Warhead On Legs

Boy this is a day we're having. I have a friend who's having some serious and imminent troubles within her family, and the husband tried to do a load of laundry and the washing machine had a sudden unexpected power failure in the middle of the first load. We got it working again but I think the search for a new washing machine is back on, so that's something to deal with. On top of getting a new car (which I have since discovered my husband has done the research and getting a loan for a new car is actually better terms than getting one for a used car, unless you're looking for a beater) and getting the heating fixed. Absolutely none of this pleases me.

There are things that please me. We still have power, we do not appear to be about to lose power, which means we can get somewhat around some things. We have groceries and can cook. I'm about to start a huge batch of cottage pie with ground turkey and another big pot of chicken soup. I've managed to do some form of exercise eight out of ten days so far in December, so I am slowly working on that. The first week or so was making sure to get regular treadmilling in, and now I'm folding in dance exercises. Next step, which was supposed to be this step but the heat conked out and threw everyone for several loops, is to make it a regularly scheduled thing, i.e. all but the treadmill exercises happen at X time in the day. Not sure what time of day that should be, but eh.

(To be honest I'm a little torn about how rigid a schedule to maintain, given that my job, theoretically the biggest part of my day, doesn't exist on a schedule. Should I try to set up a rigid-ish exercise schedule or should I just try to make a specific amount of time, say half an hour, and say "I'm going to do dance exercises for half an hour" and then fit it into my day whenever.)

I've gotten some other things done and I can't remember what they are anymore. I've also been keeping greater track of things in my bullet journal, remembering to enter in the times I do my skin care or my languages or so on. Oh, spice shopping and getting more bananas for the cats and filling my pill container and getting my root canal scheduled. So my bullet journal tells me, I've gotten those things done. Today I think the goal is to get a bunch of cooking and baking done and then get some cleaning done so if the part comes on Monday and the heating guys can come on Tuesday the place doesn't look like a shithole. Yes, for some reason it matters. Also cleaning makes me feel better about all the other crap in the world being out of my control.

I will say, it's a lot easier to manage to get things done or progressing now that my thyroid is seemingly properly medicated. It was extremely overactive, and now it's underactive, so we're testing again in seven weeks now (need to mark that on my calendar too) and we're experimenting with alternating dosages and days to see if that gets me within a normal range, but for the moment I'm not having obstructive thyroid symptoms. I'm sleeping fine, I'm not overheating, I'm not overtired. It's a small blessing.

Oooh I need to be in better habits about posting here. In my defense though, not much has happened. We went grocery shopping. I painted mummies. I did take that one bug to standup at work, and my boss got me about halfway to fixing it pointing out a couple things I either hadn't thought to look at or hadn't yet gotten used enough to the built-in functions to use. And then while she was helping other people I got myself the rest of the way, so we double checked it and it worked. So that was a moment of victory. And then I got another scan afterwards to do, but Friday was pretty quiet, and so was Saturday. And so has today been, a lot of sleepiness and playing phone games and putting sand on mummy bases.

Thankfully Past Me was apparently a smart woman and set the meeting for the last stubborn bug tomorrow for 11, so I don't have to worry about being coherent for a 9am meeting. My sleep schedule lately has been, for some odd reason, go to sleep at 2. Achieve functionality around 10. I don't know why and it's vastly irritating especially since the boy wakes me up when he comes home at around 8, but I suppose I should just go with it since I don't actually have work hours at this point. Or something. I can't decide if I want to just go with it since my work schedule is whatever I say it is or if I want to try and drag my ass back to a more 6/7-11/12 schedule.

I did discover painting the mummies yesterday that I am in dire need of acrylic retarder. I had mixed up a pretty good grayish dead flesh color and wrote down the formula to use for Mumm-Ra the Ever Living, and I was going around the 8 mummies I had left touching the exposed bits of their hands and face with it to give some sense that there was once a human being under all that wrapping, and by the time I got to the last few the mix had almost completely dried. Definitely need some retarder. And now I'm trying not to place another huge order from the online hobby shop just to get some retarder because it's a $4 product and I do not need $100 worth of hobby materials for a $4 product. And yet.

One of the hazards of living in a small town in the mountains is there are only three stores in the area that carry the kind of supplies I need and one of them is fucking Hobby Lobby. We do not patronize the Christofascist hobby store. And the other one is Michael's, which is okay but ugh, and then there's Hobbytown USA. Which doesn't have as much of the D&D gaming type stuff as I tend to play with, but they will have acrylic retarder. So I will stop there, especially since it's by one of our customary grocery stores, rather than pile on a bunch more hobby stuff I don't actually need because my job pays well but I don't need to be that profligate. I can wait until next month. or the month after. Right? Of course right.

I say this, and then I look longingly at the hobby store website anyway. They have Vallejos.

Another thing I've been contemplating doing is I get emails from Stuart Semple now, because this is what my life has turned into during the pandemic, an assload of art supplies I'm too scared to use most of the time. And he sent out this one about a contest, how everyone should mix their own color with his four magic powder color things. And they're neon. And I have Vallejo Matte Medium which I think could be used instead of SuperBase. And I have an assload of minis that need paints. Some of them could definitely be neon. So now I'm contemplating joining this challenge just to paint up some neon minis. Preferably something in a Greekish vibe like the horror of when we all discovered those statues were actually painted. Maybe horror is a strong word but you can't deny there was a moment of extreme dissonance.

Anyway. Anyway anyway. This is my life now. It's quiet and full of art supplies and code that I yell at, which isn't the worst thing in the world, especially now that covid has settled to, well, I'm still pissed that I can't really go anywhere without risking my health and maybe other people's lives, but at least I'm not worried that the boy is going to die or that he's going to bring it home and I'll die. I would still like to go out periodically. But I have a job, and it's one I'm doing from my home, and... things are okay. Which is more than I can say for the rest of the country. So that bit of dissonance is still going on, I guess.

Oh. Right. Did you know that in the middle of the night, and probably even not in the middle of the night, a click beetle in close enough proximity to an outlet can sound exactly like the outlet is making ominous about-to-catch-on-fire noises? I found this out at four in the morning last night. Hence the sleepiness and sullen usage of phone games. Fucking click beetle.

Somehow, and I blame my grandfather talking endlessly about economics and stocks and money and so on at me from long before I was old enough to care about such things, I absorbed enough information about the stock market to understand what the hell was going on with GameStop and other stocks about twelve to eighteen hours before the explainers started pouring out. Which was funny because I got to do the explainers, but also left me feeling like a bit of a freak for just ... absorbing information like that. So that was weird on top of extra weird. The GameStop thing is still going on and snowballing like Madmartigan down the hill. I have no idea what's going to come out of this but I have my suspicions that it's going to be Not Good for average people who don't own stocks. (Or, I guess, people like me, who own stocks managed by professionals and don't really give a shit about the day trading options.)

I did have my project evaluation and that went amazingly well, my reviewer (who was the same as the first project) was impressed and pleased and told me I should be very proud and yes I damn well am. And now I'm on Rails, which is going well enough so far. I'm setting up, already, now, like a smart person, a separate directory just to do Rails stuff in, over and over again, so that if I run into something I have trouble with in labs I can just fuss with it in my practice directory until it becomes second nature.

I'm also trying an approach right now that involves treating it like any other language, and just going to study groups to hang out and watch people problem solve their own labs or projects. Mostly projects so far. Anyway, I'm treating the study groups like immersion hours, listening and doodling to keep myself slightly occupied while I listen and follow along. Hopefully it helps? It may be too soon to tell.

It doesn't feel like a lot has happened in the last several days, and yet I seem to have a lot to talk about. I finally got the office, not clean cleaned but definitely cleaned enough that I'm not knocking shit over everywhere I turn. I read a couple of books the boy recommended and he was so pleased I liked them that he stacked me up with more recommendations. Unfortunately they're only partial series at this point because he's lent some of them out, so now he's going to try and get some back. It's adorable. It's also adorable that he's so gleeful that he can (finally?) make references to the books with me, one in particular that seems to really amuse him. It's so cute. I love moments like this.

There was PT. One of our tires flattened slowly and because we ended up driving home on it instead of switching out to the donut, flattened more quickly, but we're lucky and live down the street from an excellent tire place. The winds kicked up heavily last night and, well, my anxious ass didn't get much sleep between that and the cats yowling but I've roughly managed the day, I think? It's really nice to have the exciting things be "oh, well, now we have to buy a new tire" and "cats, if you want to yell at each other go downstairs to do it" instead of "Hi honey I sat for three hours with a covid+ patient can you unlock the utility room door so I can come through the garage and scour myself?"

Gah! Finally! I have done the thing! I have finished my second of five, I guess? projects for tech school and uploaded it and told the school where my Github repository is and filmed and uploaded the walkthrough and did a writeup and it is all done, I have turned it in, I have scheduled my assessment, it can fuck off for now. I'm actually really pleased with it, it ended up being way more elaborate than I think it was supposed to be but all the moving parts move correctly, which is the main thing, rather than trying too much and falling on my face.

And I got it done in time for writing hour, too. After waking up at 4 in the morning with the sweaty anxiety itches, taking Nyquil, passing back out pretty hard and not getting up until about 10, which is when I was supposed to start class. It was a rough night last night. I think it's going to be a rough week, which is why I'm putting my trazodone and NyQuil on standby. Not together, alternating nights. We'll see what happens Wednesday.

And in all of this I'm still managing to get writing work done too; I finally got the two problematic synopses finished at least in a general structure kind of a way. I now need to go through it, tidy it up some, name and organize everything so I'm not flailing about for the basic details I'll be referencing throughout the book like, oh, what is my main character called. (One of the synopses keeps referring to Heroine and Brother, so, um, yeah.) I also found a convenient BuJo spread for writers with one chart axis of chapters and the other chart axis of characters, keeping track of who appears in what chapter, and now I have to do both that one and one there the axis is chapters x secrets and the symbols indicate who's finding out what when. That's MUCH more compact than the way I was going to do it.

It's only Monday but so far it's been a weekend plus one day of successes, and I still feel pretty good about things. Which is doing nothing for my being calm and optimistic about inauguration day, but I'm not sure anything could do that, so I'll take it.

I also started getting my office reorganized with the new small drawers for my art supplies which are, heh, getting a bit out of control. Now I have a place to put some stuff I need to unpack the last three paletteful packs and put them away, find someplace to file the cards that come with them with some tips and hints how to use the materials, and find someplace to file my stack of pen and marker and paint swatches. Did not get this done over the weekend like I should have. Definitely didn't get as much cleaning done today as I wanted to but while I was waking up from the NyQuil I made a start and that's what counts.

I feel so much calmer and more in control, 4am wakeup aside, that I'm a little annoyed it took me three weeks to put together the project. 20 hours more like all told as far as actual coding hours, but those 20 hours were spread over three weeks. Ugh. Still. It's done, it's turned in, and now I get to move on, do some writing, look forwards rather than kick myself for not moving.

ETA: The coup. It was the coup. I started the project on the first of the month and on the sixth of the month we had an attempted coup and I had coup hangover for the next week, that's why it took so long. I have no idea how the fuck I forgot about the coup attempt except that it has just all been Like That for the last, what, since the election? Since before the election? The last four years? I don't fucking know.

Couple hours of code went... reasonably well? Whenever I last posted that, so this week in the weird liminal space between Christmas and New Year's I'm going to try something different to get back into regular study habits: I'm just going to do my afternoon and evening class blocks, and let the morning be for relaxing, reading, hiding under blankets from the cold, that kind of thing. Hopefully this will work out and by next week I'll be more like myself before December, when everything seemed to fall apart.

(I have ten tests left to do on this lab and then coding a project and it's not that hard and oh my god I don't want to do any of it.)

Still having severe stress shopping urges and oh my god, I do not know why I want to buy five more pairs of false lashes but that is really excessive, especially since you can reuse them 10-20 times each and I already have, um. An embarrassing amount. Clothes. I can't think of any clothes I particularly need, I have adequate sweats and underwear and socks and things, I made sure of that before winter hit because if it gets below about 30 we can't do laundry, our pipes from the utility room aren't heated and the water just freezes and causes clogs and problems. If we lived in a place where we regularly had months with it not going above 30 that'd be a problem, but I live in the South even if it is the mountains so we usually just do laundry in the middle of the day when it's in the 40s, and if we have a couple days of below freezing temps that's fine. Um. What else do I want to buy, more Frye things because I keep getting their sale emails. I do not need more boots even if I like stompy boots. More jewelry. I have lots, come on. Makeup and skin care have calmed down, I don't have urges for art supplies, but it's only a matter of time before it cycles around there, too.

... no, on second thought let's not get into an argument about why (linguistic) anthropology should be used as an excuse to erase all context, cultural or historical or otherwise, from a word or a concept and render it neutral because language evolves and... something. I'm not sure what argument this person's trying to make but it looks like an awful one and I have code to untangle.

(The code is also frustrating, but less frustrating than dealing with humans.)

I dunno. Although it is nice to feel more capable of doing things even if I'm starting it up slowly. Picked up the office a bit, wrangling the code, I did some writing prep yesterday, I feel a bit more like my brain is organized and energized enough to deal with writing. I feel more normal? Of course now that I say that something's going to knock me on my ass, but I feel better. Stronger. (Harder. Faster.) (I should get some Daft Punk for my coding music playlist.) Plus, soon the holidays will be over and I can hopefully resume a normal schedule and I feel like half these journal entries are complaining about things knocking me for six or complaining as I crawl back to normal.

I made the cupcakes for the boy's work, he took half of them to work and I got to eat the other half, and they were so good. Even the ones that had been in the fridge for a few days were still soft and smooshy, I love this recipe and I love that I'm slowly learning piping skills. I shouldn't make cupcakes as often as I want to given that I have zero willpower about cramming them in my face, but damned if I'm not making gorgeous cupcakes regardless of how often I practice. Plus, when things are back to normal in however many months, I can always send them to games with the boy as well as to work and that'll get a bunch of them out of the house.

Slowly picking up the house again, some more, still, after a few weeks of both of us being knocked on our ass, by grief, by unpredictable holiday schedules (boy), by vaccine side effects (also boy), by holiday stuff, by ... I don't even know what. Boy I can't wait till I get an IT job and can find out if we can afford someone to come in once every couple weeks and mop the floors, dust, wipe the surfaces, all that stuff that always gets pushed to one side in favor of dishes and picking up the clutter we accumulate. I probably could get in a routine to do it if my job is a 32-ish hour/week job, but other than that, ugh, paying someone for that stuff if we have the money. I will happy exchange cash for services that make my life easier. Plus, by the time I find out if I can make that much money, the vaccine should be more distributed so it'll be safer for someone to come in the house and do all that.

Also a landscaper. We really need a landscaper to come in and deal with the overgrown crap in the areas I want to walk in and make it easier for us to get around. I can live with the extended backyard being a wilderness, I don't mind the front yard being a bit of a wilderness, but the alianthus is a problem, there's at least two trees too close to the house, the mulberries need pruned (we do have a firm for the trees, thankfully), the white oak could probably use a trim, and at this point I really want someone else to put the damn berry plants in the ground for me. I just. Ugh. Too much crap going on. Not enough taking advantage of the time I had before tech school started. Also, I would like some stronger raised beds than the falling apart wood ones I have right now. Or an explanation of how to better maintain them.

Things to do when I have money. Which means I suppose I'd better get my ass back to coding. Or more accurately to dinner, then to the last bit of coding, then to the help line probably tomorrow. So it goes.

As if 2020 hadn't been rough enough, Friday we had to take Mikey in for his last vet visit. He was having trouble eating, he was throwing up whole food hours after it should have started digesting, he'd lost probably almost three pounds. We'd made an appointment for the oncologist to see him, but that wasn't going to be to the end of the month and it seemed cruel to make him wait till then in the increasingly faint hope that someone would be able to do something.

And this one hurts. More than Michelle-kitty did in a way because he was such an interactive personality. He curled up on the bed with us, he walked all over us and yelled and nibbled and licked when we didn't get up to feed him early enough. And then in the evenings when we were in the kitchen he'd walk in and yell for more food. He sat by whoever was in the armchair and tried to beg for human food. He was 16 pounds of loud, naggy kitty and the house is so much quieter without him.

That was Friday night. It hurt. We took him in and said goodbye, and stopped by to pick up subs for dinner on the way home, sat and ate them and went to bed hours before either of us normally did because fuck everything. Saturday we spent alternately hiding under the covers and getting up between episodes of Psych to do household chores. Sunday I spent... I don't remember much of what I did Sunday. A lot of doodling. Some watching Burn Notice. Trying to get my shit pasted together so I could at least pretend to be functional. It sort of worked. I polished my boots, I washed my makeup brushes, I did my skin care so my stress zits would go the fuck away. I didn't fold my laundry but, you know, whatever.

I had a televisit with my doc today, mainly to discuss the vaccine and whether I needed PT for my knee, which has finally reached "okay I guess I'll do something about this" levels of inconvenience. He confirmed that I needed to strengthen the quads for the knee and gave me a couple of exercises to do at home that, thankfully, do not require me to lean on my knee to strengthen it like most of the resistance band exercises I found online do. And he said that as far as he'd seen and heard (and I assume, being a doctor and all, especially one who has been politically active in an advocacy sense) the vaccine is as safe as it's going to get, he's going to get it when it comes around for him and he recommends I do too, and not to worry about the boy. So that was kind of a relief.

But then all I really had the energy to do was to watch a few hours of coding video walkthroughs and take another run at a lab which, yes, I got a few more tests passing on that but then I ran into issues. And I tried a few more things and none of those worked so, whatever, asking for help in the morning after I'm rested and less stressed.

Oh, and there's the health care thing. Did I mention that? It looks like I did, I would have sworn that happened on Thursday but I guess it was Wednesday. I don't know where Thursday went. Time is a lie, I somehow thought the 3rd was Wednesday. So, yeah, still getting married, there was a couple hours there this morning where the boy was grumbling about HR all being out because of covid in their department and it could take me two months to get health care, and then he made some phone calls and discovered that once we file the paperwork it will take about a day. So that's fine. I guess I need to call the magistrate's office tomorrow and see if we need to bring witnesses. I have no idea if my local aunt and uncle know the boy and I are getting married for the insurance, so that's going to be a hilarious conversation if we do.

I'm tired, y'all. I am goddamn exhausted and things keep happening to make me even more exhausted and I just wish stuff would stop happening for a while so I could sleep and catch up on my coding and my reading and my writing. And anything. Ever. At all. I want my cat back. I want things to go slower. I want... to feel better and more energized, I guess. I want to go back to last Monday when I had a victory under my belt and a large yelling squirmy furry boi nagging me for breakfast.

Somehow I'm okay with me feeling crappy enough because of a head cold to take NyQuil to go to sleep, but the minute the boy wants some because he's caught my head cold I freak out because omg covid.

It's probably not covid. He probably has my head cold that I had most of last week, and now he's stumbling around with a face full of sinus pressure, poor bastard. I suppose the good side is he's still on work-enforced paid isolation, so he has time to rest. We stocked up on NyQuil, we've got a good stock of DayQuil, I'm doing better so I can cook plenty of nicely spicy foods to clear out his sinuses and give him nutrients at the same time, and our oxygen levels and temperatures are both normal. I can't say I'm not edgy about him having recently been exposed, but I feel pretty good saying this ain't the plague.

I'm just so tired of this. And when we went out today to stock up on NyQuil there were so goddamn many people at restaurants and flea markets and gathering in clusters in places they didn't have to be. This winter is going to be so brutal and it didn't have to be if people would just fucking stay out of the bars, the restaurants, the rest of it. I get, though I don't agree, the emotional calculus of making family visits. I get being forced to go to work because otherwise you lose your home. I don't get the couple hundred people I saw shopping at a fucking flea market or sitting in the goddamn restaurants I saw today.

History is either repeating itself or rhyming and I am not best pleased.

Whatever.

I've been playing around with false lashes for the last couple of weeks and not only am I happy with my semi-mastery of false lashes I am in love with the effect they create and I want all of them. Give me all of them. I'm also testing out some new primers and some new foundations and at some point need to actually write all this crap down, but I'm loving the Tatcha Liquid Silk Primer which is annoying because it's one of the expensive bougie ones. It's not as bad as it could be because I think the last couple of times I've used it I've been OVERusing it, I think I need just the tiniest amount. And then after that a tinier amount of foundation I've been using, for the same amount of coverage. There's going to be a lot of experiments with different primers and concealers and foundations to figure out how I'm doing this. But it's fun. And I'd let a lot of the playing with makeup slide over the last several months.

I finally got around to cleaning up the portion of my office that was cluttered in front of all my watercolor papers and postcards and things, so I can get that together and start sending out mail, hopefully just in time for the combination of lockdowns and winter. Should have happened last weekend but last week I think maybe starting from the weekend was a bit fraught with head cold stuff.

And I finally have yoga blocks again to start doing yoga with props (the cats destroyed the last set; I'll be more careful with this set) and resistance bands to do some knee exercises. Because I'm pretty thoroughly tired of my left knee giving out on me, and I'm pretty sure it's fixable or compensatable by strengthening the muscles around the knee. I got the cord type rather than the strap type because I've had bad luck with the strap types snapping on me, we'll see how this goes.

I am goddamn exhausted. I don't know what brought this on or if there's a point at which I should be worried. I keep saying I have a fascism hangover, and I'm pretty sure that's what it is, decompensation from election stress and the stress of the past four years a bit and everything else. But I am really, really sick of being tired.

I had plans for today. Grand plans. I accomplished exactly two? of them? I got some dishes done and I reconnected with an old friend, so that was excellent. But I also slept in way more than I meant to on account of being woken up at 6am by the boy coming home all "I got to go to the ER tonight! :D :D" My happy half-asleep ass though he meant he'd been floated down there, as you do when you're working in an understaffed hospital and you're used to getting floated around. But no. He was there as a patient, owing to a sudden bout of high blood pressure? It was not a heart attack, they checked and they checked him out for other symptoms and they prescribed him the same blood pressure medication (ACE-inhibitor) that I'm on and sent him home early, and so he woke me up at six in the goddamn morning. And we sat up talking for an hour or so while he showered and got ready for sleep, and I did manage to get back to sleep but I feel like it's thrown off my entire groove. And no, I am not throwing him out the window.

Hi! It's been a hot minute hasn't it? Not much has developed except that I'm a little further along in my course than I was, and the election week ish coincided with Sephora's biannual (I think? They had three one year. Was it this year? Last year? Who knows.) sale and the result was that I did a fair amount of crit damage to my credit card and there is a growing pile on my sink of makeup and skin care products. I'm building myself a little mental fort out of them and if the boy has to go back onto the covid ward I'm just going to paint myself in colors and glitter and pretend I'm a heroine in some punk movie. Because I am so over this pandemic. I am over worrying about the boy, I'm over worrying about the boy being force-fed a vaccine that's not ready because he's a health care worker, I'm over all of it.

I'm still staying home of course, but I'm also very, very over it.

I'm amusing myself in between all my other hobbies by keeping a journal of my skin care experiments, though. A week and a half ago by now, I guess, I finally dragged myself bodily up by the scruff or something and put together a skin care routine with all the products I had and half-used before the last few months stomped all over my energy. I've been taking photos! Every Friday, and keeping notes and doing it all scientific and stuff. That's part of the ginormous makeup/skincare order is more sample flavors or scents to try and a couple other options to swap in and out of my routine and see if they're better. I'm also remembering to do my makeup in the mornings, and I've semi-figured out lashes, and that's helping some. Now I just have to remember that exercise makes me feel better and so does playing guitar. It's a process? Step by step? All those things I tell other people and myself but don't always hold onto.

Anyway. Mostly just checking in, and also scared a bit about what happens tomorrow when I have my project review (that I should have scheduled a couple weeks ago but whoops, and also this entire year has been a bit fucky) and how that's going to go. I'm... yeah. I've never done this before, I don't know what the hell it's going to be like, I'm a bit panicked. So I'm definitely putting on a face of makeup and if I can remember (and have time, we have some prescriptions to pick up tomorrow and other errands) practicing the guitar some, and I guess I'll just get through it. I've worked with the guy who's doing it a couple of times, and I know he's pretty nice, so that'll help.

The Barton is out! (He has not destroyed his cage, though.) After about two days, since we pulled him in this morning, of sulking in various cave-like areas he came out and meatloafed on the towel we'd set down for Cassius, who was walking around him like usual. He purred when I petted him and jumped down to rub my ankles, so I think it's safe to assume I have been forgiven for the egregious crime of removing him from the out of doors.

I had a dentist appointment for a cleaning at 9 in the goddamn this morning, which may or may not have wrecked my whole day. The cleaning itself went fine, was over quickly, wasn't painful especially since they're not using the ultrasonic right now. I appreciate that it's probably more efficient but holy crap the squeaking. But for the entire rest of the day I was tired, I was falling asleep through my classwork, not focusing. I don't know if I'm coming down with a cold or fighting off a cold or what. My blood ox is fine though. It might just be that the last five days or so have been A Lot. And they really have been. I let it go at two labs and two readings done today and am just going to try to get to bed early and get a bunch done tomorrow.

Nothing else to report, really. Feeling fairly run down. Nose hurts like it's been broken but I think is just from mucus and blowing it and rubbing it and so on. Sleepy a lot. Back to feeling comfortable with code school, did the SQL labs I'd ignored the last time around. Surrounded by cats. House needs a good cleaning but that's not going to get done until I get a good night's sleep either. Finally out of vitamins so reordering some from Swanson's, including some magnesium tablets so if I do wreck myself with exercise I have some way of recovering, and some elderberry/zinc lozenges because lo, 'tis the season for lots of low-level rhinovirii.

Okay! Well. I did absolutely nothing on Wednesday even after resolving to do the scraping part then, but today I voted early, got groceries, got prescriptions for practically everyone in the household who has them, and narrowed down the error to a much more specific question that was answered with "Ah! Yeah. That does that. I'm not sure why it works sometimes and doesn't others, but here's how I fix it. [demonstrates something I've learned already]" "Oh! Okay, I can do that. Thanks!" I stuck around for the rest of the study group and ended up giving a quick lesson on HTML, div, and conceptual boxes.

I got the scrape part working in about half an hour? forty five minutes? A relatively short time, anyway. I put it all together and got it limping along, did some cleanup, got it working better. I've almost got it working all the way through now except one bizarre little hiccup that doesn't impede the clarity very much, it's just... weird. And there. Dangling. So I need to try and address that and then maybe do some refactoring either in the evening code block tonight, or maybe skip it entirely and start refactoring tomorrow before I film the walkthrough. And then hopefully I'll be done with that! Hopefully. We'll see.

Of course now I resent myself for taking all that time dithering and watching videos and panicking and so on. And I'm not sure if I would have been able to do it this smoothly if I hadn't watched all those videos, although I definitely resent the procrastination out of fear and nerves and stress aspect. Still. It's almost done now, I'm not too far behind, and I have more confidence. Enough confidence that I think I could build more programs like this if asked to, although I'd have to do some more review if I was asked to do something with an API call. Apparently we're studying those in more detail further down though.

And I voted today, and we got groceries. I ran out of unemployment on the last tier I was on and I think I was cleared for unemployment on the next tier, so we'll see if I get the next two tiers and then what happens next year. Although Mom also said she'd start bankrolling me now, so between her funds and unemployment I should be pretty okay into the first couple months of next year if I'm careful? And I should still finish up by late February early March, even with the delay, and then it's job hunting, yay. And hopefully a job and a decent income!

I feel better. Calmer. I also feel better about my prospects for life and work in this field now that I've realized a lot of my panic and near-tears the other day was more likely PMS severely exacerbating the course stress than anything else. I took an anti-anxiety pill Wednesday night and felt a lot better at the start of today, so I guess at the next point I'm starting to PMS while doing this course I'll just take a couple anti-anxiety pills for a couple nights and hopefully kick it in the teeth before it holds me up.

Cassius is doing very well in the isolation room; we haven't managed to corral Barton yet but we're working on it. He's still pick-uppable, so that's definitely a positive. I have some ideas involving a configuration of towel and carrier but I want the boy around to help me with that part, so it'll wait a day or so.

And I'm still writing. A little less drawing than I want to be, but still writing. Still keeping on with hobbies. Still generally happy when I'm not having PMS-induced freakouts. Feeling oddly optimistic, given the pandemic is still here and the political situation.