the_rck | Entries tagged with car

I've got a book on CD from the library. 11 of the 12 CDs read fine on my laptop (via USB connection), but I can only get the 8th CD to play in our DVD/CD player in the living room. Even there, most of it won't play. I'm not sure why because the disk looks clean and unmarred. I hope the rest of the book is intelligible without CD 8.

I've got a DVD that can't be renewed and two books that can't be. I won't finish all of them. I'm going to prioritize the DVD because it has a longer waitlist than either of the books. I've also got about half a dozen comics/graphic novels that I might manage tonight or tomorrow morning.

I'm a little groggy this afternoon. Cordelia woke me at 8:30 this morning. At that point, I'd had less than six hours of sleep. I ended up taking another half tablet of halcion and got another three and a half hours of sleep. Scott told me that I should sleep as long as I needed to, but then he also got cranky about the fact that we had a deadline for being able to do a test drive today.

We just got in under the wire on the test drive; we arrived at the dealership at 2 p.m. We tried a Subaru Legacy 2020; our old car was a 2016 Legacy. The 2020, according to Scott, drives like the 2016. I can still get in and out without issues, and Scott doesn't have to duck low in order to see out the front. We'd have liked to have the option to get something used, but we're on a very tight timeline. We've only got a couple of weeks left on the insurance paid rental.

I've been spending a lot of time reading long fics. Many of them are incomplete (probably permanently), and many are only mediocre. I just haven't had the wherewithal to work at anything.

I haven't read much of anything here on DreamWidth this month. I'm not going to backread at this point because there's just too much. Even thinking about it is anxiety inducing.

I keep thinking that I'll get my feet under me and manage to deal with life well enough to get back to posting here regularly. Then something else smacks me.

I've had four PT appointments for my knee so far. We're trying a lot of different exercises because it's really hard for me to be my hamstrings to do anything at all without making the knee worse or getting my quadriceps very sore. We also haven't found anything that works for stretching my calf muscles. We spent most of today's appointment on that.

While Scott was driving home from work on the 17th, the car spun out and went into a ditch. He was a long way from help, so we're lucky that the car could still be driven. (He called the insurance; they said that staying and calling the police wasn't necessary since no other vehicles were involved and since nothing but the car was damaged.)

The back end of the car was smashed in. The rear window shattered. The trunk crumpled and couldn't be closed. The repair estimate came to $9000, so the insurance declared the car totaled. They'll give us $13000 toward a replacement, and they've been covering a rental. We're currently planning to start looking at options tomorrow.

Scott's still on 2nd shift, so he was driving on unplowed roads. It was past midnight by the time he got home. We've had some nights with bad weather since then, and all three of us have been a bit edgy about him driving home that late.

I dealt with the annual LTD review, and they've decided to extend my benefits for another year. That was a huge weight off my mind.

I've scheduled three college visits for Cordelia and am trying to pin down the best time for two more. We'll do EMU and U of M the week of spring break. MSU will be the day before she and her father go to see Dear Evan Hansen up that way (so they can just stay overnight).

Kalamazoo College and WMU visits will happen some time this summer. They make sense as things to combine with a visit to my family on that side of the state. I'm not sure how interested Cordelia is in either of those schools apart from the realization that those visits will fill awkward time with grandparents.

We may drag her out to Washtenaw Community College, too, just so that she knows where it is and how it's laid out.

Scott's birthday was at the beginning of this week. I missed the extended family gathering for his birthday because Friday's PT left me unable to move much over the weekend. Cordelia and I gave him season 2 of The Expanse and a game called Spirit Island that he and I have both wanted to try.

We were supposed to play Betrayal Legacy last Saturday, but one of our players forgot and went out of town, so we played the expansion for Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters instead. This was our first try at it, and we had abysmal dice luck. We lost the first game pretty rapidly because we couldn't get rid of any ghosts. (The ghost fighting mechanic is dice based. The players roll 1 or 2 dice, depending on how may player tokens are in the room right then. 3 faces of each die have ghosts on them. If any of those come up, a ghost in the room vanishes.)

evalerie has had to loan us a car again. Scott got home about 5:30 last night with the further news that it will be Friday before the dealership has a replacement tire for us. Driving on the spare is a really bad idea as it’s only supposed to be safe for about forty miles. Scott was more than a little panicked at the idea of trying to get back and forth to work twice on the dratted thing (after getting home on it once already). We’re really, really fortunate to have

evalerie around.

Cordelia complained last night, right at bedtime, that she has a school assignment problem— She needs to find a book to read that’s at her reading level by tomorrow. All of the books she’s got from the library are rated as too easy by the company who does this system. This thing is called 'lexile levels.' Most YA stuff is 700th to 800th lexile. Cordelia is supposed find a book at 1350. When I went to the official site, all the stuff at her level was very clearly aimed at adults. When I filtered by the age for which things were appropriate, I got absolutely no books at all. The closest thing I saw on the list to something that might be appropriate for Cordelia was The Scarlet Letter, and, well, no. She’s twelve.

I suspect that the big problem is that the company has only rated a few thousand books and has focused heavily on stuff at lexiles that kids are more likely to read. I think, too, that they may only rate things that publishers and/or schools specifically ask them to or that they know are popular.

I emailed her teacher, and I put in a reference request with the local public library. The teacher got back to me this morning. She said that anything between 1000-1400 would be fine, so I went back in. I narrowed the search by length (over 108 pages) and by age (10-13). I didn’t try to limit by genre/subject because I knew there’d be too few options for that. I got very frustrated because there were books that turned up three, four, even five times within a particular lexile, not even different editions of the book— the same exact book.

I turned up 120 books between 1000 and 1370. Most of them were at the low end of the scale. The local library only has a few of these, and those are almost all non-fiction, cataloged for adults, or part of a series without being the first book in the series. Cordelia very much doesn’t want to read non-fiction, but I think she’s going to have to. She also says she must have this book by tomorrow morning which… Yeah. I suppose Scott can take her to the library tonight if we absolutely have to; he’s not going to be thrilled to do it, though.

There were two authors who looked promising, Karen McCombie and Mary Hooper, but the library doesn’t have any of their listed books, so I guess they’re not options. We don’t have time for interlibrary loan (and the state ILL system is going down some time this month for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure when) or for special ordering a book. I suppose I could call and ask Book Bound and Barnes & Noble if they have any of the specific books. I just very much don’t want to have to.

The library just got back to me. I’m not sure that any of their suggestions are things that the lexile people have actually rated. I’m not sure Cordelia’s prepared for Persuasion (that has always struck me as an Austen book that isn’t really comprehensible until a person is well past adolescence). I have asked the teacher if Northanger Abbey or Emma might be acceptable. Code Name Verity and A Clockwork Orange may be too dark for her. I hated The Great Gatsby and Gulliver’s Travels when I read them in high school, so I wouldn’t really expect Cordelia to love them now. I think Cordelia would love Spindle’s End, but I’m not sure she’ll read it given that we own a copy.

I know nothing about The Book Thief, The Midwife’s Apprentice, or The Spies of Mississippi, so I have no comment on them. The only other specific suggestion is Little Women which… I don’t know. Maybe she’d like it. She thought Anne of Green Gables was horrifically boring, though, so I’m dubious.

Cordelia’s tastes run to YA dystopia, YA fantasy, and YA science fiction. She’ll also read some humorous books aimed at her age group that are about the trials and tribulations of middle school or high school students.

I have three more appointments covered by ACS volunteer drivers. I’m glad of that, but I’m also kind of tired of juggling it all and tempted to tell them that I’m covered all the way through, what with my friends and family. It’s just that taking me in is a fair sized bite out of the middle of someone’s day. I do have someone to drive for every single remaining appointment whether the ACS finds someone or not.

I’m trying to make lists of foods our family can’t have or doesn’t like and of foods we actually do know we like.

evalerie has offered to coordinate volunteers to try to help us with dinners until I’m recovered. Making the lists is hard because there are so many fiddly things that we need to avoid and because there are a lot of foods that two of the three of us like a lot but that the third person (almost always Cordelia) won’t touch.

And, in good news/bad news—

My sister does not have strep throat. Her son came down with it last week, and she started Monday with a sore throat. Given she’s scheduled for surgery tomorrow, this would have been a really, really bad thing. As it turns out, she has a mold allergy (this is new and not great, but…), and that won’t interfere with her surgery.

The bad thing is that our new car, the one we got Thursday, already has a flat tire. I didn’t think to ask Scott if it’s a puncture or a defective tire. He may not know. This unfortunately means he won’t be home for at least two hours yet.

In the so-so news category, I’m tired enough to be achy. A little looking around online found a lot of women saying that they had joint aches and/or muscle aches during and for months after breast radiation. Of course, I found an equal number of very medically official sites that claimed that such things could not possibly be related in any way to radiation therapy. So I have no idea. It might be the radiation; it might be that being this tired is setting off my fibromyalgia. I don’t have a fever, not even a slight one, so it’s not that. The whole thing is making me desperately want stuff with lots of sugar in it. I know that that won’t actually help because the problem isn’t lack of food or low blood sugar.

I ought to be in bed. I really intended to be. Instead, I’m up because I don’t dare lie down. I just finished a mug of ginger tea that I was hoping would help, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much. I wish what’s bothering me would just settle or make me truly sick. Either way, it would be over.

The problem is that Scott and I both had to go in order to pick up the car tonight. That took more than an hour, and by the time we were done, it was past 7:30, and we hadn’t eaten. I knew I needed something really, really mild, but I’m not sure I communicated that to Scott. He took us to Plum Market to get stuff from the hot bar. I was very conservative, but it apparently wasn’t enough. I really was desperately hungry, so I couldn’t bring myself to pass over all of that and just buy a loaf of bread (Scott keeps buying rye bread with caraway, and I can’t handle caraway, so I couldn’t count on having bread at home).

At any rate, I’m here at an hour past the time I was planning to be asleep. I really need the sleep, too, because I have three or four things to do outside the house tomorrow— radiation, Cordelia’s dermatology appointment, a trip to the bank, lunch with Scott’s sister. I can skip lunch with Scott’s sister, but if I do, I won’t necessarily get a meal between breakfast and dinner.

I am worried by tonight’s reflux and touch tummy. It’s not likely to be the anaprox at this point. All I can think of is stress. I didn’t have a chance to stop and relax in a safe space in between 10:30 and 8:30 today, and I really, really need that now. I think that I’m going to have to tell Scott that I don’t care how urgent things are and unless someone’s dying, I’m not leaving the house Thursday evenings. Thursdays are my long appointment days, and I have to pack a lunch because the cleaning lady is here when I get home and she’s fasting. I’m not comfortable with eating in front of her. She doesn’t leave until around 4:30, and I really can’t relax while she’s here.

I have my preliminary appointment, the one for the radiation planning and scans and such, for October 1st at 11:00. It'll last at least two hours, so I'll probably need to pack a lunch to take with me. Hopefully, there will be time for me to eat and a place where it's okay if I do. Then again, the the appointment really is over at 1:00, I could probably just eat after. As long as I eat by 2:00, I'm usually okay.

I've counted weeks on the calendar. If I'm really lucky and if everything happens on the best possible timeline, I'll finish radiation the week before Thanksgiving. I'm hoping for that because Thanksgiving would put a bit of a crimp into the whole process. I'm assuming I'd still need to go in that day, but the staff wouldn't want to be there any more than I would.

I've pretty much decided that there's no way I can do Yuletide with this going on. I regret that. I've never had any luck getting myself to write treats, so I doubt that will happen, either, even if I find myself able to write. I will look around and see if there are any requests that I might be able to write a treat for, but, without an actual assignment, I'm unlikely to carry through. I know myself that well.

Scott and I discussed UCon yesterday, too. We concluded that there's no way we're going to be able to do the whole weekend. He and Cordelia may go in for the day on Saturday, but I'm probably not going with them. Well, it will depend on how I feel, but... That's fairly far into the treatment, and I'm likely to be pretty tired.

I have the feeling right now that there's something I really ought to be doing, something that I've completely forgotten. I think it's just that I'm reacting to knowing that there are things coming up that I want to get done but that I can't actually start on yet. All I can think of at the moment is the dozens of emails I have stacked up. I have been deleting a lot of things unanswered because I don't feel like I have the energy to deal with them.

I'm trying to figure out how we went from three full boxes of granola bars Saturday afternoon to the current two bars in the cupboard. That seems like a heck of a lot of granola bars for three people to go through in three days. We must have as the alternative is gremlins, but it doesn't seem reasonable. I hope Scott doesn't mind being asked to pick up more on his way home from work. He expects to work until 7:00 tonight, so stopping on the way home is a much bigger deal than it would be normally.

Cordelia was really appalled yesterday to learn that it is possible for cancer to come back and for the same person to get more than one type of cancer. I think she's actually more worried now than she was over the surgery, and I have no idea how to address that. I have some age appropriate materials from the American Cancer Society, but I don't know if I can get her to look at them (or if I can remember where I put them).

Scott bought me a ginger candy bar yesterday. It was supposed to be sweetened, ground ginger, but it didn't taste like ginger at all. The overwhelming flavor was scorched sugar. The ingredients were coconut sugar, ginger, and pectin, in that order, so I have no idea how that's possible. Is coconut sugar that nasty and that overwhelming? Why would anybody make a ginger product that doesn't actually taste like ginger?

The current estimate on the arrival of the new car is eight weeks. Neither Scott nor I are very happy about that, but there's not much to be done given that nothing already on the lot meets Scott's needs. Scott's still investigating financing options. He says that the best terms he's found are at the university's credit union, so we have to find out if my status as an alumna and as kind of employed by the U (I'm on long term disability leave, but for some purposes, I'm still considered technically an employee) are enough to let us qualify for a loan there.

Scott has put in an order for a Subaru Legacy. It's a little cheaper than the Outback or the Forester, and Scott, looking ahead four years, thinks it will be easier for Cordelia to drive when she's sixteen. The seatbelt thingy still pokes into my thigh, but it's not quite as bad as with the other cars. (Scott and the guy from the dealership drove over here specifically so that I could climb into the passenger's seat and fasten the seatbelt. Cordelia got in, too, to see what she thought.) Scott's thinking about getting a cushion for me to sit on so that the seatbelt thingy can poke that instead of me.

The Legacy has pretty good trunk space. It won't be possible to pile things as high as in our current car which may be an issue when we go on week long vacations, but for 95% of what we do, we don't need all that much trunk space.

Scott's filling out paperwork to apply for financing through the dealership. He's already arranged financing through our bank, but he's doing it anyway, just in case the dealership can offer better terms. We figure it can't hurt to find out.

I finally emailed my surgeon's office last night to ask what was going on with the pathology report, and the nurse called me this morning to tell me the results. The lymph nodes were all clean which almost certainly means no chemo. The tumor itself was smaller than the mammogram showed, about two thirds the size-- 1.5 cm. It was entirely invasive mucinous which, if I understand correctly, is about the best form of invasive breast cancer I could have had. It's pretty rare, only about 2% of tumors are mucinous, but the really good thing about it is that that type pretty much never spread beyond the confines of the initial tumor. The tumor will grow, but it won't spawn anything else.

I don't know yet what all of this means, going forward. I'm to go in next Monday afternoon to find out. My case will be presented to the tumor board that morning, and they'll come up with a consensus recommendation as to what to do next. I'll probably see my surgeon's nurse rather than my surgeon because he has surgery scheduled that day and might still be in the midst of that when I come in. I'm hoping that I'm to see the nurse because things aren't going to be particularly complicated, but who knows?

Scott is trying to get Monday afternoon off. He thinks he'll be able to, but he can't promise. I've told him that I'm good to go on my own if it comes to that. I suppose I could ask Scott's sister if I really want someone with me, and it might be a good idea to have someone if what comes next is going to be complicated. My impression is that things aren't likely to be complicated, but I really don't know.

Scott is a little worried that the biopsy wound might be infected. I don't think that it is, but I'm going to start washing it every day with antibacterial soap, just in case. Basically, it's still leaking a bit, and there's an underlying layer of something white and solid in there. I don't think it's an actual infection-- I washed thoroughly last night, in the shower, with water running over that bit of me for quite a while, and it stayed looking exactly the same. Also, my breast isn't hot to the touch or red. It is swollen and bruised and painful to touch, but that's true of all parts of the stupid thing, not just the parts near the biopsy.

Cordelia is still finding her feet in terms of dealing with the new school routine. She's not sure that going early to see her friends is worthwhile-- One of the buses is now dropping kids off at the back of the school which is hard for her to get to. The other bus has been consistently late to arrive. That leaves her with one friend who's going to be biking to school as long as the weather's good.

Scott and Cordelia went out last night to buy her a bunch of composition books. She knew she needed one for social studies and thought it couldn't hurt to pick one up for each of her classes, excluding orchestra. She also wanted some pencils and a sharpener. One of the main classrooms doesn't have any sort of pencil sharpener, and her teacher has been very specific that work must be done in pencil, not in pen. It seems like a major oversight that a newly constructed classroom wouldn't have a pencil sharpener.

Scott expects to work late on Friday, have Saturday off, and work Sunday. I think I'm going to set a wake up alarm for Saturday so that he can get to the car dealership. We need to get this car business taken care of soon, and he's not willing to do it after work during the week. I think there's also a basic problem-- He very much doesn't want to take on more debt and keeps second guessing himself as to what the best course of action is.

Cordelia's appointment was fairly straightforward, but we now have a regimen of multiple creams and washes. The whole thing is complicated enough that we have a detailed sheet telling us which things to use when. It's benzoyl peroxide and two different antibiotic creams (one for her her face and one for her back and chest) in the morning. Then adapoline (sp?) and the antibiotic creams at night after washing everything with Cetaphil.

The dermatologist also noticed Cordelia's dandruff and recommended two shampoos to be alternated, T-sal and either Selsun Blue or Head and Shoulders. She gave us samples of T-sal and Head and Shoulders (though she wanted to give us Selsun Blue instead). The dandruff extends to some minor scaling on Cordelia's face, and that's why we have a different antibiotic cream for her face than for elsewhere. Scott picked up the three prescriptions, some Cetaphil, and an oil-free moisturizer on his way home from work, but we still have to order more of the 2.5% benzoyl peroxide and pick up some of the shampoos Cordelia needs. The dermatologist also told Cordelia to shower more often, every other day instead of the once or twice a week she has been doing. Maybe she'll even listen.

I talked to my psychiatrist yesterday afternoon. She's not enthusiastic about me trying Cymbalta because of just how bad my reaction to Effexor was. She didn't want to prescribe something haphazardly, over the phone, so we're going to have an appointment on Tuesday morning to go over the options.

The electric car is giving us difficulties-- It's not consistent about charging. One night, it will get to full charge over night. One night, it'll barely charge at all. Scott just emailed me to say that he was late getting to work because the car simply didn't charge at all last night. He will be late getting home, too, because he doesn't have enough charge for that and will have to stop to do that. I'm not sure where-- Probably the AAA in Canton that he mentioned a few days ago.

My SIL finally got back to me, around 8 p.m. last night to tell me that she still hasn't received the reports the Cancer Center people promised to send her on Monday. Why she couldn't tell me that earlier in the week, I have no idea. At this point, I really can't do anything about it until I go in there on Monday. Well, I have access to one of the reports she wants. They finally got around to sharing the report for my mammogram with me. (Weirdly, there are two reports with slightly different titles and exactly the same text. That was the case the last time I had a mammogram there, too, so it's apparently normal. It's just kind of confusing. I mean, exactly the same text.)

My impression is that the delay in my SIL getting back to me is that I was using her Gmail address when she responds better to messages sent to her uw.edu address. I didn't have that, and it doesn't appear on any of the webpages I could find that profile her. I looked last night. Scott's sister had the address and has shared it with me, and I've put it into my address book now.

My sister wants to put the information about PBB up on Facebook, and she thinks people will pay it more attention if she gives my story as well as hers. I asked her to give me a couple of hours to tell our aunt who actually uses Facebook first. I haven't done that yet because it will be hard and because it wasn't urgent that she know. I just don't want her to find out from my sister on Facebook. If my sister wanted to call her instead of me doing it, that would be fine. She has called the aunts on the other side of the family for me (she thought that, since they're in the same state I am, they might actually be able to help. It's possible, and asking wouldn't have occurred to me).

Around about dinner time last night, I started aching, mostly in my arms and legs and shoulders. I had forgotten just how terrible that feels. It hasn't really happened to me, except when I've had a fever, since I stopped working. When I was still working, I felt that way all the time. I ended up taking an Ativan around 8 p.m., and that actually helped. By bedtime, I wasn't achy in anything like the same way.

The runny nose has mostly passed. There's still a little bit lingering, but I no longer feel like I need a tissue in hand every moment. (I kept reassuring people at the dermatologist's yesterday that it was a medication side effect, that I wasn't contagious. I used a lot of hand sanitizer anyway.) It seems kind of unfair to have a side effect that started twelve hours after the medication and lasted another thirty or forty hours. I very much doubt that the toradol was still working by that point. I'm debating whether I should let my primary care doctor know about the side effect. It might be a good thing to document, but it's really fairly trivial as such things go, certainly not enough to prevent me taking the med again if I really, really need it.

I emailed the other Metanews person last night and told her that I don't think I can do any more link finding. She's disappointed. I think she was really hoping that we'd find a way to manage somehow. She and I are on opposite schedules, so talking about what to do next will be a slow process. I have offered to write up some sort of announcement of hiatus and call for volunteers to take over my work. I'm not optimistic about the volunteers, but who knows?

I'm getting cranky with a couple of online vendors who won't stop harassing me to give them feedback on recent purchases. I sort of understand the one I bought from via Amazon-- Feedback there matters a great deal in terms of future sales. Blair, on the other hand... I already gave feedback on the purchase once. Just because they shipped another pair of pants a week later doesn't mean they need feedback again. Both of these vendors email me every four or five days, and I really, really don't want to deal with them, but I also feel like I ought to. It will, after all, take less than five minutes for each of them. It just feels like one more damned thing piled on, though.

Last night, I called my half-sister and my half-brother and told them the news. My sister was pretty calm about it but has decided to make an appointment for a physical so that she can ask a doctor what this means for her. She's twenty five, so I don't think she'll be getting a mammogram yet, and we are only her half-sisters, so I don't know. She sounds like she's doing well. She and her boyfriend (who is also named Scott) are going to Argentina as soon as her summer job ends. She's been helping run summer camps.

My brother took the news a lot better than I expected, given what our sister thought was going on. It turns out that he hadn't called her because he thought she was still too fragile to receive calls. He expected her to call him to let him know when it was okay for him to call and/or visit. He promised me that he'd call her right away.

So far, the electric car is working okay for us. It's not recharging completely overnight, however, so Scott's very concerned about how things will work out on Friday when he has to go in early and the car has four hours less time to charge. He says there's a charging station at the AAA in Canton (maybe ten minutes from where he works), and he's going to look into using that. The other option is to go to a downtown parking structure and use one of their charging stations, but that would be kind of expensive and would leave Scott stuck downtown for a couple of hours.

I slept poorly last night. I definitely slept, but it was the sort of dream where I was running over and over a list that kept changing as I tried to understand it. Also, I was just awake enough to be aware that my head hurt a lot and to keep changing position in hopes of helping that. I got up around 3:00 and took an Amerge, just in case it was a migraine. That helped some but didn't completely kill the pain. Lying on my back instead of my side seemed to help, so I'm wondering if there was a sinus component. I woke at 7:30, and usually, I'd just get up then, but I was so groggy that I went back to bed and ended up sleeping soundly for another two hours.

My local friend, Leah, just let me know that her mother died this morning. She fell while watering the plants at a vacationing neighbor's house, and nobody found her for quite a long time. She was gone when they did. Leah is also known as

nakkinomiko, but she hasn't visited LJ in many, many years, and I'm not sure how many of you know her.

I went through my list of library books I want to try (there are hundreds, spread across about ten different lists) and put holds on a bunch of romances. I probably won't read more than a chapter or two of most of them, but maybe I'll find an author I like enough to try more of their books. I've been trying to articulate better what it is I'm looking for in romance novels because I don't think it's necessarily the same thing other people are looking for. I haven't gotten very far because it's pretty darned nebulous.

I recently tried to read a Joan Smith book because she'd been recommended to me as like Heyer. I didn't get very far because the whole situation at the start was sheer misery with no way out or way to mitigate it. The book's a romance, so I'm sure things get better. A happy ending is, after all, required for the genre. I just can't wade through misery to get there. Maybe I picked the wrong book, and it isn't typical of the author's work. I don't know. The library doesn't have any of her books, so I picked one at random on Amazon and bought it used (the only way any of them are available in paper).

I think I'm not keen on big misunderstandings. They'll often make me put the book down permanently. I don't want the hero (or the heroine, but usually it's the hero) to be an asshole, not even if he gets better later on. I can handle amoral and/or manipulative characters to some extent as long as they treat people with some level of courtesy even when they're pissed off. I like a plot external to the romance that lets both hero and heroine show their strengths, and I want both of them to have strengths.

I slept middling well last night but woke up feeling groggy and generally bleh. For some reason, my left breast (the one that gets biopsied tomorrow) hurts. The right one is fine, so I can't figure it out.

Scott discovered yesterday that the car rental was costing a lot more than he thought it was. He thought it was $33 a day, but it was actually $77. He looked at the rental agreement and couldn't find the actual price specified anywhere on it.

evalerie is going to loan us a car from this evening forward, but we've racked up a considerable bill.

Scott's definitely leaning toward another Subaru Forester. He's just not quite ready to commit to it. Also, his parents have friends whose son works for Subaru and might be willing/able to get us a deal on a car. The dealership is only willing to give us $500 as a trade-in on our old car. That's not terribly surprising, given the repairs it needs, but it is disappointing.

Scott and I both want to run something at UCon. I don't think a LARP is on the table for us this year. I suppose I might be able to do it if everything turns out to be fine with the biopsy, but I'm feeling sort of fried, and a LARP is a lot of work, even one I've run before. Scott's thinking to run XCom, and he thought I should run Sentinels of the Multiverse. I think he likes the idea of board/card games because there's not nearly as much preparation work involved. I'd really love to run a small role playing scenario, but I'm not sure that I'm up to the work involved. I also haven't GMed anything in about thirteen years and don't know any of the systems people seem to commonly run at conventions these days.

Of course, buying a car and everything might have an impact on whether or not we can afford to go to UCon.

My SIL and niece are going to come down early so that all four of us can go to lunch before my appointment. I need to be at my appointment at 1:00, so we're aiming for 11:00 for lunch. I still miss Cafe Marie, but at least, Panera's not terrible.

A couple of active parents of students in Cordelia's class are trying to organize a bunch of activities between now and the beginning of school. Unfortunately, I don't see us being able to do most of them, not with Scott's work schedule. I'm debating emailing the list to see if someone is willing to drive Cordelia to and from the laser tag session, but she'll only want to go if someone she likes is going, too, and I'm pretty sure that none of her friends will be going. We could probably go to the picnic that's supposed to be on the school playground (construction permitting), but it would take a huge bite out of our Sunday, and that's the only day we can be sure that Scott will be home most weeks.

Scott looked up the terms of Cordelia's phone contract last night because she's been getting massive numbers of texts recently (mostly Google hangouts as that's where kids she knows gather). She has unlimited texting, fortunately, but her data allowance is measured in MB. As Scott said, no wonder she's constantly running out.

I finished my link finding last night. Pinterest wouldn't let me go back as far as I wanted to, but I probably didn't miss anything. The links there are usually to posts that are years old or are things that get linked four or five times over the course of a few days. I only lost a day or two. It's my week to post, and I'll probably end up posting on Friday. The other link finder doesn't have her stuff in yet and may very well have gone to bed already. I really, really don't see myself being together enough to post tomorrow.

I've stepped my Wellbutrin down again so that I'm taking 100 mg twice a day. I really hope that that means the end of the dry mouth problems I've been having since we went up to 150 mg twice a day back in January or February.

I've been listening to a variety of things on YouTube. Amazon is recommending a lot of music to me, and most of it is artists I've never heard of. Of course, judging by what I've tried so far, there's a reason for that. What on earth makes Amazon's algorithm think that I'm interested in some of this? I've wishlisted and/or bought folk, bluegrass, 1980s top 40, and some Beatles. So far, I've tried and disliked Deep Purple, Nightwish, Rainbow, Within Temptation, and Epica. I didn't out and out dislike Kamelot, but I'm not at all sure I liked them.

I think this not being able to sleep in the mornings thing may relate to my anxiety levels. I simply could not get back to sleep after Scott got up this morning. I couldn't even get close. I already ache from poor sleep, and I expect it will only get worse as the week goes on. At least, since I'm not taking oral contraceptives these days, I don't have to worry about getting an untreatable headache from lack of sleep.

I suppose I could call my psychiatrist and ask about something to help me sleep, but I'm not sure there would be a good option-- It's not that I'm failing to fall asleep right when I go to bed. It's that I'm waking way too early and finding myself thoroughly awake. I don't want to sleep through Scott's alarm, however, as that's when I take my thyroid medicine. I need to be awake enough to do that but still enough in sleep mode that I can sleep another two or three hours afterward.

This morning, Cordelia stumbled out of bed after I'd been up for about ten minutes and demanded to know what on earth I was doing. I told her, and then I sent her back to bed. I have no idea if she'll actually sleep. I hope so.

Cordelia was willing enough to go to the library yesterday, but she objected to going for bubble tea. She said she wanted to get home, and that was more important. Combining that with her rejection of ice cream, donuts, or any other treat on Saturday (again, in favor of getting home sooner) and her unwillingness to go out for dinner on Thursday, well, I'm disturbed. It could be some sort of thing about being twelve and finding her parents undesirable company in public, but I don't think so. She didn't try to avoid going on the test drive expedition or the library trip. Most likely, it's just that she's talking to her friends online and doesn't want to miss anything, but, still, I worry about agoraphobia.

Scott is going over and over his car buying data. Of the cars he can reasonably expect to be able to drive comfortably, the Subaru Forester has the very best safety rating. The Outback is close, and that was slightly more comfortable for me. He's wondering if he should be looking at other options, too, but that safety rating is a really big deal. It's our second major criterion, coming just after whether or not Scott can see out the windshield when he's sitting upright. (In the rental car, he's got a huge blind spot in front because of how tall he is and where the rearview mirror is.) After that, we consider probable durability, probable mpg, comfort for me and Cordelia, and so on.

Scott's only purchased three cars in his life, so he's terrified that he'll make a bad decision. He's trying to weigh the potential savings of buying used against the likelihood of expensive repairs and the need for a replacement coming sooner. Ideally, we want a car that will last a decade without needing anything but routine maintenance. He also really, really doesn't like the fact that our cash reserves (aka Cordelia's Social Security money in her savings account) is nearly depleted. We're going to need to dip into that again to put a down payment on whatever we end up buying. There are still other expensive things that could go wrong around our house. The stove, the washer, and the drier are all about twenty years old, for example, and there are things we ought to do for the garage (but I think we're going to end up ignoring that garage until it finally collapses, 5-10 years from now. Which would be a pity, but we really haven't got money to put into it. I just hope there isn't anything in it that Scott values when it happens).

I poked through the prompts for Parallels and Fic Corner and found a few that interest me. I probably won't end up doing anything with any of them because of time issues and because none of them gave me immediate story ideas. I have so many other things that I ought to work on. Some of the Fic Corner prompts are for things I wouldn't have been brave enough to offer if I had signed up. (Part of what decided me not to sign up was not seeing fandoms I was certain I could write.) I haven't quite dared look at the NFE prompts as I've already got two or three Narnia WIP that aren't going anywhere. I've never actually written a treat for an exchange. I like the idea of doing it, but I never seem to get anywhere with it.

We tried three different Subaru models this afternoon. All of them were miserable for me because they've changed the design of the seatbelt so that the receptive piece protrudes and gouges my leg enough to bruise (this is also a problem with our rental). I can tolerate it for short trips, but going to Scott's parents' place, for example, would be hellish.

The Crosstrek wasn't great from Scott's point of view. He had trouble seeing out. The sun shade, even when folded against the roof was right in his line of sight so that he had to keep ducking down in order to see. His head brushed the ceiling just enough to bring out static in his hair. Leaning the seat back helped a little, but I don't think he thought it was enough.

I think Scott wanted to try the Crosstrek because he still hopes we can get a hybrid some day, and the Crosstrek is the model they used for their hybrid. The facts that he can't really drive it safely and that I can't sit in it without pain are discouraging on that front.

We didn't actually test drive the Forester (we currently have a 2003 Forester). We just got in and fastened out seat belts to see what had changed.

We also didn't bother driving the Outback. Scott's parents have one, and he's driven it before. It has good head room for Scott. He could actually look straight out the windshield. The seatbelt on that one was still painful, but it was less so than on any of the other cars we tried.

Cordelia didn't think there was any difference at all between the different models, so we're not considering her opinion.

Cordelia is acting a little weird. She spent most of the time asking when we could go home. We got lunch at Burger King and talked about getting ice cream from the Dairy Queen across the street, but she vetoed that because she wanted to go home. She was just barely willing to take five minutes to return her library books to the branch we passed, and she refused the option of stopping at Plum Market for gum and goodies.

I can't figure out if it's some sort of agoraphobia, a desire not to spend time with us in public, a really obsessive need to get back to whatever she's reading, or what. She came very close to trying to talk us out of buying lunch at all.

And now... Should I try to nap or should I link find? I don't know if my bladder will permit a nap, but I'm also pretty sure I'm not awake enough to link find or do much but stare at the screen.

We got lucky-- Scott's not working this weekend. It's a good thing because it will make it possible for us to go and look at potential replacement cars. Scott ran the numbers last night, and, even without the exhaust system replacement or the costs of rentals while the car is in for repairs, we're spending nearly as much every month on repairs and upkeep for this car as we would on a car payment. He also spent a lot of time last night looking at Consumer Reports and other sites to see about car safety ratings and all of the other things that we want to consider. I think he even went to our bank's website to see what loans might look like (then he noted that the dealership from which we bought our old car is offering 0.9% financing right now).

All three of us ended up staying up well past midnight. I think it was 2:00 by the time Scott got to bed. That made getting up at 9:30 very, very hard, but I needed my meds and my breakfast.

I managed to reach the doctor's office about the biopsy yesterday. It took considerable doing because the university's website didn't actually list a phone number for the mammography clinic. The appointment confirmation they'd sent me only gave a number for a cancellation hotline. I ended up having to call the hospital operator and getting transferred a couple of times. Then, I had to wait for them to call me back which took about three hours.

They actually want me to stop my multi-vitamin because it contains vitamin E which is a blood thinner. I already knew to avoid NSAIs, so that wasn't news. I've moved my mulit-vitamins into the bathroom cupboard for the duration so that I won't forget and take one accidentally.

Because the medical stuff took so long, I didn't end up calling the Apple folks to try to get my refund. That's for Monday.

I'm cranky with LJ. They've changed me to an infinitely scrolling feed, and I can't figure out a way to get rid of it. I wouldn't mind as much if I could go into entries to read comments and then back button to the same place I left off. Instead, when I back button, the feed refreshes and takes me back to the top. If I was only three entries down, that's not such a big deal. If I was twenty or thirty down, it's a serious PITA.

evalerie took me and Cordelia to the instrument rental place so that we could swap Cordelia's thirteen inch viola for a fifteen inch. The clerk who helped us was a little surprised that we were skipping over the fourteen inch size, and I'm a little unsure. We lost the slip on which Cordelia's teacher wrote the size she was to get. Cordelia's fairly sure it was fifteen inch, but we don't know. She does seem to be able to work with the fifteen inch viola, though. It's not in tune even though the clerk spent about ten minutes tuning it (with Cordelia muttering the whole time that he wasn't doing it right).

I did a little bit of link finding yesterday. I'm hoping to spend more time on it today and tomorrow. I need to so that Monday and Tuesday aren't utterly awful in that respect.

I realized yesterday that my reasons for not downloading Chrome no longer apply now that I have 500 GB of storage instead of 120 GB, so I downloaded it. I'll be using that instead of Safari, at least for now. Weirdly, it's having some issues with Gdocs.

I ended up having to disable Hangouts completely on my phone because I couldn't get it to shut up. I have no need for both my laptop and my phone to tell me that someone has said something. I'm a bit frustrated by that because it might actually be useful to have Hangouts on the phone sometimes (though I'm most likely to use it in places where having my phone make that much noise would be rude). I just don't want it running most of the time. All of the Google related stuff seems to default to always on and be designed to be very difficult to turn off.

I got a call back from the place where I left a message, the estimate there is $1830 (which seems oddly specific).

Scott is working twelve hours tomorrow and at least eight hours on Saturday. He says cider season is getting started early. Usually, it waits until September.

My parents brought Cordelia home and then left immediately. The original plan was for us to all go out to dinner, but they decided they'd left their dogs alone too long (and we couldn't really argue. Both dogs are at least ten and likely older, and they'd been on their own since 10 a.m., and it's a two hour drive back to Lawton).

Scott said that he wanted to out to dinner anyway, but Cordelia really, really doesn't want to. She says she's had enough of being out of the house today already. She even says she'd rather eat chicken than go out. I can kind of sympathize, but Scott and I would like to do something nicer than pizza or Wendy's. I think we'd both really enjoy going somewhere moderately nice, probably not anywhere as expensive as Blue Nile but still. I'm not sure how to reconcile that. I know that I want to go out.

I called the first auto repair place, the one recommended by people we know and trust, and found out that I lacked a bit of information that would make a huge difference-- I needed to know whether or not the catalytic converter had fallen off, too, because that adds at least $1000 to the job.

I talked to Scott a little later, and he told me that, yes, the catalytic converter fell off. So I called the first guy back. He told me that it would be between $1700 and $2000, including labor and depending on whether or not he could save any parts from the old catalytic converter. (Scott thinks not because he says he's been getting error messages from the sensors in question for a while.)

The second place I called wouldn't be pinned down to any sort of estimate except to say that the catalytic converter added $1000 to the cost, whatever that cost might be.

The third place, I got an answering machine. Maybe they'll call back; maybe they won't.

The fourth place said $1300, but I'm not sure that I believe it as it sounds very low.

And I've gotten nothing else accomplished this afternoon, no writing, no link finding, no reading even. I did do the dishes, but that only took ten minutes, so I'm not sure I count it as a victory.

Scott claims that my laptop should be able to run Mountain Lion, that it did once before (which puzzles me). I have no idea.

I feel like swearing and crying at the same time. Last night, I purchased OS X Mountain Lion. Today, I tried to install it and had an awful time because I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do to access the download. I actually had to do a chat with Apple's help staff.

Once I knew where to find it, I tried to download it only to get a message saying that my hardware can't support Mountain Lion. Apparently, my current system is as far as my hardware can go, and I'm stuck. That means there's no way to upgrade any of the software that ties into the OS. I can't update Safari. I can't update iChat. I can't ever use FaceTime (I supposedly have it on my computer, but it won't run under Lion).

Scott says that the dealership wants $3000 to replace the exhaust system. That's more than the car is worth. He wants me to call around to see if there's any place reputable that can/will do it for enough less to make it worth doing (he said around $1000. I think he's dreaming if he thinks we'll find that. $1500 might be possible, but... Yeah). I've gotten four recommendations, two for one particular place. I'll be calling another place first, though, because the recommendation comes from a friend who, in turn, had originally been directed there by a mutual friend. It doesn't hurt that that's the only recommendation that includes a phone number.

I'll start making calls as soon as I stop being quite so upset about the OS fiasco. (Supposedly, I can get my money back, but that requires a phone call and some hoop jumping, and I'm not sure I can handle that today, maybe not tomorrow either.)