evile

got up at 6, walked dogs with Thax, went back to bed.  Dreamed that I was in a big old house....it had very strange plaster frescoes on the wall. I was there with my mom. I think it was supposed to be G/Dad's house in greencastle, but it wasn't really their house....I was staying in the attic room which had a set of stairs on the outside of the house leading to a door that went into the attic room. I kept being woken up hearing someone trying to open that door, which was locked by means of a screen door hook latch that was on a very long eye bolt that was drilled into the frame of the door. Mom and I went to look at it, because I guess I told her that someone was trying to get in that door and she didnt' believe me? so we went and looked and it had been tried enough times that the wood around the eye bolt threads was shredded and the eye bolt could just come out....so we pushed an empty bookcase in front of the door. It probably wouldn't stop the person from coming in but the noise of the book case being knocked over would maybe wake everyone up.  In my dream mom was like she used to be, not the pleasant vague person she is now.

Anyway, I got up again, had breakfast, washed up and went to see her. Aunt l. was there when i arrived, but she left pretty quick. I had brought my dog Sunny, who did alright. was nervous in an unfamiliar place but did ok otherwise.  She liked sniffing around in the backyard. Mom says she doesn't get out much when I asked her if she had seen the back yard. Maybe when the weather is cooler, or if we go over earlier in the morning or later in the evening we can sit outside. If she wants to. Mostly she wants to stay in bed. She asked me if G. had cancer, and I said yes. I teared up some, and said I miss him every day. She then asked me  "Why did G. let himself get ... bamboozled?" and then she shook her head and said "I don't know what I'm trying to say,"....:(  she's processing the grief and h er brain is not helping her. anyway, Sunny behaved and she enjoyed the back yard. The owner's two dogs were there, black lab mix types. Very sweet boys. I think Sunny would have enjoyed them if she'd been off leash too, but I wasn't sure if I should let her run around the house without a leash on. anyway.....depressing. mom seems in good health. I left when they came to get her for lunch. she wanted to go to the table and eat with everyone. I take that as a good sign. My brother A. seems to think they're not feeding her enough, and not feeding her what she likes to eat....but she's in bed most of the day, she doesn't need that many calories.... so? I asked mom if she liked the food and she said yes.  At the old place in Greencastle, she'd say "It's adequate," in a way that suggested she didn't much like it. so....she does manage to get some things across pretty well. It's just a lot of effort for her to put her thoughts together and say stuff. I hate  to see her struggling like that  :( 

I got an email Tuesday morning with my start date and time for my next temp gig. It starts 8/12. I have  jury duty 8/13. I have been calling and emailing the jury duty people to try and get a postponement or something. I know that 'the law' says a person can't be fired for going to jury duty but the law is pretty thin when it comes to protecting temps. They could just say they let me go for 'not being a good fit' and that would be that and I'd be looking for work again. 

I dont' know what mom was trying to ask about the 'bamboozled'? I told her that the cancer was very fast growing and that G had been seeing his doctor regularly and managing his diabetes and his rheumatoid arthritis and doing his best to stay healthy ....cancer is just a fucking ugly beast.  It came fast and took him fast.   OTOH, I watched my bio dad fight cancer for a couple of years after his diagnosis and '6 months to live' prognosis, and that was fucking ugly and heartbreaking too. 

Pepita is coughing today. I gave her a benadryl and let her lick some honey off a spoon. It's not like when Boba had kennel cough with all of the foamy phlegm....but it is worrying me. 

Next step on getting our little rescue/adopted dog Pepita taken care of and fixing all of the neglect she had suffered before we got her. Her teeth were so bad. We got her teeth cleaned and the bad ones were extracted today. Going forward I think we'll be able to keep her teeth in better condition. We have some plaque cleaning treats everyone likes, food and water additives we are using, and we have found a dog toothpaste that all 3 dogs like and we've been cultivating an evening habit of everyone brushing teeth before bed.  In addition, Sunny is a fiend for the hard Himalayan cheese chews which have her teeth almost pristine white, with the exception of a little tartar at the top of her canines.

Anyway......Pepita made it through sedation and dental surgery just fine and I'll be picking her up around 1:30. She will need to have soft food for the next week and she's got some pain medication she'll be taking. She is such a sweet and loving little dog, all she wants is to be close to her people and play with other dogs and have treats and snuggle. It makes me so sad that her life before us was apparently one of such neglect, if not abuse.  

I caught myself talking myself out of wishing bad dental health and every other terrible thing on Pepita's former owners. I don't like this new kind hearted empathetic inner voice. I mean, yes, they are probably poor people with lousy healthcare and bad teeth themselves that they cant afford to fix or take care of, their lack of kindness towards their animals is probably a general lack of kindness and empathy for everything in the world, including themselves. Their lives are probably mean spirited and blighted , a miserable Hell of their own making...I wish I could still find it in me to hate people who are so awful to sweet little animals. But ultimately I just feel pity for the burden of existence for some people out there being so utterly mean and soulless. 

 The thing about social media (facebook is where I spend most of my time these days)....it doesn't really give a coherent picture of any particular point in ones life the way looking through old journal entries might. And, to be honest, I've spent most of this year 'checked out' mentally/emotionally. I honestly dont' know if that's pandemic or social media induced. I just don't feel very present, connected, or coherent. I muddle through most days but in a lot of ways I'm really 'gone'...no longer here...whatever or however you might say that.

Here's what I remember about this year. in January, I spent some time with a woman Thax has known since high school, the usual sort of keep in touch sporadically sort of friendship that one has. I met her for the first time probably 5-10 years ago, she has family in Houston, she's lived there, she's also gotten married twice since I met her, and now lives in Austin with her current husband and stepkids. She has a counseling degree or credentials from another country where she lived for many  years, and she has travelled all over the world providing support services to NGOs like Doctors Without Borders--basically doing 'emotional triage' for people dealing with really terrible humanitarian crises. Anyway, she's a cool person but apparently this year was her year to finally break down and I got in over my head with that; she kind of fixated on me and I got sucked in despite knowing damn good and well that when someone thinks so highly of you and behaves so inensely toward you, it's narcissist  love-bombing or some other defective mental state.  Anyway...bla bla bla, she got me way too high and I behaved stupidly.  She finally got help and meds and things have become more distant and that's good, but the aftermath is that she was doing an art installation/project/thing in the renters apartment portion of our house and now I have to get off my ass and fix all that.   The good news is that we found a really good handyman who does good work and charges a reasonable rate. He did the flooring in there and painted all the walls with KILZ to prime the canvas for the crazy, so to speak.

Anyway....I havent' written much about any of that in facebook because she's a FB friend and because I do still like her. I felt pretty used and taken advantage of at the end of the apartment debacle but Thax's kindness and acceptance of his friend and her mental state, her shortcomings, etc. kind of gave me a guide to not holding an infinite grudge for once in my damn life.  I don't really know how to be that angry with people and still keep them in my life, to be honest. 

In March, the Pandemic hit, and I also started working for a company called A Cloud Guru.  They had just merged with Linux Academy and had to create a uniform standard for service contracts going forward, so they needed to go back through older contracts to 'grade' them and provide a standard for the sales team going forward. They sent me a macbook and we did zoom meetings daily and I worked with the CFO, the head attorney, and a team of contractors to go over all their contracts in Salesforce.  That project lasted almost 4 months at $20 an hour, 30 hours a week.  I really enjoyed it, the ACG  folks are all super nice, very enthusiastic about their company and what they do, and it was really wonderful to work with people who were so awesome.  And to have an environment where you were allowed to say you don't know something, to ask questions,  and have that be accepted and encouraged. After 20+ years with the state of texas and being told things like "You've been here long enough, you should know that!" ...it was really refreshing and nice.  I did another short 2 week-ish project with another department, moving information from a program called Notion to a program called Confluence--kind of an internal webpage looking thing that team members can use to store notes, charts, meeting recordings, photos, training slide shows, etc.   And finally, in July and August, I worked with one of my original contract team members from the contract grading project on a new project, once again in Sales Force, to go through and clean up duplicate entries and develop a timeline for each client, as far as  "they bought X number of classes in 2016, renewed in 2017 and added X number of seats, renewed gain in 2018 and went back down to X number of seats" just to make the relatonships more coherent and, again, give the sales team guidance on how to approach the next renewal of contract, what upsells and cross sells had worked in the past, etc. It was fun.  I had an exit interview with the lead attorney earlier this week, they are closing out the old payroll system and all the contract positions for the end of the year, but he said I was one of their 'superstars' on the contract grading project and he hoped to be able to get in touch and have me work on stuff for them next year. Even if he was blowing smoke, it sounded sincere and it was nice to hear.

I spent a little time unemployed and picked up another temp gig at the end of October, working for the Department of Motor Vehicles through a temp agency called  Peak Performers.  It's basically call center work but I get to do it at home. It meets my needs as far as hours and money (20 hrs a week, 10-2 M-F, $16/hr), the work itself doesn't seem too hard and I feel like I do well talking to people who call in but there are a couple of people who monitor my calls and apparently want to nitpick me to death. They send IMs during the calls when they are listening in, and I get so flustered and distracted with their IMs that I lose my groove with the callers and end up looking like a complete fuck up. I feel like if they didn't interrupt me I would have been able to get enough info from the caller to realize I was in over my head, call Support, and resolve the call appropriately but once they start interrupting me I just lose it completely and end up looking and feeling like a complete idiotic failure.

So that's work.  In 2020, I've been walking the dogs twice a day every day. I started the year at 244 lbs and end weighing the same, however I think I started the year close to a size 20-22 and am now more comfortably in 18-20.  Our walks have gotten longer and I am no longer experiencing as much pain in knees and ankles as I was at the beginning of the year. So I feel good about that.   I'm still on HRT but trying to ramp down the dosage on my own. I've gone from 2 mg a day (one pill) to 1 mg (half a pill) and some days I do forget and skip it and dont' have the horrendous night sweats as a result so it's good.  I'm remembering (mostly) to take a multivitamin, calcium,magnesium, zinc. I think the best supplements I've got going are turmeric and hyaluronic acid. I also just started eating tremella mushroom. I had been reading about it and thenI found some at the asian grocery, so I bought a bag of them. I also ground it up into a powder and made a face mask with it. It's good stuff. Very hydrating.  I found that Lion's mane powder gives me a lot of bloating and discomfort but tremella doesn't seem to be doing that. So I'll stick with it. 

Dogs: Boba is a rescue from the Bastrop animal shelter. We got him late july 2019, and then Liam was posted in the Austin Corgi facebook page, someone found them at the end of their country road where, historically, he said people bring their dogs to dump them.  He had dug  himself a little spot in the dirt on the side of the road, and there was a big green bowl nearby, maybe it had food in it. The guy who found him had two big dogs and a baby on the way so he really wasn't in a position to keep another dog. Boba was posted on the Bastrop animal shelter page as a possible corgi mix, but he seems more like a basset-lab, and Liam is some kind of rough coated terrier. Boba is velvety black with a few white markings, Liam is brown and his muzzle is going white.  The vet thinks Boba is around 4 years old and Liam is 6-8.  They are friendly to other dogs and tolerate each other. Boba loves children; I'm pretty sure his first family had little ones. He likes small dogs OK but seems a bit standoffish with larger dogs. Liam loves older people, is a little skittish around kids, and loves all dogs.  Liam is also blind in one eye, he has a cataract so big his eye just looks silver.  My theory is that it is from an injury rather than age.  Anyway, they are both good dogs and Liam is my special boy and Boba is Thax's best bud.  Boba will jump around whining and carrying on every day when Thax's car pulls into the driveway. It is adorable.

Walking the dogs is nice; I've gotten to see the changes of the seasons, watch the plants and trees go through their cycle of growth, we've seen squirrels and birds doing their little things. So that's a nice feeling of connection to nature that I don't remember feeling so much before this year.

So, yeah, Thax is still having to go in to work. He works in a repair lab so he can't really work from home because of all the equipment he has to use for his job. They have the lab staff working 4 10 hour days with staggered start/end times and each person getting a different day of the week off. Thax has really enjoyed having a day off during the week to sleep in, do projects, etc.  They're starting to talk about getting back to normal soon, making everyone work 7:30-4 M-F and he's not liking that idea at all.  Traffic, etc. are still a pain in the ass in Austin.

I've done some decluttering, but a lot of this year I was fairly immobilized by.....whatever. grief. depression. dread. whatever this 2020 shit is.  But I did get rid of some stuff. I have been cooking dinner every night M-F and then weekends are either take out or leftovers.  Thax has made a habit of getting up earlier than me and going to the store on weekends to get fresh fruit, pastries from the mexican grocery, donuts, or whatever, to make us a nice weekend breakfast.

I was doing banana bread or banana pancakes or banana waffles on Sundays for a while but that attempt at tradition sort of fell by the wayside.

I also started making Jun and did that for a few months; my artistic female friend mentioned above is a recovering alcoholic and was talking about wanting something that tasted like  mead but wasnt' alcoholic, so I did some internet reading and found Jun. It's like Kombucha but made with honey and green tea rather than sugar and black tea and the resulting beverage is sweeter and sort of mead-ish, so I made some for my friend and she loved it ....but as things tapered off with her and as the scobys kept multiplying, it started seeming like more work than fun so I quit the Jun biz.

I did use the Jun scoby to make a bread starter and made some bread, as everyone seemed to be doing this pandemic year.  I think I made 3 loaves of bread. It was OK but more work than fun, so I gave that up too.

I did learn to make good biscuits this year; like, they may be almost as good as Bakery Cafe's biscuits. almost.  I think the secret is to use both lard and butter as the fat component, and grate the cold fat into the flour mixture so that the biscuits stay flakey.

Hm...what else? I spent most of my time doom scroling on facebook or playing this dumb matchy-game called Clockmaker.  I haven't read much of anything this year, book-wise, that I can recall. We've watched some TV but it goes in one eye and out the other, or whatever the equivalent is. Mostly sit on the couch with my tablet whle the TV makes noise. 

My Oklahoma family (father's side) does a family Zoom on Friday nights most weeks; I try to remember to go to those but often I forget or just get busy and the time passes.

My Texas/indiana/oregon family (mom's side) has done Zooms for a couple of birthdays, Thanksgiving, and we are doing one on Xmas eve. I've taken my aunt L to Costco a few times where we do socially distanced grocery shopping, and we've been to their house for a visit in the front yard, they came to my house for a visit in our back yard....so nothing too much. Aunt L has asthma and she and B are both over 70 so they are being very careful to stay healthy this  year.  We are all looking forward to the vaccine.

I feel disconnected from friends, family, my husband and myself.  It's been wierd and sad not to have any plans for the future, no travel booked, nothing. 

Oh, and I turned 50 this year. 

I just wanted to apologize to anyone at Moviegasm that I saw, didn't see, ignored, or was rude to in the 5 minutes it took for me to arrive, have my dog get chewed on by another dog, and leave again.

I don't have a coherent time line of memory for what happened. I have some bits and pieces, but not the full picture We had just walked in and started putting away the things we brought with us. The Dogs were all swarming around the door, sniffing and carrying on, and then the next thing I know, Maggie was jumping on Lady and they were both barking. Maggie kept taking bites of Lady's shoulders, the back of her neck, and got her on her back and was going for her throat. They were fighting and getting closer and closer to dicemonkey's baby. I saw him moving to pick up the baby, but it didn't seem like anyone was getting to the baby fast enough. I couldn't move fast enough. I was trying to get my legs between the dogs, I knew enough to keep my hands away from dog mouths and trying to grab Maggie's collar. I think I was yelling, but I don't really remember. Then I was near or on the stairs with the dog? Then I was outside with Thax and Throm brought me some icee stuff. Then I was inside and Goudananda said something to me but I don't remember. And then downstaris getting stuff out of the library/tv room fridge and cussing at Oracle_tx (I don't remember what I said. I'm really sorry) and then I pushed Freyapax out of the way and then I was in the car crying on arthurthedented. So...that all sucked. It really freaked me out and I just needed to get home.

Lady is cleaned up and none the worse for it. I checked around her neck and shoulders for punctures, but I think she was too fluffy for any of Maggie's attempts at taking out her throat.

I wish I could have calmed the fuck down, gotten the fuck over myself and had a nice time after that but I just couldn't do it. I'm really sorry to have missed a good party and a nice visit with friends.

:(

Cleaning out my digital camera this evening, thought I'd share:

( Read more... )

 

item 1: napping on the couch yesterday evening with Eris-kitty on my
tummy. Wake up because I moved my leg and my knee is suddenly in
excruciating pain!

item 2: found a VERY LONG hair growing out of my jaw this a.m. at
work. It was HUGE. How could I grow a hair that long without noticing
it? Or without SOMEONE saying SOMETHING?? It was very fine and light
colored (blonde or gray) so...maybe it wasn't noticable. I thought it
was just a stray hair from my head that had somehow stuck to my jaw &
neck, but when I pulled it off, I felt it uprooting from my jawline.
ACK.

Well, it may be the beginning of the end for the doggie. Or maybe she
was just having really bad allergies. She threw up most of the day
yesterday and all night. I told Sweetie to block her in the kitchen so
she'd be barfing on a surface that was more easily cleaned, but he
didn't. Just kept putting paper towels over all the yarfs. And
letting them set. Because it's so much easier to clean up barf &
phlegm when you let it get all crusty. Not that he cares, because
he's never the one who runs the carpet shampooer, but still.

I imagine he won't take her to the vet today. I'd be horrified for
anyone to see her right now, anyway--nails all grown out, badly in
need of brushing, tail & hind area all pee-smelling....yecch. I feel
guilty because I don't do more for the dog, but then I get mad
because Sweetie's home all day, he's had her since he was 14 years old,
so why is it *my* job to make sure she's clean & well-groomed? I
guess because it's my job to do every damnthing else, that's why.

I spent the weekend being not-ugly and not-resentful, cooking and
cleaning and doing laundry & enjoying my little puttering, and
something just snapped last night I guess as I was trying to sleep
and the dog was yarfing and the lights were going on & off. feh.

Feb. 13, 2002
My book _Building an Aviary_ says that these are very tame & playful
birds & imitate voices and sounds very well.

http://www.mynahbird.com/articles/hills/hills.html

http://www.animal-information.com/text/beo.html

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Estates/3150/Mynah.html

No breeders in Texas, though. Not that I'd really want a bird. But if
I was gonna have one I'd want a sweet, talky one with a small beak

 

• Jan. 18, 2002

   

  After reading up on finches, looking at pictures, etc.
  
  I want a small aviary. I am thinking of building something right
  outside the master bathroom window, at eye level with the window, a
  horizontal space because finches go back and forth rather than flying
  up and down.
  
  I want owl finches,
  strawberry finches,
  
  society finches, 
  
  spice
  finches,
  and cordon bleu finches. 
  
  The Cordon bleus are the prettiest. I should probably start with
  society finches and gradually work my way up....
  
  Of course, this is all far in the future, when I can build the aviary
  and make sure I know what I'm doing as far as animal care.