Forty

Aug. 10th, 2020 04:50 pm
metawidget: Blue bucket with thirty bottles of beer. (beer)
I turned forty yesterday… sometime before March I threw out that my fortieth birthday would be nice if it was anchored in beer and board games — get a bunch of people who like one or more of those things and want to celebrate with me and make a day of it.

We had a scale down a bit but both of those things happened (not all at the same time) — Elizabeth and the kids had gotten Gaïa and I played a couple of rounds with Oscar and Ada after breakfast. The standard game feels like it's a bit to draw-dependent with few interesting decisions or back-and-forth opportunities, but the advanced version (especially minus the mean cards — volcanoes and thunderbolts in our game made it so that you kind of had to ride out the violence and then play in earnest once everyone was out of ammunition) is a nicely-balanced short game.

The kids gifted me with many supervillain-themed pictures, a felt medal and a hat made from a pop bottle with an antenna and googly eyes.

In the middle of the day we had a backyard party. Elizabeth had made lime meringue tarts, we barbecued some veggie sausages, we took cover when it rained :) Heather, Andrea and Morgen came for the first while until Morgen needed her own bed for a nap, and my folks turned up as they were heading out. It was the first time this year I've seen my parents in person. I hope we can figure out a visit down there; either a day trip on a nice day or a weekend if we can tinker with our bubble configuration or get to a better place in the pandemic.

Turning forty has been kind of overshadowed by the circumstances. I'm no longer young in the terms of my union, I guess when it seems prudent I'm due for a medical check-up. Ten years ago Oscar was still in utero and I was a young and promising Methodologist, more I'm more established and shifting to be a manager and Oscar's going to be a teenager before long. I'm more readily out as bi and polyamorous and organizing workplace things for Pubic Service Pride (which wasn't really a thing in the Federal Public Service ten years ago). I'm trying to be a bit more conscious of taking care of my body — choosier about food and letting there be leftovers, morning walks, an actual ergonomic chair in my basement lair. I feel like negotiation is a theme of the last little while: bargaining, working out pandemic safety measures in our bubble, trying to line up a working like that's as good as possible. Stabilizing the wobbly bits of my life, too.

Maybe I'll have a bigger party for 41 or 42, but I liked being celebrated yesterday. It's a nice round number, but it feels like a kind of transitional time for me.

Year List

Oct. 26th, 2012 03:55 pm
metawidget: Person sitting cross-legged from the rear, in black and white with noise and scratches (body)

I've been carrying around a list in my head of things to do while I'm 32 years old; now I'm committing it to the Internet. I've seen bucket lists and life lists, but the time horizon doesn't speak to my procrastination-prone and tactical nature, and I of course see New Year's resolutions, but I think going by my years rather than calendar years is more personal, and protects me a little from the list elements being fresh when the invariable collapse of many resolutions happens in late January. Also, some elements of the list were really dear and salient to me in the summer, so it made sense to hang them on my birthday (even if it's taken months to post them here). So, here are the things I would like to do or improve significantly this year:

  • Floss more days than not.
  • Make a conscious and courageous-when-necessary effort to improve my relationships in ways that make me happy.
  • Make deeper use of this journal, as part of trying to be less guarded with people that I trust.
  • Wear through multiple massage bars.
  • Get the deposit back on beer bottles at smaller intervals and more reliably.
  • Wipe out the mortgage and direct the resulting savings to a mix of responsible and fun things.
  • Replace the chain-link fence with a durable, attractive, Oscar-resistant one.
  • Get a check-up this year and renew my vaccinations; it's been too long on both counts.

In general, I think I have more guiding values than long-term specific goals, but here are some things (somewhere between values and goals) on a longer time scale.

  • Have fewer secrets.
  • Be entrusted with more secrets.
  • Raise competent, well-adjusted kids. Do so with good humour, love and trust in them.
  • Make our house more comfortable, energy-efficient and adjusted to us.
  • Take care of my body and try and make my list of aches and pains not increase monotonically.
  • Get family doctors for all of us in the household.
  • Continue to like my job, be good at it, and be worthy of the respect of my co-workers.
  • Keep learning new things, and consolidate dabbling into competent in new areas from time to time.
metawidget: A platypus looking pensive. (Default)
1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?
Fathered a child (well, I guess some salient bits were done in 2009), grew peas, built a hardwood floor, drafted a will, published a statistics paper, took a train in business class, drove a pickup truck.
thirty-seven more )
metawidget: A platypus looking pensive. (Default)
Real posts evade me. Life is pretty intense.

Tomorrow (Friday) at 8 PM: come see [livejournal.com profile] rottenfruit play at the Yellow Door (3625 Aylmer, 144 bus or metro Place des Arts ish) $6 at the door, bring optional nonperishables for the food bank and spending money for coffee and CDs.

Next Tuesday at 3:30 PM: come see Godfried Toussaint talk about crossovers from bioinformatics techniques in rhythm analysis of flamenco and other music. It's in the EV building (1515 Ste. Catherine), room 2.184. It's aimed at all levels of geekery, and he's a fantastic presenter. Refreshments afterwards, free admission.

at the request of a ninjaaaa )
metawidget: A platypus looking pensive. (Default)

Comment with an interest in being interviewed and I'll think up some questions for you. Comment with some questions and I'll try to answer them.

Watch out, the hippie germs are contagious. )
metawidget: A platypus looking pensive. (Default)
It turns out, Bell, when I cancelled my account, charged me $2.68 for "tolerance". Yes, I know what it means, but still, it's a nice illustration of telco manners.

I got to sleep until I was more or less naturally awake with my beloved last night. Not being a slave to the alarm clock feels very good.

Lots to do as usual: coding, administration-y stuff, studying... the end of the term is coming, though. I'm a little exhausted, but stuff is falling by the wayside a little more gracefully than it has in the past.

I'm having a funny relationship with the future right now. It's pretty unreal, even though I'm looking forward to, dreading and just acknowledging some fairly real things.

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metawidget: A platypus looking pensive. (Default)
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