weekly retro: the one where i have a party and then get mad at my computer
i had a small, belated birthday gathering last night so, of course, so we split a cannoli at breakfast at 2pm and now i'm Ready To Blog™. or i thought i was until i started editing photos for this retro.
while pumagreg eats his daily spinch, i need to vent about computers. i updated my imac to the latest version of mac os sequoia this week, immediately turned off any apple intelligence nonsense and thought i was done. for some reason, now, i'm converting color profiles and figuring out why my iphone images for this post look fine on the screen but are desaturated when i upload them. i am to HEIC files and eggs as hank hill is to JPEGs and hot dogs.
speaking of eggs, that ceramic egg from collin garrity which i recently ordered arrived. in contrast to my computer update woes, the mail this week was actually quite fun.
andy surprised me with a desk nameplate to celebrate my new business. i can't overstate how thoughtful, supportive and affirming andy is of my wacky adventures and career moves. he was the one who got me my first candle making kit after i showed him candle making videos. i'm just saying, we make great moves together.
while my computer was updating, the weather was reaching temperatures in the low 50's. it felt nice to get to wear a smaller coat to run errands. as i'm wrestling with the after effects of that computer update today, the temps have dropped significantly. all the snowmen of weeks past are long gone but this drop tells me there will be more in our future.
when it's not as freezing outside it's, unsuprisingly, easier for me to get out the door and not negotiate my way out of exercise, especially during a busy week where i'm already low energy from my period. usually i let myself relax and rot as my cramps begin, but i recently, frustratingly discovered that when i don't lower my intensity before my period starts, i am less likely to end the cycle in a depressive episode. this in itself is depressing!
but that's not to say that i didn't give my body the rest it needed and deserved this week, despite all the cleaning and errands to do in the wake of my having guests come over. it weirdly helps that when pumagreg wants to lay and cuddle in bed, it's literally against the law to not oblige.
i took this apartment deep cleaning session as an opportunity to finally fix the door of our air fryer which we use multiple times a day and have been struggling with for several months. the hinge broke in a way where we couldn't get a new part, but we really did not want to have to toss an appliance that otherwise works away. i, a genius that needs several months to suffer and see if a thing fixes itself, fixed it with a safety pin. now we don't need to use our ceramic veggie steamer to hold the door shut.
and here are some stuffed bell peppers about to go into said air fryer. i didn't take a photo of them complete because i'm not very thorough at documenting my day. it's at this point of my writing this blog that i figured out how to convert my images' color profile and now they are uploading correctly.
computer woes, cleaning, and menstruating took up most of my time and energy from making candles, but i did manage to do a lot of wick and wax tests which are fun. playing with fire (safely, legal) rules.
i even managed to find time to wrestle the printer and cricut to make these labels of pumagreg and customize some blank matchboxes, a much-loved souvenir for my guests. i'll post a tutorial very soon about this.
now a new month is upon us all. between birthday happenings and it being shorter month, i did not do everything i set out to do initially, but i ended up doing other things that were probably better anyway - after all, i did not enter february with an llc or cannolis in the fridge! perhaps that's actually what going "in like a lion" means.
things i liked this week
- not the latest mac os update, that's for fucking sure
- but i do love a map, and this one visualizes USAID impact by state in case you were curious
- dan tells some important history and, unintendedly and unrelatedly, inspires me to set up a blog-post-to-email integration for this blog. i have to have a talk with jenn nation™ about this first.
- someone who i've recently come to know and enjoy the company of is brett bonfield, who reached out after i had announced my leaving fastly. we had a very inspiring, affirming conversation over coffee this week and it was another reminder that i need to write and share more (i know, everyone tells me this!).
- my dear friend mike, who i once worked with at bocoup has helped transition the company into a worker coop. during my time there, 2014-2017, there was often aspirations from leadership to make it worker owned and it kind of became a meme for a couple of us, but mike and the folks still there finally made it happen and i couldn't be more excited. it's just a good, nice story among all the sad, aggravating news we hear out of tech these days.
the photo color thing turned this writing session into something way longer and painful than it needed to be! i'm going to get away from the screen and do some figure drawing because i hardly did any in february and i don't want to say the same thing for march.
xoxo jenn
