The Cantina Staring Back At You From The Abyss

[Brightdreamer]

Seems worth a shot, at any rate... (If nothing else, there's catharsis in writing characters "based on" certain real-life inspirations and having completely random and totally fictitious bad things happen to them... like, say, someone who happens to be an inconsiderate neighbor to a totally different person than you, who runs into a random pack of velociraptor ninjas with machetes...)

Mergh... Sunday afternoon, and it is officially One Of Those Days, where lots of little things seem intent on going wrong. I suppose this is payback for having a somewhat decent shopping trip. (The store even messed up and had Mountain Dew Zero six-packs on the shelf... I haven't found that stuff in months...) But the moment we got home, it's all gone to stress and heck, and everyone's all yelly.

Oh, and the idiots who did Dad's blood draw last week put a stupid tight bandage on. Dad being Dad (having dementia and all that), he didn't mention the bandage was still on. Today's bath day, and we just found out that he has a nice infection under that damned bandage...

So, Mom is Very, Very Hacked Off right now.

In any event, I decided to not go out to the workshed today, because this is the kind of day where one makes a Very Stupid Mistake because of all the stress in the air - and, in Apoxie, you don't get a lot of second chances on Very Stupid Mistakes.

--

Later the same Sunday, and the day has continued to be daylike, on into evening. (Some kerfluffles involving paying the bills and needing to order checks and a hundred little things that needed doing all at once and involved more yelling...)

On the plus size, the turkey we had for dinner was pretty good, and there's enough left over for open-faced turkey sandwiches for dinner tomorrow. Any dinner that results in two meals is always a win, says the person who gets mighty sick of being stuck making dinners almost every frellin' night...

Now, off to attempt a post-mortem on my NaNo story. Then maybe I'll stream something, or just climb into bed and read the night away, because it's the kind of day that encourages one to climb into bed and hide from it until it gives up and goes away.

--

And it's Monday morning. The rest of the family is off dealing with more appointment stuff (blood draws) and shopping, so I'm holding down the fort and keeping an ear on the phone, Just In Case.

Today's plan is the usual. Also might look into getting a booster appointment; Pfizer isn't nearly as urgent as J&J (Mom forwarded me the chart her doctor showed her on dropping immunities... dear gods, looks like J&J always should've been two shots), so I don't think it's worth fighting for a walk-in spot this week or anything, but I still would like a booster to be on the safe(r) side of things...

 

[MaeZe]

Yay for reaching 50K NaNo words, Brightdreamer! Hope you get all those boosters sorted out.

So far the afib went away and hasn't come back even though I haven't lost any actual weight. I did lose several pounds of fluid after taking a lasix and that seems to have stayed away.

Yesterday I mowed the backyard, half grass, half leaves. Wow, so much easier to mow leaves than to rake them! I forced myself to finish when I was tempted to stop before the deepest piles of leaves. Now I'm really glad I did. That should be the last mow until spring.

I begged out of Thanksgiving dinner at the in-laws. Too risky with delta everywhere and there will be ten people or so there. My son is still going and that's fine. If he or his wife gets it, they'll do fine. They are younger and healthier and vaccinated.

He's invited me over to their place on Friday for a vegan dinner that actually sounds good: lasagna with some kind of cashew sauce. My son is a better cook than I am.

Happy Thanksgiving to all you folks in the US.

 

[Brightdreamer]

Hooray for absent a-fibs and lost liquid!

When we had a working mower, we just used the mulching blade on fallen leaves on the lawn. Puts it back into the ground where it belongs anyway. These days, I just use the weed whacker, and this time of year it's not worth our while. (And most of our front lawn is moss anymore anyway...)

And it's Monday evening. Kept feeling like today was Tuesday, dang it; yesterday's shopping trip threw me off, as I'm used to shopping on a Monday or Tuesday, not a Sunday. (And I might have to hit a store on the way home on Wednesday... sooo not gonna be fun, the day before Turkey Day.) We polished off the turkey carcass with open face sandwiches. A two-meal bird is an ideal bird. And I just did a quick transcription thing, so that's a little more money, which always helps, especially at this time of year...

 

[MaeZe]

My front yard is mostly moss too. One's feet just sink deeper and deeper as winter rolls in. Not much to mow there until spring when I set the mower on it and hack the moss back down to size.

Yum, turkey sandwiches. I'm debating cooking a turkey breast just to make sandwiches out of it.

 

[E.F.B.]

Final chapter got tightened! I am now taking a little break for allll the Thanksgiving and Etsy Black Friday prep. I scheduled so many social posts this morning my eyes were almost ded. Tomorrow is food shopping day.

ION: As of Monday, mom has started getting physical therapy for her Bell's Palsy. On the way to the appointment, she said she feels there is a smidgen of improvement in her facial drooping, namely that she feels her eyebrow isn't practically laying on her eyelid anymore, and she feels a certain wrinkle of skin is getting less deep. The PT agreed that, based on the way mom's doctor described where mom was with the drooping on the day of her ear surgery, it does seem there has been some improvement. PT was very optimistic that they can help continue and speed up the improvement. She even felt that mom may see significant improvement in a month's time. Here's hoping!

 

[CMBright]

It seems I have a bit of an infection in my jaw. Ouchie and of course, the 10yo has uncanny aim at unintentionally hitting just the right spot to make me yelp. If it was intentional, the kid wouldn't be so distressed when I yelp.

 

[Brightdreamer]

Hooray for finished chapters and PT progression!

Boo for jaw infections!

Tuesday evening, and getting stuff together for my lone day of work this week (I took Friday off because we're never catching up anyway so to heck with it). Also need to get another audiobook on standby, as I finished off the one I'd been listening to. (The Tiger and the Wolf, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Had enough left when I left work Friday to last through part of another workday, but wound up clearing it over my days off while doing work shed stuff. I call good not great; interesting Bronze Age/prehistoric world and a nice take on shapeshifters. Incidentally, if anyone's looking for a great, imaginative alt-history fantasy, P. Djeli Clark's A Master of Djinn is very highly recommended. 1912 Cairo in a world where djinn and other magical beings have returned to the world; steampunkish tech and some great culture clash/melding, plus wonderful characters.)

--

And it's Wednesday morning, before work. I don't wanna go... am tired, cruddy sleep, irritating dreams. Someone else want to go in my place? Nobody pays attention to me; they'd never know...

Nobody?

Sigh...

 

[HWigton]

Alas, it's too late to take you up on your offer, @Brightdreamer , or I would've gladly taken your place.
You'd have to take mine, though, which involved stupidly deciding to do a dozen mini pies for tomorrow instead of the one big simple one (why, for the love of all things holy, did I do that to myself) , fixing a cabinet door that I tried to rip off its hinges in a fit of, uh, let's just say...frustration...while talking to my elderly mother who watches waaaay too much F*X news, then and running a deer poacher off our land. I'm not sure who was more scared, the poacher, or the hubby, during that incident.
Sweet Jeebuz, I'm so tired.
Thank goodness the festivities tomorrow are limited to the immediate household, I just don't have the patience for BS I used to!
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, hope you have a good one!

 

[Brightdreamer]

I'm sure the cabinet started it...

And it's later on Wednesday. We got out of work half an hour early because management's given up on us finishing, too.

Dinner was leftover night, which is nice, because I don't have to cook anything.

And I think I'm going to polish off S4 of The Expanse in my (re-re-re-)rewatch binge (still cautiously optimistic about finishing S5 before S6 begins on December 10), then find something else to do with my evening. Part of me wants to give that Arcane show on Netflix a try, another part thinks I should hold off until after I've caught back up on Expanse... mergh. Too many good shows out there right now.

Oh - and I seem to have misplaced my cash wallet some time in the past couple days. Reasonably sure it made it home from the store, but it's not in my purse where it normally lives.

Dang it.

(Could be worse - it's not the wallet with my ID and cards and stuff. But, still, it had my spending cash in it, which sucks.)

 

[HWigton]

Oh, the cabinet definitely has a (wood) chip on it's shoulder for me, for sure.

I'm undecided about the Expanse series. I tried to read the first book in the series, and quite honestly couldn't make it past the first chapter, which is rare for me, so I put it down to give it another try in a few months to see if it was just the headspace I was in at the time. I just couldn't click with his voice, and the MC annoyed me almost from page one. Have you read them, and how do they compare to the show?

As for the show; I'll forgive almost anything if they have sexy space ships; does it have lots of sexy space ships?? Can't get enough of those micro meteor-scarred hulls lol

Hope you find your cash wallet, but the bright side is no wrestling or wrangling with the DMV or credit card companies on a holiday week, so it's a little tarnished, but there's certainly a silver lining.

 

[Brightdreamer]

The books are reasonably close to the show... and, yeah, the books clunk a bit, especially the early ones, but they're still solid SF once they get going. The writers of the book - Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, "James S. A. Corey" - are on staff and were full partners in the TV adaptation; there are variances, and TBH I like what has been changed, but the core plot and themes are true to the book, and it generally sticks as close to real-world physics as possible. (The main handwave is some sound in space, because TV's a visual medium and you need a little sound now and again. But no magic artificial gravity, no FTL, no instantaneous comms from one end of the system to the other, and no explosive decompression of human bodies, which is a trope that's been so ingrained that people still fight the creators on that. This is space as a hostile, hardscrabble frontier, and humans as our usual tribal-leaning selves.) I consider the pilot actually the weakest ep, but it establishes the tone. My suggestion, if you try the show: watch four episodes, as it takes a while for things to come together and the core crew to cohese. If the Battle of the Donnager in the fourth ep doesn't set the hook, then it's probably not going to be your thing. (I actually watched S1 before starting the books; S1 covers about half of the first book.)

And, yes, there are ships. Heavy Martian warships, clean Earther ships, rough Belter mine ships... A clip from the pilot: aging ice hauler Canterbury "flip and burn"

And a beautiful shot from S5, transport arrival on Luna

 

[Friendly Frog]

Hm, after I finished my Pratchett re-read, I might have to nick my dad's Expanse copy for a while and give it a closer look.

I do love me a good space ship as well.

 

[Brightdreamer]

Yesss, join me in Expanse fandom... As a bonus, the final book in the nine-book series drops in five days, so it'll be complete by the time you finish (save one novella, dropping with the print novella collection Memory's Legion in March; for now, the novellas are ebooks. Recommended but not necessarily required reading... though I still contend that the novella Strange Dogs works fairly well as a standalone, the story of a human girl being raised by the first generation of interstellar human colonists, struggling to reconcile her parent's culture and her school lessons - rooted in Earth and the Solar system, which she has no recollection of - with the alien world around her, where the same rules don't apply...)

And it's Thursday morning, American Turkey Day (a.k.a Thanksgiving). Getting various stuff together for the trek to the relatives for our little get-together. (Everyone's vaccinated, and there are only seven of us, so it's as safe as it's gonna get.) Debating whether taking earplugs would be considered an insult; the aunt's husband blares the TV and the radio, and tends to yell a lot (not just because he's become a bit hard of hearing, though he won't admit it), and crawling out to the car to get away from the noise is apparently considered "antisocial"... Really, nobody talks to me, nobody listens even if I do talk, and I just want to hide in a danged book or something so it's not a total waste of time... Mergh.

 

[MaeZe]

HAPPY AMERICAN THANKSGIVING!!



(Weird, you get a different turkey when you cut and paste instead of copying it straight from the emoticon page.)

(Even more weird. You get the regular one when you post the page.)

 

[HWigton]

Thanks @Brightdreamer for the sneak peaks, oooooh yeah, those are some nice hunks of metal
I ought to give the show a go this weekend, reading is such an intimate thing for me that if a book rubs me the wrong way I have to put a substantial buffer of time in there before I can even look at it again, but I feel I'm missing out on a whole lot of good stuff by not experiencing the story at all, in any form. Plus, I'm a SF writer, so in the spirit of keeping current, it's something I really ought to embrace, if for nothing else but to see what's selling right now. Yeah, it might not be pertinent once my stuff is back into sub circulation (I'm taking a mental health break from that at the moment), but anything that makes a splash in SF seems to reverberate down the line, if not in content, then in tone.

Meanwhile...

Happy Feasting Day to all and sundry; may your pants be stretchy, the humans small and large quietly enjoyable, and the pie abundant!

 

[Brightdreamer]

Thursday, early evening, and finally back home. Turkey Day went okay. Way too much time was spent/wasted helping a technophobe relative set up their new cell phone. And the drive home - in the dark, in the rain, on roads where the lines were essentially nonexistent - was Very Not Fun.

But we have leftovers to munch on later, and I'm off tomorrow, so that's good.

 

[E.F.B.]

Morning, Cantina! I hope everyone who celebrated had a good Thanksgiving, and everyone who didn't celebrate had a good Thursday. We had a nice, at home celebration, just me, my parents, and the dogs, as usual. I took advantage of a couple of online sales to get some dresses and some books, and got my own Etsy sale up and running.

Today is Mom's birthday, so there will be cake this evening. Otherwise, I'm just going to be getting generalized Stuff and Things done today.

 

[Brightdreamer]

Hooray for maternal birthdays!

*throws celebratory confetti at computer screen*

Friday, and had myself a nice, long, legitimate snooze-in. So glad I took today off... The plan is to get back to work on site stuff and ornaments, and hopefully come up with any new place that that danged cash wallet may be hiding. I keep thinking it made it home, dang it... I don't know that, but I keep thinking it.

Mergh...

--

Friday afternoon, still no sign of the AWOL cash wallet, starting to suspect it's not here after all... dang it.

And I just checked my work e-mail on a whim and noticed my shift had been changed next week, so I'm working Tuesday, then Thursday and Friday, instead of the usual Wednesday through Friday.

I would normally not show up on Tuesday.

Nobody said anything. Nobody e-mailed.

If I hadn't checked on my day off, I wouldn't have known. I would have shown up on Wednesday when I wasn't supposed to be there.

Words are a thing, management...

 

[Friendly Frog]

I don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but I have to thank you Americans for it because the last few years webshops here also do Black Friday Sales and it's mad, but the savings are often better than during our own actual sales periods. Just netted me a few Christmas gifts that will well received, I'm thinking. Got myself a few ebooks, because why not...

 

[Brightdreamer]

Exporting mindless consumerism is what we do best...

Friday evening, and my favorite MP3 player may be dead, because the week couldn't be content with stealing my frellin' cash. (I have a backup one, but... seriously, week? You had to do that?)

Today was mostly a flop day, save more ornament work. Just have to do the final Apoxie retouching, I think, then I ought to be good to go for priming and painting. I suppose I ought to stop putting off figuring out what the heck my color schemes are gonna be, huh?

So sue me - I'm not the most organized person on the planet...

Also picked up a few Rifftrax titles with their latest sale, because they make me laugh. That's about the sum total of today's productivity.

Anyway, trying to decide if I want to watch something tonight or do a little spitballing then crawl into bed to read; have to clear my current read by the 30th, when the ninth and final Expanse novel is due to arrive and one heck of a ride will come to an end (in print, at least; got one last season of the show, six episodes, still to go. And one more novella in March.) In theory, should be doable; current read is an MG title, and those usually go fairly fast. Especially if I, you know, actually sit down and read the thing...

 

[Friendly Frog]

Well, I try to go for ... considered consumerism? But finding a gift that will be well received makes me rediculously pleased with myself. I was always well provided for as a child and I like to spread that happiness around.

But it's not always easy since two halves of the family have wildly diverse cultures of giftgiving. One side usually pools for one larger gift each and the other side revels in lots of small but asked-for or considered gifts. Coordinating around gift giving holidays takes patience.

 

[E.F.B.]

Nothing wrong with saving some money when you can. For every mindless consumer, there's a mindful one who's been waiting a long time to get something they want or even need at a price that won't break the bank. And a heartfelt gift can make a big difference in someone's sucky year. A friend sent me some surprise books right around this time last year, and that simple act of unlooked-for kindness has been such a light during this difficult year with mom's health struggles as even the messages inside those books' stories have been an encouragement as I got around to reading them throughout the year.

Seemed mom had a pretty good birthday yesterday. She didn't want any gifts this year, but she enjoyed her cake and we got to Skype with family in the evening. I got the Stuff and Things done that needed doing and will get more done today.

 

[Brightdreamer]

Saturday morning, gray outside with a promise of rain ahead. Another snooze-in (broken up by taking the trash down to the end of the lane at too-dark-o'clock), and the shopping trip I thought would eat today has been pushed to tomorrow to coincide with (probable) prescription refill pickups. So I have today to do random things that need doing. Going to start with the weekly room tidying, then maybe some site stuff. Oh, the thrill...

 

[MaeZe]

I had a wonderful dinner and visit with my son and DiL. She liked all my stories about my travels. They are vegetarian/mostly vegans and my son made this lasagna with cashews and stuff instead of a meat layers. Really good.

Getting there was a challenge. I took the Metro which meant three buses and the light rail. I didn't want to park on his street because there isn't always a space and cars get broken into on a regular basis. He didn't have his car to pick me up because they only have one car and his wife had taken it to work, not getting off until after five.

The bus involved a bit of walking and I'm having a hard time with that. This is a bad thing I need to remedy by losing weight and walking more.

Anyway, I tripped over the doorstep going into his house and landed hard on my knees. That wasn't so bad except to stand back up I needed to get on my knees and stand up from there. That's how I do it all the time at home when I pet and play with my dog on the floor.

But my knees hurt too much and my thigh muscles just aren't strong enough even with my son pulling on my arms. And that hurt anyway because pulling on my forearms hurt my prednisone damaged skin.

Anyway, I finally made it up by myself by ignoring the knee pain, using the stairs and pulling up on the hand rail. At least no bones broke. It was awful though, seeing how fast my body is aging. I'm too young to be aging this fast. I need some serious rehab.

 

[Brightdreamer]

Hooray for holiday trips!

Boo for holiday tripping!

Mergh... creeping up toward lunch time. Room tidying was derailed by something not having been washed that I thought had been washed, so I did site stuff instead. Tedious, but needs doing. Deciding whether to push ahead with more of that or be lazy, take an early lunch, and watch another ep of S5 Expanse to keep on track with clearing the rewatch before the 10th.

Also listening to holiday music, trying to convince my brain that, yes, it's less than a month to Xmas. My brain isn't buying it.

--

Later on Saturday, and the rain has returned. Finally figured out what the deal was with the weird schedule shift at work next week; it's one of those "on paper" things to keep us from being yelled at for going over an hour limit, shifting the charged hours to another month.

At least, that's my best guess.

Anyway, sorta winding down the day. Transcription's basically a desert tonight; I think everyone's on holiday break so they're picking up jobs as fast as they're posted, which is not the kind of competition I feel like fooling with. Will find something else to do with my evening... maybe catch up on site stuff, as the end of November's dangerously close and I still have a couple reviews from the blog to splice into the main site.

--

Sunday morning. Less rainy so far, at least. Today's a shopping day. Oh joy, oh rapture... best get on with that, I suppose. Later I need to do shed stuff and exercise, and I have to push through that book that needs to be done by the 30th. (Feel a bit of plot whiplash going on, here, plus the author's dancing around things. But I'm about halfway through, and if I put the proverbial nose to the proverbial grindstone I should be able to kick it off my plate soon enough. Not enjoying it like I'd hoped, though...)

--

And it's Sunday afternoon, and the shopping trip was way too long and way too rainy so I've sorta written off doing anything remotely productive with the rest of my day because dismal day. (And I checked the last store I remember having my cash wallet at, in the off chance it was found. No luck. I keep thinking it's here somewhere and I'm just not seeing it; I did get myself a new cash wallet today, a bright red one that should be easy to see, so if anything will make it turn up again, it's getting a replacement wallet.) But I got enough dinner options for a while, so that's good.

Going to make omelet for dinner tonight. Because omelet is easy and we're frellin' lazy.

And right now I'm trying to decide if we'd use the cheap Hulu-with-ads service... through today, there's a 99-cents-a-month-for-a-year on their cheapest plan. There are a few shows I've been eyeballing on it, and for 99 cents a month it's tempting... but there are also ones I haven't gotten to on Prime and Netflix. Might ask if anyone else in the house would watch stuff on it before deciding.