We've been having an unreasonable amount of trouble trying to get Laila registered to the school for her new IEP.

We'd already lost one slot because when sashagee showed up, they only had her set for halfdays even though we were told that Laila would be started for full days, so they tried to contact Laila's home school to get the process started again. Well, the contact at Laila's school was slow so we lost our placement, but also Laila was in the hospital while all this was happening so I wasn't too worried. Well, they got her a new placement (at a much closer school, that she can even walk to if she wants), so we weren't very worried. Then things dragged. And dragged. And today literally right before she was going to go to school on what we thought was going to be her last day, we got a call that she needed to stay home because she couldn't be enrolled in a new school if she was already enrolled in an existing school. Then we got a phone call from her new school with the coordinator ready to start breaking things, trying to figure out why Laila had not yet been unenrolled from her old school (at 1 p.m. on a Friday) so they could start the process of enrolling her in a new school before spring break next week.

The case manager at her old school is completely incompetent, is what I'm saying.

sashagee managed to call the central office and get the deadline extended so that we have plenty of extra time to make sure that Laila will properly get enrolled at her new school and we don't have to go through all of this again (for an IEP that was originally decided back in January), but seriously? She's already missed weeks of school due to illness and you're telling me, "Oh, she has to miss even more school now." Come on.

We mentioned this to her preschool teachers and by their reactions they were also not particularly enthused by any prospect of dealing with administration. sashagee is done writing strongly-worded emails for today (hopefully) so now we just have to wait and see if the case manager can manage to locate the computer and push the few buttons necessary to release Laila instead of banging rocks together trying to discover fire or whatever they're doing in there.

I recently learned about "Stalin sorting" through my work on Cataclysm. What is Stalin sort, you ask?

Go through an array, iterating over the elements. Any element not in order is deleted.

Congratulations, mabown and alainamwhite!


The whole family received an invitation to the wedding, including Laila, but for obviously hospital-related reasons not all of us could go. We discussed it among ourselves and decided that I would go as the family representative, but it did mean I spent quite a bit of my catch-up-with-friends time explaining just why it was that my family wasn't there.

ping816 officiated the wedding, which consisted mostly of the vows. I admit that I was expecting some kind of reading, especially when alainamwhite showed up in a black wedding dress, but there was not. ping816 read the ritual about marriage being a sacred bonding of love, alainamwhite recited her touching vows about how mabown taught her that its okay to be excited for your passions and you don't need to try to lock in to some concept about what being an adult is like, mabown protested that he had to follow that and recited his own vows, ping816 pronounced them married, and they processed out. It took maybe fifteen minutes. Straight to the point--the bonding of two individuals in holy matrimony.

After we left and waited for the reception room to be prepared, I mostly chatted with shane.suydam and his wife meaghan.figg, and later with kati.smith.211, mostly about our respective children because that's what parents do when they meet up. It was mostly talking about Laila because everyone was worried about her, so I gave an update on her condition, mentioned that she was scheduled for surgery on Monday, and that the doctors were hopeful that the surgery would really help. meaghan.figg offered to buy us dinner when we all got home, which was extremely kind of her--Mishkan did something similar for us when Laila had her spasms--and I'll definitely take her up on that. Otherwise, we drank the extremely strong drinks that the bartenders mixed up and when the doors opened, we went in.

I did learn that shane.suydam and his wife meaghan.figg live in my parents' town, about two blocks away, so we'll have to drop by next time we're in the neighborhood!

I was not seated with any of the aforementioned people inside, though I was seated with MomoManLove and johanna.jones.127, so they're who I chatted with while I ate the fish and drank the (delicious) wine on the table. I ended up dancing with johanna.jones.127 as well, when she, starting with her boyfriend, went down the men at the table and all of them turned down her offer to dance until she got to me. sashagee was surprised that I was willing to dance, too--after one of our first nights out she told me she had never dated a man who danced. Then I told her I had taken swing-dancing lessons during the swing dancing craze of the 90s. Sadly, there were no swing songs at the wedding. The music during dancing was mostly pretty conventional, actually, which I was surprised about since the music during dinner was mostly chamber instrumental covers of horror movie songs.

Since it's a wedding and therefore there were dozens of people to talk to, I didn't really get to talk to anyone for very long, and a lot of what I did talk to people about was Laila, but it was really nice to catch up with everyone. I learned that seloy had gotten married and ran into smtemp for the first time since the Plague Years (she's moved up to Wisconsin). I got to see kati.smith.211's five-year-old use up her energy by running circles around the table she and her parents were sitting at, proving that it's not just Laila. And I got to speak briefly to both mabown and alainamwhite and congratulate them on their wedding! It was a lovely night, though I always had a bit of worry about Laila in the back of my mind.

When I left, two women got out of the Lyft that I was getting into and one of them said:

"You look like an Irishman at an Italian club.

Sidestepping the whole debate about what to call it[1], we went to the Lunar New Year parade and celebration on Argyle Street yesterday:


We left later than I wanted to--we didn't get out of the house until 11:45 a.m. and didn't get down to Argyle until 12:15 p.m. We put in our name at Immm Rice, but when it was only twenty-five minutes or so to the parade we decided that even if we did get in we wouldn't be able to eat in time, so we tried stopping in at a bakery for some buns. The first one we went to had a cash-only sign that had been hidden by the long line, so we had to duck our and search the rest of the street. sashagee spotted one on the way back run by an old Vietnamese man and got a couple buns for Laila and herself, and they ate them while we settled onto the side of the street to wait.

I wasn't expecting too many people to show up since it was -5°C with a biting wind, but the streets were still lined when the parade stepped off at 1:05 p.m. Laila had been complaining and wanting to go home for quite a while, but once the parade started all that fell away. She watched the lion dancers and the dragon puppets, watched the floats going on, and was very excited when one of the parade-walkers gave her a lollipop! She didn't complain once as we stood out in the cold, but we left a couple floats early so we could get into a restaurant. And a good thing too--we walked in, were immediately seated, and within ten minutes or so there was a giant line waiting for a seat. We ate--with a brief detour while Laila and I walked around outside because she was getting rowdy--and by the time we were done basically all the festivities had ended, so we just went home.

Next weekend is the parade in Chinatown, but we won't be able to go.

[1]: A few years ago there was a push to call it Lunar New Year instead of Chinese New Year, since more cultures than just China celebrate it. Of course now the problem is that e.g. the Islamic and Jewish calendars also have lunar new years since both calendars begin months on the new moon, so "Lunar New Year" is ambiguous.

Almost five! I can still remember when she was so small I would carry her in the crook of my arm while I was walking around the condo. Every parent says that, because it's true.

Laila is expressing more preferences and wants while also being more independent. On mornings when I get up and let sashagee sleep in, I go out with Laila and give her medicine, and I no longer just make her food and give her what she gets. I now ask her what she wants to eat for breakfast. And sure, the answer is always the same thing: "pickle AND cheese!", by which she means some pickles, a bit of cheese, some fruit (usually blueberries or strawberries), and toast with butter or jam. It's what she always wants, even when she wants something else--a couple times she's said e.g. waffles or eggs, and when I asked her, "You want eggs?" she'll respond with "Just pickles and cheese." Well, I can't blame her, since I have basically the same thing for breakfast every day too.

She's also getting more self-conscious. There's been a few times when she's tripped and fallen while running around the condo and she got so embarrassed that she immediately ran to her room and shut the door afterwards. It's not like we laugh at her or anything! We just ask her if she's okay, but she's grown-up enough to be embarrassed about it. And a few days ago, she had a coughing fit, looked up at me when she recovered, and said, "It's very frustrating!"

You're right, Laila, it is.

She's settled on her new interests and moved on from her old interests. A year ago, she was very into the Cars franchise and loved Lightning McQueen, but she hasn't wanted to watch Cars in months. A few months ago it was all Bluey all the time. Nowadays it's Hello Kitty and Friends whenever we give her the choice of what she wants to watch. She'll spend almost every free moment drawing and painting with the water markers and books we've gotten her, and painting with watercolors if we let her. The other thing she loves to do lately is have us read books to her, which has always been something she likes but it's more of an interest lately. She'll grab books herself and bring them over--her favorites lately are Sammy Spider's First Yom Kippur, Little Owl's Night, Challah for Shabbat Tonight, and You Are My Happy. I got her Sammy Spider's First Shabbat but she hasn't taken to it yet.

Unfortunately, tragedy has struck. When Laila was younger she had a habit of pulling her hair, but we had mostly managed to deter the behavior...until she spent a week in the hospital, which caused her enough anxiety that it started up again. sashagee saw how thin her hair was getting on one side and was worried she'd do permanent damage to her hair by pulling out too much of it, and so to deter further hair pulling, we gave her a haircut. A significant one:


Laila...doesn't like it. It has, however, helped stop her from pulling her hair--she'll reach for where she usually pulls and it's not there--as have my comments that if she keep pulling it we'll have to cut it even shorter. They're probably going to have to cut some of it for her upcoming surgery anyway, so it's not purely a deterrent measure. And we know that if she did give herself bald spots she'd be really upset about them when she got older, but seeing her look in the mirror and silent tears roll down her cheeks is really upsetting.

In happier news, she's fully become a fashionista. She no longer waits for us to pick out her clothes in the morning--if we wait too long, she'll go rummage through her drawers until she finds something she likes and change into it, all by herself! The only hurdles are that if she's wearing shorts as part of her pajama set she'll sometimes leave them on under her pants and, the bigger one, if we let her she would wear a half-dozen outfits throughout the day. She'll forget to roll up her sleeves when washing her hands, get the sleeves wet, and then go back to her room to change into a new shirt because she can't stand having wet sleeves. If we didn't stop her, she'd change her clothes a half-dozen times a day and sashagee would have to go laundry basically every single day.

I also make her carry her own food plate to the table. She may have issues focusing on things sometimes, but when it's her food, she can keep her mind on it. Though she does carry it at a very dangerous angle sometimes.

What other ways will she grow and change?

So I had been getting increasing WHEA errors and noticed that computers are much more expensive, but I bought one anyway and then I had to return it. That was where we left things off, and as I was trying to pack up my old computer's data for transit to the new computer I plugged in some of the old hard drives I had, which meant I finally plugged things into every USB slot I had.

That was two weeks ago and...I've had one crash since then, about two weeks ago. I've played games for hours, let my computer sit while I was out of the house, I've been idly browsing the web, and nothing.

Was it a bad USB controller freaking out while it was idle? Was there a short and by plugging and unplugging things did I jiggle the cables around? Did the new computer scare my old computer into good behavior? Who knows. I'll just ride the wave as long as I can.

Almost a week early. I thought, oh, cool, I'll just open it up now and help set it up, since I took the day off anyway since sashagee wasn't feeling well and I needed to watch Laila.

Well, I cracked open the packaging, asked sashagee to help me a bit since Laila's at school and get it out of the casing, and when I pulled it out I noticed there was condensation on the case. Oh, that's a bad sign, I said, and then when I opened up the case to take out the packaging they put on the inside I noticed there was condensation on the inside of the case, which is a really bad sign.

It did not post, of course. The CPU and RAM lights were both on on the motherboard, and when reseating the RAM didn't work I figured that if they can't send me a working computer I'll request a refund, so that's what I did. Just annoying that I have to walk through the snow with a 40 lb computer to the UPS store to ship it back.

Looks like I haven't been to one of these in two years, and this time both sashagee and I got to go! We did arrive late and miss the first two shows, but here's what I thought about the ones we did see:

( List of shows behind the cut )
The shows were categorized by another person in the group as follows:

1. Handholding Sakuga - (You and I are Polar Opposites)


2. “See, the Oligarchy DOES Care”-ass Propaganda - (Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I'll Obtain Ultimate Power)


3. Family (Selectively) Matters - (Journal with Witch)


4. Monkey See, Monkey School - (The Darwin Incident)


5. F/ACE Turn: I Can Fix Him - (Tamon’s B-Side)


6. Not All Heroes Worship Goddesses - (Sentenced to be a Hero)


7. Conquer Them With Cuteness - (The Demon King’s Daughter is Too Kind)


8. No Game, No Interest - (Shiboyugi: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table)


9. The Lover Formerly Known As Prince - (In the Clear Moonlit Dusk)


10. New US War Just Dropped - (Fate/strange Fake)

The first two shows there are the ones we missed. People really seem to like You and I are Polar Opposites, including sashagee--she's already watched a bunch of it.

I say I'll watch some of these, but I'm very bad at watching anime lately. We'll see if it happens.

Classic Chicago winter thunderstorms.

Jokes aside it just rained for six hours straight. I've hear stories of people clearing storm drains by hand--they're clogged with fall leaves because this is not usually something we have to worry about--to clear the six to ten inches of standing water in their streets. Usually it's -10°C around this time of year after the New Year Temperature Drop but today it was 12°C and all that snow we should have gotten was rain. I can still hear thunder in the distance. sashagee and Laila got drenched walking back from gymnastics and that was hours ago and then it kept raining.

At one point lightning lit up the entire house brighter than the noonday sun, and then the crash of thunder didn't come for at least five seconds afterward. This is crazy for January in Chicago.

New Year's meme time.

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Happy New Year to everyone!