rowyn

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. 

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

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.

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

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.

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."

It finished snowing on Sunday evening. News reports say the city got 10", but I don't think my neighborhood got that much. Maybe 6"? It's still too much snow. I took pity on the cat and shoveled the porches so she could stand outside without standing in snow. She periodically goes outside for five or ten minutes to glare at the snow in betrayal before she wants inside again. 

Eliyahu and I stayed at home again. I made an abortive attempt to tidy the living room, but couldn't decide what things I was willing to throw out and retreated instead. Lut owned a few thousand paperbacks and it falls upon me to get rid of these before I move. But throwing away books is psychologically hard. Vanishingly few places will take books as donations to resell anymore, though, so throwing them out is likely the only option. 

I illustrated three Apothecaria entries on the 5th and finished two more on the 6th.

January 7

I didn't do any drawing on the 7th, but I wrote some of The Secret Dragon and was happy about that. I want to work on The Secret Dragon more because I can't read it until I finish writing it and I really want to read it. One protagonist is plural and I love both of them. 

January 8

I finished the penultimate Apothecaria illustration and started work on the final one. Since it's the very last Apothecaria illustration, I decided to be ambitious about it. It includes 16 different characters. I've spent at least 2.5 hours on it and it's about one-third done. Fortunately, I don't have to post it until the 12th.

In between working on the two illustrations, I decided to tackle the living room again, this time by clearing Lut's desk. I've already decided I'm keeping all Lut's painting supplies and miniatures: there's too much sentiment and grief bound up in that for me to get rid of any of it. It can live in a corner of the room in my parent's house that I'm moving into.  

The unoccupied 2nd floor room of my parent's house is large for a single room -- something like 350 square feet, as I recall. But that's still much smaller than the 900 square feet of the main part of my house, pluse the 600 square foot basement and a garage large enough for two cars. My plan is to bring:

My king-size bed 

The reclining loveseat

The desk Lut used for painting (I will probably use this for my computer desk, in lieu of the ancient 8' table that the two of us had shared for our computers)

Maybe the giant office chair Lut got? I don't know. It's a nice new office chair, on the one hand, and on the other hand I don't use office chairs.

Probably some of the plastic drawers I've been using for storage forever? 

All of the Warhammer 40k/Kill Team/painting supplies stuff

Some amount of Other Stuff. This will be things like art supplies, art, clothing, costumes, and sentimental objects. I will bring some number of physical books, but this is likely to be a small number: a hundred, perhaps. Mostly the books I've written plus graphic novels and other particularly pretty books. I don't like reading physical books so I don't really want to cart them around. 

I strongly suspect that I will throw away unsorted everything in the basement and garage, aside from the wargaming supplies. I can't remember the last time I got anything else out of the basement. It's all things I've forgotten I own and wouldn't care about if I remembered.

Clearing Lut's desk went much better. I boxed up all the paints and paint brushes, and Eliyahu helped me break down the paint racks (four, huge) and paint brush racks (two, small). In the basement, I found an old box of 10x13 envelopes that I'd bought 24 years ago when I was on a brief kick of submitting stories to magazines. I pitched the remaining envelopes into recycling (I have not used them in 20+ years. I'm not going to. Submissions aren't even done by physical mail anymore) and boxed the parts for the racks and the paint brushes in it, then put the box in the basement with the other wargame supplies.

The two plastic boxes full of paints are still sitting on the desk, but they take up much less space than the paint racks did so it feels like progress. The basement extension (where I put the rest of the supplies) is unheated and having carefully boxed the paints I don't want to put them where the cold might destroy them. There's no guarantee they'll still be any good at whatever point I decide I want to do something with them (if that ever happens), but I want them to have a chance.

Eliyahu pointed out that the cleared desk is a much better configuration for playing Flamecraft, which has a long narrow board, than the card table in the kitchen. And also I don't use the desk for anything, so leaving a Flamecraft game set up on it will be much more convenient. We should play another game or two before they leave next Wednesday.

In the evening, I worked on the final Apothecaria illustration and did some journaling.

January 9

I decided to tackle the living room credenza again. Eliyahu joined me for company and moral support, which makes dealing with such things much more pleasant.

This time, instead of fleeing in despair, I started by emptying out a plastic tub full of ancient computer parts: cables, graphics cards, hard drives, a mostly-dead keyboard,  etc., all 10-20 years old. Lut hated throwing out computer bits and so I have at least three boxes of unused bits. I will pitch the other boxes in due course as well. I wanted an empty plastic bin so I'd have a place for "I can't yet muster the energy to throw this out" stuff. 

After emptying the bin into  a garbage bag and cleaning the dust and cat hair out, I went through three drawers in the credenza. The first drawer was full of junk I threw away without qualms, like miscellaneous bits for my previous two robot vacuums (both of which died, leading to my current robot vacuum.) The other two drawers were full of letters, cards, art, and art supplies. I was pretty sure I would not be willing to throw much of this away, but I went through it anyway. I pitched some old cards that didn't have personalized messages, some old drawings (of my own) that I didn't care for, and reminisced over other items with Eliyahu. Throwing out meaningless sketches was surprisingly easy. One side benefit of never successfully marketing any of my artwork is that I don't have any illusions that my pictures have value beyond my own enjoyment of them. Throwing out old figure drawings was especially easy; I'd only done them for practice, anyway.

I also found two ancient technical books: ones for 20-year-old systems that Lut had bought for school when they were current, probably. Those I also pitched without qualm.

By the end, I had two empty drawers and one re-packed with letters, cards, art, and art supplies. I should organize those further instead of just piling them all into a drawer. Some of the cards and letters are in boxes, but I don't have a single box that's a good size for holding all of them. 

I put some of the "can't bring myself to throw it away yet" tchotchkes from atop the credenza into a newly-empty drawer, which had nothing to do with early-stage-moving-prep but made me feel better about the state of my home while I'm still living in it.

The snow from last weekend had completely failed to melt, and we had grocery delivery scheduled for the next morning, so I finally went out to shovel a path from the kitchen door to the road. Eliyahu offered to shovel for me, but I wanted the exercise anyway. It was annoying because the snow was thick and wet, making each shovel-full heavy. But I managed the whole path in one pass. When I came in, I told Eliyahu that they'd have to shovel the driveway in front of the car in the morning if they wanted me to get challah, though.

Afterwards, I sat at my computer to do a little reading; a Scott Lynch novelette Tuftears had linked me to, and Tuftears' Timecrossed Engineer.

I wrote some about my day, and a bit of The Secret Dragon. I am slogging through a difficult scene, but I'm almost to the fun one where two protagonists meet for the first time. 

Also put some additional work into the final Apothecaria illustration. Still not done.

The next day, Sophrani's parents arrived earlier than expected. I spent the morning before they arrived playing with my devices and doing a little bit of writing on my Surface. 

The parents arrived early enough that Sophrani was still busy getting ready, so I spoke with them for a while as she prepped. Her mother wore a red-and-white scarf from a German football (aka soccer) team; she'd asked Sophrani to get her this scarf from Germany when Sophrani was there decades ago for school, and takes great joy from it.

We went to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch. Because Envoy and his SUV wasn't there, we tried to pile the five of us into Kage's antique Jaguar sedan for the trip. Sophrani's dad said he didn't care whether he sat behind Kage (no leg room because Kage is tall) or the middle seat. I sat behind Kage and Sophrani's dad struggled to fold up into the middle seat. He managed to cram into it and her mom sort of squeezed in next to him but this looked very perilous. "I'll take my mom's car," I said.

"I'll ride with Rowyn!" Sophrani seconded. "I can guide her if we lose you. Mom can sit in the front seat of the Jag and Dad can sit behind her." We piled out again. 

I had kind of a terrible time getting out of their driveway: they have a very long, steep driveway, and while it has ample space when I'm driving up it, it is much too narrow for me to back down without a backup cam. And my mom's car doesn't have a backup cam. The top is more than three cars wide but I struggled to turn around in it with Sophrani's parents car up there. (Also, I always have this problem, tbh.) Eventually I managed, though.

Even though it was a Monday afternoon, the Cheesecake Factory was crowded. They told us it was a 30-minute wait for a table, but the actual wait was closer to an hour. We spent some time browsing the It'Sugar nearby. When we returned to the restaurant for the remainder of the wait, the noise around the lobby was so great that I went outside to pace instead. My feet do better with pacing than standing. Kage suggested I try shoe inserts to help with my feet hurting if I stand for long, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Fortunately, the booth area was much quieter and we could talk through the meal. Sophrani told me about her bsky account, which she mostly uses to chat with other quillers (quilling is a papercraft) and showed me some photos of her quilling. Ooh, pretty.

Sophrani had a small gift card for Cheesecake Factory and gave it to Kage so he could use it to pay for part of the meal. He went to the restroom and was still away when the check arrived. I put my credit card on it.

Sophrani looked at me. "You got dinner last night. And Kage's got the gift card."

"And I won't fight Kage over it if he comes back before the waiter gets the check. But he has to at least make an effort. Some effort. He's not even here."

Fortunately for Kage, the waiter was distracted by another table and a problem with a drawer, so the check was still on the table when he returned. I let him replace my card with his (and the gift card).

After lunch, I drove Sophrani back to her place. I tried Envoy's trick of turning my car around in a little side drive off the main driveway and then backing up. I got about ten feet up and decided this was good enough and we could walk up to the door. 

I stayed a little bit longer to visit, then went back to my parents' home and spent the evening with them. Most of the time I spent at my parents' home was either watching murder mysteries on TV with my father in the living room, chatting with my mother in her office, or sitting with my mother in her office while we used our respective computers.

I pretty much don't watch videos at home. I'll watch very short clips (5 minutes or less) if they're linked to from social media, and I'll watch Last Week Tonight. That's about all I've watched at home since Lut passed away. When I'm visiting my parents, I watch so much video, though. Most available recliners are in the living room, where my father watches TV unless he's playing poker. I thought the only other recliner was the one my mother uses, in her office, but it turns out there's a recliner in a corner in my father's office. I may try using it on my next trip, although I suspect the sound of the TV will be too loud in the office to make it a good spot to sit in peace. When I move there, I'll bring my reclining loveseat and have the movers install it in the big empty second floor room, with my computer, so it'll be comfortable to stay up there and it's reasonably quiet. I worry that I'll spend a lot of time hiding on the second floor when I'm living there, just because I really do not enjoy the amount of TV noise generally going on in the house. My mother watches much less than my father, but she still enjoys videos and spends several hours a day watching them. 

I watch a lot of videos while visiting my friends, too, but their tastes are much more similar to mine and also I'm not staying with them for several days at a time, much less living with them.

My mother and I ordered groceries on Monday evening for delivery on Tuesday morning. This included ingredients for lasagna and sugar cookies, both of which I would make.

I also tried to set up the tablet pen with the Surface. It didn't come with sync instructions, so I web-searched for generic ones. After some fiddling, I eventually got the tablet pen to light (as generic web instructions said it should) while I held down the eraser-button, but my Surface didn't recognize it no matter what I did.

At this point, it was too late to order a tablet pen that would arrive during my visit. I gave up on the business.

December 24

I made lasagna for Christmas Eve. As with all my previous efforts to make or bake something, this involved an extra trip to the store: of all things, I had forgotten to order lasagna noodles. I picked up a few extra things while I was there, including a disposable lasagna pan so I wouldn't have to worry about overflowing or using two pans or cleaning the pans afterwards.

I made a huge quantity of lasagna because making half a lasagna recipe has never occurred to me I guess. Over the course of the next four days, I ate most of it, with help from my parents. My father had a good chunk of it and my mother had a few pieces. I ate the last piece on the 28th and was surprised that we got through it.

I decided to try fingerpainting on my tablet to see if I could make Apothecaria entries for December 27 and 28 that way. The last time I tried tablet fingerpainting with ArtRage, it had sort of worked, in that I could draw, but not really because if I picked up my finger and then put it down again, the program drew a straight line between the two points instead of doing nothing while I wasn't touching it. 

This time, it worked the way I expected intuitively: it drew while I was touching the screen, centered on the center of the pad of my finger, and didn't draw when I wasn't touching it, and of course wasn't sensitive to any changes in pressure because the tablet screen doesn't register pressure -- it's the stylus that might be able to, and it has to report that to the device. 

The fingerpainting experience was adequate, so I illustrated an Apothecaria on Christmas Eve.

December 25

I baked sugar cookies: a double batch because in the first batch I used half a cup of butter instead of a cup by mistake. (I do not know how or why this happened. It was a weird mistake given how often I've made this recipe.) 

My mother has one extremely heavy, thick baking sheet. Cookies on this baked very slowly, I guess because the sheet was too thick to heat quickly and kept the cookies cool longer? It was weird. The cookies came out in a variety from "squishy and dense" to "crisp" to "normal". I made far too much frosting and then for reasons unclear to me put it in the fridge instead of pitching it because what was I gonna do with an extra two cups of frosting? Idk.

Cookies are my one Christmas tradition: I mail out cookies every year to my family and a few friends. Sophrani always gets a box but I delivered hers in person on the 22nd. My parents got fresh-from-the-oven ones, since I was there in person.

Christmas was otherwise quiet: just watching TV and occasionally chatting. I started the Apothecaria illustration for Saturday's entry.

December 26

My mother wanted me to replace the batteries in the smoke detector, so I did that today. I wrote about this adventure in my December review post, so I won't describe it again here. I got to pair the trip to get AA batteries with the trip to get my mother's near-daily McDonald's quarter-pounder fix. She had done without on Christmas Eve and Christmas and could bear it no longer.

I finished the Saturday Apothecaria entry on this day.

December 27

I visited Sophrani/Kage/Envoy again, getting in a little earlier in the afternoon and leaving around 11:00PM. I picked up McDonald's for my mom before I left, and she let me take my dad's car (it's the newer one that she usually drives) to see my friends. Since Dad's car has a backup cam, I was able to use the "turn around in the side drive and back up" strategy successfully this time. Huzzah!

We did our usual mix of socializing and watching videos. We watched the rest of the Secret Level episodes, with an exception or two that Kage panned. For dinner, we went to a small fancy restaurant. After dinner, we saw watched a bunch of "Love, Death & Robots" episodes, sampling the ones Kage or Envoy had found particularly interesting.

December 28

I spent my last day in the area with my parents -- once again, my flight left late. 

One day when I was there -- perhaps the 26th or the 28th -- my father left to play poker and I sat in the living room to play with my computer. My mother came in to keep me company, but wanted to watch TV. Both my parents have TVs set up only for streaming services, because their cable company stopped supporting their Tivo and my brother was like "if they have to figure out a new system for TV anyway, it might as well be streaming which is cheaper and offers more shows."  But for whatever reason, my father and my mother's TVs aren't set up to stream in the same way. My mother's TV has you browse different streaming services: "this section is for PBS, this section is for Peacock, this is for Netflix, etc." My father's TV has you browse by category, wandering through mysteries, rom-coms, popular films, etc. When you find a show you want, it pops up what services you can use to watch it. I hate this, because there's no "only show me what's available on services I'm already paying for" option.

I actually hate the entire "watch streaming on a TV" experience because using a TV remote to browse or enter a show name is awful. But since I don't watch videos when left to my own devices, I didn't notice this until I was trying to help my parents with their devices. Lut and I always watched streaming videos on our computers. Technically I own a TV, but only because I've never bothered to throw it away. It hasn't been turned on since 2008 and doesn't work because it doesn't use the current standard and we didn't bother to get the then-free adapter to let it work because why would we.

Anyway, my mother spent a good forty minutes wandering through shows on my father's TV, trying to find something that (a) she wanted to watch and (b) she didn't have to set up an additional streaming service for. Like, even if they weren't already subscribed to 5+ different streaming services and didn't want another one, it's not clear how you'd actually use the TV to buy anything. Probably you'd have to buy it on a computer and then somehow convince the TV that you'd bought it. It would probably involve logging into the account that only my brother has the password for and that he will not share with anyone else, including my parents who actually use the account. There's at least one streaming service that they subscribe to that isn't set up on my father's TV as it is. Nothing about the "streaming to a TV set" experience is intuitive. 

My mother never succeeded at her "find something to watch on Dad's TV" quest, but she said she was enjoying the process, so good enough. I got her to chat for a bit about other things, like moving one bookcase from her office and into the living room, so that we could put a second recliner in her office. I advocated for this because I'd spend more time with her if there was a recliner for me to sit on instead of an ancient office chair.

Late in the afternoon of the 28th, while I was sitting in the ancient office chair, the metal arm on it broke. It didn't even break at a joint: the metal itself snapped. The design of the office chair is such that the whole back lists to one side and will probably break the other arm. Fortunately, the only person who ever sits in it is me; my mother just uses it to pile clothes on when I'm not there. When my  oldest brother visits, he uses the seat on her walker if he needs to sit with her for a bit.

Two or three hours before my flight was supposed to leave, I got a text from Southwest that it was delayed by an hour. I checked the website, and the new landing time for my first flight was 5 minutes after the connecting flight took off. This seemed to me to be A Problem.

It did not appear to be A Problem to Southwest's website, which offered no particular insight on what I was supposed to do after landing. With a midday flight, this sort of thing generally means a few hours of delay while they put you on the next flight, but with a late-evening flight, the odds of being stuck overnight at an airport go way up. 

Eventually, I web-searched to find Southwest's phone number (the mobile website wouldn't show it to me) and called them. Wendy, a lovely customer service rep at Southwest, agreed with me that, yes, landing 5 minutes after the connecting flight leaves is suboptimal. She found an alternate route that left half an hour later but the layover was on the way to my destination instead of out of the way, so it's scheduled arrival was only ~10 minutes later. Perfect!

She tried to schedule me on it, and the computer system gave her a cryptic error message. 

Wendy: "I'm sorry, I have to put you on hold while I get someone to sort this out."
Me: "oh no customer service needs to call customer service"
Wendy: "I know right???"

It turned out Southwest's system had given her a hard time because I'd already checked in on the previous route. They got it straightened out. 

Plane travel went smoothly from there. I read more of Time-Crossed Engineer on the flight, and also did a bit of writing on The Secret Dragon. My connecting flight pushed back from the gate a little early, even, so that we landed at about the time my original flight was supposed to land.

Getting home from the airport was more troublesome. First, since I'd neglected to get the letter and number of the stop nearest where I'd parked, I had to find my car. I described the spot to the shuttle driver: "I entered lot A, turned left after a few rows, drove through a gap in a fence that separated two lots, and parked near row 14, not far from the fence."

Passenger: "That sounds like you entered lot C. I think that's near the E7 stop?"

Driver: *dubious* "There's a number you can call for a service that'll help you find your car, I'll give it to you before you get off."

Shuttle: *drives through a gap in fence separating two lots, passes sign for row 14*

Me: "Oh, there it is."

Driver: "Are you sure? You want off at the next stop?"

Me: "Yes, I can literally see my car, it's fine."

As I drove home from the airport, a thick blanket of fog enveloped the area, and escaping from economy parking was particularly hellish as I had to rely on "exit this way" signs to navigate, and some of them were literally set up to guide cars in a giant circle. Four consecutive signs with "Exit" and a right arrow icon. I do not know what they were thinking. But between night and fog I couldn't actually see where the exit was. I ended up following another car and then both of us got lucky and escaped.

My car has an automatic setting for headlights, that turns both headlights and brights on and off as appropriate. Usually I leave it on this setting because it works well and I don't have to think about it. For this drive, I switched it to manual "headlights only, no brights" because the fog was so thick that the brights just reflected off the fog and made my night vision worse instead of increasing illumination. I had Google Maps navigate me to home because I wasn't sure I'd see road signs in time. It was excrutiating.

Between searching for the parking lot exit and the fog, I got in around 1AM. Eliyahu was awake and waiting for me, so we hugged and I talked about the awful drive home and sat at my computer to decompress. I stayed up another hour or so, playing Time Princess and looking at social media and whatnot. Eventually, I felt relaxed enough to sleep.

Managed to fall asleep around midnight instead of staying up to 12:30 or 1AM, yay. I woke around 6AM and struggled to get back to sleep. Lyric saw me struggling and came to snuggle me, which was sweet of her even if she was doing it because she wanted me to get up to feed her and/or let her outside. I did not get up (except to use the bathroom) and eventually fell back to sleep around 7:30AM.

When I next woke, it was 9:50AM. I lazed in bed playing Time Princess for a while, then got up. It was late enough that I decided to skip breakfast and go straight to making lunch. I gave Lyric her lunch, too, and then she went outside. Played Race for the Galaxy and posted Apothecaria while I was eating lunch and for a bit afterwards. Caught up on some Discord channels and fediverse. 

Around 1PM, I dressed and went out for a walk, listing to Small Angry Planet some more. I didn't think I'd taken an unusually long walk but it was 2:30 before I got home. At home, I let Lyric inside, showered, and sat at my computer so Lyric could enjoy her dry cat food snack with human company. I'd been thinking about getting a Coke float and writing or drawing Apothecaria, but the walk left me Very Tired. I'd thought that after 9-ish hours of sleep last night, I wouldn't need a nap. And maybe I didn't need a nap. But I took one anyway.

I got out of bed at 4:45PM, so I could make hot chocolate before Coffee's stream. My hair was still wet from the shower and the rest of me was no longer warm from it, so I was cold and a hot drink sounded nice for a change. I heated it for longer this time; my candy thermometer said it was 146 degrees instead of 128. I thought that would still be fine because the last hot chocolate had felt warm and not hot to my tongue when I drank straight from the mug, and had cooled quickly even in an insulated mug. But 146 turns out to be hot enough to scald my tongue even after blowing on it in a spoon. I don't know why my tongue is so sensitive to heat.

I started a game of Race for the Galaxy because Coffee hadn't started yet, but they began stream a few minutes after 5PM. So I joined their multiplayer room, finished the RftG game, and started writing this.

I worked on The Secret Dragon for a bit, and then did the illustration for Sunday's Apothecaria. I went to bed on time but struggled to get to sleep, finally falling asleep around 2AM.

Sunday, December 15

Sleep-wise, very similar to Saturday: woke early, snuggled cat, fell back asleep until 10-ish, then took a nap in the early afternoon. Went to bed on time but didn't fall asleep until 1:30 or 2AM.

The weather was nice again, but I didn't really want to do the whole "get dressed and go outside" thing. Telnar called around 11:30AM, while he ws driving for half an hour to visit a friend.

Instead of walking, I worked on clearing out some junk from the sun porch. For 20 years, we've kept litterboxes on the sun porch, along with an assortment of random items Lut and I were not very attached to. Everything stored in that area is covered in a patina of litter dust. Most of it was garbage: files of paperwork from 20+ years ago that we hadn't cared about when we put it there and care about less now. I discovered a stack of photographs that I haven't tried peeling apart yet to see if any are salvagable. I suspect they're convention photos; a few people in the local con scene used to take thousands of photos every con, and  they'd give prints of them to the people they photographed if you wanted. Very generous. <3 This became less popular as digital photography became common -- I knew a few people who'd email pictures, but now I don't even know anyone who emails. I think this is as much because I only go to one con with an aging attendee base as anything else. Might also be that I'm not young and sexy anymore. (Instead, I am old and sexy.)

Also some parts for paintball guns that Lut hadn't used in 30 years. And a small cache of sff books in a back corner. I checked to make sure none of them were signed or otherwise fancy, and then pitched them. Even books in good condition are hard to donate and I didn't want to try salvaging ones covered in 20 years of regular dust plus litter dust.

All of this was hidden behind a giant empty monitor box. Lut always insisted we keep the original packaging for monitor boxes, "in case we moved." I threw out some empty monitor boxes while he was in the hospital in 2017, but this one had survived the purge. Since I actually am planning to move soon, I had figured I'd keep it and was clearing stuff around it.

Then, after squirming behind it for half an hour to get to the stuff stored behind it, I took a good look at it. And realized it's not for any of my current monitors. It was for a dead monitor that was also sitting in the way in front of it. 

*facepalm*

I pitched the styrofoam and plastic and cords inside of it, and folded up the box to stuff it in the giant recycling bin. It went out with the trash on Monday. 

A little while after Telnar's call, I finished up on the sun porch, having filled about a trash bag and a half plus some recycling. There was still more on the sun porch, but I figured I'd get to that when Telnar called again later that evening, for the drive back.

After cleaning myself up and resting for a bit, I decided to take a nap. I got up from the nap in late afternoon, and considered doing more work on the sun porch. Instead, I went into the kitchen and started cleaning out the pantry.

When Telnar called, he observed that "cleaning out the pantry" seemed like more of a short-term task than one associated with "thinking of moving in 3-4 months." 

Which is fair. But a) cleaning out the pantry was a thing I should do at some point before moving, b) "I might buy more food that expires and also will need to be thrown out" does not mean the expired food currently in there doesn't need to be thrown out, and c) cleaning out the pantry is not only something I should do before moving but also benefits me right now. The clutter in the basement of doom is largely invisible to me on a daily basis. I barely notice it even when I go down there to do laundry, and laundry is about the only reason I go to the basement.  The sun porch clutter is a little more noticeable but not that bad. Whereas the lack of free space in my pantry annoys me every time I get groceries, and makes the whole kitchen more cluttered because stuff I could put in the pantry if there was room is instead on the counters. 

I had almost finished with the pantry when Telnar got off the phone, and it was almost time for CoffeeQuills. I decided to finish with the pantry before sitting down for CoffeeQuills, so it was 7:15PM when I finally hopped into the stream. They'd started multiplayer already, so I futzed about for an hour and then thought "oh no, I must have missed Coffee saying it was time for the next monster." And then realized that they were fighting a Sunserk (a 2000 word monster) so it would be A While. I worked on an illustration. They finished the Sunserk at 8:35PM and I hopped into multiplayer for ice ponies at 8:45PM. I spent the rest of the stream finishing the illustration. I keep doing multiple-character illustrations even though they take forever.

Monday/Tuesday, December 16-17

I don't remember much in the way of specifics from these two days. I went for a walk at the midtown park on at least one of those days, possibly both. I kind of think just one, though. I reinstalled Google FIt several weeks ago, so I can check that. Okay, it says I walked on Monday and did some pacing on Tuesday. So I went to the park and did three laps on Monday, then got a Thai bubble tea afterwards. I successfully resisted the urge to go to Cinnabon, though. 

Tuesday, I called my parents as a reminder that I'd be flying in on Saturday.  I also ordered groceries for Wednesday, because I had to bake cookies on Wednesday. I checked what I had on hand against my cookie recipes, and ordered everything I was out of or didn't have enough of.

Eliyahu messaged me that they thought the hostel might have been infested with something and that, despite their precautions, a bug of some kind might've gotten into their luggage.  I ordered some giant plastic ziploc bags for next-day delivery (reinstating my cancelled Amazon Prime when they offered me a week for $2, which was cheaper than next-day shipping for one order).

Wednesday, December 18

I was just about out of time to bake cookies and get them mailed out in a timely fashion, despite having basically no other distractions in my life. I got the grocery order in early afternoon, and realized right after the delivery person left that I hadn't gotten cream cheese. I checked my grocery order, and yes, I had ordered it, and Walmart had charged me for it. It just hadn't arrived. I reported it only and got a refund because there isn't a "no I really need it" option. Walmart gives In-Home customers one free express delivery in December, as a kind of holiday gift/enticement to shop. I double-checked my recipes (again) to make sure I didn't need anything other than cream cheese for cookies, then put together an order of shelf-stable goods plus cream cheese and asked for it express. It arrived an hour later. 

I started baking snickerdoodles while I waited for the cream cheese to arrive, and then made sugar cookies afterwards. While baking sugar cookies, I realized that while, yes, I had everything I needed for the cookie recipes, I always ice the sugar cookies and I hadn't checked for icing ingredients.

...

I placed a third Walmart order, this time a regular one for the morning. And then thought "this is ridiculous and I want to get the cookies iced tonight, before Eliyahu gets back in the morning." So I went to the little Hispanic supermarket that's 3/4ths of a mile away and got powdered sugar, then came home, canceled the Walmart order, and iced the cookies.

I chatted a bit with Eliyahu while baking. 

After I finished baking, I packed a bag with clothes and 25-gallon sealable storage bags for Eliyahu's arrival.