the chemyst @hafnia@wandering.shop

will admit that saying "I'm not bent on destroying the planet" feels odd in light of the 20 KILOWATT LASER I apparently am now responsible for setup of.

I keep seeing a lot of apologies for not being interesting or funny or positive, and I just wanna say:

You are a person, not a brand. You do not need to be consistently anything but yourself. If you need to take a break, that's OK. We're all people, we'll understand.

Also the most likely Big Scary Things have 5-year prognosis of 90%+, so I'm perhaps not as afeared as I should be...

Like, at one point he had one that was the size of a marble. No joke. D:

Anyway, they can't properly scope him unless they clean up some of the scar tissue, so that's what they're doing. It's outpatient, local anesthetic only. His only symptom is blood in the urine, which can be a bunch of scary things, but it seems most likely that it's stones (because he's prone to 'em, and, gout).

Right, so.

My dad is on blood thinners as a result of the stroke stuff. One of the side effects of these is excess uric acid in the blood.

Excess uric acid = well, shit, you're going to develop gout, and odds are really good you're going to get kidney stones.

They want to scope the old man to make sure everything is all right, but because he's previously had them, there's some bad scarring.

Oh my glob, Mom, you could have led with "they think your dad has kidney stones again" instead of FREAKING ME THE FUCK OUT.

I have a ton of dahlia pics, but yeah, this is from when the partner and I went out to see Gorillaz at the Key Center in Seattle. Dragged him to Point Defiance because it's one of my Happy Places.

(The partner liked it too; this is how I know that he's good people.)

Full photo, for anyone who's curious. 's a dahlia from the garden at Point Defiance.

see also: "I want people to recognize me, but I'm tired of my old avatar and flowers are in right now."

different avatar, same color scheme = A+.

oh, what's this? I finally figured out what the fuck is going on? well, finally. took long enough.

Figuring out resistivity trends like it's NBD

I swear to glob if it turns out that they're doing a cancer biopsy, I'm going to throw something. Seems like the kind of thing my mom would downplay as "minor surgery". "oh, your dad's having a lung biopsy, it's MINOR SURGERY" or whatever, like...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

(Dad has never smoked and didn't work in an industry that would put him at high risk, and there's no family precedence, but still. AHHHHHH.)

Without getting into too much identifying stuff:

-my dad is Ancient (second marriage; sibling and I were unplanned)
-he is in okay health, but he's had a few health scares in the last few years (he's had more than one stroke due to a previously undiagnosed heart defect)
-this is not for the issues that I thought it might be for (weird foot stuff); mom is not telling me anything

auuuuuuuuugh.

Dad's having minor surgery; mom is being cagey about why. Asked about the couple of things I know about which could potentially require it, and..nothin'.

great. :|

tl;dr, I'm friendly and have realized that being able to do things like talk to strangers is a skill; if you have questions about it, hit me up. No question too awkward, as long as it's about platonic interaction! :)

I downplay it a lot, but it's occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't, 'cos I'm more than happy to talk about it.

So, uh, if you have questions about that kinda thing, lemme know, and I'll do my best to answer? Promise. :)

So yeah, online friends. I'm myself, and that's enough, but I'm...different, and I'm beginning to realize that the "difference" thing isn't, "I'm a big ol' weirdo who likes to talk to people" but is instead, "hey, soft skills! I've gotten good at doing something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable!"

I've been sorta connecting the dots over the last year, but it's really come to a head lately, because someone I work with has been utilizing my soft skills as we talk to people about funding opportunities and try to communicate what we do and what help we're looking for.

Because, he says, I'm good at it.

A couple of years ago, I would have gone, "nah, this isn't really a SKILL SET, it's just a thing people do", but now I get it, kinda?