September 2020 in Review

Posted on September 30, 2020 by Thistle

September was far more eventful than I was expecting. Choosing to leave school and begin on another path. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the ensuing political nastiness. Atticus escaping the house for a day. LOTS of construction, some of which was done incorrectly and required negotiations and hiring new contractors. Decorating for Halloween. Group hikes. Football season! I’m just not used to this month being so volatile!

Books
Most of my reading was RIP-related this month: 6 of 7 books. The rest of my reading was related to the Stormlight Archive – either rereads of books/novellas already out in the series, or the weekly pre-release chapters leading up to the Rhythm of War publication in November. I cannot accurately express just how excited I am for this upcoming release. My best description would be this: When I first read Words of Radiance (book 2) back in early 2016, I fell in love with the series so hard that I listened to the 48-hour audiobook roughly ten times in a row. When RoW releases in November, I will be at the store to get a physical copy of the book the moment the doors unlock, then I will spend the rest of the day and however many days beyond that binge-reading to the end. Then I’ll put on the audiobook – which I preordered months ago as soon as that was an option – and listen again from the beginning. At least once, but maybe more. I’m more excited for these series releases than I’ve ever been about any other book release ever. So…yeah. But since I can’t call the pre-release chapters my “favorite” read for the month (though they definitely ARE), and simultaneously I don’t want to use any of my rereads as favorites for the month, I’ll have to give this title to The Haunting of Ashburn House.

Goals
A big chunk of my goals had to shift this month, as I decided to leave school and pursue a different direction for my future. We also had a bit of backsliding on our financial goal due to necessary house repairs. We had to take out a loan, and due to some miscommunications, ended up with a regular loan instead of a home equity loan, which would have been a lower interest rate. But at least most of the repairs will be paid for with this, and we can go easy (fingers crossed!) for the next few years. It’s hard to tell, with a previously-rented home. And beyond that, nearly all the rest of my 2020 goals are either completed, or on hold re: covid…

Health
More transitions in this category. My mental health was suffering at the beginning of the month for multiple reasons. After getting past those hurdles, I’ve been having to claw my way back out of the holds of agoraphobia (still in progress). Some days were more successful than others – in fact, I even drove myself to a new-to-me location for a group hike mid-month. I also got in two long-overdue health appointments (put off multiple times re: covid), and have several more labs and specialist visits to make. There may be surgery in my near future, sigh. One of my doctors put me on a new medication that might possibly help with PCOS symptoms, but we’ll see. I’m wary of these kinds of medications, as they haven’t worked in the past. However, since I began taking it, I seem to sleep better. This medication changes hormone levels by increasing insulin sensitivity and slowing down the digestion process, and so that could be related. Either way, most nights for the last two weeks, I’ve been able to sleep through the night without any sleeping medications, which is a HUGE deal as I’ve been reliant on them since my insomnia began nine years ago!

Beyond that, September was not the greatest month for me in terms of fitness or general healthy habits. I had screens on past 9pm most days, hardly exercised for the first third of the month, drank way too much coffee, etc. As with my mental health, things began to improve as I entered the second half of the month and worked my way toward getting back into my good habits. I also had a moment of clarity on realizing just unfit I’ve become – ironically on a hike that came a day after I posted about body limitations, especially on major hikes. (pic shows four sections of the climb I was doing when I had this realization) I had to cancel my participation on a recent hike at Enchanted Rock because I knew my body wouldn’t handle the 450-foot climb at 30+ grade right now. That was both discouraging, and motivating, as I now have a specific goal to reach for. It’s ironic to know that it’s easier for me to run a 5K than to hike at that grade – and it’s time for that to change.

September’s sad totals: 19 days of exercise, for 983 minutes (16:23). 8 ST, 5 yoga, 3 runs (gah), 35.2 total miles walked, run, or hiked. 91 freggies (average 3 daily).

House
Hopefully, this will be the last month of major internal house repairs/construction. We replaced all non-tiled floors in the house, with either new carpet or wood. We installed a new dishwasher. Jason built new kitchen drawers to replace the ones whose drawer-facings broke off. The entire a/c system, inside and out, was replaced. Jason finished getting the new trim up outside the back doors, and he’s in the process of doing the inside walls in the same area. After that, everything should be done inside the house (I hope!). Outdoors is another matter…

Back in JULY, we hired some folks to dig and lay new deck posts so we could put together a new deck, with the instruction to make these foundational posts strong enough (and to city code) for an eventual three-season porch. They said they would begin in mid-August, but then didn’t actually get started until weeks later. Then it took them the entire month to finish. Most days, if they came at all, it was just one guy digging holes periodically while playing on his phone the rest of the time. They left their cement bags out in the rain – we asked them if they wanted to store them in our garage but they declined – so they turned into giant rocks. When they finally came to pour the cement, they used these cement-rocks as part of what they poured (see pic below). The posts wobbled so badly afterwards that we had to call these guys back out – clearly not even a regular deck would be supported – and they “fixed” one post by pouring more partly-mixed cement on top of it. Then they charged us more than their quote – nearly $2k – for this clusterf**k of a project. (I would have refused. Jason is much nicer than me.)

Which meant that we had to hire an inspector to come out and prove that these posts aren’t up to code (because they wouldn’t listen to us, of course). We then hired someone else to come redo all this properly (for about a third of the price, UGH!), while arguing about at least partial refunds from the original contractor (yeah right). The original guys were recommended to us specifically by someone they’d worked with in the past, so we were really disappointed by how poorly this went. (We also didn’t know until far too late that they aren’t licensed/bonded contractors, nor did they ever have Jason sign a contract back in July. I didn’t know any of this until after we’d paid, sigh.) We definitely won’t be hiring these guys when it comes time to do the covered roof and three-season porch bit! At least we found a decent contractor we can (hopefully) trust the second time around…

Highlights of September
Even though there were a lot of down moments and crazy happenings in September, there was actually quite a lot of good as well. Lots of highlights this month!

  • I finally found good brown boots!!
  • got to talk to one of the local library employees for the first time since March – he was my dad’s student when we were both in high school so I’ve known him a long time
  • Zooming with family for my nephew Rory’s 4th birthday, even if we couldn’t be there in person
  • my F**k Trump lipstick arrived
  • in-person hikes!
  • an extremely unusual cold front that lasted a couple days – I know this is an indication of climate change and weather disruption, but after so many weeks of 100+ temps, the few days that felt like San Antonio November were highly welcome!
  • our new carpet is so beautiful and soft!!
  • the opportunity to rearrange several rooms into configurations we like better, including a giant photo wall
  • the new a/c system
  • new season of the Great British Baking Show!!
  • decorating for Halloween
  • watching the Seahawks on prime time – especially on a game that was so nail-bitingly tense like the one against the NE Patriots! Go Hawks! (Really, what am I saying? The Seahawks always make these games intense. It was no different a week later against the Cowboys!)
  • a moment of hysterical laughter with Jason when an ad came across my social media feeds featuring a bra with corset lacing across each cup, and the ensuing discussion of other ways we could use the same principle: a zipper for each leg on jeans, laces across each toe of shoes… I can’t remember the last time I was so helpless with laughter.
  • standing eggs on the fall equinox
  • making ghosties!
  • even after two months taken off running outdoors, I can still run a mile nonstop – yay!
  • medicine ball slam – my new favorite strengthening exercise! Plus seeing that my calves are hella muscular despite my size – woot!
  • making our ghost circle outside!
  • seeing some friends I hadn’t seen since June

Coming up in October
October is a fairly manic month for me, where I try to stuff in so many autumn-themed events and activities that eventually I crash. Heh. I’ve tried to spread them out a little more, some in September this year. But of course, it’s Halloween, and Morrigan’s birthday, and Ambrose starts his accelerated classes, and it’s potentially Readathon, and early voting, and plenty more. I’m not wary, though. October always makes me so happy!

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Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith (audio)

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Thistle

Strike and Robin try to solve a 40-year-old cold case on top of their modern-day cases and various personal life issues. Book 5 in the series.

So let me start by addressing the elephant in the book: the cross-dressing serial killer that, as I said in my discussion of JK Rowling, seemed to be an element added in poor taste. The facts about said serial killer (Creed):

  • Creed is a sociopath and narcissist who perpetrated violence against many women.
  • He is not gay or transgender.
  • He sometimes wore a pink coat he stole from his landlady, and/or a wig and lipstick, as a way to get women to think he was gay and thus not a threat.
  • He did not cross-dress for every victim he lured, nor did he cross-dress at any time other than when targeting a victim.
  • He never tried to pass as female, but played off gay stereotypes of the early 70s, when he was prowling for victims.
  • Creed is hardly in this book at all, and for most of it, serves only as a macguffin. The initial investigator of the cold case, from 1974, was obsessed with finding this serial killer, whom he believed was responsible for this disappearance as well. There is never any evidence that ties the serial killer to the cold case.

So yes, Rowling treats Creed with the same logic as she uses for why we should deny rights to transgender people. (In other words, we can’t trust that men won’t pretend to be transgender in order to appear safe to women.) This is absolutely repugnant and distasteful, not to mention clearly flawed logic. Have men dressed as women to perpetrate violence? Yes, the same way that men have posed as women or younger men/teens to lure underage boys/girls out to meet them. Predators are predators, and there will always be predators, and they will always find ways to take unfair advantages over their victims. But once again: this has absolutely nothing to do with transgender folks or the rights they should have.

Furthermore, Creed’s presence in the novel is entirely superfluous. Had Rowling taken him out completely, the book wouldn’t have suffered. (In fact, it may have been better, as I’ll discuss below, for reasons entirely unrelated to cross-dressing.) Had Rowling included him, but excluded the detail about the pink coat and/or wig/lipstick, the book wouldn’t have been any different at all than it currently stands. Had Rowling included both him and that detail, and then used that detail to make a stand against this wrong way of thinking, it would have been a better book. (And she would be a very different person who would be viewed in a far more positive light, frankly.)

There are two things that really bothered me about Troubled Blood. The first was of course the issue with Creed. The second was just how sloppy, unstructured, and unfocused the book was written. On the whole, I can say that I enjoyed about 75% of the book, which focused on the personal lives of the characters rather than the cold case. This is only because I’m five books in, though, and already care about the characters. If this had been my first experience with them, I would have given up rather early on. Novels in general are supposed to build to a climax and then taper off. This was more like running on level ground with a few hurdles to hop over from time to time. There isn’t a narrative thread that tied everything together, but instead, the story was all over the place, as if Rowling was trying to stuff five books into one. It’s not that it didn’t make sense or fit together; more like it read as a series of mini-stories that sometimes intertwined but didn’t make up a full narrative.

So. Much. Stuff. Rowling brought up violence against women, the absurdity of “men’s rights” movements, prostitution, men who believe it’s acceptable to send out a certain kind of anatomical picture, people (men and women both) who treat female bosses as if they aren’t truly in charge, stresses of divorce, emotional violence, the contrast of male and female serial killers, modern day mafia, various kinds of sexual predilections, and on and on and on. Not to mention every kind of occult detail you can think of, from astrology to tarot to blood magic. To a degree, I can appreciate the book’s style as a reflection of the difficulty of piecing together a 40-year-old case…but honestly, I don’t think she was going for that on purpose. It didn’t seem deliberate enough, and these books aren’t exactly the literary thematic masterworks that do this sort of thing.

In short, the book could have done with several hundred pages worth of pruning.

Which brings me back to Creed. As a plot device, he was superfluous. His cross-dressing element had no point whatsoever in the book, which made it a detail left in for Rowling to make a point, rather than to help the story move forward. As I said above, the book would have been exactly the same with or without that element. One of an author’s most important jobs is to evaluate the story and remove the bits that don’t enhance the book in some way. There was a lot of non-enhancements in Troubled Blood, and frankly, it felt like Rowling got rather tangled up and lost in a book that was too big for her. The fact that she left that bit in about Creed, the bit that added nothing and only served as a f—k you to transgender folks, speaks volumes.

I will likely continue to read the series, because I quite like Strike and Robin and the secondary cast of characters. Plus, as I said in my Rowling discussion, I don’t usually boycott authors based on their personal views. I also rather love the audio production, with Robert Glenister as a fantastic narrator. But it’s unlikely I’ll revisit this particular book, which kinda made me feel skeezy and sick the entire time I listened to it. Which is unfortunate, because the actual conclusions to that 40-year-mystery were masterfully done, and Troubled Blood could have been brilliant, had Rowling shown the slightest modicum of humility in the writing/editing/research process.

Posted in 2020, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Sunday Coffee – A Day in Quarantine Homelife

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Thistle

A couple years back, I participated in Trish’s “A Day in the Life of…” event, which happened to be my life as a stay at home mom in the middle of spring break. Not sure why that particular event came back to me this week, but early on Tuesday morning, I decided to record a typical day at present, as a stay at home mom with most of the family homebound during quarantine.

6:33 am – For the second day in a row, I slept without sleeping pills (yay!), and so woke less groggy than normal. I turned on the flower-lights over my bed, and lay around a bit, playing on my phone as I fully woke up. In my dream, I’d been trying to remember a specific song, and as soon as I woke, I knew it – an old Christmas song I’d once sung as a trio back in the early 2000s. Mary’s Lullaby. After half an hour of lying around, I got up, weighed in for the morning, and went to the kitchen for some water. At that point, I discovered that the boys forgot to start the dishwasher last night, so I filled up the last space left and set it going. Then I got water, opened up the blinds, and came back to my room to sort through emails, write in my journals, and plan my day.

7:30 am – Breakfast! This morning’s breakfast was Fage Total plain greek yogurt with blueberries, honey, cocoa, and wheat germ. Atticus begged for some yogurt, so I let him eat a bit of the plain stuff off my finger, then brought my bowl back to my computer so that I could read the next preview chapters of Rhythm of War while I ate. They weren’t there – I found out later they wouldn’t post until 8am – so instead I planned a hiking route for the next day while I ate. When I finished breakfast, I went back to the kitchen to rinse my bowl, and discovered that a part of our Spot Bot had gotten stuck in the garbage disposal and I had to get it out. The glories of everyday life, right? Then I got a tumbler of iced coffee and brought it back to my room, now ready to read through the newly-posted Chapter 12 of RoW.

8:45 am – I took a break to get more coffee after reading Chapter 12, and when I got back to my room, I found Nimi curled up in my bathroom sink. This has become her morning ritual, and as soon as she saw me, she left the sink and waited for me to run water for her in the other sink. That done, I returned to my computer to read through the accompanying Chapter 12 discussion post, with many side searches through the Coppermind for various Cosmere and Stormlight connections. I take my Stormlight lore seriously, y’all!

9:15 am – Time to exercise! I changed into my exercise clothes and did a yoga warmup. At that point, the morning was interrupted by workmen. They’ve been putting up new deck posts so we can build our deck, but two of the posts they installed were wobbly and definitely wouldn’t have held up the weight of a deck (much less a three-season porch, which is the eventual goal, and which they know and said they’d install for). After taking that little break, I moved into my strength training workout for the morning, a program set up by my Girls Gone Strong personal coaching course: deadlifts, split-squats, seated rows, hip abductions, overhead press, and standing chops.

10:12 am – Post ST, made myself a protein shake for recovery: beets, spinach, peaches, blueberries, apple juice concentrate, whey protein, cocoa, and cold brew concentrate. It was not my favorite. While I like beets in smoothies generally, especially with coffee and chocolate, frozen beets are much stronger and overpower the flavors rather than complimenting them. Blurgh. Oh well. I’ll just use fresh roasted beets from now on, I suppose. Anyway, I drank my shake while doing post-ST stuff: putting away weights/bands, entering my reps/weights/etc info on my GGS coaching program, entering individual exercises into my Garmin, etc. Then I caught up on some blog stuff and feedly while I finished the shake.

10:50 am – More water for Nimi in the bathroom sink, and then I showered and got ready for the rest of the day. With my headphones in so I could start on a major backlog of Real Life Ghost Stories Podcast posts, I headed to the kitchen to chop and roast some carrots to accompany my lunch. While they roasted, I unloaded the now-clean dishwasher, and conferred with Jason on Laurence’s wisdom teeth/dentist/money issue (which remains an ongoing problem). When that was all done, I realized that I wasn’t yet hungry (re: protein shake). My quads also hurt – the ST workout today was a new one and worked muscles differently than over the last six weeks – so I decided to go on a walk. The weather was sooooo gorgeous out, low 70s, cloudy, with a cool steady breeze. (This was the extent of what San Antonio saw from Beta.) It was the first time in months that I’ve gone on a long walk in my neighborhood, and I had a lot of nostalgia on seeing certain houses and streets. It was also a bit weird to pass my old house, which is probably the reason I haven’t been walking the neighborhood since we moved. In any case, I saw gorgeous flowers, a bizarre mounted moose head on someone’s siding, and a beautiful snail with yellow shell that I wish I’d stopped to photograph. Over my 2.7-mile walk, I managed to get through another couple RLGS backlogged podcast posts!

12:53 pm – The walk left me quite hungry, so I immediately made my lunch on getting home. We generally eat leftovers from the night before for our lunches here, and Ambrose was in charge of dinner the previous night. He made French dip complete with homemade bread – yay for having a baker in the house! – and the large sandwich with a side of roasted carrots was perfect. Had a text conversation with my friend Stephanie, and got the updated details for the new dental arrangements from Jason (as it turns out, the previous dentist wasn’t covered, so we need a refund and a new dentist, sigh). Post-lunch, my afternoon was filled with general decompression. I tried out and culled a few audiobooks while working on a puzzle. Did a bit of cleaning around the house. Watched a crap TV show on my phone. Played with the cats before they settled down for afternoon sleepy time.

3:25 pm – Laurence finished his day of virtual school, and the two of us drove down to Dunkin Donuts for our weekly outing. He got a frozen hot chocolate, and I got a free iced coffee from my rewards program. Of course, I meant to get some stuffed bagels, too, because I LOVE those, but I was so focused on pulling up the various loyalty scans on my phone that I completely forgot until after I’d paid for Laurence’s drink! So I made my own toasted bagel with cream cheese at home. Not quite as good as Dunkin’s, but still satisfying. I ate/drank while semi-watching Ambrose and Laurence play Mario Kart, and then re-entered that general miscellaneous period. Still with one eye on Mario Kart, I signed up for a virtual 5K that benefits the ASPCA, scheduled some hikes to host for my meetup group, folded some clean towels, went through the mail, texted with Morrigan, talked with Jason after he finished his day at work, etc. Afternoons are generally pretty unstructured around here.

5:45 pm – Food prep. Jason did the cooking tonight (sausage and egg breakfast tacos) but I toasted my tortillas and make myself a bowl of strawberries to go alongside. The boys were hyper-focused on some downloadable video game connection thingy, so we didn’t end up having a true family dinner tonight like we usually do. And I believe that despite telling the boys that they needed to get some fruit to go with their tacos half a dozen times, they never bothered. I couldn’t be bothered to continue chasing them, tbh.

6:12 pm – The weekday San Antonio covid news brief came on and I watched that in real time. It was pretty short, and afterwards, Jason and I stood up eggs for the fall equinox. I’ve been doing this since I was 17, and while I know that you can do this any day of the year, it’s become a tradition. As a teen, my ex-boyfriend told me that this was only possible on the two equinoxes, something to do with air pressure changing as the earth tilt was in balance, or some such nonsense. I believed him back when I was young and naive, and while I’ve long grown out of said belief, it’s always fun to stand eggs! My boys are too jaded to do it this year though, heh, and too interested in that video game connection thingy that they never got working. My egg stood up pretty quick and easy, though it didn’t stay up long since Gavroche walked by and nudged it. After that, I went through the traumatizing process of my weekly injection (I still hate doing this no matter how many times I have to or how painless it is!), and then spent a bit recovering from the anxiety about said injection. It helped that a Polo from my sister arrived with video of her new foster kitten!!

7:00 pm – Jason and I worked on various paperwork stuff that got neglected over the weekend (bills, budget, health claims, etc), plus scheduling with an inspector to come look at the deck posts that we know were done wrong grr. Morrigan FaceTimed us in the middle of this, so we called back afterwards and chatted with him for about an hour. (I had the sudden realization during this call that Morrigan is less than a month from his 20th birthday, which makes him the same age as Jason when we got married. I was a few months shy of 21 at the time. It’s an interesting change in perspective – especially knowing that I got pregnant a month after our wedding, right after Jason’s 20th birthday. I can see a lot better now why people worried about us…)

8:23 pm – Winding down. I put my legs up vertical for a bit to help circulation after a heavy exercise day. Then it was time to feed the cats, clean the kitchen, change into pajamas, and get ready for bed. I like to be lights out by 9ish, my flower lights on and my phone put away, so that I can relax into sleep over the next hour. With an insomnia disorder, it’s helpful to have a sleep ritual, and this is mine. After lights-out, Jason and I discussed today’s Rhythm of War chapter while he scrubbed my back until I got sleepy. At that point, I snuggled under my weighted blanket with The Whisper Man and read a few chapters before falling asleep around 10:30.

*****
Don’t I live an exciting life? Heh. I suppose I could have chosen a day when we had more appointments scheduled or something, but this is kind of just how it goes in my household. When everyone is away at work/school, things are far more structured and I have a rhythm to my day until people start to get home in the late afternoon. But under quarantine homebound life, it’s “clean here, eat here, grab a few minutes for messing around,” all of us existing in a fluctuating rotation. I miss having more order to things, but we adapt to what’s necessary, and right now, staying home and safe is the necessary. Anyway. That’s my quarantine life. Hope you enjoyed the internal look at a housewife’s boring day, ha!

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A Discussion of JK Rowling

Posted on September 25, 2020 by Thistle

I have been quiet on the subject of Rowling and her transphobic thoughts up until now. Mostly this is because I am personally quite ignorant on transgender issues, which feel particularly foreign to me as an agender person. I’ve worked hard to educate myself on these issues, and to work toward being empathetic, and especially to realize that my view of the world – as a nonbinary person removed from gender – makes me a very poor judge of anyone who feels strongly about their gender (whether cis or trans).

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Wellness Wednesday – Reasons

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Thistle

Two weeks ago, my sister and brother-in-law traveled to the Rocky Mountains for a socially-isolated vacation. They stayed in a cabin and did a lot of hiking in their week away. While they were there, an old friend of mine from high school also traveled up to the Rockies to meet a friend for a week of intense hiking. And while he was there, an old memory from the cruise Jason and I took in 2018 popped up on my Facebook timeline, with pictures from the day we walked nine miles and roughly 65 flights of stairs (in hills) around San Francisco.

The Facebook reminder was a stark one for me. I loved that day in San Francisco, but by 2pm that afternoon, I was exhausted, my feet were killing me, and my hips began to act up and twinge with pain. We went back to the ship to rest, with the plan to go back out the next day to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately, I was so sore and exhausted the next day that I didn’t even leave the ship. For someone as large as I am, I’m in pretty good shape, and I didn’t have a problem walking those nine miles or hiking up all those insane hills. But I’m also carrying around a good 75 lbs of extra weight, and that puts a lot of strain on my body. Especially on my feet and joints.

Which meant that the excitement and longing I felt on seeing my sister’s and friend’s photos from the Rockies suddenly fell flat. If I went out to Colorado right now (pretending the pandemic didn’t exist and I felt safe, of course), at least half of whatever time I had would be spent recovering, rather than being able to hike daily. I don’t even know if I’d be able to complete some of those larger hikes. And that’s disheartening.

There have been a lot of disheartening moments lately. The thing is, I love and respect my body, and I’m proud of the things it can do – but realistically, there are some things that are just more difficult in a larger body. When I went on my first weight loss journey in 2011-2012 (ish), my focus was solely on getting to a size where I felt that I looked like myself again, and where others would treat me with respect. Nowadays, I don’t feel the same about my body, and my personal respect for it helps strangers to treat me with dignity. Imagine that! Still, I want to lose weight – I just have different reasons now.

I want to lose weight in order to hike longer without tiring. I want to be able to run faster and longer, and for my running shoes to last for more miles than they currently do. I want to travel without worrying about airplane seats, weight limits on excursions, exhaustion, or injury. I miss decent bras and a wider variety of clothes to shop for (at decent prices, too!). I’m sick and tired of listening to doctors tell me that I need to lose weight despite my good health. I get frustrated with the lack of options in sporting goods, like hydration vests or running shorts, for larger women. One day I’d like to be able to buy fun and silly things like Seahawks gear from the NFL shop, or qualify for breast reduction surgery with insurance coverage, or lift my own body into a pull-up again.

My body can do so many things, but in some ways it’s also holding me back. Which really means that I’m holding myself back, because I know now what I need to do. I know, but I haven’t done it yet, because frankly, a weight loss journey is long and hard and exhausting, and I’ve spent many disheartening years trying and failing to make progress. Not to mention life is hard enough right now without extra burdens. But if I want to get to all those things I listed in the last paragraph, I have to commit and work harder. Maybe the written reminder of the things I want for my body will help me to do so.

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Adventures of an Escape Artist

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Thistle

Atticus. Oh Atticus. You absolute brat-cat.

Let me briefly recap the history of our little BrAtticus. Back at Easter in 2018, on my grandmother’s ranch outside of Quihi, TX, this tiny little cinnamon roll cat ran up to us, chased by dogs, scraggly and starving. He looked to be maybe six months old and was obviously living rough. We gave him some stew meat, and he cuddled constantly, as if he were very used to humans. He had no fear of us at all. But it was clear that if he had a family, he’d been lost for some time. We couldn’t just leave him alone in the scrub-wilderness. He wouldn’t have made it.

So, of course, we took him home. He was so good in the car, and let us hold him in the service station halfway home while they fixed our punctured tire, never trying to escape and purring the whole time. We got him home, gave him two flea baths –> and scheduled him for the vet. After vet visits and blood work, we found out that 1) he had no chip so no owners to contact, 2) he didn’t have any diseases he could spread to our cats, 3) he needed treatment for tapeworms (hence his starving state!), and 4) despite being under 6 lbs, he was likely fully grown around 1-2 years old. We took him in, where he instantly and miraculously bonded with the five-month-old problem cat (Jojo) who had been facing a return to the shelter to find a different family until this unexpected bonding. Thus, we became a five-cat household.

Despite our initial assessment, Atticus was likely never an indoor cat, and we have no idea how often he came across humans before us. Instead, it turned out that he was just a bit dumb, and because he was small, he responded to potential predators with purring, licking submission. He later grew into a 7-to-8-lb cat, and while he’ll never be as large as some of our others, he looks normal-sized. (We guess now that he was about nine months old and stunted from starvation when we found him.) Though he’s lived with us for 2.5 years now, he’s still bewildered all the time by his situation, as if the world of the indoors is just beyond comprehension. And he desperately wants to be outside again.

This has gotten worse lately. Back in July, when Jason was fixing the water heater while the rest of us were in Wisconsin, Atticus escaped into the front yard. Within five minutes, he had killed a bird and trotted up to the house with it in his mouth, happily purring through his offering. He was NOT happy when Jason took it away from him, and hissed as he was brought back inside. Since then, he’s escaped quite a number of times, and each time hisses and scratches when brought back in. If anyone leaves the house, he sits in front of the door and cries to be let out, which he never did until his bird-hunting escape.

Over the weekend, a cold front came through, and we opened the windows overnight. Now, we’ve had problems with cat-escapes before, so we take precautions and only open the windows about six inches. But we should have known better. When I got up to make coffee early on Sunday morning, I found the kitchen window’s screen pushed out, leaving a perfect escape route for a bratty, cinnamon-roll kitty.

The good news: none of our other cats bothered to follow Atticus outside. We don’t know how long the window had been breached, but because of something I heard on first waking, I don’t think it had been long. So we avoided a multi-disaster. But Atticus was gone. We searched the back and front yards, walked up and down the street, and called out for him, rattling treats. He’s a master at getting his collar off, too, which didn’t bode well. I had signed up to host a hike that morning and had to go, but told Jason to let me know if Atticus turned up.

Hours passed. We put a can of food out on the back porch to lure him. At one point during my hike, Jason heard a cat fight a few doors down, but it was too early to go knocking on doors and he could get no visual. Not long after I got home, Laurence spotted Atticus approaching the food on our back porch – so at least we knew he could find home easily – but when he tried to go catch him, Atticus took off running and escaped again. The next time we caught sight of him was 1:30 that afternoon, when he began to walk through our back gate into the yard. Ambrose tried to approach him that time, but again, Atticus ran.

There’s a green space behind our house. It’s technically commercial space that belongs to the electrical union, but it’s just trees out there right now. Jason grabbed the cat treats and went out into that area to hunt for our missing cat, because by this point we knew he had to be hungry. He found Atticus curled into some tree roots several houses down, and spent some time coaxing him with his voice to allow Jason to approach with treats. Eventually, Jason managed to snatch him and restrain him to his chest and bring him inside.

Atticus was terrified. I don’t know what sorts of things he encountered or how badly he may have been hurt in that cat fight. What I do know is that he was scared to come home, because he knew he’d done something he wasn’t supposed to do. He was also very hungry, and so dove into the pile of treats and can of food we gave him as we looked him over for any potential injuries. (He appeared to be fine except for some scraggly fur and swollen eyes that looked like a bit of an allergic reaction to something.) It didn’t take long for him to get back to normal, and by the next morning, he was curled up with Jojo again like they’ve been doing since they first bonded in 2018.

Of course, this means we can’t really chance opening our windows at all anymore, sigh. But also hopefully it also means that Atticus has had his fill of the outdoors and will stop screaming at us and trying to escape constantly. We’ll see. Like I said, he’s a bit on the dumb side as cats go, and he may be up for another adventure in the near future…

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Sunday Coffee – Weighed Down

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Thistle

I’ll be honest here. I’m not sure I can be entirely coherent as I write this. The burdens of the last who-knows-how-many years in this country continue to weigh more and more heavily all the time. I see all these posts about how, if you don’t speak up, if you stay quiet, this just means you’re privileged to stay out of the fight, but it’s not always like that. Sometimes, if you keep silent, it’s because the fight has squashed you down so badly that you have no energy to speak.

Learning on Friday evening that Ruth Bader Ginsberg had died was the latest blow. I remember back to the 2016 election, and how the culmination of all the anger and hatred and racism/sexism/all the other -isms had worn people down for a year. That year, I refused to watch a single debate, because I refused to give the Prumpster even one minute of attention. If I happened to watch the news and the man came on, I muted the TV. I have never, in the four years since, watched or listened to one minute of the man speaking. My own silent protest and refusal to increase his “ratings,” I suppose. And I remember, on watching the election numbers roll in, the devastation and hopelessness that stole into me and took my voice.

I went to bed before it was all over, and I cried myself asleep, because I knew this was no longer a “democrat vs republican” issue, but one of far greater consequence. We’ve witnessed floodgates of nastiness and backlash over the last four years. That’s not to say they weren’t there before, because they were, and they’d been building for ages as our country – GASP! – elected a Black president, and later – SHOCK! – allowed gay people to – SHUDDER! – get married. *insert headache-inducing eye roll here* But Prump gave a nod to all those prejudices and said that it was not only okay to embrace them and speak them, but that it was RIGHT to align our country to those values. And oh, we have been drowning.

To tell the truth, I have no hope for the upcoming election. I don’t think approval ratings or polls matter in the least. If the 2016 election was so gerrymandered that Clinton could win by 2.5 million votes and STILL lose the election, what’s to say that it won’t be the same this year? Biden is an uninspiring opposition, and a distasteful choice (though yes, about 1,000,000x better than the current situation), and will put up little fight against the groupies currently making the most noise. I anticipate more protest votes and a lack of turnout this year, and while Biden still may win on the popular vote side of things, I don’t think it will be as large of a margin as Clinton, and I don’t think it’ll make even the slightest difference in the electorates. Prump very well may be the first “president” to lose two elections while continuing to hold office.

Last week, I heard that one of Prump’s considerations as next up for the Supreme Court is Ted Cruz. And this also brought me back to the 2016 election, when the last two candidates with any backing behind them were Prump and Cruz. I voted in the republican primary that year, with the hope of outing the two of them from Texas’ points. On Facebook, I wrote that of the two of them, I would be more scared if Cruz won the nomination, because he seemed both smarter and more dangerous. In retrospect, I’m not sure if that’s true, but I do know that Cruz still scares the living daylights out of me, and I absolutely do not want him to end up on the Supreme Court with an appointment for life. Which may happen very, very soon.

Because we all know that the trick the republicans pulled in President Obama’s last year, refusing for an entire year to confirm his Supreme Court appointment, will not be repeated this time. There are something like six weeks left until the election, and they’re going to try to speed their way into getting someone (Cruz or other) in their before that time. Again, I don’t honestly think it’ll matter if they go speedy, because I think we have another four years of this deterioration of our country to go. I don’t believe Biden will win, not in the way that it matters. But it stirs up crushing anger and defeat and depression to watch these hypocrites embrace their gleeful triumph the very same night that RBG passed away.

“I don’t care if it’s right or wrong, as long as I get what I want.” This seems to be the motto of the current administration. The ends justify the means. And it’s crushing the life out of so many of us. It’s polarizing people, a little more all the time. I remember the kinds of debates and unhappiness involved in elections twenty years ago where one or the other party won, and it was not like this. Not at all.

I’m sorry I haven’t spoken up more. It’s not that I don’t care, or that this doesn’t affect me personally. It’s that with a foot to my neck, holding me down, I’ve spent the last four years focused on surviving, with no strength left to fight back.

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The Haunting of Ashburn House, by Darcy Coates

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Thistle

When Adrienne inherits Ashburn house, it feels like a godsend. She’s homeless, with almost no income, and without any family to turn to. The dilapidated condition of the house gives her pause, but at least it’s a roof, right? Unfortunately, Ashburn house is filled with uneasiness – from scratched messages in all the rooms to legends of madness and ghosts. And something is causing mayhem, whether an intruder intent on scaring Adrienne, or tricks of her imagination, or…something else.

I needed something light and fast-paced after the darkness of Mexican Gothic. I heard about this book in passing and immediately ordered it from the library. It was exactly what I needed right now, and the perfect creepy RIP book! Hauntings, ghosts, dark magic, madness, legends, murder, and possession…this book had it all. Not in a disjointed, overstuffed kind of way. It was atmospheric, well-plotted, and fun to read.

The only major drawback for me was right about the 2/3rds mark, when the reader first catches sight of the villain/culprit. You know how in horror movies, it’s creepier before you actually see the monster? Putting a face on something often dials down the scare-factor, and it was the same in this book. While the last third of the book was compelling, it wasn’t nearly as chilling. I don’t know that there was any real solution to that issue, because the revelation was quite important. But I missed the creep-factor of the unknown.

Still, I hear that Coates has quite a few creepy novels out – more awesomeness to explore and freak myself out with late at night this fall!

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Wellness Wednesday – Out of the Nightmares

Posted on September 16, 2020 by Thistle

It has certainly been easier to breathe over the last week. Helps me to know for certain that I made the right choice (withdrawing from school) last Wednesday. And contrary to the last few weeks of doom and gloom, things are looking up here.

First, the late August/early September PTSD quagmire has ended. For the last week, any stress I’ve had comes from current issues rather than six-years-old retained trauma memory. Better yet: during the several weeks of PTSD triggers this time, I did a better job of coping than I have in the past. I can definitely say for sure now that I’ve transferred my self-medicating coping mechanism from wine to iced coffee. Yay! This gives me hope that I can transfer it to an even safer substance in the future. I also didn’t have any major breakdowns involving the old trauma. It certainly influenced my vulnerable, easy-to-tears state of mind, but I never ended up wracked with fear, sobbing, or anger over Old Things. Running, behavioral therapy, new associations, and general rebuilding-my-life is REALLY helping. I hope that within a year or two, my two major trigger periods (May/early June, and this Aug/Sept one) will go back to being normal!

Second, the carpet. Oh, the carpet. Construction always sucks, especially when you have to do a big portion of it yourself. I don’t deal with chaos very well. It’s my kryptonite. I become paralyzed when too much is going on, especially if there’s no order to it. And, true to the stereotype about marriages, my husband is a pure chaos kind of person. This is in many ways a good thing – I can deal with all the stuff that needs order and rigidity, he can deal with the chaos that makes me curl into a whimpering ball in my room. Which includes ripping out half the carpets in the house, pulling off baseboards, leveling and sanding floors, and installing new floors while waiting for the carpet professionals to come rip out the rest of the carpets and install new stuff. The house was a wreck. Furniture moved from one room to another. Stuff in boxes, as if we were moving again. Construction dust everywhere. No way to even reach the oven or stove or microwave.

But Jason got the hardwood floors down early last week. (We were supposed to get cheap laminate, but there were a few boxes of hardwood that had been on the shelf for eight months, and were thus being sold for less than laminate – lucky us!) He got the baseboards up, the cat-scratch-wall reassembled (it looks different now, with new pieces!), and the furniture back where it belonged by mid week. He and I both got all the loose stuff put away in the two rooms where the professionals would work, and then they came in on Thursday and got all their work done in a few hours. This led to quite a few wonderful things:

  1. Even though our old carpets were old and disgusting, there was no water damage on them, which we’d worried about, and the subfloor was in near-perfect condition, whew!
  2. We got to rearrange both our living room and my bedroom because the furniture had to be moved anyway, and both rooms are far superior now to the way they’ve been the previous nine months!
  3. The new carpet is beautiful, far more beautiful than we expected (especially since our first choice of color turned out to be unavailable re: covid delays in manufacturing), and soooooo nice to walk on! It’s higher-grade carpet with a 30-year warranty, and the extra money we put into upgrading from “builder’s grade” was 10000% worth it.

I took a run on the new carpet on Monday. My room has been rearranged to have a wide U-shaped path that allows for longer no-turns distance and wider turns at the end of each U. This allows me to mimic an outdoor pace a lot more closely, without worrying about tight turns on my ankles/knees/hips. Indeed, I ran two miles in about 33 mins – the same pace I would do on an easy run outdoors. And my feet felt like I was running on air the whole time. It was amazing. I’ve never actually had brand-new carpet in a house before, so this has been a novel and awesome experience!

In addition to the new carpets, our a/c system got completely replaced over the last two days (indoor and outdoor units both). As anyone who lives in the south can testify – summer heat is excruciating and never-ending for about half the year, and a good a/c system is priceless. Our former unit was about 25 years old and didn’t work well, so the house was always mildly hot and our electricity bill was through the roof. Already we’ve noticed a major difference in how well the house cools! (Pic: Surprise gift from Jason after the construction was finished!)

Then, there are my career goals. Of course, I don’t have a 100% great idea of where I plan to go next in my life, but since switching away from the university path, I’ve been drawn toward digging back into my first love: writing. I haven’t done any major writing since the spring of 2016, and I’d all but given up on the idea. However, I’ve realized that these intervening years have helped me to see writing and publishing in an entirely different light, and helped me to break some mental barriers that I’ve had my whole life. I’m not going to say too much about this right now because it’s still early days, but I’m excited to potentially begin with some new projects soon!

So yes, it really feels like things are looking up despite the stressors that have been around for the last month. I can see cooler temps in the extended forecast, I have several group hikes scheduled, and I see hope ahead of me again.

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Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on September 14, 2020 by Thistle

Mexico, 1950s. Noemí travels out to check up on her newly-married cousin after some strange letters arrived from her at home. She’s “welcomed” into a decrepit old house by a family who believes they are superior to the “local” population because they’re white, European, and old money (despite the money being long gone). Soon, Noemí realizes it’s not just the family her cousin has married into that is wrong. Nightmares, hallucinations, sexual violence, alchemy, curses, and secrets blossom as Noemí is slowly consumed by the house.

This is not your traditional haunted house story. It reads more like a fairy tale than a novel, complete with a narrator who is more archetype than individual, major thematic elements (mushrooms, bees, gold, silver), and a blurring of reality and dreamscape. The book is not like anything I’ve ever read, and I mostly enjoyed it.

There were a few things that I struggled with. First, the early parts of the novel are very heavy-handed. Lots of talk about eugenics, gender roles, etc that feel overly stressed. However, those elements end up taking on different roles as the book went on, so by the end, they felt less like heavy-handed modern-day issues, and more like setup for the story. The first half was also a bit slow, and it took quite awhile until the story really got started. For a long time, it was unclear which direction it would go. Lastly, there are some elements (like the wrist-burns) that never really got addressed, so it just felt like “weird stuff that happened to happen” instead of deliberate.

On the positive side, the fairy tale atmosphere was really well-done. It’s hard to write a novel with a narrator who is archetypical in today’s environment, but Moreno-Garcia pulled it off well. Some of the elements in the book were particularly horrific (like the woman who opens her mouth despite having no mouth), and the horror bits were very unique (never been afraid of a mushroom before…). The blurred line between hallucination, dream, and reality gets so confusing at one point that you keep waiting for Noemí to wake up, and when she doesn’t, it’s so creepy and disturbing and unsettling – it’s perfect as a way to immerse the reader into this nightmare. Lastly, while the solutions and many of the twists were visible from early on, as part of the thematic elements, it never felt as if knowing the twists was a bad thing. You might know what was coming, but not how, and so you ride with the characters step by step as they figure things out.

All in all, for a book that is WAY out of my comfort zone and unlike anything I’ve ever read, I really appreciated it. It may not be my favorite book of all time, but I applaud the author for her work, and definitely want to explore more by her.

PS – That cover is AMAZING.

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