Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • going deep on tolkien

    2025, the year of Tolkien, started with a bang. 6 extended edition movies week 1-2. Attempted to listen to a book on tape, Children of Hurin and decided that even when a book is exceptionally well narrated, I just fall asleep. Instead, read Hobbit, started Fellowship, and watched The War of the Rohirrim. I enjoyed the movie but apparently many others did not. Back to my lovely new 70th ed copy of Fellowship!

  • Too many things

    Having a bit of time off over the christmas break was nice. Fixed a few things, made a couple of new shirts, but didn't go away, didn't do anything particularly special or large.

    What it did give me was mental space to do a bunch of things that had been bothering me. It felt remarkably like ... not a life of leisure, but more ... a relaxed pace. I could keep a list of things to do each day in my head, which is unusual what with my adhd and awful short term memory.

    Back to work now. I'll freely admit that I am one of those incredibly lucky people who finds work satisfying, even more so these past six months or so now that I have a draft of a new paper in the works, results worth investigating, an excellent team and grants worth writing.

  • poison ivy and scorpion

    A young girl share with me that for the last 7 years every summer, she gets very itchy zits and it goes away after a few weeks.

    I tell her it's probably poison Ivy as it comes back probably at the same time she caught it the first time.

    She said that yes, as a kid she played in her grand parent yard and that is when it started.

    I too was initiated with poison Ivy as a kid. In a similar way, I went to play in the forest, and the Ivy touched me on the leg. The first year it spread all over my left side. But year after year, as I learned to manage the itch and the spread was smaller.

  • New job, who dis?

    Hello bartender, I will have a grog if you please. Still very cold outside.

    Today was the first day for this new job. It went okay. As in, nothing terrible happened but nothing terribly exciting either. Which in itself is good, no bad surprise at least. I get a new way to pay for my food and board, woo. It's a real nice job on paper and I don't know enough of its reality to pass good judgement yet. I mostly shook hands and smiled as I desperately tried to build mnemotechnic devices to try to remember the massive amount of names that were poured in me at once. I feel like a stranger in the middle of a new village, because that's what I am. It does not feel good. Well, it never did in the past so no big surprise here. Still, it smarts being here alone in a mostly desert hotel eating too much food as if to compensate the emptiness inside. Look at me complaining being warm and fed.