The Monkey And The Plywood Violin

Why are all my tender spots in the "wrong" places, a fibromyalgia question.

(Winter is terrible! I will probably be back here eventually, though.)

Is that it's giant-house-spiders-come-indoors season now. I can safely say that is more arachnid than I am used to seeing outside of an aquarium. While I'm not actually afraid of most creepy crawlies, it did give me something of a moment.

Hang out under the bed, spider. Eat all the bugs, but please don't socialize. You're very fast and look hard to escort outside.

In other news, I'm still more productive than I was in Wisconsin, but it has been a Week in the chronic illness department. I will be very happy when it stops being randomly hot.

It's been a rocky few days in the Spoon Department, but I did manage to get the bed raised up. Just have been too sick to actually do any of the unpacking that needs to follow that.

In semi-related news, I have ordered a pizza today. I am not a person who believes in the One True Pizza or anything, but I can safely say that Seattle pizza falls short of exciting. Not unpleasant by any means, and reasonably tasty, but I'd be just as happy with frozen or chain-restaurant fare.

Perhaps this winter I will be able to experiment with homemade pizzas again. Or just eat a lot of Vietnamese food.

Okay, so I can convince myself to write here, I guess. Now, can I convince myself to do more than just narrate my day, complain about what my body is doing to me, and gripe about things?

Well, today had some good bits, at least. One of the things that is pretty great about this apartment is the fact that there are feral blackberries all along the alley and the property edge next to the building. A lot of that is sloped or otherwise uneven, but there are some bits where I can walk without my ankle potentially doing terrible things. So I went out and was exposed to actual sunlight for a while (after which I fell over, because bright sun makes me very tired). While I was out there, I picked these: ( Is it still understood that a polite journaller puts pics under a cut, or is that now passe? )

Which I taught L to make a crisp/crumble with later on. (No corn starch makes them a bit damp, but otherwise, easiest possible dessert.)

Otherwise, today has been pretty lazy, and I am practicing not beating myself up about it. (I have also read enough UK text lately that I've lost the ability to spell practi(c/s)ing.)

Well, Internet, that's two actually pretty good days in a row. Still pretty tired-tastic and mildly sore, but it has kept to that and I have been able to both work and do other things. It's a miracle.

Today was my own work, which was pleasant and of course led to the freelancer's cry of "I will never have work again!" (I am in fact waiting for an approval mid-commission.) Hopefully I'll be back to paying work again tomorrow, but if not, I wouldn't mind starting color on that mermaid drawing.

Things are difficult, but they are not terrible. (Something I often have trouble wrapping my brain around.)
To bed with me, and perhaps tomorrow I will be more interesting!

So, the number of things I did today? That was actually too many things. Sadly, it was just getting up at 7:30, letting the plumber in, walking through a grocery store, briefly being in a Barnes & Noble, eating at a restaurant, taking Mere to the beach, and driving back. But I'm kinda wrecked and I'm definitely not getting any work done today.

In good news, we should no longer have a sump pump spraying water under our apartment!

I was gonna say a thing, but you know what? Don't try to force through the melatonin, Self.

Anyhow, I got my package, I finished a commission about 3 days later than I wanted to, I've had a heck of a pain week. Learning experience: I can either do a full day of shopping/erranding OR I can come home and do a full day of painting. Not both, Internet, not both.

G'nite all.

Oh, Internet, Internet...

(It occurs to me that years of article-writing has me capitalizing that automatically. Yet they tell me that the AP Stylebook and the NYT have abandoned it. Shall I have to re-train myself?)

Anyhow, this has been a Day. Turns out the guy who was in charge of scheduling the plumber, and who called me on Friday (we're about four person-who-calls-a-person deep now) told me wrong. I was up at 7:30 today, my god, my god, and no plumber appeared. He/she/they are due tomorrow instead.

I've got a print order to fill, and set up the big printer accordingly, at which point it informed me that it was dangerously low on ink. I promptly ignored this and it printed two very nice images, which are safely signed and packed away. What the printer did not wish to do, after the way of its kind, was print the very simple shipping label immediately afterward. I will be forced to buy new ink remotely and send M out to pick that up tomorrow.

Since my fight with Etsy and then the printer was futile, I had another round of angrily moving things. It turns out that I can find spots for a surprising amount of stuff if I'm just adequately pissed off at it. I've got access to my desk chair again and I've unpacked the tower; after this I'll just need to actually build/acquire a desk. Preferably one no more than 16 inches deep, which may be a challenge.

I wrote another $40ish worth of article, which hopefully was not in the Incan monkey god's simple but beautiful language, flatted Morpheus while watching B99 with my Wisconsin buddies, and was rewarded with the gift of Korean blackberry wine by M. My mood is oscillating wildly.

Poor L went through a bureaucratic mess today to get her car registration up to date and legal in WA, and was promptly pulled over by a cop 20 minutes later. May the little god of stupid coincidences still be with us tomorrow, when our heroes try to get the plumbing fixed, print a goddamned label, call back after a job interview and mail a package.

Late (a bit too late) last night I finished up my current big commission, and that client wasn't likely to pay the invoice for the next one till this evening. Thus, I had the day to do things that weren't painting-for-money.

I had hoped that I would get to do some sketching or speed drills (I don't want to do speed drills, but good god am I slow...). Unfortunately, today turns out to have been eaten up by admin work and attempting to wrangle social media. My god is social media exhausting, even though I barely post, post almost nothing but artwork, and barely interact. And now it looks like a lot of the people I wish to read are attempting a migration to Mastodon, which is just baffling as a service.

If you are wondering, dear reader, Dreamwidth doesn't really count. It's not quite social media as we've come to understand it, and the pace on my feed is very much slower. Also, the risk of accidentally getting picked up in a site search by hateful minions is much, much smaller.

I may still manage some sketching tonight if I can force productivity rather than mindless video games. And thus far today, I've:

- done all the appropriate repetitive steps to get old art into postable format
- reactivated my Etsy store and put up all the art from the past few months
- made (unfortunately ambiguous) post on Twitter announcing same
- made post on Tumblr, DA, etc announcing same (different formatting concerns!)
- reformatted most recent commission and sent print file to client
- invoiced said commission plus deposit for next one
- performed job opportunity search for girlfriends
- collated said opportunities into emails
- stared at Mastodon, willing it to make sense

Which all feels like it ought to have taken like, an hour or two. But lo, it was more like five or six.

Also today: Meredy made me really good fried potatoes, it has rained in a really pleasant-sounding way all day, and my extremities are attacking.

Considering renaming this account and going pseudonymous again, since it's about 10-15 years too late to be an effective place to show off art.