Kristin

Sports fans, whether they will admit it or not, often tend to be a bit superstitious. And that can lead to an Observer Effect assumption: that whether we watch or don't watch has an effect on the sports we enjoy. (For me, that often seems to be the tendency for "my" teams to lose when I watch them, even if they win the previous and subsequent games.) Obviously there's a whole lot of confirmation bias in these superstitions, which I'm sure would break down on the slightest examination with any rigor.

But this week, my "is it me?" moment is where two of "my teams," in two different sports, in two different countries, on two different continents, both sent their head coaches packing, within a day or two of each other. In both cases, the teams have been winning far fewer games than fans expected. In both cases, the coaches involved seem to be lauded as genuinely good people who have done good things for their teams, but whose teams are now in different situations from when they were hired (and, by implication, they are no longer the right person for the teams' needs today).

The first was my Ottawa Senators. They went into this season with (in the eyes of the fanbase) unreasonable expectations, mostly because of off-ice conditions. After years with a… polarizing owner, and then a period that felt far longer than it was with that late owner's daughters owning the club while seeking new owners, the new owners were finally handed the reins shortly before the start of this season. The new owners are hockey people, but smart enough to not want to jump into decisions hastily. If they'd had their way, I think they really wanted the coach to see out the season before making offseason changes next spring/summer, but the results have been disappointing. (The team had already lost its General Manager to a scandal, where punishment was controversially announced long after the behavior at its root, such that the results of investiation and the announcement of the team's punishment came under different ownership than was in place at the time the scandalous behavior took place.)

The second was one of my Premier League teams: Nottingham Forest. Their manager, Steve Cooper, has been much loved, having brought the team up to the Premier League after many years away from the top level of English ⚽️. (In fact, after playing in the Premier League for five of the first seven seasons of the league's existence, Forest had played 23 consecutive seasons in lower leagues before being promoted back to the Premier League in 2022.) So far, this season, they are in 17th place out of 20 teams, only one rank above demotion out of the Premier League. They have lost more than half of their games this season, with only 3 wins and 5 draws to go with their 9 losses.

And… when these happen in the same week? It is really hard to not apologize for jinxing the teams I support. Intellectually, I know that I have nothing to do with it, but emotionally, it can sometimes feel that way (Aren't emotions annoying sometimes?!?)

One added bit of weirdness is that both the teams replacing their coaches are going to people that I have previous rooting interests in. In Ottawa, its longest-serving previous head coach has been handed the reins on an interim basis (presumably for the rest of this season), and a former team captain has been appointed assistant coach. At Forest, they brought in a man who previously coached the other Premier League team I cheer for* (though my opinions of him are far lower, based on how short and unsuccessful his tenure at that team was). Hopefully things go better with him at Forest, because he is the new manager, not an interim appointment.

As for new-guy results? The Sens, under their new coaching staff, took a 3-0 lead in the first period, before eventually squandering that lead to a 4-3 loss. (Change isn't instant, I know, and this change was in the middle of a road trip. The Senators play a lot of games right now, making up for having been given extra days off to accommodate jet lag around playing two neutral-site games this season in Sweden. They play again tonight in Colorado before playing at home on Saturday in their final game before Christmas.

Forest haven't played yet, but have a similarly busy stretch: they play Saturday at home, and play a pair of games between Christmas and New Year's. They then have three weeks until their next game, which will hopefully be good for giving the team and its new manager time with each other (though I am not sure what else is on the ⚽️ calendar, and whether they will be missing players during that break for international play)

* Yes, I cheer for two different Premier League teams. I had cheered for one for a few seasons after watching a documentary series. My interest has waned somewhat since the manager and so many players of that era are no longer with the team, but I still enjoy watching them (and most years, they qualify for European play, so it gives me a rooting interest in whichever competition they qualify for each year). I actually started cheering for Forest before they were in the Premier League (though not for nearly so long as most). A player I liked from the Canadian national team and from Toronto FC of Major League Soccer was transferred to Forest, so I started following them. Laryea didn't get much time to play there before he was loaned back to this side of the Atlantic, but I enjoyed watching their fight for promotion and have continued to follow them in the PL. Except when the two teams play each other twice each year, they often don't feel like they're in the same League, because Spurs are high in the top half of the table, while Forest's main goal in their season and a half has been "don't get relegated."

Thanksgiving was mostly good: we watched the parade coverage on TV (yay!). Our livetweeting became a livetooting this year. It mostly worked well. Then we watched the National Dog Show coverage. (Shrug… it's okay, I guess, but H like of it.) And then, later in the day, we had our annual Thanksgiving viewing of the 2011 movie Tower Heist. Though I'm not familiar with Die Hard, I suspect Tower Heist is as much a Thanksgiving movie as Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The main reason we watch it every year at this time is because of a fun police chase scene that goes through the Macy's parade. (Some years, that has felt a bit awkward, given terrorist attacks with trucks driving through gatherings of people. Nobody is hurt in this movie version. And the truck is ( SPOILER ).)

I have had some Mastodon frustrations: my server has been giving a lot of errors for days… I had lots of issues while trying to livetoot (errors instead of posting, long delays in receiving H's posts from another server, even though she was getting mine fairly quickly. And then… my server was down for about 12 hours Friday. And… I found that threw me off. Especially because communication was… lacking. (Partly because the admin didn't know what was wrong. There was a configuration error, and that meant that X couldn't talk to Y and was failing silently. Admin actually had to sleep on it and come back to the problem with fresh eyes before he could see (and then fix) the problem.

As a result, I've now found a Plan B. I set up an account on another server. Right now, it's just a placeholder. But… if my server goes under or there's another long outage, I can at least import my follow list and read and respond. (I'm not 100% sure how comfortable I am with the server. But as a temporary home, it would do. With so many servers closed to registrations or invite-only, I was mostly focused on finding a place. (I am also leaning to smaller instances: the one I'm on quickly grew from 60 users to 20,000 users. And I don't think they have enough resources for that. Especially if the admin is the only person on the tech side of things. The "hit by a bus" continuity issue. Or, the "if he walks away from/gets bored of running the server." He's also expressed some frustration at the number of reports he's receiving. And… I wish it would be productive to shout at him "THIS is what happens when you acquire 20,000 users and don't limit registrations!" But it wouldn't be, so I'm not telling him that.

This morning, another mild frustration. One of my pens needed to be cleaned and was ready to be filled with a new ink color. But first, the old color was slightly stubborn in coming out of some parts of the pen. (I suspect that's largely Kristin should have looked up how to clean this type of fountain pen, with a side of wanting to switch from a darker ink to a lighter one, so really wanting to be sure that the old ink woudln't contaminate the new ink.

Then, I wanted to put Queen and Castle (a nice gold color from Ferris Wheel Press) into my pen to try it out… but I couldn't get the cap off the ink bottle! (I think it was tough to begin with and then I think I may have also made it worse, because I forgot my "righty tighty, lefty loosy." I wrestled with it for several minutes before deciding, I probably need a wrench to get this cap off. And I'm not dealing with that now. In any case, I had another new ink color to try, so instead, I used the same company's Ruby Royal Flush) to fill my pen. It's… nice. I think it's a little darker red than I was hoping for. I'm a little anxious about how much glitter is in these inks. A little afraid of issues with it getting stuck in pens and being tough to clean. But it'll look nice. And the holidays are a good time for a red ink, too!

This week has really put me out of routine… in both good and bad ways. But… I've been trying to get myself less rigid about the routine (with the day out of town to help shift my mind a bit)… which is one reason that the answer hasn't been "getting back into routine." Trying to do more of the figuring out what I want/need to do, rather than "what I always do next" when I have time for it.

It is good to get the pen thing "solved." This morning, I did the "write out my daily calendar" thing, but with "the pen I (used to) hate." With the same ink that was in my other pen, it glides nicely. I no longer hate the pen: I'm currently blaming that ink.

My pen/ink order arrived just before H got home from work, so I have opened it, but not used any of it yet. I'm slightly disappointed by my set of ink samples. They don't allow any special requests for their random sample set (which is understandable, since they are offered at a discount from the price of buying the same number of individual ink samples (which they also sell). But that meant that three of my eight are of a brand that I am unwilling to put into pens (partially because of issues with consistency, reports of some of their inks behaving badly to the point of damaging pens, and that the brand comes from one person who appears to push politics I disagree with, including with his ink business). So… nearly half of them are never going to be used.

That said, there's a lot of good in the order, too: there are three full-size ink bottles in colors I'm looking forward to using. There's a pen which I kind of like: for a cheap pen, it has a pleasing weight to it. I'm going to put my favorite ink in it, on the basis that… after my last bad new-pen experience, I want to fill new pens with either their included cartridge (rarely: ink cartridges and me don't seem to get along and I'm always worried I will damage the pen or the cartridge (or myself) when I attempt to puncture the cartridge to install it. I think the last one I got, I needed H's help to get it on) or, more usually, fill new pens with an ink I know already. Right now, there are only two inks in that category. And there's no sense having my two stub-nibbed pens with the same color.

*****

This morning, I got back to the crossword puzzle I'd been working on. A couple of other guesses came to me and seemed to work out… but I still had an area with a lot unknown and a lot of guesses. So I finally started looking things up. And… in the end, I think it came down to one wrong letter I'd put in the grid that was causing me multiple problems. Even more annoying? It was an assumption. But it was fun to see how quickly, with that mistake out of the way, how quickly the rest fell into place.

H tried her hand (or her computer) at yesterday's NYT puzzle while she was out. It was neat to see how far she got, though she got frustrated by some of the "theme" stuff it had, with multiple letters in some squares. She was good, though, making sure I wouldn't be annoyed if she shared a screenshot of how much she'd done. Fortunately, not an issue. Really, the only issue I can imagine is if I was trying to work it… but I'm still going through my book and not trying current puzzles… and it's a long time before I expect I'd be ready to try a Thursday. (The tricks I've seen seem like they would be aggravating and frustrating to me at this point… but I can see enjoying them when my solving abilities rise to that level.)

I guess the other thing is… my goal doesn't have to be the same every time… and maybe some of those are more able to be puzzles I treat with a goal of learning instead of puzzles where my goal is to solve them successfully. You know… like I might expose myself to it, even admitting that I don't know everything (gasp!)

Anyway… my first "goal" is to get through this book of 50 puzzles. And I've finished 6. After that… I'll do some re-evaluating of where I am and what I want/need to do next.

So… I guess that's all for now. (Been a while since I wrote this much here)

So… the pen order is on its way. Post office says it's expected Friday, but given where the tracking shows it, I would not be surprised to see it arrive tonight.

Which is good because… I've been "off" all week. And I think the pen situation is part of it. Right now, two of my fountain pens have the ink that I think is bad in some way. Which makes them not easily used, a frustrating experience. That includes "my favorite pen." And… so everything I've attempted to write in the past couple of days has been a struggle.

But I'm not yet experienced in cleaning pens and changing inks. I've only done it once. Which means… I need to find instructions and do it. I felt I would be self-conscious and sidetracked if I tried to do it yesterday when H worked from home, so it's on the agenda for this morning: at least emptying one or both of the pens with that ink in them. I want to leave more time for the pens to dry than I did last time… I don't think that was the issue with when I refilled my favorite pen… but I want to be sure.

I'm about 95% of the way to deciding to throw out the rest of that bottle. It's a shame, because it's the largest volume bottle I have bought so far (mostly because smaller size became out-of-stock before I placed my order). But… given that it's not behaving for me… and not behaving like I've seen it reviewed… I'm going to guess it's somehow contaminated. (Which might possibly have happened after I opened it… I may alter where/how I do it to remove some risk of that in future.)

The order arriving soon will have: three full-size bottles of ink, eight small sample vials of random inks (this vendor's "birthday reward") and empty sample vials that I can use for three inks I bought in small samples, which arrived in bottles too small for me to fill my favorite pen with. So I will have plenty of inks to try out. Top priority will be getting rid of the offending ink. I suspect the "pen I don't like" (since I filled it with this ink the first time) may get my favorite ink. (It would be a match for the color of its exterior, as well as helping me determine more surely whether the issue is with the ink or the pen.) My favorite pen will probably get one of the new inks.

There is a small chance that I damaged my favorite pen during the cleaning process. At one point, I set it down and it rolled onto the floor uncapped. I am hoping it landed horizontally and didn't damage the nib. (I don't see any nib damage, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to rule it out for sure.) At least it's not a super-expensive pen. And its model is readily available: the specific color might be more difficult, but there are similar colors that would be easy to buy if it needed to be replaced. (But hopefully it's OK, and it's just the ink that's making me anxious.)

Finally, last night, I broke out the ridiculously cheap fountain pen I bought at a local store a couple of months ago. And… that is probably my pen in main use until I get new inks into pens. It's a disposably-priced pen. (Store owner said she wouldn't buy a converter for it to use bottled inks, since converter would cost more than the pen. I'm not making any decisions until it's out of ink. I don't mind the cost, if I'll use it, but… I like the way it writes, but not the way it feels in the hand or the way the pen looks. So… there is a "will I actually use it?" question. It was mostly bought to up my purchase (because I hate browsing in a small store without buying anything).)

I've also been getting into crosswords this week… ( Kristin rambles about crosswords… )

Anyway… I'm not saying much here, so I'll stop for now.

Just got an update on the package I was waiting on.

About three hours after I posted Friday, I was emailed a tracking number for the shipment, which was apparently delivered on Monday evening.

The frustrating things are:

• I didn't see the email until this morning. (That appears to be my own fault, because the headers don't show any delay in receiving the email.)
• Their web site still shows my order as "Processing," so I didn't have any expectation of having a shipping notice.
• We didn't empty the mailbox yesterday, so it's still in the mailbox over at the leasing office… since I didn't know it had shipped. (If it had gone to the parcel locker, instead of the mailbox, we would have received an email automatically.)

Anyway… what's been long-awaited is a short walk away… and after breakfast, I expect I will walk over for it, so I can put my pens in my new pen roll!

I bought a planner for 2023… and it arrived last night. So this morning, I retrieved it at the parcel locker (beside the apartment complex's leasing office) this afternoon and opened it and… I was disappointed.

A lot of it met the expectations: the layout and the paper seem exceptional. I think I have a decent shot of using this system.

What didn't meet my expectations? The covers.  This is a two-book system, with a planner containing mostly weekly and monthly spreads, and a notebook with undated "daily" pages. The cover of each book falls short of what I'd hoped for. Most importantly, in durability. The covers seem quite thin; while there's a thicker sheet of cardstock between the covers and the rest of the pages, I worry about the covers themselves surviving even a small amount of handling, let alone a full year of use.

They do sell clear covers to fit. I expect I will buy them, because a planner that can't be handled would be of limited use to me. But… it leaves a sour taste, after the amount I spent for two books and shipping. I had also been considering buying a discounted 2022 planner to use between now and the start of December, when the 2023 planner begins. That seems now in doubt: it was awkward enough to consider paying 60% of the price for about 20% of the year, but when I need to buy covers to protect them… the cost is going higher than I was hoping for, and I don't know whether I want to add to it.

The other deficiency of the covers are the colors; I think the colors are a decent enough match with the images on the web site, but they are duller colors than I expected, more greyish.

Now… I don't want this to be all moaning and groaning. The layout and the paper are by for the most important parts, and I am quite happy with those. I'm just disappointed in having to take more care and precaution in able to keep that paper useable through all of 2023. The fixes seem easy but annoying. But once I do this, I should have a planner I can work with for the entire year.

If I use it faithfully through the entire year, it will probably still have been worth it. If not… I'll end up disappointed at how much money I've wasted on it this year.

Today was a frustrating day. I was yearning for my usual weekday routine, after H had taken a week of vacation time. (It was full staycation, but we got out several times in the first few days, including a new-to-us restaurant one day, a new-to-us location of a familiar restaurant and a museum visit the next day, and our roughly fortnightly IKEA trip (mostly because the heat bothers H, so she values Ikea as a large indoor place for a walk with fun stuff to look at).

But… my day derailed very quickly. Some of it was my weird obsession with seeing things live, so when the morning news mentioned Liz Truss's visit to Balmoral to become Prime Minister of the UK, I immediately switched over to BBC News (until they got bored of talking about that… to be fair, there wasn't anything to see after she'd gone in) and I switched over to Peacock which carries Sky News (my main criteria being British coverage I could access instead of American coverage).

And then… what felt like disaster. I knocked over a partial can of ginger ale. And it landed on a pile of junk between the arm of the love seat and the table next to it. So I filled up two trash bags of that and used a couple of paper towels at what I could reach, before giving up. And… my day was ruined.

I kept with the news coverage until Truss walked into 10 Downing Street. But… making lunch before soccer came on? Wasn't happening. I am annoyed because I was looking forward to today and none of it got done.

Sigh… I wish I could write more, but hearing the thunder out there, I want to submit before lightning causes a power blink and I lose the entire post!

Yesterday was a fun day, but I wanted to write about some of it.

I'll start out with the "shape of the day" in brief and then pull out what I wanted to write about:

1. Morning ⚽
2. Pen shop visit
3. Board game café
4. Lunch
5. New-to-us dessert café
6. Quiet evening

I won't write about all of them, but I wanted to set out the order quickly, so I don't find myself diverted on tangents before I write about what I really wanted to write about.

Pen shop visit
I recently bought my first non-disposable fountain pens and have been having fun getting into them. To date, I've kept myself in the cheap end of the hobby: the most I've spent for a pen is $33. I am now at the point where I can imagine spending significantly more on a pen, but I feel I don't yet have the knowledge base I'd want to spend on a pen much more expensive than that.

So I recently learned that there is a pen shop in one of our neighboring cities. And yesterday we visited it and… I was a little underwhelmed. So much of the stuff I was interested in was displayed in ways that didn't really work for me. It was really nice to see some of the pens in person that I've only seen online, but… it wasn't clear to me if I was allowed to open any of the cabinets or whether I was supposed to ask the owner for assistance. And nothing was really labeled. If a pen is behind glass and I can't even see a price, I don't want to ask for help. (I don't want to bother somebody to show me a $200 pen when I know I don't want to spend that much.)

That said, I did make a few purchases: I bought a set of three small sample-sized inks from a brand that's really interested me in being from Ontario. This will let me try three of their colors before possibly choosing a full bottle of one of their inks. I also bought a notebook that I've seen online. It's probably not going to be my favorite notebook, but… is definitely worth a try (and hopefully will encourage me to write at times that don't feel "worthy" of a bound notebook). And lastly, I bought a very cheap fountain pen. (I don't know how the store priced it, but I found it listed online for less than $5.)

I also know that I had a bit of "on guard" about the store. From some of my reading online, it was clear that their politics do not align with mine. Given their politics, I wasn't sure whether me being trans might be a problem. But I was willing to give them a try, and as long as I was treated like a person and the political messaging wasn't in-my-face, I decided to be OK with buying from them. And, for the most part, they succeeded. My wife did see some signage about how they had never required masks in the store. (The mask issue is the only political sentiment I have seen on the store's social media.) So… definite red flags depending on local state of the pandemic.

In the end… I'm not really all that tempted. The store has a web presence, so… I'll stay subscribed to them on social media and if they have something in stock that I want then, I might go to buy it (especially if I don't want to wait for an online order to be shipped), but… I'm not likely to go there to "just shop" again. Which is a little disappointing (but probably safer for my bank balance!)

Dessert café
Speaking of dangerous, we found a cute little dessert café, which is sort of in our neighborhood. We'd seen it driving past and it had intrigued us, but we'd never actually visited… until yesterday.

We will definitely return! H ordered a wonderful slice of Reese's cake (which ordinarily would have tempted me, but I didn't want to deal with the peanut-butter cup portion given my current dental state (though the bite she offered me was definitely tasty). I ordered a slice of mocha cake which was very good. There are other things on their menu that are of interest, too.

I also found the café itself to be pleasant. The seating is nicely-spaced, and not uncomfortable. I want to keep it in mind as an option for those days when we want to get out of the apartment, but don't really want to do too much.

I could probably write more, but I'm not sure how interesting it would be to either you to read or me to write, which probably means this is a good time to stop for this post

One of the times I find I come here to write is when I wake up in the middle of the night, so let's see if it becomes a thing. (MOTN = Middle Of The Night)

So… yesterday was a… day. It was actually a good one. We had our usual fortnightly visit with B (H's adult daughter, who lives with her dad in a neighboring city to ours). Instead of the usual (B drives here, we go out to lunch, B drives home), we tried something else out: a board game cafe has opened in B's city, so we tried it out (picking her up on the way). We really liked the place. $5/person/day fee for playing games (or a $15/month membership). Their food menu is a little sparse, but I think we all found something we enjoyed for lunch. We played two games: Calico ("a puzzly tile-laying game of quilts and cats") and Forbidden Island (a cooperative game that we actually own but had never played).

Verdicts on the two games? I found Calico difficult to wrap my brain around, because tiles have colors and patterns and you got points for linking a certain number of each color together and, you could get points for linking tiles with the same pattern together (though the patterns required different numbers of tiles to score points, with the ones requiring more tiles scoring more points than those requiring fewer tiles)… and then you had patterns within your playing tray where you received points for arranging tiles surrounding a given tile with combinations of colors and/or patterns. But I also think it was a case where the second time through the game would have been much easier. But H found herself fried by all the different things to pay attention to, and said (when we were discussing it on the way home) that she could never imagine playing two games in a row of that game.

Forbidden Island was a real winner with us. We came close to playing it again, I think, before realizing that one of us had a prior commitment which wouldn't allow the time. I also found that this game was good, because the back of the card telling each player's particular role had the information about what you could do and in what order when it was your turn. (Without it, I think it would have been slightly complex, but having that info in front of us, helped us keep on track.) I definitely look forward to playing it again some time. (And perhaps there. There was talk of this becoming "the usual" for B's visits.)

I also watched two ⚽️games. (Emoji used, because I feel weird about using either name for the sport, since so much of what I watch is coming from places where it's called football, but of course, when you say football in North America, everybody's brain jumps to 🏈) Spurs had a… scare in their FA Cup match, coming within a few minutes of losing to a lower-tier team. I also read this morning about a Canadian player, formerly of Toronto FC, who is moving to Nottingham Forest. So I watched their FA Cup match today also (even though Laryea wasn't in the lineup). It was a good day for that, as they upset Arsenal. (I'm not sure how many Nottingham Forest games I'll see, since only a handful of Championship games are available over here each week. The team have paid audio and video streaming options for international fans, but… they are higher-priced than I am currently willing to pay.

I really hope I get some more sleep. I woke up at midnight, sneezy. I know that's not enough sleep. But I'm not sure if I can make sleep happen. But I think, once I finish this post, I'll try (because once daytime comes, I know sleep won't for me).

I'll end with a bit of Kristin weirdness: because my main tracking of reading is currently via Goodreads and because their tracking is based on their server's time (Pacific time zone)… it is close enough to my own that I don't want to log reading that will be recorded with the wrong date. So I forbid myself from reading between midnight and 3am Eastern. That also helps a bit with me not so often getting out of bed too early, because if it's before 3am I "can't" read yet.

It's been a long week. Both H and I dealt with various issues. For H, it was headaches (of multiple causes/types, apparently). For me, it was my mouth (as I mentioned behind the cut in last week's post).

( More about mouth pain )

Yesterday had one of those major minor successes in life. H had signed up for a virtual art museum tour via Zoom. So we settled in at the appointed time yesterday morning, and, as the speaker began, we started hearing a chirping smoke detector every little while. It was certainly irritating. As time went on, and he didn't apologize for the noise, I started noticing that the sound was reflecting in the apartment in ways I wouldn't have expected if it was coming from the Zoom.

So the first step, figure out for sure whether or not it was coming from the Zoom presentation. I got my phone's stopwatch app open, and measured: it was chirping every 31-32 seconds. So I prepared the remote control, and muted it for a few seconds around the next chirp. And we didn't hear it. Aha! It's not on the Zoom, so that means it's coming from our building.

Second step was confirming where the sound was coming from (either where within our apartment or whether it was from a neighboring unit). Very quickly narrowed it to the spare bedroom in our apartment.

And then… I managed to figure out how to get within reach of it to take it down. And, of course, it's wired in. But does have a battery for backup, as they usually/always(?) do. But the plug for the wiring blocked the battery compartment. And I couldn't figure out how to get it out. YouTube to the rescue… amazingly I found a 24-second-long video with just the answer I needed. And… it worked!

(Most Valuable Assist goes to H for making an Instacart order--which we'd procrastinated about for a couple of days--quickly to include a 9V battery and for paying the extra couple of dollars for a within-an-hour delivery.)

I am absolutely not a handywoman. But to have done so much of this quickly and independently… there was a sense of accomplishment (after I recovered from being startled twice a minute by the low-battery chirp). Makes me feel a bit less useless than usual (mostly joking)