Change bad
(You can pretty much guess when I go four days without posting that one of three things is happening: I'm ultra-busy; things I can't talk about publicly are going badly; or I'm on vacation. In this case it was a combination of the first two, but some of the things-going-badly are significantly better than they were a couple days ago.)
I've never dealt well with change. I like things to be solid, firm, immutable. My models of reality don't change, so why should reality?
Which is to say, clearly my models of reality are broken, since they don't accurately reflect reality, which changes constantly. But it's hard to acknowledge that.
Some change is good. One reason I mostly don't put art on my walls (or tattoos on my skin) is that I relatively quickly get bored with whatever I put up, and restless, and I want some kind of change. But change takes effort and time, and so I end up increasingly dissatisfied but with too much inertia to make the change.
Similarly with web design. Every now and then I get suddenly dissatisfied and rework some piece of my site. But most of the site's been pretty much static for years now, except for this journal. So rather than redesign the site, I'm just making some cosmetic changes to the journal for now. (I'm also making some invisible changes under the hood, to make it easier to customize the journals of other people who use my journal system.)
All of which is a roundabout way of saying welcome to the new look of my front journal page. Many of y'all have already seen it. After we've had some time to iron out bugs, I'll make similar changes to Vardibidian's, Dan's, and Mary Anne's journals. (They were the ones who asked for the latest-comments feature in the first place.)
A lot of other changes going on in my life, too, which I think is contributing to my restlessness, to my desire to make changes to the things I have control over, to exert control in order to assert that I'm not in fact helpless in the face of change. The biggest and most obvious of the changes is that my office is moving to SF today; starting Friday, I'll be commuting to SF three days a week, working at home two. We'll see how it goes. The new faster trains and "higher service levels" (more frequent trains) will help a little, as will finding out when and where to catch the shuttle from the train station to the office. (I could use the exercise from the 20-minute walk each way, but I could also use the time savings from taking the shuttle.) Unfortunately, despite many warnings I failed to acquire any Commuter Checks for May, which apparently means I'll have to pay train fare this month myself. But I did finally print out the form to sign up for commuter checks, so I'm hoping I'll get some next month to help cover costs.
There've been other changes lately too: some good, some bad, some uncertain as yet. One of the best that I can talk about here is some changes to the house: in addition to the new curtains I mentioned last week, Mary Anne helped me pick out drip pans for the stove (I was amazed at how much of a relief it was to no longer have all the stove burners tilting upward due to someone having installed the wrong kind of drip pan) and a power drill (vroom!) and various assorted home products (shower caddy, laundry basket, etc) and some translucent stick-on coverings for my front-door window (so I can walk downstairs in a state of dishabille without worrying about neighbors looking in the window), and she did some organizing in my closet, and she helped me choose a washer/dryer. Which was delivered Tuesday morning, and it fits (with about an inch to spare) in the tiny space allotted for it in the upstairs hall closet, and it works. Yay! Unfortunately, there's no outlet in the upstairs hall closet for the washer to plug into without running an extension cord across the hall; I need to do something about that. But at least now I can do laundry without leaving the house.
I'm on visitor #5 in a sequence of 6 (and two-and-a-half weeks into the three-week period of lots of visitors); still enjoying seeing folks, still tired. Tiredness exacerbated by lack of sleep; it's partly my fault (for staying up way way too late) that I've been averaging 4 or 5 hours a night for most of the last several nights (after a miraculous and wonderful 8-hour sleep night on Friday night), but partly mysterious (waking up significantly earlier than there's any reason to, and my usual sleeping drugs—Valerian, NyQuil—not being nearly as effective as usual). Probably stress, among other things. Didn't manage to take a nap yesterday, but got to bed reasonably early and got 7+ hours of sleep, so I'm hoping today will be a little more manageable than the last couple days have been.
Think that's all for now. Let me know if you run into any problems with the new look.
