rowyn

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

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

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

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

None were available.

...

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

Monday, May 5

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

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

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

Three minutes after midnight, four locations had appointments available.

Huh.

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

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

!

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

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

Tuesday, May 6

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

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

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

Mom: "No."

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, May 7

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

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

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

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

Sue: "You bet!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, May 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, May 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This morning, I woke early with a sore throat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, April 20

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

I told Dad the plan.

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

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

Dad: *mock-pouts*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ATM was out of order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, April 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, April 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, April 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Thursday, December 5

Too long ago; I don't really remember what I did on this day. I recall that my new tablet had been originally scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. Then I got an email that it was delayed until Friday. At 10PM, I checked my phone and discovered it had been delivered an hour ago. Eliyahu brought it in for me but recommended I let it warm up before playing with it. They'd actually damaged a motherboard by using a too-cold computer once, which surprised me. I've had issues with batteries being unhappy about cold weather. Regardless, I left it in the box overnight.

Oh, and I illustrated three Apothecaria entries on Thursday. One in the morning to post, and two in the evening so I'd have entries to post on Friday and Saturday. I laid out a fourth entry and made the sketch for it, but didn't finish it.

Friday, December 6

I got up around 9AM and unboxed my tablet while making breakfast. I spent some time getting it set up. As soon as I got it connected  to the internet, it went "Conducting set up, this may take a few minutes", and downloaded a ton of apps I didn't want. It also tried to convince me I wanted to copy things over from another device (I don't; I have welcomed our Cloud Overlords and don't store anything locally that isn't backed up in the cloud). Eventually it let me log in to my Google Account and install Time Princess.

I also deleted every pre-loaded and loaded-upon-connection app that it would let me uninstall, and disabled some that it wouldn't let me uninstall so I wouldn't have to look at them when I was searching for the few apps I care about. (Seriously, there's like a "Youtube Music Kids" app or something that can't be uninstalled. So much cruft taking up so much space on the apps list.) 

A little later, the tablet popped up a notification asking me to either "complete setup" or "remind me later" because "no" isn't a thing modern tech bros understand. x_x I picked "complete setup". 

It reinstalled all the cruft I had uninstalled, and re-enabled everything I'd disabled.

...

So I uninstalled it all again. It has not asked me to complete setup again, so there's some hope that I'm not just gonna spend the rest of this device's life telling it "remind me later". We'll see.

I understand why people jailbreak Android devices, though. I don't enjoy digging into the inner workings of my devices but I may yet end up being one of those people who does it.

This aside: Time Princess plays nicely on the new tablet. I had primarily gotten the tablet because my phone has two issues: 1) the battery is pretty degraded and 2) it doesn't have much storage space free.

1) is a little inconvenient but given how rarely I am away from home for any length of time, it's fine. For the rare time when it matters, I can use an external battery. 

2) is because Time Princess is enormously, ridiculously, storage-intensive. It had grown to consume 33 gigs of space on my 64-gig phone. You can tame this growth by telling it to prune individual books, or, more dramatically, prune everything. But both approaches mean that you have to re-download a bunch of stuff to access various aspects of the game and eventually it'll bloat up again and you have to prune and then re-download and bleh. Anyway, my phone is like 50% Time Princess and 40% OS and 10% everything else* at this point. From a storage perspective, I practically don't have anything else* on the phone. 

*Technically, I have installed a total of 12 apps on my phone. The Tapas app also bloats up and can only be pruned by uninstall and reinstall, but it's still under 5 gigs. The Kindle app is just over 1 gig. Everything else is tiny.

So I wanted a device that could easily handle Time Princess's bloat and -- perhaps! -- even let me install a Second App. Obviously, I could get a new phone, but I thought that a tablet would not only be significantly cheaper than a modern phone, but might be more pleasant for things like Time Princess and even some other things I do on my phone (reading comics and books). 

I'll probably try ArtRage on it at some point, just because, although I don't think it'll have any advantages over my Surface in running that. I also installed Learn2Speak, a gamification app for learning languages that I backed in Kickstarter ages ago and that just came out for Android. I should put some reading apps on it, too, but haven't yet. For now, I've only used it for Time Princess, but I enjoy it for that. Time Princess is a lovely game and it's nice to see the details on a larger screen.

Around 10AM, Eliyahu woke up. I asked them if they wanted to get challah for the Sabbath from the Jewish bakery. 

Eliyahu: "...well, if you have the energy for the drive." 

Me: "I wouldn't have offered if I wasn't up for it. Also, we can get bagels." I like their bagels; their onion bagels are definitely better than any other onion bagels I've tried in the city. But my favorite bagel type is asiago and they don't make that, probably because asiago is a bagel abomination in their eyes (fair). My second favorite is cinnamon crunch, also, one presumes, an abomination, and definitely not available. 

We drove the 20 minutes to the Jewish bakery and acquired challah, six bagels, and a tub of rosemary-garlic cream cheese. 

Me: "So, do you want to go for a walk while we're already out or do you want to go home and enjoy our bagels?"

Eliyahu: "Will going out for a walk later be an option or...?" 

Me: "Probably not. I mean, I might have the enthusiasm later? But I definitely have it now. When we're already in motion."

Eliyahu: "We'd better do it now, then."

So we drove to the park. It's 20 minutes to get to the bagel place from home, and then 20 minutes to get to our usual park from the bagel place, and then 20 minutes from park to home. They're not all equidistant; the park is physically closer to both home and the bagel place than home and bagel place are to each other. But the park is in midtown and there's no highway near it, so getting their takes longer for the distance. The drive time was another reason I didn't want to go back out later, especially if we were going to the park.

It was high 40s Fahrenheit out; Eliyahu wore their jacket and leather hat. I wore a sweater. After two laps, Eliyahu tapped out of the third because they were too cold. This was partly my fault -- if I'd mentioned the possibility of walking before we left, they'd've brought their mittens/scarf/toque. In any event, we returned to the car, stopped for Reward Bubble Tea, and went home.

During the Coffee's stream in the evening, I made good progress on The Secret Dragon outline, resolving most of the remaining plot issues.

Saturday, December 7

I gave up on sleep relatively early, at around 8:15AM, I think. I heard LawnGuy outside raking leaves. I don't usually do anything with the leaves because there's only a few places where the leaf cover is dense enough to impede plant growth, and also I don't care about the yard beyond making sure nature is not going to eat my house and the city is not going to fine me. However, I plan to sell the house next spring, so having the lawn look less awful would be helpful. Plus, LawnGuy's wife passed away from cancer a month or two ago, and I wanted to help him out. He's messaged several times asking for work, so he's clearly having a bad time of things. 

I first hired a lawn service back in 2017: LawnWoman, as mentioned here: https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/615832.html and here: https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/616357.html. LawnWoman never ran the business in a very formal way. I've always paid in cash on the day of service, and she seldom bothered with receipts or invoices. She often had people working for or with her, though. At some point, a year or three in, LawnGuy became one of those people. Then LawnWoman and LawnGuy got married. At some point, LawnGuy more-or-less took over the business; I stopped seeing or hearing from Diane. The reason for this became clear later, when we found out LawnWoman had cancer. x_x She outlived Lut, but not by much. I will never forget her kindness in taking on my much-neglected lawn and doing an incredible job with it (she charged for much more than a mow but did SO MUCH MORE than mow it, ZOMG.)

LawnGuy asked me to give him half after he'd done most of the work, so that he could pay for his room. And then he'd come back to finish up. I gave him the full amount and a little extra and then he didn't come back. o_o;;; But he came by while I was out the next day and finished the job, so that was fine.

In the morning and early afternoon, I struggled to start writing. The outline for The Secret Dragon was mostly complete, but still needed some denoument scenes. Eventually, I started to poke at those. Around noon, Lyric stopped lying on my feet in the loveseat, so I was able to get up, feed the cat, and make lunch. 

Eliyahu got up in time to eat lunch with me. After lunch, I poked a little more at the outline, then gave up and took a nap. Which meant we didn't go for a walk today, alas. Though after the cold walk on Friday, Eliyahu was kind of relieved to be absolved from walking Saturday.

I got up from the nap about an hour before Coffee's stream, and poked at the outline a little more. 

During Coffee's stream, I spent three hours in multiplayer, working much more diligently at the outline. I outlined the denoument scenes and made some adjustments to earlier parts of the outline to reflect material I'd come up with later. I also started writing this entry. In the last hour of stream, I took a break and spent most of it playing Time Princess on my new tablet.

After stream, I started reading through the outline, making adjustments as I saw issues or remembered things I need to reference earlier. And also reading my favorite bits aloud to Eliyahu. Eliyahu commented that it was nice that I enjoyed my own outline so much because it'd be sad if, having put so much work into it, I found it tedious and unpleasant to go through. I know some authors don't like their own books very much, but I have no idea how they keep themselves motivated to stay at it. 

It's getting near bedtime now, so I'm working a bit more on this entry before I play more Time Princess near reset. The new tablet's battery is perfectly healthy and capable of making it through an entire day of my playing Time Princess on and off, which is nice after getting used to plugging my phone in often throughout the day.

Sunday, December 8

I got up early, around 8:15 AM, but didn't do much in the morning beyond finish the Apothecaria entry I'd started Thursday night, so that I could post it now. Because I'd forgotten to finish it at any point in the last two days. 

Around 11AM, I lay down for a nap. When I got up around 1PM, Eliyahu was making food. We waited for the food to finish cooking and then I ate some for lunch (Eliyahu had already eaten and had made it to have ready for their dinner in the early evening). Afterwards, we went out for another walk at the park. The weather was very nice for December: mid-50s Fahrenheit, albeit breezy. We each dressed as we considered appropriate for the weather.

Eliyahu, who I feel compelled to note is from Canada and grew up in central British Columbia, wore two pairs of slacks, two scarfs, a toque, mittens, and a jacket over a long-sleeved shirt.

I wore a t-shirt and leggings.  I brought a sweatshirt in case I got cold, but left it in the car.

90% of the other people walking at the park: pants and a hoodie/sweater/sweatshirt.

Over the course of three laps, I didn't add any layers and Eliyahu didn't remove any. (Honesty compels me to admit that I was chilly during the windier stretches, but it didn't bother me enough to get the sweatshirt out either time we passed the car.) 

We saw a few people in shorts and hoodies but no one else in a t-shirt. So basically, we were both freaks. 

I have always been a heat-tolerant person: I keep my house at 78-81F in the summer because I am quite comfortable at those temperatures as long as the humidity is low. (The outside humidity is high in my area, but AC does a great job of keeping it low inside my house.) Eliyahu is the only healthy person who's ever made me feel like I'm cold-tolerant, though. They walk all the time in Canada -- they don't drive so they've always considered it unremarkable to walk several miles in a day, just for things like groceries or appointment -- and they manage winter weather via Many Layers and warm clothes.

After three laps, we picked up bubble tea (Eliyahu got malted hot chocolate with crystal boba, and thereby discovered the difference between crystal boba and popping boba) and went home.

I showered, drank my bubble tea, worked on this entry some more, and played Time Princess. My tablet started bonging at me, as if it had some important notifications. It had many irrelevant notifications. I couldn't even tell which notification it thought was important enough to bong over. I have taken away its Making Noises privileges. (Its speakers were already muted but apparently that is not enough to keep it from making notification sounds.

I am down to 13,600 words and 2.5 days left for the "250k in 44 days" challenge. I haven't done any dictation in the last two days. I should really do some tonight because I haven't written much else today, either, and there's only two hours left until my bed time. 

It'd be reasonable for me to start writing The Secret Dragon now, but I'd like to finish looking over the outline first. The outline is Very Long -- over 20,000 words! -- because I've gotten in the habit of making very detailed outlines. To the point where I wonder if they qualify as zero drafts now. Anyway. some of that is me talking to myself as I try to work out a solution for a plot problem. You would think that there'd be no difference between me thinking "the characters need to come up with a clever solution here. Which unfortunately means I need to come up with a clever solution." "..." "clever solutions sure are hard, aren't they?" and me writing those exact thoughts down. But it's much easier to keep myself focused on Resolving This Issue if I force myself to write about it. Talking about it is almost as good. I solved some of my plot issues during dictation this time around. But writing about it is somewhat better.

If I'm just thinking about it while staring at a blank screen or into space, I'm more likely to let my attention drift to something more interesting and immediately rewarding. I have occassionally managed to focus on plotting entirely in my head, but it's rare. (One notable incident was when I accidentally locked my phone in a rental car after returning it after hours. I spent the four-mile walk home plotting out the climactic scenes of Golden Coils in my head instead of on my phone, as I'd planned. But doing it in my head actually worked for a change and I was able to write out the outline of the stuff I'd worked out when I got home.)

Anyway, I want to make sure I've got all the details in the right places in the outline before I start writing it. Even if it's unlikely that any changes to the outline will affect the first few scenes. 

I have a hard time napping for under an hour, but I decided to give it a shot. I must have fallen asleep, because I had a dream where I was at a Rush concert. Where they were playing Laura Branigan' "Self Control" (no, the dream didn't explain why) and I was flying in my oval cat-bed-esque-pillow. At a musical crescendo, my pillow landed on the stage. I woke up before I had to explain to Rush what I was doing on their stage. I stayed in bed another 20-30 minutes before coaxing myself up to wait for Coffee's stream to start.

Earlier, I went to the park in midtown, so I could get bubble tea and dim sum after my walk. The weather is cool but not too cold for walking; I did my first circuit of the park wearing a sweatshirt, then dropped it off at my car for the second circuit. I've been to various sites trying to find out how long the trail is, and gotten wildly different lengths. I think, based on how long it takes me, "1.4 miles" is probably the most accurate. I am a slow-ish walker and two laps is a bit under an hour, IIRC. I used to have Google Fit track this stuff automatically for me, but it turned itself off and then uninstalled itself after I didn't walk anywhere or open it for 6 months. Poor app. 

I have since finished my bubble tea and half of my dim sum (the other half is saved for later). And tried to motivate myself to write. Unable to convince myself to write fiction, I am settling for 'let's write about my day.' 

And I just remembered that I wanted to do some stuff in Time Princess, so I've started that. I have to click on it now and again while it plays so it's only a little automated. Ah well. 

This morning, I woke around 7AM, at which point Lyric went "Ah, you're awake. It's time for snuggles." So I snuggled her for a while and then failed to get back to sleep after she was done snuggling. And then Lyric wanted more snuggles. I gave up on sleep and got up around 8:15, after more cat-cuddling. 

I woke from a dream with an amusing note: in the dream, I watched a presenter show an AI-generated video that included a cat knitting, using two giant ball-tipped rods instead of needles. The presenter than pointed out features that proved this was AI-generated, such as that while the knitted piece grew larger, the ball-tipped rods were unsuitable for knitting and also the yarn never looped or went over the tip of the 'needle'. 

Awake, I thought, first: wait is that right about yarn and needles? I didn't know I knew enough about knitting to give any remotely accurate description of what knitting-in-progress looked like. And second: it's a Cat. Knitting. Of course it's implausible. I don't feel like AI has a lock on crappy animation that doesn't reflect how things really work. 

I managed to go to bed at a reasonable time last night! Around 11:30. At long last! I went to sleep a little after midnight. Still want to shoot for a little before midnight, but hey. Progress.

CoffeeQuills streamed earlier than usual last night, from 4PM to 7PM in my timezone, because they had an errand for later in their day. I had finally remembered a thing I wanted to do in my Apothecaria journal, so I worked on writing that up. I managed 3400 words! It felt like the first day I'd gotten a decent word count for fiction since I finished writing Be That Way. Which it isn't; I wrote 3200 words of the Apothecaria journal on the 20th, but I'd miscalculated and thought that was only 2200. Mostly, I worked on The Secret Dragon outline from the 18th through the 21st, but I was so frustrated by my lack of "tangible progress" (ie, words in general and words on a manuscript in particular) and also because I kept thinking I was "almost done" only to discover some plot hurdle I hadn't really tackled at all yet. x_x I do not love outlining but writing books without an outline is much worse for me. And editing books that I didn't outline is a nightmare. I don't like editing as it is. I'd rather frontload the task at the outline stage.

But it's November and I want to be writing fiction. /whinge 

I have considered working on the early part of The Secret Dragon -- I outlined this part already and surely it's not going to change, right? 

This way lies regrets.

So I might finish writing my Apothecaria journal instead. I ran out of illustrated entries on November 21, so I illustrated a new one on the 21st to post on the 22nd. And then a reader pointed out that there was a weird gap between entries and I realized I'd illustrated entry 610 right after entry 608 and skipped 609. I pulled it down as soon as he pointed out the mistake (thanks, MSL!) and drew 609 early on the 22nd. 

Other than that, I spent some time on the 22nd petting Lyric and playing Time Princess. And doing some dictation word salad while doing those. I also managed some actual constructive writing using dictation! I still can't use dictation to "write faster", which is the big argument for dictation. But I can use it to write while petting the cat. It's slower than typing with both hands but faster than not writing at all.

I should be writing The Jewel-Strewn Night. I've made some progress on the draft this month; it's at 29% complete and started at 20%. But my goal was 40%. So you'd think "well, it's the 28th, you're not gonna make as much progress in the next 2.5 days as you did in the entire rest of the month. May as well give it up." But the book is projected to be short, around 80,000 words, so 11% is less than 3000 words per day. Which is a totally normal pace for me during Nanowrimo and honestly not ridiculous for a three-day weekend (all my weekends are three days: the joys of working part time). It's not a matter of possible: it's a matter of "I don't feel like it." It's been a struggle all month to get myself to work on it. It's not writer's block, or even more resistance than I usually have to writing my next draft. It's that, this time, I have some things I actually do feel like doing, so it's competing against them instead of "what else you gonna do? You're already current on your fediverse feed. Checkmate, procrastination."

My Friday started out a little weird. I've been waking up at around 5AM the last three days, which is normal, and then failing to get back to sleep and instead getting out of bed around 6-6:30AM, which is not normal. Today, I woke up at 3:30AM, checked my phone out of habit, and saw that I had a text from my credit card company. "We declined a transaction from amazon.com.br because it looks super fishy. Was this you? Respond 'yes' if it was, though you'll still have to place the order again because we already declined it. Respond 'no' and we'll cancel your card."

Me: (This seems weird but maybe Lut did it? I'll ask in the morning.)
Me, waking again at 5AM: (well, Lut came back to bed a few minutes ago, I'll ask him.)
Me to Lut: "Did you place this $$$ order from British Amazon?"
Lut, half-asleep: "yes?"
Me: "Really? What was it? Chase declined it so if you really want it you'll have to place it again."
Lut: "paint."
Me: "But you already have a ton of paint and you backed a kickstarter for yet more paint, why would you order EVEN MOAR?"
Lut: sleepily gets back out of bed to figure out what happened
Me: thinking he got up to place the order again (Well, he said 'yes', I guess he placed the order.) texts 'yes' to Chase.
Lut: "Can you send me the message?"
Me: copies the text to Lut
Lut: comes back to bed 15 minutes later "Okay, no, this wasn't me. Also, this is Amazon Brazil, not Britain."
Me: "...oh."

Lut initially thought it might be him because the Kickstarter he backed in February had just shipped the first installment of its fulfillment process, and he'd bought some add-ons through the KS's fulfillment process. But this was (a) the wrong amount and (b) would not go through Amazon of any nation and (c) KS had taken most of the payment back in February. No relationship.

Me: gives up on sleep and gets up to log in to my Chase account, where the card in question no longer exists. Not 'is closed' but 'has no record of any sort'.
Me: "????"
Me: calls Chase

So it turns out that sometime between 2:30 and 5:30AM, Chase decided "if this was her, she'd have responded by now." So they automatically cancelled and reissued the card. The old card number vanished from my account after the cancellation, but the transaction history will reappear under the new number when they're done processing the new card issue.

Me: "So it turns out I actually misplaced my other Chase card so can you cancel and reissue it too?"

That one had not had the numbers stolen: I'd lost the physical card. The one which had its numbers stolen wasn't missing: Lut and I still have our copies of the physical cards (we're both on that account, which is why I had to ask him if he'd made the suspicious charge.) Anyway, the upshot is that I have zero working credit cards at the moment. Oops. No online purchases for me for a while.

By now, the sun was almost up, so I went outside for a bit. A sleep article I read on Tuesday suggested getting some sunlight when you wake up. I am not sure this has done any particular good for me, so far? But it doesn't do any harm. On Wednesday and Thursday morning, I went for a long walk, but on Thursday I was starting to develop a blister so I thought I'd just sit on the porch today. Maybe I'll do something else for exercise later.

I ate breakfast, played a little Race for the Galaxy, and then discovered Veo Corva had cancelled their stream. So I decided to go back to bed for a nap. I may take another nap this afternoon, too. No guarantees.

After napping for an hour or so, I got up and started this entry by way of putting off anything more productive. I think I will illustrate an Apothecaria entry. I've been trying to make at least one each day and haven't done one yet for today. I've done extra ones on a few days, so I have entries to post for Saturday and Sunday already, though. But if I want to keep my buffer, I have to keep doing a new one each time I post one.

(Why do I want to keep a buffer for the story I am writing and illustrating for fun? Why am I keeping to a 7-days-a-week posting schedule for it? Why aren't I posting it to Dreamwidth at all? I don't know any of these things. Looking at all the illustrated entries does make me happy, though.)

Work today was busy. One of my co-workers wanted me to go over in Zoom how to put together a particular query, and then once she had me in Zoom went "and just one more thing" a few times with unrelated queries, which amused me.

Annoyingly, the way I'd thought should work -- use a UNION with NULLs as placeholder values for the columns that didn't exist for one of the queries to unite -- generated a conversion error message for absolutely no reason. HMPH.

My bank has been planning to replace pretty much all of our software packages, which is kind of amazing given how long they have resisted changing some of these systems. One element of the overall strategy has been "get everyone more training" so they contracted with a huge online tech training site to let everyone take as many online courses as they want. I started one for BigQuery, Google's query tool. We're not using it yet but it looks like we will at some point in the future.

The course includes labs using BigQuery, which is pretty cool. Each lab has you make a temporary student account in BigQuery, and then you can use the student account to do the lab assignments. Three weeks ago, I got to the first lab and was completely mystified by it because the instructions for the lab in no way matched the actual options available in BigQuery. I spent ten or fifteen confused and frustrated minutes trying to figure out how to match what I could do with what the lab was telling me to do, and then gave up.

I was out sick the following week. Last week, I went back to try the lab again and see if it had miraculously fixed itself. I discovered that the course had marked the lab complete, with a grade of 100%, instead.

...

I thought about wrestling with the lab again ANYWAY because I actually want to learn the product and not just get a digital record that says I learned the product. But I decided to take the win and moved on to the next lesson. There would be more labs and this lab had looked like more like a tutorial on how to use the GUI than anything more detailed.

Today, I made it through some video lessons on SQL (I even learned things I didn't know, which might seem surprising given that I've been writing SQL queries for ~20 years. It did not surprise me because everything I know about SQL I learned either by dissecting someone else's code or from Stack Overflow.) And I got to the next lab.

This time, I got to a confusing part at the start of the lab (I don't remember what happened three weeks ago so I am not sure if it was the same confusing part) and made Lut look at my screen while I said "where is this option, it's supposed to be here, oh now I see it, thank you." Rubber ducking ftw?

Anyway, the actual lab part was "take our broken queries and fix them", which was pretty fun. The lab also included muItiple-choice questions to test whether you understood the fix, which were incredibly bad and obnoxious. One of the multiple-choice answers it insisted that I select before it would mark the section complete was "SQL code is missing a page title".

Reader, I do not know what a "page title" is supposed to be in a SQL query. I have been writing queries for 20+ years and I have never put a page title in the code for any query. The videos that went over writing SQL code did not mention the phrase "page title". Nothing in the example of "corrected code" appeared to be a page title. I have no idea what the lab meant by this question or why it thought a page title was a necessary component.

I did a lot of cursing at the terrible questions.

The lab was timed, but the timing was generous -- it allowed fifty minutes and I finished in twenty-five or so.

The funny part about this, to me, is how anxious and upset the timer made me. When I was in school and had timed tests all the time, and school was my only priority, I never worried about tests or completing on time. Now, when I often contemplate retiring early and have zero concerns about staying employed or getting another job in this field, the idea that I might RUN OUT OF TIME is EXTREMELY UPSETTING. Never mind that I can retake the lab an infinite number of times until I finish it within the allotted time frame. I am yelling at these multiple choice questions for not making sense when literally I can pass them just by picking options at random until it tells me I'm done. I do not know why I am so wound up over these things.

Anyway, I passed the lab and the test and then discovered that the next "week" of lessons were all pretty short, so I finished that week and now I'm ahead of the course again, yay!

I worked an extra 40 minutes today, which I never do. But there was a live Google workspace tips thing that started right after I normally log off work, and I wanted to attend it. And I wanted to finish the last few minutes of week five's lesson plan so I could take the quiz while the lessons were still fresh. Week five was boring, though, just going over pricing plans for BigQuery. Which is sort of important even for someone totally uninvolved in the purchase decisions, because you need to know how to optimize your queries for the pricing structure so that you don't wind up racking up unnecessary processing charges.

I like the online course structure overall, though. The hands-on labs using the actual software are a good touch; I feel like I'm actually learning something useful.

After work, I took a nap, and then picked up takeout at Lut's request, and visited my local friends for a little while. I tried to call Terry, but his phone didn't even go to voicemail this time. :/ Just got a "person is not available -click-" message. Hopefully I can reach him tomorrow.

On Wednesday morning, I woke up and my back had gone out: that distinctive and painful feeling where your lower back muscles go on strike and when you move the rest of your muscles try in vain to make up for it and it hurts to do anything but lie down.

I have thrown my back out before, usually when I strain the muscles by lifting something heavy in a bad way. This time, I did it while sleeping. This is how you can tell I'm old. It runs in my family: my father permanently crippled his ankle two years ago, while asleep in his bed. No, neither of us sleepwalk or do anything more complicated than roll over while asleep. Sometimes your body just randomly breaks.

Anyway, Wednesday was also Lut's monthly oncology clinic appointment, so I had to drive him to the clinic that morning.

Also, it had snowed overnight.

I contemplated calling a cab for Lut, and also driving over the snow instead of shoveling the drive -- it was only an inch or so. But taxi service in my area is poor and Lut doesn't have a smartphone so he can't use Lyft or Uber. My driveway is at an incline and shaded, which means that (a) packed ice can trap my car in the driveway pretty easily and (b) it takes a long time to melt off. So I summoned all my determination and went out to clear the walk and the drive. It was little enough snow that I could use the shovel to push it to the side instead of having to pick it up, so this was actually possible. I don't think any amount of willpower could've made me pick up a shovel full of snow more than once. Because it was so little snow, the city hadn't plowed my street yet, for which I was grateful. It meant there was no large ridge of plowed-up snow that I would have to struggle to move and possibly not be capable of either moving or driving over. Instead, I pushed the snow out of the road in front of my drive, too.

I am extremely proud of myself for getting this done at 8AM while in significant pain and with a marginally-functional back. BE PROUD OF ME, INTERNET.

By nightfall, my back was mostly-functional again, and then I went to bed and struggled to walk again in the morning. Lather, rinse, repeat. It does seem to be improving faster today, at least. Hopefully in a few more days it'll be back to normal.

I haven't done much since it went out apart from required stuff, like dropping off & picking up Lut and also prescriptions, and finishing out my 20-hour work week at my day job. I did the color doodle of Anesh and that’s about it. Sitting up in the reclining loveseat at my computer is uncomfortable but I do it anyway. I haven't tried sitting at Pretend Coffee Shop, which is less comfortable than the loveseat in the office even when my torso is fully functional. This morning, I made hot cocoa with marshmallows and motivated myself to write this blog post, so that's something. And also, my cat is lying on the footrest next to my feet and is super cute.

I will probably get some writing done tonight, because CoffeeQuills is doing their usual Friday writing stream and those are fun.

I'm gonna write a little about CoffeeQuiills' stream because the thing I like about it is not obvious from the description. They break the stream into 10-minute blocks, using an on-screen timer: a 10 minute "progress sprint", then a 10 minute break, then repeat. During the sprints, CQ writes quietly, and during the breaks they chat with their audience (CQ talks, audience types in the chat bar). Chat is mostly casual and about whatever anyone feels like talking about -- sometimes writing, sometimes other stuff. During the sprints, the audience can watch what CQ is writing, but the feel of the thing is more "you should work on your thing while I work on my thing!" They even call them "progress sprints" rather than "writing sprints" so that people who want to work on non-writing things will feel included. The pacing suits me very well: my attention tends to wander when I'm supposed to be writing, but focusing for 10 minutes is short enough that I can generally manage it. The 10-minute breaks likewise suit me: long enough to talk a bit or to get up and stretch and refresh my drink. It doesn't leave me feeling rushed or pressured. And I write quite a bit more over the course of one 4-hour stream than I do when I just decide "I'll get some writing done today": a couple thousand words, without ever feeling as if I'm forcing myself to struggle onwards.

And it's companionable: CQ and their audience alike are friendly and encouraging. For me, the stream is much more about "hang out with nice people while you all get stuff done and say kind things to one another" rather than "spectate as one person livestreams their writing." Nothing against people who enjoy the latter, either as streamer or spectator! But I am not a good spectator so a productivity-hangout has much more appeal for me personally. I started attending the livestreams during Nanowrimo and have made a habit of going to them on Friday and Saturday evenings (my time) since. (CQ is in Japan, so their livestream is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday morning in their time zone. They have an afternoon-in-their-time-zone stream Monday through Friday, but those generally start around my bed time so I seldom attend.)

Haven’t decided what to work on, either. It’ll be either notes/outline for my next book, or revisions for Angel’s Grace.