misc

Well, I didn't bring my computer to work, and my compromise with Tumblr is that I only look at it from one device, which is my laptop. (It and Facebook are not and never shall be on my work computer or my phone. Google can track me everywhere but at least Facebook has to be content with the vast majority of my data instead of all of it.)
(Amazon likewise is only in one browser on one device, and so the shadow profile it collects on me at work where I'm logged in as a seller is probably pretty hilariously weird. I don't ever even click affiliate links on my work computer because what "you've" been browsing lately shows up to everyone in the company and no thanks, I don't need the weird brothers who own our company in Philadelphia knowing the shit I get up to online even if they wouldn't ever be able to tell which of us it was. Though I do occasionally deliberately search for really weird shit on eBay and Etsy while logged in just for shits and giggles, because I know my coworker locally is the only one who'd notice.)
(Yes, the work Etsy's "recently searched for" is mostly rubber fetish gear at any given time, but what's funny is that I don't think my coworker realizes he's logged in and so sometimes there's even weirder shit in the recents. Never kinky, alas, just weird, but I know it's stuff he's looked at.)

Anyhow I was going to post about last night. Dude was feeling grouchy and unpleasant, and so instead of going to the Monthly Bluegrass Jam Night our teacher hosts at the library by his house, he stayed home. I dithered, but then went on my own, and it was lovely.
( talking about music a little )

The other thing I did that I'd been procrastinating since ohh, recently, November? was that I finally dropped my car off to get new tires put on. In March when I got my last inspection they were like uhhhh ma'am these tires, well. they pass, but. and I was like what kind of idiot replaces their all-seasons in spring? i'm waiting until fall. so i meant to do that in fall. But it's winter, it's well into winter, and Dude was driving my car one snowy day and was like holy shit these tires suck and if I'm driving out to the farm next week I am just asking for there to be a lake effect storm by Syracuse that I die in because I'm driving on a glossy low-friction finish instead of all-weather tires. So.
I started shopping online for tires and then was like, ok, these are all like $500 and then i gotta pay a dude to put them on, so like. no. i'm just going to bring them to my corner garage, which has been good to me in the past, and tell them to put on whatever they think is best. and sure enough, the guy called and was like well I have these good ones you could pick, gave me the sales pitch, gave me the price, and I said yeah that sounds good. He was faintly surprised; I think he'd likely done the classic salesy thing where you start off mid-high and then give them a mid-low and then sell them up to the mid, and I just was like you know, I don't care that much, the mid-high is probably what I actually want.
I've been going to this garage for seventeen years now, and while they're not saints, they're also not charlatans usually, so I'll take it. I can walk there, and once when my car wouldn't start they wheeled their jumpstart machine up the street to my driveway and did the work there, so. Can't beat that.
(Also when Dude's mom dropped off her car there and then tripped on the sidewalk by her house when she'd almost gotten home (you can see the garage from her front window), and hurt herself badly, they came and got her and were extremely solicitous of her, so I like them for that too.)

(Also also one day I dropped my car off on a day when school was out, one of those holidays only schools and banks get, and the new owner's elementary-school-age boys were running riot in the place and clearly all of the mechanics thought it was hilarious and were used to them and were messing around with them affectionately and I also thought that was sweet.)

OK time to work, whatever else I was going to talk about on here isn't coming back to me so I'm just gonna hit "post".

wellwell this actually is a thing i’ve been

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well

well this actually is a thing i’ve been procrastinating since last year

you have to check on your health insurance during open enrollment right, one year they randomly cancelled mine because i didn’t tell them nothing had changed and i was screwed and it was this entire unmitigated disaster but at least i didn’t get hit by a car or anything

and last year i was paralyzed by fear of the process being hard so i didn’t check

well my tax docs came and proved that no in fact i had health insurance all last year so that’s good to know

and i managed, i did, i managed to look for this year and make sure it was all still good even though i had to reset my password and it took a lot of doing but no! it’s ok! i even still have a day left before the deadline! go me!

maybe i should go to the doctor this year then, but i mean, i’ve gone this long without and the massive hives every time i was exposed to sunlight seem to have gone away on their own so 

well, making a doctor appointment is a whole other thing and i’m just going to try to do that sometime later.

but, one bit of hope– dude managed to make himself a dental appointment after not having gone since 2001, and they were actually nice to him and there was nothing particularly wrong with his teeth and they didn’t yell at him, so maybe i can get myself together to do the same, whether or not my insurance actually covers dental. (i wish i could get him to make *me* appointments but he categorically won’t, so i’m on my own.)

anyway. good for me.

oh a sad story

I remember now what else I was going to talk about in this morning's entry.
My banjo teacher.

So, he's a lovely, weird due, with a deeply weird, lovely family. He's from Ohio, his wife is aggressively friendly and strange and from Wyoming, his kids are like 12 and 16 and rambunctious and deeply bizarre, in the normal manner of teenagers, and they all just seem like lovely and extremely eccentric people.

His dayjob is working with developmentally-disabled folks, largely kids, in some sort of educational capacity, I didn't really catch the whole thing. So he knows a lot about styles of learning, and I'd thought he was a musical educator but no, that's his side gig. He told us a great story about teaching some kids music theory with the steps to their basement, since there were twelve of them. Anyway, he's great.
From the beginning, we've noticed that he has a bad tremor that seems to affect both hands, but the right one moreso. He's got a worn spot on the heads of all his banjos, because in Scruggs ("Three Finger") style you play with your littlest, or last two, fingers planted on the head and move only the other three, and in his case, the planted finger often shakes and drags along the banjo head. It doesn't make much noise, and doesn't matter, but it is noticeable; he very occasionally strikes a string he didn't mean to, usually while he's demonstrating something, though given the wall-of-sound nature of the bluegrass banjo, as long as he's fretted properly it doesn't really matter.
He's mentioned it, a time or two-- explaining that it's hard to type, etc., and he's drawn us diagrams and it's always such a hassle I tend to try to come prepared so he doesn't have to-- and he's got it set up so a lot of stuff, he can just print whatever it is out on the printer. But he's never explained much about it, and we never asked because why would you ask about that? He just said at one point that he was glad he wasn't a surgeon or something, and that it hasn't gotten in the way of his banjo or dobro playing yet.

But last night at the session he explained, to me but partly to the other two guys there too, with whom I think he was vaguely acquainted, that the tremor is progressively getting worse and he expects he doesn't have a very long time left in which he'll be able to play, so he's trying to play as much as he can now, and is recording stuff because that'll be what he's got left when he can't do it anymore.
This might explain somewhat why he was so unconcerned about how much our lessons cost-- he charges me and Dude the same whether one or both of us comes, with the reasoning that it's the same amount of time/work for two as for one. But it's grim to contemplate. He's not that old a guy, maybe in his early 50s at the latest.

He said toward the end of the session that they're not sure what's causing the tremor but it seems likely that it's Parkinson's.
I'm just so sorry to hear it. I hope by "not long" he means like, ten years, because we've been taking lessons a year already and we need a lot more work.