For when I have free money, or to save up for these things:

Much needed:
New jazz sneakers
2 pair blue sweats?

General:
Look at your Etsy wish list
Look at your Modcloth wish list
Look at your makeup spreadsheet (Eyeliners, Notoriously Morbid Changeling lip overglosses)

Specific
These</i> in all colors but the light gray and dark brown.
Black Magic or Mad Science shirt
You need this t-shirt in your life.
Jeans that are not simple Lands End/LL Bean


Graphic Novels
Leaving Megalopolis
Secret Six: Friends in Low Places
Hawkeye: My Life As A Weapon
Hawkeye: Little Hits
Hawkeye: LA Woman

I think I need more than ten naps at this point. I'm not sure how many but I know I need a bunch. Work has slowed down somewhat at the front lately, hasn't picked back up in the mail order but it's still busy and I spent a good chunk of this morning stocking about as much as can be stocked and now we just need to wait and reorder and. I swear this sentence had a coherent ending but I'm definitely not right now.

And I can't find my stupid origami paper, which is bugging me more than I expected given that I haven't done any for a few weeks.

I think the thing that surprises me most about my various book sales is that I have any. After the initial surge of interest. There are book sales? What madness is this? I'm notoriously bad about self-promoting, I've mentioned it on this very journal many many times, and yet. Maybe I should start getting better about self-promotion. (Maybe I should finish the hard-copy edits I got after DragonCon and haven't dealt with because of the global shitshow that's been taking place since then. Heh.)

Okay, I'm slowly working on getting Queen and Parliament up at least. I put a link to Sandborn the novel in the short story that goes with it, and if you want a link to pass around for my free short stories they're here. I did get all the paragraph breaks in Q&P coded in at least, which is most of the effort. And then going through and double checking for brackets, looking for italics, that kind of thing. Bit by bit, stuff's getting done. Bit by very slow bit and mostly pushing myself and maybe I should go to bed early tonight. Or at least crawl under the covers and read some fiction. But today was the slowest work day all week, so it might be easing up.

Global politics is not easing up, so fuck that I'm going to hide in my fiction because I really don't want to think about what's going on today. I don't have the energy.

Everything still hurts. The year started out with losing David Bowie who influenced so, so, so much of my self and my creative world, and it ended with losing Carrie Fisher, who influenced slightly less of my self and my creative world but so, so much of my feminine badassery. And, heh, my blu-ray of The Force Awakens finally arrived. I got it in the very faint hope that I would be able to get her to sign the cover one day.

And then I stress bought almost all the Leia pops I could find because fuck everything including my budget. Or at least, all the ones I could find for a reasonable price, I am not paying fifty bucks for a princess leia or 200-500 for a Slave Leia. Actually I'm not paying for a Slave Leia at all unless she comes with a Jabba corpse.

One of the ways I seem to be coping is by using her voice to get me to do things like exercise or eat or scoop the litter. Last night I went through a but I don't want to do anything I want to lie on the bed and stare at Neko Atsume. Which of course meant my brain coughs up "Okay, but just do four of those kicks you love to do. They make you feel like a ninja." Yes, space mom. "And don't forget to get the cat litter. Especially that one stinky crap your new cat took." Followed by Jingle Bells, Bat-Cat smells. Yes, space mom.

I need to call Mom and cry at her, she encouraged my Star Wars and Star Trek obsessions, she'll know exactly what it means.

I don't know. Other than that I managed to get most of my routines yesterday done. I'm starting to resign myself to not having the office ready to redo until February or March, since it won't be warm enough to open the windows and let the paint dry without the smell. Also Bat Cat's in there right now. We can knock the chair rail off though. Get curtain rods for the windows. Set aside money for the paint. Bit by bit. And I'm getting through a lot of reading and slowly building my energy back up. I'm annoyed with myself that I'm not doing much more in terms of activism or anything like that, but I'm not sure what there is to call my senator about. He is the chair of the Intelligence committee, maybe I can ask him to assure me that he will go after the Cheeto of Hate for the Russia bullshit with everything he's got. I don't know. I'm not sure there's much to do yet until the new regime takes power.

Failing all else, I can continue to make good art. I can at least do that. And share it for cheap or for free if I can. Sometimes, let's be fair most of the time these days, it doesn't feel like enough though. I see all these wonderful people who taught us to be so much, to unapologetically be ourselves. And I know we have to find this elsewhere now, but how on earth can I do that? Ever? Anywhere? At all? Argh.

Also I keep crying at inconvenient times. Mostly while I'm at work with bright-ass makeup on my eyes.

Welp.

So, Christmas weekend passed quietly, I got some lounging done, some studying done, less cleaning done than I meant to. Sunday was looking pretty good for the cleaning though, I got some dishes started and the chicken started and then I hear Murdock yowling at the back door, so I go to look. It's Bat Cat! At the glass door looking all "yes human I expect my food to be served now." So I go and I get a small dish of dry food and I take it to him, and then, because I'm a lunatic like that, I remember the boy saying "Oh, I miss Bat Cat, he was so cuddly, I worry about him." And I think, well, I don't know if I can get him into the computer room. And then I realize, wait, I don't have to get him into the computer room. I can just put him in the patio.

So I do that. I move the litter boxes from the patio to the inside, or two of them at least, and I close the doors to the house proper, get all the house cats into the house proper and close the doors, and bring Bat Cat in. It takes him about fifteen minutes of him running around the room all "WHAT FUCKERY IS THIS THERE IS GLASS BETWEEN ME AND THE WORLD" before he settles down. Eventually the boy woke up and I told him "Hi Merry Christmas I got you a cat." The last time I told him this it was a stuffed animal cat.

Work has been crazy busy and destroying my sense of time and, apparently, my ability to do anything at home. I mean on the plus side part of what I should be doing at home is also reading, especially since my shitpile of research books came in. But also ugh.

... and to top off all the ugh Carrie Fisher died so I'm going to wrap up this entry and go scream quietly in a closet or something.

So. The boy works in a medical center. Which means occasionally coming home to "Honey, I've been exposed to [well that's an interesting disease]." The other day it was scabies. Because a lot of people in the center were itchy and somehow scabies was the only possibility. But on the plus side I came home to all clean bedding, clean mattress cover, fresh pouf in the shower, etc. And a boyfriend ruefully reeking of medical cream. Meanwhile neither of us are all that convinced it's scabies because if he had it, I would have it soon after, and everyone else's spouses and possibly children would have it. And the only places I'm itching are the places that usually go dry in winter.

I'm not going to say maybe it's just dry skin to a bunch of medical professionals who have weird societal issues with me anyway, buuuuuuuut maybe it's just dry skin you guys.

I stayed up past my bedtime last night pulling all my colored pencils out of the order they came in and putting them into the palette order that's on the Prismacolor website yes I am a ginormous dork. I'm also struggling to focus on writing now when what I really want to be doing is practicing all of the drawing ever. It's not as hard as it was the last time this happened, but still.

(Also now it's just going to be plain hard to focus because I grumped on Twitter about Putin's assassination trend and Gail Simone and Mara Wilson RT'd me so, Um. There go my mentions for the day. Or week.)

I keep thinking I meant to do something house-fixy this weekend and I have no idea what it is. Pick up the garage? Finish the office? Sew something for the house? Not a clue. The boy was making mutterings about shelves on sale at Home Despot, but those are plastic shelves and no thank you. I have an aesthetic to stick to. Flatpack wood composite at the very very least, and preferably actual wood even if we have to cut it and I have to sand and stain it myself. I should go back in journal entries the last couple of weeks. I guess otherwise I'm just cleaning some more of the office, maybe plastering it up some and fixing something else, and then next week something like sanding and staining my yarn crates finally. Or by that point the lazy susan and spice jars should be in, so redoing that entire part of the house.

yes, I'm nesting. In lieu of being able to control world governments and shake people until they stop trying to destroy us all, I will control and clean my immediate environment. And make good art.

There's a current debate going on between me and the boy about whether or not he gets to chop a hole in the floor to get at the dead thing allegedly in the walls of our bedroom. He is not chopping a hole in the wall because the brick is possibly literally a foot thick. That's the interior wall. At least six inches thick. But this has led to a discussion of my home improvement goals, which involve painting the office and putting up floor to ceiling bookshelves. Which doesn't look to be actually that hard, just labor intensive and time consuming. As one might expect.

(Of course now I don't want to do anything but go home and paint and build a bookshelf and dude, no. Not even if you had all day and all the materials at once. Thine tits, self, calm them.)

(But seriously, I am getting to the point with my book collecting that I want more damn floor to ceiling bookshelves both downstairs and upstairs so that books stop being fucking everywhere.)

(Also I have 10' ceilings so that's a lot of bookshelf.)

IN THE MEANTIME. Work continues to be slow. I should be writing but instead my brain has become obsessed with home improvement. So instead I am doing neither of those but doing store work like stocking shelves and attempting to bash my brain into order. Go me. I have not yet gotten dance shoes mostly because I discovered that they are as irritatingly expensive as I remember, but I should. I did get the answer keys to the Arabic books after dithering a couple of days because just in case this country becomes more of a paranoid fascist cesspit than it is already.

And I established that there will not be capoeira for me for the next week and probably for the next two weeks, as both the community centers are closed and are you high I am not doing high exertion activity outside in 45 degree (farenheit) weather. No. My lungs say no and so do I.

And other than that. I guess the goal for today is to knock down my actual goals and not my walls or anything. Get stuff written, get stuff edited. Study Arabic and Hindi because I didn't yesterday because Rogue One (I don't... really have any feelings I want to talk about that movie just yet? Except Hunky Monk was everything and when I got home realizing it was Donnie Yen explained everything about my attraction. Other than that. I enjoyed it.) and study Japanese because that's on the to-do. Be a good courtesan.

So, on the one hand I went to the local art supply store last night, and they were out of just about all the sizes of sketchbook I want and almost entirely out of Prismacolor pencils in general, never mind the soft core. The pencils made sense because apparently they'd recently had a sale, I don't know what was up with the sketchbooks. On the other hand I did get Mom's check, deposited it, and promptly spent about a quarter? of it on the sketchbooks I did want, the Prismacolor soft cores, and a shitload of research books. So now I'm set for drawing and beginning to be set for reading and researching and editing and so on for the foreseeable future.

Which is good because god knows what's going to even happen in the foreseeable future. I'm glad to be set for drawing supplies at least. The research for my writing... eh? It's good research materials. I'm not sure what's going to happen as far as censorship, availability of books, how that's going to affect my research. I did get my damn Arabic dictionary already. Probably should get the answer key to my Arabic books, but I don't think my Irish textbook is going to be very censored. The rest... no idea.

I sorted out, informally, what I'm going to be working on over the next year. Which turns out to be mostly short stories and a whole lot of editing of prior novels, hence the research. Which, to that end I really need to have signed up at inkingitout so there, that's another place to hopefully hold me accountable for staying on target. Ahem.

(Editrix is really going to crawl down my chimney and murder me in my sleep one of these days.)

Work is really ramping up at the front of the store and not so much at the back, so... I'm not sure. I guess I get to enjoy the peace and quiet while I can? I don't get days off this year, which isn't the worst thing in the world, I'm not feeling in need of the quiet time if I get time off from capoeira, since all the community centers are closed Christmas and New Years' weekend. Buuuut I don't know. I do know that I need to get my head more organized about my writing projects once I finish up this short story and Turing Shrugged. Go back and re-read the one draft so I can finish that, and then send the finished draft off to at least two readers and maybe one or two others so I can tell if not having a central life or death conflict is okay. I mean, I'm pretty sure it is? But I've still gotten way used to central conflicts being life or death instead of college or not college. So it's a weird feeling of lack.

And then. And then. I've kind of got household projects going. Well, in terms of priorities. First is getting the garage skylight fixed. Then is possibly getting a floor to ceiling bookshelf in the office, and the office repainted. Then is getting the garage loft redone because that'll require warmer weather. Actually first might be getting curtain material for all the rooms, paycheck by paycheck, and sewing more curtains. Because fuck everything it is so fucking cold. In the office, both heavy curtain material and light curtain material so I can have curtains that block out drafts and block out sunlight but let in breezes. Blech.

But I have projects. I have somewhat priorities. I cleaned the damn office! Next up will either be the craft room or more office organizing, I'm not sure which. But I have energy to do these things, which means I'm slowly crawling out of my damn hole.

And tomorrow, calling and emailing my Senator about the Ingelligence committee because fuck everything to do with Russian government trying to take over our country. Fuck that.

Well, electoral vote day which I don't think most of the country knew about until now. As predicted, the ones who were pledged for Agent Orange are voting for Agent Orange. I'm not even sure I'm that depressed, I knew this was going to happen. I did my freaking out and sobbing on Election Night (literally, the entire week was hysterics and not sleeping. I'm still taking my melatonin.) and now I'm... mostly just tired. And incredibly fatalistic. Watching the electoral bullshit cross my Twitter feed is not helping the fatalism. I want to shake most of them and scream that they're why we can't have nice things.

In light of the shitshow that is the US and large other swaths of the world right now (BERLIN I AM SO SORRY.) only nice things now.

I got my JetPens order of the other two Irojiten color sets, so I have all of those now and the more I use these pencils the more I love them. They do not blend as well as some, which is why I'm going to get a set of Prismacolor soft cores too, and then I will have all of the drawing supplies I might need for the coming apocalypse. Or at least hopefully for the first year of the Great Orange Disaster. I'm really excited about the fact that I've managed to at least keep drawing consistently in practice, if not always practicing the same subjects. Oops. Still.

Open Road is having a free Kindle Book sale, at which point I am going through and grabbing everything that looks remotely interesting. I've heard things about them not having very good formatting, they scan the book and that's it, but I'm not sure. Also free books, if that sort of thing doesn't put you off. (I stopped reading one series of books because of the poor Kindle formatting, but if they're the same ones who published Bride of the Rat God and a couple other Barbara Hambly books, I didn't have a problem there, all the chapters were clear and the text was fine.)

Apparently being angry also helps me feel like I have things to write even if, perversely, it tends to make me devalue writing as a useful exercise. I have to keep reminding myself that people I consider wiser than me have said no, really, art helps. Stories help. Write the stories. I have two that should be ready to go up on my website soon. Although thinking of that makes me want to redo my cover art for Queen and Parliament and aaaugh. I don't know. I really don't.

But small positive happy things are happening while the world burns, so maybe I will be thankful for that and use that to keep me going. That and spite.

Well. I don't know if it's the melatonin or the exhaustion of yesterday but at least I fell asleep quickly when I went to bed, and when I woke up at 4 it was long enough to catch the hour and roll over and go back to sleep. I hope it's the melatonin because at least I can count on that continuing on, and I don't really want to be so exhausted that when I get home from work I can barely function. That wasn't fun.

I don't... I have ideas and theories and wild guesses and hopes about the press conference today, and the clusterfuck the US is about to go through. But I've already talked them out to the braintwin and posted some about them on Twitter and I don't think I want to talk about them any more for fear that I'm (and I most likely am) wrong. And this whole 'insufficient data' thing has never been more frustrating.

I am having a lot more fun drawing the past couple weeks. Which I think is partly a result of stress but also a result of finding a focus, scaling things down to what I can conceivably do with a few pushes here and there. Being encouraged. A confluence of things. Getting more comfortable with my tools. I need to make it work better with my scheduling, but so far so good. So far so keeping going, which is the main thing with me and drawing. I get so frustrated so easily because what I want to draw and what I end up drawing doesn't mesh well. (And I think, looking at what goes on in my head and the process of other people translating things to paper, I need to work on using reference images)

Writing yesterday just plain didn't happen. I got home and I was decompensating from all the stress of the day and I spent most of the evening watching Hemlock Grove, playing stupid phone games, burning my mouth on pasta and waiting for my milkshake so I could go to bed. So basically nothing happened at all. Hoping that today given that there was less really weird fucked-upness there will also be less decomp and more productivity in the evening. Languages, writing at least. And somewhere in there more knitting or drawing practice, one or the other. If I have time. If not, well, I bring my knitting to work tomorrow (because yes, recent bad luck shenanigans mean I get a six day work week yay me) and knitting then. Or sketching. Either. Both. Whichever.

So, today on the way to work we found either a person in deep trouble or a dead body. I have no idea, I couldn't see the person's face or any part of flesh on the person, they had long pants and a coat and boots? I think? And a reddish flannel covering the face. And they were sitting on the sidewalk with their legs halfway in the road which is what makes me think they were in trouble, because I've sat in that stretch of road/hill before, there's a perfectly reasonable wall to sit on, a bit of a rise. Places to sit that aren't in the middle of the road. Or even extending into the road. It's a narrow road, it was difficult for us to drive past another car without hitting the person's legs. Anyway, we called the police non-emergency line and I think other people were stopping to call, and hopefully ... something. I don't know what.

Then I got into work and it was marginally handleable if frustrating chaos, and then I popped in a piece of taffy to sit and catch my breath and I found a fucking rock in the piece of taffy. At first I thought it was a filling, but I'm pretty sure all my fillings except one, that was still in, now, are the superhard plastic fake-tooth looking kind. Not the silvery obvious kind, so... I don't even know.

So that's been my morning. I've had better mornings. I suppose it could have been worse, it could have been an identifiably dead body? I'm going to choose to believe the person got questioned by the cops and got up and walked off or was taken to a shelter until I hear otherwise. And I have no idea when the decompensation from that is going to hit, so that's fun.

The boy's father also got the boy a large bulky tool chest thing for which we now have to go clean out the garage. Which we've been meaning to do anyway since we discovered the skylight leak but ... and goddammit I should call those guys back. But we didn't expect to have to do it within the next day or so. The hell.

I don't know. Today's just been exhausting in not very bad ways, but ways that are aggravating even if they mean we're better off than the average, than others, than. And all I want is to order my JetPens crafts supplies, get a bunch of notebooks, and then hide in my house under blankets for a week doing nothing but knitting and sketching and writing. And it's not going to happen but still. I'm tired. I want these random unpleasant surprises to stop happening. Both the ones today and the ones in politics.