dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with lazaefair

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lazaefair https://lazaefair.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “pullets” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/627163070258659328/pullets

this was legit fascinating to read. I can just picture the scene (and how I would film it).

Ha! Interesting! Well, for visual interest, know that the pens we were taking them from were in a trio, staggered like stair-steps across the enclosure within the fence, white PVC with arching tops, and they had silver tarps atop them we were un-bungeeing to reach down into and grab the chickens like terrifying night haunts swooping from above. Veg Man stood at the door of the Turkaboose sliding the plywood door panel back and forth to let us deposit our armloads of sleepy pullets, but not let them fall out the door as they revived. We were all wearing gloves against their claws, except BIL, because he loaned his to one of the apprentices who had forgotten hers, on the grounds that his hands are already so beat-up a few more scratches won’t matter. He’s gentlemanly like that. (He and my sister did two of the pens, and the two apprentices and I did the other pen, in approximately the same amount of time, LOL. Why we put the two veterans together I don’t know, but it worked out in the end.)

Here’s a photo of the ladies this morning on my walk, in their new very tall-grass pasture, delightedly flying in and out of the Turkaboose. You have to look close to see them, the stripes blend in better with the grass than you’d think. They are Lovely Glamorous Ladies.

(The reason the Turkaboose is being repurposed is that these girls are smarter than turkeys and will climb up into it, while the turkeys kept trying to sleep under it and were not fleet enough to reliably get up into it and get onto the perches, and were thus more vulnerable to predators. These girls haven’t had perches before in their lives, but have already demonstrated zero trouble learning how to use them. Now what remains to be seen is whether the turkeys will be able to get up onto the top of the chicken tractor and squash it flat, like they’ve squashed other past turkey houses.)

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meanderings0ul replied to your post “magickedteacup replied to your post “I have been loving the comments…”

I typically edit my posted stuff every couple years just to catch clumsy sentences, etc., and I try to leave myself a note just saying ‘Last Edited (date)’ because I really don’t think most fics readers notice the minor stuff. I have one fic I’m about to edit more extensively because I don’t think I had a char come off as intended. I’m not planning to leave any additional detail about the edit, but I wouldn’t feel weird about doing it either way <3

lazaefair

replied to your post

“magickedteacup replied to your post “I have been loving the comments…”

I make a note of it if the change is more than a paragraph’s worth. Anything less than that, no need.

These are interesting takes too, and of course, valid, and maybe I should think more about this.

Because I definitely have a feeling like, once it’s published, it’s published, and I’ve got to move on, but that’s absolutely born of having spent twenty years on some of my projects and understanding that the more I recursively edit the farther from coherent they wind up. So my feeling is, if it’s posted, that’s set pretty much in stone, and maybe I’d edit a typo or something, but I’m not going back to change anything major because the thing is what it is. Like– up to phrasing, maybe, I’d adjust, if it was really obviously unintentionally wrong, but more than that, if it’s been posted more than a couple of days, I’m going to just grit my teeth and move past. (Except, of course, for something offensive or just wrong or something like that, and that’s when I have to start figuring out author’s notes and things, because I’ll make the edit of course but I just feel like it’s gaslighting the reader somewhat to pretend I never made the mistake?)

Which is just my perspective, and obviously, that doesn’t have to be the case at all, and it’s so easy to forget that things I’ve decided on are not, like, cast in bronze or whatever, I could change my mind and do something else.

But I have a feeling, like, once it’s published, it’s out there, and people have copies on their Kindles and such (not that many do, I don’t think, but it’s possible they could!). Especially with an ongoing thing, I feel like if I go back and edit a chapter to change something before I post the next chapter, that’s then asking people to re-read the previous installment– which, in truth, as a reader, I almost always do, so maybe it’s not even outrageous, but. And i just feel like– I don’t like it, as a reader, if I read something and then realize it’s been changed significantly since I started reading it. I can reconcile myself to it depending on circumstances, but in general, I don’t like the idea that a thing I’m going to be having reactions to and discussions of is then not going to be the thing I initially reacted to. Like… I just feel like a change should be acknowledged.

This isn’t, like, a super strongly-held belief; as a reader, I think I’d follow along with changes and be like sure, seems right. But as a writer I don’t– want to, I think? Anyway.

One thing I definitely knew was Incorrect at the time and I have settled in and am obstinately Not Going To Fix is the “jarring” American slang. I did have a commenter chide me for it and it was my only sorry-not-sorry response comment. (I wasn’t intending to be snippy but i also was absolutely not going to fix it.)

I know exactly which word it is, and it was extremely deliberate, because there was no way in Hell I was writing Crowley into a pair of black lace knickers. No goddamn way. Sorry, Brits. Not doing it.

I know what I’ve done and I won’t repent, in that instance.

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lazaefair reblogged your post and added:

Yeah, that’s why I don’t make my lists with the expectation or intention of finishing them because I have the exact same problem of not knowing how long a task lasts. They’re sort of just running lists that I can go back to when I find myself wandering around in a fog not knowing what to do next. And I learned never to write down “clean kitchen” because, yeah, way too big and vague. It’s more like

Open dishwasher
Unload bottom of dishwasher
Unload top of dishwasher
Gather dishes and put by sink
Put dishwashable things in dishwasher
Put soap on sponge
Wash non-dishwashable things
Put away things on counters
Wet towel
Wipe down big counter
Wipe down little counter
Put towel in laundry basket
Get out broom
Sweep dirt into piles
Gather piles up in dustpan
Dump piles
Put broom and dustpan away

And all of that gets put onto the to-do list not as sub-tasks under a large first-level task heading, because no, that leads to another ADD spiral. They are put onto the list as first-level tasks all in their own right, which means I can take breaks in between if I need to, and when I accomplish them, I treat them like I accomplished a first-level task, because I did. It’s not perfect because my breaks last way too long. But at least I have the list to refer back to when I jerk myself out of the zone, and I know that the next thing on the list is going to be a little tiny task that hopefully won’t trigger an ADD spiral, so I’m more likely to do it. And I keep reminding myself that it’s okay if I don’t get through the whole list in one evening or whatever, the list is there so the next evening I can remind myself again that there’s another little tiny task that I can do.Also, that thing about spotting something else that needs to be done before the thing I’m trying to do because I’m way too hung up on doing things in the “optimal manner” only to keep spotting more and more things - yeah, TOTALLY understand. So now the rule is that once I’ve made my list, NOTHING ELSE GETS ADDED TO IT. THE END. It’s okay to not do the new thing right away because I know that will lead to exactly the spiral you’ve described, so no, I have to stick to the already-written list. When it comes to household chores, most of the time it actually doesn’t matter what order I do them in and my brain is lying to me that I’m a bad person for not doing everything perfectly optimally. So the new thing I’ve spotted gets written down for doing AFTER the already-written tasks.Again, not perfect, because right now for example I’ve done maybe half of what I wanted to do this weekend, and that’s after I super downscaled my ambitions for the weekend. But I just have to keep telling myself, most of the time it doesn’t matter to other people nearly as much as it matters to me. It’s okay not to finish. It’s okay not to finish.But overall, I’ve slowly managed to get it together enough that I’ve gone from “nightmare roommate” to “not completely terrible to live with” (and she even thanks me for what I contribute to the household now!) so I’ll take that as a win..

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I hope you don’t mind that I copy-pasted this into a new post because it was getting so long– this is a good approach but I am so scattered I don’t know if I could reliably break a task down like this!! I might try it.

We have a whiteboard in our kitchen where I had been writing down shopping lists and meal ideas and I stopped updating it about six or seven years ago. I could probably clean it off and try it again– make my huge fantasy lists at work, and then come home and copy them over onto the whiteboard, so I could have like, a long-term Things I Want quadrant, and then a short-term OK Baby Steps quadrant, because the other thing that happens is that Dude is unable to remember anything I tell him for longer than seconds at a time, and so either accidentally prevents me from working on what I want to do (say… for example… decides to spend all weekend cooking a complicated dish… in the kitchen… so I really don’t feel I can clean it… which is what happened this weekend, he seriously spent 18 hours making French Onion Soup starting with a beef bone), so if I actually had a list he could look at and maybe add to–

well, he would ignore it, that’s what happens. But if I make a little progress with this method before I inevitably abandon it, then maybe it’ll be something.

I guess step 1 is seeing if I can get that whiteboard erased now that the abandoned lists have been on there for half a decade or more…

(edited to fix: the crossposter cut off my response!)

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lazaefair replied to your post “Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more,…”

Your post is giving me sympathy panic. the only way I can get through that shit is by writing the entire to-do list down and breaking it down to the teeny-tiniest increments, AND continually reminding myself that it’s okay for me not to finish it. So when I find myself wondering what to do I can go back to the list to remind myself. And I can cross things off the list for that little dopamine rush.

oh my god I have SUCH a love-hate with to-do lists

i love making the lists, see, but the problem is that I have absolutely no idea how long a thing takes to do. I just don’t. So a to-do list for a single weekend might consist of three hundred hours’ worth of work, if you could actually do the math out. And the other thing I’m bad at is, on a large scale, understanding the dependencies of tasks? So I’ll tell myself that I need to Do Some Big Thing but then I have no idea where to start, and I’ll try to come up with smaller detailed things but I’ll get to that item and then it needs me to have done fifteen other little things first?

I love lists. I write basically fanfic about what my life would be like if I could fucking do anything ever.

I have not been able to have friends over for about a decade because my house is too messy for anyone to get in the door. How do you fix that?

Well, I know how you don’t. You write “CLEAN KITCHEN” on your to-do list, and then you think, well, ok, I need more detail, that’s just silly, and you write “MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” and you’re like oh I’ll have to sweep first, and you write “SWEEP AND MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” instead, and you’re all pleased, and you spend your afternoon at work daydreaming about how clean that floor is going to be when you get home.

And then you get home and well, you can’t actually… mostly… see the floor in that room, and so you need to take out the recycling, and then you need to gather up all the film plastic recycling too, and you get that out the door and that’s great, and then you do the dishes, and that’s as much as I’ve gotten done this weekend, I’ve done the dishes like fifteen times because every time I go to do another bit of the big “CLEAN KITCHEN” to-do item on my beautiful list, there are more dirty dishes and I can’t do anything until I get those out of the way. And I’m also trying to do Christmas shopping and I really wanted to sit and write for a moment, well I’ll get to that later, maybe tomorrow, oh it’s Sunday already, well ok I won’t do any writing this weekend, fine, but I still have to–

Oop, weekend’s over, maybe next time?

That’s how you go four years without sweeping your kitchen floor.

So… no, to-do lists don’t really help me much. Lists are crucial– the Christmas gifts have lists to go along with them, and I’ve written down dimensions and things, and it’s possible some of them will get done now that they’re written down. Because things that aren’t written down don’t exist, to me, so they don’t happen.

But task lists don’t really help me much overall. I’m thirty-nine years old and I’ve never actually learned how to write a list of things that are actually possible in this world.

On Monday I’ll go back to work and look sadly at my list of what I was going to do this weekend (CLEAN KITCHEN was one two items of about twelve, and another one was PUT AWAY CLOTHES which is going to involve three rooms of the house and is a huge undertaking I’ve started working on about twenty times in the last two years, to give some idea), and then I’ll sit and start a new list and daydream about what it would be like if I were the sort of bitch who could actually write a reasonable to-do list and follow it.

At this very moment in my house if I had a kind of magical summoning ability so I could pull them out of the acres of shit in here, I could probably produce a stack for you of hundreds of to-do lists I’ve written myself, and not a single one of them has more than two items crossed off on it, no matter how many items there are. And I can’t throw them out until I finish them, or the tasks I’ve conjured will cease to exist.
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