hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

I'm objectively doing well, but boy am I done with this week.

* Starting a D&D game with online friends and girlfriend. We're all going to be high elves because we think we're funny.

* Friend breakup maybe kind of? I've been mad for a while, and after trying to talk some, I'm a lot madder.

* On schedule with work! Go me! I've got full days tomorrow and Sunday, but that was planned, I'm not behind.

* Ember cat is enjoying digging in the new raised bed, which is not conducive to plant growth. Going to have to rig up some protection when I put the seedlings out there.

* The same Ember is still having a lot of trouble with her tail amputation. She needed gabapentin after only 4.5 hours today, and I've been supplementing with some buprenorphine too.

* Might need to take an all-day road trip during a pandemic? Girlfriend's childhood dog is elderly and unwell, and we need to say goodbye.

Reading:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/us-coronavirus-outbreak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132/
You know what makes you not have positive test results? Not testing.

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1251271309432098816
Communications and journalism specialist gives the tl;dr on pandemic matters the US is being misinformed about.

Gates and Passages by Irina Rempt
Choppy, with multiple POVs. There's plenty to enjoy here, but it was hard to get into.

Last night, Cousin 4 was in town, so we went over for dinner. Found out at the last minute that WAY MORE PEOPLE were going to be there, which is always so great to be surprised by. At that house, everyone just jams into the dining room until they can't fit, and it gets really loud, so I retreated pretty quickly to another room. It's nice to live closer to family, I guess, but the ways that people have never understood me are much more obvious when I'm around them more often.

Eventually, I got drawn into a game, which was better. I will talk to humans! All I ask is that there not be ten people all talking at once! And a barky dog that people are aggravating! Please.

Playing a game that a very small cousin made up by himself was the best part of the evening. I was warned about his tendency to actually hurt you if his toy is fighting your toy, and I was not entirely safe even though we started with a board game. (Pencils are swords, and his pawn was an aggressive little thing.) But he was really creative about everything. He can't read yet, so answering the questions on the cards, which is how you normally move, was out. Instead he took the four pawns we weren't using and rubbed them in his hands until one fell out, and each of us was assigned two of their colors, so we got to move when our color fell out. Smart! And then of course we got into purely imaginative play, where the game board itself became a giant shark and the box was houses. (I was responsible for the timer being a cannon, though.)

On the way home, Mom got back into her "recommending things to the chronically ill person" mode. She claims not to be unhappy or disappointed with my introversion, but it's obviously not true -- she claimed I wasn't "my best self" because I wasn't up for full-on family game night (which is like 20 people including six children) less than 48 hours after my cross-country move. Fuck off with that. And I've told her that it's hurtful when people jump in with solutions. So when she mentioned acupressure, and I said I'd tried and it doesn't work any more because my sinuses have been inflamed FOR OVER A YEAR, she literally said "have you done it for long enough?"

How long is long enough to know something doesn't fucking work? If you start from the premise that it's going to work, then I should just sit here using my hands (which are arthritic btw, and this does hurt them) to apply pressure to my face all day every day, until something that isn't working decides to work. And clearly I should also spend all my time on every other thing that someone suggests. 100% effort times the number of suggestions, FOREVER, seems totally reasonable, especially when I'm debilitated, right?

At that point, I was just like, yep, guess I'm doing it wrong. I'm sure that's it. She eventually noticed that I was blowing her off and said "well, I haven't been dealing with this as long, I still have hope."

Really.

I said, "I am doing something, and it's working, it's just not working very fast. And I'm going to keep doing it, even if it involves drinking large amounts of Limonata." (Which she has teased me about before.) She hadn't realized that was a sinus management strategy, but jfc, I'm on a million decongestants and antihistamines, I'm dry as a bone all the time, which I need to not be or my sinuses will get worse, and even I get bored with THAT much water.

So I stood my ground, but it sucks that she didn't listen when we had this conversation before. Yes, it hurts when people jump in with suggestions all the time. You're telling me that you don't think I am trying hard enough. I know how much I can try, and I'm doing it. Just because you mean well doesn't mean you're not hurting chronically ill people with this behavior.

Last night:

• Tried and failed to nap, because I kept having interesting creative thoughts, first about work and then about ceramics. Dang it, brain. I eventually had to get up and write them down before I forgot them, so that was the end of that.


• Met up with genarti and skygiants at a very noisy, very ironic tavern in Davis. Attempted to convey to Beth the full glory of the dragon-game drama currently transpiring. Had tasty potato tacos (but they could have cut the avocado up a lot smaller than that) and some glorified chicken strips with glorified ranch dressing, plus an Original Sin cider from NY that was dry and pretty tasty.


• Went to Apple Cinema, pointed out the ice cream flavors, and saw a shadowcast Princess Bride production at midnight. The movie remains really fun to watch, especially in a theater full of people enjoying it, and the shadowcast had some good moments (though the movie was more compelling). Shrieking eel as pool noodle was especially amusing.


• Found out the MOST AWESOME THING: in two weeks there will be a chiptune/retro-video-game-inspired Rocky Horror, with songs covered and animations made and OMFG. I am surprised I'm not standing in line for this already, I don't know how anything could possibly be more appealing to me.

Today:

• Got up without enough sleep and went to pottery. Sat outside in the sun when I was too early, very nice day. Trimmed two big bowls successfully and went through the bottom of one so proceeded to convert it into an orchid pot with cutouts in the shape of the Light Flight emblem. Shut up. :)


• Hung around after pottery for an extra half hour talking to my teacher about pottery ideas and employment and random stuff. I need to bring snacks if I'm going to hang around after class, I get too hungry!


• Goofing off.


• Successful napping.


• Bubble bath. (Lush Ultraviolet. I'm excited about some of their Mother's Day releases coming up, but I should maybe use more of the Easter stuff first.)

Weekending successful so far!

In getting-over-my-ex news, I have:

• Watched a bunch of Leverage by myself.


• Made waffles (and done some other nontrivial cooking).


• Gotten to where going to the grocery store merely makes me feel badgerish rather than panicky.


• Finally thrown out the food that I had made to share with them when they decided to disappear instead.


• [TMI] Made it all the way to orgasm without accidentally fantasizing about them and veering off into anti-erotic misery.[/TMI]

In general awesome doings, I have:

• Gotten my bike into rideable shape.


• Made an apple pie and won work's (very small) Pi Day contest with it.


• Kept up decently on my job.


• Successfully taken almost all of my absurd medication schedule on time.


• Given excellent presents to people.


• Polled for dragon game festival themes, including having to contact someone I didn't know to check that we weren't stepping on any toes.


• Managed a fuckton of drama about dragon game festival themes, including whipping up a storyline that incorporated multiple suggestions.


• Appeared to have an actual immune system -- still not all the way better but quickly recovered back to generally-crappy instead of getting a bad cold.


• Designed and drawn lineart for an elaborate (representational-plus-celtic-knot) mythical snake design on a bowl, to be further painted in underglaze.

I woke up in a good mood on Friday (sushi aftereffects?) and then had therapy. Therapist is onto me, as I have complained to Twitter already -- she refuses to hear only about the things that are going well now and directs me back to how the one terrible thing is getting its miasma everywhere. So that was hard but probably a good idea.

Saturday I had pottery as usual, and while the kiln is getting a lot slower since it's the end of the quarter I did get my Hallucigenia bowl back! It's ridiculous and great. I glazed the trilobite-stenciled bowl and another one, so hopefully those will be done by next week, and threw a couple more bowls that I was very happy with. One quite big, with lovely thin walls that really wanted to buckle downward, and my teacher was finally not being monopolized by Miss Working-On-Commission for the entire period and showed me how to save it and a less accident-prone way to do shaping. Always nice when I get instruction from my instructor!

Then genarti picked me up for our small hiking trip. It wasn't warm at all, but dry and clear was good enough for us. We drove out to Rocky Woods Reservation, which turns out to be adorable and very well maintained, with nice flexible trail options that don't doom you to an hours-long loop if you don't want to commit. There was an orienteering event that we both agreed we probably would've wanted to join in if we hadn't come at the end, but instead we had quite good sandwiches and a giant pickle from an aggressively quaint deli in the nearby small town. (How quaint were they? So quaint they had three kinds of store-brand soda bottled for them, bearing labels printed with an image of their storefront, complete with printed sign pointing to it in case you forgot who and how cute they were.)

Hiking with Beth is great. We climbed rocky hills! We saw a beautiful vista! We got distracted by trees and rocks! And also a weird nut (diagnosis after rock-based dissection efforts: one of these bare trees is a young walnut). And part of the trail being paved with compressed shredded roof shingles.

Then we joined a bunch of people downtown to watch Mermaid, which was hilarious if disturbing in parts. The cops! The shoes! The ceiling fan! The slingshot! The cranky assassin auntie! The badass magical grandma! (We could all have done without the teppanyaki scene.) We got food at a good Vietnamese place, which I'm about to have leftover clay pot rice from, and went by a bakery on our way home too.

Then I came home to find that pretty much everything we needed for our Flight Rising event was done to my satisfaction, and got a lot of very nice sleeping done. This morning (now that the push has started and we have some dragon data to play with) I made spreadsheet wizardries happen, took another nap, and have had time to just relax. I'm reading the weirder novels of Andrea Host, and can definitely recommend The Pyramids of London for wacky steampunk vampires and gods. Very eventful days are fun, but my health is still not great, and lying down a lot today has also been excellent. I also watched a bunch of Leverage, and I'm working on a music mix for a friend.

What have I been up to? Making trouble mostly.

1. Bat is still a tired cat but not obviously worse today, and sovay sent me a recommendation for a house-call vet for when we need one.

2. I did a couple hours' worth of quality work in the herbarium and found the best botanist name I have yet encountered (1934, Brazil): D. Bento Pickel.

3. My community on my dragon game appreciates and is sweet to me in particular, and also is creative and fun and motivated to challenge ourselves. (Some people are dickwagons but this is inevitable in any group.)

4. M-pig sent me a truly amazing customized stuffed animal: an elk with a wind-up key that plays "You Are My Sunshine" as a black-and-white bird sits on its back, wobbling gracefully with the music. It also has bat wings and a nest formed from a particular obnoxious Halloween cat toy we found at Val Vill one time. Nothing is more incredible than this item.

Getting work done at work this week.

Good appointment with therapist Monday. After which I went somewhere I hadn't been before, got a Ms. Marvel trade and Squirrel Girl #4 and ate frozen yogurt, and eventually managed to find Good Vibrations. Treating myself and also being a quality person who does things in the world.

Hurt my neck as a direct result of GV visit and woke up with nasty headache. Unsure of cost-benefit here as both make strong cases.

Had an adventure with rushthatspeaks. After being confused by inferior maps and displeased with the hot soupy weather, we did find our rose-garden goal, and then there was a convenient and free train, and ice cream for dinner. Then showering. I remain very grateful for such an excellent partner and also for the central air at my apartment.

Getting real work done really, like, I did PCR today and ran it on a gel and all. Still working out some damnfool crap from my botched reappointment, but mostly doing well right now.

Spate of fun hectic planning on dragon game, unfortunately spurred by bad news of cool people leaving our subgroup. But I drew a trout with which I am pleased.