dragonlady7

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after all that i didn’t actually tell myself the story of what i have to do today

you see the hubris. i was like “i have described the problem huzzah” check a thing off the list move on.

part of the thing i was describing was how lists don’t work for me. so like. in the text of that post was me explaining that i had to do a thing in order to function. and then. then! i didn’t do that thing.

ok so today what do i have to do! a lot of it i have already done on sheer momentum but now i have been stymied by something and have to regroup.

i have to load and run the dishwasher, check!

i have to put in a load of laundry, check!

i have to go over to my own house, bringing a number of items which i had for traveling but which should not wind up at dude’s mom’s house, check!

I am going to bemusedly greet the electrical inspector for the town, who was supposed to be rescheduled and not come today, and give him a little tour of the things the electrician said weren’t ready to be inspected, and he’s going to say oh yes, I see what he was going for, he’s done a lot of stuff already, isn’t this nice, well I’ll be back, have him call me when he’s done those two things he didn’t get to, everything else looks really good. This will derail me a bit, but I will persevere.

whilst at the house, i am going to cut out fabric to make my own not-quite-floorcloth to go under the microwave, since i want to put something there before i do anything else, and i hate the paltry shelf-liner offerings actually in stock anywhere in town, and i am too decision-paralysised to actually buy anything online rn. check! (finished measurements will be 26.5x23". I found enough white canvas for this, and have soaked and ironed it in accordance with the tutorial, but i am going to paint it and then sew it to an unpainted backing, which I hope will protect the shelf surface, as I don’t need this shelf to be grippy since it’s just to protect the painted surface from the microwave and whatever winds up next to it. So the backing is an old mostly-polyester sheet, somewhat pilled with wear, because i know that won’t be slippery but also won’t scratch the surface.)

I was going to then prime this canvas, but I don’t… have any primer? This is false, I know I do, but damned if I know where it would be. I have to stop by a hardware store for paint chips and polyurethane anyway, so now I guess I’ll get some primer. I don’t think I need art store primer for this at all.

i have terrible acrylic craft paints but i am not trying to do anything wildly sophisticated. in fact i’m not sure what i’m trying to do. actually i could get little sample pots of a couple of the colors i’m considering at the hardware store, paint smallish swatches on the wall, and then paint this cloth with the leftovers, LOL. That might actually be the thing to do???

Dude might be annoyed if I’m swatching without even having consulted with him but 1) i know what he likes and 2) he’s so busy rn he won’t even put his plate in the dishwasher or talk to me about what groceries to buy so like, he doesn’t have the energy to care, and anyway you can just paint right back over swatches and in fact I will do so, so whatever. Possibly the swatches will just give him something to disagree with but when you are as fatigued-in-general as he is, often that is the best way to get a decision made!

(heck what if i painted the whole shelf liner cloth a gradient between two of the adjacent swatch colors and then stenciled a doily over it in metallic gold that’d be a pretty sick shelf liner pattern)

ANYWAY the story of what else i have to do today is that i also have to go to the grocery store. so if i manage both the grocery store and the hardware store before noon i’m gonna be the fucking champion of the fucking world i tell you what. but that is my goal. i should do the hardware store first so the groceries don’t have to sit in the car and get warm but that feels contrary because the grocery store is more urgent. but no, i’m going to do the hardware store first because i am a little bitch and can do what i want. and i won’t forget the groceries after that. (famous last words, stay tuned to see if i do) (Your picture was not posted)

processing, farm life

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ah i never updated. so the moving company did come as promised for my sister on Sunday. apparently, on thursday, one of their crew foremen had a serious heart attack, so they’re down a crew, and one of their biggest trucks was in the shop with a broken lift and they got it back and the fucking lift still doesn’t work. and on friday, when they were supposed to come for her, they were at a job that had been quoted to last 3.5 hours, but when they got there, the customer had a bunch of shit that hadn’t been on the inventory, and there were several large items that needed disassembly that they’d said they’d have dissassembled but then hadn’t done so, and the job took 8 hours instead, with no notice, so– well the movers were super apologetic to my sister about the delay, and had brought an extra person at no extra charge, and afterward knocked some of the time off and didn’t charge her as much as they might have, and also were exceptionally polite to her and also to her housemate.

Also they congratulated them on the purchase of the house and said “you’ll make so many happy memories together here” and in general really super obviously assumed that what they were dealing with was a lesbian couple. Afterward my sister was like “oh i did have a pride banner hung up in the living room” which actually was my doing, i thought it was cute and had stuck it on a hook that was already there.

ANyway. There’s still a lot of shit in my sister’s apartment but we’ve done a lot more work and there’s less and less. we’re closing in on the end, on being out by july 1st.

There’s so much goddamned liquor, and Farmsister actually described it to our mom, who has been fretting that M-L was becoming an alcoholic– and Mom was so reassured, because a genuine addict would not have a thousand half-empty bottles each one of a different liquor. No, an addict would have empty bottles. Clearly the problem M-L has with alcohol is just that she really likes to collect things– and to be fair, there are no two bottles of the same thing, not even wine. She just has every single possible conceivable cocktail ingredient you could ever want, which is ridiculous, but does serve extremely well to highlight the fact that no, she does not have an actual addictive problem with alcohol. Kind of backhanded reassurance but it is genuine reassurance.

Anyway. Went and helped her pack more of her stuff Monday night, but that might be the last time I’ll be able to help her, because of Assorted Chickeny Tasks for much of the rest of this week. I’m going to throw this post in the queue which is why I’m being vague about it, because I keep picking away at writing more of it in little dribs and drabs here and there, so who knows what day it will be when it goes live.

oh monday was a day of screen doors– I should get a reasonable blog-shorthand name for the person who is now most concisely described as my middle-little sister’s housemate, but it’s unicornduke https://tmblr.co/mVpJNDQaUH5cHEJCTfGjjzQ, who no longer has a tumblr, and it feels weird to use that as a nickname, but like, why not i guess. anyway she stopped by and helped me hang the screen door on the south door of my cabin, which was awesome and I had been wanting to do for weeks and last time I visited had been promised help with by a couple different people and then there just never was time. Anyway. Now that’s done. And then I stole the fabric magnetic-closure flappy screen door that had briefly been up at the new house but had gotten pulled down for the movers and honestly didn’t really work in that doorway very well anyway, and stuck that to the east-facing door, which isn’t getting a proper screen door because I’m planning to screen in that whole porch eventually, but I’m not going to get that porch screened in until after the siding’s done, so for the forseeable short-term future I need a temporary screen door, so. Anyway that’s all taken care of and now it’s being 50F at night but when it’s 90 again (like it was on sunday) that’ll be totally sick.

Tuesday was chickens and it went smoothly despite three regulars being missing, we just sort of figured things out on our own. Most notably, one of the part-timers who’s here three days a week and has been mildly annoying BIL by not being a fast worker including during slaughter days came in to do evisceration and absolutely shone there, he was so well-suited to it– listened well, was great about asking questions, kept up his pace as well as could be, meshed well with us, really took to it well. So the thing about working on a line like we do with chickens is that if you’re just not a hustle-y sort of person it’s easy to get overwhelmed and fall behind and just not be good at adjusting to keep up etc., and that was the difficulty he’d had out on the plucking table. But in the evisceration room, regardless of how backed-up everything is, you’re working on one bird at a time, and it’s really obvious that’s how he does best, he gets a task and he does it until it’s done. So it was good data to have, that he’s better-used in that kind of context. He also helped us package and was quite cheerful about learning new things there too. We quite like him as a person, so it was nice to find jobs that match his skills.

I am quite tired but not as badly so as I might be, all things considered, so I’ll take it.

Oh, a sort of gross-funny-weird anecdote from processing– we’ve currently got three cockerels wandering the barnyard, all sons of the late lamented Lil Roo (a heritage Silver-Spangled Hamburg rooster) and the broody Barred Rock Henrietta, and one of them hopped up onto the trailer full of crates of meat birds awaiting processing. He checked them all out, and when he found the coops with the 20 Freedom Ranger birds, which have striped feathers similar to his, he started doing fancy dances for them. It’s partly the markings, I think, as they look like the hens he’s used to– his mother was a Barred Rock and so are most of the adult hens on this farm– and partly that Rangers are slower-growing than Cornish Crosses and thus were older birds.

Anyway, we processed the Rangers first, so when he came back he was looking for them and they weren’t there and he seemed sort of depressed. “Where did the sexy chickens go,” my sister supplied, as his line.

He is getting a new home next week, though– he and his brothers are going to get caught and thrown in with the new half-grown pullets for next year’s egg flock, who are finally old enough to come out of the brooder and go out on pasture. They’re still too young to care about a rooster for those particular duties, but the other thing roosters do is that they tend to protect a flock from predators and other dangers, and these three cockerels have been free-ranging around the barnyard for almost a year now and haven’t gotten eaten, so they very obviously know how to survive, and will likely help the new girls transition to life outdoors.

So, no more startlingly beautiful cockerels wandering the barnyard and crowing in alarming places at unexpected intervals, but we rather think they’ll be happy having jobs and like, girlfriends. They’ve been surprisingly mellow with another’s company but they definitely would rather there be hens. (Your picture was not posted)

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(Title taken from the contents of this excellent slideshow https://www.instagram.com/p/CeyZie5Orih/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D from Sylvanaqua Farms, do read it if you want to know what financially goes into raising poultry.)

313 chickens yesterday, with some fine-tuned adjustments to the process, were done by 12:30 including cleanup, and then we packaged in the afternoon, just the whole birds. I dragged a stool over and sat down every 45 minutes or so during the packaging, just for a couple minutes: if I can sit down and take all the muscle tension off my frankly useless hips, then I can re-set and not have pain in my hips for a while. Last night my back was tired enough to hurt, my lower back all across it, and I couldn’t find a comfortable position, but it wasn’t my hip so I’ll take it.

(I can feel that the back just needs more exercise, so I need to figure out what’ll actually help, there. I resorted to an old roller derby trick, which is that if your lower back is giving you trouble, do a bunch of crunches; the tension on your abs will pull the tightness out of your back. It does work, though largely by distraction. Still, probably I need to just do more crunches in general. Like, why not I guess.)

I’m creaky today but not limping, so. Thumbs up.

Did some VHS transfer work in the evening out in my cabin, now that there’s power– I have a single extension cord but that can power a VCR so I’m doing work-work too. And the tape was that someone had recorded a show off MTV in 1998, so it was a Journey Thru Time lemme tell you. Holy cow. Anyway–

Today we’re cutting up chickens, me and BIL, and we have enough vacuum seal bags to hopefully forgo Ziplocs entirely. We shall see. And we have about twice as many birds as usual, sort of by accident. I really want to get through them all but we shall see.

And then this afternoon after 4pm i’m borrowing Farmsister’s minivan to go help Middle-Little pick up a futon for her new house, and then cram the minivan full of assorted things from her apartment so that she’ll hopefully have room to pack the rest.

I did discover that the narrative she’s using to herself is that I’ve forced my way in to help her pack and she didn’t ask me to do all this, so that’s– well, I guess I did, I said I don’t want to be doing this at the last second let’s start now, though I haven’t actually helped her pack that much, the frantic cleaning last time was for the landlord visit, so I reminded her of that. And like… no, I wouldn’t do this if she asked, I’m only doing it because I’m offering! So anyway. I bought her dinner, after we went together Monday night and bought a rug in Albany (it wouldn’t fit in her car so for some reason i thought it would fit in mine? it did not but I have a roof rack and they have a guy with some twine so it was fine).

But apparently she’s taking next week off work and getting a different friend to help, which is fine and great and I am somewhat relieved. I am tired and I am going to be really tired after tonight. But we’ll figure it out, it’ll be fine. (Your picture was not posted)

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we survived our first chicken processing of the season.

more chickens than we’ve ever done at once before, purely by accident– we had such problems with predation last year we bought extra chicks this time and um nobody has killed any of them. also we switched hatcheries so we could avoid the risk of them being in the mail; this guy drives a delivery route all thru the region, so we meet him in a parking lot to get the babies, and it’s zero-waste because he’s got sanitizable plastic reusable crates he uses and we return, and it turns out not only do we lose zero in shipping, we also tend to lose fewer in the succeeding days. Guess it is a bit of a stress to have them go thru the postal system?

anyway we did manage to like, actually do the thing, and we were done before 1pm, which is not too shabby.

Then in the afternoon was packaging, as ever. We have a smaller crew this year, and so we had three people, mostly, doing the work of what’s usually been done by five. So we split off the separate bit, which is cutting up the birds for parts– that was saved for Wednesday morning. So we just packaged the whole birds, for whole-bird sale, and it dragged on but we got it done.

The birds for parts, we put in the wheeled bins and dumped ice on and stuck in the walk-in cooler, and then Wednesday morning just BIL and me came out to cut them up. We did so in the new nearly-finished commercial kitchen, and the very exciting part was that we used the brand-new never-before-used vacuum sealer machine that’s in there.

It took a little tweaking; BIL had watched a couple of YouTube videos on how they operate, and then had to phone a friend– actually the other guy at the market who sells the same stuff, but has a slightly larger operation and so has owned a vacuum-sealer for a bit longer. But we got it to work and it did work a treat, and we discovered that we definitely need to come up with a workflow for it, but also the fact that I know exactly how the packaging generally works (two thighs per pack, four legs per pack, six wings per pack, six tenders per pack, two spines per soup pack, variations as called for by damages) and thus didn’t need anything explained really helped things go more smoothly, so I did get to feel good about myself. I was slower than BIL, because I was doing all of the working of the vacuum-sealing machine and the distribution of the finished packages onto trays and such, and he was like “oh this is much slower than using ziplocs” until I pointed out that long ago we discovered that the thing to do was apply the labels to the ziplocs the day before so you could just package straight into bags and not fuss with the roll of labels, but we had not done that with the vacuum-seal bags, and he realized that no, it’s true, the lack of ergonomic workflow and preparations like pre-labeling was what was slowing us down. Using the sealer is not prohibitively slower than ziplocs, and the bags cost slightly less per item, and are likely to be much more durable, and do look more professional. So…

anyway. we got to the end of the time that we had and we still have one more big wheelie bin full of birds, so those are still in the walk-in and we have to go back out there tomorrow. i pre-labeled the bags and cleared another work surface and i hope we can be more ergonomic today and fly through ‘em, because after lunch we have to help Middle-Little sister move some furniture. (She bought a house! did I say? anyway. excitement!!!) (Your picture was not posted)

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I like for sure for definitely have had ADHD my whole life and have dealt with it with a cobbled-together series of coping mechanisms that have sometimes served me and sometimes crippled me, and the state of medicine and prescriptions in the US is such that I don’t think I will ever actually get to try medication or therapy about it, but like, you know, I have my very small life and the things I know how to do with it and that’s fine, it’s as well as anyone does really. This is not to complain, it’s just to explain, a bit.

One of the things ADHD people get commonly, I’ve read, is impulsive spending and such. And I super have that, it feels super good to buy a bunch of sparkly shit I don’t need and i definitely lose my mind when it comes to the Add To Cart button, and the way I’ve mostly dealt with it my whole life is to just not buy things, and to get super weird about hoarding. (You don’t need sparkly shit when your house is so full of old broken impulse-purchased sparkly shit you can’t walk from one room to another!) Yeah, that’s gone well. But.

Anyway it means I can live really frugally, and then once in a while I wildly splurge on all the stuff I’ve denied myself, and actually it mostly works out. There have been some problems, but like really, I do okay.

The pandemic unemployment clusterfuck intensified that, and completely broke my ability to spend money– having literally zero income for seven months and then getting $12k bodyslammed into my empty checking account in 35 transactions in a single day really fucked me up a lot. It took me a while to start to piece back together any kind of relationship to money and buying things at all, and I’m still not. Well, I wasn’t good at it to begin with. I’ll wear shoes that have fallen apart and trousers I hate and a bra that doesn’t fit for literal years, and then I’ll impulse-buy $300 worth of garments that don’t fit, and never throw them out and only wear them to punish myself. Etc.

So anyhow I’ve hit a point where I have to buy things, and it’s fine I’ve saved up for it (actually it was in our budget and Dude was like why is there all this extra money did you not buy underwear and yeah no dude i did not)– and I did okay, I bought a bunch of bras that didn’t fit and I actually did exchange them, so there’s that for starters. (The punchline is that they’re not manufactured in the size I actually need, but the close-enough is actually better than the old close-enough I’ve been wearing for three years, so I’ll take it.)

I’ve also spent a frankly insane amount of money on wool leggings, which I have wanted for literal years and have hoarded a bunch of salvaged ill-fitting woollen gear mostly handed down from other people and still have not been able to be confident enough in my sewing ability to make anything out of them. So I have bought some, and maybe I’ll still get my shit together and make something and maybe I won’t.

I also bought one of those Instagram darling wool dresses, and we’ll see how I feel about that when it arrives.

I’ve also determined that several things I very badly want are not manufactured in my size, so I cannot have them, so that’s a bummer. (Anyone with leads on a velvet blazer for a 50″ bust size, or silk underwear in a 50″ hip size, please let me know.)

But now I’m facing the downside of this Internet era. The upside is that I can find things at all; I’m old enough to remember going to the mall and dragging myself into several stores, finding none of them had anything that fit me (when i was a teenager into my early 20s I fit very neatly into the slot of being too fat for the largest size in stores selling misses’ sizes, and too small for the smallest size in the plus-size stores) and keeping searching until I cried in at least two fitting rooms, then dragging myself back out of the mall with literally nothing. Now I can just go to a new website and poke around until I find their size chart, check for my bust measurement or hip measurement, and if they have it I’ll look, and if they don’t I can close the window and get on with my life.

But the downside is that I spend the money and then I still don’t have the thing, so it’s not there to help improve my mood right now in the dark depths of my dire need.

paws at door packidge? packidge? (Your picture was not posted)

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today was about ten hours on my feet and i feel vaguely astonished that i had absolutely no pain from my hip through the whole thing. amazing!

the downside is that i’m in so much pain from my sinuses and chest that i sort of don’t care about my hip, so.

i’m procrastinating going to sleep because lying down hurts. i only have sudafed, i don’t have the guaifenisin or dextromethorphan i rely on to keep chest colds from turning into bronchitis. i should’ve gone and bought some today, but, again, ten hours’ work. really no time.

and then it was too much trouble to get takeout for dinner, so i made fried rice, and my sister fried a steak. hard to explain but. i mean we can’t get food delivered, so someone has to go pick up takeout, and it’s. it’s just so much work to go get food. it’s literally always easier to cook something.

anyway. no hip pain. i’ll take it. but i don’t know how i’m going to sleep. maybe i can sleep sitting up. lying down gives me violent coughing fits, and like. no thanks.

yes i wore a mask all day. no it’s not covid, there’s no fever and i can smell and taste…. well not fine, but acceptably.

ugh. anyway. blergh. (Your picture was not posted)

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I would swear last year was my 19th anniversary with dude but i just did the math and this year’s 19 years since 2002 so this year is our 19th anniversary.

not our wedding anniversary, mind, but like. you know. anniversary of being a thing of some kind.

anyway. 2002 was a while ago but it wasn’t that long ago and it’s weird. (Your picture was not posted)

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finally i made it to my mother’s house, because it was really truly genuinely saturday. (I cleaned my kitchen before I left, because it is suddenly Ant Season and if I leave them nothing to entice them perhaps the place won’t be overrun when I get back.)

It was late enough that we just went straight to Mom’s, even though we’ll be staying in the guestroom at the farm. At Mom’s, I began my collection of hugs. My older sister was there, with her older son and daughter, and after a while I realized the middle son and the dogs and the husband were not present. The husband had begged to be allowed to join a day later, to take care of some errands; he’d bring the dogs, which would simplify logistics. And then right before leaving, the middle boy had begged to be allowed to come with his dad, so that he’d have a day off from his siblings, and his mother couldn’t deny him that. They’ve done mostly well in this pandemic, but there’s been not a great deal of respite from one another.

And we do acknowledge that we are collectively kind of a lot. We joke about her husband needing to run away from us, but it’s… not an unreasonable thing to want.

It came up in conversation that Middle-Little, who’d had a blowup with Mom and Farmsister over moving furniture and had turned down their help as “too judgy” had then said that I was the “most acceptable” family member to help her, so I decided that was my running joke of the day, and have told everyone who’ll listen that I’m going to get it printed on a t-shirt. It’s not really a funny situation, Mom had to clean out her hoarder brother’s house after he died and is genuinely terrified M-L’s situation is going to degenerate to that point and is not just being judgy she’s genuinely traumatized over all this, but. If I can joke then that’s the thing we talk about, instead of being angry and bitter about the underlying situation.

M-L showed up after that, and then Farmsister and her husband and Farmkid, and we went for a walk and did briefly explore in the barn– part of what we’re doing this week is meant to be more cleaning and sorting of possessions of Dad’s. Farmsister leapt into the barn loft and did some barnshopping– she needs another twin bed frame to house an employee, and a bedframe that happens to have been mine as a small child was available, so we collectively carried that down out of there.

We also went and stood on the bit of the barn roof where the turkey vultures fuck. It was at that moment unoccupied. (There’s a taller and shorter bit of the barn.)

So, anyway– I’ve now made my collection of hugs from all my immediate family, and feel better about life in general.

Also BIL is now committed to the tiny house project– he’s riding high I think on having successfully put an addition onto the apprentice cabin in a very short time frame on a tight budget, so. I have concrete plans to go look at the models from a tiny house company that sells kits, and as he was looking at them he was like “we don’t have to buy the kit though, it wouldn’t save that much time and is really expensive, if we just buy the plans and materials list we could do this cheaper” which is what I’d been planning to do with Dad but hadn’t wanted to ask of him. So, we’ll see.

The farm is fully staffed for this year. The labor market is, uh. People want jobs, it’s easy to find people. “We’re gonna be broke,” BIL pointed out, because they don’t do unpaid internships, but– having more help makes it all work a lot better, and there’s an enormous amount of demand for local-raised food, so hopefully if last season’s precedent kind of continues they’ll be okay with the higher labor expenditure. And, crucially, be able to build me a tiny house.

(No none of these tiny houses include a hot tub, alas, but. maybe we can make something happen eventually. first step toward the bearselkie lifestyle is the cabin in the woods.) (Your picture was not posted)

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hey someone just reblogged one of my posts that starts off with “hey please don’t reblog this”, I’m just wondering what the accepted thing to do is? I sent a message but if they don’t answer what do I do?

No, it’s not one of the ones about mourning, but it’s about Thanksgiving, which like– I OPPOSITE of regret that gathering since my Dad died three weeks later of completely unrelated things out of the blue and also still none of us have COVID, but I’m still pretty sensitive about the whole thing since my Dad just fucking died?

anyway the_beehive https://tmblr.co/mZx3iWktGuEvWTSnGnB0Yxw delete that fucking post or I’m going to lose what’s left of my tiny mind. I get that it could’ve been a mistake or whatever but there’s a disclaimer in bold at the top that literally verbatim says don’t reblog, so like. IDK man. IDK. (Your picture was not posted)

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whew. am attempting to bask in as much human contact as possible before heading back home to erie co, who today posted numbers of a whopping 8.35% positive test rate. good fucking lord.

near-miss at work– an employee tested positive, but by coincidence i did not overlap with him or with anyone he’d worked directly with, and because of the timing of my leaving it’s very unlikely anyone exposed would have overlapped with me during the sensitive period and I was gone before they in turn would have been contagious. helpfully, i’ve been avoiding coworkers, and have been lucky enough to be able to, so while everyone else is getting tested, i don’t need to. but holy shit. a day earlier for me or later for him in our schedules, and if i were less unabashedly assholish about just straight leaving the room if anyone’s there– well, anyway, i would not have known in time and would have brought my potential exposure straight to the turkey crew and everyone at the farm and my parents.

so i’m going to get back to my house in buffalo, and i’m going to see how much of my work i can do before 10 am when the store opens, and i’m going to attempt to overlap as little as possible with other humans, and i think we’re going to try to minimize even grocery store trips. it’s bad out there. and we’re not seeing anyone for Christmas, possibly not even dude’s mom– depends on whether she gets stuck in quarantine again. just gonna sit at home as much as possible.

It’s fine, I’m fine with this. I hope you all are somewhere safe and warm and have food. It’s such a distressing fucking time to be alive, I tell you what.

Anyway– end of the farm season, I’m going home tomorrow, though I wish terribly that we didn’t have to. But it’s all right. It really is.

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So a thing about my dude, with whom i’ve been partnered for like. 18 years at this point? IDK. He’s not very demonstrative, and I’ve had a few years now to get used to it and I kind of just live like that now, but. Anyway

We’re camping in the woods at the farm and I’ve got this smallish tent, and I was setting up bedding in it last night, and I had two different mattress toppers as base layers, and was starting to lay them out. The tent has a center pole so they’d have to go either side of it, to fit– each were twin size and that’s just as much room as that tent has.

Dude came in and looked dubiously at them, and I was going to be snippy that he hadn’t done any planning and this was the best I could do, and instead he said, “IDK man, it’s supposed to be cold tonight, I don’t want to sleep that far from you. I think it’s a night for snugs.”

“Do you think you can really actually sleep a whole night with me on a twin-sized surface?” I asked. In our house we have a king-sized bed and he still manages to kick me sometimes. (In his defense, I’ve certainly punched him repeatedly. Listen I lose track of him in all that foam-topped wilderness.)

“Uh,” he said, “yeah,” so I stacked the two mattress toppers and sure enough we did.

Joke’s on him, though, it was 55 when I woke up. The forecast still calls for 45 but it’s definitely 55 out there. Those were PURELY GRATUITOUS SNUGS.

I got a few hours’ sleep but man two foam mattress toppers is not as soft as you’d think, when it’s on bare ground. I am old.

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bomberqueen17 https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/623539048320057344/sketching-conclusions-gonna-make-myself-a-mask :

sketching-conclusions https://sketching-conclusions.tumblr.com/post/623287111927398400:

gonna make myself a mask embroidered with “Please Scream Inside Your Heart” on it

Did you think I will? I really did it.

[image description: a hunk of black fabric with, in maroon embroidery pearl cotton, the text “Please scream inside your heart” embroidered across the front of it.]

It’s not a mask yet but it’s embroidered, LOL.

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argh oh my god, TW menstruation

listen I have basically been celibate for all of quarantine for purely logistical reasons (I don’t think it’s TMI to admit that like, existing scores-to-hundreds of miles away from my partner of nearly two decades is having an impact on my sex life, not even getting into any details about why I haven’t had a pregnancy scare in like, well, a real long time okay, basically never), and yet, somehow, my period was a week late just now, and like, I’m not the sort of person who has that happen so even though I know it can’t be the obvious reason, I’m not excited about all the other possible reasons it could be. (I mean, I’m 40. It’s coming. It’s just… ought not to be coming soon, given my family history. I mean, like, sooner than it was before but like. Come on. Not right yet.)

Anyway it was just because of stress, it turns out, given my current state, so guess what here it is and oh my god it’s the level of pain where I have to fidget because it hurts too much if I sit still, and also moving sucks, so like

anyway this is just me whining but also I am 40 and the surest way I’ve ever come up with for tracking my menstrual cycle is whining about it on my blog.

Like, I guess it sure was nice of it to give me an extra few days to have a lil reunion with my dude and all but I don’t know that it was worth it given the ferociousness of the current moment. Oh my fuck, I wish I were the sort of person cannabis helps. (I tried it once, for cramps, and hoo boy not only could I still feel them I also could feel them through space and time and that was not a pleasant time, I get that tons of people love weed but I am not one of them.)

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so we just got new doors on our house. (who knew that was a thing? who knew that was so expensive a thing? i know right) and so now when it’s stormy the storm door of the kitchen doesn’t rattle directly next to our bedroom all night long.

(our bedroom storm window still rattles because it’s still from 1950 but that’s another story)

I woke this morning at like, 5, and was confused by a nagging noise. it was really bugging me, and kept keeping me from falling back asleep. i finally got out of bed, and wandered around, and couldn’t find it, but.

eventually i figured out that it was rain, coming down with little blusters of wind, and i’d never heard the noise before because it had always been covered over by the storm door rattling

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So. Our coffee canister is a glass jar, which one can see through at a glance. Occasionally we buy coffee in metal cans as well.

Every morning that i am home, I wake up first, so I go and make a batch of coffee in the drip machine, and then I go and sit and read until Dude wakes up and goes and pours us coffee and then comes to join me. It’s pleasant, it’s domestic, it’s routine, that’s what adults like.

When we moved offices at work and I had room to have my own coffee-pot, I brought one in, and I brought in grounds a little at a time at first, but at some point I bought a tin of grounds and left it there. Over the summer, though, I completely got out of any habit of brewing coffee there, so I brought the tin home. But it didn’t get used; we had the canister going, and kept refilling that, and so it was set aside.

Last week Dude, assembling the grocery list, asked if we needed coffee. I looked at the canister, which was like… five to seven days’ supply, probably. Well… but the tin was there, and I’d brought it home more than three-quarters full. It was probably time we used it, I judged, so I said no, we should be fine on what we have.

The fateful morning arrived: I used the last of the contents of the canister, just now. (I was right, it’s been eight days.) Time for the tin! I popped the lid off, and…

it has less than a teaspoon of grounds in it. Literally not enough to save; there is no reason I can see that it has not been thrown away. Here’s the thing: I verified that it was three-quarters full when I brought it home. So either someone broke into our house and used it, or Dude had been using it when I wasn’t home, in which case he knew fine fucking well it was empty, right, and that for some godforsaken reason he knew that and had left it there, and so why was he asking me about the contents of the clear canister and assuming I’d know that the opaque tin I don’t use had been depleted without being thrown away??? How does one commit such an atrocity and not recollect?????

Anyway. So, not enough to make a batch of drip, but at least I could use the moka pot that Dude uses when I’m not home, and make a pleasant little round of espressos, right? The bottom of the pot was sitting right there, so I scraped the drip basket into it, and it just about fits. Perfect.

I can’t find the top of the moka pot.

I haven’t used it in maybe a year, but I know that’s exclusively what Dude relies on when I am not home.

I have just awoken, and my problem-solving skills are not what they might be, and more importantly, my actual eyes take a lot longer to get going than they used to; I literally can’t focus that well. I have looked all over the kitchen and there is no sign of the top of that fucking espresso maker.

So I’m just going to go and sit on the porch and Dude can get his lazy ass out of bed at some point and possibly figure out what the hell’s going on, because I’ve left the half a moka pot sitting on the stove. (Oh, I didn’t put water in it. I wonder if he’ll figure that out. Well, our house is nine hundred square feet, he can probably find me.)

(Oh good he just came to find me and when I explained the situation with what I think is a pretty goddamned high level of restraint, honestly I should get a medal, he’s giving me this shell-shocked look-at-this-crazy-lady “okay” in a super mild voice reaction. No “oh shoot I’m sorry” or “oh weird gremlins must have used our kitchen” or any, IDK, recognition that he is a terrible person to have done this to me. But anyway it’s not my problem anymore.) (Oh yeah we don’t have any milk, I can’t even make the coffee au lait. Bah. I should have left yesterday for the farm.)

(Oh he’s getting dressed. No, I just need you to find the top of the fucking– augh!)

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she just came over and climbed up on my chest and settled down and i can’t see my keyboard

[image description: photo of a woman’s head from the nose up, peering over a blurry gray cat perched on her chest making indignant owl eyes at the beeping webcam program]

Took yesterday off work to go to the county fair with Dude's nephew and mother. Dude's mom doesn't ride on rides, it's like a facet of her personality that she Does Not Enjoy that sort of thing, and so taking an 11-year-old on a roller coaster is something she's got to enlist help to do.
(Said child's mother was a complete junkie for rides. My dude, her little brother, was terribly wimpy about them, and she bullied him into riding them sometimes but mostly it wound up being her and Dude's late dad riding the double ferris wheel until they puked, while lil' Dude and his mom went and got snacks and maybe he rode the carousel by himself.)

So Dude got his hair cut short a while back, and ever since then has had to confront the fact that he resembles his father strikingly, which somehow with long hair he did not, so noticeably anyway. His nephew's resemblance to his own baby and kid photos has been much remarked-upon (the nephew would sometimes get confused. "Grammy, this picture is me but I don't remember doing this." "Oh, that's because it's not a photo of you.") and it was deeply uncanny how similar they looked to one another at the same age. Well, now, with short hair in similar haircuts, and both wearing sunglasses yesterday, it was eerie again-- they look very similar to one another now.
Dude admitted it was really strange for him, because while all the women of his mother's family have strong resemblances-- his mom, his mom's sister, his own sister, his mom's sister's daughters, all look enough like one another for people to pick it out. "You must be related to X, you look like her, even though we've never met, I know who you are."
(I get that sort of thing a lot.)
But Dude had no brothers, and his dad had no brothers, and so his cousins on that side only sort of resemble him. (He has discovered to his great relief that he inherited his father's hairline, which is just like his cousins' on that side-- not his mother's father's, which old wives' tales always predict-- his mother's father had the monk-style baldness, but his father's people keep their thick hair and just grow extra forehead over the years, which is what he's doing. Better a fivehead than the combover, he figures.)

This is a lot of parentheses, sorry. Anyhow, here's some photos.

from the back, and

in profile

( under the cut: O R B C H I C K E N )

I'm very low on follow-through lately, or even start-through. I used up all my Get Shit Done for the week in getting my car serviced, I think. I've been utterly useless apart from that, can't even do laundry or make dinner or plan meals or take charge of anything. Very out-of-sorts, and I dislike it.

Writing is progressing slowly; have derailed the Solarpunk Cyborgs to attempt to knock out a quick GO fic and have got that one to like 8500 words without a resolution. I don't think I can do pacing, at all, guys, I'm a lost cause.

I've read a bunch of GO fanfic, which has been pleasant but has not contributed much to my overall wellbeing and sense of accomplishment. Have managed to fend off the "everyone is a better writer than me" woes for a bit but I do have the unshakeable feeling everyone's said all I meant to say already and I needn't bother, which really isn't helping much-- that's not the point of writing, now is it?

Staring at Twitter isn't helping my sense of wellbeing but it does help pass the time at work. Which is important, so. And sometimes I do see amusing things. Ursula Vernon's twitter is goddamn amazing. In response to a disillusioned and sarcastic Tweet about how the Democratic party takes so very long a time to do anything, she came up with the theory that the Entwives went off and formed Entifa to stop Saruman and the Ents just forgot about it because they were so busy hearing themselves talk. If she designs and sells an Entifa shirt I will buy the shit out of it, and I'm pretty merch-resistant, but. For real, y'all.
(i can't find the Tweet, it's not in her TL, so she must have replied to it.)

I have my 40th birthday off from work, it turns out; half the week, but it means I have to be back by Wednesday and then I'll miss the next slaughter day on the farm. I think I can be forgiven. But now what do I do with that day off?? I could go somewhere on the weekend, but-- my older sister will be at the farm, and she scheduled her last visit during my Adirondack vacation months after I'd scheduled the vacation, and so this visit is my only chance to see her and her kids until possibly Christmas and maybe not even then, but if I just-- stay at the farm straight through, of course that's a work day, and I'll spend it working, so... Anyway, I gotta make up my mind. It's not like there's anywhere I really wanted to go? But I don't want to do nothing. I didn't celebrate my birthday at all last year, I was on a plane to go to Turkey at the time but that wasn't a birthday trip and we wound up not commemorating it in any fashion at all. And like, i'm old, but I still like cake, so.

I have a wedding to go to this weekend, to which I'm looking forward, but I'm also sort of dreading because I know my vanity will insist I wear my lovely strappy gold 3" heels that I bought for last summer's wedding I attended, and they'll look fantastic and I'll cripple myself permanently within minutes of trying to walk anywhere in them. So like. *shrug* I don't have a great deal of common sense, but also I can't really bear to wear sneakers or orthopedic flip-flops to a "cocktail attire" wedding reception. I don't have a ton of vanity but I have that much.

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laughingacademy:

plaidadder:

So, I took PJ to Baskin Robbins today and evidently they are having a whole Scoops Ahoy tie-in thing. This led to PJ asking me about Stranger Things, which she has heard about but not seen. I was explaining the show and I mentioned that a big part of its appeal is that it was set in the 1980s. For people in my generation, we remember the 1980s, so it’s nostalgic. For people 10-15 years younger than me, the 1980s is either their early childhood or a fantasy landscape they know of only through 80s movies, but it still evokes memories. For kids your age, I said, you get to see what life was like before the Internet.

She asked, perfectly seriously, “What did you DO?”

I said, well…

* We watched a lot of TV. We also talked about TV a lot because we were all watching the same six shows. (The LOOK on her face when I told her there were only four networks for most of the 1980s.)

* We wrote letters. I did, anyway. Letters to who, she asked. Friends you met at camp; friends you had in elementary school or high school who moved away; relatives, etc.

* We made fake commercials with our cassette recorders, like you and your friends do on your iPad.

* We talked to each other. Long conversations, in person, on the phone, about stuff.

* We hung out.

* We spent a lot of time listening to music.

And, you know, for me, I was writing a lot, and some of my friends were also Creative Types. But basically that was what I came up with. Feel free to add your own answers if you are old enough.

Trying to breakdance. Many cardboard boxes were sacrificed to the cause

Roller skating (not rollerblading, because in-line skates weren’t a thing yet)

Riding my bike (never did manage to pop a wheelie)

Reading. I dominated the Book-A-Thons. My parents’ friends and co-workers quickly learned not to pledge more than 10¢ a book

I was born in 1979 so I lived through the whole 80s, and honestly I’m not super into the nostalgia, but what did we DO back then?? Well it was different for everyone because not everyone does the same things now! And a lot of the things I did then, my niblings do now, because kids are kids and stuff remains pretty universal.

I spent an awful lot of time just making up elaborate games with my sisters. Some involved us pretending to be some sort of animal, outdoors. Some involved the giant bin of Barbies, and we’d collaboratively come up with an epic story to tell, and then act it out over the course of several days, with five thousand full-cast outfit changes.

I read a lot of books. Sometimes we played board games as a family. I’m really good at Scrabble and I really don’t like it. Sometimes we did puzzles, though that was less common– Grandma was really into them though, so whenever we were at her house she’d have one going on the card table and we learned the basics of how to sort the pieces by color and start with your edges and such. Kids still learn that, though; Farmkid just finished her first 200-piecer and she’s five.

Mom threw us all into the car one or two days a week in summer, and sometimes on weekends during the school year, and drove us to every single free or low-cost event or location she could find. Every historic site, every museum, every hiking trail. I could recite the recording from the push-button exhibit at the Saratoga Battlefield. We watched boats go through the lock on the nearby Erie Canal. (Actually I think we’re on the Champlain spike of it, but I don’t recall.) (Oh yes, Lock 4. We could hear the ship’s horns from our house, even though it was miles away, and sometimes she’d throw us in the car and we’d drive up there fast to see the lock keeper open the lock. Because it takes like 45 minutes to open the lock, so we’d usually make it.)

We memorized the times of our favorite shows on TV and had elaborate negotiations to decide which ones we’d get to watch, since we were only allowed 1 hour of TV a day (not counting when our parents were watching too, though, so often we’d watch whatever sitcoms Mom and Dad put on in the evenings even if they were dumb because that was free bonus TV). Mom and Dad had their own TV in the bedroom, but it was black and white, and they only used it occasionally; later on, my younger sisters would watch their CW shows up there because they were embarrassing. (The B&W set had died by then, and it was an old color set Dad had wired up to use a lightswitch to turn on and off, and the channel selector only sometimes worked. That’s the 90s though, not the 80s, I’m digressing.)

We called our friends on the phone and would talk about nothing for extended periods, on the kitchen phone with the long cord you could take around the corner, or sometimes when we got older, on the phone in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. (To this day, that phone’s a rotary dial, so you can no longer dial out with it because the line only reads touch-tone pulses now.) I haven’t called anyone on the phone in eons, but I used to be just as bad as any teenage girl.

We went to the library at least every other week without fail, and got the maximum number of books Mom’s library card could handle. Often, we passed books around the whole family before they went back; I’d read a lot of pulp mysteries by the time I was in junior high. Every Dick Francis ever. Because there was always a stack of them. That’s how I learned to devour a 300-page pulp novel in two hours, because I learned the formula, and that way I could get through the whole stack and have time to reread before someone else wanted a turn with the book.

My mom and dad babysit my nieces and nephews and in many ways, they do all the same stuff, with little variation, but– having TV on demand, that just plays whatever show you want, that’s a huge difference, and they have games on iPads and things. Those are mostly just the frills, though– the fundamental stuff is still the same. Those kids are still learning to bike and rollerskate and swim and are going to museums and making up elaborate games and all.

Being able to text their aunts and get photos of their cousins’ every landmark is new, though; I only knew what my cousins were up to if my dad had called his siblings, or if they sent a card. Aunt Judy mailed letters to Grandma from Norway with photos of her kids, and then Grandma would photocopy them and send copies to everyone so they’d all know what Judy was up to, and that was our only contact with them because long-distance was too expensive. But now we have a family group text and my sister sends photos every time her kids do anything, like learn to bake or make a huge slip-n-slide or graduate first grade. The cousins in Norway are on Instagram and I can DM them directly if I want, but I don’t, and honestly we were more up on their lives when Judy was sending letters.

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So not having seen Dude in a week I’d forgotten that he’d cut his hair. I know, he did that a while ago, but for 17 years he had a ponytail, and for a month now he hasn’t, and i hadn’t seen him for two weeks of that. So.

It’s grown out a tiny bit, it’s a little floppier now.

He said, after two margaritas, “My hair doesn’t look like Richard Spencer’s really, does it?” a little mournfully. It’s shaved on the sides and a little floppy on top, and well, yeah, that’s broadly similar to one of the fashions adopted by the alt-right types, but.

“I mean,” I said.

“I think it looks more like that soccer lady’s hair,” he said, just a little bit hopefully. I didn’t even have to ask, I knew he meant Megan Rapinoe. “She’s so hot,” he said, his tone shading toward awe. “Literally everyone is attracted to her, it’s amazing.”

“I know,” I said, and we basked in that for a moment. Then I said, “Your hair’s not lavender though,” and he was like “fair”.

I do have some purple dye left over from 2014 when I did mermaid hair, we could fix that, but it would be a little odd for a nearly-40-year-old man to suddenly show up with purple hair. It would very neatly demonstrate that his hairstyle is absolutely not meant to be in emulation of Richard Spencer though. Like, for really definite. I’m gonna suggest it. C’mon, streaks at least!

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Entries tagged with personal

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bomberqueen17: sketching-conclusions: gonna make myself a mask...

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she just came over and climbed up on my chest and settled down...

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