There are no strings on me... but cats and chocolate

I'm headed down to Jamestown, VA this weekend for Military Through the Ages.

My least favorite part of reenacting is packing all my gear into the car. This trip I'm just taking the tent (So Stephen and Shary have shade for their beer brewing demo), chairs to sit on, and my clothes.

I'm still waffling on bringing my Sutlerin gear, but I need to have something to do or talk about when I'm down there, or I get restless. I can't help cook, because they pre-cook (no idea when the judges are going to show up, so they kinda have to) and Kelly pretty much doesn't let anyone into her kitchen.

Even if I do bring the Sulterin stuff (small items that I would pretend to have for sale for the troops), it's still a fraction of what I used to pack for CTRF. It always makes me think I'm forgetting something. The car isn't overflowing? Something is wrong!

I was woken up at 5:40am this morning by the truck that empties the dumpster. My condo is not near either of the two dumpsters, but I heard the first being emptied, then the truck rumbled up the driveway right next to my bedroom and I heard the second being emptied.

I cannot imagine how loud it was for the buildings on either side of the dumpsters, all that bashing around. They usually show up in the middle of the day, so I'm awake when I hear them. Now I know they're loud enough to wake me up. What possessed them to arrive at o-dark-thirty I cannot guess. Bastards.

OMG, if you don't follow Frock Flicks, you MUST check out the video for Jane Austin's Period Drama.

Because it is HILARIOUS!

I took today and tomorrow off to take a free training that Google was offering partners for International Women’s Day. It’s a two day training that can lead to a test to earn a Generative AI Leader certificate. I figured it’s free, and it gives me something official looking that I can add to my resume that proves that I’ve got some familiarity with AI.

I’m regretting signing up for this course. The first half hour was literally a Google commercial. For this course. That I’d already signed up for and WAS LITERALLY ALREADY ATTENDING. I kept thinking, “When are we going to get to the AI part?”

And then when we did, good Lord, the presenter. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or what, but she drove me crazy. She was peppy to the point of obnoxiousness. At first I was wondering, is this woman high or drunk? Especially when her dog started acting up and she showed us the bottle of hemp treats she was giving the dog to try to calm them down to stop being disruptive. And I had her pegged as ADHD long before she commented (around hour six) that she was ADHD. She was all over the place, moving around in her chair, waving her arms around, leaning closer to and further away from the camera, playing with her hair. It was distracting just watching her.

And OMG the dog. It was excited because it was snowing out and that was making noises on the roof. Then she had workmen in the home and the dog was growling and barking to protect its territory from strangers. The presenter was distracted by the dog growling and barking. And I was distracted by her being distracted, and occasionally commenting on what the dog was doing. She was petting the dog with one hand and running the class with the other hand. Then all the dog lovers in the chat wanted to see the dog, so we had to stop to try to get it up on her lap on camera. The dog was in the background, the dog was under her desk. This went on the ENTIRE seven and a half hours of the class. We had four breaks and a lunch, and at no time did she take the dog out of the room to remove the distraction. So fucking unprofessional when you’re presenting to over 4,000 people.

It's never a good sign when I start taking notes for my review before we're even a quarter of the way through a course. I'm going to have to go back through the course with the sound muted and closed captions on, and try to arrange some other window to block my sight of the presenter to see if I can pick up on some of the content that I just wasn't able to concentrate on with all the distractions. Grrrr.