Welcome to the Abyssal Sea Blog, now running on Kiki!

Recent Posts:

Author: Lina
Published: Tuesday May 19th, 2026
Tags: post, personal, trans stuff
Description: Feeling femme has never looked so masc.

I started wearing my hair up at work, a personal decision around safety (trying to keep my eye on traffic/wildlife/etc... with hair in my face sucks, not to mention getting it caught in stuff). I've been growing my hair out for a long time (since before I was out, with a technical setback when I got a side shave and then grew that back out), and it's past shoulder length, and I'm pretty happy with it, even though I still have occasional temptations to get another side shave, or an undercut, or just go full short-and-spiky-dyke-cut.

While in the bathroom at work today, I caught myself in the mirror and...I actually felt femme. This came as a bit of a surprise, in my clompy work boots and PPE; most of the time I'm in coveralls or overalls and feel less like a particular gender and more like an orange reflective post, or sometimes just like I'm suddenly doing performative boymode. And the end result was a bunch of genderfeels coming to a bit of a head.

When I started the job, the boss and lead jumped to the conclusion that I was a woman (admittedly kinda-manly ("She has the strongest handshake I've ever felt from a woman!")), and I didn't bother correcting anyone. Getting she/her'd all the time was novel at first (in the city, when I do get gendered it's usually in the other direction), and then eventually just became routine. All the while I felt like I was falling back into a pre-transition habits when it came to my outward presentation, especially since I wasn't really able to find any suitable woman's work clothes in my size so I was largely back to men's clothes with some femme touches. The contrasting feels of folks talking to and treating me like a cis woman fought with my feeling rather masc in an interesting way that wasn't unpleasant.

But today. seeing my reflection with my hair was a shock to the system. I haven't really perceived myself as physically femme for a while (despite, you know, the breasts and still generally presenting more on the feminine side when I can). I'm non-binary/genderqueer/agender, but have always pushed more towards the femme side; and while that's not necessarily wrong, how I've been going about it has always felt pretty weird to me.

There's a song I really like called "Gender is Boring" by She/Her/Hers, and the second verse goes like this:

See, the problem I have with gender, Is that I'm not even sure whether, I know what I mean when I say I'm a girl because I feel that way. 'Cause boys can wear dresses and makeup, Anyone can wear whatever they want, Girls can have short hair and muscles, And that's where I run into trouble. 'Cause if I use she pronouns, well, what does that mean? Am I reinforcing a gender binary, That I don't believe in? That I don't adhere to? I say I’m a woman, what’s that supposed to tell you? Gender doesn't tell you a damn thing about me. It doesn’t tell you what I like or how I act, it doesn't tell you how I speak.

I think about the song a lot, and about what my relationship with my outward presentation and how I'm perceived works in tandem with how I feel inwardly. And sometimes it's all one hell of a mess!

My general relationship with being trans comes into play, too, as well as some trauma with having been called a "gender traitor" for refusing to "just pick a side" and not getting bottom surgery and all that stuff. There's definitely some performative-femininity I've been doing as a result.

And ultimately? Today I just kind of felt the pieces click into place. I've been feeling about myself better than I have since I was a kid. I'm comfortable, the way I pretended to be when I still thought I was a confused cis guy. I'm happier with my body than ever, and I think I might be past the need to be performatively femme to not think that I'm Being Trans Wrong. I felt butch, but in a trans way.

...You heard me.

I don't know if I'm totally past the point where I'll be questioning where my desire to do certain decidedly masc-or-femme things comes from, but I do think it'll be easier to enjoy the little things like my new gay shoes, or how these work t-shirts make my tits look awesome, without thinking I'm doing something wrong. I have no delusions that I won't still get flashes of dysphoria, and I'll still continue to be introspective about what gender means to me.

But I think I've stumbled into finally feeling like...me. And that's pretty fucking cool right there.

Author: Lina
Published: Monday May 18th, 2026
Tags: post, meta
Description: Don't get it right, just get it running.

Apologies to folks who read the site via RSS, you're probably seeing repeat posts right now. Well, hopefully you are, because that means things are working.

So yeah! I've been using Hugo for the two-ish years I've had this blog up, but it was time for a change (because I don't trust that project not to devolve in to a mess of slop). So instead I did the reasonable thing and found (and paid for!) another bit of blogging software, Kiki!!

It did take some effort to port everything over, although not nearly as much as I expected largely because Kiki happily works with HTML inside of markdown files, and with the paid version (seriously, it's only $11USD) offering other parsers (like php-markdown-extra) I didn't actually have to reformat any of the posts. Well, that's not entirely true; I had to use shortcode for a few things on Hugo (like html in markdown files...) so I needed to do some find-and-replace there. But content aside, the only real effort was the file headers for all markdown files. Hugo used one syntax, Kiki used another, and they weren't compatible. However some cheeky find/replace too care of most of it, and I only had to manually intervene on older files where I hadn't developed a template for that yet and the files didn't have any consistency.

Conversion aside, there were a few things that Kiki didn't do out-of-box that I really wanted. Mostly, this was a [Tag Cloud][/tags] and the ability to list pages like I do in the Blog Archive. For both, I was able to copy and modify existing code, basically just modifying and adding onto Kiki's existing Keywords, and even for someone who hasn't touched php in a long time, it wasn't difficult to get things mostly how I wanted (the dates on the archive page need some tweaking, and that's a side effect of a hack I used when porting the pages to preserve the full date stamp, which I did because I want to make some further modifications to how post dates are shown...).

This is why the site is live now; I've got a whole mess of little tweaks I want to make, some functional, some visual, but if I didn't just put it up now I'd never get around to it. Time to work on this kind of thing is limited for the moment.

Anyway, I'm happy with the result, and looking forward to messing with things as I can, and to posting as I get the time (and not putting it off knowing that, if I posted on the old site I was just making more work for myself when I got to this).

Update: Unborked the URLs in rss.xml; I have no idea what bug I hit, but while the URLs generate properly on my dev server, something did not like my actual web server. So I've thrown a hacky fix in and things shouldn't break again now.

Author: Lina
Published: Sunday April 26th, 2026
Tags: post, personal, work
Description: It's been a busy month!

Winter might be over, but nobody remember to tell it that.

I've been in-and-out of the plow truck this month, bouncing between various duties, but this last week has been something else. Last week everything started to melt, finally, but temperatures came up so quickly that it started to cause localized flooding. One of the less glorious aspects of highway maintenance is clearing out blocked/frozen culverts; you know, those metal tubes that run under driveways and roadways and let water run down ditches and eventually into creeks/rivers/lakes/etc...

Because we went from frozen to full melt so quickly, the snow on the ground melted, but all the below-ground water didn't have a chance to thaw, and combined with people covering the ends of culverts with snow they plowed off their driveways, it meant we had a lot of places where water started to come up and threaten to go over roads (which can cause a lot of problems, especially hydroplaning.

So I've been learning the art of Steaming Culverts (which would make a good band name); basically, you take a pressure washer, dial up the pressure, and then run it through a kerosene water heater that's hot enough to create steam (although we don't always go that far, and usually just use near-boiling water). Finding the culvert ends is often a problem, because one end is usually under a lot of water (like, sometimes nearly two meters), and the other end is often hidden under a mountain of snow. Normally you want to go in from the dry side, so we have a wand (like the one you'd use in a manual car wash) that we probe the ground with and use to cut through the snow. And, if we're having trouble, sometimes use things like Street View to try to see where the culvert should be (annoyingly, they usually aren't marked and aren't placed consistently, as they need to on the lowest point of the high side of the road, and that varies place-to-place). If we can't find the low side, or have trouble on that end, then we have to try on the flooded side, which involves walking out into freezing water in chest waders (rubber overalls that go up to your chest), and then fishing around using shovels, your feet, and sometimes you hands/arms. It's...unpleasant.

Then, to actually clear out the culvert, we use what looks like a heavy-duty garden hose, and on the end of it is a metal pipe about 10cm long with a bullet-shaped attachment on the end (it kind of looks like a weird metal penis). On the tip, there's a tiny hole (like, 1mm in diameter) that points forwards, and four more holes that point backwards. These direct the water forward to cut into the ice, and backwards to push the thing into - and hopefully through - the ice. Oddly, you don't need hot water for this to work, just the pressure is enough, but cold water does work slower (our burner has been in various states of not working recently). Actually getting the hose through the culvert is where the Art part comes in, because you can't just shove it in. You have to carefully feed it, start the machine up, and then let it pull itself along, carefully feeding hose in. It's actually kind of an amazing thing, because you're alternately applying gentle pressure and also holding the hose back, and feeling for when it hits ice and for when it's feeding properly. If you don't do it just right, the hose just deflects and before you know it you've got a coil of hose a few meters underground.

You also have to be very careful as the jets of water that cut the ice are also strong enough to cut through flesh o.O

Anyway, I've been learning that, and I've been getting pretty good at it, and my week started off clearing more culverts, and then getting called out to water flooding over a highway. The culverts were all working at full capacity, but there was so much water coming off melting fields on the hill next to the road that they couldn't keep up. I can work a maximum of 15 hours a day (basically), and I ended up doing nearly the full thing, as I had to babysit the site in a work truck with speed limit and flood signs and fully warning beacons. The water finally went down a few hours after the next operator took over.

Tuesday and Wednesday were basically the same (only with rain on Wednesday), and then but on Thursday temperatures dropped and the rain turned into snow. Between then and today, Sunday morning, I did nearly 1500km and around 30 hours in my plow truck, and some areas where I plowed had well over 30cm of snow in total. Which isn't bad, considering a few places not that far north reportedly had 60-90cm. There were also a bunch of accidents, and generally speaking it was one hell of a storm.

I'm still kind of surprised I didn't get called in again this morning, as it looked like it was going to pick up again overnight but apparently didn't come down hard enough to stick to the roads and cause problems. Plus, with day time temperatures hitting double-digits by Wednesday, this might have finally been the last of winter.

So that's pretty much been my month. Plowing, filling pot holes, fixing signs, washing signs, and clearing culverts. I've only had a few days off, and have only been able to get home maybe three times (and only one full weekend). Hopefully that will change and I'll get regular weekends off again.

I also bought a new-to-me car, but that's a story for the next post.

Author: Lina
Published: Sunday March 29th, 2026
Tags: post, personal, work
Description: Things went from 0 to 100 pretty damn quickly!

So yeah, I got the job I talked about in the last post, and started a couple weeks ago. The job title is "Operator", and (for a few more weeks anyway) my primary responsibility is driving a big snow plow and keeping a long section of highway (or technically, sections of two highways connected by a junction) clear of snow and ice. Given it's March you'd think there wouldn't be much to do, but winter hasn't given up yet and there's been a fair bit of snowfall, plus freezing rain one day.

When it's not snowing I'm getting trained up on other aspects of highway maintenance, including things like replacing road signs people have driven through/over and filling potholes. The manual labour part isn't that exciting, but it's part of the job so I'm learning and doing it without complaint. Definitely better than not having a job.

As time permits and as situations come up, I'm also learning more about the truck maintenance aspect (we're responsible for basic maintenance on our assigned trucks, including greasing them, doing oil changes, replacing the plow blades, etc...).

My first two days consisted of riding along with the lead operator, and on the first day he had me clear a section of highway after he was sure I had a solid understanding of the plow controls. Then he had me do it again with the wing down (which is a second plow attached to the right side of the truck). Both (plus the sander) are operated from a single joystick in this particular setup, and I didn't have any trouble picking it up. The second day there was no new snow, so we just cleaned up the sides of the roads and I got a few hours of time practicing with the wing and the sander.

On my third shift they sent me out in my own truck¹, and I did pretty a solid Okay. So far, the other operators are all surprised that this is my first professional driving job, and it seems like they like we well enough, which definitely helps!

Driving a truck is one thing, but driving a plow, keeping track of the front plow, the wing, what the sander is doing (there's both a science and an art to putting down a sand/salt combination in such a way that you don't make a huge mess and just melt the snow/ice) all while driving in the dead of night in snow that comes down hard enough to cause nearly white-out conditions. To say it's "challenging" or "difficult" would be an understatement.

Where it becomes something of a mixed bag is that, because this job is based two hours away from where I live, I'm staying with other people and I have to be away from my girlfriend. I'm home this weekend, but I have to go back tonight, and because the winter season is 24/7 on call for weather (the only reason I'm back now is because the weather is actually clear this weekend) I can't usually just go home for a while. The next chance I'll get to be home isn't for another few weeks, which is when the "winter season" for the job officially ends. At that point it switches to more normal weekday hours, and I should be able to be home a lot more regularly. Also rather than driving plows I'll be spending a lot of it hauling loads of sand from the sand pit back to the yard we're based out of, building the stock pile for the next winter season.

I won't be at this job forever; as much as I'm enjoying it, and get along with everyone, I want something that's closer to home, but this will serve to get me the experience I need to make that happen. I'll be able to apply for jobs with actual experience and can honestly say that I went from working in I.T. to driving snow plows in horrific road conditions, and if I can do that I can do pretty much any other driving job without breaking a sweat.

At least, that's the hope. :3

Author: Lina
Published: Friday March 06th, 2026
Tags: post, personal, jobsearch
Description: Finally some good fucking news.

So, it was an eventful week!

Monday started off with waking up to an email and a text message from a local carrier, both sounding a bit desperate, saying they were hiring immediately. I did some back and forth to confirm they were good with a new Class 1 driver, and they replied "experience?" and I confirmed none (they had my resume and cover letter, they should have known) and I didn't hear anything back that day. In the late afternoon I replied "Thanks for your time." and forgot about it.

The next morning I had a reply from them asking me to confirm how old I was, and when I could start training. This was exciting, but very much a mixed bag as the job was for Long Haul, something I started applying for mostly out of desperation, as I'd been applying for trucking jobs for almost exactly two months and wasn't getting a lot of contact, much less interest.

I replied and asked if I could start Monday, and there was no response, and looking at the timestamp on the original message it was likely the person was off work (probably an overnight dispatcher) so I figured I'd get a reply the following morning.

After lunch, however, I got an email from another place I'd applied to around the beginning of February asking where I was based out of so they could forward my application to the nearest shop. I let them know, and also that I had the option of working out of another town (family had offered a place to stay if I needed in order to get my foot in the door), and they said they'd pass it on to that location as they didn't have anything immediately near me.

In the evening, while we were getting dinner ready, my phone rang; it was the manager from that company's shop in that town, and we chatted for a bit, then he asked when I could come up to talk. I told him Thursday, he asked if I could come in early, I said yes, and I had an interview.

A little presumptuously I messaged the long haul place back and apologized and said I was no longer available.

Wednesday I drove out, and early Thursday morning I met with the manager. It went well, I signed paperwork, and pending a drug test (which I did earlier today) I have a job! I need to do some online training next week, and then I go in for the in-person training.

I'll be driving snow plows and gravel trucks and there'll be plenty of opportunities to learn a lot of stuff, including working with some of the mechanics, and the only thing I wish was different was that it would be closer to home so I would have to spend days away from my girlfriend and cat at a time for the foreseeable future.

But it's going to be a challenge, and absolutely amazing experience for the new section of my resume!

I've finally escaped tech and video games!

The Great Australian Snacking Disaster. - DankPods