I've been gone for a while. Inconsistency is kind of my thing, unfortunately — but let's do a quick catch-up on the past few months! Not that anybody asked, but this is my corner of the internet and I do as I please!
Work stuff
Work has been making me increasingly restless. I feel like I'm not growing, not improving. And on top of that, there's this constant pressure to use AI for everything — the message is pretty clear: learn to use artificial intelligence or you can't be a good educator. People around me are using it to design workshops and lesson plans, but something always feels off. To me it mostly just looks like a massive pile of slop. For translations it's decent enough, but almost everything else it spits out feels like a sloppy mess, full of errors.
N. or Menchiko
A wonderful new soul has joined the family! On February 8th, all the way from Spain, N. arrived — though honestly I'm not that fond of the nickname. What if I called her Menchiko instead? It was on my shortlist but I ended up going with N. Anyway, Menchiko is a skinny little black galgo — a Spanish greyhound — scared of everything and everyone.
She's the first traumatised dog I've ever cared for, and it's so much harder than I anticipated. Through her I've come to realise just how exceptional my previous dog QueenB was, and how lucky I was that she was my first rescue. With Nini, we've started working with a canine behaviourist — less to train her, really, and more to train me to support her properly. She deserves a whole post to herself, but here's the short version:
We (me and daddy) picked her up near Bergamo from a rescue association that rehomes Spanish dogs, mostly galgos — the same association who gave me QueenB in 2007. They work with Galgo del Sol, a dog shelter in Spain. From what we know, her owner (a galguero — the Spanish word for those cruel and heartless motherfuckers who hunt with galgos — and this is my personal opinion on any other hunter) surrendered her to the shelter in early 2025. She was born in 2023, so she likely never raced, and we think she was given up because she has absolutely no prey drive whatsoever. She seems to have spent her whole life surrounded by other galgos, with very little human contact — and I suspect the little she did have wasn't kind, because she's terrified of people. The number of scars on her little body are so many that every time I look at them I get angry (I already said that I hate hunters? I hate them all!). People don't deserve dogs.
She's been with me for about three months now, and progress is slow. For every step forward, we seem to take one back. Going for a walk feels like putting her through torture — she sees the leash and immediately curls up, trembling. Once she's actually up and moving she'll follow along just fine, but it feels more like resignation than willingness.
When we go out I use both a martingale collar and an escape-proof harness, because on a couple of occasions, when cars drove towards us, Menchiko completely panicked. Full-on terror. Both times, thanks to a great dose of pure luck, I managed to hold on to her. She's very much a high-escape-risk dog, and I honestly don't think I'd ever catch her if she got loose, since she won't let almost anyone near her.
A non-exhaustive list of things Menchiko is afraid of: people, cars, children, cats, birds, tractors, the broom, loud noises, thunderstorms, the neighbour, the neighbour's small dog, things rolling on the ground, aeroplanes, bicycles, anyone who walks behind us on a path, and motorbikes. I could probably add more if I thought about it long enough.
And yet — underneath all that fear — she is every inch a true sighthound. The first piece of furniture she claimed in the house was the sofa. The second, which has since become her official safe haven: the bed. I'm fairly certain she'd never seen a bed before in her life, but on her very first evening here, while I was in the bird room letting the parrots out to clean their cages, I heard a series of thuds and bumps. I rushed out and found her like this:
— photo of her on the bed —
Case closed. Certified sighthound.
Getting her in the car is its own adventure. She refuses to stay in the boot, and the divider net is no match for her — she once launched herself over it, scrambled onto the back seats and then the front, locking the car (with the keys inside!), in a complete panic because I dared to try and get her out. I aged about ten years that day. So the mountain hikes and beach trips I used to do with QueenB are still on hold, also because outside she's always tense, always scanning, always on edge. I took her to the river with friends on May Day and she stood rigid for three solid hours, eyes darting everywhere — even though it was a calm, quiet spot and she had a cosy bed right there waiting for her.
But we'll be patient and follow her pace. At night, she likes to settle close to the pillows, and almost every evening before we fall asleep she licks my hands. Never during the day — but at night, almost without fail. Small steps.
Red Bumbum
I bought a "new" car — new to me, anyway. It's second-hand, but I'm proud to say I'm only its second owner. It's a little fire-engine-red hybrid, and it is cute. My old Ford — with the best number plate in the world, seven previous owners, and 250,000 km on the clock — has been retired. We had a good run together. It was my very first car, my ticket to independence. But it had so many kilometres and so many things that needed fixing that keeping it going just didn't make sense anymore.
Enter the Renault Captur, aka Bumbum. Compared to my little 2006 Ford it feels like a spaceship. It has cruise control. Parking sensors. A reversing camera. Most importantly: an aux output so I can plug in my iPod. [clap clap gif] Android Auto isn't perfect on GrapheneOS, but I've managed to get navigation working for when I need it.
Part of my brain still thinks it was an extravagant purchase. The other part melts every time it sees those red curves.
The Garden 2.0
This year I've taken up gardening again! A couple of years ago I tried to keep up the garden my ex had set up, but it was too large and I was too inexperienced, and the whole thing turned into a sea of weeds — from which I still somehow harvested 15 kg of courgettes and 9 kg of tomatoes, so not a total loss.
This time I'm being smarter about it. Since my knee surgery I'm limited in what I can do physically — kneeling down to weed, for example, is basically off the table — so I've built two small raised beds, 1m × 1m each, one 40cm high and one 30cm. Just enough room for some tomatoes and peppers. Outside the beds I've added a courgette plant and a melon. The whole thing is watered by two small solar-powered pumps. Nothing revolutionary, but it should make maintenance much easier to manage — which matters, because again, consistency is not my strong suit. I'm also thinking of using the solar pumps for my indoor plants, which have migrated out to the balcony for the warm season.
Tech
I've overhauled my VPS, reorganised all my services, and — big news — I'm now self-hosting my own website!
[clap gif]
On nekoweb I've left up a landing page with content warnings and I'll keep updating the feeds, because I genuinely love that community and don't want to lose touch. But I mean... if you have a VPS, you might as well use it properly. Alongside Immich, Nextcloud and SearXNG, I've now got the site and an end-to-end encrypted password manager running on there too. Am I done? No. But I've been staring at screens for too many days in a row and my neck has started to protest, so it's time to step back for a bit.
As for the website itself, not much has changed visually — I removed Pagecord, which turned out to be more redundant than useful, and fixed a few broken links from the migration. I'm thinking of adding dedicated sections for houseplants, the veg patch, and the other creatures who share this little home of mine. We'll see.
And that's it for now — this post has gotten long enough as it is!
Talk soon.
A big hug to everyone passing through.