The Rose's Grove

it's different; i'm different

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 04:09:12 GMT

My paternal grandpa died this morning, and one of the things I've learned from this is that it's very different to lose a grandparent at 43 than it was at 27, when I lost my maternal grandpa. Both were on hospice before dying, both died at home, both left a widow and kids and a number of grandkids, of whom, in both cases, I was the oldest grandchild, and in both cases my respective parent was the oldest child of the family.

Three things changed: first, my paternal grandpa died at 86 and had years to get used to the fact that his body was failing, unlike my maternal grandpa, who died much younger and had a precipitous collapse. Second, I had the opportunity to say a pretty proper, quiet goodbye to my paternal grandpa—I sat by his bedside on Christmas Day and read to him, told him I loved him, and so on. He couldn't speak, due to the way his illness has struck him, but he was conscious, and I knew he could understand everything I said, whereas my maternal grandpa went from doing quite well to completely zonked out on pain meds so quickly that no proper goodbye was really possible.

The third thing that changed was me. At 27, my grandpa getting sick was pretty much the first time I'd really experienced death directly. My great-grandmas had both died, but one of them had had Alzheimers and died when I was about eight, and I hadn't been near her when she was dying, and the other died of complications from emphysema when I was 16, and I saw her in the hospital and had a very nice goodbye with her, but wasn't there while she was in the active process. I took an anthropology class on death, and I'd had pets die, but I'd never been present when they died.

In the intervening years, I've lost two friends and my own firstborn child. I've read extensively about death and dying because of that same anthropological interest that led me to take the college class, but also to deal with the grief of losing my daughter, and for a million other reasons. I've had therapy, and another child, and approached middle age. My husband and several of my friends have lost parents.

After visiting on Christmas Day, I remember thinking that it would be best if Grandpa passed sometime between then and early January, because he already seemed peaceful but weak. On New Year's Eve, I remember thinking about how people often wait for significant dates, and wondering if I would get the call the next day. And then I got the call in the morning.

On New Year's Eve I went looking through the liquor cabinet (not something I do often—I very rarely drink anymore) to see what we had, and found the last of a bottle of Gun Club Gin, which I'd bought for my grandpa for Christmas a few times in better days, and which he'd said he liked a lot. I thought about finishing it off for New Year's Eve, but set it aside for another time and had a bit of tawny port instead. I made sure it was accessible, though.

Tonight I finished it, in a little brandy-snifter glass with yuja-cha and water. I drank a toast to my grandpa straight, before adding the yuja-cha and water, and hope he can in some way appreciate that as a little way of honoring him.

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I aten't dead

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 04:54:20 GMT

I'm still alive and have once again remembered that I have a journal here! And... oh dear, it looks like it's been about a year since I last posted. Um. Very basic updates are called for, I guess.

I did indeed eventually recover my sense of smell after my bout with Covid last summer, which was very nice. Shortly after that, the Squidling started kindergarten, and we had a bit of a chaotic start to the year as his teacher had... not so much actually read his IEP. Oops. Got that resolved, things calmed down mostly, to the point where we (very optimistically) adopted a dog, who we named Astro, from a local rescue... and then everything went all to hell. The Squidling loves dogs, it turns out, but is too impulsive and, frankly, unwilling to adhere to rules, to actually behave well with a dog in the house, and the chaos of having a dog (who was both younger and more high-energy than we'd been lead to believe...) meant that he never got the calm down-time at home that was required to help him function moderately well at school. Due to that and a few other issues, we eventually made the sad decision to return Astro to the rescue.

(Astro is fine: he went into the care of a very experienced foster family who had a foster-fail dog of their own, with whom Astro immediately became best friends, and at last check they were so happy running around the yard together and then sleeping all over the people's furniture together that we're crossing all available appendages that they foster-fail with Astro, too. One sticking point of his time with us was that while he liked people fine, he really wanted a dog friend full-time, and that was never going to happen with us.)

Anyway. Kindergarten didn't go great. Squidling did not like school much, because he is super impulsive and unwilling to follow instructions, and he and his teacher butted heads basically all the time, and... things did not go well, anyway. The good news is, he loved his resource teacher, Ms. A, and likes many of his classmates, and still loves learning and reading and all that, so we're hard at work with his therapist and his resource teacher on plans to develop the good sides of things, and hopefully get him some medication to help him with his impulse control (in addition, of course, to non-medication methods like helping him think ahead and give rewards for good behavior, etc.).

Summer has been pretty good, with a friend and her kiddo visiting from out of town a good part of last month, and then a big week last week where we went to Point Defiance Zoo, then met up with several of Squidling's classmates and their families to watch the Blue Angels from a local park, and then a day of hanging out and going fun places with his grandparents the next day. Tomorrow he starts his second week-long day-camp of the summer, and they are prepared with strategies learned from his first day camp of the summer (as are we), so hopefully things will go well... and at the end of the month we'll get back to school!

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it finally got me

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 04:58:23 GMT

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

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this is strange

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 23:15:26 GMT

So, the weather suddenly turned clear and gorgeous yesterday, but it was still cold, and I joked that maybe we were getting our one nice week in April early this year.

...And then today the temperature hit 78 F.

I didn't really notice at first because omfg GORGEOUS DAY throw open all the windows and clean all the things! And then the Squidling fell asleep while The Boy was working, so I went out for a walk. And... got sweaty? Even though I was only wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved t-shirt? I mean, I was wearing tall socks, but...? Checked the temperature, and holy what the hell, this is Seattle in March, why is it 78 F?!

I have a feeling we're going to be veeeeery glad for our split system this summer. Hopefully we do not have another heat dome like in 2021. Eek.

Anyway, for now, it sure is pretty outside...

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a hastily-written rant / explanation

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 05:26:33 GMT

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.

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good omens 2

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 23:00:42 GMT

I didn't LOVE Good Omens s2, but I did very much like parts of it, and the cast was quite good. That said, I have some complaints.

( Spoilers under the cut, obviously )

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i was there, gandalf...

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 03:57:45 GMT

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.

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shaking off the dust

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 04:12:21 GMT

I've made a bunch of random new icons (what else is my overstuffed images folder for?) and, gasp, updated my profile. That was... a bit of an experience, given that I clearly had not updated it since L was born. Life is super different now!

Anyway. Getting comfy. Didn't look at Twitter at all today. Go me.

Maybe someday I'll even figure out why most of my custom mood theme doesn't work. That was always one of my favorite parts of my old LJ.

Edited to add: Well, I know why the mood theme now completely doesn't work (it used to just mostly not work) — I forgot that I'd changed my domain and my website service provider in the intervening few years since setting it up, and so all the images links are broken. Easy to fix, right? Not so much, because my new provider, Squarespace, doesn't allow me to just upload images to the root directory like any normal, functioning provider would have back in the old days, and it also obfuscates its image links so much that you have to inspect source to find them. So... I guess I could go through that whole process 125 times (because of course Squarespace borked when I tried to upload all the mood theme gifs at the same time), or I could just give up and admit that my adorable custom mood theme is a thing of the past. And I definitely do not have the time to put up with all that nonsense just to get a custom mood theme. Alas.

...Wait, wtf, some of them ARE actually still working. Where do I have these things uploaded? How can I view the existing code? WTF is going on here? ARGH. Okay, this is NOT a problem to figure out tonight, nor indeed tomorrow (because I have Actual Paid Work that needs to be done tomorrow while L is at soccer camp). But... I will come back to this. Someday.

Edited to add yet again: Found the images, they're uploaded in my DW account, and I swear to god I will go no further than this tonight. Or tomorrow. Or probably for the next week. But... yeah. Weird.

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TV watching

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 05:09:53 GMT

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 )

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B5 trailer

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 01:30:43 GMT

I can't say I'm 100% jazzed about everything in the B5 trailer, but as with everything about B5, even if I'm complaining about aspects of it, I'm doing that because I love aspects of that universe so much that I become functionally irrational around them. So.

I'm obviously mad that the whole thing isn't about Delenn and the rest of the Minbari, Londo, and G'Kar, but if I have to put up with John Sheridan in order to get more of that universe, then so be it. And even though I feel like the animated Sheridan is a bit off and weirdly serious-looking, the sound of Bruce Boxleitner's voice lights up the room just like his smile does. I have no idea how he does that, it's quite impressive.

Hearing the old familiar voices that remain to us was a delight every time they appeared, and I was impressed by how much the voices that remain have not changed. I discovered I was half afraid that Peter Jurasik might've forgotten how to do Londo's accent, but of course he has not.

The new voices were largely successful to my mind, which was kind of a surprise! Unfortunately, at least to my ear, the new voice actress playing Delenn... um...

Look. I know my standards here are very high. There's a high likelihood I would have disliked anything short of Mira Furlan's spirit possessing some other actress and speaking through her and... somehow recreating her own exact vocal cords in the process. I am a teensy bit obsessed with voices in general (it's up there with "attracted to good acting" in my qualifications for serious, and seriously weird, crushes), but... let's just say that while I think this person is a perfectly fine voice actress, I don't think she made much of an effort to sound like Mira Furlan and/or Delenn. Which I think was a mistake.

Now, I have bitched about voice actors based on a false premise before and been proven wrong. I hope I will be again here. But this is a reaction to a trailer, so this is what I've got.

Anyway. The animation looks cheap (too much use of copypasta), I'm mad at JMS for seemingly once again forgetting that not all good Minbari (or, indeed, all Minbari at all) are Religious caste, the multiverse thing is overdone, blah blah blah. I'm sure I'll have a boatload of complaints, and I don't care. It's more B5. I'll be there.

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guitar

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 05:35:12 GMT

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.

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a dog and a doctor

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 05:02:53 GMT

I've joked for a while that far too many times when I've taken Lucas to the zoo, I've found something that someone else lost on the way there. Once it was someone's cellphone, which I spent a fair amount of time asking nearby people and houses about before taking it home and eventually getting hold of the owner because her boyfriend kept trying to Facetime and call her. Another time a woman asked me if the little stray dog she'd just caught, who'd been running around trailing his leash, was my dog, and she and I spent some time checking the dog for tags and whatnot before she took it off to bring to her vet to see if it was microchipped. She had a dog of her own and didn't have a toddler, so she took the lead on that one.

Today, The Boy and Lucas and I were going to the zoo and before we got more than a block away from our house... we saw a white and black dog trotting down the sidewalk toward us, with nary a person in sight.

"I hope he's not alone..." said The Boy.

"Uhhh... I don't see anyone," I said.

He was alone.

I stepped ahead while The Boy turned L's stroller aside, and then we both called him, and he trotted right up to us and stopped, crouching and wagging his tail, so I got hold of his collar and checked his tags. His collar read "Adopt me" and his tags had the name of a local rescue org and two phone numbers. The Boy called the first and left a voicemail and then, as directed in the message, also texted it, while I petted the dog. The manager of the rescue called us back almost immediately and said she'd get in touch with his foster family and have them call us. Then, because what else could we do, we went back home and got him into our (happily highly fenced) yard and gave him a bowl of water. L, who had by now been freed from his stroller, was happily announcing "Dog-dog! Dog-dog! Woof! Woof!" to all and sundry, and despite my efforts to keep myself between him and the dog (who seemed completely friendly, but you never know if a strange dog might react poorly to a toddler with not-very-great-yet dog manners), the dog licked his face and hands repeatedly.

Now let me say first that both The Boy and I grew up with dogs, and both of us grew up in houses where our pets often showed up in ways that were... not dissimilar to this. My cats growing up included a kitten who was born in my grandparents' woodpile, and another who was found in my grandpa's car engine. One of my dogs was abandoned by our dirtbag neighbors when they moved. However, The Boy and I have spent the last year or so saying firmly to each other and anyone else who will listen, "After Theoden is gone, no more pets until L is five or six years old and willing and able to take on at least some of the responsibility."

And then this damned dog we've just met licks L's face, leans his side against my leg, and sits on my foot, and I start thinking "...Well, I mean, he needs a home, doesn't he? And he's clearly a sweetheart and good with L. He's bigger than we meant to get, living in a townhouse, but he handled the stairs just fine while we were trying to get him through the hall into the yard, and he's awfully cute, and we could always just keep the baby gate on the upstairs and not let Theoden downstairs..."

After not too long at all the foster family of the dog (whose name turned out to be Mason) called The Boy and he took the dog out to meet them, and I used the water from the bowl to water our tomatoes (the dog had only taken a few half-hearted gulps when I put it down, so I assume he hadn't been loose very long), and got L back inside, and then The Boy got back and we went to the zoo as planned. The foster family, of course, made sure to let him know during the tradeoff that he's available for adoption. And on the way, we talked about it. It doesn't really make sense for us right now, but we talked about it as if it did for a while, because, really, both of us basically always had dogs, growing up, and... well, what else do you do when a perfectly nice seeming dog drops into your lap? But it would be a hell of a thing to put Theoden through in what are undoubtedly his last years, and it would complicate a lot of things, and our yard is quite small, and... it doesn't really make sense. But I admit I'm still a bit sad about it. He was a good boy, and for a moment it felt like the most natural thing in the world in that way that is slightly unhinged and totally against what you'd ever intended. I don't know.

Anyway, the other bit of this post is a spoiler for Loki: The Series. ( Spoilers for the most recent episode, specifically. )

So anyway. I just had to share that.

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we survived!

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 05:04:04 GMT

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.

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heat wave pt 2

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 20:02:11 GMT

Yesterday afternoon we spent almost two hours at Target, having determined it was the nearest air-conditioned place we could think of where we could entertain L for a significant amount of time. It worked out very nicely -- he looked at things and ran around and played with toys and even met another little person his age whose parents had made the same calculation we had.

At bedtime, we made the calculation that the best thing we could do was not move the AC unit from the living room and instead pull out the hide-a-bed all sleep there. "All," in this case, including my increasingly senile cat, who spent the first half of yesterday so pancaked under the bed that halfway through the day, when we determined he still hadn't eaten anything or come downstairs since morning, I went up and lured him out with water, then hauled him downstairs and blocked off the stairway back up. It's only a shower curtain (partly intended to keep the AC unit from trying to cool down the stairs and the landing on the top floor), but after brief investigation Theo seems either unaware that he could move it with a single paw or just willing to accept that, yes, in fact, the downstairs is cooler than the upstairs.

All those pet-health sites that tell you cats are smart and have a knack for finding the coolest place available in times of high heat? Yeah, they don't mean senile old cats who never had much instinct for survival to begin with. My cat's idea of "instinct for survival" is "cry to the nearest human until they solve his problem."

Anyway. Convincing a not-quite-two-year-old to go to sleep in a room with other people in it meant that it had to be bedtime for everyone at 9 p.m. last night, so in spite of a not insignificant amount of giggling and kicking and turning and poking (and grabbing my finger and sticking it up his nose, which is a new one and which I wish he had not discovered was possible), and crying for unknown reasons at multiple times in the middle of the night from a senile cat, I actually slept a semi-reasonable amount, all told, before L woke us up at about 7 a.m. This would make me feel optimistic about the possibility of sleep on the camping trip this weekend if I wasn't currently debating whether or not the camping trip should be cancelled on account of stupid amounts of heat and a vague concern that some moron is going to shoot off fireworks and burn down all of North Seattle while we're not even here to protect our house.

We're not bad off, though. The living room is steady at about 78F, and my office (where I am now, while L naps on the hide-a-bed under The Boy's supervision) is probably about 80. The upstairs is about 86. Outside is apparently 94.

I've been making fridge tea because the thought of even turning on the electric kettle is too horrifying to contemplate. It's working surprisingly well. Started with the cheap shit, but tonight I might make a carafe of something better, since tomorrow The Boy has to go back to work (he cancelled all of his meetings today and said he'd be on a bit, but only occasionally). This afternoon I think we're going to go to the Target again, unless we can think of another place we can take L that would be close, air-conditioned, and entertaining enough for a two-year-old to be worthwhile. I've been thinking vaguely of the nearest mall, and wishing the one actually nearest to us wasn't closed. It would probably be crowded, though, which the Target at least is not, and the Target also has covered parking, which I don't believe the nearest mall has.

We also went on a very short walk this morning after breakfast, staying on the shady side of the nearest street. I hope we'll be able to do that again tomorrow, because I doubt we'll be able to go anywhere else. By the afternoon when we usually go on our big excursion for the day, despite being cooler than it's supposed to get today I expect it will still be too hot to go to the lake, the playground, or the zoo, and those are my three good options for entertaining L when it's just me and we can't use the car.

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heat wave

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 14:00:22 GMT

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.

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movie night: birdman, or 'well that was a movie we have seen'

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 04:03:27 GMT

Most Saturday nights, after we put L to bed, The Boy and I watch a movie. They range pretty broadly -- on recent weekends we've seen Raya and the Last Dragon (loved it), Clue (very fun, although I kept weirdly expecting it to break into musical numbers), Knives Out (absolutely fabulous) and Twelve Monkeys (didn't really know wtf to make of it apart from feeling like I've now seen way too much of Bruce Willis' butt). Last Friday, The Boy suggested we watch The Lobster, which we've had an ongoing battle about pretty much ever since it came out. He wants to see it, I don't. In a last-ditch effort to avoid this movie, I brought up Birdman, which we'd discussed seeing before but never got around to. As I predicted, the promise of Michael Keaton playing a washed-up superhero actor trying to restart his career with a serious Broadway play was an effective distraction from a movie about a world where people decide what animal they're going to turn into when they... die? Something like that? I've never been totally clear.

To be clear, I have no good reason to avoid The Lobster as avidly as I have done, it's just that it sounds exactly like what happens whenever a literary fiction author takes into their head to write speculative fiction and then gets treated by every critic in the world as if they've just invented absolutely everything about science fiction, while anyone who's been reading the genre in the last decade or two (or three...) is like "...uh, yeah, that's been done a million times and also this book is super, deathly slow and has basically no plot."

Well, friends, let me tell you that I have reaped what I spent the last few years sowing, because it turns out, that's also basically what Birdman is. And it's not very fun.

( Rather pissy spoilers for a movie from 2014. )

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this is not fine, but it is hard to change

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:33:28 GMT

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.

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irregular update

Mon, 17 May 2021 04:10:58 GMT

This weekend was The Boy's birthday, so he took some time off on Friday and had a nice lunch and a walk and bought himself a used game console he'd been wanting, and then Saturday we made char siu bao with the new bamboo steamer my mom got him and watched Clue after L was in bed, and today we took L to the aquarium. He was very excited and had a lot of fun and completely tired himself out.

L still isn't much of a talker, but he says and does a lot of things that make it clear he's paying attention and getting things, like today after the aquarium The Boy was reading him a book before dinner, and he started going "sssss" after pointing to a butterfly, and we realized he was trying to say "whisper whisper" as in "the soft, soft whisper of a butterfly" like in another of his books that The Boy had referred to a few minutes before. And he's (generally) pretty good at following instructions (you know -- when he wants to). And he plays little verbal jokes, like every time I say "Hold your horses," he says "Neigh neigh." So we know he gets stuff. He just doesn't want to really talk yet.

He's signed up for the two mornings a week that the two-year-olds group at the local preschool co-op meets, starting this fall, and he'll be one of the youngest kids in the group because their cut-off is a little over two months after his birthday, so I feel confident that being around bigger kids and adults who don't know all of his cues will push him to actually start using words rather than just clearly knowing them. So I should probably just enjoy the last six months or so of not having a toddler who's talking all the time, I figure.

Other news, let's see... week after this we get our 2nd vaccines, so that's great! I'm still occasionally twiddling with a novel, although mostly not because, well, toddler and work. And I've been working on Japanese on Duolingo, currently on an 82 day streak, so that's nice.

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brief opinions

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 01:26:24 GMT

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 )

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we're learning

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 04:21:51 GMT

So, I've been trying for a while to get L to give me things when I ask for them. He will show me his toys ("Yellow bunny! Hop hop hop!" I gamely announce as he smacks the wooden puzzle piece of a yellow bunny against my face...), but no amount of "L, can I see your ___? Where's ___?" worked.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday afternoon I asked, "Where's your red ball?" and he picked it up and handed it to me right away, whereupon I threw an absolute party for him, exulting, "Yes! Red ball! That's your red ball! Good job, buddy, good job!!!" and so on.

So, trying to build on yesterdays's success, today I asked for a toy that has been one of his favorites for basically his entire life, a little stuffed bird with crinkly stuff in it that we, in our typically creative way, have always, as long as L has been alive, called Crinkly Bird.

"L," I said, "where's Crinkly Bird? Can you show me Crinkly Bird?"

L looked around and very proudly picked up... the red ball. And handed it to me.

"Oh," I said, trying not to be too visibly disappointed. "That's your red ball." And I picked up Crinkly Bird. "This is Crinkly Bird," I reminded him, because apparently the last thirteen-and-a-half months of referring to Crinkly Bird, who was once his absolute favorite toy in the whole wide world, by that name have meant nothing, and neither did yesterday's success at identification. I had a brief moment of "My god, what if he's not learning? What if he's never going to get it? What if I'm doing all of this wrong, or if he just isn't capable? There are dogs and parrots who can identify and retrieve 200+ named objects, but my baby, an actual human being, apparently thinks his red ball is the answer to all queries."

But repetition is how things learn, so about ten minutes later I checked that the little wooden puzzle piece of a blue dog was near him but not the current focus of his attention and asked, "L, where's your blue doggy?"

He looked around, picked it up, and handed it right to me.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the huge fuss I threw over the red ball, combined with the fact that I like to play with the red ball while he's not paying attention to me, convinced him that I REALLY like his red ball, and... somewhat confused the issue, perhaps. Or maybe he thought 'where is' meant the red ball. I don't know. It's gotta be really hard learning language as a concept rather than just learning a specific language. And, as The Boy pointed out, dogs and African Gray parrots are generally held to be as smart as human three year-olds, not fourteen month-olds...

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I guess I'm in again

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 19:30:44 GMT

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.

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beautiful rain

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 18:55:53 GMT

It was terribly hot for here yesterday (96 F and sooooo huuuuuumid), and the clouds had rolled in thick over the afternoon, so I thought a thunderstorm was possible, but not certain because they're fairly uncommon here. The Boy was playing with L up in his bedroom, and I wanted to take a bath later so I decided to take the recycling out. Hauled a few armloads around to the back of the garage... and started to feel big fat raindrops coming down. Just a few, but they made me smile. And then flash, BOOM. Got another armload out, then stood in the dribbling warm rain for a minute. Drip drip drip... and I can't resist standing with my arms outstretched, hands and face turned up to the sky.

And then it gets harder.

Okay, I think... raise my hands out to it. Just for fun. And turn around once in it.

And then I hear it before I feel it -- WHOOSH. The drops are HUGE and coming down HARD, and I laugh and skitter under the eaves and back inside, totally giddy and feeling like a goddamned weather witch with the smell of moss and ozone on my skin and everywhere around.

It stopped soon after I went inside, but it was fantastic.

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30 Days of Star Trek Days 19, 20 and 21

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 23:23:12 GMT

Day 19 - Favorite Enterprise Episode

Can I count "Babel One," "The Aenar," and "United" all as one episode, since storywise they run right into each other? Yes? Then I'm doing that.

This arc has some undeniable issues, like the fridging of Talas, the literally immediate replacement of her with another love interest for Shran, the fact that that love interest is, uh, coded as quite young and naive compared to Shran? And also some things that probably bother only me, like "Why the hell do the Aenar have lights in their caves when they're blind?"

But.

Shran is my favorite Enterprise character by a long shot, so of course I'm going to like anything that involves a lot of him, and these episodes also include some truly delightful stuff, like the utterly classic-to-Star-Trek construction of a situation where Shran and Archer have to fight to the death, Shran getting impaled through the thigh with stalagtite that winds up looking strangely phallic due to its placement, Shran being strangely poetic and getting to be an odd romantic hero to someone who falls instantly in love with him... look, it basically is a Shran fiesta. What other episode am I going to love best? No matter how #Problematic! it is, I love this arc with dorky unreserved passion, and happily paper over all the awkward bits in my head. I watched these episodes (and, in fact, every ENT episode with Shran in it) while I was recovering from a really shitty life event, and apparently my brain decided that falling headfirst in love with Shran was one of the ways I needed to deal with that life event. And so I was thrilled when he was given canonical love interests for me to enjoy in addition to his obvious and delightful UST with Archer.

And anyway, she may be awkwardly written, but I like Jhamel. I like Talas, too. I really like both of them and Shran, and another character of my and gaslightgallows's creation together as a four-sexed foursome, but, alas, that was not to happen in canon. Although it's gotten to the point now, three years later, that I sometimes half-forget it didn't...

Day 20 - Character You're Most Like

Oh, fucking hell, I don't know! I've definitely got a temper/tendency to irritability and grudge-holding like Kira, and I've thankfully gotten it mostly under control much like she did over the years, but to say that I'm like her is... perhaps excessive. But probably as close as I'm going to get to one single person. I definitely am more spiritual than religious, more doubting than faithful, with significantly less tragedy in my life and much less physical confidence and control. Also, no knack whatsoever for fighting of any kind. But the other characters I can think of are even more of a stretch, so I guess that's where we're going.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some minor character who would be more appropriate, but... for the life of me I cannot think of anyone.

Day 21 - Least Favorite Character

Neelix.

Usually I adore the alien character, particularly the alien-out-of-their-element. But someone decided that Neelix should be the comic relief. And not the interesting comic relief like Quark, either. Oh, they tried, though. And the "serious" Neelix plotlines were the only thing more agonizing than the "funny" Neelix plotlines, IMHO.

It wasn't Ethan Phillips' fault. I've seen him in other roles where he's entirely tolerable, even quite likable. It's the just character. He is nails on a chalkboard for me. And I say that as a person who genuinely likes a fair number of the Ferengi episodes of DS9. Neelix is like a Ferengi without the social commentary or actual entertainment value. He's just a buffoon for the sake of having a buffoon. If Neelix was excised from Voyager and replaced with an entirely different character -- say, one who did not compulsively wear the ugliest suits ever and shriek his "humor" all over the place and behave in a weirdly controlling way with his girlfriend -- the whole show would instantly become about 30% more palatable to me.

( The other days )

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30 Days of Star Trek Day 17 and 18

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 21:24:32 GMT

Day 17 - Favorite Trek Novel

Oh, do I ever have a ready answer for this one.

I found Uhura's Song by Janet Kagan at a used bookstore when I was twelve, and have since read it, I'm going to conservatively guess, a hundred times. I had to buy a new (used) copy because my old one was too ratty to be read anymore. I have this book more or less memorized, and I still read it every few years.

After this, I read pretty much everything Janet ever wrote, and, because it was the marvelous old days of the internet and she was a sweetheart, corresponded with her by email on and off for a number of years prior to her unfortunately early death.

The book has everything I love that most Star Trek novels don't -- namely, the female characters and the aliens are centered, and there's more focus on the alien cultures than anything else in the book. Oh, and there's an OFC who's, sure, a bit of a Mary Sue, but also tiny and fierce and fun, and she significantly ups the female-to-male character quotient, and I like her tons. I'm sure someone somewhere has a thing about how this isn't a good book or whatever, but I don't care. I've loved it forever, and I expect to love it forevermore.

Second place goes to My Enemy, My Ally by Diane Duane, for most of the same reasons.

It's a goddamned pity that the novelizations aren't any good anymore. I'd pretty much kill to see what Diane or, alas, Janet, would have done with the Disco characters.

Day 18 - Favorite Non-Aligned Race

I guess this means not Federation but also not the Klingons, Romulans or other imperial powers?

In which case... er... oh, I know! The Horta! Every damned time there's a new season or a reboot or whatever I hope we'll get a Horta crewperson. There was one in My Enemy, My Ally, and I was absolutely charmed by that and have never quite recovered from the disappointment that it hasn't yet happened on-screen. Come on, guys -- we have the technology now! Do it!

( The other days )

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Flu shot, and 30 Days of Star Trek

Sat, 14 Sep 2019 12:15:22 GMT

Got my flu shot yesterday while my stepmom was watching baby L, and had a bit of frustration because when they gave me the paperwork for the shot while I waited, I noticed that there was a note saying to ask you're doctor about safety with the shot if you're breastfeeding. So I asked the girl who came to give me the shot what that was about. Poor thing was an intern, so she looked at the sheet, then took my info (age of baby, etc.) and went back to check, and the main pharmacist was busy, so she checked the manufacturer's info on the computer, etc. Nothing listed specifically. We agreed that it should be fine (after all, his pediatrician was the one who reminded us to get our shots, and she knows he's still getting about half breastmilk and half formula), and I resolved to look into it at home, and dump my breastmilk for a while if needed.

The CDC website is marvelously clear about breastfeeding and flu shots: "Flu vaccination is safe for breastfeeding women and their infants aged 6 months and older. In fact, women who get the flu vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding develop antibodies against flu that they can share with their infants through their breast milk. Breastfeeding can provide some protection against flu for infants, including children younger than 6 months who cannot receive the flu vaccine."

So, yay. Just like the refusal to give me the flu shot when I was trying to get pregnant (ie, for four freaking flu seasons in a damned row) unless I lied and said I wasn't (which I did, four years in a row, because getting the flu while pregnant is super dangerous and bad, and each of those times I was just trying, not actively pregnant (in which case I would've gotten my shot from my doctor, just to be sure it was safe)), this is a case of the companies being overly paranoid about their documentation, presumably to avoid lawsuits, in this case presumably banking on the idea that nobody actually reads that paperwork that you get with a shot. Nobody except me. Sigh. Anyway, I have my damned shot, and I'm quite happy about that.

Oh, and then my stepmom accidentally suggested that the baby's tummy troubles might be because he's not 100% breast-fed. In an otherwise lovely visit, it was kind of a facepalm moment. Whatever.

(Baby hit the toy bar that hangs over his bassinet while I was writing this, causing it to sing. ...We might need to remove that bar at night, now that he's getting bigger, and replace it with something entertaining but quiet so he doesn't wake himself up all the time by happening to flail against it.)

Day 15 - Favorite First Officer

That's an easy one -- Kira. Grumpiest and most unwilling first officer, in the beginning, and the way she grows and comes to deeply care for the Starfleet staff over the next seven years is so marvelous. I love how she does things her own way and is always a little rough around the edges, and, let's be real, I flat out adore her smile. Nana Visitor has a smile that lights up the whole room around her, and I never get tired of it. ♥

Day 16 - Favorite Voyager Episode

I'm not actually sure I have one of these. There was a time, long ago, when it was (don't tease) "Resolutions." Yes, I was what we called back in the day a J/C shipper. Somewhere, on some archive that is hopefully long gone and was never backed up anywhere else, there was once a piece of fanfic that I wrote about Janeway and Chakotay when I was fourteen. Happily, I was using a totally different username and email address back then, so no one will ever be able to trace it back to me, because... nobody's fic at fourteen should be connected to their online life as an adult.

(This was not the first fanfic I ever wrote. That distinction goes to the long-forgotten Roddenberry property Earth: Final Conflict, and is likewise lost to the sands of internet and time, thank heaven, although the theme of me falling for the alien continues down through the years.)

As an adult? I have a vague recollection that I liked the episode with Paris's black and white Captain Proton holonovel. All the actors really looked like they were enjoying a break from their normal characters, if I remember right. I've never been able to make it past the first few episodes on attempts to rewatch Voyager, though, so I have no idea if this would hold true. I feel about it largely the way a lot of people feel about Enterprise, I think -- I tried it, I didn't like it, and I mostly pretend it didn't exist.

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