#I always lose track of time when it comes to the end of December. it just flies by

[beecauseevan]

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December 2024

It's another week before Buck gets released, and it's a weird one. Eddie is no stranger to the heavy, empty feeling that overtakes the firehouse whenever a member of the 118 is missing—it haunted the station when Chim left to track down Maddie, when Hen traded in her turnout gear for a white coat, when Bobby stepped out on them, and every single time Buck was taken from then. It's always felt bad. It's always felt like, well, like losing a family member. That's what the 118 is, after all: family. 

But something is different this time, and Eddie can't put his finger on it. When he brings it up to the others, Chim jokes that it might be because this time, Buck's absence is not because of a word that starts with L—leg, lawsuit, lightning strike—and that gets a laugh out of Eddie. 

"Probably," he says, and puts the weird feeling aside until the end of the shift. 

Until he comes home. 

Until he sits in his (quiet, empty) house, a house he plans on selling even though he's never known a place that felt more like home than this, on his couch that suddenly feels too big for just one person, and he thinks back to that night when Buck came to visit him, minutes after Eddie opened the door to a brand new world of light, where freedom and joy replaced guilt and self-loathing. It had all felt so new, so dauntingly full of possibility, so—overwhelming.

November 2024

"Tommy and I broke up," Buck tells him after the movie ends, three empty bottles in front of him and a fourth one, still mostly full, sitting between his thighs. 

"Oh," Eddie says, momentarily forgetting his good manners. Then, belatedly, "Sorry." 

Buck shrugs. It's not dismissive. He looks over, eyes dark, and Eddie knows it then, with a quiet yet life-changing kind of certainty: If he made a move now, Buck would not turn him down. 

He could change everything. In a matter of moments, he could redefine everything they are, and Buck would let him.

He doesn't make a move. Buck was dating Tommy for six months and Eddie… Eddie isn't wearing pants. His face still feels naked, freshly shaven. 

They have time, he thinks. 

They have time. 

It becomes his mantra. They have time, when Buck wants to call Tommy. They have time, when he gets annoyed with Eddie for stealing his phone. They have time, when Buck offers to help Eddie find a place, because that kind of shit takes time. You can't rush it. It's going to be weeks until he finds a house that works for him, maybe even months.

They have time. Until time runs out. They have time, until he finds himself kneeling over Buck on a darkened freeway, covered in blood that isn't his own. 

December 2024

All that is going through his head when he sits on too-big couch, just a few days before Christmas. Life may seem endless, sometimes, but nobody has all the time in the world. In the end, that's probably what makes him do it. 

"Are you sure you want to go home?" 

It's the next day. He's at the hospital, helping Buck pack, when the question slips out. Buck, struggling to put his socks on without popping his stitches, stops what he's doing and turns to look at Eddie, who is fiddling with the cord of Buck's phone charger, weaving it between his fingers. 

"Uh," Buck starts, a confused smile dimpling his stubbly cheek, "I—I don't think I've got a choice. Even if I wanted to spend Christmas in the hospital, they kind of need the room."

"No," says Eddie, "look."

He pauses. Buck has no idea what he means. In a way, that little misunderstanding is a blinking exit sign. Eddie could still back out. No harm done, not yet. 

Backing out is not an option. They don't have that much time.

He puts the charger in Buck's bag and sits down on the bed. They're at least two feet apart but Buck tracks his every move, and Eddie feels those blue eyes on his skin like a physical touch. They've been here before. Then, Eddie was the one with the bullet wound and Buck was in for a surprise. 

"Are you sure you want to go back to the loft?" he elaborates. Buck drags his teeth across his bottom lip, pulls it into his mouth. Eddie doesn't let this distract him. "You just got shot. Might be good to have a medic around."

Buck releases his lip. Slowly, it stretches into a beautiful smile. 

"Can't argue with that logic," he says. 

Eddie mirrors his smile. It feels like release, like a celebration, like dancing around his living room for the sake of happiness and happiness alone.

Written for the @911countdowntochristmas - this was supposed to be 24 drabbles but the Buddie NDE speculation going around pre 8x08 inspired me and now it’s a 24-mini-chaptered fic instead. And definitely more hurt/comfort than fluff. Oops.

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[malachitezmeyka]

My symptoms always tend to get worse at night, and if I attempt to lie down my cough becomes unbearable, so instead of sleeping I went to do gift shopping that I suddenly remembered I haven’t done yet

I ordered stuff for literally everyone and spent half my allowance send help

[featherandferns]

day 1/24 - obx christmas countdown

'I want you to know that I'm never leaving' - Sia, Snowman | angst-fluff | jj x fem!reader | keep track of the obx christmas countdown here!

You stir in the night cocooned in blankets. Groaning, you blink yourself awake and squint at the bedside table's alarm clock. The glaring digital letters read three a.m. With another grunt, you roll over and kick off some of the covers. As your eyes slip shut, your body moves to snuggle into JJ’s like a reflex. You always slept on the left of the small double and him on the right. More times than not, you’d end up with all the covers and him with none, but considering he ran like a boiler engine, it didn’t much bother him. But when your hand reaches out to splay on his warm bareback, you frown and open your eyes at the feel of soft cotton sheets. Weird. 

You shove the rest of the sheets off you with a huff. Kildare was warm enough during the days of December so long as you had a hoodie to hand, but at night, when the sun went to sleep, it cooled off. As you step across the creaking floorboards, you grab JJ’s hooded flannel and tug it on as an extra layer. The old house warns of your coming: aching doors and whining floors. It’s dark as you venture through the halls until there’s a cosy golden glow from the living room. One of the lamps is on. You poke your head into the room to find JJ staring out the window into the thick of the night. 

“Hey,” you broach quietly. He doesn’t jump. He must have heard you coming. 

“Hey,” he replies, just as quiet, not bothering to turn. You make your way over and take a seat by his side on the coach. The sleepiness still lingers in your bones so you rest your head against his arm. 

“How come you’re awake?” you wonder through a yawn. 

“Jus’ thinkin’,” he murmurs. Something about the way he says it tells you it isn’t entirely peaceful thoughts. It feels too early to pry and too late to question. You know JJ as well as any Christmas carol; he’ll tell you when he’s ready. “I hate Christmas, y’know?”

“Does one of the J’s in your name stand for Scrooge?” you try to joke. He chuckles silently, his body shaking softly against your cheek. The skin of his arm smells like shea butter soap and sandalwood. “I didn’t know you hated Christmas.”

“Not as much anymore. Just when I was a kid. Reminded me of all the stuff I didn’t have. I don’t know…Guess it made me angry,” JJ drawls. “I mean, you know that I didn’t have all that much growing up. Dad was never around and never made much effort. It just sort’a ended up being another day. Except…”

“Except it wasn’t?” you offer when his voice trails off. He hums. You nod. 

It’s hard to pass Christmas off as any other day when everything around you is screaming about how it’s so wonderful. The songs, the adverts, the windows, the houses, the movies, the people…All of it. It’s like insisting that you’re not hot whilst staring directly into the sun. 

“And I would just count down the days until it was January again and everyone would just shut the fuck up about it, y’know?”

You hum. He sighs and you glance up to see him hang his head. His blonde hair is shaggy from sleep and dangles in front of his eyes. Sitting up, you reach out a hand and comb it back for him. JJ’s eyes are heavy with tiredness when he looks at you. 

“We don’t gotta do anything for Christmas,” you tell him. Nodding your head towards the hall, at the other bedrooms, you add, “the others can do whatever they want but we can just do our own thing.”

JJ shakes his head, smiling smally. “You love Christmas.”

“Meh. I love lots of things,” you shrug with a smile and roll of your eyes. It was true, you did love Christmas, but you loved JJ far, far more. If celebrating was going to remind him of bitter days then you were more than happy to sit it out together. But JJ shakes his head again. 

“We don’t gotta skip it,” he tells you. Your brows tug together. He still sounds deflated, losing his usual glow like a crack in the most stunning tree bauble you’ve ever seen. It must be easy to read on your face, the concerned curiosity. Shaking his head, he looks back out the window. He rakes his hands through his hair. “It’s stupid.”

“Maybe. Tell me anyway.”

Laughing quietly, he takes a breath and closes his eyes. “I…I’m scared to celebrate Christmas with you.”

You frown and try your best not to be offended. “Oh?”

“I just…God, how do I fuckin’ use words…" JJ sighs again, aggravated, and rubs at his forehead. Then, he looks down at you. The anxiety in his eyes makes you want to cry. “Christmas didn’t mean anything to me until you showed up. And now that we’re finally a...we...Well, I guess I’m scared to actual enjoy Christmas cause what if it goes back to being just another day?"

You try to follow his words like footprints in snow. Nodding slowly, you think aloud. “So you’re saying, what if you let yourself enjoy it, and then we don’t make it, and you have memories about Christmas that are actually happy?”

Laughing, he smiles, shaking his head, a little disbelieving. “You can always read my Goddamn mind.” But the smile slips away into sadness. Tears rush to his waterline and your heart cracks. You’ve never heard his voice so feeble, so raw, when he admits, “I don’t wanna lose you.”

Your joy at cracking the riddle is short lived. Sitting up onto your knees, you reach for JJ’s hand and take it in yours. You squeeze, hard. “You're not going to lose me. I’m never leaving, a’right? Ever.”

He shakes his head and closes his eyes, likely willing the tears away. “You don’t know that. Everybody leaves eventually."

“Hey,” you say, firmly, forcing his eyes open into yours. Nodding, sincerely, you affirm, “I mean it. I’m never leaving. You’re my home, JJ. All seasons round - not just Christmas.” 

The moment wraps around you like a blizzard. Your smile is shaky, eyes damp, voice thick as you confide in him. “You’re all I have too, JJ. The only thing that matters to me. The only thing that I truly, deeply, love.”

JJ exhales like he’s been holding his breath for a lifetime. His forehead gently bumps yours as he dips it. “What’d I do to get you?”

Smiling, you lift a hand to cup his jaw. On your thumb that rests on his cheek you feel a teardrop. You wipe it away. Nobody else saw this side of JJ. The quiet, tender, vulnerable side. The times that the child that hid inside of him, safe from his father’s reprimanding hand, crawled out into the glow of moonlight. You’d never let that privilege be forgotten. Pressing a kiss against his lips, short and sweet like peppermint candy, you shrug. 

“I think I'm the one that’s got the best gift of all.”

[waywardxrhea]

Part of Your World - George Weasley

Chapter 12

pairing: George Weasley x fem!Muggle!reader

installment list / previous chapter / next chapter

word count: 4,605

content: mentions of death, depictions of depression, insecurity, plane ride (Arthur has a GRAND time), heavy on the emotions

December rolled around and the Burrow was starting to fill with warmth, joy, and sweaters, but George still wasn’t acting himself. When he finally opened the shop back up a few months after Fred’s death, George always plastered a smile on his face for the customers and laughed when the younger ones came back to tell the stories of the pranks they pulled, but behind closed doors he lived with a dark cloud encircling him. Even with the total support and comfort that Lee, Angelina, the remaining members of the Order, and his family gave him throughout the grieving process, George still fell into a deep depression. 

As Hermione was flittering around the Burrow helping Mrs. Weasley with odds and ends to make her workload easier, she stopped in her tracks when she saw George sitting in a chair by a window rolling something around between his fingers. Upon closer inspection she realised it was your engagement ring, so with a gentle smile on her lips, she cleared her throat and asked, “What’s stopping you from going to get her?”

George startled in his seat, his hand instinctively reaching for the wand that was placed on the window sill before he realised it was just Hermione. As he slumped back into the chair and pocketed the ring, he sighed before telling her quietly, “I don’t want her to see me like this…” A single tear escaped his eye that he quickly brushed away before mumbling, “She’s probably moved on anyway, no point in uprooting her new life…”

“Oh George…” Hermione said, her voice heavy with emotion as she tried to hold back her own tears. She crouched down beside him and placed a hand on his forearm as she said, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being friends with Harry, it’s that love is even more powerful than magic. That girl loves you with everything she has, and I have a feeling that not even those memory enchantments could stop her from loving you, even if she doesn’t realise it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Remember when I went to find my parents in Australia?” He nodded. “When they first saw me, there was this look of recognition in their eyes. They knew me from somewhere but they couldn’t figure out where. That was until I lifted the enchantment. They told me that it felt like deep inside their minds there was some sort of locked box that had memories that were just out of their reach. They knew they were there but couldn’t access them. If the same stands for her, I can guarantee you she hasn’t moved on.”

“I’m just…scared,” George admitted as he turned away from her once more to let his tears fall. “I lost Fred, I can’t lose her too…”

“Then go get her,” Hermione encouraged. “I know things have been a mare, but…this is something you can control and it may help you out of this rut you’ve gotten into. I’ve always admired your relationship and how much you two make each other smile even in the darkest times. I think it’s time to bring her home.”

A smile ghosted over George’s features before he nodded, telling her, “All right. I’ll talk with Dad and we’ll start planning. How’s a trip to New York sound?”

Hermione smiled and nodded, saying with a quiet laugh, “You two will need all the help you can get navigating Muggle transport, of course I’m coming with you!”

Three days later Hermione found herself in the middle of a bustling crowd of commuters making their way through Heathrow Airport. As she walked, her arm linked with Arthur’s to keep him from wandering off, she looked at the tickets in her hand to match them with the boarding gate to their right. “Right, here’s the gate! Flight is due to board in an hour,” she said as she located three open seats near the gate for them to sit at. Seeing the whimsy in Arthur’s eyes though, Hermione sent a glance to George and asked, “Do you mind watching the bags? I think we might swing by a gift shop.”

“I don’t mind,” George replied with a nod, sitting down in the slightly uncomfortable chair. As he watched Hermione scurry off after his dad, George sighed and pulled out a book he had found himself reading a lot since Fred had died. It was your copy of The Outsiders that was heavily annotated by you, but now had some of George’s sloppy scrawl within the margins as well. 

George got so lost in the pages that he didn’t realise that the wait time had passed and his travelling companions had still not returned. “Flight 606 flying from Heathrow to JFK is now boarding. Please find your boarding group and begin boarding when instructed,” came a kind voice over a speaker as people all around George began to stand and look at their tickets. 

Closing his book and starting to look around, George let out a quiet sigh of relief when he saw his dad and Hermione approaching, the former with the widest smile on his face as he pulled something off from around his neck, telling George, “Would you look at this son! A pillow that wraps around your neck! The things Muggles dream up!”

A quiet huff of laughter left George’s lips before he asked, “Planning on sleeping through the flight?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” he replied, a giddiness in his voice as the three of them picked up their bags and Hermione guided them in the direction of their boarding group. 

After making their way to their designated seats and getting settled in, Hermione handed both George and Arthur a piece of gum each, saying, “When the plane takes off, the change in cabin pressure will make your ears pop. This should alleviate that.”

“Bubblicious bubble gum, why, George, is this a product from the shop?” Arthur asked, leaning forward to look at his son over Hermione who sat between them. 

“No, it’s a Muggle product,” George replied. A small smile graced his lips before he told him it was your favourite, adding, “One time she blew a bubble so big that I was convinced it was at least from Honeydukes.”

Right after the short conversation ended, the flight attendants began performing their safety procedure teaching for the flight’s occupants. Arthur was completely enthralled by the man’s words and demonstrations as he watched with rapt attention. George wasn’t paying much attention though as the flight attendant spoke. Instead his mind began to wander to you - what you may be up to, how you may have been spending your time in New York, and how he felt like he may be about to completely uproot your new life…

“You okay?” came Hermione’s gentle voice as she lightly squeezed his hand that had begun to drum against the armrest between them as his anxiety began to climb. 

“Brilliant,” he replied quietly in a flat sort of tone, avoiding eye contact as he once more pulled out your book to distract himself. 

“Everything’s going to work out,” Hermione told him, offering a small smile before she too grabbed a book out of her bag. 

George’s concentration was grabbed a few minutes later when the plane began moving down the runway and his dad opened up the sliding window cover.  As he looked out, the expression on his face reminded George of kids looking into the window of Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. George watched out the window as he opened up his piece of gum and began chewing it as the plane started to gain speed. “How fast are we going?” Arthur asked giddily as he too began to chew his gum. 

Hermione glanced up at the screen that was embedded into the back of the seat in front of her, informing him, “Around 290 kilometres per hour.”

“Fantastic!” Mr. Weasley breathed. His hands gripped the arms of his chair as suddenly they felt a sense of weightlessness when the plane’s wheels left the ground. After a few uncomfortable minutes that George would almost compare to his first time apparating without the intense compression, the flight attendant announced that they were at cruising altitude and that they would be landing in just over seven hours. “How fast are we going now?”

Hermione couldn’t help the small smile on her lips as she told him, “Around 900 kilometres per hour.”

“Muggles are so brilliant!” Arthur mused before relaxing into his seat, his pillow sung around his neck as he watched the clouds pass around the plane. 

“Why Poughkeepsie?” Hermione asked George as the three of them rode the train from New York City to their destination. 

“It seemed easy enough to remember, fun name too,” George replied as he looked out over the water to the left of the train. He was lost in thought as he looked out on the river, and Hermione could tell that he needed the space, so she dropped the conversation for the moment.

It was roughly an hour and a half before the train got to the end of the line in Poughkeepsie and the passengers all got up and stretched their weary bodies before filing out into the crisp winter air. Hermione had been developing a plan on the way there, so once they were out, she took a glance at her phone's screen and began walking in a direction, leaving George and Arthur to simply follow behind her.

“Excuse me,” Hermione said to get the attention of some patrons of the destination she had put into her phone's GPS. It was a pub that she had seen online posts about your parents singing at, so she thought it would be a good starting point. She said your mum’s name and then asked, “Do you happen to know her?” 

While the bartender didn’t answer immediately, a patron a few seats down called out your mum’s name in a question. “Yes, that’s her,” Hermione replied while turning her attention toward the older woman. “We’re friends from London and we didn’t know what neighbourhood they ended up in around here. See, we want to surprise them, and asking for an address would sort of spoil that wouldn’t it?”

“You’re right there,” she replied with a quiet chuckle. “She and her husband play here pretty regularly when we have live music. They’re good people. Live three houses down from me actually, just a few blocks away. Real pretty house they’re renting. Sky blue with a bright red door, can’t miss it.”

“Isn’t their daughter working in the Kitchen tonight?” the person beside her asked, making George perk up.

“She works here?” he asked, his eyes darting toward where he assumed the kitchen was behind the bar. 

The man chuckled before shaking his head and replying, “No, no, sorry you aren’t from around here. By the Kitchen I mean Hell’s Kitchen. It’s a neighbourhood in the city. She works at one of those restaurants where Broadway calibre singers perform while they wait tables. She’s damn good at it too.”

“That’s right!” the woman said, lightly tapping her forehead for her lapse in memory. “Your timing isn’t too great actually, the whole family’s gone to the city right now. The girl’s got a few performances at her school starting tomorrow night.” She turned to her partner and asked, “What musical were they doing again?”

“Newsies!” he replied after a few seconds of thinking. “If you three wanna catch them, I’d say that’s your best bet. Tickets go fast though, even for college shows, so I’d get going on that if you’d want to surprise them there.”

“That’s actually a great idea, thank you very much!” Hermione told them graciously, making sure to get the information they needed about your school’s play before leading the two red-headed men out of the pub. 

Without a word further, Hermione pulled out her cell phone and began typing away at the little screen while making a bee-line back toward the train station with Arthur and George hot on her heels. “We just got off the train, ‘Mione, why are we getting back on?” George asked, his eyebrows furrowed. The flight had surprisingly worn him out and his body was sore from sitting in that uncomfortable seat for so long. That, combined with the mental strain he had been through, George simply wanted to find a hotel and go to bed despite it barely being afternoon.

“I just got us on the waitlist for the restaurant she works at. If we get on the train soon we should be able to make it on time,” Hermione replied simply as she showed him the screen. “And now…” she said after handing the ticket person behind the glass window the proper amount of money for train tickets back to the city, “I got us three tickets to the show she’s performing in!”

“Hermione, don’t you think-” George tried to say, but was cut off. 

“I think what you’re trying to say is ‘Thank you,’” she told him matter-of-factly as the three waited for the train once more. 

“I just… What if…” George started, unsure how to end his sentence as his mind once again drifted off toward where his subconscious had liked to take him ever since you left: seeing you with a mystery man and moving on from him and the future he pictured with you. The future that sometimes he felt was the only thing keeping him afloat. “I don’t want to mess this up… If I see her happy there…”

“You’ll feel conflicted about what to do,” Arthur said, nodding solemnly at his son as he rubbed his shoulders. 

“Exactly. I just feel like if we restore her memories it’ll ruin everything she’s built here. And her happiness is what matters,” George said, looking down at the cracked concrete beneath his shoes. 

“You can’t make that decision for her though,” Hermione said. “Once their memories are restored they can decide what they want to do. But it isn’t fair for you to suffer like this and it isn’t fair for them to live the rest of their lives with missing memories when they’re so easily restored.”

A train horn blared as it pulled into the station and its occupants exited before the three of them made their way on and into seats once more. Arthur smiled softly at his son before telling him, “I bet seeing her tonight will pull you right out of that head of yours.”

And boy was he right. They hadn’t been lucky enough to get you as a server, but the moment they were seated and you made your first appearance singing the song She Used to be Mine from a musical called Waitress, George practically felt his heart swell in his chest. Feelings of love filled him, but also sadness and heartache for everything that happened in the last two years. 

Those feelings of sadness soon lifted though when throughout the meal you ventured all over the restaurant between serving your tables, belting out songs you would sing in the shower back home. With those memories flooding his mind, George finally cracked a small smile as a different feeling took over. A feeling of longing. Longing for you in his arms. To feel your gentle touch and hear your comforting words. To laugh with you. To hear wedding bells as you stood across from each other and vowed to spend the rest of your lives together. To hear little footsteps running up and down the steps at the shop a few years down the line. To just be with you. So as the meal closed out and the entire wait staff sang You Will Be Found from Dear Evan Hansen, George found himself holding back tears while he, along with the rest of the restaurant’s guests, applauded the performers. 

Hermione’s words from earlier rang in his ear as they exited the restaurant and made their way to somewhere to stay for the night, but George knew that no matter what decision you made when your memories were restored, he would be right there by your side. If that meant moving the shop to New York then so be it. All George knew was that you were the puzzle piece he needed. Even though that puzzle would never truly be complete without his twin, if he at least had you by his side, he could be held together again.

The plan was to meet up with your family after the show the next evening, and Arthur would lift the memory enchantment he placed on you all. During the show, George’s confidence in Hermione’s assurance that you hadn’t moved on wavered as he watched you on stage playing Katherine falling in love with Jack. Those feelings of jealousy retreated the moment they snuck backstage and heard you arguing with the same guy in question, telling him, “I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again Dalton, this is on stage only! I have no interest in you off stage!”

“Oh come on Doll, you know I could show you a good time! You loved tonight’s kiss!” Dalton said, his hands snaking their way to your waist as he tried to pull you into another kiss. 

At the sight, George had had enough, so as he advanced toward you two, he called, “Oi mate, she said to back off!”

“Lover’s quarrel, back off pal,” the sleazy guy said with a smirk as he pulled you closer. 

“Get your hands off of me,” you said in a low voice as you struggled in Dalton’s arms. 

“Oh come on baby, you know you-” he said, but before he could finish his sentence, he was grasping at his nose as his bogeys began flying out. In the shape of bats to be exact. “What the-?” he shouted with a start before abruptly separating himself from you and running off. 

When he was gone was when you finally looked up to see who had gotten Dalton off of you. You hadn’t recognized the voice as someone from the company, but knew you had heard it somewhere before. Looking up, you saw a tall ginger man who was dressed rather handsomely in a purple coat, something not too conventional, but he made it work. There was something so familiar about his soft eyes and smile but you couldn’t quite put a finger on where you had seen him before… 

“Thank you,” you told him after you realised you were staring for longer than you probably should have been. “I’m not sure if he was trying to stay in character for audience members or what but… Thank you for the save.”

Before George could reply or Hermione or his father could scold him for using his magic so brazenly, you all heard another pair of familiar voices enter the doorway behind you. “You did amazing tonight, sweetheart!” your mum praised you as she took you in her arms and into a bone crushing hug. 

“All that rehearsal time paid off!” your dad told you with a smile as he presented you with a small bouquet of flowers. He turned his attention toward George, Hermione, and Arthur before asking, “And who may these three be?”

“Old friends from London,” Arthur told him, stepping forward and slipping his hand into his Muggle approved coat where he was storing his wand. “I need the three of you to stay very still for a short moment if you don’t mind. And Hermione, George, please make sure no one else is around.”

“No one else is around-” your dad started, his eyebrows furrowing as he saw the older man reach into his coat. “Hey what do you think you’re-?” But before he could finish his sentence, Arthur had already taken out his wand and waved it, effectively lifting the memory enchantment he had placed on your family. 

“George?” you whispered, your voice thick with emotion as everything came flooding back to you all at once. Your first time meeting George at Regent’s Park, all of your dates since, discovering that he was a wizard, the magical majesty of the Burrow and the horde of red headed witches and wizards who occupied it, every magical spell you had witnessed and every potion you had drank, the magical joke shop, and everything in between. On top of the good though, you also remembered the fact that there was a Wizarding war going on, how there were laws prohibiting your relationship and that you ended up in New York to save your family from the wrath of Dark wizards, as well as how you were tortured by an Unforgivable Curse that wracked your entire body with pain mere days before you left. And now George was standing in front of you with tears in his eyes as he held out his arms in an offer to hold you for the first time in… Wow, sixteen months…

Without a further thought, you closed the space separating you two, and George pulled you into the most bone-crushing hug he had ever given you. His body rattled with emotion as he cried into your hair, some of the weight of the last sixteen months lifting off his shoulders. “I missed you so much…” George managed to choke out as you rubbed soothing circles onto his back. 

After the two of you separated from your embrace, you leaned up to kiss George on the cheek before asking, “So is it over? The war?”

“Yes,” Hermione answered from her place behind George. “Harry finished off You-Know-Who and things have slowly been going back to some semblance of normal.”

“That’s good to hear!” you said, a wide smile on your face. You thought for a moment before asking, “So then if everything’s over and you all are here, then that means…?”

“That means there is a lot to discuss about next steps,” Arthur said as he placed his wand back into his coat as a nearby door opened and a few cast members ambled through the backstage area. 

“That there is,” your mum said thoughtfully. “There’s still a whole weekend of shows ahead of us though, so can we table the subject for later?”

“Yes, we don’t want to rush anything,” Arthur agreed with a nod. 

He glanced over toward you and George before turning to walk out of the room with your dad, your mum, and Hermione, the former of which asked, “So about that last conversation we had before we left about magic being real…”

As you and George followed loosely behind, George pulled out his wand and produced a bouquet of your favourite flowers before telling you, “Your performance was outstanding tonight. You got one of your dream roles yeah?”

“That I did!” you beamed, graciously taking the wonderful smelling flowers from George with a loving smile. You took his hand with your free one and said, “I bet with the war over business is booming at the shop! Where is Fred anyways, I’d have thought you would have brought him with you. Especially to New York of all places, it’s a great place for a ladies man like him!” 

When you said those words, George froze in place. He didn’t think about having to tell you about Fred… You, too, stopped abruptly when he did, your eyebrows lacing together as you asked, “Everything all right, love?” The floodgates opened once more as George shook his head, trying to wipe away his tears that he couldn't seem to stop at the mention of his brother. Sensing something was off, you quickly wrapped your arms around George and asked, “Did…did something happen to Fred…?”

George nodded rapidly, a choked sob escaping his throat before he managed to whisper, “He died… Death Eaters. Explosion… Wasn’t even there…”

“Oh my God…” you whispered, your voice breaking upon hearing the news as you pulled him impossibly tighter in your arms. “I am so, so sorry, George…” George didn’t know what else to say, so he simply let you hold him for a few minutes while you both mourned Fred silently in each other’s arms. 

When you both finally pulled away from each other, you coaxed George to lean down a bit to place a kiss to his forehead. He then pulled out his wand and used some magic to erase the evidence that you had both been crying before you both headed out the door to meet with the rest of the group. Many things were discussed on the train ride back to Poughkeepsie that night, mostly just catching both families up on what had happened since you all left London, but you all agreed to table the important talks for Monday after the show closed and the semester was finished for you. 

“Of course we’re moving back home!” you told George with a broad smile on your face as the two of you sat on your bed with your back pressed to his chest. George played with your hands absentmindedly as you talked, the left of which was once again sporting your engagement ring. 

“Really?” George asked, his movements halting at the news. 

“Yeah!” you replied, leaning over and turning your head to place a kiss to his cheek. 

“And that wouldn’t completely uproot everything you’ve clearly built while you’ve been here?” George asked hesitantly. 

“Absolutely not,” you replied quickly. Hermione had informed you about George’s growing insecurity about that exact sentiment, so it didn’t come as a total shock when he asked. “The connections I made while here will open up doors for me back home, they don’t end here in New York. One of my professors has been talking with some people over at the West End about me, actually, and I think that’ll be my in when we get back! Now, I still have to finish up my schooling, but it’s always good to have the connections!”

“Brilliant,” George said, a small smile creeping onto his features at the fact that he would have you back home with him. 

There was a knock at the door a few moments later followed by Mr. Weasley saying, “Come on now George, it’s time to start getting the house packed up!”

“I’ll get started in here!” George called back through the door as he and you disentangled yourselves from each other and stood up. 

While George took out his wand and summoned your luggage and some shipping boxes, you grabbed something off of your dresser and made your way to your bedroom door, excitedly calling out to Mr. Weasley as he walked down the hall, “Hey! I think I figured out how planes work!”

Mr. Weasley smiled with a sparkle of whimsy in his eye as he said, “That’s wonderful! Tell me all about it when we’re on the plane back!”

“Yes sir!” you told him before heading back to your room to help George with the finer details. 

When you emerged into your already nearly packed room, you sighed contentedly before commenting, “I love magic!”

“And I love you,” George told you while snaking his arms around your waist. 

“I love you,” you replied before leaning in for a tender kiss. It certainly wasn’t your first kiss since being reunited, but ever since your reunion, both you and George made an effort to make every single one count. Even with the war being over, there was never a guarantee for the next day, and George was determined to not let another loved one slip out of his grasp, not without them knowing how much he cared.

reunited and it feels so good! i hadn't written a lot of Hermione (like more than a few paragraphs at a time here and there) in a LONG time until this chapter, and honestly i forgot how fun she is to write! this reunion in the aftermath of the war was a super emotional one, but rest assured that the coming installments are SUPER fluffy to make up for all the angst i've been throwing your way as of late!

likes and comments are always appreciated! xo, brooke <3

as always, dividers by @firefly-graphics

taglist: @5starl1ght @v1ckycheesue @superduckmilkshake

[operationmorewhitecollar]

Shall we play a game?

Nope, not chess or Parchisi. And not even global thermonuclear war. (If you get that reference, you might just be as old as we are!) But no, none of those games are where we're headed. This year, we're hosting a good old-fashioned game of bingo!

That's right, since we're almost two weeks into the new year, we thought it might be time to roll out our new creative challenge, which will continue throughout 2024.

As always, we're in the market for any and all fan creations centered on White Collar, and this year, we're providing prompts in the form of mini bingo cards, with new prompt cards coming out quarterly. (Jan, April, July, October) If you want to play, just let us know (comment here, dm, however you want to get in touch), and we'll get you a card so you can get started!

Some details:

When we say "any and all fan creations," we mean it--let your creativity run wild and make whatever you want to make! Draw, write, paint, record a podcast, shoot a video, whatever your creative preference.

We're using a 4x4 card format, and there is a FREE space, so that means a total of 15 prompts for three months. Complete a line of prompts, get a bingo; complete the whole card during the quarter, and that, dear friends, is a blackout!

Much like our drabble prompts, the bingo prompts are pretty broad, and many (maybe most?) are only one word. They run the gamut from theme words to genre to story length and beyond. (Not to worry if you're making art or some other non-written creations; we've got provisions for swapping prompts.)

Prompts were randomized to create the cards, and the card numbers were randomized to create the distribution order, so the prompts you end up with are strictly luck.

Okay, that's probably the most important stuff to know, except, of course, that we hope lots of you will join in and that everyone has tons of fun creating new White Collar stuff, because we're sure going to have fun seeing whatever you make!

So whenever you're ready, shall we play a game?

(We'll put a few more detailed FAQ items below the cut, but if you've got questions we didn't think of, just let us know and we'll make up an answer.😉)

Q: What can my entries be? A: Any type of creation you choose. fic, art, blog post, essay, cross-stitch, we're not picky. Interpret the prompts any way you like, in any genre, any relationship, any rating, any characters, you get the idea. (Unless, of course, the prompt is more specific.) As long as it's White Collar, it's fair game.

Q: Where do we share our work/how will you know we made something or got a bingo? A: First, put your creations somewhere we can see them! There'll be a collection on AO3 where most types of work can be shared. (We're debating if it's better to have just one collection for the year or one for each quarter; if you've got any opinions on that, feel free to weigh in.) If you're sharing here or on other socials, be sure to @ us, and use #WhiteCollarBingo. But, while we'll be doing our best to keep up, we're hoping there will be so many entries we'll lose track, so definitely tell us if you completed a bingo!

Q: Can I make one story/picture/video/etc. for the whole card? A: You may use as many prompts as you like in each entry, but only 2 prompts per line may be counted toward a bingo. (So you will need at least two entries to achieve a single bingo, and though we may have miscounted, we think that means at least ten entries to make a blackout.)

Q: Are crossovers allowed? A: Yes (and may even be a prompt!), but White Collar should obviously be prevalent in your work.

Q: How long do I have to complete my entries? A: We'll be issuing new cards each quarter (Jan-March, April-June, July-Sept, Oct-December), and in a perfect world, we'd like to receive entries within that quarter. But you know we've never been sticklers for schedules, and the point is to encourage more White Collar creations, so we'll be glad to get them whenever you finish.

Q: What do I win when I bingo? A: Bragging rights, and your name on our (soon to be created) bingo accomplishments page.

Q: What if there are some prompts I really don't want to use, but I want to try for blackout? A: We will provide a max of two alternate prompts. (This max does not apply if you're making non-written creations and somehow ended up with a card full of writing-centric prompts.)

Q: What if I just can't work with the card I receive at all? A: We'll exchange your card one time. Part of the fun is stretching our creative muscles.

Q: If I exchange my card, will any previous entries count toward bingo on my new card? A: Nope. It's a fresh slate, so examine your card when you get it to decide if it works for you.

Q: If I complete my card, can I have another? A: Yep, and we'd be very impressed! (and happy!)

Q: Where did these prompts come from? A: Many suggestions from our followers, and we've been hunting and gathering, too. But we want to have lots of variety as the year rolls along, so please keep those suggestions rolling in.

Q: Can something I made for another challenge count toward a bingo prompt/Can I submit my work to more than one collection or challenge? A: As long as it's new work, and if the other challenge doesn't ask for exclusivity, bring it on! And frankly, we'd love to see more White Collar activity in multi-fandom spaces. Also, we'll surely be hosting other events throughout the year (at least Mozzie Mania and Caffrey-Burke Day), and you can certainly use a bingo prompt for any of those challenges as well.

[blood-darkened-moon]

Isolation

Chapter 1

December 12

What do you actually write in a diary? I guess I just write whatever comes into my mind.

My name is Samantha Blair, and I’ve been stationed at the Aurora Research Facility for about a month now. This place will be my home for roughly the next 11 months. I graduated two years ago with a PhD in chemistry. This is my new job. It wasn’t easy to get it. After all, there are only a few positions available in this facility. There are 12 of us in total, and my job is to analyze ice and soil samples. It’s summer here at the moment. The sun doesn’t set this close to the South Pole any more, and at night it only gets a bit dusky, which, admittedly, bothers me more than I thought it would. Doug* gave me this journal “so I won’t lose track of time.” I wonder if that will help. At least I can try.

*Douglas Garry, station leader

December 13

Nothing interesting. After breakfast, I set about sorting the samples from the last research team and finding out which of them still needed to be analyzed and which didn’t. So the same thing I’ve been doing for over a week now. What were they thinking? “We’ll be gone soon anyway, let the next team take care of it?” After me, the deluge. Typical. Half of the samples are not properly labeled, and even for those that are, it takes forever to find out what has already been done with them. It’s all in the lab books, my ass. I can hardly do anything with the cryptic notes there if I manage to decipher the handwriting at all. On top of that, I have to pick the measurement data out of disorganized piles of paper. It was all planned differently. They were actually supposed to measure their own stuff, but towards the end of their stay, one device after another broke down. The devices are working again. Now, we’re supposed to carry out these measurements first and send them the results.

December 14

Sorting samples, searching for corresponding measurement data. Nothing new. Jeff gave me a new drill core. At least I was able to take a few measurements today.

*Jeffrey Norris, geologist

December 15

As I was going about my usual business, John* arrived and said that we were going to be hit by a heavy snowstorm in the next few days. According to the weather data, the storm will last for several days, maybe even weeks. We have to prepare the station. So we spent the whole day outside moving equipment into storage rooms or fixating it. I’m still freezing.

*John Bennings, meteorologist

December 16

Dark clouds have gathered. After so many days of sunshine, the darkness, if you can call it that, is a welcome change.

December 17

It’s been snowing since last night, and the snowfall is getting heavier, although it will be another 2-3 days before it really starts. David* expressed concerns about the dogs, but Marcus** said they don’t mind the little bit of snow. Quite the opposite. Huskies love this weather. Marcus looks after the dogs. He will know best. When I think about it, it occurs to me that we are probably one of the only stations left that still uses dog sleds. We also have snowmobiles, but Marcus always says the dogs are more reliable.

Later, we decided who should clear the paths and when. The work should continue if possible. However, if the storm gets too bad, the research buildings will remain closed until it subsides.

*David Palmer, technical chief

**Marcus Clark, responsible for the dogs, thermal engineering, welding work

December 18

The howling of the wind gets stronger and stronger. Eerie. I have hardly slept a wink. At least I’m slowly making progress with the samples.

December 19

I spent half the day clearing paths. It is a Sisyphean task. As soon as I was finished, I had to start all over because everything was covered in snow again. And the worst is yet to come. If it goes on like this, I can forget about work for a while.

December 20

Jeff was on clearing duty today. He also said there was no point. After dinner, we agreed that we would only clear the paths to the important buildings, everything else would have to wait until the storm subsided. At least the dogs are having fun. And Lena. She built a giant snowman. Lena Fuchs is still a student and the youngest of our team, and you can tell. When I see her so carefree, I sometimes think I’m getting old...

The fact that Lena is here is not a matter of course. Normally, students are not accepted for research stays. However, Lena has excellent grades, so she was selected regardless of the usual rules. At least, that’s the official reason. For those who believe it. Her father just happens to have a lot of political influence and a ton of money. It would be a true miracle if he hadn’t set the whole thing up.

She’s supposed to help me with the measurements, but that will have to wait until the samples are sorted and the storm calmed down. In the first few weeks, however, I had already shown her how to operate the measurement devices. To pass the time, I’ve now given her a pile of papers to read.

December 21

We have a visitor. The last thing you expect at the South Pole in the middle of a snowstorm is a visitor. Her name is Veronica Edwards. She is British and works at the Umbrella facility nearby. She says she is a senior researcher. There’s been a virus outbreak. She hasn’t said what kind of virus it is, only that it’s not airborne and that the likelihood of her being infected is low. In general, she kept a rather low profile. However, she said that under the circumstances she cannot stay in the Umbrella facility. If she is infected with something, we can’t let her roam around freely, but not helping her is not an option either, so we put her in quarantine. Actually, that was her suggestion. Isaac* has prepared a room in the northeast storage building for the purpose. She waited in the snowmobile she came in. The building is quite large, and it also has a shower room and restrooms. Additionally, the supply in the northeastern storage building is largely separated from the other buildings, and we can lock an area from the outside. That could work. It was supposed to be modified into another research building this summer, but the modification has been postponed for another year or so. However, it has already been largely emptied. She said two weeks of quarantine would be enough. For the time being, only Isaac and Harry** will look after her. Isaac is our doctor. Harry has volunteered. They will stay away from the rest of us to minimize the risk of a virus outbreak during that time. In case of an emergency, they have walkie-talkies.

We have offered to contact Umbrella and tell them what happened, but Dr. Edwards said she had done that before she left the Umbrella facility. They’ll send people as soon as the storm subsides. If they’re taking so long, that must mean it’s not that bad, right? Or that it’s already too late, and there’s nothing they can do anyway. Shit. We’re not prepared for incidents like this.

* Dr. Isaac Copper physician, and by necessity veterinarian

** Harold Childs vehicle mechanic

December 21 Addendum I

I have to distract myself from the thought that the woman might have infected us all with some deadly virus. And I forgot to write that our new arrival is rather strange. She was at least wearing a jacket, but underneath, she had only put on a long purple dress, high-heeled shoes, and white velvet gloves. The clothes looked anything but cheap. She looked more like she wanted to go to a gala than work in a research laboratory. Who walks around like that in Antarctica? Well, maybe she wasn’t on duty when the outbreak happened. That would also explain why she managed to escape and, according to her own statement, is probably not infected. But even as casual wear, her outfit looks pretty bizarre in a place like this.

She had to wait quite a long time in the snowmobile until the provisional quarantine was ready. Wasn’t she cold in her thin clothes? She didn’t complain. And I couldn’t see any signs that she was freezing either. Admittedly, I kept a safe distance. Speaking of snowmobiles, judging by the tracks, she was driving as if she was drunk and almost crashed into one of the buildings. Can she just not drive, or are these signs that she’s not feeling well? A fever, perhaps?

Also, I remembered Doug mentioning in the first or second week that Umbrella isn’t even doing research at the facility anymore. It’s supposed to be a materials storage facility or something like that. Well, Dr. Edwards claims she is a researcher there. I’ll ask Doug about the facility again when I get a chance.

December 21 Addendum II

Nicole*** wanted to contact AAD and ask how we should proceed with Dr. Edwards. However, due to the storm, there is currently no way through with our communication system. Always at the best possible time, of course! At least it’s not broken. Nicole has checked it. In a few days, the storm should ease a little, although not stop. She’ll try again then. Until then, we’re on our own. As old as the communication system is, I’m not surprised that it doesn’t work currently. It probably dates back to when the station was founded in the 70s.

***Nicole Windows, telecommunications, electronics, computers

AAD = Australian Antarctic Division

Next→

[foxes-that-run]

Midnights is the break up album

In the above interview with Zane Lowe Taylor talks about Happiness and how it is about ending a long term life changing relationship. Taylor said it was the last song for Evermore, and started relating to friendship. Toward the end she switches to speak in the first person. That was in December 2020, 1.5 years before Midnights. After that we saw Joe very little.

The concept of the album was a series of midnight thoughts throughout Taylor’s life, which many tracks are, however there is an element of viewing the downfall of this relationship through them. I think Taylor didn't want to make the announcement through a publicist but through her lyrics on Midnights.

Question, Glitch and SOTB are plain wishing she was with an ex

Bejeweled is remembering when CH didn’t value her love, reflecting that she also also bored and under appreciated in her current relationship

Midnight rain is possibly the toughest, it’s reflecting on a relationship she let go for fame

Dear reader is a statement that she is not who her fans think because the happy in love narrative is not her experience

Taylor stopped liking Joe's IG posts 11 May 2022, he didn’t attend her NYU doctorate ceremony on the 18th May 2022, midnights was released in October and the break up announced the following April after the Eras tour had started.

A relationship having ended would not have been announced in real time ahead of a world tour and new album. Us knowing is a secondary challenge to actually going through the break up. What I wonder about is why was Invisible String ever on the setlist, was it there to be removed when it went public?

Taylor stopped liking his IG posts 11 May 2022

Taylor also went from always liking Joe’s IG posts to stopping between 27 April and 11 May 2022, she hasn’t liked one since:

So when?

Taylor may share one day. But to me this lyric in Stop you're losing me hints at the point she realised it was over:

Fighting in only your army Frontlines, don't you ignore me I'm the best thing at this party(You're losin' me)

Taylor is the best thing at most parties, but after showing up at the Golden Globes and wrap parties for a not great TV series for Joe he made some not great (or not at all) showings at big events for her:

2020

25 November - In the Long Pond Session Taylor said Joe was William Bowery

16 December - Taylor said to Zane Lowe that Happiness is about ending a long term relationship, she switched to first person

2021

15 March - Grammy's Joe had never come & it was COVID limited, but he won a Grammy for *Album of the year* & I'd say she has the pull for a ticket for a producer of it

April - Folklore credits update to add Joe as producer on 6 songs, including 3 William Bowery wrote, Grammy eligible. No credits for midnights and evermore.

12 May - Taylor was honored with a Global Icon award but Joe left to film in Belfast the week before. Harry also at Brits and won.

21 August - Joe actually seen with Taylor

14 September - Taylor seen in ireland, seen at conversations with friends cast party

14 November - Blake, Ryan, Sophie & Selena join Taylor at the SNL All to Well launch party. Joe A was filming in Panama.

2022

27 March - They went to the Vanity Fair Oscars pre-party, but Taylor skipped the 2022 Grammy's, Brit Awards and Oscars. It's interesting that the only photos of Taylor are of getting out of the car with Joe squinting, they bypassed the press line.

11 May Taylor stopped liking Joes IG posts

18 May - Taylor receives an honorary doctorate from NYU, while not a party it is a massive deal. In her speech she smiled at a particular part of the audience when she referenced friends and family, but Joe was at a Rising Hollywood party in LA.

19 May - Joe on Kelly Clarkson talking about William Bowery

31 August - VMAs afterparty - Joe & Taylor's unglamourous run to a car. VMAs have been important to Taylor since 2009. She was on the cusp of winning the most VMAs ever, announced Midnights and All to Well won. I wonder if Midnights was already done though.

20 October - Midnights pap walk where Joe uses a coffee table book to shield his hand from being held.

2023

9 February - Grammy afterparty- Joe came to afterparty

31 March - The 1 replaces Invisible String.

8 April - break up announced said it occured 'weeks earlier'

[merrock]

As promised, there are a few pre-holiday things that I wanted to discuss with you guys this week, just so you know what is expected activity-wise through the end of the year, and some little things about keeping things festive, fresh and fun around here.

As this post might be a little bit lengthy, I am going to pop it under a cut, but please take a few minutes to read through things! xx

Firstly, although I don't have the exact dates in mind, this is a warning that we will have two more activity checks before the end of the year. One will be at the end of November / beginning of December, and one will be at the mid-month point before the holidays. The next check will be a full sweep: meaning we will look for inactive accounts, those not meeting three replies, and those who are not replying to three writers per character, nor replying to new open starters.

The mid-December check will likely just be checking for straight-up activity (inactive for two weeks: removal, inactive for one week: warning). We will not be doing a check at the end of December, but will instead be doing an interest check after the new year to allow you to make changes you need, drop characters you don't want, etc. This means that we will be toughening up and clean slating activity in the middle of January, once everyone is where they need to be. Those first couple of weeks of January should be used to do what you need to do to be meeting our rules and get back on track.

Please remember that we do not offer semi-hiatuses! It's the holidays, it's okay if you're not active every day; as long as you are able to do three replies within a two week period at any point, you are not going to lose your role, even if you might get a reminder/warning on check. We promise. If you need a hiatus, we do grant those for up to two weeks. If you speak to us personally and privately (meaning not a public OOC post, talk tags, etc.) about activity issues, we will be lenient and understanding as long as you are trying. That's all that we ask of anyone during busy times, is just that a little effort is made to be here, follow the rules, and have fun!

Not to be a meanie, but if you decide that this group is not for you, whether it just not be the perfect fit, or you simply do not have the time, please ask us for an unfollow. We absolutely never hold it against anyone! But this allows us to remain lenient while opening spots for new writers. You are always welcome to return!

As for my role as admin: I plan on maintaining rolling, daily acceptances during the holidays, and am hoping to be on daily to help with what you need. Please note that I will be having a hard "mod logs out" time at night of 10:00PM EST, with very few exceptions. And remember, just because I am online doing replies does not mean I am in mod mode -- I want to write and enjoy the holiday season with you guys, too! Please send things you need changed/updated to the ask box here on main, versus a message. Extend the same understanding and patience towards me when it comes to the holiday season and availability, is all that I ask!

Alright, past that! Let's talk a little bit about holidays in Merrock, in terms of our favorite Merrockites! As you may have noticed, we have lots of holiday fun coming up -- I recommend bookmarking our holiday guide post to keep track of everything and make it easy to plot with others around town! There should be something for everyone to do -- even those who don't celebrate specific holidays -- but we are also open to editing the post for other business owners or people who would like to offer things around town! Or even if you have ideas / suggestions. Just let us know.

We've had people ask in the past about holiday gift giving, and yes, we do allow that here! But we ask you to be considerate of dash spam. For example, if you want to give gifts to 10 friends, tag them all in one post, versus rapid fire posting 10 posts at once on dash. (It's okay to separate out a husband, a best friend, a sibling, etc.) I also want to make it clear: gifts are not mandatory. You're also welcome to post a tray of cookies and tag friends, or give out little ornaments, or just not do anything at all. We also don't want people to put so much priority into gifts that they're not active. We promise that no one will be offended if you don't have huge, elaborate gifts, or choose to focus on activity.

December and January are pretty 'in the books' for me as an admin; all of the events are drafted, announcements have been posted, birthdays and mini events are queued, so I will be taking care of site maintenance and mostly enjoying the holidays with you guys and doing my best to keep things active. I've put a lot of work into the holiday season, so please: take advantage! Post lots of open starters, reach out to those you don't normally plot with, spread love and warmth during this holiday season. xx

[televinita]

Am listening to Taylor Swift music again, and have been seized by the need to talk through some of her older albums -- favorite songs, personal history, whatever comes to mind. Maybe in yet another attempt to try and figure out my overall fave / ranking of them as a set? No real order is planned for this so I thought I’d start with this one, because I realized I actually hadn’t listened to it in quite some time.

(I don't really know what this mini-project is going to be but I’ve been noodling on it for a few nights and now seems as good a time as any to share.)

Background/Overview

When it was new -- and a 2010 Christmas present for me -- it was my favorite of the three, but now I'm not sure. The thing is that it has several songs I like better than the entirety of Fearless (except for #1 fave Change), but it also has a handful I find less interesting compared to that one’s “13 track listings, stars beside them all” success, and I can’t decide how to weight that. It does absolutely have the prettiest cover and booklet, though.

Songs

Ask me my favorite song on this album and I’ll say without hesitation Long Live. I don’t think that will ever change; it’s in my all-time-faves across her whole discography. The twin/companion piece to Change, it never fails to make my heart sing. It came out after I was an adult but it still makes me nostalgic and occasionally teary as hell for high school. Bonus association: this was my mental soundtrack for the end of Glee season 3 too (”for a moment, a band of thieves in ripped-up jeans got to rule the world").

Runner-up faves are Haunted, which really lives up to its name (Wuthering Heights-haunted style, maybe... between the electric guitar tearing open the scene and the chimes, the instrumentation is epic; this may be the only song that actually loses emotional impact as an acoustic/piano version), Better Than Revenge (which is my not-even-that-guilty pleasure and I will JAM OUT to it to this day; "no amount of vintage dresses gives you dignity" is SAVAGE and I love it), and The Story of Us ("looks like a lot like a tragedy now" is one of my favorite quotes to bust out in episode reviews about ‘ship destruction, or was when I still did those), which is similarly jam-out-worthy. Ooh, and Sparks Fly is one of those songs where I'm like, "WHY wasn't this a single, it's so good." I’m actually always kind of surprised that one isn’t the album opener; “my mind forgets to remind me you’re a bad idea” is my anthem for giving shows/ships/characters/episodes way more chances than they deserve. (Grey’s Anatomy. We’re mostly talking about every time I dip back into the Grey’s Anatomy waters). In slow-songs-I-like territory: Enchanted, which is frankly too pretty for the person it’s actually about (but helpfully easy to apply to anyone and relevant to every listener’s life). And Back to December, which suffers rather unjustly from my knowing that it’s about The Boring Taylor, because I used to automatically skip it about half the time, yet every time I actually listen to it I'm shocked to realize it’s way prettier than I remember. Both musically (when male vocals...enhance?? a taylor song??) and lyrically.

As far as the other singles, I kind of killed Mine for myself with overplay, but I do think it's one of the strongest singles she's ever released...and as I’m listening to it now, I think it might be back! What good music, what a sweet scenario, and how much do I love the “brace myself for the goodbye / ‘cause that’s all I’ve ever known...” part.

Mean is fun and deservedly sassy, although it too is recovering from overplay (with the added demerit of being covered in the worst, least appealing possible way on Glee and feeling tainted forever. Once upon a time this was in my top 5 for the CD). Speak Now is fun too, but also...damn, so much more juvenile and mean-spirited to me now than Better Than Revenge. You don't help a dude ditch his bride at their wedding! If he shouldn't be marrying her you talk to him BEFORE THE CEREMONY???? I have definitely lost enchantment with this one over time.

One I don’t know how to feel about: I have to be in the right mood for the song so I don’t always let it play through, but as a late bloomer homebody and perpetual looker-backer, the second half of Never Grow Up really kicked me in the heart when I first heard it. I thankfully never ended up having to experience this, but "here I am in my / new apartment in the big city / they just dropped me off / it's so much colder than I thought it would be / so I tuck myself in, and turn the nightlight on" really described all my deepest fears about graduating from college and still brings a twinge at the mere thought.

On the downturn: unpopular opinion but while Dear John is full of great lyrics, it’s just so damned slow that I skip it almost every time. I’m really hoping it gets reinvigorated by a Taylor’s Version, because whenever I give it a chance, I just end up freshly disappointed by the wasted potential.

Innocent is slightly more compelling music-wise, but still rather slow and often skipped, not least because it just...feels weird. Uneven. There are some great lines and a good idea buried in here, but with its history and context it's so patronizing even when I’m on Taylor’s side that it ends up cringe.

Meanwhile, Last Kiss doesn't even exist to me. It covers the same criminal territory as Back to December but it's EVEN SLOWER. Bonus Tracks I didn't hear them until the end of 2012 and even then only as standalones on Spotify, separate from the album associations, I absolutely love all three, more than the last 5 or 6 above in fact. Ours is the companion piece / sequel to "Mine," If This Were A Movie is sweet, and Superman is so cute and catchy.

[sequencefairy]

As of this am, we have a statement from Cait, via their twitter:

[ transcription:

Dear friends, family, readers, fellow authors, and members of the publishing community,

Since June 2022 I've been fighting a losing battle against depression, alcoholism and substance abuse, the full scope of which I've hidden from everyone in my life out of shame and a misguided belief that with the right medicine or enough therapy, I could beat it.

In late November, 2023, I started a new medication, and on December 2nd, 2023, I suffered a complete psychological breakdown. During this time, I created roughly 6 profiles on Goodreads, and, along with 2 profiles I made during a similar but shorter breakdown in 2022, I boosted the rating of my book, bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors, and left reviews that ranged from kind of mean to downright abusive.

Two of those authors--Molly X. Chang and Danielle Jensen--are fellow Del Rey authors. Kamilah Cole and Bethany Baptiste, just happened to be on the wrong Goodreads lists at the wrong time. I felt no ill will towards any of them, it was just my fear about how my book would be received running out of control. My memories of this are extremely fuzzy, so it's possible there are a couple of other authors. If so, please know I take full ownership of what I did to you as well. I'm sorrier than you'll ever know. There's nothing I can say to erase what I did to you.

When I was slapped on the wrist by Goodreads and vague-tweeted by a handful of people, I panicked that my secret was about to get out and rather than taking responsibility for my actions, I tried to cover my tracks. Still in the middle of this breakdown, I made up the world's sloppiest chat with a non-existent friend who was supposedly to blame, and sent fake apologies for the actions of said "friend", which only made things worse. I betrayed the confidence of my agent, my pub team, my readers, and my friends, and betrayed my own deeply held values.

I also dragged one of my dearest friends and fellow debut authors into the mud with me when she came to my defense. I'll leave her name out of this so as not to pull her in even deeper, however if she wishes to come forwards, I'll apologize to her publicly as well.

Let me be extremely clear: while I might not have been sober or of sound mind during this time, I accept responsibility for the pain and suffering I caused, and my delay in posting this is due to spending the last few days offline while going through withdrawal as I sobered up enough to be brutally honest with you and myself. No one ever wants to be judged by their worst actions, but theye not always up to us.

I'll be reaching out to everyone directly impacted, though that may take some time, since I'm checking into an intensive psychiatric care and rehab facility, which means I'll mostly be off social media, as I need to give 100% to the program if I want it to stick. All I can do going forward is to try to live my life in a way that shows you these aren't empty words.

Yours, with so much love and utmost heartbreak,

Cait Corrain

/end transcript]

Since this article was published, according to tweets from the parties involved, two of Corrain’s publishers have removed their book from their 2024 schedules, and Corrain’s agent has announced that she and her client are parting company.

[jodilin65]

FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 2020 Ready to give up on The Killing and perhaps TV in general for a while. I’m tired of the unfair and unrealistic portrayal of society in general, even though I should probably tell myself hey, it’s just TV. But it’s all about how horrible white people are and how innocent everyone else in the world is and I’ve had enough. There are plenty of ways to have good, entertaining shows without making reference to race. It simply isn’t necessary to keep bringing it up as often as most shows do. When the producers start mixing in some characters that play the race card and stories about whites who are discriminated against, then I’ll be inclined to watch more.

I slept shitty as hell. The fucking trash and recycle trucks woke me up half a dozen times since they always gotta make a big production out of things and can’t simply get the shit and go. They shouldn’t need to be here for hours yet they are. It’s just fucking ridiculous.

They weren’t the only ones to wake me up, though. I woke up several times for no particular reason and to pee. At least I didn’t have that nasty foot cramp I had the night before.

Enjoying a break from the planes tonight which was annoying last night.

My nails are continuing to look better, so I’m just going to go and dump all my old nail polish and start anew with a brand that doesn’t mess them up.

Tom brought home a bucket of KFC after work. We’ll both enjoy this, the sides that came with it, and other things he got for a few days. He’s working tomorrow so he won’t be going to Sam’s until Sunday.

Each month I count the days that I ranged anywhere from barely borderline anxious to actually anxious and at first I was horrified when I counted six days for January, more than November and December combined. Then Tom reminded me of the experiment I did which means I didn’t go as low as I normally go with my meds and that’s why I had more anxious days.

It only makes me angrier and more mistrustful of doctors in general. The problem is mostly on the meds just like I said 5 years ago. At least now the good thing is that I know what to do about it when I start to feel anxious. It just sucks that I have to choose between anxiety or fatigue. I really love the energy I’ve been having, though, which is a sign right there that it was building up in my system, so of course I would have some anxiety. I skipped yesterday, cut today’s pill, and now it’s every day until labs. I just have to remind myself it’s only for 33 days. I got this. I can do this…and then I can trade any anxiety that should be building up about then if not sooner for fatigue.

He still thinks that I’ll one day be able to take it every day without being anxious but maybe not until he retires. He also thinks that together we’ll help each other lose weight when he retires. Well, he has a great track record for being right, but I don’t think so. He might get the first one right and he might lose some weight when he retires but I honestly don’t see myself ever losing weight unless something was wrong.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020 Last night I was bored out of my fucking mind. My mind flashed through all kinds of writing projects and other ideas yet not a single one of them appealed to me. It wasn’t like I couldn’t come up with some basic story ideas. I just couldn’t motivate myself to actually put them in print.

I found myself a touch anxious and depressed, obsessively worrying about the future as I tend to do way more often the older I get. Trying to tell myself not to worry about the end of our lives because that time isn’t here yet and I can’t control it anyway just doesn’t always work. Trying to distract myself in a productive way isn’t always that easy either.

I still miss some aspects of and feelings my old self would experience, but then I know I should be glad that my worst problem in life is being bored and not finding things as new and as exciting since I’ve been there, done that, etc. Most new things I would like to try simply can’t be done at the snap of my fingers just because I may be in the mood and have the time.

I’m going to try doing a puzzle walk at the start of every hour. Hopefully, that will keep me from having too much free time on my hands while being beneficial to my health at the same time.

I read an article the other day that said that weight loss and aging are actually not normal, but a sign that something is wrong. This does make sense when you think about it, too. The metabolism only keeps getting slower with age. Not the other way around. But there definitely does seem to be a loss of appetite in older people for a variety of reasons. I’m already noticing a slight decrease in appetite now that I no longer have PMS hunger to deal with and then the hunger that often comes with perimenopause. Not a 1000-calorie-a-day kind of appetite, but I find it’s easier to go down to 1200-1500 rather than 1500-2000. Even so, that’s still too high for weight loss as a short female with a bum thyroid.

I realized a couple of days ago that I no longer get dizzy when I lie down or get up. Those ear crystals must have found their way back home.

It’s Aly I’m worried about. She’s been through so much shit for as long as I’ve known her, and while I know life isn’t fair and I shouldn’t let it get to me, I can’t help but find myself comparing her to Kim every now and then and getting angry. Here you have this great person who has one thing after another while the insane person who has no ability to feel empathy, guilt or remorse much less any ambitions in life other than to live in a fantasy world gets off easy. She sleeps like a baby, she’s never had cancer, she’s never had any stomach issues, she shouldn’t need a hysterectomy anytime soon if ever, and of course, Novasure was a complete success for her. It just hardly seems fair any more than why it always has to be me who doesn’t get to live in peace. Everyone else either has a quiet place or they don’t mind it if it’s noisy. That’s just life for you. the murderer always wins the lottery while the good people struggle and suffer.

There are at least some new and exciting things to look forward to, though, and that’s likely to be the RoboRock we’ll probably order in about a week. This is a combination vacuum and mop robot and is less expensive as well at just over $300. We checked all the particulars on how it functions, including reviews, and now we’re going to sit on it for a week or so since we don’t want to make impulse purchases, and if this still seems to be our best deal at that time, we’ll probably get it. Our old one can be used for other projects. Sometimes it’s easy to drop some bedding and turds when we go outside to shake out the pigs’ liners, and it can be used to sweep up little things in the carport.

Went back to separate books for what I share with the public versus what I keep private on PB. It was just too much of a pain in the ass to break them up into separate parts.

I didn’t sleep as well last night. I woke up many times and even had another spider nightmare. This one wasn’t super-sized or anything. I was lying in bed and watching it move across the ceiling. Then it started to fall down on its web on me and it’s like I was paralyzed, unable to move out of the way.

Then I dreamed of staying in a large house with many rooms. The drama queen was in the room next to me and not too far from us was our cousin Philip. Philip and I had some kind of problem and I later overheard him telling Tammy that he hid a note for her inside his pants that he placed on her bed. When Tammy was out of the room, I quickly snuck in and pulled a sheet of paper out of the pair of jeans that was laid out. I was curious to see if he mentioned whatever problem we had but found that he didn’t.

Then my PCP was visiting in the last dream and she wanted to take a picture of my dresser because she thought it was decorated so cutely. I told Alexa to turn on the light since the room wasn’t very bright at the moment, and she ignored me as she usually does in dreams. But the second time around she listened to me when I told her to turn on “dawn.”

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2020 I think it’s sad that people regularly refer to whites these days as white trash, and it’s okay. Call anyone else names and it’s not acceptable at all. Yeah, I think we’ve taken the politically correct bullshit a little too far these days. Yet the fact still remains that two wrongs don’t make a right any more than applying new or fancy labels to things changes what those things are.

Went out walking for about 15 minutes. I’ll walk more on the treadmill later. The breeze was cool, the sun was warm. I ran into Dixie on the way and she stopped to chat with me for a couple of minutes.

She told me that yes, there was a death in the house across from next door. Dahl’s wife Barbara had cancer before they moved here, thought it was gone, but it returned and killed her. How sad. Imagine buying a new house and then dying just a few months later? Now the question is whether or not he’s going to stay there by himself. I hope the house doesn’t go back on the market, but the guy has to do what he has to do.

The winds are northerly again which means the planes are back to being a nuisance. I could hear one roaring overhead clearly when out on my walk even with the headphones playing pretty loud. If the damn thing was just a little lower I could probably make out the airline.

I found a flaw in the Kindle app I’ve got on my phone and that’s that it doesn’t sync after I’ve been listening to Alexa read me parts of a book.

Aly completely ignored my question when I asked her if Molly was continuing to ignore her and not realize she’d been ghosted, furthering my suspicions that they’d picked up their friendship elsewhere. But why the secrecy? I don’t get why Aly feels the need to hide it at this point. She knows I know they’ve been friends and that I know it’s not my place to tell her who she should or shouldn’t be friends with.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2020 I signed up for Google Alerts on Tom and myself, plus a few others a while back. Last night I got an alert with Tom’s obituary, LOL. A 74-year-old guy with the same name died in Wisconsin.

Love how I can connect the Kindle app to Goodreads so I can mark the book I’m reading as “currently reading” and then shelve and rate them from there.

I also discovered that I could use the email account I created for sweeps for its own set of Google Docs and that way I can keep journals separate from everything else. I didn’t want to have to sift through so many documents to get to a certain thing on my main Google Docs but would still like to have journals available so I can access them on any device in any location. Not going to bother to sync my docs on the Mac because I just don’t see myself ever using the Mac full-time again.

I decided to go ahead and share public entries on the shit I got from the subtropical drama queens. Why? because I want them to be reminded of why I’ll never forgive and accept them back into my life when they get to missing me someday. I don’t expect the girls to ever look for me unless maybe to tell me if Tammy dies, but Tammy’s going to want to play kiss and make-up someday. Not going to happen, and she can read why when the time comes. Then again, I’m sure they all truly believe deep down in their heart of hearts that they did absolutely nothing wrong.

Two cars in the carport and three on the street by Dahl and Barbara’s place. Now I’m starting to wonder if someone died over there. I sent Dixie an email asking if she knew anything. Something’s got to be going on over there. Plus, I wanted to see how her wrist was doing.

Tom has this thing that tested the Roomba’s motor and it said it was working fine. It still works, it just doesn’t do as good of a job as it used to since it’s now over 6 years old. We paid nearly $500 for this one but now they have non-name brands that are a lot cheaper. I really want one that mops as well. They have some that vacuum and mop that are close to $500 and then they have separate robots that are roughly $170 each. I don’t know yet what we’re going to get.

My tits aren’t as sore as they were yesterday. I’m wondering if the anxiety might have been connected to that somehow like if there was a shift in my hormones or something like that. But since things are usually caused by what we least want them to be caused by, I skipped my meds today. I’m sure it’s building up in my system and that’s part of why I’ve had more energy lately as well. I’m going to cut my dose until the first and then ramp it up for the lab.

I’m back to having to get up during my sleep to pee, but my weight has been back to where it usually is. Can I keep from hitting the 160s this year? I still don’t know about that but I’m certainly going to try.

This is going to be my last “processed” day. I had one of his burgers and I’m already feeling that funny feeling in my head that I tend to feel when I don’t eat healthily. It’s sort of like a pressure or a vibration. I don’t know how the hell Tom can stand to eat so unhealthily as he does, but it’s lucky for him since he refuses to change. Later I’ll finish the last of my fried fish and then I’ll have mostly unprocessed stuff.

MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 2020 Been watching The Killing on Hulu but it’s just so-so. I also watched a horror flick called The Prodigy which was pretty good.

My memory is so bad that I totally forgot I’ve actually met Elaine, one of Dixie’s neighbors whom she mentions quite often. She walked by our place one time when I was outside, and we began to chat. The only thing I remember her saying, and only because I wrote it in a journal entry I saw on the On This Day sidebar on Prosebox was, “My only complaint” before someone called out to her and cut her off, leaving me to wonder if she was going to say anything about any of the plants on our lot.

The new headphones sound surprisingly good for the price. Just a little big for my head, so I’ll have to wrap some foam around the top of it or something. I went on my first walk with them. It was pretty nice out and the sun actually felt warm, so I didn’t stay out for more than 15 minutes so as to not get all sweaty. Anything loud or close could still be heard, but they definitely helped. I could still hear some planes and landscaping, but I didn’t have to walk three blocks in order to escape it.

The new guinea pig bowl turned out to be green instead of blue, but they did say “assorted colors” and green is fine. It’s not quite as big as the other ceramic one, but it’s bigger and heavier than the plastic one.

Decided not to get an iPad even though I found a good deal on one for just $300. According to what I read, it’s not as customizable and may not have the features I know and like on the MacBook Air. But Apple is pushing people to use iPads and fucking up their operating systems. Laptops are probably going to become as obsolete as computers. I get so tired of so much change so fast! Can everyone at least have and keep the same features even as new ones are being added? $300 is a bit much to spend on something that I may not like better than my new Windows computer.

I was going to get a new Kindle because my Paperwhite has gotten old, sluggish, and has issues going back through the pages. The battery doesn’t last nearly as long as it used to either. I was considering an 8-inch Kindle Fire HD but then decided to download the Kindle app on my Samsung Galaxy and try reading there. So far, I like it! The only problem is that the phone is heavier than the Paperwhite. But the app is much better than the Paperwhite because I really prefer white on black. It’s much more relaxing, especially in a darkened bedroom as I prepare for bed. It’s much faster and easier to navigate through the pages as well, and I like how it tells me both how much time is left in a chapter as well as how much of the book I’ve read. So, no iPad or new Kindle.

Even though Tom put new brushes and a new filter in the Roomba, that’s what we might have to replace because it’s still not doing a very good job lately. He said he’ll check the motor. I think it’s just getting old. I would totally love to have one that could mop floors as well!

Since I don’t feel as bad as often as I used to back when I was in hormonal hell and having trouble with my meds, I really don’t mind vacuuming by hand for a while because then at least I don’t have to prep and move things and all that. No, I may not be as thorough as Roomba when it’s working well, but I can at least throw the vacuum over the main walkways easily enough

I hope nothing is wrong with the hot water tank. It used to be that you could hear it running, but now I can hear these tapping sounds. Then again, the one in the trailer did that and so did the one in our Phoenix house, so it’s probably no big deal.

Since we have 6 1-gallon bottles of water, plus a 5-gallon jug of water, I decided to drain the tub. As for the toilet, it’s flushing faster but there were a couple of times I had to press the button to get it to flush. So we’re going to have to order a new actuator for it. It will cost 80 bucks but it’s a quick fix, he says.

He asked me what I thought about the idea of putting rocks alongside the carport instead of fake grass. After he thought about it, he realized that dog walkers might let their dogs pee on it, and being fake grass, it wouldn’t sink down into the dirt but leave a puddle on it instead. Even the turkeys could decorate it with puddles. So yeah, I agree that gravel would be better. We don’t want to leave it the way it is because that just makes more work for him since he would have to weed it, and when it rains it gets muddy.

It’s tough trying to be a raw/fresh/natural girl in a processed country. Walmart didn’t have my raw peanuts. I don’t like salt and I love freshly baked peanuts in the shell. But as Tom said, most people don’t want to work. They want to be able to just open a bag and eat their snacks. Well, there are plenty of salted peanuts out there, that’s for sure.

The reasons I’m sexist are because of the way most men treat women in general, and the other is because so many of them are dumb compared to women. My husband is smarter than 95% of the population will ever be, female and male, but yesterday was a reminder of just how dumb so many men are. We went to Target, and amongst a few annoying brats, I asked a guy who worked there if they had raw peanuts in the shell. He said they were in the nut aisle but all they had were roasted and salted which is everywhere.

Either way, we decided not to go to Target as often because Walmart is cheaper and has more things we like. I do like Target’s selection of coffee, though, so once a month or so we’ll go there to stock up on coffee.

I was thinking about how my father told me he and Mom couldn’t eat as much during one of our final conversations. At first, it’s easy to think that once I get to the point where I can’t eat as much, it will drop me to an ideal weight since I’m not as overweight as most people end up getting when they get older, I’m shorter which makes weight loss more noticeable, and I’m heavier than I look because I’m muscular. But then when I thought about just how far away I am from this happening, I could end up much more than 30 pounds overweight by the time I get there. If I were to end up something like 50-80 pounds overweight by the time I get too old to eat as much, then lose 30 pounds, I’d still be heavier than I am now. I guess that for now the best I can do is try to keep from gaining since all I can lose is a few pounds and we don’t have as much control over our weight when we get older as we might like to think we do. I’m not ashamed of my weight/size but I’m never going to be “proud” of something that has potential health risks in the name of political correctness either.

My blood pressure has definitely improved with healthier eating and less stress in my life. My systolic number is still high but being in the 130s is definitely better than the 140s and 150s. My lower number used to be in the 90s and that’s been close to normal. Right now, I’m 131/75.

I did have a little bit of anxiety last night but we’re hopeful that it was just because Monday was looming right around the corner which isn’t my favorite time of the week. Rather than skip my meds, I knew I could find out for sure if it was just an end-of-the-weekend thing if I took it today, so I did. So far, I’m fine but I’ve only been up for 6 hours, so we’ll see. If I get anxious in a few hours or so when the meds peak in my system, then yeah, time to back off a bit.

The weird thing is that my boobs have been sore lately as if I’m PMSing, though I’m not worried about it. As long as I don’t have any bleeding. But why do I have this symptom 3 months into menopause? I’ve even had faint cramp-like feelings which could be from a few things, some bad and some not, but not often or severe enough to be a concern. Last year around this time I also had sore boobs, which are unfortunately quite large, and it was the only time a period didn’t follow. Hopefully, that’s all this is and just a bit of a rise in estrogen which I would have thought I would be done with since it’s been 13 months since my last period.

We were glad to learn we’re going to get back nearly 2k and taxes since they withheld more because of the way we had to take from the 401 to get Candy. It’s still one of the best purchases we ever made, and he absolutely loves not having to stop for gas. Anyway, we still have quite a bit of debt, so most of the money will go toward that.

Even though it’s very unlikely that we’ll ever move to Stuart, I briefly entertained the idea of having my Facebook saying I live there when we move, regardless of where we end up. For one, I would rather people not know where we really end up that I’m not close to, and secondly, of course I find it funny to think of the drama queen and her shitsprings seeing it somehow, even if some of them might have moved by then.

“Why not someplace like New Jersey?” Tom asked.

Well, because they know damn well I would never move there. Then the perfect location came to me. Hawaii, of course! ROTFL! Sadly, we can never move there in reality, but we sure can on Facebook. LMAO! I just have to make sure I don’t mention the state in any of my journals which is almost certainly going to be Florida, just probably not Stuart.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 2020 We’re just beginning to see faint traces of spring here. They’re very faint but they’re there. More sunshine. Highs in the 60s more often. Low’s in the thirties less often. In fact, the motorcycles are getting more annoying. Some bastard just roared around the house. Dixie said something about the guy’s son visiting on a motorcycle that lives across from her. So fucking rude. Those things just don’t belong in a retirement community.

Dixie stopped and chatted with Tom for a few minutes when he was outside earlier.

Something bad must’ve happened to Dahl or Barbara because lately there have been 3 or 4 vehicles over there instead of the usual two that they own. The paramedics were there once or twice, and I’ve seen a medical equipment truck there a couple of times as well. It said Respiratory Care on it so I’m guessing he needs to be on oxygen just like Ralph was.

Lots of loud engines when we were out and of course some loud car stereos which the nicer weather brings out the worst of.

It was a little over 50 degrees when I was walking at around 9 a.m. I didn’t take my hoodie. I just wore my black leggings and a sweatshirt.

Yesterday I got two letters in the mail. One pissed me off while the other had me a bit bummed out.

Let’s start with a pisser. That would be from the park. Did we get a letter apologizing for the 5 days we were without water and promised a discount for those days that services weren’t rendered? Of course not. Instead, they wrote to brag about how wonderful they were in handling it and how little sleep they got. Okay, so they did pat the backs of a few of the residents for handing out water and all that but come on. Who the hell do they think they’re kidding?

The letter I got that was kind of sad was inevitable. I knew the day would come and that’s that my dentist, the best doctor I’ve ever had, is moving to Georgia with her husband so he can pursue his career in law enforcement. I was surprised. I thought she would say she was retiring and moving to Hawaii, but I guess that being older and all that, her husband was likely offered a job as sheriff or something like that.

Holly may stick around but it’s no longer worth driving all the way out to Roseville, so I intend to find a new dentist closer to home. If we were moving in a year or less I might stay with them but we’re going to be here for a long time, so I’d rather find a place closer. Plus, I still prefer to be treated by women and she’s having a guy take over for her. He could be wonderful for all I know, but he and I would rather not have to travel that far in such a crowded place. I appreciate the nearly eight years she helped keep my teeth in shape!

There are a couple of lady dentists just a couple of miles away that are from here from what I read and therefore I wouldn’t have to deal with any hard-to-understand accents of any kind which really annoys the hell out of me.

Even though my PCP has a bit of an annoying accent, I’m used to it, I’ve been with her for a while and am comfortable with her. So I’m going to stick with her for the rest of the time we’re here even though she too, is in Roseville.

Earlier we went to Burger King to try their Impossible Whopper and it was actually pretty good. It tasted very similar to real beef. After treating myself to the burger, fries and some M&M’s, I ended up napping for a little while. Not used to eating that much food and so unhealthy these days. The plant-based burger may be healthier than red meat but the rest of it wasn’t exactly healthy and it was a million calories to take in at once. This burger still has close to the same calories regular burgers do.

I’m having a second cup of coffee now to try to perk myself up. Definitely not going to unwind with Merlot at the end of the day if I stay this energyless. I hope I’m not at the end of the wonderful burst of energy I’ve been having this last week or so. I really like having good energy even if it means having a bit of insomnia. The last two nights I had trouble falling asleep but slept well once I did manage to crash. For a while, I had been getting up twice during my sleep to pee, but lately, I haven’t even gotten up once.

He’s working from home for a few hours today. Earlier, he replaced the brushes and filter on our Roomba and fixed the toilet that wasn’t always flushing properly. Hopefully, it’ll keep working, as he said, but if it doesn’t, we might have to get a new actuator for it.

Alexa has gotten so many devices and gadgets and her app has gotten so confusing and frustrating to use. I was trying to pair the Alexa clock in the bedroom with the remote and also with the Bluetooth speaker, but instead, I paired the remote to Bluetooth. Smart, huh? Fortunately, Tom was able to unpair everything for me.

The more I use Windows the less I like it. Too many things it can’t do that a Mac can do.

The more I use Healthy Hoof, the faster my nails seem to grow. I can’t swear to it, though, because my nails grow fast anyway. My nails are looking healthier as well but that could have been a particular brand of polish that caused the discoloring and lifting I was having. I’m sticking to Nicole polish which has never given me a problem. If my nails continue to do well, I’ll dump all my old polish and get a set of Nicole polish on Amazon. There’s a set of 15 mini bottles for under $20 that I’ve got saved for later.

For now, we’re going to be ordering another heavyweight bowl for the pigs since Blitz sometimes pushes on the divider. That way each side will have a heavyweight bowl since I already have one. This one is white with silhouettes of rabbits and ferrets. The one I plan to get is blue with tan guinea pig faces and paws. Plus, I’m going to get the pink lightweight headphones for when I’m out walking.

Tom said it’s the year of the rat in China. Right on, China! Even though I don’t know what the hell that means.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2020 Went for a half-hour walk. It’s 50 degrees out. The kind of weather where you wouldn’t want to be outside reading or something like that, but that’s ideal for working out.

I’m now down a total of 2 pounds and so far, it’s been easier than expected. I’ve just got to remind myself once I do start craving variety why I’m doing this and that’s to be healthier and lower my risk of diabetes. Even so, I still don’t expect to lose much more than another pound or two even if I keep dieting and exercising as I have been. My body just doesn’t give up its weight which tells me I’m probably where I’m supposed to be and perhaps not as much of a health risk as I may think at times. At least I know what to do when I start gaining a little extra. I’m not in my 70s yet. No letting it all go to hell until then!

I know Aly isn’t going to be happy about this, but I’ve had it with WhatsApp. They’ve been way too hit-or-miss lately and getting worse. If she ever tells me it’s been a few months since there were any problems there, since I don’t expect her to give up WhatsApp just because I have, maybe I’ll return then. For now, I would prefer Skype. I’ve used both apps for a long time and Skype is definitely more reliable. Rarely does it have problems.

Hard to believe we could be meeting in just a few months. I’m so excited! I told her what my schedule is likely to be in May and June but that’s always subject to change at least a little. I thought she was going to stay here but she prefers a hotel or motel just like Tom and I do when we travel, and while it would have been no problem putting her up for a night or two, I will admit a hotel would be easier on us as well. That way we can go in the kitchen and not have to worry about waking her up and things like that.

She gave me a great idea. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before but she’s bringing her Alexa with her because she likes to relax to nature sounds like I do and I realized I could take one of the older, smaller Dots to play pink noise and then play brown noise through an earbud so I have a wide range of frequencies when we go to Hawaii.

I don’t know why, but the helicopters were more annoying than the commercial planes and small planes yesterday. There were easily over a dozen low-flying helicopters zooming over that it made me wonder if there was a huge accident or something else going on. But when I checked the local news and to see if anything was trending on Twitter in my area, I didn’t find anything. I think it’s just like Tom said, helicopters are much cheaper than they were years ago, so everybody’s got them. I swear the world just keeps getting noisier and noisier, especially in heavily populated areas. I am so done with big cities when we finally get out of here!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2020 Down 1.2 pounds after the first day of having under 1000 calories. Wasn’t as hungry as I expected to be either. I just had fruits, veggies and nuts, along with a few thin slices of turkey, a piece of tilapia, and a kiddy smoothie. I try to make sure I have a few bites of veggies or fruit every hour or two, so my body doesn’t think it’s starving.

I emptied out a plastic storage container that was big enough to hold both pigs. It would actually hold three. I coaxed them into that while I changed their liners today and that made it so much easier. It took longer but it was easier because then I didn’t feel rushed and I could take the time to clean things properly. Of course, they didn’t pee in the container which would have been much easier to clean as opposed to the floor.

Since separating them, I’ve been in the habit of pushing the divider in place as soon as they each pick a side. Today’s the first time Blitz ended up closer to the refrigerator. I don’t know that they have a preference either way. As long as they’re fed, that’s all they care about.

Took care of the rats as well which I do every 10 days. I did their lower level yesterday, so all I had to do today was the top. I also changed their hammock which has been these thick blue cloths that people typically use for things like cleaning their cars. They’re about one square foot and the perfect size for them. If I had more than two rats, I would need a bigger one or to set up an additional one, not that they don’t have any other hangouts. This one is the most comfortable, though, being soft.

As soon as I heard how loud the freeway was this morning, I knew the planes would be bad, and sure enough, they’re so loud I can hear the rumble of them over the sound machine. I switched to the earbuds. Ridiculous. Just fucking ridiculous as always. I can’t wait till the summer when things are warmer and quieter even if that means more motorcycles.

When I can get brave enough to go out in the 46-degree morning for my walk, I’m going to have earbuds plugged into my phone so I can hear the music better over things like planes, landscaping, traffic and any mutts that might want to go off on me.

Just looked on Amazon and found what looks like the perfect lightweight, small headphones for ten bucks. Because one of my ear canals is deformed, I can’t wear an earbud on that side, so these would be great. Flying coach could mean negligent parents that let their brats scream up a storm, so they would be good for things like that as well.

Said hello to Bob yesterday and Dixie just sent me the dumbest joke… “Our town is so small we don’t have a town drunk, so we all take turns.” eye-roll

Really getting sick of getting notification alerts for this number that I’ve blocked and that tries to call at the same time every day. Having it show up on the pull-down is annoying enough but to have to hear the notification sound is even more annoying. However, I don’t see any way to disable it. Again, what’s the point of blocking someone if you’re going to have to know about it every time they try to make contact? And do these assholes not know they’re blocked, or is it an automated caller?

We’re going to have to fix the toilet in the master bathroom this weekend because the float keeps sticking. I had to remove the cover and I have to press down on it when I flush it to get it to flush all the way.

Started watching Guidance. Some of these high school drama shows are actually kind of funny. There don’t seem to be many episodes in the first season. I miss the days when a season would contain at least 20 episodes. It seems 6-10 is most common now which kind of sucks.

When playing around with the countdowns, I learned that I have 9446 days until my 80th birthday. I still don’t expect to make it to 80, more like to around 77 in which case I have about 8000 more days to live and over 1000 of that will be spent here.

I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist sharing the Stacey story with her kids which I know will get back to her, haha. She has two daughters and a son. The son doesn’t appear to use Facebook much unless he’s very private. One of the daughters allows comments from everybody, so I’ll be sure to give Abby, her daughter, a heads-up once it’s ready and posted on Prosebox. LOL

Saw Stacey on YouTube in an interview about a housing management award she won last year, and bitch or not, hatred for me for reason(s) only she knows, she aged tremendously well. The video isn’t the clearest and she looks like she could still be in her twenties for all anyone would know.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2020 I visited Dixie yesterday and found her to be the same. She’s still struggling but in denial. She’s able to admit that with her wrist still in its cast and her arthritic knees things are hard for her, but she insists she’s “not that old” and isn’t ready for any kind of assisted living. Again, she says Diane is getting harder to care for and needs to be put in some kind of care home, but she’s reluctant to do so. Understandably, she doesn’t want to be alone and she doesn’t trust that Diane will be looked after properly.

We still had a nice chat about this and that and she asked what was going on with me. I was happy to help her change Diane’s sheets, do a little vacuuming for her, and wash her potatoes. when I first got there, I zapped myself a mug of water, which happened to be one of the mugs I gave her, and prepared myself a cup of caramel tea while she put on her makeup. Even at her age she’s very into makeup and feels naked without it, she says. I would wear mine more often if I wasn’t so blind. Even though she’s almost 30 years older, she has better vision than I do.

For the first time since we got them a few years ago, I regret getting these motion-sensor toilets. Too many problems. Not a whole boatload of them but enough. It was also easier to pour buckets of water directly into the toilet bowl to flush it rather than have to uncover the tank and pour it in there when it’s time for water games. They would have been better if they were the kind that flushed automatically when you stood up. You still have to wave your hand. So if you have to do that, you might as well push a handle down and not have to deal with batteries, corrosion in the sensors, and shit like that.

I woke up at the highest weight I’ve ever been (158), despite increasing my exercise. Really believe I’m going to see the 160s this year. The question is whether or not I’ll hit 200 before I die. My first instinct is to fight it as hard as I can because I don’t want to become diabetic and I know it wouldn’t be good for my blood pressure and cholesterol to keep gaining, but it really truly is totally out of my control. Sometimes we really can’t change our size any more than we can change our height. If it weren’t unhealthy and affecting my mobility, I would love my size. Being a big girl definitely keeps the perverts away and me less of a target since most people believe smaller is weaker. Either way, If I could settle for not being so damn buxom and get rid of my gut, that would be enough for me, but that’s not going to happen. I’ll still try to eat as little as possible today, even though not eating much always leaves me hungry, tired and cold. I’ll just have to remind myself that that’s better than diabetes, heart disease, and all the fun stuff that goes with being so big.

I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before when doing periodic checks of my books on Goodreads to see if there were any new ratings or reviews, good or bad. Yesterday I noticed that two people “liked” that nasty review that was also left on Amazon before it was removed. Curious, I clicked to see who they were. One of them was someone named Adam with a private account, and the other was Sarah (no last name).

I’ve added this latest discovery to my harassment log since I don’t expect to never hear from them again as much as I wish that could be the case. Oh, it may be quite a while, but I know my sister. Sooner or later she’s going to want to reach out to me and when she gets no response, she’s going to once again lash out at me and encourage her carbon-copy offspring to do the same.

I’m going to stick to my golden rule of treating everyone equally. I don’t look at anyone as just family. I don’t look at anyone as just a friend. I look at everyone as people. Just people, and if I feel any of those people are toxic in any way, I don’t have anything to do with them. It really is quite simple for me. There is no “because you’re family” or “because we have a lot of history together.” It’s all about how you treat me.

Then I did some thinking and decided to unpublish my books for reasons that go beyond Tammy and her crazy brood. Basically, it’s a lack of sales and therefore lack of confidence.

I can’t go back and untell these assholes about my books and use a pen name, but this way they have less ammunition against me in the future. They could still go and bash books of mine on Goodreads that no one can ever read, since those remain forever in their database. But they can’t hurt sales if I’m not selling anything.

The biggest problem is what’s always been an issue… I’m just an okay writer and not a fantastic one, I don’t write full-length novels that most people prefer, and I’m not famous. From what I’ve seen, the only way you’re going to get regular sales is if you’re at least somewhat well-known. Yes, all books and authors may get negative reviews at times, but most of the ones with negative reviews have dozens of positive reviews for every one negative review they may have.

I can’t block these sick fucks on Amazon like I can on Facebook, Prosebox and other places. The only thing that makes no sense is that if that is the Sarah I think it is, why didn’t she leave negative ratings and reviews on other books instead of just “liking” someone else’s shitty review?

None of her kids ever struck me as the type to be into reading which fits with how empty the account is. These are the kinds of people that basically only do what they have to do in life and anything else would mostly be about food and TV and that’s pretty much it. They have no real hobbies.

But why is she listed as being in Pompano Beach, Florida? That’s 73 miles away from Stuart. But just being a Sarah in Florida who happened to join in November of last year can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to be her. Plus, she has no books, no reviews, no ratings; just that one “like.” I’m sure that when Tammy saw her review get kicked off Amazon, she encouraged the narcissistic bitch to join Goodreads.

And Tammy really thought she could scare me into believing she had an actual legal case against me that she’d already gone to the police with and that she would return to them if we didn’t call her by Sunday, December 1st? She’s even dumber than I ever thought she was if she thought I would be dumb enough to believe that shit.

I thought about unblocking them on Facebook long enough to share the entries I’ve made since the shit went down once we got out of here, but that’s just the thing… She and her kids truly are a bunch of fucking idiots and I knew that a long time ago. They’re not going to get a damn thing I say. Instead, they’ll just turn everything around like they always do and make like I’m the one with the problem, everything I’ve ever complained about where they’re concerned is false, they’ve never said or done anything wrong to me, and they’re the ones that cut ties with me. They’re true counter-attackers. I could accuse them of basically anything and they would automatically insist that no, I was the one who did it. I don’t doubt for a minute that they truly believe they’re totally innocent in everything and anything.

As far as unpublishing my books, there are other reasons like how Tom said I should do something because I want to do it without thinking in terms of what money it may bring. Oh, I’m still going to edit old stories and write more if I ever get any fresh ideas because it’s what I like to do.

Lastly, I still think the less of an online presence you have and the more private you are when looking for jobs or places to live, the better. Maybe not everyone is going to Google you and judge you based on what they find, but if someone who’s conservative can learn I’m liberal and won’t give us a place we want because of it, I could be lessening our opportunities in the future.

It’s not necessarily forever, though. The books aren’t gone. They’ve just been reverted to drafts. I can always change my mind and relist them if I want to. For now, I just feel like a few bucks a month if even that isn’t worth giving these assholes one more connection to me.

I’m currently editing We’ll Meet Again Someday which is the story that Stacey inspired. Some real-life characters and events are mixed in with what I’ve made up, though some have had their names changed. Of course, I changed Stacey’s last name.

I looked up her kids and found that they unblocked me. Stacey hasn’t, though. When I finish editing it, I may share it with them. I’ll know if they see it too, because they’ll just block me again. Hee-hee!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2020 My God, I’m as sick of hearing about Harry and Meghan as I once was to hear about Brangelina. Can we please move on to someone else now? Someone we’ve never heard of before? And can we only obsess over them for a few months or so?

It’s just after 6 a.m. and here goes the first of the small planes. Hopefully, the commercials will be as quiet as they were yesterday. Let’s check the wind direction. Southeast and rainy.

They’re back to doing OT at work so hopefully that’s a good sign. Honestly, the last thing I sense is him getting laid off. I just don’t “see” it happening. Worst case scenario if I’m wrong…they lay him off, he gets another job in the area, and we take a pay cut and have to curb our shopping. Instead of fun stuff every week, it may have to be every month. I’m not worried about it, though.

Yesterday Kim asked me if I’d heard about the impeachment and all that, and I told her I don’t usually pay attention to the details of politics, even though I am aware of it. Sure enough, today she tells me she doesn’t pay attention to politics either. What is it with her and her constant need to be a carbon copy of others? I still don’t get that any more than those who “happen” to always disagree or be different, both of which drive me nuts. Don’t those who always agree or always disagree and claim to have different experiences realize how obvious they are? I’m sorry but nobody’s that similar and nobody’s that different.

Next to get on my nerves were the pigs. Can’t even go two minutes without pissing and shitting and getting in the way when I’m trying to change their liner. I lay down the towel and they conveniently miss it. It’s like they want to make my life harder. From now on I’m going to contain them in something washable like a large plastic storage bin because I’ve had enough of their shit. Like literally. They were cute, though, as soon as I washed and dried their beds and returned them. They both hopped right in and went to sleep.

I was laughing when I saw the pictures of Guatemalan immigrants storming Mexico in today’s news. It’s about time THEY got to see what it was like being bombarded with illegals burdening the hell out of THEIR system. My laughter didn’t last long, though, because I know damn well where those immigrants are eventually going to end up. Yeah, you guessed it. Hey, why not just move the whole damn world here?

Wearing my stretchy jeans right now for the first time in a while. They seem both stiff and heavy. I’m just not a jeans person. I prefer sweats and tights when I’m not in shorts, skirts or dresses.

Got caught up on the latest episode of Law & Order SVU. It was good despite the usual derogatory anti-white comments.

Had a scary dream last night. We were at home even though the house looked different. In the dream, the living room was sort of in the middle of the place, although the house was rectangular like this one. I spotted a humongous black spider crawling along the baseboard of the living room and even Tom was scared because it was so huge. It was bigger and darker than the monster spiders we would see in Phoenix I’m pretty sure were Avondale spiders. Whatever it was wasn’t a tarantula because the thing ran fast when he went to swipe at it, and I grabbed a can of bug spray and tried to spray it. We had a powerful box fan going in the room and I wasn’t sure if the spray actually hit the spider before it ran and hid somewhere.

I begged Tom to take the following day off of work so we could bomb the place, but he said he couldn’t without giving a little more notice because they were in the middle of a big project. He said he would take the next day off instead.

Then I saw a smaller spider and wondered if it was a baby of the monster or just a lone daddy long legs.

I ran through the house to see if I could spot it and get it with the spray but every time I entered a room and demanded Alexa to turn on the lights, she ignored me (she always does in dreams). I said something about needing someone to help get her working. That someone was a young woman who appeared in person in a split second and turned the lights on.

When she was putting on her coat to leave, I said I wished I could stay at her place for the night and told her about the spider. She looked around fearfully and Tom shot me a look as if to say, “Why did you have to tell her that?”

“You’re okay,” I assured her. “You’ve got shoes on and you’re leaving.”

That was the end of that nightmare!

MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 2020 Enjoying a break from the planes this morning but traffic and landscaping will start up in a couple of hours. It’s getting my peace until 8 a.m. that’s nice instead of only until 5:45 a.m. I got up before midnight and even the small planes and helicopters were quiet throughout the night.

I’ve come to hate Rockefeller as much as I love him, LOL. Seriously, I hate it when those who don’t get along put others out because of it. Sort of like how other countries have to pick up the pieces because countries like Syria can’t grow up and get along. Well, Rockefeller not getting along with Blitz definitely puts me out and makes things a little harder on me. Changing their liner definitely isn’t as easy because I only have so much room to move the fence to and the middle divider I added gets in the way.

But I realized that if I just lower the dishwasher door, they can hide under that when I’m changing them. Lately, they haven’t had anything to hide under and that’s also part of why they’ve been getting in the way, peeing off the towel I put down, and just being a real pain in the ass. I’ll try that when I change them tomorrow and see how it works out since I shoo them over to that side of the kitchen when changing them.

Rockefeller may prefer his solitude, but he’s just going to have to deal with being with Blitz in the cage we got for them when we’re on vacation next year. I could leave them in the kitchen in the pigpen but I’d rather not because the last thing I want to do after being on a plane for several hours and awake for God knows how many more is to come home to have to change them right away. With traditional bedding in their cage, it won’t be nearly as filthy after 4-5 days as the liner would be. I’ll make sure I lay down a fresh liner before we leave so all I have to do is transfer them back. I could separate them and put Blitz under the rats but then Blitz would be depressed, and 4 days on a fleece liner, even if it’s just one pig, is going to call for quite a mess. I’d rather them both be on paper bedding, and I’d rather Rockefeller feel like his space is being invaded than for Blitz to be lonely.

Tom and I agree that in order to save money, we’d be willing to fly coach even if first-class is so much better. With my short legs, I’m not hurting for legroom, though, and if God forbid we get stuck next to a screaming brat with parents who don’t give a shit, at least it would only be for a few hours.

Since I couldn’t use speech-to-text on the plane and probably won’t take my laptop, I’ll take an old paper journal and then just speech-to-text it into my Windows PC when I get home. I’ll be taking my phone for pictures and whenever I have the opportunity to take notes and check in with friends. Even if I don’t have time to interact with them as I usually do, it would still be nice to let them know we’re alive and well. I can’t fucking wait! 2021 is too far away. :-(

In other pet news, I didn’t latch one of the lower doors properly to the rats’ cage. Then when I walked up to it later, I found it wide open. Fortunately, Woody stayed put, but of course Fuzzy escaped. Where did I find him? You guessed it; in the pigpen scavenging for whatever he could find, LOL.

The weather has been showing signs of the gradual warm-up that begins at this time of year with temperatures slowly reaching toward the 60s and actually getting into the 60s by the end of the month.

We had a nice weekend. We went to Sam’s on Saturday which was probably our quickest and quietest run ever. We didn’t get as much stuff and those annoying forklifts weren’t running around beeping really loud. They did have music playing for the first time that I remember, and of course, so did Denny’s and Walmart. Denny’s was a little annoying, but Walmart was worse, especially when you were right under one of their fucking speakers. I just don’t get why so many stores and restaurants in this state feel the need to entertain us while we eat or shop.

I got steak and eggs at Denny’s, and the steak wasn’t quite as good as I hoped and a bit tough. The eggs, steak fries and English muffin were delicious, though. He and I want to try one of those plant-based burgers that many places have these days and that people swear tastes exactly like real meat.

Soon I’m going to make a salad. That Greek yogurt dressing has really grown on me. I want to try Green Goddess avocado dressing sometime, too. I picked up a few apples since we have this wonderful peeler. The rodents really love the skin and I take a few bites of the meaty part. I hate the skin of apples because it’s too much like biting into cellophane.

After Denny’s, we went to Walmart to get some groceries. We would have normally gone to Target, but I wanted new bath gloves and I picked up some more brushes for my painting. Whenever we want more than just food, Walmart is the better place to get it if we don’t get it on Amazon.

When Rite Aid opened, we went to get treats and Merlot for me to have during the week. Ramping up my dose for the March 6th blood draw has me a bit nervous. This way, if I really start feeling wound up, the alcohol may calm me down. Plus, I got slices of turkey, so I’m armed with both alcohol and tryptophan.

I was borderline anxious on the 16th, anxious on the 17th, and I was borderline earlier today but I’m feeling better now. Thanks, Barefoot!

I started throwing copies of my journal in the ‘notes’ section of Facebook, and it’s kind of cool how they now list the reading time. So far, my entries for this year range from taking 1-9 minutes to read.

When I was working on the rewrite and editing of my book, I realized I no longer had to guesstimate property distances. Thanks to Google Maps, I can now measure the actual distance of our old property in Phoenix so I could be a little more accurate in my current story where “Riana” lives in a guesthouse in the backyard of a property with a similar layout. It was much deeper than it was wider. Tom guessed it to be 150 ft from the front of the property to the very back. It was actually 133 ft. I thought the property was about 50 ft wide. Close, but not quite. It was actually 55 ft wide. The house itself was 36 ft wide. That house was square whereas this house is rectangular. It wasn’t quite as big. It was closer to 1200 square feet whereas this house is closer to 1400 square feet.

My measurements in my book weren’t too far off but now they’re a little more accurate. The backyard we had there seemed puny compared to the yard of my childhood home, but it actually wasn’t that tiny at 55 x 40. The yard in my book is a little bigger, though.

The more I use it, the more I really like Goodreads. Discovering I was being bashed and trashed there turned out to be a good thing in the end because it not only brought positive reviews to my books later on, but it really is a great way of keeping track of what I’ve read. I love how I could add all my Amazon book purchases. So I will be adding hundreds of books over the next few days to my ‘read’ and ‘want to read’ lists. This way, from now on, if a book looks interesting to me, I can always check and see if I’ve already read it or not.

Still enjoying my new electric razor which Rite Aid sells for twice as much as what I paid for mine on Amazon. I wouldn’t have liked it when I was young, though, because it doesn’t quite shave as close as a regular razor. As we age, our hair not only thins out, but the hairs also get thinner, so any stubble is less noticeable. Plus, our legs don’t look as smooth so any stubble kind of blends in with the blemishes. So it’s good for older people.

I saw markings in the road about a week or two ago that I forgot to mention down by the office. So they’re going to be working in the road again if they haven’t already, not surprisingly. I knew they couldn’t go that long. They can’t stay out of the roads for more than a year here. Why they bothered to seal-coat them is beyond me since it’s only a matter of time before they tear up the entire park yet again.

Something was recently done in the road outside the front gate since there is a section of newly paved road, but that’s way too far away to hear anything at our place.

I had dreams about being in Florida, but they didn’t make any sense. Maliheh was working out with someone in one dream, and then I was outdoors at night when a deep fog suddenly lifted and I could see this enormous lighthouse a few hundred feet away.

Enjoy this entry that Facebook says should take you 8 minutes to read.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 19, 2020 Every now and then I do a search to see what new writing sites may pop up, and I found one called Up to the Sky. It’s like Penzu only better. It’s totally private unless you choose to create and share a public link. I figured I would use it for story drafts since anything I want to share can be done in the usual places.

I like how it has themes, though I wish it had more, and also how it has a handy area for notes, countdowns, to-do lists, and other features.

I created a countdown to when I go to the lab, hoping that it would ease my mind while ramping up my dose if I know I have only a specific number of days to have to deal with any anxiety along the way.

I also created a countdown to next February since that’s about when we’ll take off for Hawaii. I can’t wait! I get so excited just thinking about it.

The last countdown I set up was a little depressing. He reaches full retirement on January 1, 2024. Well, that’s 1443 days from now. :-( As he says, it’s nothing compared to how much time he’s already worked but still a long way to go if you’re anxious to get out of here and into a warmer climate as I am. We won’t necessarily be moving that day either, of course. It’s going to take a few months to sell the house and get out of here, so we’ve likely got 1500 days left.

The new company owners are talking about downsizing and closing some of the buildings where he works which means the threat of a layoff is looming and the dream I had about him getting a raise may mean absolutely nothing at all. It was kind of funny when he said he would look at all his options if that happened because there are only two options to look at. He either gets a job here or we get out of the state. If we want to play it safe and smart, he’ll get a job here.

Finished watching S1 of Twisted and it was delightfully entertaining with all kinds of twists and turns and probably the only show made in the last 20 years that doesn’t reference race/racism. We need more shows like this!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 2020 Re-writing my 2007 book, We’ll Meet Again Someday, for publication which will hopefully be in April. I’m modernizing it along the way.

Had fun painting the angel figurine yesterday. She came out much better than I thought she would. Watercolors are way easier to work with than acrylics. Love how easy it was to wipe off accidental dabs of paint and to paint over areas as well. Because this figurine has a coarser surface, the color adhered well enough with a couple of coats. I found that it was actually better not to dilute the paint as much. If I made it too watery it would make the paint too thin and then there wouldn’t be much color.

Decided not to paint my fairy figurine because she’s much smoother, and even diluted, it would be very hard to get much of a consistent color. The paint would just thin and bead.

I also love how I don’t have to worry about the paints drying out. I used to hate when I’d forget to close the caps on my acrylics and they would dry up.

Google Docs gave me the option to insert pics related to the journal subjects, so here’s one.

Had a touch of anxiety Yesterday and the day before, so I’m skipping today’s dose. I’m never going to get past 5 weeks! :-(

FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, 2020 It took three days but yes, Aly did notice and ask me about deactivating on Twitter. I told her I deactivated because no one was tweeting. Then she turned her account into a dream account. Not sure if her timing has anything to do with me deactivating but we’re still connected on my sleep account.

Love my new electric razor! I don’t know if it will stop me from getting irritation under my arms like I’ve been getting these last few years for reasons I don’t understand, but it’s great for my legs.

Haven’t used my watercolors yet but I’m about to after I post this entry.

When we first separated the pigs, Blitz was trying desperately to get over to Rockefeller’s side while Rockefeller was showing absolutely no interest in visiting Blitz on his side. Why Blitz would want anything to do with Rockefeller with the way he bullies him is beyond me. Hopefully adding the dividing wall won’t make even more work for us since there’s only so much room to move it out of the way when I change liners. Plus, Rockefeller hates being handled.

I added a corner hideaway that you hook on that’s made of cloth to Rockefeller’s side because Blitz has the tree trunk hideaway. The top of it is gray and pink fringes hang down across the corner. It’s not as private as their other burrows but it’s still cute. They come in many different colors.

Anyway, I’ll find out if it’s any harder moving the pen out of the way to change them when he gets up since that’s something we do together because it’s so much work. The liners have to be shaken outside as best as possible, which is better for a tall person to do, as we don’t want bits of hair and hay clogging the washer. Then I have to disinfect and sometimes mop the floor underneath the liner since it’s not a hundred percent waterproof like it’s supposed to be. Maybe their nails pierced the silica coating underneath? Then I have to lay down the new liner, shoo the pigs onto it (it doesn’t matter who ends up on which side), shake out and wash the towel I move them onto while changing them, then sweep and sometimes mop the floor outside of the pen as well. Then I have to reload all their supplies. So it’s not exactly a 5-minute task.

Right after I said they’ve been better for a while, the planes got a little annoying yesterday morning. At first I thought it was the distant rumble of thunder since we were having 20 MPH winds and rain, but nope. They weren’t the most annoying they’ve been, but they were noticeable enough. I thought they’d be annoying tonight but they’re not. Just when I thought there was a pattern, though, there isn’t. I’m not sure the direction of the wind really determines whether or not I hear them, but they definitely do seem worse when the winds are heading north. Unfortunately, that’s most of the time, too.

Had a bunch of weird dreams throughout my sleep which likely means I didn’t sleep all that well even though I’m not too tired.

In the first dream, the Twenties were still our neighbors, but we were living attached to each other in two-story condos. I headed out for a walk one day when I noticed some guys holding up these large metal sheets at the sides of their driveway. They weren’t solid sheets or thin. It’s kind of hard to describe them but I knew they were about to put up a garage and wasn’t looking forward to the noise. The bedroom was on a shared wall and I worried that the vibration of the garage door opening and closing would wake me up when I was sleeping, even though it was downstairs.

Then we adopted a baby of all things and I thought to myself that I never would have believed in a million years that we’d be parents. I don’t know what gender it was.

Then I was standing with a few other people by a counter that was as high as my chest. Maybe it was a place of business. Some guy sat his toddler on the counter and then turned away to talk to someone behind him and I secretly hoped she would fall.

Then I was doing an exercise video with Tom when I hit the floor - yes, it was a floor and not carpet - because the crystals in my ears were making me dizzy. They still are in real life, too. If my doctor doesn’t find any wax in my ears that we can’t find when I see her in March, I may need her to take me through those exercises that help get them back in place, even though it’s no big deal. I mostly only feel the sensation when I lie down and only for a few seconds. I wonder, though, if this is a glimpse into the future in a place that has the laminate flooring I wish we’d gotten here.

The last dream I remember is him getting some kind of report card at work. In the report was a list of work behaviors, including taking naps. The box next to that one was checked because, in the dream, he would take naps during breaks. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not in his boss’s eyes.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2020 Well, there was no “pray for such and such a city or country” trending on Twitter, so I guess there were no serious natural disasters or shootings today.

The water has remained stable so far and I even dared to replace the cover on the master bathroom toilet tank, LOL. I won’t dare let that tub drain, though!

Two nights ago, I pranked the office again by having my text reader repeat, “Killjoy, don’t turn the water off” on their answering machine.

Then shortly before the office was to open the next morning, something hit me and panic seized me. What if they misunderstood and took it the wrong way? What if they thought the message was really saying, “Kill Joy,” and not, “Killjoy?”

The last thing I need is for them to have the authorities trace the number and arrest me and charge me with threatening phone calls. I could skip court, but I couldn’t refuse to be arrested. So I got right on with the damage control before the office could open and I would have to talk to someone live and explained in a voice message, without giving my name, that it was just a joke because I was so frustrated over the water situation. Not surprisingly, they never called back, so hopefully they won’t make anything of it.

When I get to worrying about getting old and dying, I try to tell myself I’m not going to suffer for five years before I die as I did during peri and when my medication was backfiring on me, but even just a few days can seem like years. Plus, some people really do suffer in their final years of life. Not everyone just up and dies.

As silly as it may seem, especially since I can’t possibly know what may lie beyond or have any control over it, I still worry about what I may be in store for in the afterlife if one exists. My greatest fear is it being so much worse than my worst of times in this life. I try not to imagine it being so full of fear, pain and depression, along with loneliness for those I knew and loved, and stuck in that state for eternity, but telling myself I have no control over it either way doesn’t ease my fears as if seems to with Tom. He never worries about things that are out of his hands and just takes one step at a time, one day at a time, and deals with things as they come along. I have often wished I could be like that, but I am who I am just like he is who he is.

I can’t help but look forward to those golden years and hope they will be the best years of our lives filled with beautiful weather and a quieter place we both totally love. Oh, how I look forward to returning to Hawaii next year and eventually going yachting. I’m so sick of the same old, same old! I really need some change. Good, fun change. It isn’t that things are bad, of course. We have money, we have great neighbors, we have a safe place to live even if it can be noisy and we don’t always have water, we’re in good health, etc. But things have gotten a bit stagnant.

Tom said, we never know. The new bosses may decide to lay him off and then we’ll be forced to have to make a decision, but I still don’t see him being let go and us getting out of a place this noisy anytime soon. Although I will say that the skies have been much quieter and I’ve absolutely LOVED not having to have sound machines on at night. The winds have been going S, ESE, and SE, but I know that as soon as they’re heading N again, the planes will be back. Still doesn’t mean the daytime is peaceful around here with loud traffic and landscaping, though. I just have a feeling that we’re not going to be able to get out of here that easily. The story of my life…being stuck in places I don’t want to be. It’s been that way since my teens. If we were smart, though, we would want to stay put until he retires. It’s just too risky to take off without a job lined up, and then there’s the insurance thing, too.

When we talked about RVing, Tom said I may not want to hear this, but he doesn’t want to give up his stuff, especially his 3D printer. That’s fine. I don’t want to give up all my stuff either, but since we don’t plan to take the furniture or the exercise equipment, and since I have a lot of things I don’t use or need anymore and wouldn’t mind downsizing, maybe we could go out in an RV and pull Candy behind it. Between Candy and the RV, we could store shit in that and not have to use a storage company. That still wouldn’t mean we could get a place until after he’s been working a while, and that still doesn’t solve the insurance problem, but it’s an idea. As I was telling Aly, though, twice we changed states with no job and only a few thousand dollars if even that, and it led to disaster. We’d have a lot more than just a few grand this time around, but nothing else changes. If he doesn’t have incoming money to show from either a retirement check or a job, no one’s going to give us a place just because we could afford to give them a hefty down payment. We could also lose the chance to ever own a place again this way because we would have to live off the sale money of the house until he could get established working somewhere, which is the money that would have gone to buy a new place. Renting wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it has its downsides.

If I had to choose between Mac and Windows, I would go back to Mac. Windows is alright but it’s missing too many features that the Mac had that I found handy. Just little things here and there that I’ve noticed.

That blocked number keeps trying to call and I have to keep deleting the notification. So much for out of sight and out of mind. I don’t think they realize they’re blocked. You don’t get a message saying you’ve been blocked. From what I found out, all you get is fewer rings before it goes to voicemail. I think it only rings once. No voice messages, though I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t left any or they did, but it wouldn’t go through.

I’ve got that strange head pressure that I still can’t figure out. I don’t know if it’s TMJ, allergies, my blood pressure or what. It’s a hard feeling to describe. “Pressure,” is the only thing that comes to mind. It’s almost as if my head is vibrating as well or maybe stopped up like when you have a cold, even though it doesn’t feel that way, if that makes any sense. I definitely don’t have a cold.

I’ve been getting more private questions and thought I would answer a couple of them. Are there any power couples I’m sick of hearing about? Absolutely! Harry and Meghan. I don’t care for the royal family in general because of the way they seem to be so narrow-minded in the way they live and function. The message they send women is, “You have to marry the opposite sex and have kids as if it was 1950 all over again.”

Where are the gay/lesbian couples in the royal family? Where are the single moms? Where are the married childless couples? Where is the reality? Variety; that’s real life. Not everyone doing the same things and following the same narrow-minded script people followed 50 years ago.

Next question… Is there anything I regret telling anyone? The response to sharing my story about having circadian rhythm disorder and of how I was the victim of reverse discrimination got me thinking about how a friend said they don’t share personal things because people don’t get it. Oh, they get it, all right. But only if they can relate to it or it’s a common thing. Circadian rhythm disorder may not be that common but reverse discrimination is more common than people realize. The problem is that people don’t get it unless it happens to them. Also, it’s something that’s often swept under the carpet and under-addressed. The media chooses to focus on certain victims and leave the rest out and therefore, most people don’t believe a black/Hispanic person could possibly screw over a white person. “Blacks don’t do that,” people say. Or, “There’s no such thing,” and that gets pretty frustrating and insulting after a while. Like watching two people kiss and being told that doesn’t happen.

I was going to start Bowflexing again but the last thing I need is to build more muscle. I have more than enough. I’ll just stick to the basic exercises (my core mostly) and focus more on cardio. 80% of my exercise will be walking and jogging.

My nails are both ugly and embarrassing. I’m finding myself a little more self-conscious when it comes to things like my nails and my ear and I don’t like it one bit. It’s just not like me to give a shit. I guess it’s not so much what other people might think, but me not liking what I see. If I don’t like it, that’s enough for me to wish I could change things. But my ear can’t be changed, and neither can my nails. I realize it’s just a shape and that some people have smooth nails while others have ridges, just like some people are tall and some are short. It’s the discoloration and the lifting that bothers me more. The discoloration is probably from nail polish, but I’m not sure about the lifting. That’s usually connected to thyroid or iron issues and I certainly don’t have any iron issues.

Going to be getting an electric razor for women that can be used on the legs and under the arms in hopes of getting less irritation under the arms that way. It’s got 5 round heads, plus a regular shaver for longer hairs.

The pigs are back together but still separated. We added a new wall/fence to the pen, dividing it in half. Blitz was depressed by himself. Most rodents prefer to be around other rodents, but Rockefeller simply doesn’t like him and wants to be alone. Blitz is already perked up just being close to him and it was funny because he was trying to get over to his side. Rockefeller would only bully him if they were together again, though. He likes his solitude and doesn’t want anything to do with him.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2020 The water was off from midnight to 4 p.m. and now they say it should be back on for good. Yeah, right.

Mrs. Twenties alerted me to another more detailed interview by another TV channel, and there was even a quick clip on Twitter. It took them FIVE fucking days to set up porta-pissers behind the clubhouse!

I was LMAO when Mrs. Twenties told me that some people were taking water out of the pool for their toilets. Brilliant! That would certainly make filling the smaller jugs easier and quicker.

Ellen is the woman who moved into the yellow house on the corner where the annoying contractor used to live, and according to Carolyn, she doesn’t always provide correct information. She says the woman is really nice but acts like a know-it-all. We’ve never met, as I told her.

Whatever happened to Tom and Nanette, the people who were supposed to take over for Killjoy? And who the hell is Doug? Apparently, according to the interview we saw, he’s the actual park manager. I guess Killjoy is just the office manager.

We took our showers this evening and washed the pigs’ liner because we don’t doubt that the water will be turned off again at midnight.

Had to separate the pigs for fighting. They’ve been getting into it more and more lately. Tom looked up a video on guinea pigs fighting and wow! They can really get into it like rats and mice, although I’ve never had any that fought as badly as what I saw in the video. That doesn’t mean these two aren’t capable of getting there, so I decided to put Blitz under the rats. The rats have plenty of space on the upper level, and Blitz should be fine if it’s just him. If that proves to be too small, I’ll move him to the other cage.

Totally regret getting the pigs. But while we do have them, it’s nice to hear their chatter and it should be easier to pick up Blitz in a smaller cage for occasional cuddles where he doesn’t have as much room to run. Slaving over such high-maintenance pets really gets old, though. They’re so much work and money and of course, I don’t appreciate the smell either.

I doubt we’ll do this, but Tom and I talked about busting out of here in an RV in which case only Fuzzy would come with us. Everyone else would have to be re-homed.

Either way, we’re going to have to think about it more. We both agree that an apartment wouldn’t be any quieter so if we’re going to be cramped in a smaller space with all the shit we’ve got, we may as well throw it in storage and head out in an RV. The only problem with the RV is that storing our stuff would be harder because we wouldn’t have a set place to store it in. But what is appealing about an RV is that we could take off without any set destination in mind and get a chance to explore various places first. The only problem with doing this is that if we sink our sale money into an RV, we may never again get the chance to own. There are actually benefits to renting a place if we could keep the damn landlord out of the picture. When the landlord lives on-site is when they can be a pest like Jesse could. But if we rent, it would be easier to move if we wanted to and the major expenses would be on the landlord. But we wouldn’t be able to customize it to our liking or control when non-emergency repairs and upgrades took place. That means if something was done when I was sleeping, we wouldn’t have much control over it. I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do yet. I just know I don’t want to be stuck here for another four years!

The new company owners have cut out the overtime which is both good and not.

We got a new glucose home testing kit and when I woke up and before I had eaten, I was disappointed to find myself at 104. Tom insists there’s nothing to worry about because this is typical in older people. He reminded me that he was the same at my age and has been holding steady ever since and hasn’t continued to climb yet he’s got three times more weight to lose than I do. And yes, diabetes runs in our families.

I know losing weight would help my glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol and pretty much everything, but I hate being hungry. Unless something’s wrong with you, you can’t lose weight without being hungry, and the older you are, the less you can eat which means even more hunger. Plus, the weight would only come right back. So unless it’s dire, I prefer to keep the extra weight and eat when I’m hungry. Avoiding sugar too, of course, most of the time.

I was thinking of getting a cheap set of watercolor paints and seeing if it might be easier to paint figurines with that instead of acrylics. That way, if I fuck up, I can wipe it off if I dilute the paints so the colors aren’t as bold as acrylics and oils. I might even grab a watercolor pad because according to some videos I saw, they’re pretty versatile and you can do some really neat effects with them. I like how I could control the consistency of the watercolors.

I woke up a million times during my sleep, and one time it was from a dream about having evidence that a neighbor raped another neighbor twice. I didn’t live in the park in the dream and I don’t know who the people were. They were a lot younger. I was racking my brain trying to decide whether or not I should take the evidence to the police. I wanted the guy put away but I was afraid of retaliation if the guy suspected I was the one that turned him in.

MONDAY, JANUARY 13, 2020 The water came back on in the late afternoon. Now the question is whether or not the next shut-off is in a matter of hours or a matter of days. Really getting sick of this shit. It’s beyond ridiculous!

As I told him, I really think we should consider getting a one-bedroom apartment until we can get out of the state since that’s all we can afford here, and even that would be a little more expensive than this. We only got in here in the first place due to my inheritance and the economy being so shitty. Right now, there’s no way we could get another house, manufactured or not. I know we have a lot of shit and I would hate to be crammed into a one-bedroom, and I definitely don’t miss waking up having to pee to find him in the shower, but at least we would have water all the time. Also, this place is noisy so much of the time that the noise there would seem like nothing. If they only do landscaping the usual once a week and the place isn’t on a busy street or in a flight path, it may actually be quieter.

Okay, so that may be stretching it a bit. Apartments usually do have their fair share of noise, even if some may start off quiet. The biggest thing is all the banging…Doors, cabinets, footsteps, and movement in general. It would be our shit luck to get next to someone with a loud, bass-filled stereo or TV, and a bunch of brats running overhead with parents who don’t give a shit.

I looked at random house rentals in Florida and found a few I wished I could magically transport myself to. It wasn’t that there was anything special about the houses themselves, but I love how far back they were from the street and how they had so much more privacy and space around them, yet you didn’t have to drive an hour to the middle of nowhere to get to them. I’m hoping that rather than jumping into a house and possibly finding my asthma and allergies can’t handle that climate as I was surprised to find that cats trigger my asthma, and then be stuck there for years, we can rent a place for 6 months or so before we jump into anything permanent. It’s always good to test drive the car before you buy it if you have that option.

I spoke to Dixie by phone earlier and she said she talked to Killjoy, as is my new name for her, and Dixie asked her why she uses Roto-Rooter when they’ve got horrible reviews. Killjoy said that’s who they’ve been using for the last 18 years, and Dixie said, “Well, maybe that’s the problem.”

ROTFL! Yeah, maybe.

I was delighted that Suki already got borrowed in Germany and has already made it onto Goodreads. Hopefully not so it can be bashed and trashed.

My Tipi doll came today and is very nice. So did the 7 fashions I got for the 14” vinyl dolls that she and Elula can wear.

I also got a dozen toe rings in silver, gold and rose gold. They don’t stay shiny for long because they’re cheap junk but putting soap on a toothbrush and scrubbing them every now and then helps shine them back up. Plus, we have a jewelry cleaner.

“Camille” has deactivated on Twitter. I was going to do voice blogging there without showing my face but just couldn’t get into it. I’ll use Bubbly when I want to talk-blog, even though Aly may hear it.

I also deactivated my main Twitter account which I was connected to Kim and Aly since they rarely tweet. Let’s see how long it takes Aly to notice. When she announced on the first that she was going to check in more and interact with people more, I knew she wouldn’t. She’s just not into Twitter, and if she is, it’s not on this account.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 12, 2020 Just when I thought I couldn’t hate it here anymore, it was all I could do to keep from storming down to the office and doing things best left out of print to every single incompetent idiot asshole that works here! We’ve been without water for days. Yes, not hours…DAYS! This place has gone way beyond fucking ridiculous. It was an otherwise great weekend where I felt good and some funny things happened along the way, including good things such as The Seduction of Suki being published.

It all began Friday morning just after 11. Usually, it’s off for an average of 4 hours, so I figured it would be on before I wanted to take my shower that evening and tackle the laundry. Wrong!

Then Tom got a ridiculous automated voice message saying the water would be back on Monday, October 29th. Funny too, since both last and next October 29th are on a Tuesday.

We drove to the open fire hydrant where people were filling jugs of water and we did the same. One of the guys down there said something about them draining the line and a huge pipe replacement nearby.

I was hesitant to call the office at first because of the way the park loves to retaliate against complainers. But as the hours ticked by, I was getting increasingly frustrated, and besides, it was a formal written complaint that turned out to be against a friend of Joy’s that I got spited for. This was different. Plus, they don’t know my number and I don’t have my name on my outgoing message, so they wouldn’t know who the hell I was when I called and screamed on their answering machine. Sometimes we just have to vent, you know?

I’ve been in touch on and off with Mrs. Twenties and we both agree this is just ridiculous and something needs to be done once and for all. It’s against the law for a park not to supply its residents with water. I really think we should band together and deduct from our rent. Take our space rent and divide it by how many days are in the month and deduct the amount for the days the water was off.

Yesterday afternoon, Tom and I made a bet about when the water would be back on. He thought it would be on that evening and I said Monday morning at 10:30. Sure enough, the water wasn’t back on last night, so I get all his Bing points for this month and next.

Unable to wash my hair, I threw powder in it to dry up some of the oil and feel a little bit refreshed.

So the water finally came back on at 10:30 this morning after being off for nearly 48 hours. I thought, wow, right time, wrong day. But as I told him, I doubted that was it. He said he thought they may work on it tomorrow and shut the water off then, but it was getting kind of late in the day and he was pretty sure the water would stay on until tomorrow. Wrong! Luckily for us, we had just finished our showers and got the laundry done when it went off around 5.

Thank God I filled up the tub which I’m never going to leave empty again! Plus, we filled our 6 1-gallon jugs. Maybe I’ll still be right about the 10:30 Monday morning thing.

I left some unsavory reviews under a different name on a couple of sites and pulled a few other pranks that the Twenties found hilarious. I told them how I typed “turn the water on” and had my text reader read and repeat it like a broken record in a voice message. Plus, how I left my speech-to-text running while watching a show and sent them what it came up with on their contact form using a bogus email addy.

Then Mrs. Twenties gave me an interesting link after telling me that Channel 13 was coming to do an interview with someone on Daisy yesterday. The reporter was standing just outside the back gate reporting on the issues, and some scenes were shot around the park. I could see that the problem was by the lake. They’re replacing a 20-foot break in a 33-year-old pipe. The closer you are to the main line in front, the better off you are. Well, we’re far away from the front of the park, and Daisy is even further. A couple in their late 80s was featured showing how dirty the water is. Yes, it’s f filthy when the water is first turned back on! Tom had to clean the faucet screens.

The reporter said they tried to contact management, but they didn’t hear back from them. Well, that’s no surprise.

Anyway, my silly husband added water to the tank of one of the toilets and was replacing the cover when the sensor “saw” part of the plastic wrap on the toilet paper that was on top of it and flushed the damn thing. So I’m like, “Great, just great,” and he goes, “Yeah, I love you too.” LOL

Then, it turns out I left a container of Clorox wipes under the sink empty. I guess I didn’t realize it was empty when I pulled the last wipe out because the bottom of the container is filled with cleaning solution and the weight of it can make you think there are more wipes in it. But there wasn’t and my wonderful husband starts to say, “Any reason you left an empty—,” then stops when the cover flipped open and the liquid went flying onto the floor, including in part of the pigpen and on a piece of their lettuce. Oh yeah, there’s been loads of fun along the way, haha.

I’ll be sleeping till the early afternoon tomorrow, so if the water is on when I get up, I won’t know if it came on at the predicted time.

Again, it’s been an otherwise pleasant weekend. Even surprisingly peaceful. I don’t know why, but the planes have been much quieter lately. I doubt it will last long, so I’m enjoying it while it does.

We haven’t exactly eaten healthy this weekend, but we deserve a break at least once a week. Between his base pay and OT, he’s going to be pulling in about 6k this month. I couldn’t help but giggle at the thought of Tammy knowing that and knowing how pissed she’d be, LOL. And downright jealous, too.

We went to KFC yesterday and today we got some junk at Rite Aid. I also got a statue of an angel that was on sale.

We even had fun planning and getting ideas for our next vacation in Hawaii. This will probably be way in the future but someday we want to go on a small cruise as well. They have these yachts with only a little over 100 passengers as opposed to the 4k that was on the cruise we went on that turned out to be a disaster, and some of them are pretty affordable. We won’t do this until we’re settled in Florida, which is years away, unfortunately.

The Tipi doll will be here tomorrow.

The respiration count said he breathes an average of 11 times a minute in his sleep while it’s 18 for me.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2020 Today I’m having less dizziness and more energy. I can live with that. :-)

Today is the second fucking day in a row that the water has been off. I had a feeling they may do this too, because the last time around it was three or four days. So the water will probably be off when I get up tomorrow.

I went out walking for a half-hour or so. Planes, landscaping, planes, landscaping. Some parts of it were quiet, though. A couple of days ago I only heard a few planes, but yesterday I heard all kinds of shit in the sky. It’s a little better now but tonight will probably be bad. It’s easy to complain about but this is all I’ve known for so long now that I honestly can’t imagine it any other way. You really do adapt over time and I’m sure that when we move, I’ll seek out a similar situation at least subconsciously since people tend to gravitate toward what they’re familiar with. Definitely going to get off the busy street and further from small airports and commercial flight paths, though. If we ever did land a quieter place, I’m sure it would take time to adapt to that too, but by the time I did, it would probably be just as noisy as it is here. With the way helicopters have gotten so much cheaper and more things being done by air, I wonder if there will be any peaceful airspace left in another 10 to 20 years.

On my way up the main drag was an open fire hydrant. It wasn’t spraying water into the street, though. I wonder if it’s got anything to do with why the assholes have the water off today other than the fact that they’re incompetent and can’t fix things right.

He worked so damn late yesterday that he went from time and a half to double time, making nearly forty bucks in an hour.

I agree with the guy who commented on yesterday’s entry about obese people being discriminated against which needs to stop while overcompensating for it by claiming you’re proud of it isn’t the way to go. Obesity is definitely nothing to celebrate or be proud of, but are they really proud? Somehow, I have my doubts. Who the hell is proud to be tremendously overweight? You can love yourself and accept yourself without being proud of being unhealthy or at least setting yourself up to be unhealthy.

Perhaps some people truly don’t give a shit. I may not be 100 pounds overweight but I don’t give a shit that I’m fat as long as I don’t gain any more. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if most of those who are obese and claim they’re proud of it are in denial. I think those that tell themselves they’re proud of something they’re probably not the least bit proud of deep down, is just their way of dealing with it. Many people can brainwash themselves over time, and the more they tell themselves something, the more they believe it.

Maybe another reason some claim they’re proud to be so overweight is they figure that will keep them from being either fat-shamed or having the health risks pointed out to them by people like Jillian Michaels. But hey, let people put themselves at risk for heart attacks and strokes. I’m doing the same thing by not taking statins, LOL.

I wonder if I should make this my next blog topic. It’s just hard to motivate myself to get into blogging with no guarantees in the end. I don’t like this “maybe I’ll get paid” thing. I want to either do a job with payment in return or just not bother. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t help out a friend, of course, but I get a little tired of the maybes. Yeah, maybe I’ll fucking win the lottery too (rolls eyes sarcastically).

I had a dream that Aly was coming to visit only we weren’t in California. Instead, we were in Arizona. She was driving as opposed to flying. I looked at the clock and then at Tom and said, “Think she’s hit the Arizona border yet?”

“Yeah,” he said, and I jumped for joy and twirled around like an excited little kid. :-)

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2020 I totally stand by Jillian Michaels who was actually fact-sharing and not fat-shaming when it comes to Lizzo. People continue to be way too sensitive and mistake constructive criticism for trolling. First, I’m not a Lizzo fan. I don’t listen to music as much as I used to and therefore, I’m not familiar with her music. However, I agree with Jillian when she says her music should be celebrated and not her weight. It’s one thing to be okay with being overweight and to accept it, but it’s another to be proud of it, especially if you’re hundreds of pounds overweight as Lizzo is. Lizzo owns her weight. It’s her body and she has a right to do with it as she pleases, but like it or not, there are many health risks associated with being so big, and that’s all she was pointing out. No, not all heavy people are unhealthy, and no, not all of us could become skinny for various reasons, but we can certainly take steps to prevent ourselves from becoming 100 pounds overweight hence putting ourselves at risk for diseases. We don’t celebrate our rashes. We don’t celebrate dental cavities. We don’t celebrate high blood pressure. We don’t celebrate high cholesterol. So then why do we celebrate overly enlarged fat cells? To be politically correct? Well, honest-to-God fat-shaming by calling people names and making rude and nasty comments about their appearance may be wrong, but let’s see how much she’s willing to celebrate when she gets diabetes.

Ugh! I just had the same bout of runs I had yesterday. It came on suddenly, not surprisingly, as soon as I sat down to write. Just WTF is wrong with me?! This dizziness and fatigue are getting really frustrating, especially the fatigue. It could be a brain tumor, but I seriously doubt it. It’s just that they can cause dizziness and fatigue. I don’t think it’s a tumor, however, because I usually only get dizzy when I lie down or tilt my head in a certain way. I think it’s that crystal thing that’s causing the dizziness. Unfortunately, the fatigue is likely connected to my thyroid as much as I wish it wasn’t.

It literally makes me shiver to think of my thyroid being this bad when they threw me in jail. I would have definitely gone into a coma before they finally allowed me to have my medication.

Anyway, I’m going to begin ramping up my dose in preparation for labs and hope for the best but expect the anxiety to return once it builds up. It’s just that if I wait until February 1st to take it every day, it may not be quite enough time since I’ll be going to the lab in early March. Plus, I don’t want to shock my system. I’m going to go from 3 full doses to 4 full doses next week, 5 full doses the week after that, 6 full doses the week after that, then take it every day through February and hope to hell I don’t get anxious before labs, as unlikely as that seems.

Speaking of just how much I’ve lost since hitting menopause, I didn’t realize just how much those hormones that control libido also control other things as well, though it makes sense when I think about it. Many things are more interconnected than we may first realize. In other words, my loss of libido is part of what’s causing my writer’s block. I never have crushes on people anymore no matter how good-looking they may be, and therefore I don’t have anyone I’m eager to make a story out of. Libido isn’t just about the act of sex and getting off, so I realize, but connected to attraction as well. Again, it makes sense when I think about it.

Yesterday was unusually quiet, but today we’re right back with the planes and landscaping. A few days ago, the paramedics were at Dahl’s place and a large medical equipment truck was there yesterday. I wonder if the guy had a stroke or a heart attack. Tom said he appeared to be around 70 and not very healthy.

Last night I dreamed I was in some place against my will. I don’t know if it was more like a jail or Valleyhead but I’m guessing the latter based on the appearance of my surroundings in the dream. There were these small bunk beds in my room and I thought of how I would let someone know I didn’t need them anymore and tell them I wouldn’t be around much longer if they asked if I wanted to use them as shelves. However, I knew I could be there for years even though I was determined not to be.

Then I was outdoors walking down a sidewalk with tears of hope in my eyes for some kind of ceremony. There were people at picnic tables in grassy areas on both sides of me observing me as I made my way down the walkway. Shortly before this, someone was giving me a big hug and I kept repeating something over and over again, determined to make it a mantra to live by, whatever it was.

After I walked several hundred yards, I stopped to greet this lesbian couple I was familiar with. They happily announced they would be having another child through artificial insemination and I was elated for them.

Later…

Here we go with the water outages again. I just told him the other day that anytime now they would turn it off again. Yeah, I know their fucking schedule.

I created a new account on Twitter and opted out of discoverability in hopes that Aly won't find the account this way. I don’t show my face but I’m trying it out and will see if I might want to do my voice blogging there instead of on Bubbly.

Began the pilot of the first season of Twisted. It seems to be geared more toward older kids like Pretty Little Liars, but it’s something I might like.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2020 What the hell was that all about? After my walk, I had the runs. No idea why I have that from time to time.

Won from Rat & Mouse magazine a second time. :-) I won the Ship Rats Trilogy by Rhian Waller.

Another surprisingly peaceful morning. I could definitely get used to not having to hear planes so much. I could hear a few out on my walk but that’s about it. It’s very cloudy out there and I can’t even hear the freeway. There’s definitely a connection. If I hear the freeway, I hear the planes. So I guess it just depends on the wind and weather.

It was so cold out there! It was in the mid-forties, but the winds were calm. I walked for a half-hour and started off cold. Halfway into it, I warmed up as I knew I would. When I got back to the warm house, my cheeks felt like blocks of ice.

I only heard one landscaper, but no barking or outrageously loud vehicles. It was actually pretty dead out there. Like no one wanted to be out in the cold. Sooner or later, though, I’m sure I’ll hear some landscaping from inside the house or someone doing something.

I know I said I would stop giving a shit in general about what people that find my journal may think, and while that’s very true, I’m still going to keep it more generic than personal when it comes to public entries. The world still doesn’t need to know every single thing about my life.

The number I blocked tried to call, according to my notifications. So it works, which is nice, but I would still rather not get notifications. The whole idea is to keep them out of sight and out of mind and not be aware of unwanted callers and then have to clear notifications. I wonder if they could still leave voice messages if they wanted to.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2020 Just thought I would do an update while I wait to hear back from Dixie. I saw her yesterday, and today she said she needs milk and water from Walmart and needs help getting in. She asked if I would like to come along. I let her know I was available.

When I visited her yesterday, she was her usual non-stop chatty self. She’s definitely forgetful and a touch moody. Some of the things she says make absolutely no sense at all. After using her bathroom, I complained about how long it takes to pee when you get older and her solution was to tell me to stick a finger up my vagina and that would “get it all.” LOL Sure, Dixie, whatever.

It’s still nice to visit her every now and then. I enjoy helping her in ways I can. The poor thing can’t even hook her bra which I had to do for her when I got there. Since she still has a cast on her wrist, I took out her trash, checked her mail, cut some old pant legs into rags for her, and put a pillowcase on Diane’s drool-stained pillow. All the while I was doing this, I took pictures of all the rooms except for Dixie’s bedroom and bathroom and Dixie was none the wiser as to what I was up to, LOL. I did it to show Tom so he could compare her place to ours. It’s definitely had a lot more upgrading! If we had to stay here another four years as I believe we will, but could trade houses in an instant, I would probably do it.

What frustrated me was that I couldn’t figure out a way to upload all the pictures at once to Facebook. That’s easy to do on my cheap $1 Android but this $350 phone seems to have no option for that. That’s going to be a real bitch with all the pictures I plan to take on our next vacation.

Since I didn’t care for the mug that came with the hot cocoa gift package that was on clearance last week, I gave the reindeer-decorated mug to Dix and Di, and they appreciated it. I brought down a packet of minty hot chocolate, filled the mug with water after washing it, and zapped it in her microwave. I sipped on this while we chatted.

Anyway, not surprisingly, Dixie got a little upset by me suggesting she and Diane look into some kind of assisted living. I guess it’s just hard for older people to admit they really do need a helping hand and that things just aren’t the same. Trust issues are a big thing too. The two of them are really struggling big time. I honestly don’t see how they can go on as they have for much longer. Dixie can’t even get up from her chair normally. She has to put a wooden chair next to her lounger which she slides down onto her knees and then pushes herself up by placing her hands on the seat of the hard chair. If she can barely take care of herself, she can’t possibly take care of Diane properly with the way she is. I can definitely see doctors and others recommending she place Diane somewhere as they have. Linda, Diane’s babysitter, often helps out, but still. These two just shouldn’t be living on their own. I have a feeling they’re going to have to be forced out of there or something really bad is going to have to happen first. It’s sad and it reminds me that Tom and I will be old someday with absolutely no one to help us.

I did a heart attack risk predictor on two different sites and despite my shitty numbers, I have only a 3% chance of a heart attack over the next 10 years.

On my way back to our place yesterday, which is only four houses away, I could hear these creepy-sounding test sirens. I couldn’t hear them in the house, but I could hear them outside. I don’t think I’ve ever heard those before, and we’ve been here for 6.5 years. I’m not worried about Iran. As Tom said, there’s an election coming up. Besides, if they could take down a country that has way more weapons than they have, they would have already done so. Iran is easily one of the most hateful and deadliest countries, especially when it comes to the US. So they wouldn’t hesitate to wipe us out if they had the technology to do it.

Definitely not going to get cucumber mint-flavored sparkling water again. It’s just too weird. I’ll stick to my fruity flavors.

Yesterday was the second time I got a call from a number that’s been reported as a scammer, so I blocked it, curious to see if blocking actually works on this phone.

Since I decided to stop worrying about who sees what of my journal and started allowing comments, I got a private comment saying they like the writing prompts I’ve been doing and asked if they could ask me specific questions at times. I said sure. So they asked me to write about what kinds of stereotypes and generalizations bug me the most.

I’d say things about Jews being rich, and associating marriage with kids are a bit irritating. I’m from a Jewish family and I’m far from rich as are many other Jewish people. I’m married without children which has actually become more of the norm than the other way around. Many people that do have kids these days have them before tying the knot. But not everyone who gets married wants to have kids if they don’t already have them. I understand, though, that stereotypes don’t come out of nowhere as much as some of us may wish they did. Many Jewish people are wealthy and many people who got married before 20-30 years ago had kids. But… Times change. People change. Traditions change.

Dixie just messaged me to say she’s fighting with the government over the phone on something she won’t elaborate on but I’m guessing has to do with her inability to remain independent. So not going to the store and that’s OK because I really don’t feel all that great today. Mild dizziness and fatigue are back along with that strange pressure and sensation in my head where it’s almost vibrating. No idea what the hell it is.

Later…

Molly hasn’t tweeted since December 2nd, and I still can’t believe she would simply fail to notice Aly ghosting her or ignore her when she realizes she’s being ignored. She would be curious and want an explanation. Then she may even try to reach out to me.

I’m guessing she and Aly created new Twitter accounts somewhere to keep in touch. Not sure why Aly is reluctant to acknowledge her friendship to me when she knows I won’t pressure her about it and haven’t for a while. She knows how I feel about Molly and that’s that. We won’t try to change each other’s opinion of Molly. I’ve made it clear that I accept that she has a right to pick and choose her own friends.

They might be keeping in touch on WhatsApp and Molly may have other reasons for discontinuing her tweets, but I doubt it. Whether or not they’re in touch on WhatsApp, I think they’re still connected somewhere on Twitter. Not going to bother trying to find additional accounts of theirs because I just don’t care, especially about Molly. I’m sure I’ve done and said all kinds of things to offend Aly, knowing how sensitive she is, but if she’s mentioned it anywhere, so be it. She doesn’t have to tell me what she doesn’t want to share with me.

Even though Aly could decide to check every now and then and anyone can look me up by email, as she taught me, I’m back to using Bubbly again just for something to do. I still find myself getting bored at times and wanting to sit and chat about whatever comes to mind. Since I’m not a 10-year-old who can find comfort in talking to her dolls or playing pretend, Bubbly is my go-to when I want to do a verbal version of my journal.

I still only have one blog post and have been meaning to do a second one but I’m not feeling very motivated and encouraged. The odds of making much money this way still seem unlikely. If I’m going to work so hard for so little, it may as well be with the stories I enjoy writing. That is, whenever I have the luxury of ideas coming to me. I just don’t get as many ideas these days and when I do, they just don’t excite and motivate me in the way they used to.

I realize it’s been a long time since I cried. That’s how much better my emotions have been this last year or so. That doesn’t mean I still don’t get in blah moods at times like I am now or worried about future possibilities and things like that. But if I’m remembering correctly, I haven’t cried since we lost our last round of rats just over a year ago. I think it’s a combination of age, EMDR and hitting menopause. Just like some things don’t seem new and exciting the older we get, things also don’t tend to evoke negative emotions such as anger, stress and depression with the same frequency and intensity as when we’re younger.

At this very moment, I feel empty and bored and like I definitely need more variety in life. But what variety? Tom says he’ll never get bored when he retires because he has all kinds of projects he’s looking forward to doing. Well, I have all kinds of things I could do as well but they’re still along the similar lines of the same old things. My idea of a refreshing breath of fresh air to add variety that may perk me up isn’t something I can just act on at will. I can’t magically transplant myself even for just 15 minutes or so on the beaches of Maui, long enough to get some sunshine and take a dip in the ocean. I couldn’t just up and explore ancient ruins in some other country for a few hours either. I can’t go explore outer space. Hell, right now I can’t even muster up enough energy to go for a walk. I want to go out walking but just don’t have the energy even though I slept well.

It likely is low thyroid bogging me down, but until I can tolerate the medication regularly, there’s nothing I can do about it. I would still rather be tired than anxious. Dixie said she actually has more energy when she skips doses, but I can’t trust what someone half out of her mind says. LOL

Later…

Made myself hit the treadmill for 12 minutes and then another 10 or so outdoors. The planes have been quieter today, but the landscaping frenzy is quite annoying.

I picked up the mail on the way in and now I’m going to do whatever. First, how the hell did speech-to-text come up with “farting” for “bogging???” LOL, good thing I caught that because as I’ve learned, I’m pretty much on my own to catch my own typos since no one seems to want to point them out to me.

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2020 Decided I just didn’t like those elastic shoelaces very much, so I took them off my running shoes and relaced them with their original laces. These are the two pairs I have right now, one in pale pink, and the other in neon yellow with hot pink accents.

The morning is full of cold air and lots of planes, but hey, what else is new? As long as I feel better today, and so far, so good. I ended up having more dizziness yesterday and major fatigue for about an hour. I still have no idea what causes the random bouts of fatigue, but I still don’t feel like I have a cold either. Tom brought up the possibility of a sugar spike, but from what? I’m not diabetic and it had been a while since I had any sugar. What sugar I did have (Ghirardelli hot chocolate) was later on.

Either way, I will be going to see Dixie in a few hours. Tom will be working OT through the rest of the month, and soon he should find out more about what’s going on with the new owners. I’m really starting to think that he’ll be there until he retires. He may work part-time after we move, but I think this is going to be it for this state and that we’re pretty much not guaranteed to move until 2024. As I’ve always known and believed, nothing up there is going to be kind enough to make it that easy for us to get out of what’s been the noisiest place we’ve ever lived in. The only difference between him and I is that he’s not home or is asleep during the worst of it and he is very hard of hearing. I know most places are noisy these days, but still. There’s got to be some places left that are quieter than this that aren’t in a cold climate. I’ve got the air cleaner turned up high in the room I’m sitting in and I can still hear the rumble of jets overhead.

I may have gotten too old to lose weight (without damn near starving), but one is never too old to eat healthily, and so I made a point of having a rather large but healthy breakfast to get me going through most of the day. Okay, so the chuck steak may have been high in cholesterol, but that, including the avocado and steamed broccoli I had, wasn’t processed. I cooked it all from scratch and added nothing but zero-calorie butter spray to the veggies and a touch of salt-free Mrs. Dash to the steak dipped in a tiny dollop of A1 sauce.

For lunch, I’ll have some blueberries and OJ, and dinner will be my only processed item of a Chinese noodle and veggie bowl. I’ve got green and red grapes for snacking in between.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 5, 2020 Tipi, from the Heart for Hearts Collection, was ordered yesterday and will be here on the 13th.

Started off my day yesterday with major fatigue but eventually perked up enough to go to the store and even for a walk afterward.

I’m still having some dizziness upon lying down and standing up, so there’s something going on with my inner ear. I am absolutely not going to the doctor until I’m scheduled to, so it better work itself out. Tom thinks I just have a little cold and I hope he’s right. I don’t think I have an infection. I’ve only had one infection since the '90s that I know of.

Sure enough, the two glasses of wine I had yesterday messed up my sleep, although my sleep seems to be cursed most of the time no matter what. I woke up for a while in the middle of my sleep and had a hard time getting back asleep. I was too tired to get up, though. So I kind of slept in shifts. I’m not as tired as I usually am when my sleep gets broken up, but I sure had fatigue earlier. It’s like going to Target this morning really sucked the juice out of me. I lay down for a few minutes when we got back and that seemed to re-energize me. I even did an exercise video.

When I first woke up it was after a very vivid dream about my parents being alive again. We went to a restaurant and my mother was her usual stand-offish self who didn’t participate much in the conversation.

I was telling Dad that I hoped Trump wouldn’t get re-elected and he said something about a Democrat named Cooper that people were pretty sure would be elected.

Then I said I was surprised no one tried to take out Trump and he said that was because of the way they increased security after Reagan was shot. Only he gave a name that didn’t make sense in the dream.

Then on the way out of the restaurant which opened into a large gym-like room with hardwood floors, I realized I left my handbag on the table, so I ran back for it. When I first began running, however, my body never went anywhere. It’s like I was running in place. But I finally retrieved my handbag and pulled out a tube of red lipstick I would never wear. Dad then made some joke about accidentally reaching in my bag for it, getting it all over him and people laughing at him or some silly thing like that. But it made sense to me in the dream and I burst out laughing.

The dream left me wondering, though. It was just one of those dreams that gave me one of those feelings that’s hard to describe. If it does mean anything, I couldn’t begin to say what. That they still go on somehow? That Trump isn’t going to be re-elected? Was it a glimpse into another dimension? Something else?

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2020 I guess you could say I’m quite a hypocrite today, LOL. I just got done telling a friend how much better it is to avoid processed foods. I’ve been having more fruits and veggies and less processed food. My weight has been down a bit and my blood pressure is better. But what did I do today at Rite Aid? Well, I couldn’t resist helping myself to some of the clearance items that aren’t exactly healthy. I got a mini Mrs. Fields chocolate and caramel gift basket with cookies, candy and hot chocolate. Dixie can have the mug that came with it.

I passed by her and Linda when getting the mail yesterday, but we didn’t realize it right away. I looked down the street and saw the vehicle stop in front of what I thought was either her place or Pat’s but couldn’t be sure from my vantage point. She emailed me saying she didn’t realize it was me till right after she passed me.

I’ve also been avoiding wine and gum, but got a couple of mini bottles today - Merlot and Rosé. Plus, a small bag of chips. So, not doing all that great today but at least I got a lot of healthy stuff from Sam’s. One of their roasted chickens, plus lots of fruits and veggies. Good to see the blueberries are back since I never really cared for Walmart’s.

Going to Target tomorrow and yes, I’ll be grabbing another packet of Godiva hot chocolate. I’m glad I can get singles and have one every now and then instead of a whole box. The stuff is awesome when made with milk instead of water.

I think I may be getting over a cold. Not sure exactly what my problem was but for a few days I’ve been having lots of dizziness and fatigue. I treated both ears again this morning and the dizziness seems to be subsiding. Going out always perks me up even though it’s rainy, foggy and downright dreary out there.

I should do another blog post but wanted to update this journal first because I have other things to do.

A couple of nights ago I slept shitty as if I was back in perimenopause. I dreamed that we were looking at rentals and ended up renting my childhood home. I set up the bed in one of the back bedrooms and said we would have to put an AC in the window during the summer because of the humidity.

Then I went into the master bedroom and saw there was one in one of those windows and a bed the previous people left only it wasn’t on the wall my parents had their bed but by the window where the AC was.

In another dream, I was walking down the street and passed this place where somebody I knew lived, though I’m not sure who. The door was open, so I walked in, but no one was home. I decided to lie down on the bed in their guest room and wait for the person to arrive. Unexpectedly, I fell asleep and then woke up a few hours later. I was totally exhausted.

I got up and went into the living room and realized there was a cassette playing of someone talking that I had made. I put it in the player before napping, not realizing it would start playing. I stopped it, glad the person didn’t come home to find it running, knowing how confused they would have been.

The dream ended with me trying to decide whether I should leave, try to stay awake, or lie back down again.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 2020 I’m trying to figure out whether or not I have swollen lymph nodes. My left one seems like it might be. Taking some ibuprofen for it helped. Every now and then I swear there’s some kind of lump on the left side of my neck right where it meets the chest that I can feel if I put my head down and toward the left. Well, I read up on lymph nodes and we also have some right above the collarbone which is in that area. Since they never tell me my thyroid is enlarged, I now wonder if that’s what it could be. It seems there are a number of things that can swell the lymph nodes.

I was still getting dizzy despite having treated my good ear 4 times. Tom looked in both ears and found that my bad ear needed to be oiled and maybe hit with some alcohol and peroxide which I had him mix up and throw in that ear. At first there was nothing and then it bubbled like crazy. That one treatment alone seems to have helped a lot, too.

I’ve been having some headrushes and ringing in that ear, and at first, we wondered if I might have a cold since so many people are sick now. I still think of sneezing, coughing and congestion when it comes to colds. But other than getting some chills every now and then and feeling rundown, I don’t think I have a cold or an infection of any kind.

Despite having Alexa playing brown noise on volume 4, I can still make out the rumble of the first of today’s planes. As I’ve asked myself a million times, why aren’t I used to this shit yet?

We went to Target yesterday for the first time in quite a while. Although more expensive, it’s a lot nicer than Walmart. The store was clean and uncrowded, and come to think of it, there was no blasting music either. Just a couple of stockers in the way. Maybe we should go there more often than Walmart. Instead of going there every Sunday, maybe we can go every other Sunday or something like that. Maybe he can go to Walmart when I can’t accompany him and then we can go to Target together.

Tom finally figured out how to get MorePro’s app to track whether or not he has sleep apnea or gets low on oxygen and things like that in his sleep, but the catch is that you can only track it between midnight and 7 a.m. He usually crashes well before midnight, so he can’t always get complete info, but he’s gotten enough to tell him he’s a good sleeper. No signs of heart conditions or anything. As soon as I’m crashing at midnight, I’ll wear my own MorePro and see what it comes up with for me.

Finished watching YOU on Netflix and have picked up where I left off with the new Criminal Minds on Hulu.

I’m currently reading I Know What You Did by N.L. Hinkins and it’s a good mystery/drama.

Based on the video a friend shared with me and the things we discussed, and that Tom and I discussed, I’m going to start a little experiment. I don’t “blog.” But I sure as hell am about to start. :-) It’s going to be a Q&A site of sorts on things people may look up info on, which means I have to be as correct as possible and do my research well. I’m going to turn my old Blogger blog into a place of questions, answers and various tidbits of information that I’ll research and format in a way that will hopefully be indexed by Google and rank high on the list. Google Analytics only tells me which countries visit but that’s enough to start with. Depending on how this pans out, and I realize it may take time and I have to be patient, I may create my own website later on down the road.

Tom thinks I should focus more on what I like to do and not what money it may bring. Well, I love keeping a journal (I wrote 335 days last year), and creative writing, just like he loves coding. I also wouldn’t mind experimenting and broadening my horizons. We both watched the video together and I’m going to base my posts on that general format.

I emailed Dixie to see how her wrist is doing and to get a sense as to whether or not she may be up for company tomorrow morning.

We took care of the pigs today and the rats are on for changing tomorrow. I do the rats every 10 days and the pigs every other day. The fish is every month.

Other than cleaning the kitchen today and getting a little more exercise, I’m definitely going to get back on with proofreading and editing my story. I want to get that submitted for publication as soon as I can.

First is posting this journal entry and then tackling my blog!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 2020 Written yesterday, last year:

I’ve got quite a bit to update on but I’m really tired now so I may not post and share this entry until next year.

Tom and I were talking about how we hate crowds and aren’t people-people for the most part. I said to him, “You’re not racist and you’re not sexist, so do you consider yourself peoplist?” I mean, there should be such a word, I would think. LOL

The only thing that’s depressing about entering the '20s is that we’re now just two decades from death since I believe we’re going in the early '40s. When I think about having only 20 years left, give or take a few, it doesn’t seem like much. But then when I compare that amount of time by thinking back to the late 90s on up until now, it really is a long time. We’ve done so much and so much has happened in that time, both good and bad.

I have a short-term and a long-term goal for the next decade. The short-term one should happen in about a year and definitely appeals to us a lot more than Alcatraz and that’s returning to Hawaii. I’m already excited about it and we’ve already discussed some things we want to do. Some things we definitely want to do again and some things we don’t. While we certainly wouldn’t mind another submarine ride, it wouldn’t be as exciting the second time around. We definitely don’t want to attend another luau. That just wasn’t very impressive. But we absolutely LOVED snorkeling! So another catamaran sail is in order for sure. We don’t want to just be on the beach we want to be on the ocean and inside of it as well. Another thing we talked about doing that we have yet to experience is a helicopter ride, even though some tourists got killed recently.

My long-term goal is to go into business at some point this decade. I just don’t want to pay the many grand it would cost for medical transcription training with no guarantees in the end. We could use that money for other things. But then I got into a discussion with a guy as we were doing some work on his site troubleshooting links, and he may hire me as a content writer for his site. I was both surprised and flattered that he feels I’m more than qualified to do it and says it bugs him that Penzu ranks higher on the search list than his site. It all comes down to keywords. They outsource their articles and links, as he showed me. He also showed me a video on those that have websites that they mostly use with the idea in mind of getting as much traffic to it and making money that way. It’s sort of like AdSense. The key is writing all kinds of articles that people would search for. Even if you’re not an expert on a particular subject, you can investigate it enough to write an article in your own words.

He reminded me to be careful sharing links on his site that my family could find, and while they would be a definite concern if I did own any kind of online business, knowing that sooner or later they’re going to try to get my attention again, I realize that I have to move on and live my life. I can’t always worry about what this one may do or what that one may do. I have to live my life for me.

We talked about how we would need to expand our vocabulary since not everybody calls it a diary. Journal, which is French for daily, is what many refer to something that they write about their day-to-day lives in regularly. Then there are some that consider regular posts of almost any kind to be a blog. Everybody has their preferred terms. Like “African-American” vs. “black.” Or “native American” vs. “American Indian.”

He really is a cool guy. As I told him, I consider myself a feisty feminist who won’t hesitate to take care of herself when need be, so I would definitely and gladly feel safe walking through a dark alley with him in tow. I know he would totally mess up anyone who fucked with me!

All I know is that I hope to hell the next decade is better than the last because the 10s were easily the worst decade of my life. I’ve had all kinds of frustrating, depressing, stressful and infuriating moments in my life, but never before did I literally believe I was going to die like I did a few months after we got to Cali, then when the economy collapsed, and then when my meds blew up my heart. The closest I came before that was with the kick-ass asthma attacks I had back east as a smoker in the early 90s, and not having any liquids as well as food for a few days as a kid, thanks to my mother taunting me about my weight even though I was hardly “fat” as a kid.

Still have more to write about but I’m definitely out of energy. I didn’t sleep all that great or as long as I usually do last time around, so I’ve been tired all night. Going to spend the last few hours of my day with Netflix and an audiobook.

Written right after the new year and new decade begins:

Well, at least I got to listen to the fireworks with only just one plane mixed in. Yeah, those things go back and forth between being horrible and quiet. A couple of mornings ago there was a hell of a lot more than just 5 or 6 an hour, especially between 5:15 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. Sometimes I feel like the 4 years we have left here is more like a jail sentence than a waiting game, especially when it is noisy because of planes, traffic, landscaping or projects.

December’s royalties were pitiful compared to November. I barely made a little over a quarter of what I made in December. Hopefully, it was just a holiday thing. No new bashings on Amazon or Goodreads. I decided to use Goodreads to keep track of what I read.

Decided to get a few different kinds of salad dressing to give my salads some variety. The Raspberry Vinaigrette is surprisingly boring. Cucumber Dill is so-so. A little too much dill as opposed to cucumber. Caesar is excellent and I’ve always liked Ranch. Italian tends to be a little salty, so I didn’t get that, and I could make my own Russian if I wanted to with mayo and ketchup.

I’m breaking the house up into sections for dusting since it’s my least favorite chore. Rather than dust larger sections in fewer days, I’ll do smaller sections over the course of more days than usual.

Had a dream that Maliheh was driving us somewhere. She pulled over to the side of the road when she recognized some people she knew. They looked at us suspiciously and one of them asked if we were together. We held hands, pretending that we were, but I knew Maliheh wouldn’t do that unless she really did like me.

Ugh, no thanks. Forgiving is definitely off the table from here on out, and she’d be the last person I’d consider if I was looking anyway.

[chorusfm]

Liner Notes (November 30th, 2024)

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, or if you’re not in the States, just a good Thursday and start to your weekend. If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week (it’s free and available to everyone), you can sign up here. A Few Things * I tried to keep track of the various Black Friday/Holiday sales I saw over the past week, and the community added some others to the replies. It’s always worth taking a look at as the Christmas gifting season begins. November is now over, and the year is almost over, and time has continued flying by at a record pace. We spent most of the day today putting up the Christmas tree and decorating a little bit for December. Sitting here now by the fire with the Christmas lights behind me is quite nice. * I say this with no hyperbole: Overcast is probably the most used app on my phone since its launch if you don’t count Messages and Safari. I’ve been writing about it since its debut and listened to thousands of hours of podcasts on it. I gladly pay for the premium version, and I subscribe to (and pay for) the creator’s podcast, ATP.fm, and have listened to every single episode. I love Overcast. And yet, when I saw a message saying that the app’s price was going to increase with the next payment, I couldn’t help but cringe a little. The latest app redesign has fundamentally broken the app for me in some significant ways. I can no longer play any podcasts on my portable speaker. AirPlay says it’s connected, but no sound comes out. I used to listen to many podcasts while showering and getting ready, but this no longer works. The app crashes on me every few days. Usually losing my place in whatever podcast I was listening to. And this bug where I hit back on a podcast screen and have to hit it multiple times (sometimes between 5-8) to go back to the podcast list view makes me want to throw my phone at the wall. I hate to say it, but the app has become highly unreliable for me. And the price increase has me thinking I need to look around at the podcast market again for the first time in a decade. I’ll probably move back to the default Apple app. My podcast listening has slowly decreased over the past few years, and I only listen to a handful of shows regularly these days (and then pick and choose episodes from a few others). My subscription renews in September 2025, so there’s still time for the bugs to get all worked out before I have to make a call. But I’ve been bummed out that one of my all-time favorite apps has been so untrustworthy lately, and I find the timing of that coinciding with a price increase to be extremely unfortunate. In Case You Missed It * Black Friday & Holiday Sales (2024) * Review: Career Day – I’ll Always Be This * Unreleased Blink-182 Song? * Record Store Day Black Friday 2024 Preview * Bob Bryar Passes Away * Thrice ‘Beggars’ 25th Anniversary Variant * Liner Notes (November 23rd, 2024) * The Early November Announce New Years Eve Show * Yellowcard Play “Better Days” in Manchester * Albums in Stores – Nov 29th, 2024 Music Thoughts * Imogen Heap can’t just show up and drop “What have you done to me?” and then casually mention on social media that it’s not part of an upcoming album. That’s just not fair! The song is too good. I want more! * MxPx’s dropped the one-off single “Set a Fire” a while back, but it’s stayed in pretty constant rotation for me. I love the aggressiveness and hope they continue down that path. This week had me spinning a few of their old albums, including Let it Happen, and Before Everything and After. Every time I hear “Well Adjusted,” I am shocked that it didn’t do better on the radio or find its way into the band’s live show more often. We’ll see what my final end-of-the-year stats look like, but MxPx is on track to be my most-played artist this year. They’ve been a go-to “comfort” band all year. When I’m unsure what I want to listen to, I’ve tossed one of their records on, and I’m almost always in a better… https://chorus.fm/features/articles/liner-notes-november-30th-2024/

[uniquejellyfishqueen]

K- 11

E- 5

Y-25

11/5/2025 will fall on a Tuesday, and will mark 1 year since Election Day

5/11/2025 will fall on a Sunday

* Cornelia de Lange Syndrome Awareness Day - (CdLS) May 11, 2024 (Second Saturday in May)

12/8/2024-5/11/2025

= 155 days (11)

5 months and 4 days (9)

9/11

5/11/2025-9/11/2025

= 124 days (7)

4 months and 1 day (5)

7+5‎ = 12

12/11/2020 is Evermore’s Birthday

The album was a surprise release and was recorded at Long Pond Studio in the Hudson Valley. Swift described Evermore as an offshoot of her previous album, Folklore, and considered the two albums to be sister albums

Willow was the first of 3 singles from this album (woodvale is the missing 3)

It was also released as a single the same day that Evermore was released…..

December Singles:

White Horse 12/8/2008

Ours 12/5/2011

Willow 12/11/2020

The 1st letter from each song title spells WOW

Oh Wow! Also the acronym for Walk on Water a song released on 11/10/2017 by Eminem featuring Beyoncé it was the lead single from his ninth studio album “Revival” which released 12/15/2017… Track 9 on that album is “Like Home (ft Alicia Keys) key….?

Walk on Water had an accompanying music video that was released on 12/23/2017 released exclusively on Apple Music and Eminem’s official VEVO Channel.

*whats interesting is that he only sings “like home” once throughout the entirety of the song…

Line 16:Similar to when two cars collide 'cause

Line 17:Our spirit's crushed, and this spot's a tight one

Line 18:But here the jaws of life come

SOB… “how the hell did we lose sight of us again? Sobbing with your head in your hands, ain’t that the way shit always ends?”- Maroon

sobER “ten months sober, I must admit just because you’re clean, don’t mean you don’t miss it” - Clean

The only key is mine…

MALAR KEY

Malar is a red “butterfly” rash on your cheeks.

“When you splashed your wine into me

And how the blood rushed into my cheeks, so Scarlett it was Maroon” -Maroon

MALAR

MAROON

There is a scramble

MAN ROAR LOMA

Definition of 'loma'

chiefly Southwestern U.S. a hill or ridge having a broad top

Roar is a 1981 American adventure comedy film written and directed by Noel Marshall. Its plot follows Hank, a naturalist who lives on a nature preserve in Africa with lions, tigers, and other big cats. When his family visits him, they are instead confronted by the group of animals. The film stars Marshall as Hank, his real-life wife Tippi Hedren as his wife Madeleine, with Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith and Marshall's sons John and Jerry Marshall in supporting roles.

-film was released on 10/30/1981 in Sydney Australia with a run time of 98 minutes.

The Man is a song by TS released on 1/27/2020. On 2/25/2020 she announced via social media that the video would be made available in 2 days. (2s are 2ing) it premiered on 2/27/2020. Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) voices her male alter ego

RED & Cheeks…

“staring at the sunset, babe

Red lips and rosy cheeks

Say you’ll see me again” - Wildest Dreams

“With pictures in frames of kisses on cheeks, tell her how you must have lost your mind” - How You Get The Girl

“And my cheeks are growing tired from turning red and faking smiles”- Nothing New

“Photo album on the counter, your cheeks were turning red” - ATW

“The rust that grew between telephones”

The Rust Belt was at its prime immediately after World War II, when American industry was booming and manufacturing was a major part of the U.S. economy:

The Rust Belt began to decline in the 1950s and 1960s, and the term became more common as abandoned facilities rusted over time: 

Competition: American steel was undercut by German and Japanese firms, and the U.S. opened trade overseas. 

Labor costs: High labor costs encouraged

Technology: Technological advancements replaced workers

The Rust Belt is a geographic region in the United States that was once dominated by manufacturing, but has since faced industrial decline. Some cities in the Rust Belt include: 

Detroit, Michigan: Once a hotbed of auto manufacturing, Detroit was home to the "Big Three" car companies: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Detroit's population peaked at 1.8 million in 1950, but began to decline in the mid-20th century. The city filed for bankruptcy in 2013, but is currently undergoing redevelopment. 

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Known as "the Steel City", Pittsburgh's industrial awakening began during the Civil War when factories started producing weapons. Andrew Carnegie built the first Pittsburgh steel mills in 1875. 

Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Rochester, and St. Louis: These are also notable cities in the Rust Belt

[glassmarcus]

Picross^3

*Played throughout all of 2023, Written in December 2023

It’s Picross, but in 3D. Hal Laboratories 100% understood the assignment here because this is as exact as a 3D evolution can get. Those developers are just good at converting 2D mechanics into 3D ones if Kirby and the Forgotten Land is anything to go by. Picross 3D is 1 dimension more complicated, 1 dimension more satisfying, and at times, 1 dimension more frustrating.

The same core concepts of Picross are present. Each row follows its own rules of where squares can exist. By overlapping the rules between adjacent intersecting columns, you can figure out the nature of the puzzle little by little. Here there is just an extra axis applied, but you still end up only comparing columns and rows. You just end up doing it more times because you are essentially doing multiple Nonograms stacked on top of each and next to each other. The rules for the columns and rows are a bit stricter though, as having only a number of blocks as a rule would be too vague for it to work. Instead there are limits on how many segments of blocks are allowed. The point is, you're multiplying the amount of shit you keep track of by the depth added in Picross 3D. It feels wild at first, but solving some of these were the most satisfying Picross experiences I've had.

The reason for this isn't just the increased complexity, but the very nature of 3D. Nonograms always try to be some picture. But unless the silhouette of the image is strong, you won't have a clue what some of them are until they are colored in at the end. I never had that issue in Picross 3D while I've had that happen in even the best Picross games. I always knew what the art piece at the end was before the reveal because there is no abstraction of what the shape is. In 3D you are not painting, you are sculpting. You are given a large block to chip away at rather than constructing something from scratch. Form is the most important part of the product, so it is always clear.

The change from painting to sculpting also helps better describe the core of what I find Picross to be: Exclusion. In Picross, you find what can't possibly be colored in, so you know what has to be colored in. In 3D, you find what has to be intact so you can figure out what to get rid of. In both scenarios you are chipping away at impossibilities, but in 3D it's far more literal and completely skips the beginning phase in normal Picross of trying to place the initial building blocks yourself. You are pretty much doing the same thing, but it feels more direct here.

Now it being direct does not mean it's faster to get through these. Not all. In fact that's my main issue with Picross 3D. Things take too long to do, not because it's more complicated, but because you end up spending most of your time rotating and dissecting the initial block. I started to get Kid Icarus Uprising wrist pain playing through some of these time trials. The best advice I can give when playing this game is to not even attempt to get high ranks on these puzzles. It's veeeeery easy to mis-click a block and lose your perfect streak and trying to rotate your sculpture too fast will break either your DS screen or your hand. Also, don't be like me. Once you feel like you have mastered the logic of this game, stop and go to bed. Don't continue out of obligation. These later levels take 30+ minutes and there's a lot of them. Like even more than Mario Super Picross. Not quite as much as Hatsune Miku: Logic Paint S though. This game has a lot of content, so taking a break and coming back is recommended.

Honestly….I kinda want to play this game in VR. This is coming from someone who has sandbagged Virtual Reality at every turn. 99% of the time I’d rather just have a screen and a controller. But this left over 1% is where I think Picross 3D might fall into. I require intimate interaction with this 3 dimensional object and VR might be the best way to allow for that.

I can see myself returning for the sequel, but not going as hard with it as I did this game. But for now, I'll just stick with regular Picross. It's not as stimulating, but I sure can do a lot of them in the time it takes to do one 3D one.

[garaksapprentice]

New Year, (some) new Goals

This post was originally published on my blog here.

An Unnecessarily In-Depth Explanation of How I Set Yearly Goals

It's a new year, which means that for me, it's time for a new set of annual goals. (These are NOT resolutions. Resolutions are fuzzy and vague, usually cliché things like "lose weight" or "be happier" or "achieve world peace". Goals are things that you can actually aim at, and with enough practice, hit.)

I started formally setting and tracking yearly targets a few years ago, and while I won't call it the cure to all that ails me, it's certainly been a helpful practice. And hey, 'tis the season for everyone's "how I set goals" posts, so who am I to rock the boat?

The TL;DR

I usually start this process sometime in December, whenever the urge to wrap up the current year and look towards the new one starts to itch me. (Incidentally, this is almost the exact same process I use when doing monthly goals, just with less introspection/review.)

It goes something like this:

Review the areas of my life and how things went over the last year.

Review last year's goals - what I hit, what I didn't, what needed changing part way through the year when it became apparent I'd picked an over-ambitious target/something I didn't actually care about, that kind of thing.

Do a brain dump of all the things I want to do next year. Delegate them by life area.

Refine the brain dump over a few days, until I have a reasonable number of targets to aim for over the coming year.

Break those targets down into the things I'll need to do to actually reach the goal I'm aiming for.

Review Last Year

I'll be honest, sometimes I do this after I've worked out the shiny new goals for next year. But I always try to do some form of yearly review, even if it's just a short, half-assed version of the "ideal".

I currently use a (heavily simplified) version of the practice laid out in Alex Vermeer's 8,760 Hours Guide for this step. Finding Alex's guide to use as a springboard was extremely helpful for me. I'd tried doing yearly reviews before, but they never really "stuck" or felt like they were worth the time. For whatever reason, 8,760 Hours was the guide that worked for me.

That being said, I've modified the review framework (usually by removing things) every year I've used it. Alex's guide is super in-depth - he takes a full week to do his review, and he goes hard. While I like to think I'm that kind of person, I'm really not. Some of the review questions and Life Areas Alex uses aren't applicable to me, so I removed or combined things where it made sense. While I love complexity (the PKM scene is like pseudo-academic catnip to my dopamine receptors), at the end of the day I need simplicity - something that both On The Ball Me and Off With The Fairies Me can do.

In the (checks notes) four years I've been using his guide as a framework, I've reduced Alex's twelve life areas down to eight. I've also removed, modified, and combined a LOT of the questions in each Deep Dive. (I removed two more while I was doing this year's review, in fact.) My ultimate goal is to get it down to where I can complete the entire review in about a day, while still feeling like I got my money's worth from the time spent navel-gazing instead of eating gingerbread and knitting.

Brain Dump

Reviewing one's past actions is great and helpful and definitely a path to world peace or Ultimate Effectiveness or whatever, but for me, the brain dump is where the rubber hits the road. I always start my longer-term planning with a list of things I want to do, whether it's for the year or the month. It's essentially a real-life version of "What could happen next?", the question I ask myself whenever I'm running out of plot in my fiction work.

This question is designed to be a free-for-all. I don't let little things like the space-time continuum get in the way at first - it's just one big bullet list of things I've been dying to get to, things that have been bugging me that I want to fix, and usually a few things I feel obliged to add (because I know they're important, but I'm not really enthused about them). Most of the time I've got the first list version finished in ten to fifteen minutes.

(Sometimes there's one specific pile of stuff that's bugging me, making it hard to focus on grander things. (Usually it's the fact that the WIP pile has blown out again, or the house has reached an ill-defined but completely unacceptable level of disrepute. This year it was both.) When that happens, I brain dump all that first, in a separate list. That usually shuts up the brain weasels, and frees up enough mental RAM to get the bigger picture/longer term stuff down.)

Refine the Brain Dump

Once I've got everything down, I keep the list open on my computer and let it percolate for a few days. This lets my subconscious chew on it while I add, remove, and change things. This year's brain dump list ended up with 22 items. That's a typical number for me (the most I've had is 25, the least is 19.) Some are pretty modest, but most are things that will take a fair chunk of the year and my dedication to accomplish (as befits yearly goals).

I also work out which buckets/life areas things fit into - there's usually clear distinctions for most goals (writing, fibre arts, health and fitness etc). If there's lots of goals in one or two areas, and only a couple in others, then that's a pretty good clue about what my next year is going to focus on.

Next comes the hard part - triage.

The first triage step is trying to narrow my "I definitely want to do this thing" choices down as much as possible. This is hard. Everything on the big list is shiny and new and feels so important and urgent right now. That's why I keep the list open after I've made it - looking at it frequently, but not necessarily actively engaging with it, helps my subconscious start to pick favourites. Even so, I'm doing well if I've narrowed the list by half after the first pass.

The second triage step is working out how many of my goals are process-oriented, and how many are product-focused. Process goals involve doing a thing on a regular basis, or for a certain amount of time, every {time period}. Weave for 2.5 hours a week, go hiking twice a month, that sort of thing. They're heavily focused on small, consistent efforts over time, and they're intended to last the entire year.

Product goals require me to do/make a thing, or achieve a benchmark. They're things like "sew X new items for my wardrobe", "finish revising novel Y", "compete in/attend X event". Once that thing or benchmark has been reached, that goal is finished and I don't have to worry about it any more. While I still have to put in time and effort to get to the finish line, it can be much more focused than with a process goal - if I want, I can spend three straight days sewing a shirt, and then not think about my wardrobe goal for six months.

It's both very important and extremely tricky to get the balance of Process to Product right. Human brains LOVE habitual activity and consistency, but they can only deal with so much of it being piled into them at once. (This goes doubly if you're neurodivergent.) I've learned to tilt the balance pretty heavily towards Product when I'm writing my final list.

I try to only have one new process-oriented goal to focus on, at most. Any more than that, and I'm less likely to hit what I was aiming for. (Many of my process goals carry over in some form from year to year. For instance, I always have a word count goal, and some form of fibre-related goal.)

An example: last year, three of my goals were writing related - establish a consistent writing routine, publish at least one blog post a month, and finish revising a novel. The first two were process goals, the last one product-focused.

While I made good progress on all of them, and was happy to declare success based on the spirit of the exercise, I didn't hit any going by the letter of it. Sure, I published 14 blog posts last year - two more than the target! - but there were three months when I posted zero. And while I made my yearly word count target, my consistency was, uh, not great.

Break down the targets you're aiming for

Which brings me to my next tactic. When possible, have more than one way to measure a goal's success.

This is especially important for process goals, which by their nature are easier to 'fail' week to week. Having multiple success conditions gives you greater leeway for when Life Happens At You. Nothing is more demoralising than something happening early in the year, that throws you off your so-far perfect streak, with no way to fix it.

How does this work in practice? I take the weekly or monthly goal that I'm aiming for, multiply that number out to a year, and use that as my secondary aiming point. So "weave 2.5 hours per week" becomes both "weave for at least 130 hours over the year" and "weave 10 hours and 50 minutes every month". If (when) I don't hit 2.5 hours one week, it isn't as big a deal - I can look at how many minutes I was short, and roll that into the weeks left in the current month.

This approach saved my bacon several times last year. I had a couple of big, multi-day conferences and camps that sucked a lot of time and brainpower out of my usual schedule. If I'd just been measuring weekly adherence, I would have "failed" in April and May when I simply didn't have the energy to do that much weaving on top of all the conference prep. But because I was measuring monthly as well as yearly, I simply rolled the two weeks I took off into the weeks before and after the events, and still hit my monthly weaving target.

It can help to think about what the actual point of the goal you're making is, too. For me, the ultimate goal of "establish a consistent writing routine" isn't to have a consistent routine - it's to write more words. I really had no idea what that looked like in January last year. So I decided that "consistent" writing was 30 minutes a day, three days a week. AND I set a year-long word count target of 75,000 words. (I beat the 75k goal by 48 words, but my consistency still sucks.)

Same with blogging. The point behind "publish a blog post a month" is partly to have a consistent output, but it's also to write more words. So as well as the one-a-month goal, I also set a year target of 12 posts, total. Did I post to the blog every single month? Nope. Did I post twelve or more times in the year? Yep! Was that more than I would have posted without having a goal to aim for? Absolutely!

Last, but definitely not least, is to update your approach as the year progresses. Whatever I pick as my 'yearly goals' right now don't have to be the things I work on all year. Life gets in the way, my needs change, I have more or less (usually less) time and energy available than I thought I would.

So I give my "final" goal list (and attached success metrics) a going-over in March to see how it's shaping up. Depending on the year, I'll give it another interrogation in June or July, and adjust or drop goals as needed. Remember, your goals serve YOU, not the other way around.

Last year I started January with nine goals - I had three life areas, and three goals in each area. It turns out that's too many for me to focus on over a year. In March, I dropped one of those goals, and by May, I'd dropped a second. (Both of the dropped items were process goals - things I wanted to do every day or week. They were also, not coincidentally, things I'd added out of a sense of obligation more than actual excitement.)

The Final List

No talk of goal setting would be complete if I didn't share my final list. (I'm also doing the Habitica's New Year's Resolutions set of Challenges again this year, and the first one involves sharing your goals on social media.)

Buy a house

Publish at least one blog post a month/12 blog posts in the year

Maintain daily streak on 4TheWords/write 75k new fiction and 15k non-fiction

Maintain a 5:1 spinning:weaving ratio (ie spend 5 hours spinning for every 1 hour of weaving)

Get - and then keep - the WIP pile below 10

Make at least three new items for my wardrobe (socks don't count)

Attend HEMA training at least four times a month during terms

Take the younger kid (and thus me) roller skating at least 6 times

If we're lucky (or unlucky if you dislike this sort of talk) I'll do a check-in around mid-year to see how I've been doing. If we're less lucky, I'll do a year-end wrap-up thingummy to close out the year.

Either way, hopefully this extremely long and somewhat rambling break-down of my goal-setting is useful to y'all.

[zmyaro]

SongZ Wrapped 2022!

As with last year, I know Spotify Wrapped happens at the beginning of December (and stops collecting data earlier), but I wanted to get my top played songs for all of 2022—most notably because there was some new music I only got at the end of the year.

As always, I enjoy doing this for all the interesting ways it can confirm or disprove my assumptions, and I also found it interesting to compare to last year's to see what has changed.

Some miscellaneous observations include:

I am not surprised Tick, Tick...BOOM! did well. I was initially surprised “Come To Your Senses” beat out “Louder Than Words” and “30/90”, but then I remembered the former is on my playlist for listening to while falling asleep, while the latter is (for obvious reasons) not.

The Star Trek: Prodigy theme is my favorite new Star Trek theme since the '90s, but I was still surprised it made it to the top 5!

The only reason the Age Of Calamity theme wasn't in my top 100 last year was because I had not added it to my library yet.

(Ditto “Read My Mind” and the Smash Bros. Rainbow Road medley.)

I think I expected at least one song from Belle to beat the Mean Girls musical since I remember enjoying the music from the former more (not that I don't enjoy “World Burn”).

I am not surprised the Protomen cover of “I Still Believe” ranked highly. I have no idea why I did not listen to The Cover Up much before this year despite having it in my library, but it is really good, and that was easily my favorite track from it this year.

I am also not surprised Splatoon had some good representation with Splatoon 3 releasing this year, and it will likely get a bit of a boost in the coming year if we get an official Splatune 3. I was surprised “Fresh Start” made not only the top 100, but the top 50, beating out even “Calamari Inkantation”!

I was not surprised my top 10 last year were not the same as my top 10 this year—I knew I listened to them less than I did in 2021—but I was surprised by how far some fell. I was not surprised to see “Paralyzed” bumped down a little (I like it, but I was surprised it made #1), but I was very surprised “Keep Coming Back To The Start” did not make the top 100 at all this year, and a bit surprised to see neither did “White Rabbit” or “White Woman's Instagram”. And just as shocking, “Inferno” somehow dropped from #5 to barely hanging on at #100!

I also expected Sarah & The Safe Word to fare better since I did not think I listened to them significantly less than 2021. In particular, “The Louisville Shuffle” did not make the top 100 at all despite making it to #15 last year.

Possibly the top reason I wanted to do a full year Wrapped instead of just through December 1st was I saw Six in December and got very into the soundtracks (UK Studio Recording and Live Broadway Recording). I was curious whether any of them made the top 100 in that time, but only “Don't Lose Ur Head” did.

Incidentally, I checked my top 100 for just December, and Six held all of the top 9, and 16 of the top 20!

No matter when you cut it off, though, some album is going to get the short end of the stick. Hadestown did not fare too poorly last year, but it probably would have done better if I had not seen it in November, splitting its peak listens between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. By contrast, while I did listen to Tick, Tick...BOOM! more overall, it also benefited from its peak listens being in January.

Once again, I expected more mashups to rank higher.

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