Tag Archives: life

A 70-year nap sounds tempting

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We saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier with a bunch of friends Saturday, and it was fun. If you liked the 2011 Captain America movie, or The Avengers you’ll probably like this, as well. I thought it was awesome. I confess I’d been a teeny bit worried because I liked the previous movie a lot, and that one got so much of its appeal from the 1940s setting; I was afraid they’d try to grit Cap up and ruin him. They didn’t. The story has plenty of darkness, but the script and Chris Evans make you believe someone can face that darkness, fight it, and come out with an old-fashioned sense of honor and justice intact.

A major part of Captain America’s story is that he is a man out of his time because survived being frozen for 70 years after crashing that doomsday plane at the end of the first movie to save the world. Lately, I’ve been thinking a 70 year long nap might be a good thing.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to figure out why I’ve been tired all the time. When we were both suffering from the Martian Flu it made perfect sense why we were tired, taking frequent naps, and so on. But it’s been about a month since either of us had symptoms, yet almost every week night since, I have to take at least a short nap after getting home. And at least once a week I conk out for several hours, only to wake up just in time for bed time!

Part of it is that with heavy pollen season underway, I frequently have severe enough hay fever that I’m not sleeping very well at night. But the other thing is just that while we were sick I let my sleep schedule go to whatever it wanted. If left to my own devices, my body likes to stay up until about 3am or 4am, then sleep until noon. It’s just the way my diurnal cycle is wired. I haven’t managed to land a job that lets me work that schedule (and still pay the bills plus give me the sorts of mental challenges to keep me from being bored), so once I finally accepted that this is what the neurochemicals are going to try to do, I realized the rest of my professional life would be a battle to keep the sleep schedule from drifting to default.

This means that I can’t let myself stay up as late as I want on weekends, as tempting as it it. And it also means that about once a week I have to take a melatonin tablet at about 10:30 or 11pm, lay down, and trick my brain into sticking to a sleep schedule compatible with work.

I haven’t done that in months. And I’ve been staying up way to late working on writing projects on the weekends.

So, I need to hammer the neuroreceptors with some melatonin. I’ll probably need to do it a couple of nights in a row to make any progress. Unfortunately, that means I have to both remember to do it, and be awake at the right time in the evening to take the pill. Which I haven’t managed to do since having the realization.

I’d like to stop having these random nap attacks. So I need to get this done.

Never thought I’d be happy to do the taxes

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Us, at our reception.
It isn’t primarily about the legal stuff, of course. Except when it is.
The last few years our taxes have been very unpleasant. When Washington state voters approved the “everything-but-marriage” domestic partnership referendum a few years ago, our separate incomes became community property. The so-called Defense of Marriage Act forbade the federal government from recognizing our relationship, except that other parts of the tax code (voted in by the same congress critters who passed DOMA) required that anything which your home state considered community property had to be taxed as jointly owned property.

The upshot was that we had to file extra forms, but none of the forms that existed had places for folks in our situation to list the name or social security number of our partner. The first year that was the case, the IRS didn’t properly inform their own people, so same sex couples in the relevant states who filed early had their returns rejected and received letters threatening fines and penalties.

That got straightened out quickly, but the IRS never put out comprehensive instructions for taxpayers in our situation. Even after three years. Everyone was having to refer to one article from a gay rights lawyer posted on the web that walked you through all the different IRS publications—a few rules from this publication, the form from that, and these instructions from this other one. Yes, even the tax professionals were referring to that site.

It was a mess. And we weren’t even allowed to mail our separate filings in the same envelope.

Continue reading Never thought I’d be happy to do the taxes →

Why I hate hay fever reason number 5871, plus 4312 & 3786 & 3113 & 2488 & 2149, and don’t forget number 1364

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icanhascheezburger.come
Except I’m too grumpy to remember to say please.
Because I’m doing Camp NaNoWriMo, I had sworn that I wouldn’t post blog updates on the weekend, using all of that time to write. But this morning’s hay fever misery is too overwhelming.

Yesterday wasn’t too bad. I had to take over-the-counter meds in addition to my prescribed allergy pills to keep things to a point where I was mildly uncomfortable all day while hanging out with friends and working on editorial tasks (and later to go with said friends to see the Captain America movie). But about 11:30 or so last night, the headache and itchy eyes got much, much worse. I took some more meds and tried to sleep, but couldn’t get beyond dozing until sometime around 5 in the morning.

I crawled out of bed today, head and eyes still too miserable for words, and just wishing that I could destroy every last plant on the entire frickin’ planet. With fire.

Confessions of a technology addict

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http://spoiledrottencats.wordpress.com
Just waiting my turn for the microwave.
When our microwave died late in February, it was a bit grumpy-inducing, but it wasn’t really a disaster. A microwave oven is a convenient appliance, and while my first reaction when Michael sent the text message that it seemed to be dead was annoyance, my second thought was that at least it wasn’t an important appliance, like the stove.

That was the thing: the stovetop and oven were still working just fine, and we have a nice toaster oven for those times you don’t want to heat up the entire oven just to cook one small thing, right?

In the three or four days that we didn’t have a functioning microwave, it seemed that I had a hundred moments when I wanted to use it—to heat up some leftovers, or to heat up a cup of coffee I’d let get cold, et cetera. Each time I would get a little more grumpy about not having the option I was used to. But what made me even more grumpy is the knowledge that it was really a minor inconvenience at most (not to mention a first world problem), and I shouldn’t have been letting it get to me like that.

While the latest statistics I can find indicate that an estimated 90% of U.S. households have microwave ovens, when I was growing up my family didn’t own one. For most of my teen years, the estimates are that only between 1% and 5% of households had them. I got by for years as a young adult without a microwave. I remember one time being appalled when I found out a friend who wasn’t that much younger than me had never cooked anything on a stove—because his family had owned a microwave oven for as long as he could remember. He was genuinely afraid to even try to heat up water on a stovetop.

While I had laughed and rolled my eyes back then, it was a little weird to catch myself reacting as if it was a great hardship to get by without a microwave for just a few days.

One of our neighbors had her microwave die this week. I happened by while she was unboxing the new microwave, and we got talking about our experiences. This woman used to run her own catering business, so she is no stranger to cooking, right? But she had the same sort of issues I did. Particularly because she lives alone, since retiring she’s gotten into the habit of doing virtually all of her cooking in the microwave. As she said, it seems a waste to heat up the whole oven for just one potato.

No one wants to become so dependent on something that we’re unable to function for a few days without it. Things happen, and we have to get by. Of course, I did get by. It was not a hardship, just an annoyance.

But while humans are tool-making animals, it’s important to remember that we’re also tool-using animals and social beings. An important part of our species’ survival traits is our ability to share knowledge. We don’t each of us have to re-invent everything. We can use what has been learned and made by others to learn and make new things.

Using technology doesn’t mean we’re helpless, it simply means that we stand on the shoulders of giants. And from there, we do what we can to make the world a better place, so that those who come after us start on our shoulders, and can reach heights we can only imagine.

Time to check in on goals

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Kitten falling asleep on an Apply keyboard.
I nap a lot…
When I set my goals for the year, I tried to set very concrete steps for achieving them. Inspired by a friend’s suggestion, I modeled the tasks on the notion how one trains a pet: if a dog shows a penchant for chewing up shoes, it isn’t enough to scold the dog and try to keep the shoes out of reach; you must give the dog an acceptable chew toy. In other words, replace a bad habit with a better one.

Goal: Reduce the outrage.

Step: Listen to the Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me podcast once a week, limit the amount of time I read news during work breaks.

Progress: I keep getting interrupted while listening to Wait! Wait!…, but I am still spending less time reading serious/upsetting news throughout the day. I have also started listening to other, non-news related podcasts for my walks home from work.

Goal: Write more regularly.

Step: Spend the reclaimed break time writing. Find other ways to motivate myself to write rather than twiddle the keys.

Progress: I’m still only doing so-so with this. So I’m giving Camp NaNoWriMo a try. My posted goal is similar to what I did for regular NaNoWriMo, with the currently unstated goal of also making serious headway on the third novel in the series.

Goal: See friends for fun more, as opposed to all of my social interactions being driven by various projects.

Step: I still haven’t thought of a good concrete step for that.

Progress: We’ve gone several weeks without one or the other of us coming down sick, which should have helped. As I said to one friend just last week, it took several weeks of neither of us falling ill again before I’ve started to feel like it isn’t tempting fate to plan anything.

We still haven’t gotten a weekly get-together going. Given my work schedule of late, I’m not sure how wise it is to try to squeeze that into the schedule when we’re also trying to get back into the habit of editorial meetings and related projects.

I still think doing more fun things with friends is a good goal.

Goal: Paint, draw, and make music.

Step: Go to the Drink ‘n’ Draw gathers. Set aside some time to sketch each week.

Progress: We finally were not sick and there was no snow, so we attended this weekend! I did a horrible sketch of a dragon, and even worse of a raccoon, a decent version of a raccoon paw print (for reasons), and a rather nice sketch of the legendary cursed artifact/holy relic known as the Amulet of Ostrea. And midway through the sketching, I realized that the kneaded eraser I was using (and it was working just fine) is one I’ve own for over a decade—though it has spent most of that time in one of my art supply boxes being neglected.

Some years I wait longer than I meant to

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Cat with Christmas lights wallpaper desktopnexus.com
Time to take down the lights!
The last many years, I’ve left the icicle lights that we hang around the porch up for a significant time after we take down the rest of the Christmas decorations.

The first year I did it was way back after our current landlady bought the place (and moved in down stairs). All of the porch lights for all the units in our little four-plex are controlled by a timer in the basement. We can’t turn our own porch light on or off. As summer changed to fall and then to winter, sundown went from well after 9:30pm1 to about 4:30 pm2, but the porch lights weren’t turning on until after 9. It was freakin’ dark around our front door. The icicle lights were controlled by a light sensor that I have plugged them into, and they made it possible for people to see to walk up and down the concrete steps, and for me to find the right keys to unlock the door.

We eventually found out where the switch was, and tried to teach the landlady how it worked, but she just didn’t understand. However, she gave us permission to adjust it throughout the year, and that’s what we’ve been doing since.

The next year, because we had control of the porch light, we took down the icicle lights right around New Year’s Day. And the landlady was very sad. She asked why we took them down, because she liked the lights. Also, after the lights came down, when she drove home from work after sundown, she kept driving past the driveway3, because she couldn’t tell which house was which, and she’d have to turn around and drive back more slowly to find the driveway.

The problem is, when I leave the lights up well past Christmas, I start feeling judgmental attitudes from other neighbors and strangers who pass by. I recognize that this is mostly just in my head, but it bugs me. Also, the PCV plastic on the lights isn’t really designed for prolonged exposure outside, and the longer you leave the lights out, the fewer Christmas seasons you will get to re-use them.

So we came up with a compromise. I agreed to leave the lights up until Daylight Saving Time starts, at which point sundown is late enough that usually when she’s coming home there is enough light for her to tell the houses apart by color.4 And she agreed to talk to her business partners who had nagged at me to take the lights down.5

Since Daylight Saving Time’s start keeps getting moved earlier, I decided to change my date to the Spring Equinox. Sundown well after 6pm by then, and twilight lasts a while after.

This year, I also left all the other outdoor lights up, though I had unplugged them. I didn’t mean to, at all. But every weekend since New Year’s Day has been either very rainy, or we had a lot of things going on, or I was really sick.8

This week, since I was going to take the icicle lights down, I was determined to get the rest of the lights no matter what. And I did. I haven’t heard from the landlady, yet, but I know when I next see her, she’ll be very sad that the lights are down.

So I’ll just have to remind her that she only has to get by without them until October, because that’s when I’ll put up the Halloween lights.9

Footnotes:

1. That’s one of the advantages to living as far north as we are.

2. And that’s one of the disadvantages.

3. She lives in the unit behind and downstairs from us.

4. She isn’t completely happy with this, because when she comes home later she sometimes still misses the driveway, and has to circle back.6 She also admitted that she just thinks they’re pretty and wishes everyone left their Christmas lights up all the time.7

5. Turns out she didn’t. Last year when she and him were meeting us and an inspector as part of the refinance of the mortgage, he started to give me shit about the lights, and I told him they were still up because she asked me to leave them up. She very sheepishly explained to him what was going on. He thought it was weird, but seemed happy when I told him I took them down at after the equinox.

6. I have pointed out that we have a bunch of those solar light sticks on the flowerbed running up the driveway, and by that time of year there’s enough sunlight during the day for the lights to glow until after midnight. I know they aren’t as easy to see as lights hanging from an eave, but I still think they should work.

7. When I pointed out that most years she doesn’t even put lights in her own window, she said that it’s mostly because she’s too tired and/or busy each year.

8. Several weekends, all three were true and my husband was as sick as me!

9. Of course I put up Halloween nights! Halloween used to be the high holy days of queers everywhere. Until the straights co-opted it for Heteroween. But that’s okay. Straights need a socially sanctioned night to dress up as sexy nurses or sexy firemen. They’re so reppressed the rest of the year!

I’m not a morning person

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quickmemes.com
…and no talking!
My morning wake-up routine is not what most people would call typical. The clock radio turns on first, softly playing NPR’s Morning Edition for an hour before the earliest I would need to get up. The entire purpose of the hour of news is to ease me into the idea of waking up. Some mornings I lay there, half asleep, listening to the news. Most mornings I’m sleeping, but more lightly than if there wasn’t the radio going.

Then the first alarm goes off. Continue reading I’m not a morning person →

Lost in time

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blamcast.net
Why aren’t you up?
I wrote last year about how the time change was messing with me worse than usual. This year I can at least blame the frickin’ high pollen counts that have coincided with it. I prefer to blame the pollen, rather than think about the possibility that it might simply be because I’m getting old, and bouncing back from things, even a simple time change isn’t going to be as quick as it was when I was younger…

Continue reading Lost in time →

Contemplating one’s transgressions.

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Traditionally, Ash Wednesday is a day to contemplate one’s transgressions as the beginning of the 40-day observance of Lent. Except, of course, I was raised Southern Baptist, where rituals like a priest smearing ashes on one’s forehead are frowned upon. On the other hand, I’m taoist, now, and taoism is always open to the any traditions we find useful. Therefore, Ash Wednesday is a good day to post my monthly check-in on my goals/resolutions for the year!

When I set my goals for the year, I tried to set very concrete steps for achieving them. I tried to model the tasks on the notion how one trains a pet: if a dog shows a penchant for chewing up shoes, it isn’t enough to scold the dog and try to keep the shoes out of reach; you must give the dog an acceptable chew toy. In other words, replace a bad habit with a better one.

Goal: Reduce the outrage.

Step: Listen to the Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me podcast once a week, limit the amount of time I read news during work breaks.

Progress: I keep getting interrupted while listening to Wait! Wait!…, but I am still spending less time reading serious/upsetting news throughout the day.

Goal: Write more regularly.

Step: Spend the reclaimed break time writing. Find other ways to motivate myself to write rather than twiddle the keys.

Progress: I’m still only doing so-so with this. I still spend more time typing potential posts than working on my fiction, for instance.

Goal: See friends for fun more, as opposed to all of my social interactions being driven by various projects.

Step: I still haven’t thought of a good concrete step for that.

Progress: We were sick slightly less often during February. I did make it to a friend’s birthday get together in the middle of the month, but we’ve missed other social events we’d planned to go to because one or the other of us was sick.

We have failed to get the weekly get-together going again. Illness takes a lot of blame for that. There’s at least one vicious circle of related difficulty. If people are coming over, we need to clean up the house. If we’ve both been so rundown or tired after workdays that we don’t do minimal cleanup, there is so much to do before people come over (and just to be clear, here, since folks are always saying, “Oh, we’ll understand a little mess!” it isn’t just dealing with clutter. It had gotten a lot worse than clutter.), that trying to do it in just a few evenings after work left us both so exhausted, we needed to sleep through the period that friends would have been here.

Goal: Paint, draw, and make music.

Step: I was counting on the monthly Drink ‘n’ Draw gathers to help with this.

Progress: We were actually well enough that we could have attended, if half the region hadn’t gotten snowed in that day.

Confessions of an absent-minded whatchamacallit

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What?
What?
I lose my keys, all the time.

Not just my keys. I regularly misplace my wallet, my phone, my glasses, my hat… Almost every time I prepare to leave the house, I spend a few minutes trying to figure out where something that I need to take with me is. Several times every week my poor, long-suffering husband has to help me figure out where I left something.

And I hate it!

I have tried to fix this for pretty much my entire life. My mom used to tell the story of the day she found me wandering the house in tears, looking under papers, inside drawers, under the furniture, and so on, because I couldn’t find my glasses. I was seven or eight years old at the time. I told her I had looked everywhere. I was angry at myself for misplacing the glasses. I was afraid of what punishment my dad might mete out if they were broken or lost permanently. I was nearly hysterical. Continue reading Confessions of an absent-minded whatchamacallit →