kittydesade: Insect wings that could be from fairies, too, with dew and the edges of pink-purple flower petals. (what care i for human hearts)
More cat drama. My household is just a neverending font of cat drama.

For a surprise, though, this isn't household cats drama. This is the drama where I had put some cat food out in amidst the seeds for the crows and jays, and a couple days ago I was passing by the door and there was a cat going through the seeds and nibbling up the cat food. A freaking cat. Long black hair, pretty skinny.

So I put a small bowl of cat food out and it ate all of it so cleanly not a crumb was left, the bowl was a bit sticky with cat spit. My guess is that it's lost from its humans, given that; we've put up posts on NextDoor and Facebook and a couple other local cat groups with pictures of the poor boy. We've gotten a couple inquiries from people with lost cats but they both think it's too far away from their home for it to be their cat. I think they don't know how far a cat can or will travel (or be driven by hostiles) but we're going to give it a few days, examine the cat's behavior, and then try and humane trap it and take it for chip check and possibly vaccinations. If it doesn't have a chip, well, it's a single cat, it will go to the Humane Society or to one of the local rescue orgs to be adopted out. We are full up on cats. No room at the inn. We have reached cat totality.

Poor kitty, though. I get the feeling it's starving and scared. I also get the impression that it knows where the safe places in the house are, the crawlspace that goes under the house and into the garage. So hopefully it can have a short rest here and get some food and water before we trap it and freak it out and try and reunite it with its people, should it have any.

Other than that I suppose we've been blessedly drama free. Work continues apace, and no sooner have I gotten one pain in the ass site mostly done than another one is upon me. Though this one at least is less than half the size of the other one, so hopefully it won't be that much of a pain in the ass.

I've started a pen and paper (and stamps and stickers and washi tape) reading journal, and unlike the last couple of times I thought about it I've decided not to constrain myself to 'reading journal of this year'. Because I'll get into a reading slump and then I'll feel the pressure of "Oh no I only have six weeks left to read thirty books" and then I just won't do any of it. This way I'll just be filling in little book bingos and writing down words about parts I liked in the books I read, and making cute little drawings and pictures. And that'll be nice.

Less nice: dental cleanings. Car purchases. Well, purchase. Car purchasing. It promises to be a long and twitchy process, especially given the amount of computers that have gone into cars over the last thirteen years. Not looking forward to it. I would like a car that has a limited amount of moving parts and the only computer in it is the radio/mp3 player/cd player maybe. And yet. Somehow I do not think that is an option in our future. Well, we'll see. And in the meantime, I have been making progress on some writing things, which is deeply refreshing. More on that I think when I'm sure it's become an ongoing thing?
kittydesade: Angelina Jolie: young pixie-cut dark haired white woman in a blue top looking at a yellow floppy disk (that thing that time)
Gah! Finally! I have done the thing! I have finished my second of five, I guess? projects for tech school and uploaded it and told the school where my Github repository is and filmed and uploaded the walkthrough and did a writeup and it is all done, I have turned it in, I have scheduled my assessment, it can fuck off for now. I'm actually really pleased with it, it ended up being way more elaborate than I think it was supposed to be but all the moving parts move correctly, which is the main thing, rather than trying too much and falling on my face.

And I got it done in time for writing hour, too. After waking up at 4 in the morning with the sweaty anxiety itches, taking Nyquil, passing back out pretty hard and not getting up until about 10, which is when I was supposed to start class. It was a rough night last night. I think it's going to be a rough week, which is why I'm putting my trazodone and NyQuil on standby. Not together, alternating nights. We'll see what happens Wednesday.

And in all of this I'm still managing to get writing work done too; I finally got the two problematic synopses finished at least in a general structure kind of a way. I now need to go through it, tidy it up some, name and organize everything so I'm not flailing about for the basic details I'll be referencing throughout the book like, oh, what is my main character called. (One of the synopses keeps referring to Heroine and Brother, so, um, yeah.) I also found a convenient BuJo spread for writers with one chart axis of chapters and the other chart axis of characters, keeping track of who appears in what chapter, and now I have to do both that one and one there the axis is chapters x secrets and the symbols indicate who's finding out what when. That's MUCH more compact than the way I was going to do it.

It's only Monday but so far it's been a weekend plus one day of successes, and I still feel pretty good about things. Which is doing nothing for my being calm and optimistic about inauguration day, but I'm not sure anything could do that, so I'll take it.

I also started getting my office reorganized with the new small drawers for my art supplies which are, heh, getting a bit out of control. Now I have a place to put some stuff I need to unpack the last three paletteful packs and put them away, find someplace to file the cards that come with them with some tips and hints how to use the materials, and find someplace to file my stack of pen and marker and paint swatches. Did not get this done over the weekend like I should have. Definitely didn't get as much cleaning done today as I wanted to but while I was waking up from the NyQuil I made a start and that's what counts.

I feel so much calmer and more in control, 4am wakeup aside, that I'm a little annoyed it took me three weeks to put together the project. 20 hours more like all told as far as actual coding hours, but those 20 hours were spread over three weeks. Ugh. Still. It's done, it's turned in, and now I get to move on, do some writing, look forwards rather than kick myself for not moving.

ETA: The coup. It was the coup. I started the project on the first of the month and on the sixth of the month we had an attempted coup and I had coup hangover for the next week, that's why it took so long. I have no idea how the fuck I forgot about the coup attempt except that it has just all been Like That for the last, what, since the election? Since before the election? The last four years? I don't fucking know.
kittydesade: (dueling)
Couple hours of code went... reasonably well? Whenever I last posted that, so this week in the weird liminal space between Christmas and New Year's I'm going to try something different to get back into regular study habits: I'm just going to do my afternoon and evening class blocks, and let the morning be for relaxing, reading, hiding under blankets from the cold, that kind of thing. Hopefully this will work out and by next week I'll be more like myself before December, when everything seemed to fall apart.

(I have ten tests left to do on this lab and then coding a project and it's not that hard and oh my god I don't want to do any of it.)

Still having severe stress shopping urges and oh my god, I do not know why I want to buy five more pairs of false lashes but that is really excessive, especially since you can reuse them 10-20 times each and I already have, um. An embarrassing amount. Clothes. I can't think of any clothes I particularly need, I have adequate sweats and underwear and socks and things, I made sure of that before winter hit because if it gets below about 30 we can't do laundry, our pipes from the utility room aren't heated and the water just freezes and causes clogs and problems. If we lived in a place where we regularly had months with it not going above 30 that'd be a problem, but I live in the South even if it is the mountains so we usually just do laundry in the middle of the day when it's in the 40s, and if we have a couple days of below freezing temps that's fine. Um. What else do I want to buy, more Frye things because I keep getting their sale emails. I do not need more boots even if I like stompy boots. More jewelry. I have lots, come on. Makeup and skin care have calmed down, I don't have urges for art supplies, but it's only a matter of time before it cycles around there, too.

... no, on second thought let's not get into an argument about why (linguistic) anthropology should be used as an excuse to erase all context, cultural or historical or otherwise, from a word or a concept and render it neutral because language evolves and... something. I'm not sure what argument this person's trying to make but it looks like an awful one and I have code to untangle.

(The code is also frustrating, but less frustrating than dealing with humans.)

I dunno. Although it is nice to feel more capable of doing things even if I'm starting it up slowly. Picked up the office a bit, wrangling the code, I did some writing prep yesterday, I feel a bit more like my brain is organized and energized enough to deal with writing. I feel more normal? Of course now that I say that something's going to knock me on my ass, but I feel better. Stronger. (Harder. Faster.) (I should get some Daft Punk for my coding music playlist.) Plus, soon the holidays will be over and I can hopefully resume a normal schedule and I feel like half these journal entries are complaining about things knocking me for six or complaining as I crawl back to normal.

I made the cupcakes for the boy's work, he took half of them to work and I got to eat the other half, and they were so good. Even the ones that had been in the fridge for a few days were still soft and smooshy, I love this recipe and I love that I'm slowly learning piping skills. I shouldn't make cupcakes as often as I want to given that I have zero willpower about cramming them in my face, but damned if I'm not making gorgeous cupcakes regardless of how often I practice. Plus, when things are back to normal in however many months, I can always send them to games with the boy as well as to work and that'll get a bunch of them out of the house.

Slowly picking up the house again, some more, still, after a few weeks of both of us being knocked on our ass, by grief, by unpredictable holiday schedules (boy), by vaccine side effects (also boy), by holiday stuff, by ... I don't even know what. Boy I can't wait till I get an IT job and can find out if we can afford someone to come in once every couple weeks and mop the floors, dust, wipe the surfaces, all that stuff that always gets pushed to one side in favor of dishes and picking up the clutter we accumulate. I probably could get in a routine to do it if my job is a 32-ish hour/week job, but other than that, ugh, paying someone for that stuff if we have the money. I will happy exchange cash for services that make my life easier. Plus, by the time I find out if I can make that much money, the vaccine should be more distributed so it'll be safer for someone to come in the house and do all that.

Also a landscaper. We really need a landscaper to come in and deal with the overgrown crap in the areas I want to walk in and make it easier for us to get around. I can live with the extended backyard being a wilderness, I don't mind the front yard being a bit of a wilderness, but the alianthus is a problem, there's at least two trees too close to the house, the mulberries need pruned (we do have a firm for the trees, thankfully), the white oak could probably use a trim, and at this point I really want someone else to put the damn berry plants in the ground for me. I just. Ugh. Too much crap going on. Not enough taking advantage of the time I had before tech school started. Also, I would like some stronger raised beds than the falling apart wood ones I have right now. Or an explanation of how to better maintain them.

Things to do when I have money. Which means I suppose I'd better get my ass back to coding. Or more accurately to dinner, then to the last bit of coding, then to the help line probably tomorrow. So it goes.
kittydesade: (mecha)
Not talking about it in public, both because it involves a whole lot of things going a certain way (they're likely to, but still) and because it involves touchy subjects but with some of what Mom's been saying over the last couple of weeks I'm hesitantly starting to think that mine and the boy's life could change a fair bit for the better within the next year. Assuming, you know, covid doesn't change it for the worse. Fucking covid.

I am le tired and also a bit le overwhelmed, which is 50% my fault and 50% also my fault. The first half is my fault for trying to take on too much with this code refactor for my project, although I did do that refactor in a copy file of the original project so if it's not ready in time to demonstrate I can just demonstrate the refactor I did and then go "and I have this mostly built up" on the other. (I do have it mostly built out, I'm hoping that it all runs tomorrow except the last thing and then the last thing runs fine too, but I was too tired to deal with the lows of code testing today by the time I was done with it.) The other half is... also my fault because I have this grand idea of HEY, I CAN GET ALL THIS CRAP DONE BY THURSDAY AND START MY NEXT PROJECT AND SPEED THROUGH THIS AT A TREMENDOUS RATE.

No, self. The other part, the other reason you've been checking in with Mom once a week is to keep her reassured that you're still into this stuff (which is very true) and making progress (which is also true even if it's not as fast as I'd like) and she will support you as long as both of those remain true so calm the fuck down. Oyyyy.

Well. Tomorrow is my project assessment for the first project, so that'll be one source of tech school stress out of the way.

I did manage to do ballet today, I did not manage to do either PT or bass? Maybe? Maybe I get that done tonight before midnight? I am going to bed at midnight, I am going to drug myself to sleep if I have to. This morning I woke up an hour before my alarm and did not effectively get back to sleep and I have felt it all day. I meant to go to bed early but checking in with Mom knocked me for six and left me a bit too hyper to calm down in time.

Still no results from the vet, which is nerve-wracking and mildly irksome. Still no covid duty for the boy, which is also nerve-wracking in its own way but also a tremendous relief. War analogies about never knowing when you'll be sent to the front go here, although I don't know how accurate those analogies are. My emotional state right now though is a bit like being pelted with both soft fluffy stuffed animals and those way-too-hard red rubber dodgeballs from 80s school gym classes. There's promising good news! There's likely bad news! it's all coming at my damn face at once! What the hell!

Feh. I can't deal with this without serious attention to maintenance, I'm gonna write for ten (or twenty), bass practice for twenty (or ten), and then take my dumb ass to sleep. Tomorrow will be what it will be. And the Mysterious Things are all next year type stuff anyway.
kittydesade: Angelina Jolie: young pixie-cut dark haired white woman in a blue top looking at a yellow floppy disk (that thing that time)
Well, that's an appalling amount of money on my credit card given how much is already on there, and all I can say is I better get a good tech job. But also if we're going to go back into various lockdowns, last time exercise equipment and pink hair dye vanished from the virtual and physical shelves, so I figured I'd pick up a couple more bottles of pink hair dye and some yoga blocks and a yoga strap. Yes, I could theoretically fold over some thicker cotton and sew my own yoga strap but I've been saying I'm going to do that for almost a year, I haven't yet, and it wasn't very expensive to add on to the rest of the equipment.

So now I'm just going to build a fort out of my various hobby supplies and hide behind it and sulk till next spring or something. I have enough skin care to last me four months or so, I have my usual stash of makeup supplies which, now that I'm using them again... still won't run out by next spring but I'll feel less guilty about spending money on it all over the last four years. I definitely have adequate pens and markers and pencil lead and such (except for that ONE DAMN PEN REFILL holy crap that's annoying considering my stashing habits) to keep me going in artwork for a while, and I don't think the digital shelves are going to run out of reading material anytime soon. Or music. Bring on the next wave.

Or don't. I'm happy with don't. The boy has been kicked out of work for two weeks because a patient he was attending to Saturday got back his covid test Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon they called him all "So, your patient tested positive, don't come in for two weeks." ... Yeah, okay. I guess they did contact him as soon as they found out, as soon as they could, but I'm still going to be cranky. Thankfully? he says his exposure to the patient wasn't much, five minutes or so. He did have PPE. But this is a wracking on my nerves I neither wanted nor needed.

Heh, in the category of things flying off the shelves, I guess I'm glad we have that pulse oximeter now. Those things are probably going to once again be priced extortionately high. We have a pulse oximeter and we have about six thermometers because the boy and I both though "well, do we know where the thermometer is? better get one and a spare" at the same time. Or something like that.

Tech school continues to go well. It's actually going really well, surprisingly well, I don't know if it's because I found a rhythm or because I hit some easier (for me, I guess) material or I relearned how to learn or what's going on here, but it's going well. I'm pleased. It took about two hours to refactor my project code, which I could have done over the weekend if I hadn't gotten distracted by ten thousand other household chores to do. Not many regrets about that though. I made stuff work. And I'm making stuff work even on the labs where stuff isn't working, I don't know why, I get nervous and start thinking, well, I should ask for help, what will they think of me, oh god, I'm going to ask anyway I don't... wait. I could try this. And then I try this, and it works. So... yeah. Progress is being made. I'm really happy with it. I feel like I've forgotten things I learned a couple weeks ago, but overall I'm happy with it, and I think that's pretty normal when you're crashing through a course of study. I still have the labs, the readings, and my notes to review if I have to.

Once again I seem to be in a position where, if it weren't for all these goddamn people (and I include the US government in that) making it difficult to keep the pandemic under control, I'd actually be very happy with my life. It's so odd. I'm happy, I did an amazing face of makeup today, my skin is doing better, I'm feeling better for doing more exercise and getting back into guitar habits, and... the world outside is falling to shit, at least in the US.

But we did get the Orange Fanta Franco out of office, so that's a positive.
kittydesade: neon stylized tall blue boxes on a neon purple circuitboard floor, tilted (not actually hacking)
I am goddamn exhausted. I don't know what brought this on or if there's a point at which I should be worried. I keep saying I have a fascism hangover, and I'm pretty sure that's what it is, decompensation from election stress and the stress of the past four years a bit and everything else. But I am really, really sick of being tired.

I had plans for today. Grand plans. I accomplished exactly two? of them? I got some dishes done and I reconnected with an old friend, so that was excellent. But I also slept in way more than I meant to on account of being woken up at 6am by the boy coming home all "I got to go to the ER tonight! :D :D" My happy half-asleep ass though he meant he'd been floated down there, as you do when you're working in an understaffed hospital and you're used to getting floated around. But no. He was there as a patient, owing to a sudden bout of high blood pressure? It was not a heart attack, they checked and they checked him out for other symptoms and they prescribed him the same blood pressure medication (ACE-inhibitor) that I'm on and sent him home early, and so he woke me up at six in the goddamn morning. And we sat up talking for an hour or so while he showered and got ready for sleep, and I did manage to get back to sleep but I feel like it's thrown off my entire groove. And no, I am not throwing him out the window.

Hi! It's been a hot minute hasn't it? Not much has developed except that I'm a little further along in my course than I was, and the election week ish coincided with Sephora's biannual (I think? They had three one year. Was it this year? Last year? Who knows.) sale and the result was that I did a fair amount of crit damage to my credit card and there is a growing pile on my sink of makeup and skin care products. I'm building myself a little mental fort out of them and if the boy has to go back onto the covid ward I'm just going to paint myself in colors and glitter and pretend I'm a heroine in some punk movie. Because I am so over this pandemic. I am over worrying about the boy, I'm over worrying about the boy being force-fed a vaccine that's not ready because he's a health care worker, I'm over all of it.

I'm still staying home of course, but I'm also very, very over it.

I'm amusing myself in between all my other hobbies by keeping a journal of my skin care experiments, though. A week and a half ago by now, I guess, I finally dragged myself bodily up by the scruff or something and put together a skin care routine with all the products I had and half-used before the last few months stomped all over my energy. I've been taking photos! Every Friday, and keeping notes and doing it all scientific and stuff. That's part of the ginormous makeup/skincare order is more sample flavors or scents to try and a couple other options to swap in and out of my routine and see if they're better. I'm also remembering to do my makeup in the mornings, and I've semi-figured out lashes, and that's helping some. Now I just have to remember that exercise makes me feel better and so does playing guitar. It's a process? Step by step? All those things I tell other people and myself but don't always hold onto.

Anyway. Mostly just checking in, and also scared a bit about what happens tomorrow when I have my project review (that I should have scheduled a couple weeks ago but whoops, and also this entire year has been a bit fucky) and how that's going to go. I'm... yeah. I've never done this before, I don't know what the hell it's going to be like, I'm a bit panicked. So I'm definitely putting on a face of makeup and if I can remember (and have time, we have some prescriptions to pick up tomorrow and other errands) practicing the guitar some, and I guess I'll just get through it. I've worked with the guy who's doing it a couple of times, and I know he's pretty nice, so that'll help.
kittydesade: Angelina Jolie: young pixie-cut dark haired white woman in a blue top looking at a yellow floppy disk (that thing that time)
Ugh. I'm getting woozy with just a few minutes' of activity in the kitchen, which is not where I wanted to be today after taking yesterday mostly off and going to bed early. Still, though, I got through all the SQL labs today even though I opened the last one this morning, stared at it, and went "I do not have the brain to parse SQL joins today".

When I called Mom she said "Joins are hard!" and I felt vindicated.

Because I had lunch, figured out that if I re-read the original instructions instead of my slightly more haphazard notes, I could probably figure it out, and then decided to go have a long nap instead of trying it then. And after the nap I did it! Most of them took five minutes, one took half an hour because it was one of those trick questions with the complicated solution, but I did it without even asking help from Mom. Or anyone else but I was going to go to Mom first.

So the SQL section is completely done, if I want to stay two weeks behind I need to complete the ORM section before Monday which is 23 items plus five video reviews so, a bit difficult? But hopefully not much so, especially now that I'm better about asking for help. Or if I don't finish it all hopefully I'm down to one or two things by Monday and can finish it and move along, because after that is a short section and then an HTML section. That sound you heard was me cackling, smacking my hands and rubbing them together, and drumming my heels in glee. I know HTML. I think. There's always a chance they'll throw something at me that I don't know but I've been only doing it since it was invented, it should be a lot quicker and I might be able to make up some time.

I went to bed early last night and woke up I think at the end of every REM cycle, long enough to notice I'd only been out for a couple hours. I don't know why. I took a decongestant and that helped some, but I'm still tired and pretty sure this is me fighting off a cold, not just me after five days of pretty intense activity compared to lately. I'm... annoyed. This is either the third cold or the third wave of the same cold, either way it doesn't much matter it's the third period of down with the sickness-ness in three weeks and I just want to be able to get some walks in while it's still nice out. To get back to an exercise routine. To not have to take two hour naps in the middle of the days to stave off brain fog. Ugh.

Well, we don't have any major errands coming up. We'll have to do a grocery shop in a week or two, we'll have to take Murdock to the vet to get another blood sugar sensor installed again in two weeks, and other than that I don't think we have anything to do. So I can rest, and catch up on schoolwork and picking up and art and other things, and hopefully recover in time to get a few walks in. Hopefully things will stay okay on the finances front. They should, with family help. I've got vitamins coming since we don't need anything else at the big box store where I'd been getting my vitamins, and I added some elderberry/zinc drops to fight against this crap. Did I say that last entry? I think I did. I'm tired. I'm zonked. But I'm still hopeful. Which, these days, feels like a miracle.
kittydesade: (guitar girl)
The Barton is in the house! After way too little sleep and almost zero planning and definitely zero shutting the rest of the cats away the boy asked me when he came home this morning "So, you want to just pick him up and try and toss him into the office?" (The office is right by the front door.) I was working on five hours' sleep, I said sure. So we fed him, petted him, got him to relax and then I picked him up and walked in the fucking house.

He struggled less than I expected! So much less that I kept walking, in the noble tradition of once you have the feral cat keep moving the feral cat until it is where you want it to go as long as you're not getting ribboned while doing it, down the hall and up the stairs and into the craft-now-quarantine room with the boy closing and opening doors around me. I put him down. Cassius meowed a loud hello. We sat in the room with them for a while, we watched him scuttle around and try to hide, we watched Cassius go up to him in case they fought. Cassius's attitude was, I think I can best sum it up as, "HI BUDDY! YOU'LL LOVE IT HERE THEY FEED US AND THERE'S NO RACCOONS AND IT'S NICE AND COZY AND DRY!" Barton's attitude was "I'm sulking in a corner fuck off."

But by the end of the day he's letting me pet him, purring, actively participating in the petting so I know he's not just purring to self-soothe, licking my hand, eating treats, and while he's still sulking in one of the makeshift caves under shelves and between boxes that we left for them, I feel safe in expecting him to eventually come out and eat when he's hungry, drink when he's thirsty. And he knows what a litter box is, we've seen him use the old ones we leave outside for drip catching. Next challenge, introducing them both to the other cats. So far it's mostly stand in the doorway with Bat Cat in arms letting him look and them look at him.

There thankfully hasn't been much other news lately. I finished the project, I'd had it finished by Friday except the refactoring, which took ten minutes, the blog post, which took about two hours but most of that was getting wordpress to work right, and the video, which took forever to work up the courage to actually shoot and talk through. Gah. I hate that, I don't want to do it again, I'm going to have to do it at least four more times. Ugh. But that's done, and now I can move on.

(Or I can as soon as I upload everything, ahahah, I was so nervous about doing the video presentation I forgot to upload it. WHOOPS. Okay, that's done now.)

... gah, did I not update on Friday? I didn't update on Friday. Friday was, admittedly, kind of a mess. Friday was an early morning vet appointment, followed by hitting up another pharmacy for Murdock's blood sugar sensor, followed by hitting up Home Depot because the kitchen fluorescents were finally down to I think two? They're long tube fluorescents, and they lasted a good 7-8 years but they were burning out, so we needed to get more before we were left with one overhead regular bulb in our high-ceilinged giant kitchen. And Staples, because my long-awaited printer had finally just been cancelled by them (ugh) and I was not going to mail order this again. I had two printer ink cartridge sets that were now useless to me, wasn't going to do it again, was going to go to Staples and get a printer that I could put my hot little hands on in that moment. So now that's set up, it mostly fits in the printer alcove except for needing a small pedestal because it's got a front-loading paper tray and the slide-out tray for typewriters printers has a lip in the front, and it scans! I was able to scan in some art! YAY. (It's the scanner function I was mostly looking for, I had managed to get the printer function of our ten year old printer working.

So... well, yeah, it's been an eventful last three or four days, though Saturday was mostly household tasks of cleaning and finally doing the damn hemming I've been putting off for a couple months. Tomorrow morning I have a dentist cleaning at 9 in the goddamn which, ugh. And then it's back to business as usual somehow. Classwork, labs, classwork, labs, learning more things. With more confidence that I can do a special project now.

It's good. I'm good. It's two weeks till voting ends and that's a damn travesty, but in the immediate... it's good.
kittydesade: (invente)
Okay! Well. I did absolutely nothing on Wednesday even after resolving to do the scraping part then, but today I voted early, got groceries, got prescriptions for practically everyone in the household who has them, and narrowed down the error to a much more specific question that was answered with "Ah! Yeah. That does that. I'm not sure why it works sometimes and doesn't others, but here's how I fix it. [demonstrates something I've learned already]" "Oh! Okay, I can do that. Thanks!" I stuck around for the rest of the study group and ended up giving a quick lesson on HTML, div, and conceptual boxes.

I got the scrape part working in about half an hour? forty five minutes? A relatively short time, anyway. I put it all together and got it limping along, did some cleanup, got it working better. I've almost got it working all the way through now except one bizarre little hiccup that doesn't impede the clarity very much, it's just... weird. And there. Dangling. So I need to try and address that and then maybe do some refactoring either in the evening code block tonight, or maybe skip it entirely and start refactoring tomorrow before I film the walkthrough. And then hopefully I'll be done with that! Hopefully. We'll see.

Of course now I resent myself for taking all that time dithering and watching videos and panicking and so on. And I'm not sure if I would have been able to do it this smoothly if I hadn't watched all those videos, although I definitely resent the procrastination out of fear and nerves and stress aspect. Still. It's almost done now, I'm not too far behind, and I have more confidence. Enough confidence that I think I could build more programs like this if asked to, although I'd have to do some more review if I was asked to do something with an API call. Apparently we're studying those in more detail further down though.

And I voted today, and we got groceries. I ran out of unemployment on the last tier I was on and I think I was cleared for unemployment on the next tier, so we'll see if I get the next two tiers and then what happens next year. Although Mom also said she'd start bankrolling me now, so between her funds and unemployment I should be pretty okay into the first couple months of next year if I'm careful? And I should still finish up by late February early March, even with the delay, and then it's job hunting, yay. And hopefully a job and a decent income!

I feel better. Calmer. I also feel better about my prospects for life and work in this field now that I've realized a lot of my panic and near-tears the other day was more likely PMS severely exacerbating the course stress than anything else. I took an anti-anxiety pill Wednesday night and felt a lot better at the start of today, so I guess at the next point I'm starting to PMS while doing this course I'll just take a couple anti-anxiety pills for a couple nights and hopefully kick it in the teeth before it holds me up.

Cassius is doing very well in the isolation room; we haven't managed to corral Barton yet but we're working on it. He's still pick-uppable, so that's definitely a positive. I have some ideas involving a configuration of towel and carrier but I want the boy around to help me with that part, so it'll wait a day or so.

And I'm still writing. A little less drawing than I want to be, but still writing. Still keeping on with hobbies. Still generally happy when I'm not having PMS-induced freakouts. Feeling oddly optimistic, given the pandemic is still here and the political situation.
kittydesade: (Default)
See, I knew that if I kept saying "I am invincible!" like the guy in Goldeneye eventually the liquid nitrogen was going to hit, and it did, I started my project for real today and pasted in a bunch of the code I'd written for it aaaand it all promptly broke. And then because it was late and I'm PMSing I wanted to cry and scream and have a full-on breakdown. So that's fun! And now I have a stress headache again.

The positive side to this though is that yes, the site I wanted is in fact scrapeable, so when I'm rested and less upset I can go back, start from the beginning, do everything and put everything back where it's supposed to be and hopefully untangle the mess (or there's a study group on Thursday so I can do it then if I absolutely have to) and in the meantime I can work on getting the right scraper code and then just. Paste it all in together. I guess.

Seriously do have a major stress headache over this though. And the urge to go back and watch one of the walkthrough videos and try doing it again from semi-scratch (the file setup and associations, rather than the procedural code) is strong. I'm going to try and watch tv and eat cheesecake instead but. Argh.

At least I was productive in other areas today: got my prescriptions renewed for pickup later in the week, got one of the vet appointments scheduled, got a recipe experiment made. All good things.
kittydesade: A white feather quill laying across an open book with yellowed pages (am scribing)
I am goddamned invincible. At least until Monday, when I have to start doing the part of this code project I'm less sure about.

But I spent... what was that, about two hours? Coding up the user interface portion of the project and even if I have to do a completely different project from a completely different site now I know it'll only take me a couple of hours to do that. It's not that hard! For me, of course, now that I'm familiar with the format it's a lot like the small cutesy programs my grandmother had us doing in computer class when I was in primary school. So that's done. I'm pretty happy with it, it could be neater/trimmer but that's a problem for another day. Now it's just dealing with APIs, which I have not done before and which I have considerable trepidation on. More videos over the next few days, or on Monday at the latest.

I'm also feeling pretty competent because I successfully made my computer stop going to black a lot. It started doing that earlier today, turned out that it was because the video card drivers were buggy and there was an update that fixed it, which I grabbed off the website and installed with somewhat bated breath. Nothing horrible has happened yet and I can watch videos without kicking up errors and blackscreens. A quick check of my notifications tells me that the only ones from the video card are do I want to open the menu and go to the website for updates. Excellent.

I've been doing a lot of cross-stitch to the exclusion of all else, which I need to make myself put it down somewhat and do some drawing and writing. I have so many projects I want to do! But cross-stitch is easiest to do while watching things, either watching Cadfael to relax (which is what I'm doing at the moment) or watching class videos and walkthroughs and tutorials on things. So... ergh. I'll start with it back tonight, I have so many projects I want to write and sketch for.

The boy is finally recovered, at the end of his vacation which definitely sucks but I'm glad he's recovered, and the last time we checked in at the vet Cassius was also doing well and we get to pick him up TOMORROW. I will be so freaking relieved to have both my cats where they belong. Or possibly in the house where they will belong. Still not sure about that and whether it would be a temporary or permanent solution. Cassius does now have his rabies vaccine anyway, which means Barton should get one too, and then... not sure.

So... things are going well, personally, which is still strange to think about when the country is such a shitshow. I do have feelings about the number of positive covid tests in the government, most of them being cackling and nasty, but ah well. I guess we'll see what happens.
kittydesade: (eh?)
I... I don't even know where to begin with yesterday's adventure. Two adventures. Three? Two adventures.

We'll start with the better stuff, albeit the terrifying stuff. I went to a study group on Thursday about WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and wasn't sure what to expect except that people there were more experienced with it than I was, and I was right about that. But I also got to observe a lot of troubleshooting and learn a bit about what it looks like, what goes on in it, I get the feeling it's what I should be doing the labs in if I'm not doing them in the browser IDE (Integrated Development Environment) (where you put your code and sometimes also give commands to the computer) (I'm gonna keep up these parentheticals until I know them in and out and maybe even after for the non-coders) so all in all it wasn't a waste at all. I talked some with the guy leading the study group, we talked about the pandemic and how we were doing in it, and at one point the conversation led to one of the students he was troubleshooting was probably experiencing delayed response times from her computer because she had fifty frillion windows open and 8GB of RAM (random access memory/short term computer memory/the stuff that makes the programs go) and it was slowing her down.

I have 4GB of RAM.

I told him this. He said "Whoa, yeah, you want 16GB would be my recommendation." So on the one hand, I went to the site (Crucial.com) that he recommended and with one thing and another, bought a couple more sticks of RAM to upgrade my computer to 12GB. And then. Yesterday, Friday. AND THEN. No, wait, backing up, so I'm upgrading my computer and realizing, no, I probably can't get away with still using this one for much longer can I. Which makes me sad because it's a perfectly fine machine! For what I use it for now. Web development is a much different animal, it turns out. So okay fine, I tell the boy "I need a new machine, can you help me build one?" I don't know why. I was thinking of just getting a box off the shelf and then I decided, no, I'll build one instead, mainly because I still want a DVD drive. And the ones with Solid State Drives (faster, more durable than usual hard drives) are expensive. Which it turned out wasn't much better building my own box, which I did at one in the goddamn morning on Thursday night and Friday morning, but building my own box also means it's much more modular, I have room to expand, I have options, I know what each piece does and what I need it to do, and since I'm putting it together myself (with the boy watching over my shoulder) I'll have that experience when I need to upgrade.

So that was Friday morning, with me being exhausted enough to completely forget to make sure it has wireless ahahah oy. This is what happens when I get agitated and do things in a hurry, it has been that kind of agitating week. But I fixed that, got a wireless card for it and that's something I've even done before, installed a wireless card, so that's fine. And the parts for the new box should be on the way, here next week, I can build next Friday. I can probably upgrade this box sometime mid next week. It's fine.

Friday afternoon. Friday fucking afternoon. It may have started earlier than the afternoon, it was intermittent because the fucking rat would not stay away. Sometime in between building the box and realizing I'd forgotten wireless I noticed a rat in the kitchen. I forget what it was doing at first but it wasn't screaming. We chased it surprisingly easily into an empty Tidy Cats litter bucket and dumped it out in the backyard towards the wild field, went about our day. A couple hours later, go into the kitchen, Murdock is staring at the rat again and Little Bit is on the counter looking very offended by everything. This time the rat went under the fridge and we had to wait until Bat Cat stared at the fridge like a security guard to know where it was, move the fridge, get the rat out from behind the fridge and into the Tidy Cats bucket again, and turn it loose. And hope it wasn't a second rat.

(Side note: Bat Cat's eyes were wide and darting EVERYWHERE and suddenly I realize why people are freaked out when I do that. Okay then.)

It wasn't a second rat. I don't think. Because a couple hours later guess who the fuck was back. On the counter this time, behind the coffee maker. And then all over the counter. And then on the floor, and then behind the fridge again, and then over by one of the open lower drawers stuffed with washable freezer bags, and eventually the boy picked up the ridiculous thing with kitchen tongs and dropped it into the bucket. It was the same rat, it must have been, because this time it estimated it could get out of the bucket by jumping and did a couple of times. And eventually, finally, we got the lid down over the bucket, drilled a couple holes in it for air, and drove the goddamn rat to a field across fucking town so the stupid rat wouldn't come back. At least I hope it doesn't come back. If it comes back I'm keeping it and naming it Justin. Or Mrs. Frisby. Because clearly it's both brilliantly intelligent and really fucking dumb.

So that pretty much derailed me from getting as much reading as I wanted to do yesterday, oops. I may try and make it up tonight or tomorrow but most likely since most of it's class reading I'll put it off till Monday. Computer parts are incoming, including a wireless card. The new router works brilliantly for computers, less so for phones. I'm not sure if that's a thing or not. And it's been a nice relaxing day of cross-stitch and writing apart from cleaning 3/4 of the entire kitchens because RAT. WHY, rat. WHY are you in a house of seven cats, three of whom are known mousers? Honestly.

I still need tech icons, though. Need some kind of computer icons. Maybe I can make some from Hackers.
kittydesade: (randomity (nopejr))
Today was less of a fucking day that has been, thank god. For inexplicable reasons my lab posted as done... wait, was that ... that was today. Oh good grief.

Okay, so I got what I thought was everything started up, and then with some help from the Ask A Question feature I discovered I hadn't toggled a thing that was supposed to be toggled, so I toggled that and... it still didn't start up. But on the other hand the toggle I was pointed to also let me use the web browser interface to do my lab, so that was fine. I did my lab. I got all passing answers on the test. And I submitted it, and then the thing said "Wait you haven't completed the--" "Fuck you I fucking completed it," I said and continued on. And then I thought, well, maybe I just have to push this one thing and that really snarled everything up. So that was annoying.

Came back after an extra long lunch to try and unsnarl it and... it had unsnarled itself??? My general takeaway is that as long as I submit a correctly answered lab test it's fine and it'll mark it off eventually. I'm hoping that's right. Fortunately most of tomorrow's lessons are "read things" and "fuck around on GitHub" and there's maybe one lab but with all the reading I may just skip it and do a couple Python exercises instead. We'll see.

I picked a bunch more tomatoes and I really need to make sauce tomorrow. We have more peppers than I thought we did coming in, and the black cherry tomatoes are turning dark! And the cucumbers didn't get picked either because it started pouring, so I guess that's all going to need to happen tomorrow morning. And I continued some on a cross-stitch by Long Dog Samplers called Pandemic because... because apparently right now I'm just doing Very Large Projects? Like learning multiple coding languages at once and a many pages long cross-stich pattern. I guess. I'm not sure.

I'm losing the plot a bit here, which I guess means it's time to go to bed. But it was a good day, a much less frustrating day than Tuesday/the last class day. Which had the fun effect of Wednesday, I woke up, taking the day off from class... it felt like Saturday to my brain. Very, very weird. I've now forgotten today's Thursday a few times, but I don't know what day I'm supposed to think it is. Blurnsday. It's Blurnsday.
kittydesade: (Default)
What a freaking day this has been, redux.

So I did miss something and it was in the same environment as the prep course, which was one thing I was going to try but I asked first and hoped for a quick answer. It was excruciatingly embarrassing. I did it. It was not uncommon nor a commentary on my intelligence, and it was good that I asked. I'm still convincing myself of these things, if you hadn't noticed. So then I spent the morning session (10-1) installing various things, reading over various introductory things, cramming so much information into my head that I got a physical headache and my eyes started doing the inflamed bulgy thing. (I don't know that they were physically bulging but it felt that way.)

Tangentially I have been informed that I display a lot of the characteristics of a Gifted Kid. To which I say I prefer the term overclocked because when I push myself the way I did this morning, that's exactly what I feel like. An overclocked computer about to melt and take the whole section of the desk with it.

Anyway. So then I had lunch and a nap and then I started in on some more lessons and... gah. I started reading the lessons and the very first lesson made reference to entering things into a terminal which I couldn't find for half an hour and after this morning's chaos I was 110% ready to both melt things and crawl into a ball of shame at my own ignorance. Neither of these things ended up happening, I was on the verge of asking someone for help (on the first lesson! THE SHAME! yeah today was full of shame) when someone else did it for me and it turns out... there is no terminal. What it looks like, given that piece of information and the next two readings' worth of context, is that someone took the in-class notes from one of the in-person campuses and just tossed it all online without proofreading or changing it at first. Which is deeply aggravating. Also, in hindsight, typical given the interface was a bit shit and kept throwing up unrelated errors and didn't allow for a reasonable amount of reading OR workspace, but. Argh.

But I got Atom installed on the desktop, I got the chromebox ready to install the Linux Beta that comes with it so I can put Atom on there, and Uncle Elf Lord is running ahead of me on that and giving me the play by play so I have something to go by. So that's going well. I'm pretty much blown for the rest of the day now, but I have hopes that it's not because it's always going to be like this, since coding lessons with code academy weren't like this. It's just going to be like this for the first while I get set up. Then it's going to be a fun game of Find The Curly Brace and What Semi-Colon Did I Miss and That Method Didn't Work What's Another Good One.

I hope, anyway. Because right now my brain is trying to piece itself back together after all the crap I crammed in it this morning and I'mma go to bed. Pretty happy with the day, although I could have done with fewer moments of wanting to scream. Plus side, I'm learning and hopefully eventually working remote. Once I step away from the keyboard the only one who can hear me scream is the boy.

... also now I need some computer coding icons.
kittydesade: A blue-and-white toned picture of a many-masted galleon (bring me that horizon)
I am le tired but I wanted to cough up a report before I went to bed. Not much of significance has been happening lately, thank god. It's mostly get up, drag myself through a few routines, try to write and usually not manage it, get a handful of coding lessons done, eat dinner, go to bed. I think my tomato plants may have gotten blighted and are in the process of dying, which is aggravating but unfortunately not very fixable. I need to take a few hours and deal with the various weeds, the blight, take a look at what can be saved and what can't be, etc, and that may happen tomorrow.

Today was the interview with the tech school, which meant I spent a lot of the day tidying both in case they got a glimpse of an untidy office and, more realistically, so I had something useful to do that I'd been meaning to do for a couple weeks now, that would work off nervous energy and keep me from freaking out. It worked! My bookshelves are so much more orderly. My floor and the rest of my office isn't, but I can do that... well, if I'm doing garden tomorrow maybe that'll happen Thursday.

(We also took Murdock to the vet today to get him RE fitted with a blood sugar sensor, fortunately not at our expense since the last time the problem was with the sensor. Now we can more properly calibrate his insulin dose. He's hanging in there, despite being schlepped to the vet so many times. Poor baby. We've gotten into a good routine with his twice daily doses though, so that's good.)

Ahem. Interview! I think the interview went really well. It turned out they did have a self-paced option, the details of which didn't seem apparent to me on the website? That might just be me, everything's very fuzzy right now, but I would also understand if that wasn't an option they wanted to highlight very much. I strongly suspect I got it highlighted to me because I said in my application that I have a programming background, and the interviewer said most of their students did not. Let alone the fact that I've been working with HTML and CSS since they were first launched, and those are two of the four languages we'd be learning. I get the feeling that the interviewer quickly landed on "yes self-paced is definitely best for you."

So that happened, and in a day or two I should know their decision with my application. And we'll see how that goes. I'm hopeful! I'm also freaking exhausted, I'm not sure that was the day's worth of nervous energy, I think that was a few weeks worth of AAAAAUGH. At least. But whatever, I have books to read, I have pandemic emergency assistance until the end ish of October and who knows how long after that, depending on what Congress does (probably nothing). And I have my family to help out until I'm done with tech school and on to the job search, which this tech school promises to get me a job within six months or my money back. I hope they deliver. I think they will. I've been working on Code Academy and while saying it's 'easy' would be cavalier and not entirely accurate, I'm not struggling with it in the overall. I understand code. I've been learning it in one form or another since I was very wee. It's mostly a matter of syntax, limits, function (not programming functions but the function of this or that language), and getting used to working with it. Plus I've got friends who are promising to hand-hold me through working on collective projects, double plus I've got project ideas of my own, all of which ought to look good as a self-directed person doing a self-paced course when it comes time for job interviews.

Here's hoping.

Profile

kittydesade: (Default)
Jaguar

December 2023

S M T W T F S
     1 2
3 4567 89
1011 12131415 16
17 181920 212223
24252627282930
31      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags