lazy running a temperature day

Since I’m not coughing and my sats are okay, this isn’t covid. My appetite is definitely off and in a real shift in my behaviour I keep losing my ability to stay hydrated. I will try harder tomorrow.

Even so I made a tiffin of homemade chicken fingers in panko breading, taters and salad, (FOLLOWED BY CHAPMANS ‘FUCK YOU CUSTOMER IF YOU WON’T GET VACCINATED ice cream) ran and dried a load of laundry, did manage to get the kitchen back under control (it has since escaped), called my mOm, wrote 451 words on the Destiel fic that currently has my attention, read an edit of one of Dave’s poems, said ‘sorry no’ to a New Years Day walk with Al P., laughed out loud at Lois’s Letter at the End of the Year, had a lovely long bath, take my blood pressure twice, commune with Buster (more word training in preparation for getting him talking buttons) and of course there was that shopping expotition at the start of the day. So while I did not have a strenuous day, it wasn’t an entirely unproductive one.

Jeff took care of gravelling the slips of ice all over the damned walkways.

And now I will make my bed and find a nightie and TIMMMMMBBBERRRRRRR

AFTER I DO

THIS but not as 1 like 1 answer because that’s just letting your shit get data mined while you twirl for likes like a fucking overfed bear

Image

  1. either Michel or Kima although you know how much I love Jesse and Raven
  2. The Dosadi Experiment
  3. eh Raven mebbe
  4. wow…. any suggestions mOm
  5. Midnite Moving Co gets a ten episode series.
  6. drafting, editing, revising, plotting, in that order
  7. fanfic, M/M AU Domestic
  8. bildungsroman
  9. Go away and work on something (or nothing) else
  10. My bed. I dunno why. I like libraries and other people’s houses
  11. Dunnett, Barbara Tuchman
  12. what the fuck kind of question is that. Of course I can, I’m looking at the internet while I’m writing. OH YOU MEAN FICTION you fucking elitist. Bite me
  13. I try very hard to write every day, even if it’s just a verse of a song
  14. varies 100-4000
  15. morning, just after I’ve eaten and had caffeine; the middle of the night when things are quiet
  16. plotting jesus god
  17. Eurekalert.org. Never fails
  18. Nah, the chain letters of the internet piss me off.

30 visitors to the site yesterday

I don’t know if it’s a new record, but it was quite something to see those stats this morning.

ANY HOO

Betty White is dead. Because I’m a blabbermouth probably half a dozen people who follow me on twitter heard it from me first. The internet is helping people express their emotions, a kind of worshipful, almost amused, grief being foremost.

MANY PEOPLE ARE ANGRY THAT HENRY KISSINGER OUTLIVED HER. Many, o many.

Greeted the New Year with gentle snores, as is the custom in our clan.

This morning we will do a small shop. I certainly don’t intend to linger in the store, and I’m going to wear my most expensive mask.

VOCATION – GRATITUDE – PARSIMONY

Those are my three words this year. Work on my vocation, complete projects. Be grateful and express gratitude for my life of good fortune. Parsimony – try to expend no resources or money needlessly. We’ll see how we go.

No billets-doux from the readers at Archive of Our Own this morning. I continue to work on the stories I have on the go, but the output is rather feeble – 50 – 200 words at a time. Ah well, a beach is built by grinding a whole bunch of different rocks over thousands of years, right?

Time to plug the laptop in to charge and deal with the crockery insurrection in the kitchen.

 

 

Accomplishments 2021

First overnight sleepover with Alex

Witnessed the birth of my second grandchild, Ryker

Started collecting a pension

Rearranged my finances with the assistance of my fOlks and the support of my brO

Survived the pandemic – got vaxxed and boosted.

Recorded MOAR TUNES in January

Got all my musical instruments into the same room (the spare oom) which makes making music with Alex even easier

Started actually dealing with my health issues especially getting my BP down.

Made A LOT OF WHOLE WHEAT BUNS

Helped my mOm deal with some creative issues with her family history, and deepened my appreciation of the benefits and hazards and beauties of family history.

Invented the term TWOOTLES for Twitter mutuals

Started feeding crows.

I sat with a dying man and read a poem about it at his memorial service, and we sang, too.

Started writing letters to rellies and friends on a semi regular basis (I owe half a dozen letters currently HAW)

Was able to identify that a birdsong was of a bird I had never seen, followed the sound and identified an out of range yellow breasted chat, but was later able to confirm that where the chat sang was bang in the middle of everything they need to breed.

Got birdies to eat out of my hands at Fraser Foreshore. I recommend it as an experience.

 

 

Quiet day

Jeff couldn’t go to the family dinner at Caspell Junction because of both press of work and feeling punk, and Keith didn’t make it home from work until two minutes before I called a cab and left. Katie fixed a plate for Jeff though, and he devoured it as soon as I got home.

I got to see Ryker, hold him, rock him while he was fussy and Katie was prepping food.

Paul seems to be doing reasonably well.

sleep of the dead

These pics were selected by Alex.

Alex sleeps so hard it’s quite significant. I just got up, ran a load of laundry and wandered lonely as a large fuzzy hoodie through the house looking for my laptop, which of course I already brought downstairs to the guest room.

Last night Alex consumed his dinner, drew monsters, played Xenon pinball, brushed his teeth, played Burnout under Jeff’s watchful supervision on the xBox (it’s a game where you deliberately crash into things with your car), played the same video on his tablet until he crashed at which point I pulled his tablet out of his hand and stashed it somewhere safe.. When he was going between games he asked Jeff, “Are the mechanics the same?” and I almost fell off the spare sofa.

It’s to early to waken him so I’m listening to him making faint breathing noises. If I panicked because he was making no breath sounds at all and did a pulse check that’s just the gramma in me.

We got another 6-10 cm of the solid end of the water cycle and more apparently on the way. The videos of carnage and lack of snow removal on reddit vancouver are telling.

Melting grammas note:

he says Ryker is ‘a really good baby’.

so many kudos and snow

That was so fun. I wish all restaurants were like that.

— a one line review of one of my fanfics, posted last night.

I love this spa day adventure!

— a one line review of one of my fanfics, posted last night.

r/mildlyinteresting - The traffic lights in Lake Tahoe are filled with snow. Yes, it’s causing some issues.

Lake Tahoe had some, er snow. I’m going to take a wild guess and say four way stop procedures are in place.

Arctic outflow continues, the house is like a meat locker and I can feel drafts pouring in from all directions. The repairman swore the furnace was fine, I hope the dude was right.

 

Matrix Resurrections

It’s a full tilt commercial movie which bites off cultural excess and spits out commentary.

Portions of it are completely impossible to understand. There are many levels of reality and the people in them move smoothly through them but … it’s hard, and noisy, and perspective spinning. I didn’t like those parts because when the movie was more discursive – or just plain HERE’S A FIGHT have FUN – it was more enjoyable for me.

The basic premise hasn’t changed; but people have moved through their lives- or what they think is their lives. Everyone is older. Under the kick ass and the high tech and the gloss design and striking palettes, there is an elegaic tone that is impossible to miss, and so, of course, appears to have been missed by every cultural commentator under 40. This is not a movie for young people. Many will go, but it’s not emotionally aimed at them.

It’s also, very candidly, a movie about mental health, and how everything they give you to make you feel better can be wrong on a cellular level.

To me, the movie addressed almost all of the cultural skew (the pull of it, the magical achievement of it, the visual thrill of it) of the first movie and the horror of what happened to the red pill/blue pill takeover of the ideas of the movie by misogynists and repulsigans. It addressed the FOREVER HOWL of MAKE IT EXACTLY THE SAME BUT BETTER which is Hollywood. It addressed how in terms of story logic, Neo and Trinity being separated was sad, and had to be fixed. It raised some really interesting ideas about what constitutes a partnership, why we help people who are going to get us killed, and how the hero feels, being worshipped, when he feels grossly inadequate, tiny and possibly not hoeing the next row in consensus reality.

It gave us multiple villains, some of whom have multiple agendas.

We see what happens when you trade freedom of scope for security of the person. We see what happens when you think HEY WE BEAT FASCISM everything’s GREAT NOW not realizing that fascism reconstitutes itself in every generation and has to be fought again. For all the people thinking this is exactly the same through line as the first movie LOL try again, midges. All of the callbacks had a specific purpose. We were being pushed into an emotional killzone, and asked to question all of the mechanics that got us there.

We see what happens when you make your idea of who is ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ based in the present, not in the past.

We see AIs incorporated into the body politic. The revolution is domesticated because it becomes routine and non-destructive of the overarching enemy (any aspect of society antithetical to creativity); the revolution is made wild because it must address current conditions, which suck, and demand sacrifice to be overthrown.

All we ever want is someone who can see us, believe in us, literally hold us up, and it’s the driver of everything. It doesn’t have to be sexual, it doesn’t have to be procreative, but it does have to have meaning and reciprocity, and the ending in the light of that hypothesis – for me – was quite satisfying.

quiet Christmas

Apart from making steak and eggs for breakfast and mac and two cheeses for elevenses and two buttered rum toddies (a strong one for me, a weak one for Jeff) and shovelling the walkways, I had a very lazy day. My unputaway laundry is glaring at me, and the drawers I have to empty out to accommodate its spread is glaring as well, and two more loads at least await.

It amazes me how fast (now that I’ve learned to stay hydrated, pushing fluids all day until 6 pm whether I feel thirst or not) that I get DEhydrated; I didn’t get up and drink tea yesterday first thing, and in fact had nothing to drink until midmorning, and then spent the rest of the day trying to catch up. What they say in the health articles about not feeling thirst as much as you get older is totally true. I don’t know if Jeff has to remind himself to drink something but I sure do. My problem is that I want to drink tea all day and a) bumping caffeine all day is not healthy and b) it irritates me pipes.

I know things aren’t really much better but I feel much better. And because I’m feeling better, I’m trying to spend some time each day trying to process sadness about Tom and Ville. Two such different circumstances, and so tragic in their own way. I have names to put to two of the biggest public health related tragedies in BC history and the idea that their deaths are enmeshed in this greater social history is making me thoughtful. To me their deaths are tragedies and not statistics, but in the end they’ll just be statistics, and that makes me feel a little blank.

Today, Christmas movies (we didn’t watch them yesterday) and some yummy leftovers, and I’m thinking PUDDING RICE PUDDING but that means I have to make rice, LOL. Wonder what happens when I add butterscotch pudding to rice pudding, will it be a Frankentreat?

Laundry started, dishwasher running, kitchen counter tidied, coffee made and consumed; remembered to take mah meds, stole a picture of Jeff quietly working on Alex’s computer and now I have to find the cables to get it onto my computer gigglesnort. It’s only 6:30 and I’m well into my day.

Buster interaction

I think Buster is almost ready for OAC speech buttons on the floor. I had the following postural conversation with him today:

Hey  Buster, would you like skritches (this is specifically when I take a fork to his face. Yes, I know this sounds outrageous, but he loves it.)

I offer him a choice of forks – plastic or wood. He chooses plastic.

Since he’s sitting in my chair (my half of the LaZboy we picked up at a neighbours’ house) I just barely touch the blanket (I usually pull it out from under him) and instead of it being a tussle (he usually calls and is very reluctant to move and must be coaxed) he steps out of the way, I sit down, and give him a nice long skritch with a fork. Practically took longer to describe than to happen.

I love being able to communicate with Buster. He’s an admirable cat.

IT’S A CHRISTMAS ATHEIST MIRACLE

You’ll never guess who’s back!

CURVEBEAK!

Yes, the crow with the distinctive honker has returned to the railing next to the back door, and how? and why? On Christmas of all days?

It’s all Jeff’s fault. At this point Jeff is reading this with a faint frown and thinking WHY DO I ALWAYS GET BLAMED FOR EVENTS THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ME but he was the instigating event.

Because I had threatened to make mac and cheese, and didn’t yet, he was saying well I’m not pressuring you but if you’re not going to make it I’m going to order something, but I don’t want to order what you can’t eat. I said “Order for one, if you really want something, problem solved,” but really that’s not problem solved that’s not how we do things, we family order to get additional meals, otherwise the cost per meal and delivery gets to be too much of the food budget.

So I finally (I forgot to take my bp meds and metformin at 6 this morning, didn’t get to them until 8, so I crashed hard and didn’t really shake off the doldrums until noon) got up and watched a little of the All Madden Christmas Day special (I saw him in his hotel in California shortly after John died but didn’t actually make the connection until I was back in Canada, which makes me snicker) and then even more finally dredged up the energy to make the ham and caper mac and two cheeses but in so doing I had to assess the current larder slash cheese situation and it was acceptable, except for that one fucking piece of moldy cheddar. You know how there’s aaaaalways one fucking piece of moldy cheddar. Anyway I figured it’s bright orange and crows like bright colours, mebbe they’ll see it and eat it, and if not I’ll trash it.

Ha ha

like crows are going to pass up cheddar cut up into half an almond sized chunks when it’s ass freezing cold and in between snowfalls and that, of course, is when Curvebeak showed up, sizing me up through the window, at the back of the queue, and I almost died of joy. He is a reallly odd looking crow- his head is a funny shape, it’s not just his beak.