mistressofmuses

Well, we aren't getting as much snow as was threatened... so far. It has been so warm it's not that much of a surprise that it's not sticking much, despite having snowed all day, starting overnight last night. Then again, it is still going, so I could wake up to a terrible surprise for my morning commute!

I know this is technically ~seasonally appropriate~ but I am so. damn. tired. of the snow!

*screaming into a pillow*

It's been a hectic week.

Monday the apartments were doing random inspections, supposedly of only ten units. We drew the short straw, again.

They inspected part of the unit, but did not go to the bedroom/bathroom part of the unit. Then they gave us a "failure to comply with lease" warning, saying that we have two weeks to make the rest of the unit accessible or face eviction.

( It isn't inaccessible! )

Then we had to replace our TV. 

( Annoying. )

I ordered a gift for Alex for Valentine's day, and it made it to Denver last week... before mysteriously being sent to Pueblo, where it's now been stuck for days and days. So... I probably need to get him something else while I start a postal claim for the lost item. But since I didn't get paid until today, I wasn't able to do that in advance...

Further limiting... I am flying out of town today.

The company that Taylor works for does an annual "holiday party" that is actually generally a weekend vacation of some variety. They get to bring a plus one, and I've been Taylor's for a few trips, now. :) Several years ago was when we went to Austin. Last year was a fancy hotel elsewhere in Colorado. This year is scenic Scottsdale, Arizona! The trip is today through Monday.

I'm excited to hang out with Taylor and my mom (who works for the same company,) but I am less excited to have to fly.

Now I'm just hoping I can find something nice for Alex while I'm in Scottsdale. :/ Which I was going to do anyway, but now it has to do double duty of souvenir and belated Valentine's day gift.

We'll celebrate on Tuesday once I'm back, but... now we also have to spend that time on apartment nonsense. (I was hoping that we'd be back at a reasonable time on Monday, but we won't be back until evening. :/ And when we have to deal with that apartment stuff is not ideal timing for me to then be gone for four days.)

My heart is breaking for a coworker going through some horrible health stuff: his own, which involves leukemia coming out of remission, and the drug they want him to take to treat it costs $16000 per month, and then his wife "feeling unwell" and going to the doctor turned into a stage 4 liver cancer diagnosis for her, and they've now been in the hospital for nearly a week with her. 

Plus the apartment worry has kept me up almost all night multiple nights in a row with just churning anxiety, and I've had a headache that I can't quite shake for the last few days, and considering how badly it spikes every time I move and how many times I've just been unable to say words or express complete thoughts over the last few days I'm afraid it's a migraine (even though I haven't been totally incapacitated), AND on Wednesday morning I had one of the worst nosebleeds I've had in years, followed by an even worse one on Wednesday night that I was *almost* concerned wasn't going to stop... I feel like I'm a mess!

I am looking forward to the trip, but am also painfully worried that I will struggle to enjoy it, because I'm so anxious about everything else! I'm going to try very hard to have a very fun few days away, then a very fun belated Valentines with Alex (the plan right now is Indian food!) and then really try to get all the unfun nonsense dealt with.

Mostly I just feel really behind. The whole *gestures* everything with the election makes it hard to want to do or say much of anything, but I'm trying to get back to doing... something. Catching up here. Writing something.

My break from work was sort of a nothing span of time. We did almost nothing in terms of "going out to do things" and I did almost nothing in terms of "productive personal projects that would have been worthwhile uses of the time."

I spent a couple nights hanging out with Taylor, Sunday (Oct 27th) through Tuesday (Oct 29th). That was fun.

Unfortunately, that Sunday night, Cy started really having a hard time walking. Just about as bad as the first time we'd taken him to the emergency vet. I wasn't home, but Alex was extremely worried. He did start to slowly improve after that, though! Alex was concerned that maybe he'd had a stroke, because his balance was so bad, and he only wanted to turn to the left. I'm more inclined to think it was still just pain, and that moving right was more painful. He wasn't *incapable* of turning the other direction; just reluctant to. He's been continuing to get better, and was back to wanting to run and play by the end of the week, but it was a bad couple of days.

That same Sunday night into Monday, the first katydid, Greenbean, died. :( I knew that late-October - mid-November was about the longest I could expect to have them, but it was still sad to have him go. It's about a month longer than he likely would have lived in the wild, and he overcame that terrible probable-poisoning, and seemed to have a happy month with us, judging by his enthusiastic clicking and eating of green beans.

I miss the clicking. :(

That Tuesday (the 29th), we did our one "go out and do things," which was going to a haunted house. It was fun, though I feel like Alex always goes through them faster than I want to! But there were a lot of cool sets and fun costume pieces. There were two houses: one was nautical-themed and one was more traditional haunted house. Both were neat, but the second one felt a bit more engaging, like it was just better established, maybe. It was a good time, and I'm glad we went.

Halloween itself was kind of a bummer, just in terms of how little we did, but it wasn't *bad.*

Friday (Nov 1st) we did a big grocery trip, but Alex started feeling sick partway through, so I wound up doing most of it solo.

Saturday (Nov 2nd) was a model show. We'd spent much of the week leading up to it doing prep for that, as this one was focused on collectibility (so emphasis on things like age/rarity/condition) rather than the shows we usually go to, where the focus is more on realism. The show... did not go terribly well for us, haha. Not a lot of winners, though the show itself was good. Two of the few winning horses we had were my two from the last couple years of "NaMoPaiMo" - my wisteria stained-glass styled horse (who got second in her class) and my art-deco peacock horse (who got first in his!) I was quite happy about that.
My mom kindly watched the dogs, even though it meant barricading part of her house off so that the cat wouldn't have to see the dogs at all.

Sadly also on Saturday, the second katydid, Moodring, passed away. We suspected it was coming, as she was suddenly eating far less, and then on Friday night she didn't want to move when I got into her cage to swap out her food. :(

RIP, my katydids. I'm glad we had you for a little while, and I hope it was a decent life of green beans and no predators. I miss the clicking.

We are left with somewhere around 30 or more katydid eggs, as Moodring just kept laying them. I don't know how many of them are viable (if any), as the two weren't housed together for very long. There are a few obvious "duds" - ones that are small and dark, obviously different than the bigger, smoother tan ones... but whether they're *actually* fertilized or not, I don't know. We'll keep an eye on them and figure out what to do if we DO wind up with a bunch of katydid nymphs.

Time change has not been terribly kind to me. I am definitely feeling the impact from having it get dark so early.

The election happened on Tuesday and was a bit of a dismal, miserable shock. I still don't have anything better or more meaningful to say about it. I am still afraid of what will be coming.

The return to work was mostly fine, except that now it's dark by the time I leave, which is tough. One of my work friends (our lead instructor) had to go on surprise leave to take care of his father.

We had a major winter storm come through starting on Thursday. It snarled local roads a lot less significantly than expected (Friday night and Saturday morning were supposed to be basically impossible to navigate, but thankfully we did not actually have any trouble.) The storm total by the airport came in at 20", so it was a pretty significant storm! I was super concerned about the potential for broken branches; with the unseasonably warm weather we've had, lots of trees are still leafed out, and I was afraid the snow would break many of them. Also surprisingly less of a problem than I'd expected!

We had a weird power outage on Friday night. Our bathroom light, bedroom light/fan, microwave, and dishwasher stayed on. Everything else, from outlets to stove to other lights, all went out. We messed with the breakers for a good five or ten minutes before we realized that the lights in the apartment hallways were on their emergency power, so it wasn't just us. The parking lot lights were also out. The street lamps were on, but the traffic signals were out. I've never had something like that happen - as far as I knew, all our power to the building came from the same source, and in the past a power outage has knocked everything out, not left a handful of lights and appliances somehow working.

I haven't wanted to write anything much since the election news, though that'll be its own post, probably.

About the only good thing has been reading. I finished Acceptance and have started Absolution.

This "weekend" I decided to get my covid and flu vax out of the way, while we're still allowed to. The pharmacist who did them for me was great - whichever he did first I almost didn't feel at all, and the second only stung a bit. They haven't knocked me down quite as badly as all the previous covid shots have, but I've still felt under the weather yesterday and today. I'm hopeful I feel a bit better tomorrow when I'm back at work, but shouldn't be so sick I can't tough it out.

Unless of course, I'm just also getting sick. I've felt crappy for much of the week, with intermittent sore throat, but mostly just tiredness. That's worse today, but I'm hoping its just my usual side-effects. I've been falling asleep by 8:00 on some nights, but am still exhausted when I get up the next day. Is it getting sick, or just the depression? I can't quite tell.

Woke up with a sore throat this morning, which has gotten steadily worse as the day has gone on. It's a frustrating sore throat that nothing seems to help - cold drinks, hot drinks, warm drinks, water, food, broth... it all feels like I'm chugging battery acid. (I know I bitch about it every time, but sore throats are my absolute least favorite way to be sick; I'd rather have almost any other symptom.)

Otherwise just tired, with a runny nose, a little bit of coughing and sneezing.

Yesterday was an awful day at work, just an absolute mess, but it was also the conclusion of our summer season classes, which is at least a relief.

So I guess kind of just living up to expectations: much like in college after finals, the *instant* the worst stressful period is over, I instantly get sick, ha.

In reality, the timing is probably just unfortunate coincidence, and I've been vaguely expecting it - Alex started to get sick early in the week and still isn't feeling great, but I was juuuust starting to hope that I'd escaped it. Alas.

I had good intentions about getting caught up on some stuff, getting some writing done... but I think tonight is a wash.

One more workday and then at least I can be miserable in bed for my weekend, lol.

I'm grateful that they posted a reminder about the posting page and the inbox... I'm much happier getting a chance to choose to use it and learn it rather than suddenly having it be my only choice!

This may also be my chance to finally learn to use markdown, which I know is simpler in a lot of ways than html (simpler to read, when making a long entry or formatting writing, as opposed to the mess of html tags.) It'd be easier for me to read my own posts as I write (or fix) them, but I've just been so loath to figure out the basics, heh.

---

Playing around with the new post creator feels vaguely appropriate, I guess, because today is Big Feels About The Internet Day.

I told olivermoss earlier, but... I miss the good internet. (Yeah, yeah, nothing was ever all good, all the time, but still.)

( It got long, what a shock! )

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In other news, my manager has been sick all week. She'd completely lost her voice yesterday, and today it was only slightly better, but she was coughing quite a lot. (It was also her birthday! Fun!) But she hasn't wanted to stay home, so she's been in the office all week. And today my throat has started to feel a little scratchy and hot, and now a bit swollen... Fuck.

I can't even really say she got me sick, since yesterday was the first day I was around her, and that'd be a sonic-fast infection-to-symptom timespan. It's more likely that we both caught it sometime last week or I got it over the weekend. We've had drivers out sick, we've had sick students, etc. Tis the season.

But uuuuugh.

My ability to get things done has not improved at all since I was last complaining about it.

Basically same issues, just compounded as they grow into an ever more intimidating undone tasklist of Damocles.

Unfortunately ALSO compounded (though only today) by Not Feeling Great. Alex spent the last couple days not feeling well, so I'm a little worried maybe I caught whatever he had. (Though bright side, if it is the same thing, hopefully it'll run its course in just a couple days for me, too.)

I have a lot to do, and am still struggling to do any of it, and not feeling well makes me want to do any of it even less. Even though most of it is even stuff that's at least nominally fun!

Yet I'll feel like doing any of it even less tomorrow after spending a day at work (while also probably not feeling great.) I'd complain about needing a break, except I just HAD a long weekend. I need a different, secret break where I don't have to do anything except get caught up.

Finally got that fic posted! How long it took to post it (three days after finishing it) feels even sillier than how long it took to get it written. Predictably, no progress on another fic... I just keep running out of time, even when I'm not TRYING to put it off.

Answered 35 voicemails today, and still had 15 unanswered when I left. One of the three people on the "team" gave her two weeks about a week and a half ago, so she hasn't done a single one since then. The third person on the team had answered... 2. I'll see if any of the other 15 were done or not. If not, I guess that's my problem tomorrow. (Though at least it's only my problem for two more days.)

Tomorrow is a class close, and Sunday is a class open. I hate when we have no turnaround between class series, especially with all the new shit we have to do for them. A class close day means that you have a minimum of about two hours where you can do NOTHING else. But for the class opens, there's now about an hour of prep work that you have to do on the day before the class, which means about three hours out of my day tomorrow is already spoken for, when Saturdays are also my day to do tech support, babysit the general inbox, plus the voicemails. I'm guessing tomorrow is going to be rough.

I still have one or two trackers to post here, but also didn't do a tracker at all for this week, so now I'm faced with having to do a complete week retrospectively, which I don't like trying to do. (But skipping it, and forever having NOTHING in my journal for the week would be worse, lol.)

This "weekend" (my off days on Monday and Tuesday) will be the last chance to get things ready for our road trip, so we HAVE to get some stuff done, ha. As much as I'm looking forward to that mini road trip, I've now hit the point where I'm more anxious about it than anything else. Our rent went up by $100, and the impending government shutdown means that Alex likely won't be getting any of his aid, which puts us in the negative by quite a bit more, which is NOT great timing. We should be okay, but... I'm still worried.

That road trip is supposed to start on Friday, so I've just got a week to go, and I am so desperately looking forward to it... except for the anxiety, heh.

Also, the neighbor thinks her apartment is haunted, apparently.

Work remains frustrating. Today was just an extremely long day. It wasn't a bad one per se: nothing bad or wrong happened, no one yelled at me, I didn't have any unfixable problems. It was just... too much. I always make myself a to-do list for work (even for the tasks I've done daily for nearly six years), and today's was more than twice as long as they usually are because of all the extra shit I needed to get done.

The new classroom policies mean that if we have classes on back-to-back days (like this weekend, for example) I HAVE to stay late. The class lets out at 4:45, but the instructor needs to sign the attendance logs, I have to collect those logs, I have to pull and organize the logs for the next day for returning students or ones joining the class, plus file the logs for the students who aren't returning... And all of that is not going to happen by 5:00 for me to leave on time. (But as I bitched before, it's not like I can come in late, because I need to be there before the students arrive at 9:00.)

I also wouldn't have minded staying to get that stuff sorted if the entire day hadn't been full of too much to do and too many calls to make. By the time I was having to sort it all out, I was just so done with the day.
(And the instructor lost a log and I don't know how! It was in the pile, specifically noted because it was an uncommon name that we had two of in class, and it just vanished between my pulling it and him passing them out! What the hell!)

The VP of the company (who was, once upon a time, my direct supervisor) had to get involved in an IT ticket that as of today has gone a week without resolution, despite the fact I'd marked it as critical. (The issue where my permissions for one of my tasks was apparently removed.) She just sent a followup along the lines of "hey, get this fixed by Wednesday" to them, but hopefully it holds more weight than my periodic (ignored) requests for an update.

At least this is theoretically the last week I have to do the voicemail project. It's supposed to get pawned off on a new "team" for October.

I am so intensely looking forward to having a long weekend in October. It's to go to an out-of-state model show for Alex, but it'll be a mini road trip, and it'll be five days away from work!

-

Wrote 400ish words last night, which felt like more of an accomplishment than it usually would. Though I wound up stopping mid-sentence because I was just... BSODing. I'd *really* wanted to have that fic done and posted by today, but it's just not happening. I don't know that I'll even poke at it today, but I'll see if I get a second wind. Or a first wind - I haven't had the energy to do anything else either, lol.

It also might be a "do nothing that needs thinking" night. Too many of those lately, but my executive function and ability to plan anything has been beyond eaten up by my workday.

- Went to the dentist to get a filling. Bright side: half-day at work. Downside: dentist.

- Work was fairly shitshow-y, even when I was only there for four and a half hours. Manager's computer has been down for two days now, and their pseudo-fix lost a lot of her files that she needs access to, so she's still been struggling to get anything done. Yesterday was clearly also a shitshow, judging by just how much texting there was, ha.

- Due to the dentist appointment (despite being more than 3.5 hours ago), about a quarter of my face is completely numb. Parts are pins-and-needlesy, parts are totally numb and feel like rubber. Miserable. 0/10 stars. But 10/10, didn't feel anything during the "getting a filling" part, so it's okay.

- Though I'm fucking STARVING, and don't want to try and eat anything for fear that I will bite the hell out of my tongue. (I think a bit of feeling may be returning...)

- Internet is out at the apartment. Alex said it went out earlier today, and it was still out when we got home. Apparently it's a wider service outage, which sucks.

- For several months my phone just randomly drops service, or gives me the equivalent of cellular dial-up speeds. It's fairly random, but of COURSE it was the case at home today, so I couldn't even use my phone for brief internet.

- So we're at a Starbucks so I could do the bare minimum "stuff I want done on the internet" real quick. Though I can only taste my latte with half of my tongue.

- I wish the kind of smarmy sounding smooth R&B playing in this Starbucks was about half as loud as it is. It would be perfectly fine easy background music, but it's way too loud. I feel like certified old person complaining about "turn the damn music down", but come on.

- When we go home, will I use the lack of internet to encourage me to write for the first time this week? Or will I binge read Sleep No More? I know which I WANT to do, and I know which I really SHOULD do, lol.

...I am not having the productive night I'd intended.

Work wasn't as terrible - about half as busy, though the other person who was supposed to be helping with the new voicemail task did exactly zero of them. Still, I only had fourteen today.

Unfortunately, I woke up with a ton of sinus pressure and a mid-grade headache that never really went away.
The morning was also a frustrating series of petty garbage. Biggest was that I took some time to make myself coffee to take to work... Then on the way a loose dog ran out in front of the car. This is the second time Alex has almost hit that same collarless dog in the road, though we did manage to avoid tragedy. But it threw Bella into the dashboard (I had a hold of Cy at the time) and Bella knocked my coffee over, so all that coffee I'd spent time making wound up on the floor of the truck. :(
Then we were stuck behind a guy who nearly caused three separate accidents as he veered all over the road and cut people off while texting, and I wound up late to work.

The collarless loose dog of this morning is NOT the same collarless loose dog that we encountered in the park on Monday. That one bit Alex and tore the shit out of his hand! He's okay, but his hand still hurts, and has a couple nasty punctures and a lot of bruising.

So... not a day that lends itself to the desire to do productive things.

I am not posting pictures (of bugs. again.)

I am not really working on much writing (though I'm going to try to get some done tonight.)

I'm trying something a little different with the remaining AUgust fics. Up until now (as in, through the month of August + the one fic I've managed this month), I've been going in order down the list. That is typically my preference for when I do things like this. However, that was part of the issue with why I got as behind as I did. If I couldn't get something to work, I fell farther and farther behind as I tried to get it into a non-sucky form.

Instead, I think I'm going to try just moving on if I can't get something done within a couple of days. I can come back to any of those fics when I have time, even if that's after the month is over, and even if it means I'm posting the fics out of order.

On the one hand, this sort of defeats my primary purpose of this sort of challenge, which is "quickly get a thing done, don't spend forever revising, just get it done and shared." But it also wasn't serving that purpose to spend days trying to sort out why something wasn't working. (And while I'm willing to post these without going through a full revision, and just doing a quick editing pass... I still do have a minimum level of quality that I want to post.)

My hope is that this means I won't get bogged down forever on something I'm struggling with. (In this case, the potential E-rated story that I did not complete, much less post yesterday. I may be reluctant to finish and share it, but I can't use that as an excuse to bail entirely.)