fox

dream theater

Wed, 27 May 2026 12:42:08 GMT

Background 1. Yesterday some emails went back and forth planning my brother's next approximately-quarterly visit to stay at my house and/but hang with my mom.

Background 2. A colleague (who is at least 20 years older than I am) lost his mother last week, less than a year after his father died. He's handling it quite well in the circumstances—in both cases they were old and ill and now they are no longer suffering.

But/so that's probably why last night I had a terrible dream, the kind where at first someone I knew in college was telling me looking after my mother had consumed much too much of my time and attention in the previous year (in the dream, my junior year, although the person I was talking to was in real life a year behind me) and I'd need to step up and be a lot more present in my upcoming senior year, which I understood to mean basically "Look, is she going to die or isn't she?"

(And somehow following that extremely unpleasant conversation, my actual best friends from college and several to many other people I know now had all retreated to the attic in my parents' house and were smoking weed up there. In real life I cannot bear the smell of marijuana smoke, but in the dream I was happy to hang out with them even though I didn't have any myself.)

And at the end of the dream, my father was back somehow, but only for a short time, and then he kind of deanimated and returned to the grave while I screamed and begged him not to; and then my mother started musing that she had better go soon, and I sobbed and said no, not yet, at least wait until $Brother is here; and I called my brother and told him to get down here as soon and as fast as he could.

And then I woke up with my heart pounding.

I've got to find some kind of therapist or support group for anticipatory grief. I can't live like this for an undefined amount of time.

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heisenberg, today

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:58:39 GMT

Yesterday my mother shook my hand and asked the building manager "Will my daughter also be joining us?"

(Once I told her it was me, she said I was wearing different clothes than usual, which I was not, and it's true I don't normally go to her place on a Friday, but she had said to the manager "Oh yes I've been expecting you" because I had told her no fewer than three times that the manager and I would be coming at that time for that purpose.)

So here we are. March 27, 2026, was the first time my mother did not recognize me. And all I can think about this morning is how I'm hurtling—at an unknown speed and for an unknown time—toward the day that I will only be able to identify in the rearview as the last time she did.

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well done, everyone

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:42:15 GMT

We're halfway through the dark.

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happy birthday dad

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:46:13 GMT

My dad (R) would have been 78 today. ❤️

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okay last part first

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:16:04 GMT

When we last met, it was November 3 and my mother's um-friend had just passed away and I was in wracks of agony about choices she had made at the beginning of that relationship and hoping that now that the relationship was, perforce, over, I wouldn't have to Deal quite so much with those choices anymore.

The next day, of course, was Election Day, and as you know, Bob, the good guys did pretty well all the way up and down the street. It was a good Tuesday night and a good Wednesday morning.

Which is why it was a surprise when I got to work Wednesday morning and I was still wound up way too tight and feeling much too upset to function and subject to four-or-five-minute crying jags for no obvious reason at random intervals. I did not like it. I have come to expect to feel like this—although not to this degree—for the month of October, but here it was October 36 and I wasn't feeling any better, and that hasn't happened in 12 years. So I said to my boss, in my daily check-in email, I think I'm also going to have to write up some ways I'm realizing my mental health has been not okay for a while now and regrettably may have been affecting my work. Always fun. (To his credit, he immediately said "Well, we've got to find some time for you to come talk to me, okay, because I see an employee say 'mental health,' I sit right up and pay attention.")

So I made a list.

October 16, 2012, my mother said the oncologist said my dad couldn't have any more chemo and it was time for us to come home. He died October 28, and since then the whole month has been an annual struggle of tension and anxiety, TMJ issues, insomnia, and not letting my rotten mood affect my relationships.
In 2013 I was laid off October 1, which probably hasn't helped, now that I think about it.
This year is the first time since 2013 that I've spent the month of October with people who didn't already know me well. Somehow it didn't occur to me that that might make it harder than usual.
Meanwhile, my mother had a stroke in 2017 and has developed progressive dementia in the past five years. Last July we moved her from her um-friend's home to an assisted living facility here near me when it became clear her condition was worse than any of us had realized.
At the same time, the prince—and I've looked back and seen that I only made the most oblique reference to this at the time—made a series of attempts to harm himself and spoke about suicidal ideation. HE IS FINE NOW.
But over that summer and the beginning of that school year he had camp counselors and teachers take away scissors and pull him away from trying to poke his finger into an electrical socket, and at home he talked about stabbing himself, said he wanted to die, got a butter knife out of the drawer and made like he was going to cut his hand with it, and tried to climb into the freezer.
HE IS FINE NOW. We got him more help and changed his medication and he remembers that he used to have intrusive thoughts but doesn't have them anymore.
That, of course, is when I originally asked my doctor about medication for chronic anxiety rather than just the occasional Ativan for acute anxiety.
Anyway, my mother's condition has continued to deteriorate, and after a year in assisted living we moved her to memory care.
My brother's mother-in-law died September 22, so a planned fall family visit was postponed and has still not been rescheduled, meaning there's been extra sadness and no mom-related respite.
October was October as usual. (Actually apparently worse than usual.)
My mother's um-friend went into hospice care on October 23 and died November 2.
So: I'd been on daily anxiety medication for almost a year and a half, but in the first week or so of November I realized that for about six weeks I'd been feeling exactly the way I was feeling when my kid was struggling (see above), only worse. I spent the whole autumn taking deep breaths to get through a tightness in my chest that it took me way too long to recognize as anxiety breaking through.

Update: HA HA HA when I began it on November 20, this was going to be a post about how I emailed my doctor on like November, I don't know, 5 or 6, and she immediately (like, by that weekend) agreed to double my dose of Lexapro, and within a couple of days I was breathing more easily, and I stopped crying so much of the time, and hopefully if that happens again one of us will realize it a lot sooner so I don't spend so long suffering? And then for some reason I was looking through the old entries in here and found where someone in one of my Discords said "panic attack" on July 23 and apparently none of us (self, Himself, my brother [who doesn't live locally but given that the major precipitating event was evidently moving my mom to memory care, his input is not irrelevant]) listened? So, erm, that wasn't our best collective decision, in retrospect.

And then it turns out it's a good thing I've bumped up my Lexapro dosing, because holy shit the first week of December has been what in the being-my-mom's-children racket could safely be called a humdinger in ways I simply cannot talk about right now. I can feel the tightness trying to tighten up my chest, in fact, and not being able to do it. It's something. But whoo boy.

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Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:38:49 GMT

fuck you, Tolstoy, you fucking fucker.

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maybe this will be the last time i have to cry about this

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:44:31 GMT

Longtime readers may remember that my father died 13 years ago (in fact I lit his yahrzeit candle last night ❤️) and that my mother took up with a widowed family friend not long afterward and told us, my brother and me, about it in a manner so astoundingly insensitive that our relationship never really recovered. (The description at that link says he, the um-friend, invited her on the European river cruise, but in fact I learned some time later that inviting her hadn't been his intention; he'd mentioned it in a way of saying it would have been nice to have been able to plan something like that with company and she went ahead and invited herself to join him, because it turns out this woman may never have seen a boundary worth respecting in her entire life.) I'm not going to go hunting for the exact email at this time, but I have a pretty clear memory that it included the assurance "I would never do anything to hurt you" and that in the conversation the three of us had in which the two of us said we were unhappy about the suddenness of the seriousness of their relationship, the message we got from her was you're going to need to deal with those feelings. It wasn't exactly "I would never hurt you" / "This hurts us" / "I'm going to do it anyway" but it wasn't a million miles off.

So naturally a person withdraws from that kind of thing. I'm confident the um-friend thought we, or at least I, hated him, which was never true. I liked him fine, but I found it very difficult to be around him—or around them together, I guess—for a very long time because his presence was a stark reminder of how my mother had mishandled things. I was actually never angry at him about it; she's always been the one I've judged. I remember telling my sister-in-law that the only solution I could see was to give my mother as few opportunities as possible to hurt me. I know my mother asked about inviting the um-friend to our wedding and I went into some sort of fugue state. Himself had an email exchange with her that to this day I don't know what he said or how he talked her out of pressing the point. (In any event the um-friend had grandchildren graduating from either high school or college that weekend so he wouldn't have come anyway, but my man convinced my mother to drop it because he is a hero.)

One time she finally asked me, "So did you want me to be miserable and alone for the rest of my life?" and I said "No, Mom, I wanted you to have meant it when you said it mattered what we thought." But it hadn't then and it apparently still didn't, because she still didn't understand until I explained it that saying you don't want to hurt someone and then doing the thing they've said will hurt them is, in fact, hurtful. I can't actually remember if she has ever apologized for having done that, but if she has I can't believe she's meant it, can you? because she still doesn't get it.

Or didn't. And then she had a stroke. And now she's got progressive dementia as well. Which means the odds she even remembers any of these events or conversations are dwindling by the day and if there was ever any point in my talking about any of it with her ever again in the hope of her appreciating anyone's feelings on the subject other than her own, there isn't anymore. For example! Look, widowed parents go on to have subsequent partners. As a concept I am and have always been fine with that. Witness my consideration of other people's feelings. Telling your children you're going to Europe with your new boyfriend six weeks after you've all buried your husband/their father is less considerate of other people's feelings. As it happens, my mother had never been meaningfully alone in her life before my father died; she'd gone from home (where she was the middle child) to college (where girls always lived in dorms in those days) and got married the summer after graduating. Other people married to their high school or college sweethearts include EVERYONE ON THAT SIDE OF THE FAMILY EXCEPT ME, which I mention because speaking as the only person in three generations of this family to have spent any time single or alone, I find it extremely offensive to imply that fear of Such A Fate is an acceptable reason for doing something you know—because they have told you themselves—will be hurtful to your children.

So a couple of weeks ago, my mother, who is more and more confused, called me to tell me she'd just spoken to her um-friend, who was not doing well and was saying good-bye to everybody. And I said "Oh, I'm sorry, Mom." Because I was. She's losing her mind, and he's been important to her, and she's my mother, and I love her. And she said she couldn't talk to him anymore, but I could call him to say good-bye. And I said "Oh . . . you know, the shape he's in, probably he's got all the phone calls he can handle." Quite good, I thought, thinking on my feet. And she said but I could call and talk to him for her. And finally I said "That isn't the relationship that he and I have." And she still wouldn't let it go. She said well, but that's the relationship you have with me, isn't it. So she made me say it. I said "Mom, I'm here for you, and I'm glad you got to talk to him, but I'm not going to call him myself."

My brother, whom I texted about all of this afterward, agreed with me from top to bottom on the whole thing, including not having said mother, it is the anniversary of the time Dad spent in hospice, what in the world makes you think I want to speak to anyone at all right now, least of all . . . anyway, the next day we got a message from the um-friend's son saying they'd begun hospice care and she had called crying so many times that they'd had to ask her to stop calling, which cast "can't talk to him anymore" in a different light and made me feel even better about not calling when she asked me to; I wasn't going to do it when I thought she was saying I could have one more Moment that I didn't need, but if it was actually "they asked me to stop, so will you do it instead" that's obviously an even harder no, because see ALL OF THE ABOVE re: boundaries and my mother's inability to observe them even when her brain was whole.

Anyway. The old man passed away peacefully yesterday afternoon. He was a nice guy. He saved my mother's life at least twice. He was a product of a time and a place that may have been responsible for his having some attitudes that I didn't always care for, but you know, what can you do. Mainly, he was important to my mother, which was fine, but I was never able to forget that he'd been more important to her than our feelings were, which was not. I'm very sorry for his children and grandchildren. I myself will not miss him. I'm not going to pretend there was never any such person or anything, but a small selfish still-hurt place inside me hopes that now that he's gone, my mother will think about him less and less.

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dear Yuletide writer

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:16:49 GMT

~~[watch this space]~~

Hello, new friend! I'm so happy you're here! (And thank you so much for your patience while I had a particularly difficult autumn. As of November 9 I think I'm coming to a place where I can disembark from the struggle bus. Let's keep our fingers crossed.)

I love Yuletide, and you will have an easy time pleasing me and a hard time disappointing me. Fear not. Let's have a great time together.

The fellow fan and Yuletider who knows me best is ellen_fremedon (fremedon), who has agreed that you can ping her if you need insider info.

My general DNWs as I listed them in my signup (did I? I should have. I usually do.) are these:

character bashing, which I define more or less as giving characters negative traits that are not evident in the text—making nice people mean, mainly, because all the rest is just variations on that (making thoughtful people selfish, for example; it's all the same) (I used to say "making smart people stupid" as another example, but the older I get, the more I leave that kind of thinking behind, I think.)
2016+ U.S. politics, because I am here for escapism

That's it. Those are the DNWs. Other than that, I don't have a lot to add to my requests:

Star Wars Legends: X-Wing Series
I love these guys. :-) Anything you give me in this world will please me. I love Wedge the best, as Stackpole and Allston (and other Extended Universe writers, I think) write him, but I also like Wes and Hobbie and everyone else. I like the goofy caper plots they get up to on their missions. I like Rogue Squadron, the original badasses, and I like Wraith Squadron, which started out as more of a support group than a military unit but each of whose members grew into their various competencies. Basically in life and in fiction I really enjoy watching skilled people do things they're good at, so a story about any combination of X-wing pilots taking enemies (or one another!) to school would be right up my street.

fandom-specific DNW: none

Society of Gentlemen
I love Dominic and Silas the best—which is a little surprising to me as normally I'm not super into BDSM or any combination of such initials, but between the fact that the sub is called Dom and the rest of the crowd openly call the scruffy one a werewolf, what can I say, I adore them. I do also like everyone else as well, which is why I picked the third additional tag (which I hope is the right use of it); tell me a story in this world and I'll be pleased. It can involve politics or not, Christmas time or not, Regency period or a half a generation later (what would these fellows make of their monarch being an 18-year-old girl?). Or something else! Feel free to cross over with any other KJC joints that make sense to you, if you like. Whatever strikes your fancy.

fandom-specific DNW: none

The Will Darling Adventures
I specified Kim and Will because I love them and how they're both so good at what they do—my well documented fondness for competency strikes again—but please feel free to write any story you like in this world. A case? A well earned break? Kim as Uncle Arthur with the Chingford kids? Babs and Maisie turning out to be best friends? Whatever you like. Cross over with other KJC worlds if you care to, or not. Happy Yuletide!

fandom-specific DNW: none

If I have further thoughts, I will return and post them here, but like I said, you can also approach Ellen if the signup/this letter leaves you stumped and you need insight.

As we have also been asked in the past to affirm that treats are also welcome, let me assure you: Treats are also welcome! In fact, all the opt-ins you could ever opt in to are also great. Go wild. ❤️

Have a great time and happy Yuletide!

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dream theater

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 16:51:45 GMT

I've noted before that my most common type of dream is mishaps while traveling: I can't get to the platform for the train I need because the station has turned into an Escher drawing, or the car is hovering just a bit off the road so the wheels don't have any purchase and I can't go anywhere, or the bus changes its destination after everyone except me decides they like the other route better, or whatever.

This morning I had the strangest feeling that I couldn't remember how I'd got to work. Did Himself drive me to the metro? He used to do that sometimes if the timing was going to be weird or the weather was bad or I had something inconvenient to carry or I'd turned my ankle or something like that - but none of those things were the case today. Still, I didn't have any memory of taking the electric scooter up to the metro station or of locking it up . . .

. . . and that's when my brain said no, of course you don't have any memory of locking up the scooter, because you're still asleep in bed, ya goofball.

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in which the march of time tramples us all

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:44:11 GMT

On her last visit, my aunt brought my mother a CD player and a stack of discs in the full knowledge that operating the thing would probably be impossible for her—she can't tell what she's looking at half the time when she's seen it a hundred times before, so finding tiny black-on-black buttons on an unfamiliar machine, forget about it. But no worries, the place where she lives is full of staff who are always happy to (and whose job includes) assist with that sort of thing.

Yesterday I picked her up for dinner and she said she'd asked someone to help with the CD player one morning this week when they came in to help her get dressed, and they'd said oh, sorry, they didn't actually know anything about how to do that—

—and suddenly in that moment I realized oh my god, it's—what it is, is—the Kids Today, all their music is digital, they just stream it on their phones, asking them to put any type of album in any type of player and press any type of button is completely unknown to them. This would have been the equivalent of someone asking me in the late 1990s to help their elderly mother with her 8-track player. I might as well have used the word phonograph, or victrola. Another staffer came in with a delivery as we were leaving the apartment, and I confirmed that she does know how to work a CD player so she's going to help my mom with it when she can. She's in her 40s and agrees that the young people can't do it for online digital reasons. "Hey, you printed the 'save' icon," I said. "They can't read analog clocks, either," she said. And on the drive to my house my mom and I were talking about how there didn't used to be any such thing as an analog clock or an acoustic guitar or a landline phone, because those were just called clocks and guitars and telephones, but now here we are—a biker is a person who rides a motorcycle, so a person who rides a bicycle has to be called a cyclist.

I remember when I was in high school my parents were pretty bothered that the fall of Saigon was being taught in history class, but now there are people who are grown adults with college degrees and almost old enough to run for federal office who were born after September 11, 2001. Which can't be right because that just happened. Himself pointed out that his date of birth was closer to the Armistice (1919) than to today. It's all very upsetting.

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out of joint(s)

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:45:49 GMT

Almost every joint in my body cracks. I don't normally feel aches or tension in my hips or elbows (or lower back, thank god) before they make The Noise, but I do everywhere else - ankles, especially the right; knees, especially the right; shoulders, usually the right (but lately the left is bothering me more); spine, which I know is not a joint; neck; both wrists; all fingers.

Each finger (but not the thumbs) cracks at two knuckles, and there's something so very strangely satisfying about getting all eight in a row without having to Do Anything Special to my left little finger (first knuckle) or either index finger (second knuckle).

Last spring I'm pretty sure I strained or even sprained my jaw singing Mozart. That was a bummer. It did an unexpected pop two or three days in a row and then it hurt for weeks - I had to be careful how I opened my mouth when I yawned, which is surprisingly difficult. And just for the past couple of days my left shoulder, as I said, has been bothering me. I thought it might be referred pain from switching to a new bite guard on my bottom teeth, one that I haven't worn a hole in, but it doesn't seem to be that; my next theory is Hormones. (Perimenopause can suck a flagpole.)

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dreamless theater

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 12:57:38 GMT

Last night I put my phone down and closed my eyes at about 11:15, and the next time I saw the clock it was like 5:30 a.m. This is the first time in—I don't even know how long—that I haven't woken up at least once overnight for one of any number of reasons: Himself snoring; I'm too hot; I'm too cold; my pillows have disarranged themselves and now my neck hurts; I have to pee; a butterfly flapped its wings in Peoria.

It is the strangest well-rested feeling. I don't really know what to do with it.

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in which we probe my outer limits

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:50:24 GMT

Nobody, boss included, wants this, but it's not impossible I will be laid off in a month's time.
My mother's mental acuity is slipping; my brother thinks he may think it's worse than I think it is because I see her every week and he, although he talks to her every day, only sees her in person every few months. Likewise the director of her assisted living facility has just returned from a short vacation and called my brother yesterday to say if they were seeing her for the first time now, they'd think memory care rather than assisted living was probably the best place for her. Put another way, the call scheduled for the three of us tomorrow afternoon is definitely going to be about how it's time to plan to move her over to memory care when a place in that wing opens up. She's not going to like that, of course, but I was surprised by how strongly I didn't like it—the wave of NO that I felt in my whole body, a physical wash of Kubler Ross denial. It was something. Rationally I know it's happening and I know keeping her safe and getting her the best care is going to involve changes and adaptations and so on, but wow, the fact that the ego and superego know that didn't stop the id going MOMMY!
On the up side, one of my favorite co-workers came in to talk about a work thing yesterday, in the course of which conversation I mentioned #1☝️, and at the very suggestion that the big boss might let me go, favorite co-worker said "Jeeesus Christ, he's lost his mind." That doesn't affect whether or not I'll keep my job, but it is good for the ego.
My brother's mother-in-law is also not well, so my sister-in-law is going out this weekend to help her (because her sister, who lives near their mom, happens to be away this weekend), meaning my brother is going to have to bail on a family wedding; he and I were both already going to leave our families behind, as the bride is our cousin's daughter and our spouses nor kids don't really know almost anyone up there, so now it looks like I'll be the sole representative of my mom's node of the family tree. (The bride's-grandmother's-sister node is often not well represented, I'm sure.) My nephew is almost 15 and would be perfectly safe in the house by himself for a couple of days, but he wouldn't be comfortable with it, and of course it's right for his father not to know that and ditch him anyway. I said "You could bring him with you?"—but a last-minute plane ticket and an extra guest the caterer hadn't known about, nah; I said "You could ship him to my house?" (because the prince would love, love having an unexpected visit from his cousin, oh my gosh)—but even as I said it I went on to say that wouldn't really be fair to spring on Himself, outside of a true emergency—I could totally say "Listen, Nephew is coming to stay with us next weekend," and Himself wouldn't say "Why wasn't I consulted about this?", he'd say "Oh my God, what's happened?!" In short: My brother is staying home with his kid this weekend, which is the right decision but a bummer all around. (The much, much bigger bummer being that my sister-in-law's mother is doing as poorly as she is.)
The other bit of up side from yesterday is that when I got home from work and told Himself that my sister-in-law has to go be with her mom so my brother can't go to the wedding because nephew, etc., almost the first words out of his mouth were "He could come stay here?" ❤️❤️❤️ He went on to have a whole text-message conversation about that with my brother while I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and the end result was the same (my brother is staying home with his kid this weekend), but the fact that Himself went directly to "I can take him" without even the merest hint of a suggestion from me made me so happy. SO happy.
Only then I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and on the way home I started feeling a sort of light-headed vertigo feeling that does happen to me sometimes—most recently on the way home from grocery shopping on Saturday—but usually just for a split second, which I don't like, especially when I'm driving, but it really is normally less than the time it takes to blink twice and I don't think an awful lot more about it. Yeah but: Yesterday it came on partway home and didn't go away. I was able to see clearly and concentrate on the road, and my reaction time was fine with respect to signaling, steering, braking, all the things you need to do to drive safely, but it was absolutely terrifying and the minute we got home I told Himself about it and insisted that he do the driving this afternoon (and maybe all the driving until I know what the fuck is happening to my head?!). He suggested maybe my blood sugar was low and asked me to eat about a teaspoon of sugar straight, which in his experience is like a shot of adrenaline, so I did, and nothing happened. I ate a little dinner, though I didn't have much appetite, and that didn't help. I drank some water and that didn't change anything either. Took my blood pressure: 128/86. No fever. I emailed my doctor to tell her this whole tale and conclude with "?!!!?!??!?", and Himself said if I wasn't planning to take an Ativan at bedtime he really thought I should.
[gestures at the world in general and at our federal government in particular]
Someone in one of my Discords mentioned that in a recent protracted panic attack of theirs, one of their main symptoms had been vertigo, which reinforced Himself's Ativan suggestion. I told my usual Tuesday evening dS-watching Discord that I was going to bail and go to bed early, and they offered to punt this week's episode to next week, and I said no need to do that because of me (the responsibility of everyone else's plans changing because my stress levels are making me crazy was also kind of stressful), and they said hey look, everyone who isn't Fox is fine with shifting to next week, decision made, off you go, feel better—and that made me cry a little, people being nice to me, which just goes to show that taking Ativan and going to bed early was the right decision.
Reader, I took the Ativan. I made up a little song to the tune of "Sodomy" from Hair, and then I slept soundly for the whole night. And this morning I feel—well, none of the stressy things have changed, but I feel like I slept well and I know I'm going to be making dinner this evening instead of driving on the freeway with my son in the middle of a dizzy spell, so that's a little better.
Here's my song:

Ativan,
Lexapro,
Gabapentin,
Buproprion,
Doctor - what pills am I even on?
Medication
Can be fun!
Join the Holy Order Pharma Sutra,
Everyone!

You're welcome.

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keeping in mind the nearest exit may be behind you

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:34:04 GMT

So in the fun time that is my life, remember how this new job fell in my lap around Christmas time and I moved over to it on February 11? And then also remember how a lot of unelected teenagers and crypto bros and so forth did a hatchet job on the entire federal government in the spring? Yeah so my new workplace lost millions of dollars in grants, and three people in areas other than mine have been laid off, and yesterday the big boss sat down with me and said he's just not sure they're going to keep having enough work for me to do, and another month from now when my probationary period is over he might not be able to keep me. This is a heads up, not a genuine notice, because it's conceivable they might find a way for it to work out - for one thing, I'm the only one who does what I do and they don't want to go back to having nobody do it. I proposed a couple of solutions, one being to bill most or all of my work to overhead rather than making people put me in as a line item in their project budgets as they're doing now, because the latter has them (a) putting me down for as little work as they can as they're suuuper carefully husbanding their resources and (b) not giving me work until the very end of their process, so I'm sitting around waiting a lot of the time, whereas if I were overhead I could work with people collaboratively and iteratively and not burn up their budgets, so I'd be busier and the products I work on would be better. (Seems like a slam dunk to me, but the overhead money has to come from somewhere, I guess, so maybe that's not as much of a solution as I think.) Another is to bust me back to 60%, which would free up two days a week and still pay more than I was making at my old job.

My old job, by the way, was not allowed to backfill my position - they made someone an offer, which she accepted, and then they had to pull it, and also cut a part-timer and one of two people in the other role they had two of, so they're down to bare bones and no matter what happens to or with this job I can't go back.

So that bites! I had a little cry about it and then activated the bat-signal (emailed my former grandboss and other references), updated my resume, googled some shit, and today I have applied for one (1) job. It's easier to get into a lifeboat from the deck of the ship than from the sea. Maybe I'll aim to apply for one job a week as long as I still have this one and bump it up if it gets where I need to. Also updated my LinkedIn, which I haven't actually even looked at in many many years, but I guess people are still using it?

UGH.

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dreaming in billboards, as kass says

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 13:29:36 GMT

Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.

And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.

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two, two, two reviews in one

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:21:02 GMT

In the past two months I have been fortunate enough to read not one but two ARCs for upcoming novels by KJ Charles. One was Copper Script, which you'll notice has already been actually published. The other was All of Us Murderers, out in October 2025. So here we go, two reviews, one tardy, one timely, happy to separate them into two different posts if someone official would prefer that I do that.

Copper Script
The author said this book arrived more or less fully formed in her mind in the middle of an errand one morning. And it kind of has that sort of breathless, quick-write-it-all-down-before-you-forget-any-of-it vibe. I do not, repeat, do not think it feels underwritten, as some have said (maybe they haven't said it in public? I'm not even looking to see if I should hyperlink to others' opinions), but compared for example to All of Us Murderers (q.v.) it feels . . . hm, more like a thrill ride than a museum tour, if you see what I mean.

Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler of the London Metropolitan Police Service's Criminal Investigation Division is the titular copper; Joel Wildsmith, who lost his dominant hand in the Great War, has a preternatural gift for graphology—handwriting analysis—as well as ginger hair, representing both copper and the titular script. They Meet Cute when Aaron agrees to look into Joel's purported skills on behalf of a cousin he doesn't like. Aaron, a rare (but not entirely unique) honest policeman, is skeptical; Joel, who really can do what he says he can do, has no use for the police. So naturally their fates become entwined and Joel has an insight that reveals something surprising about a case Aaron is working on and they fall for each other, there's a certain amount of peril, and we know all along that it will turn out okay, but they don't know they live in a romance novel, so they feel a certain amount of relief when they end up happy together after only having known each other for a few weeks' time.

I admit I was confused at the beginning of the book by a small number of things that turned out not to be important. If I hadn't read practically every word of KJ Charles's backlist, it wouldn't have taken me 30 pages to work out that this book is set firmly in the world we know rather than one of the ones where magic is real. Meanwhile, I spent way longer than that expecting that it would turn out to be relevant that Aaron (and his sister Sarah) or Joel or both were Jewish; but not only did that not turn out to be relevant—it didn't even turn out to be true. So then I spent a while wondering why I assumed characters with Jewish names had to be Jewish. (I don't automatically expect a girl named Sarah to be Jewish, but when her brother's name is Aaron I expect it a lot more than when his name is something like Geoffrey.) KJ Charles has explicitly Jewish characters in ~~four books~~ three properties (two different series and one standalone novel), if I'm counting properly, and their names are Daniel, Esther, David, and Daniel. I've been quietly irritated about that before—why must Jewish characters have such "obviously" Jewish names? (as if there weren't a Gentile named David in yet another series by the same author)—and then here I am reading characters with "Jewish names" and being surprised that they don't turn out to be Jewish at all. Probably that says more about me than it does about anything else. For one thing, actually, Joel (but not Aaron) could indeed be Jewish, for all we know, because it doesn't come up in the book. For another, though, I'd frankly love it if there were a character who were overtly Jewish for reasons utterly unrelated to the plot— I don't know, just mention that the guy will be unavoidably busy on Saturday—and I'd do handsprings if he were named something utterly goyish like Declan. Maybe all unlikely in a historical, but that's where my mind went with the names.

Other pluses include a secondary character who is everyone's favorite by miles and miles, hope to see her in a spinoff yesterday; other minuses include one (1) plot point that I thought was handled just a tiny bit more heavy-handedly than it needed to have been. Can't say a lot more about that because spoilers, but suffice it to say that when an author has planted a seed, come harvest time I don't need to be told now we are harvesting the thing we planted, see? I can just watch the payoff happen and appreciate it myself. When you read the book you may see what I mean.

Meanwhile: The two leads only shag twice on the page, which is a little low for the genre and for this author in particular—the mystery/thriller side of the story gets more attention than the romance—but this book having had its inspiration in a grocery run shows through in a couple of restaurant scenes that are almost as hot as the sex. (Though that's another point that confused me: They talk about Indian food, and then they talk about beef curry, and I would simply never expect to see beef on an Indian menu at all—of course then the proprietor of the Indian restaurant is named Rahim Mohammed and I conclude that because this whole thing takes place before the Partition the beef-at-an-Indian-restaurant thing is not worth my worrying about, and in fact in the chat server British folk assure me that in the UK both Indian and Pakistani restaurants serve both beef and pork and there's me overthinking the whole business yet again.) If you don't put the book down craving palak paneer and gianduja tiramisu, then God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.

All of Us Murderers
Contrariwise, this book is carefully assembled in a way that shows the creator has got a solid handle on the craft and knows it. This is the docent-led museum tour compared to the roller-coaster of Copper Script. It doesn't quite have a checklist in its pocket, but it feels like it might have thought about having one, decided not to, and be giving you a wink about it as you follow it along. The vibe I got was very Knives Out (2019) x Clue (1985) x Agatha Christie (I can't say which novel without giving away more than I should).

Zebedee Wyckham (yes) has been invited to his ancestral home by its current owner, a first cousin whom he hardly knows; the other guests include his brother and sister-in-law and another first cousin, none of whom he likes. Completing the party are one more further-distant cousin and the homeowner's secretary, who turns out to be someone with whom Zebedee has A Complicated Past. When I tell you the book opens with Zebedee being driven to the house by a chauffeur who barely speaks to him, and the first thing that happens when he gets there is that a young woman in a white peignoir comes running from the house and disappears, sobbing, into the grounds—you can tell exactly what kind of story this is going to be, and it doesn't disappoint.

Amusingly, Zebedee knows what kind of story he's living in, and that's lucky for him. The Gothic horror and mystery of it all was solid; I think I picked up all but one of the hints the book laid down at the times I was meant to get them, so I had the satisfying experience of being with or as much as one step ahead of the characters solving the mystery. (And the one I missed was carefully constructed to be missable!) The romance—for of course Zebedee and Gideon, the Complicated Past haver, reunite and make efforts to Uncomplicate their Present—worked for me but I think it worked in spite of the in medias res of it all rather than because of it. The exposition came in dribs and drabs because of course the POV character already knows what he already knows and doesn't need to infodump for the reader; in fact knowing as he does that he's in a Gothic horror mystery romance, naturally he wouldn't, but rather would leave bread crumbs for us to discover in our own time. Still, though. A reader reading something like Dear God, it was Gideon, who probably hadn't forgiven Zeb, nor should he have been expected to can be excused for thinking "forgiven him for what?!!?" I know that's the point. I'm just saying.

I counted one thing mentioned earlyish that didn't pay off as much as I'd have liked (it wasn't just left completely hanging, but the wrapup in the epilogue was less than I'd hoped for) and, conversely, one payoff-type event that I didn't think had had sufficient groundwork laid for it (and even that's not, like, the thing in whichever Hitchhiker's book it is where Arthur Dent is reading a novel where the hero dies of thirst and he has to slog back through the book to find that they did in fact mention some trouble with the plumbing in chapter 2; there's more setup than that, just not as much as I'd have liked). In a book this complex, that's not a bad ratio!

Prequel pls?

Both titles: A+ would recommend.

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it's happening slowly, but it is happening

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 16:46:25 GMT

When my mother moved into assisted living last summer, we got her a landline phone with big buttons and six presets where you can put pictures to make it super easy to tell who it is you're calling. Alas, the pictures are hard for her to make out because the contrast isn't great at that size, so I turned them over and just printed everyone's initials, black on white, easiest thing. Her brother, her sister, her um-friend, and her cousin all have different initials, no problem. My brother and I have the same first initial so all our lives we've been designated on family calendars and things by our first and middle initials together.

She can't remember our middle names.

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what is time

Tue, 06 May 2025 17:47:16 GMT

Last night at rehearsal, the young (late 20s) woman sitting next to me was venting a bit in the break. Some friendship drama she's steeling herself to deal with, housemate may have hooked up with someone she wished he hadn't, not clear to me if she is jealous of the hookup or the housemate or both, not really my business, but anyway at one point I said "Wow—I have no real memory of being single," and I absolutely did not mean to trivialize anything she is going through!, and fortunately she didn't take it badly at all: She said "That is very good perspective, thanks for saying that."

(And I've only been married 11 years. I do have a fair few memories of being single? but there are a lot of past lives I can look back at now and realize things that were so important then don't really matter at all anymore now.)

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random fun time chez nous

Thu, 01 May 2025 17:11:57 GMT

I'm working (slowly!) on a fairly elaborate cross stitch cushion cover - and part of the reason it's so slow is that there's a fair amount of dithering, so each color has blocks and then random confetti nearby so they can blend together. Fine. But for an added complication, the fabric is not aida cloth; it's a tightly woven cotton canvas, so when I worked out that I get 14st/in if I do three threads vertically and two horizontally, that meant I have to count threads the whole time my own self. There aren't more prominent holes where the stitches go, I mean.

So naturally at some point I miscounted something and about a dozen stitches were half a column off, which needed fixing or the stitches coming to meet them wouldn't fit. Annoying, but not devastating, because it was only about a dozen stitches. Still kind of a drag to find as close to the midpoint as possible in the offending thread, snip, pick out, redo what I could, secure the new ends (where there didn't used to be ends at all), and finally get new thread and redo the last of the stitches in the correct column.

I showed it to Himself and we had this conversation:

me: See? Isn't that better? [of course I don't expect he has the first idea what he's looking at]
him: Sure, honey.

And what's super funny about that is that I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in our relationship that he has called me by anything but my name. (This is the second time. 😆 His family of origin are not a pet-naming people.)

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poetry month

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 22:09:37 GMT

96

My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

—Emily Dickinson

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poetry month

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 23:25:04 GMT

XI

Yonder see the morning blink:
   The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
   And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
   And what's to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I've done my best
   And all's to do again.

—A.E. Housman

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poetry month

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 01:01:34 GMT

Transition

Too long and quickly have I lived to vow
The woe that stretches me shall never wane;
Too often seen the end of endless pain
To swear that peace no more shall cool my brow.

I know, I know—again the shriveled bough
Will burgeon sweetly in the gentle rain
And this hard land be quivering with grain—
I tell you only: it is Winter now.

What if I know, before the Summer goes
Where dwelt this bitter frenzy shall be rest?
What is it now, that June shall surely bring
New promise, with the swallow and the rose?
My heart is water, that it first must breast
The terrible, slow loveliness of Spring.

—Dorothy Parker

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poetry month

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:48:23 GMT

Prolog

Good-Fortune is a giddy maid,
Fickle and restless as a fawn;
She smoothes your hair; and then the jade
Kisses you quickly, and is gone.

But Madam Sorrow scorns all this,
She shows no eagerness for flitting;
But, with a long and fervent kiss,
Sits by your bed—and brings her knitting.

—Heinrich Heine (translated by Louis Untermeyer)

Das Glück ist eine leichte Dirne,
Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort;
Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirne
Und küßt dich rasch und flattert fort.

Frau Unglück hat im Gegentheile
Dich liebefest an’s Herz gedrückt;
Sie sagt, sie habe keine Eile,
Setzt sich zu dir an’s Bett und strickt.

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ISO judaica experts

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:51:48 GMT

I have one (or possibly two) letters written to (or very possibly by) my great-grandmother, who left Bialystok in 1920. The language is either Hebrew or Yiddish, neither of which I would really understand even if I could transliterate the words.

Do I know anyone who can read and translate 100yo handwritten Hebrew script if I scan it to you?

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honeymoon period + survivor guilt = ???

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 03:17:03 GMT

First week at the new job is in the books. They're all very pleasant and happy to have me there, which feels a little bit strange; nobody is giving vibes like they wanted the gig themselves or recommended someone else for it or anything, and nobody whose writing I've looked at seems to wonder who the hell I am to tell them I think they should say something differently. There's almost no obstruction to anything I ask - can I have this software, is it okay if I order those reference books, hey could I bring in a dorm fridge to put under my desk? I'm so sorry but my key fob doesn't work on the doors it's supposed to. At the old job the answer to all the questions would have been no (or at least not without a lot of rigmarole) and more than one person would have heavily implied that if my key wasn't working (when I'd just said it wasn't working) it was because of something I did. Not because the old job was a bad place to work! But not being with the government, man. It's a whole other experience. These guys want me to (a) be happy and (b) have what I need, and there isn't anything stopping them from trying to make those things happen. What a trip.

And, you know, speaking of not being with the government. UGH. I feel like someone who got a last-minute phone call that caused them to miss the RMS Titanic.

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