July 12, 2025 - Day 2 of the Buck Moon

little update

Hello my beautiful little blog!

It's been a little while, so just a little update on what I have been up to:

I feel a site redesign brewing. This site has been rather cumbersome to update because of the calligraphy theme. Whenever I update the theme, I hope to preserve this theme in some kind of snapshot, like a personal site museum.
I have been biking a lot, and am getting more into distance cycling. On Thursday I biked 30 miles after work along a few trails, circumnavigating three lakes. It's been really exciting to push myself further and further, and I hope to work up to bike camping!
I have also been a lot more social lately, and I have been trying hard to meet new people. It was hard in mid-June because I had to work through a lot of fear and anxiety around friendships and relationships, but I'm feeling much more energetic and secure now!
Slightly related to some of the above, but there is a local queer coding group that I am hoping to visit soon! I'm planning on working on my site redesign whenever I go to one of their events. There's also a group ride with a local queer/trans cycling group next week that I'm really looking forward to.
I haven't been shooting my bow as much lately, but I'm hoping to get to the range tomorrow. The air quality has gotten bad again, but archery isn't as aerobic as biking by far, so I may still be able to wear a mask at the range to avoid respiratory issues.
For the past four months I have had some pretty intrusive sleep issues. I've been waking up at almost precisely 2:30 AM about 5 nights a week, and have barely been able to get back to sleep. A coworker was telling me about her menopause symptoms, and she had the exact same sleep disturbances, which made me curious. I increased my estrogen dosage and IMMEDIATELY my sleep improved. This has been a huge relief!!!
I've been teaching myself how to work on my bike from a library book and it's really nice! I'm finding I really prefer to learn out of books because the wide open, unlimited nature of the information on the internet makes it hard to simply move forward with a task and learn a skill.

That's all for now! If you're reading this, thank you for being here and thank you for taking the time to look into this little window of my life. I appreciate you very deeply.

P.S. I had a bus driver today that excitedly asked where I got my sunglasses (which have black plastic rims and black lenses, think Blues Brothers but more matte frames). I told him Zenni, which I now know was wrong because it was actually Eye Buy Direct, but he still wrote it down and made sure he got the spelling right which was very sweet. In the short time I was on the bus, he talked to a Spanish-speaking passenger and tried to correctly say good morning in Spanish. He said he sees Spanish-speaking passengers acting shy or quiet because they don't speak English or aren't confident in it, and that he wants them to feel comfortable and welcome by learning their language. I'm going to be thinking about him for a long time, he was so wonderful and earnest! I think I have a lot to learn from him.