Live, laugh, Be Cremated.

I received a (very) belated Christmas gift this afternoon from a not-close acquaintance. It was a reclaimed barn board hand-painted sign with a pretty ribbon for hanging. Very farmhouse. Very pretty. Very much a catalyst for the longest dinner debate we have ever had, I think. 

The signs says, and I quote, Don't let your dreams be dreams. 

And I know what the sentiment is supposed to be, but I just can't get past the fact that it seems like it means that your dreams are worthless so don't even bother. The boys, in trying to find kindness, point out that it means not to leave them as 'just' dreams, but to make them your reality. 

Then it is worded wrongly. Clumsily.

I had to hang it in the garage. Kind of wish it read YoU cAn ChAnGe YoUr OwN oiL, GiRlFrIeNd! or something less cutting, but here we are. 

Merry Christmas. 

Is it over yet?

Pussy riot.

Which one would you like? 

All of them.

He sighs a long sigh and checks his watch and then gets up to go to the front desk to let them know. 

I'm kidding. I don't think I can choose in a day. We'll come back. 

Another sigh, another time check. We stopped for a quick cup of coffee and visited a kitten shelter and now I can't leave. All the cats love me except for the ones that don't. My black outfit is now laced with cat hair and I'm wondering if I should add this twelve year old ginger diabetic to the mix. Or maybe the tuxedo. All of them. Perhaps this ancient chocolate point Siamese wants to yowl in a home of his own. 

I could but I won't. I'm already the crazy lady. We don't need to add cat to that description. Plus we have a new cat since just before winter and she's a dream.  But Caleb humours me in whatever I want when we are out and about and today we had a bunch of rare Saturday appointments at the lawyers office to shore up 2023 as the year we don't change anything at all, and so it was a bunch of new signatures to carry forward and the more things change, the more they stay exactly the same. 

I did, however, find a Van Cleef and Arpels charm as we walked. It's very pretty. I bet someone was pissed but what can I do? It's a needle in a haystack kind of problem but if you've lost one and you can describe it hit me up. Not my taste. I like finding dollar bills in pockets or on elevator floors. I never look up, just in, he said and I agreed in order to point out the luck of looking lets you find things and I will forever be the magpie sitting on my tiny trove of treasure. 

Just one maybe? Choose one you like. 

Is he talking about charms, cats or...men? I could never pick just one, and I no longer know what we're talking about as he holds out my coat for me to slip into and we're off for home.

The guests have gone and they took my smooth brain with them.

What do you want to do today?

Pick up some extra gas cans, ammo, cash and solar panels. Maybe guns. 

Wait, what?

I've gone down a rabbit hole reading about the WEF. It's ninety-nine percent entertainment and one percent doomscroll. It's wrapped up in an ugly package and it just makes sense. I feel guilty for using private planes. I feel dumb for having taken the vaccine. I feel helpless in the face of a world without power or internet and dammit, we just adopted an orphaned broken electric mower and fixed it to use and I conquered it handily (you have to do a series of movements to start it) and so I don't want to give that up. But I also think some stacks of cold hard green and a stockpile of weapons (I saw The Road) are a good way to go for now. If the cyberattacks come or the electromagnetic pulses or whatever they have planned hit, we need to be ready. 

I love conspiracy theories. Love them love them. Especially since some of them are glaringly true.

A brief update on why there are no updates.

A revolving door of Christmas and post-holiday visitors keeps me from being able to write. A rock in my jeep wheel means we have a project for the weekend. A new study points out the huge quantities of lead and cadmium in dark chocolate (of all things) and I am ready for a vacation or at least a bottle of wine and a spate of horror movies in a row, all to myself. That's my reward for all this and *checks watch* next Wednesday will be the day, barring any further FAA issues, that is. 

I'm making Caleb watch k-pop videos (okay, just one, actually: Halazia). I'm making Lochlan study rudimentary hurdy gurdy playing, as we are considering having one made for Henry, and I'm listening to The Arcadian Wild all the damn time now, because it's like Nick Drake but with bluegrass. Ruthie is knee-deep in taxes, having had a banner year and then some working her butt off and it reminds me that tax time is coming (haha please kill me) and I need to maybe double my pills. My skin is finally clear after months of antibiotics and so a breather from the eczema is so nice, but my fingers are all split on the tips and it doesn't help that I heavy-clean the office each Monday for my employer and he says I should chill but dirt is bad for business and I just coat my fingertips in lanolin overnight. 

The new cat settles in on the bed each night too. It's amazing. 

The good news is our guests love to eat out, and so cooking is on the light side. They also aren't my guests and so short of small talk and asking them if they need anything I am off the hook. I love that. 

In other news, all of the Christmas gifts I ordered from overseas are still in the mail system. Hahahaha.

Feeling useless when in pain.

Ben is busy setting up my iphone again. He has a crazy EQ on it to change the songs to be very vocal-centric for me so I can hear them properly. Something broke after the last update and I can't hear it to set it up properly. The joys of being deaf, let me tell you. Deaf enough to need all this help but hearing enough to function so that others don't understand how frustrated I get.

And when I get frustrated the whole world caves in because if ever there were an issue of main character syndrome it would be here on the point, and it would be me. 

In other news, we took the dog for a swim, and we went for breakfast, and it was so late I have a headache from the distinct lack of eight-in-the-morning-sharp coffee, and we got some bacon on the side to feed to the dog because I have decided that his moments of clarity are getting further and further apart and so every day I try to make sure he spends his happiest moments. He sleeps next to me in bed, he gets fifty treats a day if he wants. 

But I still have a headache. 

The boys want to go see Avatar so I told them to go. I don't want to see it. I want to nap and listen to music and paint and draw and make things but I am also so tired. I don't think the sleep apnea thing is going to get anywhere, Rather than fucking with the symptoms I want to fix the root cause and see a specialist. My doctor is strangely not on board so I'll have to put him on board somehow but I will deal with that in a week or two. Once the headache goes away.

The eleventh day of Christmas.

We are...drinking Sazeracs and having an all-day horror fest that consists of putting every new horror movie we haven't seen on Netflix yet onto a piece of paper and drawing them one at a time. I wish for a sweet black licorice death at this point, let me tell you as most of them are worse than bad and I can't name what I love about  my slasher movies so much except that if people are outside running away from maniacs in the dark I am there in spirit. Maybe it's because I couldn't run from my own monster? Maybe it's because the monster is inside. I don't know, I just know that I am almost drunk, and there's a storm coming. The wind is warm and fierce suddenly, the rain is moving in and the seas feel wrong. The moonlight is off. The neighbourhood is pitch-quiet and Ben is already fast asleep in the theatre, taking up three places on the huge sectional instead of the usual two. Boys come and go. Dinner arrived, and lunch did too at one point. I ate some jelly beans in between. At one point, Caleb came down for a visit, hand snaking around my throat to tip my head back for a brief kiss before the glare of the redhead filled my peripheral vision and I told Caleb to either sit and watch or go out and I'll see him later. He's promised me a storm walk tomorrow which is beach combing when the tide begins to furl in against the shore, a dangerous time but also the time with the highest rewards.

I hope the power stays on.

8:05/4:25

And just like that Henry has graduated from university. Wow. When I started writing here he was a thirty-pound toddler straining my back and my brain with being so incredibly like and unlike Ruthie and he worried me more but less and he remains a twin to her but his own person just the same. 

I am so proud of him and I can't believe that's it. No more school for him. No more lunch bags, no more tuition, no more working on projects and waiting forever for marks. No more any of it. 

It was a wonderful end to a very long day. I worked today and after a two week break all of the plants were half-alive and everything was so grimy. It's an office with crazy windows and a partial atrium ceiling so they have so many tropical plants and yeah...the heat was cranked and the plants were suffering so I turned it way down and gave everything a long drink and then cleaned for a few hours. Then I rushed home because the dog is getting old and having separation anxiety issues and I didn't want him to get too upset and now I'm going to surprise the boys with hot turkey sandwiches and stuffing because there weren't any leftovers after our big Christmas dinner and so I picked up extra and I'm roasting more turkey breast and making gravy and I know they will be excited. Definitely a whole new sort of countdown to longer days, as suddenly the thought of an endless dark January isn't so bad right at this moment.

Twenty Twenty Three.

Have you ever been alone at night
Thought you heard footsteps behind
And turned around and no one's there?
And as you quicken up your pace
You find it hard to look again
Because you're sure there's someone there

 

Never question a princess on whether or not she can competently (and accurately) perform Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark for an audience. She can and she will because performing is in her blood. Singing is not, especially this genre but I skewed comedic and it held and I had a rousing round of polite and surprised applause. Which is great, because secretly I've been off trying to figure out the lyrics for Halazia (the new Ateez music video) and this had me reaching into the darkest corners of my brain, my fingers trailing lightly over the ghosts the light refused to reveal. 

Iron Maiden remains the singlemost LOUDEST concert I have ever been to. I took earplugs. I was wide-eyed and ringing for days afterward in spite of them, however, but it was fun and I'd do it again. 

I have the tiniest bottle of Piccolo to split with Lochlan on the beach at midnight. The rain is holding off, humanity is ruined, everything's fucked and we'll be standing in the wreckage hoping for a better future, or perhaps amnesia from the past, or something or other. I wrote my resolutions with imposter syndrome and I'll eat them smeared on crow three days from now, having broken every word into matchsticks, as I always do. 

Happy New year.

 

I don't talk shit about you on the internet.

We're having a great time singing along at the top of our lungs with Kelly Clarkson's incredible cover of Happier Than Ever. Oh my God, it's a masterpiece.

Welcome back.

Me, I mean me. 

I have had a great week eating my body weight in chocolates, gin, cheesecake and tourtiere. Turkey, carrots and butterflake rolls. Every time someone walks into this house they bring me a coffee and so I roll through the day into the night and then into the next, wide-eyed, sugar-crushed, Santa-spent and reeling in the glow of our prettiest Christmas decorations, still on the tree.

The weather was bad. So bad. It snowed and snowed and then it rained so hard I thought we would be swept into the sea. I waved to Santa at the mall and he did not see me. Lochlan wanted to make appointments for us to visit with him and I declined. I was tired. I didn't work too hard. I listened to Ali & Theo. I listened to Shostakovich and I put on Ricky Montgomery on for the dog and the dog finally stopped freaking out and fell asleep. 

We changed light bulbs and faucets today. Some were too dim, some too bright. Some faucets were hard to turn, others seized completely. A multi-hundred dollar trip to the hardware store and the assurance of the staff that we wouldn't get a plumber this week left me pointing out that I can do this myself but in the end Lochlan only let me change one of them myself while he and Ben did the others and PJ did two in the next house over, for a case of beer, I think. He came home slightly drunk, anyway. He waited too late to go but we only have one basin wrench so there was no choice in the matter.