Category: fanfic

today the enshinening

Okay, that didn’t really work as a blog post title, but the Suzanne the Cleaning Specialist and Carer will be here today and Jeff and I have sworn a mighty blood oath (okay maybe it was coffee and PowerAde) that we’ll clean out the fridge today as our part in the enshinening.

Two kudos overnight; word count stands at 4890; my fave sentence out of the last writing session is

He tried to get in the front seat and she stared at him, a bleak and judgemental reckoning which took in every aspect of his appearance until the impossible happened; he got redder.

They’re about to visit a brothel, but not for any regular reason. Aren’t you anxious to learn why? NB he’s red because he’s sunburned, and not because he’s a tourist.

Jeff and I emptied the fridge of its rottenness (Jeff was the motor). We now have three different kinds of cheese, and condiments. Shop tomorrow I reckon. I am taking a 20 minute break because my back is screaming and then I’ll wipe down the bums of all the containers and plug everything back into the fridge.  Next up: scheduling the next clean. (later it’s on the household calendar) I believe according to the Sidetracked Sisters you’re supposed to do the fridge once a month but if we do it twice a year that would be amazing. Suzanne will do it but she’s only marginally bendier than me and Jeff and she does charge extra for that, so …. (Later, still have to clean one piece of glass and wipe out the freezer but it’s done)

and in war news, the tank manufacturer in the former Soviet Union has shut down the line, no parts. Whoever told Putin YEAH SURE WE ARE TIGHT AND GOOD FOR SUPPLY CHAIN ON ARMAMENTS is probably licking out privies in NovySibirsk now under the lazy eye of a guard who’s probably busy wearing out his pocket icon of Our Lady Derzhavnaya in thanks for not being posted to the front.

aaaaaand them damn gritty Ukrainians be torching Russian ships, which are large and invitingly shootable-at and pretty much defenceless given the collapse of daytime air support for Russian assault troops and supply chains…  since it turns out that the Ukrainian air force, tiny as it is, is blisteringly effective, and the mobile rocket launchers are STILL BEING OPERATED from inside Mariupol which means that whatever the fucking Russians say, Mariupol has not been pacified.

Tyler Rogoway, whom I started following on twitter some years back (he’s an American military aircraft journalist with Ukrainian ancestors) says that Putin has to quit, because if he wins, he’ll be facing the worst insurgency in the history of warfare; porous borders with hundreds of millions of dollars of modern mobile armaments, and a civilian population armed to the teeth, properly trained and disciplined and bitter af, and people around the world who can’t tell the difference between a sh and a shch will be raising money to make it even worse for the grunts on the ground; while Russians starve and he’s forced to figure out whether to withdraw troops to pacify his own civilians, especially the ones closest to Ukraine who are getting more of the real story. If a billionaire who isn’t a citizen of the NATO countries starts ordering and shipping aircraft to Ukraine man that would be entertaining and horrific — and I want the Russian army to go home and stay there.

Katie’s coming with both the boys after Suzanne leaves.

 

Kyiv is still Ukrainian

Putin’s a month into his war and he’s achieved so few of his original objectives that some commentators, while not exactly mocking him, are starting to worry that he’s being thwarted, which makes him prone to lash out and be dangerous and threaten nukes, repeatedly. He’s already put at least two hundred children in the ground. Why, if it wasn’t for the wars on the populations of Yemen and Syria, which Russia’s armed forces have helped to prosecute these past many years, and previous Russian outings in Ukraine and Chechnya, I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Learned about SKIF’s, the Ukrainian country/urban tank killer, whose name literally means ‘Scythian’. They’re ferociously effective in modern warfare, cheap like borscht compared to the arms it can kill. It’s a modern day crossbow in terms of its asymmetrical warfare effects – it can take down a person, a vehicle, a tank, a chopper OR – with luck – a jet.

Two kudos overnight, very surprised by one of them; one of the stories I posted to AO3 is a complete outlier because the central character dyad is not destiel, it’s a three person triad that turns into a polyamorous household full of kids, and all this while the lead character is dealing with CRUSHING depression, new fatherhood, and coming to terms with being bisexual. So it has a million feels and some very dramatic and technical sex scenes and it’s not like anything else I’ve posted. (SO it doesn’t get much love.) The other kudo, from another person, is for my most popular fic, which has more than 6000 hits now, and a 4% kudo to hit ratio.

Weather kinda miserable and damp.

very complex ‘tholian web’  migraine imagery just now. It’s probably pollen triggered, it’s just been HORRIBLE, how crappy the allergens have been making me and Jeff feel. I feel brain dead, and then I perk up a bit, and then there’s another puff of cedar pollen and BRAIN DED AGIN. Now it’s a square full of vibrating chevrons; now it’s fuzz. Now it’s fading. dammit I need coffee.

Report has come that one of the Dunnetteers from Toronto has passed of cancer. The kind words are coming in and people are speaking well of the dead; she sounds like she was a superior sort of person and we’re also told she was well cared for, and having been through sitting with Tom (even though it wasn’t much and I didn’t materially assist, not really) I am glad that she was, and that no one stinted on the morphine.

Wordle in three this morning. Somebody I follow on twitter made a hint, that the word seemed apropos today, and that really helped. Didn’t hurt that I guessed the first letter of the word right out of the gate.

R value across Canada has dipped way below one. We’ll still get another surge as the new variant comes through (BA.2) but it won’t be as bad. I feel safer and I’m not as worried about my loved ones, especially my immunocompromised loved ones, but you have to watch the numbers…

Laundry’s all done, now I have to haul it upstairs and put it away. The rug survived being laundered, thank god, often the plastic backing comes off and then Jeff has to disassembled the machine to clear it out.

Time to go back to the world of Omar and Brad and Blossom.

Katie’s making plans to go back to work; I think childcare is going to be split between Suzanne and the (humph, advised not to post this descriptive but possibly offensive soubriquet) other grandma, with me as a backup I guess. There are many advantages to this as one can see, and one can only marvel at Ryker’s good fortune that when so many kids have no grandma’s he ended up somehow with three.

March Madness continues, and I’m adding new words to my conlang, admiring the hairdos of the contestants and their ability to pluck balls out of midair, steal them from each other and otherwise perform feats of athletic magic.

Ted Cruz the douche extraordinaire, brandishing a book which he very obviously has neither opened nor read, repurposed by the lovelies at Working Class History (on finer social media platforms everywhere):

This was a possible Hair Sinister cover:

Medvedev is threatening Poland now how charming

2876 words. Very frustrating, had to delete about four hundred words because I was backing myself into a corner. However I’m in good shape now.

Rained nonstop for a day now, but not too heavily.

Three kudos overnight, two for the most recent and one for the one about crashing a glider in a cornfield.

It’s 5 am… think I’ll take a break (I’ve been writing, playing games and cruising Twitter) and consume some terrible media (Taboo.)

Called Mike last night, no answer.

Russia has demanded Ukraine turn over Mariupol this morning, which is a smoking shell of a modern city. Blowing something up and then demanding it, so adult. They’re preventing people from leaving, but at the same time word comes that they’re kidnapping UA citizens and transporting them to captivity in Russia. The spectre of nuclear war or a nuclear exchange flows over us.

from the Kyiv Independent (a more or less accurate news source) on twitter just now:

Greek diplomat after returning from Mariupol: ‘What I saw, I hope no one will ever see.’ Manolis Androulakis left the besieged city on March 15. He said it was joining the ranks of places known for having been destroyed in wars such as “Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny.”

a few more words

778 words so far on the new story. It’s about a mining engineer kidnapped by illegal gold miners in Guyana and the poor schlub detailed by the company to babysit him in-country until the person to accompany him back to Canada arrives. One kudo on the most recent story overnight.

This is what the haircut looks like first thing in the morning. I didn’t brush it or nothing, it came out my head that way.

I think you all probably know but I super detest Vladimir Putin.

Breakfast at the Foreshore diner

I had french toast an’ swossage and coffee and Jeff had the regular breakfast with bacom and coffee and it was very tasty and lorge. Leftovers in the fridge for pecking on throughout the day.

Horrifying Frontline about Putin’s war. It’s available on line but jesus I’m not recommending it because it put both me and Jeff in a foul and bleak place.

mOm got the story in the email finally. To make reading easier, I am thinking of having a password locked area of the site for people to read stories if they log in but I will leave off thinking of the mechanics for when Jeff is not buried in improvements for paying customers.

Happy St. Patricks for those who drink…

555 words into the new story.

Our old home at Valley Springs Ranch – the cottage Dad built. Roberta, David, Mary – we were visiting from Borden.

Will the laundry get put away? who cares

six kudos last night, on three different stories.

Like a fool, like a positive fool, I’ve started writing a romance with original characters.

Mariupol is under siege, 300K people are trapped, 1500 civilians have been killed there. Zelenskyy addressed Canadian Parliament yesterday and Candice Bergen sat on her hands. What a (slur/slur) that woman is.

Nazanin is free. 

She got her passport back today. It’s incredible, I wept for joy, reading that. She’s going home to her daughter and husband, who has starved himself and thrown himself at the UK diplomatic apparatus since 2016 when she landed in her predicament. Nobody with a brain or any pull believes that she’s guilty of the spying charges. I haven’t mentioned her on the blog before but I’ve been following her incarceration for at least five years.

We dined on takeout from Big Star sandwiches and it was FANTASTIC. They have a turkey, cranberry sauce and stuffing sandwich (small, which is still large) which I customized with crispy onions and Jeff had something large and equally tasty. Which reminds me, I owe Jeff for that.

 

 

Three loads full

I give thanks to the people, the land and water, the sky and creatures, the weather and the seasons, of this place. I will keep working to restore the stewardship of the Salish peoples and uphold their immemorial relationship to the beautiful lands and waters. It is not mine although they share it with me. #LandBack

Three loads of laundry yesterday. I haven’t dragged it back up the stairs to put it  away but, apart from my lilac hoodie which I neglected to include and must be laundered right away because it’s foul with spilled food (sigh), my clothes be clean.

Schrödingers dishwasher – did I run the damned thing or not.

Cleaned out Buster’s gammy ear this morning. Normally he bats at me and protests, but he was purring and gave me a little thank you chirp when I was done, so I think he was mebbe a little itchy.

Paul straightened things out with his housemates, and acknowledged to me by phone that his behaviour was boned. But Katie’s mellowed and I have not talked to Keith. Still thinking about the driving issue.

Curls fell out of my do but it’s still really cute and I love it. A bad haircut can ruin you but not for long and a good haircut just makes everything better. Interestingly I thought my hair was all the same colour but the ends were both darker and more washed out, if that’s possible, and now all the hair colour seems quite even to me, and the silver shine is (according to my stylist) something people pay thousands of dollars to obtain and maintain. God (for some reason) thinks I’m cool to extrude this stuff, and it’s great, because I can be harassing someone on reddit or going to the bathroom and I can still grow hair with undiminished vigour.

I told the stylist that one liner from James C., one of my all time favourite coworkers at the big X. About 15 years ago, at work, I read something like, “Hair is a sexual signalling device” so I wrote all the coworkers that I liked a little email, asking what their hair says about them, and he said, “My hair stands straight up,” and it was the best joke ever because he didn’t swear or even say anything particularly rude but it SURE got the point across and it makes me helpless with giggles every time I recollect it. And that email would get me fired these days and I’m okay with that.

I want that turkey sandwich from Big Star with cranberry sauce for lunch, calice. If it’s as good as the number 27 I’ll be happy. If you charge twelve fifty for a sammich it had better be good, and that was superlative.

Fourteen kudos this morning including one from my third fave fanfic writer. So that was pleasant. I’m thinking of sending mOm a variant of the drunk on the beach story (I ended up writing THREE VERSIONS OF A SINGLE STORY – I wrote one version in word (I never do that) and LOST IT LIKE WHOOSH INTO THE ETHER WHAT IN THE ENTIRE FUCK and then rewrote it, and then rewrote it again to be even more sappy. BABY GOATS BRINGING THE RINGS TO THE GROOMS AT A WEDDING NOOOOO. Actually not but the idea of a baby goat gambolling down the aisle at an outdoor wedding and then running off with the rings made me laugh so hard I put it in to troll one of the characters.

STOP WAR AND EAT POUTINE says the pic from a recent antiwar demo in Paris. Apparently Vladimir Poutine is what some convoyancers call Justin Trudeau.

Pierre Poilevre has a fortune of 9 million dollars – which he got pandering to oil companies – and it’s more than Trudeau has – and he’s speechifying about Trudeau being a rich elitist etc. Get bent Pierre and while so posed please do ram a caltrop through your scrotum, you’ll never be PM. Some people want Trump to run Canada But I Sure As Fuck Do Not.

scanged from WorkingClassHistory on Insta:

Women Anarchists have become the terror of world’s police – Their Daring Crimes are said to have outstripped the deeds of brothers of the red

Search for the woman is becoming a safe rule in crimes proceeding from anarchistic violence – the guardians of the world nearly always find a woman implicated when a ruler is stricken down – EMOTIONAL WOMEN LOSE SENSE OF FEAR.

yeah baby

Not too much about Ukraine

It’s terrible. The Russians are being indiscriminate with the bombings, but so are the Saudis and the Americans right now. The hypocrisy is thick as jam, and as sticky.

I think the next stage in my psychosocial development with respect to politics is to really examine how I am untrue both to my grandfather’s approach to other human beings, which should, since he was gentle and helpful, be a guide to me, and to my sparse and weedy ethics, infested as they are with my own version(s) of gender essentialism, ableism and libertarianism, not necessarily in that order on any particular day, and I’m sure in almost 20 years of doing this I’ve revealed enough of my other bigotries to hang myself twice, were such things possible.

I mean if I’m going to bust it back to first principles. Is it a material universe – the commonality of detectible ‘reality’ – or is it an imagined and engineered projection, taking place in real-time, or is it a natural phenomenon which one can interrogate without ever knowing the full truth of, or is it God’s Creation, or (all the Creation gods’ names)’s Creation or something else entirely? I mean, I know which way I play it, every time, but is it a material universe? Should it make a difference? Should I be ashamed that the best argument I’ve seen for it NOT making a difference was from Buddy, in Free Guy? Anyway, can’t have a philosophy without taking that one one.

Sorry about the late post, I had yet another disturbed night of sleep and when I went back to sleep I slept late, it’s now almost 10 am.

2249 words on story thus far. I think I’ll try and go back to finishing the landslide one.

Yesterday was wonderful.

We went to breakfast at IHOP (it was deserted), came back here for some TV. Paul called and we went for a walk in Fraser Foreshore (I masked, he didn’t, I drove) and I took my camera, secure in the knowledge and belief that I WOULD GET PICS for my mOm, and I sat in the appointed place at close to the regular hour, and Paul and I couldn’t even hear the tweety birds, let alone see them.

Much abashed, I trudged back to the car, grousing in a desultory way at Paul, and then I saw one of the other unofficial feeding stations and put down a handful of non salted raw Styrian sunflowers and next thing I know, there’s a chickadee in the bush on the other side of the trail making the excited food song, which is the same as their regular song but buzzier, louder and with an extra DEE in there. I had put away the camera.

So I got my disney princess moment, but didn’t get a picture. BIRDS YOU ARE ANNOYING. But cute.

CW Picture of Tom Lunderville; Paul and I went to Peggy’s after that, to pick up the hat that I gave Tom after wearing it for a while. Now I’m getting it back again. He ruint the crown but I’ll reblock it. We got tea and soup. We chatted for a long time. She’s in relatively good shape all things considered and coping as best she can with how different her life is now. We talked about Ukraine a bit.

We left to go pick up my library book from the main branch of New West Library (‘this is how you lose the time war’) and then came back to Geekhaus to eat – soup Peggy gave us and borscht and lentil soup. I also showed Paul some of the stuff online that I’ve been telling him about Ukraine.

Then I ran a couple of loads of laundry and napped and cleaned out the microwave. It was a lovely sunny day, and I’m glad I wrote about it, because I was happy yesterday and I needed a reminder.

 

Who am I fooling

Didn’t leave the house yesterday but I ran the dishes and a load of laundry. Jeff and I keystone kops’d the unloading, I wish someone had been taking video. I also mopped all the salt out of the boot tray.

Jeff left the house and returned with Swiss Chalet. Swiss Chalet has had a terrible hold on my palate ever since I visited my first resto on Yonge Street in 1980 or 81. I was working at the Delta Chelsea Inn – I was a baby, and somehow I ended up running the switchboard – an experience which made me believe it would be twenty years before I ever had the strength to be a manager again – and I’d shoot over there on breaks or go after my shift.

A couple of months back I learned to my horror that the only Swiss Chalet IN ALL OF BC was closing – it’s on Lougheed Highway, and since then we’ve made an effort to grab food from there any time we can. Jeff picked up meals for us yesterday and IT WAS SO GOOD. Then he told me that they are probably staying open and that was really good news. I want to live in a Burnaby that has Swiss Chalet. I’m not saying the food is fantastic, I’m just saying it’s a comfort to me.

While Jeff was out had a practice session so long my fingers are quite sore. ah well, if you don’t practice that’s what happens.

Talked to Paul on the phone; I read him a long twitter thread about how the Russian army didn’t rotate the tires on their armored vehicles and that’s why they can’t get through the mud (obvs more complicated than that). The big takeaway is that the Russian army is so corrupt they aren’t paying for spares or basic readiness maintenance and it’s showing in their performance. (Not so much in the south where they were more massed and the weather is better and the ground more solid.) There is also the problem of what the hell is going on with the Russian airforce. The Ukrainians are still just barely holding their own and given that the Russians have overwhelming superiority in numbers and equipment why don’t they have command of the air? Once again I’m thinking they just don’t have enough spares for operational readiness.

Go go dancers from the trendiest gay bar in Ukraine are now volunteering; the waggish comment on twitter was that we now have ‘battle twinks’. OKAY HE WAS CUTE but he’s got nuthin fer me.

A reminder that Ukraine is the second largest country on that landmass. It literally stretches from New York to the Great Lakes if you lay it on top of a map of NA.

Cried, just cried like a fool, when I saw the video of thousands of Berliners greeting Ukrainian refugees off the train so they could have a place to stay.

Too early for the kudos to come in (that’s around 3 am) but the story is at 2200 words. I’m going back to sleep, three and a half hours isn’t enough.

In like a very wet lion

March is coming in with (checks with weathercat Buster) YUP IT’S RAINING. Definitely more like a lion.

I think I owed you a Grecian urn, right mOm?

Image

3300 yo Bronze Age pottery jar with an octopus motif. From Ialysos, Rhodes

I have learned from Tish’s latest letter that Terry will be here in July and he intends to bike back to Cornwall from here. Shoulda heard me squeal, oh how we shall feast him!!! Don’t you love it when guys pushing 70 with a broom just say FUCK TIME! I AM NOT IN YOU! This is a guy whose back was broken in a bike accident …. so he’s, you know, hard fucking core. I learn also that they are grandparents again; Peter and his s/o have had a little boy.

I learn from Leo and Linda that they have REALLY CUTE GRANDCHILDREN. I mean, I already knew, but damn. They are most sincerely cute.

DAY 6 of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine 2022 edition.

Belarusian hackers have messed up troop transports from Belarus. Précis of story:

The ‘Cyber Partisans’ group said that trains had been stopped in Minsk, Orsha, and Osipovichi due to them compromising the routing system and switching devices by encrypting the data on them.

Minsk is the capital and largest city. The Belarusians are going to feel like they’re being whipped at a cart-arse in hell for supporting Putin in this mess. No surprise to me that local hackers are making their sentiments known. Interestingly Anonymous is refusing to do infrastructure hits (such as this) because they figure there’s too much that can go wrong for civilians.

Now, for a little of the old BUT HOW IS THE WAR AFFECTING THE FOLKS AT HOME?

LOLOLOL you will remember the convoy of honkies which so exercised Ottawa and Centretown for three whole weeks until the Emergencies Act was levelled against them? Or perhaps the Ukrainian ‘conflict’ has shoved that recent outbreak of boils upon the body politic from your ever more easily distracted mind?

WELLLLLL, it turns out that when you turn off the rubles AT THE GLOBAL LEVEL, the flow of money AT THE GRANULAR LEVEL which allows the honkies to continue being complete fascist assholes STOPS and they collapse like the water critter in ‘The Abyss’, when the door closes. So the convoy which was supposed to go across the US had 6 trucks and is apparently disbanding. THIS MEANS THAT THE HONKIES IN DOWNTOWN OTTAWA WERE PARTYING ON PUTIN’S DIME.

NEVER

NEVER

NEVER

forget this. They weren’t traitors by my standards (even if I said so, at the time, mostly because I’m kinda over the whole nation state thing and how can you be a traitor, etc, if the entity you’re being a ‘traitor’ to shouldn’t exist in the first fucking place….) but they sure’s fuck were dupes and bad neighbours, DUPES I tell ya, and every word of their maskhole, anti disabled, racist misogynist homophobic transphobic ahistorical anti Indigenous horse puckey was supported by Dirty Russian Money. Don’t forget. Never forget.

The punditfaced and wibblebrained Yanks on twitter are encouraging the US to go to war with Russia LIKE SURE BUDDY do you think your Cheetos are going to stay on the supermarket shelves in a post nuclear war world or do you REALLY HAVE PUDDING FOR BRAINS. Bad pudding. Jeff says, “I like pudding.”

TRANSCRIPT OF A CATHERINE BELTON INTERVIEW. She is the person who keeps getting sued by Russian oligarchs because she tells the truth about their relationships with Putin.

There are reports of gang rape (I saw on reddit, it was heartbreaking, a personal account of an 18 year old woman in eastern Ukraine being gang raped ON THE HALFTRACK by five Russian soldiers, who threw money at her and called her hohol (Ukie) whore at the end of it but it was not news and not verified) but less unclear are the multiple reports of Russian tank crews ABANDONING FUELED AND FUNCTIONING TANKS. Just leaving them in the damned road. I don’t know if they’re walking back to the border or handing themselves over to be interned until the end of the war or hiding, or just heading back to Donbas. Who the hell knows. But the untouched tanks are just sitting there. I’ve seen video of one but there are credible reports of more.

_______________

New story is up to 1516 words. I’m going back and forth with first person chapters of about a thousand words apiece.

Two kudos in my inbox this morning; one for the musicians story (in which I promote another musician/filker, go me, AND integrate a song one of the actors is well known for singing … as part of the soppily romantic ending oh come now haven’t you ever wanted to wake up after a night of love with someone singing something beautiful and romantic in the next room … speaking as someone this has happened to, it’s verra noice) and one for the “I’m going to pretend to be your perfect boyfriend” story that starts with a pickup in a bar. One of the things I like doing best in writing fanfic is taking super well known lines from Supernatural (2005) and integrating them in conversations that have nothing to do with the show to give a little frisson to the reader.

1000 words today

It was lovely to get unstoppered. Frame is a witness gets cozy with the person who’s been deputized by the US Marshals service to ‘safely conduct him to the nearest Marshals Office for processing’. The witness is traumatized and paranoid and the deputy is …. having second thoughts about being a bisexual cop in a small town in Colorado. I figure I’ll put them through hell for about 20k words and have a lovely shootout for the finale. (I don’t normally play with guns, but why not, it’s kind of a shooting week in world history.)

 

Peas rice and chicken

2.5 hours of taxi-ing and sitting in waiting rooms yesterday. When I saw my appointment time of 4 pm I was disgusted, since I knew I’d be on my ass waiting for a long time, but almost two hours was not what I guessed.

Anyway, I’m increasing the dose of one of my morning BP meds and I should have a scrip faxed in (I’ll check later today) and renewals for everything else. We’re hoping this will drop my blood pressure enough that the risk factors for cardiovascular damage drop somewhat.

When I came home, I realized I had some chicken thawed and I’d already made a pot of rice, so I dumped what seemed like a lot of safflower oil in a pan and fried up some chicken and rice and peas and added exactly one tablespoon of soy sauce and nothing else (it was the Most Caucastic stir fry ever, I assure you) and it was actually totally delicious and hit the spot and Jeff even had seconds, which meant it was completely consumed and there were no leftovers huzzah.

Still delightfully clear but cold yesterday, it’s supposed to be much warmer today. It was chilly in the basement these last two days.

One little kudo this morning. I wrote a story about two people who meet while already quite drunk from two different parties and one of them can’t stop barfing but they get frisky anyway. That’s the one that caught praise this morning. It has the funniest title out of all of my stories.

Much better night of sleep last night. As suspected I was twisted about the doctor appointment Tuesday night and that impacted my sleep. I could go on at length about how goddamned rude the people waiting with me were and how variable people seem to be in terms of both quality and usage of masks but there’s no point.

Probably getting a cleaning specialist today, and whether or not we do I’ll be talking to Jeff about whether we’re doing a shop this morning.

I got the strings OFF Otto but have not got them ON. Such a hassle to have ball end strings for the mandolin.

People are dead in the opening shelling of Putin’s war.

I don’t think Putin understands that he’s paved the way for a lot of unrest at home. The rouble’s tanked, foreign exchange is locked up, the army itself is poorly equipped and fed and trained and morale is low, and the suffering of the people on Russian territory as fuel and food and anything from the West skyrockets in price will be most terrible. One half of Russians support Putin’s war. One quarter does not. One quarter is not sure. Those numbers WILL change, and Putin’s going to be pissed when they don’t go his way.

Here’s a good overview of possibilities on Youtube. Make sure you turn subtitles on, that guy talks REAL fast.

Buster is an indoor cat

Buster had an immense weeping ear infection from a long cat scratch down his ear canal. He’s to be kept indoors and fed antibiotics and gooped for the next ten days. We are both very relieved, and Jeff says he was a brave boy at the vet. He peed in his carrier again, but he does that every time. He’s also up to date on his shots again, so tranquillity abounds, etc etc.

I had to replace ALL the ink in the printer yesterday which would have been even more annoying if I hadn’t previously stocked up on ersatz cartridges and didn’t have to go anywhere or spend any money to make it happen. Part of having ADD is hoarding, and part is being therefore prepared, and the rest is having a million iterations of shit that don’t fit. BUT IT IS OKAY because I finally got Mary’s letter printed and I’ll be mailing it today.

Got my balance ball back and that will make making music a lot easier. I love playing music on a bouncy ball, I can really rock out. While looking like a loon.

Saw Ryker the other day, he’s still an adorable baby with a commitment to sleep that outpaces my own.

Absolutely sweet comment – brief, too – on the most recent story yesterday.

Haven’t received word from Keith about how his first day on the job went.