The Cantina Staring Back At You From The Abyss

greendragon

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Prepping for a hurricane. I never thought I'd say that again. After 30 years in Florida, 25 of that in south Florida, I'd finally escaped them by moving to Connecticut. Uh... nope!

All the garden stuff and yard stuff brought in. Pics of the house taken. Supplies bought. Dishes, laundry, and soon, myself washed. Then we wait.
 
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Brightdreamer

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Prepping for a hurricane. I never thought I'd say that again. After 30 years in Florida, 25 of that in south Florida, I'd finally escaped them by moving to Connecticut. Uh... nope!

Yep. Climate change is gonna rock you like a... well... ;)

Saturday afternoon, overcast and very not summery anymore, and need to get back to writing on the Sisyphus Sequel story for a bit before starting dinner. Haven't added much new; think I need to unravel a bit, try to get things jump-started again... Did at least get some half-arsed exercise in with yard work.
 

greendragon

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I remember with Hurricane Andrew, the local rock station kept playing Rock You Like a Hurricane, Riding the Storm Out, and Riders on the Storm. They had a uniquely bizarre sense of humor :)

We needed to switch the station from Brian Norcross now and then to relieve some of the anxiety.

So far, 100% rain but no real wind. It's going a bit east of us now, but we'll still prob get 25mph sustained winds. Also, flood warnings.
 

jallenecs

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I got my hair cut today! First time in well over a decade I've been out of the house without a scarf covering my baldness. My hair still looks super thin, but my daughter (who is in school for cosmetology) did a WONDERFUL job. It looks THIN, not like a patchwork of bald and wisps. I'm very happy!

Gave up my morning writing session for it. TOTALLY worth it! I am delighted!

EDIT: Daughter's advice is what got me to this point. She recommended vitamins to encourage hair growth/strength. She's the best!
 

jallenecs

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Boy, I sure killed the conversation in a hurry, huh?

I finished another short story yesterday. It was a fun one, got a few laughs from my youngest, so that's good.
 

E.F.B.

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It's not you, Junely. ;) I think people are still getting used to AW being back, and we may even have some wayward members who still don't realize it's back yet.

Morning, Cantina. Da lab mix's wound is shrinking every day and very close to being gone. (Interestingly, it has turned perfectly heart shaped as it shrinks. Huh.) I cannot even tell you how relieved we are that it didn't require her being traumatized by having vets try to look at it and put stitches in it. We really did not need One More Thing.

Today, both parents have a bone density scan. Mom's had them done before, Dad hasn't. (Not actually sure why. He's older than her, so you'd think they'd have asked him to get one before.) I'm... wondering how well that's going to go. Dad is very overweight, has mobility issues (like, we have to lift his feet into the car for him, issues), and the scan requires you to lay on a hard, flat surface while the tech gets you positioned properly. I see tweaked muscles and complaints about back pain in our future, but I hope I'm wrong.

Well, I've mainly just been plugging along with editing lately. It's still going very well. As we approach September when I do my annual Hobbit and LOTR movie rewatches and reread one Tolkien book, I dreamed last night about watching LOTR with my Grammy who passed away in August last year. In reality, I never actually got to watch the movies *with* her, but my aunt showed her the first two movies in each trilogy (the third ones are violent enough it would have bothered her, so she didn't see them) and she really enjoyed them. It was kind of hilarious, too, because she thought the elves at Helm's Deep were all girls because of their long hair and my aunt could not get her to understand that they weren't all girls. XD So, a little bit of bittersweetness this year, thinking of her.
 
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Friendly Frog

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Also the timing with the last bit of the summer holidays and the approaching start of the new school year, will doubtlessly keep people busy and away from the cantina.

I've been travelling south for a delayed summer jaunt with my parents. So I went offline for a few days during the road trip. The weather's a bit patchy still, but so much better than at home. Got tired of all that rain.

I have not actually found anything yet I forgot to pack, which must be a first.
 
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MaeZe

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I can't believe it. There are the first fall maple leaves on my lawn. The trees are still green but those leaves are ominously saying, tough luck kid, summer is over.
 

E.F.B.

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I was partially right about the bone density scan not going well. No sprained muscles or aching backs, but that was because dad exceeded the weight limit on the machine and couldn't get the scan at all. Mom still got hers done, at least. Hopefully it says good things.

I am kinda groggy this morning. Sleep was okay last night until around 4 when I felt like I was sleeping a little restlessly because my nose was partially stuffy. (Seasonal allergies and such.) So when da beagle woke me up coughing because he needed his nighttime dose of cough medicine I had some trouble falling back asleep. Ended up sitting upright and using some saline spray until things cleared up. Thankfully this isn't something that happens often.

Nowhere to go today, so I'll be editing and crit reading today. Hopefully some crafting will happen later. I'm almost done with my Jungle Book collection (based on the classic book in the public domain, not the movie, don't @ me Disney.) and it would be super cool if I could get it up ahead of schedule so the Etsy algorithm has a little more time to get the SEO processed before the holiday shopping season.
 

Justobuddies

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Boy, I sure killed the conversation in a hurry, huh?

I finished another short story yesterday. It was a fun one, got a few laughs from my youngest, so that's good.
There used to be a sea monster somewhere near the door...maybe she's hungry and ate the conversation. Or maybe I've been away too long.

Or maybe there was never a giant sea monster that I used to feed tribbles to.

Maybe nothing is real and we're an imagination of ourselves....*stares* I need another pan-galactic-gargle-blaster, please, barkeep.
 
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Gatteau

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I've had a dragon breathing down my neck for the past week or so, that's definitely been keeping me otherwise occupied...

The fire near us has been getting steadily bigger, smokier, and more creepily closer to us every day. It seems to be mostly stalled at a point about 10 miles from us (which sounds closer than it feels, actually, because there's still a giant granite mountain in the way), but there have been new spot fires all the time, making the amorphous blob on the fire tracking map just more blobby. We're not in an evacuation zone yet, or even under warning, and we still think it's pretty unlikely we'll get to that point at our house, but we've got our plans in place anyway.

It has been a sort of useful and interesting (if not particularly fun) exercise, inventorying my stuff and giving everything a priority level. Important documents and hard drives are the first in my must go pile; my wedding dress, musical instruments (though I don't think we'll be taking the piano...), cameras, certain sentimental stuffed animals from childhood, select books and notebooks go in the I'll be really sad if I never see this stuff again pile; and the longer I sit here looking at all my stuff, the more piles and categories I make...

My husband went through this once years ago, but it's new to me. He's taking on the clear out the clothes closet and grab our snowboard gear (we both just bought brand new boards, of course) categories. We've got a truck outfitted for camping, with all the gear stowed in there already, so everything really feels quite straight-forward right now. I've been surprisingly calm about the prospect of this so far, and I just hope that attitude holds if we do get to that point and have to move quickly on this. So... for now we just have to wait and see.

We did get a couple air purifiers for the house, which finally arrived yesterday and oh boy, do they make a difference! It actually doesn't smell like campfire in the house any more! We got a little bit of a reprieve this morning with just a touch of blueness in the sky and normal toned sunlight, but now the smoke has settled back in and everything is yellow again. Yuck.
 

MaeZe

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That really sucks. I've been watching that fire because I can't imagine it actually reaching Tahoe. But you can't count on that anymore.

Worst fires several years running, heat domes, and that horrendous hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, one nightmare after another.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Hi all. It does seem odd to be back. So good, though! We've been hunkering down. We're personally doing well, but not all news is good. We lost a beloved relative this past spring, not to coronavirus, but to cancer treatment deferred because of coronavirus clogging up the health system. We're still feeling the loss.

Our eldest has been traveling, last spring to deal with the beloved relative's last days and the funeral, right now to be with friends and family at wedding preparations. Amtrak is a treasure, an absolute treasure. I cannot say how grateful we've been for train infrastructure and travel in these trying times.

Our youngest is at university, which seems, so far, to be trying to deal with the pandemic pretty well. We hope.

So glad to see you all!
 

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Yesterday was a tough day. A nice morning, followed by a fight with the husband (over my 'slavery' to technology - yes, he used that term), and then had work to do for my job in preparation for month-end closing. Then husband got a kidney stone while we were eating dinner, so he's in pain all night. I did get one chapter of feedback edited for one book but not the minimum of 5 pages I set for my other book. Today is editing day.
 

Brightdreamer

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Boo for wildfires and fights!

Mergh... I have a lot to do today, but am not at all sure if I can actually start anything; I may be needed for a store run, but nobody will come out and say if or when that will happen. So I'm trying to think of the thing I can do that will be least disrupted by being drug out of the house.

Probably not writing. (I'm already considering revisions in my head for the second pass, dang it, and I haven't finished the first.)

Site stuff, maybe. Been a pathetic month for reading because... not sure why. I want to read. I just kinda stalled out in the middle of a Kindle book and for some reason haven't picked up another one. Even audiobooks I've been washing out on more often than I finish. Right now it's probably because headspace is full of story that has to be done by mid-September.

(Oh, yeah - probably won't get time off around my birthday next month because management is guilt-tripping us over being short staffed. That's technically HR's problem for keeping us perpetually anemic, but it really is irritating that we on the floor are the ones paying for it. Then HR will yell at us for not using vacation time.)
 
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MacAllister

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(Oh, yeah - probably won't get time off around my birthday next month because management is guilt-tripping us over being short staffed. That's technically HR's problem for keeping us perpetually anemic, but it really is irritating that we on the floor are the ones paying for it. Then HR will yell at us for not using vacation time.)
We're running at about half of our usual staffing, right now (feed store and warehouse) what with the labor crunch, co-workers stuck in covid quarantine, and now my assistant manager is on a leave of absence trying to find a new childcare situation.

I've pretty much kissed days off goodbye, for the foreseeable future.
 
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Brightdreamer

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Perpetual understaffing sucks. HR's also seemingly had it in for our department for years, and I've not office-politics savvy enough to figure out why. I mean, if nobody's in shipping moving the books, the books don't get to the library patrons and the shelves go empty... Then HR turns around and gets snarky because of vacation over-accrual.

Mergh... finally got site stuff caught up. Probably won't get to writing until after dinner/transcription, at this rate, but at least the site stuff is done. Just as well, as I'm still poking at a few possibilities for where things go next. Maybe I'll go pace in the back yard while I think, so I can pretend I'm getting some exercise. (Also seem to think better when I'm moving, sometimes...)
 

MaeZe

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Spent the day reinforcing my age damaged fence with my son's help. It was great, looks ugly but got done. But my stupid prednisone damaged skin, I now have a number of new huge bruises and two new tears. Just when the last ones were mostly cleared. :rant:

Oh well, they don't hurt, don't feel like bruises feel.
 

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I'm actually sitting round doing nothing. Or mostly nothing. It's a work day, but we're in lockdown, so having communicated with my students and got things set up for them remotely, there's nothing else I can do. I did make a grocery store run, for the first time in over two weeks -- yeah, okay, I did get a big trolley full, but I think they've raised prices or something because I spent more hundreds than I have fingers on one hand. Then dearly beloved made a batch of soap, with my help. And..... that's about it. Too cold and rainy to garden, so just being a blob, which I'm quite enjoying.
 
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E.F.B.

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Rain and being a blob go quite well together. :)

I'm looking forward to the rain we're supposed to get on Wednesday (I think) off of Hurricane Ida. It's been so dig darned hot and sticky lately we can barely stand being outside for 10 minutes. Things are supposed to cool down after that. Fingers crossed.
 

Brightdreamer

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Finally done with the day's Stuff quotient (and hopefully past the time when relatives are usually loud... emphasis on "usually"); time to fire up the ol' word processor and see what damage I can do to my word count.
 

Friendly Frog

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Travelling a bit to get to see some sun. But I'm taking it in tiny doses because my skin is finicky about sunshine in the best of years and with COVID I haven't seen too much of it yet to build up some resistance.

Being the only one in the family with wussy skin is not fun. Genetics, grumph. Thanks a lot, grandad (I know it was you). (It better not be you I've inherited this weird eye-allergy thing from either.)

Got a heap of books with me and other fun stuff for relaxing but I feel l've lost the ability to do nothing and not feel guilty.
 

E.F.B.

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Man, I hate those nights when you're so sleepy you keep dropping your book on your face, but the second you turn the light off and lay down to actually sleep *DING* no more sleepy for you. I did finally get to sleep last night, but due to teh monthly lady issues, kept waking up because I was uncomfortable. I slept enough to not be totally wiped out, but could have used less interrupted sleep, too.

We'd been planning to go out today, but aren't, so hopefully I can get some good editing done.
 
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Brightdreamer

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Been there, done that on the "tired until actual attempts to sleep" nights...

Anywho, today starts with driving Mom to a PT appointment (after a frellin' year, they're finally - finally - taking her seriously when she says she feels like she's being garroted 24/7 after that thyroidectomy and getting her some danged PT for her neck) followed by shopping, which will probably eat up the day until at last mid-afternoon. I only have a little more to go in my Sisyphus Sequel first draft, so fingers crossed I can get to that some time today, but at this rate maybe not until after dinner.

And I still can't shake the danged vice around the head/edge-of-throat-scunge... mergh...
 

Gatteau

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Welp, that dragon got a lot scarier real quick... We evacuated yesterday - packed two of the cars full as they could be (had to leave one car behind because the pup can’t drive :confused:) and escaped to a friend’s house that isn’t currently in such dire straits. We’ll probably be bouncing around houses and camping for a while now. Trying to look at it as the vacation we haven’t been able to take all summer, really nothing else we can do.

I still can’t believe any of this. Totally insane. I don’t know much about fires or fighting them, but it sure seems to us like somebody screwed up royally here. It should never have been able to get this close. We’ve been tracking the fire on maps and listening to CalFire’s daily updates for the last week, saying Well there’s no way they’ll let it get all the way here, they can’t let Tahoe burn. But I guess it turns out they can... This has literally never happened before, evacuating the entire town. The other fire people talk about, back in 2007, really only effected a few neighborhoods on on side of town. This is just... everywhere.

We got the call at noon on Monday to GET OUT IMMEDIATELY and upped the already frenzied pace of packing, dodging and brushing away ash going back and forth to the car. I think the scariest part was the cops coming through neighborhood by neighborhood with a loudspeaker telling people FINAL WARNING TIME TO GO. Not at all apocalyptic...

Once we actually left the house, though, I weirdly started feeling much more calm. Something about just being finally on the road, even in bumper to bumper traffic, it was like, Well, that’s all we can do, is what it is. I very much did not like the pressure of deciding the fates of all my possessions, so once that insanity was behind me, I actually relaxed a little.

What an odd experience. Zero stars, would not recommend.