Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Arthur and Kevin's Nellorat's LiveJournal:

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Friday, May 25th, 2012
12:38 pm	Glad to Be of Help Last night, womzilla came home from work late and tired, in a bad mood, and required to log in from home & do more testing as soon as his computer rebooted. So I decided to help him pass that time in a way that might cheer him up. Later that night, he said, "Ironically, that is the only part of my day that didn't suck in the bad way." Mood: still a minx (3 Comments |Comment on this)
12:27 pm	Some Unusual TV Before and after my root-canal procedure, I watched a lot of TV. Some of it was unusual in its own nature, while some was not what you might guess I'd watch. Say Yes to the Dress (TLC). I often hit on this when channel-flipping, and for some unknown reason I find the show hypnotic. Also, it seems that the network sometimes schedules show after show in hours-long blocks, so inertial watching is heightened. Why should I care whether a bride finds her perfect "Southern chic" wedding gown, an uncooperative bridesmaid can be convinced, or a bride and her mother can agree on tea-length vs. long skirts? I have no idea. The gowns are usually pretty, and the show just slides down like whipped cream. Fatal Attractions (Animal Planet, via Netflix). It's a bad idea to keep crocodiles, cobras, tigers, wolves, or chimps as pets. Who would ever have imagined?!? Womzilla said that Animals Gone Wild should be called Humans Gone Stupid, and that fits here, with at least one owner per episode ending up maimed, killed, and/or partially eaten. The show blends OMG CUTE footage of cuddly lions with OMG NO! footage of how such relationships can turn out. Also, the show does give insights into why people in general & these people in particular would think their choices could possibly be safe. Further insights from the show: it's not wise to start feeding wild bears, but if you do, it's probably worse to just stop. Black Mirror (an international production shown on the UK's Channel 4, DVD out in 2012): A short (three episode) series of hour-long near-future dramas that reflect and satirize current social trends. Somehow Womzilla heard about it and downloaded the first episode--appropriate, as it concerns the power of Internet communications. Someone uploads to YouTube a video showing that s/he has kidnapped the much-loved princess, and her ransom is that the prime minister must be seen on international TV having sex with a pig. And how does Twitter respond? The events unfold kind-of as you would expect and kind-of not, very well done. Naturally, Womzilla and I have the other two episodes downloaded to watch. Mood: more cheerful (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 24th, 2012
11:47 am	Annoyances: Health I like to think that I've already used up much of my next month's allotted health annoyances. The big thing was, of course, the need for root-canal surgery. I thank you all for your encouragement! In fact, as tiger_spot said can happen, the pain before the procedure was much worse than the pain all-but-immediately after. Of course, that's not saying much! I even cancelled work Saturday and Sunday; I apparently sounded as miserable as I felt, given how quickly the academy agreed. I have never had such pain! Even Tylenol 3 (with codeine) only moderated it. Efforts to get the procedure on Saturday or at least get stronger anti-pain meds were in vain. I just slept as much as I could, watched Netflix (next best thing) when I couldn't actually sleep, and counted the hours until 1:00 p.m. Monday. I did make a big mistake in not keeping up the meds right after the procedure. The local anaesthetics wore off all at once, and the result was excruciating, presumably in part from the big-ass needles that delivered the local. Yet by 7:00 a.m. Tuesday, I felt renewed! dreamshark was right that overall it's not as bad as a deep, deep filling. However, I still had two problems. I was completely constipated from the codeine, and I was having independent hearing problems and discomfort in my ears due to ear wax. Sparing the messy details, I'll just say that I cured the constipation but with a boomerang effect that lasted all night. Yesterday, a trip to the GP took care of the ears. My right ear still feels a bit weird--that could be from the pressure of being stopped up for days, muscle tension or nerve stuff from being on the side of the face with the bad tooth--but the body always takes a while to heal completely. Oh, and I let myself eat yogurt and pudding when I could only slurp down food, so of course I got my period. The discomfort wasn't horrible, though; actually, that was the least annoying thing going on. I also was getting dizzy when I stood up (positional hypotension), maybe from dehydration when it hurt to drink even lukewarm liquids. My blood sugar was OK when I tested it, but it could have been high when I didn't (during the worst three days of dental pain, I just was full-up with being bothered). Anyway, it's better and I'm drinking a lot of fluids now. On the positive side, the guys were great at coddling me, supergee running out for and even fixing food I could eat, womzilla bringing me the rats for vitamin R treatment, and both putting up with my being a bitch. Status: better, trying to get back to active (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
9:23 pm	Oh Poop! Went to the dentist's today because of pain around my lower jaw. On Monday I get to find out whether I find a root canal procedure to be as bad as its iconic status indicates. In the meantime, the weather is great and plants have arrived, but the pain makes me feel lazy and highly unmotivated. And three days of teaching at the academy start tomorrow. Status: At least I still have the best rats & husbands! (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
1:33 am	Feh, Money So, we just decided that we can afford the airfare for me to accompany womzilla to Minneapolis in June, after two weeks that have been more lucrative for me at the academy, and now I don't have work until Friday. But forget about it. I'm just not worrying. In fact, that response seems to just be broken now. It'll work out. Both guys encourage me in this response. Status: stayed up late finishing a book; off to bed (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
11:16 pm	Pleasant Mother's Day As is usual for weekends, today was a big work day, so I was paid to spread knowledge among the younger generation but then be able to give them back to their real parents. I came out about our menage a rie to one student and just talked about literature with another. Nice. Then TV at home, with the five friendly ratsies on my lap, first the two Pale, Plump, Pink-eyed Princesses (Tifa and Robin) and Eduardo, then the two blonde hoodies (Mihawk and Bloo). Koko and Prissy, the decorative rats, chose to honor me by staying in their cages and looking cute. And a $50 bonus from work, which the academy head showed me, saying, "Mother's Day" and "Cake." womzilla's new position at work includes business trips to Minneapolis; he's going in June, and if we can get my airfare, I may go with him, just to hang out and see people. I'll put the $50 in my metaphorical piggy bank. Mood: cheerful, generally gardening addicted (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 27th, 2012
10:09 pm	Spring Gardening For the past five days, I've been pretty obsessed with cleaning up beds and putting in the many plants I ordered. They began to arrive when I wasn't feeling so well,* then I had a lot of work at the academy, and then it rained. I was in a very bad mood for a while, so it's just as well I didn't write here. But I'm much better now. On craigslist I found someone to do the mulching after I had done the more enjoyable work--a very nice guy who used to work for a landscaper. I hope that will keep the weeds down while the plants fill in. I also re-did a large path between beds, using the decayed mulch to dig into some beds, after which the Mulchinator refilled it with fresh pine-bark nuggets. The lilacs are blooming; the front and back yards each have one, and the flowers smell different, both great. Most of the azaleas are blooming; grape hyacinths are just finishing, and the wood hyacinths are just starting. Some ground cover is blooming--including a little-known fave of mine, mazus reptans--though I can't wait for flowers more amenable to cutting for vases. Oh, also lots of bleeding hearts, white and the standard pink. While I mostly ignored the yard for the past two years, the bleeding hearts self-seeded like a teen who just discovered masturbation. I pulled a couple from one bed I just couldn't see them in--otherwise, all yellow/red/orange day lilies--as they don't transplant well, but otherwise, I love where they've shown up. Along the retaining wall, in a very long bed that had gone to volunteers and weeds since the wall was fixed a couple of years ago, I planted bushes, including a fragrant azalea, a weigela, a pieris japonica, and two hardy hybiscus. Status: tired, off to bed * A cold, probably from going short on sleep, and some discomfort during a period from eating too much cheese. Oh cheese, why do you have to be so bad for me and the cows, yet taste so good? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2012
9:35 pm	Diggin' in the Dirt When enegim was telling us about the spa in Vermont she was about to go to, a place that has a focus on walking and circuit-training workouts, I said, "I'd have to be tricked into that much exercise." I was thinking of maybe badminton, or some other sport that made the time sail by. Now I realize I have the perfect way to trick myself, although I have done almost shockingly little of it for the past two years: gardening! It's not aerobic, but I can work up a real sweat, especially digging out deep-rooted weeds (Die, wild grapes, die!), sawing off branches, and so on. My stamina is definitely increasing, and I can also carry more, such as bags of mulch, with less effort. And motivating, even enticing? Today I got up at 7:30 a.m. so I could garden for an hour and still be at work at 11:30. Tomorrow I'll get up just a bit later, so I can get in an hour or two before it's too hot, and then I'll see if the evening is tolerable. My one nemesis is indeed heat. I've always been very sensitive to it, and the extent to which I'm well insulated only makes it worse. Over the past two springs, one time it seemed the weather went from too cold to too hot almost overnight, and the other I was horribly busy during the best gardening time. I just never got a good start. Now I hope to have every bed cleaned out, planted, and mulched before 90 degree days become too common. My gardenable space, by the way, is huge, although our yard isn't particularly big. When I was under-employed for years (in hours as well as money), I took out more and more lawn, and a good deal of the yard was already in beds down a somewhat steep hill. For instance, the whole parkway between the sidewalk and the street, grass when we moved in, is now a continuum of three beds: a rose garden, a bed with lilies and day lilies (in yellow, orange, red), and one of mixed perennials (in pink, blue, purple, white). Then there's a big herb garden on the other side of the sidewalk, giving way to perennials and ground cover around a bird bath, then a spirea bush. And so on. I always thank God for perennials, and some beds are doing very well. In others I have to replace almost everything, partly due to normal attrition over three winters but also due to lack of water and abundance of competition from weeds. I have ordered plants from four different places & am impatiently awaiting their arrival. (Ironically, the orders do not include impatiens; I'll pick up annuals at a local garden shop, along with any more perennials I need, after I have the others planted.) Much of the property is shady, so I don't really have a vegetable bed. I do have a cherry tomato plant in a pot, and I'll put in strawberries & three dwarf blueberry plants. (The plants are dwarf, 24" across, not the blueberries.) We also have a pear tree, and I hope to not just let the fruit go to the wasps this year. But I just adore flowers, anyway: smelling them on the evening breeze, seeing them in beds, cutting bouquets for in the house and to give to others. My rule is that I cut one out of three blooms, so the yard still looks good. Right now daffodils, bleeding hearts, primroses, Virginia bluebells, and yellow lamium are blooming, with columbines just starting. My bleeding hearts self-seeded, as did a columbine--feral plants, the one kind of good weed besides a dug-out-and-dead weed. As you may be able to tell, gardening really improves my mood, too. Really quite amazingly, I think. Or is the amazing thing that I didn't do much of it for so long? Status: off to bed soon (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
10:58 am	Busy Bee Other than the health issues I mention in the previous entry, all has been delightful--in fact, so good that once again I start feeling I don't deserve this much happiness and fortune, or that it will go away now. I just view those feelings as symptoms, and in a perverse way a good sign. Thanks to HandymanTom and HousekeeperDelia, our habitat just gets better and better. HT is painting the hallways, upstairs and down. We chose a very pale champagne for the walls, a medium somewhat-reddish brown for doors, and a darker somewhat-reddish brown for the woodwork around doors &c. The effect is very nice! Today HD and I will clean all the knick-knacks and display boxes to ready them for HT to put back up. Next we start on the rooms that will require moving furniture (including book cases) out of the way. Feh. But HT will help with the moving stuff as well as the painting/wallpapering, and it probably won't be until June. Because now, for me, it's gardening MADNESS. I've done little in the yard the past two years, but thank God for perennials. Actually, not so obsessive as in past years, because I just can't garden hearty for more than a couple of hours at a time--though my stamina may build. It's nice to be out, gently exercising, seeing the neighbors, the scents of flowers and herbs around me. I love that our neighborhood has, instead of svelte young people jogging, a number of older people out walking for health. Many of whom compliment me on the garden. It's a nice kind of fellowship, not intrusive, but just a sense of community as they say hello and walk on. I'm also working on writing: a piece about Peter Straub's A Dark Matter for the program book of ReaderCon, at which Peter is GoH. It will be not so academic as most of my work, an unresearched thought-piece by me; this could be intimidating, but the book itself is wonderfully rich with things I want to say. And I have a lot of work recently, with each week pretty much someone's spring break this time of year. Today is my day off; but I've still been able to garden in the morning or evening, especially if I get up early. LJ friends, I finally feel as though I have all the things in life that I want most, or that I am at least working towards them. It's an amazing feelings, scary and delightful at once. I also feel suffused with gratitude, including for y'all. Status: off to yoga (1 Comment |Comment on this)
10:39 am	No, Sir, I Don't Like It! Arthwrongus No, Sir, nothing right about it. Between Arthrotec (a great NSAID that doesn't cause stomach upset/pain) and yoga, my knee and shoulder arthritis are pretty much under control, but now I definitely have hip arthritis. Probably my default position as I garden is exacerbating it, and I haven't been able to go to yoga as often as I'd like, so there's hope it can get better. But it's also possible that pain when I walk or even lean my weight on one side, especially first thing in the morning, is just the new normal. The only good thing is that, knowing what it is & that walking is actually good rather than damaging, I am surprisingly able to just keep going. (Of course, youngersib, with lupus for years, is a paragon and inspiration to me in this.) Infection Somehow, I got an abscess and cellulitis right below the nail of my left big toe. It was uncomfortable, but even more worrisome. The good news is that it has responded wonderfully to antibiotics. I find the concept of losing my nail particularly disgusting, so I'm glad that didn't happen. The doctor congratulated me on how well my husband and I got the pus out of the abscess; I said we have had a lot of practice with our rats. The rats said they had too much sympathy to laugh at the role reversal of my being the squeezee. The doctor also aid the infection was not at all due to circulation issues, so that's good. Mood: busy, perky (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, March 30th, 2012
12:51 pm	Persevering with Writing A regular production schedule for writing is definitely the next big thing I'm working on in my life. In some aspects of life, such as eating very healthfully, I slip in and out of good habits, but I have enough groundwork done to just get back on the horse. Some aspects of my life need more work but definitely not immediately. For instance, I want to reclaim the dining room from mountains of my work papers, and we need to do more repainting and floor refinishing, but actually the house is very functional and the housekeeper prevents inertial regression. Gardening is a priority for spring, but not as high a one. It's 100% clear that writing in an ongoing sense, instead of a deadline-generated spurt, involves dealing with a lot of emotional barriers and feeling my work isn't good enough. It's kind of amazing that I got this far without dealing with all that, but deadlines did put me into an "anything is better than nothing" head space that just avoided all those issues. My goal for this spring is to take papers I presented at conferences, sometimes years past, and send them out for publication. I suspect they might not need as much revision as I thought, that those feelings might have been counter-productive perfectionism. At any rate, it's nice to start with material that is already basically there and which went over well in person. Also, I'm in correspondence with ReaderCon about having some of my writing about Peter Straub in their souvenir book, as Peter is the GoH. We'll see if they choose one of the two pieces I showed them, or if they want me to write something new, probably on The Dark Matter/The Skylark. And a friend from the ICFA will help me by vetting my book proposal about Peter's fiction, a favor I find both emotionally and practically priceless. We're discussing publishers, and I'm wondering whether I should do another book first & then a Twayne American author book. Of course, getting past presentations published will help the reception of any book proposal. For the last ICFA paper I got into post-modernist and feminist theory more than I'd expected, so I ordered books by Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray, who seemed from secondary sources to be very useful in what I was doing. I often say I don't write post-modern but I can read it, including Judith Butler; and Slavoj Zizek's writing turned out to be unexpectedly cogent and enjoyable, so I'm actually eager. Now I'm reading a book to review for the JFA, a study of fiction by Tabitha King, Owen King, and Joe Hill. We really need such a book, but so far this is not the book we need. *sigh* I'd almost forgotten how much longer it takes me to read a badly-written book than to read one that is well written. Also must make lesson plans re Kipling's Jungle Book stories for today at the academy. Mood: like the weather, sunny but with a bit of (a) cold (1 Comment |Comment on this)
12:30 pm	Back to Somewhat-like-Normal Since last entry, 1) The bathrooms are both finished, and we only have a few decorations to hang in the blue bathroom, 2) I wrote my paper for the ICFA, 3) We three went to the ICFA and had a marvelous time, 4) I came home with a voice-threatening, mucus-laden cold, and 5) After three days off, I'm back at work and feeling better. I'm also very much still working on regular writing, which I'll make a different entry. Mood: catching up (Comment on this)
12:26 pm	Men! I try to avoid blaming a whole gender, and in fact this struck me as so significant because supergee and womzilla do not do this. They know better. But anyway, I told Handyman Tom that, as I reported last entry, we'd have to go for a custom-made shower door, because I'd spent two hours online, my online-shopping skillz are very good, and nothing ready-made would work. He said he'd look into it, by which I thought he meant find a place he could work with and tell us our various options. The next day, I asked him if he had found anything. "Too much," he said. Then, in almost my exact words from that LJ entry (which on a lark I had printed out for him to read), he says that any wide enough were too tall, and any tall enough were too narrow, and we'd have to go custom. I resisted tearing him a new one (for which we aren't nearly intimate enough) and satisfied myself with just flatly saying "I told you that" a few times. At least we're not paying him by the hour. Mood: chatty (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 15th, 2012
2:09 pm	Spilt Milk, or, the Case of the Shower Door The bathrooms progress well, but now a new issue. It's like the time we had our gutters replaced, the old ones were pure copper, and we just let the gutter guys take the old ones away. A long while ago, we broke the glass in one of our shower doors; being unhandy and totally unaware of how difficult finding a replacement would be, we threw out the frame, deciding to just buy an entire new door. Now, we want a replacement, for Handyman Tom to install. Well, our shower is an oblique tub, hence an odd width; regular shower doors for with tubs are far too wide, and regular full-length shower doors are far too tall. After spending two hours online, to the best of my l33t online-shopping skillz, I have thrown in the (bath) towel, and we'll have to go for custom. And our old doors had this nice design element that perhaps cannot be duplicated now. Certainly not in our price range. Handyman Tom kept saying how nice the old one looked. Stop! You're killing me! I know! At least he'll do the legwork to get the custom door. In our menage a rie, though, we have a touchstone to keep such wasted money in perspective. Once back in Durham, our toilet ran nonstop for over six weeks. We knew it was somewhat wasteful, but we didn't get it fixed until after we got a $600 water bill. Now, at least we can always say, "Well, it's not as useless and annoying as a $600 water bill for an ever-flushing toilet." I'm sure we all have out $600 water bills. We can only live and learn. The hard way. Status: stinky because unable to shower until late tomorrow afternoon (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
8:20 pm	Weird Dream Guy One night last week, I had a very elaborate SF dream in which I was the girlfriend of a mad scientist, a gene splicer who made various bizarre creatures. At one point, I held an ugly creature, and he was showing me diagrams of animals whose genes he'd used, but none of them seemed responsible for the characteristic I had mentioned, a spiky exoskeleton; he got to a kind of crab, and I said, "Yes, that's it." At one point he handed me a big and dangerous-looking animal, which licked me. I wasn't afraid, because I knew the guy wouldn't hurt me. He never was that conventionally attractive, but then he started experimenting on himself. I still loved him and stayed with him through many of his changes. He used the word "biopathic" to mean wanting sex with a normal human in a usual human way. At oen point, he said, "I'm very changed, but I'm still biopathic." Then he had really gone beyond a normal body. There was this very clear visual of his face surrounded by almost steampunkish levers and valves that were neededto keep coherence to his face. Then he said, "I'm no longer biopathic, but you're still my friend. My only friend." I felt very sad for him, even though he had done it to himself; he was frightening to others, but not to me. Finally, he said that he had let loose a creature that would ruin the biosphere, but he handed me a plane ticket, which he said would take me somewhere safe. I was waking up then, and I wondered what place could really be safe in that case. The Antarctic? Would I want to live there? I'm sure watching the TV show Surface, which I recommend, was one influence. The paper I'm writing for the ICFA, dealing with monsters that deliquesce (such as in Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder"), was another. But the weirdest and most frightening thing is that in a dream the next night, a common oen about being at an sf con and trying to find supergee and womzilla, the guy showed up! He was still pretty human, and he was just sitting near a group of people I thought might include Womzilla. I have had recurrent dreams, but I have never had a character from one dream invade another. Also, putting on my feminist's cap, I wonder if I would dream I was the mad scientist, instead of that I was his girlfriend, if I were male. And would that be more or less creepy? In another universe, I might have made a very good mad scientist. Status: about an hour behind schedule in terms of what I want to get done today (Comment on this)
1:22 pm	Filthy Lucre, Good News We've been very lucky, and the money situation is looking better. womzilla's yearly bonus, as I said in another entry, was banked and is being used to redecorate parts of the house that really need it, as we've lived here twenty years. supergee won't go on Medicare for a while (I think 18 months), but he found out he can get full Social Security now, perhaps with a lump-sum back payout. This is consonant with both his keeping COBRA until he gets full Medicare and continuing to do copy-editing. In fact, he may get some Medicare benefits, some kind of hospitalization, starting now. My work has increased: in fact, it's back up to the academy pressuring me into more work than I want! Today and tomorrow are my two days off, but yesterday I was asked if I could come in to teach "just for three hours" and still have this count as one of the two days off I asked for. Um, no. I did turn it down, although I did--& in fact still do--feel guilty and worry about students being given to someone else more wimpy flexible. But as Supergee said when I told him I felt guilty, "They want you to." Now that I'm doing more teaching of literature and writing--to help them with regular classes and for enrichment--as well as SAT and ACT prep, I think enough work will come in. Imagine--I could possibly have a fulfilling job and a life outside it. Can such things be? The job does have its downsides--including working almost entirely on evenings, weekends, and holidays--but I do love it. I know no one in any of our three families is ever going to go hungry or lack a place to live, and I am grateful for that, deeply grateful. Still it would be nice to have the luxuries we want and still be able to put more away for the future than just Womzilla's 401k. These improvements may or may not make that possible, but once we finish the divorce and Supergee goes totally on Medicare, with me on Womzilla's health insurance, the money not being paid for health insurance will probably take us there. I'm not sure we can go back to giving as much to charity without my over-working at the academy again, but maybe even that! Then I'd be totally happy, financially. Mood: upbeat but sweaty, in keeping with the weather (1 Comment |Comment on this)
1:03 pm	Habitat Renewal, or, The Amazing Archeological Bathroom Soon--perhaps even by this evening--we will have our two bathrooms redecorated! I actually liked the wallpaper and paint, but the wallpaper was put on over earlier wallpaper and had begun to curl off in a way even supergee noticed. In the blue bathroom, there were only a couple of layers, but in the green bathroom, the Handyman discovered at least four layers of wallpaper and one of paint! Last night, the walls looked like a fascinating archeological dig, a time machine revealing the past in layers. We were going to wait until after the ICFA, but Handyman called saying he had some time and asking if we wanted to get started. Actually, unlike the floor refinishing, his work is both quiet and non-odorous (the floor sealant was choke-a-rific), so it's working OK. We like him--and his helper, an amazingly tall guy studying Criminal Justice at a nearby community college--and it will be nice to have one person we can call to do many of the Dad tasks around the house that we three lack the knowledge, time, or physical stamina to do. I found him on craigslist, which has been very, very good to me. He was originally an IT guy and is very intelligent; in this economy, after he lost his job, he decided to use skills he gained from helping his father fix up houses. We've banked womzilla's yearly bonus just to use on redecorating the house, which we've had for twenty years, in hopes that these changes will last for another twenty. The main limit now, actually, is all the stuff we have to move out of each room to re-do walls or floors. Exactly why the hall floor and stairs got done first, and the bathrooms next. And why, although the living room hardwood floor really needs sanding and resealing, we may next refurbish Supergee's study, with less stuff to move and more room to move it into, including the living room. However, my longer-term plans are to switch from indoor redecorating to gardening after the ICFA, returning to indoor plans when it gets too hot for me to enjoy gardening during the afternoons. Mood: chipper (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 12th, 2012
2:33 pm	Writing; or, the Elephant in the Room When it comes to LJ in the past six months, the absent presence, like the elephant in the room that no one talks about, has been my writing for publication. That also has been one reason why I sometimes don't write here. As I turned to the encyclopedia articles I had due, I had to face that I was putting more blocks in my own way than just working long hours. I just wrote a letter to Peter Straub, in which I addressed this issue, and I decided to print that part here (I'll even fix more typos for you guys): Finally, since my personal fortunes this way affect you, I thought I'd tell you the good and bad about how my writing is going. The bottom line is that I'll probably accomplish some things before the next ICFA that I really was determined to do before this one--mainly finally send out many conference papers for publication and work on a book about your writings--but I'm making progress. This past year the economy affected the academy where I teach, and I finally went from more work than I often like to not enough work. That's swinging up again now, which is good. However, I finally had time to write, so I had to face how many problems I had around it. I actually think that I mostly wrote in a semi-fugue state, in which worries about not being good enough, and almost all the usual blocks to writing, were just shoved away by the looming deadline. For the past six months or so I've worked on integrating writing into my everyday life, and I've been making progress. Work is still a huge competitor, but I do think it's manageable as I wrestle with these other issues. (And that wrestling has included a few argument as I've growled at the guys over my need to be uninterrupted, which is changing the household rhythm in some ways, but they endorse my goal and they're great guys.) It's about as hard and slow as working on healthy eating, harder than working on keeping a tidy and organized house, but probably easier than working on exercise (which I still do with YogaJane but still don't on my own). So someone wants to do a book on you, and it's held up by her own neurosis. Well, at least I'm making foundational progress. Anyway, now you know. Mood: mellow (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 8th, 2012
12:50 pm	More re Adam; Study Rats, Desk Rats, Living Room Rats I'm still feeling bad about the death of our rat Adam. Not sad bad but guilty bad. I even have a better way to reframe my thoughts, but turning to that perspective isn't working yet. The fact is that I don't pay enough attention to rats in my study. I like saying hello to them and having them greet me, but I'm pretty much always concentrating on something after sitting down and can't look after free-ranging a rat. I think this used not to be true; I'd do more casual reading in my study. Now I read on the subway, and my main relaxation time is with TV in the living room. Past study rats, such as Dr. Butch or Rufus, got tame enough to sit on my desk as I typed. I'd love to have another desk rat, but recently I just don't get rats in my study that tame. As a result, I wasted a lot of Adam's potential. When we finally moved him into the living room, he quickly learned to sit on my lap during TV, even becoming a rodentist, and then unlearned that-- He could have been one of my best rats EVAR! Instead, too quickly, he had to go into the hospital cage in Womzilla's study, and I didn't pay enough attention to him there. I'm trying to reframe this to see that while all this is true, it was my loss, not his. Overall, I'm much better at accepting my loss and moving on than I am when I feel guilty about some loss or upset I caused someone else. And while I can too-vividly imagine human-centered happiness Adam lost out on, I have to drop my own perspective--because really,in rat-centered terms his life was fine, not only compared to a sub-optimal life but as a fulfilled, outstanding life, the kind we want to give our rats. The cage was spacious enough for three sedentary boys; they cuddled together,and he always had a secure place in the hierarchy; most of all, I saw no signs of frustrated desire to investigate outside-cage realms, as actually many rats do show. I think maybe the same adaptability that made him a great pet when I did dote on him also meant that he was happy when I didn't. That is, unlike most rats, who want extra-cage stimulation and human company or just don't want them, maybe he was happy both ways. One good thing out of my feeling guilty about Adam is that the Imaginary Boys are definitely going into the living room. They're only 3 months old (teenagers!), so they need to be on special food, for growing rats, for three more months. The rescue said we need to, and the Imaginary Boys are indeed are among the sleekest, most muscular, and overall healthiest-seeming rats we've ever had. However, I'd been thinking in terms of living room=the cage with the adult rats, who definitely do not need food for growth. Yesterday, as I fretted about the past, I realized that for three months we can have the boys in the living room in their Martin's cage. I have long intended to get rid of one of the microwave carts in my study anyway, so the cage can stand on that, in front of or to the side of the big cage. It would help the girls get used to the boys' scent, and we probably could even have girls and boys out to play together, both easing the transition when the boys do go in the big cage. Then the Critter Nation will again be a Seraglio--in this case, a five-female harem and two eunuchs--which it hasn't been for a while. (Adam was not neutered, OK because all the girls are spayed. No intact king in our castle now!) I just now realized that some piles on chairs in the living room can even go on the lower shelves of the microwave cart. Magazines and such. The eunuch boys say they are very eager to join us to see Game of Thrones, which they hear has struggles for dominance just like rats do & features one character who's been neutered to boot! Mood: a bit rushed, overall not really unhappy (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
9:48 am	Nostalgia Police, a/k/a, Catchy, Homoerotic, Scary While discussing what to name our two new ratboys, I discovered that something I had thought a part of general nostalgia is actually limited to those who came of age in the Chicago area. Because the new ratgirl was named Cocoa, when I thought of names to go along with hers, I came up with Hardrock and Joe. When I mentioned it to womzilla on the phone, this choice drew a complete, almost audible, blank. It turns out that this black-and-white, stop-motion Christmas song video, about Hardrock, Coco, and Joe, was shown on WGN in Chicago, but not nationally. To today's licentious sensibilities, it fits the other title of this entry. Not only is it "a story so queer," but Joe serves no purpose on the sled except that Santa "loves him so." And then pulls Joe into the sled by his candy cane. The song should have mentioned Santa's "heavy sack," though, not "pack." Santa looks pretty scary, though he's actually the closest I've ever seen to someone who might be indigenous to the North Pole. I'd assumed the short piece was made by the same people as the Rudolph shows & likewise shown across the nation. The animation, instead, is both amazingly crude and amazingly effective. I'm sure that this was shown on Garfield Goose, along with the segments of "Journey to the Beginning of Time," a childhood favorite that I finally tracked down on VHS one or two Chistmasses ago & made a present of to myself. Mood: intrigued (5 Comments |Comment on this)