Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

Or more accurately, getting old friends to offer their $.02 because my head's in a muddle.

THE JOB

I have a new job... yay?  It's more money and it's a growth field, so that's good... but having gone as far as I can in tech writing, I've busted myself all the way down to a starter in compliance.  And after 25 years as a tech writer, I'm wondering if I'm capable of doing something else.

Furthermore, it's a short term contract.  Ordinarily I avoid those like the plague, but I've been given the name of two different contracts we can be moved to when this one ends (if this one ends; the last time I was on a contract with a solid end date, that date got pushed off for over two years.)

So.  That's a thing.  I start March 16 (because it's an internal move within my company and you have to start at the beginning of a new pay period.  March 1 is too early and April 1 is too late, so....)

Frankly, I'm scared.  I'm doing it, but I'm scared.

And then there's...

THE CAT

Gytha is nearly 14 years old now; old enough that her arrival was heralded on my LJ.  I think she's gone senile; I know she's gone profoundly deaf.  She still grooms (rather badly), eats (far more clumsily than she used to), drinks, and even played a little. 

But she rarely jumps and has taken to circling us like a little shark, having forgotten not to walk near human ankles.  If you pick her up she purrs and kneads... but most of the time we find out she's there when we accidentally kick her while we walk.  I had to shut her in the bathroom for a little bit yesterday to keep her from breaking my neck on the basement stairs while I did laundry.

She won't take arthritis medicine; she's not interested in the pill pockets and just pilling her was an ordeal for everyone involved. 

But the worst is that she no longer sleeps out somewhere soft in the sun.  She's taken to sleeping underneath one of the book cases.  This keeps her from being attacked in her sleep by Watson and Sherlock, who are complete shits to her, but...

When is it time?  What indicator shows that she is truly tipping into suffering?
 

Books Read: Fiction

• The Kitchen Front, Jennifer Ryan (book club pick)
• First Impressions, Charlie Lovett (book club pick)
• Keeper of Enchanted Rooms, Charlie Holmberg

Books Read: Nonfiction

•  Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen's England, Brenda Cox (ongoing read)

Substack/Tumblr Book Clubs:

• Letters from Watson
• Jekyll & Hyde Weekly
• Frankenstein Weekly

Fanfic Read:

• Into the Deep by WorseOmens (Good Omens siren AU)
• From the Deep by WorseOmens (Good Omens siren AU)

Fanfic Written:

• The Ghost of Husbands Past (Good Omens human AU) (Hallmark noir) (Nea's first longfic!)

Craft Projects:

•  Stashbuster quilt: 17 blocks of 450 (it's a 15 x 15 grid, so I hope to sew at least 15 blocks a week)

Classes Attended

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Other:

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When last I seriously posted, it was 2018, I had gotten my life in gear, Twitter was a fascinating social media, and "Pandemic" was a game.

Do I need to say "Shit happened?"

In 2019, I became disabled. ( It's gross )

In 2020... well, we all know. 

But it hasn't all been shit.  Pandemic savings meant I could afford to put a badly-needed new air conditioning system in my house. I bought a new car this summer (Toyota RAV4 hybrid. It's name is Vincent Crowley because it's a beast that goes too fast.)

And now... well, twitter is now a Nazi bar, and I find myself overwhelmed and surrounded by clutter, so one of the things I'm going to be re-instituting is the Sunday morning "Where am I and what am I up to?" reckoning.

With no further ado:

Read this week: The Kitchen Front, Jennifer Ryan (book club pick)

Reading right now: Into the Deep by WorseOmens (Good Omens siren AU)

Writing: The Ghost of Husbands Past (Good Omens human AU) (Hallmark noir) (Nea's first longfic!)

Current craft project: Gathering and prepping fabric and swap squares for Scrappy Quilt Your Way at the MidAtlantic Quilt Festival

We all tell ourselves that someday, some day, some mythical day in the future when...
... school is over
... the moving boxes are all unpacked
... the debt is paid
... the decluttering is done
... the big whatever is finished

Then - and only THEN - is when you’re free. Free to read all those books. Free to do that frivolous project. Free to learn that useless but interesting-looking skill. Free to do that thing - you know *that* thing - that you were going to FINALLY do... someday.

Those who’ve followed me on Live Journal and then Dreamwidth know what a long, strange trip it’s been for me. Thousands of dollars of debt to pay off. Seemingly unending methods of decluttering and reorganizing. House renovations done piecemeal via the Good Old Boy network to keep them affordable. Those new friends reading along via Pillowfort - welcome to my weird life, because I intend to use PF as a combination of my now-deleted Facebook and LJ.

Anyway, I’ve spent almost my entire adult life in that state of striving for someday. Along the way I gave up things I thought I would never sacrifice (who would ever stop going to MediaWest Con after 25 years?); discovered things that I never knew were in me (3 years of open hearth cooking demonstrations at a local site I hadn’t even known had existed.)

I lost some things I loved. Reviewing books didn’t kill my urge to read for pleasure, but the unending “Oh, but this is more important” shoved pleasure reading into a pleasure with overwhelming guilt. I’m... still working on that one.

But this week... Well, a little background first. I knit. It gives me something to do with my hands that burns off the nervous energy and even that little edge of anxiety when I sit in a group or watch TV or what have you. Except it’s always been hard to knit in the hot summers and nigh onto impossible this summer when the temperature and the humidity are both consistently over 90. Casting about desperately for another good portable project I first tried kumihimo, then English paper piecing.

Wow, I can see why it has such a cult in the patchwork community! I can’t do it without looking down, not if I don’t want blood everywhere, but it’s addictively quick and amazingly portable - even moreso than knitting.

Being the creature of mad enthusiasms I am, I of course had to come up with a big project idea. What shape? Oh, hexagon, accuquilt makes a wonderful cutter that makes both paper and fabric pieces at once. What form? Oh, I know what, a rose window quilt! I’ve always wanted one. What fabric? Wait, a dim memory serves... don’t I have a pack of fabric actually labeled stained glass?

If I hadn’t recently finished the decluttering I never would have found it. You have to understand - I haven’t quilted since I discovered knitting, so we’re talking over a decade now. But I didn’t get rid of everything - just the stuff I didn’t think I’d use...

... someday.

It took me less than 5 minutes to find the pack. (I am REALLY pleased with my decluttering/organization these days!). 33 fat quarters of fabric, as pristine as when I bought them god knows how many years ago.

And I suddenly realized, this weekend while I finish a book I *want* to read as background for the upcoming Jane Austen anniversary, as I prepare to cut into my long-hoarded fabric I realized that I have, unknowingly, finally staggered through the gates of my long-held goal.

Someday... is now.

See subject line. The hoopla over Pillowfort has reminded me how much I miss this community too.

Wow, it’s been over a year. Still into Yuri On Ice, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen, knitting. Still a creature of mad enthusiasms.

Have actually reached the point where I don’t feel I have to put off what I want to do in order to clean up some past mess.

... except stopping crossposts to a moribund LJ, that is.

Actually, I went the morning of the demonstration to get my fair share of souvenirs. Because I'm a bit tacky that way.

Guess who was downtown DC Saturday morning! I was convinced that the metro would overload early, the same way it had for the 2009 Inauguration and the Stewart/Colbert rally, so I'd prepped everything the night before right to the point of not just laying out my clothes, but filling all the pockets. When the alarm went off at DearGod:30, all I had to do was feed the cats and get dressed & out.

So I felt a bit silly that there was almost no one there that early in the morning. There was no one there at the Starbucks I expected to be open on 7th either, so I ended up eating a muffin I'd brought right outside it and telling other disappointed marchers that rumor was that there were open Starbucks further north.

People passing were carrying beautiful art posters from The Amplifier Foundation(.org), and told me that said posters were being given out on G-St. So post-muffin I went to check it out, and then picked up a group of women from out of town - 2 from Phoenix and one from the Caribbean (!) I walked them down to the mall, past the cops who either ignored us or in one case, wished us well. Then they peeled off in search of food and I kept going down 7th to see what was happening on the other side of the mall.

From there the gathering crowds pulled me along back to the mall; most of the marchers wanted selfies or photos in front of the capitol with their pussy hats and signs. I was there very early, but at 4th street the crowd had already become a slow river, pulling us all down 4th to Independence. The block between 4th & 3rd was already impenetrable, and more people were flooding in from the Mall and up from L'Enfant Plaza, slowly filling in the area behind Air and Space.

Yes, I did go shopping. I have a Rosie the Riveter button with the march name, and a "Nasty Women Rise!" button in BLM colors, a t-shirt, and some of the art posters that were being handed out. Planned Parenthood was selling pussy hats and giving away scarves or shirts to people who signed up for their action list. (If you wanted a pussy hat, it seemed you had to score one on the way in, from marchers on a bus or plane.) Emily's List was giving out posters (my favorite: We Are The Noisy Majority) all the way back at New Carrollton metro.

There was somewhere I'd promised to be in the afternoon, so I left very early. Early enough that one could still walk the streets, although the crowd coming up from L'Enfant was already so thick I had to let it take me to the mall and then go north up to Archives where there was a little breathing room. A *little* breathing room -- I had to ask marchers to part to let me get to my train as they flooded the platform!

The station that had been so achingly empty had a line out the door and down the block when I got back. A 3-hour wait, I was told later. And at Benfest we kept losing track of conversations or the Fluxxlock game we were playing because we were all on social media, looking at crowd photos.

I'm glad I was there. I'm glad I got out before the crowd got crushing. At least while I was there I did some tiny bit of good, pointing people in the right direction and tweeting/facebooking about where the portapotties were open and where they were locked. (So Hufflepuff of me!)

It's no good my discussing the election and trying to parse what the fuck just happened and what the fuck will happen. But what I can do and will do is suggest a course of action that can be taken by anyone in any country who is worried about things spinning out of control

1) Give yourself a holiday present of a subscription to a newspaper to support investigative journalism. Also give yourself 52+ sheets of professional looking stationery w/envelopes, a nice pen, 3 books of stamps.

2) Make this New Year's resolution: To sign up for the "take action" emails of at least one lobbying group that you support and to TAKE THE ACTION at least once a week. Make the call. Use the stationery.

First they came for the Muslims, and we said "Not this time, motherfuckers!"

I realize that the title could equally apply to the election, but apparently there's a new clinic protester in town who's really... special. But nobody's actually told me what to expect on Saturday.

I suppose y'all can expect a more interesting than usual liveblog.

Conversations with my GPS:
Me: So, which route is worst off?

GPS: Oh, honey, NO. Do not take a main highway at Friday rush. Let me take you down the back roads. Turn left... now right... now le-

Me: Wait. We're going right past the secondhand store. What I'm hearing is that you want me to go buy more scarves.

GPS: What? No! Turn left!

Me: I'm turning right.

GPS: Get back on the route! (It really did say that)

Me, three scarves and a cardigan later: So, what's the next little road?

GPS: Fuck it. Take the parkway, that'll be fastest.

Parkway: *is backed up*

Me: You lied to me, GPS.

GPS: BECAUSE I HATE YOU SO MUCH RIGHT NOW.