It's a gorgeous late summer October, the high for today is 83 but the humidity is low, the breeze is blowing, and the trees are just beginning to turn. It is a glorious time to take advantage of the fact that my current apartment complex is not wildly particular about how we use our balconies and do a little woodworking.

In my previous apartment, I had a huge balcony that was fully screened-in on all sides--closer to a three-season room than a balcony. I love fresh air, so as often as I could, I left the patio doors open and let the cat wander in and out as she liked. The new place, alas, has a more normal-sized balcony that is not screened in at all, and she was not thrilled to have her outdoor space removed.

My first thought was just to DIY some screening-in; a lot of places I've lived won't let you do that, but lots of balconies on this building have chicken wire or privacy screens or child netting hung on the railing, so that clearly wasn't an issue. Alas, I couldnt get it to work in a way I'd be comfortable with: there's just no place to attach anything to the wall without drilling into the brick, which I suspect would be a little too far. (Also, I don't have the tools for it and I don't wanna.)

Attempt two worked for a while: I got one of those pop-up doggy playpens that zips up on all sides and put it up against the screen door. Sofiya can wander outside as long as the door's open, and while she doesn't have a ton of space, she can get fresh air and watch the birds in the trees and the people (and cats! One of my neighbors takes hers for a walk on a leash) on the ground.

This was great--I even built a frame I could stick in the sliding door that I could put a cat flap in without cutting into the actual screen door--until yesterday, when somehow an extremely ambitious bird got into the playpen. Sofiya took it down in one pounce before I could coax it out again; fortunately she had her teeth removed before I adopted her so she didn't kill it, but unfortunately she did bring it inside. The bird was pretty smart and managed to get outside again fairly quickly, but she's still looking at the ceiling hoping that maybe she's just missed it. And I do not want to be doing that again, thank you.

So I've resorted to the proper solution: a DIY catio. Yesterday I went down to Home Depot and bought an armload of 1x2s and some screws, and today I'm building frames. The plan is to construct it out of square panels screwed together--it takes a little more wood than it might otherwise, but it should be more stable this way, and it'll be easier to disassemble and store for the winter or if I move. Plus, I could tuck it further over in the corner so I can actually get out onto the balcony without squeezing my way out through a 10" gap.

I am pathetically out of practice with hand tools, but there's something very satisfying about spending the morning with my grandpa's tape measure and my dad's ripsaw and a carpenter's pencil I got out of a stationery advent box, building something useful. I have no doubt that my grandpa would have thrown himself wholeheartedly into having cats for great-grandchildren, and my dad will be very pleased that I'm using the tools he gave me (and impressed I finally got around to the project; I definitely get the ADHD from him).

There has of course already been one bump in the road: I forgot how many inches are in eight feet and didn't have as much wood as I'd planned. (And of course I cut one piece to the wrong length, because you have to, as a sacrifice to Haephestus.) It'll be a little smaller than originally intended, but since it's a modular design, I should be able to add more height later on, and Sofiya isn't as interested in climbing on things as she is in being outside. Besides,I don't really want the landlord to think I'm building a structure, since that might need permits or something, so I want to keep it under the height of the balcony railing anyway.)

I took a break after cutting five of the ten boards I bought--like I said, I'm doing this with a hand saw I'm not very good at using--and I think it's probably a good idea to eat lunch before I go back to playing with sharp objects, but I think I'll be able to get at least a couple of panels done today, and hopefully the rest tomorrow. It would be really nice to finish a weekend project in a weekend for once.

It's been a hell of a few months for my little website. First I moved, which required (naturallyl) shutting down and moving the home server--we were down for probably three days altogether, because it took that long to find a place I could reach an outlet to plug in the power strip behind all the boxes. It took about three weeks to be thoroughly unpacked, and about two months to reach a state I could comfortably call "moved in," and the server didn't get much attention during that time.

Then it was ArchiveCon, which was a delight as usual but even though I didn't go to the conrunner's get-together this year it still takes a lot of energy. Not to mention the panel I wound up writing at the last minute (I have no defense for this, I'd been planning for it for a full year).

And then my hard drive decided to fail. The boot drive. On my server.

This is also indefensible on my part; I'd known it was an old drive, I'd known I was getting a ton of I/O errors, I should have been more prepared and I should have replaced it long ago. But I waited until it was actually dying, and I let it sit on my desk for three tense days while I waited for the replacement to arrive, hoping I'd be able to copy everything off it before it completely gave up. And then the new drive arrived, and I set up the copy, and I...copied the new, blank drive onto the old, dying one.

Yeah.

Fortunately, for the first time in human history or at least in my life, I had backups of everything--except, of course, my Home Assistant installation, which was undeniably the VM with the most pseronal/customized data on it.

Well, I'd been thinking about redoing it for a while anyway.

And then, of course, I had to spend all that time putting it back together, and then I had to get over it emotionally enough to write a blog post about it, and then I had to finish writing the blog post, and now it's October. On the plus side, my Home Assistant installation is looking better than ever. And I have a better backup system.

It has been one fucking hell of a month, and I am trying to remind myself of that so I stop collapsing in despair over how useless I am.

First, the weather: all through March it did the thing March in Wisconsin is known to do, going from nearly 70 degrees and gorgeous to fucking blizzards with no regard for things like "astronomical spring." I am, in fact, a houseplant with more complicated emotions, and my apartment gets very little natural light, and I am well known for finding the outdoors inconvenient at the best of times, so I have unsurprisingly been wilting.

Speaking of which, I finally turned down my lease renewal to move to a new place. I don't hate this place, and the increase is a lot but not technically more than I can afford, but it is on the opposite side of town from my friend (...I keep saying friends but I do only have one person I see regularly) and everywhere I want to go, and more importantly, it gets no natural light. Like, at all. It's incredibly depressing.

I did find a place that sounded too good to be true - $400 cheaper rent, the second floor of an old house (I love living in old houses, okay), within two blocks of the queer bookstore and no pet rent. And then I ran into the clause in the lease where the landlord can give you ten days to get rid of any pet they deem to be disruptive and I decided I'd better ask what "disruptive" meant. Turns out "likes to meow to let me know where she is" is too disruptive and also I'm an inconsiderate asshole for even looking at the apartment with a cat like that, so okay, too good to be true after all. I've settled on a place that's more expensive and a little further away (although still less than two miles and an easy bike away from the queer bookstore) but that I used to long to live in the last time I lived in Madison, more than a decade ago, when this complex was owned by a shitty landlord. So I'm feeling optimistic there, at least.

The more I think about it, the more I think I'd like to stop using the second bedroom as an "office" and start using it as a dedicated craft room. I don't have the kind of job or the kind of personality where sitting in one room for eight hours a day is productive, so the office winds up being both "the place I have to drag myself to first thing in the morning" and "the place where my computer and most of my toys are," which is not a fun combination. At the same time I'm feeling more and more overwhelmed sometimes by how much I'm relying on screens to occupy enough brain space to keep me from going insane; I'd love to go back to having one day a week where I just don't look at screens, although that sounds terrifying, and having a room with no computers in it would help. (I mean yes, my bedroom doesn't have any computers in it, unless you count the Chromecast, but I've gotten pretty good at the whole "the bedroom is for sleeping" sleep hygiene thing, and I don't want to break that down entirely.) So I'm doing my floorplan fiddling with that in mind: Craft room, maybe study, but not office.

(I'd also kind of like to replace my computer desk with a sit-stand desk and I'm really liking the idea of using something like that in the living room for a variety of purposes, but I haven't convinced myself enough yet to pull the trigger on the $800 purchase, so.)

At least I was doing that until yesterday when my boss sprang on us that we've all been reclassified as non-exempt, which technically is fine (we're support, but we're not the kind of support who can do anything useful when enough of the system goes down to qualify as an emergency) except this is the latest in a long series of decisions that seem determined to turn us into call center support, which is 1) not what I was hired to do, 2) not a job I would apply for today, and 3) not a job I would accept if offered. So job-hunting again, only this time the tech industry is in an even worse place than it was the last time a job drove me to madness, so no quitting without something else lined up.

In between all of this my parents moved out of my childhood home, FINALLY, and the week after I went down to visit them my cat got sick. Like, call the emergency vet at 11:30pm sick. (The emergency vet did not think she needed to go to an ER, and they were right, so that's a relief, but god.) Around $1,000 and a week later, it appears that she had an attack of IBD brought on by a change of food followed by the stress of me leaving her alone for ONE NIGHT. This is throwing a serious wrench into my plans to travel for ArCon in June, although at least by then I'll be close enough to have someone she knows who can look in on her a couple of times. And we will be sticking with the food that does not cause her intestinal distress, even if she doesn't seem to like it all that much. Sorry, hon, we all have to make sacrifices.

Anyway as I said on twitter, I really think there ought to be some kind of cosmic law where at least one of the trio of job, home, and health of your household should have to be stable at once, this is Too Much.