Random Thoughts on a Random Day Off [now with updates!]

My neighborhood is not the one that caused the entire school district to close. Our roads are bare and wet here. But it's not the same in the entire district and I'm kind of thrilled to get the day off.

I'm also annoyed that I couldn't get back to sleep after they called it.

Yeah, yeah, Seattle wimp-drivers. I know. Been there, done that, wrote the Vocal article.

Because while I am well enough to go back to work (I am recovering from bronchitis), yesterday was just about enough for me. 

Lizzy (because big forks are the only ones clean) is just about as annoyed as I am about the inability to go back to sleep.

Our water pressure is low today. Just us, as far as I can tell, but it's not a trickle like it would be if our pipes froze and burst. Lizzy posits that maybe they're partway frozen, leaving a narrower channel.

Lizzy was incorrect because as I typed this, a neighbor came to tell me that she could hear lots of water moving around under my house. I went to find the shutoff and slipped on the wet (icy?) stairs and down I went. Did not reinjure my knee (yay!), but I have some very interesting scrapes and bruises on my arms from catching myself.

And, you know, no water.

This is not the way to make me less irritable, universe.

Well, this blog post has taken quite a turn...

I'm waiting on a call back from the plumber. I don't know why we had no trouble with the water during the actual cold snap; we did the usual bits of responsible homeownership like wrapping outdoor faucets, leaving things on at a trickle at night, etc., and the water was fine.

Until today, so who knows?

Was this really necessary?

[UPDATE] Well.

We have water, yay! 

It took most of the day, numerous phone calls,  two plumbers (man, are they busy this week, because I assure you we are not alone in our doing-things-right-but-still-freezing-pipes), quite a lot of money, two showers and a few bathroom breaks at grandma's house down the road, most of my patience, and a short bout of situational anxiety. 

School is closed again today due to icy road conditions, both for us and for most of the surrounding school districts. I have to go out at some point today for a prescription but that can happen after noon when some ice has melted. The knee is fine, but the arm-bruises are stiff and sore.

On the other hand, Lizzy received a replacement not-LEGO piece that she was missing from one of her Christmas gifts, so she's pretty happy just chilling at her LEGO table.

So now we're okay again.

Move Redux

A Bitmoji rendering of me,
a chubby, fair-skinned, brunette
woman with a tie-dye shirt, blue
shoes, and black pants & jacket.

It has been a year, folks. 

A year since I wrote my last blog post on the topic, which you can read by just clicking the link.

I don't really have objections to working on the same resolution goal single word as last year, except that I might slack off a bit (through sheer repetition) and I'm determined not to.

Determination does not always equal motivation here at Chez GamersBabes; there are neurospicy quirks to contend with, and these (especially that executive dysfunction) are often obstacles to Getting Things Done. Yes, even things that we want to do.

Anyway.

So I have to come up with a word, preferably an action verb, along the same lines as move, but with more oomph. Something that will keep me motivated to Do The Thing even when I don't want to.

I didn't get derailed by a knee injury. 

I have closed my rings for 365 days straight (plus a couple, as it was one year on December 27).

I've got this. 

And I'm a writer, so off to the thesaurus we go.

Act? seems too theater-y.

Go? too vague.

Walk or run or climb? too specific; I can walk. I can't climb or run (at least not in the literal sense).

Progress? Proceed? too passive.

You know what? Forget synonyms for move, much less action verb synonyms. I'm going to go with...

MOTION.

After all, my doctor may have said (regarding the knee injury) "Movement is medicine" but my physical therapist said, "Motion is lotion."

Same thing, really.

We Did It!

A photo of Puget Sound (aka the Salish Sea) from
the deck of the Washington State Ferry Spokane.
Photo taken by Lizzy Kirkland

Our weekend at "the beach" (excuse me; it's not the beach unless the swimming pool is open, which is only in the summer so our weekend at "Grandma's Condo") was nice.

It was also one of those weekends where nothing calamitous happened but lots and lots of minor inconveniences did. Lots.

We forgot our toiletries bag (we left it in the bathroom at home), which also included our meds (except those I keep in my purse anyway, like a rescue inhaler and ibuprofen.). Now, none of us will die in a day and a half without said medications, but there was some concern over the ease of getting to sleep and digestive aids and so forth.

Ferry traffic was insane. We left the house at 12:30 hoping to make the 1:30 boat, but we were prepared to wait for the 3:15 sailing if needed (they only have one boat on the route right now, though it's a busy one). On the way down we got stuck behind someone who broke down in the ferry lane, and finally made it onto the 3:15... which left the dock at 3:35. My knee was super stiff and swollen after the car ride over there (although I drive for a living, even I don't generally drive for five hours at a time, and certainly not without getting up and moving around more than I did here). On the way back we were the sixth car on the 11:05 ferry because we were so close to boarding when the 9:35 sailed.

We stopped at a local grocery store for quick food and toothbrushes, grabbed some bottled water (the water there is really really hard and makes our skin and hair feel nasty), and went on to the condo. We checked in around 5:30 (we had planned for a couple of hours earlier, but, well, ferry traffic). Warmed up some of the food from the grocery store, sat down to watch a movie, and found that the batteries in the remote for the firestick we brought with us were kaput.

Some days (or weekends) are just like that.

So instead, we fiddled with the TV settings and availed ourselves of the DVD version of the Best Movie Ever (ting ting swish!) which lives up there. Lizzy does not remember seeing the Best Movie Ever before, but since it is also the Most Memeable Movie Ever, she enjoyed it greatly.

I always forget how hard it is to get into the high bed at Grandma's Condo, and had never done it before with a bum knee and the CPAP, so that was an adventure. Getting out was easier, though.

Saturday was fun; we met Lizzy's peninsula-side bestie in town and sent them (16 and 15, respectively) loose on Port Townsend while Abby and I did a little more sedate shopping (toy store, general store, lunch, ice-cream-and-candy store). Lizzy helped her friend with Christmas shopping and bought them both lunch, then they hung out at the park and the Marine Science Center (I think) until the friend's mom came back for pickup.

Another day, another episode of forgetting to buy batteries. The DVD for this one was Gremlins.

And back home, with the aforementioned ferry wait. A little motion sickness on Abby's part but that's not unusual, especially with a ferry in the mix.

Anyway, the point here is that Lizzy and I (and to a much lesser extent, Abby) are prone to losing our sh!t when things go wrong, no matter how minor. Since one of those things was the lack of medications to help us regulate that tendency (because we left the toiletries bag at home), the fact that we didn't lose our respective minds is a positive.

Sixteen

When I started this blog, in January of 2011, Lizzy was three. In this picture (taken February 2011), it's little Curlyhead Kiddo in a yellow top, "teaching Grandma to read." Mind you, Lizzy was reading a bit at this point; she's always been hyperlexic. 

Now she is sixteen. She still reads anything she can get her hands on (or even see from a distance), though she has little patience for many of the classics. We get a fair bit of, "Mom, come on, I know there've been books about people who feel like they don't belong published in the last fifty years. I mean, this book is older than you!" With all those teenage italics.

Or more specifically, she will be sixteen at 12:30PM, Pacific Time; she's very precise about these things. I have an alarm set on my phone for that time, with the Victory Theme from Final Fantasy VII as the alarm tone. I surprised her with it when we went to the mall on her... I think it was her tenth(?) birthday, and it has become The Way We Do It.

We've already had a small party, with a splash pad and board games and pizza and an ice cream cake and helium balloons and three of her best friends. Oh, and self-dyed hair; we can't forget that. She did that on Friday - split dye of yellow and pink, and she decided it made her look like a Trufulla Tree (which everyone needs). After the splash park, which is chlorinated, she decided she would do a second coat, as the yellow had faded somewhat. If I get any pix of that, I'll post them later.

Goes nicely with the daisy-flowered black dress, though.

So tonight is Dinner at Grandma's (we have done a family thing for birthdays every year since Abby turned one, so nearly twenty years now), and presents. And the birthday kid's favorite meal, which is pretty basic - bowtie pasta with marinara, and green beans. Usually bread of some sort and a cake or ice cream or something.

Perceptions

Five clay figurines in assorted colors, representing emotions.

August is hard for us.

Everyone who knows us knows this.

In fact, even people who only know us through this blog, on Facebook, or whatever know this.

Aside from the anniversary of Laston's death (on his oldest kid's 16th birthday, no less, poor Lee), there are a bunch of other August issues. There's the ramp-up to school, the not-working because I work for the schools & side gigs are tough to find this year and usually unbearable (for Seattleites) weather.

At least this year we do not (at the moment, anyway) have super extra crappy air quality from forest fires started by asshats declaring their newborn has a penis via blowing shit up in the woods.

Silver linings, I guess.

In past Augusts, my therapist has said it's perfectly okay to have hard days or even a hard month, as long as we're aware of it and not letting it consume us to the exclusion of all else. So we are doing our usual thing (though generally staying off the more contentious parts of the internet lest we let our grief and stress and basic argggghhhh consume us or hurt others), which for Lizzy (Abby is working) involves a lot of LEGO and arts & crafts and reading and video games. 

She made some little clay figurines and painted them. They are intended to be representative of emotions (a la Inside Out, but slightly different ones; she initially designed these on paper for one of her pediatric grief counseling sessions about six and a half years ago. Anger is red and orange and spiky, Fear is green and "shaking like a leaf," and so on. The one for sadness is blue and sort of a very basic figure of someone with a bulbous nose and their hands in front of their chest, as though they were wringing their hands.

“It’s that stim you do when you’re sad Mom. Where your hands get closer and closer to your face the sadder you are.”

“I think it’s upset in general, not just sadness.”

“Well… you do it a lot in August.”

Oof.

She's not wrong.

Irritation

Grumpyjenn is Grumpy.

The Grump started today because every July (the month before the anniversary of my husband's death), Facebook sends me a fresh batch of Widowed Christian Doctors Overseas Who Like My Looks and Want Me to Care for Their Poor Motherless Children and (by the way) have one picture, none with kids, are generally in a military or police uniform that should by rights be falling off their bodies from the weight of all the ribbons and awards and medals (honestly, I swear, these guys are always high ranking, and still show their awards for BSc and SSc). And they love God and Country and Dogs and Their Poor Motherless Children and they don't seem to have noticed that my profile picture is almost always a cartoon version of me.

A woman in a progress flag T-shirt, with
folded arms, an annoyed expression,
and the caption HMPH! in big purple letters

Anyway, so that set the stage for Grumpiness, which I am trying to get out of by Making a List of irritants I've seen or experienced today. 

You know, the random little things that make me want to smack people. 

Writing these out almost always makes me feel better. So here goes.

• I do not grok Star Trek fans who hate change.

• I also do not grok Star Trek fans who think NuTrek is "too woke."

• Or people who want to ban books. It reminds me of Abby's line when she was in Seussical the Musical a few years back. "Oh, Jojo, I fear you've been thinking again!" (Evidently, today I am the Sour Kangaroo, in mood if not in outlook)

• And the cognitive dissonance of "pro-life" and "pro-gun" in the same people.

• Oooo - people who call me a liberal snowflake and imply that I am afraid of everything, who also can't go to the grocery store without bringing an arsenal

• Or who are still setting off fireworks on July 23

• Or my own I-want-to-but-I-can't-get-started executive dysfunction

• Or the fact that I am allergic/sensitive to more than one of my favorite foods

• Grammarly should understand my casual writing style by now

• That the GOP thinks the electorate is massively gullible... and that sometimes they're right

See? That's helped. Possibly because I got all the sarcastic bitchiness out of the way.