lunabee34

1. Josh is a lying liar who lies, so he told us he was feeling better while the rest of us were at my parents', and though it is true that the intense, protracted bout of vomiting that began this whole thing has not been repeated, he has been so so ill. We are just waiting on the culture to finish so he can get the meds he needs, and I am so angry they didn't call him yesterday because they damn sure aren't going to call him today since it's a holiday. He is so so miserable. I would not wish cdiff on anyone.

His foot surgery has been canceled, and I am relieved. But I am also a bit worried because the surgery is to repair a tear in the tendon, and I worry that putting it off means that the tear will just get worse. Now he won't be able to have it until December. Our offices are not ADA-compliant; they are only accessible by stairs (I know), and also it will just be an enormous pain in the ass to recover from the surgery while working and much easier to do it during our off time. Sigh.

2. If you are in the market for some beautiful, handcrafted jewelry, check out OiShiny on Etsy. The wire work on these necklaces is amazing. I have two of them already and just ordered a couple more. They are even more beautiful in person; photos and videos can't really capture how pretty the stones are.

3. The roof is leaking over the bathroom again because, of course, it is.


* If you sing about making a beautiful mistake in your bed, the conclusion I'm drawing is not the one you intend.

1. I am very proud of myself. When Fiona dropped my phone and shattered the bottom of the screen at the end of April, I just shrugged and put some scotch tape over it and went on with life. I am not about to spend 300-500 dollars to replace it since it still functions, and the tape has prevented the cracks from spreading and also my finger from getting shredded. When my laptop suffered the bluescreen of death at the end of April right before finals, I also just shrugged and got the previous laptop out of the closet. It functions just fine except that the top of it is hanging on by a thread to the bottom of it (after I dropped it years ago *woe woe*), so it can only be used on the desk as a stationary object with something behind the top propping it up. As of right now, I don't plan to replace it any time soon because . . . we have to replace our AC. I was hoping we could go one more year, but alack and alas, no. So we're getting a heat pump instead of a traditional AC, and because that'll be like 8k, I'm just going to deal with the old laptop for awhile, probably until Christmas. But all these things would have sent me into an anxiety spiral a year ago (something about tech/appliance failure makes my lizard brain go into flight mode), and I am handling them with a degree of calm that surprises me and makes me think my medicine is probably working. LOL

2. Y'all, menopause is making my hair curly. It's nuts. So far it's mostly curly on the sides in the front from the crown to about chin-level, which is annoying because my hair is really long. So it's this bizarre half and half thing where the bottom half is a smidge wavy and the back is maybe a little wavy but not really, but the sides are curling up pretty good. If it continues to get wavier/curlier, I'll probably cut it shorter and see if I can roll with the curly/wavy. I found this awesome product, though, that if your hair is wavy/curly, you should give a try: Odele Air Dry Styler. You just put it in towel-dried hair and let it air dry. I was shocked by the degree to which it amplified the curliness of my hair.

3. I would also like to recommend Dr. Teal's Lemon Balm Epsom Salts. OMG, y'all this smells so good. The bathroom smelled amazing for two days after I used this. Just be sure to never let Epsom salts get on your hair; they will dry it the fuck out.

1. The dentist doesn't think anything is terribly wrong. An ulcer has developed at the edge of the gum and the crown, so he's given me a mouth rinse to help with that. I'm taking an antibiotic just in case, but he doesn't see any signs that anything is terribly wrong. Seems it's just the trauma of the procedure. *sigh* My face is special. :) All the stress of the flood and the dental work kicked off a flare up, so I'm exhausted, and I think maybe I just don't heal as well or because of the autoimmune stuff I'm more prone to inflammation and that's why I haven't bounced back from the procedure as expected.

2. I got the most amazing package from executrix full of stationery goodies and a bespoke knitted hat and lip balm. Happy belated Gauda Prime Day to me! LOL

3. The flooring trim has been acquired. Hopefully it shall be laid down in the next couple days. My goal is to have the room completely finished by Monday. *fingers crossed* A beautiful rug has been acquired to that end.

4. I have made significant inroads on getting all my classes set up and ready to go for next week. Cross your fingers that I get a few more students enrolled in a couple of them. I'm paranoid that they might cancel a couple of them at the last minute for low enrollment, and then I will be livid.

5. Mom and Dad are doing fine; they haven't had any symptoms worse than a cold. Nobody at my brother's house is ill (yet), and my sister-in-law's mother is doing well. She's been able to eat a little and bathe, so everyone's happy about that.

1. Thank you, everyone, for your comments on my Disaster Post. I am not going to answer individual comments on that post, but I have read and treasured them all.

2. The leak is fixed, the carpet is up, the floor is drying, and everything is going to be okay. It is annoying, and having the house all out of order is making me neurotic (I like everything neat and in its place), but as far as disasters go, this one could have been much worse. Looks like we're going to be able to get a floor down and everything set to rights before the semester starts, and looks like it's not going to be as expensive to repair as I had feared, so *crosses fingers*.

3. My mouth is still hurting from the temporary crown. The internet tells me this is to be expected (for up to two weeks possibly!), but I'm annoyed and can't shake the fear that something is actually wrong. If it is still hurting next week, I'll call the dentist, obviously. But it's very annoying. The dentist didn't tell me what to expect either, so that's also annoying, and I think I exacerbated it all by beginning to eat normally the next day. I'd have babied it for much longer and not had expectations that it would be basically fine the next day if they'd explained it more. Also, I'm a paranoid human, so ah. *cries*

4. Have a Yuletide rec:

Escape from the Citadel (you find your way to come back around)
Montero Cinematic Universe
The Nas-bot's story: where he came from, who he's visiting, what he wants. (Love.)

Robots, robot freedom fighters, insightful critique of celebrity culture and media: excellent read.

5. I met my Goodreads goal, and I only cheated a wee smidge! Right there at the end, I had Fiona read a few picture books aloud to me so I could hit 100. LOL But that totally counts.

1. I am signed up for Yuletide! Here is my letter. <3

2. We had a very wee ant-cident immediately following all that rain last week. I am certain it is because the water was literally almost a Feefers deep out by the road, and they were just scrambling to survive, but we lived on some sort of haunted anthill at our old house where we were constantly being invaded by demonic ant warriors, and even though this ant-cident probably involved like twenty ants total, I had a traumatic flashback to those troubling times. *crosses fingers against future incursions*

3. We randomly picked a Netflix kid movie to watch and ended up with Vivo. It was super cute (but definitely tugs at the heartstrings; contains one of the major AO3 archive warnings if you see what I mean). I didn't realize until it was over that Lin-Manuel Miranda had written the music and was the voice actor of the main character. Very, very catchy music.

4.

Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists by Mary Christian

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Utterly fantastic. Extremely readable and well researched academic prose. Accessible to the layman.

My favorite chaper is the concluding chapter about Elizabeth Robins's suffrage play; Robins is a fascinating person--actor, writer, activist. I knew a little about her as a writer, but I didn't know that she had anonymously written a play in which a woman commits infanticide because her son is born with physical deformities (and the play was apparently received more favorably than I would have imagined).

Highly recommended.



View all my reviews

1.

( spoilers for last book in Coldfire trilogy )

2. In Sexual Anarchy, Showalter suggests that in the face of religious doubt, the Victorians turned to work as a replacement for the opiate of religion, that they used work as a way of avoiding the big questions of introspection and existential horror (201). I've been thinking about that ever since I read it especially since my relationship to and feelings about work have changed so drastically over the pandemic.

I think there's a lot to unpack in my relationship to work, and a lot of it stems from my Protestant upbringing (thanks, Puritans!), but that connection is one I've long recognized and done a lot of thinking about already. This one not so much.

One thing the pandemic did was force inactivity and stillness on me in a way that I had not experienced before. My health did that as well; treatment for mono is literally resting.

Before the pandemic, I constantly worked. My mental health suffered if I didn't work. I always felt antsy and anxious by the end of summer break because it was too long. I was ready to get back to work and external routine. Too much downtime made me feel unmoored.

But that forced reset made me see the value in not working, in prioritizing using my time in other ways. And when I read that passage in Sexual Anarchy, it really resonated with me because I can see that's one of the things I was doing with work--using being busy as a distraction from those big questions of introspection.

Wow, that's a lot of navel gazing. So what are your thoughts on yaoi work? LOL

3. Last night the AC broke, and our AC guys came out within a hour or so of being called. I cannot stress how grateful I am to have found skilled technicians who are reliable. One of the things I have quickly learned as a new homeowner is that (at least in this area) it is really difficult to find plumbers, electricians, and other technicians who are willing to come out here. It is really frustrating. Every single time we have had a problem, these people have been out here in a matter of a few hours and fixed it quickly and for relatively inexpensively. So grateful.

This time, some wires burned up out at the breaker, tripping the breaker which fortunately worked as it was intended and prevented a fire. The people who built this house were so fucking stupid. They used a wire that was too small for the breaker so eventually over time (and it did last like a little over a decade), it just gave out. So he fixed the AC for short term and is coming out and replacing the breaker and putting in a wire of the proper size this weekend so that won't happen again.

1. *courtesy of china_shop; we're starting an office poster empire with this slogan LOL Seriously, this applies to all my health and food issues. I feel seen!

2. One of the garage doors broke because, of course, it did BUT they came out and fixed it the day we called, and now it is under warranty again, so that's good.

3. Today on my walk, a hawk flew low down to the ground ahead of me and landed in a bush on the side of the road. It let me get up close to it and look at it for awhile before it took off. In other nature news, my MeeMaw sent me a card with a black-capped chickadee on it. :)

4. I have been moving more! I got 10K steps yesterday and am on track to do that today as well. And I'm not in terrible pain! Just normal pain. This is very exciting.

5. I had lunch out with my new friend/colleague again, and we went shopping. It felt so normal. And weird to be normal. But really, really nice. And I discovered that Barnes and Nobles is carrying Leuchturrm1917 journals for the same price as Amazon and JetPens, and they had several Palomino Blackwing pencil/journal combos. Nice.

6. I got two cards from misbegotten this week. One says, "Be as kind to yourself as you are to others" which made me tear up (it's going on the corkboard behind my computer in the office where I can see it often), and the other is of a French poster.

7. So much reading! This is how I know that I'm doing okay. :) ( 2 Amelia Bedelia books, A. S. Byatt literary criticism, Victorian literary criticism )

1. I had my first test at the neurology office today. The technician put this tight-fitting cap with holes in it over my head; then she squirted gel into each hole with a blunt syringe and used the syringe to scrub it into my head until all the electrodes were connecting. I also got a clip on each ear and an electrode over the heart. I sat in front of a computer and followed the instructions. For five minutes, I focused on the screen with my eyes open and my body still and relaxed. Then I did the same thing for five more minutes with my eyes closed. Then I did a ten minute long reflex test where I was supposed to press the button only when a certain shape flashed onscreen. It was weirdly stressful. LOL MRIs on Saturday!

2. Emma's ear started hurting Saturday night; on Monday, the doc confirmed she has an ear infection, but she started antibiotics on Monday, and I think she's basically fine now (but will finish all her meds, of course!). Fiona fell down at school on Monday, and hurt her teeth. She told me she thought she'd chipped her top tooth and that her bottom teeth hurt. Well, I looked but couldn't see anything. Baby girl's teeth are all kinds of messed up because the ortho needs to wait for her to get some more adult teeth in to do anything. She went to the dentist on Tuesday, and she did chip her top tooth in the back, but she only bruised the bottom gum. She's totally fine now and rather proud of her RSA ("rough and scratchy area") which the dentist offered to buff but she rejected "because it feels neat."

3. Between yesterday and today, all the repairs to the brickwork have been completed. The contractor is coming on Saturday to get paid, and we'll see what the damage is.

4. Y'all, these Bradford pears are killing me. Every time I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I'm all, "Janie, what the hell are you doing having a sexual awakening underneath this doo-doo smelling tree?" It is some rancid ass shit, my friends.

5. I presented a paper on The Haunting of Hill House at an institutional conference Friday, and yesterday, a colleague I don't see often stopped by my office to compliment my work and urge me to submit it for publication somewhere. That was really nice.

6. I won the election for at-large faculty Senator for my campus. I am the chair of the committee that administers these elections, so I recused myself from running this one to be ethical (this is not rocket science, Brian Kemp), so I found out today when my committee member who ran the election posted the results. I'm glad I won because now I can run for Senate chair next year.

7. Everybody 16 and older is now eligible for the vaccine in my state, so tomorrow we need to try to get Emma an appointment.

1. Josh and I had our 20th wedding anniversary this week. We've spent our entire adult lives together. He's my best friend, and I'm so grateful for him.

2. The new washer was delivered yesterday, so we don't have to do another weekend at the laundromat. Yay!

3. In less yay news, when we bought this house, there was a patch of bricks on the front that had clearly been repaired. The inspector didn't seem to think it was anything other than cosmetic. Well, those bricks are starting to come loose again, and Josh noticed the mortar cracking in other places. He worked himself into a tizzy thinking something is wrong with the foundation. We had two contractors come out, and they think the foundation is fine; it's shoddy brick work. We just got a 5800 quote. *sigh* But it has to be fixed before those bricks fall out on someone's head. We have yet to go a year in this house without a major expense, but I guess that's the way it goes.

4. The new Power Rangers has started: Dino Fury. It has gone whole hog into the stylized interminable and ludicrous leveling up sequence, the kind where the bad guys just stand around and watch them complete the 30 second routine. I find that pretty boring. Also, the special effects are a step down from Beast Morphers which I don't understand. I do appreciate that the shows are committed to having racially diverse casts.

5. Migraine day 3. That neuro appointment can't come quickly enough.

I feel like a bajillion things have happened since my last update.

1. We had an internet outage last week; there was some kind of major accident, and a utility pole came down. Naturally, this happened two days before summer classes started, and Josh wasn't finished putting his class online. He was given permission to go on campus and work, but it was so stressful. The internet was only out for a day, and I am so grateful to the workers who got it back up; it finally came back on at 10:30 that night which means they were out there working in the dark and the rain to fix it. Such a sobering realization how dependent our livelihood is on our internet working right now, though.

2. We got the utilities to come out and mark so we can know where they are for digging and planting purposes; still waiting on the water. They were supposed to come out by the 26th and didn't; we essentially know where that line is, but still. We also had the septic tank emptied today; the guy also replaced the filter, and it was less expensive than I thought it would be. Glad to have those things checked off the list.

3. My birthday is coming up, and I already got my first present! A friend sent me a bulletin board I had on my Amazon wish list, and I'm just waiting for Josh's next grocery run (command strips) to put it up over the second desk in the study. I'm excited about having a place to display the kids' artwork and awards. Josh ordered me some pretty pushpins for it, and I'm getting myself a perfume sample present from Surrender to Chance: Lavender Sampler (Caldey Island, Serge Lutens Gris Clair, Jo Malone Amber and Lavender), Tom Ford Grey Vetiver, Jo Malone Wood Sage and Salt, Byredo Black Saffron, and Comme de Garcons Radish x Vetiver.

4. We finished the animated Trollhunters of Arcadia series. I highly recommend it. It is a deeply satisfying show. At the end they dedicate the show to Anton Yelchin. He was such a good actor; I'm so sad that we lost him so long before his time.

5. Fiona is probably going to do gifted testing at some point this summer, and I'm glad. She was supposed to do it in April, but the school closures disrupted that. I have been wondering how/when they were going to do the testing, especially since the gifted students are all enrolled in the same class(es). They're going to test a limited number at a time, and do the deep cleaning between tests, etc.

6. Josh and I have been rewatching the Alien franchise with Emma who's watching it for the first time and is really digging it. Man, I love these movies (we just finished #2). First off, they still look fantastic, especially that first movie, and I think it's because the set is real and not CGI. They feel incredibly modern and not like they were made forty years ago. Second, I absolutely love that Ripley is not objectified. I mean, for about five minutes at the end of the first one, she's in a tank top and the absolute most ridiculous pair of underwear of all time (seriously, what is up with that underwear? it's nuts; it's barely hanging on to her body); she's also in a tank top and much better pair of undies for about five minutes at the end of the second one. But for the majority of both movies, she's fully clothed in like a mechanic's outfit; she's not wearing a lycra superhero costume with a boob window or a short skirt. She's dressed like a crew member on a spaceship. Mostly, the unclothed bodies we see in the movies are male. That is very refreshing. I know that the third one has the attempted rape scene, and I don't remember enough about the fourth one to comment on how that works there, but the first two movies at least do not treat her like a sexual object.