Updates
I wrote the below post sometime around June 11, but didn’t get around to posting it until a month later.
Been quite a while since I’ve posted anything about what I’ve been up to lately. Some assorted notes on that topic:
Kam and I went whale-watching on Monday [June 8], in Monterey. Alas, the only marine mammals we encountered were orcas (two matriarchial groups, hanging out together—a total of eight orcas). I’m not particularly fond of orcas (I had been hoping for whales and/or dolphins), and I felt like they were slacking on their main job of attacking yachts.
(…I’m amused by the social-media notion that anti-capitalist orcas are attacking billionaires, but I should acknowledge that the Iberian orca attacks have included attacks on fishing boats and other relatively small vessels.)
(Wikipedia adds: “Researchers have also suggested that the [boat-attacking] behaviour could be a fad. Other such cultural phenomena among orcas have been short-lived, such as in 1987 when southern resident orcas from Puget Sound carried dead salmon around on their heads.”)
Anyway, our guide seemed to take a certain amount of glee in calling them killer whales (as in “there’s a reason that they’re called killer whales, you know!”) (quote is approximate), and in the fact that while we were nearby, the orcas killed and ate a seal. (I didn’t see it happen, but the guide apparently did.)
On past whale-watching trips, I’ve loved just being out on the water, regardless of whether we saw whales. But last time I went whale-watching, I got a little seasick (more vertigo than nausea), which made the second half of the outing unpleasant. This time, I took a Dramamine at the start, but it turned out to be quite old (long past its expiration date). I didn’t get seasick, but I could feel seasickness impending (as the six- to eight-foot swells rocked the boat), so I spent much of the trip staring grimly at the horizon to stave off problems. Turns out that staring at the horizon (even literally as opposed to metaphorically) is tiring!
It didn’t help that I had left my jacket in the car. As we left the car, Kam suggested that I bring it along, but the sun was bright and warm, and I had a light sweater, and I did my usual thing of failing to imagine that weather could change. I knew there would be wind, but I thought I would be fine, temperature-wise. What I wasn’t expecting was for the sun to be obscured by dark grey clouds for much of the time we were on the water. Which in addition to making things uncomfortably cold (not awful, just colder than I was expecting), also cast a bit of a shadow on my mood. Even the water turned a kind of unpleasant dark metallic color.
I think the whole experience led me to realize that what I love about being on boats has as much to do with the mystique of them as with the reality of them. (Kind of like how I feel about printing presses. 🙂) I mean, I do love being out on the water, but apparently only when the sun is shining and the water is relatively calm (and, as I’ve learned recently in a friend’s boat, when the boat doesn’t lean over alarmingly).
By the time we got home from whale-watching, I was exhausted. I ended up sleeping for something like eleven hours that night, and then fell into a three-hour nap the next afternoon, and continued to be intermittently wiped out for the next couple days.
Other than that, most of what I’ve been up to lately is Hugo stuff. We successfully launched the Hugo Voter Packet last month; I’ve been keeping an eye on various aspects of that, but there isn’t much for me to do on it until voting closes in August. So I’ve been reading (and skimming) and watching Hugo finalists. I’m as done as I’m going to get with nine of the twenty-one categories, and have started on a couple of others.
Spent some time these past couple days helping a young friend move out of a dorm; that went reasonably smoothly. But also demonstrated to me that my sleep schedule is still off-kilter.
What else? Getting various things set up for the next Otherwise Award jury. Helping out with some documentation for this year’s online WSFS Business Meeting. Not managing to do much anti-Trump-regime work.
Oh, and twice in the past couple of days I’ve accidentally smashed things on the kitchen floor. The first one was a jar of peanut butter—I managed to knock it off the counter, and it ended up as a few large and several small peanut-butter-covered pieces of glass on the floor. Got that cleaned up, and then about a day later I was putting away dishes from the dishwasher and a mug fell apart in my hand and smashed on the floor—I assume it was the one that the handle had broken off of quite a while back, and I had glued it back on, and I think the glue just wore out or something, so the mug detached itself from the handle again. That was easier to clean up, due to lack of peanut butter.
In better kitchen news, a week or two ago (does time have any meaning these days?) I made guacamole, for the first time in I think a couple of years. It wasn’t quite as good as I’ve sometimes managed in the past, but still pretty tasty.
Aside from the above, it’s been mostly just the usual kinds of things around here: seeing friends (online and in person), making sourdough, practicing piano, practicing Spanish, playing occasional boardgames, listening to the Kinky Boots soundtrack album for the first time, watching TV shows, voting, attending WisCon online, planning a trip, keeping an eye on US and world news, etc.
Oh, one more thing: I’ve been getting back to posting at Words & Stuff. I’ve posted every couple of days for the past month or so, and have the next month or so’s worth of posts scheduled. Haven’t yet figured out a good way to link to the posts from social media (in a way that interested people will see), but if you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to posts there.