blissmorgan. Entries tagged with life with spawn

I've been remiss in posting here. Or rather, in not posting here. I have no concrete reason to offer. Hello.

Work has been kind of crazy lately, for staffing and demand reasons, but I continue plugging away and doing my job to the best of my ability, and continue to be appreciated and part of a good team. Still, it sucks to spend as much time as I do on my feet on essentially a concrete slab. I need to invest in better shoes with more support, because I've been getting home basically in mild agony from the knees down. How does one go about finding shoes that have good support and yet are still totally cute and go with many different outfits? It's been so long since I've considered shopping for clothing outside of thrift, where finding yourself a thing is more a matter of luck than anything else, especially at my size.

Home has also been a little crazy in its own way. After we got the bed (was that really the last thing I posted about? I think it was. Wow.) we also got a new couch. I have been trying to instill a new regime of Keeping The Living Room Clean, but it's hard to combat years of habit, and I include myself as well as the Spawn in that statement.

I did manage to fix the kitchen sink finally, this past weekend, so that was pretty cool. Except now both sides are filled with dirty dishes because everyone just ignores the damn sink. I've got the kitchen table half clean again, because I needed space on it for sewing. Daughterchild is now the proud (heh) owner of a Pride Cape. Essentially it's just a tall rectangle with thick rainbow stripes. I've agreed to perhaps turn it into a small lap blanket this fall.

SALM and I are good, as are the Spawn for the most part. They have their own developments and dramas, but that is content for another, less public, post.

The itch to write has been growing again, but I feel like I need a writing partner or at least an accountability partner.

And here is the end of my posting time, because Enschoolenation must occur. Good morning, Blisstopia. <3

Mood restless

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So, I am writing today's entry using the voice dictation capability found in a Google doc. I did not know that this was a thing, until I was posting on Facebook about what had happened to my hand and one of my friends said something about installing voice-to-text software on my computer I replied how great that would be and they messaged me privately to tell me how to activate the voice to text capability in Google Docs.

It has its ups and downs. It is really nice to be able to just talk clearly to my computer and see the words appearing on the screen in the way that I had dreamed of being able to do some 20 and 25 years ago when this sort of Technology was still either just a Daydream, or in process but extremely expensive to procure. And now, here it is. On my computer, for free, no big deal, just open the thing and turn it on and Away you go.

It has some Oddity to it in terms of what it decides to capitalize. I haven't exactly figured out what it's criteria are for when to capitalize a word in the middle of a sentence. Capitalizing Google Docs makes sense, of course - it is the name of the service I am using to create this text. However, technology daydream and Oddity as well as away are all just regular words and I'm not sure if they got capitalize due to Something in the way the program works or if it has something to do with my tone of voice ellipsis I just haven't figured it out yet.

It's weird trying to figure out what punctuation this can handle. Obviously, it handles commas and periods without a problem - it also inserts hyphens where I want them to. It's interesting to see that somehow my use of the names of those particular punctuation worked in such a way - maybe from the way I said it? - that for the purposes of that sentence I was able to talk about them in words as opposed to having them inserted. I haven't been able to get it to use quotation marks yet, and I don't know how to make it do a carriage return or how to backspace or delete a word or words. However, these are relatively minor quibbles that I still yet met figure out, and until then I am content to use the keyboard at least a little bit to make it happen.

For now, I am going to leave all this as written, with the odd capitalization and with whatever incorrect words the service has put in in place of my own words I I am wondering if it is learning software. That is, I am wondering if, the more I use it, the more it will train translating properly from my voice into the text what it is that I am actually saying.

for now, this is okay.

Anywho, the spawn are in school and hated, and I am basically ready for work. Showering with one hand is hard, but by the grace of curly hair and a stick of deodorant I have declared myself not in need of a shower today, and got dressed before I came down to get anyone up for school. This means that I have a little more time than usual before I need to go to work, and normally I would sit here, make this post, and then entertain myself for another half hour with personal Pursuits - be they online, physically creative, or both. However with my hand borked, there is not really a lot I can do in terms of creative Pursuits, and I'm getting really tired of sitting on my ass on my computer. Therefore, today I am going to exercise personal responsibility for my vehicle. I am going to stop at the car place down the street from my work, where they took care of my exhaust problem for $150 instead of several thousand dollars a couple months ago, and have them replace the bulb in one of my headlights. This is technically a problem that I could fix myself however I was not feeling super interested in doing it even before this flare up in my hand, and now I am really full of nope about it. I am hitting a point where I in my knowledge of how to do or fix things on my own, and picking certain things that I know on the list and finding it worthwhile to pay for someone else to do on my behalf. Clearly, All Things Considered, having somebody else do this thing for me is worth my money.

It is nice having enough money that paying someone else to do a relatively small vehicular repair for me is actually an option that does not require re juggling my entire budget for the next 3 months.

In other money-related news I got the texts yesterday from TurboTax that both my federal and my state return have been accepted by their respective agencies, and so now I am on deposit watch, waiting to see each of those drop in. I decided to throw them both directly into my savings. That is in itself kind of a weird feeling for me - not only is this the first time in basically a decade when I actually have a tax return that I needed to even do at all, but this is the first time I can remember ever where I have gotten a tax return and had not already mentally spent it on something - anyting - before it even showed up in my bank account. Not that it was very much in my early and mid-twenties, mind you. Those returns were always very small enough for a nice lunch and perhaps a pair of shoes, something like that. In my later twenties when I was married and filing with my husband our returns were bigger, and those returns always ended up going into bigger purchases such as a dining room set a living room set bunk beds for the children dot-dot-dot guitars... That kind of thing.

I really like being able to build up a savings, you guys. It's like every deposit I put in that account is rapping a sick blanket around the head of some tiny awful person who has always been in the back of my head screaming, and I don't think they'll ever stop screaming and I don't think they'll go away, but I don't have to hear them constantly all the time at least not right now. is this what people mean when they talk about finding peace? Maybe. I think this is what people mean when they argue that yes, money can, in fact, buy happiness. money buying happiness doesn't mean purchasing things. Money buying happiness means having enough to know that when things go wrong, it isn't going to ruin your entire life.

I just want you to know that this voice-to-text thing does not in fact translate sniffling noises into any kind of text, so that's cool.

I am still waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in this morning, but that is neither here nor there in terms of getting things done. I am going to go do the needful thing now, and then get myself to work, where I will continue to do my darndest to learn how to write left-handed. Happily, it is mostly just numbers plus a few brief letters that I really need to be able to write, so I think I am slowly improving bit by bit just through repetition. it would be a lot worse if I were supposed to be writing entire contiguous sentences.

Hello blisstopia.

Mood awake

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Probably the best non-prank prank this year was that when I got home from work on Monday, Eldest Spawn came out of his room and told me he had gotten an out of school suspension. His brother was finishing up serving an in-school suspension that very day. My face fell, and my brows drew, and I got as far as "...WHAT?!?!" before the lad started laughing.

I drove Youngest Spawn to school the next morning and we had an on-boarding meeting to discuss the incident of the previous week, nail down stuff for moving forward, and send him off to class. I had a nice chat with the vice principal (who at this point I feel like i know all too well, le sigh), and then headed off to work.

I was JUST about to clock in when I got a call from the school that there had been another incident and that I needed to come back to pick Youngest up and take him home to start his actual out of school suspension.

Very funny, Universe. Very funny.

He was introduced to the wonderful world of This Is Not A Vacation by taking a trip to IKEA with me for shelves. We built them, cleared the mound of junk and useless bins out of the back corner of his room, and put them up. With them confiscated, his task while home alone all day was to work on organizing and sorting his things onto the shelves. He got about as much done as I expected, which wasn't a lot, but he did spend the brain time on figuring out which shelf would best be used for what items. When I got home I rallied him, and we managed to clear everything back off his bed, much of it onto the shelves, so he had somewhere to sleep.

Other stuff has been going on, most of which I cannot publicly discuss. Some of this stuff has me reevaluating why it is that whenever someone is talking to a group of people about a thing that shouldn't be getting done (or something that should be) I always tend to take it as a censure or instruction specific to me. Relievingly, I was told forthrightly after the fact that nothing I was (or wasn't) doing was the issue.

I met online with one of my authors last week to catch up, and circled back around for a progress check on their novel today. I got to send them a message letting them know how much I'm enjoying what they're doing, and hit some clear themes and callbacks to stuff earlier in the overall work, so that felt pretty great. I like being able to tell an author, "Yes, I Understood That Reference and it's all working and carry on yes good GO GO GO."

Tonight I need to talk to the Spawnfather about the kids' upcoming vacation week. I have the opportunity to take some vacation time to travel, but really only if I take the vacation time for the first half of the week because the second half is already claimed by some people. We'll see if that'll work out at all.

This morning I finished and sent off my tax return. It's funny because I've had it done since the third week of January and I've been sitting on it for what turns out to be no dang reason; I thought the finishing part of it was going to be more complex than it has turned out to be.

G+ is closed. I should probably delete the app from my phone, huh?

Hello, Blisstopia. <3

Mood okay

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It occurred to me that it was getting mildly difficult to track which mornthing post people were commenting on, when checking notifications in my inbox, so I'm trying out a date tag in the subject/headline box to see if that helps me keep things all straightened out.

Birthday time for the lad yesterday was a Huge Success! There was only one thing-present for him, because snowstorm wonked my shopping-with-siblings plans, but it was a thoughtful gift that he very much liked, which is the kind of gift he liked. For post-cake evening plans he had the option of several activities, most of which were solo-with-mom things, but he opted for the whole family to go to the arcade. We all had a blast playing things, and everybody gave him their tickets.

SALM in particular is quite skilled at hitting the jackpot on certain ticket-bearing games, so this was really quite excellent for the boy.

Youngest Spawn with his birthday ticket stash

Today is payday, and I have blown through all of the bill-paying I need to do this cycle, AND socked money into Savings, AND....still have money left over? WHAT SORCERY is THIS?! I've heard that being poor for a long time can lead to one's spending habits generally going one of two ways, one being that when you get a sum of monies in hand you spend it right away one things that will stick around before the money vanishes, or you turn downright miserly with it. I think I am largely having a tendency to the latter, with brief little bouts of the former.

Although I still haven't picked out a fountain pen.

I have such a complicated and perhaps not completely healthy relationship with my own finances. There's probably a post about that at some point.

But now: WORK, Long Day edition. 10 hours. much productive. very capitalism. wow.

Hello, Blisstopia! <3

Mood working

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I totally meant to have a big rambly post this morning, and spent all that time replying to comments instead. Sorrynotsorry.

Youngest Spawn turns 12 today. It's been a good day so far. I made chocolate chip pancakes, and we listened to There's A Cat Licking Your Birthday Cake. Here, you listen too:

"There's A Cat Licking Your Birthday Cake" (Watch on YouTube)

I skipped showering in favor of birthday breakfast, and I have fifteen minutes to get dressed and try to make my hair work-acceptable.

HiByeLoveyou

Mood happy

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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

Mood nervous

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And now: THE W E A T H E R

....we got hit with the same weirdy NorthEast storm that hit everyone else on Saturday night. I expected to be walking through snow to/from visiting Arisia to hold BarCon and see my folks, but it was more slushy than anything else. Wet snow and slush. Then the temperature plumeted, and Sunday/Monday everything was glazed with ice.

When I say glazed, I mean that I went out to my car a half-hour early, managed to pry open the door, and set it running while chipping away at the 1/4"+ thick ice on my windshield. I got it chipped away enough that I felt comfortable driving to the local Dunks and grabbed breakfast, then stood in their parking lot for another 5 minutes chipping at ice. Another minute or two once I got into work.

My new ice scraper works well, y'all.

At one point on the way home from work I had to brake hard, and the ice-coated layer of snow I couldn't even chip away at finally released its hold on my roof and slid down my windshield, shattering across the hood and making a bit of a mess in the street. It's the kind of thing I normal struggle with my height restriction over, to get my vehicle clear so that doesn't happen. I just couldn't do it this time - the ice was too thick, and it took my vehicle warming up underneath and the hard power of inertia to clear things off.

Aside from the precipitation, life continues apace. The lads finally had their wellness visits. They were supposed to have them in August, but I bumped it to help cover a shift. Now I actually get, like, personal time from work and shit, which is pretty great. Flu shots were had, plus three others for Youngest. We talked about the possibility of shots beforehand, so he was able to be prepared. He told me he thought he was going to be able to be brave this year, like last year (not like the previous year where he had panic attacks for an hour and I literally had to put him in a full-body hold). He was SO BRAVE. He got a little squirrely when she first started prepping his arm, and I gave him my hands to squeeze. Nurse Linda offered to bring in a second nurse to do the shots two at a time in each arm, but he fierced up and so she went. She's very experienced, and the first shot flashed in and out of his arm he was barely even aware of it. The flue shot was the worst, and therefore the last, and he had an evening and morning of sore arms.

He also had a migraine. I need to go yell at CVS after work today to get his damn meds filled.

Argh, I can no longer ignore the blipping of the Go The Fuck To Work alarm on my phone, because I really do need to get moving. Wish me luck getting out of my driveway, which is a sheet of ice on a tilt away from the street.... :-/

Hello, Blisstopia. <3

Mood okay

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Searches
Definition of "confab"
Converting fahrenheit to celsius (It's cold out, y'all)
LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You)
I'm good at mental math but sometimes I need to rest on the comfy seats of the struggle bus
Fatalities in the 1919 Great Molasses Flood in Boston, MA

Random info and learnings

How to make an Unordered (bulleted) list
HTML references for tagging and whatnots
Wikipedia: G.G. Allin (TW for bloody face in the top image)
Downloadable character sheets for D&D
A step by step guide to D&D character creation (because it doesn't matter that I've been playing D&D since I was 8 - I play infrequently enough that I need my hand held every damn time)
"To A Louse, On Seeing one on a Lady's Bonnet at Church" by Robert Burns (a poem full of lols)
How to download a butt-ton of books that just entered the public domain (I may have posted this previously but still have it open, and hattip to

joseph_teller for the link originally)
D&D Idea: the Perfectly Ordinary Dog (tumblr post)

Oooh, shopping! *clappyhands*
A 5-drawer pine dresser from IKEA, unpainted
Wyrding Studios - amazing wire-wrap jewelry
A collection of scotch-blended chocolates from LA Burdick for Robert Burns' birthday (and mine)

Music
The Residents - God In Three Rooms (full Album)
George Winston - Theme to Grace / Lament (part of a playlist from the music of Vince Guaraldi album)
Aspects of Zibaldone (not technically music, but is a/v - a playlist by

joseph_teller of language/culture/philosophy/etc.)

Images
Both is good
Heath Ledger smiling and winking (so pretty. So talented. So sadly gone. :( )
Happy Dance (several)
John Mulaney doing a shoulder-wiggle thang

~~~~~~~

....surprise! Actual post, if you got this far past the linkdump and didn't just zoom past! If I have lots of infolinks first and then the chatty posty introspection after, does that mean this is like the inverse of the standard recipe blog post structure?

It is Friday, and my day off, but today my day off is not precisely my own. I got 2/3 of the Spawn enschoolenated, of course; the bulk of my day now turns on the axis of the remaining child, Middlest. We are into the city later, to see her orthodontist and get pronouncement on how well her mouth appliance survived the holidays and whether her teeth are still in the right place, and if they are then they will likely remove the appliance and send us off with a scrip to have several teeth removed by her regular dentist so they have room to work with vis-a-vis dental spatial adjustment and straightening.

This is always a fun trip, because we get some fun girl time together (assuming she is not in full tweenager angst mode), ride the trains, grab delicious hotpot, and goof off. There will be the bonus surprise of which she is unaware, that her dad is getting some dental work done this morning and will be meeting us for hotpot lunch. I hope it is a good surprise.

Hm, I wonder if I can convince him to come with us to her appointment and then all drive home together, thereby saving monies on train tickets.

Anyhoo, trains and hotpot and all cost monies that I did not have immediately to hand, so I have to run myself through a shower, go to the bank to deposit a check and take out some monies, and then get the child up and dressed and ready to catch a mid-morning train so we get there in time for Teh Lonch.

Eventually I will be home again....at which point I will be taking Youngest Spawn over to the Home Despot to pick out a little pot of green paint with which to paint the drawerfronts of his new bureau. I also need to dig through my purse and see if I still have the receipt from the purchase, because I bought it on Saturday and less than a week later it went on WICKED IKEA Family sale. I could really use those $50, and it's worth it to go hit up their Customer Service folks for it.

If I wanna stay on track, I better get moving. There will also be grocery shopping tonight to prep against the Weekend Weather. 8-12 inches predicted in my area, y'all. Not really looking forward to it.

Hello, Blisstopia. <3

Mood busy

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It is my regular day off today, and my bedhead has decided that I am a brunette lion. I am embracing this.

I posted as much on Tumblr and am now buried under a dude-alanche of internet thirst. This isn't even that good a picture of me. What.

Definitely got a picture that I thought was gonna be a dick-pic but turned out to be a selfie. And now we are talking in French. And I am a lion.

Le what.

ANYWAY.

The day is off, and so I indulged in totally not bothering to get dressed before getting the Spawn up for the day. Enschoolenation went well, and Youngest is primed for the possibility of us going to visit my workfriend's house this weekend so she and I can crochet and drink wine and shoot the shit while our respective Spawn play Fortnite and do LEGO builds. I'm looking forward to it. She's fun. And she keeps sending me interesting crochet patterns! Right now I am working on one that is a stocking, if a stocking were one of the Yip-yip alien puppets from Sesame Street. I need to find some ping-pong balls to turn into eyeballs. Perhaps I will run across some while I am out today.

Yes, out! I am not merely spending the day off catching up on Laundry whilst playing Warcraft and watching Supernatural, tempting though that prospect is. No, today I am braving the halls of capitalism! To wit, I am going to the toy store to see if I can nail things down for my own Spawn as well as for my nieces and nephew. I am hoping that going early in the day will mean not a lot in the way of crowding. Wish me luck and perseverance.

But before that... Warcraft. Supernatural. Coffee. Because the stores are not open just yet.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

Mood okay

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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.

My good vibes. I give them too you. ::makes woodleymotions toward you through the internet::

Here is a selfie, because I have not done one here in a while, and I like the way I look and want you to have the chance to enjoy it as well:

First week of full time work is going well, so far! We will see how it proceeds in the second half, however. My first three days are a standard 8:30 to 5 workday. Thursday through Saturday are a 10 hour day, a day off, and then a 6 hour day. That will be the part that will take the most adjustment for me, I do think. I'm happy to have Fridays off - it makes driving the lads to the Spawnfather easier, and I can have a day of legit rest after the long day because everyone else is at school or work.

One thing I am having to figure out is how to rejigger the housework. There is a lot that I would just kind of do when I felt like it, because I had quite a bit of time at home. Now, though, I don't have so much home time, and I don't want to jam all my houseworkery into my day off. This morning I started a load of clothes once Youngest was up and out of bed (the washer/dryer unit is in his bedroom, poor kid), and am going to shuffle them into the dryer and start another washload before I head out to work. I'm thinking I may be able to start a routine of a load or two a day that way, get caught up, and then set up some sort of schedule for everyone to get laundry done in a timely manner without unduly invading Youngest's space in the process.

I am also with less maker time and, while I am adjusting to the heavier work schedule, I've been making practically nothing. What sit-down time I have had in the evenings I have been mostly dedicating to playing WoW and watching Better Call Saul; I've burned through all three episodes of the latter, though, and my brain is increasingly itchy to write. I've simply been unable to settle on a character/plot idea. I don't like this feeling, this mental pent-up-ness. This energy goes sour if I don't find something to pour it into.

I need to write something, for me as well as for my Patreon folks. And I'm due for a Drunkblog soon. What's good in the streaming services right now - any cult classics? Weird horror? Hallmark-stylie holiday movies? I'm planning on doing the next DB over in a channel on my Discord server. Ping me when you want an invite to the server, because it's a nice place for both synchronous and asynchronous chatting.

There's a special channel just for the Patrons.

Anyway, time to go do the thing what makes me the money, and at this point I think I will pick up breakfast/coffee en route.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

Mood good

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I’ve been taking on a lot of extra hours at work, which is good for the paycheck but man am I a tired Bliss some days. Today is not technically a workday, but I still had to be up at six to wrangle 2/3s of the Spawn for enschoolenation.

The other Spawn has an appointment in the city, to which I will be escorting them through the rain and fog. They will be cranky about the weather and yet resigned; it seems always to rain when we have to go into town.

I have been doing a lot of crochet this month; the dragonfly scarf is easy, beautiful, and satisfying. I need to scope out my yarn stash for suitable yarns to enscarfenate. Right now my project is the Aleatha shawl in crochet cotton; the main body is green and the very broad border is white. Daughterchild says I should weave red ribbon down the center to make is Christmas colors. XD

I’m doing a little writing, and hopefully should be getting back into posting regular stories on the Patreon sometime soon. This week and last were more for other people’s projects; I edited an erotic short story for Sorcha Rowan that both made me squirm and laugh, and I get to look over some of a Nobilis Reed story soon, which is going to rock because his stuff is always fun.

Last Night Me was looking out for Tonight Me, and set up turkey stew in the crock pot with leftover Thanksgiving Turkey, fresh veggies, barley, and some spices. SALM has class tonight, so it’ll be nice to have dinner done and ready when we land from our travels.

His grandmother passed last week; I don’t think I posted about that yet. He got to visit her the Sunday before, though. They had time for I love yous and goodbyes and tears; there is sad, but there is no wailing or teeth-gnashing. There is contemplation and gentleness.

I should get dressed and get moving, however reluctantly, into the day. I comfort myself with the knowledge that the bed will be full of warm boyfriend again tonight.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

Mood awake
Location Kitchen

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Sunday morning reminded me why I should not, on Saturday nights, mix wine with the concoction that Secret Agent Lover Man calls Grownup Hot Chocolate. OhmyZod. It is so cozy and tasty, but man! I was headachey and dehydrated as all heck yesterday morning.

We had a nice day nonetheless, with post-breakfast dozing and cuddling in bed, followed by dropping off a bunch of things at the thrift shop, home from which I cam with two new dresses and a teacup and saucer. I need to pick up a cheapie razor today because one of the new dresses needs some depilling, but other than that there's nothing wrong with it in the least. I also need a replacement shower curtain. DOLLAR STORE, I HOPE YOU ARE OPEN!

Youngest Spawn has an appointment this afternoon, but aside from that my day is pretty open. I had an editing job land in my lap this week, and I knocked it out this morning. It was one of those jobs I almost feel guilty getting paid for because the story was so much fun. XD

Time to do some crocheting and watch some Blacklist and sip some coffee and be okay with not doing too much because it's a holiday and I should take advantage of the children's sleepingness while I can.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

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Holy crap I smell good, y'all.

I was going through my tin of perfumes, sniffing one after another and getting increasingly dissatisfied. They were all musk and citrus and sweet, and not at all what I was after....and then I realized that what I was after was probably among my Solstice Scents vials, not my BPAL vials. So I went to my array of SS smells and picked through, and pulled out Manor.

Now, I basically haven't touched most of my SS smells for the better part of a year, some of them two or more. That is why the oils in the vial? Had separated. I spent a few minutes tilting it back and forth, upending and righting it, watching the bubble swirl through light and dark oils to mix them together in slow, thick swirls. I thought about the bubbles found in the tubes of carpentry levels, and tilting them back and forth this same way when I was a child. Is it not funny how disparate things can have something so in common?

Finally the oils were all enough one color that I felt confident to open the vial and put some on. And I smell. So. GOOD. According to the site, it is a combination of "Woody-Vanilla Musk, Vanilla & Glorious Aloeswood." According to me, it smells as if I am that woman playing hide and seek on her wedding day and have hidden within the cedar chest in the attic, nestling in the dark amongst the scent of wood and the softness of my own silk gown and the rich aged vanilla that I am wearing for the first time, unaware that the lid has latched and I may not be found for years.

SO GOOD.

Wednesday weirdness is a thing. The Spawn have a half day of school, which means they will be arriving home just around when I am leaving for work. Except for Youngest, of course. When I went to wake him he was already up, and informed me that he had vomited about an hour before. He has vomited twice since then, poor dude. :(

...wait, it's not Wednesday. It's Thursday.

It's Thursday, right?

Hi.<3

Mood awake

Tags:

Today is Braces Day for Middlest. All things considered, she is in fairly good spirits this morning - I think it helps matters that I let her sleep in, and have also been letting her plow through her Halloween candy at her own pace since the beginning of the month. I'm looking forward to our train ride and hot pot lunch.

I have a little under two hours spare until then, however, and am going to spend it trying to do the words-putting-into-sentences doing for my NaNo project. I allowed myself to stall, and I need to un-stall even if that means pushing out some crappy wordsing or skipping the end of a scene to start a new one. It probably doesn't help that this story idea is one that I wanted to do as a role-play on a forum RPing site I like, but every time I've tried to get it going I messed up and it stopped working. It's stuck in that part of my brain that insists that someone should be writing half the characters.

Perhaps I need to address it as if it were a roleplay with myself.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

Mood determined

Tags:

I promised ~~my soul~~ my self to work ASAP this morning after getting the Spawn off to school, but since on the schedule that means they put me down for 8:15, I am now taking 10-15 minutes to myself to get settled and centered for the day.

This weekend was so many different flavors of weird.

Right now I am feeling very proud of Youngest; he had an assignment he was supposed to get done last week. On Friday when I got home from the big dropoff and checked my email I discovered that they had spent two AcLab periods helping him with it, and he had still failed to get it done, and therefore it needed to get done this weekend. I opted to not notify the Spawnfather and put the onus of working through that on him; he gets little enough time with the lad as it is.

I did, however, let him know about the assignment and ask him to let the lad know that was what he would be responsible for upon returning home, and he was. He needed to pick a character from a story he read, select three character traits, and write a paragraph about each with evidence and analysis. I was really impressed with how they essentially are teaching these kids to do a Research Sandwich - Doctor Professor Mandapants would surely be proud. They call it the R E A D strategy: Review the point, supply Evidence from the text, provide Analysis of how the evidence serves the point, and Done-clusion (that's not the actual D term but the idea was conclusion and so I created a portmanteau that amused us and satisfied the purpose of the D element enough for us to move on rather than him getting stuck on what it should be) pulling it all together.

I gave him the option to hand-write or to type, and he opted to type. This was made difficult by the fact that in September our printer went up in smoke. Literally. Secret Agent Lover Man went to print a couple pages for class and it started smoking, so we pitched it to the curb. So, lacking a printer and with me utterly unwilling to attempt to find let along travel to a late night print center, he hauled out the typewriter. I got him set up at the freshly moved and cleared desk in the living room, and curled up behind him in the armchair to work on the dragonfly blanket while he wrote.

Three hours. Three paragraphs. He got it done, and I am heckin' proud.

I, meanwhile, am super behind on NaNoWriMo.

What music are you listening to a lot right now? I'm all about Bobby Darin's Beyond The Sea.

Mood cheerful
Music Bobby Darin - Beyond The Sea

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So, remember that meeting I had yesterday morning, and to which I was definitely bringing coffee? Well, I drove the lad in and sent him off to TBL and then sat down in the Main Office to wait to have the meeting - and in the process of balancing coffee, coat, and purse whilst lowering m'self into the chair, totally fulmbled the coffee. And because it is a dollar store travel mug instead of a good one, of COURSE it came open and dumped All. The. Coffee. all over the office carpet.

Someone fetched paper towels, and a nearby student helped me mop it up. The school counselor spirited away my stupid travel mug and brought it back to me with coffee in. Mostly, it was just embarrassing.

The meeting went well, for what it was. We discussed the incident a little to make sure we were on the same page with the events. I caught them (the principal, VP, head of SpEd, and school psychologist) up with what the boy and I had discussed after I got him home the day before, and the expectations I'd laid out for him. We discussed options, which basically boiled down to either I take him back home with me yesterday for out of school suspension and then he spend today in TBL only, or that he stay in TBL where he already was working on processing and making restitution and spend today at home on suspension. I thought about it - and it was really nice that everyone waited patiently while I really considered both options - and went with Option B on the idea that if he was already involved in working through and making up for things, then it made more sense to let him carry on with that, and also to have him out of school on Halloween which is a very exciting but silly and disruptive day which might be difficult for him to handle when he was already somewhat disregulated.

I had a brief one-on-one with the VP, who made the connection during the meeting that I was Eldest's mom as well, because apparently a complaint of potential bullying had been lodged against him. We discussed the circumstances, and it turns out that it was probably a case of Eldest messing around with his friend in a way that he thought was funny and assumed his friend thought was funny when, in fact, he did not. This is the same friend that routinely tries to physically prevent my boy from getting on the bus. They're good boys, but both of them not necessarily top tier in terms of social propriety and interpretation, and their tendency to goofy physicality definitely has the potential to come off as bullying.

The VP walked me to the principal's office and said goodbye by telling me that I am an administrator's dream. I am torn between feeling awesome about that, and really wishing that there was no reason for the administrators to have any idea who I am.

Principal and I let Youngest know what the plan was for suspension, and then he kindly let the boy and I have a minute alone. It gave me a chance to give him a big hug, and also to offer to pick him up (since putting him on the bus at the end of a long day of processing didn't seem like the best idea). He jumped on the offer.

He is super not into the fact that part of his suspension punishment is no screens, but worked with it. I spend over two hours in his room with him helping get it cleaner and more organized, which opened up a ton of floor space for him to work on building some of the Tinker Crates that had come in the mail but he hadn't constructed yet.

It's not a vacation day, so I still woke him up at the time he normally would have gotten up to school. The lad got medicated, dressed, fed, and we settled in to go over all the schoolwork he had sent home. There's some writing, and some math. We figured out the big parts of each, and I broke it down into a little list for him: three assignments, three parts each. He can scratch them off as he proceeds. He's plugging away, and is on track to have them all done well before it is time for trick-or-treating this evening.

I'm a little tired; this was A Lot on top of other things I've had going on. He's doing well.

Hello, Blisstopia. <3

Mood determined
Location Blisstopia

Tags:

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

Mood thoughtful
Location Blisstopia
Music Cake

Tags:

The morning has run away from me, but I think I've spent it well enough.

Last night, Secret Agent Lover Man and I stayed up quite late, watching some of the second season of <i>Big Mouth</i> on Netflix. It continues to be hilarious, and continues to be wholly inappropriate for real life children of the same age as the make-believe cartoon children on whom the show centers. I brought up to him that someone recently commented that today's children are so lucky they have <i>Big Mouth</i> to help them understand much of the ins and outs of puberty, but that was a comment with which I quite disagree. It is a show that is hilarious to those of us who have already gone through puberty, because we are past it. It's nostalgic and sort of... balloons and exaggerates the entire experience. It's not informative for kids going through it, not in a helpful, healthy way.

But yeah, funny as hell for a grownup, though.

Last night and this morning I have been making a lot of progress on the shawl I have been working on. It's a simple pattern with a four-row repeat, and in the yarn I've chosen and with the hook size I am using it is coming out beautifully - I am very much looking forward to finishing it and taking pictures.

I am more motivated to get it finished, now, than I had been, because a new project is on the rapidly-approaching horizon. I made that dragonfly-pattern blanket that I posted a picture of a few days ago, for materials and my time gratis, for a friend of my mother's. Someone saw it and reached out to me to commission one for herself, and so I had to do that detestable dance of price-setting, because I didn't really expect to be making others of this blanket and so I did not track the time it took me to make it. This commissioner is insisting on paying properly for my time, and so I am working hard to not undercut myself. They sent more than enough money up front for the materials, and I will be timing myself and giving them an accounting thereof when the blanket is finished. And I'm prepared to give them a discount anyway if it's steeper than they expected.

Eldest's best friend slept over last night, and I am positively vibrating with stress. Two thirteen-year-olds and a twelve-year-old. They all amp each other up, feeding off one another's energy to a peak. They're all doing so much better than they were three years ago, or even a year ago, but they are not to a point where I can just leave them be for an entire evening - they still require regular intervention for loudness, for cussing, for throwing things or getting physical. This means I have to stay close enough to hear when intervention is required. This means I am on edge with their amped energy even when it is happy energy, waiting for it to go south.

Sometimes weekends are the least restful time.

Later, I go shopping for the yarn. Right now, I work on finishing this shawl. And thinking about my NaNo story. I might write notes and try actual planning/plotting this year.

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

Mood anxious

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blissmorgan

June 2019

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Style Credit

Style: Bliss for Summertime by ninetydegrees
Resources: Texture by Design Shard, Icons by Romeo Barreto, John Caserta, Denis Chenu, Pedro Lalli, Marcus Michaels, P.J. Onori, Laurent Patain and Cor Tiemens from The Noun Project and Fargo

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