Warhead On Legs

I don't even remember when I last updated, although it's probably been less time than I remember. Long story short, someone brought something up in discussion yesterday that turned out to be a major trigger of mine? Somehow? I think it was a perfect storm of it being a sensitive (racism-category) topic, and it was duly labeled as such! And then on top of it being that and me having already had a hard past 12 hours emotionally, it managed to mash one of my trigger buttons really hard, such that I spent a good 3-4 hours in what I can as a Farscape nerd only describe as barely controlled Luxan hyperrage. I was really mad, okay. (Not at the friend, btw. Not the friend's fault. But the person who said the things, ooooh grrr.)

So after a while, and by after a while I mean as I was drugging myself to sleep with ZzzQuil that night, it occurred to me that maybe I had been under a lot of stress lately, and to list the stressors. And I started listing them out, starting from March 26 to almost three months:

Going into quarantine, thus isolating myself so I see only the boy every day and some store employees about once a week if I can. A couple weeks after that, going into in-house quarantine because of the boy being on the covid ward with actual patients there, therefore inducing in myself touch starvation for... I don't know how many weeks it was but we'll guess 8? It was after local lockdown. Windstorm of doom, tree falls, thereby bringing half of an actual nightmare I've had repeatedly come true. (In the nightmare the tree destroyed the house. This did not, thankfully, happen.) Got into a giant money and logistics fight with my Aunt, who believed she could just tell me things and I would magically be reassured and convinced everything would be taken care of. No. Second windstorm comes up, thereby confirming that the first windstorm has now given me a panic trigger. The windstorms continue, about three or four of them before the windy season dies down. I'm still in quarantine. Around the end of April, I think? No, beginning of April, Murdock gets sick, losing weight, badly limping, vet can't figure out what's wrong at first, so that's about a week of stress before we take him back for a proper blood test, vet confirms diabetes. Keeping in mind this is added stress because six months before our other cat had started abruptly losing weight and it turned out to be an extremely fast moving fatal cancer. So. Thankfully that stress has since resolved. He still walks funny, but that's because of muscle loss and we're working on building it back up. He's taking his medications well.

So we're into... May? Ish? My birthday happened. That turned out to be much less awful than I'd expected given we were able to do none of the things we'd planned, and we'd planned some extra special fun. Then George Floyd was murdered and the entire United States overturned in protest. (Several other countries have had protests too, but the US seems to be overturning more than most due to various.) About that point I got off Twitter because having an endless parade of 'and this city's police department did this heinous thing' 'and these people were ignored by medical departments' 'don't forget the concentration camps are now gas camps' was... not good. So that took away both one stressor but also one source of relief because I wasn't talking to my glam squad anymore, or sharing things with my writer friends. I'd started making new friends in a more smaller, contained, with a designated "awful stuff goes here" area type of place, but making new friends and feeling connections takes time! So that's a work in progress, albeit a positive one. People in my neighborhood started shooting off intermittent fireworks even up to midnight and 1 in the morning, which is a sign of overall positive morale but still a stressor. And then also our downtown area, where the store is and where some of my relatives live, was subject to three or so nights of tear gas, vandalism, fireworks, and cops being awful.

And I think even at that I'm missing stressors, I haven't been reporting on here as much and... ugh, I don't know. It all came to sort of a head yesterday afternoon? Ish. I think yesterday afternoon, and time is doing that crash into itself thing again. So, trying to get back into the habit of daily blither on here so I can keep track of what's going on. Also tagging. Tagging should be a thing. If for no other reason than then I can look for the tag to find out how much stress I've been under. Even apart from the individual things there's been the ongoing isolation stress, the boy-is-working-on-a-plague-floor stress, the financial stress of not having a job and unemployment only stretches so far (there's a thing there but until the thing happened that was a stressor) and the when will this end what happens after stress. I'm under way more pressure than I allow myself, is what I'm saying. Not that I can allow myself to be stressed or not stressed, but I haven't been accounting for it, and I probably should.

... this has gotten long enough that I think this is going to be a two post day. Post about what I've been up to incoming.

Well. That was an unpleasant surprise this morning, finding out that the (US) post office had jacked up their prices over $1 per flat rate setting. Flat rate boxes that used to be $5.25? Now $6.80. Flat rate envelopes that used to be $5.05? Now $6.45. I am not looking forward to the customer screaming that results from this and at this rate, are they going to improve their first class service? Because the last time I tried shipping anything first class from work, it was even odds whether the customer got the item or just an empty open package.

I've started the great tumblr cleaning project, possibly to be followed by the great DW cleaning project in which I go through and tag all my shit. I have a surprising number of tags, including some funny ones I've only used once, some surprising misspellings and failure to capitalizes, and holy shit I have a lot of untagged posts. This could take a while. And I need to not let it distract me from other things. Like writing.

I guess on the plus side, work is relatively slow? Relatively.

I should probably check my lab work but eeeh. The cold is acute enough that I really don't want to do anything. Which is funny because yesterday I also got Arabic and Hindi and editing and everything else done except guitar (frozen fingers) and it wasn't that bad of a day, but goddamn does it take me a while to get going unless I'm somewhere 72 degrees or above. Since we keep the house at 65 in the winter, this is a problem.

David Bowie continues to be everywhere, which is not as much of a problem as I'd expected. Mostly I'm just tired by now. Sad and tired. I have a lot of things I want to do and most of the time I'm getting through them, but sometimes I want to just stop and curl up and read all day and ignore the rest of the world. Which could be sadness, or could be the cold. Tired and sad.

I don't know. I do know that I have stuff to do, I've added three new to-dos on Habitica, so I'd better get to it and stop fussing at the find-your-untagged-posts machine. I think this is the effect of emotional overload. Last week was horrible and it should feel bad and if I sit here and categorize posts I won't have to feel everything all at once. Or something. No, work to do. Let's get doing.

( Gaeilge )

Sleepy. Stayed up too late last night reading the rest of Geisha: A Life (so now I have inadvertently done a Wednesday Reads post!) because I was near the end and I was fascinated. It's a book by Mineko Iwasaki, one of the main sources for Arthur Golden's Memoirs of A Geisha about which there are several controversies and I will leave it at that. But Mineko Iwasaki's book is a wonderful read, very comprehensible and intriguing in the glimpses it gives into her world. Hence the staying up too late. I need to figure out what to read next, though. I have the rest of Fort Freak to finish, and a Tad Williams book, The Devil's Alphabet by Daryl Gregory, The Windup Girl, and Soulless also to go through. And The Name of the Wind. Any ideas where to start first?

And, you know. Things got accomplished yesterday. I finished today's blog entry and another scene in Gods and Monsters, even if I wanted to finish the whole damn thing. Ended up dealing with the weirdest incoming shipment to arrive lately, though that supplier is always a bit screwy. Finished spinning the singles for the next two Grimm scarves, now I just have to ply them. Made a pretty good dinner. Didn't overwork myself, did get my languages and exercises done. Not that bad!

Today, oh god. Finishing the goddamn Gods and Monsters draft, preferably in the morning, and other than that collating Black Ice into a document. Which is pretty much my task tonight and Friday and Thursday during the day, Thursday evening I'm going to try to get the next episode of Haven finished. Oddly, I still don't feel rushed. Just tired. Which in this case is less doing too much and, again, my own damn fault. Workload for the next few days is doable. Though I also have no idea when we're going to watch the new Phryne Fisher or what's going to happen this weekend when Haven comes back. Ulp.

( Gaeilge )

Hey look, back to weekly routines. It took a week after Dragon*Con to fully recover, but at least it happened. I should also go back and finish the con reports for the last couple of days; right now it's all a bit of a blur. They are, though, starting to change over the Dragon*Con website from last year to looking forward to next year, so hopefully the DC heroes photoshoot will be up soon. And at some point I need to upload all the pictures from the camera onto some kind of album. I even managed to put the chip into my netbook, so maybe I'll do that tonight.

And I am starting to get back into routines. I did a chunk of exercises this morning, not all of them but enough to give me an idea of where I am, which is oh dear god how much muscle tone have I lost. How much ability to do basic exercises without aching. Hopefully that'll come back as quickly as it went away. I miss being fit. And I'm still fit, or at least pretty much so, but it's been three weeks between illness, Dragon*Con, and recovery, and I'm on the verge of not being where I want to be.

But on the plus side I'm not prepping for Dragon*Con anymore? It's amazing how much energy I was flinging at that. I still have a backlog of blogging to deal with (not a short-term backlog, just the general backlog of episodes we're slogging through) and fresh seasons are about to start up soon, so there's that stress, never mind the book publishing. But it's slowly getting done. I have one thing off my plate, I'm starting to get the house actually cleaned again only this time I'm doing it bit by bit since I don't have company coming over and there's not the urgency of "augh quick clean ALL THE THINGS." It's nice not to have a lot of urgency to deal with. Our next house project is going around and winterizing it as we didn't do last year because we'd just moved in and ugh. Which mostly means patching up the holes in the floor left by the radiators getting pulled out and replaced with radiators that only have interior holes. But anyway, that'll wait a couple weekends till more towards the end of September.

So, yeah. House in order, novel things, and blog. That's actually at least one thing less than I was dealing with previously, and it feels like a great weight has been lifted. Never mind that it's only one thing, still feels like a weight. One and a half things given the absence of deadlines for house being clean? I feel much more relaxed and like I can do things. Which is a good thing since Black Ice looks on time to drop on the 30th.

And in the category of family randomness: I knew, vaguely, though I don't think I remembered to mention it here for posterity, that grandpa owned a small printing press when he was in high school and ran a newspaper. I didn't know that he also played the accordion in a small band with four other boys and sometimes they played for school dances. My family, ladies and gentlemen. Even the people I think aren't musically inclined were musically inclined before I was born.

( Gaeilge )

... Why is house buying so stressful? Why? No details on the "I don't want to jinx" this thing, also by way of keeping me from dwelling on the current thing more than I am already, which I am trying hard not to do. The next step is to get an inspector out there while I bang on people's heads to get them to cough up details about the work they're already doing. There, is that cryptic enough for you? And then I get to decide if this is out of my price range or just at the upper edge of do-able. Meanwhile the boy gets to pick the next three houses to see, since I picked the first three. This, in retrospect, was a BAD IDEA. So bad.

No, seriously, I am not allowed to make big responsible adult decisions anymore. I want all the shiny and there are stars in my eyes and dreams in my head. But I have not put my signature on anything nor committed a dime just yet, nor will I, except the required dimes to assess the situation more deeply and properly. Because I am a responsible adult even though I REALLY REALLY WANT THE SHINY.

Oof. Other things. Once Upon a Time has stolen my playbook and I freaking want it back. Right down to the Glaucon option. Admittedly he makes a very wee Glaucon, but that's what he freaking did. I will say, though, it is by far not the worst display of Sorcery I've seen. I will reserve that for throttling Sherlock bloody Holmes and Gatiss for stealing my angst angst brood on a high place thing. That wasn't even the original plot point, that was Sherlock goes and broods on a high place to think because that's what Sorcerers do. Rarr. And on the other hand this means all the Sorcery I have left is Nate's semi-competent flailing, tonight. I can live with that.

Right. I'm going to go off, do my work, try not to have house flail, and talk to the Architect about inspectors and things. And email back the realtor lady and thank her and see if she has answers to those questions we had.