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I keep looking at these photos to remind myself that packing progress has actually happened:

( Largeish images )

Yesterday Xtina de-cluttered a lot--amazing how the place can get so cluttered when we're in the process of putting things in boxes, which you'd think would lead to less stuff and more organization--and took shelves apart. Tonight Josh hauled a bunch of things down to the trash. The apartment feels much brighter and airier now.

The magnificent zia_narratora came over tonight to help with packing. I fried up a bunch of dumplings and took apart some shelves (the empty pine ones in that last image), and she filled four bins with our SF/F/H anthologies and a fifth with coffee table books and Arthuriana. She also helped us kill off a bottle of bourbon--hooray, one less thing to move!

(Those bins are Jugglebox bins: 27" x 17" x 12". That's 12.75 cubic feet of anthologies. Of course that's only the trade-size ones; the mass markets are already packed.)

After she left, I filled seven more bins with lit fic, biography and memoir, mythology and folklore, cookbooks, booze books, philosophy, and DVDs. The living room shelves are now almost completely denuded, and the space where the pine shelves were is now full of bins. Xtina surveyed the results and started calling me "clockwork Rose", which is about right: I'm very wound up and have no obvious emotions. I mean, I probably have emotions about the move in general, but packing and disassembling doesn't make me feel happy or sad or satisfied. I just feel a compulsive urge to do it.

We have a few empty bins left that we'll fill this weekend with the last of the things in my room. To be on the safe side, I've emailed Jugglebox to ask whether we can get another five bins added to the order; that plus the remaining cardboard boxes plus our suitcases and the like should take care of everything in the kitchen and closets (not counting the things on hangers, which go in the wardrobe boxes if I can figure out how to make the wardrobe boxes actually become boxes). This whole Jugglebox thing is completely awesome and I will never use cardboard again... though it is a bit alarming to realize that if we'd gone 100% with them, rather than putting half our books in boxes, we would have needed their 3BR package and then some. Did I mention that we have a lot of books?

My other big accomplishment today was FINALLY getting renter's insurance. It's transferable to the new place and will cover our stuff during the move, which is excellent. It cost so little that I paid for the entire year of coverage up front. And now we're protected in case of everything except vermin, breakage, nuclear disaster, and war.

Tomorrow: work. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday: pack everything small, disassemble everything large (except the loft bed, which the movers said they'd help with), dispose of the futon and coffee table. Xtina will go over to the new place Monday night and paint our bedrooms and the living room, because she is insane and also amazing. Tuesday the movers show up at 10 a.m. and then a miracle occurs.

For now, sleep, because it would probably be a bad idea to start taking apart the shelves in my room at this hour of the night.

My aunt and uncle threw a fabulous party tonight for my mother's 70th birthday. You would never have known she was freshly recovered from knee surgery, much less that she was 70; she practically danced around the room. She shone so brightly, as she always does, and was surrounded by adoring family and friends, as she always should be.

I don't write about my mother very much because it's impossible to put words to how I feel about her. We've loved each other unreservedly for 33 years (34 if we include the love she gave me while I was in the womb, which we probably should). Our relationship can't really be explained or described to anyone else. But I can at least manage to say that I adore her, and she is extraordinary, and I am endlessly and every day glad that she is my mother. I think that any time devoted to celebrating her is time well spent. I hope she felt well and truly celebrated tonight.

And then there are the hard days, when I sleep badly and wake up with terrible calf cramps (twice!), and I spend the early part of the day completely out of my mind with stress and anxiety, and then I take taurine and it makes me loopy, and my glasses are off-kilter and making my ear sore so I try wearing my old contact lenses and the world won't come into focus, and I lift something heavy and strain a muscle in my back, and I pull myself together for a truly lovely family dinner out and then plummet abruptly into rage and tears when we get home. I accomplished very close to nothing today, and I don't even get to feel good about righteously slacking because I could barely think about anything except all the things I need to do. I feel useless and despairing.

But dinner really was wonderful, and when I was feeling grumpy I consoled myself by reading saladinahmed's absolutely superb new novel, and Xtina is sleeping on the futon tonight so I can sprawl in my bed, and Josh gave me very sweet hugs and laughed at me*, and there will be no alarms to wake me (and no pain either, I hope). I will get lots of good, good sleep, and tomorrow things will be better.

* The gentle mockery was both deeply affectionate and entirely appropriate:

"Everything sucks and it's all my fault."

"Then you can apologize and everything will be fine."

"But if everything's fine I can't beat myself up! What's the point of everything being my fault if I can't flagellate myself?!"

"Sweetie, you're completely ridiculous."

...yeah, sometimes I just need to hear that.

Rent at the new place is cheaper per person than our current place. We'll be splitting utilities in three rather than two. Josh got a raise. I'm doing pretty well freelancing. Xtina living with us means I don't have to save up for trips to visit her anymore, which of course I was always happy to do but is also a tidy sum to take off the balance sheet.

If I did the math right--and I'm pretty sure I did--we are going to have substantial unallocated funds to play with once we move. Enough to make me go O.O and triple-check my numbers.

We get that money two ways. One is in monthly income that's greater than our monthly outgo. The other is in two "extra" paychecks; we get paid every other week (26 paychecks a year), but I calculate our monthly income based on two paychecks a month (24 paychecks a year). So my theory is that the excess of monthly income should go toward credit card balances, and the extra paychecks should go to fun things. If we go that route, we get an excellent vacation each year and still only take three and a half years to pay off all our debt (which is mostly my debt from the days of the dot-com bust in California, when credit was a lot easier to come by than income, and I will forever be grateful that Josh was willing to shoulder part of the burden).

If we were to put the extra paychecks into debt repayment, we'd kill it dead in two years. That sounds great, except that we've spent the past three years counting pennies. Our house move is being funded by my savings account, which technically is intended for paying my 2010 taxes. (I am very glad that I decided to save up all year rather than making quarterly payments the way I'm supposed to. Fortunately we're going to be able to pay it all back before April.) What little fun money we've saved up has gone to conventions, except that all those conventions have been work, so the trips haven't been as relaxing as we might have liked. I put a good chunk of change into buying online ad space that didn't do as much for my freelance business as I'd hoped. Josh was unemployed for most of two years; then he got a job at a great start-up that has only recently started paying something close to market value for the amount of skill he has and effort he puts in. It's been hard. We are both really tired of having to check the bank balance every time we want to spend $25 on a hardcover book or a nice bottle of port, never mind traveling. Our 2010 summer vacation was almost entirely put on credit cards, canceling out years of painstakingly paying down balances; that was a hard decision and maybe a foolish one, but not being able to use our vacation time on anything remotely resembling an actual vacation was driving us both crazy. Another two years of that? No. I know it would save us money on interest. I know having the debt paid off would be a tremendous weight off of both of us. But no.

Which is all to say, look for us at Chicon and London-in-2014, and other places in between; and expect big cheers from this direction in three and a half years.

My aunt and uncle are throwing a birthday party for my mother. They send an invitation addressed to me and Josh and Xtina.

Our household financial week runs Friday to Thursday. It's Thursday night, so I get the coming week's cash from an ATM--in three separate transactions, so each of us will have tens as well as twenties. I leave a packet marked "J <3" under Josh's glasses and another marked "X <3" next to Xtina's purse. (One time I slipped Josh's under his door and it got lost under a pile of l*undry, so I'm more careful now.)

Josh makes a mix for the party. My brother and I arrange for the perfect flowers.

Josh goes to the family dentist. He runs into my mother in the waiting room. The dentist tells him, "Say hello to the girls from me."

Xtina and I sit up until far too late at night, talking about the best ways to make this strange transition from 3000-miles-away to next-room-over. We start out two feet from each other on the couch, nervously hugging our knees. We end up snuggling, my head on her shoulder. When we finally make ourselves go to bed, her kiss goodnight feels like a promise.

My brother asks what he should wear to the party if he can make it down. I suggest he wear a suit. I make the same suggestion to Xtina, and she takes the dress pants that Josh gave her to the tailor to have the cuffs let down.

Xtina tells me and Josh she wants to paint the new apartment. I give her one of my business cards and she gets paint to match the colors. Josh tells me he wants a blue bedroom. I tell him to tell her. Then I tell her myself, just in case.

It occurs to me that Josh and I will also wear suits to the party. I picture the three of us at our dapper best, mingling with my mother's friends. I grin. A lot.

I get home late from work, after Josh and Xtina have gone to bed. Two beer bottles sit on the dining table, a sign that they enjoyed their evening together. I wonder whether Xtina gave the cat his medication; she didn't text me about it, and the calendar where we check it off is in the bedroom, where she's asleep. I go over to the meds tin and find a note from her telling me that the cat has been gooped and the calendar updated.

Tomorrow Josh will leave his laptop at home so I can listen to the mix while I wait for Jugglebox to deliver the rest of our moving boxes.

Josh and Xtina and I will wear our suits out to Brooklyn on Sunday to look at our new apartment before we go to the party. I make a mental note to remind Xtina to bring an apron or a change of clothes so she can put some test swipes of paint on the walls.

I always preferred even numbers, but three is growing on me. Three towels hanging up in the bathroom. (I hope the new bathroom has more towel hooks.) Three toothbrushes on the sink. Three coats carelessly tossed around the living room.

If we are this amazing when we're all living in one another's pockets and stressed to the max by work and moving, how amazing will we be once we're settled in at the new place? I can't even imagine. I can't wait to find out.

I've read and written fanfic of copyright-protected works. That puts me very solidly in the anti-SOPA and -PIPA crowd. Therefore, no posts or tweets from me today, and I'm going to be doing my best to generally stay offline. Maybe I'll even get some extra work done.

If you're in the U.S. and you haven't already had an earful of this stuff, you can read up on SOPA and PIPA here and then express your opinion on them to your representatives. I especially urge you to do this if you're generally liberal/progressive and your rep generally agrees with you, and you've gotten complacent about complaining; many Democrats and progressives are supporting these bills. You can look for your reps on the lists of SOPA co-sponsors and PIPA co-sponsors. Yes, New Yorkers, both Schumer and Gillibrand are co-sponsors of PIPA. If you think that's uncool, let them know.

See you on the other side.

Nina, Raj, and Jose are my heroes. They came over to help with the packing, and with their assistance we got all the nonfiction, romance, erotica, crafts, and humor books boxed up, plus a substantial quantity of the SF and children's/YA. Still to go: the rest of the SF and children's/YA, non-SF fiction, metafiction and lit crit, biography, myth and philosophy, reference, cookbooks, Josh's gaming books... I would estimate that we're about 50% done on the book-packing front.

To give you some sense of scale, we went through 75 12x12x8 Priority Mail boxes and the non-homogeneous equivalent of maybe another 15 or 20. I think that comes out to around 2000 books, with another 2000 to go. Give or take a few hundred.

I have emailed Jugglebox and Bin-It for quotes on 70 cubic feet of container space. I hope that's enough. We also need to pack dishes and kitchen stuff and misc. stuff and augh I need to stop thinking about this now. Deep slow breaths. Deep slow breaths.

We have two more weeks, including weekends. We will get it all done. Somehow.

If anyone wants to come over and help us pack at any point in the next two weeks, we would be pathetically grateful. I won't be able to pay you in culled books after tomorrow, because we're about to donate them all to a local bookstore to free up floor space for boxes, but we still have bottles of booze that you could assist in emptying. Ping me to schedule.

EDIT: After Josh had gone to bed, I mentioned in passing that I'd needed to explain to Nina and Raj how I like books to be packed because it turns out that not everyone packs books the way I do, and Xtina got a very wary look and said "There's a wrong way?" and it turned out that a bunch of the fiction had been packed spine-up with other books on top. It was 11 p.m. and I was underslept and I hadn't really eaten since noon and packing is very stressful, so I freaked out disproportionately and started panicking that the books were all going to be warped and damaged. I opened some boxes to check and repack them, and then I realized I was shaking from hunger, and then I had something of a meltdown. Poor X had to simultaneously deal with her own urge to fix it RIGHT NOW (because she and I are both very much fix it RIGHT NOW people) and her frustration at not having been told there was a right or wrong way (I hadn't really realized that this is a thing I am apparently very picky about, and of course in my head it's "obvious" that the way I do things is the best way and therefore the way everyone else would do it, so it never occurred to me to offer instructions in advance) and wanting to comfort me and also get me to eat something dammit. So that was pretty lousy all around. But we got through it and were good to each other despite our individual and combined stress levels being off the charts, and eventually I managed to stop crying and we agreed to repack a few of the boxes and then have food and tea and get some sleep.

Realistically, the books will be fine. They're books. I said "They're just books" and Xtina said "No one has four thousand 'just books'" and of course she's right; I care a great deal about the books. But what I meant was that they are reasonably sturdy and can probably handle two or three weeks of sitting in boxes, even if the conditions aren't ideal. All the same, I might spend a chunk of tomorrow repacking. X and J both have to go to work but I technically don't... though I probably will anyway. And also I need to take book donations down to the Washington Heights co-op bookstore. And wow, I'm exhausted. So enough worrying about what to do tomorrow. Right now, I'm going to go to bed. I can figure out tomorrow when I wake up.

EDIT EDIT: Just remembered I took a Celebrex this morning and washed it down with caffeinated tea. Did I want to have a panic attack? If not, that was very bad planning.

Please help us pack our books on Sunday! 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. or thenabouts; we will pay you in snacks, drinks, and FREE BOOKS. (Bring your own wheelbarrow. In all seriousness, if you have a car you can lend us or use to drive book donations down to Word Up, that would be fantastic.) We have 75 boxes and hope they will be enough. We will look like this, only with books instead of butter. It will be epic.

RSVP here or by email. Let me know if you need the address.

J: Oh, huh, someone put a brown ale in this six-pack.
X: What are the rest of them?
J: Belgian pale ale.
X: I'll take the bullet of the brown ale.
J: Nah, I'll take it.
X: Oh, sure, you get the SPECIAL beer.
R: Well, he is the one who brought the beer home.
X: But he always gets the special beer!
R: The two of you could always share it.
X and J: *incredulous noises*
J: I want it all to myself!
X: No sharing!
R: *side-eye*
X: Well, I figured as long as we were behaving like kids I would go all the way.
R: If you're kids, you don't get any beer!
X: ...fair enough.
J: *is already drinking the beer*

We have signed the lease, including the rider, woo. The landlord is super nice and has started IMing me updates on the bathroom renovation. When Xtina shyly said she would like to perhaps refinish the deck if that would be okay, he got all starry-eyed. I think this will work out well.

I have informed our current landlord that we will be vacating the apartment as of Feb. 1.

I have turned in all my contributions to our spring announcements issue. Every time, I say I'm going to get a head start and get it all done early, and every time, I end up staying at the office until 2 a.m. Fortunately this only happens twice a year.

I have spent a day taking care of my mother as she recovers from knee surgery. She's doing extremely well and was a very easy patient. She even let me cook for her (by which I mean she let me reheat things she'd already made... maybe she'll really truly let me cook for her someday).

I have taken a leave of absence from the CD*NY board and gratefully taken a fellow board member up on her offer of help with Playford Ball stuff.

I have taken care of several miscellaneous Readercon things.

I have repeatedly reminded myself, and Xtina has repeatedly reminded me, that she is in charge of getting us moved to the new place and I can relax and let her take care of it.

Josh and I have a date night on Friday. I think the odds are actually quite good that I'll be able to focus on him and not have a million things going through my head. What a lovely thought.

---

Tonight Josh picked me up from my mother's place and asked whether I'd told Xtina to expect us home late. I hadn't, so he whipped out his phone and called her to update her on our plans and ask whether she wanted us to come home right away for dinner together. Both of them were a bit bemused by my delight over this, because of course they're thoughtful toward each other and they communicate well--but it's not "of course" to me, and it's glorious and wonderful because I don't have to do anything to make it happen. Every direct interaction between them is an interaction I didn't have to mediate. Every time one of them remembers the other's preferences, it's something I didn't have to keep track of or inform anyone about. Their thoughtfulness and communication is what makes us a family, not just a V, and it makes me squee every single time I see it.

After Josh went to bed, I had one of those moments of realizing that we all really live together. I was about to go hang out with Xtina on the couch while she did some ironing, and it occurred to me that I didn't have to. I could hang out in the bedroom by myself. There was no need at all for me to clutch at every single moment with her, because she's not going back to Oregon. I get to see her every day (except for days when I stay at the office until 2 a.m.). Giving up two hours with her no longer means giving up a substantial fraction of our time together. I have choices! Choices are amazing! And then I hung out on the couch with her anyway, because she's fun to hang out with and that was the choice I wanted to make.

I sometimes think that eventually the wonder and glory of it all will wear off a bit, and then I remember that Josh and I have been together for ten years and Xtina and I have been together for seven years and none of the wonder or glory of that has worn off even a little bit. It all just keeps getting better and better and better.

We packed the first boxes today, and threw out the furniture that had been irredeemably damaged by cat pee. The floor they were on is stained black. *wince* But that was the point of moving those things today: now we can scrub the stains with Dr. Bronner's, and soak them with peroxide, and shake baking soda over the peroxide to sop up whatever it releases from the wood, and sweep up the baking soda once it dries, and soak the floor with rubbing alcohol to kill the odor-causing bacteria, and repeat all that for several days, and hope the peroxide and alcohol help to bleach the stain as well as reducing the smell. At the very least I think we can get it to the point where it doesn't reek anymore.

Maybe in the new place we will grout around any furniture that's flush to the ground so if the cat pees there it can't seep underneath. Or maybe we'll just put it all up on bricks. Bricks are cheap.

I'm trying to get the annoying, complicated tasks taken care of first so we only have simple things left to do at the end of the month when we're totally burned out. The china cabinet was one of the ones we had to move, so I very carefully packed up almost all the china. Yay for free weeklies and the guys at the deli who gave us their leftover Daily Newses. We might even have enough paper left over to pack all the everyday dishes. I just have to remember to wear gloves when handling newsprint; my hands got ridiculously dry.

We also packed up the hardware and the shoes and the table linens and a bunch of the cookbooks and food writing (after we culled a few dozen cookbooks for the giveaway bins). I'm trying to remember to count how many books go in each box so we can take a rough inventory and get apartment insurance for the new place. Yes, I do believe in every action serving at least two purposes. Also I'm kind of curious to know how many thousands of books we have.

Xtina and I are both jittery and energetic. We watched a couple of movies in an effort to wind down but ended up wisecracking instead, which didn't help much. Josh is neither jittery nor energetic, but he very nicely put up with us and did most of the furniture-moving and went grocery shopping and cooked dinner (chicken stew, mmm). I wish I could relax enough for cuddling but my spine feels like a coiled spring. I suspect I'm going to crash very hard sometime around Thursday.

Now I should go to bed, because I have to be at work on time, because I have a fuckton of work to do and also need to get a pair of cashier's checks and sign the lease and I have things to do after work so I can't stay late. I'm sure I'll feel sleepy any minute now...

About eighteen months ago, I went to get my ears cleaned out, and afterwards I mentioned that the right one still felt blocked.

About six months ago, I went to get my ears cleaned out, and afterwards I mentioned that the right one still felt blocked. "That's what you said last time," the ENT said, and he sent me off for a hearing test and an MRI. Neither showed anything out of the ordinary.

A bit after that, I took a plane flight to California. On the descent, I felt a sharp pain in my right ear. The flight home was uneventful.

Four weeks ago, I woke up with a feeling of fullness in my right ear, accompanied by loud tinnitus and hearing loss. I washed out my ear. The feeling persisted. I went to the PA, who said there was nothing in my ear and sent me back to the ENT. He confirmed that my ear looked entirely fine and sent me off for another hearing test. This one had me nearly in tears because it was so hard to hear anything through the ringing; there was definite, objective hearing loss, though not dramatic and not below what's considered normal. (My hearing in both ears is usually much better than normal.) The ENT tentatively diagnosed inflammation of the inner ear, possibly consequent of an upper respiratory infection, and said we'd wait a week to see what happened; if it didn't get better, we'd try treating the presumed inflammation with steroids.

A week later--two weeks after the initial bout--it was better. Like, all better. Hearing test normal. Ringing almost entirely gone. "Hooray," the ENT said, "it was just inflammation, it went away on its own, no steroids needed--but just in case, go for blood tests to rule out a few possible other causes." (Including lupus. I told him that it's never lupus. He didn't know the reference.)

Today I called to get the blood test results. "All normal," the ENT said. "That's good to know," I said, "and by the way I should mention that two days ago I woke up with that feeling of fullness and loud ringing in my right ear again. Yesterday and today it's been better but still present."

"In that case," he said, "I'm going to call this atypical Ménière's disease. Usually that includes a lot of vertigo, but there are some people who believe it's possible to have Ménière's that's just hearing loss and ringing, and that's what you have. And it's idiopathic, so we don't know what causes it and we don't really have a way to treat it unless you want to try going on a no-salt diet or taking diuretics, neither of which I would recommend given that the tinnitus is annoying but not majorly disruptive. Sorry about that. Come back in six months for another hearing test, or sooner if you have subjective hearing loss. Keep in touch."

So that's fun.

There's some evidence to implicate viruses such as herpes in the development of MD, including successful treatment of MD with antivirals. I am HSV+, and just because I've always been asymptomatic doesn't mean it's entirely dormant, so I've left a message asking the ENT to call me, and when he does I'll ask whether he thinks it might be worth trying a course of aciclovir.

In the meantime, if we hang out in person, please face me and speak up a bit, especially if we're in a noisy place. On days when the ringing is really bad and there is no such thing as a moment of peace and quiet in my head, I will probably run away and hide from everything as much as I can. Hopefully there won't be too many days like that.

Guess I'm going to have to change my "neighborhood" userpic!

Our new place (pending lease signing etc.) is on Prospect Place between Grand and Classon. Let me know if you're nearby so I can add you to the family Google Map (visible only to me, Josh, and Xtina). Recommendations of restaurants, wash-and-fold services, veterinarians, and other neighborhood goodies would be fabulous too. All comments are screened.

We really like the Washington Heights place we applied for, but for the sake of hedging our bets, we went to look at this apartment today. Even including the back yard, I don't think it's really 1750 square feet. The apartment itself is 850ish. Despite technically being a 3BR, it might actually have less space than our current place. The layout is funky; it's a four-story building that was intended to be a one-family home and has been converted, so two of the bedrooms are the former front and back parlors. This would be a dealbreaker except that the front room has its own door out into the building hallway, so you can escape without going through someone else's bedroom. The third bedroom is tiny. The bathroom is long and narrow and we have no idea how we would fit one litterbox in there, let alone two (which we will need when Xtina gets a cat).

We fell in love with it anyway. The price is right (not much more than we're paying now, and 20% less than the other place), the deck and yard are in pretty good shape, I love the idea of having my own exit (something I had in my childhood bedroom and always adored), the location is great (a quiet-but-not-too-quiet residential street around the corner from a shopping street, with several friends and several train lines and a boatload of shops and restaurants within a few blocks), and the landlord is fabulous. He's on vacation but he still managed to exchange over forty emails with me as we worked out a time to see the place. At one point he even tried to fly home early to show it to us! The friend of his who showed us around instead was charming and generous with her time. The upstairs neighbor came home while we were poking around and immediately invited us to see his apartment so we could get a sense of what the layout is like with stuff in it; he's got a Russian blue rescue cat, a magnetic rack for his kitchen knives, and something like a dozen guitars, so of course we all got along splendidly. He also vouched for the landlord being awesome.

We gave the landlord's friend our extensive packet of documentation and an earful of enthusiasm, and then we walked the three blocks to Danielle's place and I emailed the landlord to say "We want it!". He wrote back less than an hour later: "You have it!" Apparently he cares much more about good vibes than credit checks, and his friend said nice things about us (probably not only because I offered to bake her brownies), and my emails were... good-vibey. Or something. I don't know! But I'm happy to roll with it.

We offered to pay to have a dishwasher installed, and I plan to ask whether the bathroom can be renovated (because it's in lousy shape, and the one for the upstairs apartment had clearly been redone recently), and we were going to sign for January 15 but there might be a film shoot there the second week of January that would delay cleanup and repairs from the prior tenants... so there are some negotiations still to take care of. The landlord said he'd call me Wednesday so we could hash it out. I replied that that would be fine and I'm also free all day Monday and Tuesday and would love to get this sorted out soonest so we can officially give notice at our current place and withdraw our other applications.* We will all remain nervous until a lease is signed, so the sooner that happens, the better.

* I ended that email "Can you tell I'm excited?!" so he would understand I'm not trying to rush him. He wrote back "yes I can, you are also up late. :)". At 2:55 a.m., so clearly he's also a night owl. It's amazing how much that little smilie face reassures me that he's not going to pull the rug out from under us at the last minute.

I'm not too nervous to fiddle with floor plans, though. Click "Ground floor" and select "Rose's plan" to see what I've done so far. I think we can actually fit all our furniture in the apartment, with a bit of wrangling. I am very excited to be able to do the split room thing, too; the front room looks to be nearly as big as my current room, with a layout much more conducive to using bookshelves as room dividers. That will block the light from the windows but a) I don't much care and b) north-facing street-level windows aren't going to get much light anyway.

I have no idea how I'll get through the next few days. Lots of taurine. Lots of sleep. Lots of nail-biting. *looks at hands* Except I'm already reduced to cuticle-biting, so I guess that leaves taurine and sleep.

*jitter*

For the past two weeks I've been trying to peg my sleep cycle to Xtina's, since we're sharing a room. That's meant going to bed around midnight and waking up around seven.

For the past two weeks I've been getting steadily more cranky and depressed. I've been avoiding dairy, using the light box, going outside... none of my usual antidepressants seem to help. Mostly I'd chalked it up to the stress of apartment-shopping.

Xtina stayed over at Danielle's last night. I went to bed at 2 and woke up at 10. I feel AMAZING. It certainly also helped that I purged a lot of icky built-up stuff out of my brain last night with Josh's very kind and loving help--but I think a great deal of the credit goes to being back on my natural schedule.

Conclusions:

1) For the next month, when Xtina's schedule will be a good four hours offset from mine (she's due at work at 8, I'm due at work at noon), I will sleep in the loft bed. She sleeps very soundly, so once she's asleep in the "downstairs" bed (the one under the loft), I won't wake her by climbing up; and if I'm elevated, she won't wake me by getting up. We can still snuggle before she goes to sleep. I'll just stay up another few hours after that.

2) Looking for a three-bedroom apartment is ABSOLUTELY the right thing for us to be doing.

Speaking of which, time to shower and dress and go look at another place.

I could fill up screens and screens with doubts and fears and worries and plans and hopes but really it comes down to this: change is scary and hard.

I think I'm going to go knit something. When in doubt, create order and beauty.

Josh has gone to bed. Xtina is in the living room, singing along to her music and ironing shirts. I can just faintly hear her through the closed door to the bedroom, where I'm on the bed with my laptop in my lap. Sam is kittyloafed on the pillow next to me, companionable if not cuddly. Java is lounging at the foot of the bed. I'm about to put the internet away and spend a precious, glorious hour sitting and reading a book, because I can.

We applied for this apartment today. The floor plan is a bit out of date; the living room is now a third bedroom, opening only onto the end of the hallway. It's just a touch bigger than our current place, with plenty of wall space for bookcases, minimal natural light, efficient heating, a rather glorious bathroom, and most importantly, a dishwasher. The social space is up front and the living quarters are in the back. We all liked it very much. It's at Haven Ave and 177th, close enough to Inwood that we can still meet with our gaming group, but 15 minutes closer to work and Brooklyn. The building faces the Hudson (though the apartment itself lacks river views, alas), and walking there from the subway station with the biting river wind in our faces reminded me so much of my childhood home on the far western end of 12th Street. I hope we get this place. I would like to go back to having my life punctuated by sunsets over New Jersey, even if they're no longer as spectacularly refracted by smog.

I believe firmly in bet-hedging, and there are many reasons that Brooklyn would be a good place for us (as reluctant as this lifelong Manhattanite is to admit it), so tomorrow, while we wait for word to come in from the broker, Xtina and I will go look at two apartments near regyt and novalis's place. Both of them are a good deal cheaper than the Haven Avenue place, with no broker's fee, and who knows? They might be amazing. We will see.

Xtina came in to ask whether I wanted tea. This has become something of a bedtime ritual of ours. The one who's feeling more up-and-about serves the one who's feeling more indolent, and then we sit and sip and relax. Now she has brought me tea, and petted the kitten, and wandered off down the hallway again, threads of song trailing behind her.

It's been seven years since I was part of a family this way. That's a long time, and my memories of House Dreamland have faded. Surely we had our rituals and sweetnesses, shared hysterical laughter and quiet late evenings, moments of pure generosity and kindness. I complained extensively on Twitter today about romance novels where the heroine's dead husband is vilified so the hero can be her first real true love; I don't want to demean the past just as a way of saying that what I have now is better. But truly, could it have been--could anything be--as wonderful as this?

A non-exhaustive list of phrases we use to indicate that something should not ever happen:

"Uh huh."

"That seems reasonable."

"I can detect no flaw in this plan."

"It's not a GOOD idea, but it's a GREAT idea!"

"Great idea, Dan! We just need to be able to drive a truck over it."

Our household is not a safe place for the sarcasm-impaired.

( End-of-year memeage )

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:

Don't make yourself sad.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

Breathe
Live
Help
Give
Focus
Trance
Wake up
Dance
--Janelle Monáe, "Dance or Die"

Yes, I played the RENT soundtrack on Christmas Eve. It's required.

So. Our lease is up Feb. 1 and the landlord refuses to negotiate on the rent increase. Xtina is getting very understandably tired of not having a bedroom, all of us would like to have a living room that no one sleeps in, and we're enjoying living together, so we're going to look for a three-bedroom place to share. It's not yet clear whether we're going to move in January or re-sign the lease and then attempt to break it mid-year. It's also not clear whether we'll stay in Inwood, where apartments are huge and beautiful and cheap and we know the neighborhood and community, or move to Brooklyn, to be closer to regyt and have shorter commutes. But either way, after seven years in this lovely place, we'll be moving.

*looks around*

I suppose it's not practical to just nail plywood over the fronts of the shelves and move them as-is. More's the pity.

So, in the grand tradition of book-shelving parties, any interest in a book-packing party sometime soon? We will, as always, be glad to pay you in snacks, drinks, and books (we have at least two hundred ARCs and finished copies culled already, and more to come). And of course, once we move, there will be the ULTIMATE shelving party, starting with a blank canvas! I'm very excited about that.

It has been a very mellow holiday weekend so far: lots of sleeping, snacking, culling and sorting and shelving books, and collecting documents we'll need for rental applications. Josh has gone out to get lemons and olives for making hummus. I've lit the chanukiah (and texted Josh to ask him to get more candles; we're running low). Xtina is cat-and-dog-sitting for a friend, but she came by for lunch with Josh--I love that the two of them do things without me--and then hung out here for a bit so we could discuss moving logistics before heading back downtown. Josh and I got out into the sun both yesterday and today. My new boots keep my feet very, very warm. 2011 has been a very strange and often difficult year, so I'm glad it's at least winding down nicely.

So this happened.

Then this happened.

Then this happened.

Then my mother and her inamorato made this happen.

The world is amazing.

I am really, really sorry, LJ folks, but LiveJournal has made it impossible for me to comment on my own posts--even style=mine no longer works--so commenting on my posts is now Dreamwidth-only. Please come visit over here! I promise it's a lovely place. I'll even turn on OpenID commenting for you so you don't have to create a DW account (though there's no reason not to create a DW account). Clicking the DW "leave a comment" link is just as easy as clicking the LJ one used to be.

I'm annoyed that I can't participate in discussions in my own journal. I'm heartbroken that I can't do it in anyone else's journal either, after nearly eleven years and uncountable thousands of fabulous conversations. If you don't crosspost already, please consider starting so those of us who have been shut out of LJ can keep commenting on your posts. If that's too much hassle... well, I'll miss you.

EDIT: Aha! Apparently what they did was globally un-set a tiny little setting. To fix it, go to http://www.livejournal.com/customize/options.bml and set "Disable customized comment pages for your journal" back to "No". Whew! Alert canceled.

But you should create a DW account anyway, because who knows what LJ is going to fuck up next?

LJ's new comment style suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. Like, 8000+ complaints worth of suck. That's impressive!

Things you can do:

1) Go to http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/?cat=display and select "View comment pages from my Friends page in my own style". If you use a journal style that has old-fashioned useful comment styling, now everyone else's page will look like that too! Just remember that other people may not see the information you put e.g. in the subject line.

2) If you use Firefox, install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livejournal-addons/ and select "Open posts from menu in my style" and "Open all LJ cross-links in my style".

3) Get a Dreamwidth account. Through the end of December, you don't need an invitation code to create a free account, and if you want to pay for your account, you get 10% more points per currency unit than usual. Dreamwidth does things like really thoroughly beta-testing changes before they roll out, and listening to their users. It's awesome.

If you currently use both DW and LJ and this is going to drive you off LJ (or drive you to turn off comments on LJ, so all the conversations on your posts will take place on DW), please let me know so I can put you on my DW reading filter.

I remember back when I was thrilled to be able to buy a permanent account because I loved LJ so much, as a service and a company. How times change...

I always hear "pomodoro" to the tune of "Papageno! Papageno!" from The Magic Flute. And now, if you know your Mozart, you will too!

I love that Firefox's spellcheck knows "Papageno" but not "pomodoro".

Anyway!

Since several of you have asked, yes, the pomodoro technique--summarized as 25 minutes working, 5 minute break, and a longer break after four rounds--works very well for me. This was the first time I'd tried it, after seeing it mentioned several times on various freelance lists. It let me edit a 120,000-word novel in three days. I would call that a success. (I'm glad to know I'm capable of that. I hope I never have to do it again.)

I keep the timer where I can see it; I use a large-font digital timer on my phone, with a pleasant alarm sound, so it doesn't startle me or sound like it's scolding. I use the same sound for the 25-minute alarm and the 5-minute alarm. When the 25-minute alarm goes off, I try to at least stand up and walk around--get some water or tea, take out the trash, go to the bathroom--but sometimes I just spend the break checking email or Twitter. The rhythm seems to have the general effect of making me very eager to continue working, which is very useful. It's also getting me to stand up and drink water a lot more than I usually do when I'm working, which can only be good for me.

To my surprise, I found myself often wanting to work through the break. Apparently 25 minutes is exactly how long it takes for me to get really into what I'm doing. Fortunately 5 minutes is short enough that I can get up and walk around and make tea and whatever without losing that intensity.

Enforced breaks are also very good for my arms. I still took Celebrex every night to be on the safe side, but I didn't need the ice pack nearly as much as I thought I would. My bicep tendons are twinging a bit, but I expect that to fade now that the marathon work run is over.

I definitely found it helpful to have my schedule planned out in advance. That way, when some potential distraction comes up, I can say "I'm setting this aside until [time]" and trust that I really will get back to it. It occurs to me that this is a technique I've learned for interacting with other people--setting a time for something provides the comforting expectation that the thing WILL happen, gives everyone time to prepare for it, and makes it easier to do something else in the meantime--so I'm not surprised that it works well for negotiating with myself. Completely closing email and Twitter is essential to keeping myself focused, and I can let go of my usual "but what if I miss something?!" urgency by reminding myself that I can look at them again in just 25 minutes. Chat stays off but the only people I chat with regularly can call or text me if they need to reach me that urgently.

Judicious applications of caffeine, sunlight, and sleep helped me stay focused. I was a bit underslept on day three and that made it harder. I still got everything done, but I ran an hour over because I'd gotten distracted and my half-hour or hour-long breaks had run long.

Speaking of which, time to put together my Wednesday schedule and go to bed.

Today:

- 09:45: Wake up (without an alarm again! so weird!), feed kitties
- 10:00: Internet
- 10:45: Shower, dress, eat (refried rice)
- 11:45: Go for a walk
- 12:30: Pomodoro x4
- 14:30: Get up, walk around, lapsang souchong, toast, taurine, pet kitties (Sam sat on my lap just when I felt cranky and needed a bit of snuggling, because she is awesome)
- 15:30: Pomodoro x4
- 17:30: Get up, walk around, second brew, Oreos
- 18:00: Pomodoro x4, order dinner at 19:30
- 20:00: Josh and Xtina get home, have dinner
- 21:00: Pomodoro x8
- 01:00: VICTORY
- 01:30: Go to bed

Apparently I needed a lot of snacking today. Not sure why. Oh wait, maybe because I edited 40,000 words in 10 hours.

Tomorrow is going to be a bit weird because I have to go downtown for an appointment. Let me see what I can build around that...

- 09:30: Wake up, internet
- 10:15: Shower, dress, eat
- 11:15: Go for a walk
- 12:00: Pomodoro x4, tea around 13:00
- 14:00: Go downtown, working on the train (about Pomodoro x1)
- 15:00: Appointment, grab a snack somewhere
- 16:00: Go back uptown (Pomodoro x1)
- 17:00: Pomodoro x4, more tea
- 19:00: Dinner
- 19:30: Pomodoro x4
- 21:30: Get up and walk around
- 22:00: Pomodoro x6
- 01:00: VICTORY (I hope) and straight to bed

I didn't have to keep a "things I'm not doing right now" list today. And that last four-hour stretch was pretty much just a four-hour stretch with no breaks, which did get the damn thing done but left me very tired. I have to remember that the breaks are good for me.

Oh wait, maybe I'm very tired because I edited 40,000 words in 10 hours.

Time to go ice my arms, sleep eight hours, and then do it all again.

Here was the plan. What actually happened:

- 11:00: Wake up (without an alarm!), internet
- 12:00: Shower, dress, eat
- 13:00: Recycle fabric, buy cat food, return library books, lapsang souchong (mmm)
- 14:00: Pomodoro x3
- 15:30: Look at crazy not-really-a-4BR apartment down the street, internet
- 17:00: Pomodoro x3
- 18:30: Dinner, wash dishes, take out recycling, second brew from used leaves, pet kitties
- 19:45: Pomodoro x4
- 21:45: Wash dishes, feed kitties
- 22:30: Pomodoro x4
- 00:30: Victory tea, ice arms, internet

I made my goal: the 1/3 mark of the manuscript. I really did knock down 30k words in seven hours of work. I don't feel wrung-out, either; if it weren't so late, I'd be inclined to keep working. Thanks, Pomodoro! Now to do it again tomorrow and again on Monday.

Useful things: turning off chat entirely (including on my phone), completely closing Hootsuite and Gmail while working so I couldn't tab over to them, and keeping a "things I am not doing right now" list whenever I got the urge to do something other than work:

Buying pear cider (I did go by the farmer's market while running errands but didn't have cash in my wallet, precisely because carrying unallocated cash leads to random crazy impulse purchases)
Putting up coathooks
Twitter
Readercon stuff
CDNY stuff
Making tea
Punching Microsoft in the face (it crashed and ate a few pages of work, grr)
Twitter, again
No, seriously, Twitter
Artistically biting my nails
Going over to [neighbor]'s place to keep her company
Running errands for [other neighbor who isn't feeling well]

It's surprisingly satisfying to compile a list like that. Sometimes it just feels good to say "no" or "not right now" to things.

I also think I hit the right balance of letting the schedule creep a bit and not letting it creep too far. Taking an extra ten minutes to snuggle kitties: essential. Making my goal before 3 a.m.: also essential.

I expect I will go to bed around 02:00, so the plan for tomorrow:

- 10:00: Wake up, internet
- 10:30: Shower, dress, eat (refried rice)
- 11:30: Go for a walk
- 12:30: Pomodoro x4
- 14:30: Get up, walk around, lapsang souchong
- 15:00: Pomodoro x4
- 17:00: Get up, walk around, ice arms
- 17:30: Pomodoro x4 (second brew around 18:30)
- 19:30: Dinner (order in?)
- 20:30: Pomodoro x4
- 22:30: Victory tea, internet, more ice
- Josh and Xtina come home
- 01:00: Go to bed

Note that this plan involves more ice and less washing dishes. I was... maybe not very smart about that today.

Right, time to pull out the ice pack and brew up some of that victory tea, by which I mean nice warming sleepiness-inducing ginger honey drink, and feel very pleased with myself.

I was supposed to have a four-day working weekend. I did indeed do work today... but not the work I intended to do. So now I have a three-day working weekend in which to do a close edit of 90,000 words.

The plan for tomorrow:

- 11:30: Wake up, internet
- 12:00: Shower, dress, eat
- 13:00: Recycle fabric, buy cat food, return library books
- 14:00: Pomodoro x4
- 16:00: Water and stretching
- 16:30: Pomodoro x4
- 18:30: Dinner, internet
- 19:30: Pomodoro x3
- 21:00: Water and stretching
- 21:30: Pomodoro x3
- 23:00: Victory tea, feed the cats, internet, knitting
- 01:00: Go to bed

I tried the pomodoro thing today and it worked pretty well. I'm hoping it will work even better when I turn off the internet entirely. My goal is to edit 30k words a day. 40k each on Saturday and Sunday would be even better because I have a doctor's appointment on Monday. I have no idea whether this is possible. We shall see.

For now, there is taking Flexeril (two nights of bad sleep = very achy back) and gooping the cat and going to bed.

EDIT: No Flexeril to be found. It must be in Josh's room. Celebrex instead; justifiable as I want my arms to be in very good shape going into this marathon.

If you wanted to create a Dreamwidth account, now's a great time; no invitation code needed!

Operation Shut the Fuck Up and Listen Sometimes is proceeding swimmingly. For example, I have rediscovered just how marvelous it is to have a real conversation with Josh--which tells me how long it's been since I actually took the time to do that. So hooray for him telling me I needed to do it more, and I promise I will be back to LJing once I've created some new conversational habits that can withstand occasional bouts of being a narrator.

I may be scarce 'round these parts for a while. All's fine; I'm just busy, and I have gotten too much in the habit of talking about myself rather than listening to other people, so I figure stepping away from introspectionland will help. Catch you later.

We are all completely fine. I say this because it is a useful way to preface a post about having fended off three would-be muggers.

Josh and X and I were walking up through Isham Park after dinner, around 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday. We're generally alert around the north edge of the park, since it's where two guys tried to mug Josh a couple of years ago, but we weren't being super-vigilant; they've improved the lighting and cut back the trees, and it was a fairly busy time of night, and there were plenty of people around.

In fact, three of those people--young men, age 19 to 22 or so--were walking very closely behind us. VERY closely. And they had black scarves over their faces. I think Josh noticed them first and then we all did and started walking faster.

One guy made beckoning motions and said something like "C'mere, c'mere". We continued walking faster. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out an object that was supposed to look like a gun. For a moment, I thought it was one, and I slowed a bit and said "Uh, guys?" to suggest that Josh and Xtina should look at him and be aware that he was threatening us with a weapon and that sort of changed the situation.

Then I looked at it again. It did not look like a gun. It looked like an L-shaped piece of plastic. And he didn't handle it like a gun. I have seen handguns up close all of twice, in very different conditions; I am not anything like an expert. I knew this even as I was making the assessment, and I knew that a wrong assessment would be very dangerous. But... it just wasn't right.

He sort of gestured with it and murmured, "I could blast you away right here."

Reader, I laughed. I'm sort of horrified to admit this now, but I did. It was just so ludicrous! "Blast you away"? Here? With so many people around? With a fake gun? An incredulous "ha!" came out of me before I could stop it. And that reminded me that I could make noise, and that I should make noise--yay for years of anxiety-induced self-training and reading up on what to do in this sort of situation--and I pulled out my project-from-the-diaphragm voice and shouted, "GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HERE!"

Meanwhile, Xtina had her phone out and was dialing 911, and Josh was giving them his best intimidating look (helped by his bulky jacket and him being rather bigger and stronger than any two of them put together). And some other people were coming down the street and looking our way. And we were well out of the park now and in front of apartment buildings with windows at street level. And it was Saturday night, for heaven's sake, and cars and pedestrians all over the place. The three guys glanced nervously at one another and decided this was not where they wanted to be, and they headed back into the park.

We did not try to follow them. We went home, and I called the cops, and two minutes later the cops picked us up (they happened to already be down the street) and took us to where five teens had been stopped by other cops, and they asked us if we could identify any of them as the ones who had tried to mug us. We couldn't, really, because they had been wearing masks and it was dark, but it didn't look like the same people. It looked like some kids had been stopped for walking while POC, basically. They were bored and annoyed. The youngest was maybe 13, and clearly familiar with the routine: get patted down, give your name and address, blah blah blah, come on, man, I just wanted to hang out with my friends. I thought of karnythia's sons and it all just broke my heart.

One of the kids had a black face mask in his pocket, and the cops asked us if he looked familiar, but by then I was keenly aware of us being a bunch of white adults about to pass judgment on a bunch of non-white kids, and we couldn't conclusively ID them, and I don't know about the others but I was really done. My heart had been pounding for twenty minutes straight. These kids had probably been pulled over before we even made the call. It was all just stupid and sad.

So we apologized to the cops for not being useful (they were clearly irritated by our reluctance but carefully polite nonetheless) and thanked them for being so quick to respond, and we went home, and Xtina and Josh had some whiskey and I had some taurine and we hugged one another a lot and made bravado jokes and did housework and buried ourselves in the internet while our hindbrains attempted to make sense of all of it. The others thanked me for shouting and I second-guessed myself a whole lot (though even my finely honed second-guessing mechanism had to admit that we had reached the best possible outcome and so I could probably feel reasonably confident that we all behaved appropriately). I set up a PIN to unlock my phone because the PIN screen has an emergency call button on it. Josh went to bed. Xtina bustled around. I tweeted. We hugged more.

We are shaken and sad--oh, so sad, for those kids and the wannabe muggers and the whole fucked-up culture--and once we're done with that we'll probably be angry and annoyed and sad. Also very glad that no one got hurt, obviously, and vaguely glad they didn't get any of our stuff, though I only barely care about that. A few phones and some small bills, whatever.

Of course that is exactly why you're not supposed to fight back when someone tries to mug you. Not getting shot is far more important than material goods! But there is a third element to the equation, as it turns out, and that element is being completely fucking outraged and disbelieving and appalled by the entire situation. I didn't feel intimidated or scared or out of my depth, even in that indescribable moment when I saw the guy reach into his jacket and knew he was going to bring out a weapon. I just thought, oh, this changes things. Then I realized (or believed--I suppose I will never be entirely sure) that it wasn't real, and that changed things again and suddenly the whole thing was just ridiculous and outrageous, and I reacted the way I react to ridiculous, outrageous things: laugh at them and tell them to fuck off.

I think it was the same for Josh when he was attacked a couple of years ago. One of the guys hit him over the head with a bat. It didn't knock him out. It just made him pissed. He turned around and yelled at them--not because he'd been trained to but because he was startled and angry--and they ran.

I am very, very aware just at the moment of how much societal privilege goes into reactions like that. I'm very glad and grateful to have such privilege. I am furious beyond words at this fucked-up culture, at the white cops stop-and-frisking the nonwhite kids, at the gutted economy that drives people to steal for a living, at the muggers' casual assumption that we would be completely freaked out and compliant, all of it, all of it, all of it.

At least some of that is clearly the last of the adrenaline leaving my system, as I'm also starting to feel really tired.

Before I sign off for the night, a brief attempt to answer some of the likely comments: Yes, we still feel generally safe and happy in this neighborhood and plan to stay here. Yes, we will probably be avoiding that particular route home after dark. Yes, we really are fine. I probably won't have the mental wherewithal to answer most comments directly, but please accept my advance appreciation for your expressions of kind concern.

I have no idea how to tag this.

R: So my character is a halfling monk, which doesn't happen, because halflings don't like to be confined in monasteries--
X: *sneezes* Fuck you!
R: Are you allergic to the word... monastery? *watches intently*
X: *does not sneeze* What? No.
R: Oh. Damn. Because that would have been AWESOME.

She was saying "fuck you" because I'm sick and she doesn't want to be catching my cold. I preferred my interpretation. She claims my interpretation is evidence that I'm a jerkface. Thus do we express our love.

Things and stuff.

I am coming off one of the worst PMS mood upfuckednesses in memory. I have finally hit the stage where my bursts of energy and enthusiasm and organization and ideas are not accompanied by tremendous crankiness and introversion. This is a great relief for everyone in my household.

My sleep schedule has been out of whack for a month, by which I mean that I'm consistently going to bed between 5 and 7 a.m. This is bad. I'm not sure what to do about it. Every time I get exhausted and go to bed early, I sleep too much and then go right back to going to bed late. I keep thinking that there must be some way of magically tweaking my schedule just so, over a period of days, so I'm sufficiently tired but not too tired...

Of course the real issue is that 1 a.m. comes around and I suddenly feel like there's so much to do and I haven't done any of it and I can't go to bed yet and then I get all frantic and then I play video games or knit to calm myself down and then it's 5 a.m. and I still haven't done any of those things but I'm too exhausted to worry.

So, a plan!

02:00: Go to bed.
10:00: Get up.
11:00: Food.
11:30: Shower, dress, go for a walk.
13:00: Work.
17:30: Food.
18:00: Leave for dancing.
23:30: Get home from dancing. Tweak, soak, rinse, and block hat and gloves. (I am very pleased with how they came out.)
00:30: Get ready for bed.
01:00: Go to bed.

This seems reasonable. We shall see.

EDIT: My plan went awry immediately, as I went to bed shortly after 2 but couldn't fall asleep until around 3. Then I managed to turn off my alarm without really waking up, which is supposed to be impossible. (It makes me solve a puzzle. I may need to make the puzzle harder.) I woke up for real at noon--not 10--with a stuffy nose and a feeling of deep despair. Nonetheless, I will attempt to proceed with the plan, only shifted two hours later; and I will take my laptop to the dance so I can make up for the lost work time, unless I decide that the stuffy nose is a good enough reason to skip the dance altogether.

I have been thinking a lot about plot lately, spurred on by a) some recent critiques for freelance clients, b) Holly Black's terrific talk for my teen mentees last week, c) a book called The Plot Whisperer that actually has some very useful stuff in it despite also being full of woo-woo nonsense about how we are all tapped in to the Universal Story [sic], and d) Film Crit HULK's completely brilliant blog post on the myth of the three-act structure. It's making me want to write fiction. Thinking about wanting to write fiction makes me nervous and shy. Then something comes up that's more important and/or urgent than getting past the nervousness and shyness. Oh well.

This was originally part of another post, but I'm making it its own post so I can turn off comments. I'm not interested in discussing any aspect of this. I just wanted to note it.

One of the many, many reasons I love Xtina is that I can be cranky about work and procrastination around her, and she can tentatively offer helpful suggestions while repeatedly checking in about whether I want suggestions or just want to vent crankiness, and then when I say "this is making me too cranky and everything is annoying and I need to go into the other room" she is totally fine with that and doesn't take it personally.

<3

And then I went into the other room and implemented one of her suggestions: the 120,000-word manuscript I have to edit within three weeks is now broken down into six chunks of about 20,000 words each. Tonight or tomorrow I will sit down and edit 1000 words (not counting the prologue, because I already know my first recommendation will be "cut the prologue" so I don't need to edit it) to give myself a benchmark for this particular project. One of the biggest problems I have with an editing gig like this is that it doesn't have natural stopping points other than "THE END", and I can't go by chapters because they're of very variable length; but I can scroll through and type "*****" at regular intervals, so that's what I did.

As usual, the hardest thing is just opening the file. And as usual, just opening the file makes all the rest of it seem much more doable.

Now to make dinner, as blood sugar will also make it seem much more doable.

When Xtina arrived in New York, nearly two months ago, our apartment was in something of a state of chaos. I'd brought home heaps of books--literal heaps, stacked in front of the already overflowing shelves--and they were in no order at all. The nonfiction in my bedroom was thoroughly disordered. Dozens of romance novels were piled up in front of the romance shelves, and all the books I'd considered for the 2011 Best Books were wedged next to my bed, along with a bunch of books I'd been planning to read but hadn't quite gotten around to.

After Xtina got laid off, she said she wanted to feel useful around the house and have things to do all day when she wasn't jobhunting, so she suggested that she could sort the piles of books in the living room. She proceeded to organize them to a faretheewell. Gradually, her cheerful determination became infectious. Josh and I started picking out books that we really didn't want and setting them aside with the duplicates, and soon there were bins full of unwanted books. Then I organized my romance, crafting books, and nonfiction, culling close to a hundred books in the process. (Note to self: seriously, don't bother with any books on current events. You won't read it soon enough for it to be relevant, and the retrospective that comes out in five years will be better-researched and more interesting anyway.) We've got heaps of books to sell to Cash4Books and AbeBooks and Powell's--Xtina has a price comparison spreadsheet going--and heaps of ARCs to leave in the l*undry room or toss in the recycling. I still have about a hundred books at my office that I've been meaning to bring home, but in a bit Josh will come by and help me cull from them so we're only bringing home books we really want to keep.

I found some books I'd forgotten I had, and some books I can't believe I ever wanted. The only book I really wanted to find that I have not found is London Labour and the London Poor by H. Mayhew; if you borrowed it from me, please let me know so I can add it to my borrowed books spreadsheet!

The organizing is spreading to other areas, too. For the first time in living memory, all our sheet sets are together, with F or Q or K written on the corners of fitted sheets so we know what fits which beds; I moved all the bedding into the living room, freeing up shelf and cabinet space in my room for bags and daily use objects and beloved tchotchkes that had been cluttering up the floor and random shelves. Josh yanked the files off his busted old laptop, which has been unusable for close to ten years and can now be recycled at last. Xtina scrubbed the kitchen floor to within an inch of its life and finally discovered clear plastic mats that Sam-the-cat thinks of as part of the floor rather than objects on the floor; since Sam believes food isn't food unless it touches the floor and is in the habit of carefully removing food from her food dish and placing it on the floor before eating most of it and leaving the rest to form a revolting crust, being able to pick the mats up and scrub them in the sink rather than getting down on hands and knees to scrub the floor is a most excellent thing. The hamper we once used for things that needed dry cleaning is now Xtina's hamper, so that she can wash her l*undry separately from ours and there's no sorting needed, and she hangs up my skirts to encourage me to put my other clean clothes away. (I don't know why, but I DESPISE hanging up skirts. It is the bane of my housecleaning efforts.) She also washes the dishes, bless her a thousand times, and in turn that encourages me and Josh to cook, carry in cups and glasses from around the apartment, and put away the clean dry things.

Three people in one apartment could easily make things more chaotic. I love that instead we're making it cleaner and neater, bit by bit.

Tonight I hit 1:30 a.m. with a good two hours of work ahead of me and a lot of yawning coming on. I opened a bottle of Coca-Cola, measured out one capful (about a teaspoon, I'd say), and knocked it back. Two hours later, the work was done and the yawning resumed. Perfect! I will have to remember this for the future. Usually a one-ounce shot of Coke, which is six teaspoons, will keep me going for six hours or so, not twelve; perhaps I should start measuring it out in smaller, more frequent doses when I need a buzz.

Thanksgiving #2: EPIC. My aunt made an enormous and quite wonderful dinner including extraordinary turkey gravy made with foie gras, which she described as "the ultimate giblet"; turkey is my least favorite bird by a long shot but I went back for seconds so I could have more gravy. My uncle's pecan pie, which he very kindly made without dairy so I could have some, remains stratospherically delicious. My mother contributed a really superb pâté of chicken liver and ground pheasant. We stuffed ourselves, as is traditional. My uncle didn't make my mother spit coffee across the table, as is also traditional, but he did reduce us all to wheezing side-clutching laughter a few times. I got to see my cousins being radiantly happy with their respective doting partners and catch up with relatives I haven't seen in decades. When a few people started talking politics, several others promptly changed the subject. It was just what a family holiday should be.

The only down notes were moments of missing my brother (who was traveling elsewhere and couldn't join us) and my grandparents. One of my cousins pulled out a book of breathtaking photos of my grandparents and great-grandparents, all of them astonishingly glamorous, and we all indulged in some slightly weepy nostalgia. But that's part of what a family holiday should be too.

The Thanksgiving paradox: our fridge is full of leftovers and I feel like I won't be able to eat again for weeks.

I am especially pleased that X and I were able to have fun and not get grumpy despite both being very underslept. She still has a lingering cough from her most recent cold and it's made it hard for her to sleep. Meanwhile, I'm doing this thing where I alternate days of sleeping way too much with days of sleeping way too little. Last night she started sorting books at 00:30 and that made me want to sort books, so now my crafting books are very thoroughly organized and I went to bed at 5:15. And then at 5:45 some weird auditory hallucination woke me up. And then the alarm went off at 10. So... yeah.

Speaking of which, time for bed.

(xposted from vegancooking)

My beloved omni mother made vegan creamed zucchini for yesterday's family Thanksgiving. Her recipe was something like: shred 15 zucchinis (with the shredding blade on the food processor unless you want to really kill your arm), spread the shreds on a baking sheet, sprinkle with salt to leach out the water, bake at 250F until very soft, mash up with a lot of Earth Balance. This made enough creamed zucchini to fill two foil loaf pans. It was delicious but SO SALTY because Earth Balance only comes pre-salted and my mother's used to cooking with unsalted butter, so no one ate very much of it and there was about one loaf pan's worth left over.

The flavor reminded me of a pasta dish I had with zucchini cream sauce back when I was still eating dairy. Aha, I thought, I will add cashew cream and that will balance out the salt and make a perfect pasta sauce. So I dumped about 2.5 cups of raw cashews and half a cup of blanched slivered almonds in the blender with four cups of water, blended on high for a few minutes, mixed the resulting cream with the zucchini and a bit of freshly grated nutmeg and black pepper, and heated it over a low flame until it was warmed through. Success! It was delicious on pasta--my omni-with-some-exceptions partners gobbled it up--and after generously saucing a full box of elbow macaroni, we still had two cups of sauce left over that I think we'll have cold as a spread on French bread, or maybe use as a dip; it would go great with pita chips or carrot and celery sticks.

If I were going to make it from scratch rather than starting with leftovers, I'd use 2 or 3 zucchinis, 1 cup cashews, and ~2 cups water (more for a pasta sauce, less for a dip/spread), plus salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste. Very simple and very tasty.

Last night's Thanksgiving was the one I was most nervous about, since it involved a lot of people I don't know, and it went really brilliantly. The coming-out thing turned out to be a total non-issue, as we had been helpfully* outed by someone else well prior to the event, so we just showed up and were our extremely polite and decorous selves and everyone was entirely welcoming without even a moment of side-eye or confusion. Hooray! Also the food was genuinely excellent, and I was really touched that our hosts went to so much effort to make dairy-free food for me and Xtina. I paced myself and diligently avoided dairy and felt entirely well all evening; I know it's traditional to eat until you feel sick, but some traditions are worth breaking.

* Not sarcasm.

At one point my mother asked wistfully whether Xtina (who has been doing mighty amounts of housework while she's funemployed) might come over and iron her clothes, and without thinking, I retorted, "She's my wife--get your own!" While this fits in with our usual jokes about her being a housewife, it may also have been my subconscious suggesting that at some point X and I should have a chat about commitment ceremonies and whether we might want to have one...

I have sent off a slew of thank-you notes. I have also slept for 11 hours. Now I can spend today relaxing and eating leftovers (and baking another pan of mulled brownies/chocolate gingerbread, which I must say were superb--half the spice of the original recipe, 3/4 cup of sugar instead of 1/2, and a generous handful of candied orange peel from Kalustyan--so I'm glad I went to the effort of going to Zabar's the day before Thanksgiving for the essential Ghirardelli sweet ground chocolate & cocoa). Thanksgiving #2 is tomorrow and then #3 a couple of weeks after that, and I fully expect that both will be excellent. It's so nice to be able to let go of all the pre-holiday stress and just look forward to good times with good people.

To the people who enjoy trying to cause trouble for me by emailing links to my journal entries to people who might not read my journal:

I am not afraid of you. You cannot intimidate me.

I am aware that public means public. When I make a public post, I fully expect that my family, friends, employer, and clients--present and future--can and will read it. Anything I write here about a person, I am quite willing to tell that person to their face. You cannot out me or reveal my secrets.

I am not ashamed of anything I write in this journal, public or filtered or private. You cannot humiliate me with my own words.

I have very strong personal and political reasons for being out, loud, and proud about much of my life. You cannot silence me.

All you are doing is exposing your own desire to cause trouble for other people, and your own abundance of free time. I respectfully suggest you seek professional help for the former, and consider volunteering with a worthy organization for the latter. Volunteering might also help you to find joy in helping others rather than in trying to bring them down.

Regardless of your feelings about me--or about the people you try to "help" with your malicious messages--I wish you well and hope your troubled mind someday finds a measure of peace.

Sincerely,
Rose

P.S. If you would like to email me and tell me about why you feel the need to do this, I would be glad to enter into a mutually respectful dialogue with you. If you are doing this in retaliation because you feel I have wronged you, let me know the source of your distress and I will do what I can to make it right. You know how to reach me. Let's talk.

Reportedly, a proposed law is coming to a vote in Russia that would make it illegal to write or speak in public about being queer or trans.

On the one hand, this makes my vexation over needing to be closeted at a not-even-my-family Thanksgiving dinner* feel a bit petty; it's just a few hours, it's with people I don't know well whose opinions don't really matter to me, whatever. It's not like my country is considering making a law forbidding me from being out. On the other hand, it makes me more determined than ever to be as out as I can be, because I can be, and queer people taking risks to be visible is the only thing that makes the world aggregately safer for us. The more of us there are, the less oppressible we look--and the more we look like people, real people, not just a voting bloc or a bunch of rainbow flags or some limp-wristed and hairy-legged (or marriage-destroying and child-molesting) stereotypes.

* I am very glad and grateful that I don't need to be closeted around my family.

Well, okay, I actually am totally a hairy-legged buzzcut-sporting lesbian stereotype. I even wear flannel. But a lot of that is precisely because I choose to make my queerness visible: to slowly reduce the number of people who think they've never met a queer person. To be a role model even for kids who just happen to pass me on the street. To make sure my elected representatives know that they don't just represent straight people. To defy, with my very existence, all the people trying to claim we're a tiny, deviant, predatory, worthless minority. Most of all, to charm people into liking me even though they don't like "the gays", to gently encourage them to examine that contradiction, to open minds and hearts, to be an ambassador and a diplomat from the mysterious Land of Queer.

My dream is that the next time a bill like this comes to a vote, everyone poised to vote on it takes a moment to think, Hang on... this would cause problems for some pretty awesome people. And then future bills die in committee, and eventually the idea of stifling us becomes laughable. But that will only happen if we speak out and keep speaking out until everyone has heard our voices and been given a reason to care about our welfare.

Online petitions are next to useless. Please sign this one anyway.

I've been using the same "angry" userpic for ten years. It was definitely getting to be time for a new one. This perfectly fits the bill.

Yes, there is a specific thing I'm angry about right now. No, I can't really blog about it. It will sort itself out eventually, I suppose.

Now I'm going to put on some loud angry music and play violent video games for a bit, and then I'm going to turn off both and take some deep breaths and get work done while enjoying the sweetly domestic sounds of my beloved partners cleaning house and making dinner. Every day I am so grateful that my home is a place where I feel safe and loved.

The other day, Xtina declared that if something something something, she would eat her hat. "Don't eat your hat," I said. "It would make you sad. Don't make yourself sad."

She said "Don't make yourself sad" sounded like a hymn, so I put on my best chorister voice and sang "Don't make yourself sad/ By eating your hat/ Don't make yourself sad/ You wouldn't like that" and now we have a new catchphrase. (I'm not allowed to sing it anymore, though.)

I realize it's been like a billion years since my last substantive public post. Things have just been heaping up and there's no end in sight. We have two different Thanksgivings to plan for, which means baking things and trying to keep track of who's who and, in one case, remembering how to pose as married-couple-and-housemate for our very conservative hosts. Thanksgiving time off also means very tight deadlines at work. I'm behind on so many freelance projects--partly because life has cut into freelance time, partly because I drastically underestimated how long it would take me to do these gigs--that I just refunded a client $1000 because it was that or shift her deadline from November to February, and I'd rather give her back the money and maybe re-contract with her in February if she's interested than sit on her cash while not working on her book. Three other clients have generously extended deadlines, but it's taken some exhausting negotiations to make that work. Plus I've had dance stuff and Readercon stuff to do and so on.

Physically and mentally, I'm entirely wrung out. I almost never get time to myself anymore; I love family evenings with Josh and Xtina, and I love sleeping next to Xtina now that we've figured out how to make it work, but I miss having solitary time at night and in the morning, and I think the lack of solitary recharge time is taking its toll. I spent all of Wednesday (seriously, all, from early afternoon into the wee hours) having one long panic attack for no good reason at all. Thursday I fueled myself with sleep-dep hypomania and got things done and then crashed really hard and snapped at everyone. I tried to sleep in today and woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep and then I didn't eat much so I'm still cranky and teary. Once I'm done with this I will go to bed; Xtina is sleeping on the couch tonight so I can have my room to myself, in hopes that I'll sleep better that way.

Of course, as a bonus, something in my room is perfumed (but only at night? or something? because I smelled it last night and I smell it tonight but this morning there was nothing) and tripping my allergies and I have seriously sniffed my entire room to figure out what the hell it is and I just can't stand it. All I want is to be able to sleep well in my own goddamn room, not to sit here breathing perfume and feeling my nose get stuffy and my eyes get itchy and my throat get sore while I try to figure out what on earth is giving off that reek. In the meantime, I lit a match on the theory that it would ignite the volatile oils, and it did seem to help. I also closed the window on the assumption that the scent is coming in from outside. (It smells like dryer sheets. I despise dryer sheets and don't allow them in my apartment. Maybe one of our neighbors has a clothes dryer--though I have no idea why they would--and runs it at night.) Of course that means my room will get stuffy and too warm, but that's better than perfume. Probably. Maybe.

Anyway, this is why I haven't been posting much. Big things and little things are all heaping up and I'm crispy-fried. Right now the best I can do is try to get everything done and not make myself sad. I'll be back once there's room in my life for more than that.

I should also add here that Josh and Xtina are heroes of the revolution and I owe them my life and what little sanity I have left.

I'm almost too tired to figure out which tags to put on this post. That is real serious tiredness.

Me, apropos of nothing: I love you very much.
Xtina, promptly: You have to. You're contractually obligated.
Me: I do anyway.
Xtina: You'd better. ...Why do you ask? Er, why do you say?
Me: I think that whole exchange sums it up pretty well, actually.

[a bit later]

Me: I love you because you suggested taking a walk in the park and then having tea.
Xtina: Well, of course! Because tea! *OMG face*
Me, patiently: Also because you're an incurable romantic.
Xtina: Oh, yeah. That. I mean, I love you too, shmoopybutt.

Should I go to this event? Of the participants, there are three I would consider friends or friendly acquaintances, two I don't know, one I've annoyed by negatively reviewing their book, and one I've royally pissed off. Maybe I should just email the three I know and like and suggest we go out for coffee before or after.

In the meantime, all of you should go because that is a kick-ass lineup and there are at least three authors there who write fantastic books and totally deserve your support. Maybe as many as four or five.

(Maybe I'm still annoyed about things that happened years ago and I really ought to get over it.)

Yesterday was the sort of day where everyone was grumpy for unrelated (and in some cases unidentifiable) reasons. I was the least grumpy, so I foolishly attempted to set mine aside and caretake, which got us to the point of a generally happy family dinner and evening but abruptly crashed on my head a few hours later--after Josh had gone to bed and I'd just had a rather emotional conversation with X, so I didn't want to bother either of them. Times like this are why we have cats; Java was extremely tolerant of my rather desperate cuddling.

Then I went to bed and dreamed that I was living in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn and I was putting all my energy into making it a nice place to live (I note that in real life, I do not equate "gentrified" with "nice place to live"--rather the opposite!) but none of my friends wanted to hang out with me anymore because I was boring and always busy and focused on doing practical things rather than having fun. Even my brother-in-the-dream scorned me in favor of hanging out with my younger-sister-in-the-dream, who was giggly and cheerful all the time. And I was left on my own because I'd been trying to do nice things for people and they didn't care or appreciate it.

My brain: SUBTLE.

But I woke up to lovely partners who do care about me and appreciate what I do, and Josh gave me lots of hugs before he went off to work, and Graham gave me e-hugs, and now I will shower and get Xtina-hugs and then go off to work and to #MadSqLunch where I will get friend-hugs, and the day will continue improving from there. At least it had better keep improving from there if it knows what's good for it.

Tonight we made chicken stew for dinner. When Josh suggested it, I wasn't terribly enthused, because I think of chicken as bland-ish and stew as bland-ish and had no sense-memory of flavors attached to the concept of "chicken stew". But now I do! It tasted like chicken pot pie without the pie, and it was delicious.

The recipe is straight from Cook's Illustrated as usual. We didn't bother cutting up the chicken thighs before stewing them; why bother? Once the stew was done, Josh encouraged them to finish falling apart into shreds. Neither of our local grocery stores had celery root, so we substituted turnip. The thighs came in packages of eight, so that's what we put in, and it did not feel insufficiently chickeny even though the recipe recommends using twelve. We cooked it on the stove for longer than suggested, as a loaf of bread was occupying the oven. (Homemade bread is an excellent accompaniment to this stew, incidentally.) The recipe as given below has half as much garlic (for my sake) and onion (for Xtina's) as the original recipe; adjust as you see fit.

( Chicken stew with winter vegetables )

Their estimate is that this recipe makes six to eight servings; we added just a bit of rice to stretch it to eight. It is very, very filling even in small quantities. We will definitely be making it again.

Xtina: Nyquil jokes are the best jokes! ...no.
Me: No.
Xtina: Hey, you're not supposed to agree with me on everything.
Me, deadpan: Oh, okay.
Xtina: ...I give you these lines because I love you.
Me: And because you're on drugs.
Xtina: And because I'm on drugs.

I do hope she feels better soon, even though it means she'll have the strength to kill me for blogging her illness-induced hilariousness.

-----

Now that it's cold out, I've been reminded just how much of my winter gear has worn out over the past six years. My snow boots are in bad shape; I can probably patch the leaks with sugru and waterproofing spray to get them through one more winter, but the lining is wearing thin and there's not much space in there for insoles. My rain boots are cheap and ill-fitting and chafe at the ankles even when I wear thick socks, and I should really just get rid of them. I've had my beautiful beloved wool coat relined at least twice; the lining is in tatters again and there's a growing hole in the back of the shell, thanks to my fondness for backpacks. I generally spend four months of the year wearing turtlenecks, but most of them have been washed and heat-dried so many times that they've shrunk to the point where they expose two inches of wrist and I can't tuck them into my pants (and I have a short torso).

The boots are really the most urgent thing to replace. In a perfect world I would get these beautiful objects for snow and these for rain. Then I'd hit a bunch of thrift stores for turtlenecks, men's shirts if I can find any in my size, and a nice androgynous wool coat, since I try to avoid funding sweatshops by only buying used clothes other than underwear for obvious reasons and footwear because I walk so much that I have to invest in quality. (Even when I get good sturdy shoes I usually need to replace or resole them every year or two.) Total outlay: probably around $300, since I have a coupon for Timberland (20% off plus free shipping) and LL Bean shipping is free and I expect I can find a pretty decent coat for under $70 at Monk or the spiffy 8th Street Goodwill or the slightly less spiffy but very large East 23rd Street Goodwill or maybe Housing Works if I get very lucky.

Now I just need to figure out where the hell I'm going to get an extra $300. In theory I could save it up over six weeks of never spending more than $3 per lunch/dinner or spending any money on anything else. In theory that shouldn't be difficult as long as we do a lot of low-cost cooking for dinner and I have sandwiches (homemade, not deli) or dumplings (Prosperity, not Rickshaw) or hot dogs for lunch. In theory I can skip post-KGB dinners and #MadSqLunch and haircuts with no difficulty or stress at all. Why does reality never conform to these theories? (Because cooking every night is exhausting, is most of why.)

Or I could try to sell 60 origami bookmarks for $5 each or something, I suppose. Does anyone even use bookmarks anymore? I should probably save my arms for work and cooking, anyway.

This is me trying very very hard to ignore the voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me I'm investing in years' worth of winter gear and I should just put it on the credit cards, it makes sense to pay off this sort of thing over time, and what's an extra $300 compared to all the rest of our debt... I am going to live within my means, dammit! Willpower, I can has it!

-----

In happy money news, according to my freelance work spreadsheet, I have just passed $120,000 in cumulative earnings from freelance work since June of 2006.

-----

The clocks have changed, so I have changed my alarms. My plan is to stay on exactly the same schedule I've been on, with the only difference being that according to everyone else I'll be doing everything one hour earlier than usual. This time I will be clever and not officially adjust my work schedule; I will certainly try to get there by 11 and leave by 18, much as I have been trying to get there by noon and leave by 19, but leaving my official start time at noon gives me a lovely hour of leeway.

...so of course I'm still up at the 2 that used to be 3. But I am very sleepy! So I will go to sleep, and I'll probably wake up around the 10 that used to be 11, and it will be fine.