Mice are a Menace

So, fall 2021 we had a mouse in our apartment. We were not prepared. We were so very, very not prepared…

CW: poop horror, the mouse dies

Ignorance is bliss

The first mouse sighting was actually at the end of September. Pete was telling me about how he’d seen a mouse under my computer, and then it popped up on the deck, in broad daylight, investigating the plants. We went out to look, and it quickly ran back to a hole that clearly led into the building. We bought a no-kill mousetrap and set it, but the next day we had to leave for a week of petsitting. Not wanting to come back to a starving and/or decomposing mouse, we put the trap away.

When we returned, the mouse had left a gift of poop behind a cushion on the floor, but that seemed to be it. The trap didn’t catch anything that week, so we thought maybe he’d gotten bored and moved on. At least last year’s decision to put most of our food in plastic bins now seemed smart instead of paranoid. :)

A very one-sided game of telephone tag

For a few weeks we thought he was gone – and then spotted him again. I was a bit busy, but eventually set out the mousetrap and put in a maintenance request mid-october. On the 19th, I got a voicemail from the head maintenance guy asking me to call him. I left him a voicemail in return, then tried again later that day. A week later, I remembered he never called back, tried again, and eventually left a second voicemail. The second week (and beginning of November), I tried some more, then called and texted the building manager to see if he knew anything. A few days later I added an email. Radio Silence. By this point I’m wondering if they’ve both got covid and ended up in hospital (or worse).

Three days after the email, just as I’m about to submit a second paper form to see if someone else has taken over answering them (and look up the phone number of the company my rent cheques go to), I get a reply to my email! :) The building manager hasn’t been able to contact the head maintenance guy either, but he’s on it, and will get back to me. A few days later there’s a maintenance guy at the door; he puts steel wool into the holes I’ve found and tells me to call when/if the mouse comes back. He also mentions that the head guy is fine; they’re just really overbooked. Neither of us think to look behind any furniture, and he says our place seems clean, so I figure I’ve done things right and maybe I’ll get lucky and not see the mouse again. It’s not like we had anything for him to eat, right? Aahahahahahaaa. 🤣

Water interlude

November 16th, a few days after Merritt was washed away and Sumas Lake reclaimed half of Abbotsford, I found a little water damage of our own. Who’d have guessed that steel wool keeps out mice but not water? 😛 My most recent piece of IKEA furniture has a wonky corner now, and the carpet was soggy again, but having no highways connecting BC to Alberta kind of made that seem like a minor problem. And lucky for us, none of the subsequent rains were heavy enough to get in, because the maintenance guy still hasn’t had time to waterproof it (it’s March, FFS). 

That was also the day the mouse was seen and heard again. It sounded like he was either in the walls or our bedroom, but it was hard to tell. I found a new hole near the old holes, but the hardware store was out of steel wool. My landlord gave me scrubbing pads meant for the kitchen, which I kinda managed to shove into the holes anyways. The next hole was small enough I plugged it with an earplug the maintenance guy had left behind (partly to see if the mouse would push it out, which he eventually did).

Poopocalypse

November 22nd, after reminding them about waterproofing the hole again, I felt like having oatmeal for breakfast. I’d bought a box of assorted flavours months ago and forgotten about them. The flimsy little brown paper sachets of instant oatmeal. Which I was keeping in an open bin. 🤦 Yeah, that mouse had a feast in there. And left a very disgusting mess in the back of that cupboard. One that made me cough after inspecting it (and the cough stuck around enough to delay my dentist appointment). Then something prompted me to look behind the couch that we haven’t moved in like a year, and under the radiator back there was poop. So much poop. I had no idea one mouse could poop that much. :/

I had a wee bit of a freakout at that point. One of the main reasons I don’t want a pet is that I’m not okay with cleaning bodily fluids (or not-so-fluids) out of carpets. Or any other surfaces, really. It brought up some very unpleasant memories. But Pete was there to help, and we came up with some vague plans to get more traps and do some cleaning. Originally Pete wanted to bleach it, but when I brought up bleach safety rules he changed his mind, and my experience with pets was one of using vinegar and baking soda. Neither of us knew there was anything more to know about the situation. The maintenance guy had just said to contact them when/if it returned, but since they seemed so busy, I just mentioned it as an aside in some of the water emails.

I went off to the hardware store for more traps – lethal ones this time. Still no steel wool there, and I couldn’t figure out how to set the cheap snap traps, so I got some fancier ones and then grabbed a handful of something labelled “glue traps” that an employee recommended. Pete didn’t want to touch those, and that night I looked up how to dispose of them and found out exactly why he wouldn’t touch them. 😬 I didn’t sleep much that night. They are true nightmare fuel (although I can handle using them on bugs).

I went back for more snap traps the next day; luckily Pete’s much better at setting them than I am (he says they still weren’t set quite right, because they weren’t on an absolute hair trigger). The mouse still wasn’t taking the bait, at all, whether it was peanut, almond butter, or even nutella. Around this time we named him Houdini. 

Cleaning blitz

The next week I spent doing almost nothing but cleaning. Pete was putting out multiple fires at work (and log4j hadn’t even happened yet) so I did the bare minimum of physio to hold my body together, and channelled all my chaos energy into dinner (which got me two new dishes I like, and probably did help maintain sanity). I was having three sips of Pete’s coffee every morning to keep me focused and inhibit muscle spasms, then picking a section of carpet and/or cupboard to vacuum and scrub with borax, vinegar and/or soap, then vacuuming again once it was dry to get leftover borax out of the carpet. The more furniture I moved, the more poop I found.

On the bright side, it turns out that having a bit of protective gear, especially the mask, makes cleaning up poop a lot less disgusting. Thank fuck for that, because I was very very close to my limits as it was. Impressively, my body held out with only minor spasms until day 8 (November 30), when I started to get some warning signals. December 1st my heart started to object to the caffeine; luckily I had to take a break that day anyways for a dentist appointment. (That appointment also took us past a hardware store that did have steel wool in stock, yay!)

Somewhere in there, we started hearing Houdini in the bedroom again. Loud enough to keep us awake, randomly throughout the night. I even pulled the dresser away from the wall to see if it was behind it, waited there flashlight in hand, and saw nothing. But for November 30th we decided to take a break and visit the one friend’s house we’ve been in since march 2020; I was gonna dye my hair, so the night before I went to get my dyeing shirt from the bottom of my dresser, and found poop. I hadn’t realised how little I use the dresser during covid times; forgetting that I wasn’t wearing a mask, I opened all the drawers and inspected them properly, and he’d left little gifts in the back of every drawer except the underwear one. While it was a huge relief that he hadn’t reached my underwear, I might have figured things out a lot sooner if he had.

So then that day was cleaning and laundry. I washed almost all the clothes I own, in the end. But at least we had removed his chew toy (which turned out to have tiny invisible-from-the-side holes in two places), and I was slowly eliminating hiding places, cleaning them out and leaving furniture well away from the wall. I put a lot of things in plastic boxes, too, since he hadn’t tried to chew even the flimsiest of plastic in the kitchen.

I couldn’t stop him from climbing the dishwasher hose to visit the counters, though. I also found another food source: one of our juggling balls had been full of couscous, and he ate most of it. I had to throw out several balls from that bin, and some really nice glow-in-the-dark poi I got in Berlin. :( By this point I was seriously considering my friend’s offer to loan us his cat.

It wasn’t until November 30th that I did some of the googling I should have done from the start, and found out that there are government guides for dealing with mouse infestations. And that I was doing multiple things they said not to. Turns out mice here can carry Hantavirus, which is much deadlier than covid and has about the same lack of treatment options (which are all taken up by covid patients now anyways). Yikes. It turns out it’s not very common at least, but we’re lucky that this mouse didn’t have it; at that point I was already about 90% done the cleaning, had gotten a cough from it twice, and really didn’t think my body or mind could handle redoing it all in bleach. I’m not even sure I physically could have removed that much poop from carpet without a vacuum.

Ding dong the mouse is dead

The evening of December 1st was when we finally fucking caught him. He’d been out in the living room while we were at the dentist; Pete startled him when we got back, and we set out traps around the desk he hid behind. It wasn’t long before he hopped over them and ran off to the kitchen. We thought we’d lost him there for a while, so I started making dinner. Turning the oven on must have flushed him out, and I saw him run from the stove to the fridge.

At that point I was So Very Done With This Shit, and started covering all exits with tinfoil and traps. I put an extra layer of tinfoil past the traps to make noise when he got past them, then got back to cooking. Sure enough, when I looked up later, he had just climbed over a pack of four traps. My swearing scared him backwards into them, everything went snap, and he was caught right on the neck – a quick and relatively clean death, thankfully. Although I did have to hold the trap down so his death throes didn’t send him back under the fridge. :/

We got the corpse bagged up and into the dumpster immediately; I had the most bizarre reluctance to believe he was really dead until he was physically gone as well. There was a lot of swearing and laughing that evening, as I came down from the adrenaline of it all. Every so often I’d just sigh and go “Holy shit. Holy shit!” 😂

Aftermath

After that, there was still cleaning to do, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel. We were 90% sure he was alone, so no additional poop was being produced; I just had to finish drawing the rest of the fucking owl cleaning the rest of the apartment (and inspect every box and drawer to see where else he’d hidden poop). We finally got something resembling proper sleep – although it was still interrupted by every small noise as our brains went “is that a mouse? How about that?” :/ It took a week spent with the in-laws for xmas, where any noises were Definitely Not My Problem, for me to retrain my brain out of its hypervigilance. 

I was done the cleaning December 10th, 2.5 weeks after I started (going a little slower and limiting myself to 1-2 sips of coffee), but it was really hard to get myself to stop. You know how it’s dangerous for a horse to go from a gallop to a dead stop (which is probably the origin of the phrase)? Kinda like that; I felt like I had to wind down slowly from the cleaning blitz. Plus the silver lining to all that cleaning was a chance to reorganize everything; I moved the living room furniture to a layout Pete had wanted to try out, and it was like we magically had more space. :) I turned what had been a bookshelf into more kitchen storage, and used some of the many plastic boxes I’d bought to store the books I wasn’t going to read anytime soon. Then I wanted to do a turkey dinner before xmas (since xmas dinner would be excellent vegan food instead). I thought I’d rest over xmas, but as we were packing to leave I got a migraine minutes before we were picked up. I’m just glad the pain only lasted one day, after pushing myself so hard. Once I recovered, all the light and sound and socializing was still more draining than I expected, but at least it was fun. :)

It wasn’t until January 1st that my body finally got the message that it was rest time. Since it didn’t make that transition easily, I spent the first half of January just doing the minimum and letting time be a blur. Although I couldn’t stop my brain from composing half this blog post in the shower back then. ;) It took me the rest of January to catch up on normal cleaning, and then I got to do more organizing for february – by which point my friends had their own mouse to deal with. I hope it goes better for them, but their house has a lot more hiding places. :/

Bladder training vs bladder… un-training? Relaxing?

So a little while ago I was telling someone about the wonders of bladder training, and went to look up instructions to link – and discovered it did not mean what I thought it meant. The exercises I’d been using (quite successfully, starting a month before my specialist appointment) weren’t on the internet at all, and now I’m not sure they ever were, so I figure I should write up what they are before I forget again. :)

This might be TMI if you’re not dealing with bladder issues yourself, so, you have been warned.

Actual bladder training, it turns out, is a combination of strengthening the muscles and holding it longer, until they’re strong enough you don’t need excessive bathroom breaks. I had similar symptoms but the opposite cause – my muscles were so strong and tight they weren’t letting my bladder hold anything without incredible pain, so I needed to relax and unknot them instead so that “holding it” wasn’t excruciating. (This might have been interstitial cystitis, but it’s one of those “this hurts, fuck knows why” diagnoses).

Disclaimer: Please, please check with your doctor before trying any of this! I don’t want anyone giving themselves a hernia – or god knows what else. This isn’t real medical advice, just a thing that’s been working for me so far that I want documented.

That said… I don’t remember what I did the first time, beyond some cryptic notes about “ab exercises”. But I do remember the maintenance version I do when it tries to act up again.

When my bladder is mostly empty, I breathe into my belly, and use that air to bear down on my abdomen until I feel just the edge of the bladder pain. Then I back off, and gently ease back into it, trying to relax everything around the bladder while pushing on it from above, and hold it on the edge of the pain as long as I can comfortably hold my breath. A few reps of that a few times a day, and the angry-pain starts to turn into healing-pain, and in under a week there’s a lot less pain. Then I can go longer between bathroom breaks, and I can do that exercise with my bladder only half-empty.

When that can’t reach the pain any more, I add in my ab muscles, which is harder to explain… I kinda just play around with them until I find a way to stretch or massage a sore spot. Pretty soon there isn’t much more to find, and then I forget about it until my bladder starts acting up again :)

Seeing as the only other method of bladder stretching I’ve seen online sounds kinda invasive, I wish I could tell pelvic floor specialists about this so they could turn it into a real treatment… although just now I found https://www.nafc.org/bhealth-blog/how-to-relax-your-pelvic-floor which… gets halfway to what I’m doing? but breathing alone wasn’t enough, and I didn’t need any of those stretches (although they are fun).

Oh right, I have a blog.

Wow, the wordpress editor has changed a lot. I’m… just gonna post this little test post to see what happens. And then maybe update my about page?

I haven’t touched this thing in years, but I’m still here. Haven’t really been up to blogging for most of that time; pain meds are not good for clear thinking. At least I did get working pain meds. Way back in… what, 2015? So much has happened since then, and yet so little. I still don’t fucking count as disabled to the Canadian government, even though I’m still not working. I *have* been well enough to cook 6-7 days a week through this pandemic, so that’s good. And I think I finally know *why* my body started trying to destroy itself – but hypermobility is something Canada just… doesn’t diagnose. The diagnostic criteria is flawed and soon to be changed anyways, so my doctor is happy to skip right to treatment – 90% of which it turns out I already did while figuring this shit out on my own. :P

(Side note: the UK seems to take a similar approach. The RCGP EDS toolkit – which might disappear from the internet soon – says this: “This section focuses on the hypermobile subtype (hEDS) and the related condition hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD), where there are features of hEDS but the full criteria are not met. These conditions are not rare.  As GPs, we may work with a ‘suspected’ diagnosis for each of these conditions without referring for confirmation. The associated conditions, approach to management and the prognosis are felt to be the same for hEDS and HSD, so there is no clinical necessity to state with certainty which label is applicable.”)

Anyways, I might start blogging about some of that medical bullshit. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll throw in a sewing project too. For now I just wanna get *something* up here. :)

Not dead yet

I’ve taken down my server, but I still exist. :) I just don’t have the spoons to maintain it, and don’t want it turning into someone’s spambot. It may or may not return.

Same for irc; my client was on that server, but I wasn’t actually using it, and I still haven’t got around to installing an android irc client.

I forgot to blog about my attempts at waterproof pouches, too. I haven’t really felt like blogging in a while.

On the bright side, I’ve actually been able to reduce some of my migraine medications. Yay, progress :)

Pocket hacking: the rigs

I’ve talked about pouches, now I’m going to talk about what they attach to – the belt and the purse rig.

The belt is actually quite easy to sew, if rather tedious. I just attach the buckle at one end, then sew a vertical line attaching the nylon strap to the leather every 4cm, all the way around (plus a bit extra where I had to use a second piece of leather). The nylon strap should be as long as your belts, plus a bit for attaching the buckle; the leather should be a bit less than the narrowest you’d ever have the belt. The height of the leather piece is important too – you need a bit of a lip at the top, maybe 0.5-1cm, to protect against any scratchy bits on the pouches, and enough below that the belt grips your clothes and stays in place. Mine’s about 2 inches thick.

As for the buckle… The rough belt had d-rings, which are great for small adjustments but take a bit longer to get on and off. For the good belt, I picked a buckle with quick-release that also looked like one side could be adjustable. The quick release was great, but in practice the adjustable part was too loose. After the belt fell off a couple of times, I added a scrap of leather to the end so that it couldn’t slide out all the way. Now at worst, it ends up on my hips. Next time I might put in a separate adjustable bit, though.

Now, on to the purse rig. This was, as I said, basically three nylon straps sewn together every 4cm. Originally it was one strap folded at the ends, with d-rings in the folds, but I quickly discovered that the d-rings needed to be at the top, not the sides – if the forces don’t balance, the rig will bend and squish and be really annoying. On this one the d-rings are attached with fabric scraps, but next time I’d use some leftover ribbon. I did try just sewing them on, but the thread wore through pretty quickly – you need something that’ll resist abrasion and hold a decent weight. (More than the weight of the purse – I tend to rest my hand on my purse at times, and if the purse got caught on a backpack I wouldn’t want it breaking.)

As for the strap, I’m still using the one off another purse. All it needs is a clip at each end, and adjustable length. I like the narrow straps most purses come with – my purse is light enough for it, and it’s a great place to put buttons. :)

That’s all for now – hopefully I’ll have more to talk about next month, though. I’ve got plans for not just waterproofing, but also two new pouches… :)

Pocket hacking: the pouches

Today, I’m going to go into detail about my current set of pouches.

Both are based on the same pattern. Both have the same molle straps on the back. Where they differ is that the wallet pouch has a slot on the back for a bus ticket, whereas the phone pouch has a divider and some boning to keep the phone protected and easy to reach.

What have I learnt from the basic pattern? Mainly that I’m not as good as I think I am at mapping between 2d and 3d. :) the original pattern had the corner bits wrong (thankfully by not cutting enough – easy to fix), and I had to reverse-engineer my way to a correct pattern afterwards. :)
The seams were a bit fiddly too – I had them sewn twice, so that the ends turned in on themselves and couldn’t fray [edit: TIL this is called a french seam], but because the two margins were the same size, little frayed bits stick out of the outer seam in a few places. I had more success on the second round, but it still wasn’t perfect.

Next, the molle straps; the wallet pouch was my first time using two separate straps for each loop, instead of bending one around. I prefer this way – it sits flatter on the belt – but it does mean there’s a seam above the belt strap. I’m glad I have a little extra leather at the top to protect me there. :)
I did learn a couple of things here: first, the straps need to be just a tiny bit further apart to fit a bus ticket between them. Second, the sew-on snaps I’ve been using are not ideal – they always feel like the thread could snap at any moment, and the thread seems to stretch after a while too, leaving them a bit loose. I bought a selection of alternatives from dressew and tried them out; in the end, the strongest seemed to be the press-on snaps and some little white buckles. I’ll be trying those out next time I build a new pouch.

Now, the ticket holder… At first I tried sewing on a scrap of netting. That did at least prove I can get a ticket in there if it pushes the straps aside a bit, but it turned out to be a terrible material – bus tickets kept catching on it, and eventually it tore (and I never did get a photo of it! darn).
The second time, I used the same fabric as the pouch, and made a two-sided little envelope, with boning at the opening, before sewing it to the pouch.

For the seams, I decided to try a different method – I sewed only once, with bias tape covering the rough edges. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but it was super fiddly to sew, probably took longer than sewing twice, and I didn’t have a good way to finish the ends of the bias tape itself. To attach it to the pouch, I sewed the top edge on first, but it was getting folded up sometimes, so I added a line of stitching down the middle (not visible in the photo) to form a T-shape. Oh, and one last lesson – things inside the wallet pouch can obstruct the ticket holder. >.< I’ll have to add a stiff panel between them next time.

As for the phone pouch, there’s not much to say. The divider I added is working well, despite only being attached on 2 sides. It’s just a piece of plastic mesh inside a fabric sleeve, with extra fabric on two sides to form a sort of half-box. Why not three sides? because if I’ve attached a charger or headphones, I need some extra space for their cables, and I need to be able to get the phone out without detaching those cables. :)

The other addition was the boning in the opening. It helps hold the structure a little, but it makes the zipper even harder to close. And usually flips itself over too. I might try a shorter piece next time. I’ll also try adding it to the wallet pouch – it could do with a little more structure so that there’s space beside the wallet itself.
That’s about it for the pouches right now – but I’ve started planning a new iteration already. I want rainproof pouches for autumn, now that dressew has some decent colours of rainproof nylon. It’s not quite as waterproof as vinyl, but it’s much easier to work with, and should be enough for all but the heaviest rain so long as I’m careful with the seams. :)

Pocket hacking 2.0

I’ve done a lot of sewing since my previous “pocket hacking” post. For one thing, I’m actually at a point where I can wear my creations out in public. :) At the end of the last post, I was hoping I’d summarize some of the problems and solutions this time. But, that’s no fun. I’m just going to discuss what I made again.

First off, I did finish that laundry pouch from last time, and it was useful. :) I also made a simple molle belt out of the first thing that was handy (an old jeans leg). For a while that was all I had, as I planned and procrastinated on the next set of pouches, and continued the quest to not have goddamn headaches all the time (which is actually making progress now, yay, but debugging humans is sloooowwww).

Eventually, though, I decided to bite the bullet and just make a wallet pouch, even though I still wasn’t sure what I wanted. I went for a very simple design – heck, I could have used a pencil case, if I had one in the right size and colour – added molle straps, and that was it. It fit the wallet that I was using in my purse, so I didn’t have to move individual cards and such when switching between them. Later I tried to add a bus ticket holder on the back, but it didn’t really work out.

With that done, I procrastinated a bit more on making a new phone pouch, and copmpletely changed plans several times. When I’d had enough of that and decided to try making something, I started with the exact same pattern as the wallet pouch. In fact, for a couple of days I had just that simple pouch, until I got tired of the mess and made a divider to keep my phone separate. I had intended to add some pouches onto the divider, but somehow it didn’t happen that day, and I ended up using an old coin pouch as a “temporary” organizer that turned out to be good enough to keep. :)

Once I had those pouches, I could put my entire purse contents onto my belt. But my outfit didn’t always include a suitable belt, and sometimes a purse is the easiest option, so I made a quick frame to combine the pouches into a purse. It’s just three nylon straps sewn together, with rings to attach a purse strap (the strap is borrowed from another purse, at least for now).

The next step was a proper utility belt, one pretty enough to wear outside. I made it out of green leather, with an adjustable quick-release buckle at the front. I was planning to cut the leather in a nice pattern, but haven’t quite got around to it yet. :)

So that’s what I’ve been wearing this summer. :) It works fairly well, and a friend even asked about me making one for her. :) It’s a good thing that it’s summer, though – absolutely none of this is waterproof. I have started on plans for waterproof covers, but for the moment I’ll have to hide the belt under a jacket if it rains.

I’ve glossed over a lot in this post – I could probably talk for an hour about each photo. Maybe I’ll write another post with details, maybe I won’t.

Working with vinyl

This was going to be titled “Sewing with vinyl”, but I didn’t actually end up sewing my successful projects. :)

(This post is a bit rough, sorry. Migraines suck. I don’t think I’ll have the energy to clean it up before I lose interest.)

The goal was to make a waterproof rain skirt, so that I could sit at bus stops in the rain. The folks at dressew told me (and I later confirmed with the shower) that regular water-resistant fabrics wouldn’t be enough, and I should try vinyl. They also warned me that the holes from sewing it could easily turn into perforations. So I got $3 of their thinnest clear vinyl (4 gauge) and started experimenting.

The first test was regular sewing. I made a little pouch (not quite the one I was intending to make, but oh well) and was careful to not stitch too close together. Still, when I pulled gently on the seams they seemed to stretch. Tolerable for a little coin pouch, but not for the kind of strain I could put on a skirt if I sat down quickly.

Next I tried gluing the seams. Glue guns aren’t much use on vinyl – it just peels off when dry. The glue gun itself wasn’t hot enough to fuse the vinyl properly, either. White glue was even worse at sticking.

The experiment with the glue gun got me to try the soldering iron, though, and that worked much better. With parchment paper to keep the tip clean, it easily fused two layers of vinyl together… Although it did burn holes in the single layer where I accidentally touched it. Good thing I was practising on scraps first! :)

For practice, I also made a cute little coin pouch, which almost holds water (I only made two pinprick holes).

After finding the right soldering temperature and speed to fuse the vinyl without damaging it, I went back to figuring out a skirt pattern. I wanted as few seams as possible, so I just made enough pleats that I could sit down, and soldered the very top of them.

While the vinyl stuck to itself enough to test at home, I needed a proper fastener to make it stay on reliably. Since I also needed to adjust it to a varying waistline, and have the ends overlap, Velcro was the obvious choice. Not so obvious was how to attach it. Sewing was already ruled out, I didn’t think stick-on Velcro would be strong enough, nobody sells the iron-on kind around here… But I was poking around in dressew and stumbled on “Velcro glue”, which appears to be one step below superglue, and works on vinyl. It was a bit of a pain to apply (I was scared of touching it even though it claimed to not bond skin) and it’s not quite as strong as I’d hoped, but it’s strong enough. I could still peel off the Velcro if I put a good bit of effort in, but the forces on the skirt won’t do it on their own.

In positioning the Velcro, I made it so that the opening was on the side, with the opening pointing backwards. That way it’s easier to walk, still keeps the rain off as much as possible, and I know I have vinyl protecting me when I sit down.

So, I have a skirt! :)

In testing the skirt itself… It does a good job of keeping rain off, but the non-velcro side was being awkward when I sat down. Next time I’d probably do two pieces with Velcro on both sides. It’s also a bit awkward in general, despite being the thinnest vinyl I could get, and even though it folds up small enough for my backpack I wouldn’t want to put it in there while it’s wet. It’s like carrying around a second umbrella in that regard. I think I’d only wear it on heavy rain days, and maybe I’ll try a smaller square of vinyl for sitting on at bus stops.

Oh, and I upgraded the coin pouch with some boning (stiff plastic strips used for corsets) so that if I pinch the ends it opens up :) that part was easy, since I just had to fold the ends over the boning and fuse them shut.

The land of no-bumping (a metaphor)

Imagine, if you will, a world where it is considered barbaric to bump into anyone in public. And you’re blind. Oh, and everyone is required to wear sunglasses all the time, so people can’t tell whether anyone is blind, and some people don’t believe blindness exists at all.

It is possible for you to learn alternate methods of sensing your surroundings, but it’s hard. No matter how hard you try, occasionally you’re going to bump into people anyways – maybe you were tired and distracted, maybe someone moved too quickly for you to sense, maybe some jerk tripped you on purpose.

Now, some people respond to this by loudly proclaiming “blind person coming through, watch out, watch out, not my fault if you get in the way,” and then blithely walk where they wish, bumping into lots of people and stepping on their toes. That’s not very nice, and anyways, many people suspect that they’re not blind at all, just jerks who wanted an excuse to hurt people.

Other people are so terrified of bumping into anyone that they curl up into a ball muttering “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t bump into me.” That’s no way to live, but they can’t think of any alternative besides option 1 above.

Eventually, groups of blind people find each other, and set up spaces where there are clear non-visual clues about where to walk, and nobody really minds if you bump into them now and then so long as you don’t seriously injure them. Some people are more careful than others, and there’s debate about how much care ought to be expected and whether it’s okay to punish someone who’s utterly careless, but mostly people get along and the ones that were curled up in corners start to come out of their shells (bumping into a lot of people in the process, but they’ll get better at that in time).

At the same time, however, there’s another group of people… well, sort of, because they have funny voices, and they haven’t quite been considered people in the past, and for a long time it was fine to walk into them, or even beat them up, and nobody cared. But they’ve been fighting that long and hard, and they’ve finally got the anti-bumping laws to apply to them too, even if a large minority still ignores those laws and acts like they’re crazy for being upset when someone bumps into them, or denies it ever happened. They’ve built their own funny-voice-only spaces, but regular people keep trying to break into them, so they have to work hard to defend them while also working hard to defend themselves whenever they’re not there.

Some of the funny-voice people are blind too, and fuck is that ever confusing. Should I expect other people to stop bumping into me now, even though I bump into them still because I’m blind? What if the person is blind? Should they have been more careful, or was this just one of those unavoidable times? And oh god, what if I bump into a funny-voice person, they’ll be so mad at me for not treating them like a person but really I just didn’t notice them, but maybe I should have been more careful, maybe I should just stay far far away from them so that I never accidentally bump into them… Maybe I should retreat to the safer blind-friendly spaces (even though less people will consider me a person there).

But now it turns out those blind-friendly spaces are sitting on top of a gold mine, and regular people keep coming in to mine for gold. And the funny-voice people don’t want to be left out of the gold-mining like they always were when they weren’t considered people, so more of them are coming in too. But the regular people don’t want to share their gold, so they keep bumping into them trying to hurt them, and the blind people are bumping into them too – either because they’re blind, or because they want to hog the gold too, or both – and some blind people are regressing to their pre-friendly-space behaviour, and the funny-voice people are getting injured and really pissed off about everyone bumping into them all the time and some sound ready to just fucking punch everyone…

And here I am, blind with a funny voice, wishing everyone could get along somehow, and wondering if I can ever get any gold myself without bumping into all these goddamned people (or getting injured myself). Some days, curling up into a ball seems like a much easier option all around, but I worry that if I do that, people will say “see, funny-voicers aren’t really people” or “see, blind people can stop bumping into anyone”…

…

So yeah, I have aspergers, and I’m going to say some stupid shit sometimes and cross boundaries unintentionally. And yeah, I’m female, and I deserve to have my boundaries respected. I’m doing the best I can to minimize the former, and be assertive about the latter without traumatizing other aspies. And once in a while I’ll be a jerk when I know better and could stop myself, but I’m doing my best to minimize that too.

But I still wish everyone could just get along…

grub 2 and multiple hard drives

I recently set my home computer up to dual-boot, and it took far longer than it should have, so I thought I’d blog about one of the issues.

I’ve got two hard drives; windows is undisturbed on hda, and linux I installed on hdb. After jumping through some bizarre hoops to get the bios booting off hdb (wtf asus bios, why do you hate multiple hard drives), I discovered grub couldn’t boot windows. I could boot windows from hda just fine, so I knew the problem was with grub…

First problem: 90% of the information out there is still for grub 1, not grub 2. they’re almost completely different beasts, with different config locations (/boot/grub/menu.1st vs /etc/grub.d/), different config languages, and even different bloody partition numbering systems! Oh, and of the 10% that is for grub 2, 90% of that is for ubuntu, which has a few convenience scripts other distros lack.

I’ll condense what I learnt about that here:

1. Most of the stuff in /etc/grub.d/ is fancy autodetection scripts that you don’t want to touch.
2. What you do want to touch is /etc/grub.d/40_custom. leave the tail line intact, and treat the part below as your old menu.1st, but with the new config language (api reference and examples).
3. Ubuntu’s update-grub is just grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Once I had my head wrapped around grub 2 enough to get a test menuentry up, the next question was, what is actually wrong with the autodetected windows entry? The error windows threw had no shortage of google results, but a lot were from mangled windows bootloaders, or 32 vs 64-bit issues. Most of the rest talked about mbr vs gpt, or legacy bios vs uefi, or secure boot; I was almost convinced one of these was the issue, despite them all being in the context of windows 8 (I’ve got windows 7), but I kept testing other things while I thought about it, and happily stumbled on the solution:

It turns out that while installing opensuse, I had let grub swap the order of the hard drives, and it was passing on this swap to windows, confusing the heck out of it. I converted some grub 1 advice to grub 2 syntax (hint: map is now drivemap) and windows happily booted up from grub. :)

I’m worried by what I learnt about UEFI and Secure Boot, though. Between bricking bugs and vendor lock-in, it sounds like things could get ugly next time I want a new computer. :(