Category: General

So.

Before we start today’s little ensemble piece I’m going to say I’m okay. I am, however, thinking I might want to get some therapy. I’ve been talking about it for a while, and with my customary speed am moving in that general direction. So yeah. I’m okay, but just not in a fabulous place right now.

The world’s been hard lately. And I know that for plenty of trans folks who came before me the world was harder and sharper and flayed the tissue from their bones. I know that the world was harder and they couldn’t exist in any meaningful way, that their treatment was brutal.

I have the good fortune to have transitioned at a time when while the care was shit, gatekeepery as fuck, and at best haphazard, it was possible for me to use my privilege to get adequate care, adequately quickly. Althought he brainworms I had and have meant that stuff I may be should have done or could have done, I didn’t (FFS, for example, which I’m considering and have a consultation appointment for).

And the irony is that I’m happier in my body now than I think I’ve ever been (although if I could stop randomly hurting, that would be nice. Waking up at 2am because my brain’s fucking stupid and then not being able to go back to sleep because my knee randomly aches is aggravating). I’ve dropped slowly and gradually to 66kg (literally, the scale read 66.0kg today) just through actually exercising and eating healthier (basically not eating extra snacky shite every single day and cutting out a bunch of milky coffee drinks).

But right now I do feel like I’m fraying at the edges. Like the constant abrasion of the world attacking trans people, the loss of feeling like I could ever go back to the UK, all layered on top of the fucking ridiculousness of people ignoring the Eldritch horror that is the impacts of climate change, the dissonance of working in a slightly semi-rural bit of the US where people are just not getting it, and a bunch of people are trump supporters so I don’t feel comfortable or safe at work?

It’s starting to take a toll on me. I’m finding myself wanting to shelter in the same kinds of online spaces I did when I first came out. I’m desperately seeking out more queer – specifically trans – people to be around. To just feel like there are others (outside of just my amazing wife) who I can actually just relax around.

And I know the fact that (for some opaque reason that my brain isn’t yet giving me access to) the fact I’m not sleeping isn’t helping. It’s wearing at my capacity to cope in a way that’s slowly exhausting me.

And I know that the combination of my anxiety about and inability to finish the damn house isn’t helping. (Because I feel like next year’s election may go in a direction that makes staying in the US long term untenable – in which case selling the house will be a priority – which I’ve harped on about before and to an extent I just need to do it, but also when?

All that said, the singing has been good, the writing has been good too – probably why I’ve been writing her. And I’m trying – really fucking trying – to do some socializing. Hopefully that will help.

And maybe I should just get on and organize a chat with a therapist.

So, y’may have noticed that I’ve been kinda quiet on here. That’s because I’ve been rambling a lot on mastodon (@pyoor@lgbtquia.space) and I’ve also been chatting on the Dorley discord (for the Alyson Greaves novels, although I love all her novels), but mainly I’ve been doing my singing (what I rambled about yesterday) and I’ve been working on my novel. Huh, interesting. I think I’ve always called it a “book” or “story” before, but in this moment I chose to write “novel”, which is… uh, novel ;) So that’s taken up a lot of my writing space. All of it, really. It’s interesting because I know myself and I tend to have periods of near hyperfocus on one hobby or another interest, and then that’s done for a while and I’m on to the next thing. And I know that happens, and I don’t know why.

It can be frustrating because I’ll get up to a level of skill or understanding in something (like I was pretty comfortable with my EV conversion stuff), and then boom – that interest is suddenly secondary to something else and I find myself concentrating on, say, cheese fondling or gnome collecting, and then when I do finally circle back to whatever other interest it was I feel way out of my depth for a while. Ah, brains. How they do their thing is a mystery to me.

Anyhow. Oh, and then I logged into the site today and promptly broke it (I let it run an upgrade and it’s not happy – the editor is broken, which seems to be a known bug – but not one I know how to fix – I do have a work around for the moment though). Anyhow, so, little life update. We finally got around to building our media stand. It still needs a bit of paint because weirdly on two of the boxes we managed to get a chunk left unpainted. I have no idea how.

I’m pretty pleased with it, even though it was a ridiculous amount of work. And – actually – hasn’t got as much space as we hoped (at least in part because we decided to put the speakers in there. Which is tricky because I’ve been being bad about buying music. Or good. Depends on your position on buying music I suppose. I’ve also been bad buying books – but in our last “pull” which is what we euphemistically are now calling ‘getting rid of books’ (to new homes! They don’t go to a farm in the countryside), we removed about 60 books…and still don’t have space for all the ones we’ve bought over the past few months on the shelves. Augh.

I’ve also spent a chunk of time gradually working on the garage. It’s a slow job because I’m actually trying to not just throw things in random boxes and pretend like it’s tidy. I’m trying to work out what makes it a more functional space – one I can actually work in. It’s such a tricky space because it’s trying to be multiple things – and that’s something I’ve never found a good solution to. Our library/studio/spare-bedroom in Bristol always felt precisely like that – a mish-mash of things all trying to do multiple jobs. The spare bedroom in Slough, which was my study, that too felt like it lacked coherency. And the garage is trying to be a garage, an electronics space, and a store room and it feels it. I mean, it’s less of a problem because it’s a workspace. And it’s definitely vastly better than it was. But it remains a work in progress.

Aren’t we all a work in progress?

Anyhow. So that’s been occupying some time – along with trying to get the studioshed somewhat towards finished. Kathryn’s doing some classes and it would be nice for that space to be functional (now it’s not full of media stand), and I’d like to get some trim onto it (although she’s not that bothered ;) ). But I promised a studio and I’d like it to be done nicely, or at least, moderately nicely. So. Unfortunately it’s trying to rain again today – we really need to get the trim painted, but adoption stuff has occupied a lot of the summer and now we’re moving into a damp and drizzly season (much needed), and much of the wood isn’t painted at all. So. Need to fix that. Plan was to do some of that today, or at the weekend, but it looks like it’s going to try and rain. Although maybe not today? It’s hard – one app says it’s going to rain, another says it’s not. The sky’s overcast…

Feh, I guess we’ll see, and as Kathryn suggested I’ll go poke the wood with the moisture meter and see if it’s dry enough to paint – because it rained this morning, and it might just be too wet anyway.

So yeah. That and my TE job – which took me to Vancouver and put me on stage talking to people about things – it’s always weird doing that; in a good way. I mean, I know I know stuff, but it’s odd to have people actually pay attention to what I’m saying about technology, or food, or what have you. Like normally I’m this weird girl on a YT channel, and now I get to play in the big tent in front of people as part of a panel having a serious discussion; not me by myself on camera harping on about we should make the world more equitable at the same time as making it greener. Especially if we actually want to fucking survive on this rock.

So yeah, that’s been pretty cool.

There’s also been a whole bunch of stuff going on in my head about – well – basically presentation. How my presentation has shifted over the past few years as I’ve thought more about the harm my abusive ex did, and actually realized that some of her opinions had snuck in disguised as my own. That if I enjoy wearing make up and skirts and shit like that I should just fucking do it when I want. Part of that is about me and my introverted self playing a part for the camera – and for when I’m out doing “being not-really-but-slightly-famous-in-a-very-limited-set-of-circumstances” – where I need to fake being way more social than I really am (which is usually at the level naturally of: is that a rock? can I crawl under it? in these circumstances). So for that I started playing the part of a way more outgoing version of myself, someone who’s happy to smile, chat, and make small-talk (although I’m still remarkably bad at that), and that person presents way more geeky-femme than I typically do. That character also puts way more effort into their appearance than I am naturally inclined to do (although I’ve realised a chunk of that is that I’m forever working on projects. It’s hard to care how cute / cool I look when I’m knee deep in cutting lumber.

Anyhow, that character has bled into my non-character self because – stunner – I actually like the way I look in those clothes. I like the way I do my makeup. I mean, a chunk of it is that I like my body more now I’ve lost some weight and actually have a shape that isn’t weetabix. And examining why I’ve not done any of that for the past twenty odd years I ran into my ex stating at length how all that stuff is reinforcing the patriarchy, and how my expressions of femininity were unnecessary, and blah and blah and blah. And to an extent I do have hesitancy around the fact that I shouldn’t have to do makeup for YT.  Technically I don’t, but I think I look better (which is absolutely societal expectations, and should I reinforce that? Probably not. Am I going to? Probably, because I enjoy it).

I do have a ton of hesitancy around the fact that male YTers in our space can present wearing dirty jeans and a scabby tee and be taken seriously, but we get mansplained – sorry, that’s not PC – episodes of correctile dysfunction in the comments whatever we wear – about how we are wearing definitely the wrong thing for whatever message we’re trying to send. But also:

So yeah.

That’s where I’m at. I’m at – I enjoy this. Fuck anyone who says I shouldn’t, and more specifically and individually fuck the person who put these brainworms in my head anyway. And I’m going to try and explore me being me more as time goes on.

That said, my exercise regime has been fucked by the fact that I seem to have injured my heel in some nebulous and confusing way (as in – it was fine – it’s now not – I don’t quite know why). I have not been able to go running for two days and the day before that was a really short run because putting my heel down hurts. Which is very upsetting.

I don’t like it. Not at all.

A little while ago I decided I was going to start having singing lessons. I’m not sure where exactly, but it’d been lurking in the back of my head that this would be something fun to do. I enjoy singing but I’ve always been a bit… nervous about my voice. I mean, it broke as a teen, it made me dysphoric, and then when I transitioned I got fairly minimal voice training, and mostly it was just me and the other trans folks guessing. So I’ve never… Loved it? People told me they liked it. I certainly have a slightly unusual way I speak which is a result of the voice therapy dealing with my very depressed monotone.

But years in the ED, and having to shout people’s names in crowded waiting rooms, plus presenting on YT and more recently, presenting in person on stage, I’ve got to a point of this is my voice and I’m good with it. But singing?

I did sing as a kid. I had to. It’s part of the RSoM piano exams, or at least it was. I got to the heady heights of grade 6. But then I stopped. My voice broke. And I stopped singing. I mean I’d sing at home. Or in the car. Because I really, really enjoy it. Buuut, not in front of other people.

So yeah, I decided to fix the first part – and got singing lessons. And apparently I’m not as bad as I thought I was. Like, my pitch isn’t terrible, and I *know* when I’m off which is apparently important. My breathing though, that needs a lift of technical work, but I’ve already gained some range, which is freaking wild because I’ve only been doing it a couple of weeks. And I’m also, excited because she said that with practice I’ll fill the passaggio between the tiny little register I have at the top (which apparently will also probably gain notes) and my main register. (I think that’s what she said).

Excitingly, today I fairly consistently hit the high note (it’s not super high, just high for me – I think she said I’m pretty much a tenor, maybe eeking a little into the Alto range with training), got the timing okay and y’know, it more or less sounded pretty okay.

… And to top off the icing on this cake, some friends have said I can come sing with their group, if I want to and can find songs they want to learn.

I cannot express how cool child-me would think I would be if I did that. And occasionally it’s fun to impress child me.

This post talks about weight, and body image. A lot. It might be triggering for some folks (and some trans folks).

So – I’ve lost weight. Not a ton of weight. But some. I’m kinda weight wise both where I’ve settled (no more seems to be shifting and I’m happy with what I’m eating and how I’m exercising), and better (as in less mass) than I wanted to be / expected. Yes, all of that weight loss was intentional.

I’ve been eating healthier (less cheese, more fruit, mainly), continued my epic run of exercising every day (core muscles, jog in the morning; sit-ups in the evening – I actually feel the best I’ve felt physically probably since my 20s). I’ve also – obviously – just come back from a holiday with a lot of walking, and due to a last minute discovery that our local Kia dealer no longer has courtesy transport I accidentally walked four and a half miles home.

You may wonder how you “accidentally” walk 4.5 miles. Well, this was a case of me reliving my student-youth of “oh hey, this bus doesn’t come for 20 minutes, I can just walk to the next stop…” Rinse and repeat that endless times and you eventually end up hot, bothered and back at your house having singularly failed to catch a single bus. Despite the fact they’re free, have aircon, and it’s the middle of a heatwave.

Well done there Kate.

Anyhow, so, I’ve lost this weight and I was vaguely aware that not only were my bras getting ‘a bit sad’ (as in, my wife was gently pointing out to me that maybe I should get some new ones. I mean, several of them were getting on for ten years old and had kind of gone weirdly bobbly…), and also that maybe, having lost some weight they perhaps didn’t fit as well as they once did (or perhaps they’d just stretched?).

So I took it upon myself to measure myself. Grabbed the tape measure and wrapped it around my chest following the assorted internet directions.

And I thought “Nahhh, ‘m doing it wrong.”

See, I’d always been, either in reality or just in my head, a 38B. Broad chest, okay breasts. Being in the post-puberty HRT trans group I kinda never expected a ton of breast development and was fine with what I had, they seemed a not unreasonable size, but. Meh?

What I got this time was 34DD.

So then I got my wife to measure me, and she came up with the same answer and we both went “Naaaaah”.

Now it turns out that because of social conditioning, I think of DD as being “big”.

It’s not.

It’s actually well within the normal range for women. But men wrote a lot of the formative media that was around when I was growing up, and DD is media-coded-large breasts. I mean. Having now discovered that that’s what I’ve gone and grown, it’s… well, weird. Because it’s a bit of a dichotomy, right? I’ve got what I’ve heretofore thought of as ‘not great (size wise) breasts’, which I was okay with but kinda leveled out on “uh, that’s what I got”, which have now turned out to be very averagely sized breasts, on a frame which I’d previously thought was kinda on the larger size – with smaller breasts, and that’s actually smaller-framed-with-larger-breasts than I thought it was.

Which has had a weird amount of impact on the way I view myself. Despite the fact I’m still wearing the same size shirts, I’m still just and exactly the same shape as I was two days ago, I feel much better about my shape.

The things about me that bugged me a couple of days ago I can now slap with the justifiable science stick of “no, no, see, you’ve been measured and its fine”. Fuck knows if it’ll last, but the bit of me that likes to gnaw away at my self confidence like a little beetle on a rotting log? It’s been forced to have a massive dose of shut-the-fuck-up, which is kinda a nice relief.

So yeah. All in all, very affirming, annoyingly external validationy, and huh, odd.

I wonder how long it’ll last.

There’s an interesting vague anxiety which I find now accompanies being offline. I notice it if I forget my phone – generally a rarity – but that uncomfortable sensation that I’m missing something important. Not that I’m missing out, though there’s elements of that. But that I’ve left behind something significant, like my keys, or my coat. Or maybe like I’ve left the iron on. It’s a discomfort, a worry.

And when we arrived at our holiday cabin (a rental, don’t go getting big ideas); a spot on Vancouver Island after a couple of days in the city (Vancouver, specifically), we realised that “No WiFi” translated to “yes, there is a mobile signal here – but not for your network”. Technically, if you’re Canadian, and maybe on some other carrier, our phones showed a bar of signal. Along with an exclamation point and a note to inform us that we could only make emergency calls.

And I felt some of that formless anxiety for the first couple of days. It would pop in unbidden, and wander around my head trying to interrupt thoughts. I worried about what would happen if someone needed to reach us – but then, what would they need to reach us about? We were away for 2 weeks, chickens in the care of family (vet approved to see them if needed), house set up to water things automatically*, and of course, we trust the fridge.

And eventually that feeling faded.

And since then (and I know it will wear off), I’ve been enjoying the disconnection. Since we’ve got back I’ve felt the pull of the internet. The sucking dragging desire to see what’s happening on social media (although I’m far from Nazi Bebo (or Twitter, as some would call it, or X as the Nazi wanker who owns it calls it)), but even with its uncurated timeline, Mastodon sucks me in (because it has on it folks I care about); Discord calls to me, and of course then there’s the whole rest of the internet.

BUT – despite my Z88’s spectacular failure to survive the journey – its entire raison d’être in my life (being a nice non-distracting word processor) being destroyed by it becoming incredibly sickly (it, I think, got powered on in Vancouver, then crashed and stayed running in some unhappy state, then seems to have…I dunno, died. I need to take it to bits and prod it with an oscilloscope) – I did write. Annyoingly on my phone, but I did. I’m now up to 46,000 words in a novel that I don’t yet know if I’m ready to let anyone see.

I don’t yet know if it will be any good or, if this time around I’ll finish it. But I did write. And it felt good.

I also read. I read Nona the Ninth, a bunch of Martha Wells Murderbot books, and nothing whatsoever serious. Because right at this moment I need a break from it. I’ve been swimming in oceans of the climate is a fucking disaster area and we need to fix it now, which is absolutely true. But also, I can’t always be dealing with it at the forefront of my brain. I’m just not that kind of person. I need to breathe, and it’s been harder and harder to do that.

Y’know, people trying to make your very existence illegal, and then people gaslighting you about how that’s all fine, actually. That takes a toll on a girl.

But anyway, it was and has been wonderful to escape everything just for a few short weeks. And I know how lucky I am, as someone who’s living in the US, that my best beloved and I can build up enough leave to make that possible (and yes, I still think that building up leave is fucking ridiculous, and I hate the concept of building hours of sick leave with a burning passion). And I wonder how that will play out as the climate fails, as food and basic shortages spiral. But right now? Right now I’m having the last of my days off. Because I might be back in the world of internet, I might be back in the world of always connectedness, but I’m trying hard to remember that I don’t always need to be connected.

That said, I am feeling a desire to connect more with local queer/trans folks. I miss that in my life – probably because I’ve been reading Alyson Greaves – Dorley series, well, re-reading – and it’s not finished, but I decided I wanted to enjoy (is that the right word? Be engaged by) it again.

What did we do while we were away? Well, obviously we went to a remote cabin – half an hour from Campbell River, where we managed to get a quick swim in the lake, a paddle in the kayaks, and a very long walk up a very steep hill (well, 8km, not long, but 1500m up, which is quite a lot, at least by our standards). We also read – a ton, and napped a lot. And we disposed of 3 mice, which was less fun.

Before that we stopped in Vancouver, had amazing meals at Burdock and Co, and Vij’s, visited the amazing bookstore Massey, and visited the beautiful Bill Reid gallery. We visited the bookstore from The Neverending Story, which is like walking into an emense pile of books, albeit one staffed with friendly interesting people. We stopped in Nanaimo, and at a place called Goats on the Roof store (which is very, very touristy, but also had Penguin bars. I miss Penguin Bars).

We visited a bunch of gardens, including Buchart, and the Milner Gardens and Woodland. We hit up countless nice coffee places (and some not so great ones), I ran through the grounds of the British Representative to Victoria – many times. We wandered all over Victoria and saw a little snippet of the oldest Chinatown in Canada. We dropped by the Victoria art gallery and saw some of the most challenging exhibitions I’ve seen for a while. An experience that’s left me more determined to make some kind of a difference to the future of the planet. We drove up to Gold River, and then out to Upana Caves, for a little very light spelunking.

And we bought an awful lot of books.

All in all we had a delightful, disconnected time.

Photos are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/49965961@N00/shares/1pY2Z1W37q

* Although, annoyingly this was the thing that people needed to contact us about, because one of the watering circuits stuck open and we got through a lot of water over several expensive days.

Plan was go use the Pi’s own built in camera connector and add a USB camera for a second view. I also added a USB Wifi dongle because the Pi2B doesn’t have WiFi.

So this was one of those things that was theoretically easy, but turned into an abject nightmare of ridiculousness. Mainly because the Pi2B doesn’t have WiFi and is *extremely* finicky about power supply for its USB connections, so just plugging in a cheapie (‘linux compatible’) WiFi card didn’t work*.

After much failure the process I used that worked was:

Use a powered USB hub for the WiFi dongle and the USB webcam.

Make sure you have a really rock solid power supply for the Pi2B

1. Install Kali Linux on the Micro SD card. The version I got that worked for me was: kali-linux-2023.2-raspberry-pi-armhf
2. Connect the Pi to wired ethernet, plug the USB camera and Pi camera in, plug the WiFi dongle in and boot. Run through all the Kali Linux setup stuff.
3. Install the RPi config utility (missing from Kali)
   • Add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
     • deb http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/ jessie main
   • Run these commands:
     • apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 7FA3303E
     • apt-get update
     • apt-get -y install raspi-config
4. Run Raspi-Config and setup the camera.
5. Install Motion
   • sudo apt-get -y install libav-tools motion
   • Use v4l2-ctl to identify the cameras and configure motion to use both cameras. This involves both setting up the default configuration file and the secondary camera config files. There’s a good explanation of what needs to go in those other config files here, since everyone else seems to skip over it.
6. Okay, now the fun bit… a lot of the cheap WiFi dongles are based on a chipset that’s not installed by default in debian installs (it’s part of the non-free repositories – and has to be compiled for the Rpi). That’s the RTL8188FU chipset. If that’s the chipset you’ve got then you’ll need to do all this guff: the best set of instructions was on this github project page.
   • Build the driver and install it:
     • sudo ln -s /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/arch/arm /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/arch/armv7l
     • sudo apt-get install build-essential git dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r)
     • git clone -b arm https://github.com/kelebek333/rtl8188fu rtl8188fu-arm
     • sudo dkms add ./rtl8188fu-arm
     • sudo dkms build rtl8188fu/1.0
     • sudo dkms install rtl8188fu/1.0
     • sudo cp ./rtl8188fu-arm/firmware/rtl8188fufw.bin /lib/firmware/rtlwifi/
   • I had to tweak the configuration to disable rtw_ips to make it work – which tweaks the github instructions to look like this:
     • sudo mkdir -p /etc/modprobe.d/
     • sudo touch /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8188fu.conf
     • echo "options rtl8188fu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0 rtw_ips_mode=0"” | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8188fu.conf
   • I also disabled mac address spoofing as is recommended in the firmware build instructions, and for 5.15 and 5.16 kernels you have to blacklist the built in driver otherwise they conflict:
     • sudo mkdir -p /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/
     • sudo touch /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/disable-random-mac.conf
     • echo -e "[device]\nwifi.scan-rand-mac-address=no" | sudo tee /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/disable-random-mac.conf
     • echo 'alias usb:v0BDApF179d*dc*dsc*dp*icFFiscFFipFFin* rtl8188fu' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/r8188eu-blacklist.conf
7. And at that point, for me, it worked. However, if you want it to start at start-up I have never managed to get the motion service to work right. It starts up, but I think because of when it starts, the cameras often don’t come up. So instead I add it as a cron job. For that, you want to tweak the motion configuration to start in daemon mode, and then edit your crontab. For me that was just a case of adding:
   • @reboot
   • /usr/bin/motion

*Made doubly tricky by the fact that I’d picked up a fake MicroSD card that lied about its size, which I didn’t realize – and so it kept corrupting data. Always test your MicroSD cards, kids.