Warhead On Legs

Today was sort of a wash, on account of explosions happening last night until nearly three in the morning. Ugh. I woke up, rolled out of bed, took my pills, had half a Crumbl cookie (huge oversized gourmet-ish cookie store) with the boy for breakfast, and then went back to bed until maybe noon. And then when I woke up I still felt crappy.

But I did get some work done regardless. I cooked the chicken in the fridge for dinner, I showered and clothed myself and did a bit of reading and a bit of cleaning, so today was only sort of a wash. Things got done, partly, slowly, but they got done. And I didn't push myself into worse exhaustion.

I called my Mom and we talked some about recent events in our lives. About the boy not being able to move to days because no one new's getting hired to replace him, about her test results that turned up a calcium deficiency and something else her doctor wants to talk to her about, but nothing urgent. That asterisk of "I want to talk to you about this" is a bit nerve-wracking but it's also a lot better than her saying, by the way I've been losing a lot of weight so I scheduled a whole bunch of labs with my doctor. Yay that you're scheduling labs with your doctor but also what the hell, Mom.

(Of course then she told me what "losing a lot of weight" meant, and it meant over several months and since she stopped going from a sedentary, computer-job life to a life taking care of farm animals, so that's definitely a thing. Mom needs to just stop giving me anxieties.)

We also had a talk in which I think she was trying to suggest she could give me money? But for the first time in my life I'm in a position where, yes, I would never say no to free money but unless she's specifically telling me "I am sending you this to buy treats for yourself so there end of sentence" there's nothing I actually need. And she's paid for enough stuff in my life. So I did not ask for money, and I told her I was fine, we don't have any major expenses and we're paying our bills. And that felt really damn good. I'm in this position because of family generosity anyway, I don't need to go "pls send me money" when I can pay even for my own somewhat pricy luxuries. Airbrush I'm looking at you.

It's definitely a weird feeling to be in this position right now, better than I've been at any other time in my life, when the world is doing what it's doing and the US is at a time of near? worse than? Gilded Age inequality. But here we are. Anyway.

I got nothing else, and everyone's had their medications and I should go to bed, but also I'm looking at my icons thinking "hmm. I should really update those. a lot."

I keep swinging wildly back and forth between this is going to be the best house ever and oh god I've already fucked up the decorating with the three lights I've selected. Which, shut up backbrain. The chandelier is fine, that's where the dining table is going to go anyway, so shut the hell up. I did a bit of looking at furniture on craigslist, which seems like a good place and hopefully that'll turn up some good deals, and if I'm very very lucky, I'll have a nicely furnished house soon. And maybe my backbrain will shut the fuck up about my decorating sense or supposed lack thereof.

Still hope we can swap the kitchen lights, though. And still not entirely sure why they couldn't originally go where they were meant to (potrack over the sink, pendant in the center) but oh well. The board the potrack is supposed to go on is, admittedly, a little narrow for the anchoring pendant, but we can nail a couple pieces of wood to either side, paint it up, and install it there and it'll be fine. And then the boything won't hit his head on my pots and pans, either! Stove and bed are due to come next Monday, if I'm clever and remember I can take the work dolly (that's a rolling handcart, I don't know where 'dolly' isn't common terminology, but just in case) home and we can move the old appliances out of the way, new ones into place. Fuck this waiting for the appliance store shit. And then... thinking about it, and then we'll just be waiting for the stove and our brand new bed, and possibly still looking for furniture if a couple of craigslist inquiries don't turn out. Well, still looking for other furniture, but looking less urgently. Holy crap.

I also had the distinctly odd realization that I actually will be in the house in time to celebrate my first Hanukkah. The trepidation and squirminess I felt earlier seems to have dissipated, thankfully, replaced mostly by a wistful curiosity and anticipation of, what, reconnecting with child me? That's a lot of what it feels like, actually. Being a child at holidays again. I'll take that as a sign as I'm doing something that's right for me, and so I guess the first thing to do the next time I get over to the house is dig out my shiny new menorah and the candles. Fortunately they're in the same place. And then I'll know where it is come sundown on the first day.

Plus, for whatever reason, despite as far as I can tell no one in either my Mom's generation or my generation celebrating the holiday, we still give out chocolate gelt this time of year. Or rather, periodically I get packages with gelt and find it on my desk and whatnot.

I managed to even do my exercises this morning, which is sort of amazing. I've been really lackadaisical about it this past week. But as was pointed out to me by one of my sister courtesans, even a little bit of exercise will make me feel better. And it did! Slow but steady progress. Back to routines and something resembling normality for the next couple weeks, that thereafter will more closely resemble normality as we settle in to our new home.

I wonder if someone will smite me or lecture me with patient well-meaning condescension if I put up Christmas lights in white and blue. Probably not, they'll just think it's a snow theme. And yes, I'm still practicing pagan, and what. I like pretty lights. We'll call them holiday lights. Especially since I don't plan on putting out any Santa stuff, just, pretty lights and maybe put out some cloven oranges in the house. Which is where you stick cloves into oranges and your fingertips bleed but then the house smells really really good. We used to do that at home, too.

I should write home. I should do a lot of things, fiddly little detail things, most of which are written down on my to-do list but several of which involve finishing knitting projects. And starting more knitting projects and then finishing them. Knit ALL THE YARN! Write ALL THE BLOGS! And ALL THE YULETIDE! And and and. My mind is currently going in twenty directions at once, which is a good sign that it's time for me to start rambling at alloy'all and start doing some of those things on my list. Okay, ramblers. Let's get rambling.

( Gaeilge )

Okay, so, riddle me this, Batman. Me being played by Marion Cotillard I can see, because of seeing Dark Knight Rises last night. But why the fuck was I gallivanting around with Sebastian Roche last night in some sort of Phryne Fisher era, both of us being ... some sort of foreign correspondants for newspapers or something? And what the hell was up with that engagement ring. That thing was huge and awkward looking.

Yes, I did in fact get dream-engaged to someone who looked like Sebastian Roche. It was very, very weird.

So, I did see the Dark Knight Rises. Which was very good, as long as I turned my brain off just to enjoy all the pretty people punching the shit out of each other, speechifying, and snarking the hide off of everyone. That is definitely not a movie to be looked at too closely. Still, it was pretty, and there was Christian Bale, and I managed to come out with an unreasonable fascination with Bane as one might expect. Seriously, I want to take him home with me and pet him and send him after my enemies. He's so much fun!

And another thing that happened yesterday was Operation Connect Jag With Her Heritage, which involved purchasing a mezuzah and a rather pretty menorah and telling lots of stories about my grandmother and handing me books to read. And one entertainingly misguided stall vendor telling me stories about people in New Mexico who were just now starting to rediscover their own Jewish heritage. I, um. I've never been to New Mexico. I know it looks like I should have grown up somewhere close to the border, maybe in California, whatever, but, um. No. I'm an East Coast original. I didn't disillusion her, though, and I ended up sitting on a bench on the outskirts of the festival sipping drinks with my aunt and listening to stories about our family. Oh my family.

We also went over to the house and managed to pull most of the greenery off the side of the garage, and cut a lot of the rest. Hopefully now the stuff that's higher than we could reach without a ladder will die and we can get up there in a couple months and pull that off. We trimmed down some of the trees, dead and dying, in front of the windows, and I trimmed some of the hedge in front of the other window. Not much, on account of it's a fucking tall hedge, taller than I am, and there's only so much I can reach. There may have to be a ladder. Or a chainsaw. We're going back over this evening after work to do some more on that, so we'll see how that goes. The eaves and fascia and soffits are done, the old gutters are off and presumably new ones will be put on today and/or tomorrow. Um. Stuff! Stuff is happening. It's awesome.

( Gaeilge )

Well, that's going to require some work.

I checked my email this morning only to find out that no one had told me about the mail order sale (free shipping) we're having next fucking week. For those of you who have been around me for longer than a year or so, mail order sales range from the "was that a thing? It didn't feel like a thing" to "AUGH I HAVE BECOME A DECAPITATED CHICKEN." This on top of all the house shit. My Aunt did spend about half the drive in apologizing to me for springing that on me. Still want to strangle half my family. Mostly the uncles.

House stuff! Okay, so, since I haven't updated people in a while since I got so damn tired of it, starting from the beginning. We are applying for (and hopefully finishing, now) a renovation loan for Old Hotness. That means the loan is for the total cost of the house plus renovations. Originally the selling bank had come down on the price from $Tigers to $Lions, and that plus the quote for the renovations that we got from the contractor we ended up going with ($Wolverines) just about hit our budget. We figured the house would appraise the second time for what it had appraised for the first time, which was about $Sabertooths, so we'd be good. Right? Of course not! Instead it appraised for $Pumas, which meant we had to make up the difference between $Pumas and $(Lions+Wolverines) or we had to get the selling bank to drop the price by the difference.

I hated that. Because I had to go to my family for help, and even though I know Grandpa can throw any $$ of a number of wild animals my way, that doesn't mean I enjoy it. At all. It makes me feel like a failure as an adult and a whiny spoiled child who throws tantrums until she gets what she wants. But, indeed, I swallowed that and told my Mom where we were (actually I've been calling her fairly regularly with updates anyway) and asked if there was a way to get help with that. And two days later, I had a check for the difference.

And two? three? days after that, I got an email from Realty Lady saying the Listing Agent had sent over an amendment with the price dropped by the difference.

Because of course if I hadn't stomped on my squick and asked for help, it wouldn't have happened. I think what happened with the selling bank, too, is that they realized they had a house on their hands that finally had a buyer after three years, that was in the process of falling apart, and that they wouldn't be able to sell again any time soon without throwing a shitpot of money at it themselves. Because the $Wolverines cost of the repairs is only what is needed to make the house functional as a modern house. It does not involve any of the cosmetic shit needed to make the house a picturesque sale. This is partly out of budgetary concerns and partly out of me going I will decorate my own goddamn house thank you very much. But it's also what led to the appraisal coming in low, annoyingly enough. Anyway, I suspect the bank guessed that. And the odds of someone coming along in the next couple months with enough money to sink into the damned thing who would want to are very, very slim. And if that house has to go through another winter as it is, I feel fairly confident that the shitpot of money needed to fix it up for sale will double.

SO. Where we are with the house is basically waiting on a clear to close ... date? Letter? Confirmation? All the paperwork is in, all the money for the down payment (except what the boy has) is sitting happily in my account plus the amount I got from my family that we may no longer need, but which Mom told me to sit on anyway just in case. Because I have the best family ever. Renovations Lady thinks it'll go through. Realty Lady thinks it'll go through. Paralegal and company are just waiting for the date. Contractor Dude is ... well, is actually on vacation but is gung ho and ready to go when we get closed. I won't be moving over Dragon*Con (thanks be to the Goddess, yeesh) and the guy who's completely redoing the heating in the house is the same guy who was working on it when someone last lived in there.

To sum up: the house will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine.

This weekend I ... well, I intended to do very little. Instead I will do batch cooking as little as possible, mostly involving throw shit into a pot and stir it every 30. I will do Arabic Saturday morning and try and remember to goddamn post it here. Saturday evening there will be Hiddlestoned Shakespeare. Sunday there will be sleeping. And possibly sewing. In between there will be writing this Thing that started out as an emotion play profiling-as-courtship Grimm fanfic and has turned into a nearly 20k Grimm Big Bang. Because Monday new Grimm canon starts and I want to at least have a completed draft before the Grimm writers rip my headcanon to shreds.

( 日本語がもとめの練習 )

( Gaeilge )

WEAVING. I DID A WEAVING. Or rather I put the warp mostly on the loom. It was AWESOME. I cannot express in words how awesome it was to have all of this make sense. I am definitely going to need to put more warps on looms, I think I've got the hang of winding a warp and how to figure out how many threads you need and so on, but actually putting the warp on is something I need to repeat. A lot. I also want a Baby Wolf now. Yes, that's actually what the loom is called. Sadly, it costs about as much as a plumber's visit, electrical tidy, and mason's visit combined, so no Baby Wolf for me. Or more than that, actually. Plus, it's not like I can't abscond with a shop loom every now and again if I really want to. I just have to make sure I don't do it during class time when people will actually need the loom.

And then again, I suppose if I really REALLY wanted, too, we could find a way to disassemble the ginormous floor loom of ginormousness and move it into Old Hotness. Or I could just start going out to the farm and using my aunt's loom. I have options. That do not involve dropping $Maine on a new loom.

My aunt told me a story on the way in that I need to write down lest I forget. Apparently when they were living in Portugal for that year, year and a half. In the castle. Periodically a gypsy wagon would come by and they would call out to bring out your knives and scissors to sharpen. Horse-drawn wagon and everything. And my aunt, who was maybe 7 at the time, remembers thinking that if she could just leave my youngest aunt, the second youngest child, on the front step maybe they would take her. Oh my family. These are the kinds of people who raised me, folks.

And, you know, the reason I don't speak Portuguese, for those of you who know how I got started speaking a frillion languages, is because they only spent a year or so there before moving to Spain. So now you know.

Things and stuff. I need to make up a review plan for Japanese and check in, too exhausted to do so the past couple days. Or too busy. I need to print out emails from Paralegal Eagle and see if we have to sign or turn in anything. I need to run to the post office. I need to beat on the Leviathan. I don't think there's much else I need to do. Sley the rest of the colors on the loom, maybe. Pack, as usual. I hope this will be a more relaxing day. I really hope.

Have a Renard icon. Because my god that man is pounceable. ETA: And speaking of Renard, could someone who is not me who is on TV Tropes please please please go change his damn name to the correct one? It's giving me fits. But I don't want to get sucked in.

( Deutsch )

One of these days I will remember not to do stupid shit like slinging boxes around at high speeds, especially when they're over 20-25 pounds. Until that day comes, pass the naproxen sodium. No, it's not bad, it's just irritating especially when I know better.

There's a rumor in my family that may well be true, that when Martin Luther King spoke at the National Cathedral (I think it was) towards the end of his life, my mother and one of her friends snuck out from school to see him. The only thing I know about this friend is that she was black, because apparently this made the papers because it was just so cute, a little black girl and a little white girl holding hands and watching this man speak. One of these days I'm going to stop by a library when I'm home and see if there's some archived issue of that paper that has that photo.

It's funny how things change. When I was a kid, presidents in this country were old white men. Hell, up until Obama started making serious noises about running a few years ago, presidents were old white men. I remember half holding my breath throughout his entire inauguration, waiting for some jackass with a rifle to shoot him for having the audacity to be president.

I have a bit of a funny outlook as far as race goes. I didn't grow up like so many people in this country; DC is its own little microcosm in a lot of ways, and my socio-economic bracket where I grew up there doubly so. Aware and not aware. I was lucky. I like to think we're moving more towards being a country where that can happen, where (as I heard so often in my childhood) you and me are free to be you and me. Where my Mom and Dad can be married (well, for as long as that worked) and I can have an awesome Dad who teaches me the joys of rock guitar and backgammon and how to hit a cooked crab with a mallet and pull the meaty bits out. And it doesn't matter that he doesn't look like me, because he's my Dad, and he was a pretty awesome one.

Anyway, there was a much bigger ramble here about my outlook on race and what my childhood was like as far as race goes, but I chopped it. It's still around here somewhere if anyone wants to see/know.

I have too much shit to do and not enough hours in the day to do it. Where's my collapsable days, dammit?

( Gaeilge )

Got a bunch of stuff done last night. Little fiddly bits, but a lot of things. Printed stuff out, pulled together documents, made lists. Made lassi. And then I got on the phone and talked to my Mom for a couple last bits of information and got yanked completely off my equilibrium.

There's a... a thing. That happens, sometimes. If you don't know all the details of your past or, hell, even if you think you do. I thought I did. I thought I knew the worst that was in my past, as far as my bio-dad, who I haven't seen since I was three or four. And then I called my Mom and got some stuff from her for an official thing, and there was a place for information about my bio-dad. I put 'unknown.' I still got off the phone with my mother with the option to contact him, because I'm going for my annual physical in a couple weeks and having a medical history would be really nice. But other than that, I don't think I want to know. And what she told me makes me even want to know less.

The shortest version, the version I feel comfortable putting out there (although it's my day to check in and I really need to unscramble this) is that she told me not to Google him because I would find some really unpleasant shit. And then she told me the gist of the unpleasant shit. And, Mom, I love you, but if you tell me don't look at this because you don't want to know and then tell me anyway? What's the point of telling me I don't want to know.

I have no idea how this affects me. Or, no, I have no idea if it affected me before I knew, because now that I know it sure's hell affects me. It makes me question a lot of shit in my life. It makes me scared. It makes me angry. It makes me want to destroy all the contact information and it makes me want to call the guy up and scream down the phone what the fuck are you? Which, according to one of my aunts, he has patched it up. And changed. And all that. So I don't know. It's just, bad shit. All of it that I found out last night. I called up my Mom to get one piece of information and got knocked completely base over apex.

Something something. Today almost everyone in the store except two people have doctor's appointments, so this is going to be one hell of a day. Expect either silence or explosions.