a nupdate

May. 1st, 2025 07:22 pm
kindkit: Stede Bonnet from Our Flag Means Death hauling a rowboat into the sea (OFMD: Stede and a rowboat)
I got my MRI results back, and as far as I can tell from googling all the medical terms (and the fact that I haven't gotten a call from my healthcare provider saying to come in immediately) I don't have cancer. I'm relieved, obviously, or at least as relieved as I can be when nobody has actually said, "Hey, you're fine." It's not fine, but it's not life-threatening or urgent.

More on the not-fine-ness under the cut. Includes reproductive anatomy, but nothing TMI, I think. Click here for more. )

So, in non-medical good news, the city moved my bus stop back to where it used to be, hooray! I was expecting the construction to go on all summer at least. It saves me close to ten minutes' walking each way, which doesn't sound like much, but which a lot of days was definitely TOO MUCH. (Partly because the route to the original bus stop mostly skirts the riverside park, which is pretty pleasant and only requires crossing a couple of streets. The route to the replacement stop ran along one of the town's main roads, with many street crossings and many drivers who neither look nor slow down before they turn. I almost got hit multiple times in just a couple of months.)

Between these two developments, I no longer feel quite so much like the last straw is incoming.


I've been reading a bit. Seeing the trailer for the Murderbot TV show made me decide to try the books again--previously I read the first two and lost interest. I still think the first book is by far the strongest, while the later ones get repetitive and wish-fulfillment-y. But I enjoyed them well enough and I'm looking forward to watching the show.

Most recently I read Freya Marske's romantasy Sword Crossed, and liked everything about it, in a popcorn sort of way, except the central romance, which irritated me intensely. But the worldbuilding is fun, and I like that it's a fantasy focused on trade and economics rather than swords and dragons.


New series of Taskmaster begins soon! Normally I would hate the idea of an American guest, but Jason Mantzoukas is so weird that I think he'll be great.


And finally: if you had asked me ten years ago who would turn out to be a better LGBTQ ally, J K Rowling or Robert de Niro, I would certainly have guessed wrong.


ETA: And my hearing seems to have recovered from the MRI. It took a couple of days, though.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
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.
kindkit: Sailing ship at sea. (Fandomless: Blue ship)
Well, back again after another loooong hiatus. I didn't mean to be silent for so long (as always), but the last 3 months have been taken up with errands and appointments of unbearable tediousness. Also, *gestures vaguely around at the state of the world*. It's been hard to do anything but look at the news and worry.

1) Name change: the various steps of this got delayed when I got a Mysterious Respiratory Illness at the end of January (more on this later) that left me tired for quite a while. But I finally managed to update my driver's license, which took 3 trips. Trip 1: Oh, I see appointments are required now. Trip 2: After waiting an hour past my appointment time, I learn that if I wait two more days, I can renew my driver's license at the same time and not have to pay twice. But it cannot be done two days early. Trip 3: Success! Also went to the bank that day to update my name on my bank account.

Note that every visit to the MVD involved an Uber, because it's far from the nearest bus and I didn't want to risk being late.

1a) No, I still don't have a car. It's been over a year now. I was waiting until I could access my retirement account (turns out I can't, I was mistaken about the age requirement), then came the US Dept of Education informing me that I still owed them $$$$$ on student loans that I thought had been rolled into the ones I was already paying, nobody having told me otherwise for EIGHT YEARS. So my monthly payments have nearly tripled. And now the price of cars is likely to skyrocket due to tariffs, so I'm not likely to have a car anytime soon. I wish public transportation here in my oh-so-progressive and environmentally aware town wasn't so awful. The latest thing is that they moved a whole bunch of bus stops due to construction, so what used to be a 20-25 minute walk between the bus stop and my work is now 30+, on a heavily trafficked and frankly dangerous road rather than being mostly a nice stroll by the park along the river. The move is temporary, but I know the pace of construction around here.

2) Reading and watching and etc. Unfortunately, the return of Trump has meant the return of my focus difficulties, and I'm finding it hard to read again. I keep bogging down. I am currently bogged down in Great Eastern, by Howard J. Rodman (a Victorian pastiche featuring Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Captain Ahab, and Captain Nemo--I'm still not sure if it's silly or Extremely Serious) and The Athenian Murders, by V. J. Randle (murder mystery set in contemporary Athens, but the murders have elements of ancient Greek religious ritual; thus far my vote is for silly despite some attempts at talking about policing, fascism, and the plight of refugees). I did manage to finish The Helios Syndrome by Vivian Shaw, she of the Greta Helsing supernatural doctor novels. This one is contemporary, with the mc a psychic who assists in the investigation of airplane crashes, and I liked it a lot right up until the utterly ridiculous ending. I also read Melissa Scott's newest Astreiant novel, Point of Hearts, with enjoyment probably based more in my longstanding love for the world than the quality of the novel itself. (To be fair, I was expecting a very different book. Based on some WIP snippets Scott posted on her Patreon, I thought it would be Istre-centric. Instead, Istre's not in it at all. Maybe that'll be the next book.)

I continue to listen to a ton of podcasts, because I have a long commute. Mostly nonfiction ones that I've talked about in previous posts, but I'm always trying to find more. Currently I'm trying out Cautionary Tales, which is basically stories of things going horribly wrong and what we can learn from them--I like the actual content a lot, but there are really irritating moments of dramatization, voiced by actors of varied abilities.

3) Health: due to length and also TW for eye surgery and different possibly serious stuff, this one's going under a cut )

4) More cheerful news? I dunno. I got a haircut today? John Oliver did a really good segment about trans athletes? (It's on YouTube.) There's going to be a third Knives Out movie?
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
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.
kindkit: Stede Bonnet from Our Flag Means Death hauling a rowboat into the sea (OFMD: Stede and a rowboat)
1) Today I filed for a legal name change, which I've been meaning to do since, oh, late 2019. Covid restrictions messed up the plan for a while, but after that it was just my own indecisiveness and procrastination. But now the thing is done. Sort of--I have to have a hearing before a judge to grant it, but that's just pro forma. So pro forma that when they gave me the forms to fill out, they specifically said that under "Reason" I could just put "personal." Which I did.

In the end, I took the cautious/cowardly way out regarding my new name: I picked names readable as gender-neutral rather than clearly masculine. I'm not worried about problems with my job or my health care, but I am worried about housing, since protection from housing discrimination for trans people doesn't exist on a federal level as far as I know, and anyway Trump + his Supreme Court lackeys will try to roll back such anti-discrimination measures as exist. (I'm morbidly curious to see what will happen with Bostock, which protects LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination, and which was just decided in 2020. One of the judges in the majority was Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, not because he cares about queer people but because his legal thinking is heavily focused on the text of the law, in contrast to Kavanaugh and Barrett whose legal thinking focuses on what goals Trump and/or the Federalist Society are trying to achieve. Not that Gorsuch has gone against the pack much lately.)


2) I need to change the gender marker on my driver's license, but I'm not sure whether to go with M or X. In some ways I prefer X, because in principle I think putting people's gender on identity documents is almost as weird and gross as putting race on them was. On the other hand, X will quite literally mark a person as gender-noncomforming in some way. On the third hand, I kind of feel like, well, some of us have to take some risks. I neither like nor am good at taking risks, but I'm also in a relatively safe position, and An Old to boot, and thus in a better position to take some minor risks for the sake of not rolling over and playing dead.


3) In other news, I saw Conclave today. IMO it's a very well-acted and mostly well-made film with a naive and ridiculous premise.


4) I recently read Dragon's Winter and Dragon's Treasure by Elizabeth A. Lynn, who's probably best known (at least in these fannish parts) for The Dancers of Arun. Didn't love the dragon books, didn't hate them. The story feels deeply unfinished (as in, was supposed to be a trilogy but the last bit never got written) and surprisingly conventional in all kinds of ways. Not least, sadly, the handling of queerness and queer relationships. It's a bit weird and depressing that Lynn was bolder about this in the late 1970s than she was 20 years later.

There is probably a tale to be told about how a (relative) plethora of queer sff in the 1970s/1980s just kind of faded away from the 1990s until relatively recently. I get the sense that a lot of the Kids These Days think there was no queer sff until, like, Gideon the Ninth or something.


5) Tomorrow begins a long workweek that will not end until Thanksgiving. Wish me luck.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
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!
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
Short version if you don't want to hear any more about Covid: I'm fine, absolutely nothing dangerous is happening, Covid is just super annoying.

Longer version under here )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
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.)
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
Back again after yet another longish disappearance (sorry). It's been a tougher adjustment since my car got stolen than I was really anticipating, and I feel like I'm only starting to emerge from a fog of tiredness and deep but indistinct distress.

More details under the cut )

I have done other things besides mope! Sort of. I've been reading! For instance, I've read Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf and Starhawk fantasy trilogy, about which I have complexly mixed feelings that I won't go into here on this already-long post. And last night & today I read K J Charles's latest, Death in the Spires. It's a bit of a departure for Charles in that it's almost not a romance. (There is a love story, but it's not really central; one interesting detail is that this book has no explicit sex scenes whatsoever.) Formally it's a mystery, but really the mystery elements are pretty perfunctory. What it actually is, or wants to be, is a crime novel exploring a group of friends and how that friendship fails in various ways both before and after the crime. Charles tips her hat textually to Sherlock Holmes, but the influences I felt at work were different: Barbara Vine, Tana French, perhaps Donna Tartt. To be clear, Charles's reach exceeds her grasp here--the novel needed to be longer and to explore the characters more, particularly by giving our protagonist clearer and more consistent motivations. But my sense of Charles's most recent, oh, 6-8 books is that she's been straining at the limits of genre romance for quite a while now, and I'm happy to see her try for something beyond them. I'm curious about where she goes next. I'd actually love to see more of these characters, but I don't see how Charles could get another book out of them without abandoning even the pretext of male/male romance. I guess we shall see.

And I'm watching Taskmaster S17. Not loving the cast so far, but sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to them. And S16 is going to be a hard act to follow.
kindkit: Sailing ship at sea. (Fandomless: Blue ship)
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.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
Home. Apartment not burgled. I looked in the parking lot in case this was all a dream, but sadly my car was not there. I haven't heard anything from the police--I didn't really expect to but I still kept checking my phone all day.

When I signed up with my current insurance company, I was pretty broke and opted out of everything that wasn't absolutely necessary, including coverage of a rental car if needed. And then when I was less broke I forgot to go in and add that coverage back (in part because it renews automatically and I never thought about it). Oops.

Also, while Santa Fe does theoretically have public transportation, it's pretty limited. There used to be a bus that went from fairly near my apartment to quite near my work. Buses were infrequent and the service ended at 7 pm (earlier on Saturday, nonexistent on Sunday) but at least I could sometimes get to work on the bus. The city eliminated the route, and now there's no bus that would get me much closer to work than a mile away.

(I'll be fine. I'm just annoyed as hell.)
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
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. )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
I'm not doing [community profile] snowflake_challenge in any systematic way, but I quite like today's Challenge #5.

Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:

1. Something your favorite character would like
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A fandom place you would like to visit
4. A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
5. Something you find comforting
6. Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A book or song with a color in the title
9. Something only someone in your fandom would understand



My answers, with pictures and (if I've done it correctly) alt texts are under the cut )
kindkit: Sailing ship at sea. (Fandomless: Blue ship)
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.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
$chair is here! It's not as ugly as I remember it being in the shop, which is nice. The floor model I saw was labeled as chocolate brown but was more like a beige; the chair that arrived is genuinely chocolate brown.

(I'm not actually a huge fan of brown furnishings, but the chair was on sale so there weren't a lot of color choices. Also I am stuck with hideous brown carpet in my apartment that I didn't want the chair to clash with, though I am looking around for a big rug to cover up as much of the carpet as possible. And to replace those brown privacy curtains--it's an efficiency, there is no separate bedroom--with something more colorful. Nevertheless, a certain degree of brownness can't be helped.)

Yes, I have lived here a long time and should have gotten a rug years ago. First I had no money, then I kept thinking I'd be moving to a nicer place. But nicer places are unaffordable, so I might as well make this place as tolerable as I can.)

Anyway, chair!


A large, plush, dark brown, expensive reclining chair.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
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.)
kindkit: Two cups of green tea. (Fandomless: Green tea)
This Thanksgiving, I have mostly eaten Chinese food (I got takeout last night--2 main courses and some wontons--had some for dinner last night and some today, and there's still another meal's worth left). For breakfast, however, I had a truly heroic quantity of St. Angel triple cream brie, eaten with pecan raisin bread. It was yum.

I also watched the S16 final of Taskmaster.
Some spoilery things, warning for one of them being a bit yuckyI'm intrigued by the definition of "family friendly" that includes "Julian makes Alex kneel to him while he, Julian, eats a doughnut, then spits doughnut in his face." (Which still wasn't as gross as what Susan or Lucy did, just kinkier.)

[pedant]Also, no vanilla ice cream is using castoreum as a vanilla substitute. Castoreum is hard to obtain! And consequently rare and expensive! It's not even used much in perfumery anymore, as far as I know.

And also, Greg, "enormity" does not mean what you think it means.[/pedant]

Hotel Taskmaster was brilliant.

Greg called Alex "cutie." I am easily made happy.



I do have to work tomorrow, but it should be very very quiet and allow me to catch up on stuff.


Anyway, I hope those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving had a lovely day. Also those of you who didn't!
kindkit: Ed (Blackbeard) from Our Flag Means Death, touching the red silk that Stede has folded and put in his pocket. (OFMD: Ed red silk)
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.

back

Nov. 4th, 2023 10:56 am
kindkit: Two cups of green tea. (Fandomless: Green tea)
On Thursday I finished an eight-day work week. It was voluntary-ish on my part, in that a project I ended up organizing big chunks of (despite not officially having the title/authority one would associate with that kind of thing) went live on Wednesday, and I thought I should be there Tuesday and Wednesday (my normal weekend) in case of glitches. I was not wrong, by the way: there were glitches and unthought-of details like "maybe the obvious URL error customers might make when trying to access the website [think plural vs singular] should redirect to the right page instead of just throwing up a 404 error."

Now I have my delayed weekend, and then I'm back at work for 2 days on Sunday/Monday and then I get my regular weekend. Still tired though. Still frustrated with my job, where I keep ending up responsible for things no one else has time for or wants to do (or, often, has the knowledge to do), and I'm happy to do that because I like organizing stuff but also I would like my pay and recognition within the company to reflect that I am doing work now that involves big projects and coordinating multiple departments across several locations. (My store management is great; they see what I do and they've fought to get me better pay. But upper management--and we are a co-op with four locations, not a giant corporation--I think sees what I do but they just don't give a fuck. Supposedly upper management is planning on creating a higher-level job that would be responsible for . . . the things I do already, except officially across all the stores. Someday. Maybe. And even if they do, I'd have to apply of course, and who knows if they'd want to hire me for it or someone with better-looking credentials on paper.)

They are lucky that (a) I mostly enjoy what I do despite the frustrations, and I don't reasonably see a better job elsewhere at my age, (b) I have a certain amount of inertia because I hate job hunting, (c) the fact that it's a pretty queer- and trans-supportive workplace means a lot to me, and (d) the health insurance is really really good.

And I should go to the laundromat today but I don't wanna. Grumble grumble as hard as I work I should be able to afford an apartment with a washer and dryer.

Anyway, I owe a bunch of people replies, which I will try to get to. I want to make another post about OFMD S2 now that a little time has passed. And I'll be talking more about Taskmaster, possibly today; my condolences.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
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.

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kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
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