lizvogel

I got my second Covid booster yesterday, the Omicron-enhanced Pfizer one. No exciting side-effects, as usual. Arm's a bit sore, I think maybe a little less than previous times.

For once, I actually arranged a day off, or at least a day of mostly-rote, sit-down tasks. I was thinking that the tired wasn't hitting me, and then I was sitting there thinking I should get up, I should really get up, why on earth am I so tir-- oh.

I am still kinda wiped, though I'm not sure I can blame the vax for that, since I was pretty tired before it. I think it's the day off that did me in: I gave myself permission to relax and take it easy, and I think the strain's been the only thing keeping me functional. ;-P

I'll have a green Christmas, without snow
I'll have a green Christmas, I know so
The sun's shining bright, not a hint left of white
So I'll have a green, green Christmas

Not there yet -- we got a lot of snow a few days ago, which is why Saturday started with a marathon shoveling session -- but I can see it coming.

It's been an "interesting" little while. We've been playing Roofer Roulette for months now: Will they come today? Will they come tomorrow? ....will they ever come? The housemate is moved out of her bedroom with most of her stuff in storage, because the ceiling's so damaged the room's not fit to live in. We've got the pictures off the walls and the breakables off the high shelves; the bathroom exhaust fan is installed and poised ready to cut the hole in the roof and have the roofers do the final, outside bits; we scrambled madly to get a home equity line of credit set up, with contingency plans if the roofers showed up before the loan was ready. That last was in October; still no roofers. They just told me maybe Wednesday, but they've told me so many maybes before that it's almost more of a no than a yes at this point.

We were really poised for roofers last week, which is when we also got to play Furnace Follies. It'd been blowing cold air intermittently, maybe once or twice a day; cutting the power usually sorted it for a while. The furnace guy finally came to inspect it (they're swamped like everybody else) and determined it needed a new gas valve. Which he ordered, and brought out a couple days later. Meanwhile we'd gone from occasional cold air to cold air four tries out of five. He then discovered they hadn't given him a propane conversion kit for gas valve, which is basically a tiny spring, but necessary. So he had to go get that. Then he discovered that the flame sensor, which had been showing its age anyway, was corroded to the point of failure; possibly all the restarts had finished it off. So he had to get that, which meant coming back the next morning. New flame sensor installed, the furnace still wasn't starting properly; he spent several hours testing every single component that can be tested before determining we needed a new control board. Which, yes, was another trip out for parts and another return visit. In all he had to go get parts and come back four times in two days, during which time we had no furnace at all. But he stuck with it, and now we have half a new furnace and the house is toasty warm (knock enough wood for a small deciduous forest).

(All that said, I love our furnace company. They call before they come, and they show up when they say they will. They wrangled one of their service contract options to cut us a break on the parts. And they treat a dodgy furnace like the urgent issue it is. The contrast to the roofers is particularly dramatic.)

Speaking of houses, a friend of mine just bought her first one. So I've been helping her play Keep-Toss-Donate, and giving Homeowner 101 tips. I believe we have an appointment with a caulk gun some time this week. (Brainstorming ideas for her house is also giving the housemate & I a fresh perspective on our house; it means more projects, of course, but there's some interesting new solutions to some ongoing problems bubbling up.)

Meanwhile, the housemate's dad, whose health has been not great for a while now, took a fall last week and ended up first in the hospital and then in a rehab facility. He's doing all right atm, but she's been running back and forth between that and massive overtime at the job along with all the house stuff, and trying to have That Conversation with her aging parents. So here, have a big pile of stress.

Meanwhile meanwhile, I have found a replacement webmail provider. Runbox is not perfect, I have to jump through some hoops for some of the non-standard stuff I do, but I can function with it. I'm still open to suggestions for other providers; I really don't like being dependent on the whims of one service, and I'd like to go back to having two viable email accounts. I still have a massive amount of email to archive off the old provider before it croaks in a week and a half; I'm not going to make it, and emergency measures will have to be taken.

Oh, yeah, and my author's copies of Analog's Jan/Feb issue arrived, with "Dix Dayton and the Miner from Mars" happily ensconced within. I keep forgetting about it, what with prepping for roofers and all. It's in stores now.

Other news that I realize I've neglected to put here:

Narrativity 2021 went extremely well! We had an awesome little con over Labor Day weekend. (And registration is now open for next year, which will be Memorial Day weekend.) Attendance was down a smidge due to Covid and such, but we still had a bunch of really cool people (some old, some new), a ton of great panels, and an all-around fun time. I came home more exhausted than I've ever been in my life, and...

...five days later, I started a new job! I'm working part-time at one of the local libraries, and loving it. The learning curve was insanely steep, which was particularly vertiginous since I was a post-con vegetable, but I'm finally starting to get my feet under me. I basically get paid to geek out about books. This is awesome.

So that's roughly the state of the me these days. I'm feeling smeared to a grease spot by the stress, but if we can just get the roofers to come and do their thing, a lot of the other pieces will start falling into place. Or at least I can start pushing them, instead of balancing them all precariously and making contingency plans if they fall.

How the bleep did it get to be mid-July?

I was all set to do this on the first, for once, but then the phone rang and I spent the next week+ sitting with a friend in the hospital and then having her crash on our couch. She's doing well enough to be home now, though we're still keeping tabs. I don't mind one bit having helped out when needed, but there's no denying it rather knocked lesser matters askew.

Total new words in June = 6751

All on Lightning Strikes Twice. Not bad at all, especially considering it once again represents only about three weeks of actual writing. The last week of June just... didn't happen.

There was a profound lack of querying and story submissions in June. I've still got a few things out in slush-land, but I need to get on the stick again.

July's goals... well, so far nothing's happened and the month's half over, so I'll be happy just to get writing again. A couple subbing/querying sessions wouldn't hurt, either. With the con gearing up, I don't expect the numbers to be great, but higher than zero would be a good thing.

I should have been at MediaWest*Con this weekend. :-(

Instead, we planted flowers. This is typically a mid-June activity for us, sometimes later (sometimes *much* later), so it was very strange to be at the local nursery when it was full of both flowers and people. Last year we got a very late start, which combined with the shortages and the hard late freeze that necessitated a lot of second plantings, meant that most of the nursery was empty and most of what was left was petunias. Fortunately we like petunias. But this year we wanted a change of pace, so the housemate's side is loaded with marigolds, and my side is overrun with celosia and snapdragons.

And a few of the deep purple petunias, for contrast. ;-)

They didn't have the crenelated-alien-brain celosia that I like for the front edge, but they did have a variety called Flamingo Feather, which is pleasingly frond-y. I'm very curious to see what it looks like when it really gets going.

I took a badly needed Day Off a few days ago, and spent it in bed with a book. It was glorious. Also, apparently the focus and pressure of tasks needing to be done is the only thing keeping me awake, because without it I was only good for about half an hour at a time before I dozed off again. Still, glorious.

However, since then I've been feeling not at all the thing. I'm convinced half of it is psychosomatic; my body quite liked not having to do anything for a day, and would like to do more of it. The cranky tummy could be due to the headache, which could be due to the usual neck+shoulder muscles. And the chills -- well, it's spring in Michigan, which means that yesterday it was snowing and it's supposed to be 80 on Tuesday, so adapting to the temperature is a joke anyway. But there does seem to be a little more going on than that. Pretty sure it's just a cold and not Covid (and won't it be nice when we don't have to add that caveat anymore?), but I'm going to take it easy and eat comfort foods for a while regardless.

I actually managed to see the Friday Five on a Friday and for once have the leisure to answer it, so I will:

1) Where's your favorite place to go connect with nature?

I suspect this list was written by a city dweller. Uh, my back yard? Or perhaps going for a walk around the pond, and seeing where the deer have trampled paths for themselves this year. The woodchuck and muskrats have made a heckuva mess of the bank on the west side, but as long as they keep to the parts I don't have to mow, we're all good here.

2) What's a disposable thing that you've found a use for?

You know those packages with the plastic blister mounted to a boxboard backing? Peel the plastic off, flip it over, and it makes a great paint mixing tray for small craft projects.

3) Where does your community need [to be] de-trashed?

By "community" I assume they mean in town; our town is actually fairly tidy. But may I just rant briefly about people treating the country roadside like a public trash dump? It's time for the annual post-winter patrol of the road-edge of the property, during which I will collect beer cans, fast food wrappers, and assorted other garbage that people have disposed of by flinging it out their car windows as they barrel past. Sometimes the garbage includes bills or other items with identifying addresses, and no, I haven't yielded to the temptation to return them to the owners along with everything else I've collected, but that time may yet come.

4) What's your favorite flower?

Irises are beautiful, and both periwinkle and wood violets are very pleasing to my eye, which is good considering their prevalence in the lawn. (We have both the traditional purple wood violets and several variations on white ones, some with purple striations.) But I think I will have to go with the lowly dandelion. They're bright, cheerful, and tenacious as all hell. How can you not admire that?

5) What positive change do you wish we'd all make?

List writer was clearly going for an ecology-related change, so I'll limit it to that. You know, I think I would be fairly happy if people would just keep their trash to themselves until they got to an appropriate place to dispose of it. And perhaps recycle the things that are fairly easy and efficient to recylce, like paper. I know recycling has its own set of issues, but some of it works pretty well, and yet so many people don't even bother to do that.

I got my first vaccine shot today! (Yes, it was at the location I thought it was. Only took four contacts to confirm that....) It's the Pfizer vaccine. Procedure was pretty straightforward: show up at store, fill out the usual stupid medical forms, wait a very few minutes, get called in, get shot, wait 15 minutes, go free.

Arm's a little sore, but I've done worse to myself working in the yard. Flexing it occasionally seems to help. Otherwise, no side effects; I'm a little tired, but that could just as well be from getting up early to take the car to the shop & drop the housemate off at work.

(I wore my I-got-vaccinated sticker afterward; I wish there was somewhere I could go to show it off properly. Lookee! Whee!)

In more good news, the car is back; local shop was able to weld a patch to repair the broken catalytic converter neck. I think it may be a smidge louder than it was pre-break, but it's definitely way, way better than pre-repair. Certainly driveable for the foreseeable, and for very little moolah.

I have this massive post in progress covering the last week or so, which included: getting a new water heater after a five-month wait (yay!); discovering a massive, long-term plumbing leak in the crawlspace, and summoning the plumber for the second time in two days (oh gawd); cleaning up after said plumbing leak (gross)*; discovering that our favorite restaurant, which was supposed to be our treat for all that adulting, has been playing fast and loose with the mask rules (and we really thought they were one of the good guys); discovering that the local laundromat not only wears masks but wipes down the insides of the machines after each use (and what does it say when your laundromat has better hygiene standards than your restaurant?). But let's face it, I'm never going to finish writing that.

I want this damn pandemic to be over so I can go back to pretending that most of the human race isn't a complete waste of space.

I also want to be done with all this damned adulting for a while, but I suspect the test kit to see if the water softener is doing its job has other ideas.


*Title is in tribute to what was involved in that part of the process. Climbing *over* the heat duct was the easy part.

National Discount Chocolate Day was kind of a bust. My usual source was pretty much wiped out; all I managed to score was a few of the little 4-piece boxes. I tried a couple of other stores, but their discount racks were full of the sort of thing that's still there for good reason.

Perhaps this is the universe's way of telling me I don't need a couple pounds of chocolate creams?

Hey, local-ish folks - Pinball Pete's has a GoFundMe to help them stay in business through the pandemic. If blowing a stack of quarters to shoot pixels at other pixels for hours is your kind of fun, check it out.