the_rck

( Scott tested positive for Covid Saturday )

Scott only worked two days last week. The vacation schedule was planned before he took the second shift job, but he'd forgotten that he'd scheduled Thursday and Friday off. He made some repairs to the ramp from the back porch to the driveway (one of the supports underneath had come loose and tipped over because Scott's father thought that screws down through the ramp to the supports would interfere with the ramp's functionality and therefore didn't let Scott anchor things properly), so there's no longer a soft spot halfway down. We got some things stored and some other things cleaned. I did some moving of books in the basement that I'd been intending to do for literal years.

We discovered during the book moving that three or four books had gotten a little wet and needed to be pitched. None of them are things we particularly care about. I'm just annoyed because, while I knew we were getting dribs and drabs of dry soil through the corner of that basement window, I hadn't ever seen signs of moisture there. We could so easily have lost books I cared about. I also pulled more books to donate.

We discussed trying to get rid of some of the furniture in the basement, and Scott had plans in that regard before he got sick on Saturday. At this point, who knows? I did ask Cordelia if any of that stuff appeals to her for a few years down the road, and she was unenthusiastic. Which is fair.

Cordelia will probably want any of the bookshelves that we manage to clear. At least, I assume so. Everybody needs bookshelves. Right now, though, we need to move the furniture so that I can get at the C-G author paperbacks and the H-S author hardcovers. I haven't weeded them at all. Ideally, I'll be able to shift everything enough to clear the dining room shelves for some of the board games Scott has stacked on the floor. He's weeding those, just more slowly than I'm weeding the books, because he wants to play each of them at least once.

I also need to drag him to the basement to weed his books. I wouldn't keep the Dragonlance books, but he used to run a campaign in college and has major nostalgia about them. There are a couple of other largish sets that are 100% his. I'm not touching them unless he tells me it's okay. I'm also not touching anything that's in that gray area of belonging to both of us. At least, I'm trying not to.

( Talking about Yuletide sign ups )

There are a few things that I have partly done that could serve as treats for fests/exchanges with impending deadlines, but I don't know if I will manage to finish any of them. I might be better off working on my Past Imperfect assignment which is due in about three weeks. I don't have a firm idea of what I'll be writing for that, but I matched on something that ought to be straightforward for me.

I signed up for Chocolate Box. I may regret that because I'm not sure what my resources are going to be for it.

I'm going to order several things that I'm hoping will be functional aids-- a carpenter's belt for the many, many small things that I need to tote around the house with me, some headbands to maybe keep my hair out of my eyes (if I can't find something for that, I'll need my hair much shorter), and a reading light that I think I can make work for light on the pages of a book without light in my eyes.

My main hesitation over ordering the lot is that we've discovered that the pertussis testing I had done in October is not covered by insurance and cost $300. The clinician who asked if I was willing to be tested didn't mention the cost and didn't indicate that it was a test that might not be covered or that might need pre-approval. There was a pretty fair chance that I did have it, given the intersection of the prednisone, the pediatrician appointment, and the number of diagnosed cases in the community.

Given that she couldn't give me antibiotics (I'm allergic to the ones she was authorized to prescribe), testing was indicated if only so that I'd know whether or not I had to keep quarantining myself, but I might have been better off staying isolated for a few weeks rather than paying $300. I did stay isolated up until the results came back.

I'm not sure we've got any recourse now, though.

Cordelia's back at school as of today. We took the tree down yesterday. I removed the ornaments and the lights while Scott and Cordelia did the grocery shopping; Scott dealt with putting away the tree after that. I put aside a bunch of single color glass bulbs that we never use and some single color plastic bulbs that we occasionally do but would rather replace with more interesting things. Those filled a paper bag.

I'm not sure what we'll do with them. The glass bulbs are things Scott remembers from childhood, but they're also kind of dull. I don't think anyone in the extended family is going to want them. Some places around here will accept that sort of thing donated in November/early December, but nobody will take them right now. Will we remember in November? Very likely not but anything's possible.

I've got a lot more books that I intend to get rid of. The mass market paperbacks can just go to the Friends of the Library. Other books, Cordelia's school library might want, but I'm not clear what their needs are. Some books might be worth selling, but we don't have a good way to do that. I have a lot of collections of fairy tales.

I've heard nothing at all on my LTD case. I'm hoping that things will start moving this month, but I'm not relying on it. My impression is that there's not much I can do right now.

Cordelia and her friend ended up pulling 5.5 trash bags of stuff out of her room. Half of that went into the trash bin. The other half is probably donatable. I'm going to go through the stuff this afternoon to make sure that nothing's going out that Scott or I value. Cordelia realized that Scott would want to keep his childhood teddy bear, but she might not realize that one of us wanted some other item.

I also ruled that we're keeping the camping pad. It's in the hall closet now. There's room for it there since I got rid of the ancient Disney Princesses air mattress and sleeping bag set. We'll want the pad if Cordelia ever has someone spend the night again.

The idea of added salt was kind of horrible yesterday, so I didn't do it. Today, I'm feeling out of proportion exhausted, and last night, I ached. The aching might just have been because I walked so long on Wednesday and then cleaned the fridge until I was just short of falling over on Thursday, but... It's so very hard to tell. I have a sample size of one and a lot of variables that I can't easily control for.

There's a reason it took me decades to realize that blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries all make me sick the day after I eat them.

I haven't written any fiction in a week. I'd like to manage some more before the end of the year, but I don't know if it's going to happen. I need to get going on the time travel exchange story. I have a rough shape for it, but I need to review the canon and don't wanna. Meh.

I'm going to try to catch up on book logging today and to answer a couple of sets of questions about writing. I also want to finish some library books so that I can return them tomorrow. Most of what's waiting for me to pick up, hold-wise, is CDs, so it's not that my shelf of to-be-read library books would overflow. It's just that some things can't be renewed and that others should be easy to get through fast. I just haven't made myself start.

The stuff that's due tomorrow that can't be renewed is:

Star Wars Rebels complete season 4 - We've only got 3-4 episodes left. I think we'll be fine on this one.

Venom - We've watched 10 minutes and may not get back to it.

Timeless season 1 - We haven't started this. There's a hold on this and a copy on the shelf, but the library system won't let me renew unless someone actually has time to go to the shelf and retrieve the copy that's there already.

How to Invent Everything by Ryan North - I've just barely started this, but it looks amusing, so I'd like to go on with it.

Teahouse of the Almighty by Patricia Smith - This is a book of poetry. I'm maybe a quarter of the way through it and may give up due to lack of time.

Also due tomorrow but can be renewed:

Elementary season 4 - I'm six episodes in.

Negima! omnibus v.1 - This is a reread, but it's been so many years that I really want to review so that I can try to remember who's who. This is one of those manga series with far too many characters whose backstories and abilities actually matter to what's going on. I remember liking that aspect of the series but finding it overwhelming, too.

We didn't make it to the library to pick up holds yesterday, so I need to do that today. I won't need to carry much on the way there because Scott dropped everything off at Traverwood yesterday.

I also need to run laundry and the dishwasher. I got about half of the dirty dishes into the dishwasher while I was making breakfast for myself and Cordelia, but there were a number of items that need soaking. I haven't been able to persuade either Scott or Cordelia that rinsing bowls right after using them is something they really, really need to do. Maybe a new dishwasher would be robust enough to deal with dried on food, but the current one isn't.

Beyond that, today should be mostly Yuletide related things. I would like to pack up more stuff to get rid of, but realistically, we're not doing another run for a couple of weeks. I'm frustrated in terms of my of to-do list in as much as it consists mostly things that I simply can't accomplish quickly (or need help with) or readily break down into steps that can be accomplished. I keep looking at it and realizing that I haven't finished anything today and won't tomorrow.

I'm still, for example, only halfway through cleaning out the hall closet. One of the two things remaining to be done requires Scott's presence because I need him to decide which coats he wants to keep. The other thing to be done is to wipe down all the flat surfaces with something damp to remove the dust. I'm hesitant about that because of the dust it will raise, even if I'm careful. (The hall closet is directly across the hall from our bedroom door.) Also, I don't think I can reach the top shelf for dusting even with our step stool.

I'm tempted to pull all of those coats out and put them on the loveseat where Scott normally sits so that he has to deal with them, but I think today is not the day for it. He needs to pay bills today, and work hit with a big project on Friday that needs to be completed today even though everyone in the office* who has any clue how to do it will be out. Scott's going to be trying to figure out something entirely new to him and to the plant without the support of his coworkers. Oh, and he might need to go to urgent care for a skin infection that hasn't responded to the prescribed antibiotics.

Then again, the looking at coats thing should take about ten minutes. If there are a dozen things in there, I'd be astonished.

*There are only four employees in the office. One had kidney failure right after Thanksgiving, and no one knows when or if he'll return. Another scheduled a bunch of medical appointments for today, planning it months in advance. There's no reason that the big new thing must get done today except that the folks higher up want it immediately.

I got very little done yesterday in terms of what I'd planned. The search for that dratted fitted sheet ate all my energy, and I never did find it.

I put aside more things to get rid of, though, and I ran three loads of laundry. I found a couple of food stashes high in the hall closet. I'm pretty sure they date to a point when we had mice, two to four years ago. The stashed stuff showed no signs of having been nibbled, and the cloth hadn't been soiled as far as I could tell nor had it been shredded.

The shelves are high enough that Scott's the only human living here who could reach them without a step-stool. I very much doubt that he tucked almonds and a dozen or so of those white chocolate disks (these were dyed light blue) into an old flannel fitted sheet. The almonds were petrified. The white chocolate looked scarily the same as it had when Scott bought it (he has a bunch of molds, and he wanted to make multicolored candies for one of Cordelia's birthday parties).

The flannel fitted sheet will be going out the door. When I moved it, in addition to getting showered with the almonds and such, the elastic made sounds of crackling that told me that had been dead for a long time. The cloth looks fine, so I'm going to donate it. Maybe there's someone who will have the time and skill to replace the elastic or to cut the thing up for other uses.

I suppose it's a project that would be forgiving-- since we're never going to use that sheet anyway-- if I wanted to experiment with Scott's sewing machine. I'm just worried about hand tremors and sewing machines not being safe to mix. (We wouldn't use the sheet even if the elastic was healthy because I'm not enthusiastic about how sleeping in/on flannel feels. In my childhood, my mother and I had ongoing fights about the textures I liked versus the ones she thought I ought to like.)

I found a lot of stored clothes in various closets. I gave Scott a big bag of gloves that were in the hall closet. He looked at them and nodded and said, "Yeah, that's where we keep them." I gave him a puzzled look because, every winter, he can't find gloves for snow removal work or driving. If he's the one putting gloves and hats and such on that particular shelf, why on earth doesn't he ever retrieve them from there?

I wish the house had better storage options.

At any rate, we're donating a lot of cute winter hats that we obviously bought when Cordelia was a preschooler. Some still have tags. We're also donating any gloves/mittens that are too small to go on my hands. Plus one that is wide enough to accommodate my hands/wrists but that has fingers that are only half as long as they need to be. Possibly I washed them incorrectly at some point? Does microfiber shrink?

Does anyone know-- Can one donate bras that still have tags? They're on hangers and obviously haven't ever been removed from them. I'm almost certain that they're the ones my mother bought around the time of my lumpectomy. She wasn't sure what would fit me (nor was I as I hadn't worn bras for something like twenty years) and bought a range of sizes. My guess is that these two were leftover after I found one that worked. Mom didn't consider spending an hour plus to return them to be a good investment of time given that they'd been about $10 each at Target.

I didn't search much of the basement for the fitted sheet because a lot of stuff got stacked high and deep when our SIL visited. We needed space for a double air mattress down there and for her to be able to walk around, too.

Scott wants me to bag and box the stuff that needs to be donated. At this point, I think I'll use the study as a staging area. The basement has more space for that, but it would require taking things downstairs to sort and then back up again when Scott's ready to load the car. The study doesn't really have the space I'd like for it, but we don't use it much.

I've been feeling pretty terrible most of today. I feel like I've got cramps. That started yesterday, and I assume it's some sort of bruising from the uterine ultrasound. I had a headache for most of the afternoon, but it seems to have gone once I had dinner and some Tylenol. The headache naturally started at a point when I needed to limit myself to water for 2.5 hours.

I'm trying to decide whether I'm up to doing laundry or unloading the dishwasher. Cordelia's got a cold and general ick, so I don't want her to empty the dishwasher with germy hands.

Scott attempted to take some of our old electronics to a county recycling thing today. He got there at the very last moment and discovered that all of the entrances were blocked by police cars. I later found out that they had closed the event early because the line got too long, long enough that it was going to take two hours to process everybody.

So now we have a car full of non-functional electronics.

I had hoped that Scott would go earlier in the day. The event ran from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and I told him that more than once yesterday and forwarded the url for the event at 8:30 this morning. He didn't actually look at the flyer until after 1:00 when I pointed out that it was closing soon. At that point, he was removing hard drives from old laptops. He just hadn't processed the timing.

This has left both of us a little cranky. I feel like I reminded him and gave him enough information. He knows that I did but is kind of generally pissed off that the world didn't cooperate with him playing games all morning. He was up at 8:00 but didn't shower until 11:00. Then he spent a while on the phone with his parents.

Scott has gone off to teach our niece and a couple of her friends how to play D&D. I'm chipping away at certain bits of household chores that have needed doing for quite a while as well as working on more urgent things. I was considering taking a bit of a walk, but it's too hot out there for me. Maybe this evening.

Before he left, Scott brought up one of the boxes of junk from the basement. I've almost finished sorting that. Most of it is trash, but I've got a grocery bag of stuff to donate and a grocery bag of Cordelia's old report cards and certificates and school work. Scott wants to keep all of those papers, but we don't have a defined place for them. I want something other than a paper bag for storage.

There are a lot of index cards in the bottom of the bag. I'm not quite sure what to do with them. We might still use them, but they're loose and kind of grimy. I'm pretty sure Scott would want me to keep them, but... I think that the bottom of the box has mouse droppings all over, so I'm inclined to pitch them and the box.

I also found Cordelia's 3DS which she had apparently never realized was missing. I didn't find the stylus, but I suppose that's easy enough to replace if she gives it away or donates it.

I have no clue at all why there's a rock the size of my fist at the bottom of the box. It's gray, dirty, and ugly, and I don't recall anything that would have given us something of the sort as a souvenir. I feel ridiculous putting it in the trash, but putting it in the yard will just mean the lawnmower hits it the next time Scott mows. I can't see myself walking to the science and nature center or to the railroad tracks in order to put it down.

I kind of want to write, but I'm not sure I have sufficient brain for it just now. Last night was not great for sleep, and I had to be up with Cordelia this morning.

I have managed to find my cloth sling and am wearing it so that I don't keep using my left arm. I'm hoping that the elbow will start to recover if I can just keep it still.

The results of my blood draw on Monday are mixed. My blood sugar is stable, but for the first time ever, I have high(ish) cholesterol and triglycerides. I was expecting my A1c to have gone up because my diet, with regard to sugar, has been terrible during the last few months as I've struggled to keep myself functioning. My blood pressure at my appointment today was 98/63, so that's still fine. It bounces around a bit, but it's never once gone higher than 110/80 which I've been assured is still solidly in the middle of the normal range.

I gave three books to Cordelia’s English/social studies teacher today. Two of them are hardcover books on the Presidents of the U.S. up through Obama. The eighth graders study U.S. history, so those are likely to be useful to have. I also gave her a library bound copy of Journey to Topaz which is a novel about the Japanese internment during WWII from the point of view of an eleven year old girl. The author based it on her own experiences, so there’s a lot of solid details to make the book feel real to kids. The eighth grade curriculum has a focus on 'genocide literature' and includes the internment under that umbrella.

All three books were in extremely good condition.

I’ve given several books to the librarian for evaluation as to whether or not they’re useful for the collection. The two Dork Diaries books are pretty likely to end up in the collection. The three Miss Bianca books are iffier. They’re pretty pristine hardcovers (book club editions from around 1990, I think), but I’m not sure if kids these days are interested. It’s hard to tell. Pretty books are more likely to circulate, and these are.

Anybody reading this have a child or know one who might be interested in a Backyardigans CD? I’ve got a copy of Born to Play that I’ve just finished listening to to make sure it plays. It sounds fine all the way through.

I’ve been testing Cordelia’s old CDs and seeing whether or not I can get the scratches out of the ones that won’t play. I’m only willing to trying grinding the scratches off twice because the thing we have is manually operated and kind of tiring to use. (We tried an electronic one once. It didn’t work well, died fast, and Scott lost the instructions.) Those that don’t become playable after that are going into the trash.

We’ve got about twenty empty CD jewel cases. None of us have any idea where those CDs could have gone. They’re not in the basement. They’re not in Cordelia’s room. They’re not with my CD collection or in any of the carrying books we’ve got. I can’t imagine that that many CDs are really lurking under couches (I’ve checked) or got thrown out accidentally, so I assume there’s a cache of some sort somewhere in the house. I’ve been keeping my eyes open for about three years, however, and haven’t found them yet. I’m getting tired of keeping the jewel cases, though, as they take up a lot of room.

Would it be terrible to just throw out the CDs Scott’s parents have made and given us of inspirational sermons? None of us have ever listened to any of them, and I don’t expect we ever will. I don’t know. Maybe Scott’s sister’s SIL might know someone who would want them. She works for a church of the same denomination as the one Scott’s parents attend. I was wanting to email her anyway to find out if there’s a place I can donate those cotton rag socks.

I slept soundly from a little after 11:00 last night until about 4:30 this morning. I didn’t sleep at all after that. I don’t currently have a headache. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the dratted thing stays gone.

Cordelia is doing okay at school in terms of getting around with her crutches. I think there’s less stuff that she goes downstairs for this year than there was last year, and they’re not doing any classes in the basement any more. Tomorrow is a half day, so I’m going to have to remember to set my alarm to tell me to go pick her up very early. Thursday, I have an oncology appointment at 1:00.

Before Cordelia’s injury, I wasn’t worried about getting back before school ended because our cleaning lady will be here then. Now, though… If I see the nurse on time, I should easily be home in time, but if they’re running very late, it gets tight. Normally, Cordelia stays at school until about 3:45 on Thursdays for the GSA meeting, but that meeting gets canceled sometimes with no warning, so I want to be home by the time school ends at 3:03. If I’m done at oncology by 2:30, I can probably make it. If I’d known last Thursday that Cordelia would need help getting home, I’d have talked to our cleaning lady and asked if she was willing to do it if I wasn’t home in time. At this point, I could call her and try to explain over the phone, but English isn’t her first language, so that’s challenging for something complicated. I could leave her a note, but leaving a note wouldn’t give her a chance to say no.

Scott has come down with the cold Cordelia and I had (and still kind of have).

I poked at the Zenni Optical website last night. I measured the frames of my current glasses according to the instructions and discovered that I’m either doing it wrong or have a really weird head. The frame width on my old pair is 125 mm (I measured four times and had Scott check that I wasn’t miscounting). The website considers that to be a child’s size. I can’t find anything at all that matches the measurements I got from my old pair, not even approximately. If one dimension matches, others don’t. There aren’t any instructions I can find for measuring one’s head to figure out sizing. I’ve never had problems finding frames that fit when shopping in person.

Yesterday, I did three loads of laundry, baked a cake for Scott, did the dishes, took out some of the trash, and cleaned out my two dresser drawers and the floor of my closet.

I have one overstuffed trash bag of things that I think are still wearable and therefore worth donating. I have one trash bag about 1/4 full of things that aren’t worth donating for resale. I know that most of the places around here sell such stuff by the ton to companies that do… something with it.

I haven’t done much weeding of what’s hanging in my closet yet. I might get to that today, and I might not. The closet is packed, and it’s going to be challenging. I have a lot of dresses that are cotton knit and that are too worn at the seams for me to wear them in public without feeling self-conscious (most of the wear, I doubt anyone but me would notice). The dresses are 1X petites, long sleeved mock-turtlenecks, with elastic waists and A-line skirts that go down to mid-calf on me (I’m 5’2"). There’s a lot of fabric in each that’s still in excellent condition, some of it in big pieces, but it’s only going to be useful to someone who sews and who can make something else out of it or take it in to be worn by someone smaller than I am. I’m wondering if I should try the local freecycle list or something similar.

I haven’t really worn dresses since the cancer diagnosis in 2015. I couldn’t wear them immediately post lumpectomy and didn’t want to deal with them during radiation. Once I started the Tamoxifen, I couldn’t deal with clothing that heavy/warm. I haven’t worn anything long sleeved since December 2015. No, I take that back. There was one afternoon I felt chilly and wore a cardigan. (After Cordelia’s concert, Scott’s mother kept trying to get me to zip up my coat before we went outside. She didn’t say it directly but kept talking about how very cold it was out there. If I’d zipped up my coat, I’d have melted by the time we got to their car. I finally realized that I needed to explain that.)

I’m trying to decide how much to keep and how much to get rid of in terms of the things I’m not going to wear while taking Tamoxifen but will wear again after. I’ve got almost four years of Tamoxifen left, and that’s a long time to keep things, but, you know, cotton turtlenecks aren’t going to spoil or anything if I store them for a while. Buying replacements would be expensive.

At any rate, my first priority today is changing the sheets (that became urgent this morning). The second is the rest of the trash. Then I must make about three phone calls (well, ideally, I’ll intersperse the calls with other things). After that, I’ll consider my closet.

I was right. Scott had to leave as soon as he got dressed. I don’t think he even ate anything before he left. I hope he remembered his Beano so that he can eat some popcorn without getting sick.

Scott says he wants to keep any Lego people we might have. I was going to let him sort them out, but I knew that, if I asked him to, it would be weeks before he got to it. I don’t know how many of the figures will actually be useful for his purpose (minis for gaming), but they’re separated out now.

Ideally, I’d like Scott to take them and the books not worth selling to donate today. Art Fair may make that too hard to manage (it certainly means the books won’t go to the Friends of the Library), but keeping two tubs of toys in the living room isn’t great (and taking them back down to the basement seems unwise).

I’ve printed the directions from the Chicago hotel to various destinations including back home. Later on, when I feel a little more able to focus on it, I will print the directions for getting to the hotel from all of those places. Experience tells me that reversing things doesn’t necessarily work with, say, bus routes, and I don’t want to rely on Scott (or me or Cordelia) having enough charge on his cell phone to access directions that way.

I’m going to have to nail Scott down on what he wants to do when so that I can print directions from one destination to another. I’m not willing to do directions from everywhere to everywhere else, not when there are five or six distinct destinations that he and Cordelia are talking about.

Scott apparently doesn’t care when bread gets stale because I can’t persuade him to put loaves into bags or to close those bags. He’ll eat it anyway, but Cordelia and I won’t. Yesterday, he bought baba ghanouj that came with very thin flatbread for dipping. Scott left the bread open on the counter. I found it about six hours later at which point it was crunchy. We had a similar problem with flour tortillas earlier this week. The bag hadn’t gotten closed at all, and all of the tortillas were so dry they were crispy. I suppose that microwaving might revive one of those, but I resent having to try to salvage something like that. Also, microwaving only tends to keep things soft for a couple of minutes.

I’m going to wash the dirty sheets now. Then I’ll see about getting Cordelia to put away silverware so that I can run the dishwasher. After that, I’m not sure. I should write, but I feel like I need a nap. I got up earlier than usual because of Scott getting up, and I’ll have to do it again tomorrow because I have a dentist appointment in the morning. Or maybe I could manage a walk. It’s not horrifically hot yet, and it’s not actually raining right this second.