Perpetual

Things progress:

• The cat is eating, the metamour is healing.


• I do have a tenant! He starts March 1 and has signed an 18-month lease, though the deposit money hasn't shown up yet. Something to poke at.


• I finished all my sewing/alteration projects and immediately got itchy for more. I've been intending January as a low-buy month, so there's stuff piling up in online baskets at blankshirts.com and moodfabrics.com. In the meantime I'm realizing that some of my athletic wear is still produced by black magic. I have flat seams that look like the wrong side of coverstitch machine stitches, but on both sides.


• Made progress on several of my handstand exercises, and also more hand-to-hand. We're getting more used to working on it with no extra mats and no coaches.


• The Montana trip is shaping up. The squirrel is going to come along(!), and we barely kept Birdie's dad from also showing up (!), and we found a surprisingly nice AirBnB very near my dad because I guess search results for groups of four are just better around there. Yesterday I told my dad the schedule and the guest list, and he took it pretty well, if with some confusion.

Things don't progress:

• The NYT rejected my third crossword puzzle, which I'd had really high hopes for, with a very nice personalized letter from one of the head editors saying she was sad about them not taking it. But a rejection nonetheless. We are planning to rework it to address the feedback... but I'm feeling pretty down about it anyway. Maybe my taste in themes just isn't aligned enough with the cruciverbalist masses.


• I was going to go to the Fetish Fair Fleamarket with the squirrel this year, but eventually learned that NELA itself has ceased operation and the FFF is no more. Looks like the pandemic killed it. More lost chances, another thing I attended for the last time without realizing it might be the last time. :( My gripe about this on a forum led to a discussion about Arisia also being much smaller than it used to be, about #metoo and Dobbs and covid collectively being extra hard on communities that require the genders to get along en masse.


• Thanks to a giant snowstorm, there was no circus open studio today and no show to attend this evening. Only shoveling, and some stretching at home, although Birdie came over and stretched with me and cooked (we're attempting rosemary-salt bagels). A lot of things will still be closed on Monday too.

I'm having just a few feelings about being unemployed, or I guess about not being considered valuable by large powerful (rich) organizations. Some of this is about an unexpected eldercare expense, some of it is hearing about various perks provided by other people's jobs (subsidized concierge healthcare) and remembering the ones provided by my old job. Somehow the ICE stuff in Minneapolis, which oh yeah I've got to call my congress critters about, is not helping. It's a "what if nobody powerful cares about me" feeling. Of course I have some power of my own.

This week was so much, I really wish I'd written separate posts about some of these things. It is troublesome how much good stuff and bad stuff happens at the same time -- and usually far too quickly for me to absorb, metabolize and think over the last experience before there's another.

I said last time that I hoped to have a couple of days in which to get more creative. So let's start there -- I got them! I finished my exercise video, and also got on with various sewing repair/alteration projects. That's been amazing because having a serger is amazing. The way it cuts as well as making a seam means I don't have to be very precise at all about cutting out pieces, as long as I'm precise when feeding fabric into the machine. So among other things, I 100% finished the project I thought would be the most daunting: adding size to a T-shirt by opening the side seams and adding racing stripes. And I got a little artsy with another one, where I was trimming down a loose dress and decided to try out some reverse applique with the leftover pieces of fabric. That was surprisingly fun, and came out very cool too. I asked Perse to draw on the dress, and went home and stitched around the drawing before snipping it out with scissors, and none of it required measurements or much planning. (Am I getting more punk, here in my middle years? Yes.) I enlarged the arm holes of a tunic, and am turning another tunic into a T-shirt, and am generally having a great time. Once the repairs are done, I'm going to maybe get into reverse applique in earnest. Blank T-shirts are cheap.

Circus continues to be good or great. We got our first standing hand-to-hand completely away from the safety mats, on Monday, and quite a few more on Friday.

The new condo: I got overconfident, and maybe a little bit antsy, and decided to get an official lead inspection. I thought the odds of finding lead were approximately zero, given the recent gut renovations to that house, but I didn't realize that the inspector would also look at the exterior of the building; yup, we've got some lead on exterior basement window sills, and now we have to disclose that to tenants and I'll have to find a deleading place. And I will get on that tomorrow, because for the rest of the week I was busy with the next things. It should all come out okay in the end, since there's a $3000 tax credit for bringing a unit into lead compliance, but in the meantime what a pain.

Pasta?? Yes pasta, I attended a fresh pasta cooking class at Dave's Fresh Pasta with the squirrel and it was a good time. We actually made pasta from eggs and durum flour, rolled it, and cut it into spaghetti and fettuccini. They fed us a lot of snacks plus salad, sandwiches, and our own newly made spaghetti, and the squirrel had a marvelous time. I forgot all about the idea of Dry January, and had a couple tiny glasses of the nice white wine they were serving; so much for my dedication to sobriety.

Cat. This was the worst. Early in the week Caltrop, the impetuous 3-year-old cat, simply and abruptly stopped eating. This took a while to notice and be sure of, especially since I usually feed the cats their wet food while heisenbug usually feeds them dry food. So on Monday she got her annual checkup and I said everything was great, but she'd actually already stopped eating, and on Thursday I was back for an urgent set of X-rays and fluids and anti-nausea and appetite stimulant. Ugh. Which barely worked, and also she freaked out and decided her brother was a stranger and we had to separate the cats and it was all a giant pain, so on Friday we went back for bloodwork too, but after that she started eating a bit. Dry food only so far. But it's been more every day, and today I found a couple of "moist" meaty options she will also eat. A vast improvement. I'm not sure if I just spent $1000 for nothing, or if we just saved her life, or something in between; or if she had acute-onset pancreatitis (which the blood test might still tell us) or a Mysterious Cat Thing. She still won't eat her normal wet food.

Metamour. Overlapping this, on Friday, Perse had her third abdominal surgery in four years. So Friday was just the squirrel and me sending worried text messages back and forth about our creatures. We gave up on saying "Everything is okay" and settled on the more plaintive, but more accurate, "Some things are okay... so far." But her surgery went well. We were planning to visit her in the hospital on Saturday, but as we drove there we found out they were discharging her early (!), so the "visit" turned into picking her up and taking her home! Discombobulating, given that they said 2-4 days initially, but positive.

Tenant? For the third time, I have someone halfway through signing an 18-month lease on my new condo. Hopefully this one will finish signing.

In the meantime I'm just tired. And glad that my cat is eating. And also tired.