I wished I’d a digital camera yesterday. The weather flipped back and forth so fast, and every change was beautiful. I woke up to heavy, black clouds hanging lower than the tops of the mountains. If I’d been a giant, I could have plucked them from the sky and eaten them like licorice cotton candy. Then, the sun came out, and the day was like May: birds calling, things coming up and beginning to bloom. The tree outside my office hasn’t leafed yet, but it looks like it wants to. A few minutes later, the temperature dropped, probably forty degrees. Snow swirled around the courtyard as I worked, big heavy, complicated flakes in complicated patterns. Not ten minutes later, I had a warm walk to the store to get lunch. Yesterday evening, it was dry, then rained while I went to pick up things from a customer, and dry while I carried them to the office. I got back to the house (Ruth’s house), and the sky went white, with wind blowing the snow horizontal. By the time I walked home again, it was warm again.

I made good progress last night on porting the dazuko library binding from Python to Ruby. It amazes me how much smaller the code gets when using the Ruby API. C with Ruby’s library and garbage collector is rather like a statically-typed PHP.

I had a big blow-up with my parents. I feel bad for it, because they are doing it out of genuine concern. Darn it all.

The similarity of some minority cultures (Queer culture I know best) and some cults is still disturbing to me.

Most cults encourage people to drop outside ties — stop calling family, stop talking to them. Let thecult be your family.

Queer culture ends up doing the same, as a last resort to stay sane for a lot of people, but I think sometimes it might be encouraged a little too soon. I’m not sure.

I’m doing okay, all considered. I did cry this morning. We both did. It’s the end of what was mostly really good. I’m glad I have such good friends: Carrie for being not only supportive but inspiring and an amazing lover the last four years, Ananda for being a friend after being an ex, and to Tessa for the same, Dawn for being great to talk to here and in person, and for being able to put aside old shit and be friends, Josh for being surprisingly good to compare notes with, Max for being understanding and not maing the last week hell, and for being graceful in the latest adaptations, Amy for inspiration to not be anything but oneself, Asa for being a constant listener and great friend over the last months, and FTMichael, Hal, Evin, Blaise, Caleb and the rest of the #YayForQueers group for being supportive and wonderful and mind-opening since I met them, and to Alex for being a great friend and listener, too.

I’m at peace. Life will go on, goodbye isn’t usually forever, and missing people is quite okay.

They just left. I’m crying.

Conversations like the one I had the the other night are among the reasons that having the group of friends I do is so wonderful. Talking about relationships and the way people think and feel and being able to compare intricate notes with Josh took me well past midnight. I fell asleep in my sister’s huge puff-chair, which wasn’t the best place to sleep. I got chilled and didn’t sleep particularly well.

It’s been a relatively intense week. I am working, so I have my time to myself, but Josh and Ryland are here, mostly at Ruth’s, Max is here, mostly here in my house. All of this while dealing with major life changes.

Carrie’s moving out. The house is full of half-packed bags, things being sorted into piles labelled in our heads as “mine” and “yours”. I’m not entirely sure what I think. I’m going to miss having Carrie around. I’ll miss the companionship of having someone to share dinner with, a good reason not to eat dinner over some piece of work or while chatting online.

What we choose to leave behind and what we choose to take with us is such an odd choice. There are more art supplies being left behind than I suspected would be, and not as many cookbooks. I’ve inherited a tarantula of the acanthoscurria geniculata sort. There’s seed catalogs and a garden to plant. So much is the same as it has been while Carrie’s been in the youth corps. It’s a bit eerie.

I think we can be friends. There’s tension between us, but so most of my angst is having my routine disrupted and having it be hard to get a moment alone. I have my things to do, though, and she has her life to live. I can’t be possessive. I don’t think it’s in my nature.

Ryland’s taking off with Max and Carrie early tomorrow.

• How double-entry accounting works and why,
• what each layer of the OSI 7-layer model is, and why,
• how recursive descent, LR (and LALR(1)) parsers work,
• if they use a Unix-type operating system, the filesystem layout standard for their OS,
• XML, including a little reading on the top-down document-type versus the bottom-up piecemeal-type debates,
• how to locate relevant W3C and IETF standards, drafts and intermediate documents,
• basic C, including how to include a header, how to write “Hello, World”, how to allocate and free memory, and how to link a simple program,
• how to use diff(1) and patch(1),
• how to use cvs(1) or svn(1), preferably both,
• basic SQL, and how the JOIN operator relates to the ⊂ operator,
• and how to speak basic POP3, SMTP, and HTTP.

More should probably be here, but there it is.

Incident No. 25: Kimothy’s Mouth.

Sheer brilliance.

Doh. I shouldn’t stay up so late arguing with Polyergic.

I want to see the Dresden Dolls some time Really Soon.

I said today that I missed ASL pronouns in English. I am always confused in complicated conversations involving more than two subjects when there’s too many pronouns. I can’t ever remember which thing “it” is referring to.

Imagine if you had a set of pronouns, “de”, “dele”, “dela”, “delo”, “delele”, “delala”, “delolo”, “delalala”, ad infinitum. The first is “it” as we know it, the first subject, but a bit less ambiguous as it wouldn’t change. “Dele” would be the second person you referred to, and so on. “Les went to the store and de left before it got dark. De went to the park. Meanwhile, Sam went to the store too, and then to the park. De and dele went home and were happy”.

Perhaps it’s harder to keep track of, since we’re not used to keeping track of the subjects and objects of sentences, and unlike ASL, you don’t make it obvious when you use a slot.

I went snowshoeing with Ethan and Eric and their friend from Grand Junction, Michelle. I’m a little sunburned but I feel very, very alive. The sky was deep blue with perfect light-grey clouds. It was well above freezing — I didn’t even stay wet more than a few seconds. We hiked up from Red Mountain Pass, at about 10,000 feet, up a couple miles to one of the huts back there, stomped around a bit above there, and came back down.

I had one of the nastiest hypoglycemic attacks I’ve had coming into Ridgway, making me feel literally like I was going to keel over, but we got chinese food right after, which was excellent, and I felt much better. I think hormones fuck with my metabolism. It’s gonna be interesting to see how that pans out. Just gotta adjust my diet.

<pre>aredridel@mizar:~$ ls /home/storage/Music/ | wc -l 666 </pre>