Wrong Ideas

Well, hello there, Constant Reader! It’s another Friday work-at-home morning, and it’s very chilly in the Lost Apartment this morning. It’s only fifty here this morning currently; the temperature dropped significantly over night here in New Orleans. I don’t have any meetings this morning, which is also lovely.. I do have some trainings to get done and some data entry to do as well as some quality assurance, which is one of those things you can do with the television on while sort of watching something. The weekend is looming large before me, and I would like to get to the gym twice–tonight, and possibly Sunday morning. Yesterday’s Secret Santa at the office was nice; I got a lot of candy and one of those single-serving portable blenders, which is super nice–and will come in very handy for my post-workout protein shakes. I also want to get a lot of reading and writing done over the course of this weekend, and I want to get some rest, too. I have some errands to run for sure, and…and…and…all this stuff to do (I also made a to-do list yesterday) but it’s not overwhelming to me the way it was recently (which is why I think I was avoiding making said list for so long); now I look at it and think get to work, bitch.

I really need to stop swearing at myself. I should add that to the list.

But I had a nice evening at home last night. I worked on the book (MY book!) a little bit, made groceries on the way home after work AND picked up the mail, and did my reading last night. It was for the Publishing Triangle, and was quite lovely. I read my story “Moist Money,” completely forgetting that maybe something seasonal might have been more appropriate than a dark tale of gay rage, but ah, well. Things happen. But the response to it was quite nice, and it’s always nice to do a reading, you know? It’s also nice to do them without anxiety or stress, which was super-lovely. Before the change in my medications last year, I would have spent the entire day with the reading hanging over my head, nerves and pressure from the anxiety building all day until I was a sweaty-palmed, butterflied stomach, trembling mess–so it was lovely to know that public appearances no longer will do this to me. I wish I’d been on the right medications all along. Ah, well–live and learn, as they say.

I slept about an hour later than usual this morning, but I feel pretty good and rested. The kitchen is cleaned up already–still need to do the floors–so I’m starting out ahead of the curve for this weekend. I guess there is college football this weekend, the first round of the play-offs, but I don’t really care about watching when I can just check scores and highlights Sunday morning. Christmas is in a few days–I have to go into the office on Monday and then am free again until Thursday. These next few weeks are going to be disorienting, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to do an end-of-the-year review of highlights and lowlights because I can’t fucking remember anything anymore. That’s fine, although I wish I could remember all the amazing books I read this past year. I know I read two Scott Carson novels that were fantastic, Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory was one of the best things I’ve ever read…but beyond that I don’t remember much of anything I read, which is more about my brain than anything else. I’ve also forgotten television shows and movies we’ve watched, too, so I can’t do a round-up of that, either–but I am leaning toward picking Agatha All Along as my favorite television show of the year. (The cast alone was fantastic.) I’ve also fallen down on the job as far as writing a Substack essay every week, too–does the twenty-two different essay drafts count?

Yeah, I didn’t think so, but it didn’t hurt to ask, did it?

I saw the insane pictures of the security escort Luigi Mangione1 had for moving jurisdictions yesterday and cannot believe the insanity of this political theater we’re seeing. Granted, he planned and committed a brutal crime, but how is he any more dangerous than say, I don’t know, a mass shooter like Dylan Roof? Why was he charged with terrorism, as opposed to someone like Dylan Roof or the Oklahoma City bomber, or even the Unibomber? School shooters? He can be escorted from place to place by basically a military unit, but the cops won’t enter an active shooter situation while children are being slaughtered. It’s nice to know that the “children” the Right and their cosplay Christianity are always so concerned about–always less important than gun rights–are even less important than CEO’s.

But sure, yes, by all means, Reich-wingers, call me a child-killer for supporting women’s right to healthcare.

Even the Democratic governor of New York is offering CEOs state police fucking protection.

So the taxpayers are paying for security for corporate CEO’s who make a shit ton of money and whose heartless, soulless companies are rolling in cash.

Priorities, right? And Congress is already melting down and the new “administration” hasn’t even been sworn in yet. They are already eating each other’s faces, which means the next four years are going to be even more horrific as I’d assumed this Hogan’s Heroes American version of fascism would be in fact…although it is going to be interesting to see one narcissistic sociopath being a beta soy boy to an unelected billionaire. Tell me the Republican Party in this country isn’t bought and paid for by foreign interests.

And on that note, I have an on-line training to do. Have a great Friday, Constant Reader!

  1. And to me it looks like the Right has decided Italians aren’t white anymore. The leopards are already eating their faces. GOOD. ↩︎

Cool Yule

Work-at-home Friday. I had early morning PT this morning, but when I checked my phone when I got home from work my surgeon had called to reschedule, so the rest of the morning for me is free. I’d taken sick time for this morning, which I can now cancel and use at another time, I guess for when the appointment is rescheduled. This was a bummer for me, because this was the removal of stitches and hopefully cleared from the brace appointment. I’d planned all of this out so that I can get it all taken care of on my old insurance, since I have new health insurance in January and a deductible to meet. Ironically, I had just been thinking that despite everything, this wasn’t ruinous financially. I was also hoping to be cleared from PT until late February. Here’s hoping I can be rescheduled next week sometime, but it’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so what are the odds that he’s either working or has anything available? I am trying really hard not to get anxiety over this, but it’s kind of hard. Sigh. No sense in stressing about something unknown, so when I finish this I’ll go ahead and call his office.

I knew it was all too good to be true.

But I’m glad I got it taken care of, anyway.

I was tired yesterday. The adventure of making a red velvet cheesecake one-handed and assembling it while making frosting with a nosy high energy kitten exhausted me, and once my caffeine wore off I was exhausted. I did get a great Secret Santa gift–a rechargeable battery operated hand-held vacuum I can use in the car, which I’d been wanting for a while–and I cannot wait to use it. If the weather is sunny this weekend, I may even wash the car. Ooooh, crazy talk, right? And I am getting my new microwave this weekend, which I am unnaturally excited about, frankly. This time I am keeping the instruction manual and teaching myself how to use it properly, rather than just reheating stuff.

I do have a lot to get done this weekend, which was partly why I was hoping to lose the brace for good today. But I can work around it and the High Energy Kitten, who slept so adorably in my lap last night while we watched Reacher and started watching Looking, which we are really enjoying. At the time it came out, it got terrible reviews and queer people seemed to hate it, and no one watched much. At the time I only knew Jonathan Groff from Glee, and not one of its highlights, so it didn’t take much for me to decide not to watch. But now having seen him in Hamilton (on Disney) and in Mindhunter, I was more open to it when Paul suggested it last night, and I was very pleasantly surprised with how realistic it was. It’s very well done, and while I personally didn’t identify with any of the characters, it showed a part of gay life and culture that I know exists. (One of my primary disappointments about the Queer as Folk reboot was the writers clearly weren’t from here–maybe they were, I don’t know–but it wasn’t a real New Orleans I saw on that show, and it was such a missed opportunity. Queer life in New Orleans is very rich and very much a part of the city’s culture in and of itself; imagine doing a queer show set in New Orleans and not mentioning the gay krewes, the leather community, and Southern Decadence is just sitting there, waiting for it’s film/television debut! I primarily watched the entire season for friends who worked as extras–my former supervisor Joey’s drag persona, Debbie with a D, was in the show a lot.)

I also want to finish reading the Tamara Berry novel and move on to the next. I am really enjoying the Berry, despite not being able to focus on reading this week in the evenings, so hopefully part of my cleaning plans this weekend can be broken up with an hour or so of reading every day. I really miss reading. I was scrolling through my ebooks on my iPad, lokoking for a cookbook which was one of the earliest ebook purchases tlast night and was stunned to see how many books I’ve gotten electronically over the years since I got my first iPad back in 2010. (I’d purchased the cookbook in 2011.) So, yes, my TBR stack is much larger than assumed because I never think about the ebooks. Sigh.

And on that note, I need to get to work. Have a lovely Friday Christmas Weekend Eve, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably be back at some point today.

Boogie Woogie Santa Claus

I also am hearing today’s title to the tune of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.”

It’s Tuesday morning and I survived Monday’s early morning PT. It went extremely well, so I am hoping that my surgeon will release me from it until February, when I can start strength PT. The wounds have healed, and cleanly, which is super nice. The bicep is also starting to look like a bicep again and not like a flat tire.

I also got back to writing yesterday and it flowed extremely well. I am very excited to be back on that horse again, and now that I know the plot for the book it’ll be a lot easier to get it finished. The middle (or Act II) will be a struggle as it always is, but at least I know how to end it, and I also know what the primary plot is going to be, and I do think it’s going to be really funny. I rewrote with a mind to the new plot, and everything just kind of was clicking into place and easy, which is AWESOME. I’m itching to finish this and get back to what I was working on before this project fell into my lap*. And I am having fun writing again. Maybe the surgery and the new meds served as a hard reset, like I unplugged my brain and then plugged it back in? I also slept well again last night, showing that Sunday’s restless night’s sleep was an aberration.

It’s very cold here this morning–it’s 44 outside–and thus did not want to get out from under my pile of warm blankets this morning as the alarm started its horrendously annoying beeping sound. This of course brought Sparky out from his fort under the bed, and he cuddled with me until it was time for me to stop hitting snooze and get up, which made it even harder for me to get up. (The affection is merely to make sure that he knows the exact moment when I get up, so I can feed him–he doesn’t fool me! He was nowhere to be found last night once I sat in my chair and edited what I wrote yesterday.) But the good news is I feel very rested and have some energy, so here’s hoping this carries me through the day. I have to go shopping for my secret Santa gifts, and I also have to pick up the mail and figure out when to make the red velvet cheesecake for Thursday’s potluck. I may go ahead and make the red velvet layers tonight, and then do the cheesecake tomorrow night, putting it all together on Thursday morning before work. That sounds like a plan.

I also went a little overboard preparing food for the week. There’s way too much of it, and I’ll need to eat dinner every night when I get home to get rid of it all. I also hadn’t calculated on the potluck Thursday (denial that Christmas is this weekend, no doubt), and one of my co-workers wants to get lunch with me tomorrow, so that’s two days I won’t need to bring lunch. Heavy sigh. I also think I will take Christmas day off from everything; no emails, no writing, no social media–I wonder if I can do it? I’d like to finish reading the Tamara Berry to move on to the next cozy in the TBR pile; there are so many ones with diverse voices and characters I am having a very difficult time choosing one. I am trying not to buy new books until I’ve made a significant dent in the TBR pile (with exceptions, of course–my always must-reads like Laura Lippman, Lou Berney, Megan Abbott, etc.) or donated more books to the library sale. We went to Costco over the weekend, and I had some stuff delivered; so another goal for the week is to do something about the box congestion in the living room; one of the reasons I’m not big into box stores as much as I could be is I don’t have enough storage space in the house to accommodate the things I could get; I’d be in real trouble if I did have the space. I am going to clear out the cabinets in the kitchen; there’s a lot of stuff we don’t need that has just been collecting dust for years.

And the cabinets and laundry room are seriously in need of organizing.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later.

*Perhaps my goal for 2024 should be to finish everything unfinished in my files…