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There are so many points in my life where there’ve been these big deciding things. Forks in the road. Places where things could have gone so differently. Sometimes I’ve known about them, sometimes I haven’t… Random shit like, as a teen I’d go to London with one of my very few friends. We’d often go to this cafe, which, it turns out is a couple of streets away from the gender clinic I ended up going to when I came out.

I literally walked out of the underground station and thought – huh, I used to come here. I *literally* walked past it. If I’d’ve seen the sign there’s a non-zero possibility I’d’ve called them because I knew there was something not right in my gender identity – I just wasn’t ready to accept it – and so “oh I’ll go talk to someone about it” would have been a reasonable thought. I could have ended up coming out at 16, not at 20. Which for the 1990s would have been pretty fucking early*.

There’s the moment my awesome and lovely friend Kate K offered me an interview at Acorn in Cambridge, an out that would have got me out of the abusive relationship I was wandering into (maybe she knew, I was too blind to notice) *and* would probably mean I stayed in IT, and didn’t move into healthcare.

Or the day I decided it would be good to meet some random person off the internet at a bar in London. One of the absolute best decisions of my life.

Anyway, sometimes I look back and think how life would have been different if I hadn’t done the thing. Or if it would have ended up the same anyway…

But right now we’re facing down a decision. We’ve been looking at adoption for a long time. We’ve been trying to adopt now for a couple of years without any real traction. Part of this is we’re both deeply non-social people. Socialising is really tiring for me, and my work sucks pretty much all the energy I have for it – and so really I want to just hide when I get home. Also… we’ve had this little thing called COVID which has been ongoing (and is still killing or sickening a lot of people), so even more than normal we’ve not been socialising.

Added to that the more we’ve both learned about adoption, the more uncomfortable we’ve both become with the whole *shudder* adoption industry. It’s just awful. And supporting that is… difficult to navigate with any form of ethical comfort. We found an LGBTQIA friendly adoption consultant, who…hasn’t really met what we were expecting to happen. As in, the vast majority of potential matches are from people in Florida – a state it’s not legal for me to exist in. So, uh, that doesn’t really work for adopting.

So then we (well, Kathryn) found a couple of adoption agencies. One of them, PACT, sounds ideal…they’re super queer friendly and focus on adopting POC into families of colour. Which sounds perfect, except they’ve had one “Asian / Indigenous / Other” adoption basically since they were founded.

And then there’s OA&FS, which sounds great but is…very, very expensive (as in, nearly all our savings), and that timeline is LONG. Now, if it weren’t for the prospect of the GOP Nazis being elected at the next election cycle – i.e. November next year, and then the very likely probability of me being made illegal, having my healthcare removed, and then fucking thrown in a prison for the crime of existing by a bunch of dime-store-fascists, then I’d be fine with a long time line. It would actually be okay.

But now we’re facing down this choice. Do we throw our lot in with OA&FS, and hope that we can get through their process, and matched, and have everything squared away by November next year (which seems…unlikely, since they say their typical time for waiting once you’re in their adoption pool is 18 months). Do we take a punt on the Nazis not being elected (Kathryn has more hope than me on that front). Or do we try and up our game with the private adoption (which has a whole other ethical unpleasantness – I mean, I just…everything I hear tells me it’s super important people get real counseling before they make an adoption plan. That they should have life-long support available. That you, as an adoptive parent should have life-long support available).

*SIGH*

Or do we accept that parenting isn’t going to be something that happens for us. And I hate that option. I mean, I can see a life. I can see a perfectly good life. But will I always be wondering “what if”. Particularly, if the Nazi’s don’t get in next election – then will I be devastated to know that we could have stayed, we could have ended up matching.

But then there’s no guarantee anyway. OA&FS said that the last lesbian couple they had waited much more than the average – but also, the average is skewed by the fact they only effectively had one.

I just don’t know even how *I* feel. Let alone what I want to do. We’re going to sit down and chat – actually, we’re going to go for a drive and chat this weekend. A chat to work out what the hell we want to do…effectively with the rest of our lives.

It’s incredibly intense. I have no idea what the right answer is, or if there’s even a right answer.

*We don’t talk about that I asked my mum when I was 4. And they constantly had problems with me pilfering my sister’s stuff… and the stuff my grandparents brought for my sister to try on from their charity shop… I mean, *we* do, but it’s not useful to talk about it. It was the 80’s the doctors would probably have tortured me like the GOP is torturing trans kids now.

Yesterday was a solid day of progress on things. In fact, in general, there’s been a lot of progress on things. We’ve been working on the temporary media stand. It’s coming along.

The many chevrons are glued down (more or less, we won’t talk about that any more than that eh…), we need to order the varnish and decide on a finish pattern for the sides (it’s the chevrons, but it has a stylised flower/plant & planet (well, I kind of think of it as a planet) engraved), and we’ve decided it’s going to be painted. The specifics of that are still being worked out…

Anyhow, the top looks pretty cool – especially for the amount of work that’s gone into it, and I think the sides will look pretty nifty too. Just a case of getting the wood top-surface trimmed (one of the errands today was getting a new blade for one of our circular saws), the sides on, and the whole lot varnished (once the varnish arrives), and praying that the bits on the top that stuck…less well than we might have liked (despite half our library being stacked on there) stay stuck down.

As usual the amount of work that we’re putting into this “temporary” object belies the likely nature of its temporaryness.

Anyhow, then yesterday after a raft of errands (there seem to have been a lot of those recently), I set to on upgrading the Z88. I’d bought a 512K RAM / 512K Flash upgrade for it, but instructions were… absent. Eventually I found this set of instructions which was much clearer than anything else I’ve found and after desoldering the original chips I replaced them and lo, it’s running OZ 4.7 (can I share that it’s wild that people are still collaboratively working on an operating system for a Z80 based machine from 1987?), then burning that onto flash chips and sending them out…?

Aaaaand, it has 512K of RAM! Isn’t that shiny.

Of course, having got it working I was terribly excited to try connecting it to the mac, at which point I discovered that of course, Apple stopped supporting the common-as-muck USB-Serial chipset that’s been around for a dog’s age. There is, apparently, the FTDI chipset variants, that are still supported – and thankfully I was within the return period for the one I got. So back that USB-Serial has gone, and a new one is (theoretically) en-route.

The other thing I need for it, ideally, is a decent set of rechargeable batteries. A set that’s actually a set (because I have a bunch of mismatched ones). In today’s massive list of errands (including switching over Raven’s tyres for the summer ones) was a run to initially Target (out of rechargeable batteries) then to Ace (needed that saw blade, also out of rechargeable batteries). Hence I’ve given in and ordered them online. Because late stage capitalism is working flawlessly *rolls eyes*

*Then* I can really have a play with it.

Since I had a bit of time before Kathryn got home yesterday, I decided I’d also like to try and fix the Acorn Pocketbook II (AKA, a Psion 3a). This, of course, did not go exactly to plan. First up, I *suspect* I’m responsible for the disintegration of the button bar during disassembly (although I’m hoping that superglue will hold that). But more importantly, the fancy replacement ribbon cable I bought in the UK, that I paid for rush shipping on? It’s…

Well…

Uh hu. Vastly too long. A couple of options are ahead of me at this point. If it’s 1mm spacing then I can just order a generic one – although whether it’ll be heat resistant is a question – but it needs to be soldered at one end (because obviously, why not? Why not solder a flexible cable permanently at one end, then socket it at the other end). Alternatively, I miiight be able to shave the kapton tape off the top surface of this, trim it shorter and solder it. It’s a possibility which I’m going to explore.

Or I could just I dunno, travel back in time and buy a spare when they made them.

As I put it on Mastodon yesterday: My genius plan of “Oh, I’ll just fix this thing incredibly fiddly object made of unobtainum using pixie dust” seems to have come a cropper for some inexplicable reason.

Le sigh.

So today was a bit of a mission. I’d iiiintended to be back by lunchtime from a quick errand – namely, getting my glasses, grabbing some more concentrated isopropyl alcohol and distilled water, and also getting a new seal for our bidet handle which, it turns out, leaks. It leaks because the silicone seal on the hose has given up the ghost, sadly.

However, thanks to the wonders of capitalism’s finest achievements, getting isopropyl alcohol took and distilled water took three stops, and thanks to me being a twonk and wearing a nice clean wool undershirt shirt when I left the house to grab my glasses, I had to come home in-between to get changed. Then thanks to the US’s decision to stick with imperial measurements because… I dunno, they feel nice? I can’t get a seal, nor something likely to work, because the seal is metric. I could just order stacks of random seals from China or Europe – but that seams like a road that will lead to frustration and annoyance.

So. Instead after visiting many shops I came back home feeling a little dispirited.

The alcohol and distilled water are required for my ongoing attempts to revive the Acorn A4, which needs to have a nice bath in some distilled water and then a second bath in isopropyl alcohol, then a nice dry. That means it needs, probably, a whole day of work. If not a morning, then a day to rest and dry out, then a morning for reassembly. So I wasn’t intending to do that today. But I did think that the little errand to just “grab some distilled water” would be quick. Turns out not so much.

But – having got back I contemplated going out to the garage to upgrade my Z88 to 512K / 512K flash with a new OS. The idea here is that then it should connect – more happily – to the Mac. And then I can transfer files. Which means I can actually more easily use said wildebeast. However, by the time I’d had lunch, had tea, wrapped Kathryn’s prezzies and grumbled at the universe because one of her best prezzies is currently, apparently, in London (it took 4 days for it to travel about 50 miles. WTF Royal Mail, WTF?) and finally found the answer to “how do I wire this thing up” (because the instructions on the ebay page are just some pictures, which confusingly include pictures of things that I suspect might contain cut tracks, but it’s not immediately obvious where those cut tracks are, or if they’re there at all, or if there’s some other modification that should be blindingly obvious to me but isn’t instantly apparent).

At any rate, there’s a fully reversible mod here.

Thankfully, I managed to resist the urge to run out and do that (which was tempting, but let’s be honest, it wasn’t going to happen in an hour). But I’m hoping to tackle at least one of these two projects next week. Once one (or both) of them is (are) off my “current projects” list, I’ll return to recapping the RP-119 (for which I now have the service manual!) and replacing the couple of caps I missed on the DA-1000 when I originally recapped it.

I’m also trying to build up courage to look at Rebecca again.

That’s helped by the fact that the *FANFARE PLEASE* garage and the studio now have functioning outlets. And lights. Granted, at the moment, there’s a wire draped down from the ceiling in the garage, and I need to go grab some more conduit to attach to the ceiling for all the LED lights in the garage, but…

….there’s light. I can just go in and switch on a light and *plink* lights come on.

Unfortunately, the light doesn’t come on in the studio because the bulb holder is faulty. So we need to get a new one of them, which I meant to grab today, but I’d forgot :-/

So I headed over to the UK for my mum’s 80th birthday. It’s the least complicated trip over to the UK that are done for a while – although I managed to make the ending really rather complicated, but we’ll get to that in a second. The flight over was fine and apart from me screwing up the day that the rental car was meant to arrive and thus on landing having a flurry of angst inducing text messages followed by some frantic phone calls… But even that I managed to work out.

Despite fascist TERF Island being…well, itself, the weather was lovely and I had no actual issues. In fact, my mum organized a facial / makeover and it was delightful. She’s seen the same place for years and for much of the time had the same beautician. It was a all in all a super positive experience.

We spent several days up at her home striking out on day trips to Looe, Totnes and Padstow, and just generally having a pretty chill time. We obviously dropped in to the Dutchy garden centre, because it’s impossible to visit my mum without going there. Then she’d found, and her husband had booked, a house on the coast in Fowey (which is pronounced foy, incidentally). That was absolutely lovely and had delightful views of the ferry and the river.

My unwillingness to go eat in a restaurant or sit in a jam packed pub wasn’t, I don’t think, too much of an issue. I keep reading the COVID research and long term it’s just shit, so until vaccines take us to a flu-like level of death and disability I’m probably going to just continue masking.

So yes, we pottered around. I spent a lot of time talking to my mum, and I read readme.txt and The Keepers Six. I’m so glad that I got to be there though.

the journey home though has been a bit of a nightmare, although that is at least in part my own fault because I foolishly decided to believe Google. See someone nice on Mastodon shared with me a link to someone who was willing to sell a “sold as seen” z88 at non-ebay prices. Google said that this would only add 20 minutes to my journey to the airport.

I don’t quite know what caused me to believe Google in this case because I’ve driven around the area and know that the roads are tiny and slow. I think really it was just my excitement and desire to have the Z88. So I set out this morning and leaving at 5:00 a.m. having got up at 4:45. The weather forecast was pretty rough but when I got in the car it was dry and above freezing. However, the weather rapidly deteriorated and I did most of my driving today in sleet or snow, or at best rain. At various points I was stuck on single lane roads behind trucks, or better still a truck stuck behind a tractor. The extra hour i’d tacked on in addition to charging vaporized with the Volkswagen ID3 suffering from the cold temperatures and charging super slowly. It also additionally vaporized after I took a wrong turn which then led to me being stuck in a road closure / diversion situation where the diversion wasn’t really signed posted and the Google was unaware of the road closure.

…And adding a final layer of you ain’t getting to the airport on time, the final charger was broken and all the other charges at that site were in use.

Thankfully I made it to the airport and through security…where I then realized that my flight was delayed by nearly an hour. The flight itself was fine and actually I got a whole row of seats all to myself which was very pleasant, but unfortunately today someone has chosen to drive the wrong way up i-5 leading to it being closed and traffic being terrible. Which means that my beloved who is doing her best to come and collect me is stuck in the world’s most tedious traffic — and I am facing down 24 hours of being awake…

so forgive me if this isn’t the best written post.