Spinning on that dizzy edge

Going almost two years without posting here was never a deliberate choice, but more a result of having nothing momentous to report, a trade-off I will take for the absence (mostly) of Bad Stuff. My immediate household is all vaxxed and boosted and has avoided getting COVID, though I did pick up a wicked cold from spending Christmas at my parents' house, visiting with several family members I hadn't seen since before the pandemic. I still have my job. The kid has been in person for school since August and doing much better scholastically as a result. (Last school year was a nightmare grades-wise and emotionally.) The husband is still unemployed, though he's been doing better about helping around the house. The dog is my faithful companion; I am grateful to her for providing the impetus to get out of the house at least once a day to walk her.

( Family, excuses, etc. )

Right now I'm in a contented state of the weather having finally snowed a proper amount, such that the ground is all covered and no mud/grass/grossness is showing through, and the forecast is cold enough that it should stick around a while. It makes my Northern European/Scandinavian, hygge-loving heritage so satisfied. The kid has also been on snow day vacation for the past three days, though he had to get up even earlier this morning to go with the school bands to a jazz band festival. At least I didn't have to drive him, just drop him off that the school and pick him up in a few minutes.

In short, Hi! I've missed talking to you all.

This is getting long, so I will make another post about participating in Festivids for the first time in AGES.

I got my walk in this afternoon, and it was delightful. I was bundled up in two layers from head to toe; the only part of the cold that was bothersome was my nose running, but that's what pocket tissues are for.

Here we are tipping over into February, and it turns out I am still nursing resentment from the holidays. I took off from work the week between Christmas and New Year's, and from the span of December 21st to January 1st I think I got all of a day as an actual vacation. The rest was spent decorating, cooking, shopping, wrapping, planning, driving, and being at other people's houses. My mom and dad were super grateful, even as it was occasionally weird and hard and awful without my brother there, but...*Sigh* And then my in-laws made me want to scream due to ongoing shenanigans and drama.

So I need to work on letting that go, which is hard, because I can nurse a grudge like nobody's business. I'm prescribing myself deep cleansing breaths and making lists of gratitudes. Like:

1) Our furnace has soldiered on like a trouper through this cold.

2) We had enough food in the house that we didn't have to make any emergency store runs.

3) I have a treadmill so I can get my steps in regardless of the weather.

4) The bills are paid and will continue to be paid for the foreseeable future.

5) Circumstances aside, it's nice having both of my boys home with me as I work.

6) I am lucky to have you guys as a sounding board and Team Me. Thank you!

TGTF!

SERIOUSLY. My customer DB turned out to have a nasty surprise in it, and so I found myself compelled to keep working on it. Until 10 PM. SELF, YOU CHOSE POORLY. At least I was catching up on my YouTube watching in the background. (kouredios, that Dan'n'Phil pumpkin carving was ridiculous and delightful. The guts!hair as the crowning touch! *dying*)

( Candy fail, family grief, kid progress, tired )

So yes, I would welcome some nice long stretches of boring. But first we have to get through next week. I swear just having the robocalls and email and text barrages come to an end would be a relief, but I am nursing a small sprout of hope in my heart for better.

I hope you all have a glorious weekend with lovely weather.

(Alas, Torrid doesn't seem to have them currently in stock.)

So wow, today was A Day. Crappy night's sleep, hours of meetings, kid forgetting his therapy appointment (we were late, but made it), kid resistant to acknowledging that trying and failing is still worth recognizing (thank you for the backup, therapist!), then off to the music store to buy more band materials, then to percussion lessons, then patience-sapping arguments about the unfairness of a world geared towards right-handed people, and the gendered pay gap, and his inability to have an open mind during discussions (you are 13, young man, and though you may feel like the internet is your teacher, a whole bunch of people know more than you do! INCLUDING YOUR MOTHER), then home, then more work to make up for the hours missed. Hi, 8 PM, how are you?

Then, bolstered by the wonderfully supportive comments from Team Me in the last post (Thank you everybody!), and armored in my villainous undergarment, I called my mom. Who was not pleased, but because of company, could only give me quietly upset voice instead of yelling. Because she had intended it to be a day trip? (She never mentioned that.) And didn't think it was a good idea if I went up by myself on Sunday. (Despite have said previously that I need quality time with my brother.) And because of the house guests, she'd have to talk to my dad and wouldn't be able to get back to me until Thursday, and couldn't understand why I was changing my mind when I'd already agreed. (Ignoring the "I think that sounds OK, but I have to talk to the family.")

Self, "It is okay if others get angry." Self, "It is okay to say no." Self, enjoy your glass of sangria and sleep all the sleeps tonight.

1. Despite my inability to post here in my own space (and the lesser frequency of commenting in other people's), I do in fact continue to exist.

( Kid, health, cancer, body issues, and VVC )

G'night, all!

It’s actually, properly September now, the Friday before the last long weekend for a while. The husband and kid both have today off, and I am working from home. OK, "working": I’m waiting for the meds to kick in to combat my current bout of cramps, while keeping an intermittent eye on the work queue and fighting off a case of the fuckits.

Things I am grateful for:

The Internet, for providing me such answers as how to hack my CPAP to slightly turn up the pressure, and confirming that the shamelessly manipulative packet I got in the mail is from a charity with a shady financial history.

OTC medicine that can tackle mundane body issues.

My job situation, which lets me work from home whenever I want, and my work team, who are such an improvement from my previous position that my frogskin is almost all the way recovered from the boiling treatment.

My immediate in-laws, who are a band of enthusiastic and affectionate goobers.

My son, who gives me hope every day that he’s on the path to being a happy, independent, self-aware adult, which is my biggest goal for him.


Things for which I’d like to file a bug report:

The failure of the future to deliver robot bodies and instantaneous transporters. I’d even take a mashup of the two, where you rent a remote body.

Local companies that don’t call me back for work I need done, even after I’ve paid them!

My parent company, who in their infinite wisdom decided that the division of the company I work at (as in I have a cubicle in that building) but not for (my boss and team are an hour south of me, but we’re all on the same network) is obsolete, so they’re letting 100 people go in two months and outsourcing those responsibilities to third parties who can do them cheaper. It’s not a surprise - everyone in the building has been seeing this coming, but the timeline was a shock. Most of the people being cut have worked for this company for 15 or 20+ years, so their skillsets are out of date and they're much closer to retirement than most companies would probably like; getting new jobs will be a grim prospect. I am both grateful and guilty that years ago I jumped at a new position in another division when it was offered, but it doesn’t stop me from being angry at the recent decision. Fuck capitalism and its naked greed.

Right now I am also angry at the sheer awfulness of people; the hate playing out in the White House and the US, and across the world, make it really hard to raise a kid with any sense of optimism and belief in the merits of being a good or even decent person. It would be helpful if the positive news came in amounts larger than glimmers.

It’s a comforting delusion to believe that me and mine are insulated and far away from Those People, the racists and white supremacists, even as the local bumper stickers and check-out line conversations would indicate otherwise. But then I run smack dab into people I know, in the family circle, who are unbelievable DICKS, and my brain fugues into WTFery.

( Content warnings for familial anti-Semitism )

*deep breaths*

It doesn’t help that I’m still angry about something that happened to my son earlier this week. I picked him up from the library, where he hangs out in the teen space after school, and noticed that he was a little bit tense. "Mom, don’t be mad," he started, which never seems to end well, and proceeded to tell me that he had loaned his phone to an older kid who claimed that he needed to call his family. The phone came back to my kid with the battery almost dead, with multiple open tabs of porn and a porn app installed. My son closed and uninstalled everything, but he was worried that I or his dad might think that it was his doing, because he was pretty sure that the other kid had done it to get him in trouble. I had to hug him and assure him that I wasn’t mad at him at all, but I was plenty angry at the other kid for abusing his trust and making him feel bad for trying to be helpful. I also thanked him for being so open with me, and pointed out that being able to trust him meant we would automatically believe him.

I understand that the real world is mean and full of harsh lessons like that, but damn it, fuck that kid for reinforcing that the world will screw you over given the chance.

ARGH. I’m happy that it’s a long weekend; here’s hoping that everyone gets a restorative break. With enough deep breaths and restful sleep, I might even move past anger for a while.

...is what my library suggested as a search term when I mistyped "Bette Midler Friends". I was disappointed to find, though, that they didn't actually have any listings for "Butte Milder Friends". Way to lead me on, library! I remain amused that all the CDs I've looked for are in "Easy Listening". Tell that to 10-year-old me, who found it hard at times to sit through hours of Barbra and Bette and Judy, and wished her parents were into cool old bands like the Beatles. :)

The music hunt is to fill in some missing songs for what I hope to be a 20 minute photo collage vid for the anniversary party. I have about a week left before I enter the party/VVC Thunderdome, and I'm at minute 7. It feels weird to be throwing photos at the timeline instead of moving footage, like it's almost cheating. But in trying to build a loosely chronological narrative, I'm missing a chunk of about a decade, so I'm raiding my own photo albums trying to fill in the gap. Clipping is a pain, no matter the source. I'm also talking myself down from the ledge that my parents' reaction will be a bland "That's nice, dear", or "Well. That happened." Stop caring, self! Just do it!

The job queue was blessedly slow this morning, so I spent hours cleaning up email, both work and personal. Signing a lot of online polls and such result in a ton of political email; I had to resort to some mass deletions just to be able to see legit messages. I can breathe now and not click away from that tab in a panic.

Tomorrow, if the weather and other random acts behave, I should be getting a new patio poured. I still have to clear off the crap huddled on the small remaining patch of concrete so it can get broken up and replaced. Progress, please!

All in all, not a bad Monday. I hope you all had at least a fair one as well.

So the conversation with my mom went about as badly as I thought it was going to. When I brought up that Vividcon was the same weekend as their anniversary, and proposed that I would be at the con Thursday night through Friday night, then jump back to their place for Saturday, then duck out Saturday night to get back to the con, you'd think I had taken a dump on the whole concept of anniversaries. I'd promised to help with cleanup! she shrilled. How could I even think that I would have any time at all for the con! she demanded.

She can't get over how "last minute" I am in planning this party. This party, about which I have been trying to get any details or preferences out of her for almost a month now, for their anniversary which is 2 months away, because she wants me to coordinate everything with my brother first, to whom it came as a surprise that this is their 50th anniversary year, because math is hard?

I just...RAGE RAGE RAGE. Because in her mind, as the girl, as her daughter, of course everything should be on me, because social facilitating (AKA emotional labor) is women's work.

I am already fucking sick of this whole thing and trying not to have a panicked breakdown about it, and we've barely gotten started. My husband wants to ream my mom out for stressing me so badly, and wow would that get ugly quick.

My brother's girlfriend is an event planner; I just want to throw money at her and be done with it already.

I'm so glad I tried to do something thoughtful for my parents! :|

Look at me - not even a week and I'm posting again. Winning! :)

I am officially signed up for the Vividcon Auction, so I'm enjoying the brief lull before I started freaking out about the whole process ("OMG no one is bidding on me!" "OMG everyone else is raking in the money!" "Crap I have an assignment now what do I DOOOO?")

The Emperor is on spring break right now; I've been working from home and appreciating the hell out of the flexibility of my job. This also means getting more sleep since I'm not rushing around in the morning getting myself ready and fed, and hurrying the Emperor out the door to school. Also, a big Yay for working in comfy clothes!

Last Friday evening we had dinner at the in-laws to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and youngest BiL's birthday. It was delicious and fun; I got to snuggle both my new niece and nephew. They thought their Auntie was very cozy baby furniture and were perfect angels.

I have been offloading as much stuff as I can onto the newly kiddified in-laws, which has prompted me to take a good long look at the basement, AKA the Pit of Despair, the embodiment of piled higher and deeper Round Tuits. I finished the last of the dreaded and huge reorganization of the Christmas collection, so it now takes up 12(!) boxes and totes, but it's all separated and labeled so I won't have to paw through each one looking for specific pieces. (I may even do a non-Space Battle Tree decoration job next year with all the rediscovered treasures.)

I spent most of this past weekend going through the basement's remaining boxes, totes, and assorted crapstacks. It's not finished by any measure, but it's certainly more organized. Once I get rid of a bunch more totes of unwanted clothes at the next ladies' clothing swap, I'll have even more room.

Last week we briefly had the opportunity to adopt a dog from a friend of my parents, then he rethought the offer. It was a minor disappointment, but it kicked me into higher gear to get the house and our lives ready, so I continued my streak of accomplishments this afternoon by finishing up my work assignment and making several phone calls that I've been putting off: more doctor's visits and home improvement stuff. The sooner we get the backyard transformed from its current state of unfenced mudpit, the sooner we can bring home a new dog.

I totally adulted this Monday like a boss. :)

Greetings, everyone! I have had one of those weeks that make me sigh wistfully for a robot body, or a uterine replicator, or both.

So...last weekend was Vividcon, which was wonderful and low-key for me. I hope to write about that sometime soon, but this is not that post. This is a song about a whale! *BZZZT* No! This is a post about being grumpy.

( So very grumpy. )

Showing up to work this morning just might be my only job accomplishment this morning. My DW backlog is at skip-260, so I'm aiming to be caught up by the end of the day. Sorry if I missed anything exciting in the last couple of weeks.