entering the whirlpool

Many years ago, in the days when blogging was mostly long-form and photos were rare, someone linked to an essay written by a (games-adjacent, I think?) blogger who wrote it while dying of terminal cancer as a letter to those he left behind. I have no idea who the writer was (and had not heard of him besides this essay) but it was an atheist's monument to having been alive that ended with the repeated: I lived. I lived. I lived!

I am working on living. (my brain: 45 was ok.--wait, I mean, being 45 was fine, I guess, except for all the other stupid crap going on...) I have made a great many tiny clay things and several quite large clay things, a shrine with multiple icons for the Altar of Good Sense at Pennsic, bits of art in many shapes & sizes, fun clothing and useful clothing that no longer has holes in it, baskets from invasive vines & pine needles, and a great many other things I can't remember at present. I've read a lot of books. After intending to do it for some years, I'm actually working on a little free library. (Ok, it would be up already if I didn't feel the need to decorate it like a tiny house.) I am trying to remember that when I spin down on Doing Things, having random art time or mucking about in the yard for a bit makes the day better.

The Megatherium got into her coveted Visual Arts magnet program for middle school, & seems to have managed to grow into sufficient responsibility to handle the academics with enough spare time in most of her classes to fill up the pages of her binder with drawings of anime characters. She will occasionally try to explain her alternate universe fanfic plotlines to me with great enthusiasm and semi-incomprehensible recountings of things I haven't read, and then she & her friends bounce off each other joyously speculating about their demonslayer AUs and I do vaguely remember when I had that level of energy, but it's been a minute. (or thirty years...) In any case, she is still happy for me to walk her to the bus stop, so I do actually get out of the house & get a little exercise on school day mornings, which is helpful.

Among the far too many tabs I have open (the bulk of them are interesting clay things from various museum collections, & I should *do* something about that...) is Mary Robinette Kowal's free mini-class on Barriers to writing, in the continuing quest to get out of my own way and actually type stuff, as my brain is still stuck on "can't write now, someone else is in the house!" too much of the time. Tho there was recent discussion about finding a way to flag, "the door is closed, do not come check on me right now" in a house with very few actual doors, and cats who would prefer not to get locked out of the space with the FAVORED HUMAN.

Got a giant air filter for Xmas, trying to make enough living room & little enough mess to invite people for craft days or something on the grounds that trying to parent a teen in the middle of an apocalypse is gonna go better with some sort of community. Maybe space in the basement for said proto-teen to have a gaming space or something. Ideally without problematic levels of exposure to this plague or the next for us or the cats. (All the cautions about H5N1 I've seen say don't let your cats go outdoors, which they don't, but they have got access to the screened-in porch, & I am *hoping* this will not be a problem.)

There are more hatches to batten down in the next month, but we are not dead and not dying yet despite my child's interpretation of the "dress like the future" school spirit day, where she borrowed my skull feltie hairclip because "we'll all be dead in the future." (I had to assure grauwulf that I hadn't put her up to it.) Tomorrow I will make more art or read another book or find another way to make something better, and onward.

I had heard the rhyme about oak trees (300 years to grow; 300 years to thrive; 300 years to die; 900 years alive) before, but I was recently introduced to The Lost Words: Spell Songs, and their second album has a tune for it which has been playing in my head.

It translates nicely to human terms at a century to a decade, and I am contemplating getting nearly half-way thru my "thrive" years in the middle of the worst storm of grauwulf's mental health yet. Climate change has taken out a lot of 400+ year oaks too, tho. (The few that haven't already been logged, anyway.) Both my grandmothers made it past 90; my mother is 30 years older than I am and still pretty solid. Meanwhile, I got my psychologist to increase my antidepressant dosage temporarily (during a moment it looked like things were being *solved*) which is probably good, given that the last month of my life has unexpectedly brought me a soap-opera of epic proportions in which I, the flakey artist type, am still by far the sanest one despite dousing grauwulf with the contents of two different beverage containers yesterday. (It has been a *very long* month. Or two. Or decade plus...)

(Things I can disrecommend from experience now include having one's spouse attempt his first polyamorous relationship-- about which he is still inclined to be excessively guilty, but that's most likely due to early imprinting on his mother's terrible relationship decisions-- with someone he met in detox (his first, her fifth) where she kept picking fights with the staff. Especially one who also has a sometime-crazy stalker husband for bonus points. I cannot imagine that I would have recommended this in the first place, but I was not consulted on this front. I still think having a *stable, well-defined* second relationship w/ someone who's more excited about sex than I am would be good for grauwulf, but this is not what we're dealing with.)

I have been practicing my inner Cordelia and trying to figure out where all the nonsense is coming from, but it appears to be the end of my second year of "Patience and Persistence" right on schedule as my patience has rather run out. I'm considering the fortune-cookie fortune I tucked into the case for my computer: "Avoid compulsively making things worse," although I suppose choosing a goal for myself ought properly to be something I don't mostly want to encourage in other people. My to-do list today included three counts of "Make something better," which seems like a more useful formulation to apply to myself.

Things I am presently trying to make better include having an actual attic for storing things (fabric) I don't want to languish in the mildewy basement-- a project complicated by having to reattach the fiberglass insulation that slumped off the bottom of the roof when it leaked seven or eight years ago. (progress has been made, but there's a lot more to do, plus suiting up for working w/ fiberglass makes things slow.) I have theoretically engaged a writing tutor to try to get the Megatherium through the ADHD-exacerbated pandemic learning gap which hit right as she was beginning to gain some steam on getting words from brain to paper. At some point I would like another cat (or a pair of cats??) for my mental health not only because cats are good to have on that front, but also because the *house is full of mice.*

I am just too tired right now to add writing to the actual list. Because brain to paper is hard, and I keep trying to start things that require too much world-building. Clay is easier, since if I haven't got a plan I can just muck about and squish anything that doesn't work out. It's also in a dedicated not-my-house space. Other than that, we're back to the future being less predictable than ever. (Not that it ever really was, of course, but it used to feel that way.)

The concept of assigning a word to one's year instead of goals has come up a bunch of times on the Space Gnome Discord... it's a theme, to be reinterpreted as needed rather than a more specific commitment. I'm giving it a whirl (tho being by usual somewhat contrary self, I've got two words): PATIENCE and PERSISTENCE.

ie, remember there's all this crap going on right now, and yes, it will make many things harder and some impossible. We know this. But that also doesn't mean giving up.

Well, I am now 41, which is going to be hard to remember because I've been thinking of myself as (almost) 40 for multiple years now, and it's not interesting like 42. I feel highly unprepared to write something introspective; I have been battling clutter with losses on both sides, rediscovered my writing process, lost it again, and am struggling to get it back (my latest to-do list included "think about [character]"), and my crafting internet-friend-group has been put through the wringer & is part-way through restructuring itself. My other internets are mostly-silent (here) or drowning in apocalypse (twitter), and my irl friend groups are largely busy in other places than I am. There's a lot of losing touch and shifting things going on, and I haven't figured out what I want to do about it, besides "something."

My goals going forward are continuations: continue writing, continue decluttering, continue walking up hills twice a school day, continue slowly getting around to the things I want done. Read books. Get sleep. Coax my brain into working better (always) and the Megatherium into doing her homework/chores/etc less painfully. Oh, and I want to plant some chestnut trees out at the annex come spring.

Our baselines are way up from last year, at least... grauwulf is doing pretty darn well; he's gone back to barely sleeping in the last month or so, but otherwise is a functional adult (yay!) and while the Megatherium has taken to sudden fits of tears or belligerent denials when told to do basic tasks like get dressed or help clean things, we (mostly I, but she did help) cleared out enough of her room that I can vacuum 2/3 of the floor that doesn't have furniture on it. She has also been watching The Zoo (behind-the-scenes doccumentary at the Bronx Zoo) which is orders of magnitude better than the Paw Patrol of last year, and her teacher says she's mostly worked out her ability to concentrate in school.

As of mid-morning, I have now been breathing air for 40 years, so here's to a new year of me and the continued functioning of my lungs and assorted other biological systems. I'm presently curled up into a rather small space by my bed between stacks of unread books and a box of patterns to get rid of (anybody want some women's clothing/costume patterns ~size 8-10?) typing, while my child watches paw patrol somewhere else and my husband (after getting escorted out of the DMV-- sorry MVA, stupid maryland-- for asking multiple times if it were possible to get a replacement title *today* instead of having one mailed from the kiosk) has reputedly gone back to sleep on the couch & thus is not available to decipher the titles of the paw patrol episodes. I said, "sound it out," and her Megatheriosity concluded that it was easier just to watch that episode rather than do work to figure out if it was the one she wanted in advance. This is about normal for the household these days, I guess. ("We have a child for whom 'Cambrian' is a sight word, but who can't read 'ready'," as her father said yesterday.)

Christmas went pretty well (in fact, despite a really ghastly first half to the month, grauwulf's brain has been almost kind to him for the last week and a half) and the Megatherium, who made certain that I knew she wanted gum in her stocking about six times in the last few days, is now half-way through the first of four packs of it. (I said, "Did you tell Santa Claus?" b/c she'd mentioned doing notes to Santa in school since they had an elf-on-the-shelf in the classroom, to which she replied, "I told you!" She also mentioned being mad at her classmates when she couldn't convince them Santa wasn't real, so, yeah, fair enough.) The day before we spent most of the day repeating a conversation where I asked her to help clean up & she said she didn't like cleaning so I should do it, and I pointed out that I didn't like cleaning either but we weren't having christmas until the living room got cleaned up, and everyone was cranky. Eventually grauwulf suggested she could help me by sweeping, and she did and rediscovered Cinderella's lost shoe, which has been missing since the day after she got the doll for her 4th birthday party. This is why we have multiple adults, because that sure hadn't been working for me.

Anyway, that's where we are. I went out to the annex last week and unsurprisingly didn't want to leave again once I got there. I scared some deer, wandered down the hill, took a bunch of unsuccessful pictures and a quite nice bit of video of the little rill leading down to the creek (those on twitter might have seen that), and left uprooted garlic mustard hanging from the shrubs as trail sign. There are a lot of invasive plant infestations, but the garlic mustard on the hillside is actually fairly minimal so far. There are bits of the creek I recognize from the last time I was down there; I still have no idea of the perimeter, but I will be back. So that's one thing.

In a week I can make grauwulf hie himself to the doctors to work on his brain issues, so that's another thing.

In smaller quests, I have far too many library books that I need to read or decide not to read. I have been enjoying journaling, so I hope to continue that. I still want to creep back up on writing, which is beginning to appear possible. I am slowly digging back out of the creep of stuff that got put down places b/c it didn't have a home; I read something a while back about selfie & mom/cooking/etc blog culture leading to a skewed impression of people with perfect lives and make-up and spaces, so I've been consciously posting the occasional picture of the appalling mess my desk has got to or how tired I look today on twitter. It would be nice (in these enlightened days where I take my pictures with my phone, which doesn't talk to my computer since I refuse to update itunes) to figure out some way to get those pictures here, as well.

I-- as I always seem to-- had a brilliant cards-to-send-people idea around the 15th of December. It deserves its own essay, I think (tho... I just turned up two little bits of paper outlining essay posts I didn't write from a year and a half ago) but the gist of it is tarot-style cards with little soundbyte items in the vein of little things you can do that *actually make a difference* to ecology or climate or whatnot. Besides turning off the ---ing water when you don't have anything under it. Most of the big things are at government or big corporation level; misinformation on what helps at an individual level is rampant; even things like cutting corn-fed beef and air travel only help in aggregate b/c they're still going to fly that plane even if you personally aren't on it. But. Even if Baltimore Harbor is awash knee-deep in 20 years, that's still 8-12 generations of chickadees you can make or break by what you plant in your small suburban yard and what you do or don't spray on it. There are Things You Can Do to change lives on a small budget of time or money. Little Good Things. So I want to work on this, and perhaps send some out in February. Or whenever, because plans around here...

Judging from my grandmothers (& my mother's record so far) I hope to have at least another ~45 years of functional time barring the unexpected & disasterous, so perhaps I'll get something done eventually.

Birthday again, and having mentally adjusted from thinking of myself as 37 to thinking of myself as "almost 40" being 39 is sort of a non-thing. It's also a silly place for a new year, since the next (known) big change is next fall when the Megatherium goes into kindergarten and everything is going to be Different. (I'm a bit skeptical about this full day kindergarten thing, but it seems to be our option, so we'll see.) Lots of my life is still unhelpfully dependent upon the health & sanity of others, but that's people for you, I guess.

I haven't really attempted to write all year, which I'm ok with so long as it's temporary (writer brain is still in there; I came back from Pennsic with Ideas, but time and brain are still not aligning usefully, and stress levels are high enough I think it's counterproductive to push. Ugh, brains.) I have been doing other creative things: craft swaps, a little gardening, some hand embroidery, a lot of little horses & other jointed paper creatures, and now machine embroidery. I've actually more or less made friends with some of M's classmates' parents/grandparents, tho we'll see how many of those last once she's in a different elementary school. I've been playing too much silly dragon game on my phone, and ignoring too much horrible politics.

I have no idea how the household sanity levels are going; my child spends a lot of time being cranky and demanding and dissatisfied. (Her threats are still hilarious, tho-- "Daddy, can I please watch a Princess Leia video? This is your last warning!... [later] If you don't, you'll be superheated and rolled flat into paper.") Some of it's the age, some of it's her way of protesting the non-dependability of her environment. There are times when you have to pull her Doc McStuffins videos from her screaming hands to get her to stop watching them (and there are far worse shows to be addicted to, but I wish she'd picked something with less marketing.) Grauwulf is still... whether I think he's doing better or worse depends on when you ask me. We've also postponed my birthday dinner out with possible ice skating until he's not being knocked flat by a cold/sinus infection. And we've been priced off the exchange for healthcare so M & I are losing the doctor we've had since before she was born. Too many of my spaces are covered with random crap I need to deal with or find a place to put away.

In the next calendar year, I'd like to be less sedentary (it comes & goes...); carve back out space to do things in my craft room, my bedroom, the kitchen counters, my desk...; and continue to try to do things that are important (nurture family, feed birds, pester politicians, make real things instead of just fleeting "what a good idea"s.) Buy less stuff, possibly declare a Year of Using Everything Up.

When the Megatherium's in real school... I want to write. I want to get to know the annex, and do some work (habitat improvement, invasives removal) there. I want teach myself to read more fiction in sane chunks without making myself sick by staying up too late compulsively turning pages and be able to do that and write in the same brain. I may want to get back into the writing community in realspace ways. And that may be more than I can really commit to, so we'll just let the naturalist garden blog and the giant list of proto-projects continue to float in the maybe-some-day.

I have a vague recollection I posted something about new year goals being to clean the toilets more often last year? Which I've done; having a toddler who doesn't *always* follow one into the bathroom helps there. (Independent play is a marvelous thing! Now she needs more friends...)

Slightly more ambitious goals for this year. ( depression, things to do about it )

So, goals!
*Exercise more consistently. I'm not sure what this looks like yet, but have some ideas to try.

*Post here, ideally at least once a week or so? I miss journaling.

*Write at least 3 sentences of fiction, at least any day I don't journal. This may go up if I get back into the swing of things, but this was working pretty well at the beginning of December, so we start back there.

*Have friends. (Correspond, get together with people, possibly find a knitting group or something?? I mean, not that I ever knit. Maybe quilters...? Anyway, I want to have craft days! And tea parties! And go to cons with writer-friends! There has got to be some way to make a little of this happen, even if it's only a few times a year. Sitting here wanting is not it.)

*Enjoy parenting more. We tried co-playing Boom Blocks a couple weeks back, which would have worked better if the Megatherium's hands had been big enough to hold the wiimote & press buttons at the same time, but then I coaxed her outside for a walk the next day by saying we could wander around the neighborhood scouting for things that, were we playing Boom Blocks, we could knock over with the bowling ball. (She wanted to throw pretend bombs at people's houses, but that seemed like a bad idea.) So, this kind of thing: co-operative world exploration & inventing silly games. (also, if anyone has suggestions for toddler-friendly wii games-- I made her a wii fit profile, & lied about her age to get her on, since you can't play if you're under 3, and she liked the balance board, but so far the ordinary controller is just not quite there yet. Maybe something where she can steer with the nunchuck while I point & click at things?)

*Accomplish at least one ridiculously overdue task a week. (Perhaps starting with passports for me & the Megatherium; also wills, though I admit I still have no one even to ask about literary executorship, so I'll theoretically have to do that again later. But making sure that if horrible things happen to grauwulf & me the Megatherium goes to her "and Grandma is my third parent!" rather than the side of the family that doesn't believe in education is something we should have done years ago.) Things of a less bureaucratic and monumental nature are also fair game.

Xposty from dreamwidth.

I am now old enough to run for president, though fortunately I'm not required to do so. (speaking of things I don't want to do with my life...)

My resolution for the next year is to clean the bathrooms more often. (No, really.) Though it's astonishing how much time an 8 o'clock bedtime and regular naptimes produces, so there's even the chance that I'll get back to writing someday. It's a nice theory.

We had exciting Christmas with 10-month-old, and are working out what we want for family traditions now that "go visit my parents for dinner" isn't what it used to be. We're thinking I shall cook breakfast & grauwulf shall make exciting feast-like dinner with roasting and stuffing things, and thus I continue to escape being responsible for Dealing With raw bird. (This is not the only reason.) The down side to baby gifting celebrations is that she's at that age where you need one or two good new toys, and then it feels unkind to pry her away from the thing you just gave her to make her open another present. And there is some... familial dissension regarding what makes a "good" gift for a kid, which led to the questionable moral choices between exchanging gifts for things we approve, or donating things we don't approve of to those who maybe can't afford to be so picky. (We went with the former, and then donated something we did approve of, but then there's the question about what do you say on the phone to the person who wants to know if the kid loved their [[seriously creepy singing battery-operated toy]].) Just adds a little bit of squick to the holiday season all round. And then the xylophone piano thing we picked out completely mystifies us by having mi and fa both sound mi, despite clear different paint jobs and apparent size discrepancies. All three adults present remain baffled by this one, but we entertained ourselves by building towers with the Megatherium's blocks & stacking toys as she wandered around and knocked them over and chewed on the yak column.

(B. elemenosqueeze! Weird animal blocks that look like they came out of a ruined temple in an Ursula Vernon comic... We have a thrift store assortment so far, bought last-minute after I minorly obsessed over the mouse column for a month & then went back & found them still there, but I ordered a new set as well.)

There were a host of other things I was going to talk about, but darned if I can remember what they were. Also, most of my large stack of library books are due tomorrow, so maybe I should go see if there are any I can finish before then. Or play the silly computer game my brother got/loaned me (ok, he got me all 3 Skylanders games, and how in the world he thinks someone raising an active 10-month-old is going to get around to playing all of them I don't know. The Megatherium quite reasonably hates it when I start concentrating on a video game when she's awake. But we have this undead lady who throws exploding skulls encased in purple light, and I can throw them at the creepy egotystical character, so what's not to love?)

I went down to return some books to my father last week, and came back with my twin sized foam mattress to make daybed seating on the short side of the loft and a native rescue azalea. While there, I asked if my parents were aware that RA MacAvoy had a new book out, to which my father asked if I was aware that his brother had dated RA MacAvoy in high school. (and here I was still vaguely proud of myself for recognizing her as the Bertie MacAvoy mentioned in passing in Making Book)

The old bedroom is now set up as an interim library, and I've spent large amounts of the last few days running up and down stairs transporting large stacks of books. I may have slightly underestimated the amount of hardback fiction we owned, but it does (just barely) all fit on the giant shelf with the Pratchett double-stacked in its own cubby and my picture books filling the bottom row. (Yes, I have six linear feet of picture books... my mother used to be a children's librarian.) Grauwulf came up last night and found me sitting in the middle of the floor, momentarily distracted by The Nargun and the Stars, and said that this was me in my natural habitat: surrounded by books.

Also, I have now got two versions of Chapter 1, one of which includes a Jessamine who (pretends to think/) thinks she's a princess in disguise, and the other an Alisoun who's full of wild plans for how she's going to marry the prince. I'm considering renaming the dead princess (who, um... becomes important to book five, sigh) in the Alisoun version from Joellein to Jessamine, because I can. Evaluation to follow on which one of these chapters I'm actually keeping. Stupid beginnings.

On the subject of revisions, or was that goals... I've always wanted to do something terribly exciting for leap day, and never come up with anything good, so that is the day I'm going to send out a query so my top-choice agent can tell me she's not interested in this. (At some point I should also do some research into finding other agents I want to query...)

Xposty from dreamwidth.

I was making pancakes to use up the last of the gallon of sour milk this morning when grauwulf asked if I would go with him to see the Great Barrier Reef before it's gone. Apparently he's been reading that the carbon dioxide content of that part of the ocean is about to reach the point of no return, beyond which it's predicted that the entire reef ecosystem will die off in a matter of two or three years. And since that's on his life list of places he wants to go see, it's about time for me to get my passport renewed. (Well, past time, but that's another story.)

An hour or two later, I was making my way across the state to go to a craft fair and getting on the ICC at a shiny new entrance ramp where several years ago I dug holes in the middle of a small forest and watched my dig partner save a frog from being eaten by a snake next to our unit. (Admittedly, the whole place was chock full of invasives, but there was a bunch of good stuff in there too.) And I started to think that the reef thing was horrible, but not anything I can do the least bit about, and half-way through thinking that I reminded myself that I was in the process of burning half a tank of gasoline on frivolous things this weekend alone (Longwood Gardens yesterday, Gaithersburg today, two journeys of over an hour each way with only me in my little toyota on the highway.)

If I were the worst offender... the world would not be in a lot of trouble. But that is very different than not being part of the problem. There's a lot of people being the problem to go around at the moment, and I've been mostly avoiding it because I don't know what I can possibly do to change the minds of people whose general political attitude seems to be to stick their fingers in their ears and yell louder at the first breath of disagreement. And while I definitely think we need social services, of all the ridiculous and terrible problems in the world caused by people being ignorant or careless it's the ones that threaten the rest of our ecosystem that are most likely to make me want to come up swinging.

So. I don't use a lot of gasoline; usually I'll buy a tank a month, sometimes two, and generally most of my driving is to the aquarium or the grocery stores with the occasional craft store or trip to see my parents thrown in. That's less than twelve gallons to fill up even if I've driven a ways with the fuel light on, so it's not a major expenditure, and on the whole, most of my driving is pretty frivolous. If I were dedicated, I could take the light rail in to Baltimore (it takes at least twice as long & involves standing about in the weather) and get one of the bicycles working to go to the library and things. But I'm spoiled, and unlikely to do either of these things, or stop gadding about the world occasionally because I feel like going places. So instead I'm instituting a personal carbon offset policy.

For every dollar I spend on gasoline (and I write it all down in a little notebook in the car, with a bunch of other semi-useless statistics that would allow me to calculate mpg and various other things if I ever went back and looked at them) I will spend at least as much money on something that contributes to a general lessening of the harm done burning it. I'm starting with the native plant sales (and I've printed out the list of MD coastal plain approved natives that'll be happy in mid-to-dense shade, so I'm ready to find things to fill up the sides of the back yard.) After that, I guess it'll be time to look into what's actually a good investment in the way of alternate energy sources and saving the rainforest-- if anyone has suggestions, please do share!

Also, next week I *will* get up early enough on Sunday to make it to one of the Baltimore farmer's markets, since they're actually open already.

(grauwulf says, "you're a hippy." He doesn't mean it in a bad way-- the next sentence was that he thought I was being very noble-- but neither of these are really related to any of what's in my head about this. Maybe it's just having Oberlin for context, but in my head actual hippies are more alternate lifestyle, possibly drugs, & the overreacting PETA-style crazies who are just as likely to stand around the building exits smoking in front of the "don't smoke in the air intake" signs or try to make people sign giant paper mache toxified caribou to "oppose" alaskan oil drilling as do anything actually useful. The dictionary on my computer covers druggie and sub-culture in a historic context. And I'm not any of those things; I just believe in not wasting things, and I like nature and want it to be able to go on being natural.)