I did, in fact, fall asleep promptly after writing yesterday and I woke up again at 11am. I did some of my morning tasks, but didn't study Spanish or read from the history textbook. Then I read LJ and DW, but never quite got to reading. I finished the "Sexy Men" pictures so now I can go back to photoshopping at my own pace and with some creativity if I feel like it. I'm not sure what I intend to do next, maybe the snow pictures from Gatlinburg since there's only 10ish of those and I can knock them out in a day. I may not photoshop for a while, though. I've done that a lot lately, a lot more than I wanted to, and I'm a little crispy on it.

I drew a dragon, my third for the month. This is because Alex is trying to draw a dragon every day of this month, and I don't have that much dedication to the dragon, and not that much resources either since all my drawing is done off of youtube videos right now and there were only a few different dragons. Despite this, I wanted to join in a little bit, so I drew 3 dragons. I want to color one in, but I think I need to buy plastic cups for paint water or else declare one of my many coffee mugs to be for paint water only. I don't like this dragon as much as I like the previous two dragons. It's more snake like and I think I made it too skinny.

Anyway, despite waking up with plenty of time, I didn't do any of my reading. I messed around at Victor's board and tried to play with my dog, who was apparently offended by this and ran into the other room to see Kevin. I kid, a little bit. Jack likes it when he's allowed into the living room because there's carpet in there and he can use it to scratch his back.

At 5 I went to my mother's house for dinner. My sister was upstairs. She was supposed to have a meeting at 4 but at 4 her boss said he was on a call with a client and he would ping them when they could have the meeting. At 5:30 she was still waiting for this meeting. She suggested eating Chipotle and we ordered dinner. Then we let the dog out and the dog chased a squirrel into a tree and refused to stop barking at the tree. We had to pick the dog up and carry her inside, and she never did pee. Then we went to Chipotle, picked up the food, and came back. Mom and I ate, and dad joined us when he got home from tennis. He says his form hasn't bounced back after not playing for several months earlier this year, which is what I am afraid of with fighting. I know Wistric said your body wouldn't forget, but like? I think I've forgotten?

Anyway, we finished dinner and then went to work on the family puzzle. Kelly joined us and ate her burrito until I had to leave.

I came home and we had improv. We discussed yesterday's show both what worked and what didn't work and why. One of the groups really made it obvious why you don't want to ask questions. One of the participants kept doing that, and it really burdened her partner. Then we played a new game where we started with a sentence then said "yes, and" and built on to it. Our first one was just okay. We started with the sentence "2021 is going to be a great year" and it just turned into sort of a group rant about all the things we can't do in 2020. Our second one went some weird places. I don't even remember how it started but somehow it wound up with everyone deciding we're going to wear slut costumes to the Renn Faire (except for me - I'm going in a Star Trek uniform).

We also did a couple of scenes including one with a new guy. All of the scenes went well. We didn't finish until 8:45, and then I fed Kevin and got ready for bed and marked off my dailies and tracked my calories. Actually, despite not paying any attention to habitica today I only didn't do 8 things, 4 of which were reading and 2 of which were exercising. Well I have to drink an awful lot of water real fast to finish one of them, but I think I can, and if not, then I'll miss that task too, oh well.

I looked up Pennsic and apparently you don't have to pay until June 16th, which is plenty of time to know whether I've been able to get a vaccine or not to go to an event on July 30th. I mean, I guess technically there is time after that that I could get it, but it's late enough that I won't be disappointed if I decide not to go and then get a vaccine anyway. For some reason I was remembering registration being in January because that's when I paid last year but that's apparently just when it starts.

Anyway, I'm pretty much counting on not going to Pennsic since the vaccine roll out is already slowed down and Trump intentionally didn't get as much vaccine as he could. Pretty much all workers are ahead of me, as my mom points out. No one is giving us a time frame for this to happen, but I'm sure it will take months to get through all of the essential workers. I'm worried that if I sign up then don't get a vaccine, enough people will have vaccines that they decide to have the event, but I don't want to go, and I'll lose my money.

These ads that keep playing when Kevin goes to watch youtube videos are pissing me off. The line I keep hearing is "Rafael Warnock defended a criminal who murdered a police officer. He's too radical for Georgia." Now, the lawyer types can correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the assumption that everyone who needed one got a lawyer and if you're a defense attorney it's your job to defend them as best you can no matter what crime they've committed. The presumption that someone who murdered a police officer doesn't deserve a lawyer reeks of... IDK... maybe that's just what republicans think now. Republicans are, actual facts, evil people.

Kevin reminded me I had to put dinner in the crock pot tonight. Then he says "hey while you're in there can you make me some bagel bites?" Uhm. No. I already cooked for him tonight, which is supposed to be my night off since it's my night with my mom, and I'm not cooking for him twice when I'm not even eating. He can get off his ass and cook for himself, or he can go hungry. But also, I already cooked two french bread pizzas for him and he ate an entire box of popcorn. What the hell does he need with bagel bites?

I'm frustrated because I gained 3 pounds almost overnight. I'm not sure if this is because my scale battery is dying and I never actually weighed as little as I thought it said the other day or if I actually gained weight. I haven't gone over my calories once since the last time I weighed myself, and I haven't started exercising to gain muscle. So I'm super frustrated with the scale today. I've purchased more batteries for the scale (they were super expensive, too - $14 battery. If I'd thought about it I'd have just replaced the scale which was only $11!). I'm going to try to lay off the temptation to weigh myself again tomorrow and wait for the new battery. But I'm wondering if I'm gaining weight because I'm not eating enough, which seems to usually be my problem. In which case I need to eat another 200 calories today to get to the minimum suggested by sparkpeople. I have been allowing myself to stop at 1300, but maybe that's a mistake. I'm kind of hungry now anyway, though I'm sure that it will pass if I just sit here.

I am writing a lot - I'm probably going to pass my ultimate goal for the year (616,616) today or tomorrow. The problem is I don't want to pass it - I want to hit it exactly. I guess I can stop tracking when I hit it though. There are no more cool numbers for 10k words, so I guess that's what I'm going to have to do. I only need 188 words total to get to my goal. I will clearly write more than this tomorrow, and there's still Talos Battles on Wednesday. Maybe I'll just sit here and finish tonight.

Katrina is coming tomorrow, and Kevin has refused to do the dishes. There is an embarrassingly high stack of them in the sink. I think I need to pay Katrina extra to do Kevin's one fucking chore that he's supposed to do regularly. Dishes aren't her job but I'm certainly not doing them for Kevin. I swear to god he is a petulant child. He has one chore he needs to do and he regularly doesn't do it for weeks on end.

I bought a mask from my college. I don't even know why. No one knows what CC Tigers is around here. But they were asking for donations because not having students living in their dorms puts them out large amounts of money, and I figured I could donate to the cause. I regret it now, though.

I went to sleep around 2:30 after finishing all my midnight tasks and then talking to Alex. I woke up at 1:30pm, and read lj and dw. I wound up not logged on to LJ for some reason and they showed me an ad. It was in Russian and asked if I wanted to work great jobs in the USA and had a picture of a construction guy. Thanks, ad. I'm pretty sure I'm not your target audience. I'm a little frustrated that they are showing me ads because I was under the impression that my permanent LJ account would prevent visitors to my site from seeing ads, but apparently it only stops me from seeing ads. I guess if I need to show someone anything on here who isn't already here, I'll show them the DW site, which I'm pretty sure does not have ads. The only person I can imagine trying to send to my blog who doesn't already read it is Laird, anyway, and he already has both urls.

I was finished with reading LJ and DW 15 minutes before my call with the social worker. Now, that is an annoying amount of time because it's not enough time to actually do anything but it's also too much time to do nothing. I did, however, do nothing. I poked at my calendar and wondered whether I should bother putting SCA events or movies onto next year's calendar. I decided against it because it has just been disappointing as I passed those without them happening this year. Also, I don't think anyone really knows when movies are going to be safe again, or when they're going to start hitting theaters.

The social worker called promptly at 3. We decided one of my goals for next year should be to do some kind of exercise that will stop me from being so out of shape I can't fight once we go back to fighting. This led into a discussion of fighting and the SCA in general. She said she took a week off for the holidays next week, so she won't be calling me which gives me two weeks to get started. Fortunately, this two weeks includes January 1, so I can start when I said I was going to start. I said that my first goal is just to do as many push ups, sit ups, and squats as I can (maybe in 2 minutes was her suggestion instead of actually maxing out). This will give me a base line for where I am starting, and if I test that every once in a while, I can see progress even if I don't see weight loss progress.

I had an hour before I had to be anywhere else, so I spent it reading.

It's Monday so I went to my mom's house. She was in her car leaving as I got there but said she'd be right back. Then she called me and told me to ask my sister what she wanted for dinner and she'd pick it up while she was already out. This led to a comedy of errors as I ran to my room (where my sister sits at the desk to do her work usually), her room, and finally had to ask the maid where she was. He said she had gone outside with the dogs, so I went out. We decided on burgers from a place we haven't been before called BurgerIM. Kelly Kept pronouncing it Burger I M and I kept pronouncing it Burgerim as if it were Hebrew. I'm honestly not sure which it is supposed to be.

The burgers were just alright. Kelly said the sauce tasted like In N Out's sauce, which is just thousand island. But they had the best sweet potato fries I have ever tasted.

When we were done with dinner, we decided to see if we could see this Christmas Star. There was something bright in the sky, but Kelly didn't think it was it because it wasn't in the right place according to google sky. Then mom decided we should drive to a big parking lot over a highway that went in the appropriate direction to see if we could see it. There was a building in the way. We went home and told dad. He took out some binoculars and said that the star we had originally seen was definitely two stars and they could be clearly seen if we came outside and looked through the binoculars. We did and sure enough that was the Christmas Star. I have to say, I'm not convinced I would have followed this thing to Bethlehem if I were a shepherd. Sure, it was the brightest thing in the sky (and actually the only thing we could see through the light pollution), but it wasn't like life changing or anything. Dad said that although this hasn't happened in 800 years, it's supposed to happen again potentially within my life time. I'd be 99 years old, but that's potentially within my life?

Before I left I told Kevin that if I didn't hear from Sandi about improv, I would pick him up dinner from Zaxby's. I did hear from Sandi, and texted him that, and now he's mad at me for not turning all my plans upside down to be his servant. Sooner or later we are going to have to have a very nasty discussion about the fact that I am not his fucking servant.

I came home and logged onto the zoom call for improv. We played newscaster and then did several scenes. Kevin ordered dinner to come after it would theoretically be over, but he knows full well that we often/usually go over time so then he expected me to get up in the middle of my thing to deliver food from the front door to the bedroom for him. He swore about the whole thing telling me that Sandi needs to learn to live on a fucking schedule. But the thing is, we're having fun, and no one is complaining except him. I'm not sure he actually gets a vote in how long improv goes into the night since he's not involved.

Anyway, we finished around 8:30, and then I raced through my dailies, ate a cookie Kevin had bought me from Arby's, and poked at SparkPeople. Once again I need to eat more before I go to bed, which realistically means pretty soon since I try to start my SP day at midnight rather than when I wake up. This time I need 350 calories, which is like a whole extra meal. I don't think I have anything other than more cookies that is that many calories. I mean, it's a lot. I don't want more cookies.

Moving on, the good news is I have lost another 2 lbs, and am now at the lowest weight I've seen since I was an undergrad after the army. Also, I'm no longer 100 lbs overweight (according to BMI), although my doctor has said with my frame I really shouldn't try for much below 170, which is what I weighed when I was in the army. According to my BMI calculation I should weigh 132, but he says that doesn't apply to everyone.

I read an article on SP about how to get calories if you're regularly low. It suggested hummus, cheese, dried fruit, eggs, bananas, frozen yogurt, use milk instead of water to make oatmeal, nuts, and smoothies. Of these, hummus, cheese, bananas, and nuts seem reasonable. Maybe some dried mango if I can find it.

By the way, is this triggering for anyone? As always, I prefer not to cut, but am willing to if someone specifically asks me to. Speak up if you ever need a trigger warning for something you see in my journal.

My gauntlets got here, and they smelled funny. Kevin identified the smell s WD-40. I now own a full set of armor for the first time. I didn't even own the gauntlets when I fought in Colorado, borrowing from Fred if I ever needed to fight with a two handed weapon. They are nicer than I expected, coming with articulated fingers instead of mittens. That's usually expensive, so I'm pleasantly surprised, but nervous that they aren't legal. I think they were just cheap because they came from India. Shipping was free so I assumed IN meant Indiana, but then they got stuck at Charles De Gaul airport for several days, so I'm guessing it meant India. I'm impressed they got here as quickly as they did from India, honestly.

I picked up my embroidery today. I don't think I'm going to finish the 3rd piece this year, which would be exactly half of my stated goal. It's possible, but not probable, especially if I want to finish getting those sexy male models out to people by the end of the year.

I rejoined GYWO for next year at a pledge of 300k for the year. This is half what I wrote this year, but I think I wrote a lot this year because I wasn't going to SCA events or practices. On the other hand I also wasn't going to write ins this year, so... maybe it comes out in the wash? Last year I wrote about 500k, but 100 of it was in November and I doubt I'll do that again. I think in a normal year where I'm going out and doing stuff, I write an average of 1k per day with more in April, July, and November. So that's 300k with some wiggle room. Hopefully by the end of the year it'll be a more normal year anyway.

Today was supposed to be the last day for sign ups of kehillot, but I haven't heard from the other two when we're meeting or for suggestions as to when to meet. One of them we're supposed to be watching Zoom Shabbat services together, so that will be on a Friday. The other one is open. Also, only 4 people out of 10 have answered when they can meet for the cooking one, and the other 3 only picked one time each instead of any times they were free. 3 of us have picked the same time, however, so I suspect that will be it and it will be a late evening snack instead of a meal, which makes me wonder if I actually need to cook 6 eggs? I mean that's a meal for both Kevin and me, but if I cook it with onion and pepper Kevin won't eat it anyway, and he's not a very big fan of tomatoes which are the main ingredient, either. Maybe I can just cook three eggs? Especially since eggs don't really keep well in the fridge to eat them the next day I don't think?

I'm caught up with my writing goal, if my writing goal is to write 616,616 words for the year. I need fewer than 1000 per day at this point, and will probably make the goal before the end of the year and then pass it, but since I won't make 626,626, I will stop tracking when I hit the 616,616 count, at least for GYWO.

This is going to be a short entry, I suspect.

I didn't get to sleep until 5 or 6am this morning. I spent the time talking to Alex and a little bit to Gerda. Also, yesterday I had one, one hard cider at the happy hour YAD Squad thing. By 2am I was hungover and hating everyone and everything. I think someone warned me this may happen on metformin so maybe I should quit drinking. I've done ok with one drink of the brandied lemonade, though, so maybe it's something specific to ciders. Or maybe it was just an ill timed migraine. Either way, I fixed it with some advil migraine, a gatorade, and a lot of water. By 6am I felt enough better to go to sleep. Which is what makes me think hangover, because migraines usually take longer than that to go away, but who knows?

I spent about an hour brainstorming activities to do with my WriMos in November. I came up with about 200 words worth of activities and descriptions which was about a page worth including the things the other foreign MLs are doing as a large group.

Then I discovered that I have a personal twitch account. I don't know why I have it or what made me start it since I swear I've never heard of twitch before, but there it was with my username and email.

Anyway, then I slept until 4:30. I hadn't set an alarm, but Kevin woke me up getting ready to go and I happened to look at my watch, which was good. I helped Kevin get ready - he has apparently gained weight on quarantine and couldn't get his belt buckled. Then I got myself ready and we drove over to my parents' house. We sat in the living room because dad thought it was too hot to sit on the porch but then Kevin fell getting off the couch because he couldn't get his legs situated under himself with his knees over his ass.

We had our usual for dinner, and then had chocolate cake for dessert. Eventually my mother got uncomfortable enough sitting in the dining room chairs that she asked if we could go back to the living room. Kevin decided that meant it was time to go home. We got in the car and then as we were driving out of the neighborhood passed my parents and their dog on their evening stroll. I'm not sure how my parents got ahead of us. I'm a little disturbed.

My mom laughed when I told her she was getting an amazon gift card for her birthday. I had asked her last month what she wanted, and she said she'd think, but then she never thought of anything, and today she said there's literally nothing she wants. She's even scrolled through online lists of "100 kitchen gadgets that will improve your cooking" and the like, but she just doesn't want anything. I had to admit that there's really only one thing I want, and I'll likely get it for my birthday, and then won't be able to think of things other than books (I always want more books?) to buy myself for prizes for word count in November, or ask for for Christmas in December.

Speaking of December, my parents said they were going to pay for my sister to come visit them. They asked if we would be too concerned about seeing her after she flew and suggested they may bring her out two weeks before Christmas if she's not back at work yet because she can work from their house as easily as she can work from her house. I'm not sure she's going to want to come from California to Georgia, unless something drastic changes (like our governor dies and gets replaced with someone less awful?). But maybe the prospect of being alone for Christmas is worse than the prospect of coming to Georgia? IDK. If I lived in California, I probably would not get on a plane and fly to Georgia this year.

We came home and got in a fight because I had left the laundry basket in the kitchen instead of setting it on top of the laundry machine. Everything has to be just so for Kevin, even things he has never complained about before but just expects me to know. This led into all the ways I am awful (sometimes I leave drawers open! I don't always interrupt what I'm doing to come take the bath mat away from the cats!)

USAA sent me a survey to do about my recent roadside assistance call, so I did actually get to complain to someone about both the fact that he wouldn't take payment any way other than apple pay and the fact that he refused to wear a mask and was all up in my business without it. Since it is USAA, I'm sure someone will actually read this and care.

I realized as I was writing here that I was about to lose my art every day streak, so I quickly photoshopped an image. That's about the quickest thing I do that I'll consider art. Usually I try to do at least 3 images on days I say I did photoshop, but technically one is art, and it makes it so I've still done art all but two days of this year.

There's three days coming this week with 60% chances of rain all day but high temps between 80-82F. Could this mean an early fall for us? Oh gosh, please tell me we're getting an early fall! I mean it's going back up towards the end of the week, but usually it doesn't get that low until September, so maybe? I wish that I could sit out on my porch for it, but there are still too many mosquitoes, and it becomes an uncomfortable thing this time of year even if it is a little cooler. Spring is for sitting outside. Summer is for huddling inside. Most of fall there are still mosquitoes, unfortunately. Then winter it's usually too cold to sit outside for long. I guess I could do it on some days though if I dressed warmly enough.

Speaking of mosquitoes, a very large one came into my house when I let the dogs out when I came home from my mom's. Both cats started jumping and chasing it, and Aggie actually caught it and ate it. Good kitty. I knew I had cats for a reason.

I'm actually on track to write 50k words again this month. I'm down to needing about 1100 a day, which is only 100 a day more than I write in an average month. I'm sure if I join one more Talos battle and write just my usual daily words, I'll get above 50k again. I'm not sure that's my goal, but I think it's going to happen either way. I'm actually over 30k now, with 15 days left to write, so I guess technically I'm on track for 60k, but I don't plan to get that. 50k this month, my prep work for the next two months, and 50k in November would put me well over 500k for the year, which may be my goal, even though my GYWO pledge is only 300k. I've already passed that, so I guess I need a new goal? Half a million seems reasonable. Although I don't write it equally over the year, it amounts to a bit less than 50k a month, or sustaining the pace of NaNo year round. I did it last year, although 160k worth of those words were in 2 months. I won't do it any year in the future, since Tabby's daughter's spring break is in April and Pennsic is in July, so two of the NaNo months are cut short by trips.

I guess this wasn't a short entry after all, was it?

I tried to go to bed at 1am, but failed, but stayed in bed until 3am. Then I got up and talked to Sarah's friend Gerta for a while. Normally Gerta just PMs Sarah and doesn't talk to the rest of us, but I guess Sarah has missed her appointed time to talk to Gerta several days in a row, so Gerta was worried and wanted to know if I had seen her. Gerta was telling me that the Netherlands had originally had crazies like the people who spit on my friend at Walgreens but they'd all been arrested and spent a week in a jail, and now it had stopped. I hope they actually arrest this bitch and give her jail time, and continue to consistently do that to people like that.

Anyway, the number of you who think both that Kevin is a libertarian and that he voted for Bernie Sanders is baffling. How do the two go together? Anyway, you're right that he voted for Bernie Sanders but he is probably closest to a democratic socialist. The correct answer to all of the questions of whom he voted for is Bernie Sanders (including the 2016 general). Anyway, he's certainly not a republican, and if we started lining up republican leaders in the street to shoot them all, he'd volunteer to be the gunman.

I went to bed around 4am and woke up around 4pm. This does not bode well for my ability to get to a dentist appointment at 1 tomorrow afternoon. I did, however, wake up several times earlier than that because Katrina came and cleaned, so I woke up at 10 to let her in and at 1 so she could clean my bedroom and at 1:30 to pay her and lock the door after she left. Then I crawled back into bed and slept until 4. Kevin was asleep when I woke up.

I read lj and dw, and that was about it for the day. Kevin woke up and we ordered dinner from a burger place. They fucked it all up and I was sad. They gave Kevin exactly what he ordered, but they gave me a bacon cheese burger with nothing but lettuce on it when I ordered a plain cheeseburger with lots of toppings, and then they didn't give me fries at all. Kevin gave me some of his fries, but they were Parmesan flavored so they weren't very good, and I only got like a quarter of a small fries because they only filled his fries up halfway and then I got half of what was left. It was wholly unsatisfying, and I don't think we'll ever be ordering from BurgerFi again.

After dinner I logged onto the SCA meeting. They had a bid for Red Tower, our October event, which I guess is really aspirational because I think we're going to be just starting a second wave of virus right around then. I'm not going either way because if things do go well, that's the weekend of my 20th high school reunion. But they've received permission to proceed as though this is going to happen, but try not to spend money on things that are perishable yet. Iazzie's wife is going to run it, which is interesting, because she never does anything with the group. I didn't even know he was married until they tried to run for baron and baroness. I'm surprised so many people want to go ahead with this when in the same meeting everyone said they're not going to DragonCon because they're worried about the virus. Red Tower is only one month after DragonCon.

Someone (I forget who) said they wanted to arrange a "porch fairies" exchange where you get paired up with someone random (but close to you) and you deliver something homemade to their porch. The only home made thing I have is alcohol, so I'm hoping I can specify to pair me up with someone over the age of 21, but I'd be excited to play porch fairy and also get something from someone in my barony.

We hung up around 9 and I decided not to finish my dailies because I still had to do all but 2 of them for the day and that kind of time just didn't exist for the day. I went into the inn on habitica, and then started writing here. I think I'm going to finish writing here and then go watch the video for my Jewish video chavurah. I also sort of feel like embroidering the outline of my turtle but that may be a little aspirational. I want to get it done this week (which ends tomorrow), but I keep just staring at it. But video!



I'm kind of a mess today. I didn't wake up until 4 so I didn't take my morning meds because it was too close to dinner meds time and I didn't want to cause low blood sugar. But now I haven't taken them, and IDEK. Yesterday dinner consisted of a candy bar and half a bottle or white wine, and I was still sitting right around 100 when I woke up. I guess that's a lot of sugar and not much protein, though, so who knows. Maybe that counts as a meal.

i'm doing pretty well with my writing. I'm already down 130 words per day for my goal to reach my goal for the month. i'm trying not to over achieve because that's stressful, but keeping on top of the goal is fine. GYWO is allowing people to change their yearly goal next month, and i am debating whether I want to do that. On one had, I'm way ahead for the year. On the other hand, I still need to write a pretty large number of words per month to finish on time and probably need July and November big numbers to do it. Maybe I can just start shooting for smaller numbers each month and assume I'll make up for it in November. But then again, if we haven't come out of quarantine by November, I may not write large numbers that month. IDK. I'm only 110k away from my goal and I have 8 months to do that. That means I really only need 14k per month to finish on time. Maybe I just need to change my monthly goals to 14k and be fine with where I am? That seems reasonable.

I just need to lower some stress somewhere and I don't want to give up the art challenge because I think that that is actually lowering stress despite giving me something else to manage each day. I also don't want to give up my lj writing streak. So writing 1000 words per day may be the thing to go, and we'll just focus on trying to get a couple hundred words per day instead.

Now my sewing machine is taunting me. I have to figure out how it works, but that sounds like a project for another day. Also, my thread is missing. I left it on top of the machine when I moved it in here, and it is not there now. I imagine the cat moved it so I might not find it in usable condition.


Atlantia posted their classes for their university event in June. You can't register until May 15th, but I'm looking and deciding what I want to register for. There look to be a lot of good classes. Someone is apparently teaching dance, but I'm not sure how you can teach dance without the ability to form groups. I don't think I'm curious enough to go to it.