My mom loved to say Spring is sprung, the grass is riz. I wonder where the flowers is?

Pretty sure she was quoting a song or poem or something, but it will always be hers to me.

Equinox was a few minutes ago as I'm writing this. I made eggs and spinach and potatoes for breakfast, and I may do nothing else all day. Or I may tackle my list.

( Cut for boring list )

My dad wants some help with his website at 1. Other than that, if I don't want to do anything today, I don't gotta. I can just relax, try to figure out today's Semantle, and take the day as she comes.

Happy Spring, y'all!

I have fallen into the habit of posting my updates on Twitter/Facebook even though I prefer this place to those, in theory. Not sure what that's about, especially since there are enough family members and co-workers on Facebook that it keeps me from posting anything with any depth most of the time. And on the gripping hand (h/t Aahz, may his memory be a blessing), I don't get deep all that often these days.

Anyway, lots and lots has happened since I was here last. Still miss my mom so hard that it's sometimes hard to move past it, but there are real patches of joy now, and that wasn't really the case at first.

( House )

( New Mexico )

( Work )

( Writing )

( Family )

Anyhow, there's a lot happening, and I want to share that with you, and to return to keeping an online journal if I can manage to find the follow-through to do that.

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?

I will try to make these brief, but I'm trying to post when I think of it so I don't just keep all the updates in my head.

( reading/watching )

( family )

( work )

( health )

I have been super-productive lately. Wrote a 40K-word novel draft in a week. Managed doctor appointments and medical drama at home, and [redacted] at work. Just sitting down to copyedit a book by one of my clients who writes interesting niche nonfiction. And I'm decluttering in preparation for a yard sale we're planning to have after mom's surgery is done.

I know part of being able to do all this is that my chronic pain levels are low-ish lately.

I'll take it.

• Kicked butt at work today.


• piglet did something really nice for me.


• James made yummy pasta and I made equally yummy garlic bread, so dinner was a win, and lunch was good, too -- leftovers from last night's amazing beans with salsa verde


• I finished a short story and sent it out into the world.


• I think I'm figuring out how to wrangle my statistics for my Resistance Manual pages

There were other good things, too, but I just wanted to remind myself that these relatively easy and joyful days do exist.

Happy Lunar New Year!

I spent the first half of the day just sleeping or staring into space, but I'm a lot less sick now as a result, so that's a good thing.

I was just made disability team lead on the Resistance Manual, and I would love it if some of you came and joined me in building those pages to be really great, as well as checking to make sure other areas on the RM are intersectional with regard to disability.

I have been writing every day and submitting several things a week, and I still don't know where the energy is coming from, but I'll take it. Maybe the cold weather really is my friend.

The debt-elimination project is going well. I'm blogging sporadically about it, but the best result so far is that after 2 months, we paid off 10% of our highest-interest card, and it's only going to get better.

And I got a stellar performance review at work, and applied for a better job on campus.

Let's see, is that it? Well, other than my mom possibly having a MRSA infection, yes. I think that's it for now. Now I'll go read your journals to see what you're up to.

Fifteen years ago today, I made my first entry in this journal (at LiveJournal at the time). It was my 35th birthday (which makes today my 50th). Some changes:

( Read more... )

My life right now is hard in different ways from before, but it's also joyful in the same ways, and peaceful in about equal measure. I like who I am. I like the people I surround myself with for the most part. Onward!

Up since 4 for no good reason. Enjoying the quiet of a solitary Sunday. These are the times when I want to catch up with my peeps, so I've read your posts (haven't commented much, but I'm listening. Lisa, I love how you notice things about all your kids).

I've been spending a lot of time on SparkPeople lately, working on my food/exercise program (a.k.a. diet, but not for weight-loss, because ew). It's working (i.e., my blood is no longer testing as prediabetic, and I'm reducing my heart meds a little at a time with doctor supervision), so it benefits me to make it as fun as possible, which means a fair bit of online socializing, which is the bulk of my social life and has been for, wow, almost 18 years now (I got online in mid-1998).

Wiscon folks are being chatty on Twitter and it sounds really great, but considering who my friends are, it makes me wonder how things are in the background and how my friends who aren't going any more are feeling today. I want to hug you all.

Work is decent. Without the old boss, things are much calmer in my area, except when I stick my foot in my mouth and cause myself anxiety, but usually, things are good. I'm really good at working. That's something I don't always give myself credit for. I kind of suck at the social end of it, but the customer service part, I rock at, and the paperwork part is my STAR THING.

Mom is still dealing with major major pain issues and there's not much that can be done for a variety of reasons, so we (meaning she, I, James) try to keep her distracted and happy as much as possible. I foresee a time not too long from now when she'll decide it's not worth it any more. I will cope with that as best I can if/when it comes. This paragraph doesn't lend itself to language. There is much unsaid.

I haven't been writing. I'm not sure why. When there's time, I play my game or hang out online, and I just have no desire to write. I don't even really feel bad about it, though I do seem to be happier when I'm producing at least poems. But lately, just can't be arsed.

Enjoying (if that is the right word) Top of the Lake, but I love Elizabeth Moss and the kind of gritty police drama it's shaping up to be (I'm on the second episode), so it is a natural for me.

James is still obsessed with home shows, and that led to his new obsession, our house. It was apparently built by an artist/architect who turns out to be kind of interesting, and the house itself was a marvel when he built it in 1948/9, so James has become Mr. Research Man, constantly finding new bits of information about the guy. If you're awesome at finding out stuff about dead people and want to join the puzzle, let me know and I'll shoot you the guy's name. Since he got a lot of press that included our address, I don't want to just say it here.

The kid finished her first semester of college!! She thinks she got mostly As and a B. Either way, she finished!! It's not something she loves, but she chose to do it, and she finished. Super proud!

Dad and I are still working on teachelectronics.com, and he retired yesterday from his in-person teaching job (he still teaches a bunch of online classes), so he'll have more time for it soon. And I'll have Fridays off starting next week, so we're going to work on it together. If you want to learn college-level electronics online for cheap, let me know and I'll hook you up with some free coupons for his courses.

Hm, what else. Sister is still in jail. Nephew is still lackadaisically looking for work and living off his dad and my mom. I still miss the Bay Area and my peeps there (especially Guy, of course). I'm reading a little, cooking a little, staring into space a lot. My pain and dizziness are bad enough to make me tired and sad, but not any worse than that. I get a lot of joy out of little things, and my entire life feels like it's in a holding pattern while we live this stage of our life as well and as usefully as we know how.

Oh, and Black Twitter is still one of my most favorite things in all the world. And Captain Awkward. And YoIsThisRacist. And my game (Two Dots).

Much love, my lovelies.

Awoke at 4 to a random sound that my brain processed as something hitting the house. It was probably just someone closing a door in the house somewhere -- it's a big house. I also had the beginnings of a migraine, so it could've been exploding head syndrome, which I do get sometimes, and which is one of the coolest-named benign pschophysiological things ever (if you know of others, tell me -- cool names for shit are my lifeblood).

Anyway. Four in the morning.

Because of the impending migraine, I took aspirin and caffeine, and if I go back to sleep, I will doom myself to a full-blown migraine, so instead I have turned down the brightness on my monitor and settled in with DW/LJ and my "Right-hand Man" earworm to do a nice long update, which I haven't done in some time, and which will be under a series of cuts.

( 1a: Work babble )

( 1b. Residency, a.k.a. Work Babble Two )

Starting to get the migraine nausea, so I'm having trouble concentrating. I think I'll cut this short for now and pick it up later. Have a good weekend, my lovelies!