sinking

So the day before last, dude was doing dishes or something, and at one point he put the electric kettle on and then poured the entire thing down the drain once it boiled. "Drain's slow," he said.
I'd noticed when we got back from our weekend away that the sink seemed to be draining oddly-- it'd go, then back up, then "burp" and go down. Not a good sign. "We'll have to pick up some drain cleaner when we're out," I said, and then, like, was never out-- I walk to work and there's no hardware store on the way, when am I going to run errands on my way home? I'm not.
( a saga, but with a happy ending )

pomrania: narramin: what a fucking power move [Image...

via http://bit.ly/2su3JdK

pomrania:

narramin:

what a fucking power move

[Image description: photo of some text (source not given) about Caesar’s last words. Transcription follows.]

Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: “Kai su, teknon” (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin “Et tu Brute?”). It literally means “You too, child,” but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest cites “an important article” by James Russell (1980) “that has often been overlooked”. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar’s putative last words were not “the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son” but more along the lines of “See you in hell, punk.”

[End description.]
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email to kindle

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FYI: if for some reason your computer stops recognizing things plugged into the USB drive as disks, such as, say, your Kindle, you can email things to your Kindle. And the help docs on Amazon will explain to you how to do that (every Kindle that’s compatible with this feature is automatically assigned an email address you can email to!) but what they will not tell you literally anywhere except once you’re elbow-deep in the Manage Device tab on their site is that your kindle will only accept emails from email addresses you’ve told it to accept from! You’d think they’d mention that in the help doc that’s meant to explain the process to you, but they do not.

So. Pro-tip. 

Also finding the Help instead of Sell Me Stuff search bar on Amazon is challenging. But. My ADHD-crippled ass figured it out (honestly I am super fucking foggy lately, it sucks) so I believe in you. you can do it. 

And now I have my free Tor.com novelette of The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander on my device, so, maybe I’ll really read it. I actually have another free novella on there I never got to. One of these days I’ll feel like I have the leisure to read. No, let’s be real here, I’ll only read it at work when nobody’s looking if I’m not working on something better, I don’t have Free Time or Leisure in my life, that’s not how I live. (If I do, I squander it fretting about How Best To Enjoy My Leisure and wracked with guilt that I’m not writing, so.) (Honestly I shouldn’t be allowed to have weekends, it never goes well.)

(I just opened the Bolander book and *gasp* there’s elephants. OMG I should read shit I’ve only ever heard the title of more often.)
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i played myself

ha ha walking to work this morning was a carnival of frictionless surfaces. i wiped the fuck out on my own driveway before i'd gone three steps, and sat there for a moment contemplating my choices. i could go get into my car, but then i'd need to move dude's car. the roads weren't icy, just the sidewalks, but.
no, i soldiered on, walked to work. had to shuffle like an old lady, did a lot of flailing, but didn't fall any more, at least.

got to work, all is fine. ate breakfast at my desk. felt a little odd. mostly ok though. decided to make myself a cup of coffee.

drank some coffee, began to eat lunch. started feeling dizzy. thought, maybe i left it too late to eat! eat more. finished my lunch. and coffee. then drank a whole big thing of water.

i have pretty bad vertigo by now, and it's not improving! i've had sugar, i've had salt, i've had vitamins, i've had carbs and fruit and protein. i feel sort of queasy and quite dizzy.

well, i could leave early, but i'd just have to walk.

i don't have any way of getting a ride home. dude carpooled with someone else; he won't be home until 5:30. i guess i could wait until then and then have him get his car and come get me. it would be 6pm by then. i'd have to clock out and, i don't know, i guess i could still sit at my desk or something.

no, i'm better off walking home. i guess i'll leave at my normal time.

i'm not dizzy if i don't move, but if i move at all I'm miserable! this is very inconvenient. I feel like I did exactly the wrong thing but last time I had this problem it was dehydration, and the time before it was lack of caffeine, and the time before that it was low blood sugar, so drinking a bunch of coffee and a bunch of water should have fixed it, I feel like.

christ I wish I could teleport .I mean, i always wish that, just. more so right this moment.

(no subject)

Who knew, walking home slowly, while unpleasant, helped the vertigo/queasiness.

Am now slowly making dinner and am about to sanitize every surface in the kitchen.

The Only Harmless Great Thing

Confession time: I don't read much. Yes, really. I was a voracious reader up through high school, I don't do it as much now.
Anyway.
I remain a fast reader, but it's a bit like a drug, to me; I go on benders, and it consumes my awareness, and it's just. I don't know, I don't like what it does to me. I have terrible impulse control about it, and I get so sucked in I can't think about anything else, and so on.

But. Tor.com has a mailing list, and if you sign up, you can get free novellas and novelettes once in a while.
And this month they have Brooke Bolander's The Only Harmless Great Thing. So like, run don't walk.

Another confession: I had heard of this largely because I follow a few authors on Twitter who are hilarious, and another confession: I had Brooke Bolander confused with I think Sam Sykes because her Twitter handle is gender-neutral and I am easily confused and so I thought Sykes' user pic was hers and it was a whole thing where I just had no idea who was who. And in the Twitter threads, it was easy to lose track of who was self-promoting and who was talking about a friend and such.
So I had no idea 1) who Bolander was, 2) what this book was about, 3) why I should read it, except a vague "friend of friend" feeling because she's in this circle of authors I like who talk to each other. (I don't really talk on Twitter, actually; I mostly retweet political things, which is why I haven't much linked to my Twitter. It's not fannish content for the most part. It's not personal content either. It's political shit and nothing crossposts anymore.)

So anyway, I downloaded it, and managed to get it onto my Kindle, and I wasn't going to read it today, but then I opened it to make sure the thing had worked, and then there was the opening paragraph, and...
well it's really good, ok.
There are four POV characters and one of them is an elephant and another is a mammoth. The elephants speak to humans using sign language with their trunk. (The mammoth is in the past and is not referred to as such.)

!!!

Anyway it's really good and I won't say any more because I don't want to spoil it. I'd say there are some warnings for a POV character who is severely ill and dying, and the accompanying body horror, so do be careful if that's a thing for you, but it's not like it creeps up on you, it's basically the first thing you learn. It's not a fluffy story.

ETA: I feel I should mention that I just cried in the shower thinking about one of the final scenes of this book. It's. I mean. It's dark. But it's like. I mean grim, but sort of hopeful. But grim. The scene that specifically made me cry was from the elephant's POV, and to tell it as spoiler-free as possible, hmmm... she's paralyzed with fear at one point, and the only thing that gives her the courage to go on is that one of the human POV characters takes her lead rope away from a mean man to lead her instead, and this gives her enough of a sense of "we", long-missing in her absence from a herd, that she is able to go on. It's so-- it's that, I don't know what that is, but that distills the book pretty neatly, I think.