Warhead On Legs

Monday down, tomorrow to go, which will be the most difficult. It's the coldest day of the week for one thing. I have an 8 am dentist appointment. I should have gone to bed, this being the case, an hour ago but since the wind is up my nerves are accordingly rattled and I don't think I'm going to get to sleep before midnight. First the dentist appointment, and then I head home and then I have a work meeting at noon and thankfully I don't have anything after that. I can collapse.

I've been, for no real reason other than that I finally got around to spending money on it, assembling sort of a capsule dark academia wardrobe. I have two tops, three skirts that I haven't yet been brave enough to try on (though they should fit, I took my measurements), and one vest. And then a couple more vests and a blazer incoming, so we're trying blazers again. Maybe it'll work better if I actually get blazers that are already tailored for a woman's form instead of blazers that I always say I'm going to tailor and then never do. Heh. Anyway, I've now reached the point where apart from two colors of tops, maybe an extra white blouse, and a black skirt I have pretty much everything I need and now I just need to exercise enough to achieve my final form. And I don't wanna. I can buy clothes and red hair and jewelry, why can't I buy my fit, martial-artist body back? It's so rude.

(I mean, plastic surgery does exist, but it doesn't confer muscle. It just removes mass and tucks and trims and everything, and what I want is muscle. I want to be able to haul around the bulk bags of cat food and cat litter like they're nothing again. And also to be able to kick people into walls. I really enjoyed having that kind of power in my legs.)

Alas. But I am getting better about exercise. I've managed to keep up on the elliptical, I've managed to fold in some port-de-bras onto that, I did some weights today so maybe I can fold in some weights and a couple more dance exercises. I'd've done it this morning if I'd been better about going to sleep on time last night. (I'm giving up on that tonight, but tomorrow night I'm going to try again.) Slow but steady progress.

So, I should get up and do some dance and another round on the elliptical and then it might be time to take an anti-anxiety pill and at least try to go the fuck to sleep. Stupid wind. Stupid anxiety. Stupid multiple tall trees falling down around my house giving me windstorm anxiety. Do not want. Do not enjoy. Dislike. Strongly.

Okay. Well. On Monday I got the call from the heating people that the part either had come in or was on its way in in some verifiable capacity, and was Wednesday morning all right to fix the heat, and obviously I said yes because YES PLEASE GIVE US OUR CLIMATE CONTROL BACK. To a greater degree than we have now, space heaters and all. And I already had a therapy appointment on Thursday and a root canal on Friday and now I have an additional potentially very good thing on Thursday afternoon and it's all either good to neutral but also I am feeling extremely overwhelmed by Things to Do. And a need to be an Adult Human. Who interacts with people in adult human ways and not oversharing or over... what's the opposite of oversharing. Over aggressing?

I'm tired just looking at my schedule for the week ahead, never mind managing it. I think part of that is that it's fucking freezing in the house and if we didn't have so many cats I'd just spend the day in a coffee shop on my laptop or something else, but I want to make sure they're okay. So we all sit and suffer in our space heated home, as my spoons freeze and crack and crumble away. Brr.

I dare say probably on Wednesday after the house starts warming up again I'll feel more up to Thursday and Friday. And then once we've gotten the heating fixed we can consider getting a new washer (it had another power blip the other day) and start shopping around for new cars and so on. Fixing all the less urgent problems. Developing all the less urgent developments. Improving things. 

Improving myself, I've managed to be pretty consistent with exercise, writing, languages, in a way I haven't I think since the pandemic started. I'm not sure what changed, the languages have always limped along but the writing kicked off first and now the exercise. Not sure what's going on with me or what caused the sudden shift, but I guess I'm enjoying it. It's hard to find enjoyment right now with so many things cold and broken. I was enjoying it before we lost heat in the house! And I'm rather enjoying that I'm kind of limping along and keeping it up even without heat in the house. Not entirely sure how I'm managing, I think on sheer stubbornness and having a job that allows me to rearrange things to take it easier on myself, such as doing work on my laptop or letting my boss know I'm in a Situation and to take it easy on me. But... well. Keeping up these habits makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I'm back to sculpting myself into the me I want to be.

At any rate. Less than twenty four hours to go before we have heat back on in the house! It'll be fine. We'll get through this. There will, soon, be better days than this.

Well. It's day two of no heat in the house.

Let me back up a little. Yesterday the heating guy came at 9 in the damn morning because our heating was being weird. It didn't feel like our thermostats were always kicking in when they should. And what we thought was, oh, well thermostats are only supposed to last ten years, aren't they? Maybe that's what the burning smell was, the wires from one of the thermostats shorting out, we'll just have him clean up and tune up the boiler and replace the thermostats and it'll be fine.

And he did clean up and tune up the boiler, and he took a look at it and then he found out that in fact it was not the thermostat that was busted. It was in fact the electrical panel on the boiler that processes the sensors and the input and then tells the boiler "hey, the water for the radiators is a little cold, better fire it up and make it hotter" or "hey, we need more hot water in the upstairs boilers, let's go." Those were not at all working. And he gave it something like 90% odds that that panel was what we'd smelled shorting out, which, yeah, probably. And the good news is that that panel, or rather a direct replacement now manufactured, still exists and is easy to come by. The bad news is it's not actually safe to run the boiler until it gets replaced because of risk of electrical fire.

So the good news I guess is that we found out what had caused the electrical fire smell without the house catching on fire, and the bad news is that we have no heat for at least a week. In the middle of winter.. I am not best pleased by this. No one in the house is best pleased, not me, not my husband, not the cats. But then we'd be even less pleased if the house or the boiler or something caught on fire, so I guess needs must.

And this is better than the last time we didn't have heat in the middle of winter. That one was due to a power outage on account of a fallen tree also knocking over a power pole, and that took three days to fix and the winter was even colder than this one. This time we have space heaters and a working oven to make hot food and a working dryer to heat blankets. So it could be a hell of a lot worse. I'm just still unhappy.

But I also met my current root canal dentist, and he seems pretty nice and all that practice does is root canals, so I have to believe they know what they're doing. And we topped up the spices that need topping up, and we got more catnip bananas for the cats because for some reason every single cat in the house is only mildly interested in catnip mice, but will absolutely go wild over catnip bananas. I don't know, I just provide the bananas.

Work has been done, I got to sleep in today which gave me some strength to deal with everything, I get to sleep in tomorrow because I've done everything that doesn't involve taking things to standup meeting and going "I need another pair of eyes on this, it's driving me batshit." I feel like I've accomplished some other things but I can't remember what the hell they are. Got cats fed on time, maybe. Got cats and me fed on time, medicated. Picked up my prescription. I got Christmas presents out, I think all of them except the box for the friend who's not going to be home until later, and that's going out in January. I'm keeping my head above water on things I want to get done even if it doesn't necessarily feel like it. There will be better days than this, and there have been worse. So it's going to be okay.

It's December. Why is it December. Where does the time even GO?

We still haven't bought a new car, although I think the boy is finally ready to start looking. We were supposed to start looking today but we both got vaccinated yesterday (covid for him and flu for me) and he got the covid vaccine reaction where one feels like one's been hit by a convoy of trucks, so not much happened except for eating and sitting on the couch and occasionally napping. We'll see about tomorrow, or even Monday since he has Monday off.

I'm setting up next year's bullet journal and hoping this time to actually keep track of all the things I'm building trackers for, as opposed to last year when the trackers just sat unfilled in the beginning of the journal. Things like, oh, savings. Garden tasks. Reading lists. I did actually do some reading and gardening and saving money (I've gotten MUCH better about putting money in savings or investments as soon as I get paid) but I never wrote it down. I need to write it down, or make a better try at it anyway.

We had some drama with the electrics last weekend, but the electricians came out and said we did not have an electrical fire brewing in the outlet, and we haven't noticed the fishy smell (I did not know electrical fires smelled like fish) since the one night, so... I have no idea. And then the downstairs thermostat wouldn't kick on the boiler for the heat, though whatever it was didn't seem to affect the upstairs thermostat so we still had heat and now... oddly, it seems to be working. So. A whole lot of drama and I have no idea what to make of all of this. Except that electrical fires are now going to bother me and keep bothering me for a while. I remembered at some point over the week that I'd actually been in an electrical fire at one point, although everyone was evacuated safely and no one got hurt just scared. I'm pretty sure that contributes some to the edginess about the electrics. But, realistically, everything's been fine for years and every time the electricians look at it they go "eh, don't see anything awful" besides whatever it is they've come to fix. Burned outlet. Power box yanked off the wall because a tree took down a power pole. You know, the usual.

I have decided that this year for NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month, which should come some time after National Novel Writing Month, but not necessarily the direct month after) I am in fact scrapping my entire Nano novel and doing it over again for Camp Nanowrimo, this time properly and with an outline. I tried completely pantsing it this year and I don't know if it was the novel I was trying to write or my style or a combination of both but it did NOT work. I ended up with about 2.5 pieces of two different companion novels. Don't like it. Not going to keep it. I do like the world and the characters though, I'm going to keep them. Just, also to start it again with an outline and some sketches and notes and things. In April.

My labs came back, which I didn't expect them to do until Monday. My fasting glucose is fine and I don't have diabetes, which for some reason was also tested this time (maybe it didn't get done at my yearly physical? Or maybe I just didn't notice because usually when I give blood for my thyroid it's in the early morning when I haven't eaten breakfast anyway and this one time it was after lunch) but the bad news is my thyroid is... less active again. What the fuck. It was overactive only eight weeks ago! So annoying. So inexplicable. I'm going to go through my collection of half-full bottles of thyroid pills now to see what the hell my last dosage was and then look up if there's a dose in between or if we're just going to do this dance regularly for months. Ugh.

Not much else of interest going on. Which is fine. I like it when things are only mildly interesting.

I had a realization the other day when I was looking around the "post" feature to see if I'd been using the beta screen or what, if I was going to have to get used to another interface. And that realization is that I joined LJ in either college or just out of college, and I was on DeadJournal before that, meaning I have been on some LiveJournal or another type of site for about twenty years.

That's a lot of years. That's especially a lot of years in Internet Platform time. I don't know what to do with that realization. That's a hell of a lot of years.

Didn't catch up on Nanowrimo as much as I wanted to do over the weekend. Didn't actually get done as much as I wanted to do, but I did get a fair bit done.  

(of course now I'm up an hour past my bedtime, but mainly because we had a blood sugar scare with Murdock after his doctor's appointment and I want to be sure his blood sugar isn't tanking after his evening insulin.)

And I'm staying somewhat organized. And... I don't know, things? Stuff? I have so much work to do tomorrow, I meant to get more of it done this weekend and instead I spent yesterday with a head cold.

I tried fussing around with a pasta bake recipe and I think I got it good enough to improve on for a second try without feeling like I'm wasting any ingredients. It'd be better as filled pasta shells, definitely, but I don't have large pasta shells right now. I do still need to make the liquid solution for the macaroni and cheese bake. Which is amazing. I freaking love it. I also got some better cheesees for it. And I didn't get around to trying the spinach dip recipe that I intend to adulterate to take out, what was it? Mushrooms (which are less objectionable, just not to my taste) and fried onion rings (seriously, what even)? Something, there were a few weird things in there. But I can try that either next weekend or later in the week. I'm really enjoying the single serving casserole dishes as hot lunches, especially if half of it's frozen and slowly defrosted over the course of the day. Advantages of working from home.

I don't know, not much else is going on. The wildfires are blessedly coming under control, the closest one to me hasn't grown in days while the containment level has gone steadily up. Another couple fires are either 100% or 95% contained. As of today's summary, the Cherokee fire was reported as having not grown in 24 hours, which is the first day that's happened since it started, and hopefully they can get that under control. I'm having a lot less panic about the whole thing, and  it looks like we'll escape without too much loss of structures and I don't think any loss of life? I hope.

At any rate, things are quieter than they have been. I have a dentist appointment later this week and I'm hopeful that's all the excitement we'll have. That's as much excitement as I prefer.

Things have been way too hectic this week. Work has indeed picked up, which isn't a bad thing, it's still within the realm of what I can get done, just closer to a full time job in terms of time spent. I'm making as much or a little over what I was given to understand I would make when I started, so that's fine. And my contract was just renewed for two more years! Which is great, I love my job. Being on contract makes me a little skittish, but I love my job.

There's been some awfulness too. ( Pet death, not mine ) Even if it wasn't a personal awfulness, it was still an awfulness. Not really how I wanted to spend my Wednesday.

But. Contract renewed for two years, I'm very excited about that and I need to call my Mom and my aunt and tell them. And I am now eligible to be sponsored to take the CPACC exam, which I have of course promptly started building up a study plan and collecting notebooks and study materials for. There is so freaking much material. There are also practice exams, which I need to figure out how to avail myself of, and courses I could take if I wanted to though I'm not sure I do want to exactly. There's a content outline. There's plenty of stuff to go on. I'm excited! And a little nervous. It's been a long time since I've studied anything that didn't have to do with code. I've collected my pens, I've written up sort of an outline based on their content outline and with some notes about the things I think I'll end up having to learn, and I've ordered a Trapper Keeper to hold all my notes because apparently they still exist. Which just delights me. Trapper Keepers! I'm ten years old again.

The continuing adventures of Felix Doe, International Cat of Mystery point towards it becoming more comfortable around us. It was waiting for us to come out with breakfast this morning, on the front stoop. That's a first. The boy still thinks we can trap it, I think we're going to either need to use a box trap or maybe some kind of fish net, or just do this the slow way and make friends with it. Probably the latter. I think he wants to think we can trap it because if we make friends with it it's never leaving the house. He thinks. I... don't know. What I'd like to do is get it into the house and then bring around the family who thought it might be their lost cat, and see. But so far it's sticking around, it's come to see us as food and shelter, so at least it's not in much danger.

I want to get a bunch of house cleaning and mini painting done this weekend, but after this week it might just end up being a weekend for resting. We'll see. I still have some of Jamestown to watch, I don't know how restful that will be, I need to find a quieter show. Or some cartoons. Or something.

I get the feeling this is the right dose. I woke up, actually I woke up early, ended up getting up with my husband a half hour later, showered, got dressed, had breakfast, did some Duolingo, got the cat medicated, got me medicated, got the outside cat fed, got a couple things picked up. Made some hot chocolate. Passed back out for a couple hours then cleared a handful of things off of my slate that had been lingering last week since I was getting 2-4 hours of sleep a night. Picked up my meds refills, fed the cat again, did laundry, did some exercise, did some more coding, did the daily tarot spread, put some stuff away, and started dinner. I haven't been this productive in definitely more than a couple weeks. I'm not sure how much more, and given that the last couple weeks have involved 1) very overactive thyroid and 2) sudden pet death there are sort of extenuating circumstances for me becoming a potato, but. Well, yeah. This seems to be the right meds dosage.

So at least things are better on that front. I'm trying to drag myself back into the habit of writing daily and in the habit of writing fiction in general, but since it's only been a couple weeks instead of a few years I don't think it'll be that hard. I just. I'm also in the middle of getting caught up on a lot of crap, including Inktober. I meant to have this be WIPtober too, and then I got behind on everything. Maybe it still can be. IDK. Maybe it still can be and I'll just focus on one WIP, like Treason's Crusade, and get that done.

(I'll talk about Treason's Crusade later when it's not 10pm and I'm trying to get things done before bed.)

I also haven't started Inktober technically, but I have the sketch of the first one done, which is a bit of a relief to get that started. My sort of theme for this Inktober is to do biological drawings of Creechurs, as tumblr calls them. Basically I'm mashing two or more animals together visually and making a drawing of it. My first one was a bat/horse/gerbil, which amounts to more of a hammer-headed fruit-bat with dik dik legs? and a round belly? But it looks pretty creechur-like. Second one is going to be more challenging, a peacock/rhino, and then I also have corgi/quokka, a god of worms, an armored bird (so like an anklyosaurus/ or armadillo/bird), and something crossed with a hippo, I wrote that down somewhere. I'm looking forward to trying to sketch it, and I was going to try and ink the first one tonight, but time and things to catch up on got away with me, see also the list upwards of all the things I got done today. So. I'll work on getting sketches done tonight and then take some time tomorrow to ink things. I might fill my rapidographs though, and do some practice drawing with them to see how I feel. I haven't worked with them yet. I inherited a set from my uncle, who used to use them for technical drawing. I've wanted to use them for a while, I've just always been too intimidated to.

Once again hoping that I'll be lucky and I'll have a few weeks to chill and catch up on things, do Inktober, work on what I'm going to do for Nanowrimo, before the next crisis happens. I know we need to buy a new car as this one's slowly giving up the ghost, but as far as I know the rest of us are in good health and there's no other things about to break. Well, my cholesterol keeps worrying my doctor, but other than that I think the rest of us are in good health. Cholesterol schmolesterol anyway. I'm working on eating better though. Less mac and cheese, more vegetable soups. It was more salads, but now it's heading in towards winter and I don't actually want much in the way of cold foods. So, vegetable soups, roast veg, warm soppy grains. Less pizza rolls and velveeta. And less stress. Please, less stress that makes me want to eat like a ninja turtle.

I didn't want to write this entry, but if I'm going to actually keep a presence here I suppose I should talk about it here too. On Sunday night we were naffing around the house, getting ready for a blackout scheduled for Monday so the power company could do some equipment upgrades or something, and I went upstairs to try and find my iPhone batteries. I found Maggie on the floor, legs stretched out like they should be stiff although they weren't very, tongue hanging out of her mouth. For a second I thought she was dead and then I picked her up and she yowled, like she was mad. I'd be mad too in that situation I guess? I called my husband, actually called on the phone because I didn't know if he had his head phones on. He came upstairs and took a look at her and we basically went "ER?" "ER."

We took her to the vet ER and I held her out to the nearest person who came out of the back in scrubs and said "Seizure cat" and they took her back immediately, directing people to take our details and to take a medical history. Within about ten minutes or less they had us back in a room. Within fifteen minutes they said they didn't think she would recover from this. Her blood sugar had indeed tanked, her blood pressure had also tanked, I asked how long it would take to do bloodwork just in case it was another low blood sugar seizure (she'd had one of those in February, which she'd recovered from just fine and she's had excellent quality of life since then as far as we and our regular vet can tell) and then the vet came back from, I guess getting the vials together for bloodwork to tell us that she thought Maggie was trying to pass on, and that she wouldn't survive taking bloodwork. So we gave the okay and we said goodbye to her. When we got back the time elapsed between when I called my husband to come upstairs and when we pulled back into the driveway with an empty carrier was 75 minutes.

It was the ... well, the second easiest euthanasia decision to make, the first easiest was Zeus because he was actually on his way out and if the vet had told us "he can pass naturally, he's not in any pain now" we would have just held him until. But definitely the second easiest, because this seizure did look much worse than the low blood sugar one, she really did feel in my arms like her blood pressure had tanked (which I know from holding Zeus, who also had that, albeit with less seizure and more slowly fading over a few hours). And after the few months of health problems last fall we knew she'd taken some damage from her diabetes going all over the place. First her insulin dosage was too low, then within a couple months it was too HIGH, then it was too low again (although thankfully we didn't find this out with an ER visit, just with a regular checkup). So we knew there were problems, and we knew something like this could happen. We just didn't quite expect it to happen within 75 minutes.

It feels more real today, Tuesday night, than it did on Monday. Monday was hard, and I was glad to take the day off because of power company issues and not have to explain to my boss "yeah my cat died and I'm a bit shattered." I actually think she'd understand, she has dogs herself, but I still feel weird saying I might need a couple days, and having a day of enforced doing nothing, because of course the internet was down completely and I ended up laying on the bed, listening to music, and napping in and out of consciousness. That kind of helped. My husband had to go back to work, but his work demands attention more forcefully and immediately so maybe that helped too?

And there's also Cassius. Maggie never warmed to him the way she bonded to Michelle but he adored her, he bunted her and tried to get her to lick-groom him and tried to get her to accept him lick-grooming her. I found him sitting in the spot where she'd seized tonight, and according to my husband (who sees him more in the evening when he's getting ready for bed earlier) he sits there a lot of an evening. I don't think he's waiting for her to come back, I think he knows she's died, I think he's grieving along with the rest of us and I wish I could do more to help. We're giving him extra cuddles, for now.

(There's also a part of me that's superbly bitter at the universe, wondering if the appearance of Felix Doe, Cat of Mystery is the universe's way of balancing out that sudden loss of one cat. Bitter. And a little bit angry.)

Other than that, not that that isn't a lot of "that", things are going well I guess? But it hurts, and I'm still looking around for her when I turn around after a shower (she used to jump in the tub and catch the water that dripped from the faucet in the last couple seconds), when I go into the kitchen (and she would follow me expecting to be fed wet food), when I'm walking around the water bowl (she used to lay down by it, I think because after two rounds of getting hospitalized for dehydration it was sort of a comfort thing). It hurts. And Cassius hurts and I want to make it better, and it's awful.

And the cat drama continues! Still largely drama of the outside cat variety, the most drama there is inside the house is one cat getting pissy because another cat wants to play and the first cat doesn't want to, so a corrective slap is issued. Outside, on the other hand, I've come to find there's a second black cat sniffing around the front of the house. The second black cat is not a Felix Doe as far as I can tell, it's known to us as Tailypo because it has a bobbed no-tail. (The tailypo is an Appalachian folktale with a wikipedia entry.) Tailypo came around today, sniffed around the front stoop, and casually walked off towards the neighbor's yard. Tailypo also, to my eyes and considering it came up pretty close to the front door, very healthy looking and well-fed, so I'm less worried about that one needing to get caught and returned or adopted out.

But Felix Doe is still coming around, I saw it with its feathery tail after Tailypo had left, so tomorrow we're going to try and trap it. From there we take it to the 24 hour vet (because by the time there's a car at the house again our regular vet will be closed) and get it wanded for a chip, if there's no chip I'm going to request that they vaccinate the silly bugger, assuming that won't result in adverse effects, and we'll possibly host it long enough to get it fixed. And then we will be adopting it out because there is no more room at the in, Felix Doe, I'm sorry, there just isn't. I'm sure you're very sweet. But no.

Other than that I can't really say much has been going on. I've finished the Singing Hills series as far as it's come, which is good timing because the new book is supposed to come out tomorrow. I'm now on to A Deadly Education, which is the first of Naomi Novik's actual published books that I've ever read. It's all a bit of an odd feeling, but I'm trying to take a more active approach to actually reading books now.

I am also having a problem with going to sleep before 2am, which is partially my fault of staying up till about 12:30 and also partially just I can't seem to actually fall asleep once I go to bed, despite being tired. I lay there and almost drift off and then I jerk back awake again. As a first step I'm going to try throwing some valerian at the problem an hour or two before I actually want to fall asleep. It usually works, and for once I'm not having any trouble staying asleep, so that should be fine.

Yeah. other than that life has largely been boring, which is nice. I like it when the biggest drama in my life is oh no I forgot to take some meat out to defrost for dinner, or, oh shoot the bread I was going to eat for lunch has gone moldy, or oh great a hairball I found with my foot. 

I was too tired to do a bunch of things I've meant to do today, so a short list of things I want to get done over the next couple of days (other than trap the cat) and then we'll call it good. Let's see. I want to make a tumblr post to give away some copies of She Wolf and Cub by Lilith Saintcrow. I want to read over another Blasted Lands story and make a list of all the concepts and characters and places I need to write up. I want to draw out the map of the city for Bones of the Labyrinth. I want to make some progress on my American Sign Language course. I want to read some Gatsby for the novella and some Deadly Education for my own pleasure. I want to sit down and paint some minis. I think that's good enough to be going on with for the rest of the week.