:the fyr place:

What have I been up lately? Let's see ...

It's been a minute, yeah?

Well, I've gotten a few things done since the last time I posted.

The DO droplet has been successfully downsized and I finally got caddy working as proxy ... nginx is disabled. I gotta tell you that I love working with Caddy. It is so much easier to manage than nginx. And so much fun too. I don't even have to manually do a certbot renew on my certificates because caddy does this automatically. It also forwards all the usual headers (X-Forwarded-For, etc) to the backend by default. It also servers SSL by default. You have to tell it not to. There is even a tutorial for running caddy on your development machine locally with SSL but it's for Linux users and I haven't spent any time researching how to do it on OS X. I am not in any hurry at the moment. The Python built-in http server works just fine.

The other stuff I have been doing is trying to sort through an episode that happened 6 years ago, in a public post on Facebook where my "sister-in-law" and "aunt-in-law" decided to give into their inner trump and lay into me for expressing my opinions on the USian thanksgiving holiday.

Apparently, I have no right to criticise the US. I should be grateful ... or at least have ... I dunno ... gone back to where I came from ... if I don't like it here? Or something. I still don't understand why they felt the need to attack me like that. I have been holing on to a lot of anger about it. Anger and hurt. But in all honesty, that isn't helping and only hurting me some more. I am stuck, now, on figuring out whether to just put them in my rear-view mirror and just move on as if they don't exist ... or some other strategy. I was able to write it all out in a private draft but it is so toxic that I think I'll just keep it private. The post is up on Facebook still if anyone is interested in reading through it all. But I don't need to rehash it here.

But I will summarise for those who would rather stay off Facebook.

Here is what I posted:

I have been having difficulty with the Thanksgiving holiday ever since I moved to the United States. I don't understand the history of it or the contemporary meaning of it. I have difficulty associating it with a feeling of gratitude. There is a thought that it had to do with giving thanks for the harvest, but unless you're in the south, the harvest should have long come in before now, yes?

So it must be something else.

The other bit of history that I can recall has to do with the pilgrims and the Native Americans ... which planted a seed of doubt and cynicism in me when I first heard it.

This year ... the whole idea of it feels even more distasteful than ever.

As an immigrant, as a black woman ... I am not excited to "celebrate" Thanksgiving this year.

The dogpile that followed is memorable only in that it is your typical white womaning on a public post of a supposed family member in the only way trump cultists know how to do. It would be funny if it wasn't so damned sad. I am not over it, but I am getting there.


Finally, I discovered Calckey and decided to make the move from Misskey. Why? I am not entirely sure right now since the last few weeks have been a little topsy turvey with an update that almost completely screwed my server. Somehow I managed to get it working again and I don't intend to touch it until I know the next release is stable. It works right now.

On the sidelines I have been testing out a new medication that is supposed to help with some of my symptoms - my anxiety symptoms, that is. Long story short, the meds I am on tamp down on the anxiety and panic attacks, but they don't really help with the levels of anxiety I still feel. So the psychiatrist I have been seeing has me trying out different things to balance out that negative side effects as well as do a little better at managing my anxiety symptoms. It's not going as well as I thought it might - the side effects of this one is ... uncomfortable. I get awakened in the middle of the night with some really bad reflux, my mouth constantly has a kind of metallic, rubbery taste, and I am sleeping too much again. But ... focus is a little better and sleep is more refreshing so I guess there is an upside.

I think I am going to crosspost to writefreely ... at least until I figure out how to do feeds from here.