Posting twice a year is like keeping current, right?
I wish more people still used DW, so clearly I should be the change I want to see in the world.
Basically my life is going well/smoothly with just the occasional bureaucratic annoyance to keep me on my toes.
Home is still fine, though I've been to City Hall twice in two weeks first because they mailed me to say, "you haven't gotten an inspection for Certificate of Habitability" (a thing which would only apply if I were a landlord, which I'm not), so I had to head over there to say, "look, no. Stop it." Thankfully earlier this week I got a confirmation that they agree to stop it. :P
The second issue which caused me to head over to City Hall again this morning was that they mailed me to say, "you owe us more property tax" to which my response is "that's nice - that's what my escrow account is for - it has all the money you're looking for and more in it. Why aren't you charging my mortgager who are supposed to provide it to you?" Now that I've spoken with them and my mortgager I'm hoping I'll similarly get confirmation of that being worked out soon. (The sad thing is - I already spoke with them about this issue before and had thought it was solved... so clearly this time I'm going to have to followup and keep a closer eye on it. Woo, fun.)
Aaanyhow. I would like to see less of City Hall in my future, here's hoping that comes to be.
The other not so great thing is family stuff. My mom's health is a real concern lately. I'll be seeing her in a week, and am guessing I'll be helping her out with more medical paperwork, because she always finds that difficult. She's in a place now where she's trying to figure out whether or not heart surgery is a viable option that might prolong her life, or just added hardship that may not help. Conversations around this are universally depressing, and I'm trying to be supportive to her while really not feeling like I know what to say. Also, when I attempt optimism in the area of this topic, my mom pulls pessimistic shutdowns, so I sort of don't want to prompt her to find them and have stopped volunteering any hopeful sentiments at all and have just gone for the "I'm sorry, this all sounds difficult for you" sort of approach. I have no idea if this is any better or worse.
Work's still fine. This year I got promoted, so my title now is Senior QA Engineer, which I'm pretty pleased about. In particular, I'm happy with this because I think a large part of my getting promoted was looking at the standards listed for the position and telling my boss, "so I notice I'm performing at this level, as outlined by our standards. I'd like to be promoted." I'm not generally good at self-advocacy, so I'm reasonably proud of myself for that.
I'm still on the same team, but I'm also sort of working for another team as well, but all in all I don't care because a lot of my life is data-related and I really enjoy that. I do feel slightly adrift in terms of the usual "ah, two years into a job - I basically know the things I need to know to do this job efficiently... now what?" I wish I knew the answer to that. I could still learn more here, I'm sure, but at the moment we're a little short-handed, so rather than having a lot of cross-team training opportunities, etc, we're sort of in "all hands on deck, hit the crucial stuff fast" mode.
At least I've been sort of pleased by being on the Social and Volunteer Committee for my workplace.
I'm really into process improvement and efficiency, but I'm also really into sort of optimizing social elements where possible, and it's sort of nice to have input into things to try to push in directions that I think promote sort of unity and acceptance at work, rather than silos and cliquishness.
I feel like the things I'm enthused about are really weird. Process efficiency, social cohesion of groups, spreadsheets, bridges...? I assume other people have equally weird things they're unexpectedly passionate about, but periodically I just have people looking at me with an expression that broadly reads, "ooookay there, scout."
I haven't been in chorus this season because I'd booked a vacation that accidentally stompled over every performance date we had, both the big concert and the smaller sort of followup playing at retirement homes type things, so I think artistically I'm a bit at loose ends lately. Definitely want to fix that for fall. The vacation was nice, though.
The vacation was two weeks in the UK, wherein I walked 90 miles, took a reasonable number of pictures, saw four comedians I really like, went to two free classical concerts and a couple museums, and saw random bits of the country. Swansea is quaint as fuck. First time I've ever seen "Merry Christmas" as a graffito. Cambridge (in one half of the town) is sort of obnoxiously beautiful, and was a great place for rambling through. Leicester is as uninteresting as it was last time. (Sorry, Leicester.) And it was neat to see Birmingham, since it's such a large city, though I didn't get to spend enough time there to see a particularly large swathe of it.
This summer I'm going to take another French course at Boston's French Cultural Center. I finally got around to doing their placement test, and have been decreed suitable for Advanced French, so am taking the first class in that series as a 5 week accelerated course to keep me busy later this month and next month. Looking forward to it, though also a little nervous. It'd be nice to feel more solid on my grammar, though, because honestly the last time I spent much thought or effort on that stuff is just about twenty years ago now.
I feel like the theme of my life after graduation has been "everything's basically fine... now what?" It's been in some ways a really observable sort of "oh, look I've hit a new level of Maslow's hierarchy, and now I need to solve for problems I never had time to worry about before." Two years in and I'm not sure I've figured much out, other than "I really don't like downtime very much," which I feel like some people could've already told me an age ago.
I'm walking more than I may have previously because I have a Fitbit now (largely because I thought I would need one for integration testing for a thing at work, which has turned out to basically not be relevant), but it's sort of neat to have that as a bit of added incentive. Also neat to be able to see coherently that ah, yeah, when I have nice weather and free time, walking six miles a day is a thing I'll totally do unprompted, why not? Also with the weather being nice lately, and having just done vacation, where I was really enjoying walks in London, I was thinking, "okay, not all of Boston is unattractive... clearly I should attempt to get out and appreciate more of it," so when I don't have places to be after work, I ramble for a bit rather than just walking to the nearest train station. Last night I walked home via the Longfellow Bridge, which they've just finished most of the construction on, and now has a lovely, wide walkway on both sides. I may do that again tonight on the other side. :)
The other thing I've done a lot of this year is reading. Goodreads says I'm working on book 126 for the year, but in my view some of those are novellas, and I count my actual total of new books read for 2018 thus far at 102. I think a nontrivial portion of what I'm reading is fairly crap, but I also don't care that much about if what I'm reading has objective merit or is just enjoyable escapism, and it's a great way to ensure that mass transit doesn't make me impatient. I can say, however, that I'm glad to have read Daniel O'Malley stuff this year, and broadly recommend that, and have also generally been enjoying Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. Also I think it may be possible I find M/M romance to typically be less inane than M/F romance I generally find, and it's useful to know that and have new things to look for.
I suppose it's possible that I'm reading too much and should be doing some other hobby more often, but I'm also sort of pleased to have gotten through so much new stuff, because I feel like I always mentally frame myself as being a big reader, but then went through multiple years where I just wasn't getting to it that often and felt like perhaps I was a fraud (because why limit impostor syndrome to only work areas of your life when you could let it interfere with your personal characterization as well? :P ). It's nice to be objectively certain I still can read as much as I did as a kid.
I wish I had some overarching goal I felt I needed to accomplish and that I felt able to accomplish, personally. Sometimes it feels like it's possible every part of life is a distraction and there is no main event. This is not to say I'm unhappy. Just unchallenged, I suppose?
The one other sort of odd thing that's been recent is I think I've gone somewhere around a month just being completely content with my hair. I feel like usually I'm endlessly whittling away at pretty much every part of my appearance pretty constantly, so it's sort of nice to not have that be a thing currently. (Not that it's stopped across the board. Pretty much only the hair. But I guess I'll take it?)
Anyhow. So broadly life is good. I need more goals, though.
This entry was originally posted at https://sandrylene.dreamwidth.org/16422.html. Feel free to comment here or go there and comment at https://sandrylene.dreamwidth.org/16422.html?mode=reply.
Basically my life is going well/smoothly with just the occasional bureaucratic annoyance to keep me on my toes.
Home is still fine, though I've been to City Hall twice in two weeks first because they mailed me to say, "you haven't gotten an inspection for Certificate of Habitability" (a thing which would only apply if I were a landlord, which I'm not), so I had to head over there to say, "look, no. Stop it." Thankfully earlier this week I got a confirmation that they agree to stop it. :P
The second issue which caused me to head over to City Hall again this morning was that they mailed me to say, "you owe us more property tax" to which my response is "that's nice - that's what my escrow account is for - it has all the money you're looking for and more in it. Why aren't you charging my mortgager who are supposed to provide it to you?" Now that I've spoken with them and my mortgager I'm hoping I'll similarly get confirmation of that being worked out soon. (The sad thing is - I already spoke with them about this issue before and had thought it was solved... so clearly this time I'm going to have to followup and keep a closer eye on it. Woo, fun.)
Aaanyhow. I would like to see less of City Hall in my future, here's hoping that comes to be.
The other not so great thing is family stuff. My mom's health is a real concern lately. I'll be seeing her in a week, and am guessing I'll be helping her out with more medical paperwork, because she always finds that difficult. She's in a place now where she's trying to figure out whether or not heart surgery is a viable option that might prolong her life, or just added hardship that may not help. Conversations around this are universally depressing, and I'm trying to be supportive to her while really not feeling like I know what to say. Also, when I attempt optimism in the area of this topic, my mom pulls pessimistic shutdowns, so I sort of don't want to prompt her to find them and have stopped volunteering any hopeful sentiments at all and have just gone for the "I'm sorry, this all sounds difficult for you" sort of approach. I have no idea if this is any better or worse.
Work's still fine. This year I got promoted, so my title now is Senior QA Engineer, which I'm pretty pleased about. In particular, I'm happy with this because I think a large part of my getting promoted was looking at the standards listed for the position and telling my boss, "so I notice I'm performing at this level, as outlined by our standards. I'd like to be promoted." I'm not generally good at self-advocacy, so I'm reasonably proud of myself for that.
I'm still on the same team, but I'm also sort of working for another team as well, but all in all I don't care because a lot of my life is data-related and I really enjoy that. I do feel slightly adrift in terms of the usual "ah, two years into a job - I basically know the things I need to know to do this job efficiently... now what?" I wish I knew the answer to that. I could still learn more here, I'm sure, but at the moment we're a little short-handed, so rather than having a lot of cross-team training opportunities, etc, we're sort of in "all hands on deck, hit the crucial stuff fast" mode.
At least I've been sort of pleased by being on the Social and Volunteer Committee for my workplace.
I'm really into process improvement and efficiency, but I'm also really into sort of optimizing social elements where possible, and it's sort of nice to have input into things to try to push in directions that I think promote sort of unity and acceptance at work, rather than silos and cliquishness.
I feel like the things I'm enthused about are really weird. Process efficiency, social cohesion of groups, spreadsheets, bridges...? I assume other people have equally weird things they're unexpectedly passionate about, but periodically I just have people looking at me with an expression that broadly reads, "ooookay there, scout."
I haven't been in chorus this season because I'd booked a vacation that accidentally stompled over every performance date we had, both the big concert and the smaller sort of followup playing at retirement homes type things, so I think artistically I'm a bit at loose ends lately. Definitely want to fix that for fall. The vacation was nice, though.
The vacation was two weeks in the UK, wherein I walked 90 miles, took a reasonable number of pictures, saw four comedians I really like, went to two free classical concerts and a couple museums, and saw random bits of the country. Swansea is quaint as fuck. First time I've ever seen "Merry Christmas" as a graffito. Cambridge (in one half of the town) is sort of obnoxiously beautiful, and was a great place for rambling through. Leicester is as uninteresting as it was last time. (Sorry, Leicester.) And it was neat to see Birmingham, since it's such a large city, though I didn't get to spend enough time there to see a particularly large swathe of it.
This summer I'm going to take another French course at Boston's French Cultural Center. I finally got around to doing their placement test, and have been decreed suitable for Advanced French, so am taking the first class in that series as a 5 week accelerated course to keep me busy later this month and next month. Looking forward to it, though also a little nervous. It'd be nice to feel more solid on my grammar, though, because honestly the last time I spent much thought or effort on that stuff is just about twenty years ago now.
I feel like the theme of my life after graduation has been "everything's basically fine... now what?" It's been in some ways a really observable sort of "oh, look I've hit a new level of Maslow's hierarchy, and now I need to solve for problems I never had time to worry about before." Two years in and I'm not sure I've figured much out, other than "I really don't like downtime very much," which I feel like some people could've already told me an age ago.
I'm walking more than I may have previously because I have a Fitbit now (largely because I thought I would need one for integration testing for a thing at work, which has turned out to basically not be relevant), but it's sort of neat to have that as a bit of added incentive. Also neat to be able to see coherently that ah, yeah, when I have nice weather and free time, walking six miles a day is a thing I'll totally do unprompted, why not? Also with the weather being nice lately, and having just done vacation, where I was really enjoying walks in London, I was thinking, "okay, not all of Boston is unattractive... clearly I should attempt to get out and appreciate more of it," so when I don't have places to be after work, I ramble for a bit rather than just walking to the nearest train station. Last night I walked home via the Longfellow Bridge, which they've just finished most of the construction on, and now has a lovely, wide walkway on both sides. I may do that again tonight on the other side. :)
The other thing I've done a lot of this year is reading. Goodreads says I'm working on book 126 for the year, but in my view some of those are novellas, and I count my actual total of new books read for 2018 thus far at 102. I think a nontrivial portion of what I'm reading is fairly crap, but I also don't care that much about if what I'm reading has objective merit or is just enjoyable escapism, and it's a great way to ensure that mass transit doesn't make me impatient. I can say, however, that I'm glad to have read Daniel O'Malley stuff this year, and broadly recommend that, and have also generally been enjoying Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. Also I think it may be possible I find M/M romance to typically be less inane than M/F romance I generally find, and it's useful to know that and have new things to look for.
I suppose it's possible that I'm reading too much and should be doing some other hobby more often, but I'm also sort of pleased to have gotten through so much new stuff, because I feel like I always mentally frame myself as being a big reader, but then went through multiple years where I just wasn't getting to it that often and felt like perhaps I was a fraud (because why limit impostor syndrome to only work areas of your life when you could let it interfere with your personal characterization as well? :P ). It's nice to be objectively certain I still can read as much as I did as a kid.
I wish I had some overarching goal I felt I needed to accomplish and that I felt able to accomplish, personally. Sometimes it feels like it's possible every part of life is a distraction and there is no main event. This is not to say I'm unhappy. Just unchallenged, I suppose?
The one other sort of odd thing that's been recent is I think I've gone somewhere around a month just being completely content with my hair. I feel like usually I'm endlessly whittling away at pretty much every part of my appearance pretty constantly, so it's sort of nice to not have that be a thing currently. (Not that it's stopped across the board. Pretty much only the hair. But I guess I'll take it?)
Anyhow. So broadly life is good. I need more goals, though.
This entry was originally posted at https://sandrylene.dreamwidth.org/16422.html. Feel free to comment here or go there and comment at https://sandrylene.dreamwidth.org/16422.html?mode=reply.