February ProgBlog #3: the week everything kept falling and then picked up

Last week was "interesting".

I found out (from deviantART via another friend of hers who found out from a mutual friend of theirs on Facebook, which is how I'd suspected for a long time I would find something like this out) that an online friend that I have been talking to almost daily for the last couple of decades had died apparently on Christmas Eve. We had been chatting the week or so before, and she had told me at some point not long before then that she suspected she was cancer-riddled and that her organs were starting to fail and she probably didn't have long left (she suspected cancer quite a while before then but was so terrified of hospitals she chose to just die from it rather than seek treatment, and the myriad of health issues she'd had throughout her entire life probably played a part in that decision too). I don't know what the actual cause of death was.

That took some processing.

I went to a local friend's house for a gathering, and a mutual young friend who is a cheerful drunk got cheerfully drunk, but while their filters were down some processing that has been needing to happen for years which I think they were actively preventing from processing for about that long just happened, which resulted in a meltdown and three of us automatically flying into parent/support mode. While they were in that unexpected open/sharing mood a lot of things we had long suspected were confirmed.

It ended well (at least for now, that poor kid still has a lot more processing/work to do), but on reflection it was probably a pretty intense process as while I didn't notice it at the time, I was inexplicably really tired when I got home (moreso than I would be from just having been around a lot of people for an extended period).

The aircon is still out and we've had a few really, really hot days which has made it extremely difficult to work (it's been so hot all anyone wants to do is sleep and even that's really hard) so even on my designated project day I had a couple of hours in the morning that were actually productive (I'm extremely sluggish in the morning) and a few at night before I was supposed to go to bed (I went late) so between that and everything else I really didn't get a lot done.

To the point where I bad-temperedly chose not to post on Sunday because there wasn't an appreciable difference visually between the last progblog and what I'd done even though what I'd done had been several hours worth of trying to get the mesh to be how I needed it to be.

And then I decided I should probably stop being petty and immature at some stage and just write.

It's not like everything was all doom and gloom anyway. The tradies that are doing our aircon (Ingenuity Electrical Contracting) got the one in eldest's room done.

He felt a bit bad getting the first aircon as he has the highest heat tolerance and his siblings' rooms get hotter but felt slightly better when I pointed out his was the experiment (they had the most room to manuver in his room and had to figure out some shenanigans to avoid drilling into the asbestos, apparently all the extension external walls are asbestos and the dividing walls are gyprock, I thought the external shell was asbestos and all the internal panels gyprock, which destroys all my plans for getting rid of the asbestos) and now they'll get the other two rooms done quicker.

The younger two got theirs earlier this week and I haven't taken photos yet.

The guys are apparently busy for the next couple of weeks and hopefully after that we'll get the house one fixed.

The correct usb-c card thing that had to come all the way from Europe arrived (unlike middle child's water bottle which was supposed to arrive the same day, there was an "attempted delivery" apparently but no attempt was made, there were five of us in the house and all they had to do was beep).  It was installed with minimal fuss (the original incorrect one that was in there was transplanted into J's computer), booted up and...

...nothing.

Then J found another smaller cable that had been in with it, realised that the display port on the card was an input not an output and that the short cable had to connect the usb-c card to the graphics card.

Then the tablet started some insanity flickering, and apparently that card doesn't put out as much power as the other one so I actually had to use the power cable that came with the tablet.  But now I can draw directly on it again.

There were a few interesting glitches and freakouts (at one stage the driver simply stopped seeing the tablet but was still able to see the remote), not sure what caused them but a restart probably would have fixed it if I hadn't restarted into Wayland just to see what would happen (a lot of inexplicable focus stealing was most of what happened, the rest was weird mapping which as far as I can tell came from the driver and the graphics tablet kcm clashing, basically made it unusable).  Stuck in X11 everything has been okay so far.

I will have to do that big writeup that sibling dearest wants to see very soon (I can't remember the exact wording but she said something along the lines of if I didn't blog about it she'd be disappointed and I said I would do a writeup once I got it working on the big rig).

Meanwhile I finally got back into it and most of the hours that I spent (and it was literally hours) was just readjusting the mesh to this.

When I got there I realised I have no idea how I'm going to do the top membrane.  I thought I had some idea but I was so very wrong.  Right now it's a later problem, I'm going to get the wing and the main membranes done first.

I hate parts of it but I have no idea how to fix the parts I hate or if they even need fixing, but that's yet another long running trend.