The Rose's Grove

I only ever seem to post here anymore when things are going haywire, don't I? Ah well, that's what journaling is like sometimes.

Last Monday, after the first day (my work-in-camp day, of course) at our last camp of the summer, hosted by our old preschool, The Boy got a positive Covid test. We'd been feeling cruddy the week before, and we'd both tested a few times that week because my mom had found out after visiting with the Squidling that she'd been exposed. But none of those tests turned up positive... until last Monday. Then, bam, by Tuesday we were both sick. (No word of certainty on whether the Squidling actually ever had Covid: for our money, testing a neurodivergent 5 year-old who already has anxiety about sickness would be an exercise in making more trouble for ourselves when we had enough to begin with. Either way, he was not terribly sick, and was back to normal way sooner than either of us, that's for darned sure.)

I was mostly just exhausted on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday added a cough and congestion, sniffling, and headache into the bargain, was sniffly and tired but otherwise okay by Saturday and Sunday... and then Monday while I was getting ready in the morning I went to put on my usual perfume and couldn't smell it. I was not congested, but I couldn't smell any of my perfume or the various essential oils I keep on hand.

So... that's been interesting. My sense of smell is still AWOL as of today, but I otherwise feel pretty much normal, so that's nice I guess? I keep testing it, and trying to "re-train" by smelling known things and reaching for the familiar smell, but nothing so far. It's deeply strange. I cleaned the bathroom the other day, and couldn't smell the Scrubbing Bubbles, which, if you're familiar with Scrubbing Bubbles, you'll understand that's quite a weird thing. Also takes away seriously from my appreciation of tea, which is one of my greatest simple pleasures, and food in general, as well as removing completely the simple joy of putting on a bit of perfume oil every day (I have a frankly excessive but beloved collection put together over more than a decade). Hell, I can't even properly determine whether a shirt can be worn again at the end of the day, and have to just toss it immediately in the laundry, which I find rather wasteful if I've been clean and not overly active. But what else can I do? I can't tell whether it smells or not!

Otherwise things have gone pretty okay. The Squidling missed out on both weeks of camp and was stuck at home all last week, but he was relatively patient about it (or at least mollified by a lot more TV and movies than he is usually allowed, and by the fact that my husband, always the preferred parent, was home from work, even if he was sick and exhausted). This week we've been on two outdoor-only masked outings that he approved of, to the Ballard Locks to see the salmon going through the fish ladder (and the seals and sea lions catching them while they do so), and then to the zoo. The former was particularly successful, since it's a relatively rare treat. My child may never understand that the zoo is, for most kids, a treat: we live in walking distance from our local zoo, have a family membership, and literally went weekly when he was younger. But the locks and the fish ladder, oh, that's an exciting adventure! ♥

I think tomorrow we'll hopefully be able to risk an indoor excursion, since he's been after me for weeks to take him to the Burke Museum again now that he's really into dinosaurs. He's good with masks, I double-mask inside, and we should be pretty well past contagious at this point. Plus the weather is supposed to be good enough tomorrow I don't expect a ton of people to be at the natural history museum. :P

It occurs to me, in the context of a Bingo card for Disco's last season that I saw on Tumblr, that my very complicated feelings for Discovery have mirrored the trajectory of my feelings for Enterprise in almost perfect reverse. Well, except for the whole, like, two decade gap in my Enterprise viewing experience where I watched the pilot, noped the fuck out for nearly 20 years apart from one scene viewed without audio (or, rather, with angsty K-pop audio) in a boba tea shop during college, then came back later and found it exactly what I needed during one of the worst periods of my life.

So... here goes. ( A lot of nonsense about my Star Trek fandom feels from two ends of the spectrum. )

I'll try to post something real someday soon. I just wanted to put this here because it feels like full-circle given how I started out with Disco here.

Popped by YouTube for something dumb and easy to watch while I knitted, and for some reason the algorithm decided to suggest Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for me.

Oh, my sweet summer child. You don't need to suggest that nonsense to me. I was there the first time around. I remember it very well.

I also remember not too terribly long ago, when someone on Tumblr (I think?), referred to it as "Joss Whedon's If I Did It," which is another reference that one has to be above a certain age to get, but let's be real, this is Dreamwidth, we're pretty much all that age to begin with. And yes. It definitely is.

Tried watching the first episode of Marvel's Secret Invasion last night, and... umm... it did not go well.

( Spoilers for the first episode of Secret Invasion, obviously, and also for all of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, probably other Marvel properties to date )

So, I picked up the guitar again a few weeks ago for the first time in... at least two years? I'm quite sure I've hardly even picked it up since L was born. And L is actually the reason I picked it up again, in a way, because The Boy got out his guitar to try to learn some songs for L (like "Old McDonald" and "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider"), and I immediately thought "Oh, shit, I should try to play my guitar again, too."

Not because anything I can play is kid-friendly, mind. My repertoire is entirely sad folk songs and murder ballads. But just because seeing someone else play the guitar makes me feel like I should pick mine up again.

And... it was hard. At first, I was afraid I'd lost everything, and since I learned entirely by virtue of having a very patient teacher who figured out where I should put my capo to make songs easier and wrote out chord charts and finger-picking charts for me, and I basically learn everything by rote because I don't have the thing that lets some people just "noodle and figure things out" that would have been a total disaster. I've never learned a song on my own. I'm helpless, really. It's quite sad. But at least I can sort of play a few things.

But! Within the first night of practicing again I discovered that I had ingrained one song so deeply in my fingers that they remembered it even if my brain didn't, and since my brain still remembered the words, everything was okay. A week or so in, I can now play one other song pretty reliably, and am in the process of recovering another -- it turns out the finger-picking pattern that my teacher wrote out for that one was not the one that I settled on, and I never bothered to write down the diagram for what I was using, so I went through a lot of "No, I'm sure that's wrong..." before I figured that out. Now I just have to deal with the fact that my fingers don't remember how to transition between the chords very effectively, and from what I recall I was still dealing with a little of that on this song back when I quit, so... no terribly great loss, there.

In short, if I keep up with this I should be able to recover where I was at mostly in... a month? I think? Especially since I'm skipping the songs I never really liked all that much and sticking to the ones that I actually care about. There's at least one more that I want to get back. And then I can go about trying to nail down the ones that I was still flailing at when I was in lessons (one I'd been playing for a while but never quite got comfortable with, and one that I'd just started when I quit), and maybe look into one or two that my teacher had written out for me but that we hadn't got to... and then maybe, if I'm really doing well, I can try to pick up a song on my own.

We survived Baby's First Camping trip this weekend, although it was, in some ways, a bit of a doozy.

First, we had to run a few errands on the way and drop off keys with some friends so they could look in on Theoden while we were gone, give him his meds and all that, and while we were doing that L started getting fussy. I gave him some crackers, but then when we got to the friends' house he thought we were going in to see their kitties and got upset when we didn't take him out of his car seat. Then Google directed us north, which was odd, since we were quite sure we were meant to be going south, but given where we were we thought it was redirecting us around some bad traffic to a faster route to the 5. By the time we figured out that was not the case and that it was trying to direct us up north to catch a ferry we did not have reservations for, L was bawling and I had to pee, and we were closer to home than where we were meant to be anyway, so we just went home and gave him a real snack in his high chair, had a bit of a snack ourselves, hit the bathroom, reset, and got back out on the road.

Then Google kept trying to direct us back north to the ferry. Every three minutes. For, like, half an hour. "There is a faster route..." Not if you take into account that the ferry isn't always right there waiting to pick up a single car and rush to the other side, idiot! We could not convince it to stop telling us this. It was deeply annoying and the best thing I could do was stab the "No thanks" button as soon as it appeared so that The Boy didn't have to deal with it and we had to hear as little of the message as possible.

Eventually Google figured out it would take us longer to turn around and go back north to the ferry than to continue onward, so it shut up and we had some peace for a while... until we got close to our destination, where my dad had said we would encounter a QFC where we could pick up some food and call them to see if they needed anything. Except the QFC never appeared. It later turned out that he'd just assumed we would go by one of two available and functionally equal routes, but while we were trying to figure this out, we thought we hit a stick and dragged it for a bit. Then we got to the welcome center at the campground, and while we were in line... the driver of the car behind us came up and told us we had a flat tire. Great. That pinned all of The Boy's Saturday morning on getting the donut spare onto the car, driving to the nearest town with a Les Schwab, and buying new tires... oh, and practically the first thing my stepmom told me was that she'd hurt her back and wouldn't be able to pick up or carry L very much this weekend. This after my dad had promised me when I agreed to this trip that he and my stepmom would take L as much as possible (he said basically the whole time, but I knew that wouldn't be happening...) so that The Boy and I could actually rest. Ha. Oh, and then that night L woke The Boy up at 2am whining because he was cold, and then put The Boy's arm to sleep and the rest of him not so much to sleep for the rest of the night. So.

Anyway. After all of that (and me having a near panic-attack the first night because I was stressed and peopled out and uncertain about whether L was warm enough and and and and and...), we did have a pretty good time. Some of Dad and Stepmom's friends turned out to have a granddaughter the same age as L who they were missing and so took especial delight in spoiling and snuggling him sometimes when Dad and Stepmom weren't doing so, L got to go on a boat for the first time and didn't get scared at all (or test his life jacket, thankfully), tires were replaced with minimal fuss, and although neither of us got much alone time to relax except for an hour I spent in the tent with L while he was napping, we did still have fun. My younger stepbrother even dropped by for dinner, flying in to the local small airport on his plane, which was nice because it was the first time he's gotten to meet L. The second night I had The Boy sleep in the parents' RV, and although L woke up at 9:30 with a nightmare or something we had a pretty good sleep together in the big bed, and he let me sleep until 5 and then doze until 6:30, so that wasn't so bad.

L picked up some exciting new words over the weekend, too, namely "bed," "beer," and "butt monster," which mostly sounds like "buh mama" but which I am delighted by. I'm less delighted by "beer," which he's very clear about, given that he was excitedly pointing and shouting it at the grocery store on our way home and... come on, kid. We drink maybe one drink a night two or three nights a week, but you're gonna give everybody you meet, now, the impression that we're alcoholics. I'm fine with having the kid who shouts "Butt monster!" and "EEEWWWW!" because I feel like that gives people a realistic impression of me as a parent. "Beer," not so much. Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

Tomorrow is L's birthday, and I've made a lemon cake with lemon curd filling, and will do up some cream cheese frosting for it tomorrow. The frosting will either be plain or pale green, I'm not sure yet. Will probably decide based on whether I like the color that it comes out as plain.

Good morning, friends. Yesterday it was 99 degrees here in Seattle, and the lowest temperature reached overnight was 72! At four in the morning.

Fuck climate change, seriously.

Hoping today that we can manage to keep the top floor of the house from turning into a goddamned oven. We now have foil-fronted insulation squares fitted to all the major windows, so it's possible. Our one mobile AC unit does good work in whatever room it's placed in, but it goes in L's room overnight, so the rest of us... get toasty. I slept on an air mattress in my downstairs office last night, because it was the coolest room in the house.

I think what I'm trying to say here is bleeeeehhhhhhhhhh.

Oh well. Temporary. At 7:30 we'll get the kid up and go to the beach and eat breakfast and hang out there. I should go water the tomatoes before it gets too warm.

My neck and shoulders are in a pretty much permanent state of aching, tightness, and knots right now. Have been for the last week and a half. I wake up with neck pain, and it stays through the day, progresses into my shoulders, and then I go to sleep with it. I am unsure how much of this is carrying an increasingly heavy toddler, how much of it is chronic bad posture and a recent complete lack of exercise that doesn't involve chasing/herding/coaxing/watching a toddler or pushing a stroller, and how much might have something to do with sinus pressure and/or possibly my long-overdue impacted wisdom teeth pressing on... things. I don't even know what. Who knows what those bastards are up to. (And, yes, I have a referral to an oral surgeon literally on my desk, buuuuuut, to return to an earlier theme, I am the primary all-day caregiver to toddler, so getting put out of commission for oral surgery right now is not exactly top of my list of convenient things to do.)

It is not the level of pain that requires drugs. It is the kind that means I spend a lot of time trying to stretch, crack my back, massage out my own muscle knots, and wear a hot pad around my neck and shoulders.

Anyway. I aten't dead. Occasionally remember to even check this thing.

Edited to add Okay, I had the husband give me a back/neck massage, which definitely confirmed the oh-shit-knots situation, and I did some strategizing about what the problem(s) is(/are) and how I can fix some of them. I can't help the fact that I spend a lot of my day looking down at L and bending slightly to hold his hand, or carrying him. I can set my desk (which has been in sit-mode since we moved) back to stand-mode, which I have done, and focus on scrolling so that I'm reading or writing or editing or whatever at actual eye-height rather than down, which, due to the afore-mentioned downturn to my head because of baby, I'd started to get in the habit of not doing. I found myself reading at the bottom of my screen a lot, and that's bad. I can also just try to focus on my posture in general (which I've been trying to do, but not consistently), try to stretch in the morning and at night, and see about scheduling a real massage for once our vaccines take effect. So... gonna see about doing all of that. Because yeouch.

My brief opinions of part one of the Discovery S3 opener, with the disclaimer that I had partaken of a stronger alcohol than usual before watching it, and had some probably-hormone-related emotional issues regarding the episode.

( Spoilers under the cut )

Immediately on the end of Discovery S2, I said I wasn't interested in watching the next season until the whole thing had aired. I didn't want the slow-motion disaster again, the feeling of watching something I love slowly, agonizingly fall apart.

After watching only about the first third of the Picard series, I felt even more certain about that decision. That show was... very much not what I wanted. Which is not surprising since even when it was announced my reaction was "Thanks, but I really don't want more TNG, and I get plenty of old white men's opinions and stories in my government." I didn't much care about any of the characters except Laris and Hugh (okay, and also the unnamed mohawk-Romulan security guard in the second episode, who I... for some reason developed a deep and strong attachment to the minute he showed up, and then felt pissed off when Boring Romulan Who Looked Exactly Like Ethan Peck Spock turned out to be the focus instead, and only my beloved writing partner understands exactly how on-brand it is of me to immediately be like "Yes, that random background character, he is the one for me!").

Anyway. Other than that, I didn't give a crap. I watched the heist episode with Seven of Nine and then said "Y'know what? Fuck this nonsense."

So after all that, I was very ready to ignore the shit out of Discovery until it had finished a season and I could, like, hear what they were doing and decide if I was interested.

But then the premiere date for the season was announced. And it is my birthday. My late-thirties-this-pandemic-year-has-sucked-and-I-have-no-life-because-baby birthday.

Now, I already feel like I'm being cheated on my birthdays, because the theatrical release of Hamilton was supposed to happen on my birthday next year, and I was really excited about that, particularly about the idea that we could leave the baby with his grandparents and get dressed up and have a date night and go to a "Broadway show" at the local independent movie theater. That sounded awesome. But then the pandemic happened and Disney saw a cash grab moment and released the theatrical cut on the streaming service we don't pay for and also the local movie theater will probably be bankrupt by next year and basically fuck everything.

And then my favorite show announces it's coming back on my birthday this year, except my favorite show decided to make a disaster of itself in its last season and I have no idea what kind of shitstorm we're walking into this time. And I was pissed. Like "why not just at me, I came here to have fun and I am feeling so attacked right now" kind of pissed, which is very silly to feel about a tv series, but there we are.

But then... I don't know, I guess the memory of how much I fucking hated S2 has faded, and my indignation about the new Pike series has faded into "oh ffs, whatever, at least they're not all going to be on Discovery anymore," and... the feeling that's left is that feeling of "This is my show and I will love it no matter what" that I started Discovery with. The helpless defensive feeling I had where I clung on to the characters I loved all through that first season even though it seemed like half the world was yelling about how awful everything was. And even though now I'm the one bitching about it and feeling wounded and annoyed... I did say I'd love it no matter what. And last year had that whole firing-producers-because-of-a-toxic-work-environment thing going, so maybe some (most?) of the disastrous writing decisions came out of that?

I liked a grand total of, like, four things about last season. Two of them were left behind at the end of the season and I am not going to be forgiving that any time soon because... one of them involved some pretty poor writing and out-of-character decisions on the part of one of my favorite characters. But Burnham's still there, and so's Stamets, and I hear Reno might be coming back which would be great. And, fuck it, I really need things to look forward to right now, especially in the fall because everything leading up to the election in the US is going to be miserable, and the results might be damned apocalyptic. So I resignedly told The Boy, "I think I'm going to have to watch Discovery as it comes out after all."

"Yeah," he said. "I kind of always assumed that would be the case."

Because he knows me.