Saturday, Sept. 30, 2023 - 9:38 a.m.

Got through the birthdays. My mother behaved herself, only one attempt at singing the birthday song, and it was when Q wasn’t around. I don’t know why she can’t not, especially because it was when Uly was specifically telling her not to out of concern for Q, and then she just had to, somehow.

I suffered from my own demand avoidance rather badly, especially on my own birthday. I don’t really like people commenting on my age, and that was worse this time. I don’t like the feeling of being obligated to show up so people can wish me a nice day, a day which would generally be nicer if I were left to my own devices. I dislike the pretense that the day is mine to do with as I wish, when it is only so within parameters not really defined by me. I’m grateful I have people around me who want to wish me a nice day, and do nice things for me, but I feel the constraints acutely, is all. It’s the same thing I feel at all the big holidays now, pretty much. There’s a certain amount of forced conviviality that drains me.

That said, I got some really nice calligraphy ink and a stuffed slug and a platter with bees on it, and the pie was excellent.

I also discovered that my pinhole camera app didn’t make the transfer to the new phone and was no longer available and so I had to try to find a new one and (this is the worst part) I will have to re-measure the aperture of every single one of my cameras before I can use them again. There are a lot of other annoying details like I don’t really know the speed of the paper, it isn’t listed in the ones in the app. The other app was suboptimal in that it overestimated exposure time by some amount, but I never knew why. And I don’t think it adjusted for reciprocity either. So I’m hoping to do some experiments to get the settings in the new app accurate, but… yeah. Well. It’s a lot.

Also the tomato plants grew too big for the little hydroponic machine, and so I got U a 5 gallon bucket system and today have attempted to transplant the two large plants there. I’m not sure whether they’ll survive the transfer.

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