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So I've been screaming about Crusade on Tumblr again:

It’s the annual “Look at A Drift of Stars and try to figure out where it goes” festival, which means re-reading all of my weird little idea stubs and semi-chapters.

I have this tendency of roughing out concepts in present tense, and then as I fill them out they get converted to past tense. So I know this scene (from an episode tag for the script “Little Bugs Have Lesser Bugs”) is supposed to be just a quick little “I’ll fill this out later” sketch to grab the feel of the scene before it slipped away:

Galen falls asleep almost immediately, clutching her hand like a lost child who’s just been found and doesn’t yet trust that they won’t be lost again, and with his jaw still set and brow still furrowed. It takes much longer for the tension to bleed out of him, but in the end his face relaxes and his grip eases until Dureena could easily slip her hand out, if she wanted to.

She knows better. She remembers the nights of waking alone in unfamiliar places, when she had just begun to understand the magnitude of the loss and the wounds were still fresh. How she had ached, then, for any friend’s care—for open arms to comfort and gentle hands to soothe, a shoulder to lean on and the steady beat of another heart to leaven the echoing emptiness inside her.

So she leaves her hand in the circle of his and leans her head against the edge of the bed, content to rest and listen to the reassuring murmur of his breath, a steady refrain to remind her that he is alive and safe, that her little patchwork family has not been abruptly reduced by one (and perhaps the most important) member.

Just... fuck. How am I supposed to be filling that out, Past Me? What else did you think we were going to pile on top of phrases like “How she had ached, then, for any friend’s care,” and “her little patchwork family has not been abruptly reduced by one (and perhaps the most important) member”?

All this to say, Past Me just kind of blows me away sometimes. Also I guess the next thing I post will be the episode tag for “Little Bugs Have Lesser Bugs”. And then maybe the other tag for the same script, because Past Me wrote basically a whole second take on this same general starting point right in the middle of the other one. Just, y’know, for options.

So that's a thing that happened. And then I started doing some re-reading of scripts and re-watching of episodes to nail a few things down in my head, which... did not make my any less of a screaming feral maniac about this show. Obviously. This particular scene from the Little Bugs Have Lesser Bugs script has been living rent free in my head, because Peter Woodward (who played Galen) wrote it:

As the coffin closes, GALEN begins to revive. He shudders. The monitors around him spring to life. CHAMBERS and DUREENA lift him up. He is utterly exhausted.

GIDEON
Galen?

GALEN

I once had a terrible hangover. Felt like an insect had crawled into my mouth and done something very nasty.

His mood changes, as he reaches for DUREENA.

GALEN

Dureena, I'm sorry. I never really understood your pain. To feel the agony of another species as its children are slaughtered one by one... is almost unbearable.

Galen's head rests against her. Her hand strokes his head.

I MEAN. LOOK AT IT. My dude was just like, "You know what my character's relationship with this other character really needs? More vulnerability and intimacy! And for good measure, let's just do it in front of the Gideon, Chambers, and Eilerson, so they can be uncomfortably outside this moment. Again." (I'm thinking of The Memory of War here, when Dureena returns Galen's staff. Chambers and Gideon are both there, and both look so awkward about being present for Whatever The Hell Is Going On Between These Two. I love it.)

Anyway, it's a good ensemble episode, but it still reads like The Galen and Dureena Show to me, and that's exactly how I like it. And I love that it's also maybe how Peter Woodward liked it.

Was I always such a solitary, self-contained little clam? I don't know.

I think I have perhaps tended to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, to brew and reflect on and brew some more until I'm either ready to let them out on my terms or they boil over. I'm having a lot of them these days, and I wish I had someone to talk them over with--but there's no one, friends or family or therapist, that I feel comfortable sharing them with. I've thought about it--I've opened chat windows, I've brushed ever so gently against the edge of the topics--and then I just can't bring myself to go any further. It just feels too personal, too private. Too vulnerable.

I wish, sometimes, that I had made different choices. I sit and think about how things might be different right now, if I had taken another path, and that other life sounds... nice, actually.

I think that's normal.

And then I remember all the little things that I took for granted as normal (or at least not that far out of the ordinary) that have, in fact, turned out to be... not so much. It has a way of taking the certainty out of one.

I'm tired. I'm afraid. I'm heartsore. I want to scream and kick my feet and make a mess until something, anything, happens... but I won't do that. Age at least comes with a useful lesson: on a personal level, at least, tantrums never help and often hurt. Sometimes we simply don't get what we want. And at those times, the only thing we can control at all is ourselves.

Sometimes the emotional beats of a failed spinoff that was cancelled more than 20 years ago are so immaculate that you just have to stay up past your bedtime silently screaming "Fuck!" at your computer screen.

I mean, Jesus. I would say "there's no reason for the opening scene of The Path of Sorrows to go as hard as it does," but there absolutely is a reason, because it tells us so much about the characters. I mean, we've got Galen going after someone so hard that Max "Morals Are An Inconvenient Obstacle To Corporate Profits" Eilerson looks uncomfortable. And who's Galen going after? Dureena, who is arguably one of his very, very few friends in the entire literal universe. In fact, this scene helps us understand their relationship* because Galen knowns just what buttons to push to get the reaction he needs, and Dureena's first reaction (before the twisting of the knife overrides it) is confusion that he's ragging her for failing.

This is also (in my viewing order, anyway), the first time we see that Galen will use his friends for his own ends. He'll be sorry to do it, but that doesn't stop him. I don't think it's an accident that we see him do this very obviously twice in the episodes we have--here in The Path of Sorrows, and again in The Well of Forever. It sets up a really interesting set of precedents for the character that I wish we could have seen pay off down the line in one way or another.

And then--then! The thing that absolutely fucking slays me every single time I watch this episode! Once he has intentionally wounded her and she has started storming off to deal with that hurt on her own, he says "Stop," and she does. I have watched this episode so many times over the last 23 years, and the emotional punch that packs somehow only gets heavier with time. There's so much that can be read out of the stillness, out of the silence, and I still can't put it into words. Honestly, what the fuck is going on between these two?

And that's all before the opening credits. Honestly, I can take or leave most of this episode. The three different backstory exposition stories in one episode feels a little clunky, and personally I think they would have been better served by being spaced out. But man, when it hits, it hits hard.

* Ok, and the followup, where Dureena calls him out on what he did:

"Look, you know me, Galen. You know me like few ever have or ever will, and you used that knowledge unfairly." And while he says he required no special knowledge because everyone is afraid of failing, he doesn't actually say he doesn't have any.

I think it's fair to say that 2023 is off to a bit of a rough start. On a personal note, at least--I frankly haven't had the energy to look up and around at the world at large, or even my more immediate surroundings. For all I know, things could be fine out there, although I suspect we're still more in the "hand basket" category of events.

That anxiety attack I posted about last time ended up lasting about 6 days? And even after the worst of it broke, I've been running right on the ragged edge of having another most of the time. It's exhausting. Everything that's not the emotional equivalent of pap triggers a fight-or-flight response. Work is probably the worst--support isn't exactly a relaxing job at the best of times, because the people who open cases are rarely doing it because everything is fine and wonderful in their world. And since this is a new product involving several new-to-me technologies, I feel All Idiot All The Time, arguably my least favorite feeling in the world. I know that at least some of the pressure I feel to excel is manufactured entirely internally. New people fuck up sometimes, that's just... part of being new. But I don't give myself the same pass I give others--I have to do it perfectly, the first time, do it fast, and make it look easy.

Good things the insurance is so good.

I found a therapist who specializes in anxiety (after getting ghosted my one and told by another that my anxiety, as I described it, was too severe for her level of experience), and I'll have my first real appointment this coming week. I'll also be on phone queue this coming week, so hopefully I won't just have a fucking heart attack on Monday before I can even have my first therapy appointment.

There's some other stuff going on, too, which I'm still not sure how to talk about, or if I even want to talk about it in a public entry. It's been A While since I worried about that, so it's kind of a wild feeling. I'm much more used to writing letters to the void than to myself. Some of it, I guess, is that I just feel like I've lost my... me-ness? over the past few years. Pandemic trauma catching up with me, maybe, but I've been feeling a lot lately that somehow I've lost touch with a lot of things that I loved, that were very important to me and how I thought about myself, and nothing else has come in to replace them.

That's a dreadful place to leave things, but I can't really think of a way to wrap this all up. No nice little thread to tie everything up in a tidy package, just... mess. Forgive me, void. I'll try to do better next time.

Who has two thumbs and is on day 4 of an anxiety attack? That would be this unlucky bitch right here.

This is a very fine and healthy reaction to fairly normal shit happening at my job, so that's all cool. It's definitely not feeding into my anxiety to think about how my anxiety might fuck up my new, better-paying job and even get me fired. Neither is thinking about how my anxiety negatively impacts my relationship with Peter and could potentially end up destroying it! (Lies, all lies, we 100000% specialise in catastrophizing over here in this brain, please send help.)

Anyway, trying to find somebody doing online psych appointments who specializes in anxiety, in the hope that there's something they can suggest that works better than breathing exercises and mindfulness.

Trying to write while listening to a podcast: what could possibly go wrong?

Insert gif of hysterical laughter here. I swear, I remember writing my thesis and also a huge chunk of (admittedly discarded) fanfic while watching Downton Abbey and The Hogfather constantly, but apparently age has come for my ability to hear words and come up with completely unrelated ones simultaneously.

I'm feeling... broadly good? Specifically not great at this very moment, because it's bloody cold out and I'm trying to gin myself up to going to the gym after the kind of day where I had to work hard to make myself work. Fair to say I'm a bit low on supplies of motivation just at the moment. But broadly, good. I haven't actually done anything with any of my stories, but I have at least thought about them, and thought about taking a stab at some of them again, which is a damn sight better than I've done in a while. Little bits of progress are made here and there on house projects--I'm not just totally burned out all the time.

Put like that, I guess it doesn't sound like a very typical description of "good," but it's good for me, going by the standard I've been setting for the past year plus. It's a start, and it's frankly wonderful to not feel so flattened, both energetically and emotionally.

I have even, at

atamascolily 's instigation, started a new series that is not fluff targeted at children (The Untamed)! It can be almost uncomfortable having big feelings sometimes, but fiction is a nice safe space to start having them again--which is good, because I already love so many of these characters, and I am 100% sure that many bad things are going to happen to them. I'm kind of hoping this will ignite my fanfic mojo again, given that I have been stuck on Certain Dark Things for a whole fucking decade now. (Ok, granted, it's a decade where I haven't done a lot of sitting down and just hammering away at the problem until I figure it out, which is what I should be doing, but also maybe the real problem is me and my weird hangup on somehow making that ship not a toxic mess. ... and The Untamed seems to have a main ship with tangentially similar moral issues, so I dunno, maybe that will help.)

Today's achievement: being able to tell the difference between sadness and anxiety (as in, "oh, I feel bad, but that's not sadness, that's anxiety about X"). 35 feels late to be developing this skill, but I'll take it.

The amount I've been getting done recently (at least compared to my standard for the last year-ish) feels absolutely bonkers. I mean, compared to Normal People (TM), I feel like I'm probably still pretty lackluster, but honestly... no fucks given. I decided some blankets needed to be washed, and washed them (and in the process set up a laundry basket for downstairs laundry like blankets and clothes from the bathroom, and put the giant pile of floor clothes in the laundry room into it). I have swept twice in the last week. I finished cleaning the couch, and got it slipcovered. I had an ADHD "company is coming" cleaning marathon and cleaned off the dining table, all the area around it, and very seriously tidied the living room. Today I put on a pair of leggings with holes in them, and instead of putting off mending them for the millionth time, I pulled out the sewing machine, found the right color of thread, wound a bobbin, and sewed them up.

There are still mountains of clutter and recycling and of course The Great Wall Of Boxes, but I'm definitely feeling a bit less maddened by the house situation, and also more capable of continuing to deal with it!

We had mock calls as prep today, and holy shit I forgot how anxiously sweaty I get on customer calls when I'm anything less than 1000% confident. Clammy, disgusting cold sweats . You're welcome for that oversharing.

My leftover anxiety turned itself into a strong desire to get the fuck away from my computer and burn off the adrenaline by doing something physical, so once work was over we booked it out to the nature trail to squeeze in a brisk walk before the sun set all the way. Brilliant idea, strongly recommend. I felt much better for it. My body even asked for protein and vegetables for dinner instead of just a giant bowlful of pasta! I'm very proud of it.

My vertigo seems to be slowly subsiding. I'm not sure I've had any days with none, but the number and intensity of the episodes is definitely decreasing.

But honestly, I'm mostly just an anxious mess about work. I still need to book exams for my certifications (which I feel massively underprepared for), and then pass the exams, and then I'll be slowly getting into the queue over the next month or so... to say that I have been having anxiety nightmares basically every night (and sometimes they start before I've actually completely fallen asleep, which is wild) would be understating it a bit. I feel like a complete fraud, and also like I'm waaaaaay behind where I'm supposed to be at this point in my training. I mostly don't think that's actually true--only one person in my little training cohort has actually passed the exam yet, and he got the absolute lowest score you can get and still pass--but try and convince my hindbrain that I'm not about to be eaten by lions.

My experience of the last 5-6 days can best be summed up thusly (pulled from my texts this afternoon):
"vertigo is bullshit and I hate it"

This afternoon was particularly miserable because there was a stretch of an hour or so where I was having vertigo even while sitting still in what has previously been a reliable recovery position. Absolutely wretched, do not recommend. I'd say avoid the thing that gave it to me, but right now we're working on an official medical diagnosis of "eh, sometimes vertigo just happens, try hydrating more and doing these exercises for a week to see if it goes away."

Well, I'm hydrating so much that I could probably float a (very small) boat on my daily output, not to mention having to get up and pee once or twice during the night on top of my regular morning bladder-based alarm. It's not making any notable difference to the horrible swooping sensations that seem to be trailing me like a codependent dog. The only thing that seems to make a difference is time of day--I feel more or less my best in the morning, and trail steadily downwards until bed.

There was definitely something else I was going to write about, but apparently I'm exhausted by my strenuous day of... sitting quietly and attempting to deal with the sensation of the room whirling away from me. No idea what the else was going to be, brain says fuck it. Proooobably a good thing I'm not trying to do NaNoWriMo. I feel like I would not be meeting with signal success.

I should be paying attention to a class right now, but I have a nascent headache, I need a nap, and it's Friday afternoon. I'll just read the docs later.

Wednesday once again kicked my ass to the moon and back. I actually thought of something to write about on Wednesday and on Thursday, but in both cases exhaustion came and swept it away before I got a chance to materialize anything from it. No idea what it was now.

I ended up taking an involuntary nap yesterday (bonus nightmares!), and still went to bed by midnight... at which point I had more nightmares. Pretty sure some of them were about being fired for falling asleep during work hours. Probably I should be glad to be having nice straightforward anxiety nightmares like that instead of only weird horror nightmares.

Today Casper performed his new trick of getting on the roof and coming to the office window to be let in. Based on his general demeanor, I have to assume that a) getting on the roof is easier than getting off of it, and b) once he's on the roof he finds it's not as much fun as he expected. He's now completely zonked out in the chair next to me, doing his best impression of a cat who will never do this again--but this is the second time I've let him in through the office window, and I'm pretty sure it won't be the last.

In general, I'm feeling restless and vaguely discontented. This isn't great, but it is better than endless, overwhelmed apathy. I actually feel the desire to go out! And do things! But then when I'm out, I get overwhelmed by the number and proximity and volume of the people around me--so many, so close, so loud! I liked it better when people stayed 6 feet away unless they knew you. Is anyone else having that experience in public these days?

"Hope for another good night's sleep tonight."

Excuse me, but I can't find a gif of hysterical laughter that goes hard enough for the all-night nightmare marathon I had last night. Fucking hell. I mean, I didn't wake up from it much, so physically I'm doing ok, but emotionally? Woof. I'll just go hide in a hole forever now to lick my self-inflicted wounds.

The rich text editor is back! Now I know to enjoy it while I can.

I'm still getting the hand of Wednesdays--14+ hours away from the house after all the pandemic isolation is heady, but also deeply exhausting. I do feel absurdly metropolitan parking and walking a couple of blocks to the office, and being able to wander around downtown over my lunch break if I choose. I've only done two Wednesdays at the office so far, and they've both kicked my ass. I'm hoping that it will get easier as I get used to being out and around other humans that much again. (I mean, it's still going to be a really long day--work+choir before beginning the 45 minute drive home is just A Lot--but there is definitely bonus Introvert Exhaustion going on.)

Training is keeping my busy for work. Most days by the time we're done my brain either a pile of mush, or well on its way there. It's not exactly conducive to writing, alas--thus the radio silence here. I thought very briefly about trying to do NaNoWriMo this year, but there's just no way.

Casper went to the vet today for vaccinations, and he's doubled in weight over the past 6 months! It's hard to believe when he's busy making himself into a neat little loaf, but much easier when he's stretched out all the way across the back of my recliner. I expect Zefira will have manifested a similar miracle when she next goes in, but her body and head are shaped in such a way that she just never had quite the same Smol Bean Energy that Casper had.

Mood-wise, things have been holding pretty steady, so... that's cool, I guess? It would be nice to have a slightly higher baseline, but the same baseline for cheaper is fine. I did have a pretty rough day yesterday, the result of going out and being among people when I should have stayed home and rested. My left shoulder has been giving me a lot of grief over the past few days, plus nightmares every night, and I just hadn't gotten enough good sleep to go out and be somewhere very busy and overwhelming... except I was the only first soprano, and Peter was the only tenor. So we hauled our sad little carcasses down to the church, and the moment 3 people starting talking to me at once I hit a wall. Oops.

Anyway, I passed out sometime after 10 last night, with a brief interlude of awareness after Peter found me and woke me up to take my meds and brush my teeth, and then slept through until about 6:30. That's pretty decent compared to the last week, and I'm feeling better in the brain regions today. To make up for it, I've had a dry cough off and on all day so far. I'm going to blame the change in the weather, drink a boatload of tea, and hope for another good night's sleep tonight.

Ok, let's give this a try: using a WYSIWYG editor so that I don't have to type all the damn HTML tags myself, and then pasting the HTML source into the HTML editor. Thank god for SeaMonkey.**

So here's where I am today:

The thing about reality is that you can't make other people do anything. The only thing you can control to any extent at all is your own actions. I sometimes find this immensely frustrating. I am, in fact, currently finding this immensely frustrating. I hate not knowing things, I hate the concept of things that are broken and can't be fixed*, I hate uncertainty, I hate waiting...

Honestly, it baffles me when people talk about how calm and chill I seem, given my own turbulent experience of my internal life. I don't think of myself as being particularly good at presenting anything other than how I feel, except for having a well-practiced Customer Service Voice(TM). And the more of that chirpy little thing I put on, the crankier and more irascible I'm feeling.

Anyway, that's the vagueblogging about that for now. I'm putting on my patient shoes and sitting on my hands, because it's not like I actually have any other options. Grumble grumble mutter, etc.

Peter and I are going to the ballet this weekend, where they're doing Dracula and The Masque of the Red Death for Halloween. My wardrobe is woefully low in spookitude after a couple of moves and three years of no events to goth up for, so I'm trying to brainstorm an appropriately darksome outfit to honor the event. Somehow I've come to the conclusion that I still need even more black swooshy/twirly maxi skirts. Preferably the kind with lots of gauzy layers. It should shock no one but me that I am once again out of
step with current fashion (even goth fashion, apparently), and can't find such a thing for love or money. I would say I should sew one, but that would just be adding to the pile of sewing projects I mean
to do but continually fail to actually follow up on.

*This is such a hard one for me that I literally had to walk away from working on my Last Trial fics for my mental health. They're all fixits for Raistlin, because the whole idea that he's just broken and doomed and unfixable is so fundamentally offensive to me. But to fix it, you have to engage with the source material, and dammit but they don't leave a single crack to slip a fingernail into until way, way too late.

**Incomplete success, too many tags. The search continues.

Apparently today the RTE is going to work for me. I will not question my good fortune.

So far today I've sliced one of my fingers on the bread knife (do not recommend), and given myself a small-but-painful steam burn on the thumb of the other hand. To say I don't approve would be an understatement.

On the bright side, my brain is feeling fizzy and alive! It wants to make more words, which is a thing I haven't felt in a long time. I mean, it wants to make them while I should be paying attention to training, so some of that may simply be self-defense against my trainer's incredibly irritating voice, which is like unto nails on the chalkboard of my soul. No idea why, but more than 30 minutes of this poor man talking just makes me want to hit mute and run away to join the circus. 6 or 7 hours a day? Kill me please. I can't be bothered to look it up right now, but I think (hope) that tomorrow's subject will be led by someone different.

My first full paycheck for the new job posted to my account today, and it's gone a long way towards assuaging my anxiety about the hit our savings took on our trip to Nova Scotia. All hail entering the Most Expensive Time of the Year with less lean accounts. Come spring, we'll probably even be able to afford gutters. As it is, I have a schedule of smallish-but-out-of-normal-reach expenses that I've been putting off since before we bought the house. The first one is going to be a real office chair. I've spent the last three years of pandemic working from home out of couches, recliners, kitchen chairs, and beds, and Peter has been fretting himself to bits over the potential ergonomic implications for almost as long. I still can't bear to splash out for one of those $1000+ chairs that are apparently The Absolute Best For You, but I've scoped out a chair that runs about $500 that seems decent, and which I can just about bear to pay without too much wincing.

Well, lunch is over. Back to training with me. How is it not already Friday, again?

Hoo boy. Ok, let’s try journaling again.

My process for journaling kind of broke when my old posting app stopped working with DW. It turned out that opening up a tab and going to the posting page before starting to write was enough of a barrier that I just… stopped. Not ideal. (Edit from posting!Sara: I wrote this in a text editor and then pasted it in, and it was at that moment that I realized the RTE doesn't work for me. Into the HTML mines I go.)

Honestly, given that I had been journaling semi-regularly since I was a teenager, I’m kind of surprised it was so easy for me to fall off the horse, as it were. I guess you could stake it as another sign that my mental health has been incredibly Robust (in the old JournalFen server sense) for the last several+ years. I mean, it wasn’t great before the global pandemic, or the two moves during the pandemic that wrecked all of my routines and habits… but it really took a turn for the worse in terms of being able to deal with shit. I’m still trying to work that out and find a new balance in my life.

I don’t even know where to start. (Ok, I mean yes, this is already the fourth paragraph, but you know what I mean.) I guess I miss the feeling of having a confidant—a confessor of sorts, a place where I can pour out all of my thoughts and emotions without worry or reserve. This kind of journal is like a heartfelt letter sent out into the void of the internet—you don’t really know if anyone will read it, or care, or understand, and it sort of… doesn’t matter. The thing is to have done it, and let it go.

Maybe that’s the place to start. My subconscious, in particular, is very bad at letting go of things. My dreams are full of people I haven’t spoken to in years—and my dreams are often so intense and vivid that I have a hard time divorcing them from reality once I’m awake. I can go through a whole day—sometimes even multiple days—intensely haunted by these dream-ghosts.

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

I truly don’t know what to do about it. My husband (who is long since master of lucid dreaming, and doesn’t have dreams he doesn’t want to) has suggested changing the dream—but the closest I get to lucid dreaming is knowing I’m asleep and not being able to change anything at all. And honestly, the dreams can be seductive—they’re often about rebuilding or comfort. The problem isn’t the dream itself. It’s the cognitive and emotional dissonance of carrying that dream-life with me when I wake up into a world where that’s not how things are, and desperately wanting the thing the dream gave me for a little longer.

To be clear, I’m not unhappy in my life as it is. Inasmuch as my grab-bag of brain weasels allow, I’m content. I have a lovely husband, my cats and chickens, my house, and my few-but-wonderful friends. But fantasy calls us all sometimes, I suppose. My sleeping brain just takes that very, very seriously or something. When I’m awake and untangled from dreams, I know that reality is always more complicated and nuanced than that dream-world—but I guess that’s part of the allure right there, isn’t it? Things can be so simple in dreams. In a complicated, dangerous, challenging world, why wouldn’t I want to chase that simplicity, that clarity, that feeling of safety?

I woke up this morning without any dream-webs weight me down, but I doubt I’ve seen the last of those dreams.

What else is there? Well, I got a new job that pays twice as well, and the company seems much less abusive so far. Ideally they’d like us to be hybrid, and come in to the office 1-2 days a week. I haven’t done it yet, but after 3 years of working exclusively from home, the idea of going to the office and getting away from the house for a day or two each week does have a certain allure. We’ll see if I can work myself around to getting up early enough to make the 45 minute drive sometime soon. I also accidentally-on-purpose went off my antidepressant at the end of last week (yes without consulting my psych, yes I know it was stupid, yes I am a very bad patient, no I have not actually told my husband yet either*). This particular med did help when I started it in late 2020, but it has also been an absolute pain to actually get as local pharmacies have been out of stock on several occasions when I needed refills, and it’s really expensive from the mail-order pharmacy because they don’t take the manufacturer’s discount card. I’ve also been noticing that my symptoms haven’t really been very well-controlled recently, and my depression inventory scores have been slowly creeping up for a while. My psych has taken a wait-and-see approach on that, but my local pharmacy was out of stock and couldn’t refill my prescription on time again, so I just went “Fuck it, I don’t have the anything to deal with this shit, I’ll just stop taking it.” Obviously don’t do this at home, kids, no matter how many times I do it. My depression is such that I’m not at any kind of immediate or severe risk from being unmedicated. Fortunately, I haven’t had any negative side effects so far from stopping without tapering. I also haven’t seen any changes in my mood or energy yet either (granted, it has been less than a week, and I’ll be continuing to monitor). As an initial result, this is kind of confirming me in my feeling that the medication wasn’t doing much for me anymore.

Animal update: we’re at 4 cats and 4 chickens. Luna is still ticking along, becoming ever more venerable with every passing month. Just like last year and the year before, I’m wondering if we’re coming up on her last winter, but except for increasing arthritis her health has been good for a cat of her age. Inanna didn’t enjoy the upheaval of multiple moves, but after a year in this house she’s finally starting to settle in, even if we did commit the sin of adding two kittens to the household. Zefira is a little white whirlwind of a thing with about 5 black hairs on her head, and now that she’s hit 1 year old she’s just starting to get the idea that laying on the bed with the people might be nice. Casper is a tabby, a former street kitten, and expert at casually happening to hang around in proximity to the humans. Neither of them are really lap cats, but that’s ok, because Luna wouldn’t share anyway.

God, I feel better. Guess I’ve been doing my impression of a solitary little clam (emotionally speaking) for way too long.

* I swear to god, I don’t mean to keep secrets, but the idea of telling him gives me anxiety because I know I’m doing a stupid.

(Is the rich text editor not working in Firefox for anyone else?)

Things have been... basically totally bonkers.

In May, we bought a house. We're not living in it yet, for reasons that will become obvious. It was built in 1934, and had been sitting vacant for (as best we can make out from the garbled account of the previous owner and the slightly more cogent account of our charming Old Stoner neighbor) five years or so. This was due to the last tenant deciding to save money on heating costs by shutting off the hot water baseboards in the middle of winter. The previous owner (his landlord) had declined to add glycol to the system (due to being a cheap bastard, as far as I can tell--I do not have kind feelings towards this gentleman for reasons that I may elaborate on later). You'll be shocked to hear that the heating pipes, which were still full of water, froze and proceeded to spring leaks everywhere.

The previous owner called a plumber to take a look, but patching one round of leaks just revealed more, and (as it turned out later), the boiler was also completely fucked. So he threw up his hands and left the house vacant until he finally got tired of owning an uninhabitable house and decided to sell it in this nice hot real estate market. It was in surprisingly good condition despite the whole "all of the plumbing potentially being fucked" thing, and we were unsurprisingly very tired of house hunting, so we leapt upon it as a starving lion upon a scrawny-but-still-edible gazelle.

We opted to go ahead and have the whole house re-plumbed, out of an abundance of caution*. Then the plumbers put a great stonking hole in the dining room ceiling to access the plumbing for the upstairs bathroom and promptly discovered a Structural Problem.

It turns out that, when the plumbing for the upstairs was run, someone cut a massive fucking hole in one of the joists to accommodate the waste pipe. Something on the order of 70% out of the top, which is very much not what you're supposed to do. (AFAIK, you're not allowed to take more than 60%, and you're only allowed to go so close to the top and bottom edges of the joist.) They stuffed a bunch of cast iron pipe in the hole, packed concrete around it, and called it a day. Then, some clever bastard decided that instead of drilling through the joists to run the water lines, they would just cut some square notches out of the bottom of the joists. This is also Very Not Good. As a result, we currently possess what my father-in-law's bar buddy (who is, conveniently, a structural engineer and kindly disposed towards us) described as "load bearing concrete" and "load bearing pipes".

Plumbing, which was supposed to take about a week and start at the beginning of June, is still not done. Fortunately, the downstairs plumbing isn't impacted by the Load Bearing Pipes, and there is a bathroom down there. Theoretically, this means we could already have running water downstairs while the upstairs plumbing waits for a framer to free up and make the necessary reinforcements. Alas, we do not live in a land of theory, and this beautiful plan was stymied by the fact that the old connection to the city sewer was terra cotta, and also broke in the process of the plumbers digging out our waste line to replace it.

In fact, the city sewer line (which, it turns out, literally runs through the back yard), is terra cotta and 4 inches in diameter. There was some temporary question about this last week, when a couple of guys from the city came out and, I absolutely shit you not, dowsed for the sewer line. Their dowsing indicated to them that the actual sewer line was several feet back from whatever that thing in our yard was. Will you be shocked to hear that this turns out to be a fantasy? For lo, a different set of guys from the city came out to spec the work order, and... yep, that terra cotta pipe is the sewer line after all. Our plumber confirmed this by sticking a camera in it and asking Old Stoner Neighbor to flush a toilet.

Now we wait for the city to get us on their schedule, and maybe then we'll be able to wash our hands and pee without having to drive across town to my in-laws' house. The way things have been going so far, though, I'm not exactly holding my breath.

Completely unrelated to all of that nonsense, YouTube led me down a rabbit hole of foreign-language musicals that resulted in me deciding to learn Russian. The proximate cause of this is a Russian-language Dragonlance fan musical, which is one of the weirdest sentences I never expected to find myself saying. It's called Последнее Испьтание** (or The Last Trial in English), and it's just... really catchy. The ultimate cause was a Japanese staging of the Viennese musical Elisabeth - Das Musical, which looked like a Labyrinth fan musical and somehow wasn't. So I've taken a lot of weird media side trips recently as I try and find Russian shows I can watch to practice listening and get the shape of the language in my ear. The most successful so far (in the sense that I want to just mainline it), is a TV series called Анна - Детектив (Detective Anna or Anna the Detective would both be reasonable English translations of the title, as far as I can tell). It's about a young woman with mediumistic talents and a skeptical police detective from the big city with a mysterious past who Solve Crime! Much fun, although it gets a bit darker than you might expect.

* At no point have I regretted this decision even slightly. There turned out to be a slow leak under the upstairs tub, all of the cast iron pipes were very much showing their age, and it turns out that someone decided to patch a hole in the waste line out of the house by just sort of... sticking some concrete on top of it. Not to mention the legendary Load Bearing Pipes.

** Russian is getting bolded because italic switches it to cursive characters, and I don't know how to read all of those yet.

Baking notes and pre-bake thoughts:
- Cut the butter into roughly 1/2 in cubes and rubbed in entirely by hand
- Add-ins: 1/2 c roughly chopped slivered almonds, 1/2 cup mini semisweet chips (Equal Exchange), medium handful bittersweet (EE)
- I know I've previously fit 8 scones onto this baking sheet without them joining into one giant Ur-scone, but fucked if I know how. Pretty sure that at least some of them will merge in the bake.

Pre-bake, my main concern is that we may have reached the part of the year where my hands are too warm to rub butter in entirely by hand, even taking the butter directly from the fridge to the flour.

At some point, I'll have half & half on hand when I make these, but today is another milk day. Omitted the cranberries--kind of on the fence about that, but I didn't want to push my luck on the scone-to-bits ratio.

Also, I never brush these with milk (too lazy) or sprinkle with sugar (because Peter hates the way that feels on his teeth).

Post-bake thoughts:
Well, I was right about the spacing on the pan--every single scone is at least lightly touching at least one other. Should've taken pictures last time. Other than that, both Peter and I thought these were pretty damn good, so I think this is the final iteration (until I get around to trying half & half, anyway).

Look, this is a dangerous recipe, and I take no responsibilities for what happens once you find out how easy it is:

Cream Cheese Thumbprint Cookies

1-cup butter, softened
3 ounces cream cheese, softened 1-cup sugar
1 egg yolk
1-teaspoon vanilla extract

21⁄2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour Jam or preserves of your choice

Cream butter and cream cheese.
Gradually add sugar and beat until fluffy.
Beat in egg yolk and vanilla.
Mix in the flour.
Chill the dough at least one hour.
Grease cookie sheets and preheat the oven to 325 F.
Shape the dough into smallish balls and place on pan about an inch apart. Use your thumb or a small measuring spoon to make a depression in each cookie and fill the depression with jam.
Bake 12-15 minutes. Allow cookies to cool a bit on the pan before removing them because they are a bit fragile when still warm.

Continued experimentation in scones. Same recipe from King Arthur, but this time:
- milk
- 1 cup of add-ins, split approximately equally between bittersweet Equal Exchange chips, semisweet Equal Exchange chips, and cranberries
- 1 tsp vanilla, 1 tsp almond extract
- I actually remembered to sift the dry ingredients together, instead of having to try and smash baking powder pebbles by hand

I think I also did a slightly better job of cutting/rubbing the butter in this time, with fewer Big Chonks. The dough was thicker and stickier, which made it easier to portion out. It looked like there was less butter leaking during the bake than previously, which... I don't actually know if that makes any difference, who am I kidding.

On tasting, these do seem a little more crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside, and I think the flavoring ratio is spot on this time. I also like the ratio of overall add-ins to scone better. In the warm scone, I'm feeling pretty good about the ratio of the add-ins to each other, as well, but last time the experience of the warm scone vs a cold one the next day was pretty different, so we'll see how I feel tomorrow.

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