something queer going on

I finally got my MRI yesterday. It was supposed to have been last week, but caught a cold and I was coughing and sneezing way too much to be able to hold still during it, so I rescheduled.

Getting an MRI is deeply unpleasant, 0/10, do not recommend. I don't think of myself as especially claustrophobic, but being put into a narrow tube and told not to move is an efficient way to find out just how claustrophobic you are and how many horror scenarios your brain can conjure up. (I had a death grip on the "Get me the hell out of here!" call button in one hand and the IV line--which I'd been told to hold onto so it didn't get tangled--in the other, and at a couple points I thought very seriously about using the call button even though I could see the end of the tube if I looked up and back.) It doesn't help that communication during an MRI is one-way only: the tech can speak to you but you can't talk back.

Among the things you can't say are "I can't understand anything you're saying to me" and "One of the noise-protective headphones is not properly over my ear and HOLY FUCK IT IS LOUD IN HERE."

When I got out, my left (unprotected) ear was ringing badly, and even now, more than 24 hours later, my hearing is somewhat dulled in that ear and I have new, significant, unwelcome tinnitus. If it hasn't gotten better in a few days I'll have to call my doctor, I guess, and ask for an audiologist's appointment. (It probably doesn't help that it's the same ear that I got a nasty ear infection in ca. 13-14 years ago. The eardrum burst and it was months before my hearing returned to normal-ish. No, I never followed up at the time because I didn't have health insurance.)

When I got out of the MRI I mentioned the headphone problem and the ringing in my ears, and asked if it would go away, and got a "probably" and an indifferent shrug. That was pretty typical of how I was treated throughout--they didn't do much to prepare me (even though they asked if it was my first MRI) or to help me afterwards when I was pretty disoriented after having had my ear blasted for half an hour. I don't know if that utter lack of care was for me specifically (I don't think it was on their information that I'm trans, and I was doing my best to be low-key, but I don't look feminine anymore and I was in there for a specifically uterus-having problem, so it could have been some kind of gendered disgust) or if they're just overworked/jaded/callous. It was certainly very different from how other specialists in the same system have treated me.

So now comes the wait for the results.

Anyway, if you need an MRI I have two pieces of advice: (1) you probably do want the sedation, and (2) make SURE the headphones are placed properly and cover your ears.

1) I am legally in possession of a new name!

The process was more awkward than it should have been, because I foolishly relied on information from a co-worker who had just changed his name, rather than calling the court to check. Co-worker told me that (a) all the hearings are over Google Meet only, and when I checked the form I was sent, it did say in small print on the bottom "All hearings are on Google Meet," and (b) the judge wouldn't ask me any detailed reasons for the change, and "personal reasons" was sufficient, which was also what the clerk told me when I was filling out the form.

I'm sure nobody deliberately misled me (my guess is that my co-worker saw a different judge with different procedures), but neither thing turned out to be quite true.

( Click for more )

2) Not much else is going on. My life is dull, apart from looking at the news in ever-mounting horror.

I want to stop getting my news from Twitter, in part because I'm in the process of leaving Twitter altogether. I'd like to support actual journalism by subscribing to an actual newspaper, but my god, the options are grim. ( Click for more )

3) I'm not even reading much. I buy a zillion books (on sale, on Kindle, yes I know), but the general state of everything everywhere is making me hugely risk-averse when I can be. So I re-read, or look at YouTube videos of Dylan Hollis baking or the chocolate guy making fully-functional superconducting supercolliders filled with raspberry ganache, or I watch low-stakes British comedy panel shows.

However, I am reading one thing I've never read before: The Odyssey in Emily Wilson's translation. Recently Twitter had another round of ignorant right-wing douchebros giving her shit about how bad and woke her translations of Homer are, so I bought one.

( Click for more )

3) A bit late to mention this, but I wrote a thing for Yuletide.

Puppets (2312 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Astreiant Series - Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Philip Eslingen/Nicolas Rathe
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding
Summary: It's only an old story.


This is a story idea I may revisit at some point; there are things I'd like to explore about Astreiant's matriarchy without having a deadline at the most exhausting time of the year for me, and also not needing to keep the result suitable for gift-giving. (Basically: what if Astreiant had a men's rights movement? But even in the very different context of an actual matriarchy where men actually do have fewer rights than women, I realize that "men's rights movement" is not a phrase to necessarily spark joy.)

I don't know if it's perverse of me to want to focus on that (maybe? I tend to have the urge to pick a canon up and shake it). And I don't think Scott presents Astreiant as a utopia at all; I do however think some fans see it as one. Which requires a certain effort of will--while men in Astreiant have a lot more rights than European women did at the period the Points series is based on, the inequalities are still clear. (To be fair to utopian readers, though, the canon of the Points books is shall we say variable, so some picking and choosing is inevitable.)

If I ever actually wrote all the fics I intend to write someday . . . I'd have a lot more fics.

So, I turned 55 on Monday. Like all multiple-of-5 birthdays, this one is inspiring thought. Aging, mortality, all of that extremely fun stuff. And I can no longer set it aside with "someday." Someday is now, or in the next few years, at least. (I do not have a family history of people living long lives in good health. Maybe I'll be different. Maybe not.)

It's interesting how much "What do I want the rest of my life to look like?" is a different question at 55 than even at 45. And how very much I don't feel any closer to an answer.


Anyway, I took a 4-day weekend for my birthday, which has been nice although far from long enough. I haven't done much--that was kind of the goal--but I did see an actual movie in the actual cinema for the first time since before Covid started. (It was Deadpool and Wolverine, which was slightly better than it deserved to be. I'm the wrong kind of nerd to be the ideal audience for it, and I'm pretty over the whole "mass-produced corporate entertainment product ironically poking fun at mass-produced corporate entertainment products" thing, but I still mostly enjoyed it.)

Other activities:

Reading: I'm still having trouble finding anything I really like. I keep shying away from books that are obviously going to be serious or challenging, and then resenting the books I read because they're unserious and unchallenging. ( More under the cut. )

Listening: Modes of Thought In Anterran Literature, by Wolf at the Door studios (with Alex Kemp as writer, showrunner, and main performer, though you have to dig deep to find cast information), which I saw recommended on Twitter. This is an audio drama consisting largely of lectures for a Classics course of the same title at Harbridge University. Anterra is an ancient civilization, dating back to approx 78,000 BCE (and no, there's not an extra zero in there), whose ruins were discovered on the seafloor after a Chinese submarine accident seven years ago.

I've listened to all the aired episodes--about 30--and I still don't know if I like it. The stuff that's actually about Anterra is interesting, and I really like the idea of an audio drama structured as a class, but the focus has increasingly shifted over towards X-Files style conspiracy stuff that doesn't interest me as much. Plus, the academic angle is just plausible enough, with a lot of actual real-world archaeological references, that my skepticism engages, and I want to know things like how the Anterran language (an unknown language, much too old to be closely related to any known ancient language, in an unknown and apparently logographic script) could possibly have been deciphered at all, let alone so quickly. And why this seemingly undergraduate introductory class has so many graduate students in it. And why the lecture topics are so random.

Randomness is the main problem, really. The show seems to be winging it, without a clear direction or a planned endpoint. Plot elements get dropped in and forgotten while new ones take over. At this point, new episodes aren't even being numbered, so I have no idea how close we are to the end, or if there is a planned ending, or what.

At the same time, I don't not recommend it? It's trying something pretty unusual, and I can respect that. It might be worth trying a few episodes to see what you think.


Watching: Nothing at the moment. But a new season of Taskmaster UK is starting in a couple of weeks!

After another long silence for no good reason--mostly the feeling that nothing in my life is important enough to post about--I at last have Significant News.

To wit, I have COVID. For the first time, as far as I know.

So far it's been very mild, just tiredness, an annoying dry cough, mild intermittent sore throat, mild temperature elevation that technically doesn't quality as a fever (although it should, because my normal temperature is only about 97.5 F and I've been running about 2 degrees higher), and some tightness in the chest. I'm keeping an eye on it, of course. I have a pulse oximeter that I bought back in 2020/2021; I'll dig that out and check occasionally.

Interestingly, my symptoms started on Wednesday morning, but I got negative COVID tests on Wednesday and Thursday, and my first positive test was today. It was very, very positive though: a big bold line appeared within about 8 minutes of applying the sample.

So I'm off work until next Thursday, probably; if I continue to feel decent-ish it might be almost enjoyable.

I am, however, pissed off that after over 4 years of avoiding crowds and masking (almost) all the time indoors in public, a moment of truly pathetic weakness led to COVID.

I can't be sure, of course, but my best guess is this: Tuesday of last week, after a doctor's appointment, I wanted to go to Starbucks. I don't regularly go to Starbucks, but I had the craving. And it was a hot day, and this Starbucks had no outdoor seating that was in the shade. So I sat inside, and didn't put my mask back on between drinks because I felt silly. I was there for maybe 45 minutes tops, and wasn't sitting close to anyone. But that seems to have been enough to get whammied.

Apparently there's a new variant again and a new surge? I am an object lesson in why we should keep masking, or mask up again.


So, I'll have some time on my hands for the next week. Can anyone recommend me things? I'm more likely to get to books and podcasts than anything visual, but all recs are welcome. Preferably fairly lighthearted, preferably queer.


Here are some things I've been enjoying lately:

1) The novels of A. J. Demas. These are mostly male/male romance, set in a world based on ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia. They're fun, and there's plot beyond the romance. Some of them are a bit Tumblr-y for my taste, and unfortunately the last novel, The House of the Red Balconies, which was on track to be my favorite, ends very suddenly about 100 pages too soon. However I can recommend Honey and Pepper, and One Night in Boukos (which has two romances, one m/m and one m/f).

The author's notes link you to her other novels, written under the name (possibly her wallet name?) Alice Degan. I read one of them, From all False Doctrine. It was well-written and I enjoyed it in many ways, but it was very, very, very, very Christian. I think the Degan novels were written before the Demas books, and you can definitely see traces of a Christian worldview (specifically Christian sexual ethics) in the early Demas books. There's a lot less of it in the most recent ones.


2) The Old Bridge Inn series, by Annick Trent. Historical queer romance set in 1790s England. There are 4 books: 2 m/m novels, 1 f/f novel, and 1 f/f novella (more a short story imo). They can be read in any order, so I'd recommend trying the best two, The Oak and the Ash (m/m) and Sixpenny Octavo (f/f). These books are deeply, impressively embedded in history, and the central characters are all workers and artisans rather than rich people. The connecting thread is a "reading club" run out of the titular Old Bridge Inn, which meets for reading aloud and to which people can subscribe for a small fee and borrow books. But in the anti-revolutionary panic of 1790s England, the club is only dubiously legal even when it stays out of politics. And not everyone in it is staying out of politics.


3) Various by T. Kingfisher. I thought all of her Kingfisher books were adult books, and that the children's stuff was all published as Ursula Vernon. Turns out that's not true, but I enjoyed both of the kids' books I accidentally bought (Illuminations and Minor Mage). And I really liked Thorn Hedge, which is an adult book (a retelling of Sleeping Beauty) although sadly quite short.


4) World Gone Wrong, by Audacious Machine Creative. This is an audio drama in the form of a chat podcast that discusses the various happenings of what seems to be the ongoing end of the world. More light-hearted than it sounds, with hints that the characters are as deeply traumatized as you'd expect but are trying not to think about it. This is of course riffing off of the Covid pandemic in various ways, so a lot of the jokes are in the "it's funny because it's painfully true" category. But there's also pure silliness: the first episode tackles the question of what to do if your Pekingese dog becomes a werewolf. I've only listened to the first couple of episodes but I like it a lot so far.


5) G.O.B.L.I.N.S, a very new scripted audio drama by most of the people who made Stellar Firma at Rusty Quill. (This is not associated with Rusty Quill, just to be clear.) Features Tim Meredith, Ben Meredith, Imogen Harris, Jenny Haufek, and Amy Dickinson.

The premise is that a woman who works in planning for local government accidentally stumbles through the Veil and into a world of goblins, elves, fairies, the fae, and other such beings. Specifically, she finds herself in their equivalent of a local government planning office. Since she's stuck there until the next time the Veil thins, they offer her a job.

The show is crowdfunding right now, so there's only the pilot episode. But the pilot is very good indeed: funny, engaging, with a whole lot of worldbuilding and characterization threaded, apparently effortlessly, throughout. The pilot only seems to be available on acast, although the show itself will eventually be obtainable from all the usual suspects. You can listen here.

And if you like it, and can spare some money towards helping its staff get paid, the crowdfunder is here.


6) Speaking of Rusty Quill, I keep bouncing off of The Magnus Protocol. Not for any fault of writing or acting, but because the sound design makes portions of it incomprehensible to me. Any scenes set in the staff breakroom or outdoors have background noise, echoes, lower dialogue volume, etc. etc. and while I can see that it's realistic and atmospheric, it's hard for me to understand even listening in my relatively quiet apartment. In my more usual podcast-listening environment (walking through town, or on the bus) I can barely catch one word in four. And I guess transcripts exist but I don't want to have to look at transcripts; I want the sound design to be listener-friendly.

And, well, nothing so far (I've listened to eight episodes) has made me think the show's doing anything genuinely new with the Magnus Archives world. (If I'm wrong, let me know, okay? No need for spoilers, just tell me if you think I should keep trying with it.)

My car hasn't been found, to exactly no one's surprise. I have managed to stop looking expectantly around the parking lot every day, as though it might find its own way home like a lost dog.

I've decided that I want to wait a bit to buy a replacement. Once I turn 55 in September, I'll be able to use money from my retirement account without a big tax penalty. Then I can pay more of the cost up front.

Public transportation in Santa Fe is, as I said in an earlier post, absolutely pathetic. But I can get to and from work (by which I mean, a 15-20 minute walk from my work) most days--the only times I'd have to Uber would be Saturday and Sunday mornings, when the buses don't start running early enough. The walking part is annoying, but I'm supposed to be walking at least half an hour a day for my health anyway. And I can rent a car every couple of weeks for things that are inconvenient by bus and Uber, like the laundromat and big shopping trips. The cost will still be cheaper than buying a car.

I haven't yet actually talked to my insurance company. Of course I filed a claim online immediately, then got a call from the assigned adjustor on Friday (when I was at work--I missed the call, tried to call back and only got voicemail), then again on Monday (while at work--managed to call back, but then she said there were other claims in the queue ahead of me and she'd call me back today). So far, although she asked me what time would be convenient for me and I said about 10:30 am, and it's now past noon, she has not called. Ah, well, I wasn't expecting them to be speedy. And she has the voice of someone who is deeply tired of dealing with people, so even though I've done nothing wrong, I don't think the conversation is going to be delightful.

I felt pretty awful for a few days due to the stress and emotional reaction, but better now. I do feel a weird level of grief for the car, though. I never anthropomorphized it all that much--my old roommate, years ago, was surprised that I'd never given it a name--but still, I'd had it since 2001 and grown attached. It kept going through cross-country moves, Minnesota winters, New Mexico summers, several years of on-street parking in Washington DC, and driving through what was described afterwards as a "thousand-year flood." (I had to get home; there was no other choice.) Even though since 2008 I've never had the money to maintain it properly, it kept going. I'm sad that it ended up either trashed somewhere or in a chop shop. I'm sad that I won't drive it again, though that's more about me liking familiarity and disliking change than about it being some kind of high performer. It was a Honda Civic, the definition of serviceable. It was, however, red, and had a moon roof, and because it was a 2-door coupe it had a very vaguely sporty silhouette. It was, before time and weather got to it, a reasonable attractive little car.

However, if it had to get stolen, I'm glad it was stolen before I spent $$$ getting the air conditioning fixed, which I would have needed to do before summer.


ETA: Have now communicated with the insurance company. It was a different person than the adjuster--someone who's helping her with her case load. There was a whole lot of faff, with the whole interview being recorded. And I've had to request a copy of the police report so that I can send it to them (they can request it themselves but it takes longer.) Anyway, I'm sure this is a lot less faff than it would be if my car was new/ish and valuable.

I would apologize that it's been over a month since I've posted (or, alas answered comments), except that I seem to do that so often that it's become its own routine. I've been meaning to post, really! But the stars (the desire, the time, and the energy to post) have not aligned.

( Some updates under the cut, including allergies, work, shoes, books, and podcasts. It gets a bit long. )

I've been feeling stressed, and also kind of low, for a variety of reasons: the general state of the world, the increasingly annoying state of my job, the usual holiday retail stress, and having three medical appointments in 2 weeks. The medical appointments were all routine, and they're over now and went fine, but experience has taught me that I will be humiliated and browbeaten at all medical appointments, and while this is usually not the case with my current providers, I can't seem to unlearn it. My blood pressure SHOOTS up to worrying levels every time, although when I monitor at home it's normal (thanks to meds); at the second appointment of the most recent three, they retested at the end when I was more calm and my systolic pressure had dropped more than 40 points. So at least my white coat syndrome is documented now!

Also stressful: as we reach the end of 2023, I had to try and dig out paperwork for the claims that my stupid FSA* demanded more documentation of. I've been putting it off forever and of course stressing more and more, but I finally did it today and managed to find most of what I needed.

Anyway, I've spent much of December feeling emotionally crappy, but hopefully things will swing up again now that the medical stuff is over. As soon as the last appointment was over--yesterday--I stopped feeling queasy and on the verge of tears, which is a start.

I'm taking a whole three days off for Christmas, go me! This is mostly because Christmas falls on a Monday this year and my regular days off are Tuesday and Wednesday. It's still nice; there've been a lot of years that I worked Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas. I'm looking forward to doing nothing in particular.

My gaming group had been planning to meet this Saturday, the 23rd, but our GM and host is currently ill so that's probably not happening. *sigh* It's the only thing I do socially these days, because with COVID not going away, I like being around lots of people even less than I ever did. I was looking forward to it.

Ah, well. Christmas is coming, bringing a few days off for me, and hopefully some of that peace and goodwill in the world that I keep hearing about. Also today, or maybe tomorrow, is the solstice, and the light will start coming back. On the whole I prefer winter to summer, but I wish we could have cold weather without having it be so dark. (I know why we can't. But a boy can wish.)


(*FSAs/HSAs are a medical savings plan offered by some American health insurance companies. They allow you to set aside a certain amount of money each year, tax free, that can be spent on medical expenses not covered by insurance. The advantage, besides being tax free, is that while the money is deducted from your paycheck over the course of the year, you can use the whole total from the start. The disadvantages are, however, large: (1) it's so bureaucratic that I just had to provide documentation that money I paid to a medical laboratory associated with a hospital was really a medical expense, and (2) any money that you don't spend, you lose. Where does it go? No one will say. I assume the administering company keeps it. Perhaps the executives have a party. Both these things make having an FSA stressful. I go back and forth about whether it's worth it, and in the end I decided to put a lot less money in it next year.)


Mostly I'm posting this so you know why I've been so scarce, and even worse than usual at answering comments. I always appreciate it when folks reply to my posts, and I'll try to do better about responding. And I do read everybody's posts, even when I don't comment. Please accept my virtual hugs and real gratitude, all of you.

On Monday, while taking my daily stupid walk for my stupid health, I (stupidly) tripped and fell quite hard. It was bad enough that someone driving past stopped to ask if I was okay.

Basically I am okay--I didn't hit my head, though the jarring gave me a headache, and I didn't reinjure my back. But I do seemed to have pulled a muscle on the left side of my chest while trying to catch myself.

Things it currently hurts to do: raise my arm, roll over in bed, breathe deeply, lift much of anything. Not loving this.

It's making me glad I bought $chair, because I imagine my recovery from top surgery will be like this except worse and on both sides.

In related news, $chair is being delivered any minute now. The delivery company says they will mask if requested, which I plan to as well as masking myself. And hopefully they won't need to be in my apartment that long, but there is a certain amount of set up and making sure the chair works that has to happen. (I don't like having strangers in my space, even apart from the newest COVID surge.

(A GIANT truck has just pulled up outside. I assume $chair is in it.)

1) I finally gave in and bought a bottle of Beaufort's lovely ginger/pepper/smoke perfume Coeur de Noir. I dithered about it for ages: did I love it enough to buy a whole bottle, especially when my perfume opportunities are limited (work has a no-perfume policy)? But recently I wore it again from my sample, having not worn it for a while, and I loved it even more than I remembered. Then a few days later I tried to wear it again and my vial was empty, oh noes! When I found myself opening up the vial and rubbing a cotton swab along the inside to get the last traces, I figured I wouldn't regret the bottle.

It was delivered today from Bloom Perfumery, along with the other samples I ordered and a couple of 2 ml freebies. (Freebies are Monsieur and Sucre d'Ebene, both from Pierre Guillaume; Monsieur sounds fine based on the listed notes, while Sucre sounds unsurprisingly too sweet; I mostly haven't loved other PG scents I've tried.) Despite my resolve to test scents in a more systematic way, I ended up ordering a hodgepodge of things that sounded interesting and/or have been recommended to me: Black Vetiver by Phaedon Paris, Haxan by Parfum Prissana, Oud Imperial by Perris Monte Carlo, Savitri by Parfum Prissana, Larmes du Desert by Atelier des Ors, Lentisque by Phaedon Paris, Nuits de Bakelite and Iris Cendré by Naomi Goodsir, Iron Duke and Terror and Magnificence by Beaufort, Northman by Alexander, Chypre Shot by Olfactive Studio, Garuda by Jul et Mad, and Tara Mantra by Gri Gri.

Excited to have new scents to try. Perfume testing in the fall/winter is not what's usually advised, I think, but I feel more myself in cooler weather and I seem to enjoy perfumes more then.


2) Also delivered today, the teas I ordered from Tea Source. I got the Phantom Power oolong (they describe it as "a hearty cup of fruit and bone," and I really could not resist); Clouds and Mist Supreme, which is a Chinese green tea from Sichuan, said to be floral and cucumbery; Clearwater Sencha, which is a Japanese green tea from the Saemidori cultivar and is said to have qualities of cantaloupe and snap peas (I've had what Tea Source called otsuka saemidori, which one of the heavily brothy, savory Japanese greens, and adored it, but alas Tea Source no longer has it); Root Word raw pu'er ("salted plums, citrus rind, juniper, and wilderness"); and Jasmine Dragon Pearls, which is your basic bitch of a jasmine tea but I like it a lot. As you can see, Tea Source gives their products fanciful names, which I don't love because it makes it harder to find something similar, but they do also provide lots of info about where the teas are grown, who grows them, and how they're processed. I'm too ignorant for most of it to mean much to me, but I like that Tea Source knows. And I've always found their teas to be really high quality, which I can't say for teas I've bought locally from other retailers (even specialty ones). That's why I go to the effort of ordering online. Shipping is free if you order over a certain amount.


3) And finally, today I spent the price of over a month's rent on a goddamn chair. It's a recliner, which I'm going to need when I finally manage to get top surgery; sleeping in a recliner rather than bed is recommended for a while after surgery. I probably should have bought it in a sensible way, by comparison-shopping online etc., but instead I procrastinated for ages and then finally walked into a furniture store that I've passed multiple times without going in, "just to see what they have," and ended up spending $$$. It's a powered recliner, which feels silly to me but apparently these days, the only manual recliners available also rock and swivel, which I didn't want. And when I thought about it, I figured that the ability to change positions with the push of a button might be very welcome post-surgery.

I feel (a) astonished that anyone can afford to have a whole houseful of furniture*, (b) pleased that I will finally have a comfortable chair like a goddamn adult, (c) full of longing for a nice place with nice furniture that I could enjoy living in rather than tolerate, and (d) horrified that the delivery people will contrast this expensive chair with my shitty apartment and probably laugh at me after they leave.

It's not actually being delivered until Dec. 13, the first available date on which I was neither working nor booked up with medical appointments. So I have some time to figure out where I'm going to put it.

The chair, by the way, is quite ugly but comfortable, which is the important bit. I also fell in love with a $500 rug (on sale from $900) but I did not buy it.

(*I know estate sales, thrift stores, etc. exist. I've yet to see a piece of furniture or a rug in a local thrift store that I'd pay money for**, and even if I did find a great bargain, I have no way to transport it or get it up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. Delivery is a must.)

(**Thrift stores seem to be geographically variable. I used to get great stuff, including furniture, from them when I lived in Minneapolis. Here in Santa Fe it's all junk--SF is full of rich people who resell their furniture at $$$ consignment stores. There are also, I'm told, a lot of people now who make their living combing thrift stores, snatching up all the good stuff, and reselling it online at a premium. So some it's just changing times, I guess. *sigh* I do feel like it's increasingly hard to get by if you're not rich. I'm definitely not poor anymore, but a comfortable life feels almost as financially out of reach as it always did. And I don't think that's just a matter of rising expectations.

Anyway, I have a chair! Or I will in a month, anyway.

Today I:

1) Went to the laundromat.

2) Went to physical therapy.

3) Signed new paperwork on my lease so they could raise my rent, oh joy.

4) Got a flu shot, which took 2 attempts and 2 phone calls.


No more adulting must be required of me for some time.