Tag: journal

About Me

Snow and more snow

Autumn

This is the winter than never ends …

So, I’ve become even more of a space cadet now that I’ve taken to spending each day waiting for the snow to stop falling. Is there such a thing as sunlight and warmth? I don’t know. Maybe it was all a dream …

Returning to seriousness, I’m beginning to suffer from a sense of guilt. I enjoy my Spring Cleaning routine of opening windows and chasing the stuffy winter air out of the house, yet here we are in April and I have yet to scrub down anything. The rugs need to be shampooed. The car could use a thorough vacuuming. I feel so lazy.

But I can’t exactly drag the shopvac out into the snow, now can I.

Don’t mind me while I wilt over here. I’m sure that Spring will come eventually.

Or the world is in for a lot of trouble.

XD

About Me

Online

Autumn

Technical difficulties left us without internet for a few days. Naturally the kids complained, and I was all, “When I was your age, we didn’t have the internet at all.”

Cue feeling old.

I think my family got online around ’98 when I was 10, with dial up over the phone lines so no one could make or receive any calls while it was connected, which severely limited how much time we spent on the internet. Kind of crazy thinking back to how much the world has changed since then.

Anyway, it was kind of a spontaneous vacation. Got pancakes at IHOP, went to a craft store in person, spent time at our local indoor swimming pool, and roasted coffee beans over charcoal briquettes to see how it would taste, despite there still being snow on the ground.

Now here I am, not doing anything particularly useful because the internet is back. I question everything.

Sorry about not updating The Scions on Monday, but I didn’t get it set up before the technical difficulties started. With everything as it is, I figure that I can resume next week.

About Me

Cat update

Autumn

The 16-year-old dying cat is peeing on everything.

I’m resigned to simply dealing with it until the inevitable. I’ve told the children many times over that they need to keep the doors to their bedrooms shut to prevent the cat from peeing on their things as well. Naturally, they didn’t listen, and I’ve had to do some extra laundry loads as a result.

I’ve been keeping old towels on the floor in the kitchen, to encourage the cat to pee on them instead of anything else. Easier to manage. Somewhat works. We already have an easily accessible low-profile litter box for the three-legged cat, and at least he’s doing his other business in there.

Death is such a tricky subject, particularly with these slow moving conditions. We know the cat’s kidneys are failing, he occasionally throws up uric acid, but he’s on a (ridiculously expensive) specialized low-protein diet, and he does seem to be holding steady. I could be cleaning up cat pee and vomit for awhile.

Better than ‘died suddenly’. Please excuse the smell, we’re all coping with something over here. It’s still too wintery to bust out the spring cleaning supplies. Heavy snowstorms and all that. Maybe in March.

art

Turtles

Autumn

After I inflamed the tendons in my foot with sloppy treadling, I decided that I should mix up my yarn spinning by using a drop spindle every now and then. Eventually, I got a turkish drop spindle set.

Naturally I made a quick reference of video tutorials to ensure that I was winding the yarn on correctly to create a center-pull ball. I very quickly noticed that everyone was neatly lining up their yarn to make very neat “turtles” that visually look very neat. (Turtles are what they call the yarn balls that are woven around the cross sticks)

Context:

I’m an INTP. When I saw this video by Frank James about how the different personality types kill their relationships, my initial reaction was, “I would never go out in public wearing pajamas … but yeah, he’s spot on.” I’m not all that big on social presentation. I can’t remember the last time I wore makeup, and while I do clean house every day, I’m terrible at organization. I figure that I don’t have any room in my life for people who are going to be pissy about my house being full of children. There are toys everywhere. Deal with it.

So, when it comes to spending extra time making a temporary ball of yarn look pretty, I’m skeptical.

If there’s some other purpose, then I’m open to the idea. Does it tangle less when being unwound? Fits more yarn? I’m genuinely curious. I don’t mind spending the extra time if it somehow benefits me later — I’m just not going to do it purely for aesthetic. I’m waaay too INTP for that.

I almost asked about possible other benefits on one of the youtube tutorials, but was overcome with anxiety instead. Would my question be taken as an insult, and get me attacked and ridiculed? I daren’t say anything.

Which paints a depressing picture of how I’ve experienced socializing with other women.

Personality wise, I strongly prefer spinning wheels anyway. I’m only doing this to avoid aggravating the tendons in my foot again.

So I’ll just quietly do my own thing, and stay far away from those pretty little “turtles”.

About Writing

TBM remake

Autumn

The other night I had an absolutely hilarious dream about The Black Magus, where the two main characters were bad stereotypes.

Lily was recast as a socially awkward red-head, desperately trying to get the Black Magus’s attention through not-so-subtle means. At one point, she had her phone in hand and was fretting about whether or not she should call him, talking to herself, “I didn’t steal his phone number; I borrowed it.”

Ainmire had short black hair, and dressed all in black. He was too caught up in his own self-importance to actually care about anyone else, but for his own amusement he decided to throw that awkward red-head a bone — because, c’mon, she was being ridiculously obvious about wanting him.

Even as I was dreaming it, I kept thinking about how ridiculous it was.

But it would make for a fun spoof.

And yes, I dream about my own novels and characters.#WeirdoWriter

Does anyone else miss calling them pound signs?

About Writing

Writing in 2022

Autumn

I had made it my goal to publish a book every year, but at this point I can definitely say that it’s not going to happen in 2022.

It’s been a chaotic year.

At the very least, I can say that this year was dedicated to fairly big events, like having baby #6, and saving our cat’s life at the cost of her leg — there was never a point where I could have been writing, but just didn’t. So hey, good enough for me.

Dear master sergeant Hartmann, one day you will grasp the object of your desires. But probably not this month.

And CR1515 will have to wait until next year to continue his steamy philosophical rants. You have no idea how much I enjoy writing a cynical cyborg.

On that note, I’ve had this particular quote by CR1515 echoing in my head of late.

Humans have become the worst combination of lazy and entitled. They don’t want me to be relatable – they want to hate me because they know that I am superior to their celebrations of mediocrity and failure. They don’t want to achieve anything great, or even to manage their own basic survival, and they will attack anything that reflects their own pathetic state back to them.

This speech is promptly followed with lots and lots of delicious arguing, lol. Gosh I miss the bickering and ranting in that story.

Maybe (and this is a big MAYBE) I’ll get away with publishing both The Scion Suit Multiverse and CR1515 next year … provided no one loses any more limbs.

About Me

Continued

Autumn

We ended up deciding to transfer our cat over to our regular vet for some extra care, so she didn’t come home until today.

She’s eating well, but with the broken front leg and the cone around her head, I’ve been helping with holding the food up so she can reach it more easily (I can’t figure out how to get the cone off for her to eat, and I’m scared to handle her at this point).

The kids are being really well behaved about all this. I’ve told them that they can keep her company sitting by the kennel, but they have to stay quiet and not touch her, and so far they’ve been perfectly obedient about it. Of course, she’s a pretty pathetic sight at the moment, and they’re probably just as scared of accidentally hurting her as I am.

Tired.

At this point, all that’s left to do is to keep an eye on our cat and keep up with her medications.

Probably time to catch up on some sleep.

About Me

Cat

Autumn

Our cat, the one who’s fur I spun into yarn for fun, disappeared for a couple of days, then showed up yesterday badly injured.

I took one look at the cat’s back leg and honestly told the children that the she was probably going to lose it. My husband rushed her to the emergency clinic, where they put her on painkillers and IV fluids, and an examination of the wound revealed that it was not only badly infected, but had maggots in it as well. Yuck! Her blood work showed that we found her in the nick of time, because the infection was on the verge of going systemic and turning into blood poisoning.

Sure enough, her back leg was amputated during the night.

Her front leg is also broken, and she has deep bruising all over. My husband asked the clinic what they thought could have caused all these injuries, but they couldn’t say for certain. It could have been a car, or she could have gotten caught on a fence and fallen.

She isn’t home yet — we’re waiting on a consult with an orthopedic specialist for what to do about her front leg (whether a splint is going to be sufficient for her bones to heal, or if she’s going to need pins inserted). I’m hoping to have her back this afternoon or evening.

I feel awful when I think about how much agony she was in while she was dragging her broken body back home, especially because it took a couple of days.

But if she had wanted to die, she would have laid down in the bushes and died. She wants to live. Besides, this is our cuddle kitty who’s all heart and no brain — we have to do what we can to take care of her.

I’m going to get a kennel set up for her in the laundry room, with puppy pads because the vet said that she won’t be able to use a litter box for awhile. She’s going to need medicine, and to have her bandages changed regularly as well. However, the vet has assured us that cats handle amputations very well, and that there’s a good chance she’ll return to full mobility once she’s healed — but she does need to stay indoors from now on.

For those who are following my blog, you’ll know that this is coming on top of our 15-year-old cat getting treated for an abscess after fighting with a stray.

So, kind of feeling a touch cursed right now.

About Me

Ramblings

Autumn

In Splatoon 3, I get the feeling that there are two factions: those who want to have a chill time inking base, and those who want to rush middle.

Me? Well, I’m a mid-30s stay-at-home mom playing Splatoon 3 because my 10-year-old likes it. I don’t have the reflexes to successfully rush middle, so I prefer to ink base.

But I am tickled by the fact that no one has any clue what these terms mean. Look at me, I’m blabbering gibberish. Ha, ha!

Seriously though, Nintendo isn’t exactly known as the hardcore gamer console. I like it the best because the games are playable for me and my kids. Just because this particular game is online, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be just as playable as Luigi’s Mansion or Breath of the Wild, and I don’t particularly enjoy being told that I should emulate the way a 20-year-old male NEET plays video games.

Anyway, the artwork on the whole is a lot more lighthearted and less furry-oriented this week, which is better. I actually bought a stylus for my 10-year-old to use for drawing, because she’s really developing as an artist. Watching my kids grow as individuals is the best part of being a parent.