tiger_spot

So there was sewage on my lawn.

There is not sewage on my lawn any more.

Nor are there roots in the sewer pipe, thanks to the nice fellas in the quickly-dispatched utility truck. Yay city services! Also yay plumber who said on the phone "Where outside? Hm... try calling the city, they may take care of that for you." (Non-yay for the disconnected "if you are experiencing a sewer backup, call this number," but the woman who answered the main Public Works phone got me immediately transferred to the right place so that worked out okay.)

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly started getting horrible stabby pains in the back of my left hip. My OB recommended a chiropractor who specializes in pregnant people. He vibrated some muscles, tapped some bones with a little tiny jackhammer, and sent me off with exercises (and some things to pay attention to when walking that had never occurred to me, like the camber of the sidewalk -- apparently if you spend more time walking very slightly tilted to one side than to the other, that can cause some pressure issues around the pelvis). Over the course of the next week, the pain shifted from stabby to achy, and kind of spread down the side of the leg some. This was mostly an improvement. I felt enough better to go to yoga on Sunday and give the dog a short walk on Monday night, although it had to be pretty short because I was still hurting.

I had a follow-up with the chiropractor on Wednesday, where he said "Huh. The way you describe it now, it sounds just like a running injury," vibrated some muscles, tapped on the same bones, tapped the matching bones on the other side, tapped some bones up in the middle for good measure, and waggled my knees back and forth. The rest of the day the front of my hip hurt like crazy (although the back and side were fine). That faded a bit yesterday, and today my leg feels pretty much like a leg. It's still sore, but it feels like the kind of sore that gentle exercise, a bit of stretching, and taking it fairly easy for a few more days should make better. I took the dog out for a normal-length walk this morning and only got a bit sore towards the end of it.

I don't know if it's all the chiropractic, or if Sputnik decided to move and quit squashing the nerve, or what, but I am much happier now.

My previous theme broke somehow. Poll bars started displaying vertically smeared all over the screen. It was decorative but hard to read. Therefore, new theme. Advantage -- tag cloud! Disadvantage -- icons over to the right in a less noticeable spot.

Let me know if you see anything broken and I will poke at it some more.

Also I am bored but should not be distracted for too long. Know any good jokes?

I'd decided that, although by the time 4th Street rolls around I am probably going to be Too Pregnant to enjoy it properly, what with the flying and all, I was going to try to make it to WisCon. Okay, the main hotel was sold out by the time I made this decision, and assuming nothing magical happens to my hip[1] between now and then I really want to be in the main hotel, but there seemed to be a fair number of people looking for roommates and things, so it was a good plan still. Flights were a little obnoxious time-wise but doable. Etc.

... but I couldn't get the time off work. Aargh! (If I'm going to put up with the pain in the ass that is flying, I want to be there for the whole thing, and the powers that be are not happy with the 4 days off right then that is whole thing + recovery time given the slightly weird flight timing. 2 days off okay, but 2 days off is not sufficient. Boo.)

Now I need something totally awesome to do Memorial Day weekend so as not to be pouty and resentful the whole time. Maybe I will hold my own very tiny convention in my living room.


[1] <voice="KHAAAAAAAAN!">
SCIATICAAAAAAAAAAAA!
</voice>

Remember my unhappiness with the YMCA?

After I sent the letter, I got a nice response from the director thanking me for taking the time to write out my concerns and letting me know that it had been forwarded to the director of risk management.

When I mentioned it to my obstetrician, she thought I was being silly and should take it less personally. "Sure, it would be fine for you to make that decision; you're informed about your health. But lots of people don't follow their doctor's instructions." (That made me grumpy.)

Today I got an e-mail from the director of risk management, informing me that the policy has been changed and now they'll just use the regular waiver that they use for everything else.

::victory dance::

So I guess I'm going to prenatal yoga next Sunday!

Wheeeeeeee!

Convention convention convention!

What, you expect coherency? I used all that up. I used my whole brain, and also, I don't know, my pancreas or something. It was a most excellent convention, with most excellent attendees[1], and interesting panels, and great conversations, and a couple of good restaurants, and tasty food in the consuite with enough nutrition to support conscious thought the entire weekend!

I hereby declare the mascot of FOGcon 2 to be Cordyceps fungus, which came up more or less independently at three different panels I was at.

I think my moderating went well; I had people come up to me after each panel and tell me it went well, anyway, so I choose to trust their reports. :) brooksmoses also said that I maybe talked a bit much on the second one, for a moderator, but I had opinions.... So I will totally sign up to moderate and/or panelistize (is there a verb for that?) in the future, because it was fun.

I do not have detailed panel reports, but I do have lots of ideas for programming for next year (and a strong urge to volunteer to run like six different things [consuite! childcare!], but I really really shouldn't because I do not know if I will actually have capacity to handle anything besides Sputnik to a standard that pleases me; perhaps I will have a better sense closer to time, and can do a few shifts of something or other, to start with).

I have figured out what it is that happens to me on the last day of cons: between the sleep deprivation and the constant positive reinforcement for talking, all the filters between my brain and my mouth get eroded. I get kinda loud once they're gone. (The post-mortem what-went-well, what-needs-changes panel kind of turned into the Theresa and Brooks show because we kept reminding each other of other little things to mention.)

We couldn't stay on for the dead frog party because Andres had to catch a plane, so we headed out after the post-mortem on Sunday. Despite having used my entire brain (plus spleen or what-have-you), I kept coming up with possible themes for next year[2] all the rest of the day. Want! More! FOGcon!


[1] On the way home in the car:
me: FYI, this year's con crush is [name redacted].
chinders: Aw, yours is local! I only get crushes on writers from the East Coast!

[2] Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Go here and suggest "Family". Provide diverse and creative supporting reasons. :) Suggest other nifty themes as well if you think of them; I have a few more that I will also mention, but Family is the best one and I wish to encourage the concom to consider it thoroughly.

We're having new office furniture delivered today. That means the entire contents of the office are, as of yesterday evening, dispersed about the rest of the house. The chairs are in the living room, the desks are in the garage, the drawers and filing cabinet are in the library, my computer is set up on the dining table because I have work to do this morning, the other computers are in the den, the printer is in the guest room, little piles of things out of the cabinet and off of the desks are hither and yon and everywhere, the art is folded up (well, just the sarongs, not the framed stuff) and tucked away. The shelves are over on the other side of the room, out of the way of the delivery and installation path; Andres put a heck of a gouge in the floor trying to move the smaller one without taking the books off it, but we think if we wax it it won't look too bad. We are hard on the floor anyway.

The room looks very strange without furniture in it, though not quite as strange as it did before Andres cleaned up the little dust clouds where there were computers living on the floor and the peculiar ring his chair wheels left in the middle of the room.

The benefits of the new furniture are twofold:

First, it has a lot more storage space in it than was previously available in the office. That lets us move some office-relevant things out of the den closet (and throw out a bunch of no-longer-relevant things while we're at it), freeing up space in the den to take stuff from the library, which is turning into Sputnik's room. We're also going to move the two tall bookshelves from the library into the office along the opposite wall. I think that means the shorter shelf has to come out of the office; I have no idea where we'll put it. We're also not sure what's going to happen to the comics; it's possible that after a cull there'll be space on the office shelves, but there are an awful lot of them right now. I think the shelves the comics are currently on may stay and be toy / kid book storage; they're a good height for a very short person to access. The middle shelves are adjustable, though, so I should look into whether that's considered hazardous (I can see this scenario where the shelf gets dumped and a peg holding it up gets swallowed... I don't know if that sort of shape is a choking hazard). Andres has been looking into getting some additional cabinetry installed in the garage to keep the board games all together; he's a bit frustrated by the expense of what he feels ought to be very simple storage devices.

Second, because the new desks have backs instead of being open tables, it will be easier to secure cords and cables in a visually unobtrusive non-tripping-hazard kind of way. I hope.

Anyway, this is all very exciting, and I am hoping that having written it down I can now actually get on with that productive stuff I was supposed to be doing this morning. Being in a weird spot and waiting for delivery people has kind of been throwing me off. Oh, hey -- and there is the big truck now. I shall go direct!

(Edit: False alarm. That is a different, unrelated big truck. Phooey.)

The other day I had a rather unpleasant surprise from the El Camino YMCA. It turns out that before one can attend any of their prenatal exercise classes, one must produce a note of consent from one's doctor. They have a handy little "Pre/Post Natal CONSENT FORM" for the doctor to fill out, which I have a copy of here. I complained about this a bit when I got home: chinders suggested I put dead fish on their desks. andres_s_p_b suggested I forge the requested paperwork. After playing along long enough to e-mail my doctor and see if there's a good time this week for me to drop in and get the form actually filled out, I thought about it a bit more and decided exactly how annoyed I was.

I am very, very annoyed.

I have written the following letter, which I intend to send to the Executive Director, both Associate Executive Directors, and the Group Exercise Director. My goals here are twofold:
1. Blister their ears so badly their hair catches fire.
2. Effect immediate policy change.
I consider 2 less likely, so I'll settle for 1 if I have to.

Have a look. See if you can spot any ways it could be improved towards either of those goals. Also, do you think I should have my doctor countersign the letter or at least review the paragraph she's in, or is that just playing into their hands? Furthermore, while I'm planning to e-mail each director a separate personally-addressed copy, should I mail four physical copies as well or just one? If just one, does "Dear Directors:" work as a salutation?

( It is about a page long. )

chinders borrowed a guitar from miyasato to see if open mic night at Red Rock would be more fun with a bit of accompaniment to her singing.

I have been intending to fuss with it a bit on the grounds that heck, there's an instrument in the house, I may as well learn to play it! Today I actually managed to find a website that explained theoretically basic guitar-related topics in a way that actually made sense to me, then piffled around translating some of the more standard notations (tablature and chord diagrams and the like) into actual sounds.

E minor is kind of an awesome chord.

Anyway, I now understand the logic of the fretboard, in a sort of rudimentary way, which is a great help. I played a nice regular proper scale. Now it is not all random "Do THIS ridiculously complicated thing with your fingers! Now shift to THIS one! No, don't pick that string, augh!" and instead is only combinations of nice sensible notes. Whew.

The interesting thing about the guitar, as distinct from piano or voice, is that it is ALL ABOUT the chords. My typical approach to a bit of music is to figure out the melody, one note after another, and then maybe once I've got that down try adding in a bit of accompaniment with some additional notes, at the same time. Whereas the basic guitar approach seems to be to make sure that your fingers are in a position such that every string is playing a note in the same chord, then play some subset of those notes, whichever ones you happen to feel like at the time, maybe all together, maybe one at a time, maybe an interestingly rhythmic combination over the course of the measure. This is a very different approach. It's one that I had sort of started to fuss with a bit on piano, given simple chords in the left hand as accompaniment to right-hand melody, but I feel like coming at it through the guitar mindset will be terrifically useful. I've been kind of working it out from first principles based on logic, but here's this lovely big pile of natural examples to explore.

It'll be fun. (Once my fingers stop hurting.)

So FOGcon is coming right up, March 30 - April 1. You should go!

You should especially go because, in a fit of enthusiasm, I volunteered for things and am going to be moderating two panels! My panels are both on Saturday, so if you are local and just want to buy a day pass that is the day to aim for if you want to come heckle support me. They are:

Best Alien Ever
10:30 a.m. Salon A
Some aliens are just humans with funny foreheads. But sometimes an author creates an alien that stretches your mind or makes you see ordinary humans in a whole different light. What makes for an alien species worth reading about? What are the most extraordinary aliens authors have successfully portrayed?
Moderator: Theresa Mecklenborg
Panelists: Chaz Brenchley, Juliette Wade, Ann Wilkes

Did Everyone Fail High School Biology?
1:30 p.m. Salon A
From stupid stunts with DNA to implausible ecologies, lots of science fiction just gets biology wrong. Why is this? What are examples of books, movies, or TV that gets it right?
Moderator: Theresa Mecklenborg
Panelists: Tari, Wendy Shaffer, Cassie Alexander, Pat Murphy

(I am having some serious sad about things that are scheduled across from one another. Too many cool things, cannot be at all of them at once, oh woe.)

My job as moderator, as I see it:
* Ask interesting questions.
* Make sure all the panelists get chances to talk about the particular relevant things they would like to talk about.
* Interrupt/redirect as necessary to keep discussion flowing and the conversation ball moving between people.
* Keep an eye on the time.
* Summarize statements or rephrase questions as is helpful to aid general understanding.
* Track who gets to talk next.

The part of this I am least practiced at is the part where there's a panel/audience separation -- I've moderated a discussion or two, but they've all been sort of roundtable things, without that division. Anybody have any tips about audiences? I'm thinking save 15-20 minutes at the end for audience questions, maybe move that a bit earlier if the panelists seem to be running out of self-generated steam or the audience is all bouncing up and down waving their hands in the air. Does that sound like enough time? (These are all hour and fifteen minute panels.)

I have sent out pre-planning e-mails with a dozen or twenty possible interesting questions, so the panelists can tell me which of them sound most interesting and whether there are other directions they would like to explore, and then when I get that feedback I will make up a further list of slightly more tailored interesting questions to print out and keep in front of me in case interesting questions do not present themselves naturally in the discussion as it happens. If I can pick out the bits they'll argue about I'll put stars next to those questions and make double extra sure they get asked.

And that is my moderating plan! People who do this sort of thing more often: Good plan? Bad plan? Am I leaving out any important bits?