blissmorgan

There is something in this house, probably either a board that expands/contracts with changing heat but possibly a pipe, which makes a very particular flappy/clicky noise that hits my brain the way it sounded when my dear departed Serendipity would self-clean and then resettle herself with a shake of her head that made her ears flap against the side of her wee kitty skull. Or perhaps I merely have kitties on the brain; I sorely miss having a little fuzzy roommate.

This morning's enschoolenation went better than I expected, considering I had to get my shower in in the middle of the routine, and I had to chat with Youngest to bring back up the mini-meltdown he had on Friday and set up expectations for making things right. I walked out to the bus stop with the kids, which I do not normally do, so that he could begin with apologizing to his bus driver, at whom he swore on Friday. He also knows to be expecting to get called down to the office to speak with the principal about his behavior, and that while it won't necessarily be comfortable it IS necessary and a consequence of his behavior.

I expect the school will be calling me at some point today, but I hold out hope that the principal will just email me back about what happened.

Today is a day of change for all our routines; SALM is working his way through his Master's degree, one class per semester at a time, and today begins the new semester for him. It's a late class, starting after 7, and he has already begun his routine of doing homework late Sunday afternoon and into the evening, which means I am Point Parent basically from midday Sunday until Tuesday afternoon. We have done this before, and it is quite doable.

Today it is made interesting by the fact of an appointment right after work, so I'm going to ease the transition for the kids by getting food from their favorite pizza place once I'm done with all my grownuppy things.

Other grownuppy things I need to do:

• Dishes
• Laundry
• Clear the table and put down a new tablecloth
• Taxes, because I am employed now and that's a thing I gotta do, Oh Zod how do I do this
• Call the doctor that does the prescriptions because apparently a medicine someone needs is on backorder. Till SEPTEMBER. WTF.

Yes really, for more than half a year. The kid's been off the med for three weeks now due to pharmacy kerfluffle, though, and given its likely inaccessibility I am going to ping the doctor about possibly trying an alternative of some kind.

• Get additional laundry out of living room
• Build Youngest's bureau
• Paint the drawerfronts
• Remove old books from living room, offer them on local Buy Nothing group or something
• Shelve new books

Rearrange furniture (again)

....this list has gotten really long. It will have to be, I think, a list for this week rather than for tonight. I will hold myself accountable for a minimum of 1-2 things on this list tonight.

Other doings:

• Write a short story
• Read a chapter of a thing and circle back with the author
• Write a response to 2 online RPs

Anyway, here's a selfie because I'm really digging this whole Hair Dryer With Diffuser And Certain Helpful Hair Products thing to let my curly hair actually be itself.
Whoop, it's BOB o'clock. Gotta scoot.

Hello, Blisstopia. <3

It's odd how going to sleep at midnight and waking up shortly after 8 somehow doesn't feel like a full night of rest, even though clearly I was or I'd have not awakened and stayed awake. Perhaps it is because I spent so much of my sleeptime dreaming, and therefore my mind was quite active during its rest period.

Without getting too deeply into it, I dreamt of lions, and of a demon with a nickname, and of sex that some people might consider problematic because it involved explicit preemptive consent rather than in-the-moment consent. That is, perhaps, something worth setting up a private filter for. Sex and sexuality, the nitty-gritty sexy-wexy that lead to the erotica I write, the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of non-het non-mono relationship lifestyling: let me know if you're interested in being in on that filter.

....I've had this post sitting open for almost two hours because when SALM finished cooking breakfast he sat down and we proceeded to have a long conversation about the dangers of sharing personal information on the internet, my long personal and third-party familiarity with those dangers, the way they have morphed over time and differing services (I've outlived several online journaling services; I was on OpenDiary back when it was free. And existed.), and how nowadays one must not only be concerned with individual manipulators using one's own information against you but also corporate and political movers attempting to do so as well. It surprised him how much time and thought I've actually put into all of it; it's not something we've ever really discussed in depth before. Topics ranged from the Livejournal Strikethrough to the Koch brothers, from Ayn Rand to G.G. Allin to Nationalism, Antifa, and Communism.

It was a long more thinkythoughts than I was expecting this morning, and there are parts where I fucking floundered due to lack of knowledge/information, but it was also damned wonderful. At one point, too, he strongly urged me to look into getting an MS in Library Information Science, because a strong swath of the needs of the positions making use of such a degree include a strong leaning into Information Literacy, something which is of definite interest at large these days and which he sees me having an affinity for. We'll see; for now, I've lodged that as a thing to consider.

Last night I went and played D&D for the first time in quite a while. My DM lives north of the city, so it is a bit of A Drive getting there and back, but it is so worth it. Apparently two of the other players have been clamoring for me to come play, because I was in a game with them that he ran a couple years ago and was so much fun. Then, I was a halfling fighter whose exploits included jamming a bomb inside a severed monster head to use as a frag grenade against a crowd of evil dwarves, and stealing not one but TWO airships. I was an excellent admiral, y'all. This time around, I am a half-orc granny rogue whose weapons of choice are a demeanour of being aged and infirm until the fighting starts, as well as the actual weapons which are a pair of knitting needles (daggers) and an oversized pair of scissors that can be yanked apart to use as a pair of shortswords.

My DM loves me and lets me get away with shit because we are both writers and I pull shenanigans that are as entertaining as hell, even if I do have a knack for completely derailing his adventures. Heheheheheh.

Today will involve a bunch of driving around. We are going to hit IKEA to pick up a corner shelving unit for my bathroom upstairs, so I no longer have my stuff in sort of just a piled drift in that particular corner. I'm also going to get a pine 5-drawer unit and some green stain for the Youngest Spawn. Well, the stain is for the chest of drawers which, in turn, is for the Spawn. He's been handling using soft hanging units in his closet for his clothing, but he is getting big enough and his clothing collection big enough that they don't fit handily into the hanging units any more, and have a tumbling-out tendency.

The driving around is also going to involve playing Ingress. I started playing it a month or two ago, bopping over into it sometimes while we were already out playing Pokemon Go, and my interest in it intrigued SALM enough that he started playing it over a long weekend when he was away visiting family. He went up 5 levels in as many days, and we have been having a grand time going for drives together and building up portals, links, and fields.

This evening I have some picking up to do in the living room, and I may very well set the children to the task of de-decorating the tree. It's time. I want it out.

I also have writing to do, so there will be some introspection today. It may involve lions.

Hello, Blisstopia. <3

Being able to sleep in is somehow elusive to me. Several times in the past week, thanks to children being away and various holidays/weekends, I have had the opportunity to do so, and usually stayed up late the night before. Each time, however, my body wakes around 7. That is the time that is the point of no return when it comes to getting the Spawn ready for school, and I think my body clock is somehow attuned to it.

On Sunday I paid tribute to the porcelain gods and returned to bed for a while. Today, no such luck. Today I was not sleeping alone, and while the room had been cool enough for me to comfortably fall asleep, for the comfort of my fellow sleeper there were two warm-mist humidifiers running. The air was too moist; I was too conscious of my breathing. It was a low-grade version of trying to inhale in a steam room. The other rooms in the house are all unsuitable for sleep. So, I am up.

I am back into that space where I am having vibrant and narrative dreams, and my mind is alighting on random objects, sounds, happenings, and making of those things brief but vivid scenes or vignettes. These are tell-tale signs, to me, that I am ready to start writing stories again. I was doing so regularly for the first... I want to say the first third of last year. Approximately once a week I wrote a story and shared it in relatively rough/unedited form on my Patreon. I would like to do that again. I need to get over that awful little "but what do I write about?" hum, however.

Perhaps there are story/writing prompt communities or accounts here on DW; I shall have to have a looksee.

My Mornthing post the other day was huge, but that showed me that I actually do have rather a lot to say when I am letting it come, rather than when I am trying to push myself to make social media posts on a daily schedule. Mornthings here are likely to be less-than-daily, but I reassure myself that they will also be more content-rich.

Today I am going to spend some time writing. First up on the docket is transcribing the responses to my written RPs into actual digital responses to them. I've been snatching spare minutes here and there putting them in a dead tree notebook. Then... then I shall go on a prompt-hunt, I think. Perhaps I'll even dig out the neato notebook that I had set up to use as a bullet journal (bujo) and see if I can't kickstart its use in some way that dovetails in with my writing. A dedicated page that tracks what I've written and when and how long it is, perhaps. I'll figure it out when I get to it.

The world is silverybright and damp outside my window. It rained fiercely here last night, and not only here - a friend half a continent away said it was like the universe was powerwashing last year off this world. I am holding that comment in my mind concurrent with the person I helped yesterday who commented to another person that the new year was just another day.

Every day is just another day. But every day is a day where things can change for the better.

Happy new year, Blisstopia - and good morning.

 Good mornthing! I managed to make a shower fit into the time that is normally just enschoolenation prep for the Spawn. And then I got my hair to do The Thing by accident. And then I found my eyeliner pencil sharpener. I’m cautiously going to declare, even though it is currently not even 8am, that this is A Good Day.

Eeeeeearly this morning, my new neighbors have arrived. I have not yet gone downstairs to introduce myself to them, but will do so sometime today.

Everyone is away this weekend, which has left me to my own designs. To this end I spent some time last night rearranging and cleaning the living room. I am still somewhat dissatisfied with it, but find it to be better than it was.

I am running laundry like woah, both mine and Spawn's.

Last night I did a Drunkblog on here, and it was quite enjoyable, especially with unl33t doing a watchalong with me. Next DB I do will probably be on Pluspora, at the suggestion of one of my Patreon patrons, to see if there's more engagement. More does not necessarily mean better, but a large part of starting the DBs was for communally shared entertainment, so it's worth experimenting with different sites.

Mostly, today is crocheting and watching The Blacklist as I do so. I've got a stopwatch app keeping track of my crocheting time, as it is a dragonfly blanket I am making on commission for someone who is insisting on paying me properly, and therefore I need to know how many actual hours it's taking me to make the thing. I'm currently 7 hours in and have 41 rows, which means I'm doing approximately 6 rows per hour; since this is a 6-row pattern repeat, it will make it really easy to total up if I lose the timer somehow. XD

I can't stop mentally rearranging this room. I feel like it would be best laid out if we had an L-shaped couch instead of these weird IKEA loungers. Maybe after I finally save up enough monies to get the car fixed I can think about something like that.

I feel incredibly mundane today.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

I almost wordflubbed and fucked up another relationship. Almost. I reshared, on the book of Faces, one of those brief little images with sentences on, this one having to do with how when you judge you reveal an unhealed part of yourself. A friend made a (rightfully) bitter comment about all their unhealedness due to judging people for their bigotry, and I responded by saying that healing a wound like that requires getting rid of what's reopening the wound. Their response was shockedface and a comment that what I said was not at all what they were expecting.  In retrospect, I can definitely see how it would look like I said my friend should be got rid of. I clarified that I meant that bigotry needs to be eradicated in order for that wound to heal, not that they need to stop judging people for it.

As it turns out, they were expecting me to respond with something about turning the other cheek or being the bigger person, and that my response was, rather than an anaesthesia to deaden their pain, an antiseptic that was stingingly helpful, as "sometimes the wound requires additional cleaning." We then discussed how the inciting image seems to be meant to work on an individual level, but falls down when it comes to societal-level wounds, and the importance of nuance and context in discussion and the big lack of such in these little 1-2 sentences-on-an-image thing that tend to proliferate rapidly across social networks with easy reblogging and image share capacity.

The interaction could possibly gone a whole different and unpleasant direction at several different points, but for the fact that this friend and I both made the effort to clarify ourselves and understand each other properly. It would have been so easy to recline into the couch of assumptions and from there be butthurt or vituperative. Instead, we reserved judgement in favor of seeking greater understanding.

This is not a set of thoughts with which I expected to begin my Monday, but here we are, and I have this exquisite little pang of hope.

~~~

In the more mundane and less thinky side of things, enschoolenation went fairly well. One Spawn is staying home sick. Another could not find their bag nor hoodie, but went off to catch the bus in a borrowed fleece that they didn't love but that kept the morning chill off. Small, manageable problems that remained small and are being managed. Even just a year ago, one of these things would have thrown off the entire morning and possibly even thrown the entire day off kilter at best. Now, we're rather taking things in stride.

I carry ongoing hope for the day, even though it is expected to be weird; I'm jaunting off to work, but leaving it for an hour or two in the middle of the day for a school meeting, then going back to it to finish out the day. I like that I'm able to do such things, but now I look at the time and I must run!

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

[EDIT: This was yesterday's post that I apparently never hit post on, so I shall simply continue now:]

The meeting at the school went great. Eldest Spawn is doing excellently with motivation, self control, getting things done. His counsellor told me that the lad is essentially the social leader of his friend group, that they look to and follow him, and I just about cried.

Then, on the way out, I got flagged down by the Assistant Principal. Youngest had had a meltdown. And this was a bad one. threw chairs. Shoved other children. Several kids went to the nurse.

Soooo today I am going to the school at 8am for his suspension hearing. IDK if I am supposed to bring him and let him go to regular classes, or leave him at home, or what, so we are going in at usual dropoff time to find out and proceed accordingly.

You bet your ass I'm bringing coffee with me.

Hello for reals, Blisstopia.<3

Yesterday I was feeling small and sad and quiet, and it was my day off, and aside from making the Nightmare Fuel Prompt happen I did not do anything that could really be considered my usual posting. Some folks noticed this, and independently of one another reached out to me in private to make sure I was okay. And I guess I kind of am, really. I'm spending a lot of brain cycles considering my posting habits - frequency, content, public versus private. What I am putting out, and what I am taking in.

In the wake of the Pluxodus, and how few people have made the effort to connect with me here, I find those very deliberate connections, those checkings-in, to be incredibly valuable and gratifying. Too, there then comes the accompanying question of just how much am I continuing to seat my sense of self-worth in the regard of others for me, in the attention I get.

It's all a process. Mindfulness versus self-centeredness.

Work continues apace, with some interesting developments that I will perhaps make a filtered post about.

Home is in flux. Not in a bad way, but in a got-home-from-work-and-it-was-Surprise-Clean-All-The-Things-Day way. So, having been up since 6am and worked till 2, I launched into helping, because I was raised in such a way that if someone is cleaning, everyone is cleaning or else they are having A Bad Time. A piece of the kitchen that had been let go fallow is now clear and clean again. There are almost a half dozen boxen and bags ready to be donated to the thrift shop. Youngest Spawn now has caution tape wrapped around his door, and we are both delighted.

~~~~

This post was disrupted by dinner. We have a bonus child tonight, as Eldest's bestie is sleeping over tonight. We re-cleaned the table (which had become covered in laundry and donatables) and for the first time in a long, long time had a sit-down dinner with everyone at the table. It was pleasantly tumultuous.

Hello, Blisstopia. <3

I gave myself an extra twenty minutes in bed this morning, although I did not sleep for any of it. That was typical for the night, though. 

You see, I took my car in to the shop yesterday. You remember, we were all hoping it was going to be an inexpensive fix, like the heat shield replacement or something. Well, it’s an “or something,” but not an inexpensive one: the entire exhaust system except for the manifold need replacement. Also, my brakes. All to the tune of over three grand.

Y’all, I do not have three grand. I only started this job four months ago, and I was feeling good about pulling together half a grand on short notice. *headdesk*

So I had them replace the bulbs that needed replacing, and do the oil change, and I have applied for a loan through my credit union. I should hear back on that next week. In the meantime, I borrowed Secret Agent Lover Man’s car last night to take the Eldest Spawn to his dad’s, and then also this morning to get to work, because it makes me super uneasy to drive my car knowing that CO2 is leaking into the cabin.

Borrowing the car meant not leaving till 5, and with traffic I didn’t get home till half past ten. I had a coffee to carry me through, so I don’t think I was actually asleep until close to midnight.

At 3am, the smoke alarm went off. It was very exciting for a couple minutes, but ultimately we sorted out that it was because SALM had set up The humidifier underneath the smoke detector, not realizing how sensitive it is to water vapor. he turned it off. I calmed Youngest. We went back to sleep.

At 5am the cable to his smartphone started to malfunction, the flow of electricity to the phone stopping and starting, and every time the phone chimed. Irregularly. After a dozen or so chimes I elbowed him awake and asked him to take care of it, and he did with all suitable apologies.

Now I am at work, and so stressed, and so tired. There is espresso and sugar in my coffee.  I will edit in the selfie later, because it is not happening on the phone.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

Hello, Blisstopia.<3