Zombies!

Hello to any who might still check this blog. I am still alive, though suffering a flare up of an existing, exhausting condition. It’s been over a week of not being able to work and getting very little done. It’s demoralizing. Anyway, I am looking ahead and hoping next weekend will see enough of an improvement that I can run my zombie workshop at the library. I don’t think I’ve shared many of my zombies, probably should have checked before posting but this headache means I am not going to so, here are some of the little blighters.

I like the green ones best and I like the little guy in overalls w/ the yellow shirt the very best. His name is Slurpie and I love him. I’m realizing that I need to pay more attention to the goofy gore and make sure all my zombies actually have some zombie features beyond just the eyes. Some of them don’t obviously look like zombies and that is a shame.

I’ve also made, using the basic zombie template, Drizzt for my husband’s birthday.

Watching the cars outside my window…

So we’re ill again, somehow, despite a million precautions. Husband gets a Covid test later today and then we wait to hear back. UGH. The worry is hard to keep at bay but I’m doing my best. We’re okay, our symptoms are pretty mild and if Covid wasn’t a thing we wouldn’t be concerned about them at all.

We have so much on our plates it’s insane. I don’t know how we’re doing it sometimes. But we are so that’s good. I am tired and achey and I’m going to rest. Be well, Everyone. Be safe.

Tuesday Update: Now w/ Books!

It was 39 degrees when I woke up this morning, so lovely. Not that I want the growing season over just that I enjoy being slightly sane and enjoy being able to stand wearing clothing. I’m hoping to enjoy wearing sweaters again someday, maybe even this winter, when my crazy hormones finally loosen their grip. We’ll see. I am pleasantly chilly this morning.

My hubby is sick but of course started work before 8am. At least he’s home and can work in his bathrobe if necessary, he could work from our bed even. Working remotely is kind of awesome, I mean it would be better if it was more of a choice, but still. He’s working ridiculous hours now, that’s just a job at a school in September, to be expected.

Apparently I’ll be writing the grant proposal for the Cultural Council next month. My boss has confidence in me and promised to check it over before we send it. Look out, I just might become competent at my job! I still have plenty of gaps but I love what I do so I keep trying to learn it all. One thing at a time, I’ll get there.

My reading for the year is ahead of schedule. I think I’ve read 42 books out of 52 I aimed for. With life being busy, stressful and so on I figured 1 book a week would be a decent goal for 2020. Then it turned out the whole world changed and got weird so I might have to raise my goal or something. I am currently reading The Library of the Unwritten; by A.J. Hackwith, Crossings; by Alex Landragin, Among the Fallen; by N.S. Dolkart, Fury of the Demon; by Diana Rowland, and This is My America; by Kim Johnson. Next up: Beowulf; by Maria Dahvana Headley and Disfigured; On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space; by Amanda LeDuc. I’m enjoying all the books I’m reading, I just can’t seem to settle down into one. I’m blaming stress.

I’ve only read one dud-book this year. Surviving the Lake House was just a dull slog. I almost never give a low rating to a book, I hate to do it, but I felt like the writer could have benefitted from serious editorial intervention. It was bad enough I looked up the publisher and, sure enough, self-published. I understand the desire to want to hold a book you’ve written in your hands. How amazing must that be? But writers need editors. They need a dispassionate someone to tell them; “This isn’t ready yet. It needs to have a consistent tense.” or; “You’re writing in the first person you need to tell your audience why you’re telling them this tale.” or: “You need more description. The reader needs to be able to visualize your characters, scenes and so on, they need to connect to the characters.” Plus all the usual grammar fixes etc.

Incoming B-Day Season!

Feeling ill today, so is my husband, neither of us is allowed at our workplace at the moment. It is highly unlikely we have picked up “the covid” as our precautions against it have bordered on the paranoid but better safe than sorry. The doc sent hubby in for a test hopefully that comes back negative! Eek.

On a happier note the spate of fall birthdays approaches rapidly and, as I have a spring birthday, I am currently preparing a stand-alone adventure to run (3-5 sessions) across the whole birthday season. My husband is currently running 3 RPG campaigns, and has one of the aforementioned fall birthdays, so I thought I would take on the task of providing this activity for everyone. Pathfinder and Roll20 really make the whole thing so much easier. I’ll be running the adventure “The Slithering” on Roll20 which will have all the maps and almost all the pawns we’ll need. The only pawns I will need to create will be those for the PCs and any animal companions or familiars they might have. I’m reading the adventure now and gathering all the monster stats referenced so when I go to run it everything will be ready. Since we own the actual, physical booklet, access to maps and everything on Roll20 is about $10. The booklet set us back about $20 or so, so $30 for entertainment for 3+ parties/sessions? Not too steep! https://paizo.com/products/btq023hg?Pathfinder-Adventure-The-Slithering

I did have to whip up my own, very brief, player’s guide since Paizo didn’t bother with making one for this short little romp. For their 6-modules-long Adventure Paths they make these awesome player’s guides that are full of suggestions as to how various ancestries and classes might fit into the campaign, suggested backgrounds and skills that might be especially relevant etc. They’re really helpful. The one I made is less than a page long and not at all fancy but I think it has the bare bones information needed so the players can construct useful, non-frustrating characters.

Now I’m tired and going to lie down and keep reading the adventure. Be well!

So tired…

I haven’t been blogging. I haven’t known what to write and I mostly still don’t. The world is crazy, the pandemic is out of control in the States and we’re just pretending it isn’t, and my health isn’t awesome. My joints are sore and achey, my head hurts most of the time, I’ve got painful swollen glands behind my jaw, I’m exhausted and still can’t sleep.

In more positive news I’m making real progress on a tomatoless pasta sauce that rocks. I made Meghan Markle’s zucchini based sauce a couple of times and it was good but not great so I was waiting for the tomatillos from our farmshare, still waiting, but I had summer squash so I chopped it up and threw it in my crock pot with onions, garlic, and homemade broth. That turned out well enough that I took the next bunch of summer squash and tried to improve on it. I used all the ingredients from the first attempt and added a bunch of spices that are in a highly rated spaghetti sauce and BOOM! Suddenly the sauce is YUMMY. I also added a little lime juice because tomato is acidic and summer squash is… not.

Puddin’, Why I let milkweed grow in the yard, blue visitor, & purple flower.

The blackberry and mint harvests continue, a little bit most days. Today it is raining and we have severe weather alerts but I got 1/2 a pint of blackberries and some lovely flowers before it started. I hope the rain doesn’t ruin the staghorn sumac. If I had the energy I’d go harvest it now but that is not going to happen.

Before this … whatever it is… completely walloped me we walked out to the pond by the local library and I noticed it also has pink water lilies. So pretty, so I snapped the pic above. My fingers hurt so I’m going to stop. Be well!

Battening Down the Hatches

Well, it seems we’ve made the call. My son’s school has closed and is gearing up for online learning, my husband is/has been working from home while ill, we’ve stopped taking my middle-est daughter to school and are hoping they will let her learn online so she can graduate in the spring, my eldest tried to get time off from the pharmacy she works at but they said she could come in as usual or lose her job so she lost the job, and I am hoping like crazy that my boss keeps being supportive of my NOT going in to work. At this point, with no way to know what my husband is ill with we are either protecting others from getting Covid19 or we are protecting my very vulnerable husband from it. I did not imagine having to make a call like this until very recently. Life has gotten weird.

We’re as stocked up as I could get us. I built up our supplies of TP, pasta, rice beans, tea and other staples, froze a bunch of chicken and beef, a little bacon, got ahead on toothpaste, soap etc. we have board games, video games, rpgs, and tons of books and art supplies. I also made sure to have cat food and litter to last a while and plenty of dog food. I think we can lay low for a month or two without going crazy or suffering privation. We’ll see how it goes I guess. schools are closing, sporting events are cancelled, library programs are being cancelled, companies are telling people to work from home, hand washing instructions and videos are popping up all over and social distancing is being encouraged widely.

i don’t think we’re overreacting, we are calm and making the best calls we can on all of this. When my daughter quit her job we had doubts, we felt awful, but then we saw a video where a Doctor with 30 years experience talked about why this disease in particular has him worried. There was a situation he was involved with where 13 people were exposed to this virus and all 13 contracted it, something he has never seen before, all 13 got it and 3 ended up in the ICU, 2 are still there. If my husband doesn’t happen to already have this thing there is no way in hell I am letting him risk getting it. He has terrible asthma, just shockingly bad. We’re already doing everything we can for him outside of a hospital setting and his doctor wants us to hold the course. The doc calls daily, sometimes more than once, to check on him. We’re in limbo here and we’re making the best calls we can day by day.

Explanation…

By way of explanation. My husband has been asked by his doctor to self-quarantine because he works at a school with students from all over the world, is ill with a very bad cough, and it’s possible he might have been exposed to the latest corona virus because parents of some students came to campus to pick up their kids.

My husband also has very, very bad asthma. He’s been ill for over a week and isn’t getting better. The doc just started him on updraft treatments 3xs/day which seems to be helping. They said to keep the kids in school and the eldest and I were allowed to work… which seems crazy and wrong and a great way to spread whatever Hubby has. (though I do not think he has the corona virus, his symptoms just don’t add up to that. Thank the gods.) I am letting my boss decide when she wants me to come in. So far she’s opted to have my shifts covered.

I have been out to the grocery store with full hand sanitizing and staying away from people and they are starting to run out of certain things. I was able to get sanitizing wipes and bleach but they are 100% out of rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, witch hazel, hand sanitizer, and so on. I got some of the last wipes. They are low on a lot of things but food can be had aplenty in our area still. I’ve been hearing that Costcos nearby are out of near everything, I’ve heard of people not able to get inside them to shop, schools are talking about, and in some cases preparing to, go into online learning mode. My kid’s schools are discussing these things though there are no known cases in our county yet.

We’re ok, I hope you and yours are too!

Physical and Mental can get in Sync Any Time Now….

I’m physically falling apart and mentally starting on an upswing. It’s actually super weird because I feel like I can tackle anything, in my head, but my body does Not agree. Usually my head is the one dragging me down, telling me I can’t do something, and I’ll feel physically confident even though I am a huge klutz with limited skills.

I’ve been quite tired for a bit now and achey. I keep getting minor injuries, bruises and that, from crashing into things, (klutz) or stumbling, or the other day when either my IBS was acting up or I had food poisoning. Yeah, I seem to have lightly pulled a muscle in my back … from puking. LOVELY. I keep turning my ankles stumbling just enough to keep them achey. It’s ridiculous.

Meanwhile, I’m busy cleaning, decluttering, working on fun projects for work and for myself. One project is I’m knitting house scarves (Harry Potter reference) for the teens at the library. When I show Sorcerer’s Stone in December I’m going to have puzzles the teens can complete to enter a drawing for the house scarf of their choice. I really hope I can get all 4 done in time. I’m only halfway through the Griffindor scarf at the moment.

I’ve also been reading more, trying new recipes, getting ahead scheduling events at work, managing my time better and saying NO to things I don’t have time for or don’t want to do. I’ve also been working on enlisting the kids to do more around the house. There’s just so much and they need to develop the skills for when they’re on their own. (whatever they may believe about me exploiting their labor)

Before I pop off, here’s a book recommendation: Hollow Kingdom; by Kira Jane Buxton. It’s insane, funny, touching, heartbreaking, filled with expletives and still reverent. I don’t want to give anything away. It’s Wonderful.