things they've come up with over the last few years, that's kind of a relief to know. The top prize went to the same actor as last year, and I'm going to be interested to see what he goes on to do.
5. A while ago, my shower developed a persistent drip, so after putting up with it for a bit in the hope it would go away, I decided to take another step into adulting and learn how to replace the little rubber bits inside taps. The most difficult part of it turned out to be finding a tool that would fit into the cavity and unscrew the tap fitting; I have a feeling the wall was tiled after the taps were installed, and the tiler didn't think to leave enough room. (I ended up making several trips to the hardware store in search of the right tool, and spent some time reflecting on the advantages I had in terms of time and disposable income that allowed me to persist and not give up and live with the drip.) When I did get it out, it was definitely the little rubber thing that was the culprit; the one on the hot tap was completely worn away, and when I'd replaced it (I did the cold tap too, to be on the safe side) the drip was gone. So was another problem the shower had been having where the amount of hot water would arbitrarily decide to have no connection to how much the hot tap was on, which I'd been putting up with for months on the assumption that it was down to a problem in the water heater that would be too expensive to fix. Part of why I assumed it was the heater and not the tap is that the kitchen sink has a similar problem; I recently had a go at those taps, but had to give up because the tiler left even less room and I'm not yet annoyed enough about it to go and buy yet another tool just for this one job.
2. Have been continuing the process of identifying sources of stress, or activities that I wasn't enjoying enough to justify the time I was spending on them, and letting them go so I have more time and energy for the activities I do value. I was worried for a while that I might find I didn't have anything left, but my enthusiasm for the Rep Club is undiminished, and although there are aspects of the band that I'm not enjoying, on the whole I think it's in the way that makes me want to stick around and try to fix them.
One thing I'm going to have to keep putting up with is my job, which I don't enjoy much and occasionally find myself explicitly thinking of as time taken away from doing something useful, but I don't have anything to replace it with. (For one thing, I am not sure, and don't know how to find out, whether the problem is this particular employer and set of working conditions, or this occupation, or me; so I don't know whether it could be fixed by finding a different employer, or a different occupation, or if I'm going to feel like this about any other job I might get.)
3. Speaking of the Rep Club, the long form improv show went well. It ended up being less ambitious than I pictured when I first heard about it: rather than improvising a single full-length play, we improvised a few short plays, about 15-20 minutes long each, and filled the rest of the evening with the more usual sort of one-scene improv games. Which is probably just as well, in retrospect; making up a full-length play as you go along is the kind of thing you need to work up to gradually. Anyway, we enjoyed it, and the audience enjoyed it, and the improv group is going to keep meeting and will maybe do another show next year.
4. The performing arts festival is over for another year. The instrumental music weekend went well, and included a massed band workshop where all the musicians who played on the weekend and any other interested local musicians were invited to come and play in one big band together. (I enjoyed it a lot, which apart from being good in itself was useful at a time when I was feeling down about playing in our local brass band, and trying to figure out whether it was that I'd lost interest or it was the band that wasn't doing it for me. I wish more of the people from the brass band had made it to the workshop.) The drama evening was good again, although some of the teenagers' self-devised pieces got a bit intense, with domestic abuse and murder and so on. Apparently, there's an actual project they do which involves delving into mental health issues and stuff, so they're not just leaping to these subjects on their own initiative; after some of the things they've come up with over the last few years, that's kind of a relief to know. The top prize went to the same actor as last year, and I'm going to be interested to see what he goes on to do.
5. A while ago, my shower developed a persistent drip, so after putting up with it for a bit in the hope it would go away, I decided to take another step into adulting and learn how to replace the little rubber bits inside taps. The most difficult part of it turned out to be finding a tool that would fit into the cavity and unscrew the tap fitting; I have a feeling the wall was tiled after the taps were installed, and the tiler didn't think to leave enough room. (I ended up making several trips to the hardware store in search of the right tool, and spent some time reflecting on the advantages I had in terms of time and disposable income that allowed me to persist and not give up and live with the drip.) When I did get it out, it was definitely the little rubber thing that was the culprit; the one on the hot tap was completely worn away, and when I'd replaced it (I did the cold tap too, to be on the safe side) the drip was gone. So was another problem the shower had been having where the amount of hot water would arbitrarily decide to have no connection to how much the hot tap was on, which I'd been putting up with for months on the assumption that it was down to a problem in the water heater that would be too expensive to fix. Part of why I assumed it was the heater and not the tap is that the kitchen sink has a similar problem; I recently had a go at those taps, but had to give up because the tiler left even less room and I'm not yet annoyed enough about it to go and buy yet another tool just for this one job.
