d'oh! *embarrassed*

[ursamajor]

Sorry I confused people with some of my posts this week! I'm currently going back and integrating old posts from various other dying blog hosts/social media into my Dreamwidth so that they're all in one stable place. I didn't realize they were showing up in the contemporary feed on reading pages, though :( Have found the tickeh that needs checking now to prevent that, though, and will do so going forward.

A more general life update - we're coming up on four years in the Bay Area. We've survived the pandemic thus far through whatever combination of vaxxing and masking have brought us, along with I'm sure a decent helping of luck; even our more careful friends and family are more likely than not to have gone through a bout, it seems. We're lucky being outdoors is a good social option for us most of the year. We still need to buy some patio furniture to facilitate this, though; right now, we have two random chairs on our porch and that's the grand sum of our outdoor seating for grownups.

hyounpark and I joined the Oakland Symphony Chorus in January. The masking (everyone at every rehearsal and performance except the conductor) and vaxxing (must be vaccinated) policies convinced us the relative risk was in line with our risk budget, and it's been lovely. We had our first performance with them in May, a commission from Martin Rokeach about the Flint autoworkers strike: Bodies on the Line. Timely libretto by Rebecca Engle, too - we were thinking about Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks baristas because so many of the same lines about overwork and suffering and solidarity we sang about Chevy autoworkers have prominent modern-day counterparts. I wish it was available to hear more widely; H and I still sing parts at each other around the house.

I'm finding my social slow bike people. I found out about local Friday coffee rides where we meet up at a different BART station every week and then ride a few miles to a nearby breakfast place with a patio, where only about half of us drink coffee while the rest of us focus on food and tea. It's absolutely been a social lifesaver. When we first moved out here, we thought we had plenty of time to start establishing social routines with old friends while making new ones. Seven months later, we found ourselves in lockdown, Zoom and walks our only social outlets. Even after the original rounds of vaccines, most of the people we know nearby are parents, and too tied down by kid needs and schedules to lift their heads above water more than occasionally. Thankfully, I found out about the coffee rides on Instagram, figured out how to get my bike on BART, and now I have a standing Friday morning "there are friendly people who like biking and are being covid-cautious enough for me" meetup :)

It's also been good for starting to piece together the local bike network, patchy as it is. The Ohlone Greenway runs right through our neighborhood, providing a jogging corridor for H and a safer biking corridor for me, but also access for us to local shops and the farmers markets and restaurants and the train into Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco without having to get into the car. I learned how to take my bike on BART just about a decade after BART first put bike storage areas on its trains, and it's opened up a lot more of the area to me. I learned how to ride the Wiggle to get to the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, and the Great HighWalkway. I've taken my bike on the ferry. I pester my local shops and city councillors to get more bike parking and safe biking infrastructure, as most of the local cities and towns have proclaimed the importance of addressing climate change and environmental issues amid our housing and transportation crises (whoever coined the "polycrisis" term recently hit it on the head), but are struggling with the political will to make the changes necessary to ensure long-term sustainability. But mostly? I hop on my bike and almost always come home with food, whether that's produce from the farmers' market, pastries from a popup bakery, packages of takeout, or a proper grocery run. Which is exactly how I like it.

I miss late night bookstore dates, though. Our closest indie bookstore (about a 45 minute walk away, or 15 minutes on an infrequent daytime only bus, but not easy to get to on my geared-for-the-flats-of-Boston three-speed) closes at 6 pm, and others near-ish-by not much later than that. San Francisco understands bookstores as nightlife a little better, particularly once you get out of downtown and into the more human-scale neighborhoods, with more bookstores closing at 8, 9, 10 pm, but. I miss Harvard Books, even though I could only make it to 9 pm when I was there in June. Aging, man.

Comments

[kareila]

Some of us were just worried that the resurfacing of some of your older posts on our reading pages meant that DW was broken - glad that wasn't the case 😅

Good to hear from you, and glad to know that you're back to singing! The autoworkers piece sounds fabulous.

[ursamajor]

Oh thank *god* no, at least not AFAIK! I'm not saying I haven't inadvertently broken tech before in server-error ways, but thankfully this time it was just PEBCAK :D

And the Rokeach was awesome! A good challenge, a fair bit of atonality, and it was fun to get to sing more formally with Hyoun again. We'll have to see how our fall travel schedule shakes out, but the choral schedule looks intriguing :)

[jadelennox]

Me, having slept badly, and reading the comments before the post: Rokeach? Like, the gefilte fish and shabbat candles? Do they make music?

Me, several minutes later: A lot of brand names are actually family names, you absolute nitwit.

For an exhausted and underslept brain, trying to figure out how whitefish has atonality was a trip and a half.

[ursamajor]

For an exhausted and underslept brain, trying to figure out how whitefish has atonality was a trip and a half.

I am *convinced* somebody has to have written an atonal song about gefilte fish. It'd fit perfectly into a Pesach seder right before Dayenu!

*sleepy hugs*

[kareila]

Symphony of Psalms! Singing that in my high school choir was such a formative experience for me.

[ursamajor]

Ooh! I haven't actually heard it before, I don't think. *remedies*

[cesy]

Good to hear from you!

[ursamajor]

Aw, thanks! Glad you're still around here, too :)

[siliconshaman]

Figured it was something like that. Ran across that little 'feature' before when I migrated from LJ.

I just treated it as echoes from the past. Said hi to your past self..

[ursamajor]

:) My past self is both bewildered and relieved by her future self!

[oracne]

Choir hooray! That piece sounds great - https://www.mcchorus.org/ in Philly does a lot of cool commissions like that.

My choir [much smaller, usually around 40, does a mix of early/baroque/modern) requires vaxxing, but stopped requiring masks in the spring. I still mask for both rehearsals and concerts, but not many do. I am hoping that the high ceiling and dome of the church we work in helps out, as does a high vaccination rate in Philadelphia. But being without choir was just...not fully living. It's the biggest risk I take and it feels worth it to me.

[ursamajor]

I love it when choirs can do commissions - it's evidence people are still out here writing complex music that you really need a lot of people to come together and collaborate on, that it's somehow bolstering the future of choral music. And the days and weeks of working together are instrumental in building that trust.

I'd taken a few years off from choral performance towards the end of my Boston years, but I'd assumed when we moved to the Bay Area in mid-2019 that of course I was going to audition for local choirs that spring when auditions opened up. Oh well. Having Hyoun around helped a lot; we're both musicians and we've been singing together off and on since 1997, so we had a deep enough back catalog to keep things fresh. But it's been wonderful being able to sing with others again, and we agree that it's a risk worth taking, especially because our choir policies accommodate risk reduction. I know some of the elders are starting to argue for mask optional, though, so we'll need to see how that goes in the fall.

[oracne]

I've been seeing a number of cases in my friend group lately, mostly people who hadn't caught it up to this point. Several of them came back from Europe sick.

[ursamajor]

:( I've been jealous of what feels like everyone flitting off to Europe this summer; I soul-need to go back because I'm watching all of the biking infrastructure expanding, and where they are doubling down on trains and transit instead of private cars. But it's such a pointed reminder that covid ain't over, and everything has a risk calculation attached to it.

[jadelennox]

I'm finding my social slow bike people.

The one* good thing that's come out of covid for me was discovering slow but moderate intensity hikes. "What do we do when we won't go indoors" became "well let's go to the fells" became learning how to do moderate intensity without exacerbating injury or getting heat exhaustion, which has slowly led to finding other people who like exactly the same thing.

• Okay, there's two: the fact that my entire industry has normalized remote work.

[ursamajor]

Remote work/WFH, seriously. Having that level of flex over my day and what I can multitask on (laundry and dishes can definitely run in the background while I'm on a call or doing focus work, and get swapped when I get up to stretch) and not having a rush hour commute on a regular basis, invaluable. If I changed jobs/careers, I wouldn't mind a commute again a couple of days a week because I do like some face to face time, but I would find it very difficult to go back to "leave the house at 7:30 or 8, get back around 6:30 or 7, deal with crowds at the start and end of my day" as what was normal before.

[ursamajor]

And yeah, starting the pandemic in a small 2-bed apartment with no private outdoor space and a pool we couldn't touch after March 2020 definitely drove us to getting outside for a walk, a jog, a bike ride as much as we could.

[niqaeli]

It didn't help that I think a couple other users had some weird out-of-order posts showing up too, heh. I'm glad nothing's broken and you've integrated some of your archives in a way pleasing to you!

[ursamajor]

Ha, I am not alone, I am merely *part* of the chaos and entropy *cackle* :)

[azurelunatic]

I figured it was some sort of archival process after I wondered what had happened on "Tuesday", found nothing in the news, and then registered that it was a September 2001 entry.

Hooray for friendly acquaintances and BART!

[ursamajor]

Urk, yeah, the fact that September 2001 was one of the primary months I've been integrating this week *wince*

And going for ice cream tonight with bike people!

[ephemera]

You did give me a moment of "wait, what major event did I miss" before I figured out that it was some kind of backposting things - your actual update is really good to see, though - I'm glad you're finding both social and physical landscapes to explore and enjoy. The choir sounds fantastic - how cool to be part of a world premier, and Bodies on the Line sounds like fascinating and timely work!