#silly personal shit

[subversivegrrl]

Just had a family member basically say to me "please stop talking about your hyperfixation"* which I really don't talk about much at all (to them) and I really really really had to dial back the urge to say "FUCK. YOU."

Second urge: "What I hear when you say that is 'I don't want to hear any more about this thing you are interested in.'"

Third urge: "I don't tell you to stop telling me about the things you're interested in, even when you go into extreme detail outlining what you're going to be doing at your next event (which I definitely did not ask you about)."

Fourth urge: "You have no idea how many things I already edit out of the parts of my life I do tell you about. Give me this one goddamned thing."

*what they actually said was, "methinks you spend too much time thinking about that piece of media." Is there some other way I could interpret that that would make it less hurtful?

What I actually said in response was, "after watching the show for almost 15 years, you get to have opinions about it."

[subversivegrrl]

The only time I wish I had a partner is this time of year, when I am so itchy I'm almost to the point of walking over to the park so I can scratch my back against a tree trunk like a bear. If there was another person around here they could give me the good old double handed backscratch with fingernails (carefully) on bare skin that I require.

This is in no way enough of a reason to seek a partner. Not even an accommodating roommate.

[subversivegrrl]

Yesterday I played some Bach on YouTube - Itzhak Perlman playing the Partita No. 1 in B minor - while I was at the library trying to write. It was good. It was fine. But it wasn't the version I grew up with, which I knew was Yehudi Menuhin. So I poked around and found that version, too. It's the version I listened to when I was a little kid and we had basically two choices for our entertainment media: a TV with poor reception out in the boondocks of SE Ohio and maybe 3 stations to choose from if they even came in on the rabbit ears, and a cabinet stereo/radio (WWVA country or KDKA out of Pittsburgh). So I listened to my dad's music - opera, show tunes, bebop jazz, and lots and lots of classical. My middle name is my dad's tip of the hat to Debussy. And maybe that version isn't as technically good as Perlman was in 1978, or even as good as Menuhin himself would have been later in life, but I realized yesterday that he was 19 years old when he recorded that. And the peculiarities of phrasing and tone are a part of me. (There's a long story about me trying for literally decades to figure out what work it was - all I knew was that it was Bach and it was violin and the one part went "dah-DAH-dah-DAH dah dah dah-dah-dah". Blessings on the music store people and classical musicians and DJs over the years who put up with my floundering attempts to recreate it well enough to identify.)

So I ended up crying in the library and hoping that no one was paying enough attention to come over and check on me. Because it wasn't bad crying, just emotional over music I have been listening to almost all my life.

[subversivegrrl]

A couple of weeks ago my boss told me (on the QT, because he really wasn't supposed to tell me, the CEO planned to talk to me sometime soon but he couldn't wait) that I was getting a raise, over and above the COLA I got starting October 1st. A fairly large raise, because they had done a salary review/analysis in conjunction with negotiating the contract with our new union (which due to the nature of my position I'm not eligible to join) and concluded that I was underpaid.

So the CEO joined my weekly meeting with my boss yesterday in order to tell me, but shortly before it was scheduled to start, Boss said, can you jump on the call early, I need to correct some information. Which, sure, but then my brain went, aw, crap, he overestimated the raise, and then went, maybe he UNDERestimated the raise...

He looked at the wrong line in his chart. He did underestimate the amount. I'm getting double what he told me initially. Nearly a 20% increase. I am gobsmacked. I came very close to crying.

And he goes, and now I need you to react just like that when she tells you. So I did, basically. She told me what my new salary was going to be and I went, excuse me, what???

So tonight I went to my favorite food truck and got two of their excellent entrees and two appetizers (which will feed me for days) and then I stopped at a convenience store and got a carton of their peppermint stick and chocolate chip ice cream. Because hell yeah I'm celebrating.

[subversivegrrl]

Can I just say how much I hate the Libby app? I used to be able to easily recommend books for library purchase via the library's website (I still read everything on browser), but since they transferred all of that to Libby I cannot for the life of me figure out how that's supposed to work, and even the "notify me" tag... SUCKS? Like, I go to the book that's not in my library's holdings and I tap the tag and it takes me back to the book listing and nothing looks any different, so I can't tell if I've added that tag to the book, and does that let the library know I think they should buy it? I want them to buy all of Alexandra Rowland's books (@ariaste), the only thing currently in the digital catalog is A Taste of Gold and Iron, and the whole thing is damned frustrating. Give me back my beautifully simple Overdrive!

[subversivegrrl]

GDI brain.

[subversivegrrl]

First heirloom tomatoes of the season: a Striped German that weighs about 1.5 lbs all on its own, and a Berkeley Tiedyed (which I think displaced Brandywine as my favorite last year.)

The farm that grows these uses high tunnels to start their crops early, so they've already had their sweet corn for almost two weeks.

Tomatoes for breakfast tomorrow! (With sweet corn biscuits, yum.)

[subversivegrrl]

Text from my mom. My sister's reaction was "is she sure it was a dream and not a memory?"