Weird week to be having a mundane conversation about anything, with the news what it's been the last few days — everyone's still talking about the rally shooting in Pennsylvania, and then Biden dropping out of the race yesterday on top of it. Dad had the TV on low in the background the whole dinner, glancing at it between sentences. Election year noise, on top of everything else. Anyway. Dad brought up the power bill at dinner tonight, not angry, just pointed. It's noticeably higher than it used to be and he's not wrong about why. I offered to cover a chunk of it going forward, which honestly I should have offered before he had to bring it up. Feels like a small, overdue adulthood milestone — the first time I've had to actually negotiate the real-world cost of this project with the people whose house it happens to run inside of. Told them, again, in vague terms, that the project's "gotten more serious" and that's part of why the setup's grown. They didn't push for specifics, same as always. I don't know if that's trust, or politeness, or just genuinely not knowing what questions to ask about something this far outside their world. Probably some of all three. Still 23, living at home, running an increasingly expensive research operation out of a bedroom. If teenage me could see current me he'd probably think it looked exactly like success. Current me has more complicated feelings about that than I expected to.