Weekends are restful, and other delusions

 So... I think I might be getting my sleep schedule back on track. And I'm keeping up with Duolingo, which is perhaps more of an amusement than a practicality at this point, but still worthwhile. And I managed to run a (short) D&D game for (most of) the youth D&D group, so we're getting that back on track too. And really, the weekend was calm and restful and... {snicker} restorative and.. {guffaw} relaxing...

So over here in Reality, Secondborn skipped his meds on Saturday, which makes us crazy but also means he has an appetite. He had a hearty breakfast, a good lunch, a solid dinner... and by evening, he threw up a fair amount of everything he'd eaten. Most of ended up in the toilet, at least. We got him down to bed, and he went to sleep. Firstborn, meanwhile, got his COVID booster on Friday and woke up with a 103 degree fever on Saturday morning. The home test was negative for COVID, so it was probably a reaction to the booster, but... Not. Relaxing. Still, a bit of Tylenol brought the fever down and we got him through the day and down to bed for the night as well. I even got a bit of the dishes washed.

On Sunday I woke up a bit after seven -- apparently I've hit the point in my life where I only need about seven or seven and a half hours of sleep. So I got out of bed, feeling somewhat refreshed despite the day's trials, and walked into the bathroom and found that the handle for the shower was sitting on the edge of the sink. 

All right, I thought, in a fit of laughable optimism, we can deal with that if we must. I took my morning meds, and then realized that the strange sound I was hearing was someone whimpering. 

It was Secondborn. He had a stomach ache. He had the kind of stomach ache that was acute enough to lay out him -- which is impressive, since it takes a pretty fair amount of pain for him to even notice. So I tried to get a laxative into him; he promptly threw it back up. I got some probiotic into him, and cleaned out the tub so he could climb into a bath. Beautiful Wife woke up at about that point, and gave him an enema, and he pooped out a solid sphere of poop that I swear to the gods was about the size of a softball, followed by a more poop of more regular consistency. Beautiful Wife cleaned the bathtub after that one. 

At which point he was unmedicated, unfed, and feeling much better: the perfect combination for making us all crazy. We got some more food into him, and then his meds, and finally got him settled in just in time for me to try to pick back up on the D&D game for Firstborn and his friends. 

Y'all... I am so done. I have nothing left. I'm going to drop him off at school, get to work, and try to start sorting things out again... but I'm either going to be dragging, or I'm going to be running on unbroken adrenaline. We're going to have to keep Secondborn on regular laxatives for at least the next two weeks, and we're going to have to make sure he eats. (Part of the reason we hadn't realized he was so constipated was that his ADHD meds kill his appetite, so he doesn't eat enough to have the kind of side effects that make it obvious.) Firstborn made it through Sunday with no noticeable fever, so that was almost certainly a reaction to the vaccine... but that didn't stop it from adding another set of knots to my shoulders. 

The house is a mess and I've done very little about it, if anything else comes up I don't know if I'll be able to cope, and I swear by the dark and forgotten gods that I will stab the first person who suggests that "life never gives you more than you can handle" or any other positive-thinking bullshit. This -- this weekend, the week that preceded it, all of 2022 so far, the last three years of global pandemic and related gaslighting -- has all been a lot and it's a fucking miracle that any of us are still functional. 

So if you're still doing anything, however minor or however haphazardly, just remember that you're doing good. None of us are okay right now, I don't think. And anyone who is, is probably in denial. Take care of yourselves, gentle readers; take care of each other. If the only way out is through, then the best way through is together. Keep the faith; keep staggering forward as best you can.

Booster Shot

Well, I did it. I went and got the booster shot at noon on Wednesday, knowing I'd have Thursday and Friday off to recover. And it went about exactly the way I expected: I crashed hard Wednesday night, woke up logy Thursday morning, and proceeded to spend the entire day playing Skyrim because hey, why not? I paused briefly to: 

• Run Secondborn and Beautiful Wife over to the nearby donut shop, which does really excellent sausage-and-bacon pastries as well.
• Afternoon grocery shopping run. 
• Bake a frozen pizza because I didn't eat lunch and by 4:40 or so I was starving.
• Pull the roasted potatoes out of the oven because Beautiful Wife was busy walking the dog. 

That was literally it. And honestly, aside from just being kind of dazed, the booster wasn't that bad. (And even that was probably only partly the booster's fault -- I haven't pulled a day of Nothing But Downtime like that in way too long, and I needed one.) I don't appear to be magnetic, nor do I have the power to manipulate metal with my mind. Bill Gates has not broadcast any orders into my brain. Nor am I shedding protein spikes, except in the vague sense of getting in the shower and washing off a bunch of dead skin cells along with the dirt and grime. I didn't even wake up as a gigantic cockroach. 

The whole thing was pretty anticlimactic, which is honestly about all I want out of a vaccine booster. Even my shoulder has quit being sore. 

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill some more dragons. 'Tis the season, after all.

I am tired of these people

 

 

Yeah, I'm... "having a moment" over here. We're right back where we were last year in terms of COVID-19, except that by now we should know better... but we still have several Republican governors who clearly want people to get sick, and at least one who's decided that it's more profitable politically to offer a more-expensive "cure" to sick people than it is to keep them from getting sick in the first place. 

I don't even have words for this; just rage. This is my family that these assholes are willfully endangering.

And unlike Dr Manhattan, I can't even teleport to Mars. Even more tragically, I can't teleport our governor to Mars.

I want them to face consequences; I hope they do. But I'm not holding my breath for that.

I am so tired.

I need things to stop happening.

I need things to stop happening. Like...

We had the Snowpacoplypse. 

Then we had two weeks of school and trying to get everybody back on schedule. Then we had Spring Break, in the week immediately before Daylight Savings Time starts and we lose an hour of sleep, because that's how you know your children are going to bright and alert and back on their school schedule. 

This, as Beautiful Wife reminds me, after the boys came home for Spring Break last year and never went back. Now we've come full circle. 

And just as the boys are going back to school -- online, but still -- we have their aunt and cousins in town to visit the family. The cousins are really excited to see each other, and would love to spend all their time together... but of course the boys are in school this week, which I'm sure means that the family visiting time is going to take place in the evenings, which I'm equally sure is going to mean that sensible, regular bedtimes are rapidly on their way to the place of long-lost myths and pipe-dream aspirations.*

And meanwhile, Beautiful Wife is starting into her Spring Break, and I of course am still on my regular work hours with several major projects that require my full attention, ha-ha-ha.

So I need things to stop happening. I don't mean I need everything to come to a stop. I just need several weeks -- or preferably months -- during which we can get everybody onto a regular schedule and get back into the sort of rhythm that lets us catch up and keep up with things. I need to get back to where we're managing the day-to-day things... or else I need to be able to drop the day-to-day things completely, and concentrate on steering through the chaos instead. 

Instead, we're stuck trying to do both. And as happy as I am to have the boys on Spring Break or family in town, I really wish it wasn't all happening right now. I wish this wasn't my circus, and these weren't my monkeys. But some days -- some weeks, some months, some goddam years -- are like that, and the only way out is through.

There are good things happening too. Indeed, much of this is, in various ways, a collection of Good Things. It's just taken all together, it's a lot.

* Since we are still in the middle of a goddam global pandemic, I feel compelled to note that this is not a thoughtless bit of selfish social whimsy. There are compelling reasons to have the girls and their mother visit right now, even though it means flying them in. While I haven't discussed it here on the Blog o' Doom, those reasons are yet another situation that's keeping everything chaotic for the foreseeable future. That said, it will be darkly fucking hilarious if this effort manages to get us all infected with COVID.

Year 2020 ADHD

At this point in my life, I'm pretty sure that Beautiful Wife and I both have undiagnosed (now adult) ADHD. And in reading about the various less-recognized versions and symptoms of ADHD, I'm noticing a particular theme: one way that people with ADHD hack their brains into getting things done is to stress themselves out enough to switch over from distraction to hyperfocus. And for a lot of people who use that trick, the generally high stress level of 2020 is making that harder, if not impossible. 

I read that, and I just thought: Ooof. 

I am here to tell you all that I am absolutely freaked out. Election day is in two days, the Republican Party has spent the entire election doing their best to suppress voting, throw out legitimate votes, and rig absolutely everything they can -- all the while screaming about how the Democrats are trying to steal the election. They're also busily trying rat-fuck the opposition; it's worth noting that the push that Giuliani and others are making about the Oh So Scandalous contents of Hunter Biden's laptop is actually in regards to the second of these supposed laptops to mysteriously turn up. (And at this point I feel compelled add: at least the second. I would not be surprised to learn that there were more.) The first one appeared right around the time that the impeachment hearings were starting, in the hands of a former Fox News contributor. Meanwhile the right wing is predicting all the horrible, terroristic things the Democrats are going to do if they win, while their own people are already doing them.

It also seems quite clear that Donald Trump has no intention of conceding the presidency, no matter what the voting results look like on election night. The entire Republican Party is, I expect, going to back his play; they have so far, and I can't imagine why they'd stop now. Plus, they've managed to stack the Supreme Court in such a way that if the question ever gets that far, the results are going to make Bush vs. Gore look like a well-reasoned legal decision. 

Oh, and there's a pandemic. As of last night, we've over a million deaths globally and nearly 231,000 deaths here in the United States -- a set of numbers that I strongly suspect is being undercounted, at least here in the U.S. And looking at the death toll alone is understating the cost regardless, since we already have plenty of evidence of ongoing health effects in over a third of people infected by it.

The medical impact isn't all of it, either: there's also the economic impact. I don't think it's really showing up in the news, and I'm not sure that there's any sort of widespread understanding of the full effects of it, but: a lot of people are out of work. A lot of people are facing eviction. (A lot of people have been evicted.) A lot of people are facing medical bankruptcies. Hotels and restaurants are not going to be operating at full capacity any time in the forseeable future. (I saw an ad the other day for a hotel chain... it wasn't this one, but it gave off a similar feeling of "Please come stay with us, you can social distance just by being the only person in our hotel!") Tourism has pretty much bottomed out. I strongly suspect -- though I don't have a citation for this one, or really any good evidence -- that the only reason "The Economy" hasn't crashed is that "The Economy" is measured in ways that are being artificially propped up until after the election. (Stock Market, I'm looking at you.) I'm expecting (and Dark Gods, but I'd love to be wrong about this) that by January we'll be in freefall regardless of who wins. I'm also expecting that this will be the subject of much shock and surprise on the part of politicians, pundits, and reporters... while the Disaster Capitalists who set it all up rake in the money, and the folks who still haven't recovered from the last recession or two wind up even worse off.

I'm also expecting a rise in hate crimes following the election. If you're a member of a vulnerable group (or even you're not) please have a post-election safety plan. I hope you do already. It's going to get crazier out there.

So... yeah. What was I talking about? Oh, right, stress. Life is just a teeeeeeensy bit stressful right now. And if that's interfering with your ability to operate, you aren't alone. Everybody I know is freaked the fuck out right now. The only ones who aren't seem to be the ones who are looking forward to the violence, or even pushing for some kind of new civil war. Being utterly discombobulated by all this is perfectly natural (in fact, a lot of what's getting passed around as news and rumors right now seems purpose-built to create that effect). Needing way more sleep than usual is also nothing unusual. This is not normal, and there's nothing wrong with you for noticing and reacting to that.

Me? Well, I'm planning to stay off of social media until the election is past; maybe through the end of the week and into next weekend. I may or may not be putting things up here on the Blog o' Doom; if I do, they'll likely be pieces that have nothing to do with the real world. Aside from heavy drinking (which I really can't do right now, owing to some medications I'm taking) and writing all this out (which I've just done) I can't think of any other good way to cope. You can only take so many hot baths.

Take care of yourselves; take care of each other. If you know me and you need help with something, let me know; I'll do what I can. 

If there's any hope to be found in all this, it'll be found in supporting each other. 

And for fuck's sake, VOTE. If you already voted, awesome! But also be aware that it may take more than that to get us through this. Figure out what you can do, what you're willing to do, and be ready to do it. People are -- and have been -- organizing; if you're in a position where you can be part of that, your presence is needed. 

And now that I've written all that out, maybe I can finally go to sleep.

Book Recs: Pandemic Reading

I’ve been reading things that I find cheery and uplifting lately (and recommending them to anyone who seems to need that), because that seems like something that might be surprisingly helpful.

-The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. I re-read this every once in a while, because it’s both really well written with a fascinating world and a lot of courtly intrigue, but most because it’s… well… kindness porn. It’s about a young man who suddenly finds himself in the position of Emperor, and approaches the job with wits and compassion and loyal companions.

-The Guild Codex: Spellbound series (starting with Three Mages and a Margarita) by Annette Marie. Cheery, fun urban fantasy adventures where the protagonist gets by on her wits, courage, and loyalty. It’s about a young woman who takes a bartending job, only to discover that the bar is actually a guild for people with magical powers. Word of warning on this one though: I tore straight through them from book one to book six, and book seven… isn’t out until July.

-A Pale Light In The Black by K.B. Wagers, about a team of… outer-space coastguard is the best way to describe it… working together to solve a mystery. Well-developed, varied characters solving things with skill and teamwork.

-Paladin's Grace, by T. Kingfisher, and in fact pretty much everything she's published under this pseudonym. Paladin's grace is a cozy little romance with berserker paladins and severed heads. Nine Goblins is a fun and funny short, Swordheart is excellent and made me laugh out loud several times, and now I'm neck-deep in Clockwork Boys. So check out any or all of them and see if they're to your taste.

Uh huh

Observation One: When your announcement about a phased reopening of services opens with a disclaimer that this is all Governor Abbott's fault ("The Governor’s order supersedes all local orders.") that does not exactly instill confidence in the idea that this is a carefully-considered action weighing risks and benefits, and not just a cynical ploy to sacrifice the poor and vulnerable in an attempt to avoid having to provide help and services for them.

Observation Two: Everything is awful and I want to go back to bed.

Weekdays, Revised

My sense of time is only sort of barely hanging on, and it's only managing that because of electronic calendars. (I'd read about people losing track of what year it was during major historical disasters and I always wondered how that was possible; I'm pretty sure I get it now.) So forget days of the week. I'm not using them anymore.

Instead, well, I'm using these:

Stunday
Frazzleday
Droopday
Ugh
Flubday
Sighday
Shatterday

Our new weekdays are subject to revision at any time and in any order, so if you find yourself having a Swishday when you were expecting a Droopday, well, that's just how it goes.

It Just Gets Harder

I was going to do the weekly blogging challenge this morning -- I really was -- but the topic is "your silliest pet peeves" and at this point I'm not coming up with anything. Like, I could throw out "People who think 3.5 is the better edition when DnD 5e is clearly a superior system" just to annoy one of my friends, but honestly? They appeal to different kinds of play. Who cares? Or I could go with "People who insist that Trump is somehow competent and not stultifyingly corrupt," but at this point that feels less like a pet peeve and more like an existential crisis. So... yeah, no good topics there for me.

We're on, I don't know, maybe 2,547 years of lockdown now -- or at least it feels that way. And it's wearing us down. It seems like every morning it's harder to get my family out of bed (including myself, honestly), harder to get out the door, harder to get the boys down for bed in the evening. Monday night, the dog got ahold of the last little bit of Secondborn's chocolate bar and promptly devoured it; then Beautiful Wife decided to sleep on he couch so she could cuddle with the dog. Somewhere in small hours of the morning, she rolled over and put her foot out, very likely smacking Crotchstomper McSnuggles in his already-sore-from-eating-chocolate stomach, and he bit her foot: not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to bruise and really, really hurt. Then she spent the day trying to get Secondborn to do at some work (any work) on his schoolwork, while I spent the day in the office dealing with a chaotic cascade of incoming issues. I really need to go finish the thing I was trying to work on yesterday (and finally got to look at for maybe twenty minutes at four o'clock in the afternoon) but I can't seem to focus and I'm not sure I care.

The boys aren't getting anywhere near enough exercise; neither is the dog. I have eaten more bacon in the past few weeks than is currently legal under the Texas Blue Laws (so please don't tell the authorities). And, of course, I'm watching various elements of our government try to navigate the pandemic using the only tools they seem to have: a combination of denial, dishonesty, and homicidal, kleptomaniacal greed. We've already had a lot of completely avoidable deaths, and we're going to have more; I will not be at all surprised when we see other countries closing their borders to us. (Canada already sort of has.)

And it just goes on. The best case scenario that I'm seeing (in the things I'm reading) is that we loosen the Stay At Home restriction is a couple of weeks, enough to keep the economy from collapsing. (Beautiful Wife: "That ship has sailed.") Then we see a rise in cases, and a few weeks after that we go back to a tighter lockdown. Wash, Rinse, Repeat... at least until we have a workable vaccine, a very effective and widely available treatment, or evidence that we've built up enough herd immunity for the worst of the threat to be past us. And the timeline on that -- assuming we get wildly lucky and develop a vaccine that works brilliantly and gets fast-tracked through testing and can be put into widespread production immediately after -- is another fourteen months.

This. For another fourteen months.

Well, I say that. The actual Best Case scenario is that the government steps up and provides some degree of Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare, at least for the duration of the pandemic. But I'm pretty sure that won't happen, because we have too many politicians and too many oligarchs who are absolutely fucking terrified that people will realize that yes, we can absolutely do that. They'd rather let people die. They'd much, much rather let a whole lot of people die. Over in Georgia, Governor Kemp is moving to "reopen" a whole lot of business (and an awful lot are precisely the kinds of businesses where it's not going to be possible to maintain social distancing). He is, at least, getting some pushback, but one of the things I've seen pointed out is that the move probably isn't motivated by a desire to get the economy going again; people are still going to stay home, and a lot of business will actively lose money by trying to have paid staff available when customers aren't coming in the door. No, it's probably an underhanded attempt to cut off unemployment benefits; if people aren't going into work/looking for work just because, y'know, there's a highly contagious and life-threatening plague on, well... that's on them, right? We're not paying unemployment if the jobs are there and available. The Texas Lieutenant Governor is back on his "Some people are just going to have to die to get our economy going," kick and I'm absolutely baffled as to why there isn't a row of guillotines in the street in front of his house. You know damned well he's not going to be the one nobly laying down his life for the greater good. Perfectly happy to sacrifice other people, though.

I had hoped that writing this out would make me feel a little better, but it hasn't. I'm angry, I'm disgusted, and I'm sad. I still think we'll pull through this -- though I think it's going get even more horrible before it gets any better at all -- but if I'm wrong, well... as a species, we'll have brought our extinction on ourselves.

Yeah, I'm not thinking happy thoughts right now.

One More Note on the Soft Apocalypse

I do have to say that Crotchstomper McSnuggles (our half-Doberman, half-who-knows-what) is living his best doggy life since nearly all of his people are home nearly all of the time.

Still trying to find a rhythm

First up: No new scenes for Dark Armor today, no new scenes for Into The Black tomorrow. It's just not going to happen.

So we're... trying to keep everything going, but it's hard. Beautiful Wife and I are both still employed, at least, but that's hard too in its own way. (Though admittedly, a lot less hard than not being employed would be.) The boys are doing their schooling at home, which makes it hard for Beautiful Wife to get her work done -- Firstborn has pretty well organized himself and is getting his work done independently, but Secondborn still needs to be prodded and monitored. I'm not sure what I can do to help with that; I'm still going into work, but having me work from home (even on the limited basis that I'd be allowed to do so) really just makes our house more crowded, which hurts more than it helps. And, of course, it's hard to stay focused what with the sense of impending doom hanging over everything and the federal (and state, to a somewhat lesser extent) government's absolute clusterfuck of botched responses and counterproductive messaging. Even my own workplace (municipal government) which I normally think of as fairly sensible and proactive seems to be making financial and economic decisions when it needs to be making medical and humanitarian decisions instead. And trying to be on a regular schedule at work is all sort of detached and surreal; I would have missed a meeting yesterday if somebody hadn't skyped me a "You're late, are you coming?" reminder... either because I'd lost track of the fact that it was Wednesday, or I'd lost track of the fact that we have this meeting every Wednesday, or maybe just because I'd lost track of the fact that I'm me and therefore supposed to attend.

We're doing what we can to stay sane. I'm running the Firstborn-and-friends DnD game on Saturdays and a Saltmarsh campaign for some of my friends on Tuesdays, and playing in a Curse of Strahd campaign on Saturday nights and (starting tonight) (I hope) an old-school Vampire: The Masquerade campaign. This is good for my emotional health, but it's not helping me be productive on my writing projects since I'm putting those energies into creating new characters and getting a feel for them instead. Beautiful Wife is experimenting with online movie nights and just talking on the phone a lot. But all that requires new arrangements, and a different rhythm for our weeknights.

We're doing all right, I think. I'm sure we're doing a lot better than a lot of people, and I feel a little self-conscious about pointing out that despite that, it still sucks. But I'm going to bring dinner home with me tonight (and I cooked dinner for everyone the last two nights - yay me!) so that Beautiful Wife doesn't have to worry about that; and I'm going to try to put away some laundry; and then I'm going to try to play Vampire: The Masquerade.

We do what we can.

How are the rest of you holding up, gentle readers?

The Golf Course? Really?

I do not understand why we seem to think that keeping the firk ding blast golf course open should be any kind of priority right now.

Normally, sure. We have an award-winning golf course? Good look! Applause! Bragging rights!

We're determined to keep it open during a pandemic? Maybe... and I don't want to go too far out on a limb here... maybe not such a good look.

Some progress, at least

Credit where it's due: this week my workplace finally closed off our offices from the public and moved all public-facing interactions to a larger meeting room where we could set up sensibly-spaced stations that can handle citizen interactions (bill payments, permits, etc.) while still maintaining social distancing. It means that a lot of us still have to come into work, but it's one hell of a lot better than it was.

Conversations have gotten louder, as we're generally half-shouting at each other from six feet away, but what the hell; when I recommend a good book for reading during the pandemic, I don't care who else hears it. They should read it too, if they want to.

We have had at least one confirmed case among our workforce, and naturally that took away several of their co-workers as well. I haven't heard whether any of the co-workers were actually infected, but they're in self-quarantine -- and this is in a department which generally has a pretty high turnover rate anyway, so they're now notably short-staffed. This has led us to cut back on some services, because we don't really have a lot of choice.

(Citizen response to this has been a mix of "We appreciate what you do" and "if you're cutting service back to half, are you going to cut our bills in half to match?" with a strong emphasis on the latter. There's also been a small contingent of "So if I want to help out by taking care of this one thing myself, is there a facility open to deal with it?" Which, in fact, there is. People never fail to fascinate me.)

I'm beginning to think that the people who did the early hoarding were mostly premature (not to mention that they immediately created the same problem that they were trying to avoid for themselves and/or profit from). I think that as the pandemic progresses, we're going to see it placing more and more strain on systems that seem at first glance as though they should be unaffected. (Maybe not always a bad thing...?) If I had to guess, I'd say it's going to be another week and a half to three weeks before we start seeing genuine issues in our supply chains.

I hope I'm wrong about that -- we've got enough issues with the disease itself, the strain on our already-under-equipped healthcare system, lack of federal leadership, massive unemployment, and having the economy on hold in a way that's going to utterly destroy untold numbers of businesses. But I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't worried.

It seems like the only way forward is through, and the only way through is by pulling together (albeit at a safe distance). Take care of your own, and do what you can for others. That’s my plan, and I’m sticking to it.

Music: Don't Forget

Secondborn made me go find this. Apparently it's from something Undertale-adjacent called Delta Rune. I think the song itself is only about thirty or forty seconds, but it repeats (at least here):


I'm noticing that I'm blogging less regularly here at the end of civilization, but I feel like that's really just where we all are right now: doing our best in weird, unexpected, stressful, difficult circumstances. I don't know what else to do about it. Every time I start to feel rested, something new comes along and knocks me off my balance, and all I can do is sort of try to ride the wave and hope this all settles at some point.

Hope y'all are having better luck with the This Is Just Stupid parts of this than I am.

Putting the Social in Social Distancing

I got on a Google Hangouts call with some nearby friends last night. They're mostly people I play DnD with, but they also know my wife so I went up to get the boys started on bedtime I put her in front of my computer in my place. It was... therapeutic. She went from vaguely depressed to positively fucking vivacious in about two minutes flat, and was having such a good time that when I was ready to get back on I just rejoined with my phone from another room.

Social contact is important, is what I'm saying here. And the Internet gives us some basically unprecedented ways of doing that. So if you have any way to take advantage of it, do it! Play games with your friends. Get on a video link and chat where you can see each other's faces. Put the Social back in Social Distancing!