Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

I Continue to Shrink

Gary noticed it last week. “What shoes are you wearing? You’re short now.”

Confirmed at the doctor’s office: I’m down another half inch. After years of 5 foot 8, I went to 5 7 a few years ago and now I’m 5 feet 6.5 inches.

I also have a bone density test coming up now. I can’t imagine how I could have weak bones: I’ve never broken one, my favorite drink as a child was milk, my labs have me over the top of the recommended range for vitamin D, and I am right in the middle for calcium. 

What I can’t get over is that I am now literally less of myself. Very disheartening.

Rewriting the Novel: Halfway Begun

Well, I looked at my outline and I’ve hit the midpoint, and I counted the words, and I’m at 30,000. Thirty thousand very very poor words, but exactly half of what’s expected. 

It’s almost all dialogue that could be pared down to make room for pithy descriptions. 

I think I’ll be hard-pressed later  to find the right number of words for the second half, given that in parts the outline truly says “Something happens here.” Maybe this is where that inspiration thing kicks in.

This Is Why We Don’t Use ‘One’

I visited the Wikipedia pronouns page because we’ve hired some Southerners  which stemmed a work discussion about “you all” filling in as the second person pronoun, with “all y’all” meaning a specific number of “you all”.

Pronouns are just a mess. We’ve given up the fight on “his or hers” and went with “theirs” (or rewrite).

Seriously, One The Pronoun? I’ve always explained that you don’t punctuate the passive pronoun it as “it’s” because you wouldn’t write, “The man trained the dog to put it’s paw in hi’s hand.” And now you give me one’s as the possessive pronoun.

And on top of that it isn’t Oneself? Or Onesself? It’s onself? Really?

Of course, I’m using Wikipedia as a reliable source. That’s my problem. Of course, I have too many books to find my Chicago Manual of Style.

Basement

Well, even after we got the drainage fixed, the puddle in the basement welled up on the New Year’s Day ice storm, but it was an ice storm, and there’s expansion and blockages that go with it, so I let it slide.I just cursed a lot.

The ice storm cursing was nothing compared to the cursing last week. I read in the paper that parts of the St. Louis metro area were flooding because there was so much rain and no place for the water to go. Our puddle hadn’t show up for three months, so I decided to go down to my dry basement and feel smug. 

Puddle. Epic cross-basement puddle. Usual corner puddle combined with stair landing leak trickling all the way to the drain.

Before the drainage work, we’d have a puddle every time it rained. Now it has to be a newsworthy event to prompt a puddle. I need to remember that that’s still an improvement, and no one in this neighborhood of rabbit warrens and river clay has a totally dry basement.

The smartest thing I could do is rearrange the basement so my art area is no longer on the border of the puddle so I don’t even look at it (on the now rare occasions it makes an appearance). But that would require more electrical outlets in the basement, and the moving of light sources. I did suggest we put Gary’s drum kit in the wet corner, just to see his reaction, which was very satisfying.

So, a puddle every season is better than a puddle every week, and at least the puddle is contained. And at least there IS a basement, given the current tornado season. Time to mop it out of my mind.

———— one day passes

Only ... that was yesterday. There’s a puddle again, and frankly, it barely rained. Time to rearrange the basement. Or to put in a new back porch. Or to meditate every time it rains.

When the Abnormal Feels Normal

I was driving with Gary, returning from the only other stop on our bubble path, when I said, “Hey, do you want to go out to dinner? We haven’t gone out to dinner in ages.”

And then I remembered, there’s a reason we haven’t gone out to dinner, there’s a global pandemic, hello.

So strange that I’ve become so used to the pandemic that I’ve forgotten there’s a pandemic.

Rewriting the Novel: the Drudgery

Okay, I just had my narrator speculate what a very petite woman might look like pregnant, and it was something about how she would be baby from her crotch to her chin and there would be a baby arm sticking out of her nose. 

This is because I am bored. I have a draft of all the exciting scenes: the fistfights and oil finds, and now I’m writing scenes about people thumbing through the Sears 1930 fall-winter catalog.  it has to stay, because she arcs away from convention and rules and the Sears winter catalog scene is key.

Still, it’s boring. Sadly, my way is to finish things when they go south and then immediately start again, instead of abandoning: the yellow and red hell-foyer, most but not all paintings (I did abandon the peonies before the bologna peonies). 

But it is tedious. 

I Have Personally Contributed to Half of the 100k Views

This video has just the right proportion of weird and funny for me. It makes me laugh every time.

 

Vacation Plans

Last year I took no vacation days until summer, and it became very inconvenient to have vacations and deadlines at the same time. 

How will I fill these days? Write, paint, play the guitar, I suppose. Or, put another way: fail, fail, and fail. I do like to fail, but intermittently. A week of it might be discouraging. 

I’ve got lots of yardwork, of course, and I need to get out an old worn suit jacket and some iron-in embroidery letters to make it read “These pants fit a year ago.” But other than that I have nothing to fill my time.

 

Unbumped Bullets!

• Wednesday evening at 5 pm I checked my email, and there was an invitation from the county to schedule a time for my vaccine! I’d been resigned that I would need to wait until next Monday.
  • I don’t know what category I was in. I had read that we immune-suppressed were being pushed to the end for our own protection, because no one knew how we’d react. So I suppose the organ donors on immunosuppressants were in the earlier phase as guinea pigs?  Who knows, who cares, who is going to argue? I picked the earliest appointment: Thursday at 2:45 pm.
• It was a long stretch between Wednesday at 5 to Thursday at 2:45. I stayed up late, too excited for sleep, doing research, deciding what to wear, and planning how I would dupe my  body so no fluids etc. would inconvenience me. Essentially, I stopped eating and drinking after breakfast, and it was supremely successful.
• Gary went to the same venue on Monday for his second shot and had a three hour wait, so I planned for that. Then - an encouraging sign - a local Facebook friend posted she’d just been through the line at the place I was headed and it was terrific. “In and out.”
• I arrived at the gate at 2:42. A man in a military uniform checked the form they’d sent me to fill out before the appointment. Six officers belonging to what I assumed was the National Guard waved me to my parking spot.
• I was expecting a line of people inside. Nope. Just empty switchbacks populated by more uniforms than civilians. There were three people in front of me who were moving very fast. I wove through that line like it was Six Flags during a tornado watch. I just handed my form to various people and never broke stride from the trot the three people in front had established. I even commented to the last officer that I couldn’t keep up. He put me in the last seat in a “lane” of seats. I turned my head and a woman with a needle was rolling up to me. Swabbed me, grabbed my fat, gave me a shot. No pinch or anything. 
• I asked her what had changed between Monday and today, because this was remarkable, and she said “I wasn’t here Monday,” which I took to mean “That was the problem with Monday.” It was 2:53, 11 minutes after I drove into the lot.
• Then I began the longest stretch, the fifteen minute wait. My vaccinator turned to the man on the other side of the aisle, jabbed him, and he clutched his arm and began screaming dramatically, clearly to get a laugh. I shared my vaccinator with the man across the aisle and that was it. One vaccinator per pair. Ten vaccinators per aisle. Unreal. 
• I looked on the other side and saw a man in camo, and another man in camo with “Air Force” stitched on a label above his pocket, and I realized I have no idea what the National Guard looks like. They could have activated the Air Force, I don’t know.
• I asked them how they had turned things around so dramatically since Monday, and he said, a little cryptically, that Mistakes were Made, and they had been ironed out. Then he said, “Steam-pressed out.” I took that to mean things might be a little too efficient.
• The timer rang and the lane to my left was free to go, and after they walked out every chair was sanitized. Then it was my lane’s time to go. I was out of there in twenty six minutes. With the venue fifteen minutes from home I was home in less than an hour. 
• I got the Pfizer vaccine, so a three week wait for the next one, and then two more weeks to be sure, and I can relax a little. Still wear a mask, though, so I don’t unknowingly breathe in a bug and breathe it out on someone unprotected. 
• I did not get a superhero bandage like Gary and some others I know, but I will let that slide. I guess the military doesn’t supply Batman band-aids. Small price to pay.
  
  

 

Gary’s Continuing Fight Against the Apnea, Part II

Ok, so when Gary finally accepts he’s got to wear a mask for the apnea, there will be another problem.

The pulmonologist the PA recommended was Dr S______, the anti-hospice pulmonologist who made Mom’s last day even worse, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

At first I gave it a hard nope. Not that guy. Then I realized the man’s big crime was he was focused on patching up Mom’s deteriorating lungs. Not his fault Mom picked him to run her hospice without researching his views first. I want a doctor who is committed to Gary’s lungs.

But then, I remember, he said he didn’t read the correspondence or file or whatever he got that says, “Congratulations, you’ve been chosen to be a hospice doctor!” Big oversight.

So, Dr. S______ is the type of doctor you want if you are committed to living. I won’t have to see him. Or we could always ask for a different referral. I have other friends on breathing devices, certainly they have doctors. I need to find that out so there’s an option I can suggest if I can’t get past the history.

AARP Old

In the current issue of AARP magazine (no, really, it’s useful), there’s an article about a woman who was unprepared when her husband died and she had to deal with the finances.

Gary and I share the money chores, so that won’t happen to us. Instead, Gary will have no idea how to maintain the garden and I will be lost with equipment that doesn’t plug directly into the wall outlet. 

Depending on who goes first, either Gary will have to take a class called “Weed Identification for Widowers” or I will just have to hire someone from Best Buy to connect the router to the laptop to the TiVo to the receiver to the splitter with the Xbox and the DVD player.

If there’s a community college course on that I’ll be glad to take it. I remember Mom enrolled in a course on stocks to maintain Dad’s portfolio, which she did, though I don’t think she made any actual trades in the twenty years she lived on after he died. 

 

I Am Obsessed

You can’t just have extra soap and not use it.

Extra soap

Pro tip: use a water-pik to clean your skulls.

Okay. Now I’m done.

Doing the Bump

Last December I was in vaccine phase 1B, but then in January I got bumped to 1C after they invented 1C.

Then in February I realized I forgot to get an organ transplant. If I took the same immune-suppressant drugs because of an organ transplant, I would move up in line. I suppose organ transplant donees start with a normal immune system that is cut in half, while my auto-immune gave me a 110% immune system. So that mine, cut in half, is still better than theirs. 

So in early March, I registered with another site that asked me if I was immunocompromised due to an organ transplant, and then asked later if I was immunocompromised for some other reason, and I thought, cool, I might bump up now. Nope, they put me in Phase 2. Another bump down. Luckily they asked if I was in the financial services field: I think that’s the only thing saving me from Phase 3.

Last night I heard that one local vaccine venue had lines stretching from one major highway to another.

Today I woke up to the news that starting on April 9, three weeks from now, everyone in Missouri is eligible for a shot, and my phase, Phase 2, starts March 29. I mean I’m happy for us all, but also sad to realize how much I wanted to social-climb my way up through our new vaccine class system.

Slow Movie

A Room With a View was released a few years after we were married. By the time we got our new VCR attached to the TV, it was too late for the tea-steeping pace of a Merchant Ivory movie, and I fell asleep before the end. 

Since then it has been thirty-six years. A baby born during the premiere would have a) made a mess in the theater and b) grown to be a post-menopausal woman who could still not stay awake during this movie.

I have tried. I try to watch it every decade or so. Usually I find it when it’s toward the start and the only thing happening is bees buzzing in a field FOR FIVE SOLID MINUTES, or so it seems. 

So, the TiVo said, “You are sleeping in regularly now, and you seem to enjoy this bustles and crumpets bullshit, so how about this,” and it recorded it as a suggestion. We have played this game before, where a movie sits in my suggestions long enough for me to say, “No, Sophie’s Choice, no, On the Basis of Sex, no, I have never watched you and it appears I am not going to watch you this time.”

This time though, I am taking a new approach. I am ingesting A Room with a View in twenty minute capsules. I get my dose of Helena Bonham Carter every few days, but only twenty minutes of her, no more. I’ve done this for a few days, and she just got kissed in a field. (It’s been so long since that movie was made that it depicts a non-consensual field kiss.)

I could be wrong, they might be lulling me in to a stupor so the drama has more impact, but I doubt there’s going to be a frantic gondola ride at the climax.

Ultimate Brains

The green brains arrived. And they were white. I contacted the seller and he sent out what I requested, pink brains (I went back to pink).

But really, shouldn’t I carve down the soap so it fits inside the skull? Then label the skull “Soap” in some nice lettering?

Next I have to find a better way to hang the metal face. It has to go next to its twin, and that’s hard.

I feel like after my death they’ll discover this bathroom and hail me as one of those obsessed folk artists who turn their homes into UFOs or airplanes. 

Food as Entertainment

I think all American office workers are in the same boat: we all gained our Covid 19 pounds because we ate and drank our feelings, and now even our business casual clothes don’t fit.

I hope one of my money managers is throwing my my retirement savings into stretchy business suit stock. 

I have dropped five pounds from my peak, and I’d just dropped down to my first set of non-extra large pants in decades the night before we got the call to shelter in place. Luckily, all my pre-pandemic clothes are still in a box in the basement, so I am covered. 

I do occasionally visit my closet, all the way on the other side of the house from my pile of pajamas and two modest Zoom shirts, and I look at my old clothes. There’s a green jacket I bought that I wore one time and I am certain it will not fit. 

And my god, the shoes. I’ve only worn my dress three-inch heels once in the last year. Will I be able to walk in heels? I might have to practice.

There’s a very depressing day ahead in all our futures, the day before we start work again when we find we have nothing to wear and we can’t walk in heels. I really think if there were ever a time for TeddyJ to allow us to come to work in trash bags and bathrobes, this is it.

Rewriting the Novel: Things I Can’t Say

Now that the novel is in first person, I notice how modern my language is. 

It’s set in 1930, so I can’t have my narrator say modern things. I just had to cull “split-second” from a sentence (I used “instantly” instead).

I’m questioning “orbit”.  I could just say circle. But I like orbit.

Questions like this are why it takes me half an hour to write a paragraph. 

The Nemesis Interrupts a Very Emotional Scene

There’s a little more detail on the front, but Mom’s Storage Unit recently intruded into a very emotional scene in For All Mankind.

Odd, none of my friends had a storage unit. You’d think they were everywhere the way they dress a scene.

Sunrise vs Sunset

I’m always flummoxed by the surveys that ask: “Which do you prefer, sunrise or sunset?” How is this even a question? I’ve never seen a spectaular sunrise, though I’ve seen them over Haleakala and the Grand Canyon. I see spectacular sunsets on the regular.

This past year I’ve been in my kitchen at sunrise every morning, and I make a point of finding out when sunrise is, and it is routinely a disappointment . Sky gets lighter. Yawn. No amazing colors breaking through clouds. 

Until yesterday.

I realize now that my sunrise view is blocked by houses and trees, and it has to be a high sweeping sunrise for me to see it.

It did occur to me that I might get a better view of the sunrise if I look out the windows on the opposite side of the house.

Masking Flavors

I recently joined in to a Facebook conversation all about how we like our fast food. Do you get pickles on your cheeseburger, wasabi with your sushi, what do you get a pizzeria, etc. 

There was a definite trend to my answers. Cheeseburgers plain. Sushi plain. No extras. No mustard, ever. Because I still believe that mustard is a way to mask the taste of slightly-spoiled meat. Same with wasabi. If my meat or sushi is off I want to know. And why eat a  bite of cheeseburger if all you’re going to taste is pickle? I want it to taste like a cheese and burger, that’s complicated enough.

This rule only applies to condiments and vegetation. Spices are fine. (Well, except for when I doubled down on the cinnamon in my last batch of butter chicken after halving the garam masala and tomatoes. It was ... cinnamon yogurt chicken?)

So I’ll give you spices, especially garlic and onion, it seems like they help kill any growing bacteria. But condiments are right out. Blergh.

Of course, the big exception is coffee. Doctor that up so it doesn’t taste like coffee at all, please. 

What are your views? Do you like catsup with a hint of burger?

Much Better Brains

Oh these brains are so much better than the other set.

But are they perfect? Maybe, or maybe not. What about the same brains in green? Already on order.

The Little Things

These things have pleased me lately because I anticipate a bad situation, and then find it has not happened. 

• I open the garage door, expecting a cold dark garage, and find it is a cold illuminated garage, because we always keep the lights on in the garage for this very reason. Somehow even after thirty years I still think the garage will be dark, just like after a year of quarantine I still think every work meeting will be in person.
• I open the dishwasher, expecting a ten minute chore with pots and sorting all the silverware, and Gary has compulsively run the dishwasher with, and this is true, three forks, one spoon, two coffee mugs and a bowl.

I know both of these things are very wasteful for the environment, but the burst of joy I get is worthwhile, and as I have said, we have more than made up for it by 1) never using plastic baby diapers and 2) never washing cloth baby diapers.

Sad Little Brains

Well, I have very poor visual-spatial perception (I think that’s evident from the paintings) and the brain soap I bought is just too small for the mini-skull.

Larger brain soap is on order, though. 

Wee Addition to the Medical Bathroom

I have made the bathroom into my own 25 year art project. You saw the addition of the epithelial cells chart. 

I thought, I just need one more thing. A speculum.

I did find this festive rainbow speculum ...

... but I checked the dimensions and given the shelf it’s going on, it’s just too big. (But we can say that about all specula, can we not?)

But, if you look at the left side of the shelf below, there is tiny speculum on a stand.

It’s a wee speculum key chain, literally off the chain. 

And look, it even opens if you need to do a Pap smear on, say, a squirrel.

Maybe that’s too big for a squirrel. 

Bring me a lady raccoon, then.

Basement Life Hack or Bad Idea?

It’s been hard painting in the basement now that the weather is below twenty degrees. I’ve got a space heater (it’s okay, it’s not a fire-setting space heater) and it just isn’t doing the job (probably because it’s not a fire-setting space heater).

Back upstairs, I got in to bed the other night and plugged in my heating pad to heat my feet, which were oddly cold, and thought, wouldn’t it be neat if they had full body sized heating pads? I eventually realized they do and they are called electric blankets.

I am unfamiliar with electric blankets: they were not used in our house when I was growing up (too new-fangled and suspect). I certainly don’t want to be bundled up in an electric blanket post-menopause, but it occurred to me I could lay an electric blanket under my chair in the basement and it would be like radiant flooring. Toasty on the feet, and then the heat would rise. And the basement hasn’t flooded lately (even though there were some torrential rains) so no danger of shorting everything.

I am certain there is some reason this is a bad idea. Do people do this? Use an electric blanket for a heated floor? Is that a bad plan?

Buffer

My brother said one of his physical therapists had recommended using a car buffer on his back for his pain. 

It sounds odd, but it seems this Ryobi buffer is just the ticket for any big muscle pain. It’s heated and the oscillation gives a good massage.

Dave raved about it so much that I got one too.

Somehow he has a setup where he can jam it between some couch cushions and get relief, but I needed to have Gary cooperate. (“Buff me, baby.”)

Lessons learned: next time take off the denim shirt pre-buff. That little sheepskin thing at the bottom is blue now.  (I thought the shirt might be shinier after, but it is not.)

It really did melt all the back and shoulder pain away, but sadly, replaced it with a massive headache. Don’t know if that’s going to happen every time.

New Decor

Friend #2 was out and about in The World, and spied something she thought I might like.

She sent me a photo, and I mulled it over, and called the store the next time they were open. 

I made the actual purchase over the phone, and only had to step two paces in to the store, point at the rolled up item, and back out. I didn’t even breathe.

And now the medical bathroom contains that chart on the back wall of the tub:

Of course that meant the rest had to be rearranged.

I’m tickled the three dimensional man gets to look at his twin. We’ve still got some display space by the ceiling.

 

Amazon Delivery

Usually this is how Amazon deliveries are at my house:

1. Someone gets a soda or a snack and passes the front door on the way.
2. That someone looks out the front door window.
3. If there is a box on the porch, that someone shrieks “TREEEEATS!” and gets to open the box as the other person watches. 
4. The person who ordered the treat gets to play with the treat first.

It’s almost always Gary who has ordered the treat, and usually it isn’t a treat for me, so my role in this dance is to do steps 1-3. 

It’s such a habit now that I do it even when Gary’s not around. The other day I peeked out the window and saw no treats, but I did see an Amazon van parked on the street.

When I the driver started up our driveway I opened the door, reached out just my right arm and just made grabby “gimme” hand gestures. 

It made the driver, laugh, anyway, and afterward I did compulsively say “treeeeats” quietly just to myself.

Earplugs

I’ve had awful sleep lately.

One night there were animals rattling around in our attic (or possibly on the roof), chittering loudly enough to wake me.

The next night Gary was the animal rattling around. He can’t get comfortable, so he switches positions in bed, and then he hurls himself in the bedroom chair, and thrashes and sighs, and last night it woke me up all the way across the hall.

I stomped into his room and sighed “JESUS” in a very non-reverential way.

Evidently, when he repositions himself he still maintains all his REMs, because he sounded like he was taking in his sleep when he answered, “...earplugssszzzzzz.”

As it turned out, I had an entire box of earplugs I forgot I bought on Amazon Prime day, and they worked perfectly. They worked so well I forgot about them until this morning, when I was momentarily alarmed when a neon green cone of foam sprang out of my ear into my coffee.

 

Rewriting the Novel: Exhilaration

Well, evidently writing is quite easy if you schedule it into your day. I find I get quite a bit of writing done if I start at 11:00 pm and then write to ... well, let’s see, it’s FOUR A.M. NOW.

Some people say you shouldn’t write for a certain length of time, but aim instead at a certain number of words, say 300 (about one page). That’s crazy. I just wrote for five hours and I have three pages. 

This is not going to be sustainable, but it is quite exhilarating. 

 

Rewriting the Novel: I Have Had to Buy 100 More Tiny Magnets

Is this progress?

I find I have had great success writing crabbed notes on scraps of index cards, though. The notes mean I don’t need to write things chronologically, which is a chore.

It’s good to have two ways to be productive. On left-brain days I outline, or right-brain days I write.  I don’t even see how people could sit down and start writing, without sketching it in first. That would be like painting a painting, and painting the bottom left corner in full detail and leaving the rest blank. Just .... how could you even do it? 

I’m slewing crap on the page with a broad brush. And all I write is the dialog - that way I don’t have to deal with tapping in to the narrator’s emotional pain. That’s later. I think what I’ll have at the end of this is a plot synopsis, all in dialog. Sadly, I’ll already have to gut it, because I have written 20k awkward words now, and that puts me at half the words for the age I want. 

Then a round later for description, and another for making the dialog distinctive, and then characterization, then reaction and emotion, then a vital one for subtlety, to de-telenovela, and then each one again, and then again one last time. 

I wonder if it’s like painting in that the last twenty minutes , when you do the details, is the most fun, when it comes alive. I hope the book isn’t like the block peonies, in which I plan and do the easy stuff and then give up when it gets hard and is ugly.

NOVA DNA

A few months back I used ancestry.com to accuse my 6th great-grandfather of incest. I based that on the doubling-down of DNA and some iffy generational numbers. “How can my 5th great-grandmother bear my 5th-great grandfather? Oooooohhh.” 

This week I watched a NOVA episode on DNA that explained that it’s a range of DNA matches that determines a generation, and each range can overlap with the next range. So five generations back might be 32-43 matches, and six generations back might be 41-52 matches, and 42 matches might fall in either generation. Plus, the DNA analysis only goes back five generations, so that woman was outside of the DNA analysis anyway. 

The NOVA episode also mentioned that when Ancestry.com checked my BRCA breast cancer genes, they only checked the three most common BRCA gene anomalies out of thousands.

Still, it was an interesting episode of NOVA,. I am ashamed to say I don’t always find NOVA fascinating anymore. Back in the 70s I loved it. The best episode was about Washoe the signing chimp. When I see the chimps at the zoo I always sign “BABY IN MY DRINK” in solidarity.

A visit to Wikipedia reveals that what I actually loved was a BBC show called Horizons, repackaged and re-dubbed for an American audience.  

I have to admit that I conflate episodes of NOVA, Frontline, and American Experience. I have to take a moment to analyze the narrator voice I remember. Sonorous male voice? Frontline. Confidential soft female voice? American Experience. And, based on the most recent episode, NOVA is narrated by a chipper young woman. Encouraging for the girls today who need to get into the STEM field, but it doesn’t match with my ‘70s NOVA memories.

Bumped!

The Missouri rules had Gary and I in phase 1B:

Only now, the rules have been released for my specific county, and Gary and I have both been bumped from Phase 1B to Phase 1C.

If I did not admire first responders and the elderly I might be resentful.

Glasses

Earlier this week I was having trouble reading my work laptop. I adjusted the lighting, changed the font size, it still seemed small and blurry and dark.

That problem lasted from Monday through Tuesday. The work laptop was not a problem on  Wednesday,  but then, Wednesday I was on vacation.

Thursday morning I was getting ready to have a zoom meeting and noticed I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I finally found them in a room I hadn’t been in since the previous weekend. 

It would seem my glasses are so out of sync with my petrifying eyeballs that the glasses don’t correct either my near- or far-sightedness. I just blurringly wander around in my long day’s journey into night, and I only notice the problem when I’m between near and far-sight: on my work laptop. Happily, I can look forward to Gary’s current state - eyeballs that have warped so much that my vision improves for a while.

I could also get new lenses, but then I would have to leave the house and stick my face into that eye-measuring device. That thing has too many nooks and crannies, how could they effectively clean it? I’ll just wander around in a fog, fine with me.

Eyebrows

So, as I said yesterday, I’m feeling a little insecure about my appearance lately. That’s why I was delighted that Amazon chose today to deliver a device that will up my eyebrow game: an eyebrow template.

I have great trouble making my eyebrows symmetrical. I know how they’re supposed to look, and the best I can hope for is for each eyebrow and to look good on its own — but they don’t look like each other. I’ll have a round eyebrow on one side and an angular eyebrow on the other,  or Vice versa.

I narrowed down my Amazon choices to two eyebrow devices:

1. Vaguely gynecological adjustable steampunk eyebrow machine:

2. Plastic strap-on templates:

Both translations were equally bad, but “Step 5: Enjoy your beauty” made me laugh, plus I knew there was a chance that I wouldn’t adjust both sides of the eyebrow speculum the same, and I’d just be where I was when I started.

So here I am, and after reviewing all the templates, most of which expected me to have eyebrows growing up into my hairline, evidently I am a Seagull. It says Seagull Eyebrow right in the middle.

One thing I hadn’t considered, all these devices assume you have eyebrow hairs in generally the same area on both sides of your face. This thing made it obvious that one side of my face has now slid down a good quarter inch lower than the other, and if I wanted eyebrows at the same latitude I would either need to shave one off entirely and draw it in, or go crooked. Sigh.

I would not have vertical symmetry, but I could still aim for horizontal symmetry.

Not too bad. A seagull banking for a curve. Left face says “Really?” and Right face says  “why so judge-y, Left face?”

Mail

I should not shudder when I get my junk mail.

The Vanguard fund is the oldest and most respectable of the index funds. It was the first, so it came by the name Vanguard legitimately.

But after I watched The Vow and Seduced, I’m a little skeeved out seeing that name. I wonder if the Vanguard people are annoyed — or if they even know — that a sex cult leader went about calling himself Vanguard. (As if he was the first sex cult leader. Please.)

(I bet they know. I bet some Vanguard executive has HBO and has been in a fetal position for the last few months.)

More Work on the House

Do you have a basement? Is it leaking? Yet? 

Well, when you get leaks, you have two approaches.

1. Patch the walls, dig up the cement, put in a French drain, and try to relieve the hydrostatic pressure ... this adds up to a large investment. And then, do what the wall-patchers say is your last option: fix your lawn drainage issues for another large investment.
2. Skip the patching and go directly to fixing the drainage issues in the yard. It is an awful amount of money, but supposedly afterward your basement won’t whine and bubble up from underneath when there’s a bad storm. 

We have taken path 1, and I wish we had taken path 2. But here we are. Massive trenches are being dug and garden beds are being razed. Thankfully the great stone wall is not a problem.

At least the trench diggers are suffering too. I found myself listening to snippets of their conversations.

”No, we need just another foot. Can you get another foot?” (They did.)

“Bug spray. Do we have bug spray?” (I don’t know why they would need this. It’s December. Did they find an underground cicada community?)

”That bush needs to come out.” (Great! I hate that bush. But yet, it did not come out. I think the trench is being truncated in favor of taking out the bush.)

They suggested it might be done in a day and a half, now they’re revising that to be three days. I might have to stop working at home so I can eavesdrop all the time. 

Electoral College

And this is why I voted in person. The President is now harping that mail-in votes are “illegal” and should be thrown out only in the states where he lost. 

He didn’t lose in Missouri, of course, a state as red as the blood of a deer machined-gunned to death by a beet farmer if the deer had hemochromatosis. Trump won by 56% in Missouri. He won by 57% in my particular county (sunburned deer with hemochromatosis). 

Gary said this would happen — pressure on the electoral college — and I thought he was being paranoid. The big concern now is that either Trump will lean on syncophant politicians and win via lawsuit, or else he’ll be a martyr and win in four years. 

Rewriting the Novel: Resolution

I wrote the first chapter and now I am obediently following the Internet instructions on How To Write a Novel, and they tell me that I am to write the resolution early on. You need to know how your character ends up, and that way you know to start at the opposite end of the spectrum in the beginning, and then you have a spot to aim for and you can pace things correctly.

And damn, it got hard. The resolution has her making a hard and selfish choice, and I don’t like it. First of all, there’s a lot of emotion, and it sounds like a telenovela. Ugh. And I don’t love that  she gets to this point, and that’s sad. I know Jane Eyre got there, too, deciding for self-interest against convention. (It’s not “Jane, guess what, Bertha’s dead,” three times on the wind.) 

Worse, it’s transparently the same choice I would make if I were given the chance to be a fictional person. All the things she says and reasons she gives have been hidden in my mind at some time. Then again, if anyone asks, I can say it was the same decision my mother had to make. That’ll work. Throw my dead mother under the bus.

Well, it’s a first draft, and because she makes a hard decision I can always change it. But it’s not fun. Up until now it’s been a fun challenge, fitting the exposition together with minimal words like a cunning Haiku. Now I have to drag my Mom character through hell.

This is therapeutic , I remind myself.

Outage

Last week the cable company cut the cord on me for several hours. It was inconvenient, of course, given that I was working at the time. The only work I could do was attend meetings on the cell phone. I had no internet, no tv signal, no dial tone, and no Alexa.

And so, these vital questions went un-answered:

Google search: “Where are my kidneys?” 
That question went unanswered because even with a bathroom full of medical imagery, I could not find exactly where my kidneys are. I know generally where they are, but I needed to be more precise. (they  are exactly below were I seem to have pulled my back on one side.)

Alexa question: “Alexa, how long to cook chicken thighs?” And “How many tablespoons of juice are in one lemon?
I decided to swap lunch and dinner prep to use this new free time most efficiently, and dinner was Butter Chicken.

What surprised me was  I have a room full of books, and it never occurred to me to go in there and open a book, old style, and look for either answer. I just decided I wouldn’t know until later.  If I forgot this skill, what will happen with Kids Today, who may have never learned it?