misc

[dragonlady7]

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am at work. i went in at 8am because it was that or, like, kill an hour. i was up, i was ready, why the fuck not.

unemployment asks how many days you worked, not how many hours. so there’s no point going in a few hours for several days, which had been my original thought. i’m so much more productive that way? but no. so i’m going to see if i can’t knock out nine hours’ worth of work today.

my position ideally should be done by somebody who comes in three hours a day three or four days a week. this doesn’t work with my schedule of traveling. they ought to replace me. it would be for the best for both of us. sadly, they cannot find someone, i am certain, to do the work for the pittance they pay me. (for the last six years at least the only time I have been given raises have been because NYS has raised the minimum wage so it’d be illegal not to give me a raise. i know, right? well.) so they accomodate my schedule, but that means that I can’t possibly really do the work in a way that makes sense. so it piles up while I’m not there, and then I do a bunch and get ahead and nobody touches it while I’m gone, so I come back and have to redo it. We’re trying to work out ways around it but it’s ridiculous, they should get someone else, but nobody else will do it, but why do I do it? why do i think I’m not worth more money?

well isn’t that a question for the ages, hm?

anyway, in two days off, I did get a lot of cooking stuff done that I’d wanted to, but no cleaning or sewing, which were the things I really wanted to do.

One entirely stupid thing I did, well, that wasn’t entirely stupid– I got a giftcard from work like a year ago for the sales commission on some cameras, you’re not supposed to get it for online sales but my supervisor worked out a way, and anyhow, it was three hundred bucks and that’s not nothing. But I couldn’t use it for gas, and that’s literally the only thing I’ve bought since March. I had been saving it to buy myself a treat or something, but. No.

So I went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of beer with it, and then restocked my travel first aid kit. I had a good one, but it got burnt up in the yurt fire. So I bought all the band-aids in the world, and some assorted other shit, and then I sat at the table and packaged it nicely into this sweet stiff-sided nylon case I got at work– someone traded it in with camera equipment in it but it’s red and has a white cross on it and has mesh and vinyl pockets inside, it’s clearly meant to be a first-aid kit. So I cleaned it really well and threw it in my closet and like a year later here I am putting it together.

As I was doing so, I used a knife to open the shrink-wrapping on a bottle of ibuprofen and cut myself with the knife, so I put neosporin and a band-aid on it like a competent human and laughed at myself. Normally, I would’ve just wrapped it in a bit of paper towel and gone about my business until the paper towel fell off.

Dude came in and saw All The Band-Aids and was like “as an adult I go through like, one of those every five years,” and wordlessly I held up my hand and he started laughing.

I hadn’t been in a grocery store since like April, not really. I didn’t know where to stand. I have just… I mean, I’ve been freeloading, living at various people’s houses and eating their food and moving through the world like a ghost, living as an accessory to other people’s lives, unpaid and not paying. If my credit card company is selling my data they must think I died; I bought my last tank of gas in cash because BIL occasionally slips me cash and guess what, Stewarts still lets you select “pay inside” and then get gas, good old Stewarts. Nobody here in Buffalo lets you do that, you gotta prepay and then go in for change or go without a full fill-up.

Oh, weird observation– it’s a long-term fact of life I’ve known for years that gas is cheaper the farther East you go on the Thruway. Like, gas on the Thruway is usually a few cents more expensive, not enough to get off an exit but you’re not getting a deal, but as you go east it climbs, and it’s as much as thirty cents more a gallon in Troy than it is in Buffalo? Well, currently, that’s the opposite. I got it at $2.29/gal and when I got off in Buffalo it was $2.09. Been like this the whole pandemic, give or take fifty cents across the board. Couldn’t begin to tell you why. Did the supply chain reverse? I don’t know! It’s weird!

Anyway, I had cause to pull a jar off a basement shelf that said “med containers” on it in my handwriting and discovered it was full of medium-sized containers in leather, plastic, or glass that I’d saved from various things. Delightful! One was a latching hinged plastic waterproof case with the name of one of the products at work we distribute, and it was perfectly sized to fit a tube of neosporin and a bunch of assorted band-aids, so now i have a purse first aid kit too. Good for me, I’ll lose it shortly but I feel prepared now. I also found a plastic box embroidery thread had come in, and with a rubber band around it to keep it shut it’s perfect to hold Q-tips in my travel toiletries bag, so that’s another win. (I had a great tin for that purpose but yurt fire, shrug, I’ve just been doing without Q-tips this whole time and I mean, you can get by using a washcloth and it’s probably better for you but I do like a good Q-tip now and then.)

I also wrote a bunch of porn yesterday. I’m not done. The chapter is over eight thousand fucking words long, and it’s almost entirely porn, I mean it about the “fucking” words– I mean, I guess there’s more than one bit where nobody’s fucking but they’re reading porn, and I’m not going nearly as much into detail with that as I’d expected from the brainstorm sessions, but the actual fucking itself is a completely different dynamic than I had intended all along. I really really had a plan, and it’s not doing any of that, at all. F’rex I thought they’d do dramatic readings of the pornography but Jaskier said it was too filthy for him to read aloud, so he’s just gasping and giving Geralt judgy eyes. Yennefer was going to be in charge but she is falling down on the job. Jaskier just got a glass of wine and is sitting and keeping score in a notebook while the other two fuck. Geralt thinks he’s hilarious and is doing a more-terrible-than-usual job at hiding this. Yennefer is beyond caring about anything except orgasms.

I feel like I have to let them do whatever they want, though, because I was figuring on having this be the last chapter of that particular story, and I wanted to wrap it all up. Which begs the question– you can re-order series on AO3, and while MDS–>Sisterhood–>Innermost Depths –> Ancient Sea makes coherent sense, it sort of doesn’t because most of the other stories are earlier in the timeline, so how the hell do I arrange that???

Anyway Ancient Sea isn’t the end of the series, anyway, I just.

also I’ve already written an epilogue but I might post it as a separate story because it’s got a Ten Years Later tag on it that I don’t entirely want to take seriously as I’m not committing to any timeline beyond 1263 really. But that’s a lot of thinking.

Anyhow I’m working as I write this but I should go focus more on really getting work done, since I’ve got to cram a couple of months of work into today.