lizvogel

Had a productive day yesterday, with lots of small tasks & errands accomplished, culminating with actually making dinner! I seared the little round roast in a frying pan, then opened the preheated oven and grabbed the rack to lower it.

With my bare hand.

We ate dinner (it was yummy), then finished the evening at the nearest 24-hour urgent care, because while the damage wasn't too bad, burns hurt. Surprisingly, they did actually supply effective pain relief. Fortunately the 2nd-degree burn on the pad of the ring finger is small, and the burn on the webbing between finger & thumb is only 1st degree. Still, that was 2 seconds of stupid that's going to cost me 2 weeks of raging inconvenience.

So if I'm slower than usual replying to folks, that's why.

Any remaining typos brought to you by my amazing one-handed touch-typing.

I started reading Firelord by Parke Godwin, based on a rec from somebody around here. Godwin's doing interesting things with grounding the Arthur legend in real history; Arthur is the tail end of the dying Roman tradition, the Picts are basically Faerie. And the writing is beautiful. But it turns out I don't have a lot of patience with Arthuriana any more. I know how this story ends.

There was a time when I found the great tragedy of it all appealing. And if the time comes when other people's venality and petty egoism haven't left wounds quite so raw in my life, maybe I will again. But these days I've no interest in tragedy in my entertainment, especially the kind that could so easily be avoided if people weren't short-sighted and selfish. I rather wish I'd come across this book in my younger days, when I was on my King Arthur kick; I suspect I would have liked it a great deal, then.

This polar vortex or arctic invasion or whatever it is needs to Go Away.

I am not dealing well with this overenthusiastic advent of winter. Partly it's because we still have the stray cat in the (unheated, uninsulated, drafty) garage, and spending a couple hours a day out there with him is more up-close-and-personal with this sort of temperature than I would otherwise choose to be. (And then there's the executive overhead of constantly trying to find ways to make it less-cold for him.) Partly it's just that it's cold, and dark, and gray when it's not dark, and it's getting to me.

I am pleased, however, that shedding the time-demands of first the condo and then NaNo is making my days feel much less constrained and overloaded and, well, constantly behind schedule. I'm still not getting as much done as I would like and probably need to (yes, convention, I do remember you exist), but it's nice to be able to go spend half an hour with the stray cat and have it turn into an hour and that's okay. And to take care of minor little tasks like typing up the hastily-scribbled notes on the plumber's advice for maintaining the water heater properly, which have been sitting by the computer for two months now. (On a cardboard box, because that's what was to hand when he told me this stuff.)

I really must get on with both being con chair and doing Xmas cards (as my mom is no longer around to be the point of contact with the Christmas-card-extended family). But I'm enjoying not feeling Constantly! Late! All! The! Time!, and having the things I am getting done feeling like accomplishments and not derailments.

We closed on the condo Wednesday last week. The new owners should have arrived from Florida yesterday or today. I'm still waiting on a few last things like the final utility bills, but essentially it is Done.

Feels good.

With the condo finally off my plate, I've been picking up steam on NaNo. Currently at 31,600 words, which is pretty damned good. The Apocalypse is going swimmingly.

Trying to balance between picking up some of the other things I've been letting go (hello, convention) and not getting sucked headlong into one to the exclusion of all else. Currently mostly erring on the side of hiding from everything, but it's a work in progress.

Small buds of sunshine
Strong shoots poke through whitened ground
Mother finally rests

- - - - - - - - - -

The world changed for me back in November, when I realized I was going to have to start taking care of my mom. Not full-time; at that point we still thought she was going to get better (as, in fact, she did, for a while). But after that first fall, I could see a long road ahead of helping with PT, making sure to check in more often, trying to get Mom -- never a joiner -- more involved with social activities that would keep her active, even making sure she was eating and not deciding that dinner was just too much effort. It meant a lot of time and energy redirected from a life that already needed more time and energy than it had, but I found ways to see it as something I could manage, even enjoy. I had plans.

Now the world has changed for me again, and I'm still figuring out how to stand in this new place. I have stopped being my mother's daughter, and started being her executor. (Obviously I'll always be her daughter, but it's not the active role it was, and was gearing up to be more so.) There's no shortage of things to do, but there's a lack of urgency to most of them that's a disorienting change from "She needs pain medication NOW." But they're not completely without timeline, either; the cable should be turned off, the condo prepped for sale. I've learned the very hard way not to let things sit, since a five-minute delay on my part routinely turned into three days' delay for Mom; the estate should be somewhat more accommodating, but I still suspect that the thing I blow off will be the thing that comes back to bite me.

I am coping, because one does. But I am stealing bits and pieces of time for my own things, and looking forward to when that can be a majority pursuit, not a sideline.

I went to LTUE, which was fun, and woke up on the flying-home day to a missed call from my mom's fall-alert device, which I'd just set up the morning before I left. Fast-forward a few hours to me standing in the Salt Lake City airport boarding lounge, yelling over a bad cell connection to try to get the urology doctor to talk to the spine doctor mom was shipped halfway across the state to see before he wheeled her in to a surgery that no one had even told her what it was for, and you can just barely begin to guess what kind of post-con week I've been having.

McLaren Flint is a hellhole that almost makes Sparrow Lansing look good, which is something I never thought I'd say about anything. The dead cockroaches in the emergency room were clearly a sign, but at this point they seem almost a homey welcome by comparison to the "care" she's gotten here. Nurses who take two hours and six requests to deliver pain meds to a woman with a broken back, the "good" department that issued her a broken call light and blamed us for thinking that pushing the button should have summoned someone, doctors so busy talking to each other about internal paperwork that they don't notice the patient they're actively working on is asking them a question, nurses who refuse to tell the patient their names, what they're there for, or even the name of the medication they're pushing into her vein....

The doctor nominally overseeing her case didn't know a damn thing about what was going on but had the unmitigated gall to stand in her room and try to make out like it's her fault for being in pain, and said to her face that she's too sick, has too many things wrong with her, and is just going to be in this amount of pain, apparently forever. Less than 24 hours later, her heart gave out. Coincidence? Nobody who knows anything about the effect of mental state on physical recovery would think so. They brought her back, but now she's in the CCU where I'm not allowed to stay with her, and I'm just supposed to trust that no one's going to give her the wrong medicine (which they have before) or try to take her for surgery she doesn't want or need (which they have before) or bully her into signing something she can't read (which they have before), or put what little food & water we finally managed to get them to give her out of her reach (which they have before), or ghod knows what.

Oh yeah, and that surgery I mentioned above? Could have killed or paralyzed her, because they don't talk to each other any better than they do to us.

When morning comes, I'm going to continue demanding that she have a different doctor assigned to "oversee" (i.e., ignore) her case, and then I'm going to start trying to get her transferred to another hospital as soon as she's remotely stable enough. The patient experience person at McLaren Flint told me that's impossible, but during a desperation late-night call to the Medicare complaint line, they assured me I absolutely can. We'll see who's lying or incompetent tomorrow, I guess. Given recent experience, I'm betting on all of them.

I was ahead on NaNo, almost two days ahead. Now I'm almost 4000 words behind. I have an incontrovertible excuse: my mother's in the hospital with a fractured pelvis. I could bail on NaNo now with no recriminations, and if anybody looked at me sideways for it, I'd happily punch them in the eye. But that said, I've won NaNo every time I've committed to it, and I really like being able to say that. I'm going to keep going if I can.

Every time I've done NaNo, I've learned something from it. The first time was simply to see if I could do it at all. I learned that I could, and that if I kept going after the initial word reservoir ran dry, I'd usually get a second wind, and another decent chunk of words out of it. I also used it as a test run to see if the life of a full-time writer would suit me as well as I thought; I was working 100% freelance at the time, and I was able to clear the boards and do nothing but write. Conclusion: yes, that life would suit me very well.

The second time, I learned how to write that much while working a regular job. Not a full-time one, granted; I was working at the hardware store then, usually about three days a week. But it was a physically exhausting and mentally tiring job with no time off, and I managed my 50K anyway. I think there were some other things going on then, too, though it escapes me atm what.

I'd wondered what I was going to learn this time. It may be that this NaNo's lesson is how to write through adversity. Which I've done before, certainly, but never at this volume. Even if I don't make the full 50,000, whatever I do end up with will be worth the effort... and I might just be able to pull it off. 4K behind sucks, but it's not insurmountable.

Must go write now.

Me: I've got half an hour between obligations. I shall do something fun just for me!
Thirty minutes later: Damn I do not have time to finish this article about author self-promotion.

I think perhaps I am not doing this "relaxing" thing right. ;-)

Last weekend we cancelled our cable.

You have to understand, having cable has always been very important for us. The housemmate & I have always been big media fans, and I grew up in an area where broadcast channels were very limited; cable TV meant actually being able to get the shows we wanted to watch. (For those reading this who're below a certain age, yes, there was a time when DVDs didn't exist and the internet didn't actually contain video. Shocking, I know.) It was a deal-breaker back when we were shopping for houses, and it very nearly did break the deal when our idiot realtor turned out to be unable to tell a cable line from a phone line.

But in recent years, we've been using our cable less and less. Between pre-emptions, schedule changes, and random outages, it got to the point where it was easier to wait for the DVDs than to try to keep up with a show on first run. (The final straw was probably Agents of SHIELD, where our cable was out, or half out, more often than not. I particularly liked the entire episode that came with no sound.) Add in the number of shows that are increasingly only available on streaming, and the ever-increasing price (percentage-wise, our cable has gone up more than any other utility since we've lived here), and even we finally decided that it just isn't worth the cost of cable to be able to veg at HGTV or the Food Network once every few weeks. We'd been meaning to cancel it for some while, but every time I psyched up to make the call, our internet flaked and I ended up calling about that instead.

I'll spare us all the rant about our last bill, and the many hours I spent on hold getting the charges that should never have been there removed. Suffice to say, by the time I'd fought through that, I was highly motivated to stop giving the company any more money than we absolutely had to. They're also our internet provider, so telling them to fsck off completely is sadly not an option. But I cancelled the cable, and the next day we went out and bought our own router/modem so we could send back their overpriced internet equipment, too. (Also something that's been on the to-do list for quite a while.)

This weekend, we got behind the entertainment center and disconnected all the stuff that we now no longer need. That was actually more traumatic than cancelling the service. Gone is the four-way splitter-booster, and all the coax leading to our various recording devices; they're strictly playback machines now, as we no longer have a signal they can accept. Gone is the cabling diagram that I was tempted to print out in color and frame, it was such a work of media-geek art. We still have the five-way switchbox and the RF modulator, of course ("RF modulator" is to be pronounced in a Marvin the Martian voice, always), and I left the "video stablilizer" (i.e. copy-protect descrambler) in sequence, because it's not hurting anything and taking it out might have been more trauma than I could handle in one go. It's not like we don't have video; I've long said that if civilization collapsed tomorrow but the power grid stayed up, we'd have enough stuff on VHS and DVD to watch for the rest of our lives. But not being able to flip on the TV and channel-surf is a heckuva change, even if we weren't actually doing it much of late.

At some point we will hook up the new TV, and there will probably be a streaming service or two. But for now, we are somehow soldiering on with only the massive video collection and the occasional thing on YouTube.