shesingsnow: (Default)
2025-03-01 04:07 pm

Game Night

It's 4:07pm and we're in the last prep for the Dungeons & Dragons game tonight. We started this game in roughly late 2020. Ragnarok hit in approximately the year 1050CE, and we adventurers took on the task of restoring the moon and restoring the sun. Tonight, we're finally going to do the ceremony to restore the sun. In a few sessions, we will transition to a new game and new characters. These Saturday nights have been a blast.

On vacation next week. Staying home to putter about the house. That's the most important thing - wander about the house, play with the kittens, take some serious quiet time. I do want to solve my problem of "too much clothing, too little space", but I can parse that out. I haven't made too many plans other than an appointment for the furry critters on Monday. And on Thursday we have a Free at Last Players show in the morning. I need to spend a lot of time letting the back brain think. Plus I have homework, so that's plenty.

I don't like work politics. I don't really get all of the subtleties, especially when people are hiding their cards. But my intuition is generally good. There are people I can mostly trust and people I can mostly not trust. Then there are people I can trust to always be consistent, which is a different form of trustworthiness.

Off to it, then.
shesingsnow: (Anna Downton Abbey)
2025-02-23 04:15 pm

February

I've wanted to write for a bit. Finally made it back here today. I guess I'm gunshy about today's crazy climate. Do I take my journals down? But these have been a part of my life for many years. Maybe not today. Today I paid for another year of Dreamwidth.

It's about 4:20pm. At 5pm is a Dungeons & Dragons game. John ran a game for 12 years. We switched to Zoom during the pandemic and then added friends in Indiana and Missouri, so we had to stay in Zoom. When that long-duration game ended, we started a new game. This is that new game, which has been running for a couple of years now. It's every other Sunday. Right now I'm feeling a bit stressed because the weekend was too tightly packed with stuff and now I have this game when I'd rather be preparing for the week. But - I told myself that one of my themes for the year was "play". So I am doing that. I get a lot of fun out of work, but I really need to get a lot of fun out of not-work.

We also have an in-person Dungeons & Dragons game that runs every other Saturday, on different weekends from the Sunday game (because I told John absolutely not in the same weekend).

I only have forty minutes before tonight's game, so I am going to post this and head off. I have groceries waiting on the deck and I've got to take some curtains down to get them into the washer. There are new tiny kittens with accidents that have hit the bottom of the curtains.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2024-03-18 11:26 am

Myriad Thoughts

I took the day off from work because I'm recovering from an asthma thing that happened Saturday night. I finally go up out of bed at 11:30am, but I might go back to sleep soon.

It's partly sunny outside: beautiful.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2023-03-15 07:27 am

Figuring me out

I have this vision of myself as a person who cooks. Pancakes on Sundays; dried beans come to life; roast chicken in the oven and fresh cookies always on the counter. Much of this vision comes from years of the Food network and various forms of social media that tell me this is who I should be. Plus, I'm a fairly grounded Taurus who loves this idea of the farmhouse with kitchen garden.

Toward that end, I have a well-stocked kitchen. Appliances of all sorts, stopping just short of a pizza oven. Staples of all sorts: a variety of lentils, rices, dried peas, flours, sugars, herbs, and spices. Pots, pans, etc. Many cookbooks, because I love to read cookbooks. (I recently gave away ~20 cookbooks and that hardly made a dent.)

The kitchen is overflowing. There's not enough room. It's the kitchen of the person I think I should be.

The thing is, while I do cook every now and again, I mostly don't cook. I mostly work and read. My life is full, but it's not full of cooking. My life doesn't resemble Mark Bittman's, in which I come home and "relax by cooking". On Saturday mornings, I relax by loading up a spreadsheet. John and I - with low community transmission - go out to eat. I certainly do not have a garden.

It occurred to me last night: do I need a kitchen full of staples? Am I really ever going to make homemade pizza? Am I going to be a person who makes bread? Will I really stop buying canned beans?

Note that I live in New England, where weather could keep me trapped at home. (But somehow, that has never gotten me to use my collection of staples. Instead, I stock up with new groceries against the weather.)

If I separate the Food Network/Farmhouse version of myself from the real version of myself, it's likely that I could pare down a lot. That scares me, though - scarcity thinking, I think. It's always smart to plan against a rainy day. But my kitchen makes me feel guilty.

First world problems. I am incredibly lucky.

Anyway, the bigger picture is: how many of my perceptions about who I should be are formed from external influences? What am I doing because the world tells me I should be doing it?
shesingsnow: (Default)
2023-02-22 07:02 am

The Oodie

Got myself an Oodie, which is basically a hoodie-dress with the weight and construction of a fleece blanket. It's great to wear when you're not moving, way too heavy to walk around in.

The Oodie is very warm, so much so that I haven't used it much as it's been a winter on the warm side.

However, I'm wearing it now as the morning's a bit brisk and I wanted to sit at my computer and not freeze. I've reached the point in the winter where I'm well and truly sick of being cold. I've been back here in CT since late 2007, but I haven't overcome my Florida-based aversion to heavy clothing. So while I have plenty of sweaters that fit perfectly well, I tend not to put them on because I prefer not to. But then I stay a permanent level of cold all day, which is not useful.

I suspect that next winter we will not get as lucky as we did this year, so I ordered a second Oodie. The first Oodie has big cartoon-type Taurus symbols all over it; this next Oodie has pizza slices all over it, which I thought was pretty funny.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2023-01-02 03:04 pm

Calm

Strange to say it, but yesterday I noted an internal sense of calm. Two weeks of vacation has done wonders for my mental state.

I got an email from work today and my innards didn't immediately erupt into nausea. That's a great sign.

I did have an intense dream this morning in which two houses in my charge were both badly infested with roaches, due to my neglect of the problem. This is either related to stress or to my realization, upon coming home yesterday, that my house mouse problem is worse than I had realized. In my dream, I did deal with the problems, but it was quite difficult and disgusting. The bottom line, however, is that I need to get my act together with respect to this house - more than then topical work I've been doing.

Toward that end, the dishwasher is running.

Post-vacation, the two thoughts in my head are:

1) I must create. #2022repeat
2) Discipline means freedom. #stoicism

For the second, I am tired of two things:

- Mount Clothing in the bedroom (aka the four foot pile of clothing on my bureau)
- The Mad Scrambles to neaten up the house before guests arrive (as in, clear off the dining room table, make it so that the kitchen isn't a near-total disaster, throw out all of the garbage, etc.)

I don't want perfect, but I'm tired of Mount Clothing & Mad Scrambles. Acknowledge: these are first world problems.

Mount Clothing
So, last week I sifted through the closet and brought out a bunch of clothing to either to go upstairs (to wait for warm weather) or get tossed (old and worn, etc.). That made enough room for me to deconstruct Mount Clothing and I have now managed to keep clothes off of the bureau for almost a week.

Mad Scrambles
Mad Scrambles are tougher.

One key element is that I have (once again) accumulated a massive overabundance of Tupperware, despite giving it away at holidays & birthdays. I need to cull.

I have a slight logistical problem. If I throw out a worn Tupperware bowl, I want to also throw out the matching seal. So until I find the matching seal, I keep the bowl. I don't want to end up with a bunch of seals-without-bowls. So it is taking longer to cull than it would if I simply tossed everything.

Another element is that I don't have enough room in my kitchen for staples-that-I-rarely-cook (e.g. rice, lentils, beans, millet, oats, etc.) and all of the other food I buy to avoid cooking the staples. I have room for an array of small appliances (e.g. rice cooker, Instant Pot, Air Fryer, Crock Pot, Vita Mix, etc.) because of a shelving unit acquired in 2021, but the shelving unit is stuffed with grocery items, which makes it hard to get to the small appliances.

My kitchen island is covered in a great pile of grocery items. I have four bags of groceries that I can't put away because I have nowhere to put them.

My dining room table has still more grocery items.

During Mad Scrambles, things get put into bags, which end up piled in my bedroom and on one of the living room couches.

Again, REALLY TIRED of Mad Scrambles, because they always result in more mad scrambling and clearing off of the bed to sleep.

No, I'm not a hoarder.

The kitchen has very little storage. The primary storage for this kitchen (as designed in the 1960s) was an 8-foot countertop-height cabinet which my parents removed and took with them when we moved to Glastonbury. That left this kitchen with very little storage space, so I am struggling to keep a well-stocked kitchen that's not covering every surface.

Bonus, I dislike doing dishes, so the disarray compounds during weeks when I don't fill the dishwasher.

I do like to cook, but it's an uphill battle when the kitchen is in disarray.

Long story short: discipline in the kitchen will go a long way toward freedom from mad scrambles.

Back to it, then.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2022-03-20 07:27 pm

Writer's Almanac

Pain Management
by James Silas Rogers

One day, in your forties or fifties,
you will start to think that life is turning
into a long string of small extinctions.
You will feel the word gone rise inside you
and might even say it aloud, quietly, the way
you would say it if the house had been robbed
and, months later, you reached for an item
you never knew was missing, thought had been
in a drawer the whole time: Gone. Add these
to the workaday wrong turns you half-knew
were coming from the start-you know: the shy
girl with trusting eyes with whom
you did not sleep, the dad who let you down—
and you will begin to think that if you started
crying now, you might never be able to stop.
But that doesn't happen.
What happens instead is you make a cup of tea.

You sit on the front porch, and there you look
at spindly asters on a September afternoon:
flowers with ragged edges that are barely petals,
a color from somewhere down the spectrum
after blue-the same blue of cold skies
in early winter. And behind them,
the deep green of bloomless morning glories.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2022-03-01 07:36 am

Test Post via Email

Let's see if this works!

[image: lewy-body-dementia-2965713_1920.jpg]

shesingsnow: (Default)
2022-01-30 07:28 pm

Instant Pot

I bought an Instant Pot Pro on 12/31. Finally unpacked it and put it on the kitchen shelving.

Tonight, I'm trying it for the first time. The first thing they say to do is a water-boiling test. I'm scared out of my gourd that it's going to explode.

EDIT:
It did not explode!

I moved on from water to pasta. This thing is pretty cool. I found myself plagued by a kind of suburban guilt that I just got another device which pulls from the electrical grid and effectively supports climate degradation. On the other hand, if it ups the probability that I will make dinner, this new appliance will be very helpful in my life.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2022-01-24 06:32 am

Monday morning coffee

The siren call of work is very strong this morning, but I am stopping for a moment to ground myself by writing for a few minutes, before I dive in.

I love blankets. I have lots of lap blankets, although I am not organized enough to use them effectively. The critters sleep on them quite a bit, because I have a few folded up on the backs of the couches. Some lap blankets were gifts and I feel either awkward/resentful or ambivalent about those particular blankets, but not so much that I find new homes for them. Frequently, because I want to keep the blankets I love in good shape, I end up using the blankets that I'm not crazy about or that bring up bad memories.

A childhood friend posted a handmade granny-square afghan on my town's free-for-the-taking site last night. She selected me as the giftee. I think it's a great sign that I shift to using blankets I love rather than blankets that make me feel either bad or empty. (I really didn't need it, but I wanted it!) Marie Kondo to the rescue!

Off to work, then!
shesingsnow: (Default)
2022-01-12 07:23 am

The 2022 Reading Year

Last year I set a goal of reading 50 books and I ended up reading 51.

Fifteen of the 51 were book summaries from Blinkist, all of them non-fiction business-type books. I count these because those types of books contain a lot of filler and the Blinks boil it down. I decided that I wasn't going to keep paying for Blinkist this year, although I'm still mulling over it because it's a decent source of mass business non-fiction. The cost of Blinkist for a year ($99) is certainly less than the cost of all of those books, but it is unlikely I would have bought all of those books, so I don't know as it's really a savings. Blinkist has the ability to send to my Kindle but I'm not crazy about clogging up the Kindle (it has enough on it for me to sort through), so I end up reading the Blinks via the app or on my computer.

However, I did some quick searching and SparkNotes is a now-free service that has a host of book summaries for classical-type mostly-Western literature, from Shakespeare to Gatsby and back. This morning I read a summary of Coriolanus - the plot architecture in two forms (list and paragraph) and the analysis. I've decided I'm going to count reading from SparkNotes, for this year. I don't have time in my life to read all of the books/plays I want to read, but I would like to revisit Shakepeare's plays and have a passing familiarity with a lot more "literature" than I currently do. The Crucible is a great example of a play I'd love to read but for which I will probably not make the time. Canterbury Tales is a great example of a book in that same vein - I should have stayed in the medieval English literature class in high school and I'd have read it.

I worked until 6pm last night. I'm suddenly in a new thing where I get called into 5pm meetings. My ego is happy for the attention and this bothers me, because my ego gets VERY UNHAPPY when I do not get such attention. NYAH.

Off to it, then.
shesingsnow: (Coffee Cup)
2022-01-10 06:35 am

Coffee & Tea

Back in 2016 and 2017, I developed a good habit of drinking herbal tea for most of the day, rather than 7-8 cups of coffee. Key to this was skullcap tea for its calming effects and raspberry leaf tea, which seems to mitigate the effects of the new ways my body creates hardcore depression-level emotions after the ovarian cyst surgery.

My tea drinking dropped off when I got the new job in 2018 - I tried to continue for a while but it was much harder to maintain in the new office. The cafe had coffee, so I went back to the all coffee all day channel.

Come pandemic2020 and working from home, I haven't done much better with the much easier access to the coffeemaker. I eventually got a hot/cold water dispenser to help encourage me to drink more tea. I bought fancy tea, boxed tea, tea accessories, and even a special tea mug, but I haven't really gotten it together.

Last night I turned a corner. I could feel it within. Something about this year is new - and the feeling hasn't faded. Last night, during the D&D game, I started making tea. I rediscovered the special tea mug yesterday afternoon, although I don't know what I did with the cover, and brought it out during the game. I went and dug through a bag in the bedroom where my Tay Tea stash was and brought the tea out. I drank four cups of tea last night. It was somehow easier than it has been.

Notably, the artisanal tea was leagues better than the boxed tea, with the exception of the one boxed tea I really like - "Stress Ease" from Traditional Medicinals. The Tulsi tea from Organic India wasn't that great. The other two cups were a Tuk Tuk Chai and Soder tea (a black+fruit tea) from Tay Tea. I put milk in the chai. I put two packets of stevia into each of the cups.

I might have two cups of coffee this morning, but then I'm switching to tea. I actually feel as if I will continue this time. There is something much easier about working on the same floor as the kitchen.

Off to it, then.
shesingsnow: (Snow Whiteness)
2022-01-05 06:54 am

Snow is Coming

Snow is coming, or so the internet bots tell me - both in twenty minutes and in two days.

I have been not-avoiding this week. Set up an appt with the eye doctor. Called the old APRN to see if she would take me back (she took care of my mother and currently takes care of my father, so maybe).

Called the tree people. It'll cost $1000 to take down the beautiful-but-dead tree at the base of my driveway. It's very, very tall, (>=~50 feet)and old Christmas tree planted in the early 80s. Every storm brings down more branches, and while the tree looks fairly sturdy, I don't know how dead it is inside. It is sad, but it is time. I wish this were a forest and I could let it live out its life.

I (mostly) kept with my work intent yesterday: crafting more creator/connector roles into my job. I realized that it's getting more fun now, with my team, as they learn more. There were the usual emergencies, but either I'm less stressed after vacation or I've come to expect urgent requests.

Notably, I did work until 7pm to finish an urgent tasker. I felt important, but that's not how I want to spend my days.

So far, keeping with the cooking streak. It's a good thing I had planned "heat up pierogis" for dinner last night and that the pan was clean, or I was at risk of ordering delivery.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2022-01-04 07:48 am
Entry tags:

Begin again, the story of your life

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life. - Jane Hirshfield

Hardly slept last night - insomnia has been a thing these past few nights. John left at 6:30am. I put some steel cut oats into the rice maker and went back to bed for an hour.

I told John last night that I don't want to let work and school make me forget my own life. I don't really believe in work/life balance, but I do believe in work/life alignment. If I am a creator/writer/teacher/connector, I need to do those things.

I'll get into it as soon as I turn on the work computer - I'll find my way this morning. But I really want to remind myself that I get to hit the reset button and run my day as I want it to be run. I want to foster independence on my team. I want to stay in proactive mode rather than allow myself to shift to the reactive pulled-in-every-direction mode. I already have an emergency meeting on my calendar this morning, but my job is to take care of those emergencies and ask the team to take care of the rest.

I told John last night that I want the team to take the training wheels off, but I'm having difficulty letting go of the handlebars on their bikes. I must let go much further past where my comfort level is, such that I can get back to myself.

I almost took the coffee cup directly to my work table, but I stopped and headed here to the "home" computer instead. I needed to set my intent for the day. So I have.

Off to it.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2022-01-02 04:54 pm

Don't Eat the Potpourri

In 1988, my family rented a house on Capitol Island in Maine, just outside of Boothbay Harbor. It was a lovely setting in a house that reeked of three floors of mildew. My mother kept a pot of orange peels, cinnamon sticks, and cloves simmering for two weeks.

Last night, we hosted a Dungeons & Dragons game. Food delivery wasn't available because it was New Year's Day, so I made a chili, cornbread, and rice. Tortilla chips were offered on the side. Crockpot with the chili was on the stove, next to a small saucepan with a Maine-style concoction.

My dear, beloved man, the Dungeon Master, served himself a bowl of chili with a healthy helping of potpourri on top of it.

I took a side glance at his bowl and thought "gosh, those tortilla chips sure puffed up." I took a second glance. And a third. Then my body curled in on itself in revulsion when I realized what he'd done. I'd even brushed a tiny bit of mold off of this particular orange, before I peeled it.

He'd gamely eaten one cinnamon-laden orange peel and accepted that parts of the meal must simply taste awful.
shesingsnow: (Tara Fateful Hour)
2022-01-02 03:21 pm

Twenty Years, this journal

At the end of this year, I'll capture this line and attempt to draw meaning from it - this line starts the theme for the twentieth year of this journal.

Last year's theme was clearly "Work". I didn't actually set a theme - it simply happened upon me. This year end I was lucky on two counts: I had two weeks of vacation at the end of the year, and I didn't get assigned a massive year-long objective that I had to plan for during the break. (I got assigned something, to be sure, but it didn't require my working on it during the break.)

This year, I'm choosing a theme: Create.

But I didn't create anything new this year, other than some good PowerPoint slides at work and a new scarf that I crocheted to give away as a Christmas gift.

I am sufficiently freaked that my mother started to decline at age 52, and I am age 51 and a half. In other words, now or never, even if "now" means by the inch. That's how you grow a garden, according to the song.

I've long used it to pour out every bit of angst/struggle, such that I might release it. I've had good reason to need an outlet. But sometimes the outlet has been a reason for the angst/struggle to exist, which was never the intention. It's kinda like setting a metric and then the behavior changes to meet the metric.

I want to shift this journal to containing things I want to remember, starting today. I might not always succeed, but it's a good intent for the third decade here. I think it complements the drive I'm feeling to create for this world.

Off to it, then.
shesingsnow: (Coffee Cup)
2021-07-27 06:54 am

Tuesday morning coffee

The smoke from the fires out west has reached us here in New England. Sunday night I was catching the faint scent of smoke in my bedroom; yesterday I couldn't seem to clear my throat. My house is something of a sieve at certain spots. Yesterday the haze was quite intense - it was as if a fog had come across the lake.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2021-01-11 06:23 am

TouchNote

Last year, perhaps Sept or so, I bought a year's subscription to a service called TouchNote. I can easily send a postcard from their app. I can upload photos from my phone or use their library of images and artwork. It was $120 for six postcards per month. It's actually 6 credits per month and postcards use one credit. You can upgrade to greeting cards for a count of two credits, but to me this loses value.

I sent a thank you postcard to my brother and his girlfriend. Accidentally sent it to my own address. This had the benefit of me being able to see it. It came on what seems as if it's laminated paper, although perhaps it's just super-glossy heavy cardstock. The postcard is of a very nice quality, but I can't help but feeling that the lack of a handwritten note loses something of the specialness of the intent. It rather feels as if it's one of those advertisements from Stanley Steemer that comes on the same type of paper.

I'm glad that I subscribed, because I can take a spare few minutes at any point and send out a card. But I'm not sure I will subscribe again next year. I should get my act together and start mailing actual cards instead. That said, I really like being able to send customized cards so easily. A simple upload of the latest photo of Henry or Alice and it's done. That's pretty nice.
shesingsnow: (Dowager Downton Abbey)
2020-11-07 04:18 pm

Today

Today. President-Elect Joe Biden.

And more importantly, Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris.

Today is a good day.
shesingsnow: (Default)
2020-09-05 03:09 pm

The Book of Camp Branch

How much delight I've known
in navigating down the flow
by stepping stones, by sounding
stones, by words that are
stepping and sounding stones.

Going down stone by stone,
the song of the water changes,
changing the way I walk
which change my thought
as I go. Stone to stone
the stream flows. Stone to stone
the walker goes. The words
stand stone still until
the flow moves them, changing
the sound - a new word -
a new place to step or stand.

~ Wendell Berry ~