#I've never taken a pic bc I'd feel weird doing it but I like it a lot

[heartbeetz]

Someone in my neighborhood has an old beat-up reddish-tan el camino ss and every time I walk past it I think "that is SUCH an Anton car to me". I can't find my "list of vehicles I think Anton would drive" post but I remember el caminos being on there, so I'm happy to report the thought still stands.

[post-office-by-the-bay]

dearest covey,

how is life by the sea treating you? i hope the salty air and wet sand are making you feel at home.

no, but in all seriousness, i love the new blog! this must have taken so long to make! the idea is so cute, too, the vibes are immaculate. I feel like i'm actually at the seaside.

i know i haven't sent a letter in for a while, and i'm sorry, it's just been a super hectic week. i went to visit my grandparents this weekend, and they don't have internet at their cottage, so i wasn't able to access tumblr, but i did manage to finish an essay that has been stressing me out this past week, and i'm really proud of it! in othwe news, i went thrifting on friday, and found the CUTEST white maxi skirt, plus some pretty pajama shorts with blue flowers. i also got some makeup from the mall, including some nice blush/highlighter, and some lip oil. my little brother (5th grade) came third place in a district-wide chess tournament, which makes me a little worried about him getting bullied, but i'm still proud of him lol. seriously, though, that kid is scary smart. he's definitely the favourite child. (joking, I hope). do you have siblings? i have two younger ones, my brother and my sister, and while they can be a pain in the butt and hog the nintendo switch, i'd still die for them any day.

i'm thinking about converting the radio station to a flower shop, if only because there's better inspiration pics on pinterest and i'm not extroverted enough to be a dj lol.

that's all i really have to say, but I hope you life has been good recently!

love from way up in canada, flora. 💐

to my best girl flora,

the salty air is amazing, but compares nothing to sitting in your flower shop with you by my side!!

(squealing- we're so cutesy, you and i!)

no worries about the time between letters. i'll always wait for all of you!! i actually spent my weekend by the beach but i had the worst goddamn cell service like fr not a single bar in sight- pissing me off lmao. congrats on finishing that essay tho!! i FINALLY found time to talk to my ap gov teacher and she was a massive help with my FRQ4 (essay answer, basically) bc ya girl was STRUGGLING. also, i loveeeee when i have a good thrift. i found the cutest tank top the other day but it's been too gloomy to wear as of late.

also, about your brother, TELL HIM CONGRATS FOR ME!! my school is kinda strange bc we're also having chess competitions rn but they are actually hyped up more than football games. everyone who competes is actually so cool and well loved, so just let him know that cool people play chess too!!

i've got an older sister who's pretty cool. but...tbh, i think in every single other universe, im the older sister (lemme explain-). she's got really bad anxiety so my parents have always kinda babied her and there have never really been any expectations put on her, so they were all kinda put on me. i've gotten really good at lying to take the blame for things that she did bc her anxiety and mental issues would just make my parents reaction worse so i just take the blame bc she's my sister. of course im gonna look out for her, ya know??? she also went through a weird phase of wishing i didn't exist to my face when i was like eight BUT she's gone to therapy and apologize for that so we good!! i truly do love her but i know im her protector, not the other way around!! which is chill, ya know!

ANYWAYS MOVING ON FROM THE KINDA TRUAMA DUMP- i think a floral shop would be so so cute!! and while i LOVE the dj theme, i think it's kinda hard but the floral shop will be so much easier and wayyy easier to find pics for too!!

all my love from da beach,

covey 𐙚⊹ ࣪ ˖

[fereldanwench]

so husbando and i checked out of our dragoncon hotel a couple of hours ago and are getting settled back in at home.

this was the first time since our weekend getaway to quebec in 2019 that we had taken a trip together. not like we went far--we were still in the atlanta area, but we left our home and kitties for about 4 days, which was a little nerve-wracking at first. i even bought a camera to check in on the cats, which i never thought i'd do, lmao. (and they were fine.) ((said camera was immediately unplugged and going into my closet now bc these things honestly kind of freak me out.))

we've attended every dragoncon since 2012--we even took the weekend off in 2020 to make the most of the virtual event and try to recapture some of the magic at home, which was surprisingly fun. the 2021 con was weird and a little depressing in hindsight. i probably wouldn't have even gone if i hadn't let my 2020 tickets roll over, but it was very limited (with good reason, of course) and we didn't have a hotel so ubering sucked. (i also got royally screwed on our trip back that saturday when they overcharged me $50 which still makes me rage.)

i wasn't sure if we'd be able to do it this year on account of the job situation (or lack thereof), but i found a room in one of the overflow hotels that wasn't too bad, and we were a little more frugal with the food and drink spending this year. the hotel was a little dingy and kind of far from the main action, but it was better than ubering. it did prevent me from cosplaying because i didn't want to deal with that hike (or the shuttle bus with an erratic schedule) in the atlanta humidity while fighting with a costume, but in recent years i had started to prioritize comfort over cosplay anyway.

i did drink, and the dull, persistent headache i woke up with this morning was a reminder why i quit for over a year, lmao. letting loose was fun, though. finding perches to people-watch and listen to the live performers and banter with strangers while having a beverage was always one of my favorite things to do at the convention.

i didn't really take any pictures other than a few shots of the buildings--not using social media outside of fandom really has pulled me away from the impulse to document every single event in my life and just exist in the moment. i know it sounds like a cliche, but it is really nice. (although i am glad that i have almost a decade's worth of pics from previous dragoncons. something something balance or whatever.)

it was a good weekend all in all and i love having dragoncon as a sort of farewell to summer, but this is probably gonna be the last dragoncon for us, at least for a few years. i remember towards the end of the weekend in 2019 i had started to feel like maybe it was time to take a break, but then 2020 happened and i was grasping to any sense of normality and comfort i could find. i think that kind of pulled me back to seeking a familiar experience.

but it's expensive, it's claimed every labor day weekend for the past decade, and even though it is a very unique convention experience, i feel like i've gotten all i can get from it. my priorities have shifted a lot in the past few years, and i'd rather start putting this money and time to new adventures and experiences that better reflect and nurture that growth.

i'm really grateful that i got to do this for 10 straight years, and i've had some absolutely incredible moments at dragoncon, but yeah. it's just time for something new. 💙

[the-bjd-community-confess]

Since we're on that thing with entitled minors. I just remembered this story, and I think it's a bit funny. Not super related to my dolls, but also kinda is?

Most of my main characters are in their 30-50's, they might start out a bit younger, but most of the story plays when the characters are in that age range, just because as a teen, I grew tired of stories focusing on 14-19 yo's, since it just felt like the same thing over and over. So I decided it'd be interesting focusing on "older" characters. Well, you don't actually know at first read that they're that old, though I do mention them not being teens and stuff. Well, some kid who apparently was on the same server as me, server focuses on writing characters and world building, had the strangest freak-out when they found out that most of my characters "middle" aged, (I don't even think 30-40 really counts as middle aged these days?) and apparently thought it was the grossest thing that I'd make my MC's all grown adults.

LoL. Anyway, this was all in a convo I had with another server member when we compared and just had a small convo about our progress. That kiddo was lurking, and then literally went to a mod and complained, the mod just contacted me and said the minor had been telling them I was being creepy, and I was excluding* them, even though I'd never interacted with the kid before.

Few key words the mod gave me was that it was predatory, creepy, and that I was making the kid feel unwelcome. Repeat, I never interacted with the kid before, the kid was not even joining the convo, and I didn't even talk about anything even close to the NSFW line, it was just the most basic convo about "Yeah ok, So A is 30, and B is 40'ish, but they don't really interact after their first meeting until a year later." Just that kinda stuff. If that wasn't enough, kiddo then had a petty rant while I was AFK, and wrote an essay about how it was iffy for us adults to focus so much on how much older a character is from being a teen. And if you write a character old just for the sake of being old, you must have issues with people being young. Tl:Dr for the entire probs 1000 word essay: If you have old characters and mention it, you are weird because you must be a creeper to specifically mention a character being old instead of young, and it's sus if your young characters grow old.Yes, you read that right. And yes, the kid insinuated you're a pedo for NOT writing teen characters as your MC's, or for having teen characters become 30+ yo adults bc you're aging up a "minor" bc aging up means you wanna frick them. * Excluding is a more specific rule about several people ignoring a single person for no reason when the person is actively engaging with the others. If you have a problem with a person you tell a mod, not do schoolyard bs like ignore them. It's taken seriously so I guess that's why the kid said it, and why mod mentioned it. Only way I can relate this to my dolls, is that these characters are represented by a few dolls I own. And Bonus story for that, because I had a similar experience in a way.-

I buy adult sculpts which often still look young because there's no wrinkles, or anything in the sculpt itself, bc let's be real, there's no real middle ground specifically for mature older looking sculpts. You either have kid-teen dolls, smooth skinned adult, or deformed shrivelled oldies. The few who technically would work just aren't my aesthetic sadly. So I normally get mature sculpts, and then add in small wrinkles, like under eye, crowsfeet, and smile lines, while doing the face-ups. Twice I've gotten a comment that I'm doing "the face-up wrong" because the doll aren't "intended to have wrinkles" and one said that me using "young" sculpts implies I'm sexualizing teens. Just for reference, the pics I got this specific comment on, is on a pic of two Loongsouls I own, and each of those is on the mature body sculpt so 68-75cm, which I'd argue are their clearly adult sculpts/sizes.

~Anonymous

[mycelier]

My name is Simone and I would like to tell you a tale!

I will not have access to my laptop for some days more and because writing on my phone is kind of painful (physically, because I am working on hand mobility now), this may end up in drafts and taking a while to post. I am going to share what has been happening the last 2 months because I feel like everything went from 0 to 100 in the span of a few weeks and its been really, really wild.

So!!! LETTUCE begin!

For roughly 5 years I've been struggling to get a diagnosis on an extremely painful area of my arm. There was literally nothing visible; no lump, discoloration or any other physical abnormality to indicate anything was wrong. I spent thousands on pretty much every kind of imaging you can do, and was told time and time again that there was nothing wrong and, perhaps, it was psychosomatic and I needed therapy or, more often than not, I was given a shrug and a vague "i dunno" response.

This year, something changed. I deal with chronic pain (my spine is congenitally fused in my neck and lower spine and I have baby bone spurs all over), and in the process of trying to work on that I brought up my arm again to a dr I no longer see. He'd told me my arm was SEVERAL things over the years I had been seeing him but this time said it was a fibromyalgia knot, something I had been told by a team of doctors some time before that. I said okay cool and was sent to a physical therapy rehab center where the dr worked with myofascial release and stretches to help with injuries. This amazing man fixed my plantar fasciitis and helped get my chronic headaches under control but NOTHING we did helped my arm pain. Within a month he was worried bc we had started to notice that there was a hardness to the spot that never changed with any exercise or massage.

Worried that there was a nerve being trapped or crushed (another diagnosis I'd gotten over the years), this amazing man sent me to a neurosurgeon who immediately frowned and said he didn't think my neck pain and my arm pain were connected. He ordered an MRI of my arm and despite it not being visible on an MRI 2 years before, he found something PHYSICALLY THERE where I said I had pain. He considered doing the surgery to remove it (despite being a neurosurgeon he was fascinated with this weird horribly painful spot) but eventually sent me a surgeon for an oncology center, assuring me it was because this new surgeon was one of the best in Texas for removing soft tissue tumors, not because there was any thought of cancer.

I met with the surgeon who gave me one more diagnosis of an AVM (arteriovenous malformation), snd said they were benign and not necessary to remove as well as the possibility that if removed it would likely return. Truly, at this point after 5 years of constant nauseating horric pain when someone brushed against me or if I gently brushed against ANYRHING, a pain so bad that it had basically made me stop using my right arm as much as possible (of course I'm right handed lol), I said GET THAT FUCKER OUT OF THERE MAN and my first surgery was scheduled.

Surgery one occurred Nov 5th and was an out patient event. I went home and passed out. At some point my mom said that while I'd been in recovery the dr said the thing in my arm hadn't looked like what he expected so he had sent it to pathology. I went back to work and was hanging out until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving when I went in for a super immediate meeting with a different doctor who told me that what had been in my arm was a synovial sarcoma, aka, cancer! He, this incredibly kind man I did not know, gently discussed chemo and told me I needed to have a CT scan immediately. Based on the CT, i was either in stage one or stage four if it has spread to lungs. The day before Thanksgiving I received the news that it was stage one, it had not spread, and i was so fucking happy.

Then it was time talk about next steps. My surgeon marked out a circle on my arm to indicate how much he was gonna remove in order to guarantee clear margins..but it was not enough of a meeting for me to grasp the surgery I was about to receive.

The day of my second surgery, dec 8th, came quickly and i met with the plastic surgeon, the kindest, most patient man. He moved my arm around and explained how he was going to hijack a vein from my forearm in order to keep the blood flow health to the flap he was gonna take from the donor site: My inner thigh.

It has been 11 days and I am living in an inpatient rehab facility, working on dealing with the nerve damage/pain, the EXTREME pain of my donor site, and the lost mobility that I am working on getting back, both in my leg and my hand. The majorities of my arm is numb...except where the nerve pain burns my wrist and forearm and makes it painful to wear my arm sling (I can't fully extend my arm, nor can I lift, push, pull or use my arm in any way that would stress out my new arm flap). Also may have a brand new urinary tract infection but as I write this I'm chugging water for a urine sample to hopefully get that treated. Below are some pictures I have taken/had taken of my arm! Im not ready to look at my leg outside of the bandages (which, since having the wound vac removed today, hell yeah, will need daily dressing changes).

EDIT: I tried posting pictures of my arm last night and my post disappeared immediately so I will try to make a new post with these photos in case the whole post was erased because of them. I will tag them as post surgery photos. I do not consider them gory or excessive but hey that's just me.

I intend to post more things as I keep healing and as I gain more mobility. I was given "independence" in my room yesterday which means I can officially get up without any assistance needed (using my badass new cane to help me lift my foot in and out of bed)!!!! Which also means I can get up whenever I want without the bed alarm going off. I have a badass cane that has been the best tool in helping me get around (and has inspired my mom and others to suggest and look into getting me a cane sword which makes me laugh REAL hard). See below me using the cane to move my foot in and out of bed!

Part of why I'm posting this is because I really needed to talk about it and while later posts may not be this long or expository but I wanted to have a base post to explain other ones related to this one!!!

I will update with some newer pics tomorrow night when my mom comes by to help me take newer pics. The arm flap looks super healthy (according to the drs), and when they changed my leg dressing they said its looking really good and healthy!

I......also really wanted to post my Amazon wishlist. Due to this stupid wild bad lottery ticket, I've been struggling to pay my bills and rent but!!! I have good insurance, thankfully (since I live in the US and my hospital stay and this rehab stay would have more than bankrupted me), and im hoping my disability checks will get here in time for rent!!! I'm putting up my wishlist bc I can't afford some of the "essentials" on there and, also, because I havent been able to have any kind of comfort during any of this. I never ask for anything for holidays because usually i...dont want to burden people with spending money on me since I know how hard money is, especially right now. And if I don't have enough for rent later I might have to create a go fund me...but right now everything looks good for rent and bills just...not for anything fun.

Thank you so much for your time!!! And happy holidays you wild bastards!!!

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/36PG6BAYD18U7?ref_=wl_share