On the subject of "if you're Literally God you're allowed to set unattainable standards and then forgive puny humans for not meeting them, it's in the job description." Reminded me of this sonnet.
I really enjoyed Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale a few years back and also I really enjoy espionage, so when ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is osprey_archer's post.
I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.
I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!
The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.
To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.
Now bothosprey_archer and genarti, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But," osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.)
However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.
Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'
With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.
osprey_archer alerted us that Adam Gidwitz had written a children's WWII espionage thriller called Max in the House of Spies, I immediately jumped on board for a buddy read, about which here is osprey_archer's post. I knew from the inside cover that the plot of this book involved German Jewish refugee Max getting shipped off to the UK on the kindertransport and subsequently recruited for espionage, with an invisible dybbuk and an invisible kobold on his shoulder.
I did NOT know that it was also RPF ABOUT EWEN MONTAGU, MR. 'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' HIMSELF?!?!
The fact that the spy foster uncles whom Max meets in England are Ewen and Ivor Montagu, respectively Mr. Operation Mincemeat and The Communist Plot Device In Several Fictional Operation Mincemeat adaptations, altered the experience of the book significantly for me. I don't know that it made it better or worse per se but it immediately became much, much funnier.
To be clear Operation Mincemeat is not referenced at all in the text of the book, although Jean Leslie and Charles Cholmondeley make significant cameos (alas, no Hester Leggett, though we were eagerly awaiting her!). Ewen Montagu was chosen out of the many available interesting historical British intelligence officers this RPF project both because he's Jewish and he had a brother who was both Also an Interesting Guy and Also a Communist Spy. By putting Max between Ewen and Ivor, Gidwitz gets to explore the complex position of Jews in England, point out the moral ambiguities of Britain's role in the war, bring in some alternate political viewpoints, and also discuss the Inevitable Betrayals of Espionage in a way that remains appropriate for a middle grade novel. I think it's a very smart move and I appreciate it. It is just also, again, very very funny. I want the Ewen Montagu scion who wrote the politely scathing review of the Colin Firth film and its unnecessary romance plot to review this one for me please.
Now both
osprey_archer and genarti, in reading this book at the same time I did, thought perhaps it was a bit implausible that British Intelligence would recruit a thirteen-year-old for active service duty. I did not have the same stumbling block. I have read Le Carre! And so has Adam Giswitz, because he talks about it at the end of the book. If you put yourself in Le Carre mindset, as indeed this book is very determined to be in the middle-grade version of the Le Carre mindset, it is only a small hop, skip and a jump to 'let's recruit a thirteen-year-old.' ("But," osprey_archer pointed out, "it's RPF and Ewen Montagu told us about everything he did and so we know he didn't recruit a thirteen-year-old." Small details.) However, the thing that did throw me is the fact that the dybbuk and the kobold mostly seem to exist in this book to point out how absurd it is that British intelligence is attempting to recruit a thirteen-year-old. They Statler and Waldorf angrily around on Max's soldiers going 'this is ABSURD. why are they letting you do this! you are going to DIE!' I think it must be an intentional irony that the supernatural creatures are there as the voice of the reader/voice of reason, but I'm not sure it's an irony that ... works ...... I mean they're quite funny but if we are expected to believe these critters have been around since the dawn of time they surely have seen worse things in their thousands of years than a thirteen-year-old going to war.
Okay, aside from that, one other thing did throw me, which is the several times I had to stare at the page and hiss 'EXCUSE ME! THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT!'
With those two caveats I did have a great time, and I was both annoyed and excited to find out at the end of this book that it's part one of a duology and I have a whole second Max Espionage Adventure to experience.
This was a rec that was a creative twist on the "High Fashion" bingo square, which I was grateful for because I didn't expect to run across much for that in the wild. It's set in 2002; Cayce Pollard is a freelance fashion consultant/marketer. She has an innate sense for judging "cool" versus "uncool" logos/aesthetics, and can give companies feedback accordingly. The flip side of this ability is that she's "allergic" to lots of trademarks and logos, and so she can really only function in extremely generic monochrome clothing with no identifying labels.
Bingo: High Fashion, like I said.
The national symbols of her homeland don't trigger her, or so far haven't. And over the past year, in New York, she's been deeply grateful for this. An allergy to flags or eagles would have reduced her to shut-in status: a species of semiotic agoraphobia.
Her hobby is participating in a web forum discussing/obsessing over a series of mysterious video clips that have been emerging in the pre-Youtube era without identifying information. Are they clips from a finished project that the auteur is deliberately releasing in a seemingly random order? Is it a work in progress? It's a mystery.
Cayce gets hired by an exorbitantly rich firm to consult on their branding, then to track down the creator of the footage. So she basically has all the resources she could want, but has to cut deals with shady characters from the corporate world and the internet, and also she might be being stalked by bad guys.
I didn't feel like we really got into Cayce's head much, and so it was hard to get invested in her or anybody else. The writing style is often fragmentary and distant.
Cayce feels herself make a decision, though she couldn't say what exactly it is, pulls out the chair at the end of the table, and sits, but without putting her legs under the table.
*
And managing to speak, wakes, awash with grief and terror and some sense of a decision made, though she knows not what, nor yet by whom, nor if indeed she ever will.
*
And that in the address window, as though she would actually send it.
Touchpadding down menu to Send.
And of course she doesn't.
And watch it as it sends.
After reading "The Difference Engine," maybe I was cynical about women being objectified. Here, Cayce and her forum friends work on catfishing a nerdy Japanese guy with digitally-manipulated photos of a sexy lady. She's sort of revulsed by this, but not revulsed enough not to do it; it feels like a kind of "have your cake and eat it too" attempt at the narrative. Similarly for "eh I don't know how I feel about working for big business but I might as well spend all their money."
A lot of it is kind of thriller-y; the speculative aspects are slight, mostly Cayce's weird abilities/sensitivies. There's also a plotline about steganography. It is true that you can use technology to hide secret data messages in (say) image files, or watermarking to prove "this was authenticated by the same source." But to the best of my knowledge, you can't use this kind of embedded data to track the spread of a file around the world. So maybe that was just SFnal artistic license, but when it happens to overlap with something I sort of understand, it's like...I can't tell if most readers are supposeed to understand this as taking creative liberties or not. (Similarly, retired NSA cryptographers should not be calling in favors with their friends who are still active to trace e-mails. [Even if you pay them in black-market pocket calculators.] But this is the post-9/11 security state, so no one's at their best.) I guess the idea of a functional reverse image search was science fiction in 2003.
I like the aspect of "obsessive web forum friends coming through for each other and being just as cool in person as they are online." But beyond that, this one didn't really do it for me.
Bingo: High Fashion, like I said.
I was sitting outside at work two weeks ago reading Zen Cho's Behind Frenemy Lines when our regular volunteer suddenly popped up next to me. "What are you reading?!" she demanded, and I blinked at her, and she said "I can't remember the last time I smiled as much reading a book as you were right now! Please tell me the title, I have to read it!"
So now you all know two things, which is that I have no poker face when reading in public and also that Behind Frenemy Lines is a delight. It's a particular delight to me because this book is a really fantastic, affectionately grounded example of bring-your-work-to-the-rom-com; my brother works in the same kind of big law firm as the protagonists and every word of it rang true. As soon as I was done I texted my long-suffering sister-in-law to tell her that she should read it immediately. (My brother should read it even more, but he will never have the time to do so, because, again, he works in big law.)
So, the plot: our heroine Kriya Rajasekar has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and followed her boss to a new firm, which has unfortunately resulted in her sharing an office with the competent but deeply awkward lawyer whose presence throughout her career has coincidentally but unfortunately coincided with all the most screwball catastrophes in Kriya's career.
Charles Goh does not know that he is Kriya's bad-luck charm. Charles actually has kind of a crush. This is regrettable for Charles given that life has provided them with a couple of perfect reasons to fake date (Charles needs a date to his cousin's wedding and Kriya needs to fend off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss) and also a good reason they should not real date (Kriya is busy fending off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss and does not need romantic complications from her office-mate/fake boyfriend.)
As a sidenote, the cousin's wedding is a Fandom Wedding, the details of which I will not spoil but which are the other half of why I was laughing visibly out front of my office building (and which I did not explain to the volunteer.) I would not trust a lot of authors to write a Fandom Wedding, but this book carries it off with charm and ease. It really helps that the leads do not understand what is happening and do not really care except inasmuch as it's nice to see a person you like get married.
Of course everybody catches feelings, but also everybody also catches more serious ethical dilemmas, as the corruption case from The Friend Zone Experiment rebounds back into the plot and forces both Charles and Kriya to figure out where their professional lines actually are. I love where the characters make their respective stands, and where they end up; the stakes feel exactly right for the book, deeply grounded and deeply personal to the characters. It's so nice to pick up a Zen book, and know I can trust her to always be very funny but also to always make her books about something real.
So now you all know two things, which is that I have no poker face when reading in public and also that Behind Frenemy Lines is a delight. It's a particular delight to me because this book is a really fantastic, affectionately grounded example of bring-your-work-to-the-rom-com; my brother works in the same kind of big law firm as the protagonists and every word of it rang true. As soon as I was done I texted my long-suffering sister-in-law to tell her that she should read it immediately. (My brother should read it even more, but he will never have the time to do so, because, again, he works in big law.)
So, the plot: our heroine Kriya Rajasekar has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and followed her boss to a new firm, which has unfortunately resulted in her sharing an office with the competent but deeply awkward lawyer whose presence throughout her career has coincidentally but unfortunately coincided with all the most screwball catastrophes in Kriya's career.
Charles Goh does not know that he is Kriya's bad-luck charm. Charles actually has kind of a crush. This is regrettable for Charles given that life has provided them with a couple of perfect reasons to fake date (Charles needs a date to his cousin's wedding and Kriya needs to fend off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss) and also a good reason they should not real date (Kriya is busy fending off the increasingly inappropriate attentions of her recently-divorced boss and does not need romantic complications from her office-mate/fake boyfriend.)
As a sidenote, the cousin's wedding is a Fandom Wedding, the details of which I will not spoil but which are the other half of why I was laughing visibly out front of my office building (and which I did not explain to the volunteer.) I would not trust a lot of authors to write a Fandom Wedding, but this book carries it off with charm and ease. It really helps that the leads do not understand what is happening and do not really care except inasmuch as it's nice to see a person you like get married.
Of course everybody catches feelings, but also everybody also catches more serious ethical dilemmas, as the corruption case from The Friend Zone Experiment rebounds back into the plot and forces both Charles and Kriya to figure out where their professional lines actually are. I love where the characters make their respective stands, and where they end up; the stakes feel exactly right for the book, deeply grounded and deeply personal to the characters. It's so nice to pick up a Zen book, and know I can trust her to always be very funny but also to always make her books about something real.
There are some books that I can't read until I've achieved a pleasing balance of people whose taste I trust who think the book is good, and people whose taste I trust who think the book is bad. This allows me to cleanse my heart and form my own opinion in perfect neutrality.
As it happened I hit this balance for The Ministry of Time some time ago, but then I still needed to take a while longer to read it because, unfortunately, I was cursed with the knowledge that a.) it was Terror fanfiction and b.) it was on Obama's 2024 summer reading list and c.) I had chanced across the phrase "Obama says RPF is fine" on Tumblr and could not look at the front cover of Ministry of Time without bursting into laughter. And I wanted to come to this book with a clear heart! an open mind! so I waited!
.... and then all of that waiting was in fact completely fruitless, I was never going to be able to come to this book with a clear heart and an open mind, because, Terror fanfiction aside, I'm like 99% sure that it's either a direct response to Kage Baker's Company series or Kaliane Bradley is possessed by Kage Baker's ghost. Welcome back, Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax! The mere fact that you're so much less annoying this time around means I'm grading on a huge curve!
Okay, so the central two figures of The Ministry of Time are our narrator -- a second-gen Cambodian-English government translator whose mother fled the Khmer Rouge, and who has gotten shuffled into a top-secret government project working with 'unusual refugees' -- and Polar Explorer Graham Gore Of The Doomed Franklin Expedition, who has been rescued from his miserable death on the ice and brought forward into the future by the aforementioned top-secret government project.
The project also includes a small handful of other time rescuees -- Graham Gore is the only actual factual historical figure, and frankly I think the book would be better if he wasn't, but that's a sidenote. Each time refugee gets a 'bridge' to live with them and help them acclimate; in Gore's case, that's our narrator. The first seventy to eighty percent of the book consists mostly of loving, detailed, funny descriptions of the narrator hanging out with the time refugees as they adapt to The Near Future, interspersed with a.) dark hints about the sinister nature of the project and the narrator's increasing isolation within it that she repeatedly apologizes to us for ignoring, b.) dark hints about the oncoming climate apocalypse, c.) reflections the narrator's relationship to her family history, and d.) intermittent bits of Terror fanfiction about Gore's Time On the Ice.
I do not think this part of the book is necessarily well-structured or paced, but I did have a great time with it. Does it feel fanfictional? Oh, yes. The infrastructure that surrounds this hypothetical government project is almost entirely nonexistent in order to conveniently allow the narrator long, uninterrupted stretches to attempt to introduce Graham Gore to various forms of pop music;genarti described it cruelly but perhaps accurately as "Avengers tower fanfic". But I like the thematic link between time travelers and refugees, and I like the jokes, and I like the thing Bradley is doing -- the thing Kage Baker does, that I am extremely weak to -- where just when you're lulled into enjoying the humor of anachronism and the sense of humanity's universal connection you run smack into an unexpected, uncrossable cultural gap and bruise your nose.
Now, this only ever happens with Gore, because Gore is the only one of the refugees who is a real person in several ways. Margaret (the seventeenth-century lesbian) and Arthur (the gay WWI officer) are likeable gay sidekicks, and then there's a seventeenth-century asshole whose name I've forgotten. At one point Arthur tosses off a mention to his commanding officer 'Owen who wrote poetry' and I nearly threw the book across the room. Have the courage of your convictions, Kaliane Bradley! None of these coy little hints, either do the work to kidnap Wilfred Owen and Margery Kempe from history or don't! But Gore is obsessively drawn and theorized and researched, because, of course, the whole book is largely about Being Obsessed With Gore, about interrogating why the narrator, a not-quite-white-passing brown woman from an immigrant family, has built her whole life around this sexy British naval officer turned time refugee, symbolic of the crimes and failures of empire in six or seven different directions. A bit navel-gazey, perhaps, but as a person who spent five books begging Kage Baker to think at all critically about the horrible British naval officer turned time refugee she'd built, I'm just like, 'well, thank God!'
And, again, for the five people who care, I cannot emphasize enough just how similar Gore is to Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax and yet miraculously how much less annoying. They both have a code of ethics formed by the loyal and genuine belief in the good work done by the British Imperial project (thematically and historically reasonable); a shocking level of natural charisma combined with various secret agent skills at weaponry, deception, strategy and theft (extremely funny, extra funny with Gore because as far as I can tell what we know about him From History is 'normal officer! popular guy!'); and -- such a specific detail to have in common! -- Big Sexy Nose That The Man In Question Is Really Self-Conscious About.
And both of them, of course, end up struggling to navigate their positionality in the Imperial machine, between government operative-with-agency and experimental-subject-with-none.
So that's the first seventy to eighty percent of the book, and then, in the last twenty to thirty percent of the book, the dark hints finally resolve into the actual plot, ( which is IMO successful in theme but completely goofy in actual detail )
As it happened I hit this balance for The Ministry of Time some time ago, but then I still needed to take a while longer to read it because, unfortunately, I was cursed with the knowledge that a.) it was Terror fanfiction and b.) it was on Obama's 2024 summer reading list and c.) I had chanced across the phrase "Obama says RPF is fine" on Tumblr and could not look at the front cover of Ministry of Time without bursting into laughter. And I wanted to come to this book with a clear heart! an open mind! so I waited!
.... and then all of that waiting was in fact completely fruitless, I was never going to be able to come to this book with a clear heart and an open mind, because, Terror fanfiction aside, I'm like 99% sure that it's either a direct response to Kage Baker's Company series or Kaliane Bradley is possessed by Kage Baker's ghost. Welcome back, Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax! The mere fact that you're so much less annoying this time around means I'm grading on a huge curve!
Okay, so the central two figures of The Ministry of Time are our narrator -- a second-gen Cambodian-English government translator whose mother fled the Khmer Rouge, and who has gotten shuffled into a top-secret government project working with 'unusual refugees' -- and Polar Explorer Graham Gore Of The Doomed Franklin Expedition, who has been rescued from his miserable death on the ice and brought forward into the future by the aforementioned top-secret government project.
The project also includes a small handful of other time rescuees -- Graham Gore is the only actual factual historical figure, and frankly I think the book would be better if he wasn't, but that's a sidenote. Each time refugee gets a 'bridge' to live with them and help them acclimate; in Gore's case, that's our narrator. The first seventy to eighty percent of the book consists mostly of loving, detailed, funny descriptions of the narrator hanging out with the time refugees as they adapt to The Near Future, interspersed with a.) dark hints about the sinister nature of the project and the narrator's increasing isolation within it that she repeatedly apologizes to us for ignoring, b.) dark hints about the oncoming climate apocalypse, c.) reflections the narrator's relationship to her family history, and d.) intermittent bits of Terror fanfiction about Gore's Time On the Ice.
I do not think this part of the book is necessarily well-structured or paced, but I did have a great time with it. Does it feel fanfictional? Oh, yes. The infrastructure that surrounds this hypothetical government project is almost entirely nonexistent in order to conveniently allow the narrator long, uninterrupted stretches to attempt to introduce Graham Gore to various forms of pop music;
genarti described it cruelly but perhaps accurately as "Avengers tower fanfic". But I like the thematic link between time travelers and refugees, and I like the jokes, and I like the thing Bradley is doing -- the thing Kage Baker does, that I am extremely weak to -- where just when you're lulled into enjoying the humor of anachronism and the sense of humanity's universal connection you run smack into an unexpected, uncrossable cultural gap and bruise your nose. Now, this only ever happens with Gore, because Gore is the only one of the refugees who is a real person in several ways. Margaret (the seventeenth-century lesbian) and Arthur (the gay WWI officer) are likeable gay sidekicks, and then there's a seventeenth-century asshole whose name I've forgotten. At one point Arthur tosses off a mention to his commanding officer 'Owen who wrote poetry' and I nearly threw the book across the room. Have the courage of your convictions, Kaliane Bradley! None of these coy little hints, either do the work to kidnap Wilfred Owen and Margery Kempe from history or don't! But Gore is obsessively drawn and theorized and researched, because, of course, the whole book is largely about Being Obsessed With Gore, about interrogating why the narrator, a not-quite-white-passing brown woman from an immigrant family, has built her whole life around this sexy British naval officer turned time refugee, symbolic of the crimes and failures of empire in six or seven different directions. A bit navel-gazey, perhaps, but as a person who spent five books begging Kage Baker to think at all critically about the horrible British naval officer turned time refugee she'd built, I'm just like, 'well, thank God!'
And, again, for the five people who care, I cannot emphasize enough just how similar Gore is to Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax and yet miraculously how much less annoying. They both have a code of ethics formed by the loyal and genuine belief in the good work done by the British Imperial project (thematically and historically reasonable); a shocking level of natural charisma combined with various secret agent skills at weaponry, deception, strategy and theft (extremely funny, extra funny with Gore because as far as I can tell what we know about him From History is 'normal officer! popular guy!'); and -- such a specific detail to have in common! -- Big Sexy Nose That The Man In Question Is Really Self-Conscious About.
And both of them, of course, end up struggling to navigate their positionality in the Imperial machine, between government operative-with-agency and experimental-subject-with-none.
So that's the first seventy to eighty percent of the book, and then, in the last twenty to thirty percent of the book, the dark hints finally resolve into the actual plot, ( which is IMO successful in theme but completely goofy in actual detail )
Knee is slowly improving, hamstring is slowly improving, foot is getting worse!
Remember that spot on the ball of my right foot that I injured last year, that popped and slid when I walked on it, caused weird feelings in my middle toes (especially the one next to my big toe), and sometimes was painful? I had to buy whole new shoes to deal with it and consistently wear recovery slides?
Eventually it started to slowly get better, and it finally got to the point where it didn't pop even when I stepped on it, only if I manipulated it with my fingers.
Well, on one of my recent long walks (2 weeks ago, I think), I made the mistake of massaging it when I was massaging the rest of my foot for pain relief. I figured out last year that I shouldn't do that, but I thought it was safe this year! Alas, no, the spot has not recovered that much.
I immediately noticed it was popping again around the house. "Dammit, I re-stretched the spot that had been slowly tightening. Fine, it'll get better again like it did last time."
Two days ago, I was out on a short walk about half a block away, and I noticed the weird sensations in my toes. It's hard to explain, but the middle toes feel cooler and also mostly wet. Last year they would feel mostly warm and wet, but right now it's 36 Celsius, so maybe everything feels cool in comparison to that.
This is happening around the house even in my orthopedic slides, and I'm not sure what's up with that. I had noticed that my outdoor slides had deformed due to normal wear and tear (that's what you get for walking 5-8 miles a day in them, I guess), and I was overdue for buying new ones (they're expensive, which is why I was putting them off). It also occurred to me that the insoles in my regular shoes are a year old and probably also flattened, so I've ordered new ones of those.
Hopefully those help! I need to be able to start walking again! I was just starting to envision a future in which my knee and hamstrings were stable enough to allow running again. This weekend will be perfect walking weather, but I may need to stay home, finish revising the latest draft of Peter Keith, and give my foot another week to see if the new footwear helps. We'll see if I actually adhere to that plan. (I continue to badly need a break from writing about Peter Keith.)
Remember that spot on the ball of my right foot that I injured last year, that popped and slid when I walked on it, caused weird feelings in my middle toes (especially the one next to my big toe), and sometimes was painful? I had to buy whole new shoes to deal with it and consistently wear recovery slides?
Eventually it started to slowly get better, and it finally got to the point where it didn't pop even when I stepped on it, only if I manipulated it with my fingers.
Well, on one of my recent long walks (2 weeks ago, I think), I made the mistake of massaging it when I was massaging the rest of my foot for pain relief. I figured out last year that I shouldn't do that, but I thought it was safe this year! Alas, no, the spot has not recovered that much.
I immediately noticed it was popping again around the house. "Dammit, I re-stretched the spot that had been slowly tightening. Fine, it'll get better again like it did last time."
Two days ago, I was out on a short walk about half a block away, and I noticed the weird sensations in my toes. It's hard to explain, but the middle toes feel cooler and also mostly wet. Last year they would feel mostly warm and wet, but right now it's 36 Celsius, so maybe everything feels cool in comparison to that.
This is happening around the house even in my orthopedic slides, and I'm not sure what's up with that. I had noticed that my outdoor slides had deformed due to normal wear and tear (that's what you get for walking 5-8 miles a day in them, I guess), and I was overdue for buying new ones (they're expensive, which is why I was putting them off). It also occurred to me that the insoles in my regular shoes are a year old and probably also flattened, so I've ordered new ones of those.
Hopefully those help! I need to be able to start walking again! I was just starting to envision a future in which my knee and hamstrings were stable enough to allow running again. This weekend will be perfect walking weather, but I may need to stay home, finish revising the latest draft of Peter Keith, and give my foot another week to see if the new footwear helps. We'll see if I actually adhere to that plan. (I continue to badly need a break from writing about Peter Keith.)
30 mile walk on Friday! And my left knee, left hamstrings, and back all held up better! As in, my knee became painful and/or sliding and popping, requiring intervention, 3 times, not a million times; my back made me lie down once, not a million times; my hamstrings hurt a lot but not so much that I had to stop for them!
I did have to take a 45-minute break for a work meeting (it was a workday), so that probably contributed to my feet not hurting as much. I definitely had foot pain, and for the last 4 or so miles, that was the majority of the pain (especially as I was able to take off my bag for the last 3 miles and ease up on my back).
That night, I lay in bed with hurting legs, and I eventually realized that it was nerve pain from tight glutes, not muscle pain. My legs were not actually that tired! My muscles actually felt really strong at the end of the walk, like they could have easily kept going another 5-10 miles, if not for the foot pain, the hamstrings, the nerve pain, and the running out of time at 10 pm. If I hadn't been worried about my knee, I would have run as much as I could (I ran half a block near the end and felt fine, had the fitness if not the knee stability to keep going.)
Lying in bed, I tentatively halfway stretched the glutes on my right side once. That's the stretch that's extremely effective but fucks up my knees, so I only did it a little bit, only on the side with the stable knee, and I stopped as soon as I got some pain relief. But it really helped! I'm going to see if I can figure out a stretch for the gluteus medius and minimus that doesn't fuck up my knee; I have an idea.
Soreness over the weekend was minimal, although my legs are definitely not fresh and have no desire to do another 30 mile walk immediately.
One thing that went wrong was that in order to keep my left knee happy, I had to put my weight on the inside of my foot, not the center. That's obviously bad alignment, so I not only ended up with a bit of a tight muscle in the shin and ankle area, I wore out the seam in the spot I was leaning on in my shoe. These amazing shoes are freaking expensive, so I'm not happy about that, especially with all the expenses of 2025. Oh, well!
I did get a blister on my left little toe, which has been a thing on all my long walks in the last few weeks, but it's never a bad blister, only comes on toward the last mile or two of the ~30 mile walks, never interferes with my walking even then (very mild discomfort), and goes away quickly. I do wonder how much of that is angling my left foot wrong to appease my injured knee.
The worst pains were my left hamstrings, which have clearly not recovered as much as I'd hoped (though they are a lot better than they were, and are not hurting me on short walks), and my back. The good news is that in the last two weeks, my back pain did miraculously get back to where it was before May! No idea why that is, but previously, if I only took out my phone once or twice for navigational purposes, I'd be in agony and needing to lie down every mile afterwards. This time, I took out my phone a million times, because it was a workday and I had to monitor Slack*, and I didn't have to lie down!
Oh, yeah, where did I go on this walk? I went to a state forest 11 miles away that I've been wanting to go to for over a year. I've been working up to being able to walk 11 miles in each direction plus an amount of time in the forest to make it worth it, and now I can! I want the second half to be less of a sufferfest, but we're getting there (I hope). The fitness is clearly there, the injuries still need work.
I was able to spend over 90 minutes in the forest, and I would have spent another hour if I hadn't run out of food and been concerned about making it out and to a place of purveyance (we're talking remote!) before hunger became too much. Next time I remember to stock up at the last grocery store before the forest! (Ugh, I just remembered I'm moving soon, there probably won't be a next time. Anyway! The point remains. Slightly more food, slightly less worry about too much backpack weight for my back pain.)
* My boss started off my walk by pinging me about an error and asking if it was related to my Wednesday migration. I obviously couldn't check, so we asked someone else to check, and I had to monitor closely to see if/when that person was going to get online, and then monitor and respond to what they were saying about the error, and I had to keep checking if my boss would need me to turn around (or call a Lyft) and go home. Fortunately, it turned out to be unrelated to my work (which I thought it was, hence why I kept walking, but I could have been wrong!).
All the flexibility we get at work is highly contingent on responsiveness. If you want to be the kind of person who never responds to work messages when you're off, you can, but then you're going to have to request all your time off formally. If you're willing to monitor Slack and be responsive, you can have a bunch of informal time off. I choose to take the latter approach, which is how I get to take 30-mile walks on workdays that I'm technically "working". My boss has actually commented that he's happy to give me walking time, as I'm often more responsive when I'm walking than people who are at the computer working and focused on what they're doing.
I did have to take a 45-minute break for a work meeting (it was a workday), so that probably contributed to my feet not hurting as much. I definitely had foot pain, and for the last 4 or so miles, that was the majority of the pain (especially as I was able to take off my bag for the last 3 miles and ease up on my back).
That night, I lay in bed with hurting legs, and I eventually realized that it was nerve pain from tight glutes, not muscle pain. My legs were not actually that tired! My muscles actually felt really strong at the end of the walk, like they could have easily kept going another 5-10 miles, if not for the foot pain, the hamstrings, the nerve pain, and the running out of time at 10 pm. If I hadn't been worried about my knee, I would have run as much as I could (I ran half a block near the end and felt fine, had the fitness if not the knee stability to keep going.)
Lying in bed, I tentatively halfway stretched the glutes on my right side once. That's the stretch that's extremely effective but fucks up my knees, so I only did it a little bit, only on the side with the stable knee, and I stopped as soon as I got some pain relief. But it really helped! I'm going to see if I can figure out a stretch for the gluteus medius and minimus that doesn't fuck up my knee; I have an idea.
Soreness over the weekend was minimal, although my legs are definitely not fresh and have no desire to do another 30 mile walk immediately.
One thing that went wrong was that in order to keep my left knee happy, I had to put my weight on the inside of my foot, not the center. That's obviously bad alignment, so I not only ended up with a bit of a tight muscle in the shin and ankle area, I wore out the seam in the spot I was leaning on in my shoe. These amazing shoes are freaking expensive, so I'm not happy about that, especially with all the expenses of 2025. Oh, well!
I did get a blister on my left little toe, which has been a thing on all my long walks in the last few weeks, but it's never a bad blister, only comes on toward the last mile or two of the ~30 mile walks, never interferes with my walking even then (very mild discomfort), and goes away quickly. I do wonder how much of that is angling my left foot wrong to appease my injured knee.
The worst pains were my left hamstrings, which have clearly not recovered as much as I'd hoped (though they are a lot better than they were, and are not hurting me on short walks), and my back. The good news is that in the last two weeks, my back pain did miraculously get back to where it was before May! No idea why that is, but previously, if I only took out my phone once or twice for navigational purposes, I'd be in agony and needing to lie down every mile afterwards. This time, I took out my phone a million times, because it was a workday and I had to monitor Slack*, and I didn't have to lie down!
Oh, yeah, where did I go on this walk? I went to a state forest 11 miles away that I've been wanting to go to for over a year. I've been working up to being able to walk 11 miles in each direction plus an amount of time in the forest to make it worth it, and now I can! I want the second half to be less of a sufferfest, but we're getting there (I hope). The fitness is clearly there, the injuries still need work.
I was able to spend over 90 minutes in the forest, and I would have spent another hour if I hadn't run out of food and been concerned about making it out and to a place of purveyance (we're talking remote!) before hunger became too much. Next time I remember to stock up at the last grocery store before the forest! (Ugh, I just remembered I'm moving soon, there probably won't be a next time. Anyway! The point remains. Slightly more food, slightly less worry about too much backpack weight for my back pain.)
* My boss started off my walk by pinging me about an error and asking if it was related to my Wednesday migration. I obviously couldn't check, so we asked someone else to check, and I had to monitor closely to see if/when that person was going to get online, and then monitor and respond to what they were saying about the error, and I had to keep checking if my boss would need me to turn around (or call a Lyft) and go home. Fortunately, it turned out to be unrelated to my work (which I thought it was, hence why I kept walking, but I could have been wrong!).
All the flexibility we get at work is highly contingent on responsiveness. If you want to be the kind of person who never responds to work messages when you're off, you can, but then you're going to have to request all your time off formally. If you're willing to monitor Slack and be responsive, you can have a bunch of informal time off. I choose to take the latter approach, which is how I get to take 30-mile walks on workdays that I'm technically "working". My boss has actually commented that he's happy to give me walking time, as I'm often more responsive when I'm walking than people who are at the computer working and focused on what they're doing.
Invested in a nice new monitor (since the last one unexpectedly died) and what a delight! Maybe I should replace the other one I've had since like 2006 lol.
*****
( books! )
*****
( books! )
Apropos of my previous post, I also want to say that if you do the math, i.e., the 4.5 months of work that I put into prepping the migration (mostly researching, writing, and testing code), you will see it started in early March, which means I sustained momentum on this project through the disruption of my life that was my partner announcing on April 8 that she was leaving the country and leaving on May 1.
I am proud of that. I did it by dint of
1) working on it a little bit every day, weekend or weekday, except for April 8 and May 1 themselves,
2) agreeing with my boss that while the massive disruption was ongoing, I would keep the CouchDB migration moving along, and be responsive to team needs and do small amounts of work, but not take on medium-sized additional projects like I normally would.
My brain works largely by momentum, and I knew that if I took time away from this project, even if everyone understood and supported that decision, even just a weekend, it would be hell trying to pick it back up again, and I would be making my own life easier with my minimum daily quota.
This is why in the last few years,cahn's job has been to hold me accountable for various quotas, mostly German study and Peter Keith writing.
I'm hoping to finish the current batch of Peter Keith writing in the next week or two, and then get back to other things, like German study and reading! I miss reading.
I am proud of that. I did it by dint of
1) working on it a little bit every day, weekend or weekday, except for April 8 and May 1 themselves,
2) agreeing with my boss that while the massive disruption was ongoing, I would keep the CouchDB migration moving along, and be responsive to team needs and do small amounts of work, but not take on medium-sized additional projects like I normally would.
My brain works largely by momentum, and I knew that if I took time away from this project, even if everyone understood and supported that decision, even just a weekend, it would be hell trying to pick it back up again, and I would be making my own life easier with my minimum daily quota.
This is why in the last few years,
cahn's job has been to hold me accountable for various quotas, mostly German study and Peter Keith writing.I'm hoping to finish the current batch of Peter Keith writing in the next week or two, and then get back to other things, like German study and reading! I miss reading.
On Wednesday, I performed one of the biggest/hardest/scariest database migrations of my career, from CouchDB to Postgres. It took 11 intense hours to complete, the culmination of 4 and a half months of work, but it went off without a hitch (to everyone's surprise, mine most of all; I was expecting to have to debug issues along the way).
This is something my boss has been saying the company needs to do for at least 5 years. He brings it up at executive meetings and tries to get the company to allocate resources to the migration. But everybody else always had higher priorities.
Two years ago, he told me our team didn't have the skills and the engineering team would have to do it. I mean, we (I) would do the database part, but they would have to write all the code.
Last year, one of the engineers on my team and I pulled off a couple major database migrations by ourselves--again without a hitch--that had my boss going, "Actually, I think the two of you could do it!"
Then, this year, when it finally got prioritized, I actually volunteered to do it myself, because I thought I finally had the skills.
And I did! I pulled it off! It's one of the biggest engineering triumphs at our company. And my doing it meant everybody else could keep working on their major projects and nothing had to be delayed to make this happen.
On Thursday, my boss asked what would make me feel appreciated. I responded with the two most me things ever:
One, I wanted him to lead the team meeting on Friday so I could take a long walk and dial in without having to share my screen and walk us through the slide deck. (Also, it ended up being super windy, so I could barely talk at all.)
Two, when he commented that he noticed I had already started a MySQL to Postgres migration, I was like, "Yeah, that was going to be the other thing I asked for: let me focus on that next."
IOW, my reaction to being praised for work is to ask to do more work. :P
Also, also! While I was out for my walk, the VP of Engineering came back from an executive business trip and discovered we had completely eliminated CouchDB from our system. He started posting the below in Slack channels with hundreds of people across the company, so everyone could appreciate this accomplishment. (Note that CouchDB *per se* is not a problem, it's how we had it implemented at our company. I don't want to badmouth CouchDB, which is a perfectly fine database if you use it right.)
Here is what he said:
Over the past 3–5 years, it's hard to count how many times we've heard some version of "CouchDB is a huge risk." But while many of us have voiced the concern, Mildred actually took action.
Their work to fully remove CouchDB from our platform is a huge win—not just for reducing technical debt, but for improving our overall security posture. This change has a direct impact on our ability to meet and maintain the compliance standards we hold ourselves to.
Even more importantly, it eliminates a system none of us had deep expertise in, which clears the path for a healthier, more sustainable platform going forward.
Thank you for your leadership and execution,mildred_of_midgard—this is real impact.
This is something my boss has been saying the company needs to do for at least 5 years. He brings it up at executive meetings and tries to get the company to allocate resources to the migration. But everybody else always had higher priorities.
Two years ago, he told me our team didn't have the skills and the engineering team would have to do it. I mean, we (I) would do the database part, but they would have to write all the code.
Last year, one of the engineers on my team and I pulled off a couple major database migrations by ourselves--again without a hitch--that had my boss going, "Actually, I think the two of you could do it!"
Then, this year, when it finally got prioritized, I actually volunteered to do it myself, because I thought I finally had the skills.
And I did! I pulled it off! It's one of the biggest engineering triumphs at our company. And my doing it meant everybody else could keep working on their major projects and nothing had to be delayed to make this happen.
On Thursday, my boss asked what would make me feel appreciated. I responded with the two most me things ever:
One, I wanted him to lead the team meeting on Friday so I could take a long walk and dial in without having to share my screen and walk us through the slide deck. (Also, it ended up being super windy, so I could barely talk at all.)
Two, when he commented that he noticed I had already started a MySQL to Postgres migration, I was like, "Yeah, that was going to be the other thing I asked for: let me focus on that next."
IOW, my reaction to being praised for work is to ask to do more work. :P
Also, also! While I was out for my walk, the VP of Engineering came back from an executive business trip and discovered we had completely eliminated CouchDB from our system. He started posting the below in Slack channels with hundreds of people across the company, so everyone could appreciate this accomplishment. (Note that CouchDB *per se* is not a problem, it's how we had it implemented at our company. I don't want to badmouth CouchDB, which is a perfectly fine database if you use it right.)
Here is what he said:
Over the past 3–5 years, it's hard to count how many times we've heard some version of "CouchDB is a huge risk." But while many of us have voiced the concern, Mildred actually took action.
Their work to fully remove CouchDB from our platform is a huge win—not just for reducing technical debt, but for improving our overall security posture. This change has a direct impact on our ability to meet and maintain the compliance standards we hold ourselves to.
Even more importantly, it eliminates a system none of us had deep expertise in, which clears the path for a healthier, more sustainable platform going forward.
Thank you for your leadership and execution,
mildred_of_midgard—this is real impact.