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rowynI woke very early, maybe at 6AM, and spent some time petting Lyric because she comes to collect early-morning pets if she sees I'm awake. When she was done being petted, I went to the bathroom and then back to bed.
Around 8:15AM I woke again, completely forgot to check if Vicorva was streaming (they were) and lazed in bed playing Time Princess until 9:15.
After getting up and eating breakfast, I illustrated and posted the day's Apothecaria.
I spent some time writing about the past two days in the early afternoon, starting before and finishing after my afternoon nap. Before CoffeeQuills started streaming, I went through everything I'd written during the 44-day challenge, because the only part I'd tracked separate from the total was "fiction drafted" and it turned out I wanted a more granular breakdown than that. If I do something like this again next year, I'll have to devise a new spreadsheet for it so I can track the breakdown more easily as I go.
I started writing up the challenge details before stream started, and finished it during the stream. From there, I switched to writing The Secret Dragon for a few paragraphs. Next, I worked on the Apothecaria illustration for the 12th. This one was pretty complicated. I spent more than an hour on it and still hadn't finished by the time stream ended.
After stream, I let Lyric in, gave her an evening snack, and poked around the web and Time Princess. I eventually went to bed around 11:45PM and fell asleep around 12:30.
Thurday, December 12
I woke around 8:15, and lazed in bed for an hour, mostly playing Time Princess, plus reading a little on Tapas and the fediverse. I unlocked the rest of a completed series on Tapas but have not been rushing through it.
Around 9:15, I got out of bed and made breakfast, then played Race for the Galaxy while I ate and for a bit afterwards. Around 10AM, I saw the Gneech had announced Surprise Art Stream. I wanted to finish up today's Apothecaria so I could post it, so I used the excuse to tear myself away from RftG, and hopped into the stream to chat and draw. Around 11AM, I finished the illustration but hung around the stream until it ended.
Then I made lunch and descended back into playing RftG for a while. RftG games are so short that they're like potato chips: I keep playing Just One More Game. I eventually did the text layout for tomorrow's Apothecaria, but instead of drawing it, I took a nap. I slept for an hour, and played Time Princess when I woke up. There's a new event story, so I read about half of it.
Around 4:15PM I got up and made hot chocolate, this time by melting chocolate chips into milk using improvised double boiler. (Fill big pot with water, heat on stove. Put smaller pot inside big pot, make sure there's enough water that the smaller pot floats, put milk and chocolate in smaller pot. Stir until melted. You don't need to use a double boiler for this, but it ensures you won't scald the milk or burn the chocolate because it can't get as hot as a pot resting directly on the stove, and it's easier to stir than using the microwave.)
I had meant to work on the next Apothecaria Illustration, but when I sat down, I saw Maggie had launched the Jokka caravan play-by-poll game she'd discussed on Discord several months ago. So I read the post and various reader comments and RP regarding it, then put in my two cents. By then, it was dinner time. Food and more RftG! This is the pattern of my days.
I poked at the emails on my real-name account, which gets basically no personal email so I let it pile up. I just check now and again that nothing important is in it without bothering to clear it out. It doesn't get much Real Spam, but it gets email from Patreon and newsletters and I like looking at these things but not as often as they show up to be looked at. It also gets lots of confirmation emails and while technically I want the confirmation I don't really need to actually open it. I just want it to exist. As confirmation.
Many of the piled-up emails are from Healthcare.gov, which nags me every day or two that I should go to Healthcare.gov and check what insurance plan I want. It's not a disaster if I don't; it just means I stay on the current plan. The available plans are not that different. But it's still a good idea to look. I genuinely appreciate Healthcare.gov's tireless nagging on this point. An actual human would've given up on me by now, but Healthcare.gov is still trying. Keep it up, website. I'm gonna look at options on Friday or Saturday, before the window to change closes.
This reminded me of the estate tax form that the executor of Terrycloth's estate had mentioned I should expect back in October, and which never materialized. I texted the executor Thursday evening about it. He's on a trip at the moment but said that if I remind him on the 17th, he ought to have a copy he can scan to me. Which would be good. I need to figure out what my approximate taxable income is by the end of the year so that I can move money around to make sure it's in the right range.
There was no CoffeeQuills this evening; they've moved their one no-stream day per week to Thursdays (Wednesdays their time). So I have to conjure my own motivation if I want to do anything. I thought about reading more Time Princess stories, but remembered that I hadn't gotten my streak in for today in 4thewords
Then I thought about writing The Secret Dragon, but decided to write about the last two days as warm-up instead. The warm-up strategy worked pretty well during the 44-day challenge.
4thewords has started the Winter Wonderland event. This event lasts for a full month but it has far fewer quests than the 44-day challenge, so it's pretty relaxed. It does mean I get another month of battling ice ponies for mastery, which is nice. I loaded up on quests from it before I started writing this. One quests suggested writing about the year in review as a topic, while another offered the year ahead. Which are both things that I write about! But not until the next year actually starts, so mid-December is way too early for them. It feels like most web services want to do year-in-review stuff in December and I can't get used to it. The year's not over yet! When do you count things that happened in December if you do your review in December? Is the rest of December part of 2025? Do you just assume nothing that happens between December 15 and January 1 mattered?
When I did reports for the bank, we did tons of them for end of month/quarter/year. We always waited until after the last day before starting on those reports, because they had to cover the whole period. Perhaps this is why it seems so unnatural to me to start earlier.
I am thinking about it already, though. I will not be completing my year's goals for 2024. That's fine. It was a tough year for me. One goal was "Be gentle with myself." I'm gonna do that one.
When I finished writing about the 11th and 12th, I spent some time illustrating the next day's Apothecaria, and wrote a few hundred words of The Secret Dragon. I am content.
I stayed up late for no particular reason, and fell asleep around 12:30 again.
Friday, December 13
I woke up at 6AM and struggled to go back to sleep. I kept giving up and picking up a device to play with it, then putting it back down and trying again. I finally dozed off around 7:30, then woke up at 8:15. This time, I remembered that V would be streaming, so I hopped into the stream on my phone and got up. I played Race for the Galaxy through the stream. Grocery delivery arrived a little after the stream ended. I'd ordered ingredients to make more pasta sauce, including chopped onions. Which pretty much meant I had to make the sauce immediately.
I had accidentally ordered only one can of cream of mushroom soup instead of two. I considered adding some milk and canned mushrooms as a replacement, with a little flour for a thickener. And then realized that I was only making sauce for one (1) person and I could just halve the recipe. "But then I won't have as much leftover sauce. Only, like, 3-4 servings instead of 6-8!"
You have to understand that I really love eating the same thing meal after meal. I generally get on a kick for something I love and then keep eating that thing daily for months. I cannot relate to the "but we can't have [thing] tonight, we had [thing] last night" mentality at all.
I halved the recipe because that was better than leaving the house to buy a second can or risking a ruined batch with an ill-conceived substitution. I will have to order more groceries soon if I want to keep having sauce on hand, though.
At 11:10, I finished cooking and ate lunch.
Around 1PM, I dragged myself away from games and social media. I couldn't quite get myself to do art or writing, so instead I finally caught up on some administrivia for the Time Princess society I manage. I suppose that only half counts as getting away from games, really.
I lay down for a nap at 2:30PM and woke around 4PM. I stayed in bed, reading comics and Time Princess, until it neared 5PM. Then I got up to make a coke float before CoffeeQuills's stream started. Which turned out to be starting at 6PM. So I did some more Time Princess administrivia and then, at long last, went to Healthcare.gov to pick an insurance carrier. I had to fill out the form twice because I realized too late that I'd used the wrong estimate for my income. And you can't just change one thing on the healthcare.gov application: you need to go through the entire application any time you have to make a change to any part of it. x_x It's generally a good site for what it does, but that part is Not Great.
Once I'd finished picking health insurance, I looked into my 2024 income. I need to make sure my income this year is at least enough that I qualify for ACA coverage. My state never expanded Medicaid, so if I don't make enough money then I have to pay the full cost of health insurance for the year. Thus, I needed to know my total income before the end of the year, so that I could sell stocks or convert traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs to boost it up to the minimum if necessary.
I did not have the foresight to send myself my income for the year-to-date from the bank so I only have a guess as to what that is, based on the number of hours I worked and my extremely vague memory of my hourly rate. (I can find the amount the bank deposited in my account each pay period easily enough. But this is useless for determining my income because I was putting 75% of my paycheck into a Roth 401(k) and 20-24% went to taxes and other withholding.)
But assuming I am not wildly off on the income from my job, I have reached the minimum income for ACA coverage. Yay! I suspect the missing estate tax form will push my income up further, but I won't know until I see it. I possibly won't know after I see it, either, depending on how cryptic it is. Ideally, I should do my taxes before the end of 2024 to be on the safe side. Bleh. This will be especially challenging without the tax information from my job, which I probably can't get until January.
Still, I have achieved Minimum Necessary Adulting on the taxes-and-health-insurance front. Please be proud of me.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-16 07:17 am (UTC)Adulting
Date: 2024-12-27 07:32 am (UTC)I've told myself I'll get my finances in order in the new year, because 2025 is the year I'm going to make serious steps to seeing if I can break even working in the Arts. Which means I need to have a clean financial slate to start with, so, yeah. Thankyou for posting this; it gives me hope that I, too, can get my shit together.