I figured having a post that contained some basic info about me, some of my interests, and a couple of links to posts that describe most of the past 9-ish years of my life might be kind of helpful.
So, here we go! (This is going to be a living document that I'll try to revisit regularly so it's got the most up-to-date info.)
( Read more... )
Ugh. Life has been... a thing the past couple weeks.
I started dealing with some shortness of breath and feeling like my heart was pounding while just sitting at my desk - and it looks like the culprit may be my ADHD meds. I reached out to my doctor's office about it, and got the ever so helpful response of "stop all ADD meds until next appointment" - so I'm off my meds until next month. Time to drag out all those old coping mechanisms I used to use before I got diagnosed and on medication, wheeeee.
On top of that, poor Hannah has an ear infection and a claw bed infection in both her dewclaws, and I had the joy of learning how to give a cat pills and eardrops for the first time in my life! (And the first time in Hannah's life, too, since she's been pretty damn healthy up until now.) She's also got elevated liver levels, and her white blood cell count is high (probably due to her infections), and I'm a stupid anxious mess over my old baby cat. She hates it every time I put ear drops in, and won't let me go near her for like a half hour afterwards, which makes me feel bad. She hasn't gone poop in two days, either, and is dealing with a little nausea from the antibiotics, so I have to go pick up more medications for her after I get done with work today.
I need a break from life. Can I do spring break over again, please?
This week's ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
thefridayfive answers:
1. How far back can you trace your family tree?
My younger sister and I did some digging around on Ancestry.com at the end of 2023, and with some help of a distant cousin, I think we were able to trace back to our great grandfather on our dad's side, and I traced back to one set of great-great grandparents on our mother's side.
2. What is the most interesting (or strange) thing you've heard about one of your relatives?
For "strangest thing I've heard about my relatives": I think that would be all the rumors around my uncle Roy's death. (Ruth and I were really young when he passed.) It seems like different parts of the family were told different things about his death - my mother told Ruth and I that Uncle Roy was drunk while fishing and fell out of his boat and drowned, my older sister Johanna was told he committed suicide, and some of our second cousins are convinced Uncle Roy was the victim of a mafia hit. Since most of my mom's generation of the family and older are gone now, I don't know that we'll ever know the truth.
3. How do you feel about legacy names like John Henry Smith IV or naming children after other relatives?
I mean, I don't care either way - my mother gave my sisters and I variations on family names. Johanna's middle name is the same as our maternal grandma's first name, my first name was inspired by my great grandmother, and Ruth inherited our maternal grandmother's first and middle names. (Back when I was dating Franco oh so long ago, I used to joke that if he wanted a Franco III, it was going to be a dog, hah.)
4. Would you consider yourself and/or your family to be traditional?
oh no, not at all. My family is a trainwreck, and I'm about as non-traditional as it gets.
5. What is one tradition you have passed on to your children and/or plan to pass on to them?
Not having kids, so this one is kinda moot. Oh well.
I keep fussing with my journal layout and style, trying to get it just right - and right when I think I've got it settled, then something catches my eye and I go "oh god what's that font doing there" or "aaaaugh all my most popular tags are over a decade old at this point and don't match where I am in life at all right now" and have to go back into the journal style customization options to fix it.
🤦♀️
I also can't seem to find a layout that gives me the "omg that's perfect feeling I used to get when I'd find a good journal layout back in the day - maybe I need to learn how to make my own DW layouts. I know enough HTML and CSS to figure it out eventually, I bet.
I should honestly be working, though - that one Photoshop course I'm working on isn't going to style itself.
Well, it looks like it's that time again: updating folks on what's happened in my life since the last time I posted in here. (For those who are stumbling across this journal organically and aren't part of m DW circle yet, there's a post from 2022 that's friends-only due to sensitive topics - I'm picking up from where that post left off.) I feel like writing about the important points of what happened over the past two years will be a good distraction from the emotional regulation nonsense I was dealing with earlier.
This is kind of long and rambly, so I'll put it behind a cut for those who might not be interested.
( Read more... )
Went through and cleared out my follow/access list of people who:
Looking through the list of people who gave me access/followed me over the years and still have my account on their follow/access list was like stepping back in time. So many names I recognize from over the years of people I mostly communicate with on other platforms now, or people I've completely lost touch with... dang.
It also hit me that I've had my Dreamwidth account for almost 16 years now. Daaang. A lot's happened in those 16 years.
Yeah. After last night's rambling on the Alphasmart, and this morning's rediscovery of my Dreamwidth account, I think I'll keep writing here instead of starting something new. Sure, my ADHD loves shiny new things, but the archivist in me likes the history I have here, and wants to keep adding to it.
Though good gods, I still need to go through and manage my tags. Early twenties me committed some serious crimes of tag abuse that make my information science masters degree cry. I started the process a while ago, but never finished because it got overwhelming. (everything was overwhelming back in 2020, though...)
I miss LiveJournal.
Or, more specifically, I think I miss the social aspect of semi-public journaling on the internet, and the catharsis I'd feel after writing out my feelings and releasing them into the world, knowing others might see them, and feeling a little less alone in the world for that fact.
I thought about resurrecting my old Dreamwidth journal to post in. I may still do that, I dunno. Currently writing this up on an Alphasmart Neo that I bought on eBay the other day, and it has zero internet capabilities, and I haven't decided yet where this'll ultimately end up. My old Dreamwidth journal certainly has a lot of history attached to it - I managed to get almost all of my LiveJournal accounts backed up to it before I jumped ship there - but... ugh. Some of that history is embarrassing. Some of it is rough to remember. Still, I kept more regular entries in those journals than I did in a paper journal for quite some time, so maybe I should just keep on writing in the Dreamwidth journal. I don't know.
I do know I need to get back into journaling again. Whether that's in my paper journal, or in some strange combination of typing entries on the Neo and feeding them into an online journaling service, I dunno yet, but I'll figure it out.
I'm not even sure what the point of this entry is. It's mostly just tired ADHD-brained rambling nonsense, I guess. Still, it felt good to write, and it's nice to be able to write on something that's not constantly pinging me with notifications. (And the keyboard on the Neo is oddly satisfying to type on - much nicer than the Alphasmart 3000 I bought late last year. It's okay, but I like this better, so the 3000 is going up on eBay shortly.) I'll figure out where this is ultimately going to go at some point tomorrow.
Edit: well, clearly this ended up on Dreamwidth, since it's here and all. And for those curious, behind the cut there's a picture of my trusty little Alphasmart Neo, with this entry all typed up on it:
(also, don't panic, this is the writer formerly known as purpleparadox - haven't actually used that username for anything regularly in a damn long time, so I changed my username to dreamingpixels.)
I think I need to focus more on the good things in my life, as opposed to the bad things - since there's so much unpleasantness in the world today, we all need to find a little light in the darkness to help us keep going.
So, for the next week or so, I'm going to try to post daily about the things that bring a little light to my life. I'll start out with something inspired by a photo I took yesterday.
At first glance, this looks like a rather cozy little farmhouse in a quiet rural area, surrounded by trees, lightly sprinkled with snow. The front porch has neatly stacked firewood, and there's smoke coming from the chimney (likely from a toasty warm fire). There's a garden in the front yard, and a chicken coop, and if you zoom in really close you can even see chickens running around in the yard. There's a dilapidated old barn, and a tiny little shed next to it.
To me, it's home. The back window on the second floor belongs to my room. The blue car in the driveway is Lapis, my much-loved Subaru. The shed next to the barn holds my scooter and my bicycle. I affectionately refer to the chickens in the yard as "the chicken ladies", and if the weather's nice, they typically come out to say hi when I come back from a run.
After living here since March, it finally feels like it's my home. When coming home from a run last night, and seeing the house from the road, I felt warmth and happiness and a sense of... belonging, I guess. I've been struggling with feeling like this is home since May, when it turned out this was now where I was living permanently. For the past four years, this was just someplace I came to visit - sometimes I'd stay the weekend, and I even had a drawer for some extra clothes on the off chance I needed them, but otherwise? It was J and Kasi's house. It was a safe space for me, sure, but it wasn't my house. Rana and I had a house, and that was where I lived.
Now, though, this feels more like home. Sure, there are times when I'm walking through the house downstairs and my brain still processes things as "I'm just visiting", but that's happening less and less lately. I've started to make some space for myself in the house (outside of my room, anyway) - it's just little things, like claiming a spot on the top shelf of the shoe rack for my box of running accessories, or having a spot in the gallery upstairs where I sit and crochet and read in Rana's old glider chair that nobody else tends to use. (Except the kittens, anyway - they love napping in the glider.)
So here's today's light in the darkness: looking at the house I live in, and it finally feeling like home.
I swear, I am so ready to be done with 2020.
I try to look on the bright side of things, but it's hard sometimes. Still, I do have my health, and a safe place with very few people around to go walking and running, and I live with people who actually give a crap about my mental health. My life is going pretty well, considering everything going on - and if my brain hadn't been so much of a dumpster fire this year, I think I'd actually be pretty well off, pretty happy.
Buuuut 2020 had to happen, and so here I am, angry at all the selfish folks who can't be bothered to wear masks and wash their hands and stay the fuck at home because they'd rather go eat out at Cracker Barrel and pretend life is normal - after all, they're the only people in the world who matter, didn't you know? Fuck everyone else, Karen's gotta have her brunch! /sarcasm
Yeah. I think I might be experiencing the stages of grief out of order here, because I've gone from denial to depression to acceptance to anger.
Yeah, I know, I disappeared for most of November - up until last week, NaNoWriMo was eating all my spare brain energy. Then depression hit, and I stalled out on writing, and I highly doubt I'm going to be able to crank out ten thousand words before midnight tonight, soooo... yeah. I've got 40k words of Elinyr-related nonsense (some of it is even good!) that I'll probably continue working on at my own pace, now that the pressure is off.
I also worked on some drawings over the past few weeks. I'm really happy with how they turned out. I'll share them tomorrow, when I'm on an actual computer.
In other news, I can't believe that December starts tomorrow. I'm happy that 2020 is almost over, though. I am so goddamned done with this year.
I'll post something with more substance tomorrow at some point - just wanted to tell everyone that I'm still alive, and I'll be back to posting pretty regularly again.
It's been a weird couple of days, that's for sure.
I'm not even going to talk about the election. I don't want to jinx things there by talking about my hopes/etc.
NaNoWriMo has been going alright - I passed 10k words yesterday, but kept getting distracted when I sat down to write in the evening. The big brain-breaking interruption was from Rana, saying "someone we know came out as trans today" and commented about how she was jealous that this friend was able to transition so quickly.
Then she showed me a picture of her new car, and said something along the lines of "Luna came out and told me that she never really felt right being a giant powerful Subaru Outback, and she transitioned into a fancy Toyota Prius Prime."
That kind of hit me weirdly - first off, I thought she was going to be a Subaru girl, and she even convinced me to get a Subaru of my own. Plus, we used to make fun of Priuses when she had a Honda CRZ (a fancy sports car hybrid) and say "our hybrid is more fun than your hybrid!" What really got to me, though, was her going back to a tiny sports car hybrid like she had when we first met - it was like she was erasing our time together and throwing herself back into her batchelorette ways. She bought her first Subaru (a Crosstrek) because she realized that maybe it wasn't exactly practical to have a car with no back seat, especially if we make large purchases that don't all fit in the car at once. (Like that time we bought two desk chairs at once, and she had to leave me at Office Depot with one of them while she drove the other home because they both wouldn't fit in the CRZ.)
So, yeah, I spent a chunk of time crying into my tablet last night while trying to write an emotional part of my novel. I guess that's one way to get into your character's state of mind? I blame my reaction on a combination of things, including anxiety over the election, dealing with hormones (it's that time of the month), and my general emotional shakiness thanks to the pandemic. Usually I'd be so excited about Rana getting a new car. Hell, she even talked to J about his experience owning a hybrid! And she hardly ever intentionally reaches out to J for anything! I should be happy, you know? But it's just another reminder that she and I are splitting up. And it sucks, because I still love her, and I still want her in my life - I just can't live with her any longer, we drive each other insane.
Dammit, if I keep talking about this, I'm going to start crying again, so I'm going to end this entry here, go make myself a chai, and prep for my next meeting (one down, two to go, wheee)
I've only been awake for two hours and have already cried into my breakfast because of a post a friend of mine made on Facebook where he talked about how he's been feeling for the past few months, and we're essentially experiencing the same things (heightened anxiety, jealousy/anger at people just ignoring safe protocols to spend time with people outside their house/pretending things are normal, generally a hot mess). I just want to go hug him and tell him he's not alone, but he's in freakin' Kentucky and I'm in Indiana and there's a pandemic raging on, soooo...
Yeah. I don't think today's going to be a good day.
Got sucked into novel writing. So far I've managed to crank out a little over 5k words - that's one-tenth of the way done with NaNoWriMo! :D
Aside from writing and working, haven't done a heck of a lot. Probably going to throw myself wholeheartedly into writing tomorrow (and maybe Wednesday too) so I don't hyperfocus on the election - I'm honestly afraid of what the next few days will hold, election-wise. Doing creative things and taking care of myself are the best things I can do, I think. I doubt anyone is going to be doing much work tomorrow, that's for sure - my co-worker Emily is planning on setting up a Discord server for the office so we can get together and play some Jackbox games to try and distract ourselves, and I might see if anyone wants to come visit my island in Animal Crossing.
Yeah, definitely nervous about tomorrow.
I had a busy day today. Or, well, as busy as a Saturday can get in isolation mode, anyway. J and I did a lot of housework and yardwork today while Kasi ran some last-minute errands in town - I feel rather productive, even though I was kinda wiped out and a little cranky the entire day. I even got to use a leaf blower for the first time! It takes some finesse, wrangling leaves with a leaf blower, but it's also kind of fun.
We also ended up packing up the contents of the tent we've had up by the fire pit all summer, so we can take the tent itself down tomorrow or Monday. I'm a little bummed that it's time to pack it away for the winter - it'd been so long since I had a tent to hang out in during the warmer weather, and the woods behind the house are so peaceful and quiet during the summer. Today, though, the trees are mostly bare, and it's been too cold recently to spend too much time outside, so it's time to pack things up out there. (I'm eagerly looking forward to next spring, so I can set everything back up again.)
NaNoWriMo starts in about a half hour in my time zone - however, I'm kinda tired and not sure I can convince myself to stay up late and try to write for a little bit once the clock hits midnight. Besides, there's always tomorrow morning - I can make myself some coffee, flop down in my favorite chair, and write for a bit.
Tonight's the first night in a long time (and the first night since we've had Mo) that we're letting the kittens into the bedroom at night, and I'm hoping they don't wake us up with late-night kitten shenanigans. We started keeping the door closed when Anya was still super little and was trying to nurse on the blankets in the big bed at 3 am - so far tonight, though, she's just been lounging around and occasionally wandering over to watch me type. (which she's doing right now!) Here's hoping tonight is relatively quiet, kitten-wise.
Sitting at home, watching the leaves fall off the trees, digging out all my warm clothes because now I'm freezing cold all the time, pondering whether or not to throw myself at NaNoWriMo this year after a few years off...
Yep. It actually feels like fall today.
Thankfully, today was pretty quiet. I kept getting distracted by coming back here every so often to poke around my old entries or change my journal theme, so not having anything too brain-draining to worry about at work was nice. Aside from the pleasant distraction of rediscovering Dreamwidth, today was a pretty standard "work at home because we're in a pandemic" day. I did some laundry, watched the kittens do ridiculous things, and thought of a million things I wanted to talk about here but made myself wait to post because this isn't Twitter and I don't really need to make a million posts a day, now, do I?
I took a walk for the first time in ages today. For a while I was pretty good about going for a walk as soon as I finished work for the day, but the the weather got ridiculously hot - and by the time it cooled back down, I'd fallen out of the habit. My back started doing that weird muscle twinge it usually does if I haven't been too active lately, though, and usually that means a day or two of nasty back spasms isn't far behind - and since I really don't want to have to go to urgent care right now, I went for a walk in hopes the extra movement would get my back to shut up. (so far, it seems to have worked) Hopefully I can get back in the habit of walking after work again - it really helped separate my work day from the rest of the day, which can be really hard to do when you're working from home every freaking day.
While walking, I thought about maybe doing NaNoWriMo again this year - it's been quite a while since I last participated, and it used to be a huge thing for me, but with life being the way it has over the past few years, I just couldn't drum up the energy for it. Now, though? Well, I'm still not sure I have the energy for it, but dang, the NaNoWriMo nostalgia is hitting hard right now, just like the LJ/DW nostalgia. I do have four more days to plan, if I do decide I want to do this. I think I won one year with just one day of planning. I'll think about it, that's for sure.
Meanwhile: dang it's obnoxious to try to write an entry on my phone. Even with the new phone I have with the gigantic screen. I wonder if I can find a small Bluetooth keyboard of some sort that I could use when typing up entries on my phone... I've got a Bluetooth keyboard to use with a table, but dang that thing is large and clunky. Technology has to have advanced enough in the past few years to have small light Bluetooth keyboards be a thing, right?
I will say, it's weird posting on my phone. It's not something I did much back in the day - I usually spent all my time in front of the computer, so why post using the tiny phone screen? Now, though, the only place I can leave a computer set up long term is occupied by my work computer, and it's such a hassle to drag out my laptop and find a flat surface to park it on. I suppose I could use my tablet... I dunno. I'm rambling. XD
Today was a good day, though. Which I'm happy about - I need more good days.
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