Serene of the Oakland Serenes

Via redbird, who says "via various people, details of phrasing via kazzanos."

1) What is the oldest thing you own?

Not counting some fossils? Either a bracelet that belonged to my grandmother (if I still own it; haven't seen it in a while) or a glass dish of hers that may or may not be older than a couple photos I have of my mother and her family of origin from the 1930s. I think James probably owns some books that are older than that, but I probably don't.

2) What is the oldest home you've lived in?

No idea, but this one was built in 1948/9, and I lived in a Victorian in the 1990s that seemed really old at the time.

3) What is the oldest book you've read?

I've read bits of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but read all the way through? Probably Beowulf or the Bible.

4) What is the oldest electronic device that you still use?

I'm hard on stuff, so it doesn't stick around that long. Probably my phone, which is a few years old.

5) What is the oldest work of art/architecture that you've seen?

Likely most of the stuff I saw when I lived in Spain (grades 4 through 7, lots of field trips to castles and museums) was older than anything I've seen in the US. I remember some frescos vaguely; lots of castles; lots of religious iconography. OH, wait. I saw/held an ancient statue similar to the Venus of Willendorf in an anthropology class once.

My mom passed away this morning. I have never had a day that didn't have her in it. I am numb and sad and fine and scared and confident she would find some amusement (the dark kind) in the fact that she died from a mystery ailment and not the fucking coronavirus.

There will be no services. If you want to honor my mom, find something you're not using anymore, and give it to someone who needs/wants it. That was her way, and she would get a kick out of that.

There's a fundraiser for mac_arthur_park's memorial service, if you can afford to help and want to.

1) Stuff is growing in my farm box! I'll post pics later.

2) I have started a Poem-a-Day project on my YouTube channel. Today's will be one I wrote here for ljgeoff.

3) Work appears to be preparing us for budget disaster. No layoffs are planned right now, but they won't be filling a lot of the vacant positions, and we're bracing for whatever comes. There are only two people in the district in my classification, and I don't have seniority.

4) Because my heart symptoms have worsened since quarantine (I assume because of inactivity and a lax commitment to eating what my body's happiest consuming), I have been riding the stationary bike for 30 minutes a day and moving back toward the foods that seem to help with these symptoms. I have to be very vigilant to avoid diet trauma when I do things like this.

5) Folks are fine here. Mom has settled down and isn't so frantic to get out of the house. Maybe once a week she takes a ride someplace safe (she's going to drop a letter in the post office drive-up box today) and for the rest of the time she seems content to read, play cards with me, do some cooking, and water the garden from time to time.

6) When they announced Hamilton is coming to Disney+, I subscribed SO FAST!


How are you, my lovelies?

On May 4th and 5th, mom and I planted a bunch of stuff in a square-foot-gardening box, and I'm going to start keeping a plant diary here. I'll put them under boredom cut tags. :-)

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Plant babies!

Questions and answers, the former from adrian_turtle, who is awesome, and at least one of the latter stolen from hobbitbabe, who is also awesome.

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Just emailed this to a family member and thought I'd put it here for my later reference:

Thanks for the update. Sorry for being brief before. They closed my school to move to online instruction (and UCSD; and most or all the K-12s; I don't know about SDSU yet). We're off for at least two weeks, and they'll let us know for sure on the 23rd if we're going back on the 30th. They're paying us, thank goodness (and thank labor unions), and they've given me remote access so I can work from home, which I'm happy about.

Mom has finally gotten it in her head that this is serious, so she's bowed out of her big weekly bridge game, which is actually illegal here now -- more than 10 elderly people or more than 250 people, period, is outlawed.

Today, I'm taking it easy except for a visit from the kid and some work-from-home stuff that's not difficult. For the next two-plus weeks, I plan to read a lot, write a lot, and play cards with mom, who will develop cabin fever pretty quickly. We stocked up on necessaries last weekend, so we've decided that barring actual urgency (not, like, "I want ice cream" urgency, that is), we're not going to shop at all during my break. This will be harder for mom, as you can imagine.

My baby brother (he will be 48 this week -- a mere embryo! -- is near ground zero in Washington State, but so far, his family is okay. He's worried about his wife's grandparents, who are quite old and quite ill. He (my brother) is in management at the cable company there, and he's just making sure his installers keep their distance, etc.

Love you, and hope to see you soon. Don't touch your face. :-)

My week has been stressful. They called Thursday and offered me the half-time job. They needed to know that day -- we haven't heard back on the lucrative job James has applied for, so I declined, citing the fact that I'm the only breadwinner and James hasn't heard back about the job he was waiting to hear from (I didn't mention to the HR person that it's a job at my same employer, because it's probably not her fault they're lagging on his job, and I'm not an asshole). She wanted to know when I'd know, and I said, "Well, I was supposed to know two weeks ago, so I mean, soon, I hope, but no guarantees."

She called me back an hour later and offered to give me a week to decide (because they actually don't want the other two people who interviewed, is my surmise), so yeah, rollercoaster day on Thursday.

And then a student's mom called and cussed me out for like half an hour. I don't take that stuff personally, but it does wear on me. My co-workers marvelled over and over about how calm I stayed, and I said (and I meant it), "She was frustrated. That's understandable. And I don't have to attend every fight I'm invited to," which became a theme for the week.

My mom got in a fracas with another member of her senior center, and I shared my week's theme with her. I think she felt a little chastised, but she also seemed to latch onto the theme as a potential sanity saver.

And then today at the donut shop, I accidentally passed up another person who was waiting to pay (because I followed the person who gave me our donuts to the register and didn't notice the other person who was standing away from the registers at the window. She berated me for many minutes about how rude I was, and how I should give a bitch some space, and how in America, we call this White Privilege, and and and... I just apologized, didn't engage beyond that, (felt frankly detached and mildly amused -- not sure what that says about me) and then once she'd left, the cashier apologized to me for the customer.

Me: "Nah, she's not wrong. I didn't see her, but I did cut in front of her."

I mean, I don't like being yelled at, or having people behave in ways that I perceive as rude towards me, but I'm not gonna fault someone for standing up for their space when I've violated it, so long as they're not hitting me or something. Not a fight I need to get into; not a hill I'm gonna die on.

So yeah, stressful week for many reasons, but not something that's gonna ruin my Saturday, which will now be completed by spending many many many hours writing and catching up on webcomics.

And how are YOU, dear ones?

Part of how I got out of debt last time was to be frank with myself and others about my finances. For the first 10 years we were together, James and I had zero debt, and it took some pushing past shame to admit we'd accumulated $10K+ in consumer debt, but admitting it was the first step to eliminate it. This time, the debt is even higher (but it was important, she says with some shame, to fix our teeth and our car, and and and...) but it's not any different: the key to getting rid of it for me is facing it. Well, facing it and having a plan.

Facing it, having a plan, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.

Another thing I have to face is that I can't afford to go part-time yet. Not until either James gets the job he applied for or I get more editing work. I'm a little sad about that, but it's okay -- I can do this for a year while we knock out debt, and then I can decide what to do after that happens. When we don't have debt, we have SO MUCH FREEDOM. I just need to keep that in mind.

In completely other news, I don't get a "Least Complicated" earworm often, in day-to-day life, but something about getting to the "Music" box on the DW posting page brings it to mind; it's my most frequent "Music" entry, and it seems to just be a conditioned response to seeing the input box. Weird.

I desire to get back in the habit of posting regularly here, so I will post every day in September and see if that helps. This blog (if you count its beginning on my 35th birthday, just after 9/11, as a LiveJournal) is the oldest internet "belonging" I have, except for my email address. I don't want to lose it through neglect.

Today, I will report that in August, I paid off 1.20% of our consumer debt, and I expect that to snowball as we pay off the higher-interest stuff. I will report in once a month.