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Current Music: This is What it Sounds Like - Huntr/x

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(no subject)

Loud coworker was grating on my nerves yesterday, she is just such an energy vampire and negative nancy. She came in all het up bc an escalator was out of order so she walked around the whole building instead of taking the hallway (that is, yes, largely boarded over for the construction which necessitated this detour in the first place) and it never improved. It's a daily thing, everything is stupid this and fucking that. Girl just shut the tuck up!

Train was majorly delayed on the way home. Two announcements of "major delays" but nothing else, and certainly no trains. After half an hour, I gave up and walked to the bus. Of course that's when a train came but I do not regret this decision bc it was a single car to serve the last 30+ minutes of people gathering. My stop wasn't all THAT bad, but the next one was by the bus stop and it was PACKED. No thanks! I got a nice little walk in on the edge of a storm.

Evening was spent watching fluff (animated movie and murder documentaries). I had pasta and sauce for dinner. Put on a set of stays (with help) and tried on the striped sack (with help). I think that iteration of the sack will be fine. Less work for me! Trimmed my petticoat waist and pleated it, then basted. Finished stitching one pocket hem and then did the other side. I am now prepped for hemming and waist taping. Then its FART JACKET time (snicker snort). Kittens did not fall out of the window and let me sleep.

Busy weekend. Mama M comes in tomorrow evening and we have Lion King show on Sunday. We have to squeeze in a visit for our friends' dog, he is 12 years old and his heart disease is finally catching up with him. He is coughing more and struggling with breathing. We told him back in early May that he had to make it until Mama M came in, and it seems like now that she's almost here, he won't be long for this world. Gonna miss that stinker.

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Developed a terrible case of nausea late yesterday afternoon, so my only goal for the evening was to take it easy and do very little. Thankfully, M had a frozen pizza on hand, so he had dinner available whenever he wanted it. Baby went down at a decent hour, so I tried as hard as I could to take it easy on the couch and not irritate my guts.

We had a power flicker for no damned reason in the mid-afternoon. We haven't even reached our hottest temperatures of the year yet. It seems like every day there's another signal from this apartment that it's time to get out. Just seven more months!

Been poking at the cassock project, and was all geared up to start sketching out the embroidery, when I read on someone's blog (Sibella's maybe?) that it was described in detail in 17th Century Women's Clothing Vol.2. I had looked only at volume 1 when I'd been doing pattern research, so I dug out vol.2 and there it was, with the entire embroidery laid out on the pattern pieces! That makes my job a thousand times easier. There's also a similar, non-embroidered version in the same book, and I like its lines slightly better, so I'm contemplating combining the pattern from that one with the embroidery of the first one. They wouldn't be very different, it's just the non-embroidered one has a collar and cuffs, and a two-part sleeve instead of a one-part. It would push the date slightly into the 17th century instead of being more plausibly late-16thC, but the dates are wiggly enough that I think it'd still be SCA-okay.

Anyway, the plan is to do a wearable mockup of the pattern so I have something to wear to Baronial College in September if the embroidery isn't finished (which it likely won't be) and aim to have the embroidered one done in time for my "lying in" period at the end of my pregnancy, when no doubt I will end up stuck in the hospital again for a couple of weeks because my body is dumb. That would give me five months to do the embroidery, which seems pretty reasonable if I chip away at it a little bit each night.

M finally got the email from HR setting up his third interview for the job he's going after. His friend told him to keep his eyes out for a second email sometime between now and the interview, but didn't elaborate on what it could be. M suspects that his potential boss wants to have an informal in-person meeting, but I think he's getting a bit ahead of things. We'll see what unfolds.

M's birthday is Monday, and he's taken Mon-Tues off for it. I asked him if there's anything he wants to do, but he waffled and said he didn't want to spend a bunch of money. I suggested a few not terribly expensive things he could do, like going to the range for the day or catch a band he likes, or even just going out for a steak, but he was non-committal. I'm sure he'll think of something he wants to do as the day comes around.

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1780s robe de gaulle

(no subject)

A dress really starts to feel like a dress once bodice and skirt are joined. I set the waist on my chemise dress last night and worked on the drawstring channels for the front.

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randomness

Busy day...

More tomorrow...

(no subject)

Almost forgot to post about it since the amnio took up so much of my brain space recently, but Maintenance finally came and looked at our air conditioner! And, it's completely borked. We told them that when the last few guys had recharged the AC, it had cooled for about 4 hours or so before blowing warm air again. They sent some leak detector stuff through the system and didn't see any leaks outside, which means that the leak is somewhere within the walls. M speculated that the complex would put us up in a hotel while they tore up the walls to fix it (to which I had to stifle the hearty laugh that was trapped in my chest.) Instead, they just marked the service ticket as "resolved" and went on their merry way. So, I think we are without AC for the rest of our time in this apartment. Which, thankfully, will only be until next spring. We've survived so far with our window units, we can keep going the same way until winter.

Current Music: Soda Pop - Saja Boys

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pet en l'air

(no subject)

One of my lovely local-ish friends messaged me the other day about a Shadow and Bone actor being in a play and heeyyyyy he's really good actually?? Now I'm back in fandom hell? I sent them some fic recs (alas, not my pairing) and then oh gosh they were in the best kind of fanfic hell. Yesterday they messaged me again saying they were going to watch said play (having aired on PBS recently), and that their friend had told them "you have a problem".

Gurl (gn), you do NOT have a problem. I already did this shame spiral 4 years ago so you don't have to! I've watched some very questionable things for my fandom crush, I gotchu! I offered to watch it with them, so last night we got ourselves settled and they streamed the video and we watched it. I wasn't familiar with the story at all so I got to experience the highs and lows in real time and it was so, so good. You think it's about managing mental illness (in this case, bipolar) and it's really about so much more than that. Augh it was so good. Reminded me a lot of Dear Evan Hansen.

During the show I put in a bit more stitching onto the petticoat. Silk is sooooo nice to sew, I'd forgotten that. I dropped my needle though and thought I heard it hit the silk, but couldn't find it at all so... the couch and possibly the floor around the couch is lava! Hands are still mad, and I struggled with curling my wrist (the one I slept on funny last week). The book said to pleat it up before even hemming, which I've already prepped (bc it was easy couch sewing while I watched the play) so I guess that's my plan tonight. It's been a hot minute since I did any 18th century sewing, it's needing a refresher lol. Weather is very cool right now, forecasted high of 20C/70F, so I can get into kit if I need to and not die.

Federal government is giving people a break on their taxes starting on July 1, so I've just seen it on my paystub for tomorrow. Yes, thank you, I'll take that extra $40! First thought was to blow it on "fun" but the wanting-to-be-financially-responsible side said to save it and work with my originally planned income. Yes, of course the responsible side is right. But maybe I'll let this first one be "free" and save the rest. I have travel plans I want to make.

(no subject)

Amnio went about as expected. We waited an hour once we arrived for a room to open up. They took my vitals when we first got there, and then sent us back out to the waiting room for a small eternity. Once in the room we waited some more. Then it was lots of ultrasounds to take measurements of all her anatomy, and I got to see her tiny little walnut brain and her crazy alien skull with all its open plates. Very freaky and very cool.

The procedure went quickly. With Kate they had to poke me twice because she squirmed so much, but this one was more cooperative, even though she was doing backflips on every scan, so I only had to be impaled once. They can't numb you for the procedure, so you just have to endure being stabbed, and man does that suck so, so much. I felt very sore afterward, so we went home and M got us some burgers for lunch, and we all ate together on the couch.

I am very glad that Chance was able to watch Katie while we were at the appointment! M expected us only to be gone for an hour (lol) and not the three we were actually out. Kate would have been a mess if she'd been with us.

The baby napped after lunch, and so did M. Once M was awake again, he headed out for the evening since Chance was taking him to the movies to see The Thing as a birthday gift. The baby ran around and was in an overall good mood for the rest of the evening. Quick dinner of sausages and cheese, and then she went to bed without fighting me, thank goodness.

I crawled into bed not long after and watched some TV in the cool bedroom, ate some chocolates, and enjoyed my rest.

Entry tags:

1780s robe de gaulle

Proven Wrong

Why is it that every time I post that I won’t get time to sew or something is going to take a long time to finish, I am proven wrong? I ended up getting to sew last night and tonight, and now the skirt is nearly ready to put on the bodice. I just have a little bit more to gather, and then I’ll be ready to start setting the waist. The front isn’t done, but I want to get the back on so I can figure out where the top of the front goes and how deep to cut the front slit.

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lanvin infante

Progress...

The armhole is finished and I started binding the neckline.

Plenty of time! I have until the 30th...

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I have done a thing!

Probably none of this will make any sense to people, but I'm super proud of myself, so I'm gonna write about it. This is kinda a follow up post to the one I made about a week ago, so maybe go read that one for background?

Our new Helm Maintainers group has been really cranking. To date we have:
* Closed 47 pull requests as already fixed, duplicates, or no longer needed.
* Actually reviewed, updated, and merged 11 pull requests.

Our automation is supposed to release the updated Helm charts once a week, but since the developers weren’t getting around to doing code reviews, we weren’t having any updates, so the guy who set up our automation turned off the weekly releases. Which I kinda suspected after I looked at all the workflows and saw that they hadn’t been triggered in two months. So when out weekly team meeting ended early on Tuesday, I messaged him right after the call ended and asked, since we had twenty minutes free, if he could talk me through the workflows. Because there were five different workflows with “helm” in the name, and I wanted to understand which ones did what.

He talked me through all of them. And I took notes. And after I got off the call with him, I wrote up my notes in a Google Doc and shared it with the two Developer Advocates that I’m working with. Because I’m a technical writer, it’s what I do. And also, we shouldn’t be in a situation where only one guy knows how all this works. Then I was going to knock off for the day. But I’m promised myself (and posted on the Community Slack) that I’d make sure we got a release out on Tuesday. So I pushed the button. And instead of generating a new PR, it updated an existing PR that I didn’t realize was still hanging around (I’d closed a bunch of that were at least two months old). I pinged the developer and he said that was expected behavior. Then I was going to wait until this morning to merge the PR. But I wanted to push the button.

So Reader, I pushed the button.

I could see immediately that the Helm Chart version was updated in our repository. But one of the workflows was to publish the chart to another repo and to the ArtifactHub, which is where people download them from. And I didn’t see it published, even after I cleared my browser cache. I had dinner, checked back, still didn’t see it. Then, when I was really ready to finally shut down for the night and stop watching, the chart in ArtifactHub finally updated.

So I did a thing. Because we hadn’t run the workflows in two months, I wasn’t sure if they were going to work or not (we had a security incident back at the end of April and had to replace all our authorization tokens and I keep finding workflows that we missed, because we haven’t used them since then). But everything worked, just the way it was supposed to. And I published a new set of Helm Charts. Whoo hoo!

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wtf_wednesday

WTF Wednesday - Home Owners Association fees

https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-boomer-hoa-homeowners-association-fees-downsizing-retirement-home-sales-2025-3

Older homeowners tell Business Insider that steep HOA fees are making it harder to downsize.

The average HOA fee has soared 42% since 2019, worsening housing affordability.

And a growing number of US homes are governed by HOAs.

Like many older homeowners, [Patrick Luzzi would] like to downsize to a single-story home that he can comfortably age in. But after nearly two years of searching for a suitable condo in his home county of Westchester, he's not sure he can afford to.

Luzzi looked into a condo complex in the town of Somers, New York, about 40 minutes north of him, but was discouraged to find that the HOA fees run between $1,600 and $2,000 a month, he said.

According to the US Census Bureau, the average HOA fee in the US was $243 a month in 2023. That's 42% higher than the average HOA fee in 2019, which was $170.

$2000 a month? WTF? My condo fees currently stand at $521 a month, but that’s not just paying for the dumpster, landscaping, and snow removal. We also have a pool (that I have never used). And our gas heat (and cooking) is included in the monthly fee. I’d think it was outrageous if our heat wasn’t included.

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Ours is not to question why

Why as in, WHY am I knee deep into collecting the things I need to make my pet en l'air?

Who cares. It's been on my list for 7 years, I have almost everything I need (if not actually everything), why NOT get started? Just because I have no plans to wear it anywhere doesn't mean a dang thing.

Part of what precipitated this is that I've been toying with rebooting my blog on Wordpress. No one seems to blog anymore except for a few diehards but I really don't want to get into videos (except for a few topics that would benefit from a visual medium) and I still have lots to say on various topics. I can sneaky-log in to Wordpress at work (as sneaky as anything on a work computer is) whereas Blogger is tied to my Google account which I will *not* log into at work.

I haven't posted since January 2020. My therapist had asked me once if I had a blog because I was very passionate about writing and I had a lot of things to say. Sure, I said, it's focused on sewing but I don't have a lot of sewing to talk about these days. Any time I went to write a post for that blog, I just got dragged down by the weight of continuation. (Of course, thinking about it now, I COULD just pick up and move along exactly as if I was working on a new one. Well that's a consideration for future me.) Yesterday I started to collect some content ideas and the pet en l'air was one of them, which tickled my brain meats and here we are I suppose. Standing at the corner of "go for it" and "what even".

Anyway, the pet. Why did I even want to make one? I don't know, but when we were shopping in LA after CoCo '18, I bought silks for it. I picked out the embroidered bird fabric at Home Fabric first and then a lovely orange at the store three doors down where the owner treated us SO nicely we wanted to give him ALL of our business. That was right after my anxiety meltdown and about a month before I decided that I needed a break. I came back from my break almost 18 months later to my apartment flooding and COVID lockdowns. So... it wasn't a priority. I either tossed or sold my old pocket hoops and I did make new ones at some point in 2022 (I think), so that is taken care of at least. I also started the petticoat, where I have put exactly one needle's worth of thread into the side seam. I don't have enough left over for trim, but I should be able to make some bows and ribbons for the jacket. My plan was to seam it up on the one side and lay it flat for waistbanding before stitching the other side.

For the jacket, I'd always planned to use the Simplicity AD pattern. I've already used it and fitted it, should be easy enough to just lop it off at the length I can get with only 2 yards of main fabric lol. Now I'm wondering if I should refit it. Or try on the striped sack for an idea of if the shoulder adjustment I made for that one was sufficient. Decisions! Main inspo is of course Janet Arnold.

In other news I am having a little better of a body day. I am wearing the Scout dress and discovering how badly this actually fits lol. The waist is so big and feels terrible on my skin (my bike shorts don't come up high enough to prevent touching), the waist darts are so wide and too tall, the pocket openings feel too small. Just now I think I will have to take most of the waist area apart to refit it, it's SO irritating and I want to take it off and it's barely 9 am lol

Entry tags:

lanvin infante

A little

Seams bound, neckline and armscye pinned down ready for ironing and seam binding, beads bought at a local store.

I still need to come up with a design. Sequins, rhinestones, seed and bugle beads, so I'll come up with something pretty!

Entry tags:

18th century pocketbook

At a Standstill

Vacation is good for needlework. I finished the embroidery for the pocketbook except for the black that I ran out of. I ordered more, and it should be here this weekend.

18th century pocketbook progress - 7/4/25

In the meantime, there's a lot of housework to do. If I get time to do any sewing before the weekend, it will be a minor triumph. And if I do, there's a dress to work on and knitting to block.

It's here!

My new vacuum just arrived! A day early!

I know what I'm doing after work.

ETA - And I worked late and ran out of steam. It might have to wait until the weekend. =(

(no subject)

Did nothin' last night besides print out a pattern and trim the pages. I was watching the new "season" of a documentary series (all of four inter-connected episodes) and that took enough attention. (It's called Into the Wilds or something like that; every "season" started with a single incident wot happened in remote locations [national parks, Alaska], and then the following episodes delved into the offender's past to show that holy crap this dude is *not* ok and also extremely guilty.)

Today it is forecast to be REALLY STINKIN HOT again, so we'll see what I get around to doing. Probably time to pick the cross stitch back up, it's a great hot weather activity.

Had a crisis of fashion this morning. I HATE the pointy darts on the Scout dress, partly because they are too tall and sit basically on the apex, I hated the neckline of the poly floral dress bc it shows my bra (coulda solved that by not opening it up 1/2" when I narrowed the CF), and then I checked the weather and said fuck it, put on a t-shirt with pineapples on it and the sailor pants. I wore them for all of 20 minutes and I felt like they were pulling down the in back so even though I lowered the front, I was feeling tilted. I'll have to check that in a mirror, I might need just a titch longer in the rise, or a deeper curve at the crotch hook. Not my favourite thing to be wearing right now, but I was so late already, I didn't have time to figure out anything else without tossing on one of the icky RTW ones. Its also too roomy in the front, but I don't know how to fix that since the entire reason I have it is bc of my belly. Sigh. Meat suit is meat suiting hard today. Future me problems.

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Yesterday afternoon was death by a thousand cuts, I tell you what. Everything went just slightly wrong, enough that it built up to a burst of frustration. The sausages from dinner might be spoiled (thankfully they weren't), there are no clean pots, the cat is getting sick while things on the stove need to be watched, the baby is running toward the vomiting cat!, the internet keeps going in and out, I'm on a call with customer service while I need to clean a pot and while the sausages are cooking and the baby is screaming. AUGH.

Anyway, dinner got made, the internet people are sending a tech out today, and everyone ended up fed and entertained until bedtime. Yeesh.

Baby fought bedtime, so we had an extra hour cuddle session and then she went down. M went to bed, and I struggled to watch the latest episode of The Gilded Age while the internet cut in an out every 15 minutes. I finally gave up and watched the last 10 minutes on my phone, which I hate doing but I wanted to finish it.

M was still up when I went to bed, so we used his phone as a hotspot to watch a bit of TV before falling asleep.

Baby was up at the crack of dawn, before my alarm even went off, so I got her up, changed her, we brushed our teeth together, and I made her breakfast. I had to wake M to take over when it was time for me to leave, and he was cranky about it because he had only managed to fall asleep at around 5AM.

Internet tech is coming at 11 today, so I'll likely have a long lunch hour. Hopefully I can get the baby down for a good nap and M can get one, too.

Amniocentesis is tomorrow morning. Chance is coming over to watch the baby so she doesn't have to see mommy get jabbed with a giant needle. I'll probably take the opportunity to get my bloodwork done afterward since my OB requested it again, and maybe I can get M to spring for going out to lunch together, since we hardly get the chance to do that anymore.

Entry tags:

lanvin infante

Progress!

The machine sewing on the Lanvin dress is done. Next up, placket, snaps, and a hook at the waist, seam binding, necklace and armscye binding, and piping the waist.

I was going to do the skirt and then the placket from bodice to skirt, then read the reprint pattern and it has you do the bodice placket, pipe the waist, then add the skirt. That will be much easier than beading with the skirt attached!

I haven't patterned the skirt yet, but it's just a rectangle with an overlap.

(no subject)

Started off the long weekend nicely, with the Captain bringing in barbecue for lunch for everybody. Unfortunately, admin decided that because everyone expects to be let out early the day before a holiday, they were going to teach us a lesson and keep us at work for the full day. -_- Petty bastards.

The long weekend was pretty nice. We didn't celebrate the 4th because what's to celebrate. I made chicken tikka masala for dinner, and we had a quiet day with rain on and off.

Saturday was also pretty quiet. Baby had a nice long nap just as M was getting up, so he and I lounged on the couch together for a while before I got up to heat up lunch and then take a shower. I had a burst of sewing mojo while in the shower, and wanted to simultaneously make a ballgown bodice for the ruffle monster, and Elizabethan shift, and OH! I could totally make that embroidered cassock at the V&A! Of course, once I got out of the shower, the baby woke up and any ability to sew flew out the window.

M went to bed early, so I actually had some quiet time to myself, which is a rare luxury these days. I pulled out some costume books and started looking for a cassock pattern. I figure I can actually use the pattern I drafted out for the loose gown and just shorten it, but it was nice to see that the basic shapes for the extants is pretty much the same. Went to bed around midnight.

Woke up Sunday to a very nice storm. It rained hard for about two hours, and then was overcast and dreary the rest of the day, which is a novelty in July! Unfortunately, my mood deteriorated throughout the day until I was fairly depressed by early afternoon. It didn't help that the baby absolutely refused to nap, so I had no time to myself at all. M brought me a burger for dinner, which was very nice, and I shared my fries with the baby, who had her first taste of ketchup. She kept sucking the ketchup off the fry and then redipping it to get more ketchup, silly girl.

She went down early for bed, but woke up a couple of hours later after having a nightmare. We cuddled on the couch for a while and she had some cheese and milk, and then went back to bed.

Slept poorly and am dragging today, which I blame on my sleep schedule getting out of whack during the long weekend. Got up early enough this morning to iron a dress for work and make breakfast for the baby, but I feel dead and just want to rest. Don't foresee that happening, though.

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Weekend Update - Getting Shit Done

Saturday and Sunday were devoted to getting MOAR shit done around the house.

This weekend I tried to do at least one 20/10 in each room of the house (that's another UFYH trick).

In the bedroom I took down the Christmas lights in the sunroom, because someone complained about them (technically they’re illegal, but other people have way more fugly illegal junk on their balconies and decks, it’s just that my simple white Christmas lights are at eye level as you walk into our building. Then I weeded the T-shirt drawers, because I’d gotten to the point where I have too many t-shirts to be able to fit them in the dresser and they’ve been piling up on my bedroom chair. Then I weeded the bra drawer, and got rid of anything that I don’t wear or is too stretched out. Then I weeded the underwear drawer and tossed a couple of pairs where the elastic was starting to fail.

I called Mom around lunchtime on Saturday to tell her really quick about an article I’d read that I thought would interest her. We only chatted for a few minutes, because they were busy with their after lunch card game. But then she called me back around 3:00 to let me know that they’d had an offer on the condo they've been trying to sell for months now. And mom accepted before dad could dither too long about it. So yay, the second condo is finally sold!

After mom called me the second time I realized that I was pretty tired. I started exercising this week, and between that and all the housework on Friday, my body was pretty cranky with me. So I had a snack and sat in the Comfy Chair for about two hours. Then I had a long shower and washed my hair, because I wasn’t fit for polite company at that point. The hot shower also helped loosen up my tight back.

I threw in a load of laundry and decided to pretty much call it a day once I got that all folded and put away (which is why the t-shirt drawer got weeded).

Sunday I tried to fix the vacuum, because it’s been clogged and wasn’t sucking. But it turns out it wasn’t clogged, it’s just on its last legs. I ordered a new vacuum, but it won’t be here until Wednesday at the earliest. And my carpets are just grotty, and now I have to wait a couple more days for the new vacuum to come in (and for me to make time to assemble it) before I can do the Hoovering. BAH! I might have to vacuum every day for a week once it arrives, just to see how much dirt I can get up before I pull out the steam cleaner and tackle the stains.

Not being able to vacuum really threw me off, and I can’t say that I got as much done as I’d hoped after I discovered that I wasn’t going to be able to fix it. But I did spend a lot of time just putting random things away, trying to clear some surfaces. Hanging up clothes, shelving books, putting things back in their cabinets or drawers. And things are starting to look SO much better around here. I’ve been slowly getting caught up on tidying, but this weekend was a big leap forward in that I got through enough tidying to actually get to do some cleaning before I ran out of steam. I wouldn’t quite call the house “clean” right now, but the kitchen and bedroom are SO MUCH better than they were at the beginning of the weekend. If I can get in a couple more productive weekends this summer, I will be quite pleased with myself.

This week (month?) I’ll be taking a crack at the books and papers in the living room. I’d really like to move down at least one more photo on the hoarding reference scale. Just to be clear, I don’t think my kitchen or bedroom has ever been worse than a three, but the living room? My living room is probably about a five right now. And I’d like to get it down to a three. But that means purging boxes and papers and books. So purging stuff out of the living room is going to be my ongoing project for the rest of the summer.