the deep moans round with many voices

why is moving so much work???

2025-06-23T03:04:59Z

I have successfully emptied my filing cabinet into two boxes!

Admittedly the first box was not sorted or weeded at all, but that's because that drawer contained all my folders of Things What I Have Written and I knew if I so much as cracked one open I'd lose the entire day. So nope, directly into the box, do not pass go, do not collect $200, I'll sort it in Minnesota.

The other two drawers got sorted with extreme prejudice and I chucked a good 2/3 of the papers. A small victory by size of box, but a very large victory by amount of psychic weight I have consequently shed. :)

I'm trying to do a little sorting of the GIANT ACCORDION FOLDERS my mom kept for every goddamn year of my life up through... I think the end of elementary school? Anyway, I did weed all the preschool materials some years back so those are just in nice normal file folders, but the best I managed with the TWO massive kindergarten accordion folders was condensing them down to ONE massive accordion folder. Which is not nothing! But I do need to weed more strenuously when I have more time to be selective and also to ditch some items after taking well-lit photos.

...I think I will tackle 1st grade after I eat some dessert, and then I might call it a night.

(I have been trying to finish all paper-sorting tasks today since recycling gets picked up at about 4am on Mondays and I would like to get as much nonsense out of my apartment as possible.)

comments

drive-by update!

2025-06-16T02:16:12Z

1. I had a uterine fibroid embolization on June 4. This is a minor surgery that basically murders a fibroid by cutting off its blood supply. I had to stay in the hospital overnight for observation, since blood clots can be Bad News and this procedure essentially creates an artificial clot -- they needed to make sure it didn't hare off and cause problems.

My sleep was very disrupted for about a week thereafter, and I had some minor side effects as well as discomfort, but I am now pretty much back to normal. It will take a month or two to see if the slow withering of the fibroid fixes some problems I was having.

2. Friday the 20th will be my last day at the rental company. I am trying to get a certain set of tasks complete before I leave, but Lawyer Man keeps yanking me aside to work on stuff related to our imminent website revamp, which is frustrating. I am 90% sure I will not be able to finish everything I want to wrap up, but such is life.

3. I have two U-Haul U-Boxes set to be delivered to my driveway on Monday the 23rd. My parents will arrive later that day, and the goal is to have the boxes packed and collected by midday on the 26th, and for us to hit the road no later than mid-afternoon on the 27th.

Then I get to crash in their guest room and go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa for a bit.

4. In July Mom and I will return to Ithaca for my surgery follow-up appointment, and probably also to close my Ithaca bank accounts. Later in July I am road-tripping through western Canada en route to a fandom friends' gathering, and then road-tripping home by way of Washington and assorted bits of the northwestern US, because why not.

Then I will do a bit more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, and in August I start looking seriously for a new job. New housing will follow, since it's easier to rent an apartment convenient to a job location than to find a job convenient to an apartment location.

5. I have been sorting through boxes and bins of stuff that I have not touched for literal decades, and holy shit I have been clogging my apartment and my life up with so much nonsense. It will be good to start over on a cleaner footing.

comments

wherein Liz takes a bunch of photos and does some slapdash tidying

2024-02-09T04:51:49Z

I worked 9am-5pm at the rental office today instead of my usual 10am-6pm, so that I could then go work 5:30-8pm at Not the IRS where I had two tax prep clients.

The main thing I did at the rental company today was take a whole bunch of photographs of the stairwells, hallways, trash/recycling areas, and assorted utility rooms in one building, which I will use as references for my floor plans. I am not going to create total accuracy, but I do like to ensure I have doors in the right places and to reflect the places where there are random angled wall sections versus 90 degree corners.

When I got home, I spent a while putting away the remnants of my air-drying laundry, and then doing a quick tidy-up in preparation for my parents' arrival tomorrow evening. To be perfectly honest, a lot of this consisted of just straight-up chucking several containers of leftovers into the kitchen trash bin, along with a grotty old car cushion wedge that I had failed to throw out for... uh... several years now, and then chucking the trash bag outside into my trashcan. But I have produced a cleared off table we can eat at, as well as a cleared off armchair my dad can lounge in, so I will count that as a victory.

Last night I weeded out a bunch of clothes I no longer wear from my closets -- I think that was part of the same general tidy-before-company-comes impulse, though directed slightly diagonal to my usual efforts. Anyway, I now have a whole stack of neatly packed boxes in my front room, ready to be donated to one of the various re-use and goodwill operations in town. I must remember to load those into my car.

And now I think I will read fic for half an hour before falling into bed. :)

comments

a small decluttering success

2023-01-20T01:53:08Z

This evening I weeded through my winter closet (...for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I have one closet for pants/skirts and winter shirts, and another closet for miscellaneous nonsense and summer shirts) and got rid of a bunch of long-sleeve shirts that no longer fit correctly or that I just don't really wear anymore. Then I finally got around to properly boxing up all the miscellaneous donations that have been piling up in my front room as I've slowly weeded various categories of Stuff, and put the boxes in my car so they're ready to drop off whenever I get a spare 20 minutes.

I also collected my trash and took the bag out to the trash bin.

Having those tasks off my list feels good!

I should probably weed my pants and skirts as well, but I think I have used up my quota of Useful Task Activity for the day and will use the next couple hours to catch up on some reading and then go to bed.

comments

belated post of stuff

2023-01-11T03:19:54Z

I keep forgetting to post here, which annoys me. Um. Anyway, I went to Minnesota over the New Year's weekend, which was nice -- it is always lovely to see my parents and brother in person!

I wrote a Yuletide story and ought to make a proper separate post about that soon.

I got into cross-stitch a few months back, and started with some pre-made kits (purchased via Etsy) that I immediately began modifying both for genuine artistic reasons and also a couple times because I goofed my stitch count. The first two I only modified in very small ways, but I am currently working on one where I changed some color choices, reworked parts of the backstitch writing for the central motto, and drew some entirely new additional flowers on my pattern guide in colored pencil because a couple parts of the field looked weirdly blank.

I am also working up a pattern of my own devising as a gift for my friend Cat, because reasons, so. Begin as you mean to go on, I guess?

Tax season has begun, which so far has meant that I have spent ~9 hours over two days sitting in a Not The IRS office doing basically nothing. (I mean, what I actually did was cross-stitch, but you know what I mean.) I answered the phone a couple times and made three calls reminding past clients it's time to schedule their tax appointments, but if corporate wants to pay me to do nothing, I'm not going to stop them.

And in non-work news, I potted some plant cuttings that had grown roots over a few weeks in water, weeded some old shirts out of my closet, and vacuumed my apartment for the first time in... uh... you don't really need to know how long it's been, okay, let's just move on. I also cleared some papers and whatnot that have been collecting on various flat surfaces.

I think my task for the back half of this week is to continue weeding my clothes so I know if I need to buy any new items, and then sort, package, and actually donate all my collected no-longer-needed/wanted items to charity.

This includes the small filing cabinet I really should have gotten rid of over the summer, but eh. Better late than never, right?

And now to bed. :)

comments

miscellaneous update

2022-10-19T03:56:01Z

Things done recently:

1. Got my bivalent Covid booster shot AND my annual flu shot Monday after work. I am gonna be SO IMMUNIZED. \o/

2. I'm continuing to work through various tax training courses. At this point I am well over the minimum credit requirement, but learning is good. Also apparently the learn-up option for advancing to Level 3 within Not the IRS is less of a problem than I thought? Which is good, because scheduling the test-up option is always a freaking nightmare to coordinate around my main job, and I would like to get the Level 3 "commission" rates. (They're technically not commissions because of assorted complicated reasons, but effectively they're commissions.)

3. Removed my air conditioner from the window for the winter. I am pondering a rearrangement of various closet junk that might let me store it in my bedroom closet instead of having it just sit on the floor of my study. And I need to sort and rearrange my closet junk anyway, so.

4. Made roasted zucchini sticks.

5. Began looking through the Yuletide tagset to see if I want to request anything besides the three fandoms I nominated.

6. Signed up to do coffee hour cleanup this past Sunday and the next two Sundays, because it's good to get out of my house and interact with people, it's good to participate in social groups, and it's nice to have clear, defined tasks with clear, defined end-points. :) Also washing dishes is meditative for me, as I think I've said many times before.

7. Finally finished watching episode 5 of the Sandman on Netflix. I'd been putting that off because I knew it was going to be difficult, but today it occurred to me that I could use my cross-stitch project to sort of... blunt the edge, maybe? Eat just enough of my concentration that I wouldn't get too wound up with sympathetic dread and/or mortification. And that plan worked, which was very validating! I am now halfway through episode 6.

And that's enough for now. Good night!

comments

daily update, Sunday April 26

2020-04-27T03:21:09Z

1. Changed linens.

2. Added nose-piece to the last facemask.

3. Reorganized some stuff in my sewing basket to be more readily available and also let me get rid of a far too large pincushion my great-grandmother made. (I should probably acquire a more reasonably sized pincushion at some point. At the moment I have some pins in a little cloth circle that's built in to the basket lid, and a bunch of others stuck into an old index card, but that's not ideal. I also have a bunch of needles stuck through an index card or a scrap of really thick and awful fabric that serves a similar purpose.)

4. It rained steadily all day, ranging from medium-light to medium-heavy, so I only went for a quasi-walk. By which I mean I drove to Cascadilla Creek to take my daily photograph, and then walked the rest of the way into town to buy a BLT for lunch, walked back to my car, and drove home. So it was maybe... half a mile? Two thirds of a mile if I'm being generous. Still, it was better than nothing, and I didn't get completely soaked like I would have if I'd walked the whole distance to the Commons and back.

5. My period started, blargh. I'd predicted Monday, so this is well within my one-day margin of error. (I don't have the world's most regular schedule, but my body sends very clear "hey, we could make a baby now! have I mentioned that we're currently super fertile? because we are!" signals. *sigh*)

6. Wrote a tiny Iron Fist ficlet, and did some more editing on the Narnia/Naruto crossover. I am through the violent part of the fight/confrontation scene, and the next bits are more tense negotiation than action, so hopefully they'll go faster. (The main problem with this whole scene has been that my POV character is not doing a lot of the fighting and couldn't see what anyone else was doing. Now she's going spend the rest of the scene getting progressively woozier from blood loss until she passes out, but at least she can see the other characters again.)

And now to bed. :)

comments

daily update, Wednesday Feb. 5

2020-02-06T03:36:01Z

Things done today:

1. Sorted another folder of childhood papers, this one from when I was five years old. I photographed some of the art that I wanted to document but didn't want to bother keeping in hard copy. (I will try to remember to post them online at some point, because they are intriguingly weird in the way small children's art so often is.)

2. Vacuumed my apartment. Ugh. I intensely dislike vacuuming.

3. Wrote four more fills for the Three Sentence Ficathon, only one of which is actually a 3-sentence ficlet. *sigh* Ah well, structural restrictions have never been my strongest suit.

I also wrote ~225 words of the still-untitled Narnia bridge fic, which is still refusing to get to the point about bridges. But I have successfully shoved both Protagonist and Naiad back toward Beaversdam to talk about a defunct sawmill with the tax auditor, so presumably we're at least going somewhere. *hands*

4. Not the IRS 4-8:15pm. As happened last night, we were getting ready to close at 8pm on account of having no scheduled appointments for the 8-9pm slot, when a client walked in just a couple minutes before we closed down the register program. Fortunately this one just needed a bit of advice about what tax info to include in a certain program application, so we were able to close only a bit later than planned. I had one client at 4pm and then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading, writing, and chatting with coworkers.

5. On that note, I started reading Crooked Kingdom, though I haven't gotten very far yet.

6. Bought groceries.

7. Looked over a draft document for next week's church Board of Trustees meeting.

And now I shall continue winding down for maybe half an hour before falling into bed. :)

comments

today is a Day of Many Tasks

2019-05-01T19:09:56Z

Stuff done so far today:

-bought groceries.
-changed linens
-prepped for laundry
-potted onion
-enlarged drainage holes in carrot planters
-preliminary tidying of cluttered flat surfaces
-moved overwintered peppers and onion out to back porch for the afternoon

Stuff that still needs to be done:

-laundry
-transplant carrots
-finish tidying cluttered flat surfaces
-dust ceiling corners
-dust bookshelves and flat surfaces?
-vacuum apartment
-scrub toilet

...

I should go get started on the laundry. *sigh*

---------------

ETA, 6:00pm

Stuff done:

-laundry has been washed and dried and partially put away
-dusted ceiling corners (and the weird fiddly bits under my two tables while I was at it)
-dusted bookshelves and some flat surfaces
-scrubbed toilet
-took daily walk and snapped daily photo of Cascadilla Creek
-listened to four chapters of my latest Great Courses installment via Audible

Still needs doing:

-fold and put away remaining laundry
-transplant carrots
-plant the chard while I'm at it, since it will be sharing space with the carrots
-vacuum? (maybe put this off for tomorrow; I am tired and sore)
-oh right, dinner needs to happen at some point...

I think I'm going to turn on the oven and then go deal with the remaining laundry while it heats up to ~425F. :)

---------------

ETA, 9:30pm

Stuff done:

-cooked and ate dinner (and washed dishes afterwards)
-folded and put away laundry
-moved peppers, onion, and tiny fruit trees back inside for the night
-transplanted carrots
-planted chard
-reconciled credit card statements
-weeded some junk out of my filing cabinet
-backed up my laptop

Stuff to do tomorrow:

-VACUUM!
-move carrots and onion outdoors?
-finish tidying clutter off flat surfaces
-put away laundry that's air-drying overnight
-call Mrs. M about the lemon tree
-text/call Susan to work out Friday evening details

comments

a small adventure in kitchen fires: follow-up

2019-03-25T00:27:34Z

Landlord Dude came over today to check out the oven, and we jointly fished out the following mess from underneath:

The tally includes

1. a second disposable lighter
2. a lipstick-sized bottle of Advil (pills still inside, ugh)
3. a mouse-shaped cat toy
4. pieces of dry pet food
5. two beer caps
6. a lump of silly putty
7. a pen cap
8. a list of things not to forget
9. a cigarette butt
10. cashew shells
11. the lid to a spice jar
12. a long piece of straw or wicker
13. various plastic pull-tab lids
14. a small bolt and washer
15. one penny
16. the metal top of a THIRD lighter
17. so much dust
18. ashes

It is pretty damn obvious that Landlord Dude and Former Landlady forgot to clean under the oven as part of the turnover before I moved in. He apologized for this, as well he should.

I have vacuumed under the oven and inside the broiler drawer as thoroughly as I could, and also vigorously scrubbed the whole area with Windex. There was so much grease and grit and gunk. SO MUCH.

I'm now letting the whole thing air out overnight, and I think I may not use it until Tuesday, since that's when I'll be able to turn the oven on for an hour or so early in the afternoon and hopefully work through any residual burned plastic smell before I cook dinner that evening.

We shall see how it goes. :)

comments

a small adventure in kitchen fires

2019-03-23T00:45:15Z

So apparently in the almost TEN YEARS I have lived in my apartment, I have been courting disaster every time I turned on my oven.

How do I know this, you ask?

Because tonight something underneath the oven exploded in a small FIREBALL that sent a shockwave of accumulated dust, insect wings, and various other bits of dirt around my kitchen.

What caused this, you ask?

A cheap red plastic Bic lighter, which is now shattered into at least three pieces.

No, I have no idea how that got under my oven.

No, I have no idea why it didn't blow up sooner.

Yes, my kitchen smells of gross burning dust and plastic, but the fire didn't catch or spread and the plastic shrapnel missed me so I'm unharmed. (Also my dinner was thirty seconds away from being done, so I still have edible food.)

...

I am going to yank out the bottom drawer and do the MOST THOROUGH CLEANING OF MY LIFE before I use my oven again.

Because fucking YIKES.

comments

[Fic] Random fragments that I will never finish

2019-01-17T00:40:20Z

A small thing I did today:

As part of tidying my apartment in preparation for Susan's visit this weekend, I typed up a bunch of my paper notes into proper electronic files. This means that A) they won't be clutter anymore, and B) I will actually be able to find their contents when I need them instead of losing them at the bottom of a several inch thick stack of paper scraps.

Some of them I don't have any context for anymore, while others are pretty straightforward background worldbuilding or story outlining. And others are scraps of actual stories.

I have a lot more random story snippets than I remember actually writing.

Here are a few that I am pretty sure aren't going anywhere anymore:

---------------
---------------

( Harry Potter - untitled Hermione and Ginny fragment )

(I have no idea where I was going with that.)

---------------
---------------

( Homestuck - untitled Rose Lalonde fragment )

(Again, I have no idea where this was going.)

---------------
---------------

( Daredevil - untitled post-Season 1 fragment )

(I think I abandoned this because it was more didactic than I wanted.)

---------------
---------------

( Daredevil - miscellaneous fragments whose context I have lost )

(I think the first was an attempt at a Black Jewels crossover/fusion thing. The second is clearly a divergence post-Season 1, but beyond that, I got nothing. *shrug*)

---------------
---------------

( Riddlemaster Trilogy - Not Compassion (Those from the Sea) )

(This was clearly an attempt to give the nameless Earthmaster woman some backstory (and also assign her a name that seems plausible, given the "Those from the sea. Edolen. Sec," line that... I think one of the dead kids under the mountain says to Morgon?) and try to make sense of the inherent tension of a society where everyone has that kind of unfettered power even if they haven't quite realized it yet. But I never really had a plot, so it stalled out here.)

---------------
---------------

( Original - untitled fairy-tale fragment )

(This is one of the seeds of Sunbright and Shadowfall, even though I think it originally started as some kind of sideways Homestuck AU? By which I mean, IIRC this was loosely drawn from a dream, in which the lonely witch was Jade Harley, but I dunno exactly; it was a long time ago and I never wrote the details down.)

---------------
---------------

And that's that for my brain-dump. Everything else is either too fragmentary to be comprehensible, or is something I actually do still mean to finish someday.

comments

wherein Liz gets some stuff done on a slow day

2019-01-10T02:02:58Z

Things I have done today:

1. Got through some general apartment-tidying, though much still remains
2. Put away laundry
3. Potted a spider-plant baby and put a few others in water to root
4. "Worked" 2-7pm at Not the IRS, where I did three case studies
5. Started reading The Harbors of the Sun
6. Wrote three more 3-sentence ficlets (two Homestuck, one Narnia)
7. Took my compost to the communal bin (must text Landlord Dude to tell him it hasn't been picked up since December)
8. Listened to 2.5 lectures of a Great Courses series on the Black Death

I think I will now eat a few oatmeal raisin cookies while reading a bit more of The Harbors of the Sun, and then fall into bed. Mmm, cookies. Mmm, books. Mmm, bed. :)

comments

bleh

2018-01-09T04:28:27Z

I wrote four three-sentence ficlets today, and was going to knock off the fifth and final one, but it unexpectedly wants to be a full-length fairy tale. *headdesk* So I have shelved that for tomorrow and will try to think of a proper plot while I am falling asleep tonight.

(Other things I did: finished my preliminary triage of a cardboard box of miscellaneous stuff. I now know what's in there! ...I still have no idea what to do with most of it, but at least I know what it is.

Also I recycled a quarter of the stuff because if I haven't looked at it for over ten years, clearly I won't miss it. I will probably end up recycling another batch later on, but I want to look at those papers more closely first.)

And now to bed, because it's late and I'm tired.

comments

computer chairs

2017-12-30T02:53:55Z

This Christmas, my parents bought me a new computer chair from Ikea (Renberget model) which I put together tonight. None of the parts were missing or damaged, the instructions were clear, and the screws were generally well-behaved.

I needed a new chair because my old one was A) gross (pro-tip: do not get computer chairs with fabric arms), B) falling apart (the seat cushion was there to keep the seat screws from stabbing me in the butt), and C) not great for my back. I mean, considering what I paid for it (i.e., nothing; I stole it from the trash room in a former apartment building because some other tenant had abandoned it), it served me very well for the past decade-plus. But its run was clearly up.

The new chair is far from perfect -- the arms are a good 4-6 inches lower than I'd like (no support when I'm typing, boo; also they poke at my thighs when I try to sit in funny positions), and there's something uncomfortable about the angle of the seat and back that will require cushions to adjust (which also makes sitting in funny positions tricky *sigh*) -- but for now it does not attack me when I sit down, and doesn't make me worry what hideous diseases may be lurking in its upholstery, so all in all? An improvement. :)

(Still gonna replace it within a year or two, though. And next time I will test the chairs out myself. *wry*)

[[photos of both old and new chairs available via this link!]]

comments

stuff done: Monday-Friday

2017-07-29T02:23:07Z

1. Put away remaining laundry.

2. Took weekly photos of my vegetable garden, but forgot to post them. Ah well, next week!

3. Trimmed some overgrown bushes in my front yard, such that a person can now walk between the house and my car instead of finding the way impassably blocked by greenery. I must attack some other shrubbery this weekend, and possibly drag out my stepladder and give the lilac a thorough pruning.

4. Acquired cardamom and plain Greek yogurt in preparation for an attempt to approximate a Blue Apron recipe.

5. TOOK A NAP.

6. Took compost to bin. (I did this on several days, actually, but I am only going to list it once. Also the compost company finally came to empty the bin, and provided us with a new plastic liner bag which they'd neglected to do that last couple times they swapped bins.)

7. Remembered to bring a new box of tea to work, since my old one had run out.

8. Cleaned bathroom sink and toilet.

9. Called Cat Thursday afternoon and chatted for an hour and a half.

10. Cut my fingernails.

11. Vacuumed my apartment and did a little hand-dusting in awkward corners.

12. Volunteered for my church's recycling sale; I will presumably hear back from the organizers sometime this weekend.

13. Looked up hours of operation/donation for a few places I need to get to over the coming week.

14. Bought groceries (including almonds and dried currants for the previously mentioned recipe approximation attempt).

15. Backed up my computer files.

16. Began sorting my final coffee table storage box, which is full of I don't even know WHAT all kinds of completely unorganized stuff. I am taking a leaf from Cat's book and doing this in 15-minute increments, so I only take out small sections at a time and if I haven't figured out where they should go, I just put them all back in the box when I'm done. So far, I have sorted a handful of stuff into a permanent home in my nice new storage basket, recycled about twice as much, put two items aside to use a couple pieces and then throw out the rest, and set one thing in a place where I can't ignore it so I will finally get around to framing and hanging it properly. (It is a ridiculously twee baby's-first-cross-stitch project of a rearing unicorn that I sewed back when I was... I dunno, 10 maybe? which came with its own super-twee pink plastic frame, but dammit, it's adorable and I will display it with PRIDE.) And I stuck a bunch of other stuff back in the box because I have no clue what to do with it, so.

We shall see how that project continues.

17. Called my parents to discuss trips to and from NJ in August and September, and also to wish them a slightly early Happy Anniversary. As of tomorrow (Saturday 7/29/17) they will have been married for 43 years. ♥

18. Rescheduled a planned phone call with Vicky, because today turned out to be bad for her after all.

19. Posted two mini-ficlet prompt meme fills: How Easy All Can See (Rabadash talks to Ilgamuth about the political implications of courting Shezan) and Queen of the Night (Lucy decides that a queen of Narnia can set her own bedtime). Both went slightly diagonal to the prompts, but I think they turned out all right even if they're not what I meant to write. *wry*

And that is pretty much that for the week. :)

comments

stuff done: Monday-Friday

2017-07-08T00:27:21Z

1. Took weekly Monday photographs of my vegetables, but forgot to post them online. Ah well. I will do a two-weeks-in-one post this coming Monday.

2. Walked to the Cayuga St. bridge to watch my town's fireworks display at 9:45pm Monday night. (Ithaca usually does fireworks a day or two before the 4th. I am not sure when or why that offset started, but at this point it's a tradition and continues through sheer inertia.)

3. Wrote four fic DVD commentaries. :)

( more items under the cut )

21. Applied to TC3! (I mean, I fudged some dates because I don't remember the exact end dates of my association with my high school and previous colleges. I can tell you month and year, sure! But exact day? Pfff, no. I assume they will understand and cut me slack on that front.) Tomorrow I will start arranging for transcripts. I believe I can do that online for the two colleges. For my high school, I think I have to make a phone call, so that will wait for Monday.

22. Emailed Vicky about some super-secret plans we may or may not be conspiring over. ;)

And that is that!

For the record? My productivity was wildly uneven this week. Points 1 through 8 took four days (Monday-Thursday), whereas points 9-22 were all done in a single day (Friday). This is because I knocked my sleep schedule completely out of whack and did not manage to yank it back on track for several days, during which I kind of zombied around doing nothing in particular. I can't even say I was relaxing and enjoying myself; I was mostly just going through the motions and hoping some spark of emotion/inspiration would light me up.

I really need to stop letting my sleep schedule drift. That is utterly devastating to my ability to be a functional person.

comments

stuff done: Saturday-Monday

2017-06-06T04:33:04Z

1. Started making paper fruit for a new counter display at the rental office -- by which I mean I chose line art from online, copypasted it into Word documents (and resized and tweaked until I had about six iterations per page), and printed it out on colored paper. Miss Cactus already started cutting some of them out and adding detail with thin-point Sharpie pens. I am not sure whether I will arrive on Tuesday to a finished display, or whether I will get to do some cutting and coloring myself during any slow periods.

2. Acquired a new houseplant. See, a tenant couldn't bring the plant with them to their new apartment, but felt bad throwing a living thing away, so they brought it to the office and asked if we wanted it. I said yes. I then transplanted it from the dinky plastic store pot into the slightly larger ceramic pot the tenant had been using purely as decoration because apparently transplanting is hard. *sigh* Anyway, hopefully I will manage not to kill it.

3. Put three nails into one side of my oldest bookcase, to hold parts of my paperclip collection. (Context: I string paperclips in chains of ten onto keyrings, 25 chains per ring, and then hang them up for display. All the paperclips must be 'found' items -- I can't purposely buy them -- which is why it has taken me literally twenty years to collect a thousand paperclips. Well. A thousand and three, as of Saturday.)

( more items under the cut )

18. Called Vicky and caught up for an hour or so. :)

19. Chopped onions, summer squash, and a large bell pepper and made a batch of veggie sidedish. Tomorrow I intend to bake some chicken.

All in all, I think it was a fairly productive weekend.

comments

stuff done: Saturday-Thursday

2017-05-05T05:06:15Z

1. Called Cat Saturday night to catch up, since I was too buried in work to arrange a call over the past few months.

2. Boiled a dozen eggs.

3. Went to church Sunday morning to hear Rev. Weis preach. Then attended the special congregational meeting, in which we voted (98.6%!!!) to call her as our new settled minister. She accepted! \o/

( more items under the cut )

20. Cleaned AC and otherwise prepped for installation on Friday.

21. Organized another coffee table box (this one containing hundreds of photographs and some photo albums) into a nice basket. I still really need to get the rest of my Germany trip photos from the 90s into the albums and label all of them, and then do something to organize all the others -- because they are completely disorganized. But that is a project for another day. (Uh. Days, probably. Whatever.)

22. Called parents to organize a few more details of their visit Friday and Saturday, which is a thing that is happening. :)

comments

stuff done: Monday-Thursday

2017-01-20T04:36:49Z

1. Photographed my kitchen garden projects.

2. Put away laundry.

3. Brought empty recycling bins from curb to porch.

( more items under the cut )

12. Figured out why the Cotton Candy Bingo prompt ficlet I've been trying to write hasn't been working, and started over with a new approach that seems to be going better so far. Hopefully I'll have that done and posted sometime this weekend. :)

comments

Snowflake Challenge, day 3

2017-01-12T16:52:02Z

snowflake_challenge Day 3: Set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

I have various and sundry goals for the year, but I think the biggest ones are... hmm...

Okay.

1. Starting in April, get really serious about finding and applying to full-time jobs, because my current one (though it's nice and has a reasonable hourly wage) is only part-time and therefore has no benefits. I'm keeping it for now because it meshes well with my seasonal tax-prep job, but I want something more stable going forward.

2. Finish at least three chapters of "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," because I failed miserably on that front last year (ugh, depression) and now that I'm feeling less pervasively gray, I would like to get back to more regular writing.

3. Relatedly, write something every day. This can be as little as a single sentence, but I find that I do best in life when I arrange my days (or weeks) to have reliable structures and patterns. Last year I was pretty successful at finally training myself into making daily flossing a reliable habit, so I'd like to try that with writing this year. :)

4. Also relatedly, keep up my daily to-do lists! I have used to-do lists off and on over the years, mostly when I am having particularly bad problems with depression (I always list a few gimmes, like meals, to make sure I have things I can cross off and point to as 'see, I am NOT doing nothing!' evidence), which is why I started up the habit again in 2016, but I've been trying to regularize it a little more, and plan some items a few days in advance, and it's been very helpful in creating a sense of stability when my greater life has felt too big and terrible to ever be within my control. I'd like to keep that up in good times so the habit will be in place whenever bad times roll back again. *wry*

(They always do. These past couple years were only the second time I've had long-term depression; it's been almost entirely situational, which was also the case with my first extended depressive period, so I was pretty sure it would clear up when my life got less chronically stressful. (Spoiler: I was right.) But even when I'm doing well, I still get my blue funks -- I have periodic clinical depression, which means that a few times a year, my brain chemistry randomly conks out for a few weeks -- and I like to have a well-honed set of tools for getting through them.)

5. Continue my decluttering project. I have a bunch more boxes and cupboards that need to be sorted through, and there are still a bunch more clothes I should try on and decide whether I'm ever going to wear them again. I think I'd also like to get a new computer chair, and maybe some kind of shelving unit I can use to store my spare gardening stuff instead of having it randomly stacked on my kitchen floor.

6. Figure out a way to get more physical activity into my life. It needs to be sneaky and low-key, and it needs to be easily slipped into a daily routine rather than a special-purpose event solely about exercise or flexibility. I already walk 1-3 miles a day -- this is easy, because I don't usually have a car and I have an established routine of going to take a photograph of Cascadilla Creek from the Tioga St. bridge every day that this is physically and temporally possible -- but I want to add something a little higher intensity, and maybe also something to improve flexibility since I've been getting a bit stiffer as I get older and that annoys me.

Any advice on the exercise front would be very welcome, btw! :)

comments

stuff done: Friday-Tuesday

2017-01-04T04:46:48Z

1. Taped, sanded, and painted a fifth frame; touched up the two I painted on Thursday. Then I touched up the fifth on Saturday morning before packing them all into a laundry basket, carefully cushioned by towels, and took them down to NJ.

2. Made a packing list. Then packed.

3. Bought groceries.

( more items under the cut )

10. Went to see Rogue One with Susan at 4pm. I liked it a lot!

( cut for spoilers )

On the other hand, as Susan justly remarked, there wasn't very much of that ineffable sense of joy/wonder/boundless possibility that is the hallmark of Star Wars at its best and most inspiring. For me, the movie's virtues outweighed that flaw -- I am totally down with Star Wars attempting a gritty and morally gray war movie (the tragedy is not a departure; tragedy is a central theme of the franchise, just as much as hope) -- but judging by reviews a bunch of other people feel differently. And that's okay!

( more items under the cut )

17. Responded to all the comments on my Yuletide fic and my Daredevil Secret Santa fic. \o/

comments

stuff done: Friday-Sunday

2016-10-31T02:21:24Z

1. Paid my November rent.

2. Bought groceries, including another batch of Halloween candy. I still don't think I have enough.

3. Boiled fourteen eggs. (I have added a hard boiled egg to my standard breakfast of toaster waffles, applesauce, and black tea -- the meal now contains fruit, carbs, protein, and caffeine, which I think is a pretty solid start to a day.)

( more items under the cut )

12. Prepped for Halloween. I don't know if I'll be able to leave the office early tomorrow, so I have arranged with Downstairs Neighbor S that I will leave some stuff in the foyer of the house, which she will place out on the porch around 5pm and/or when the first trick-or-treaters arrive. I mixed all my candy into a big wicker basket (which I usually use for collecting empty bottles to return for the bottle deposit) and made a little 'TAKE 1' sign with a picture of a jack-o-lantern on it, which I have taped to the back of a folding chair; the candy basket will sit on the chair seat.

.

( more items under the cut )

16. Repaired a mug whose handle broke when I dropped it about two weeks ago, and the lid to my casserole dish (which also broke when I dropped it two weeks ago; I was having a very clumsy couple days). The mug is perfectly functional again. The lid is... less so. The ceramic was very crumbly where it didn't have glaze to hold it together, so there's a noticeable missing wedge, and the pieces have very sharp edges.

If anybody knows a material I could use as filler, that would be awesome. It doesn't need to be oven-safe -- I only use the lid as a cover after I've baked stuff, either to keep it warm for serving or to protect the contents in the fridge -- but it does need to be waterproof and preferably mold-proof as well.

.

[[link to Tumblr post A, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

[[link to Tumblr post B, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

comments

wherein Liz rambles about family stuff

2016-10-22T02:11:32Z

Mom drove up to Ithaca today to collect Dottie, so as of about 3:30pm I no longer have a dog. Woe!

On the other hand, I have a lot more available time now. Pets are wonderful, but they eat time like nobody's business.

Anyway, we went out for lunch at the Heights Cafe, a restaurant we hadn't yet been to (discovered via a listing of pretty much every restaurant in the greater Ithaca area, which was published in a recent-ish issue of the Ithaca Time and which I duly saved and took down to NJ for Mom's use), which turned out to be both pretty easy to get to and a place we think Aunt Cara would like, and which we may therefore end up visiting again on either the Tuesday or Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

(We are doing Thanksgiving at my place again this year. That pattern began several years ago for perfectly sound logistical reasons, but I have a feeling that this repeated confluence of work schedules and transportation options means that I have accidentally 'inherited' Thanksgiving, whereas Vicky's the one who will 'inherit' Christmas if and when our parents get tired of hosting it. We've done Christmas at Vicky's place twice now (once in Spain, once in DC), but she's never hosted Thanksgiving and I've never hosted Christmas. I'm still gonna make Vicky do all the Thanksgiving cooking, though, while I handle the cleanup and leftover-packaging work. That split ends up making everybody happier than if we tried to split the work 'evenly' or I cooked while she cleaned.)

We also went to Michael's (an artsy-craftsy supply chain) to buy some gold paint and paintbrushes, so I can attempt to touch up the frames of some old pictures my parents inherited from my paternal grandmother. This would be by way of a Christmas present to Mom, who doesn't want to do the work herself.

...

The reason I had Dottie this time is because Mom and Dad compressed a ridiculous number of home renovations into a single two-week period and for obvious reasons could not have a dog around for any of it. (In fact, they couldn't have themselves around for the second half, and duly drove down to DC to visit Vicky, Aunt Jan, and Uncle Charles & Aunt Ji-lan.)

The first week, they had several ceilings repaired and replastered, had the massive hole in the living room wall repaired and replastered (the hole being a side-effect of a water pipe fix from earlier this year), had the hideous wallpaper in the stairwell stripped and destroyed (which should have been done thirty years ago, and I am not exaggerating that time period in the slightest), and then had the entire downstairs plus the stairwell and the main upstairs hallway repainted. The second week, they had the wood floors of the dining room, living room, staircase, and upstairs hallway stripped and refinished, because they were beat all to hell, aka ugly as fuck and a bit splintery in places besides.

So now they are slowly moving furniture back into its normal locations, and also trying to decide what they want to do with regard to carpets and/or area rugs. I think they have decided against wall-to-wall carpeting, but I will be curious to visit at Christmas and see what they've done with the place.

comments

stuff done: Monday-Friday

2016-10-08T04:20:52Z

1. Photographed my peppers. Posted about them on Tumblr. (Did not crosspost to DW because I ran out of spoons, whoops. I will try to correct that this weekend. Or maybe Monday.) I also chopped up and froze a pepper that was developing a fungal infection -- obviously I cut off and threw away the nasty parts.

( more items under the cut )

17. Rearranged two of my kitchen cupboards to put some things I use frequently (tealight candles and scented wax melts) within easy reach and put some things I only use once or twice a year (trivets and decorative hot pads) up where I need to stand on a chair to reach them, because obviously having them in the opposite places was logistically stupid.

And now it is time for me to go to bed, because I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.

comments