the victory of optimism over experience
Nov. 15th, 2025 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanBack when the house nonsense started I applied for a grant being offered by the federal government to make your house more energy efficient. Since I was going from UN-insulated wooden box to an insulated wooden box I figured I would qualify for at least some money.
Well that was a whole Prime Minister ago, and after two extensions and lots of missed targets I finally got the final energy audit done this summer. Something went wrong though and the application was never completed so I sat down today and dug through a stack of email attachments to figure out what was missing. I think I'm on the right track, so wish me luck I can get it fixed. A few bucks to offset the money pit would be very very useful.
Next on the donwanna list is compiling the full list of contracts and bills and fix-it work that has had to be done. If I can get a comprehensive list together of what has and hasn't been done up to today's date it will be easier to add to it as things go forward.
***
Nothing yet from the city inspector. I spoke to the permit-wrangler and he left a message with her on Friday, so hopefully she gets back to him this coming work week.
I haven't done much in the basement while I've been waiting to hear back, so that means I have time to finally put my living spaces in better order. Lots of moving furniture and cleaning up cat puke. Finally made homes for a stack of pots and pans that have just been living on top of the stove. And I finally installed the new front door lock that's been sitting in a drawer and waiting for me to deal with it for um, about 18 months.
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My sister got an email from a woman in Australia who said her DNA test with ancestry.com showed a match. I'm pretty sure my mother told me we had relatives in Australia but I don't know how we're connected with the little info I have. I had an old free version of ancestry that didn't have much info on it, so I upgraded to a paid version and now I just need to find time to start adding stuff to it.
I have an aunt who is charge of remembering all the family members and how everybody is related so once I have a skeleton together I'll reach out to her and see if she can fill in things like how many kids my cousins have, because I have no clue.
It's a project I've been meaning to get around to for pretty much years. But maybe I'll have a little bit more free time this winter.
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Physio still going really well. Crossing my fingers I'll be back to normal in a couple of months.
air conditioners moved
Nov. 13th, 2025 05:18 pmredbirdcattitude at our storage unit, so he could transport another bookcase and several boxes of books. We have also brought some boxes of books from the storage unit in a Lyft, but that doesn't work for moving bookcases.We have now hired the same guy a few times; we also hired him and his brother to put up curtain rods and hang curtains. (The ceilings in this apartment are too high for us to have sensibly installed the curtain rods ourselves).
Vilnius, Bi+ Equal Founding Meeting conference 2 - the disagreements
Nov. 13th, 2025 08:05 pmlovingbothThe Founding Meeting for the pan-Europe organisation Bi+ Europe saw almost everyone agree about almost everything. Yay! There's some legal work to do, but it should start up in April next year.
What were the main disagreements? There were five things that more than a couple of people voted against. Not in the order they were in the draft documents, they were...
Voting System ( Read more... )
Non-bi+ members of the board ( Read more... )
Extra vote ( Read more... )
Russia / Belarus ( Read more... )
Definition of bi+ ( Read more... )
Again, thanks to some very deft work during the entire process before and during the meeting, none of these led to shouting matches, and I don't think anyone went away going 'Well, that vote went the wrong way, I'm not going to take any further part...'
Thanks once again to Governance Leader Soudah, Governance Analyst Demet, and polishing sessions chair Darienne for that work.
1. I have done STV votes by hand in Student Union elections in the early 1980s. It is doable; you just don't want to have to do it, and it was the one reason I was glad that turnouts tended to be low in the elections in question.
2. In small elections, ties are rare in STV but can happen. In that case, it can make a difference how high you put someone even without the vote being 'transferred' because there are still people in the running above them. I once won a place on the Liberal Party's Federal Executive because I'd put the person I'd tied with third on my list of preferences, and they'd put me second.
3. Following the formation of a coalition government in the UK in 2010, there was a referendum on adopting AV. It's not a good way of electing a Parliament, but it's better than simple plurality, known in the UK as 'first past the post' even though the 'post' isn't fixed... It wasn't just most of the two largest parties campaigning against it that meant I knew it would lose, it was when the Electoral Commission published the booklet on it that went to everyone and managed to make 'put your choices in order and if your current preferred choice is last, we use your next one, until someone gets over 50% of the votes' so complicated that I could barely understand WTF they were saying.
Here, there was a tiny bit more detail on how STV works than I thought was strictly necessary, but I am not crying foul...
4. Note it doesn't matter what the second preference of the people who voted for 'one or two' is, or even if they had one or not: the outcome of 'none' vs 'minority' is not going to affect its two wins.
5. Five produced a (different) single clear winner and another produced a two-way tie. As well as simple plurality, AV, and Condorcet, there's the French Presidential style (if no-one gets a majority, the top two go into a runoff), Borda (you allot more points to people's first choices than their second etc and see who has the most overall), and approval voting, the one that produced the tie (you can vote for as many as you like, highest one wins). That last one was added by the later book, I think.
At some point, I'm absolutely going to put the table of votes and the various results on a t-shirt...
6. Well this one, anyway.
7. The only possible exception I can think of is Albania, whose horrific situation was more home-grown / China's. And we didn't have anyone saying they were from there.
still resting LIKE A POTATO, with a slight lapse yesterday
Nov. 13th, 2025 01:06 pmelisema few things make a post
Nov. 12th, 2025 06:25 pmredbirdThe delivery pharmacy somehow got the wrong dosage of one of my prescriptions. This is annoying partly because I noticed the problem, told them, and we both contacted my doctor. (The prescription is 1/day, and they filled it as half a pill every day.) I thought we'd agreed that they would hold off until one of us heard back from her, and I took delivery yesterday because I thought they were bringing the other thing I'd ordered. So now I have to contact Carmen again, and figure out what to do here.
After several days of looking at Medicare open enrollment stuff, I sent an email this afternoon to the state-funded office that provides free advice on the subject, asking for an appointment. The questions are, roughly, do I want Medicare Advantage next year, or do I want basic Medicare, a separate (Part D) drug plan, and a Medigap policy. My existing Medicare Advantage plan isn't being offered next year, so I have options, but also have to decide something.
We have, however, heard back from the handyman/moving guy, and arranged for him to take the air conditioners out of our windows, and also bring more things from the storage unit. He took just long enough to get back to us that Adrian was trying to find someone else to do the job, but I'm glad we don't have to.
idle memories (while resting LIKE A POTATO)
Nov. 12th, 2025 02:41 pmelisemAnyone else remembering points of departure to Mike-spiels is invited, nay, implored, to post them here.
Sincerely,
Elise,
who is still recuperating from COVID by RESTING LIKE A POTATO
* Yes, the attic of which Lois McMaster Bujold said, at first sight, "It really IS the attics of Vorkosigan House."
Vilnius, Bi+ Equal Founding Meeting conference
Nov. 11th, 2025 10:23 amlovingbothMonday 20th October - time to work! ( Read more... )
Tuesday 21st October - more work! ( Read more... )
Wednesday 22nd October - finishing off ( Read more... )
Overall
Like I say, this was an astonishing example of international community building. Congratulations to all the organising team.
Having the amount of money they had helped: it meant a bunch of people got flights and/or accommodation and/or conference fees paid. How many, I'm not sure, but my guess would be somewhere between a third and a half.
It's not necessarily a model I'd want to follow, because without large grants 'gold plated' events are not sustainable and this was one of those. It was a catered hotel event - and hotels tend to go 'ker-ching!' when told you want to have a conference there because they're used to businesses that don't really care about the costs. I would never ever ever had considered having an official photographer, for example.11 But this was Bi+ History being made and the results are very good to look at.
It was also the least fluffy bi conference I think I've ever been to, but that's entirely OK: it was clear from the first mention of it that this was a work event much more than a social one, and attendees were picked according to what they could contribute rather than 'anyone and everyone' or 'first come' basis. And that definitely worked.
I'm already looking forward to the next one.
Oh, since more or less finishing this, I see that the two people who led the governance process have published their version. It's great, and I'm not just saying that because there's a flattering picture of me in the middle of it :)
1. I'd thought the reason they're part of ILGA Europe etc is around safety, but it turns out that they'd prefer to be part of 'European' organisations rather than 'pan-Asian' ones.
2. An obscenely low £61, a quid over twice the cost of the train to and from the airport.
3. Just over £370, but mostly because I had eight nights in Vilnius rather than three and at one point, the plan was for L to come too. Staying at the hotel effectively cost €290 in a single room for four nights, so more per night than I paid. There was also the option to share for €40/night.
4. €250, or about £220.
5. In the end, I spent around £95 during my time there.
6. It 'obviously' couldn't have been both: with one normal meeting a year, you'd almost always be within six months of the previous or the next one.
7. This is how we realised the published programme was wrong - when registering, there was a form for signing up for this walk on Monday or Tuesday. I was about to go for Tuesday anyway when one of the people on the desk mentioned that I had no choice because of when my session was scheduled. "No it's not, it's in the first afternoon slot, look..." "Ah."
8. I do wonder if I was the only person to go 'that's 25% non-bi+ identified...' I should also note that I'm presenting this in a slightly different way: the text was around having all or a majority of people being bi+ identified, but this is the way the discussion in the session was actually framed.
9. I tried doing some typing on governance lead Soudah's laptop with a French keyboard but gave up. Having a few of the letters change position wasn't a problem, but what sort of keyboard has a key that has both full stop and semi colon on, but makes you press shift for the one everyone uses the most? :) :) More seriously, given that English was most people's second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth language, the other way I felt a minority there was in my monolingualism.
10. There was a noise warning, but I'd have moved away to avoid the smell if I'd realised what the noise warning was about: the smell of these really irritates my nose. Fortunately, this one wasn't too bad.
11. Even before he was occasionally irritating! Presumably being more used to doing weddings, he wandered around coming into sessions, walking around the room one way or another taking photos from various angles of various people, then leaving and coming back later to repeat that. Had he come to my one, I'd have been very tempted to tell him he had two minutes and that was it. In the end, he went with the first of the walking tours and, as mentioned, the results are great to see.
[ gaming ] An interlude, soon to be slightly on fire
Nov. 9th, 2025 10:40 pmkiyaDramatis Personae
Izgil, who did not do much because his player was out this session
Celyn, who has complicated class issues
Viepuck, who is very busy causing chaos as usual
Robin, who is doing a lot of engineering lately
When we concluded last session, the party was having something of a vacation in Robin's new demesne of the village of Asineau.
( Things have been pretty chill for a bit! Warmer now. )
nothing is sacred nothing is safe
Nov. 8th, 2025 11:19 pmthe_siobhanI didn't really plan ahead for the day after NaDruWriNi, so I had to drag myself out of bed to work on Sunday. I woke up to a message that my dad was in the hospital. The medical issue was dealt with promptly, which is good. Thursday they announced they would be sending him home the next day.
Problem being, he has been getting weaker really fast and after almost a week in bed we were worried he wasn't safe to go up stairs on his own - they live in a two-story row house. So his wife rented him a bed and equipment to set him up in the living room. Since I'm the only family member who doesn't work Fridays I went over to haul furniture around and make space for the delivery. Their 100+ year old house has a staircase that gets narrower as you get higher, something I discovered while hauling a marble-topped fucking table up the stairs. (They've lived there for 30+ years and they have SO MUCH stuff.)
But room was made, bed was installed with no issue, and today the rest of the family showed up to finish organizing, hang a privacy curtain, and install some child-gates and locks. He was wobbly and exhausted when he got home on Friday, but reports are that he's a lot stronger today after a good sleep.
***
Meanwhile I got a call from permit-wrangler that he was showing up at the house on Monday with the inspector and to have the blueprints available. Last I heard she (the inspector) was going to talk to her boss about what could be done. I haven't heard anything back, but I'll follow up on Monday so cross your fingers for me.
I haven't done anything more in that basement room since I figure I'll wait to see if I have to rip it all out first. So today was spent trying to sort out my shit on the first floor. I'm trying to make enough room that I can empty out the storage unit, because that will save me just under $300 a month.
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I spoke to a friend who spent the summer dealing with a broken ankle and he gave me the name of the physiotherapy clinic he goes to - which just happens to be barely a block from my house. The woman I met with came to the conclusion that the plantar faciitis is actually healing just fine - but that at some point my achilles got involved, and that's what is now causing the majority of my problems. She's been treating that for the last two weeks and holy shit, it is SO MUCH better. I'm still using the cane to protect the plantar fascia because that's not 100% yet, but already have so much less pain. Halle-fucking-lujah.
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Goths Against Fascism are raising money for the National Immigration Law Centre this weekend. So listening to tunes after a day of hauling my own furniture around.
As I posted elsewhere, I would like my times to be less interesting now please.