The new LJ Terms of Service, though it claims to be legally non-binding, forbids breaking Russian law:

"User shall be liable for breaching the terms and conditions hereof, including the requirements to Registration and Content posting, as well as for violation of applicable laws committed by User, including the laws of the Russian Federation". Also, "Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0 −18) as “adult material”". I can't promise to do those things -- I don't know Russian law, though I'm told it forbids pictures of Putin as a gay clown.

It's been a good 14 years and I'm as change-averse as anyone. I'll miss giving monthly virtual gifts to norwoodbridge. But the import is done, and I won't be cross-posting. My username there is the same as here.

Here is a FAQ entry on moving from LJ to Dreamwidth (it works).
Here is a good post on "How to move to DreamWidth and Like It".

I've found as many of my LJ friends there as I can, and my plan is to basically subscribe/grant on DW and at the same time unfriend on LJ; that will let me keep track of who hasn't migrated or created an account there, and encourage me to read DW first.

Many people who post sporadically may not yet know about the new TOS and the mass migration to dreamwidth. In hopes that some folks have settings that will email them when they are tagged: I hope you'll come to Dreamwidth, miyyu, a_kosmos, le_coeur_chante, and serrin. I don't think I'll have this LJ account for much longer.

Really interesting lunch conversation today with a Zillianaire who's been there for a few years. I knew (though it's not widely known) that he actually came out of an early retirement to take this job, and for weeks we'd been planning to have lunch so that he could talk to me about early retirement and the pitfalls he encountered there. In the kitchen earlier this week I couldn't help noticing out loud that now he's got a hard-driving job and an infant -- he is, I said undiplomatically, like the kid who beat Super Mario Bros and is now playing through it again, starting over on the way harder mode where all the easily stompable Goombas have turned into fast-moving metal-coated beetles.

So we had lunch. Apparently he retired even earlier than I'd realized: in his "mid or early thirties". After this he drifted for a few years. He learned to make jewelry, which was super cool (and oh, I just realized this is why he has an awesome wedding ring. He probably made that). He got a masters degree in CS for fun. He took writing classes, but learned he wasn't a writer. He traveled around seeing friends, hoping to hang out with them as he'd done in college, but found out that the friends had jobs and kids and it wasn't the same.

He also got depressed. And when he did try to get back into the workforce, he found that most companies didn't want to hire him because of the gap on his resume. (Zillian didn't care: he spent four weeks practicing coding questions and then he interviewed well, and that's all we wanted to see.) Which turned into kind of a silly mistake on his part, since he'd intended initially to get a lower-stress job than this one, but so it goes.

He lost a lot of his social life -- even more the loose connections that a person says hi to, then any especially close work friends.

He lost something good to say when people said "so what do you do?" Our culture revolves strongly around work, and he never identified enough with his hobbies to feel comfortable answering like that.

He felt disconnected from the culture he'd been part of. It's more fun to be in it than be observing it, he said.

He got bored. A feeling I can only vaguely remember.

And he felt useless and not needed, with no particular reason to persist at anything that got annoying.

Any early retirement of mine would be almost 15 years later than his, it sounds like -- so I'll be that much older and tireder -- and maybe my heavy involvement in acrobatics and fitness would give me an obvious non-work place to keep belonging and keep trying to achieve things. Maybe. That bit about having trouble getting back into the workforce after time off, though, would probably be much worse for an older woman than for the man he was at the time. So it's definitely worth thinking through the psychology of the whole thing, before pulling any triggers; it's likely to be a one-way trip.

Just finished reading The Boys in the Boat, a gift from my biography-loving father-in-law about a 1936 rowing team. It's not my usual kind of thing, but turned out to be a nice read this long weekend as I lay around like a zombie trying to recover from work. I suppose my FiL thought the athleticism would interest me, as well as the childhood poverty and neglect faced by the most closely followed character, Joe Rantz.

As often happens with stories like this, I was sobered by (what appeared as) the sudden acceleration of time as the author flashed past the rest of the boys' post-Olympic lives in just a few pages. The 20th anniversary row, the 30th anniversary row... the 50th... and the deaths. It invites the obvious question: if anyone were to write my biography, what parts would get a gloss like that, and what would get the closeup? Thus far, the most statistically unusual part of my life has still been my childhood, a span of time I don't want to romanticize. Maybe I can beat that by doing something awesome when I'm old, or maybe I can escape the biographer altogether. (As some of you know, my dream is the anti-legacy... living contentedly, and, in the end, slipping away without leaving a void. Maybe it's possible, maybe it's not.)

It's funny but, sitting here thinking about it, some of what impressed and disturbed me about the book was the sheer detail it pulled from so long ago from interviews, newspapers, photos. I still have family photo albums of my own, stuff bequeathed to me by my mom after she finally divorced my dad... so sticky and family-saga-esque. I don't know for sure why I haven't shredded it all, but "just in case" and "waiting for more people in the pictures to die, so they can't be hurt" seem like the most plausible answers.

Note to self: biographies make you morbid! Knock it off and go to the gym.

This week hit its apex yesterday with a thousand-dollar vet visit followed by a ten-plus-hour workday to a hard deadline. Everyone's self-assessment was due, including for me and for my three reports who are up for promotion.

The amusing crossover between the two: I'm realizing that backing assertions up with numbers and evidence works in nearly every area of life.

Me: I really love my cat...
Person: Aw, of course you do.
Me: Yes, she turns 19 in a month, and I've had her since she was 8 weeks old.
Person: WOW.

So as for that vet visit, it was at the New England Veterinary Oncology Group, and it was a follow-up to Nala's surgery six weeks ago (we'd found out after that successful surgery that the lump removed was indeed cancerous). The vet clearly came in with the assumption that my cat was dying, and soon; he told me a lot about the terrible odds before even doing any tests, and how this usually kills cats within three months. How it spreads (locally, but early and fast), the high odds that it had spread before surgery even though the surgery went well, how our various options for aggressive care are limited by Nala's age and kidney issues. Also how nobody knows a whole lot about treating anal sac carcinomas in cats, because they're very rare; they're more of a dog thing.

Off he went to do tests, anyway, his respect for me bolstered by my use of the phrase "palliative care". Ultrasounds, X-rays, a rectal exam, and kidney panels... I waited in the room and read a book that apfelsingail recommended I buy last Christmas, and the badass lady character did rather cheer me under the circumstances.

The know-it-all vet came back looking about an inch taller. Want to guess what he found? The rectal exam revealed no palpable growths or bumps, only a scar from surgery. The kidney numbers are better than they were at surgery time. The ultrasound showed... smaller-than-usual kidneys, which is in line with known kidney troubles... and nothing else. The X-ray showed ribs and lungs and the body of a fine, durable feline. HELL YES.

So my cat is an odds-beating BAMF, even if she is now an elder stateswoman, and she went away from the oncologist with no follow-up visits planned. Perhaps that vet will test first and talk later, next time.

Most of my thoughts lately have been about work. I took a class a week ago that basically hit me like a truck, about managing larger teams and how managing a 15-person team or bigger is fundamentally different from managing a 5-person one. It was useful, and actionable, and deadly depressing. I've been getting more unhappy feedback from people who report to me in the last year than I ever have before, always been one person at a time, and the class pounded into my head that in some ways that's working as intended. The group is now too large to lead purely by consensus, and that means somebody will be unhappy with nearly every decision I make. There will also always be somebody unhappy enough to affect the group, just because life. (And, apparently, someone always out on baby leave -- my reports are nothing if not fertile.)

The class had good advice: deal with the reality that your job is not what it once was; learn new skills; stop having a standup status meeting with way too many people trying to go around the room; don't succumb to the temptation to regress to what you're good at, or to fill all the gaps in your team with yourself. (cough. I totally do that.) But damn it, I'm still reeling from the realization that my team is never all going to like me anymore. To be clear, I'm no fragile flower; I've been disliked plenty and I can deal with it pretty well in general, but, sigh... it was so nice to be the non-asshole manager for a while. Must those days really be over, so soon, and just when things were otherwise going well? I'm not sure I want to move forward in this direction.

Then there's the creeping burnout. This is easier to deal with -- I mostly need vacation, or at least more disconnected time. I've been doing work, sometimes tiny bits of work, on both weekend days for a while now. So guess what I just did? I went over to my work window and requested next Friday off. Yeah. And two days for my birthday while I was at it.

On this note, birthday. It's coming up, it's my 40th, I probably ought to do something to celebrate. Nothing felt right, until last Friday when I started asking myself if I had any childhood dreams left unattended to. A lightbulb went off: of course! I need to go to hang gliding camp! Probably this one, a weekend thing in New Hampshire, though it would be rather wonderful to work toward a Hang 1 certification. I can do a fancy view-of-Boston-skyline dinner on the day of, but the gliding will be the real celebration. :D

Despite everything else in life, I'm thrilled by how well it's working to focus on maintenance in my own workouts (while still trying to learn new things in circus). I have my list of 10 skills to maintain, and have done nine of them so far this year, and every single one of them feels good every time I do the thing, and in each case I've granted myself this whole year to get comfortable at a level and enjoy it and not push beyond (unless of course I feel like it, and I have felt like it sometimes on Turkish get-ups, and I hope I feel like it soon on my splits). It's fun to go to the gym and try to tick a bunch of them off, and know I can write that day's date down on the relevant sheet of paper when I get home.

For the curious, the one I haven't done yet is a backbend kickover, which I was doing in late '16 but lost the hang of over my break. I'll give those another serious try tomorrow. And I did another for the first time just today: two 5-rep sets of pistols on each side, which I've been able to do for years but recently had to pause because of hip annoyance. Less of an athletic victory, that one, and more "yay, I'm getting better".

(The one that feels most magical is touching my cheekbones to my shin bones in a pike. It takes some warmup, but it's soooooo worthwhile. Truly I am the envy of my 25-year-old self.)

This is a good article on how to stay outraged / politically active without losing one's mind (or being shamed into stopping entirely).

( Here's some information I found about MA members of congress, and executive orders.Collapse )

If this sounds like I'm still a mewling newbie, in the phase of learning to gather information, you're right. What I have actually done this week: paid for 6 months of digital access to the Wall Street Journal (I was already a paying subscriber to The Atlantic). Joined Twitter specifically so that I could subscribe to my members of Congress: @SenWarren, @RepMikeCapuano, @SenMarkey. Subscribed to that newsletter. Did my reading about executive orders.

I did really well in Monday's handstand class and it felt nice. I held a handstand for over a minute (according to the teacher's timer), and also kicked up and did five "tick-tocks", which are side to side weight shifts, without my spotter touching me. That all felt really good. Wednesday didn't go as well, handstandwise, but on Wednesday I nailed a standing reverse h2h with soong and I'm sure not complaining about that.

As I have not told you yet, the growth removed from Nala's rear end last week did turn out to be a carcinoma. This validates my surgery decision, but means a follow-up appointment with an oncologist, which I sincerely hope results in "no more treatment necessary". For now, I go on helping her recover from surgery; this mostly means keeping her in one room, and feeding her a mix of metamucil and baby food to encourage her little system to poop. She is still a conehead, and very sleepy.

Most of the rest is work: I just can't catch up, though it's improved. Last week I found out that one of my team's efforts has basically been a waste of time for the last year but nobody remembered to tell us things had changed, so I'm going around flipping tables and winding the project down. (Curiously, when people find out that we've been doing work for them all this time, they suddenly become interested in us continuing, even though we've been working based on the wrong metric).

Politics is a continual and horrifying distraction.

norwoodbridge went on a successful first date last night (basically ALL of his first dates are successful), bringing his sexy-creature count to three, and I didn't really jitter at all. Partly because of recent poly successes, partly because if Four-Leaf didn't kill us then this more sane-sounding person who lives a couple of hours away is seriously not going to. And also, let's be honest, I was working too hard to feel much of anything. A potential problem. :-/

Yesterday I marched in the Boston Women's March! Estimates are now that 125,000 people were there. It was my first such event ever, which is why I'm posting about it -- so I can tag it with my "firsts" tag -- and I did in fact find it worthwhile and uplifting. I went out because I knew attendance would be counted (at least estimated) worldwide, and I wanted to be in the count, in the Inauguration-attendance-crushing count. It was a "show up and be counted" kind of day, in a more literal way than any since Nov 8 of last year. And some of the signs were excellent.

Today, already, the internet is full of scolding, scowling reminders: to people who marched about not sitting on self-congratulatory laurels now, to white women who marched about how white women voted for Trump, to everyone everywhere (or so it feels) about how we haven't yet done ENOUGH.

Okay, internet, but my house needs cleaning now because of the march yesterday. Can we have just a minute to breathe, here? Preferably without an accusation of "white tears"? I need to fold my laundry. Then do some work. Then I will do some other political thing.