rowyn: (cute)
 Sunday, June 15

M texted around 8:45AM to let us know he'd arrive around 1PM. I was already awake and got up shortly after he texted, got breakfast, and let Dad know the expected arrival time. Around 10:30AM, I called Mom to ask her about lunch and if she wanted us to wait and bring M when he arrived. She'd had a rough morning and did not have any appetite, so was fine with waiting. 

I was feeling groggy, so went back to bed around 11AM to try to nap. I didn't really sleep; I read some and lay in bed with my eyes closed for a while instead. It was restful, though, and I felt better when I dragged myself out of bed at 12:50PM so I'd be dressed when M got in. As I dressed, I felt ridiculous for taking M's estimate as Exact Time Of Arrival because no one's gonna know the minute they'll arrive when they're driving 4+ hours.

Then at 1PM, as I emerged from the laundry room, I saw Rosie, M's dog. "Rosie! You must have brought M." After a minute or two, when M did not appear, I told Dad, "Look! We've mysteriously acquired a dog. This is great!"

M came into the living room (he'd been putting stuff down out of sight in in the guest bedroom) and said, "Your new dog has brought a dog walker with her."

"Ooh best dog accessory."

M remembered it was Father's Day and wished Dad a happy Father's Day, so I did that too. We are not big on holidays in my family anymore.

Lyric came downstairs to check on me and saw Rosie. 

Rosie: (OwO what's this?) *comes over to investigate*

Lyric: (OH HELL NO) *bristles up and hisses*

Rosie: (New fren? Fren? Sniff?) *attempts to sniff*

Lyric: *jumps at Rosie, landing claws on her face, then springs back, otherwise standing her ground* (you can't turn your back on a monster because then they'll CHASE YOU and that's worse)

Rosie: *starts back, puzzled*

Rosie: (but we're still gonna be frens right? new fren?)

M came over and verified that Rosie was unharmed (she was). I came over and sat down between them to reassure Lyric and to protect Rosie from further assaults. 

Lyric: (okay well this is craptastic I need to hide in the garage now)

I let Lyric into the garage, which is fortunately her happy place anyway. I brought her lunch and a bowl of water into it for her (it already has a litter box). 

When I went upstairs, Rosie tried to follow, but I told her "No" sternly, and she didn't attempt to come in the room. I closed the door on her, because I wanted to keep my room free of dog-scent for Lyric. I called Mom to ask about lunch again, and she asked for subs, so I ordered those. Dad, M and I left together; I drove because M had his rental car set up with a dog hammock in the backseat. 

At the nursing facility, we asked about bringing Rosie. Dog visitors are fine! They wanted proof she'd been vaccinated, but the receipt M had on his phone for her last vaccinations was sufficient. We figured we'd bring Rosie with us on Monday. 

We chatted during the visit, then headed home around 3:30PM. We drove through a rain squall on the way home. It'd stopped by the time we got there, but I drove over to the gym anyway because the clouds were still threatening and I don't like walking in rain. I asked M if he wanted to come with me, but he passed. I'd thought this was a weight day and was disappointed when I checked my phone and discovered I'd done weights on the 14th. Oops. I used the stair climber for 21 minutes. My pulse rate didn't get as high as usual on the 2 setting, so I moved up to 3 for most of it, yay: slightly less boring. Still listening to Tress, but only while at the gym instead of during the drive, since M and I talked during the drive.

At home, I convinced Lyric to come upstairs and get a snack, then sat at my computer for a bit. Lyric started growling from her perch on the back of the loveseat, and I turned to the door to see Rosie peering through the opening; I'd left it cracked so Lyric could go to the litter box downstairs if necessary.

Rosie: (I know I can't come in but I can LOOK right??)

Lyric: (OH HELL NO).

Me: "M! Please call your dog."

M got Rosie back downstairs. Lyric retreated behind the computer, where she stared distrustfully at the door. The next time I went downstairs, she wanted to return to hiding in the garage, so I let her.

It was garbage night, so I stuffed the last of the packing paper into the recycling bin, and then started on the cardboard boxes. The flattened boxes were too big to fit in the recycling bin, and folding them further did not work for cramming them in. So I spent some time tearing them into chunks small enough to fit. I strained my right wrist doing so; it still hurt the next day.

In the evening, I watched most of a "Poker Face" episode with Dad & M. I checked on Lyric a few times, but she was unwilling to emerge from the garage. Even hours after M went to bed and took Rosie with him, closing the bedroom door so Rosie would stay in, Lyric preferred the garage. She'd come inside, sniff at the laundry room floor for a minute, go "NOPE", and return to the garage.

I did a little drawing and editing as it got late. Started over on the hair for the Delphia portrait. It's coming out better this time. Mostly I caught up on journaling, though.

Monday, June 16

I woke around 6AM and went to the bathroom, then checked if I could coax Lyric inside. She was not enthusiastic, but came in and followed me upstairs after a bit. I opened the snack box for her, then went back to bed. Lyric came over to the bed, but took up a perch on the desk behind my head, where she could glare suspiciously at the door. When I came downstairs for breakfast around 9AM, Lyric returned to the garage. 

M had to take Rosie to a vet appointment at 2:30, so his plan was to bring Rosie to visit Mom, then drive from there to the vet. "So we can take two separate cars. Unless you want to go to the vet with us.

Me: *thinks about this*

Me: "If I go with you to the vet, I don't have to drive."

M: "Sure, we can take my car."

Me: "Sounds great." 

I don't hate driving, but it's so much nicer to ride than drive. 

When I called Mom about lunch, she didn't know what she wanted, so I suggested their favorite nearby Asian place. She was good with that. They had an online ordering page, but it wouldn't let me set up a pickup time before noon. So I got M's order, made sure Dad didn't want me to order something as leftovers for him (he was going to poker instead of visiting Mom), then called in the order a little after 11AM, for pickup in 20 minutes. 

 

I usually have my parents pay when we pick up food for Mom, but since I wasn't paying online, I paid in person with my own card. I could've brought Mom's card but eh, figured it wouldn't hurt to buy my own lunch for a change. 

When I remarked on this later to M, he said, "We can add you as an authorized user to their card if you want? I just use Dad's card when I'm buying something for them, but since you're here and buying things in person for them, might be more convenient."

Me: "Eh. I can use Mom's card when I have to. But it would be handy to have a card I could keep in my wallet. I guess if it's really easy to do--"

M: "Oh yes, you just ask for it online."

Me: "In that case, sure, let's do it."

M commented, "I also didn't want it to affect my credit -- you know, keeping everything separate. Not that it would have a big impact."

That made sense at first, and then I went, "Wait, does being an authorized user affect your credit? I thought it didn't because you're not responsible for the payments."

M thought that it could. I searched online on the subject that night, and the answer is "usually but not always." Most credit card companies report under the names of authorized users and not just the account holder, but not all of them. So it varies. I'm surprised it gets reported at all, or that credit scoring agencies incorporate it; it seems like "you know a person who will let you spend their money and that person pays their bills" would not be that meaningful in predicting if you will pay your bills. But there you go. Maybe knowing people who pay their bills is a predictor of individual behavior, idk. I am not concerned about it; I have excellent credit and so do my parents, and I barely use mine anyway.

We had a good visit with Mom, and she was really happy to eat something different -- she even ate more of lunch than usual -- so that worked well.

I had planned to go to the gym after the vet appointment. My wrist still hurt from tearing up boxes on Sunday night, so I thought it might be a good idea to let it rest and just do cardio. But by the time we neared home, I wanted a nap and decided to skip the gym entirely. 

While I napped, the social worker called and left a message asking me to call back about transport for Mom. It was after 6PM when I woke and got the message, so I just wrote down the number. I'll call tomorrow.

I watched some more "Poker Face" in the evening with M and Dad, though I went upstairs while M watched the episode with the pig-tailed demon child. I had seen most of that episode already, and the one bit I'd missed was a bit I really didn't want to watch. (It's a good episode but oof. M described it as "the darkest episode" of the show afterwards, which I thought was funny because most of the episodes are murder mysteries and no people get killed in this one. But I could see his point. I mean, it did have a bit that I did not want to watch because I considered it too painful.) I tried bringing Lyric upstairs, but she was having none of it while Rosie was loose, and even after Rosie was in M's room for the night, Lyric still wanted to go back to the garage the next time I went downstairs. 

Lyric is Not Enjoying this visit, poor kitty.

I had M give me the passwords for Dad's Amazon account, so I can order stuff for them through that and generate fewer confusing alerts for M. I also got the streaming passwords and the Tivo account password, so that hopefully if Dad's TV gets logged off, I can get it logged in again without calling M. We haven't had the issue with Dad's TV getting logged off in some months, though. They used to have internet access from one provider and phone service from another, and the second provider also had a wifi network that existed but didn't provide internet. We got rid of the second provider entirely and that may've made the TV less confused about how to connect and solved the issue.

I also discussed the Hoyer lift option with M; the nursing facility didn't volunteer to send her home with one, but we could get one and may need it. We decided to stick with not getting it for now. If it turns out we need it, I can always ask for it later.

I also finally remembered to take another look at the transfer-board-like object. It's not identical to the one the facility uses, though it's similar. I want to have them order a transfer board for me because while I don't know what else this might be, I don't think it's appropriate for the task -- it's got some reinforcing pieces of wood on one side that gives it an extra inch of height and that'd just make it more awkward to use for transfering.

I wanted to catch up on journaling tonight, and have done so, which is good. I haven't done anything creative today and it's now after midnight, though. Time to finish Time Princess dailies and go to bed. 

rowyn: (studious)
 Health & Fitness

I exercised the first eight days of May: two times at the community center gym, while the rest were either unpacking-related or pacing while on the phone. Then on May 10, I came down with COVID (caught from my dad, who caught it from his poker buddies.) 

On May 11, Mom also came down with COVID, and at 2AM on May 12, she fell on her way to the bathroom and broke her leg.

Between all of that, I didn't do any more exercising for the rest of May. COVID was weird. I never felt very sick. I had a sore throat for a while. It was mostly gone after several days and I went back to drinking caffeine-free Diet Coke instead of strawberry-watermelon drink mix. Then a few days after that, I switched back to drink mix because my throat felt a little not-right. It wasn't exactly sore, but soda did not feel good going down. I am still having drink mix instead of soda, though I stopped warming it up a week or so ago. (Now I make it cold, with filtered water from the fridge and crushed ice.) My throat doesn't bother me at all but I feel like it would bother me if I drank soda, so I haven't. I like the strawberry-watermelon drink mix pretty well, and the nice dietitian Lut saw a year ago recommended flavored drink mixes over soda. I had a significant amount of fatigue that lingered along with a little congestion and a little cough and the barely-noticable sore throat. So I was like 90% recovered after four days and then stayed at 90% for a week and a half, and then upgraded to 95%. By the end of May, I'd reached 99%, with just the barely-noticable throat thing remaining.

Eating habits have been reasonable by my standards. Mom often wants a sub, and I get one whenever she does, so technically I'm eating a lot of restaurant food. But sub sandwiches are fine as restaurant food goes; I get a bit of veggies on them and they're not particularly fatty, nor large; I'll eat half of an 8" sub for lunch and have the other half for dinner (unless my father eats it for dinner first). No worse than the usual foods I eat. I also ate more frozen vegetables at home this month.

Dailies

I did well with these until I got sick, and then stopped using them again. May 11 through May 23 is just blank. Once again, with the new month, I've started using them again.

Writing

I basically did no new writing in May. Like two hundred words added to The Secret Dragon, up 39,604, I'm guessing. (I haven't done much writing so far in June, either, but I forgot to check where I was at the start of the month. Didn't work on the soloRPG at all.

The Business of Writing

I renamed Be That Way to The Kitty Coffee Pack (which also may not last as a title) and made progress on edits. I got it to 40% complete by the end of May. My goal for the month was 50%, so I missed it, but with everything else going on this month, 40% is pretty great.

Art 

I drew a few times in June, finishing one small (6"x6") marker picture of Koysko from The Secret Dragon, and starting a similarly small picture of Strikvi from the same story. Art ranked at the bottom of things to do this month, so it's amazing I did any of it.

Reading

More big chunks of unfinished manwha. I re-read some of my own books for comfort, but no books by other people.

Lyric update

Lyris has adjusted to her new home pretty well. She likes to hang out in the garage. At first, I thought garage was her Substitute Outside. But it has since struck me that the detached garage at my old house was a favorite hangout of hers, too. It was very common for her to emerge from it when I called for her to come in after a few hours. Perhaps even more common than hanging out on the porch. Maybe she just likes garages.

She got outside once, when Mom let her into the garage without realizing I'd accidentally left the outer door open. I came home when Mom let me know, and Lyric came running to me as soon as she heard me calling for her. Since then, she hasn't tried to get outside; she no longer mews at the door, or comes running when it opens, or runs in front of me when I approach a door, hoping to get out when I open it. I keep an eye on her when Dad and I leave the house, because there'd be plenty of time for a cat to get out, but she just watches us from the living room.

So while I still feel like it'd be nice to have a screened-in porch for her, I'm not sure she needs it. Also, I asked the HOA about a catio and the rep was like "NO CATIO. But MAYBE you can have a screened porch. First you need to read this 80 page document and figure out what in it is relevant and complete this form asking for approval from some number of neighbors and then we'll think about whether or not we'll allow it."

I don't even want to read the 80 page doc and I definitely do not want to wander the neighborhood stalking neighbors to get them to sign the form. Dad has a poker buddy who's involved with the HOA; I may ask him at some point if there's a way to make this process less onerous than it appears. But between the cost, the bureaucracy, and Lyric's increased tolerance of life as an indoor cat, I'm leaning towards letting the whole thing slide.

Goal Scorecard for May

  • Provide care for parents: This has been A Lot. Dad is low-maintenance, thank goodness. The home health aide is mostly important for ensuring he gets showered; he's pretty self-sufficient on other daily tasks. Mom was in the hospital for nine days and is now in a skilled nursing facility. I've visited her every day but one (when I was too exhausted from COVID and poor sleep to feel safe driving). I've been bringing her food most days (she won't eat the institutional food), and doing what I can to make her more comfortable and promote her recovery. (Sometimes those goals do not go together.) She hasn't been able to walk since her leg broke; she's not allowed to put weight on it and she's not strong enough to support herself with her arms and one leg. So therapy is doing what they can to improve her mobility.
  • Pay May bills: Done!
  • Call Ting to cancel second phone line: the magic of goal list works again: this is done.
  • Complete at least 50% of final edits: Not done, but honorable mention for making it to 40%
  • Register with the HOA: Done
  • Find out HOA approval process for catio: Done and bleh.
  • Attempt to get DMV appointment: Done! On the second attempt, I even succeeded at getting an appointment!

Stretch Goals:

A bit surprisingly, I did none of these. I mean, yeah, it was a busy month. But usually I get some random stretch goal done anyway.

June Goals

  • Provide care for parents
  • Pay June bills
  • Complete 70% of edits on The Kitty Coffee Pack
  • Find out what I need to do to register car in new state
  • Make podiatry appointment for Dad
June Stretch Goals
  • Write 10,000+ words on The Secret Dragon
  • Finish edits on The Kitty Coffee Pack
  • Publish The Kitty Coffee Pack
  • Play more of romance soloRPG
  • Exercise 15+ times (organizing stuff/cleaning counts as exercise)
  • Track what I read
  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed
  • Ask Bookbub for a Featured Deal and run another ad campaign for a book
  • Get backmatter updated for whatever book I promote
  • Pick an old picture to redraw
  • Do some art
  • Sell mom's car (I do not expect to do this until Mom is home and I don't really expect her to come home until July, at this point. But I want this to stay on the list so I don't forget about it entirely.)
  • Register car
rowyn: (exercise)
 Sunday, May 4

I was getting together Sunday afternoon and evening with Kage, Sophrani, and Envoy. This wasn't until 4PM, which turned out to be late enough that I didn't fritter away the whole day in Waiting Mode. I did some editing on Be That Way in the morning. I think this was also the day that I set up the 6' folding table behind my reclining loveseat in my room, and then piled all the miscellaneous stuff that cluttered the floor underneath or on top of it. That left just the piles of artwork leaing against the walls still to deal with.

When I met up with my friends, we got dinner at Asian Harbor. I had a pad thai bento box; I wasn't impressed with the pad thai at the restaurant, but I really enjoyed it as leftovers a few days later. I think it's that the shrimp were tough and since I'd eaten all of them at the restaurant, I was left with just tasty noodles and rice at home.

We watched the new episode of "I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level" and also several episodes of "Spy x Family", both before and after dinner. It's very cute but apparently there's a million episodes of it, so I may get frustrated by a lack of progress in the plot eventually.

I got home a little before midnight, and got to my computer at 12:05AM. I went to the DMV webpage and clicked through to the appointments.

None were available.

...

A few other sources had said that the DMV opened new appointments daily, for 90 days out. So rather than abandoning all hope and spending a day camped out at a DMV, I decided to keep checking after midnight for the rest of the week.

Monday, May 5

Veo had another bonus stream of Blue Prince in the morning, whee! I don't remember much about this day, to be honest.

As usual, I was still up at midnight, and once again I remembered to check the DMV page for openings. At two minutes after midnight, there were three locations with appointments available!

The closest was 60 miles away so I didn't make an appointment, but it was proof that DMV appointments existed and the entire website was not just a cruel joke. I refreshed a minute later to see how long the appointments lasted at those locations. Maybe the server opened new appointments some time before midnight and I needed to check earlier?

Three minutes after midnight, four locations had appointments available.

Huh.

Maybe it took a while for the server to open appointments at all locations?

I kept refreshing every few minutes. For thirteen minutes, nothing changed: four locations had appointments available, all 60+ miles away. Then, at 12:17AM, every location in the state had appointments available.

!

I scrambled to make an appointment, and now have one for Monday, August 4, at 9AM, at the location that had nice people, where I took my parents a few weeks ago. I had to confirm the appointment via email or text within 15 minutes of making the appt, and did so. I got a confirmation email that I'd confirmed. Whee! I will have to confirm it again on July 31, hopefully with more than 15 minutes between receiving the request to re-confirm and clicking the confirmation. o_o;;;

That I got a Monday appointment explains why there were no appointments available last night: it must open slots daily, not weekly, and 90 days out from May 5 would've been a Sunday.

Tuesday, May 6

Since my father had a hearing aid appt on Wednesday, I checked to make sure we could still find the one that didn't fit anymore.

It was not on the charger or in my father's ear. My father remembers the audiologist taking his hearing aid away at one point "for repairs", and that the audiologist never gave it back, so he had assumed this was why the right hearing aid was missing. (My mother says this is not true. Presumably what happened is that my father remembers a "taken for repairs" incident from some months or years ago, and not the part where he got it back). 

Me, to my mother: "Do you suppose Sue put it somewhere Dad couldn't find it, so he wouldn't lose it?"

Mom: "No."

I looked at the usual "my father lost his hearing aid" spots (around his bed and in the pockets of his clothing in the hamper), but no luck. Welp. We can always buy a new hearing aid during the appointment instead.

I looked at my goal list for May, and decided to call the HOA since I hadn't yet heard back from the email I sent over the weekend. They wanted me to come to the clubhouse to fill out and sign paperwork. There was also a $30 charge for giving a third person access to the clubhouse.

While I was on the phone, a different person replied to my email to the HOA, also telling me to go to the clubhouse to fill out and sign paperwork. They responded to my question about bulding a catio to say, 'you can enclose your porch but you can't have a catio. Here's the 67-page Residential Design Guidelnes and a two-page Modification form. You need to fill out the modification form and provide any documentation specified in the 67-page guidelines."  The modification form includes, among other things, four signature lines for neighbors and says to attach additional signatures 'as necessary.'

...

Much as I would like a screened porch for Lyric, I don't think I want one badly enough to read 67 pages of guidelines to find out what the "specified documentation" is, much less to spend however long it takes to catch an unknown number of neighbors while they're at home and convince them to sign the form. Oy.

One of Dad's poker buddies is involved with the HOA, so I may ask him if the process is as nightmarish as the email made it sound, or if there's some "you can hire this contractor that we always approve and they'll take care of everything for you" shortcut.

Despite being annoyed by the HOA approval process, I got dressed to go to the clubhouse. Before I left, I checked with my father to see if his poker games were at the clubhouse again. During the early days of the pandemic, they'd moved online, and then later moved to hosting the games in various players' homes. But they were at the clubhouse now, so my dad used the clubhouse for that. My mother doesn't, though. I thought it was kind of silly to pay for access for me when it was entirely possible neither me or my mother would get any use out of it. My father: "Eh, don't worry about it, we'll pay for it." 

I drove over to fill out the paperwork. I felt silly driving over in retrospect, since it's only a quarter-mile away. At the clubhouse, I needed a fob to get in so that I could fill out the paperwork so I could get a fob. I felt like the people who told me to come to the clubhouse had not thought this all the way through. Another resident let me in before I had to call the HOA to ask them what they were thinking.

But the people at the desk redeemed themselves by asking if my parents used the clubhouse, and then offering to transfer my mother's fob to me, since she doesn't use it, instead of charging for a third. "Your mother can still use the clubhouse with a guest pass, and you can always get a third if she changes her mind about using it."

Once I had a fob, I went to use the gym as long as I was here. They have an array of cardio machines -- treadmills, bikes, stair-climber, elliptical -- a big collection of free weights, and various weight machines. I kind of wanted to do something with the weights but it's been so long that I don't remember any exercises. I used an elliptical machine instead, since that was easy and the motion of ellipticals is sort of fun. I hadn't brought ear buds, though, so I only used it for 15 minutes. Exercise machines are boring.

At home, I took a nap, then worked on editing Be That Way.

Wednesday, May 7

I haven't been writing lately, not even about my day.  Now I have 4 days to catch up on, which means I'll spend my evening writing about the last few days instead of writing fiction. But recent evidence suggests I wasn't gonna write fiction anyway.

I woke up around 6AM, read for a bit, and went back to sleep until 8AM. At that point, I got up to have breakfast before Veo's stream. I told Sue, about the audiologist appointment at 11AM.

Sue: "Your mom already told me. I put the ill-fitting hearing aid next to your purse on the counter." 

Me: "Aha! You did put it somewhere Dad wouldn't try to wear it."

Sue: "You bet!"

I ate breakfast and watched Veo's stream. Some other watchers could also only stay 90 minutes today, so Veo ended today's stream a little early, after the first day of the stream took 80 minutes, instead of starting a new day. Only got through one day, but got some cool new things on the run that Veo can carry over to the next stream. 

I feel like, at some point, Blue Prince will turn into "you have to get things A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, several of them in the correct order, or you can't progress" and it'll just be annoying instead of fun. But so far, none of the days have felt like a complete waste even though there were things Veo was trying to do and couldn't on them. It's weird because the mechanic of "very little carries over from one day to the next" feels so arbitrary and frustrating. But I generally don't feel frustrated watching the game.

I read social media for a bit, then went downstairs to get dressed to take Dad to his appointment. Sue had already gotten him ready to go, but it took a few minutes to get him out of the house anyway. It's only a 5-minute drive to the clinic but we left about 20 minutes to get out of the house, into car, drive to clinic, get out of car, get up to clinic (it was on the third floor).

My initial thought of "assembled wrong" turned out to be correct. It turns out each of Dad's hearing aids have three different parts (I knew they had two but didn't realize the other place they could disconnect.) I had the audiologist show me where to disconnect the bits and the correct spots to reconnect, so I could fix it if it happens again. The trip wasn't wasted, though, because the hearing aids have a hollow tube that's supposed to be flexible but which had stiffened up over time and wear, and needed to be replaced on both hearing aids anyway.

The visit was very quick: the audiologist had fixed both hearing aids and we were out of there before 11:15AM. 

I'd originally planned to chill out at home until it was time to visit Sophrani, but since I had 2 hours, I decided to go to the clubhouse to exercise at the gym there. I normally dislike going to a gym to exercise, but since it's only a quarter-mile away, I can just walk there and count the transit time as part of exercising.

While I was walking to the gym, Sophrani texted to reschedule crafting for Friday. 

This time, I brought my ear buds. I used an elliptical machine again, but set the timer for 45 minutes. Even with a podcast for entertainment, the elliptical machine was extremely boring. Also draining. I averaged 4mph for the first 15 minutes, but had slowed to 3mph by the end. I kept wanting to stop in the middle, but stuck it out. The machine automatically switched to a 5 minute "cool-down" timer, but if I actually slowed at all during this supposed "cool-down", it paused the timer as if I'd stopped. 9_9 I gave up after 90 seconds of this because a "cool-down" where my heart rate is still double normal is not actually a cool-down. I had to walk back home anyway; that'd be enough. 

Another disadvantage of the elliptical is that the pressure on my feet is continuous, because they're always in contact with the pedals. It's not as bad as standing for the whole time, but it made my feet more sore than walkiong does.

At home, I spent a chunk of the day editing Be That Way, and finished reading through reader comments and making the editing list. The final list is 31 points long and more daunting than I'd expected, but I think my 50% complete goal is reasonable. I also took a nap in the afternoon and ordered groceries for delivery on Thursday. In the evening, I wrote a chunk of this entry.

Thursday, May 8

I went downstairs to get breakfast around 8AM, and told Sue to expect groceries by 10AM. I returned upstairs to eat breakfast at my computer. Ninety minutes later, I went downstairs to get a snack. By then, groceries had arrived, but the store had not delivered peeled hard-boiled eggs for my father (because they were out of stock) or chocolate chip cookies for my mother and me (because I forgot to order them). We still had two packages of cookies, but I had ingredients for chocolate-chip cookies and decided I might as well make them now. At which point I discovered we are almost out of uncooked eggs, because Sue has been boiling them for my father since he ran out of the pre-cooked ones. Whoops. I need to put regular eggs down as a subsistute for hard-boiled when I order.

Still, we had five left, which is more than I needed to bake cookies, so I proceeded.

After I made cookies, my mother ordered pizza for lunch instead of getting a burger like she usually does. So I ordered pizza, too, although I might've eaten fewer cookies if I'd known I was having pizza for lunch. Oops. It was fine.

I edited Be That Way, including putting an estimated difficulty down for each editing point. According to the estimate, I am 15% done with editing, which is about on track for getting to 50% by the end of the month. 

I took a nap in the afternoon. In the early evening, I looked at the stacks of pictures leaning against the walls of my room, and resolved to at least get a hammer from downstairs and bringing it up so it'd be possible for me to hang pictures.

While I was in the garage, I grabbed a box of brads as well. Back upstairs, I hung pictures for a bit, until I needed a step ladder to reach high enough for some. Then I went back downstairs, got the stepladder from my dad's room, and returned upstairs to hang pictures.

I put up 27 pictures, looked around at the walls, and thought, I really expected putting this many pictures on the walls would have more of an impact on the piles of art to be hung.

After hanging another 6, I tidied the piles so it would look like I'd made a dent. There's only 14 more framed pictures that I want to hang, plus 2 that I don't like enough to put back up. Then there's a big stack of unframed art, and a stack of empty frames (that are mostly not the right size for the unframed art). I'll have to find a place to put them.

My father has a frequent cough, which sounds more distressing to bystanders than it is to him; he generally doesn't remember that he's been coughing (his memory is shot), and says he's fine if asked.

In the morning his cough was more pronounced than usual. By late afternoon, it was so much worse that I came to over him pseudophedrine (I saw him blowing his nose) and cough syrup. He was still perplexed by the idea that he might want cough syrup. He accepted the pseudophed and wanted acetaminophen because he had a headache, so I gave him that too.

Friday, May 9

On Friday morning, Dad admitted to having a sore throat and feeling poorly. I gave him some Dayquil and another pseudophedrine. My mother thought he was having an allergy attack and gave him allergy meds, too.

Despite feeling unwell, he went to his usual poker game anyway. I found a mask for him to wear during it, at least. He hadn't wanted to call off from poker because a buddy had called to make sure he was coming, since the game was at six players including Dad, and this is the threshhold where it'd be cancelled if anyone else backed out.

By the time he got back from poker on Friday afternoon, he was completely recovered: felt fine, didn't even remember feeling poorly. Yay! Maybe it was allergies.

I'd woken up at 7AM and been unable to get back to sleep, so I ate breakfast early and watched Veo stream more Blue Prince. I was meeting Sophrani between 2-3PM for crafting, so after the stream I went to bed, and fell asleep around 12:15PM. I woke after 2PM; later than I'd planned to nap. Got up and wandered about the house getting ready to leave. Sophrani had texted to say she was running late, too, and to aim for closer to 3PM. I didn't get on the road until 2:35PM, at which point Friday traffic had started. I got to the house around 3:20PM. 

Sophrani spent her crafting time making a simple syrup for sweetening tea, and deciding the layout for the bouquet she'd started quilling two weeks ago. I sketched another Mucha-inspired picture, this one of Duke Strikvi from The Secret Dragon. He's supposed to be an androgynous-looking man, but I think he came out just looking like a woman. Oh well. I colored most of it anyway, but didn't quite finish it.  Maybe I'll get to it before next crafting session, though past experience suggests not.

After crafting, we hung out for a bit waiting for Envoy to arrive, then went out to dinner at a little Italian place. I had lobster ravioli. :9

Post-dinner, Kage, Envoy and I watched the three newest episodes of an anime, "Bye Bye, Earth." Sophrani tapped out on this one because it doesn't make any sense. Kage: "You can watch it with us if you want. Just don't ask us to explain it because it doesn't make any sense if you watch it from the beginning, either."

I was curious as to the appeal of the Anime That Made No Sense, so I watched it with them. It was pretty and haunting in places. Occassionally it verged on the intelligible, but never quite made it there. All the factions seemed to have the same goal of destroying their god, and yet they were all fighting each other anyway. 

After we finished the latest available episode, I checked my phone and found I had a voice mail from my mother. My cat had gotten outside. My fault: I'd left the external garage door open when I left (I meant to close it but forgot). Mom, having no way to know it was open and no reason to think it would be, opened the interior door so Lyric could have Garage Time. Lyric zwooped outside before my mom could close the door.

A few minutes later, Lyric came meowing to the front door, but wouldn't come in when my father opened the door.

My new city doesn't allow outdoor cats, but Lyric was an indoor/outdoor cat for years in my previous one. She wrenched her leg once, but has never gotten in any serious trouble. She'd come when I called after she'd had her fill of outside (usually an hour or two).

So I wasn't too worried. But still concerned--she's never been outside around here--so I came home right away, rather than staying to watch another episode or two of something else.

My first hope was that she'd come to meet me as soon as I parked: she always did that at our old place. No luck on that, though; no sign of her as I pulled up and got out.

I stood in the driveway calling her name and waiting for a minute. Still no sign of her. After I put my stuff inside, I came back out and circled to the back yard, calling her name.

As I walked through our small yard towards the neighbors on the southwest, I heard a distant meow. It sounded like Lyric's "where are you? I'm here" meow, and also there are no outdoor cats so it was highly unlikely to be any other cat.

I walked towards the meow, calling her name as I fumbled out my phone and the cat called back to me. I got the phone flashlight on and shined it towards the meowing. Cat eyes reflected back at me from several houses down, running my way as soon as I got the light on.

I walked to meet her, crouching to pet her and tell her what a good cat she is.

Then I turned to go back to the house, clucking for her to follow me. She followed me all the way, no hesitation. She'd had enough Outside Time and was ready to come in.

Saturday, May 10

This morning, I woke early with a sore throat.

...so maybe my dad's illness on Thursday/Friday morning wasn't allergies. x_x

I took a pseudophedrine and ate some cough drops and failed to get back to sleep. I got up early and played some Time Princess and Race for the Galaxy while I ate breakfast. Around 11:30, I was tired enough to try sleeping again and lay down. Eventually I dozed off, napping until 2:30PM or so. I still felt crappy, so I gathered up more cold meds and took everything I could find. Annoyingly, I can't find any pseudophedrine beyond the almost-empty sheet that I keep by my bed. I sometimes wake early because I'm congested, so I keep it on hand for that. I bought two boxes in January and I really don't think I used all the other pills. MEH. I'll have to go out for more tomorrow. I can't find my masks, either. DOUBLE MEH.

Around 4PM, I decided I needed to switch from drinking caffeine free Diet Coke to hot clear liquids. The problem with this is that I don't particularly like any hot clear liquids. Even the one I like best -- a spiced cider mix -- I don't like enough to drink when I'm healthy, and it goes bad too quickly to keep stocked for when I'm sick.

I ended up mixing some strawberry-watermelon drink mix into hot water and have been drinking it out of the giant tumblers Lut got a while back. It tastes better cold, but drinking it hot is better than plain hot water. It's fine. 

I'm hoping since my 80+ year-old father shook this off in 30 hours, I'll be feeling back to normal by tomorrow afternoon. But we'll see.

In the mean time, I am malingering, playing games, and feeling sorry for myself instead of trying to be productive. I'm sick. I'm allowed.

In the late evening, while I was malingering and playing games, I heard a brief shriek, a loud thump, and a muffled "ow." 

"Mom, are you all right?" I yelled, already getting to my feet.

"No."

I hurried downstairs to find my mother sitting on the floor of the bathroom. She was unharmed, thankfully, but she couldn't get up on her own. My father and I offered to help her stand, but she can't tolerate having her arms or shoulders tugged. She's got arthritis, an old surgery on one arm that cost her much of the muscle, and artificial knees that don't bend far enough to get her feet under her. She tried scooting over to the stairs, which she's used after past falls to lever herself back to her feet. No luck this time, though. I offered to call 911, but she wanted to keep trying on her own. I put a pillow next to her and she was able to scoot halfway onto that, then she rolled enough that I could jam a second pillow under the other side. We repeated this to get her on top of two sets of pillows, but she still couldn't get herself up the extra two inches to reach the first step. I offered to try pushing her up from under her rear, but she didn't want to try that. By now, it'd been about half an hour. I'd offered to call 911 a few more times during this; at this point I just said I'd call and my mother agreed.

The EMTs wanted to get behind her, cross arms over her chest, and lift from under her shoulders. My mom and I were both pretty confident this would put too much stress on her shoulder for her to tolerate. But these were professionals, so we let them try. The male EMT made the attempt: it was too painful and my mom made him stop.

After this, the EMTs scooted a blanket underneath her rear, and then the two lifted her together by the blanket, which was basically what I'd expected them to do at the start. Success!

My mother reiterated that she was fine and didn't need any further assistance. Once she had her feet under her, she took her rollator and walked back to her recliner on her own. I gave the EMTs a few details -- name, date of birth -- but they didn't ask for her insurance information. I don't know if that's because they already had it on file or if that's because they don't charge for this sort of "help you stand up" service.

This scenario -- the possibility of my mother falling after my father went to bed, and being unable to get up or reach a phone -- is the big reason I wanted to move in and not just get my own house in the area. In this case, though, my mother would've been fine anyway, because my father came out looking for a thing he'd forgotten when he went to bed. So he would've been able to bring her a phone to call 911.

We still need to get fall-detection devices for my parents, though -- the kind that call emergency services when they detect a fall, or if you press a button -- because I'm not always here, or always awake.

Attempting to assist my mother made me feel briefly young and healthy in comparison. By the time I got back upstairs, though, I was back to feeling sick. The sore throat and general acheyness persists. I took some generic Nyquil around 11PM, then stayed up playing Time Princess until after reset at 1AM before flopping.

rowyn: (Default)
 Tuesday, April 29

A Discord friend, Pemaladesi, has been doing daily sketches in a tiny sketchbook. I have two tiny sketchbooks myself (art-card sized ones, plus art cards, plus a small sketchbook (6" x 6"). The 6" sketchbooks were ones I used all the time many years ago, back before Lut was dianosed with cancer and when I still liked Twitter. I used to bike to the coffee shop with my marker case, take prompts from my Twitter friends, make marker illustrations to the prompts, and post photos of them to Twitter. I filled most of two sketchbooks doing this. I don't remember if there was a particular reason I stopped or if I just moved on to other pastimes. 

After a little consideration, I picked the 6" sketchbook that still had some blank pages. Then I browsed the image search results for Mucha, picked one at random, and make a sketch based on it. I didn't like the sketch enough to color it, though.

Tuesday is too long ago now and I don't remember what else I did with the day.  I started using my checkbox tracker again and checked every box, though. I did some editing on A Game to You and wrote a little of The Secret Dragon. 

I also unpacked more boxes. I was into single-digits of boxes remaining to unpack and that was exciting.

Wednesday, April 30

Another "Blue Prince" stream by Veo! They only got through two days this time. The first day of ths stream was slowed down by spending twenty minutes messing with the time-locked safe. They got it open, though!

More unpacking. Also, like Tuesday, spent some time editing A Game to You and writing The Secret Dragon. I also decided to try another Mucha-inspired sketch. This time, I modeled my female figure on Koysko, a protagonist from The Secret Dragon. I liked how this sketch came out, but didn't start coloring it yet.

I bought the rest of "You've Got the Wrong Girl!", a manwha on Tapas, and immediately regretted it. In the very next entry the male lead tortured and then killed a servant because the servant had withheld the ML's correspondence by the orders of the ML's now-deceased father. 

Just. What. Why is this in a romance comic. The problem with reading manwha is that the authors have Very Different sensibilities and sometimes this will show up in horrific ways.

I kept reading because I'd already paid for it, but even aside from Random Offhand Murder, the ML's behavior is incredibly grating. I had really liked this comic and now I've got seven purchased-but-unread episodes left and I'm not sure they're worth reading.

Thursday, May 1

In the morning, Sue, my dad's health aide, reported that my father's right hearing aid wouldn't fit back in his ear properly. It looked to me like it had been assembled wrong -- it matched the configuration on the left hearing aid. But I couldn't figure out another way to reassemble it. After some back and forth with my mother and Google maps, we figured out which audiologist he used, and I gave them a call.

Receptionist: "Your dad's audiologist is on vacation, so the first appointment availaible is Wednesday."

Me: "Can we get in any sooner? It doesn't have to be the usual audiologist; it's a mechanical problem with the hearing aid, not with my dad's hearing or the electronics."

Receptionist: "Not at that location."

The other location was much farther away. I asked Dad if he wanted a sooner appointment with a much longer drive, or to wait until Wednesday. He picked waiting until Wednesday.

 

Sue took the hearing aid from him and told him she'd put it on the charger. To my mom and I, she said, "It won't stay in, so if he keeps trying to wear it, it'll fall out and he'll lose it."

A bit later, I washed the comforter I use at my computer. (Some people like to have a small lap blanket when they're sitting. I like to have a king-size comforter.) My mother has a fancy dryer that tries to detect when the contents are dry, then turns itself off. It is not great at this. With the comforter, it turned itself off when 80% of the comforter was dry but the balled-up center was still wet.  I straightened out the ball, put the wet parts on the outside, and put it back in the dryer for another cycle. The dryer told me it would run for another ~81 minutes. 

3 minutes later, it shut off. 

I checked the comforter: still giant wet spots. I put it back in. Dryer: "okay 81 minutes, go."

3 minutes later: "done now!"

Comforter: still wet.

Me: "..."

Me *goes into mom's office* "Is there a way to get your dryer to just, like, dry something for a while instead of turning itself off while the thing is still wet because for some reason it's sure it must be dry?" 

Mom: "If there is, I haven't been able to find it."

I fiddled with the settings some more, trying "Very Dry" instead of "Normal Dry", with no better results. But "Timed Dry" turned off the auto-detection and just ran it for X minutes. I put it in for another hour Just To Be Sure, and also because I had to go visit my friends.

As with last week, I visited Sophrani to do crafting together in the afternoon, and then got dinner with her and Kage afterwards. I brought my ginormous marker case, plus the Surface and my small sketchbook. Sophrani did Delicious Crafting for her part, making a half-batch of chocolate chip cookies. She'd seen an article that recommended adding milk powder to the cookie batter and wanted to try it out. The cookies were delicious, but Sophrani and I couldn't tell if milk powder had made them extra delicious. Kage thought it did, though. I may make a more scientific effort at this at some point, and make a batch that's half with and half without milk powder. 

While Sophrani baked, I colored the sketch I'd done on Wednesday. I am content with the way it came out but for some reason I haven't bothered photographing it yet.

We went to The Loop for dinner, a counter-serve place with pizza/sandwiches/burgers. I got a veggie sandwich that was quite tasty and possibly even healthy, and French onion soup that was also delicious but definitely not healthy.

After dinner, we went to Trader Joe's. I don't think we plan to make "grocery shopping after dinner" part of the routine. It just worked out that way. I got maple syrup, truffles, goat cheese, and eggs. Eggs because we were almost out but I'd forgotten to include them on Friday's grocery order. 

The truffles are small dollops of chocolate ganache dusted in cocoa. The appearance on the box reminded me of truffles I used to get from Costco around Christmas time. They taste the same, too: so good. This is a mixed blessing at best. o_o;;;

Friday, May 2

I got up a little before 8AM and made pancakes for myself and my father (Mom didn't want any), so I'd have an excuse to eat the maple syrup I'd bought the night before. For some reason, there's no baking soda in the house, and my usual pancake recipe uses both baking powder and baking soda for whatever reason. But we had some Bisquick from when my sister-in-law had made shortcake, so I made Bisquick pancakes, substituting melted butter for vegetable oil because we didn't have that, either.

The Bisquick pancakes came out perfectly. It was uncanny. Fluffy and golden brown. I was like "why do I bother making pancakes from scratch? I should just use Bisquick." (Now I feel like an advertisement. They really did come out great, tho.)

I finished making pancakes and went upstairs to eat them while I waited for Veo's stream to start. This was more of "Blue Prince". I had a good time watching the stream and making notes in my spreadsheet for most of it, but around 90 minutes in, I started getting motion sick for some reason. I listened to the stream and watched chat for a while instead. My mom wanted to get subs for lunch, so I picked something to order and my mother placed the order. Around 11AM, I left to pick up the order. The stream hadn't ended yet, but I didn't miss much -- it ended a bit after 11AM. Blue Prince streams continue to run late, but not 3.6 hours like Monday's stream. 

My mom had accidentally order a full sub for me instead of a small. I ate half of it for lunch and put the rest in the fridge. After lunch, I really wanted a nap, but we had grocery delivery scheduled for 1-3PM, so I had to stay awake for that. I unpacked the last box, which was mostly cosplay clothing and fabric. I threw out a bunch of things that didn't fit anymore, and put much of the rest in the wash because it was musty from a long time in storage. 

A little after 2PM, I'd finished with the last box and went upstairs. Shortly afterwards, I heard my father call, "Come in." I hurried back downstairs to get the grocery order. I was kind of impressed that the delivery person had somehow made enough noise to get the attention of my mostly-deaf father without either ringing the doorbell or making enough noise that either I or my mother could hear it (granted, we were both much farther from the door than my dad. Still.) The delivery person had the bags on the front porch. While I collected some, she carefully moved the rest just inside the door, positioned so the door couldn't be closed. I am not sure exactly what the point of that was. Fortunately, Lyric was enjoying Garage Time and so did not take the opportunity to bolt outside.

One case of caffeine-free diet Coke was soggy, so I dealt with that first. Two of the cans inside were damaged and leaking, so I threw them out along with wet cardboard box. While I handled that, my father loaded groceries onto the seat of his rolling walker, and brought groceries into the kitchen. "You don't need to do that, Dad," I said to him. "I'll handle it."

My dad said, "I thought I'd take advantage of my wheelbarrow here to help out."

As we put away groceries, my father mentioned that the grocery webpage had a habit of adding things to the shopping cart because you'd bought them before and it assumed you would want them again. So you had to check the cart to make sure the thing you wanted wasn't already in the cart.

I giggled. "I don't know if the page still does this, because at this point, I'm ordering for myself, and K is putting in what Sue orders for you, and Mom either emails K or adds things to the cart directly. So there's no way to tell if the grocery did it or if one of the other two people ordering did."

My father's observation may have been prompted by me ordering two packages of smoked salmon despite there already being a full package in the fridge (plus an almost-empty one). I'd thought we only had the almost-empty one and I was thinking of buying fresh bagels and eating some this week. Now I really have to get bagels. (My father eats plain grocery-store bagels but I'd much rather eat fancy ones from a bagel place.) 

After putting away the groceries, I moved laundry into the dryer and went back upstairs. In addition to being bad at detecting when things are dry, it is terrible at estimating how long the dry cycle will take. It told me 38 minutes when I started the cycle. I came down ~40 minutes later and it now said "9 minutes." I came back half an hour later and it was now at 8 minutes. 

...

I opened up the dryer and took out all the stuff that was already dry, then threw the remaining few items back in for another round. 

Since it was now May, I realized I could start editing Be That Way, so I did that for much of Friday. I spent Coffee's stream in multiplayer with them, sometimes working on edits (and giving myself editing credit to defeat monsters) and other times writing up my April-in-review post.

Saturday, May 3

I haven't done a daily entry since Monday, so I don't know if I'll be able to reconstruct the previous days well enough to write about them. I'll take a crack at it, though.

I woke at 6AM and played with my phone for an hour, but got back to sleep and didn't wake again until 8:40AM, so that was nice. I played some Time Princess and then got up.

I had cereal for breakfast and discovered that the grocery had delivered one box of Raisin Bran Crunch, as requested, and one box of Raisin Bran, as not requested. The difference between the two is that Raisin Bran Crunch stays crispy in milk for several minutes, while Raisin Bran is soggy by the time you get the cap back on the milk. I suppose I'll eat it, though. They also delivered a battered case of soda with two out of twelve cans leaking. I should talk to my parents about changing groceries because the service from Walmart is better and cheaper. They won't go for it but I should at least try instead of silently groaning at their current grocery.

After eating breakfast and playing some Race for the Galaxy, it was 10:30 and I was like "what am I supposed to be doing now?" I didn't have ay plans for today but I felt as if I ought to. It's weird having all the boxes unpacked. I need to try to straighten up the plastic bins and stuff littered about my room. I made a token gesture at doing this today, but made no meaningful progress. I still have a few empty spaces where I could put stuff. I just haven't. I ran out of transparent plastic tubs before I ran out of things I wanted to put in them, though. The biggest pile of random stuff is parts for Lut's computer -- cables and keyboard and whatnot. I don't plan to set up Lut's computer, so that seems like a good bin candidate. But I don't have a free bin for it. I think I'll move some things that are currently in bins into the inaccessible and mostly-unused cabinets in the laundry room. (The top shelves are not only high but you have to reach over the laundry machines to get to them. I put some stuff in them but not much because I need to get the stepladder out to reach them.) 

It'd be a good place to store the king-size mattress pad until I get a new bed. Though it's so large and fluffy, it fills up a bin by itself; it might be too big for the cabinets. Also, I'm not sure if I'll end up using it; after 20+ years of having a California king mattress, my fitted sheets and mattress pads were all California king, I think. And I doubt I'll get a new California king bed. I don't need the extra length. Not that I need the extra width when it's just me, either. But I plan to get a king-size bed anyway. It's just the normal bed size for one person. All the other sizes are too small. I guess they're for kids or something, idk?

I am presently sleeping on a twin and it literally is uncomfortably small. Even with my weird O-shaped pillow to keep me centered in the bed (and to make sure I can't knock my side pillows off the bed), I keep draping over the side or having my arm pressed against the wall. And I'm not a large person! I know so many people who are fine with sleeping in twins but I am not one of them.

Anyway, instead of organizing my possessions, I went through first-reader feedback on Be That Way. I've been reading through comments and making changes when a comment prompted a quick alteration. With comments that need more consideration to implement, I make a note on the editing list and move on. I am a little over a third through and the editing list is at seven points so far. Looking very manageable.

At 2PM, I asked my mother is she wanted a walk; she declined. I thought about napping, but went back to editing instead. I didn't lie down until 3:30PM and didn't try to sleep until after 4PM. I napped for maybe 40 minutes: short for me, but I had done a pretty good job of sleeping the night before, so maybe I just really didn't need a nap.

After I finished eating dinner, I went to CoffeeQuills' stream page a bit after 6PM to wait for it to start, only to find it already running, to my surprise. It'd only been up for 90 seconds; it was very early for Coffee (7AM in Japan). They had plans with their partners and would be heading out at 10AM their time, so they'd started stream early. I hopped into multiplayer with them, and started writing this entry.

rowyn: (cute)
 Health & Fitness

I was pretty much back to baseline in April. Since the move, I've been eating perhaps slightly worse than I did living alone. I haven't been drinking bubble teas or Coke floats, but I've been eating more cookies and eating restaurant food more often. Not super often; maybe twice a week? But I think that's more than I'd been doing since Lut passed away.

Oh, and I switched my breakfast food since the move: I've been eating raisin bran or a bagel with smoked salmon for breakfast. Nutrition-wise, pretty similar to the yogurt and granola I'd been having.

I didn't do much formal exercise in April; I counted move-prep and unpacking as exercise instead. I spent lots of time on those, however, and they involved plenty of physical activity, so not wholly unjustified.

Dailies

I quit using my checkbox-based tracking system as the move date grew closer and didn't really get back to it until the end of the month. From April 13 to April 21 is completely blank, and I feel like the dates surrounding those are not particularly accurate. This in turn made me less likely to do all the creative things that I would normally check off. I am trying to get back to it now, although I am feeling less inclined to tell myself to stop doing one creative activity and muster the energy for a different one. For example, on May 1, I spent a few hours on a picture, but I didn't do any writing or editing. On May 2, I spent several hours editing Be That Way, but didn't write any fiction or draw. 

It makes me wonder if I should add some time-based checkboxes (for measuring how much time I spent on creative activities) or if that's gonna make it too unwieldy. I like being able to see what days I did certain activities at all. The spreadsheet is already a little unwieldy, so idk if I want to make it more so.

I have not been good about remembering to check the physical mail here, so I've added a checkbox for that. And am also getting up to do that now, before I forget.

Writing

I wrote a tiny bit of The Secret Dragon. It's up to 39,378, so 2,850 new words. This was more love than the soloRPG romance got: it's at 4,434 and got 1,100 new words. Writing even a little bit of fiction has been a pulling-teeth sort of exercise.

The Business of Writing

I finished initial edits on The Jewel-Strewn Night, but didn't send it to first readers because I gave my first readers until May to finish Be That Way. I guess I can give it to first readers now? I don't know how enthusiastic they'll be when some of them only just finished comments on Be That Way

After I finished editing The Jewel-Strewn Night, I started poking at edits on A Game to You. Mostly easy stuff, like replacing placeholders. There are so many placeholder names in this book. Oog.

Art

I checked the "draw" box 7 times in April. I finished the character portrait for Raeku (from Be That Way) that I'd started in March, and revised/cleaned up a character portrait for Caliper (also from Be That Way). With the illustrations for Be That Way finally done, I did a portrait for the villainess soloRPG. I also did two pencil sketches, inspired by finding my small sketchbooks and a Discord friend doing daily sketches in a tiny sketchbook.  

After years of daily art for my Apothecaria journal, this level of art feels like "basically none" in comparison. But it is not zero! I am actually rather pleased to be at not-zero for art. Apothecaria had a lot of instant gratification going for it, and continuing at all without that is an achievement.

Reading

I haven't done much reading. Some big chunks of unfinished manwha, some of a new Time Princess story (A Cat and Dog Affair, which is a weak story paired with a terrible translation: bleh), and a bit more of Feathers of Dawn, which I still haven't given up on even though I'm barely reading it. 

Moving

I am moved! 

This was so much work. I paid people to do everything you can pay people to do except for unpacking (you can pay movers to unpack but it's expensive and doesn't help much so I didn't) and it was still So Much Work. By the end of April, I was down to three boxes left to unpack (I am now at zero). But I don't have enough places to put stuff away, so lots of stuff is littered across the floor of my room and needs to be organized and put somewhere that makes sense. It's progress, though. I'm much closer to the point of "now there's enough space in my room to put some furniture that can hold the stuff that's currently strewn about the floor. Most of the stuff on the floor is in plastic bins so when I finish organizing it, I can stack them. I can get some more stuff into the attic but not all of it.

I have a long list of things Still To Do in connection with having moved. Many require phone calls or going to places of work in person, which explains why I haven't done them yet. None of them are urgent. I will put some of them on the May goal list so I actually do them, though.

Not all of them, though. There's too many of them.

Goal Scorecard

  • Move to provide care for my parents: I did the thing! This was the big one.
  • Cancel Google Fiber & return equipment: Canceling Google Fiber was so easy -- they let me do it with an email; I didn't even have to fill out an online form or something. Getting the equipment back to them was more challenging: it took three tries for them to get FedEx to email me the necessary QR code, and then I had to take the stuff to the FedEx office and deal with people. But still, pretty easy.
  • Contact realtor about selling house: Done! I have some regrets about going through a realtor instead of just selling to some terrible private equity firm for 70% of the value, since the only offers I've gotten in the two weeks it's been on the market have been from terrible private equity firms for 60%-75% of the value. But eh. I'll stick it out for a month or two before I give up and take a crappy offer from a crappy company. 
  • Pay April bills: done!
  • Pay taxes and file extension: done! I still have to file the actual return, but that's not urgent.
  • Complete form for Terry's executor: I had to print out a piece of paper to fill out and sign for the executor of the estate, but Kage got it printed for me. I know a person with a working printer! That'll be convenient for the 1-2 times a year that I need to print something.

April stretch goals completed

  • Finish initial edits on The Jewel-Strewn Night: Oh hey I did this and it was actually a significant accomplishment. 
  • Write some of The Secret Dragon: Technically!
  • Play more of romance soloRPG: Even more technically!
  • Finish illustrations for Be That Way: Done!
  • Track what I read: I didn't finish reading anything, but hey, I tracked it all.
  • Make progress clearing out stuff I no longer want: So much progress. o_o I still have many things I don't have much use for and some things I don't particularly want. But it's pruned down by so much. I got rid of more than two-thirds of my possessions during the move. Maybe as much as 90%, counting the furniture and things Lut had owned. (I kept quite a few things of Lut's: all the game-related stuff, his computer, the painting desk, etc. But I gave away far more, just counting the books and clothing.)
  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed: Actually did this!
  • Get new health insurance for new state: This was a "do within 60 days of move" task but I figured it'd be better to do it soonr, since I get health insurance through healthcare.gov and no telling how long the government will be functional enough to keep the website operational. -_-
  • Notified bank and credit card company of new address: Technically I suppose I should change my address with the utility companies, too, but I'm kind of hoping the house will have sold well before address forwarding runs out. (Utilities for my current home are in my parents' name, of course.) Anyway, I took care of this with the two companies that I plan to keep doing business with.

May Goals 

  • Provide care for parents: So far, this has been somewhat less than Lut needed. My father has a home health aide three times a week for bathing and a few other things, but my parents are still pretty self-sufficient about daily activities. My dad even put away groceries with me when they arrived today, and probably could've handled them all if he'd had to. (Usually they get grocery delivery while the aide is here but my brother forgot to schedule it). My mom likes to walk with me both for company and security in case of a fall, and to have me pick up food from places that don't have drive-throughs. Both my parents can use someone to transport them to and from appointments. But I feel more like a security blanket than a daily necessity, which is nice.
  • Pay May bills
  • Call Ting to cancel second phone line: yes I'm finally putting this on the goal list. I don't even know where Lut's old phone is now, much less get any use out of it.
  • Complete at least 50% of final edits on Be That Way: This is perhaps optimistic when I haven't finished going through reader feedback yet. But I don't think I'll make any complicated sturctural changes to Be That Way.
  • Register with the HOA (bonus goal: find out HOA's approval process for a catio): I've been thinking I'd need to call to do this and ugh, phone calls. But I checked the HOA's contact page and they have an online form to send email. So I completed that just now. We'll see if it gets me anywhere.
  • Attempt to get DMV appointment for license transfer: This means being awake at midnight on Sunday and remembering to check the DMV site. I usually manage the "awake" part but have not yet managed the "remembering" part. We'll see if I do any better this Sunday. I'm getting together with Sophrani, Kage, and Envoy on Sunday afternoon/evening so I'm not counting on being awake and remembering it while at a computer.

May Stretch Goals

  • Write some of The Secret Dragon
  • Finish edits on Be That Way
  • Publish Be That Way
  • Play more of romance soloRPG
  • Exercise 15+ times (organizing stuff/cleaning counts as exercise)
  • Track what I read
  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed
  • Ask Bookbub for a Featured Deal and run another ad campaign for a book
  • Get backmatter updated for whatever book I promote
  • Pick an old picture to redraw
  • Sell mom's car
  • Register car in new state (or start process thereof)
rowyn: (exercise)
 Thursday, April 24

I didn't sleep well on Wednesday night, and spent much of Thursday morning trying to nap. My napping efforts were interrupted by my mother, who planned to order pizza for lunch and wanted to ask what I'd like. I picked something out and lay back down. My mom ordered around noon and the pizza didn't arrive until almost 1PM. I ate up in my room, like usual. I would feel antisocial for always eating in my room, except that my mother always eats in her office and my father always eats in front of his TV in the living room. 

So okay, it's still antisocial, but I come by it honestly.

I finished eating a little after 1:30 and realized, oops, this was about when I'd meant to leave to see Sophrani. She had kindly suggested a time frame of 2-3PM instead of a specific time for me to arrive, so I was in the range when I arrived around 2:30PM. Despite my conversation with my mother on Wednesday night, I took my own car again and drove very carefully, staying at or under the speed limit. My father's car is fine, but I'm more comfortable in my own. Also, I don't have to adjust the seat or mirrors on it.

Sophrani had a big quilling project she wanted to work on, but she decided to do something small and unambitious as a warm-up because she hasn't done any quilling since December. She spent a little while in her office, picking out a design to base her project on.

I started by re-working my favorite of the pictures I'd done of Caliper, the goblin protagonist in Be That Way. I've drawn her four times now, trying to get her right. My favorite depicted her in an evening dress from late in the book, but I wanted to use it as an illustration relatively early. I want to have an illustration of Caliper, specifically, because "goblin" covers a wide range of shapes/looks. I drew pictures of all the protagonists, though. Anyway, I changed Caliper's outfit and the background to be appropriate to the early scenes.

With that done, I had more-or-less finished pictures of all four protagonists from Be That Way, and could finally draw something else. I did a portrait of Delphia, the protagonist of the romance soloRPG I have poked at briefly. 

Around the same time I finished the portrait of Delphia, Sophrani did a final flower for her quilling bouquet and pronounced her work for the day done. She invited me to get dinner with her and Kage, so I hung out until Kage got back from his dentist appointment. Kage had some crafting of his own to do: powder-coating a lightsaber hilt. He masked off the parts he didn't want coated (mainly the interior) and put it in a smoker (dedicated to this purpose) to bake.

Once it was sufficiently baked, he turned off the smoker and we went to a little Japanese restaurant for dinner. I ordered chirashi for dinner, and discovered a problem with ordering chirashi: it does not make good leftovers so I have to eat it all in one sitting. This restaurant served a ginormous portion and it was too much food for me to eat at once. I ate it all anyway because I can't bear to let delicious food go to waste.

Afterwards, we went to the nearby grocery store to get soda and a box of cereal. 

Kage: "Shall I move the car closer to the store?"

Me: "It's in the same plaza; we can just walk. Although we'll have to carry back whatever we get."

Sophrani: "We're just getting soda and cereal. It's fine."

We left the grocery with soda, cereal, a gallon of distilled water, and three bags of Other Stuff. 

Kage: "This always happens."

Kage: "It's not too late for me to bring the car around."

Sophrani: "There's three of us. We can manage."

Me: "I'm sure we can make it. Possibly with some complaining along the way."

We didn't complain much en route to the car, though. I found the episode amusing because I've been doing either grocery pickup or delivery for the last eight years. So while I still remember getting a bunch of extra stuff every time at the store, It's been so long since I actually watched the phenomenon. 

I went home soon after we got back to their place, because overeating was putting me into a food coma and I didn't want to end up too tired to drive. 

At home, I finished dailies in Time Princess, took an ibuprofen because my legs hurt, and crashed early, around 11PM. For the first time since my stuff arrived on the 14th, I didn't unpack any boxes on this day.

Friday, April 25

Despite getting to bed early, I was tired for much of Friday and did some napping. I did get up in time to watch Veo stream a new game, "The Blue Prince". They were enchanted by the game and streamed for two hours while playing it, instead of their usual ninety minutes. You can only save the game at the end of an in-game day, which is awkward given that it took two hours to finish a day. It's not clear to me what the "save" in this game does, since the house resets at the end of each day and you also lose your inventory. The game doesn't keep any digital history for you; it encourages players to use a paper notebook to take notes. Presumably saving does something, because Tufty noted there was a save-game bug on one platform.

To make up for unpacking zero boxes on Thursday, I unpacked three on Friday. I ate my leftover pizza for lunch. CoffeeQuills' stream started at 7PM. I had decided earlier to skip dinner because I'd had a big lunch, but by 7PM, I regretted this decision. I made eggs-in-a-hole for dinner. Once I'd finished eating, I forced myself to actually work on writing fiction for a change. I did not write a lot -- 400ish words -- but this was an improvement over the zero  words I've done on most days this month. Seriously, I'm at about 2000 words added to The Secret Dragon in the entire month so far. I haven't been writing the soloRPG, either -- about 1000 words for the month to date.

It's been a busy month and I'm not gonna beat myself up over it, but it makes me antsy to not be writing at all like this.

After the stream, I remembered that I hadn't checked the mail in a few days and my mother's driver's license was supposed to have arrived (I have "Informed Delivery" from USPS, which means they email images in the morning of any envelopes that should arrive that day.) The mail also had the gas bill from my old house, which USPS had said would arrive on Tuesday but which still hadn't been there when I checked Wednesday. I'd already guessed at what the bill would be and paid it, and was pleased to see that my guess had been just a little over so I didn't need to send more money. I put the envelope with my mother's license on her computer keyboard, since she was already in bed and I figured she'd be sure to notice it there.

Around 11:15PM, my brother M texted because he'd gotten a notification that a "new device" had logged in to our father's Google account at 8:30PM. Google often counts "this device was logged out and then logged back in" as a "new device". My father was asleep now, but had been awake at 8:30PM, and it seemed likely to me that either his TV or his tablet had logged him out for whatever reason, and so he'd logged back in and triggered the alert. My mother's TV had done an update earlier in the week that logged her out and made her log in again. 

Since (a) my father was asleep now and (b) likely would not remember if he'd had to log in a earlier anyway, M wanted to investigate further. So M wanted to log in to my father's account, which meant he had to look up my father's password and then I had to authenticate M's login from my father's phone. This process turned out to take 45 minutes, because M has the world's most sluggish laptop. He rebooted once during the process and the reboot alone took 20 minutes. Opening a spreadsheet was another 10 minutes. My desktop is ancient too but it's not this slow. o_o We didn't start the log in process until after midnight. I played Time Princess while waiting for M's laptop to complete basic tasks.  Around 1AM, M had identified the login as "a Linux device" in the state my parents and I live in. The "Linux device" was weird, because Android devices are identified as Android and we don't have a LInux computer here. We figured it was the smart TV, though, given the location and the need for two-factor authentication to log in. 

Once we'd finished, I went to bed.

Saturday, April 26

I woke up around 6:30AM.  and decided to get up around 7AM, eat breakfast, and nap later in the morning. Around 9:30 AM, I was ready to go back to sleep. I let my mother know I was gonna nap, in case she wanted anything and also so she wouldn't wake me up while I was napping. She wanted to go out for a little walk with me sometime today, but no urgency on it.

I read for a bit until I fell asleep. I started a new comic on Tapas.io: "Sigrid." It's a returnee fantasy romance manwha. I read a lot of these, but this one struck me because the female protagonist was a knight, and she's still an adult after returning: she was 25 at the time of her unjust death and goes back to when she was 20. The female protagonists in romance fantasy manwha are most often noncombatants. Those who do any fighting are more likely to have magic powers than armor and a sword. I've seen two with melee combatant heroines, but I didn't stick with either of them (one where I got to the point of disliking most of the case, and the other because I detested the male romantic lead). Sigrid seems much more promising, although I hate the male romantic lead in this one, too. Sigh. Not as much as the ML in the one I dropped, though. Tapas was running a "first 20 episodes already unlocked" promotion for "Sigrid", so I read the first 21 episodes over the course of the day and still liked it, which is generally a good sign.

Around noon, I got up from my nap and checked to see if my mom wanted to walk now. She was eating lunch, so I made my own lunch and ate it. I checked again around 1PM and she was napping. At 2PM, I checked a third and she was ready. I got dressed, then sat down on the stairs to wait for my mother to finish dressing. Then moved to sit in the living room as it became clear this would take a while.

When she was ready, my mom went out the front door, throwing the door wide open to maneuver her walker outside. Lyric took this as an invitation to saunter out. I followed my cat, who did not go far or attempt to evade me, although she did complain when I picked her up. My mother took a seat in her walker while I put the cat back inside. Lyric stuck near the front door, waiting for it to open again, so I decided to go out through the garage instead. The garage opens into the laundry room, so the laundry room serves as a catlock to keep the cat from getting into the garage, with the garage as additional catlock to keep her from the outside. In this case, Lyric was so fixated on the front door that she didn't even try to follow me into the laundry room.

My mother has little stamina and walks slowly; she took four breaks over the course of walking four houses up the street and then back down to our house. I paced around her or in front of her while she sat, to keep my feet from hurting by standing still, but I didn't try to make the outing good exercise for me. We got back to the house around 4PM.

I made a point of making dinner around 6PM so that it wouldn't interfere with Coffee's stream, and then discovered that Coffee wasn't streaming tonight. D'oh. 

Instead of being productive on my own, I spent most of the evening reading the new book in Time Princess so I could finish the event for it before the event ended. I went to sleep a little after 1AM.

Sunday, April 27

I woke around 6:30AM again, but went back to sleep after an hour instead of getting up, and then got up around 9AM. When I went down to get breakfast, I asked my father if I could move some stuff around in his giant walk-in closet so I could have a section. He was fine with that.

In the late morning, I cleared the most inconvenient area of the closet (behind the door, so you have to close the door while inside to get to it). My mother had told me it was my father's closet, but the clothes in this section were all my mother's. Stuff she seldom wears anymore; all the clothing she wears is in her office. She didn't much care if it was moved, either.

After moving her stuff to other areas, I opened a wardrobe box and carried clothes down to hang in the closet. Like my mother, it's clothes I seldom wear, and mostly cosplay stuff.  Lyric was fascinated by the open wardrobe box and went to some trouble to climb into it and investigate. 

In mid-afternoon, I asked my mother if she wanted to go for a walk. She grimaced. "Give me another 30 minutes?"

"Sure. I'll be upstairs, just call me when you want to go."

She did much better this time, taking only three breaks and shorter ones, as well. The afternoon was more pleasant, too: it wasn't as hot in the sun and there was a pleasant breeze. Birds were singing in the trees, too. Lovely day. We were out for maybe half an hour.

During Coffee's stream, I did some journaling. Oh, and some editing on The Jewel-Strewn Night. I'd finished the PWA pass, but there were a few other alterations I wanted to make before I declared it done. I have declared it done now and it's ready for first readers. 

It's Monday as I write this and I have only the vaguest memory of yesterday. I didn't get to sleep until ridiculously late, around 2:30AM, for no good reason. 

After I went to bed, Lyric decided to scramble up one of the tall, narrow boxes, perhaps thinking that she could hop into a box on the other side as she had with the wardrobe boxes. Instead, she tipped it over and it crashed to the floor. Cat: unharmed. Box looked fine too. Oh well.

Veo was doing a bonus stream of The Blue Prince at 9AM my time, so I told my internal alarm clock to wake me at 8:50AM. "No earlier. I want to get as much sleep as possible beforehand."

Monday, April 28

I woke at 4AM, looked at my phone, and told my body, "I feel like you're not even trying here." I went back to sleep, woke again around 6AM, did a little reading, and went back to sleep again. When I woke at 8AM, I gave up and got up after a little reading. I made breakfast and brought it up to my room, then played Race for the Galaxy until Veo's stream started.

The Blue Prince is not the sort of game I'd play, but it's fun to watch Veo stream it because they encourage their audience to speculate and figure puzzles out along with them (as long as you don't already know the solution from playing yourself or looking up answers or whatever). Partway in, I made a Google spreadsheet to take notes of things, and then shared it with the chat so they could make notes too. Jubal used a new tab of it to organize certain clues in a new way, which turned out to be very insightful, woohoo! I even managed to solve one puzzle before anyone else (this was purely a mechanical advantage; it was a very straightforward puzzle). 

Veo normally streams for 90 minutes. At 75 minutes, they finished Day 2. "I know we can't finish another day in the time left in stream, but I'm starting Day 3 anyway."

At 110 minutes, they finished Day 3. Veo: "Oh no, I'm so sad it's over. I want to do another day but it'd take another hour and a half."

Me: "Day 3 only took 35 minutes."

Veo: "But that's only because we got unlucky and it ended quickly."

Me: "Yes, but I also think the days take less time as you progress because you already know stuff about the game and don't have to spend time working it out."

Veo polled the chat to see if we all wanted to go another day, which of course we did. "Okay, one more day!" Day 4 began!

At 146 minutes, they finished Day 4. 

Veo: "..."

Veo: "Okay, one more day! Just so we can [redacted]. It'll be so quick. We've gotten so good!"

Me: *laughs out loud* 

All of chat: *jokes about Just One More [Turn/Day/Etc] in other games*

Veo: "I know and the days are SO LONG in this game, too."

At 210 minutes, Veo finished Day 5 and closed the stream, perhaps more because they were hungry and needed to make dinner than because they wanted to stop playing. 

I made lunch and played some RftG, then unpacked boxes. I decided to unpack all the tall, narrow boxes to prevent Lyric from toppling any of them again. One was for Lut's monitor and the other two held a few framed pictures each. I've been leaning framed artwork against a wall because I'm not sure how much art I have to hang and how much free wall space I'll have to hang it.

After carting the cardboard out to the garage, I decided to unpack the other two wardrobe boxes. This left my section of the closet crowded but not overflowing. Lyric wasn't quick enough to get a turn in the first wardrobe box I unpacked today, but she made a point of scrambling into the next one.

In the early 90s, I took figure drawing classes in college. The teacher had us use charcoal on 16"x24" paper, and I bought a gigantic portfolio case -- 24"x32" or something -- to lug them back and forth to class. That case was shoved at the back of the last wardrobe box. After I hauled it out, I went through it and weeded it down, dumping old sketches into recycling. I kept the ones that I liked and/or had sentimental value, then shoved the portfolio under my bed. 

I left the last wardrobe box up a little longer so Lyric could play with it, but still broke it down before the end of the day and took it out to the garage. I've broken down most of the emptied boxes, and used a few to fill with packing paper (I think I'm up to 5 of these now). I've been tucking them out of the way in the garage because the recycling truck would only take what was in the recycling cart. In my old city, you could put as much recycling as you wanted on the curb. I checked the new city's website, and apparently I have to arrange for a Special Pickup which will be of Flattened Cardboard Only. Yay. I guess I just jam as much of the packing paper into the recycling cart as I can every two weeks until it's gone? It's particularly annoying because they pick up trash every week but recycling only every two weeks. I will ask when I call for my Special Pickup if they'll take packing paper too and the website just doesn't say.

I asked my mother at 4:30PM if she wanted to go for a walk, but the Don' Wanna was too strong with her today.

Around 5PM, I was feeling pretty sleepy and thought about napping, but I was also hungry so I made dinner instead. 

After dinner, I found out Coffee's stream was postponed and would run from 2AM-8AM my time. I do not plan to stay up for it. Or get up for it. Maybe if I happen to wake at 6AM anyway, I'll poke my nose in. 

I unpacked a sixth box for today after finding out stream was cancelled, because I still rebel at the ide of doing anything creative. I only have nine boxes left to unpack. Single digits!

My room looks like a disaster despite having far fewer unpacked boxes in it, because I don't have good places to put stuff. I've got several open plastic bins where I've been re-packing things for long-term storage. All the board games and card games and Kill Team and Warhammer 40,000 and supplies for painting miniatures. Many of the actual paints are under my bed, because I don't know how they'll fare without climate control. But the brushes and bits and tools will go in the attic, if there's space.

There is not a lot of space left in the attic, but I think I can make room for more boxes by rearranging the stacks. I could also put boxes in the garage if there wasn't so much cardboard and packing paper in the garage already. And also I want to have space to store a bicycle when I finally get one. Biking around here will be so nice. The weather is lovely and the terrain is pretty flat compared to where I used to live. They have bike lanes, too.

Anyway, I haven't stacked these boxes in the attic yet because I am trying to pack them for maximum efficiency and organization. So I want to get as much of the appropriate kinds of stuff as possible into them first.

Since unpacking the day's last box, I've mostly been journaling. It's pretty late now, so I'll wrap this up here and post it. And play some Time Princess before bed.

rowyn: (tired)

Monday, April 21

Mostly I did some unpacking on Monday. I tried calling Telnar around 10AM, when I felt like unpacking, but he was having brunch with a friend. I unpacked a box anyway while waiting for Telnar to call me back. When he called back, I did more unpacking.

I don't have places to put many of the things I'm unpacking. Some stuff is just getting piled on top of things. I brought four bookcases with me and somehow none of them have shelves tall enough to fit the tallest books that came with me. I don't know how that happened. I mean, I knew the largest bookcase didn't because it was custom-built for a used bookstore to hold paperbacks (this is what I like about it!) I should check to see if any of the little ones have adjustable shelves, though.

I have checked and two of the small ones have holes as if the shelves were designed to be adjustable, but the shelves themselves have no apparent means of removing them: they're not resting on pegs and there's no indication that they were screwed in place from the side. I guess if I had more shelves I could stick additional ones in using the holes and make the shelves shorter? Weird.

Some stuff I have unpacked and re-boxed to put in the unfinished part of the attic. So far, this is all miniatures & miniature-related things, plus my tiny Christmas tree. I'll probably put my boardgames in there, too, when I've unpacked them. As long as I shuffle and pack stuff so I can make the stacks tall while still being stable, I can get a fair amount of stuff piled in there.

Putting stuff in the attic is a bit of a hazard, because Lyric will go in with me if she can. The attic has a small section with a plywood floor, which is where I've been stacking boxes, and a much larger space that's covered in either puffy white insulation or, for one section, just ceiling (I think this is the section above the porch.) I do not want Lyric diving into the insulation or walking about on the ceiling. D: The attic has this weird half-height door with no knob on the inside, so I can't close it behind me when I enter. She's already followed me inside twice, so I need to stop going in there unless I know the cat is behind a door somewhere else in the house.

The first day I unpacked, I counted boxes as I unpacked them. I haven't been counting since; it's just "at least one per day." I unpacked several on Monday, but I don't know the number. I finished unpacking the first row of boxes in my room, though, so that was cool. For most of it, I was chatting on the phone with Telnar.

K had groceries delivered today, but I wasn't around when they arrived and the home health aide put them away. I kept forgetting they'd actually arrived because I'm not used to there just being more food in the kitchen.

Tuesday, April 22

More unpacking! I started on the second row of boxes in my bedroom. The second row includes two giant wardrobe boxes. I don't have a closet or a wardrobe in my room, so I haven't tried unpacking those. I finished the rest of the second row, though. Tomorrow I can tackle the boxes against the wall. Perhaps I can make enough space to move the wardrobe boxes against the wall. Or maybe my parents will let me consolidate their clothes together in the giant walk-in closet in the bathroom, so that I can put my stuff in there. It doesn't have a lot of free space, though, so I don't know that this would work.

Tomorrow, Kage needs to get his car from the shop, and Sophrani's busy so can't take him. So I'm picking him up to take him. I have a plan for tomorrow! 

So weird, this "having plans" thing. I remembered to tell my mother I had a plan so she wouldn't expect me to do anything else around then.

My mother wanted a sub from Firehouse for lunch today, instead of her usual McDonald's burger. Firehouse doesn't have a drive-through and it's a production for my mother to go into a store: she has to wrestle her walker into the trunk, drive there, wrestle her walker out of the trunk, go into store, repeat process to get home. One time she tried getting by with just a cane and this was a disaster, so she does not try that anymore. This time, she asked me to come with her so I could go inside for her. We placed the order online, too. I could've gone by myself but it was nice to have company. It's a very short drive. There's so much stuff that's within two miles of my parents' house, despite them living in a sprawling retirement community. 

I spent some time today and yesterday going over The Jewel-Strewn Night in ProWritingAid, and finished it. There's two structural changes I want to make before I send it to first readers, but it's pretty close. 

It's after 10PM now and about when I give up on getting anything done with the day. But I will try to write a little fiction just because it's been so long since I've even tried.

Wednesday, April 23

I got up around 9AM and fixed a bagel for breakfast. I bought a bagel pack from Panera on Sunday (13 bagels) and ended up eating 8 of them over four days. It's a good thing I like bagels. I'd thought my parents would eat more but nope. When I sat down at my computer to eat it and opened Fediverse, I saw that Veo's stream had started; I'd forgotten about it. I brought it up and watched the rest of it. I'd been curious how running a city would go in Exile Princes, and the answer for Veo was Very Badly. When the next election came up, Veo didn't run again and that was clearly the right choice. 

Watching it made me want to play it again, but I resisted the temptation and looked at my to-do list instead. The last item I'd put in the "must do in April" category was to return the Google Fiber router and extender. This involved Google Fiber telling FedEx to send me a QR code, and then me bringing the equipment and QR code to a FedEx location, where they'd package and ship it (and charge Google Fiber). Google Fiber had first attempted to get FedEx to send me a QR code on April 7. I had to ask two more times before FedEx finally succeeded at sending me one on April 20. 

I had almost an hour before I had to leave to give Kage a ride to the car shop, so I figured I had enough time to run an errand first. The nearest FedEx store was in the plaza adjacent to the McDonald's my mother always gets lunch from. So I checked that my mother wanted lunch from there and that I should pick up a burger for my father, too. Then I set off. I didn't bring up Google Maps at first because I thought I knew where it was, and then I realized I was thinking of the time I'd been to the USPS location in the same area. And also a UPS store. It's a big retail area. I brought up Google Maps to find the exact spot after I got to the right general area; it was actually in a little plaza tucked behind the big strip mall. 

Once there, the FedEx folks scanned my QR code and took the equipment with no issues. Yay! At 11:15AM, I left the store and went to McDonald's. I thought about texting Kage that I'd be late, since clearly I would be, but figured I'd wait until I knew exactly how late. There was no line in the McDonald's drive-through and I got my order quickly. The man taking the cash recited the order back to me, then peered at me. "You're not the usual woman who places this order."

I laughed and explained I was her daughter. "She'll be back sometimes, though, I'm not always picking it up for her."

He told me to tell her hi. I forgot to relay this anecdote to my mom; I should do that tomorrow.

At the house, I nuked my mother's burger for 12 seconds, got a diet Coke for her, and delivered the food to her and my dad. I forgot to get my mom's bbq sauce from the fridge for her, though. So close! I set out for Kage's place at 11:33, about 10 minutes behind schedule. Not too bad.

Ten minutes from Kage's place, after I'd turned off the interstate, a cop car popped his lights on behind me.  Startled, I pulled over. He pulled in behind me, while I was thinking 'what the heck? I haven't done anything.'

He'd pulled me over for having an out-of-state plate. -_- 

Which is not a crime, obviously, but cops love ticketing visitors because they won't come back to contest the ticket. In my particular case, his excuse was that he couldn't read the state on my plates because, he said, it was obscured by the plate frame.

The plate frame came from the dealership and has been on the car since I bought it eight years ago. It did not obscure the state name. It touched the very top of the letters for the state name. But in his defense: my old state uses a smaller font than my new state, and puts the state at the top instead of at the bottom. I could see him initially thinking the state name was competely hidden because he expected it to be at the bottom, until he'd pulled me over and was close enough to the license plate to read it. (I couldn't read the state name on my plate from more than a car length away, either.) 

He told me he was just going to give me a warning, but asked me first to pull into the adjacent parking lot (we were blocking the exit where he'd pulled me over) and then come sit in the front seat of his car. That was, on the one hand, kind of creepy and outside the norm? And on the other hand, it was less frustrating to sit in his car with his A/C running, where I could watch him check my registration and look for outstanding warrants and whatnot and have an idea of how long this would take, than it would've been to wait for 10 minutes in my own car wondering what the heck he was doing and when I would be able to go. He asked various questions: where I was from, why I was in the area, what I did for a living, etc. I thought about all the "shut the f up" PSAs from lawyers, but answered anyway because the odds that I was actually a suspect of anything seemed vanishingly low and I figured cooperating would get me out of there faster. He let me text Kage to let him know I'd be even later. I did not attempt to explain to Kage via text why I was late, because any short explanation would make the situation look worse than it was.

The whole encounter took maybe 10-15 minutes; unsettling but not serious. I double-checked that the plate frame was the whole issue and getting rid of it would rectify the matter: yup.

At Kage's place, I asked if Kage could get the license plate frame off for me because I knew he had All The Tools and I don't know where mine are, or if I even brought them all with me. Maybe? I remember looking at Lut's socket wrench set and thinking I hadn't used it in years and did I really want to bring it? But I don't remember what I decided. I think I donated it? My parents might have one, though. But Kage's were right there. For some reason, the bolts holding plate & frame on were two different sizes. Weird. The plate didn't want to come out of the frame, after all these years, but Kage got it apart and now there is one less excuse for cops to pull me over. Yay.

This accomplished, I took Kage to the car place and waited with him while he paid and verified that his car was in good shape now. Then he headed back to his place to resume his workday, while I went home.

At home, I had lunch and a few cookies, then contemplated writing or playing The Exile Princes before deciding on napping. 

Post-nap, I had dinner. I fired up Spirit City but still didn't feel like doing anything creative. I looked over my to-do list again, and decided to get new health insurance. Healthcare.gov is state-based, so moving to a new state means I need new insurance. I have 60 days to get it but figured I might as well get it over with. It's annoying to have to switch insurance right after reaching the out-of-pocket cap on my old policy, but there's no help for it.

With that taken care of, I got up to finish unpacking a box I'd started yesterday. I unpacked two more after that for good measure. The remaining boxes and floor are littered with things I do not have a good place for. I unpacked most of the books that actually fit on a bookshelf, though, so that was nice. "I have a place for this!" *shuffles all the knickknacks currently on the top shelves to new spots to make room for the books where they belong.*

After I showered, I chatted with my mother about my day for a bit. When I told her about the incident with the cop, she said, "You know, you're welcome to take my car as long as I don't have any plans to use it."

Me: "Yeah, I was thinking I'd do that next time."

Back upstairs, I had a few more cookies, and played Time Princess and Race for the Galaxy while waiting for Coffee's stream to start. I feel very drained of energy. Tomorrow, I'm going to visit Sophrani, where I'll do some drawing and she'll do quilling. (Kage will be working). A little bit ago, Lyric mewed for me to let her into the attic, which I am Not Doing. She has settled for Garage Time instead. I'll be up for another hour or two, but I don't know if I'll do much of anything before going to bed. I started a monster with a 24-hour timer in 4thewords; I like those because they're big but I don't have to finish them on the same day.

rowyn: (smile)
 Saturday, April 19

I woke up around 8AM, which was too early given that I'd stayed up until 1:30AM. I got up anyway and had the rest of the cereal for breakfast. My mother used to eat Raisin Bran Crunch but hadn't been having it lately and I'd been eating it for breakfast since I got here. There's no reason I couldn't have the same things here that I had at my old home; I just haven't been. 

I can actually still get groceries from Walmart, it turns out; the nearest Walmart has the same "In Home" service I previously used. But my parents are used to ordering from a local grocery and I doubt I can persuade them to use a different one. Even though Walmart offers better service for less money. My mother has had a grudge against Walmart since they botched delivery on a TV she'd purchased. 

After breakfast, I played some Time Princess. I remembered that I  unpacked my requisite box, and took a shower. By the time I finished with the shower, I was tired. I was seeing Kage, Sophrani, and Envoy at 2PM, and had about two hours, so I lay down for a nap. I mostly failed at nap but managed forty-five minutes or so. I got up again at 1PM and got ready to go. Fussing with various little things before I left took longer than I'd expected, and I left a bit late. And also forgot to bring up directions, so I had to stop to do that. I still haven't memorized the route to my friends' house, but I remember their address and my own new one now. 

This morning, Kage had been helping his father get his house ready for sale, but he'd already gotten back by the time I arrived, which was a pleasant surprise. 

Sophrani: "You know, since you live in the area, I just wanted you to know that you're welcome to see us more often now."

Me, joking:  "So, like, more than once a year?" 

Sophrani: "Yes! A lot more often. If you want to get together for lunch or stop by for an afternoon or whatever, that'd be great."

So Sophrani and I made plans for Thursday afternoon to do crafting together: she'll work on quilling and I'll draw. 

Envoy arrived shortly after I did. I generally come by in the early afternoon, so that we have time for lunch beforehand and also Envoy has time to wake up. He sleeps very late on the weekends. 

For an hour or two, we chatted in the living room. Kage had recently purchased a laser engraver, and talking about that reminded me: "Wait, you have a working regular printer, don't you?" Terrycloth's executor had sent me a form to sign in early April. I don't own a printer and usually went to the library on the very rare occasions when I needed something printed. But I hadn't gotten around to it before the move. I sent Kage both attachments even though I only needed one page printed, because I wasn't sure which attachment it was. Before I sorted it out, Kage had printed both of them. Oops. But I could finish this task finally!

After chatting for a while, we went to the theater room to watch some "Witchy-poo", their nickname for the anime I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, which is rather unwieldy to say every time. We watched three episode from Season 2. I haven't seen all of season 1, but it's a cozy, episodic fantasy with basically no actual conflict, so missing some episodes isn't an issue.

We went to dinner after that, at a local italian place. Sophrani ordered a crostini appetizer and shared it -- very tasty! They have a crab & ricotta manicotti that I probably got last time and got again this time -- it's tasty, but I should try something else the next time we go. I saved room for dessert because they had cookies and cream cannoli and and amazingly everyone else decided to get dessert with me. 

After dinner, we went back to Kage & Sophrani's house to watch "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves", which Envoy and Kage were both enthusiastic about. Sophrani and I hadn't seen it. I expect living near the three of them will catch me up some on my deficit of sff-viewing. It's nice that Kage and Envoy are so content to re-watch the things they've enjoyed.

I remembered to get my leftovers out of their fridge and headed home after the movie. I felt peckish when I got home, so I ate the rest of my cannoli (the restaurant has served me two and I took one home). I played some Time Princess and then crashed.

Sunday, April 20

I had no plans for today except to get bagels for breakfast, since I'd eaten the last of the raisin bran. I woke around 8AM again, and got myself out of bed at 8:30AM. There's a Panera maybe a mile and half from the house, and a Brueger's a little further. I went to the Panera because I like their Asiago cheese bagels. They don't have onion bagels, but my dad likes everything bagels fine. My mother prefers he have onion bagels because he gets poppy seeds all over the place when he eats everything bagels, but whatever. They have a cleaning service. It's fine. 

I told Dad the plan.

Dad: "Great! Are you getting cream cheese and lox, too?"

Me: "Cream cheese, yes, but tragically bagel places nowadays seldom sell lox. We'll have to get some from the store."

Dad: *mock-pouts*

I checked the fridge for the status of cream cheese: they had a brick of plain, so I figured that was plenty for Dad and I could get honey-walnut for myself and my mother. They also had an unopened package of smoked salmon, which I excitedly showed to my father. "I don't need to get lox*! We have some."

* Smoked salmon and lox are not the same thing, but my father is a Jewish man from Brooklyn and has been calling smoked salmon "lox" his whole life. Close enough.

I got a bagel pack from Panera. Back home, I fixed bagels for my parents and myself, and went upstairs to eat mine. I had smoked salmon with honey-walnut cream cheese on mine, which did not seem like a natural pairing but I like sweet with almost anything, so I figured it'd be fine.

It was so good. I wanted another bagel right away. I restrained myself and waited 75 minutes until it was 11AM, so I could call the second bagel "lunch." 

Lyric remains fascinated by the garage. She went into it before I left, came back inside for lunch, and then was lurking by the door to the garage when my mother wanted to get McDonald's. I had to come down to grab her while my mother left. Lyric seems to have accepted the garage as an acceptable substitute to going outside, though. Long-term, I think enclosing the back porch will be preferable. My parents don't go out through the back door, so Lyric wanting to use it won't be an inconvenience the way the garage can be.

After lunch, I unpacked two boxes while listening to podcasts, then took a shower. Post-shower, I felt pretty worn-out, so I put on some lo-fi to nap. Listening to lo-fi while I sleep/try to sleep has been working very well. It makes my room feel peaceful and cozy, and even at low volumes, masks enough of the noise from downstairs that it doesn't keep me awake. I managed to nap for 90 minutes or so; that was nice.

I was tempted to have a third bagel-with-lox for dinner, but ate my leftovers from yesterday instead. 

My brother called to ask us about groceries: he had the grocery list for my father from my father's home health aide, but hadn't ordered on Thursday like usual. He told us to email if we needed anything else, and I said I'd just add to the cart the stuff I wanted. Mom didn't want it delivered until tomorrow because the store has a surcharge for Sunday deliveries, and we didn't need anything urgently. 

I added stuff to the cart throughout the day, as I remembered it. 

I played some more of the Exile Princes, and discovered there's some kind of soft-cap on number of units, where their morale is bad if there are too many of them, even if you're able to pay them all. But I'd discovered where you could dismiss units, so I got rid of some. And then accidentally didn't have any people who were good at defense left. Oops.

Somewhere in here, I unpacked a third box. I also moved two boxes into the unfinished section of the attic where the upstairs furnace is. There's not much room in there, but I can stack some stuff in the space without obstructing access to the furnace. One box is just the gigantic tabletop Ogre game, and the other has my Jyhad collection and a bunch of Magic: the Gathering cards.

Around 7PM, I closed the game down and finished re-reading Kingdom of Beasts in Time Princess. Around 8:30PM, Coffee canceled stream. Cutsycat encouraged everyone to fight the Flame Mountain God in the current 4thewords event, because the community challenge to defeat it has been running for 3 days and the community is still less than halfway through it. 

I have a timed quest to defeat a hundred tiny monsters, so I did a few for that first, then switched to fighting Flame Mountain God for the rest of the night. 

All my writing has been journaling, though. I keep thinking "I'll get back to writing fiction now" but not actually getting back to writing fiction. 

For now, though, it's after midnight and I'm calling it a night. I'll go downstairs to refill my drink and let Lyric back inside, then go to bed.

rowyn: (tired)
 Tuesday, April 8

Today has been tough.

The movers are coming either Thursday or Friday, and I won't know which until tomorrow. So I've been trying to sort the remaining stuff that is in the "might come with me" category. I'd already spent two days on the kitchen without making much progress, because I'd work for an hour or two and then stop for the day.  Today, I probably spent 6 hours on it. Lots of "work for an hour, sit down for an hour, get up again, repeat throughout the day." Around 7:30PM, I decided to quit for the day. I made pancakes for dinner, because I haven't wanted to buy groceries and have run low on some usual staples. There's still frozen food I should eat, but I forgot about it. 

After dinner, I went back to the kitchen and did a few more things anyway. 

I wrote down a list of the things I want to do before the movers get here and before the car leaves (car is scheduled to go on Thursday). Because I've been afraid I would forget them. There are 12 items on the list. They are not quick items. I am not getting all of them done tomorrow. 

One item is to scatter Lut's ashes in the backyard. I want to do it here because the one thing he wanted most, whenever he was at a hospital or rehab facility, was to come home. Every time I think about it, I start to cry again. I didn't want to write it down because it's making me cry again. I plan to bring a little bit of the ashes with me. They make memorial necklaces that will hold a little bit, and I want to use one, but I haven't picked one out yet.

Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about getting most of the kitchen done, until I made the list and realized that, ideally, I would do all of it tomorrow while I still have the car and when the movers definitely won't be here. Now I feel panicked instead.

Most of it isn't that important and the stuff that is That Important is not time-consuming. So I shouldn't panic. But I'm panicking anyway. I'm gonna go do an easy important thing: Pay Taxes, which is separate from File Taxes; I can get an extension for filing but I need to at least guess at what I owe and pay it, since I am retired and do not have withholding. Ideally, I would do this after actually doing my taxes, so that I could pay the correct amount instead of guessing. But no. Paying taxes now lets me cross both "paying" and "filing" off the list of Things To Happen Before Saturday. I can file an extension on Sunday or whatever. It's fine.

There, now I only have 10 things to do tomorrow. That's more manageable, right?

o_o;;;

I'll go do another one.

Okay so I did the important part of another little task. And then added another thing to the list. But it's only a little thing! (Clean the litter boxes I'm taking with me.)

It's 10:17PM and I think I'm just gonna be done worrying about stuff for the day. Tomorrow may have 11 items on the list but only four are critical to do before the movers get here. Good enough. I'll finish editing the chapter of The Jewel-Strewn Night that I started this morning.

Wednesday, April 9

Before I went to bed on Tuesday night, I added another item to the list, bringing it to 12. I fell asleep around 1AM and woke around 6AM. When I couldn't get back to sleep after an hour, I got up and made pancakes, then sat down to watch Veo's stream and completely ignore my looming to-do list.

Veo defeated Ganondorf and then Ganon to win Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, after several months of streaming it. So watching the grand finale was time well-spent. But after it finished, I got up to start working on my doom-filled list.

I carried some bins of stuff to donate out to the car, adding to the bins already waiting to go. With six bins filled, I delivered the donations to the thrift store, then came home and cleaned out the car. I even, for the first time ever, brought my dustbuster out to the car to vacuum it. The dustbuster works great on furniture and carpets, but was not good at car floors for some reason. Still, it helped. The car had to be cleaned today because the auto transport was supposed to pick it up on Thursday. (It didn't need to be vacuumed, just have all the loose stuff taken out.)

Once I finished with the car, I came in, undressed because I don't like outside clothing, and checked what else was on the priority list.

Oh right. Cry. Because I needed to scatter Lut's ashes.

I dressed again, putting on my favorite comfy black dress and a necklace, because Lut always liked it when I dressed up for him. 

It was a little windy out: the tornado warning siren had been going off when I got home, though it was quiet now. I  transfered a little bit of Lut's ashes into a small bag to take with me, and scattered the rest over the daffodils planted around the patio. I still had some left, so I scattered the remainder by the peonies. Lut didn't much care about the flowers, one way or another, but I always liked them. They came with the house. I made a few minor attempts at gardening in the first spring after I bought the house, but I never cared for it. The peonies and daffodils have survived 22 years of my neglect. They're pretty hardy.

And I thought about Lut, and I cried.

Lut is home, and he's staying here. 

He didn't care what happened with his remains, but I had them anyway and this was the most appropriate thing I could think of.

Afterwards, I did the next item in priority order: pack my jewelry. The movers can't pack jewelry, not even costume jewelry, so I had to handle this one. I am not very good at packing but I managed it.

The last must-do-Wednesday item was pack luggage. Because even though I don't leave until Saturday, I needed to set aside everything I was bringing with me to make sure it didn't get shipped over land.  Since the movers may not deliver my stuff for as much as two weeks. 

But instead of doing that, I decided to work on pruning more of my stuff. This was also on the list, but lower down because while it would be annoying if some stuff I didn't want got packed, it would be much more aggravating if I didn't have luggage for the next two weeks.

However, the thrift store stops taking donations at 5PM, while I could finish packing any time before bedtime. 

So I went through the kitchen and bathroom and filled up the car with 5 tubs plus the roaster oven. Because I was weeding out stuff from the kitchen, much of it was ceramic or glass, or oversize, making it unfeasible to fill the car with 10-11 tubs for a trip the way I had for the used bookstore. 

As the day grew later, I became hopeful that perhaps the movers wouldn't come on Thursday and the move would happen on Friday, giving me more time to prepare. But around 2PM, I got the call: they'd be here on Thursday morning between 9 and 10AM. Alas.

Around 4PM, I returned to the thrift store. While unloading, I realized I'd forgotten to grab the DVDs I wanted to donate. I checked with an employee that they took DVDs (yep) and considered trying to squeeze in a last trip before 5PM. Maybe I could do it in the morning before the auto transport came for the car? Maybe the thrift store could take later donations if I didn't need a receipt?

Then the auto transport place called and asked if they could pick the car up tonight.

Me: "Um, I guess? Tomorrow would be better, but it's fine."

Them: "Great! We want to deliver it Friday, is that okay?"

Me: "...I don't arrive until Saturday. But my parents and also my brother and sister-in-law will be around so...sure. It's fine."

I called my mom and emailed everyone with this new development, and then started packing my luggage because another trip to the thrift store was out of the question now.

A little after 6PM, the driver arrived. He took a zillion pictures of my car, very sensibly documenting its current (dinged-up) condition. 

Me: "So you should have the phone number for the destination. No, wait, I mean, I gave the people who contracted your service the destination phone number. Whether that has been passed along to you is another matter entirely."

Him: *checks phone* "Yeah, they only gave me your number."

So I gave him my parents' number.

Him: "Okay, let your mom know I'll be there before noon tomorrow."

Me: "..."

Me: "HOW? It's a 16 hour drive and it's after 6PM?"

Him: "I'm getting gas and driving there as soon as I load your car."

Me: O_o

Him: "I'll call your mom in the morning with an exact time, once I'm closer."

After he left, I realized I'd forgotten to take the empty bins out of the trunk. Oops. I had wanted the movers to pack stuff in the plastic bins where possible, because the bins are sturdier and it's likely stuff will be in boxes for A Long Time. Oh well.

So I called my mother and sent a new email, and went back to packing luggage. Packing luggage took longer than usual because I kept getting distracted by other tasks, but I finished it around 8PM. After a short break, I went back to the task list. The extension had almost nothing I wanted to keep, so I moved the handful of items I did into the living room. Then  I poked through the accumulated piles of stuff to see if there was anything else. The stuff I'd collected from my office in 2020 after 6 months of working from home was still in there, unsorted, because anything I hadn't needed for 6 months couldn't be important.

Lut never liked to be photographed. I have very few pictures of him, and most of those are of the cat and he's partially out of frame. Once, when we dressed up for an office party in the early 2000s, the party photographer took a film photo of us and we got a copy later. It is the only good photo I have of him.

I'd forgotten I kept it on my desk at work.

If I hadn't gone through that stuff, I would've left it behind.

I was profoundly relieved to find it, all the more so because I hadn't been thinking about it during the move prep. I'd looked for the photo a few times since Lut passed, but figured it'd turn up eventually and there was no reason to worry about it.

After that, I went to the basement, partly to look for more stuff I wanted to keep and mainly to clean off the free weights. I have several sets of dumbbells that I'm bringing with me. They were kind of nasty from being unused in the basement for 15+ years and I didn't really want to bring them into a new house in that condition. So cleaning them was on the list. And I was running a load of laundry anyway. While I was in the basement, I updated the disclosure form for the house sale with some things I'd forgotten to mention. I also moved some other items I wanted to keep: model horses and the tiny artificial Christmas tree Lut and I owned.

After getting the dumbbells clean and dealing with laundry, I cleaned out some of the stuff stored under the center of the bed (not in a convenient drawer). I threw out a bunch of stuff and then decided there was nothing to rescue there and I should do a different task. I cleaned out two of the four litter boxes so they could be packed.

By 11PM, I had added 6 more items to my move-prep list, and completed 12 of the now-18. I decided this was much as I was going to do, and stopped for the night. I played some Time Princess and did some reading before going to sleep at my usual 1AM.

Thursday, April 10

I woke up at 4:30AM, thought, "I have to get back to sleep" and spent the next 90 minutes or so alternating between playing with my phone and trying to sleep. A little after 6AM, I gave up and got up. I figured I could nap after the movers were gone.

I ate breakfast and then went back to work.

Finding the lost photo last night inspired me to conduct a more thorough search of the rest of the basement and Lut's closet. I rescued two sweaters from the office stuff, and found a box in the basement with my extensive Vampire: the Eternal Struggle collection and also some Magic: the Gathering cards. I don't think there were any valuable M:tG cards in this box, though I didn't go through them. My collection (from the early 90s) has some valuable cards, but I am pretty sure my collection was upstairs. Lut had started M:tG even earlier than I did, but he had traded in all his valuable M:tG cards for Warhammer 40,000 miniatures in the mid-90s. He had kept lots of commons and uncommons that had no meaningful resale value, though. For a little while in the early 2000s, we'd used his collection to build decks and play M:tG because if no one's using rares the game is pretty balanced. 

I also found a mostly-empty box with some books in it, that I'd missed when I went through the basement and donated all the books. Aww.

Lut's closet had nothing of particular value to me, but it held two full bins of books. 

Oh no.

It's also very likely that I am the one who put those bins there. I remember clearing out Lut's closet in 2017, when I was trying to make the house easier to navigate for him. I suspect the bins had been elsewhere on the first floor, and that I'd stuffed them into Lut's closet after throwing away enough empty electronics boxes and dead monitors to make room for them.

A few weeks ago, I’d bought a 3.5” external disk drive. Lut and I met on FurryMUCK in 1996, and we talked and roleplayed there for around a year before meeting in person. I saved logs of most of our interactions; before we met in person, I often re-read them. After I moved to his city, I seldom looked at them again, though. I saved them on my hard drive and backed them up to ten or so 3.5” disks. When moving computers at one point in the late 90s, I failed to copy over the logs from my hard drive, and didn’t realize it until it was too late and I’d reformatted my old computer.

Of the 10 backup disks, I’d found three on the first floor while going through stuff, and one more in the basement, along with a box of other disks, mostly for writing that I still had on my current hard drive. I hadn’t plugged in the drive yet to see if any of the disks worked.

I hadn’t yet tried using the new floppy drive, but I had put it on the list of “do before moving”, because I was afraid if I packed the disks, it might be months or years before I unpacked them again. And the odds of them being readable after almost 30 years were already slim.

So a bit before 10AM, I finally unboxed and plugged in the drive, and started checking disks, starting with the ones from the first floor.

I had some trouble with the files from the first disk I checked, one of logs between Lut and me. Some copied over to my hard drive fine. Others wouldn’t copy until I changed the name to have a .txt extension instead of .LOG. Some wouldn’t copy over but I could open them from the floppy and manually save them to the hard drive. A few were corrupted and wouldn’t open no matter what I tried. But I got most of the files from the first three disks. Not as nice as getting all of them, and I’m still missing so many. But it was nice to get some.

The disks from the basement were all unreadable. I threw away most of them, since I was 95% confident that they’d contained stuff I already had copies of. The last one was of logs with Lut, and I kept it just in case there’s another recovery method that would get some data out of it.

The window for the movers to arrive was 9-10AM. Around 10:15AM, I called the office to ask for a status update.

Office: “Hm. Let me call them and call you back. They left over an hour ago, so .. they should be there by now.”

Me: “Oh gosh, I hope they’re all right.”

A few minutes later:

Office: “Soooo they were double-booked for 9-10AM. They’re delivering now and will come to you around 11:00-11:30AM.”

I got two calls from the driver, the first confirming that estimate and the next when they left.

Around 11:30AM, three movers -- Nicole, Xavier (guessing at the spelling; he pronounced it “Ex-zavier,” which is pretty cool. Nicole called him X), and...Roger, I think? It’s been two days and he made less of an impression on me than the other two. Xavier was really kind, admiring the artwork I had hung up and asking if I was an artist, so I showed him and Nicole some of the books I’d written and did the covers for. I have print copies of most of my books and they were gonna see them while packing them anyway. Xavier liked Lut’s sword, too. Lut used to fence and owned an actual combat rapier made by a swordsmith, from when he and his wife did Renfaire and SCA events. He’d wanted to get rid of it when we moved because he didn’t fence anymore or take care of it, but I kept it because it’s beautiful. I’ve worn it with costumes a few times.

It turned out this team was just here to pack. Another team would be here on Friday to load. I don’t know if I’d misunderstood when Travis explained, or if it varies whether they pack & load on one day or break it into two.

The movers were there until a bit after 6PM, taking a break around 1PM for lunch. They waited to pack my office last, and left my computer and its peripherals unpacked so I could use it after they left.

At 10:15AM, my sister-in-law, C, emailed: the car transport would deliver at 4PM. Later, we found out that he’d been delayed by trouble with the truck, rather than, say, needing a nap or lunch or something.

Nicole and Xavier were very conscientious about labeling the boxes they packed, writing down not just where it came from but what it was. Roger marked where it came from but for many boxes he packed, he just wrote “stuff.” This is less of an issue for the basement, where almost everything was Kill Team, Warhammer 40k, or painting supplies for them. For rooms like the office and bathroom, more inconvenient. But there were only a few boxes from the office and basement, and he did a better job with the bedroom. Overall, I think it’ll be fine. The labels will be particularly nice because much of my stuff is likely to stay in boxes. I just won’t have anywhere to put it, and the miniatures wargame stuff tends to live in boxes anyway.

Although I’m hoping to make a place to display the painted miniatures. I brought one big bookcase and four small ones, and very few books. So there may be shelf space for knickknacks. We’ll see. One advantage of storing them in boxes is that the miniatures won’t get dusty in them.

While the packers were there, I alternated between pruning more stuff that hadn’t been packed yet, checking areas that weren’t being packed (extension and most of the basement) for stuff I wanted, and sitting at my computer to play games. It was many times easier than packing things myself, but still tiring. My parents used professional movers for every move when I was growing up, and I used them when I moved to the house in 2003, but I’ve never done a move like this, where I had to explain what to take and what to leave.

Before they left, I realized Nicole had packed Lyric’s gabapentin (100% my fault: I forgot to put it with my luggage despite knowing I needed to give Lyric some for the flight). I only remembered because Nicole had written “pet meds” on the side of the box. She fished it back out for me cheerfully.

Roger also packed my trackball (I took it out of the room when he went to pack, but then needed to check something on my computer and brought it back.) They got it back out for me, too.

They packed 49 boxes.

49 seems like so many boxes.

It was actually under the estimate in almost every category, because I’d pruned out a bunch of stuff that I’d told Travis I was taking. Even at the original estimate, Travis had called this a “small move”. Maybe it’ll be fine.

The loader, Joey, called in the afternoon to say he’d be at my house at 8AM. The moving company called a few minutes later to give me an 8AM-9AM window.

I asked Nicole if she knew how long it would take to load, and she waffled for a bit, then gave up. “Just assume it’ll take all day. It’s hard to estimate because every house is different. Like it goes faster if you can back the truck up to the front door and you don’t have any steps, but neither of those is true here.”

Around 4:30PM, my sister-in-law called because my car still hadn’t arrived (it was 5:30PM there, so 90 minutes late) and his voice mail was full.

C: “And I can’t text him because...”

Me: “Oof, what happens if you text him?”

C: “Just a minute.” *taptaptap* “Okay, that went through.”

C: “We were going to go out to eat but when we got outside we realized the car wasn’t here. He’d said he’d leave it in the driveway and the key in the mailbox. I didn’t want to leave if you want us to wait here for the car, though.”

Me: “It sounds like he wasn’t planning for you to be there anyway? So go ahead, have a nice dinner.”

A little later, she texted me that the car had arrived. It showed up while they were heading out. Yay!

After the packers left at 6:30PM, I went “oh good, I feel gross and I can finally take a shower.” I went to the bathroom and realized they’d packed the soap/shampoo/conditioner.

This was a mutual fail: Nicole had asked if I wanted them to leave it, and I had said “yes, please do”. But I’d left it in the shower stall instead of moving it to an area marked "do not pack". I’d put a towel and hair towel with my luggage for this reason.

I waffled; I had a bar of crappy soap I could use, and I could skip washing my hair. But it’d be Saturday before I’d be at my parents’ house, and I didn’t want to go three days without washing my hair. I don’t really like skipping it for one day unless I’ve kept it braided (which I hadn’t).

So I opened and searched 2 of the 3 bathroom boxes to find the shampoo and conditioner (already regretting the lack of informative labels), sealed the boxes again and put better labels on them, then showered.

Much better.

I spent the evening at home, mostly just trying to decompress. I made dinner with the stuff that hadn’t been packed. (I left most of my cookware because my mom has lots and mine is only better in a few cases.) I think I played some Time Princess and Race for the Galaxy. Maybe I edited The Jewel-Strewn Night? And wrote about April 9. I didn’t get to much of the 10th. It’s the 12th now as I’m writing this.

I called my local friend to give him a status update. We planned to get together on Friday after the loaders left.

I went to bed early but stayed awake until 1AM like usual.

Friday, April 11

I woke at 7AM, and couldn’t get back to sleep. After a bit of playing with my phone, I got up and tended to some remaining tasks. Somehow there were still things left to take care of, even with virtually everything being packed.

I hadn’t noticed how much stuff had been left in the pantry unpacked; apparently I forgot to look. Peanut butter and nutella are “liquids” for purposes of both TSA and movers, and cannot be transported. I stuffed the three nutella jars in my suitcase. I figured if it was over 50 lbs when I got to the airport, I could throw it out or put it my carry-on.

At 8AM exactly, while I was still eating breakfast, the driver for the movers arrived. I showed him the furniture and boxes that I was bringing. He got to work moving boxes. His assistant arrived a little bit later. I watched Vicorva’s stream; they were playing The Exile Princes, which looked pretty fun. I might play it sometime.

They left the office for last, but by 9:00AM, they were ready to start loading it. I switched the stream to my phone and got up to unplug my computer and all the peripherals.

By 10AM, they had everything loaded, went over the paperwork with me and had me sign everything, then headed out. The driver told me he would deliver on Monday -- the earliest date in their time frame! -- which was great news

I sat down in Pretend Coffee Shop, which still looked mostly-normal because I’d only brought the robot vacuum, wall decor, and bookcase from that area. I read fediverse and played Time Princess while the movers finished fiddling with things in their truck and headed out.

A few minutes after they’d pulled away, I realized I’d forgotten to tell them to take the free weights. Oops. I had the driver's number but I didn't try calling him to ask him to come back for them. I haven't regularly used the free weights in over a decade, and I was only bringing them with me because I thought I might be more likely to use them if they weren't in a nasty basement. I was put out that I'd gone to the trouble of cleaning them and now they'd just be thrown away, though. But so it goes.

Around 1PM, I called my local friend and we agreed to get together along with another friend around 3-4PM. 

While I waited for them, I remembered that I needed to close my safe deposit box at the bank. Many years earlier, a teller had asked me to get a safe deposit box. "Employees get one for free, so it won't cost you anything, and the front line has an incentive program running now for opening new safe deposit box accounts." So I got one. I'd thought to put data backups in it, but I was pretty sure I never had. 

I hadn't seen the keys for the box in years and had no idea where they were. I'd had some mystery keys in the jewelry armoire, but they didn't look like safe deposit box keys and two of them said "property of state of Ohio" on them, so those couldn't be it. The last time I remembered seeing the safe deposit box keys, they'd been in my desk at work.

...

Wait, did that mean they were still inside one bag of stuff from work?

I went to the extension and dug carefully through a bag that had something jingling in it. I thought it was an empty key ring that I'd noticed on my earlier search, but I found at the bottom a key-sized red envelope. Inside: two safe deposit box keys. 

AW YEAH.

Triumphant, I set off on foot to the bank. It's less than a mile away, and checking the box's contents and closing it would take a little bit, so I didn't want to make my friends come with me for it.

The box was, indeed, empty; I'd never even gone to it. Let this be a lesson in accepting complimentary things you don't particularly want: they can come back to haunt you later. I was just relieved I wouldn't have to pay to have the box drilled. (No, there are no backups for safe deposit box keys. No, bank employees cannot open the box without the customer's key. If the customer loses the keys, the bank pays a locksmith to drill out and replace the lock and charges the customer for the service.)

I went home and played on my Chromebook while waiting for my friends. After they arrived, we hung out in the living room for a bit, then headed off to the thrift store to drop off the remaining stuff I'd bothered to bag, and Half-Price Books to get rid of my remaining 2.5 boxes of books. I hadn't realized Half-Price Books was an actual used bookstore. They have more of a discount retailer vibe. I don't expect a used bookstore to be a chain. Anyway, they wanted me to wait around while they priced everything (and presumably entered it into their system), so we hung out and looked at used books and chatted for a bit. I got $20 out of it and used it to defray the cost of buying dinner for my friends.

We went out for Mongolian barbecue, where all the sauces were weirdly much spicier than expected. Like my friend got "sweet soy" which doesn't sound like it'd be spicy, but was. The roti was so tasty I got a second order, though. 

Afterwards, we went to my friend's house to hang out, because he and Other Friend had work to do -- mostly running ice-dyed clothes through the washing machine. Around 9-10PM, he took me home. 

At home, I gave Lyric her gabapentin for the trip, played some Time Princess, and flopped early. 

Saturday, April 12

This was it: the worst day of Lyric's life. 

Lyric hadn't come to bed with me the night before, but she was at the foot of the bed when I woke at 5AM. She walked up to the head of the bed and flopped down on top of me. I stayed in position under her until it got too uncomfortable, then rolled over. Usually if I move when she's on top of me, she leaves, but this time she stayed flopped on top of me in the new position. She had an "I'm too stoned to leave" weight to her. I managed to fall back to sleep like that.

I got up around 8AM, took care of a few things, then sat down for a bit to eat breakfast. A little after 9AM, I resumed Final Chores. I packed the GFiber router and extender in my bag; the fiber was already out, though they'd said it wouldn't be turned off until 4PM. No real issue, though.

What was much more inconvenient was that I was suddenly out of space on Google services: drive/email/photos. I wrote an angry email to Google support, because why did I only have the 100 GB I got from paying for Google One and not the other terabyte that I'd had for as long as I'd been using Google Drive. 

I was at 120 GB, so I started deleting big files that I didn't really need -- things that had gotten sucked up by Google Drive when I started using it to backup my data. Getting down to 103GB was easy. Getting below 100 GB was painful because I had to dig through lots of small files for ones I didn't want. I abandoned this effort to do physical tasks around the house instead. I cleaned out the fridge and put one full trash cart on the curb for pickup on Monday. Then I started emptying liquids into the sink so I could throw those out, too. 

I got increasingly anxious as time went on. I have never had a panic attack but I felt as if I was on the brink of one. I focused on breathing, telling myself I was doing great, and continuing with steps. The realtor will hire someone to clear the house  (and bill me for it) so I didn't really need to throw away the food. I just thought that food was a particularly gross thing to leave sitting around and I didn't want to risk that the pantry wouldn't get emptied (since the kitchen didn't have much junk left in it the way the basement/extension did). 

I discovered a bunch of chocolate I'd been keeping in the freezer, so I put that in my luggage since it wasn't as if it needed to be frozen. It was just there so it'd keep longer.

I gave Lyric her second gabapentin around 10AM, an hour before she'd go in the carrier, per instructions.  She was pretty mellow.

My friend arrived a little early. As I'd told him the night before, I was not ready to go. I wanted to put Lyric in the carrier as the last thing I did before leaving the house. I finished throwing food away and taking out the recycling while he petted the cat.

During one trip from the house, I accidentally left both the kitchen door and exterior door open and Lyric followed me out, but she hung out on the sidewalk and only complained a little when I picked her up to carry her back inside.

Loading Lyric into the cat carrier was easy: I put some catnip in it and she followed. She was quiet up until I carried her out of the house, and then she started meowing. She did intermittent meowing, every minute or two, for most of the drive to the airport.

At the airport, my checked bag was a few pounds overweight, so I threw out all three jars of nutella to get it under again. If I'd wanted to check another bag, I could've put it in there, but I wanted to keep my devices with me.

The line at security was short, but they needed to run the cat carrier through the X-ray machine with no cat in it. Because I wasn't sure I could get Lyric back into the cat carrier again without her escaping, they took us to a private screening room. With the door to it closed, I let Lyric out and held her while one TSA person took the carrier for screening and the other waited with Lyric and me. 

When he returned with the carrier, I flattened out the puppy pads again and coaxed Lyric back into it with some kitty treats. She was not thrilled.

While we waited at the gate, Lyric started scratching at the puppy pads, the way she would at a litter box, and I smelled urine, although the scent wasn't strong. The puppy pads ended up crumpled together at one end of the carrier. I hadn't brought any puppy pads to replace them because I hadn't expected to be able to take Lyric out of the carrier. Southwest's instructions had been clear on this point: once the pet arrives at airport, the pet must stay in the carrier until you leave the airport. The actual airport was more flexible; the TSA person told me there was a designated free-roam area where people could let their pets out. 

But Lyric didn't appear to have made much of a mess: nothing was leaking or detectably damp from outside of the carrier, and I didn't have much time before the plane left.

I freed up enough space in Google Drive that I could modify files again, which was important to me because I wanted to be able to write on the plane. I opened a few files in offline mode before the plane took off.

The plane was mostly empty and I got row of three seats to myself. The flight attendants said Lyric could stay on the empty seat beside me during take off and landing, and I'd figured out how to get the carrier to expand as well as condense with the cat still in it. Lyric was quiet during the first part of the flight; I don't know if the engine hum soothed her or just made her think drawing attention to herself was a mistake. She started mewing again partway through. I wrote a little on the plane, about Thursday and Friday, but mostly I read Angel's Grace and Feathers of Dawn.  

The flight was nonstop -- if I hadn't been able to get a nonstop, I would've driven with Lyric so she could have food/water/litterbox while traveling instead. At our destination, I went to baggage claim, while my sister-in-law texted updates about their status. My bag was one of the first few on the conveyor belt, so I grabbed it while I waited for them to come to me after parking.

In the car, I learned that the litter box I'd added to my parents' grocery order two weeks ago had never arrived. So we stopped at a store on the way to my parents' house, because I didn't want to let Lyric out of the carrier without having a litter box available, and I still wasn't sure if she'd peed in the carrier.

Once home, I filled the litterbox and opened the carrier. Lyric had urinated on the puppy pads, which had soaked it up entirely. Both cat and carrier were clean. That worked much better than I'd expected! I washed the liner on the cat carrier anyway, just to be thorough.

My sister-in-law cooked a delicious meal for us -- coconut rice, chicken, roasted asparagus, and marinated cucumbers. It was great. :9 

Lyric wandered her new home, meowing loudly for a chunk of the evening. This surprised me, because she's been a quiet cat for as long as I've had her. She'd mew when she wanted to come inside, if she could hear me near the door. She'd mew if she caught a mouse. On rare occasions, she'd meow when she wanted something, but that was very rare. Here, she mostly didn't seem to want anything. To go outside, sometimes, but that was about the only thing. 

It turns out that not only does the HOA prohibit outdoor cats, but the city does as well. Doubly confined. I talked to my brother and his wife about having a catio built for her. My sister-in-law suggested a kennel run, but that would be much more awkward, since I'd have to carry Lyric to and from it and she'd probably complain every time. 

But a catio will require asking the HOA about what my parents are allowed to modify on their property. Whee. 

April 1-7

Apr. 7th, 2025 11:44 pm
rowyn: (just me)
 April 1, 2025

It's a new month and I get to do my month-in-review, yay!

I haven't started it yet, even though it's 9PM and I look forward to it. I have done Other Things instead.

I woke at 8AM and did my usual "breakfast and goof off" until 10:30AM, then went back to bed. At 12:30PM, I got up again and made lunch. Shortly after I finished lunch, Telnar called. Usually when he calls, I either go for a walk outside or pace about my house for some minimal exercise. (Telnar typically also walks during our calls, either on his treadmill or outside). Since I still needed to gather stuff for donation, I did that instead. I filled two 25-gallon bags with stuff from Lut's closet and decided that was enough work and started pacing instead. Then went back to pack one more bag before we finished the call. We usually talk for an hour or so. 

It's the last day of Sprint in Time Princess, which is All Consumption Day, when every kind of spending from the last four days counts, plus "society contribution". My society has more contribution than it can ever use (I should know, I run it), so this last category is just "dump a bunch of resources into the void in return for Sprint rewards." The other spending categories, you get something for expending resources in addition to the sprint rewards, so they're more fun. On the other hand, the resources expended for society contrib are ones that I have very little use for outside of sprint, so it's not all bad.

I spent a chunk of time on both my accounts (but especially the alt because no QoL improvements) doing dailies and giving companion gifts, because that has the best expenditure-to-reward ratio of the various possible activities. 

I also read through two chapters of The Jewel-Strewn Night

While I waited for water to boil for dinner, I put today's bags of clothing in the car. It looks like I'll be making multiple trips to the thrift store just because there's more than one carload of stuff. Lyric went outside since the door was open for long enough for her to decide she wanted outside. Also she likes having me outside with her so she often goes outside if I do. Even though she usually wants to stay outside after I've gone back inside.

During Coffee's stream, I wrote about my day so far. I also decided that I would Finally Post the last several days of entries, but I wanted to read through them first. So I've been alternating reading with writing this and also with finishing up some things in Time Princess. It has not been efficient, is the thing. 

Now that I'm current on today, I'll start the month-in-review entry.

April 2

I woke up around 5:30AM to a ferocious thunderstorm that'd probably started much earlier. I knew the storm was coming because the power company had emailed about their preparations for it. I stayed awake for an hour or so, petting the cat and reading on my phone, before finally getting back to sleep. 

I woke again a little before 8AM, briefly contemplated watching V's stream, and went back to sleep instead. At 8:45AM, I woke from a bad dream where I was GMing a game I hadn't finished reading and one player had gone "oh we don't need to worry about that because [thing] about [group]" and I went "of course, [group] [thing], right, haha" (I should've read all the fluff). And then I dozed off while I was supposed to be GMing and slept for 12 hours and it was 8PM and the day was OVER oh NO.

Okay, subconcious, I'll get up now. Sheesh.

I watched the rest of Veo's stream while getting out of bed and eating breakfast and what not. At 11AM, I decided to work on clearing out stuff some more. I filled one bag with trash and another bag with shoes to donate, then went to the bank to discuss payment options. Single-transaction ACHs are either not a thing my bank does anymore or the front line at my branch didn't know how to do them (not clear which), so I just paid for a cashier's check. 

While clearing out Lut's things, I'd found a bunch of change -- mostly pennies -- so I turned that into bills while I was at the bank anyway. I wonder if people who carry money in their pocket are more averse to carrying and spending change than people who use a purse? I always spend my change, instead of dumping it somewhere for it to grow into a big pile that's too unwieldy to spend. It's been fifteen -ish years since I last converted change into bills, and that time was also a bottle of change Lut had been feeding.

I asked the teller to verify that my debit card was still functional and about changing the PIN. Because I worked for a bank for 27 years, I have long since gotten out of the habit of using my debit card. If I needed to get cash, I got up from my desk and walked to the teller line. I didn't even have a debit card for much of that time, because what was the point when I needed it so seldom that I couldn't remember the PIN. Even after I stopped working in the branch in 2020, I still didn't use my debit card, although I'd gotten a new one and set the PIN to something I thought I'd remember, just in case. The branch is less than a mile from my house, so going to the teller line for transactions was still easy.

So I hadn't used my card in years. The teller said I could change the PIN at the teller line, but I figured I should check to see if I remembered it first. So when I left the lobby, I went to the ATM.

The ATM was out of order.

Okay then. The lobby had several customers in it when I left, so I drove to the thrift store next and donate seven 25-gallon bags: almost all clothing and shoes, plus a few miscellaneous items. A staffer brought out a shopping cart for me and helped me load it. Very quick, especially since I didn't need a receipt.

Then I went back to the bank and changed the PIN, possibly to the same thing it was already, who knows? I figured that was easier than finding a working ATM to check the PIN at. 

Afterwards, I went home and fed myself and Lyric lunch. Lyric had no interest in going out today because even though the storm had passed, it was still heckin' wimdy and also noisy, both from road work on the nearby street and a leafblower in the neighbor's yard. Lyric loves outside but hates both wind and noise, so she wasn't even poking her nose outside while the door was open, like she normally does.

After lunch, I did a bit of editing on The Jewel-Strewn Night, played some Time Princess, and called my local friend to let him know my move date. I decided to take a nap around 4:00PM.

I woke from my nap around 6:30PM, got up to make dinner, then ate and goofed around until Coffee's stream started. I finished up my March-in-review entry and posted it, then grudgingly wrote a little of The Secret Dragon over the next two hours. After Coffee's stream, I finished up dailies in Time Princess, and chatted a little on Discord. Just before midnight, I put in a bit more work on the portrait of Raeku. 

Somewhere in here, I also emailed Google Fiber about cancelling my service. 

Then more Time Princess until a bit before 1AM, when I went to bed. Did a little reading in bed and fell asleep around 1:30AM.

Thursday, April 3

I woke around 8AM, then lazed in bed for an hour, reading Fediverse and playing Time Princess. At 9AM, I made breakfast and played Race for the Galaxy. Around 10AM, I decided I should try to be vaguely productive, and started writing up yesterday in lieu of being actually productive. 

It's now 11:30AM. I was about to take a nap when I realized that I was almost done with one of the daily quests in 4thewords, and if I finish it before noon, I can take another copy of it just before midnight (if I remember). So I wrote another handful of words to finish the quest. Now: nap time!

The rest of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday is a blur now (it's Monday as I write this.)  These are the days when I cleared out excess stuff from my closet. I still haven't emptied Lut's -- I donated most of the clothing but there's a bunch of boxes of unknown stuff, probably ancient graphics cards/motherboards/other electronics parts. But I know I'm not bringing anything from his closet, and I am bringing everything from mine. So pruning out my own stuff was more of a priority.

It was also much slower, because I wanted to sort through it. I donated or threw away (depending on condition) anything that I didn't like or that didn't fit. I had so much cosplay stuff that I bought 20+ years and 40+ lbs ago, and I finally disposed of it, huzzah. I also had three giant stuffed animals and I pruned that down to one. (My inner child always wanted a giant stuffed animal, so I bought her some when I found them cheap at Costco 20 years ago. She gets to keep one but the others can hopefully find a good home with an actual child.)

I heard back from GFiber on Thursday that I could cancel by email and specifiy a date. So I emailed them on Friday with the bits of information needed. I have to return the router and the extender by presenting a QR code at FedEx. Haven't gotten the QR code yet, but I can do this at any FedEx. So I will probably just pack the router and extender in my luggage (and have wifi until the last minute!), then ship them back from Durham.

On Saturday, I finished pruning my closet and dropped off everything at the thrift store. I wanted to be sure to do it on Saturday because I'd have a friend in the car on Sunday and I didn't want it full of donations still. 

Sunday, April 6

I started on the kitchen today, filling one bin with stuff to donate before I ran out of steam. I had plans to see my local friend at 2PM. I did a little bit of editing as well, before I headed out.

We went for food at my favorite local pizza chain, then I took him back to my house for a bit. Several years ago, I'd told him he could store some of his stuff in my garage. Months ago, when I told him I was moving and he'd need to get his stuff, he said, "Oh, I got it all already."

And I went, "...really? Because there's a lot of stuff in the garage that I didn't put there."

He's been by the house a few times since, but we'd never remembered to have him look at the garage. So I brought him to it today. He poked at one box that was full of broken reclining loveseat parts (mine; I'd had the repair guy drop it in there and forgotten it, because he couldn't do haulaway). And then looked at a few more boxes. "Oh crap. This is my stuff."

Me: "...well, you've done without it for years, so you can't need it too badly?"

Him: "But now that I remember it exists, I want it back."

I feel kind of bad because he has a tiny house and way too much stuff for it, plus a storage locker already that's full. And I'm leaving Saturday. But he has the option of leaving it, and I tried to tell him months ago that he still had stuff here. So I don't feel too bad.

We went back to his house and spent several hours talking and entertaining ourselves. I had a diet Coke at the pizza place and wne to the bathroom like 6 times in 6 hours, which is why I do not normally drink caffeinated beverages. I didn't look at my phone, or even think about my phone, until my friend finally had to use the bathroom. I felt like this was a socializing triumph on his part and told him so. "Usually I would sneak off to the bathroom at least once to check my phone, but I didn't bring it with me any of the times. Because I didn't think about it."

I got home around 11PM and hurried through all my pre-bedtime stuff, including putting the trash cart and recycling cart on the curb. The trash cart was exactly full! That was nice: maximizing free disposal. I got to sleep around my usual time, 1AM.

Monday, April 7

The move grows inevitably closer, and it becomes correspondingly more difficult to do things. Today, I loaded two plastic bins with kitchen stuff to donate and put them in the car, then stopped to load other donation items in the dishwasher and run it. (These were things I'd put away years ago, and dust and whatnot had accreted on some of it since.) 

At 2PM, I met with the realtor and signed documents for her. I am leaving a bunch of stuff in the house because I don't have space for it in my parents' house, and I ran out of time/energy to get rid of all of it. She thinks the house will sell faster/for more if it's cleared out, so she's gonna hire a service to haul everything away after I leave and bill me for it, which is fine with me. She left the seller's disclosure and lead disclosure with me to fill out alone, because they're long. 

I completed those after she left, and then poked tiredly at games and the web for a bit, before remembering I could just nap. So I took a nap from 5:30PM-7:00PM. 

There's this theory that you should nap for 30 minutes or less at a time, but I think this is one of those "true for the average person but you personally may not be average" things, because I generally nap for around 2 hours and prefer it that way. Short naps don't feel restful at all. I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep last night; I woke at 7AM and couldn't get back to sleep.

I made dinner after I got up, put in laundry, and did some editing on The Jewel-Strewn Night when Coffee started streaming at 8PM. A little after 9PM, I switched over laundry, then opened 4thewords in the hopes of getting some fiction-writing done. 

Fiction-writing has not happened, and it's after 11PM now. So probably not happening. But I will go look at the file.

All right, I have written a token amount of The Secret Dragon. Good enough.

rowyn: (studious)
 Health & Fitness

I finally had gallbladder surgery on March 3rd! This meant I felt much worse from March 3-8 or so, and then started to feel better. By the end of the month, I was more-or-less back to baseline.

I've sometimes wondered if my "takes a nap every day" thing was a sign of excessive fatigue, and I'd had a little hope that I would have more energy after recovering from surgery than I'd had before the first gallbladder attack. That does not seem to have panned out. I'm not entirely sure I have more energy now than I had on February 26 and 27, before surgery, when it had taken me a while to load 9+ boxes of books into the car for two trips to donate books. I'd needed to rest a few times, but I had loaded them. I'd been feeling pretty good. 

On the other hand, from February 28-March 2, I mustered basically zero energy for activities related to purging stuff, so...yeah, I'm probably doing better now than before surgery. When your main symptom is fatigue, it's hard to tell how bad the fatigue is.

I did laundry on March 2, including all the bedding, and counted that as exercise, then counted pacing on the phone as exercise on March 8. But I didn't make a real effort to get back to exercise until March 10, when I had the post-surgery follow-up. From the 10th through the 31st, I exercised 17 times, so 19 for the month. Which is pretty good for a month where I had surgery!

My diet has mostly gone back to pre-gallbladder-attacks foods, which means I am once more eating lots of cheese and high-fat snack foods, and almost no vegetables. The one exception is breakfast: I used to make cream of wheat with nutella for breakfast every morning, and now I have yogurt with granola. This is more because I don't have to cook it than out of a belief it is significantly healthier. It's probably a bit healthier, though: no palm oil.

Writing

The Secret Dragon is up 36,526 words: 13,200 words for the month. More than I've written in any other month this year! Progress still feels sluggish but

*waves arms at everything else*

yeah that.

I started a romance soloRPG, "Reincarnated as The Unlovable Villainess." That journal is at 3,328 words, with another 1000 words of notes for it. It's fun but not enough more fun than writing The Secret Dragon, so I've mostly been working on that when I'm in the mood to write fiction.

The Business of Writing

I did a bit more editing on A Game to You early in the month. Then, while recovering from surgery, I read through The Jewel-Strewn Night and decided to edit that instead. I've remained focused on The Jewel-Strewn Night for editing, and it's now in the final proofreading pass before I share it with first readers.

Except most of my first readers haven't finished with Be That Way yet. So I'm likely to finish The Jewel-Strewn Night in April but not share it with first readers until May? Idk. We'll see.

Art

I checked the "draw" box 23 times in March. Most of that time was spent on the cover illustration for Be That Way, which I finished on March 18. I'll probably tweak it a bit when I do the cover layout, but that can wait until I'm done with final edits and know the exact dimmensions of the paper book. (And therefore the exact size for the wrap cover). I worked on three other character portraits for Be That Way in March and finished two; the last one is still in progress.

Reading 

I finished one Time Princess spin-off story (the spin-offs are short and have no meaningful choices), "Timeless Love". I got halfway through Feathers of Dawn and then stalled. I haven't quite decided to DNF it yet, tho. Mostly I've been reading big chunks of unfinished manwha and a new unfinished Time Princess story. I checked the habit box for reading on 30 days; probably half for Feathers of Dawn and the rest reading manwha (I don't count reading a single update, but if I read a big batch of episodes, I count that) or Time Princess stories.

Moving Preparations

I did very little in the way of physical preperation, but I made arrangements for a bunch of things. I have movers scheduled for both my stuff and my car, plane tickets for myself and my cat, and a new cat carrier. I also took Lyric to the vet to get her shots updated and also cleared for travel (this last turned out to be unnecessary, because the airline I'm flying on doesn't require a certificate of health from pets on domestic flights. But I had to take her in for shots anyway, so no issue.) And got the vet's recommendation to give her gabapentin before the flight. 

This felt like so much while I was doing it, I gotta say. I have my sister-in-law to thank for me getting it done at all, because she went through and called bunch of movers in my area to find the best ones for me, and contacted the transport company I'm using for my car. 

On the last day of the month, I also called a nearby thrift shop about what kind of donations they take (basically everything I have to donate), and filled two 25-gallon bags with the clothes from Lut's bureau.

Things I have to do in April:

  • Take care of payment for movers
  • Talk to realtor about selling the house
  • Shut off the utilities to the house, unless the realtor advocates leaving them on for a while? I actually might need to leave them on because the gas furnace has an electric start, so if I want the furnace to run to keep the pipes from freezing, I need both (freezing is unlikely in mid-April but still). Oh, and the sump pump is electric and the backup sump pump is water-based so...yeah. I don't want to turn off water/gas/electric until the house sells. I'll unplug everything instead. Still need to turn off the fiber, though. Also need to find out if Google Fiber will want their equipment returned to them.
  • Talk to my mom about anything else I might not be thinking of.

My parents have bought, moved, and sold so many houses just in my lifetime. I think they've owned four different houses in the time I've lived in this one, and four more between when I was born and when I bought this house. I've never sold a house before and I haven't moved in 22 years. I hired movers the last time I moved, too, but that time was local so it was simpler. Though I'm actually moving much less this time, since I'm not moving Lut's things or most of the furniture. The reclining loveseat, the painting desk, the desk chair, and one bookcase are the only big awkward pieces that I'm bringing with me. Everything  else is either small or folding. Anyway, my mom is an expert on moving and selling houses so I should consult her.

I have some other prep things that I'd like to -- mostly donate or throw away more stuff -- but if that doesn't get done, oh well. House is selling as-is. It will be worth less because of this but meh. My house was always a place to live and not an investment.

Goal Scorecard

  • Have gallbladder removed: done! Rest in peace, gallbladder.
  • Recover from gallbladder surgery: done!
  • Call parents a few times: done! I talked to them four times in March, even. 
  • Pay March Bills: I forgot to put this on the goal list but did NOT forget to do it. So victory!

March Stretch Goals Completed

  • Talk to vet about traveling with Lyric and see what they recommend: done!
  • Contact moving compan(ies). Figure out date for moving: done!
  • Get plane tickets for move (including whatever ticket Lyric needs): done!
  • Track what I read: I didn't finish anything in March but technically I'm still tracking it!
  • Exercise: 19 times, pretty good for a surgery month (even if my bar for what consitutes "exercise" was very low)
  • Write some of The Secret Dragon: 13,200 words!
  • Edit: Made good progress on The Jewel-Strewn Night and got a little done on A Game to You
  • Play a romance soloRPG: Done! Though I haven't played very much of it.
  • Work on cover art or book illustrations: I did both! Cover and one book illo is done and the other two book illos are mostly done.
  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed: Pretty sure I missed some days, but I covered the 5th through the 31st, at least. Good enough.

April Goals

  • Move to provide care for my parents
  • Cancel Google Fiber & return equipment if necessary
  • Contact realtor about selling house
  • Pay April bills

I know I'm gonna do more than those four, but those four are the big ones that I must do in April, and moving is super-stressful even when you can afford to pay for all the things to make it easier. 

April Stretch Goals:

  • Call Ting to cancel second cellphone line
  • Finish initial edits on The Jewel-Strewn Night
  • Write some of The Secret Dragon
  • Play more of romance soloRPG
  • Finish illustrations for Be That Way
  • Exercise 15+ times
  • Track what I read
  • Make progress clearing out stuff I no longer want
  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed
  • Ask Bookbub for a Featured Deal and run another ad campaign for a book
  • Get backmatter updated for whatever book I promote


Pick an old picture to redraw

rowyn: (Default)

Sunday, March 16

It's been a while since I wrote about my day. For a while, I was writing about my day to warm up for writing something else. Lately. I've been going straight to writing fiction instead, or working on edits or drawing..

Not that I've been writing lots of anything. A few hundred words of The Secret Dragon on most days, and that's about it.

Today, I woke around 8:45AM and lazed in bed for an hour playing Time Princess before I got up. I made pancakes for breakfast, because on Friday I'd made a batch of pancake batter and had been putting the leftover batter in the fridge after making the morning's pancakes. So this morning I used up the last of it. Tomorrow, I'll either have to make more or eat something else for breakfast. I could make more fried eggs-in-a-hole; those are easy and tasty.

I may conserve my cooking energy tomorrow to make pasta sauce. I got ingredients to make it on Wednesday, I think, but I've been too lazy to spend the time cooking. Tonight I wanted to have some to eat but not enough to make it. Maybe tomorrow.

I ran out of energy around noon and went back to bed to nap at 1PM. Got up around 3PM, ate lunch, and then coaxed myself out for a walk. I've been walking around the neighborhood, which is very tiring because it's so hilly. The last two days I've done 2.5 miles and turned back because I didn't want to run out of energy before I got home. I thought about driving to the trail so I could walk on a flat area and get bubble tea afterwards, but I decided the neighborhood was fine. It's nice not to drive. 

Several days ago -- Wednesday, maybe? -- I saw a meme about ice cream and caved to the sudden urge to go to the frozen custard place.  I got my usual small triple-chocolate concrete and actually finished the whole thing in one sitting (yes they call it a "small" but it's an enormous amount of dessert nonetheless). But they hadd "gooey butter cake frozen custard" by the pint this time, and I bought a pint of that. Which I then ate over the next four days, mostly in very small amounts at a time. Yesterday I kept getting a little more every few hours, instead of having a few spoonfuls for the day, though. So there wasn't much left today. 

On Thursday, I finally decided to try playing "Reincarnated as the Unlovable Villainess", the romance soloRPG I picked up back in January, I rolled up the characters, wrote down a little background, and rolled for the results of the first day. I've written out part of the first day. In my usual long-winded fashion, I haven't gotten to any of the material from the prompts yet. I like what I've seen of the game prompts. The mechanics might be too random for me and I may end up cheating to get the story I want. There's an optional rule for "go back in time a 2d6 days if you hit a bad end" so I might use that instead of cheating. Or I might get lucky and not need to cheat? I'll see how it goes. I'm not actually worried about playing by the rules in a solo game. 

I wrote a little more of the soloRPG today, but only a few paragraphs. It was not coming along easily. I wrote a few paragraphs of The Secret Dragon since I was struggling anyway. Writing The Secret Dragon was not easy either. After that, I worked on the wrap cover for Be That Way. I've been working on the background that will go on the back cover and it is very tedious, especially for something that only a few people will ever see. I mean, I'll probably post the wrap cover on social media at some point so I guess people will see it that way? But it's quite possible the only person to buy a physical copy of it will be me. My books don't sell many physical copies.

Anyway, I'll do a little editing next just so I can check off the last habit. I've been editing The Jewel-Strewn Night. Ironically, it only has eleven items on the editing list. One of those items is Extremely Hard and I'm not sure how to tackle it, but I've been completing the others because what the heck, they all have to get done. I read through it several days ago and decided I do not want to leave it trunked. 

Monday, March 17

After my usual morning routine of breakfast and games, I decided I didn't really want to do anything else, and got up to go for a walk. Then I remembered that I'd planned to clean the kitchen instead of going outside for a walk. "But if I go out, I can drive to the trail and then get a bubble tea and also more gooey butter frozen custard on the way home," I told myself.

And then I remembered that the good bubble tea place is closed on Mondays.

I could go to the park in midtown and get bubble tea from the other bubble tea place. But the drive is twice as long, it's in the opposite direction so the frozen custard shop isn't on the way, and, most importantly, I really don't like it as much. The customer experience at the closer place is much better.

So I went into the kitchen and did some cleaning. Mostly this was decluttering plus putting away dishes and loading the dishwasher, but I wiped down the stove, table, and counters, too. My dishwasher isn't good at some types of dirt so I prewash most of the dishes, making loading the dishwasher more of a chore than it would be otherwise. I've been thinking "I should replace the dishwasher" for years, but I'm moving soon and my parents' dishwasher works fine. So like everything else wrong with the house, this can be Someone Else's Problem soon enough. 

After cleaning the kitchen, I finally made pasta sauce and had that with angel hair and parmesan for lunch. 

Around 3PM, I lay down for a nap, but instead of sleeping, I read comics on my phone. I am still reading a novel, Feathers of Dawn; it's 50% through now so I'll probably finish it. I've been reading it so slowly that Google Play's "estimated time left to finish the book" is only slightly shorter than when I started it. I've mostly been reading it at my computer instead of on my phone, though.

As it neared 4PM, I still wanted more gooey butter frozen custard. While "rush hour" in my city is really nothing--oh no it takes a few extra minutes to get somewhere--traffic between my house and the frozen custard place does become noticeable between 4PM and 6:30PM. At first, I told myself to nap for a bit and then go later in the evening. Then I realized that traffic would not really be better until it was almost time for CoffeeQuills' stream. I aborted my nap plans, got dressed, and went out for frozen custard.

It's been warm for the last few days and the frozen custard shop was busy both times I went. I opted for the walk-up window rather than the drive-thru both times, because there were so many cars lined up for the drive-thru. The last time, I placed my order right away but had to wait a while for them to make it. This time, I had to wait to place my order -- I got two pints instead of one, and skipped the concrete -- but they had some pints already packed so it was ready almost at once.

I like their concretes but even the "small" is ginormous and it has the same problem as a milkshake: you can't store it for later. Pints of frozen custard keep just fine, though. :9

I didn't do multiplayer during CoffeeQuills' stream. Mostly, I edited The Jewel-Strewn Night. I basically finished the wrap cover illustration for Be That Way; I'll touch it up a bit and adjust some things for the text layout, but it won't change significantly. I put a coffee-shop blackboard in the background and I think I'll put the "Now with 200% more lesbians!" part of the tagline on it. I haven't done the text layout because I'm still hoping I'll come up with a title I like better.

After finishing the cover, I started another illustration for Be That Way. There are four protagonists, none of whom are fully human. I'd kind of wanted to put them all on the cover but my only ideas for fitting all four in would require drawing a significant portion of each figure and make them all relatively small on already-tiny cover and this seemed like (a) way too much work and (b) unlikely to be something I could pull off, since I couldn't crib from a stock photo for it. The cover I finished is mostly just a close-up of the catgirl's face and hands while she's drinking coffee; I painted over a stock photo for her and then a different one for the coffee shop.

Anyway, I figured maybe I could do portraits of each other character in a similar minimalistic style. We'll see if I like them well enough to use them. I've drawn all the characters at least once so far, but the catgirl illo for the cover is the only one I like.

I also did a token amount of writing on both The Secret Dragon and the new soloRPG. Lately I've been pretty consistent about doing at least a token amount of everything, so that I can check it off on my tracker.

Tuesday, March 18

The bubble tea shop was open! So around 11:30, I got ready to leave. While pulling on leggings, my back spasmed, which I guess is a reminder that I need to start doing core workouts again. -_- When Eliyahu was visiting, we always went for walks to exercise because they would wak with me but the aerobics videos intimidated them. My back continued to give me occasional little pain twinges but I finished dressing and drove out to the trail anyway.

For the first time since the gallbladder attack in mid-January, I did a normal-length walk on the trail. Google Fit says it was only 2.5 miles; I am not convinced that Google Fit is right about this, especially since it measured Saturday's walk, where I turned back sooner, as longer. So Google Fit definitely has one or both of these walks at the wrong length. Google Fit puts the time of Tuesday's walk at 69 minutes, which is about right. Pretty sure I am slower than ever.

After the walk, I went to the bubble tea shop. Another customer was there, chatting with the bobaristas while they made orders.  As the owner finished my order but before adding the ice, he asked me to try it. "I was distracted by the other customer and I'm not positive I counted the right number of pumps."

Without getting a straw, I took a sip. "Hm, it's the right amount of sweetness and tea, but it tastes thin? Like maybe the creamer didn't get added?"

He considered this with a perplexed expression, and then made another one from the beginning. As I watched him make the new one (not realizing at first that's what he was doing), I realized why he'd been confused by my feedback: leaving out the creamer would've made the liquid level significantly lower unless he also added too much of something else, and it's unlikely he was so distracted that he got two different steps wrong. 

He gave me the new one, then put a lid on the original: "Here, you might as well take this one too."

On the drive home, I realized the more probable culprit for why it tasted thinner: I drink bubble tea with a straw and get a few boba with virtually every mouthful of milk tea. The boba doesn't change the actual consistency of the milk tea, but it does affect my perception of its consistency. So I feel like the tea itself is thicker because it's paired with the density of the boba. Taking a sip without any boba left me going "something's missing about the texture" without correctly identifying why.

I drank both of them at home and I'm pretty sure this was the only issue. Oops.

I didn't nap Tuesday, because All The Thai Milk Tea. This was another day of "token amounts of everything": a little editing, a little writing on both novel and game, a little drawing. 

 

 Wednesday, March 19

I woke up around 6:30AM and struggled to get back to sleep without success before finally getting up a little after 8AM. I had breakfast and managed to stay awake until the end of Vicorva's stream at 10:30AM (V's stream is temporarily a little later in my timezone, because the USA is already in DST but the UK isn't yet; in a week and half, this'll change back). Then I went back to bed and napped until noon.

I got up and made pasta for lunch. After eating lunch, I was tired and didn't want to do anything. I caught up on my Dreamwidth feed, then still didn't want to do anything. Read a few pages of Feathers of Dawn. I opened The Jewel-Strewn Night and made myself replace the last of the placeholder names, woohoo. I also added another two editing points to the list. So there's nine that I've finished and four left, at present.

Since my back is still annoyed at me, I decided to skip exercise today. I started writing about the last few days to see if that would get me interested in doing anything else. Not really? Around 4:30PM, I decided to take another nap.

After waking up, I chatted a bit on Discord, finished off a pint of frozen custard, and played some games. I made a late dinner during CoffeeQuills' stream, and have poked at soloRPG for a bit. Now I will post this and then write a token amount of The Secret Dragon before I do a token amount of drawing to finish out my day.

 

rowyn: (Default)

I often think about how voraciously I read during my school years. I didn't track numbers, but I'd often read a book in a day, and must have read hundreds of books every year through the end of high school. People often commented that I read beyond my age; I read The Hobbit around age seven, and The Lord of the Rings around age ten. (In both cases, I didn't read the books until after seeing an animated version on TV.) My mother still remembers vividly that I chose to read The Iliad and The Odyessy when I was twelve or so. I always loved sff and as far as I was concerned, all the magic and gods and demigods made these books fantasy. 

My reading habit more-or-less broke in college. There were a few periods where I'd get back into reading for a while, most often reading a particular author until I ran out of books by them, and then returning to my usual "not reading much" state. I feel like I've read fewer books in the last 30 years than I did during any one year from ages 7-17. That's probably not literally true, but I suspect it's close.

But I had another entertainment habit as a kid that broke when I went to college, and I never think about that one: television. As voracious as I was for books, I was at least as passionate about TV, if not more so. A standard childhood punishment for misbehavior was "no TV for a week." My parents never prohibited me from reading books; I think this was in part because reading was 'good for you' in a way that TV wasn't, but perhaps also because I felt the loss of TV more keenly. I definitely couldn't replace it with reading books.

I remember a news story about a wristwatch TV and being thrilled at the idea of TV that I could carry with me and watch wherever I went.

My childhood self might be appalled by how little I read now, but she would be flabbergasted by my near-total lack of interest in videos. With trivial effort, I could watch most any movie or show made in the last 20+ years (not to mention many much older). And yet I don't. I carry a device everywhere that I could use to watch whatever video I want. 

And I don't.

I watch new episodes of "Last Week Tonight" (the Youtube versions) with some regularity. I've watched some Casual Geographic videos. If a friend on social media links to a short video -- a few minutes or less -- I'll watch it. I wanted to watch some Helluva Boss episodes but I couldn't figure out how to find the episodes in order so I could see where I'd left off, and gave up without watching any. If I'm with friends or relatives and they want to watch something, I'll usually watch whatever it is with them.

But otherwise, left to my own devices, I do not watch movies or videos. 

The key difference between reading and watching is that I miss reading but I've always felt like watching videos wasn't worth the time.

I don't know why, exactly, videos do not feel worth the time. The one entertainment constant from childhood to present has been games: I've never stopped gaming, though the games vary. I spent a lot of time on arcade and computer games as a kid; nowadays I spend a lot of time playing Time Princess (mobile interactive fiction game but with a bunch of dailies and puzzle game options that I spend time on) and Race for the Galaxy (a tabletop board game that I play online in random-match games). Most of day goes to those plus social media, and the random blog posts and articles I stumble onto from social media. Do I think this is a better use of time than watching movies or shows? No. I enjoy my daily activities and consider that reason enough to do them. But there's no reason I couldn't spend more time watching videos and less time on social media or games. I just don't.

I'm moving to live with my parents, who always have one or both TVs on. My friends in the area love watching videos and movies. So I'll be watching more videos and movies soon anyway; I don't need to make a special effort to do so. 

I have made a special effort to get back to reading; I've put it down as an activity to do daily and I'm sticking with that, even if it's only a few pages each day. I've read four novels, three graphic novels, and one int-fic story so far this year: more than I usually manage in the first quarter of the year. 

But I seldom think about how little I watch shows compared to my child-self, who spent several hours every day glued to the TV. It's striking to think about how this changed. I find commercial television unbearable now and don't know how I put up with it 40 years ago. The internet replaced all my entertainment habits, really. It's just less noticeable with the computer games because I still play computer games: they're just online now. In a sense, I still do a lot of reading, but it's also online now: articles, blog posts, and social media. Video is the habit that was hardest hit, because I haven't adopted any internet-based video habits. Yes, I'll watch short-form videos, but I don't seek them out. I might watch an hour of videos a week, if you added them all together.

It's an interesting point.

rowyn: (Default)
I've collected the final entries of my Apothecaria journal into two new epubs: Honor, Witch of High Rannoc-Book 3 and Witches of High Rannoc-Book 4. All four epubs, covering the full run, are available to download here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PZBpM45Ot8QiTKG3e7OU701dbV8m5T-_?usp=drive_link. These are fanworks: they're free, not for sale.

Books 1 and 3 also contain Special Bonus Content! During  Book 1, I wrote a vignette of Umbral and Magnus arguing after Umbral saw Magnus & Cassie kissing and Cassie fled.
 
During Book 3, I wrote another vignette (much sweeter) of Magnus and Umbral together after Umbral drank Honor's clarity potion and the two had left for the night.
 
I didn't illustrate either of these because Cassie/Honor weren't present for either scene. They're just bits that I felt like writing and I wanted to include them in the epubs. These vignettes are only available in the epubs; I never posted them to any of the social media sites. If you go to the chapter listing, they're the only ones with a title instead of a number.

I also made a correction to Book 2 -- it'd been missing a page. And I changed the titles for books 1 & 2 because the original seasonal theme didn't work when books 3 & 4 were also during summer. So everything in the folder is new or updated.
rowyn: (studious)
 Health & Fitness

Overall health for most of February was Not Great. After feeling mostly-okay on the 1st and 2nd, I felt much worse again on the 3rd. For probably half of the month I was having regular but minor pain, and for basically all of February I had high levels of fatigue: taking multiple naps every day and too tired for much if any exercise. I started setting the bar for "have exercised" very low, including at one point "finished filling one (1) bag of trash in the basement and carried it out to the trash cart." Because if that's all I have energy for, I might as well count it.

I reached this extremely low bar 17 times in February, so hey, that was something. 

Eating habits were not bad, in the sense of "I generally managed to eat enough food." My appetite started to recover towards the end of the month. I have continued to avoid eating more than tiny quantities of my usual high-fat snack foods (ice cream, brownies, hot chocolate). 

I'm having my gallbladder removed on March 3, so I expect to feel much worse for several days and then hopefully I will gradually feel better at after that. The surgeon said most people have a few weeks of digestive turmoil after gallbladder surgery and then everything goes back to normal, but some people have long-term issues, especially with eating lots of fatty food at once. No telling which I'll be.

Writing

Work on The Secret Dragon continues slowly. Book was at 23,325 words at the end of the month, so 8,560 new words in February. Still haven't started another soloRPG. Maybe this month?

Part of me is like "8500 words? This is so slow. I'll never finish writing it at this rate." And the rest of me goes "please bear in mind everything else going on and chill." 

Oh, right. Everything else is going on too.

The Business of Writing

I finished initial edits on Be That Way and sent it to first readers. At least one person finished commenting on it (because they told me) but I am following my usual policy of not looking so I don't get neurotic about it. I told first readers they had until May because between gallbladder and moving plans, I doubted I'd get back to it any sooner than that.

I started initial edits of A Game to You, more so that I could check the "edit" box on my habit tracker than because I think I will finish editing it in 2025. 

Art

I did some drawing in February: portraits of Caliper and Raeku from Be That Way, random drawings of ocean and a rose, and some miscellaneous hand sketches. I checked the "draw" box 14 times; I generally didn't push to finish pictures in a single day. 

Reading

I finished first-reading Tuftears' Timecrossed Engineer, and went back to reading The Spellshop. After I finished that, I read Jaycee Jarvis's Taxing Courtship. Also read a graphic novel, If You'll Have Me by Eunnie. I started reading Martha Wells' The Cloud Roads on February 28; haven't gotten very far in it yet.

I opened a Storygraph account to see if that'd help with tracking. I am not enamored of it yet but I guess I like it marginally better than Bookwyrm? It does some things that annoy me -- like when I mark a book as read, it defaults to "no date" for when I started or finished and I have to manually adjust it 3 weeks later when I notice (and no longer remember when I started or finished). But maybe I'll get used to it. It might be better about the date behavior if I mark books as "currently reading" before I mark them as "read", idk. It does use the current date as the default "start date" when I mark a book as currently reading (which I had to fix for The Cloud Roads because I changed the status on the 27th but didn't start reading until the 28th, but at least it was close.)

Three books and one graphic novel in a month is not a tremendous amount of reading by my childhood standards (I was a book-a-day reader before I went to college). But it is evidence of Reading Regularly: good enough. I checked the habit box for "read" 26 times in February. Yay!

Moving Preparations

I filled the trash cart every week in February with unwanted things that I didn't think anyone else would want as a donation. I have failed to do this for tomorrow, mostly from lack of energy. I will also fail to do this next week, because I'll be recovering from surgery and also not supposed to lift much weight at one time. (I am allowed to pick up my cat, though, so that's good. Not that she likes being picked up much so I rarely do, but it's the principle of the thing.) 

However, this week I accomplished the much more important task of donating all the books. 19 tubs of books. I'm keeping some books but I donated the vast majority to a used bookstore.

I have a bunch of other stuff I'd like to donate -- all Lut's clothing, for one category -- but made zero progress on that.

I need to call movers and buy plane tickets and figure out cat and car transportation. (My plan is to pay someone to move the car, while the cat will fly with me. But I should see if I can get good drugs for Lyric for the trip because she hates even short car rides. And also I don't know the exact logistics for these things.)

Goal Scorecard

  • Finish initial edits for Be That Way: done!
  • Contact primary care physician if I haven't heard from specialist by 2/7: Yes I did have to follow up, and yes I did. SUCCESS.
  • Contact at least one (1) place about donations. Of anything.: I contacted TWO places! Because the first used bookstore I tried didn't have space for all the books I have to donate. The second one did, which is why I stopped at two.
  • Finish reading Timecrossed Engineer: Done!
  • Call parents a few times: Three times! Yeah, that's about as good as it gets. On the bright side, I will be living with them soon and will no longer need to use the phone to contact them. So that'll be nice. Phones should be seen and not heard.

February Stretch Goals completed

  • Write some of The Secret Dragon: 8500 words! 
  • Made progress on clearing out stuff I no longer want
  • Track what I read: I even got a Storygraph account!
  • Got a HIDA scan and scheduled gallbladder surgery: okay so this wasn't a stretch goal, but these were important things and they count.

March Goals

  • Have gallbladder removed
  • Recover from gallbladder surgery
  • Call parents a few times

Yeah that's gonna be it for the Actual Goals. Everything else will have to be a stretch goal. Surgery recovery is supposed to be "one week to recover, one month before you can lift heavy things," so in theory I should have around 3 weeks where I can do things like write/draw/edit/sort out logistics for move. But in the spirit of being gentle with myself, I will not count on it.

March Stretch Goals

  • Talk to vet about traveling with Lyric and see what they recommend
  • Contact moving compan(ies). Figure out date for moving.
  • Get plane tickets for move (including whatever ticket Lyric needs)
  • Contact real estate agent about selling house.
  • Maybe donate/throw out stuff by carrying small quantities at a time idk?
  • Track what I read
  • Exercise (at all)
  • Write some of The Secret Dragon
  • Edit A Game to You or another book
  • Work on a book outline for whatever I'm writing next
  • Play a romance soloRPG
  • Work on cover art or book illustrations
  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed
  • Ask Bookbub for a Featured Deal and run another ad campaign for a book
  • Get backmatter updated for whatever book I promote
  • Pick an old picture to redraw
rowyn: (Default)
 Health & Fitness

As the "when gallbladders attack" part of the header on the last entry might suggest, it was not a good month for health or fitness. Except in the "well I didn't overeat because I had no interest in eating" sense. I don't feel like that really counts.

I did pretty well on exercise for the first half of the month, and gave myself credit for the effort of decluttering two times after gallbladder attack. For a total of 14 times in January. Which I guess is pretty good for a month where I was too ill to exercise for 11 days.

I am probably not actually 100% yet, but I felt well enough to drive out to the trail for a walk on February 1 & 2, and pretty sure the queasiness during it on the 1st was more from my period than residual gallbladder stuff (though it's hard to tell.) The walk on the 2nd was fine and I even got bubble-less tea afterwards. (The bubble tea place was out of boba. I chatted with the proprietor to get a not-high-in-fat version of my usual Thai milk tea, too.) So doing all right.

Writing

Continued to write The Secret Dragon, albeit slowly because of gallbladder attack. It's up to 14,765 words: 7528 new words in January. I also added a bit more to the Apothecaria journal before illustrating and posting the final entries.

The Business of Writing

I made the editing list for Be That Way. It is unprecedentedly short at just nine items, five of them so easy that I already finished them. The other four are trickier, but I should be able to finish edits this month.

I also experimented with Bookbub ads towards the end of January: discounting Demon's Lure to 99 cents and running ads for it. This was a money-losing venture, as I assumed it would be going in, but it was fun to try something different in the marketing arena. I made a long thread on Fediverse where I live-posted about the experience over the course of six days. . Before my next adventure in paid advertising, I'll submit for a featured deal, which is unlikely to be a money-losing venture but also I won't get one. I submitted one in January after I'd already started the experiment and they turned it down, of course. 

Also, I should get the backmatter updated on whatever book I advertise next, because I have never bothered to update any of them. o_o;;;;

Art

I finished posting my Apothecaria journal in January. It feels like this was an age ago already, as if I finished it last year instead of this.

My art output cratered after I completed the last entry. (The last entry was ridiculously intricate, granted.)  I finished one drawing of Caliper (the goblin from Be That Way) and mostly-finished one of Caliper with Taeyna (the wolf-shifter). 

It's been nice not posting images daily to Fediverse. 

Reading

Mostly been first-reading Tuftears' Timecrossed Engineer: Back to School. I started The Spell Shop at some point, maybe during the last plane trip in December? I'll probably go back to that after I finish Timecrossed Engineer.

I started and finished a manwha, The Return of the 8th-Class Mage. It's the first action fantasy manwha I've finished, and was remarkably similar to the romance fantasy manwha I've been reading. The main distinction is that the romance plotline was less prominent and the action plotline more prominent. I read one comment on it, made near the end, where the reader complained that the main character had never been in any real danger and that the audience always knew he outclassed his opposition and would defeat them in due course. And my thought was: Yes, exactly, that's what I enjoyed about it. A lifetime of stories of rising stakes and increasing tension has left me rather delighted to read a low-tension story where hardly anything goes wrong for the MC and almost every conflict is soon resolved in his favor. 

Social

Eliyahu returned to Canada in mid-January. They have to stay in Canada until June at least. I can't imagine it will be feasible to invite them to stay with me for a month when I'm living with my parents, but maybe we'll work something out.

Another long-distance friend had mentioned visiting in January, but I didn't contact them immediately after Eliyahu left and then I was horribly sick for the rest of the month. I should get in touch with him. I am tentatively planning to go to a convention on the other side of the state in three weeks, and I'll probably see him there if not sooner, at least.

I did not make plans to visit my parents, because Gallbladder Attack. I don't intend to make plans for air travel until I talk to a specialist about the gallbladder thing.

Gaming

I didn't start playing a romance soloRPG, but I downloaded one that looked promising. I read partway through the rules but didn't finish. Part of me wants to play another soloRPG and another part is like "wow that was so much work for something that's not really mine." Playing Apothecaria was fun in a way that writing without prompts is not, but still. So much work.

Tuftears is running a game with two friends using a soloRPG as the base, and I admit this is something I'd like to try, too. GMing an Apothecaria game would pretty fun, for instance.

Goal Scorecard

  • Write some of The Secret Dragon: done!
  • Read through Be That Way: done!
  • Make an editing list for Be That Way: done!
  • Finish illustrating and posting my Apothecaria journal: done!
  • Make plans for next trip to parents: nope, putting this off until I know what's going with my health issues
  • Call parents a few times: three times, good enough

January Stretch Goals:

  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed: I actually did this for a change!
  • Track what I read: I didn't start using Storygraph but hey, I updated the "reading" section of this entry, good enough.
  • Pay for car insurance, pay quarterly taxes, and file and pay for business license & annual tax return: these weren't on the list but they really should've been regular goals, because they're not optional. Also, they're done now, woo.
  • Make progress on clearing out stuff I no longer want: I've been nibbling away at this. I'm making a point of filling my trash cart completely on each trash day. The city does free pickup for one full trash cart, which holds around 4 full trash bags. When it's just me, I don't even generate half a full trash bag from ordinary use. So the rest can be filled with things I don't want and doubt I could donate. I have so much more to go through, but I'm making progress. I really need to contact places about donations, though.

February Goals

  • Finish initial edits for Be That Way
  • Contact primary care physician if I haven't heard from specialist by 2/7
  • Contact at least one (1) place about donations. Of anything.
  • Finish reading Timecrossed Engineer
  • Call parents a few times

February Stretch Goals

  • Write some of The Secret Dragon
  • Play a romance soloRPG
  • Work on cover art or book illustrations
  • Exercise 20+ times
  • Track consumption
  • Track what I read (maybe try Storygraph finally?)
  • Make progress on clearing out stuff I no longer want
  • Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed
  • Ask Bookbub for a Featured Deal and run another ad campaign for a book
  • Get backmatter updated for whatever book I promote
  • Pick an old picture to redraw
rowyn: (tired)
 I had a gallbladder attack on January 18, which I wrote about in some detail for the next two days. I took a break from writing this to finally post it, friends-locked because so many medical details. x_x

I felt terrible for several days after the attack: exhausted and dizzy and in pain. This week hasn't been so bad, although on Tuesday and Wednesday, I had weird stabbing pains when I took a deep breath and sometimes while lying down. The weird stabbing pains were mostly gone by Thursday, though. Which is good because it happened every time I yawned. And I was tired all the time so there was a lot of yawning. x_x

Not long before the gallbladder attack, Bookbub had sent me a "hey would you like to learn how to do Bookbub ads?" email, which they do from time to time. I've always ignored it before but decided, eh, what the heck, and signed up for their "week-long course". Which consisted of "sending an email every day for six days explaining each step in the process."

After the gallbladder attack, I wasn't feeling up to doing much of anything, but "reading one email" was generally manageable, so I mostly kept up on the course.

On Sunday, January 26, I was feeling well enough to Do A Thing and decided making a Bookbub ad for Demon's Lure would be that thing. Then I got the price changed for it, which was quicker than I'd expected, so I went ahead and placed an ad.

I spent the next few days tinkering with Bookbub ads: placing new ones, changing designs, changing targetting, etc. My best campaign managed a CTR of 1.11%; given the price differential between CPM and CPC, I think most Bookbub ads fall in the 1-2% range. (Bookbub's business model is "subscribers sign up for daily/weekly emails advertising books in their chosen genres"; their CTRs are high because literally the only people who see the ads are people who opened an email to look at book ads in that genre.)

I made a new campaign based off the most-successful one and planned to keep it running for a few more days to see if I could bump the sales rank for Demon's Lure enough to get some algorithmic support from Amazon. But the CTR for the final campaign was 0.31% and nothing I did seemed to help, so I pulled the plug on the experiment. The early ads mostly did better than the later ones, so it may just be that I hit the "show it to people a 2nd time" thing and that was the dropoff? Not sure what happened. I expect I'll try again at some point. It was not close to profitable but it was fun to try something new with book promotion. Maybe if I keep at it for long enough, I will eventually grow my audience? That'd be nice.

If you've read any of my books and can think of a "you might like [this author] if you liked L. Rowyn [or specific books of mine]", lemme know. I need more comparable authors to target my ads. n_n

Wednesday, I did some adulting. I filed and paid for my business license and city tax on my business, and completed the personal property declaration for my car. I cleaned off a set of shelves in the office, throwing away old software and jewel cases, and putting the music CDs on a spindle to keep. 

I called my mother several days ago and let her know about the gallbladder attack, because usually those mean gallbladder removals and I don't know how this will impact my plans to move. I'm still waiting to hear from the specialist. And answering my phone when it rings during the day, which is so annoying because it's all scammers calling about "your property". Yes, I am interested in selling, but not to some spamming call center. Anyway, I don't know yet if this will be something like "you should get surgery ASAP" or "you should get surgery but maybe wait until after the move so there will be people around you while you recover" or even "you can make dietary changes and roll the dice if you want instead?" The last one seems unlikely given that apparently all the women in my family have had their gallbladders removed. I am doing better than most by making it to mid-50s with mine.

My mother called me Wednesday, a thing she literally never does. When us kids went away to college, our parents told us "you know our schedules and we don't know yours so we'll just wait for you to call us instead of bugging you with phone calls." When I was younger, they used to call on my birthday, but I don't think they've even done that in 20 years. So she calls at 6PM and I didn't answer because I have my phone set to Do Not Disturb outside of business hours so that I don't have to listen to scammers asking about my property. My mother immediately panicked because, I guess since she never calls me, it did not occur to her that I don't generally let my phone ring. Or answer it. (I've mentioned this to her before but I doubt it stuck.)  She called my brother and he emailed me that she was panicking. I  saw the missed phone call at 8:00PM and listened to my mother's message -- which, remarkably, sounded casual and not at all panicky, just "call whenever you get the chance". I called her back immediately and she fretted about the weird stabbing pains and wanted me to call the doctor. Again. I'm not calling the doctor until the two-week window where I was supposed to hear from the specialist is up. I should call my mother and let her know the stabbing pains went away, though. Maybe tomorrow, just in case they come back soon. 

I should tell Mom to call my sister when she's panicking about me, because my sister knows to check my Dreamwidth feed for news. :) Actually, the best place to get my attention is Discord, because I get desktop notifications for it as well as phone notifications. Everywhere else, I only see when I pick up my phone.

I didn't see the email from my brother until 9PM, but I emailed him to let him know I was okay and had called her. I do not think he'd panicked.

Also, I cooked on Wednesday! This is particularly noteworthy because my appetite since the gallbladder attack has been (a) poor and (b) wonky. I didn't get any dietary instructions from the ER, but a friend dug up some medical articles on gallbladder attacks, and these recommended not eating fatty foods and "the Mediterranean diet" and otherwise "eating healthy."  (My actual doctor was just "avoid fatty/greasy foods".)

And then my body went on this whole kick where I just didn't want to eat, like, almost anything that I would normally eat. At one point, I stood in the kitchen looking for the thing that sounded least awful and picked "sardines and crackers". I have not eaten sardines and crackers in 45 years. I only have sardines and crackers in the house because Eliyahu was eating them and didn't finish them all. I don't know why this sounded better than any normal food but, okay. I ate it.

I have mostly recovered my appetite, which is mostly good because forcing myself to Eat A Food three times a day was hard. Alas, now I am getting tempted to eat when I'm not hungry again. I still haven't done much of that because my normal snack foods don't sound very appealing, tho.

I'd bought ingredients a few weeks ago for my mom's spaghetti sauce, and had been thinking on Monday and Tuesday that it'd be nice to have it. I finally made it Wednesday night. Pasta + sauce + parmesan got to 20 grams of fat (mostly because I really love parmesan with my pasta & sauce). That's a little high for one meal, but not into the "fried chicken" range. I've cut back on both parmesan and sauce when having it for leftovers since. I had some for dinner and I kind of want more now that I've finished.

I wanted a snack Wednesday night and tried having some chocolate chips. I got like ten out of the bag, ate three, and put the rest back. Appetite still wonky.

Thursday was pretty quiet; I spent the day playing games, eating meals, and writing this entry. Oh, and I took a shower. I'd meant to do more decluttering before showering but forgot. I took a long nap, too, like 2.5 hours. In the evening, I did a little writing on The Secret Dragon, which was nice since I haven't been doing much creative stuff.

Friday was likewise quiet. I watched Vicorva's stream, played some games, and took a short nap. Post-nap, I decided going for a walk was too ambitious, so I emptied the last shelves of software and CDs, throwing away everything but music CDs. I ran out of space on the CD spindle so now I have two small round boxes full of CDs. The CDs do not fit very well in these so this seems like a sub-par solution but meh. 

I only have one small bookcase left to empty in the office. It's full of DVDs. I might keep a few of the DVDs in their cases, idk. DVDs feel like something I should make at least some effort to donate instead of just throwing away. Possibly they can go to the same kind of places that will take books?

I still need to clean out the closets. The closets are huge and jammed with stuff. I cried when I started to go through Lut's closet and I haven't tried again since. He had this one lap blanket that he loved; it has a print of a big cat in a light and dark brown, and his grandmother gave it to him. It's always felt "scratchy" to me, and I put that in quotes because it's not actually scratchy? There's just something about the texture that irritates my skin and I don't know why. I never liked having it touch me. But I don't think I can possibly bear to throw it away.

I have thrown away many of his things already. Old video games that he loved and kept the boxes as mementos. Boxes of cables and computer components. There's just ... a lot more to go still. I haven't even touched his clothes.

I dreamed about him last night. He was lying in bed, reading a paper book. I didn't know I was dreaming, but I knew it wouldn't last because I knew he was dead. But I thought, "Still, it's so nice to see him comfortable and doing something he loves."

My goal with decluttering is less "get rid of everything" and more "make it possible to identify to movers what I want to bring with me." And/or make it possible to identify what to remove to a junk-removal service.

Emptying the little bookcase took most of my energy. Maybe will read or write a little now.

rowyn: (huggy)

January 13

I got up around 8:30AM, and actually convinced myself to look at Be That Way in the morning, instead of spending the entire morning on RftG, Time Princess, and social media. I made some small fixes: moving a description to a more sensible place, and replacing all the placeholder names. I hadn't meant to start reading it but I kept reading several pages wherever I happened to be making fixes anyway, so I decided to start from the beginning. The list of changes is very short and most of them are easy, which makes me think that reading through it will bring other things I want to change to mind. Maybe not, though. Be That Way is a fantasy rom-com where the only conflicts are "people being annoying and ridiculous", so the plot is much less convoluted than some of my books.

In the afternoon, I asked Eliyahu if they were up for a walk. It was still below freezing outside, as it has been every day for the last week and a half. But they were leaving on Wednesday, so we wouldn't have any more opportunities to walk in pleasant weather, and at least it wasn't windy. 

Eliyahu: "Are you feeling like you either have to go for a walk or declutter more, and you can't face decluttering?"

Me: "Kind of? I don't mind decluttering but yeah, if I don't go out, I'm gonna declutter. And it would be nice to get out. We've barely left the house in the last week and a half." (We literally didn't go farther than the porch from Saturday until Thursday evening, when I finally gave up on the snow melting off and shoveled the walk.)

So Eliyahu agreed, layering on Lut's winter coat atop Lut's jacket, plus two shirts and two trousers, hat, scarf, hood, and mittens. I wore leggings, t-shirt, sweatshirt, and my winter coat.

Around 3PM, we drove off to see if the trail was walkable or if it was still covered in snow from the snowfall the weekend prior. Just before parking, I remembered that my biggest reason for going to the trail -- to get bubble tea as a reward afterwards -- was foiled by the bubble tea shop near the trail being closed on Mondays. Alas!

We parked anyway and followed the sidewalk towards the trail.  The sidewalk was not shoveled and still snow-covered. After a few hundred yards, we gave up and turned around without even reaching the trail, which I assumed would be worse. So that the trip would not be completely in vain, we walked a few laps around the arena parking lot near the trail, which was perfectly clear. The arena has a skating rink and some people were parked to use it, but no events were going on so it was deserted compared to the size of the lot. After the first lap, I stopped at the car to drop off my jacket because I was too warm. After a half-dozen yards, I went back to the car to take off my sweatshirt and put the coat back on; there was just enough wind to merit a windbreaker.

The cold really wasn't bad at all, to my surprise. My rule of thumb used to be that below 40F was too cold to walk for exercise, but apparently I'm more cold-tolerant these days.

In the evening, I listened to CoffeeQuills' stream and did multiplayer 4thewords with them while I wrote daily entries and The Secret Dragon

January 14

The last full day of Eliyahu's visit. They are at their limit on "time spent out of Canada" until June and have to stay in the country to retain their benefits, so I will not see them again for a while. ;__; I am not sure how visits with them will work after the move to North Carolina, either. My plan is to live with my parents and I know my parents will not be as keen on month-long visits as I am. Maybe I could rent a furnished apartment for a month so Eliyahu and I can hang out together and I'll just check in on my parents for that month instead of living with them? Which seems ridiculous, but I'm rich and can afford to spend money to solve problems.

In the morning/early afternoon, I read through more of Be That Way and drew a picture of Caliper, a goblin protagonist from the story. The goblins in the setting are cute little people, like the goblins in Alfie and Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic, so I've been wanting to draw one for a while. Picture came out okay but not great, so I'll probably try again. Maybe I'll try drawing a scene from the story next time.

After I finished the picture, we went for a walk around the arena parking lot again, this time with actual bubble tea reward at the end. Mm, bubble tea. :9

I joined Coffee's stream for a bit in the evening, while Eliyahu was busy with prayers and dinner. Got in some writing of The Secret Dragon.

In the evening, we played a game of Flamecraft while Lyric was uncharacteristically attention-demanding. We've played Flamecraft at least a dozen times, and Lyric had never before shown an interest in the board or jumping on the table while we were playing. This time, however, she would not stop. She hopped on top of it several times, batting at the pieces and lying down in the middle of the board and generally making a nuisance of herself. We tried playing with her, letting her outside, and giving her catnip, but she quickly lost interest in all of these things and as soon as we returned to Flamecraft, she wanted to jump atop it again. (Eliyahu also tried petting her, although she was very obviously not in a mood to be petted so I didn't). I don't know why she was so fixated on the game this time. I joked with Eliyahu that she realized they were leaving tomorrow and was demanding their attention while she could still get it.

Eventually, we managed to finish the game. Eliyahu won! We're pretty sure this is the first time they've won. \o/ I don't know what I do in general that makes me better at this game than they are. We have equal amounts of experience with it, because I've only played it when Eliyahu was also playing. Anyway, it was nice to have them win for a change, although Eliyahu is a very good sport and enjoys playing regardless of the outcome.

After the game, Eliyahu went to bed early so they could get up early for prayers. I stayed up until my usual bedtime and got some reading in. For the first time since I made the 2025 habit tracker, I checked off every habit on it. \o/

 

2025 Goals

Jan. 12th, 2025 09:02 pm
rowyn: (Default)
 I have been unusually reluctant to settle on my goals for 2025. 

Part of it is that I want to make more granular goals than usual, and I want to do a bingo card for them because I heard that as a suggestion for goals and it sounds like fun.  But I can make a normal new year goal list and then break it down into a bingo card later. I don't need to wait until I've figured out everything before I can get started.

Goals 2025:

  • Move to North Carolina
  • Assist parents
  • Collect the rest of my Apothecaria journal into epub(s)
  • Independent of my Apothecaria journal, complete six writing/publishing stages
  • Complete monthly updates
  • Be gentle with myself

Stretch Goals 2025

  • Keep up with the habit tracker most days
  • Keep up with the art habit now that Apothecaria's complete (Doesn't have to be as often as "drawing most days". Producing one finished art a month, doing curator prompts. Anything that shows that I'm not forgetting to do drawing/painting for months at a time).
  • Make a goals bingo card and see how that goes. I can add or restructure my goals any way I want for this. 
  • Exercise 15+ times per month
  • Play through a short journaling game
  • Try some more journaling games
  • Figure out how to measure personal improvement at art (every year this is a stretch goal because I still don't know how to tell)
  • Read at least a few pages of fiction (or a nonfiction book) I didn’t write, on most days
  • Redraw an old picture that I'd put considerable effort into at the time
  • Promote my books a little
  • Write 50 blog posts and maybe also post them?

Details

The Move

The critical reason I'm moving to North Carolina is to provide care for my parents. But moving to North Carolina makes sense even beyond that. Despite living in Missouri for twenty-eight years, I've never really "built a life" around the community here. I am unlikely  to build one in NC, either. My life is online and at my computer, and this is what I enjoy. But I already have friends in the area where my parents live, and given that I always make a point of seeing them when I visit my parents, it's likely that I'll see them at least once or twice a month if I live in the area, too. That's more often than I'm likely to get out in my current area. 

So, while I will let myself off the hook for moving if something happens and it no longer makes sense for me to provide care for my parents, moving is a good idea. I don't plan to keep my house in Missouri because I don't plan to return here, regardless of what happens with my parents.

Writing/Publishing Stages

These are:

  • Outlining
  • Drafting
  • Initial Edit
  • Final Edit
  • Cover Creation
  • Layout/publishing

They are not all equal. The stage that takes the most time Actually Doing the Thing is generally drafting, but drafting takes the least mental effort/willpower, other than cover creation. The part that takes the most time psyching myself up to do the thing is usually the initial edit, though the final edit is close competition and sometimes harder. Outlining gets harder every time I do it, but this is because I've been pushing much of the stuff I used to leave for Drafting into Outlining. Layout/publishing is so easy that I'm only giving it a stage because I deserve a cookie for getting that far.

This is my approximate timeline for each stage. Times are laughably imprecise.

  • Outlining: 3 weeks
  • Drafting: 12 weeks
  • Initial edits: 9 weeks
  • Final edits: 9 weeks
  • Cover Creation: 3 weeks
  • Layout/publishing: 2 days

But this timeline should not be interpreted as "it takes 36 weeks and 2 days for Rowyn to turn an idea into a published book." First, I don't work that way: I don't pick an idea and then work on it and only it until it's published. I give pretty much every book two rest periods of at least a month: between drafting and initial edits, and between initial edits and final edits. Many books get long rest periods here, and often I take breaks on books at other points, including in the middle of stages. Ask me how many incomplete outlines I have! I don't know, I'd have to dig around. At least three?

For my six completed stages in 2025, I expect something like:

  • 4 stages on Be That Way: initial edits, final edits, cover creation, layout/publishing. Time: 21.5 weeks
  • 1 stage on The Secret Dragon: drafting. Time: 11 weeks. (I got about a week done on it in December)
  • 1 stage on new WIP: outlining. Time: 3 weeks.

I expect November will take me around halfway through drafting a new WIP, but I won't finish it this year.

My process generally involves some overlap -- I'm likely to make a cover at the same time that I'm drafting or editing a different book without changing the time estimate for either. I briefly entertained overbooking myself and setting the goal at 8 stages, which would be perfectly achievable in a year where I wasn't moving and wasn't caregiving for two elderly parents. I am moving and caregiving. Sure, let's build some slack into that schedule.

Also, this is not The Official Schedule To Which I Must Hew. I have to do 6 stages. It doesn't matter what 6 stages.

Turning my Apothecaria journal into ebooks is a separate goal because (a) I don't know whether I'll be able to get the last 221 entries into one book or if it'll have to be two -- the image files are BIG and Atticus struggles to combine 200+ of them into one epub -- and (b) I refuse to edit it on the grounds that I'm not making any money from them and also editing the entries is a nightmare because each page is laid out with its illustration in ArtRage, which is a paint program, not a layout program. So (c) the only stages for it are "cover creation", which I am skimping on because Not Getting Paid, and layout, which is the easiest stage. The Apothecaria journal would artificially inflate the number of stages I can do in a year. Especially if I split the last 221 entries into two epubs instead of one.

Habit Tracker

Spirit City has a weekly habit tracker, where you can enter habits and then check them off if you do them. I like this concept and made it into a spreadsheet so I could look at past weeks and not just the current one. My current habits are: Edit, Write, Draw, Exercise, Read,  4tw. "4tw" is just "did I maintain my 4thewords streak this day y/n". "Read" means "read at least a few pages of fiction written by someone other than me." The bar for checking a box is low and I like it that way. 

I started using this on January 4 and even with the bar being low, I haven't checked off "Edit" once yet. o_o;;; I need to start on that soon, because one January goal is "read through Be That Way and make an editing list." That doesn't require a lot of time spent editing, but it does mean some

Blog Posting

I have actually written posts for Dec 14 through Jan 11. Some days are more detailed than others; I stopped writing about my days for two or three weeks and then got back to it and wrote what I remembered of the missing days. But I never bothered to post any of it. I kind of do need to post it because Dreamwidth is how I organize that sort of information and if it's not here I won't be able to find it again. I should just backdate a bunch of entries to keep it from being one ginormous entry. It might exceed the post length maximum for DW at this point. Idk if DW has a post length maximum tho. If it doesn't, I could just post it as one ginormous private entry, which would have the dual virtues of "putting it where I can find it later" and "not spamming folks with 30 days' worth of back entries."

rowyn: (studious)
 January 10

I woke at 7:40AM, did not want to get up, and checked Fediverse to see if Vicorva would be streaming. Stream was cancelled, yay, I could back to sleep.

But instead of going back to sleep, I started to play Time Princess, "just to do a few quick time-sensitive things". Eliyahu got up at 7:45AM and went out to shovel snow. Another inch of snow had fallen during the night, so they had to clear the walk again, too, but that part was quick.

Around 8AM, I gave up on the idea that I might go back to sleep and got up.

At 9AM, I went out to take the shovel from Eliyahu so they could do morning prayers. They'd gotten most of the driveway done, so I just widened the top a bit further and then cleaned off the car. 

Once the car was cleaned off, I went inside at 9:30AM to get ready to go out, and found Eliyahu had just finished showering and was still drying off. I sat at my computer for a bit while I waited for them to finish in the bathroom, so I could use it before I left. Around 10AM, I set out on Challah Quest. 

I listened to a podcast on the way there and most of the way back: Left, Right, and Center. I started following this podcast six or seven years ago, but I may drop it this year just because USA politics are so dreary now. The value of the generic "stay informed" is extremely unclear to me. The show got to the topic of trans atheletes in schools and I turned it off. I do not know why there is a national conversation over whether maybe 100 American trans girls should be allowed to play sports. Why are you this threatened by a tiny number of young women. Why do you care which kid is playing a sport you don't follow in a state you don't live in. Please just leave them alone. (Sometimes people care about trans boys in sports too but that seems so much rarer.) 

Anyway, I got challah and bagels and returned to the house around 11AM. For the next two hours, I did very little. I ate two bagels and a brownie, played a lot of Race for the Galaxy. Oh, and groceries arrived, so we got those put away. Around 1PM, I decided to take a nap since I wasn't doing anything else useful.

I woke around 3PM, dragged out of bed, and poked at my computer for a bit. A little before 4PM, I had Eliyahu keep me company while I made spaghetti sauce. I finished making food around 4:30PM and ate while playing RftG like usual. At 5PM, Coffee Quills started their stream and I wrote in my journal for the first part of it. 

For the rest of the evening, I wrote some of The Secret Dragon, and finally finished the last Apothecaria illustration. 

January 11

Woke around 8AM, played Time Princess for a bit, and dragged myself out of bed around 8:30AM instead of sensibly trying to sleep in further. Made breakfast, played Race for the Galaxy, ate a brownie, played some more Race for the Galaxy. Eventually dragged myself away from RftG and started writing up my 2025 goals. 

A little after noon, Eliyahu finished prayers and came in to play with Lut's computer (now the guest computer, since I don't use it.)  I'd thought to go through more of the living room credenza, but decided since Eliyahu was already in the den, I might as well decluter in the den instead. I have two drawer units next to my loveseat that are mostly full of cruft. I emptied the top two drawers and threw away much of the contents, then cleaned the drawers and put the drawer organizers into the dishwasher for a more thorough scrubbing. I moved most of the stuff I didn't throw out to the top of the credenza for staging. I want to organize things in a way that makes sense and so I'll be able to find it again, instead of stuffing them back into the same lack-of-order. 

I am not sure it makes sense to organize things when I plan to move soon anyway. But some level of organization will survive even the move; things stored together tend to get boxed together even when you're hiring movers. 

After I finished the second drawer, I asked Eliyahu if they wanted to play Flamecraft. I'd been carefully leaving the top of Lut's desk pretty clear so there'd be place to play. Eliyahu was up for that, so we played a game. This one was pretty quick by our standards: under two hours.

After the game, Eliyahu did afternoon prayers and I made myself late lunch/early dinner. I was cold after dinner, unusually, and so fixed a hot chocolate using the last of the premade chocolate bombs I'd bought in November. Storebought hot chocolate bombs are not as good as homemade but homemade are so much work. I used two little ones in a single cup of hot milk and that worked all right. 

Now it's time for Coffee Quills' stream but all I really want to do is declutter some more. o_o;;;

I'll try writing a bit of The Secret Dragon until the next break instead, and declutter after break if I still feel more like doing that than writing/drawing/editing.

~

Ended up just writing The Secret Dragon and doing a little reading after stream.

January 12

I posted the last Apothecaria entry. I'm free! \o/

I did more decluttering on Sunday. I emptied all the remaining drawers on my side of office with the exception of the tax paperwork drawer. Throwing away tax paperwork is not generally advised so I'm just keeping that. I moved one drawer into the living room, because it was a stacking drawer and didn't fit well under the drawers it'd been resting on. I moved all the music CDs into sleeves in a binders, stacked a handful of data CDs on a spindle, and threw away all the jewel cases. I haven't used any of these things in 10+ years, but once you get rid of the jewel cases, they don't take up much space and it's nice to have backups. In an ideal world, I would back up this stuff to some even smaller medium but ripping that many CDs would take quite a while. I also threw away all the ancient software (most of it was 20+ years old. The copy of Windows 7 was the most recent item. It's been a long time since we bought anything on CD.)

Lut and I had bought a few dozen movies/shows on DVDs, and most of these I will either donate or pitch, though. If I decided to stop using a music subscription, I might listen to the music I bought on CD again. But I almost never watch movies a second time. I'm not gonna dig out a DVD to watch something even if it's not available on streaming. I haven't reached the shelves full of DVDs or Lut's music yet, though. There are a few DVDs I might keep out of love or nostalgia, even though the odds I will ever use them are almost nil.

I restocked the drawers near me with a handful of things that I actually use, and put about half of the remaining things I hadn't thrown out in the drawer I moved to the living room. The top of the credenza is stacked with miscellaneous small items that I want to keep but haven't decided how to organize. 

After I finished with that, I showered and looked at my daily habits list. Coffee Quills had taken the day off because it's a holiday in Japan (where they live). So no stream to watch. I opened Be That Way and collected notes into an editing list so that I could check of "edit". Then I fought a few monsters in 4thewords while writing The Secret Dragon, so I could check off "write" and "4tw". I read a little of Timecrossed Engineer and checked off "read". I thought about drawing something so I could get "draw" checked, but didn't. 

I keep thinking of loading the last Apothecaria entries -- 221 of them, IIRC -- into Atticus, but not actually doing it.

The Time Princess society event "Fantasy Promise" started after at 11PM, so I stayed up fiddling with Time Princess and the event. My society is very keen on Fantasy Promise, and I'd dragged my alt into it to replace a long-time member at the last minute, because she hadn't logged in for the last 5 days and wasn't communicating outside the game, either. :( Hope she's okay.

Went to sleep a little late, but not ridiculously so.

 

June 2025

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