Magus's Grimoire [Abridged]

Let's see if I still remember how to use this thing.

I'm teaching weekly dance classes for the next couple of months, and I'd like to keep a record of both what I teach and how it goes. The goal is partly a record I can look back on later, partly to do a better job of reflecting on my lessons and what goes well and what goes poorly, and partly to have a written record so that when it comes time to submit a record of my teaching experience as part of my candidacy for certification (Part 4) I have something to refer to.

Of the blog-type sites I'm present on, dreamwidth seems the most appropriate structurally in terms of supporting the kind of writing I want to do, and I think having it be public may help keep me accountable to actually do it, so you all get to read it, at least for now. I'll use cut tags to spare uninterested people details. I might think about moving it to a separate account or creating a community to post to (especially if any other teachers would be interested in also doing this and reading one another's work), but for now it'll be here and I guess that at least means there will be content here again after many years?

First post will be either tonight (if I don't fall asleep immediately upon getting home) or tomorrow.

I should also get an appropriate icon. I might need to ask someone to try to photograph me mid-kilt flip.

Gee, it's been a while. I just got a new haircut yesterday, which is totally not the reason I'm back, but since that was the last thing I posted about I feel like I should at least acknowledge it.

For some reason the browser on my desktop started going completely nuts in a way that made me not want to keep a tab permanently open to each of LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. Combined with my having largely moved to twitter, twitter+facebook+googleplus having taken a lot of the content that used to be here, and my spending less time in front of the computer for pain reasons, I got out of the habit of checking in to the journals.

Last week I got fed up with Opera not working the way I wanted on my netbook, firefox being unusable, and upgrading/installing browsers being a giant pain because Gentoo and a netbook with a small SSD don't actually get along well at all and blew away the whole storage and started over again with Arch Linux, which I keep running into whenever I'm doing searches for how to fix/improve something in a Linux installation. So far I'm loving it...things pretty much just work, installation is easy, customization seems straightforward, it thus far has insisted on installing very little cruft (I have a working system with a good deal of storage left), and the speed of installing binaries is really pleasant. Plus for some reason it's running a lot more smoothly than Gentoo ever did, including being able to handle firefox with a dozen or two open tabs including a bunch of app tabs without having any trouble at all. Not sure why, but I'm pleased.

And the happier firefox means I'm able to come back here more easily, at least on this system. Will probably return to my usual habits of lurking a lot and posting occasionally.

I'm looking for a relatively water-tight (needn't be perfect) cylindrical container, ~2.5" in diameter, and ~1.5-2" in height, opening at the top.

This is to contain shaving soap, both for everyday use and to travel. Plastic is ok, metal might be more fun in the long run, I don't much mind if it has brand names printed on it or mild stray aromas. Unlike hand soap, shaving soap doesn't get very wet, so the seal can be approximate.

Surely someone knows where the exact thing can be found inexpensively/free, and I just haven't thought of the right place to look. Any ideas?

I think Parker [the older of my two ferrets] is learning how to negotiate consent despite being nonverbal [being a ferret and all]. Like everything she does, being the cutest thing to ever cute, it's adorable.

See, ferrets like to play quite rough, and since we brought Alec home and she has another ferret to play with, she's escalated the roughness of her play from where it was when we first brought her home, even after she healed from her surgery. Watching the two of them play looks exactly like those scenes in cartoons where you see a tangle of limbs poking out every-which-way with no actual identifiable bodies, and there's a lot of teeth on necks and the like. It has a fascinating rhythm to it which I can't quite explain right now.

They also like to play with me in exactly the same way, roughly as though my hand and forearm were a ferret to play with. I think Parker at least has decided that the fleshy area between my thumb and index finger is my "neck" for these purposes, and that's usually what she goes for when she tries to bite me.

The interesting part I've noticed recently is how she bites me. The first time she gets me, she'll completely freeze with her teeth just barely touching flesh, as though waiting to see how I'll react. If I continue to play, or even just stay still, the next time she'll bite harder. Around the third or fourth time it's usually enough to cause a bit of pain, but if I yelp and jerk my hand away she backs off. Actually, she usually backs off on the rough play entirely for a bit, but then will come back at a less bitey/less strong bitey level.

shield_toad111 once told me about a technique for training puppies not to bite too hard involving yelping and then leaving and sulking if they bite you enough to hurt . . . that this is how they would learn their limits when playing with other puppies in their pack. I'd kind of decided to try something similar as soon as we brought Parker home, and in retrospect I think it had a positive effect, as she now seems to be actively seeking those signals from me.

Obviously, words are less ambiguous and allow you to negotiate before you reach the limit rather than when you're at or have just crossed a line, but it's really neat that my ferret has developed a model for determining what sort of play is appropriate in the moment and minimizing harm while playing in the way she prefers. And of course if I don't want to play bitey-tickly in the first place, I can decline to respond when she bounces around excitedly at my feet, and she'll find other entertainment.

Addendum: [A quick shower tells me I should add this after all] Parker does not represent the Gold Standard for enthusiastic consent by any stretch of the imagination. But something to think about: are you worse than my two-year-old ferret at making sure the people you're playing with want to play with you, want to play with you in the way you're trying to play with them, and are still enjoying playing with you in the way you're playing with them?

I voted with my impatience and decided to go ahead and do the lens thing. Even if this turns out to have been a poor choice, at least this time I won't regret procrastinating it for another year when I had a chance to do it.

Yesterday wasn't too bad. I awoke with kind of mediocre vision, but good enough that I could be fairly functional for an hour or so before it really got to me, then switched into some glasses which we believe to be -2.0 diopters. I didn't do too much that involved reading, because I spent a fair amount of the day with pretty blurry vision, but I could mostly get by. It was actually less bad than I expected.

This morning marks day two. My eyes are now uneven, with (surprisingly) the right eye having significantly better vision than the left. I'm typing uncorrected right now, and I know that I'm primarily using my right eye for reading, which is kind of uncomfortable and probably going to lead to a lot of strain and headaches, especially since my vision is a bit blurry even in that eye. It also will make switching to low-power glasses awkward, because the ones I have at these powers are balanced between the eyes, and I probably need something in the -2 to -3 range in the left, and probably only about a -1 in the right right now.

Hopefully as things get worse they'll also even out, but today's likely to be a day for a lot of radio or mindless TV or such that don't really require a lot of looking at things, or something.

Whee!

So I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do about my hair, and I'm finding it hugely stressful. I've accepted that my hair is pretty curly (and the extent to which it zig-zags rather than curling is significant, but doesn't look any different to a casual observer and probably doesn't make much difference in either how it should be treated or what styles will have what effect), and that I can like it that way. I've learned ways of caring for it that it seems to like and that are less stressful to my hands and arms than how I used to care for it. That's all great.

( Cut for length... )

[Preemptively, I do not want any discussion here on things to do with no-longer-attached hair after cutting. Any comments on that topic will be immediately frozen and the commenter banned and possibly untrusted/defriended until I stop being angry at them. I'm not kidding around here. I don't care how much I love you.]

A friend of mine just linked me to this announcement that Japan Post will no longer accept US-bound airmail packages over 1 pound because they'll be stopped at the airlines in order to comply with new TSA antiterrorism measures.

This is clearly a response to the toner cartridge bombs a few weeks ago. I'm trying to figure out whether this is because the Japan Post has no way to certify that packages don't contain a toner cartridge over 1 pound, or if there's more going on that I'm missing, because the only relevant restriction I'm finding is on inbound toner cartridges.

Anything factual that doesn't trace back to the Japan Post Services Co. announcement would be appreciated.

I'm not big on FPS games, I'm not at all up to date on gaming systems or gaming trends, and I'm often not all that big on multiplayer games. However, I just saw this advertisement in a post at Shakesville, and it is enough a thing of beauty that I want to share it with everybody.

( Video and more behind the cut... )

As probably many of you know, I got a bunch of cards made up at VistaPrint a number of years ago through their 250 for "free" (something like $6 S&H) if you use one of their small selection of preset designs (which change) and allow them to print a reasonably subtle ad on the back of the card. The idea was to have something I could hand out at conventions and the like when I met someone interesting as an easy way to give them contact information and help them remember who I am.

I'm running low on cards, and the contact information is pretty woefully out of date (it has my ICQ number!), so I think it's time for a new batch. It looks like they still have something like that deal running, so I'm probably going to go with it again.

In addition to the contact information being out of date, I'm not sure the text I put on them is still what I want, especially as I don't really do much roleplaying any longer, and I've gotten involved in some other things not reflected (dance, costuming a bit).

( Current Card )

I'm looking for some brainstorming help for the new card. Ideas for things I might want to reflect, or specific text to capture them succinctly would be appreciated.

I'll probably replace the last line with something like "Most sites: marcmagus", since I have that as a user name most places these days. Suggestions for alternate wording definitely welcome.

I think I want to stick with the style of silly entrepreneurial adventurer/Player Character type business card, rather than a proper formal calling card. If only because the lines about the sorts of odd jobs I do are fun and generally get a positive reaction.

Any suggestions?

[If this is too frequent/uninteresting, feel free to filter these posts out on the "hair" tag if your aggregator allows it. If it doesn't, complain to the manufacturers for giving you a crap product.]

I've spent much of the last couple of days reading around at CurlTalk and learning more about how curly hair works and how the whole CurlyGirl/no-poo thing works from a chemistry perspective.

One thing that kind of jumped out at me as I was reading was that most of the basic hair care regimens suggested sounded like they'd be less stress on my arms than all the brushing and combing I've been doing, so I'm going to start experimenting.

Yesterday I walked to CVS and got a cheap ($0.06 due to luck and a kind cashier) bottle of VO5 Free Me Freesia conditioner. This morning I washed my scalp and hair with it thoroughly, put a bit more in, rinsed with dilute vinegar, squeezed out most of the water, and gathered things up on top of my head with a T-shirt for a couple hours to dry out of the way while I went about my business.

I know I'm probably going to have to look into some sort of finishing product to hold things together and prevent the top from lifting off and frizzing, but two things dissuaded me from doing so yet. The main one was that I was kind of paralyzed by indecision looking at shelves and shelves of options (and the product mosephine kindly recommended wasn't carried). The second is that by only introducing one new product to my routine, I can kind of get a sense of what and how much it does on its own before adding something else in. Yay data.

So, this is what I've got, about half an hour after letting it out of the shirt. Not sure how I feel about it, but it's definitely . . . different.

( Photos... )