Human being in progress.
I continue to be one of the "long-term unemployed." It sucks and job searching is hard and I'm getting desperate, to be completely honest. P. spent four days in the hospital with a nasty case of cellulitis in his right leg. He was in the local hospital, the one I've spent too much time in. We kept insisting that my infectious disease doctor be assigned to his case and ultimately he was. I spent…
Is this thing on? I sometimes wonder that about myself. It's been 8 months since I was laid off and I still don't have a job and my unemployment has run out. This, predictably, sucks and I hate it. In the last eight months I have gotten precisely one interview and one phone screen. I'm now widening my search to include part time work and contract work (preferably long term). This is a terrible job…
written on Monday, July 21, 2025 Boarding the Acela in Boston to head back to Wilmington. Except for Amtrak staff, the train is empty. All seats are assigned, and the quiet car has no unassigned seats as I tried to change my seat prior to my trip and could not. When I arrive at my seat, there’s the blandest of white dudes in the seat next to mine, bag blithely tossed on my seat. He has to move his…
It has been seven years since I got sick. I’ve talked about this a lot, on here and on BlueSky and in person, so I don’t want to belabor my various ailments because I’m starting to find it really tedious and this was written on the last day of Readercon (which seems fitting, as I had my first serious symptoms at Readercon) so I’ve been talking about it a lot. I will say that I am doing so much…
As of July 1 of this year, I was laid off from my job as a junior web developer. The details don’t matter, it essentially boiled down to: I was a bad fit for the job and the job was a bad fit for me and we tried to make it work and couldn’t. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past couple of weeks and I’ve decided that I don’t want to continue in web development. I prefer to code and do…
I’ll be at Readercon 34 in a few weeks and I’ve my final schedule so I thought I’d share! Friday, July 18, 2025 What Hath the Billionaires Wrought? 1:00 pm, Create/Collaborate Jeff Hecht (moderator), Natalie Luhrs, Vandana Singh, Victor Manibo, Will McMahon Are billionaires taking science fiction too seriously as they try to shape the future? Adam Becker suggests this in his book More Everything…
No Static Today I'm lucky. I can think clearly, which means I might actually get some things done that I've been dragging on doing--small tasks like putting away one small basket of laundry so I can wash my unmentionables, cleaning some fountain pens so I can put them away, and some work on my 150+ book To Be Read pile. A literal pile, as most of it's non-fiction and I much prefer reading…
Content Warning: Violence In 1989, I participated in Future Problem Solving as part of my schools Gifted and Talented program. The problem we had to "solve" was acid rain (Wikipedia tells me that Problem I was Energy Sources , so that fits with the scenario we were given). There were two teams from my school participating and I was on the team of first-timers--the other team had competed the year…
This is the beginning of an occasional series of letters to my friend Moobie, who passed away in summer 2023. Dear Moobie, I have "The Humpback Whale" from Trad Arr Jones stuck in my head and it's all your fault. I played the album for "Little Musgrave" and the fuzzy guitars on "Canadee-I-O" and "Billy, Don't You Weep for Me" and then it was "The Humpback Whale" and here we are, three days later,…
Six years ago today, I entered into a showdown with my pancreas. I won, but it's been a hell of a journey. At the time this happened, I was doing extremely well at work and I was feeling really good about life, despite the odd digestive issues I was having--which I know know were signs of my gallbladder getting ready to have a hissy fit and turn my life upside down. Now, I'm almost back to feeling…