Jul. 7th, 2017

dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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withsugarandlime:

glorious-spoon:

It always cracks me up when people describe fetal movement as butterfly kisses or bubbles or other nice, soft-sounding names, because in my experience over the course of two pregnancies, it feels exactly as you would expect it to feel to have a three-pound independent being living in your abdomen and kicking the shit out of you–that is, unnerving as hell.

thank you times one million for the straightforwardness of this post. Among all the bizarre, intrusive, and genuinely inexplicable questions I get about why I’ve opted out of gestating a human being, by far the weirdest is “but don’t you want to know what it feeeeels like????“

And I’m like. My friend. My relative. My dearest random acquaintance. Babies kick so hard that it’s visible from outside the gestating PARENT’s BODY. Not for a single hot second do I want to know what it feels like, I can see it just fine from over here, what the entire fuck.

I was once at a baby shower with my roller derby team, and about half of us were non-child-bearing people of various genders, and the other half were moms, and this was really close to the kid’s due date so the expectant parent was really giant, and at one point the baby kicked– but like, one of those really unnervingly big that’s-a-whole-ass-baby-in-there ones, where like, an elbow or something poked out and dragged across the whole belly and you could see it through her shirt, and all the moms in the room kind of went “aww” and all of us who’d never been pregnant all shrieked in unison and recoiled violently across the room because what the fuck was that.

It was absolutely hilarious, and also, you could not possibly convince me to ever ever do that.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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klyaksa1 replied to your post: withsugarandlime: glorious-spoon: It always…

The thing is, it feels wonderful. It may look unnerving to someone who has never been pregnant, but it’s a wonderful feeling.

I dunno! The mom at that baby shower wound up with a dislocated rib from that little nugget’s kicking!!! It was intense!!! NO THANK YOU.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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“Maybe I’m too old for this, she thought. Too old for war, too mean-tempered for peace.”
- Martha Wells, Wheel of the Infinite
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
via http://ift.tt/2tZr3TJ:More Murderbot Adventures from Martha Wells:

marthawells:

marthawells:

annleckie:

thigm0taxis:

annleckie:

More Murderbot. I mean, we knew about the one coming in January, and then two more after that.

More Murderbot!

I just got an email from amazon saying that my preorder for January has been “canceled by the publisher.” Anyone know anything about why?

You are not the only person I’ve heard this from today.

That said, my Kobo pre-order is still pre-ordered, according to the website. So it may be an Amazon thing? I’m not sure what the best thing to do about it is, though. Maybe re-pre-order? @marthawells is this something your editor might know about?

It looks like it just happened this evening, and might be a glitch with the distributor. I’ll check with my agent in the morning and see if she can find out what happened. Right now the paperback is showing as still available for preorder.

More info: I found out this morning that Artificial Condition had to have its ISBN changed, that’s why it disappeared from retailers. It should be back up for preorder soon, and it’s still coming out in 2018. Artificial Condition and the third novella in the series, Rogue Protocol, are finished drafts, it’s just the fourth one I’m still working on.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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I’m so ADD I can’t function without a routine but also can’t construct myself a routine, so– it’s kind of a catch-22 and that’s how I live my life. Journaling is the only thing that has really helped, because I can write down the things I want, and then go back and look at them and see if I still want them, and kind of cobble together action lists out of that.

I’ve been at the farm, at work, in Canada, in Rochester, and then had Farmsister and her family visiting overnight– and so I spent my first day Off, which wasn’t either at the farm, in Canada, or in Rochester, cleaning the house enough for visitors, since she hadn’t told me she was planning to stop here on her way to Illinois so I hadn’t cleared out the guest room at all– and so yesterday was my first Day Off that wasn’t spoken for in probably months, not that I can remember, and I didn’t know what to do.

So I kind of squandered it, rereading Raksura books (which I’ve been doing in between other stuff while traveling too) and trying to teach myself tambour embroidery. I have so many projects I want to do with that, but I want to master the technique first, and it’s really. It’s not. It’s not working.

 I get the idea, I can do the stitch, and it works one time in ten. The other nine times, I snag the hook either on the previous loop, the substrate fabric, or both. Every tutorial dismisses this as a non-issue– “apply backward pressure to the hook as you come through the fabric, so you can clear the hole”– but I also know that I keep forgetting to rotate the hook, so obviously, it’s related to that. I just don’t see how. You stick the hook in the fabric, loop the thread around, rotate the hook, and pull it back up through the fabric. I don’t understand why you have to rotate the hook, because it is not interfacing with the thread at the time you rotate it. It has to be facing a particular way when it comes back out of the fabric, but it can go into the fabric in any direction, so why rotate it? And it doesn’t seem to matter which direction it’s facing or how I press on the hook as I pull it back out, it just snags on the fabric or previous stitch’s loop regardless. So it must be the angle or my posture or how I’m holding the hook, and I just can’t make it work. I keep getting frustrated and ripping the fabric or breaking the thread.

Some of it is that all the tutorials say “use any fabric and any thread!” and clearly, the combo I picked was probably the worst possible. Don’t use stranded embroidery floss, because the strands separate and then your stitches don’t go through all the loops. And cotton muslin is obnoxiously tightly-woven.

So, when they say “use any fabric and any thread”, that’s just because it never occurred to them to use cotton muslin and embroidery floss. Don’t use those, you dumbshits.

Anyway. I have many things i want to make, but I don’t want to start on a finished piece because I haven’t yet found a combo of thread and fabric that doesn’t turn out to be a fucking terrible idea. I’m working on scraps, and having trouble abandoning them anyway, and that’s my weird hoarding thing, where I can’t Use The Good Whatever, and it’s fucking obnoxious.

So I was also trying to tidy the house. I made great strides on Wednesday, and cleared out the guest bedroom to cleaner than it’s been in at least five years, and cleared out the bathroom to be cleaner than it’s been in about ten years, and that’s awesome, but now I’m stalled. I want to clean the kitchen floor, which no fucking joke, hasn’t been mopped since about four years ago when I last did it and said to myself, I’m not doing that again, I’m going to see how dirty it can get before Dude notices. 

Well. It’s been four years, and it’s actually horrifying, but I basically treat my kitchen floor as if it were an outdoor surface, because now I don’t know what to do– he called my bluff, so, now I know, I guess. And I want to end that now, but I don’t know where to start. [The thing that bothers me is not that he’s willing to live in utter squalor– it’s that he manages somehow to both not care in the slightest about the squalor, and bitch about it, without ever being able to be caught in the contradiction. He is helpless, you see, to improve his environment, because apparently nothing he can clean is free from the taint of my belongings, which he doesn’t want to disturb. Somehow, he cannot tell dust bunnies and dropped food scraps and actual filth from my possessions, which he would never wish to disturb, and therefore, only I can clean; he wants it to be clean, but is utterly powerless to effect this, and so is Resigned, Nobly, to living in squalor. I’m not shitting you, that’s really how it’s shaken out, and I’m so profoundly flattened by guilt that I can’t even bring it up now.]

[Here’s the other amazing thing– I used to do all our food shopping and menu planning, and he did some cooking but it was all always from plans I’d made. As I grew increasingly unwell, less and less able to compensate for the depression and attention-deficit issues I’ve always had, I was less and less able to do this (it didn’t help that I lost all hunger cues and ability to derive pleasure from food for a while there; how do you make a meal plan when you are incapable of experiencing desire or pleasure or thinking about any deeper topic than your next breath?), and he was more and more cranky about it, until finally I said, “If I am responsible for planning meals, we will henceforth eat a single baked potato apiece prepared identically every single day, because I do not have the capacity or desire for any more, so you can either take that over, or we can starve to death, I’m to the point where I honestly don’t care, death might be a sweet release actually”, and so after complaining that I needed to be medicated better, he subscribed us to Blue Apron. (Amazing kicker: he’d then read me the three options they sent and ask which one I wanted first. Every damn week. I was like, I cannot experience desire or pleasure, so I’m not capable of making any meaningful choices and it only upsets me when you ask me to; make the one you feel like making. He still wanted me to perform the token emotional labor of choosing, for some reason I can’t fathom. It was fucking incredible and to this day he does not understand why that was shitty, even though I explained to him why it was shitty.) I mostly don’t cook, now, and haven’t for years. But with me out of town so much, he had to unsubscribe from the boxed meal service. So like, last month or so, he made a grocery list and a meal plan, with my help, and then we cooperatively cooked things from the list going forward. And this is the really rich part: he seems to sincerely believe that he just invented the concept of meal planning and grocery shopping. I honestly don’t know what he thinks we did for the first entire dozen years of our relationship? I mean, he was there, wasn’t he? I made a list of meals I wanted to make, and a list of ingredients to buy, and then made those meals during the course of the week or so, and if I stretched it longer and wound up making stuff that was all canned or boxed ingredients because I couldn’t bear to go grocery shopping more often, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t still using those meal plans? But he genuinely, sincerely believes that he just invented this system, and I don’t know what to say to him. Has that little plastic castle always been in the corner of our fishtank or did it just get put in? He might honestly not know. NB: W E   A R E  T H I R T Y - S E V E N   Y E A R S  O L D  basic adult functions should not be a  r e v e l a t i o n.]

[Best coda to this: we make the lists together, and make the choices together, and many times the meals are things he plans on making, and somehow, mysteriously, even after literally years wherein I did not cook anything, I still wind up doing the majority of the choosing and the cooking. Again! Amazing. It’s a lot closer to 50-50 than it ever was before, but it’s still not exactly.]

So. I can’t clean my house, and yes I’ve read self-help books and websites, so if you have some Miracle Idea for how I could get better at housework, please keep it to yourself.

I can’t evaluate items, categorize them, and discard them. It’s not a thing I can do. I’m trying to do an end-run about that by getting myself excited about a project I can use repurposed items for, and thereby collecting all the items I’d like to repurpose into one well-labeled box for each repurposing, and then taking one of those boxes and sitting and converting all the items into repurposable formats. I feel like that would be an important bit of progress to make, and then I would have the bonus of having converted all those items from clutter into a new item. But that’s not going super well just yet, and I’m stalled. 

Still. It’s a start. 
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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shepardly:

Stone: you let another court take Moon?!?
Jade: What was I supposed to do? Start a war by telling his mother, The Terror of the Reaches, that my answer to her reasonable request is ‘no’?!?
Stone: *taps mic to make sure it’s on and leans in far enough to press lips against it* YES

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