how's your week going, Beehaw

Reminder: Do a little something for yourself. I shut my email down, took a minute off from advocating, job hunting paused, and I played no mans sky for 4 hours. I then made some bread and took a walk.
I was recharged and ready to continue. I forget to do this for myself sometimes and it really does help. So I'm alright this week.

Been letting the stress get to me too much. My anxiety level is too damned high. It's beginning to manifest physically.
- Did not be afraid to ostrich yourself and just completely disconnect with your head in the sand. There’s no shame in that if it’s for self care and not willful ignorance. I had to do that for December and January because it was all too much, but the break definitely recharged me.
  
  I'm begining to think I may not have a choice in that if I'm to be at peace. I can find other ways to contribute, and besides, you can't post your way out of fascism.

Pretty great. Been working out all week since I got back from a ski trip so I can go on another ski trip starting tomorrow!
- I miss that even being an opportunity. My handle is because of one of the trail signs I got over the years. I last skied in 2008.
  
  I’m lucky enough to live within a couple hours of most of the major Colorado resorts. Actually heading to ski Utah for the first time tomorrow.
  If it’s not a painful question, why did you pause?

Started out good, not great now, but doing my best to make it better for tomorrow

It's been a week alright. I'm getting settled into my new job, and slowly learning what thing are worth stressing over and which aren't.
- First couple weeks always suck. Hang in there!

Trying to balance gathering online resources and personal stuff. Working on being a more positive influence in discussions I have online, which is draining.
- Did not expect the government situation to deteriorate so fast, tho.

I just dropped off my resume to a plant nursery with an apiary in the southern US. If all goes well, I'll finally be allowed to walk into work each day and say 'beehaw'

I've had random jaw/tooth pressure for a few weeks now that won't go away. I went to the dentist and then a specialist, who claims I do not have any tooth related issues.
It doesn't seem to be sinus related so...only thing I can think of is clenching (which I don't think I'm doing? I don't notice it, at least? Both dentists didn't see any related issues that would point to it) or some kind of muscle tension, which is specifically causing pressure on my top right row of teeth.
I'm kinda at a loss at this point. I figure I'll go to the doctor in a week if it doesn't resolve itself. I'm assuming it's stress related or something considering everything going on in my personal life and well...the world lol.
In other news, the new monster hunter game is coming out soon. Which is kinda crazy to me because I didn't finish the iceborne dlc of worlds or get around to rise at all. Where has the time gone? I'm looking forward to that!
- Did you talk to your dentist about a night guard? You might be doing it in your sleep.
  
  I think you're right.
  I'm not sure if I could keep a night guard in my mouth, though. I had one about a decade ago, and I would always wake up with it either in the bed or thrown across the room.
  They also checked my teeth for grinding, and they don't think I am? It's weird.

I don't remember a single thing I did this week. Work and bite my nails, I guess.
I was gonna say I've never even heard of a local protest but I actually found one through Lemmy. There's a single post buried in the subreddit naming the organizer and it's a suspended account. I've seen three or four different start times and two different addresses. It's at the capital building, how many of those do they think we have?
Is this how it's normally done? Is this worth losing my job for? I don't want to be a coward but I don't want to lose my home and have it turn out this was a prank.
- Pick and choose your battles, love. This is a long road. You don't have to physically be present for every battle.
  
  This is great advice. Good people can often stretch themselves too thin trying to fight the tide of horror. Self care is important. If you burn out it helps nobody.
- Paint your nails so you'll stop biting them 💅 (worked for me anyway)
  
  Thanks! Unfortunately I tried it in the past and it didn't work for me. And things that do work just lead to me picking/chewing elsewhere. I probably need to deal with the anxiety itself rather than the symptoms.

I’m feeling a lot of energy drain from US politics and news, as well as teaching my class. I started teaching night classes the semester before COVID-19 hit, and summers aside, I haven’t taken a break since. I have a full time day job, so that’s no joke. I finally prioritized myself and rescheduled my trip to Japan, which I was supposed to leave for the week everyone got sent home. It meant taking a semester off though this fall. It’s the right decision, but I’m basically just trying to survive the semester at this point. My day job has a lot going on too.
Just gotta be patient with myself, get rest, hopefully get some exercise after that rest, and wrest myself out of this energy hole I’ve dug myself into. I am proud of myself for keeping the kitchen clean, and did a deep clean and vacuum of the living room yesterday. It feels much nicer in here now. :)

I had few days of high headwind last week but it got better. Now I have around 1400km according to my cycling computer, I am in Córdoba and next week I should be in Portugal.
So yeah, my tour is going great for now. I just wish that there will be more camps on route.
- I spent an entire day walking along the coast in Lagos, Portugal. The scenery was stunning!

I was referred to read the book "They Thought They Were Free" by one of the bees here and it's great. I have a copy of it on document and my library has the audiobook version. I am studying Spanish and sometimes I think I'm such a hack at it but today's lesson with my sweetheart Argentinian teacher made me feel like I'm making progress. Some dickwad at a karaoke bday party gave me covid last week. Today is the first day of being covid negative. Paxlovid sucks, though. I finished building an RSS for myself so I can pick the good newsources and let the shitty ones be. I also finished studying pixelfed and cherry pick last week. Old friends are reaching out to me because the state of this country (the US) is scaring the shit out of everyone and they are coming to me to teach them about decentralized socials and because I worked as a human rights journalist/analyst for over a decade.* I guess they find comfort in talking to me. I donated money to archive.today and uhhh sh.itjust.works. Will donate to beehaw. My cherry pick instance is worried about being hosted here in the US and I told the mod I'll try and help them figure out a move. So any thoughts on that would be great.
- I finished building an RSS for myself so I can pick the good newsources and let the shitty ones be.
  This is such a, well, simple thing people seem to have forgotten still exists. Pair it with Firefox, uBO and NoScript, and it's like reading a paper from 20 years ago, except just shit you might be interested in.
  
  Any good links you know of that explain how to get started? I've tried looking for this type of info a couple times but never seem to have much luck finding a tutorial.
  
  Exactly. And even if there isn't an RSS available some of the paid RSS servers will webscrape for you. I have been building my own webscraping code but it works. I just decided I need to put some distance between myself and the abusive way we are presented news these days.
  
  Can you give me a breakdown or a guide you'd recommend for doing this? I used to be an RSS junky years ago, but my skills atrophied. It sounds lovely and a fun distraction project for me.
- If you want a bit of a variety in book recommendations, bridging the US to Optimism gap would be Rising Out of Hatred. Then for the earliest national forest and wildfire relief, The Big Burn. People coming together to rebuild A Paradise Built from Hell.
  For fiction/sci fi the new James S. Corey series starts with Mercy of the Gods. Its good. For RhE rebellious sci fi side, Red Rising and its series is quite good. Takes off, in my opinion, around the end if book 2 and into 3.

Well, I certainly learned some humility.
- You did great. Your intention was in the right place.

Slightly better than usual, work is going well since the merger, they're about to take some duties off my plate since I'm taking on more in other areas. Notwithstanding that the next four plus years are going to be fraught with political turmoil, I'm cautiously optimistic about my personal life.

I went to a day long Zazen retreat and it was lovely. Little victories. Needed the reset.