Freckles & Doubt

It has been glorious. It has been so glorious. I have spent four solid days mostly in my own home, with rare detours, and I have had time to sleep until I'm not tired, snuggle the cat until she moves, work until I get bored, fuck around until I want to work again.
I haven't achieved a whole hell of a lot, but I did get started on some things, and I did a tiny bit of clearing out of my floordrobe, which is taller than the bed by now as it happens. (I dress myself out of a tangled dragon-like hoard of garments, at this point.)

I wish I'd done more stuff. But I didn't flip out, and I did a lot of decompressing.

And the cat, man-- she got so much done this weekend. Today alone, she got to sit on me for a long time this morning, she got to nap in the chair, she got to nap on Dude's belly on the couch, she got to run around the house, and then he took a nap in bed and she slept curled in his arm for like an hour, and then I took a nap in the bed and she slept curled in the crook of my elbow for another, like, hour, and then she sat on my arm on the couch for over two hours and slept so deeply she had several twitching dreams, paws and whiskers, and just now she has had dinner and is satisfiedly grooming her whiskers on the floor.

Oh, speaking of cat business-- I don't have any more conference call updates but I do have a hilarious video via Twitter of an autotuned cat, which really annoyed Chita this morning.

I'll be kicking myself probably the rest of the year about all the shit I did not do this weekend-- I never have four consecutive unscheduled days-- but it was so glorious to have zero expectations, and the fact that I did not even think to try to write myself a to-do list probably goes to show that I have been pretty near the end of the tether, lately, so.

Oh I hear the cat getting into bed with Dude, it's time to go to sleep. :)
(Dude is quite recovered, by the way, and actually made dinner tonight, so that's good progress too. Oh no I dallied too long, the cat is back to yell at me. Bye!)

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I almost never use that warning. Chose Not To Warn. 

I’ve considered it, though. I’ve had a few experiences where I wrote something, devoted a lot of thought to the tags, pointed out everything I thought could be problematic, and still wound up with a nastygram in my inbox because something triggered someone, something I’d thought was pretty well-explained within the text (drug use, but it was a prescription drug taken as prescribed; noncon, but it was consensual, just one of the characters had a drink to fortify himself before he went for it; underage, but both characters were of legally consenting age in the relevant jurisdiction and I just hadn’t specified enough, I guess?)

There have been a couple where people weren’t mad about it, but let me know that I triggered them severely, because I described something really vivid that happened to be something they’d experienced. But it was so specific– I’d put on a general warning, but short of having summarized the fic in detail there’d be no way to realize– even then, it was a descriptive detail I’d used that gave them a flashback, in one case, and they wouldn’t have known to brace for it, and I certainly wouldn’t have known to warn for it. It’s not possible; some triggers are so idiosyncratic, that if you just tell a vivid story, you’re going to risk setting someone off. 

And even if the person wasn’t mad at you, it’s still upsetting. You tried your best, but you still upset someone, and that doesn’t feel good.

I write pretty straightforward stuff; I’m kink-adjacent, but not really very kinky, and my shit is generally pretty vanilla; I go in more for emotional self-torture than anything else, and it’s usually pretty obvious that I’m gonna fall short of the dark side of fic, even in the darkest stuff I publish. 

And even I sometimes have trouble tagging my stuff. I’m a person without any triggers, but with some pretty serious squicks, so I get how serious it is, but just enough really to understand that there’s a lot I don’t know. 

If I wrote more complex stuff, I’d probably use the CNTW tag. Like, I can’t guarantee that I’m going to get everything tagged correctly. Proceed with caution. I’d prefer a wider audience, so I’m gonna try to use the archive warnings and tag as specifically as I can, but it gets to a point, sometimes, where you’re just sure you’re going to miss something, or you’re just not sure how to tag it.

That’s why the CNTW tag even exists. That, and some people just don’t really understand the warnings system. If you haven’t spent eight years on Tumblr reading the various discourses, if you haven’t had much experience reading up on how fandom specifically handles this shit, if you’ve never been to therapy and you’re not entirely sure what any of that means, how the hell are you going to know how to properly tag your shit?

That’s why that option exists. Some stuff, you can’t warn for. Other stuff, you don’t know how to warn for. CNTW is a big general-purpose warning flag. If you are the sort of person who’s going to be triggered by something, if you’re someone whose entire day could be ruined by an untagged major character death, if you’re someone who’s going to go into a horrible anxiety spiral over something too vivid, then please, for the love of God, take care of yourself, and steer away.

It’s not a “fuck off, we’re too good for your kind here.” It’s a “I’m so sorry, we don’t know how not to hurt you, and we want you to be safe.” Maybe it’s a “we don’t understand you,” or maybe it’s a “we have to take care of ourselves and the way we do that is by creating painfully cathartic content that we know hurts other people but our own compass for that shit is so broken we don’t know how to tag it anymore”, but either way, it is a big, bright, sparkly “this is not a safe space!” neon sign, and it is really important, and it is there on purpose, and it is there so you can take care of yourself.

You can take care of yourself. And that is really the only way to guarantee a safe space: giving you the tools you need to make it safe for you. That’s what all warnings are, what all tags are. But you need to use them. You need to curate your own experience. You need to understand that other people have vastly different requirements from their fictional escapes than you do. You need to arm yourself. You need to empower yourself.

That’s how it works. 
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I haven't actually had a long weekend in forever-- there's always something going on, or I take advantage and travel, or most commonly, we don't actually get that day off at the camera store so I have to go in.
So... Dude hasn't done anything useful around the house but he also has not needed any help from me, really. I fetched him a couple things a time or two but he's pretty much recovered, for the most part, and doesn't need me to tend to him.
So I've been doing my usual puttering around in high anxiety and poking things all over the house but not getting a single blessed thing done, for two days now, and finally today I think I'm actually making a little bit of progress, so that's good. That's the thing that kills me-- I just need so much time to decompress from work and then unspool my mental to-do list and then rediscover my inspiration, and it's a huge waste of time, and the vast majority of my life does not have enough leisure time for me to ever complete that process and get to the point where I can proceed on literally any project.
I can shortcut it a little by having someone assign me a project, sometimes, but even that doesn't reliably work.
So. Having Friday off means maybe I'll actually be able to use my weekend? We'll see. I squandered yesterday basically in pacing anxious circles about what to do, but today, well...
Anyway-- I've begun to hand-tack the all-white crumb quilt section to a backing piece of fabric, and once I've done that I think I'll be able to do some fun crazy quilt embroidery on it, finish it up and square up the edges, and then I'll do a proper quilt sandwich with at least some salvaged batting scraps or something, I'm not sure. It might wind up a cushion cover or a curtain or something, I'm really not sure. What matters is that it was bits of trash and I've now assembled it into enough of a thing that I'll probably eventually make it into something.
Here it is, with Chita supervising. ( she is extremely helpful )

And here, for good measure, is the breakfast I bought myself this morning. There's a wonderful donut shop a mile or two from my house, and I think of it often but never go there because it's not in a direction that's on my way anywhere, and this morning I resolved that I was going to go there and bring us back a treat. So I did. ( mint chip frosting! )

So here's to actually making myself do a couple of things, instead of obsessing over how I ought to.

I made dinner last night, Cuban baked beans in the Instant Pot, along with rice and some quite good chorizo. Today I'm making meatloaf and baked potatoes, and I had the bright idea to get a handful of mushrooms to throw in the blender and add to it, so I'm looking forward to however that turns out. (Also I substituted some gochujang for some of the ketchup the recipe calls for. I looked at both my mother's recipe and the Joy of Cooking recipe and did not use any measuring implements, so we'll see how that turns out.)

Also I bought gesso at Hyatt's last weekend, thinking of all the canvas signs I've painted for the farmer's market booth, but currently have no signs in my request list, so I just... coated a couple of pieces of canvas I cut up a while ago and never made anything out of, so that maybe tomorrow I'll paint some signs. I need ideas. I'm taking requests.
(It's the same canvas I painted the "let's get this travesty started" quote from the last Raksura book on, a while ago, so it should be in a series, but I can't think of any other fictional quotes I really want to add to that series, at the moment. Clearly, I need to ponder it more.)

And I cut a bunch more pajamas up into squares, and am not sure yet whether I'm going to do quilt-as-you-go or a rag quilt with them. Or whatever it is where you turn all the seam allowances upward and try to get them all to fray. I don't know if that will work but it's more likely to work than the quilt-as-you-go is, if I don't trim in a disciplined fashion, but IDK man, IDK.

Aight gotta get that meatloaf out of the oven. Dude is recovered enough that he went and fetched me a beer, so that's a good sign.

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lady-knight-keladry asked: I just watched Stargate Atlantis for the first time with my sister and I just wanted to let you know just how much your fic made the the whole experience a million times better. It colored the whole experience, and whether you write more or not, you've made this fandom so much more enjoyable for me and my sister, so thank you!

Awwww thanks!!!!

I recently got a jerky comment on one of those old stories along the lines of how dare i leave it incomplete, but at almost the same time, I got a little mini-thread of nice comments too, from a person who was delighted to take them as they were, even unfinished, and another person who saw the first comment and agreed. And it made a ton of difference. 

I’m sorry I drifted out of the fandom before I could tie everything up, but I’m glad I made what I did, took what spoke to me and turned it back outward to speak to others. And I’m glad it found you and spoke to you too! That’s the curious thing about fanworks– how they’re about what meanings people bring to those stories, and tease out of them, and not really at all about what the stories’ commercial creators may or may not have intended, or thought through, or had time to explore. 
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I have an embarrassment of riches on my Kindle, currently-- things I've downloaded for free from Tor.com or snagged during Kindle promotions, things I've seen on sale, things I've impulse-purchased. I figured out how to transfer things to the Kindle via email (they hide it, but there's a way to do it from within your Amazon account), and so I got a bunch of fics I'd long ago downloaded up on there, including some ones I know are gone off AO3 now, so that's nice.
I took it with me when I took Dude to the doctor, and so I was quite sucked in during my time in the waiting room. I read Witchmark, by CL Polk, and reviewed it on Tumblr so that should crosspost here-- it might still be free on tor.com, you have to give them your email address but they only seem to email you a couple of times a month, and one time each month is to offer you a new free novella to download. That's how I got The Only Harmless Great Thing, which is really a staggering work of heartbreak and genius and I know that phrase is from a cliche, but it's true in this case. After reading it, I bought the other novella Bolander has for sale on Amazon, No Flight Without The Shatter, and haven't yet had the courage to read it.
Her shit is intense, ok.

Dude is recuperating in bed, held there by the cat, and I am dutifully bringing him an ice back every 20 minutes, then taking it away after another 20 minutes, to the letter of the doctor's instructions. Ironically enough, he seems to be in no discomfort, and I meanwhile have been suddenly saddled with a terrible headache that I think is due to a sudden shift in the weather-- it was sunny, but now it is very blustery and cloudy, and I can barely see straight. I'm typing with my glasses off, so I can't really see the screen, but i can see the shape of it and that seems to be enough.

Last night at banjo lessons, we came in and stood awkwardly in the kitchen, as usual, while he finished the lesson ahead of ours, and the banjo teacher's wife has a little table in a kind of nook off the kitchen where the basement steps come up into a landing, and there's a microwave tucked in there, and this little table-- well, today she had sewing supplies spread out across it, and was clearly working on a quilt, entirely by hand, made out of small hexagons. I asked her about it, and she pulled it all out to show us-- it's based on the hexagon thing from Catan, but she's discovered that hexagons are perfect for hand-piecing because the surfaces all interlock perfectly. Sometimes with squares, she said, you wind up getting a little off, then a little off, then a little off, and it compounds-- but with hexagons, you have such short surfaces, they have to keep each other honest.
And she was right-- it's brilliant! And you can do repeating little patterns easily, and use up oddball scraps easily, and...
Maybe since none of my fucking sewing machines will properly work for shit, maybe I'll just take to carrying piles of hexagons around with me and hand-sewing them together any which-way. Sigh.

I am trying to think of how to tell the banjo teacher that his wife is super awesome. (Last time we were there, she appeared suddenly from the basement steps, brandishing an antique power outlet clearly wrested recently from its fittings, and explained to us how hard it was to patch plaster walls. She's alarming and amazing, and possibly some sort of witch.)

ooogh my eyes kind of feel like they might explode, I'm such a wimp about headaches. Ibuprofen didn't work for this one, and it started like half an hour after I'd just had breakfast and coffee, so I'm gonna try not staring at a screen for a while and see how that does. I bet it's just the weather, though, and it's the warranty on this body expiring. Blech.

Ha I have committed a new-to-me social media faux pas courtesy of Dreamwidth being a bold new world-- idly read a bunch of link roundup style posts, opened the links in new tabs to read later, read some, decided to engage with them, and then went and thanked the wrong OP for one of the links. LOL. It seems faux-pas-ish to pass on links without acknowledging when you saw them, but it's so easy, with tabbed browsing, to forget why you have a tab open?
Anyhow, one thing that's better than any other social media site I'm on is that if I go back to my Dreamwidth reading page and scroll back, the things that were on there will still be where I left them. I get that some of that is that I just don't follow quite the number of posters as on Tumblr (and also, most people don't post more than two or three entries in a day, if even that; many do one a week or so, while most do one a day, instead of Tumblr where some people turned out to just shotgun-blast a dozen or more posts a day, often all within an hour) but Tumblr did love to just refresh my dash without my asking it to so I could never find what I was just looking at, and on Twitter the timeline reshuffles constantly and displays me things it thinks I want rather than actual content from people I follow-- an astonishing proportion of the shit I see on Twitter is from people I neither follow nor interact with-- and Instagram is super into forcing me to look at every single photo in a multi-photo posts so it'll reshuffle people's posts back up to the top, and not show me things I want to see, and lately I find I'm following people I never clicked on, so that's fascinating and by that I mean I hate it...

Anyhow. I'm adjusting, still, but I drastically prefer Dreamwidth to anything else. And i'm trying to remember to leave comments on posts I enjoy, and we'll see how I do with that.

So the water heater installation guys' other job for today was on a rooftop, and given the sustained winds of 30mph with gusts up to almost 60, and the three-inch layer of impenetrable ice frozen from slush on every single surface in the world, they opted to do our nice safe basement job instead.
I can't imagine doing a rooftop ANYTHING in the winter, but ESPECIALLY not on a day like today; I almost got blown down the driveway when I ran out in my clogs to move Dude's car so I could drive mine. Clogs got no grip, and so when I planted my feet not to get blown over, the bulk of my whole self kinda caught the wind like a sail and I was like welp here I go. I didn't fall, I seem to have really good balance despite all of *waves hand at self* this and my inability to consistently remember that I live in a physical reality, but that's mostly just practice and muscle memory. I definitely traveled down that driveway at a clip I had not intended.

(I was glad not to be walking, an hour or so later.)

(As I had anticipated, I dozed off on the couch at about 5:30, and then Chita woke me up at 6, 6:15, and 6:30, so I got up and moved the car and made coffee, and I'll be a fucking zombie today.)

Dude and I discussed it; he slept a little better last night because he's sort of burned out on being anxious about the wind, but I apparently have an infinite capacity to be fucking anxious. He was like "yeah I worry about things blowing away" and I was like "I have formless heart-racing anxiety about everything and the only relief is that it's so bad I don't actually have time to worry about the things I normally constantly worry about [social injustice, nuclear war, my own economic precariousness, mean things someone said to me in fifth grade, that sort of thing] so honestly just panicking constantly about nothing is kind of a relief" and he was like "gurl" so. I did get a hug this morning, at least, though i wasn't expecting it because that's not his style but he was clearly quite tenderly concerned for me. Aw. (I was in the middle of something and did not understand what he was trying to do and nearly smacked into him and it was the most awkward hug ever but it was very sweet.)

Oh speaking of getting a poor night's sleep, yesterday my coworker came in and confessed he'd slept very little because he'd been up half the night in a Wikipedia spiral. Guess what it was about! You'll never guess.

Did Jim Morrison (of the Doors)'s Father Start The Vietnam War? The answer may surprise you!

That's the closest I've come to a shitpost all month and it's not even properly a shitpost! Though, sometimes I feel that's really the thing that distinguishes a stellar shitpost, when the absurd nonsequitur turns out not to be.

There's a chance, a slim chance, that we could get our new water heater as soon as tomorrow. Apparently... if the weather is too bad... they won't be able to do a bigger job they have... so they'll pop over and do ours instead?? So like?? I don't know. I don't know what the chances really are.
(It's going to cost $3700, by the way. Yes! Well. Great! Hey, we set aside $10,000 to spend on the house this year so honestly we're still ahead of the game. It's only February though and we have a lot more to work on.)

So we went down and hauled a bunch of junk out of the basement. I found a box and realized it had all my papers from childhood in it. Some of them were water-damaged. I found the card my grandmother who died in 2002 wrote me for my Confirmation. Her handwriting was so familiar still. It was badly water-damaged but I did not throw it out. I threw out some other very old papers I decided very quickly not to care about, like ripping a Band-Aid off. i don't need the tourism brochure from when I visited the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1998. No, I don't! I don't. It's gone.
But then I put the box away, carefully, on a surface so it won't get further damaged by the water heater leaking.
(It's leaking all the time now, not just when it's on. Alas.)

I did dishes and cleaned the disgusting sink too, by boiling water in the kettle, and it worked fine, but I wanted to take a shower and didn't dare turn the water heater on. It's not worth it. Not if I'm getting a new one tomorrow.

I pointed out that there's no electrical outlet anywhere near the proposed site for the heater. Dude was like "they're pros they'll figure it out", and I was like, "they're going to run an extension cord across the entire basement and charge an arm and a leg to do it". I'm envisioning having to run down there and plug it back in because the cat tripped over it or something. Ugh.

Dad and I installed a circuit down there, since there were literally no outlets in the entire basement, but that was in probably 2005. I don't remember how to do it, or I would have run out and gotten the stuff and quick put in another outlet over there. (I think the rule of thumb is that a normal circuit can run four outlets, and we only put in two.) But I don't remember nearly enough. If they don't install the thing maybe I'll look it up and try... no, I'm not going to do that. it's been like twelve years since I did the one job of wiring I ever did, I would burn the fucking house down. It's so easy to do, though, I remember that it was easy, and I remember the rough outlines of it. If I'd known, I'd have asked Farm-BIL to help me do it when they were here last. But I didn't know, of course, so I didn't.
(Having an outlet over there would be super handy because it's not that far from where I have all my sewing machines plugged in just now, and those are powered by a sketchy power strip strung along the floor joists above and hanging from a shoelace because the power outlet Dad and I installed is too far away.)

My hands have been cold all damn day, I'm going to take my greasy gross self and just get in bed and hope I get some decent sleep tonight.

Dude had to run over to his mother's last night to bring her some paperwork or other that she needed. He went on foot, as it's slightly under a quarter-mile and it was dry and in the mid-20s F last night. (Though it was unpleasantly windy; I had a miserable walk home because the wind was in my face, which is unfair because the prevailing winds are such that they're in my face on my walk in, and had been, so I got to be wind-blasted both directions and it's not fair.)
He came back and said, "She tells me to beg you not to walk tomorrow, as the weather's going to be awful."
"It is?" I looked it up. 25 degrees, snow-sleet, windy, warming to 30 and becoming sleet.
I mean. That's not great, but it's perfectly normal?
I moved Dude's car this morning, so I can get mine out, so I could drive if I wanted to-- that's really the limiting factor. There's no on-street parking overnight in the winter, and so whoever parked last is the only one who can get out. Moreover, our street gets parked solid at 7:30 sharp every morning, as students arrive to attend the high school across the street. So if I want to drive to work, I have to either pull my car out before Dude arrives home, and then pull in after him, or I have to go back out because the street is still parked solid and so when he arrives home I have to move my car while he waits to pull in so that I can pull after him, or I need to get up before 7:15 and move his car to the street, or I need to roust him from his work (he wakes up and logs in to work immediately and some days is actually quite absorbed in work before I leave; since he works remotely, he does this, then takes a long break to get dressed and shower, then takes another break to commute in at midmorning, etc.) and make him get in his car to pull it out while I leave, then pull back in.---
at any rate, it's very complicated, and a large amount of the reason I walk to work is that my car is just fucking inaccessible. And if I'd known this was going to happen perhaps I should have lobbied for us to put a pull-off or turnaround in the front yard when we had the driveway redone last year, but at that time I worked so far away that I left before him and arrived after him most of the time, so it wasn't important? Anyway.

I'm still wondering if I should really bother to drive in! But I'm feeling poorly, of late; headaches for two days now, and they're mild but noticeable and i'm not a headachey sort of person? (I say that because I know so many people with chronic headache conditions and my sympathy goes out to you because even the tiniest headache is so fucking debilitating, I can't imagine how you poor folks suffer and I'm so sorry for it!)

It's just snowing, there's almost no accumulation, and it's not slippery at all, but I sort of hurt all over and it's really fucking windy out there, so. I'm going to be a wuss and exercise my privilege and just fucking drive to work because my mother-not-in-law said so. Sigh.

why do i have so much guilt over this? it's goofy is what it is, but that's how I'm wired.