pedanther

Strictly speaking, this is an octave in review, covering the period from Saturday, 29 March, to Saturday, 5 April. I seem to have settled fairly solidly on doing the weekly blog post on Sunday, and it was getting annoying having to keep reminding myself "no, that happened yesterday, it goes in next week's blog post", so I'm shifting the window.


Our production of Guys and Dolls finished yesterday. It was successful both in the sense that the audiences had a good time and in the sense that the cast and crew got on with each other and also had a good time. The wrap party after the final performance featured karaoke, which, since it was the cast of a musical doing it, was a lot less painful than some karaoke sessions I can remember. I didn't step up to the microphone - I wouldn't have minded, I just couldn't make up my mind to a song - but I enjoyed singing along to the chorus parts and a few songs that the whole room did en masse.


After having never, to my knowledge, ever heard "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan before, this week I've heard three different versions: the original, Rick Astley's cover, and a karaoke rendition done at the wrap party.


The light bulb in the spare room died during the week, which wouldn't be particularly noteworthy except for an incidental consequence. To get a ladder under the light fitting to swap the bulb, I needed to move the boxes that were piled there, and in the process I regained an accurate sense of just how many boxes I have full of books that I'd shoved in a box with the intention of carting them to a second-hand book shop at some point. I now have all those boxes piled in their own space where I can continue to see how many of them there are, and have added another reminder to my phone; whether that results in any of the boxes actually being disposed of any time soon remains to be seen.


At board game club, we played MLEM Space Agency as the main game, and then several different variants of Uno to round out the evening.


I finished reading Comet in Moominland. I didn't vibe with it. I realised afterward that I'd been in a bad mood on the day I read the last third, due to lack of sleep and some life things that I'd been not thinking about, but I don't think it'd have clicked in any case. I liked the first chapter or so, and then the comet shows up and it turns into a string of arbitrary whimsical events - and, mind you, I like a story that's a string of arbitrary whimsical events when it works, but this didn't work for me.


I did Parkrun both Saturdays of the octave, but if I encountered any charismatic fauna, I didn't make a note of it.


The colour-coded exercise tracker I set up in January seems to have hooked into my brain in a useful way, and my consistency of exercise is gradually increasing. In January, I never went an entire week without exercising at least once; in February, at least twice; and in March, I exercised at least three times in every seven-day period, which was the minimum goal I was working toward. So far this month, if it's not too soon to be saying so, I'm on track to never fall below four exercises in a week.

Stuff happened, but a lot of it isn't relevant to people who aren't me or my immediate family. I watched a lot of internet videos (and went to the cinema to see Catvideofest, a 75-minute compilation of cat videos from the internet with ticket proceeds going to charity), made some substantial progress through the omnibus of "Classic Tales of Science Fiction" (which I'll get to in a separate post at some point), and took part in an Ingress event which was a good excuse to go bike riding regularly. I am keeping on top of the washing up, and I succeeded in putting away all of the backlog of clean laundry. I continue to be thankful for the new air conditioner, which is making life in the hot weather much more pleasant.

. Did some more weeding, around the back and far side of the house, and the part of the front that I hadn't done yet. One of the goals was to create clear space around the outdoor parts of the split-system air conditioning units, which was a good idea in any case but (see earlier post about self-motivated scheduling) had been given a boost by the landlord notifying me that there would an aircon tech around at some point to make sure all the units were working before summer sets in. I ended up clearing around the last unit in a hurry after receiving a phone call to say the tech would be there in half an hour; one of the brain weasels tried to make something of the fact that I'd put it off until the last moment, but was firmly rebutted by a more sensible part of my brain which pointed out that the important thing is I'd been organised enough to do most of it already on other days, so that there was less than half an hour's work left to do.

. All the air conditioners are, as expected, in good nick except for the one in the living room that squeaks loudly when it's running; the tech says that something's worn out and how quickly or cheaply it will be replaced depends on whether the replacement parts are still available for a unit that old (it may end up being easier, or necessary, to replace the whole thing).

. The Hidden Almanac is a podcast that ran from Friday the 13th, September 2013 to Friday the 13th, September 2019. Each episode is a few minutes long and presents a couple of historical anniversaries, a potted biography of a saint whose feast day it is, some seasonal gardening tips, and a message from the episode's sponsor -- all of which are the product of the imagination of fantasy author Ursula Vernon. (Well, except for... let's say many of the gardening tips, because Ursula Vernon is a keen gardener and knows what's what. Especially when it comes to the zucchini problem.) I fell off listening partway through the first time I gave it a try, but 2024 sees the return of Friday the 13th of September, which seemed like an appropriate occasion to give it another shot. This time I'm planning to stick to listening to one episode at a time, on the appropriate date, because from what I remember the problem I ran into last time was that I kept trying to catch up by listening to a whole bunch of episodes at a time and suffering from overdoing it. So far it's working much better at the intended pace; each episode is a bright moment in the day and doesn't outstay its welcome.

. At the boardgame club, I got to play my first game of Captain Sonar, a game in which two teams take on various roles of crew members in a submarine, and each crew attempts to locate and sink the other submarine before the other submarine does the same to them. I had the role of planning our submarine's route to avoid giving away too many clues about our location or putting too much stress on the boat's systems; I did an all right job of it. The real MVP of our submarine was the crew member whose job was to collect clues about the other sub's activities and plot its possible locations; she made very detailed notes, kept her head at a point where I would probably have decided the sub had given me the slip, and managed to pinpoint its actual location just as it surfaced for repairs, allowing us to chase it down and put two torpedoes into it before it could do anything to stop us.

. The Songs of Penelope trilogy by Claire North is about the aftermath of the Trojan War from the point of view of the women whose views on the whole thing tend to be underrepresented in the epics. The central character is Penelope, wife of Odysseus, left to keep his kingdom together for years while he's off doing the Iliad and the Odyssey, with a supporting cast of women who mostly don't get mentioned in the epics at all. There are also a few high-profile guest stars: the first book of the trilogy revolves around the fate of Clytemnestra, the self-made widow of King Agamemnon, and the second gives an answer to the question of what happened to Helen of Troy after she was brought home from Troy that turns out to be more complicated than it first appears. Penelope gets an uncontested spotlight in the third book of the trilogy, which retells the last part of the Odyssey from the moment Odysseus arrived back on his native shore, with a lot more attention than the epic poets gave to questions like "How much did Odysseus really understand about the situation he was coming home to?" and "What kind of future is there for a husband and wife who haven't seen each other in twenty years and barely had a chance to get to know each other before that?"

Off the back of my previous post, it's occurred to me that reviewing a week's worth of journal entries at a time is reasonably doable, and maybe once I'm caught up I could make a weekly habit of it. So here are five things from my first week of journalling:

. One thing I have achieved in the past month, though not to as full an extent as I would have liked, is that I've done some yard work and weeded out the plants that have grown up around the sides of the house over winter, which I never quite found the time and energy to deal with when I was working full-time. In the first week, I concentrated on the side of the house where the clothes line is, because some of the plants had grown tall enough to brush against the clothes when they were hung there to dry.

. I've already mentioned that I didn't achieve any progress on reading The Female Man; I loaded it onto my ebook reader at the beginning of the week and then spent the entire week never quite getting around to starting it. Every evening I'd remember that I needed to read something to keep my streak going, then decide that I was too tired to start what would probably be a book requiring concentrated attention, and read the latest Letter from Watson or Wildfell Weekly or a story from He Do the Time Police in Different Voices instead. On the Friday, there was a power outage lasting much of the day, which presented a prime opportunity to get a concentrated bout of reading in - and that's when I decided it was about time I got around to reading the latest Liaden novel.

. I am still really enjoying the D&D actual play series Natural Six. Each new episode premieres with a half-hour live pre-show on Twitch, with many of the more dedicated fans watching it and chatting together as soon as it premieres; due to time zones, that happens in the wee small hours of the morning here, so I'd always missed it. On my first week of leave, I decided to try getting up early and watching, since missing a few hours of sleep wouldn't be a problem when I didn't have to work later in the day. I made it through the pre-show before deciding that I was way too tired to sit up for another three hours watching the actual episode, or to get any enjoyment out of interacting with the other watchers, and went back to bed. I watched the episode on VOD later in the day, and it was a lot of fun and ended in a really dramatic place.

. During the week, I received a phone call which, after a confusing beginning, turned out to be from someone who was calling because they still had me down as the contact person for the brass band. That reminds me that it's been several years since I last talked about the band here, back when it was starting to rebuild after the pandemic hiatus and the loss of several key members, so I should probably at least mention that I haven't been playing with the band for a few years now; I wasn't comfortable with the direction the band was moving, and, to be fair, would have been uncomfortable in any case since the pandemic had left me with a lingering discomfort with the basic idea of getting together in a group to operate devices that spray bodily fluids into the air. I told myself when I stopped that I'd go back if I found that I missed it, but that hasn't happened yet; I miss in a general way being able to regularly make music with other people, but not the brass band in particular. (And partly that's because one of the reasons I stopped going to the brass band is that not very much time was being spent at the rehearsals actually making music.)

. On the Wednesday, I decided to go and have lunch at the café that recently opened a few blocks up from where I live. It's at least the third café that's tried to make a go of that location since I've been paying attention, and we'll see if it lasts any longer than the previous two. There was a good range of food, but the menus showed signs of being hastily assembled and could have done with at least one more round of proof-reading; I particularly remember that the burger I ate purportedly contained "friend onion".

1. Shortly after I moved into this house, I noticed that one of the washing lines (there's a set of five, strung in parallel) was looking significantly frayed at the end and was probably going to give way sooner or later. Then I had a look at the other end and realised that each line is on a reel, so that if it breaks you just have to release the tensioner widget and pull some more line out, so I decided to not worry about it until it happened. Well, last week it happened (while I was in the middle of hanging out laundry -- who would have guessed that the time it snapped would be when it was having weight put on it?), so after the laundry had dried and been put away I set about figuring out how to operate the tensioner widget. It took some figuring out (by my count, I unscrewed at least three things that didn't need to be unscrewed at all), but in the end I had restrung the broken line, as well as a couple of others that were beginning to look frayed, and as a bonus had adjusted the tension on all the lines, and it felt like enough of an achievement that I wanted to record it somewhere.


2. At the Rep Club, our big musical for this year is 9 to 5, the musical of the film of the Dolly Parton song. (If you know the song, I'm playing the man from the line "I swear sometimes that man is out to get me".) It's going to be a lot of fun if it comes together; we're currently at the "four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse; three weeks, and it couldn't be worse" stage.


3. Speaking of musicals, the local high school that does a musical every year or two is currently doing The Wizard of Oz (the version that's adapted from the 1939 film). I'm not sure if it's the first musical production they've done since the lockdown, or if I've ignored some in the intervening time because I felt it was too soon to be sitting in a crowded auditorium for several hours, but anyway it's the first one of theirs I've been to since last time I mentioned I'd been to one. There was the usual range of talents on show for a student production, with Dorothy and Scarecrow being the strongest performers, and the kid who played both the Munchkin Coroner ("not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead") and the Winkie Captain standing out among the smaller roles. The guy playing the Wizard did pretty good characterisation, but wasn't so good on the vocal projection (and for some reason, even though all the main players were miked, nothing was done to make his voice more impressive when he was doing the Great and Powerful routine). Their version of the disappearing-reappearing ruby slippers wasn't as slick as the version in the last production I saw of this show, about a decade ago, but it was pretty good. I had a good time.

3a. One thing I used to enjoy doing at these shows, that I didn't get to do this time, was spot the cast members I knew from performances at the annual performing arts festival. The performing arts festival hasn't been held since the lockdown, and I suspect there isn't going to be another one any time soon, because the two most load-bearing members of the organising committee have separately become too occupied with other commitments.


4. I was on the fringes of the solar eclipse last month. Around the time when Exmouth was experiencing totality, I went out into the garden with a pinhole viewer and got a good look at the moon covering about half the sun -- but if you didn't know there was an eclipse on, and were just going about your day, you probably wouldn't have noticed anything. It was a bit less bright than you might expect for a cloudless midday, but that was all.


5. I mentioned back when Dracula Daily was finishing up that I was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to re-read Anno Dracula, Kim Newman's Dracula-meets-Jack-the-Ripper novel, while the details were still fresh, or if that would just lead to me spending a lot of time complaining about things Newman changed or got wrong. In the end, I decided instead to read The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's non-fiction book about what the standard Jack the Ripper myth doesn't tell you about his victims. I have a feeling that this means there are even more parts of Anno Dracula that would make me complain about things Newman changed or got wrong, but I think it was the right choice.

5a. Rapid-fire reading challenge update: November (a book with "ING" in the title) - Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson; December (a book with a number in the title) - The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; January (a book you wanted to read last year and didn't get to) - Deathless Gods by PC Hodgell; February (a book by an author you love) - The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman; March (a historical or epic book) - The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; April (a book about rain or weather) - Winds of Evil by Arthur Upfield; May (a book about emergencies, panics, or escapes) - the first couple of volumes of Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo.

Our season of short plays came and went successfully, playing to surprisingly large audiences for a short play season. The audience sizes might have been because the headlining play had name recognition, but we got a good audience response for the play I was in as well. (And also, because it was an absurdist comedy, a fair number of people professing that although they'd enjoyed it they didn't have a clue what it was actually about. And several people independently mentioning that they'd expected it to end in a particular way that it didn't because that would have made too much sense.)

I got an unexpected bonus out of it. Part of the set for the play was a sofa that was donated to the play by a club member who didn't want it any more, but the club also didn't want to keep it because of having several sofas already and not enough space for another one. Meanwhile, I've been pondering getting a new sofa for a while now, because the one I already had was fine for sitting on but too short to properly lounge on. So now I have a comfortable newish sofa at considerably less expense than if I'd bought an actually new one.

Our next production, which opens next week, is the local instance of All Together Now!, a musical revue show being performed simultaneously in over 2000 theatres worldwide. It's an event intended to help encourage people back into attending live theatre, and particularly small local theatres -- it features numbers from major Broadway musicals that would normally cost a pile to licence, but the licence-holders are allowing participating theatres to perform them, and providing the necessary sheet music, etc., without charge on this one occasion. The programme varies from theatre to theatre, but we're doing numbers from (among others) Les Mis, Rent, Godspell, Little Shop of Horrors, and Matilda. If you're interested, and in a part of the world where attending live theatre is currently a sensible proposition, there's an online map you can use to find out if there's going to be a show near you.

. The Rep Club's Christmas show opens this week. I'm running lighting and sound. I don't recall off the top of my head if it's the largest and most complicated show I've ever run lighting and sound for, but it's certainly the largest and most complicated one I've done recently. The night after the first dress rehearsal, I had a stress dream in which everybody got eaten by zombies and then I forgot to pack for an important trip (in that order).


. I've finished clearing out the pigeon nesting site and other clutter in the garage, and am spending a few days making noises at random times and other stratagems to convince the pigeons that it's not a good place to hang out. Once they've got the idea, I look forward to being able to store stuff in there without it getting decorated by pigeon droppings.

(While I was waiting for the baby pigeons to grow old enough to leave the nest, I had some interestingly ambivalent feelings about them. Fuzzy baby pigeons are a miracle of nature that made my heart warm when I thought of them, but at the same time I would prefer them to go and be miracles of nature somewhere where their family won't be crapping on my stuff.)


. At gaming group this month, I've played Dungeon Busters, Custom Heroes, and Betrayal Legacy.


. On homeward leg of the Globe trip, I listened to the audio book of Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks, the first official Doctor Who tie-in novel. I first read it years ago and enjoyed it, especially the bits that expanded on what was on screen; I didn't enjoy it so much this time, because parts of it are very much of their time. Ian has some moments of taking it for granted that women are the weaker sex that needs to be protected, and everybody, including the Doctor, is completely on board with the idea that the Daleks must be evil because they're ugly and the Thals must be good because they're beautiful. There's also a weird bit near the beginning where Ian, a non-smoker in the TV series, lights a cigarette to settle his nerves; it doesn't help that it's fairly obviously happening to set up the next bit of the plot, and Ian never so much as mentions cigarettes again for the rest of the novel.


. Here's a delightful Star Wars sequel trilogy fic that more people should get to appreciate before it inevitably gets stomped on by Episode IX:

a gate to many wonders (3643 words) by melannen

In which Luke Skywalker does his first manifestation as a Force ghost, and there's some interesting thoughts about what it actually means to be a Force ghost, and also the first person he meets is the last person he was expecting.

One thing about the house I live in now is that every light bulb that needs replacing is its own little adventure, due to high ceilings, stylish light shades, or in the case of the living room, both.
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Five things I have done within the last few months, for the first time ever without adult supervision:

1. Taken a load of rubbish to the municipal tip.
2. Run a load of dishes through a dishwasher.
3. Mown a lawn.
4. Driven through an automated car wash.
5. Gone on a plane trip.

(The plane trip was, unsurprisingly, the most stressful one, although only in the planning stages; the day itself went without a hitch. I was alarmed the night before to receive a text message informing me that my flight had been cancelled and rescheduled, and then bemused to discover that it had apparently been rescheduled to the exact same date and time as it had already been scheduled for. It turned out what had happened was that the number of passengers booked on the flight had been low enough for the airline to assign a smaller aircraft than the one originally assigned, which from the booking software's viewpoint made it a different flight that happened to be at the same time.)

I've been even worse than usual about posting here over the last month, I realise.

Part of the reason is that I've been moving house.

There were several reasons for wanting to get out of the old house, and my family had been encouraging me to find somewhere new for a while, although interestingly their reasons didn't have much overlap with the reasons I eventually committed to doing it.

Moving out occasioned some moments of regret and acknowledging missed opportunities. One of the reasons I chose that house in the first place was because there was a room that immediately struck me as perfect for putting my bookshelves up in, but while I was moving in that room was temporarily designated the place where things got put until I figured out where they were going, and, in the way of things, most of them stayed piled up in that room until I moved out, so I never did get to put the bookshelves up.

(While I was moving into the new house I made a point of identifying where I wanted the bookshelves and keeping it clear, so now the bookshelves are all up and my books are out of boxes and on shelves for the first time in years.)

The new house is larger than the old one, both in having more rooms and in the rooms themselves being more spacious. It's also older, and has a bunch of things that need repairing that weren't obvious when I looked at it before I signed the rental agreement.

Another thing that wasn't obvious before I moved in is the colony of incontinent pigeons that lives in the roof, and about whom I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it's nice to have living things about the place, and they've been helping me get over the twitch I developed in the old neighbourhood about mysterious noises. On the other hand, I was rather counting on being able to store my extra stuff in the garage without getting guano on it (and the same goes for my car).