Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

I went to Lambert House for the trans group as usual last night, and it was a good group, if small: trans yoof youth talking about trans things. One thing that made it more pleasant than usual was that nobody connected to the online meeting; everyone was there in person. I just find it harder to divide my attention between the screen and the room, and the audio is always terrible. If the purveyors of online video hardware & software really want to take over the world, they're going to have to solve that second problem.

And while I'm complaining, I'm tired of the setup and teardown needed for the video calls. We can't just set it up and leave it up because we're still at St. Mark's, not in our own house. However, says Ken the director, we're moving back in July. I'm oh so ready, and the yoof youth are too, I found out last night.

Just two more trips to St. Marks for me, I think: I'll be in San Francisco in early May. It was pretty damn fantastic of St. Mark's to rent us that much space for that long, complete with use of a kitchen. Like many if not most queers I'm deeply suspicious of most conventional religious organizations* because they're full of people who crave being told that doing horrible things to queers is OK. Nevertheless, the Episcopal church in general and St. Mark's Cathedral in particular have won my grudging respect.



*Hence the popularity of woo among queers. If I could roll my eyes in writing right now, I would.

So I mentioned that I'd like to charge various devices using solar power. Here's how that went.

First, the SAE-to-USB widget didn't work. Either there wasn't enough voltage or current coming out of the 10W solar panel to make it think it was plugged into something – it was, after all, intended for a motorcycle – or it was just plain defective.

I have an inverter, i.e. something that turns DC into AC. What if I tried that, and never mind the inevitable losses? First I needed to plug the inverter into the solar panel. The panel has an SAE-to-alligator-clip adapter, and the inverter has something that you plug into an automotive outlet, like the kind cigarette lighters use.

Pro tip: on an automotive plug, the pointy part is positive. The springy contacts on the sides are negative. After I did that, plugging a tablet or phone into the inverter's AC outlet just barely, intermittently worked. But I'd forgotten about one of the inverter's features: it has old-style USB outlets, which seem to work better.

What would really make things work is stronger light and fewer clouds, which aren't going to happen where I live for a few months. The acid test is, come springtime or so, can I recharge my bicycle headlamp in a few hours? If so, I'm all set for The Thing In The Desert.

Taller Woman had surgery for cancer. Again. Last week. I'd promised to visit her in the hospital. She told me when it was happening, but I didn't put it in my calendar, so I missed the window. I was in New York when she told me, and thoroughly distracted, but I still feel terrible about it.

And last night, I thought I was going to Seacompression, but neau. I found out at almost the last minute that it's next month. At least this had a happy ending: I found out before I got on transit, so I went to the Merc and said hi to the gang.

It keeps raining in the morning just heavily enough to keep me from riding my bike.

Two things are driving me meshuggah lately: the company that runs the world's favorite search engine, and the SSO that I have to use. The latter explains why I'm writing an entry in the early afternoon.

But! I have plans to see Tacoma Girl, Dancer, and the Tickler over the next couple of weekends. Happiness.

Circumflatulation continues. No, I won't elaborate.

Yeah, I had to go back to (the temporary location of) Lambert House and fix the stupid UI, which is is written in Visual Basic for Applications. And what did I have to fix?

• The stacking order of UI elements, which gets messed up every single time I touch them.
• Actually do the plumbing from Access's pidgin SQL to VBA. How pieces of data get from the former to the latter isn't exactly obvious. It's the seam that holds Frankenstein's head on.
• Figure out why the check boxes weren't checking. The answer here was that if you want to check a box you have to click about 1mm to the left of the box. That's right, there are arithmetic errors happening way down deep in a UI library, and they'll never be fixed because they've been unsupported for years now.

So what's the really right way to fix this? Move to a real SQL server and write a front end. It wouldn't even take much Javascript to do what Lambert House needs. But that's a big-ass project, and one that I've already tried and failed to sell to Ken the director. Welp, if things ever really go sideways I'll be doing that project in a big hurry. Maybe I should engage in speculative execution.

I got home after 10:00 last night and slept the sleep of the just.

Earlier this week I had (Foreshadowing!) two dates with Dancer scheduled, one for the 10th and one for the 24th. But Dancer replied to a calendar email — the one for the 24th — saying that she had a friend from out of town who'd be visiting her Saturday and could we move our date to Friday?

You know where this is going: I had the wrong Saturday in mind. What's more, Shiny H, whom I haven't seen in a while, claimed me for Friday the 9th. I said no, I can't do Friday. I was puzzled when Dancer, who can see my calendar, moved our calendar item from the 24th to the 23rd, but I didn't grasp the implications. Since I owned the item for the 10th, I deleted it, still believing Dancer couldn't make it.

Yesterday Taller Woman hit me up asking if I wanted to go out early on the evening of Saturday the 10th. I was bummed about losing my date with Dancer, so I said yes enthusiastically and put it on my calendar. Late last night, Dancer texted me to ask, in essence, WTF? And that's when we finally cleared up the misunderstanding.

Le sigh. I really was looking forward to seeing Dancer on Saturday. We had... plans.

It probably doesn't help that my sleep hasn't been good for days now. I had another two-hour wake break in the wee hours yesterday.

Oh: somebody pooped in East Neighbor's yard last night, and put a brown paper napkin on top of it. Ew. It was cleaned up by morning.

I have just hate-finished the Esperanto course on Duolingo.

Why hate? Because the last of the four sections got really repetitive. And to make matters worse, skipping levels meant getting tested on vocabulary that I hadn't practiced in a while and forgot in a few cases because – wait for it – Duolingo was too busy drilling me on the same things over and over.

Why finish if I hated it? Jeez, have you met me or read this journal?

So do I still recommend Duolingo? Not for obscure languages like Esperanto or Welsh. The Spanish course seems to be much better done in terms of both content, presentation, and audio quality, and I speculate that the more popular languages are also well done. I suspect that the Esperanto course was a volunteer effort. I hope that the deficiencies in the course are due mostly to Duolingo's algorithms, not their efforts.

What do I think of Esperanto as a language? I grudgingly admit that it's easier than Spanish, and it's probably easier than English for those learning it as a second language. Here, however, are my beefs with it:

1. As in Spanish, the prepositions don't line up nicely with those in English. This was probably inevitable, so no disrespect to Dr. Zamenhof on this issue.
2. It's a mouthful, thanks in part to the reluctance to multiply roots, especially pairs of antonyms, and its abundance of "affixes" to make up for that. Road to hell, good intentions.
3. Because Esperanto borrows so heavily from both French and German, Esperanto words nearly always have a cognate in English, but that doesn't necessarily help you remember them. It does, however, make you feel dumb when you forget them.
4. Esperanto has been infected with two of the romancisms that I like least: reflexive verbs that could be intransitive, and verbs that insist on a phrase with a particular preposition instead of transitivity. At least they're not as irritatingly common in Esperanto as in Spanish.
5. The pronouns all end in "i", which can make distinguishing them when spoken difficult.

What do I think of Esperanto as an idea? Le sigh. I want to believe in it, but I don't. Peace and understanding through a shared language made way more sense in 19th-century Bialystok, Poland than they do in America today. Can Esperanto be a window on the world, or even a ticket to it? Sure, but people have to want those things, and I don't know how to make that happen. And there's a bootstrapping problem: an awful lot of what gets written in Esperanto is about... Esperanto.

But did I have fun learning it? Shyeah!

So I had that date with K*, moniker TBD, at the Wildrose last night. She arrived late, after having to deal with teenage children and drive to Capitol Hill from east Renton. For you non-locals, that's a good 20 mi./32 km. No pressure.

I'll tell you what, K is 100% real. We talked about our parents. I told the Opera Story. We talked about kink, natch, and pluses and minuses of bottom surgery. In other words, we talked about the kinds of things I write about here.

She directed me to the sofa in the far corner of the near-empty Wildrose and viciously made out with me, as she'd been planning all along. I've been... womanhandled. I liked it. Yeah, I know, surprising as the sunrise, which is in a few minutes.

As K mentioned, I haven't been nearly as "forward" as K because I've had it all but beaten into me that I'm big and scary. So at least as far as some members of the queer community are concerned, I've overcompensated. But K raises the excellent point that we're getting old, and life is too short to waste on reticence.

This would make the third and by far most intense time that I've made out with a woman in the Wildrose. I have every intention of increasing that number.

Oh: shortly before we were getting ready to go, a bunch of younger women came in. I could have sworn that the 'Rose closed at 10:00 on Sundays. Well, hooray for late night party dykes.

She kindly drove me back to my place, saying that the 57% battery in her Leaf would get her home. Did you know that there are places in Seattle where you can charge a car for free? Says K, even if it weren't free, it would still be way cheaper than gas. The downside of electrics? Range anxiety, at least with older models.

And now, the fine print: she says she's "polysaturated", meaning she's polyamorous and her dance card is full. She said we could be "comets", i.e. seeing each other about once a month. Once again, I'm an ADDer's calendar item, and that won't be enough for me. Even if I had them, a calendar full of these relationships wouldn't be enough for me.

But did I enjoy the date? Hell yes. Will I see her again ASAP? Also yes.



*K's name happens to be identical to a word from a Native American culture. That's a coincidence.

Long time no update. I'm OK.

Walked all over the Pike/Pine corridor and then hit the Merc on Saturday; I realized it was the only time this month that I could do that. Temptress was there again, looking fabulous but unfortunately there with... that guy. I picked exactly the right time to say hello.

Work is. I want to find an AWS rep and install a new orifice in them. AWS's docs? Good, if you can find the right one. The suggestions that the UI gives you? Dead wrong. I burned an awful lot of time over the weekend trying to make it do things it really can't.

I didn't call my mother for Mothers' Day because she doesn't talk on the phone anymore. She hardly talks at all.

Tacoma Girl introduced me to Bar House yesterday evening – It's all about the fabulous, theatrical, Fremont-esque decor, and otherwise an ordinary bar that everyone goes to. Then I introduced Tacoma Girl to Mr. B's Meadery. Happiness.

I'm not wearing much and coping with the relative warmth.

Lambert House, the queer youth center where I volunteer as database monkey, has to do an annual statistical report for its funding agencies at the start of the calendar year. I haven't gotten remote access to work since I moved*. So I bopped on down to the house, which is unheated when the youth aren't there.

Picture me doing three hours of database queries and spreadsheets in my big, red & black coat with gloves on. Even with the extra clothing my fingers and toes went numb. Hello, Raynaud's syndrome! I felt completely justified in going up the street to Smith for a bowl of clam chowder. I miss the days when the Monday night Lambert House crew would hit Smith for drinks & munchies.

Punch line: the director said afterward he could have turned the heat on for me remotely. Le sigh.



*I think it's an IPv4 vs. IPv6 issue. Xfinity wants to assign me an IPv6; the thing at the other end only wants IPv4. I might be able to configure my way to happiness, but I'm not messing with that until work settles down.