Life, Bleh

My photo journal and stats page have both been updated. With an attempt at returning to normalcy in May, including eating (outside) at restaurants and having people over for board games, we actually have a reasonable number of photos: 2292 in the past 4 months. It’s still lower than the pre-pandemic 3417 since we weren’t doing weekly games or the usual weekend social things, but it’s still nice. (There are also some board game photos on photos, for the first time since the pandemic started. Woo.)

But of course, it’s all just in time for us to have to start being super cautious again, thanks to delta, and particularly thanks to all the people who refuse to vaccinate. I expect the next four months will be depressingly low in photos again, as we curtail in-person things. So that’s bleh #1.

Bleh #2 is work… I don’t think I’ve ever felt this utterly dejected in my professional life, and the worst part is that there isn’t even a reason for it. It’s probably just a ton of burnout, brought on by a combination of things in work and the world at large (because hooray the world is continuing to fall apart). I’m trying to push through it, like always, but I wonder if I actually need to find some more concrete changes I can make, like offloading some of the teams I work with to other people.

So of course, bleh #3 (and probably the biggest one) is the world in general right now. Politics is still an endless mess of poop, states are still doing horrible things (looking at you in particular, Texas and Florida), and the fact that we can’t even come together as a country in the face of an obvious, immediate threat (Covid) really doesn’t bode well for us being able to do anything about climate change.

Speaking of climate change, bleh #4 is that our basement flooded again, thanks to Ida. We’d been expecting for years that the flooding was due to the gutters being clogged and/or was coming from the walls. But this year… gutters were cleaned and cleared, and the water barriers we’d set up maybe suggest that the water is actually coming up through the concrete foundation, given the walls were actually relatively dry, and the wet patch in the middle of the carpet kept getting wetter as we cleaned it up, despite everything around it already being cleared. So that’s going to be some more house fun, and continue to curse the people who finished a Pittsburgh basement without proper consideration for the fact that basements of 100-year-old houses get wet.

Maybe the one “interesting” thing is that our food apathy and indecisiveness have led us to try some meal kits. After the arguably terrible experience we had with Blue Apron a few years back (“Let’s use every plate and pot and utensil and take 2 hours to make this overly-elaborate dinner that is supposed to serve four but barely serves the two of us!”), I didn’t have high hopes. But it turns out there’s a ton of meal box services now, all of which seem to be running specials. So…

Our first attempt this time around is Dinnerly. We got a 6-meals-for-4-people box and, to my surprise, the servings actually seem relatively well-sized. Some of the meals (pulled pork bowls) seem like they’re actually more like 3 servings instead of 4, but others (stir-fried eggplant) are more like 5 servings than 4. It’s also not a huge pain to cook… the things are more elaborate than I would usually make, but not unreasonably so. If it wasn’t for the fact that the meals also felt a bit plain (like things I could easily plan myself, such as grilled portabella with quinoa), it feels like it might be a good way to help with the food issue.

Next up, we’re trying Hello Fresh. They had some interesting-looking dishes up next week (particularly mushroom gnocchi and mushroom cavatappi), so we’ll see how that goes.

So other than the food, that’s a lot of bleh. Not much is going well in life right now, all things considered.

Yay life?

Water and a Watery Fourth

I owe some sort of life update or something, probably.

We’ve been having a fairly fun time with the house recently. A few weeks ago we had a super heavy storm that happened to coincide with a planned dinner trip… so of course I got stuck halfway between home and Squirrel Hill when the rain and wind started, and got utterly soaked everywhere. Dinner itself was also generally mediocre, so I wasn’t in a great mood when I got home.

Not to be outdone, I went into the basement to sit for a bit, and was greeted by the sound of dripping water… it was water coming from under the walls in the (unfinished) furnace room, running into the drain. Okay, I guess that’s weird, but whatever. A short while later, there’s dripping from the other (finished) side of the basement, into the drains near the laundry. And lo and behold, there is water coming from there. And everywhere. And the entire space under the stairs and under the router is flooded. Yay our basement is flooded!

So we spent the rest of the night vacuuming up water (hooray for owning a shopvac?), and then had Stanley Steemer come out the next day to assess the damage. Ended up having them pull out and discard the carpet pad, and clean and dry the carpet itself. We still need to have someone come by to install a new carpet pad and re-stretch the carpet, also.

The Fourth of July was a pretty nice affair this year. We went to the pool, and then had some people over afterward to sit in the backyard… so of course it starts to storm again. Enough rain that parts of the basement got more water in them, again, although not nearly as badly as last time. And enough wind that we lose power, for nearly 8 hours. So we had pizza and wine by candlelight, indoors, and it was a surprisingly nice evening anyway. Still, I can’t help but feel like the power loss and more basement water was an appropriate way to celebrate the fourth this year, given the way the country has been going this past year.

Not much else has been happening in life, but with adventures like that, I’m not sure I’d want much else to.

Life

Uh, wow. It’s been three months since I last posted. So much for posting at least once a month…

In the home repair department, we successfully replaced our old bathroom ceiling fan. We are quite proud of ourselves!

Downtown flooded a bit in March, thanks to the excessive rain we’ve been having. We missed the worst of it, but caught some of the mess.

Life has otherwise just been full of board games and rock climbing.



With luck, it won’t be another three months before I post again…

Dryer, Water, Gingerbread

Our dryer adventures have concluded with a successful self repair, after an appliance service quoted $180 for someone to come out. We ended up not quite having to take the entire dryer apart… instead, we were able to glue the new seal on while the drum was sitting mostly in place (which meant we didn’t have to unhook any of the belts… huzzah).

The repair was completed just in time for the huge water main servicing our area to break, leaving us with minimal (and contaminated) water, foiling my plans to deal with all the laundry stacking up. Instead, we went out to investigate, and found some impressive remnants of the breakage.


Other than that, life has been going. I’m officially done with work for the year. After we got reasonable water back, I spent most of my first day off (Monday) doing 6 loads of laundry while sitting and playing Persona 5 in the basement to make sure the dryer didn’t catch fire. It seems to have worked properly, which is good.

Persona 5, by the way, is a pretty amazing game. I think the visual novel/relationship elements are integrated really well with the RPG elements. I’ve been kind of obsessed with it, and hoping to finish up the fifth palace soon!

Our neighbors had an ugly sweater party with gingerbread house making, so I tried my hand at making a gingerbread house. It didn’t turn out too badly, I think?





In any case, Christmas soon approaches, which will be nice. I’ve updated my photo journal given the free time I’ve been having. It’s nice having time off to catch up on errands and chores.

New Year, PWSA, LJ sadness

It’s a new year. Yay. life’s photo journal and stats pages have been brought up to date. (Also the new daily photo project continues, which I’m honestly surprised by.)

The PWSA continues to be incompetent. We’ve had repeated billing problems where they bill incorrectly based on a correct meter reading. (For example, a meter reading of “18” bills us for 18,000 gallons of usage, instead of subtracting from the previous month’s reading of “17” and billing us for 1,000 gallons of usage.) This issue seems to be getting harder and harder to resolve each time, culminating in this month where I went down to the service center in person, and ended up with a rude supervisor and a submitted (paper) letter that apparently schedules a formal meeting with an appeals board…? That’s still ongoing, so yay for incompetent public departments.
Seriously, this issue has stressed me out so much that there have been multiple days where I feel like we should just sell the house and rent again to not have to deal with them.
Blargh.

In other depressing news, Livejournal apparently recently moved their servers to Russia, which is causing an exodus of users from it to Dreamwidth. This makes me sad for a lot of reasons.
I’ve previously talked about how I hate social media and miss long-form writing. Livejournal was my first real “community” (before Facebook really took off as a way to share life updates). I got to know so many people better through LJ. That community has been mostly dead for years, but the few remaining people on it will probably move away now as well.
Also going through and deleting all of the posts reminded me of how much people used to interact, on a deeper level than just “liking” your photo of breakfast or whatever. We used to really engage with people. Stupid social media.

I’ve mentioned before that I like having control of my data (it’s why I use WordPress installed on webserver that I pay for). So in a lot of ways, I feel vindicated that I use this (and syndicate over to LJ) instead of primarily using LJ. On the other hand, LJ’s fine-grained access controls were particularly useful for things I didn’t think I should be posting publicly. So I’ve had to go through today and delete hundreds of posts of things I hadn’t posted publicly in this journal. I guess that’s no guarantee that the data is gone (they probably have backups), but at least it makes me feel better about it.

Anyway, yay for friends and board games and rock band?