Stank and Circumspection

Do I need a break?

Right this moment, yep. The dog has eaten enough snow in the past week to give himself an upset stomach. Fortunately for us, it’s not the vomity kind. Unfortunately for him, it’s the gassy kind. He is scared of his own farts, so as best we can tell, he genuinely tries to hold them in while he’s awake.

He loves napping in my home office when I’m sitting at my desk. I’m on a video call right now with some of my fellow Novelry peeps. We get together for virtual silent writing hours during the week. If I wasn’t on mute, they’d be able to hear him snoring.

THOSE AREN’T SNORES.

THEY ARE FOUL.

THICKLY, STICKILY FOUL.

They aren’t sharts; I’ve checked (not this morning, but definitely multiple times this week). The smell is just stank, and what doesn’t get vented winds up trapped in his fur, so now and again, when he’s awake and ambiently around in other rooms of the house1, it seeps out, and Alexa and Siri are convinced I just start crying randomly in private for no apparent reason because Neither One of Them Can Smell.

I know they are, because they AreJustTryingtoHelp by selling these data points to pharmaceutical companies that keep pushing me ads for medications to treat Pseudobulbar Effect. I do not have Pseudobulbar Effect, and here’s why: a) I would be able to cry in public, and b) when I do cry in private, it is Always Because Something Stinks. For example:

the dog,

my favorite writing tool’s getting hacked2,

the current political climate,

my son’s turning twenty-one in this current political climate,

my mother’s being dead for ten years,

…and that it took me six days to write this blog post, which looks nothing at all like the original I intended, or its re-write, or its re-re-write before I tossed it and stared at laundry for a while, No I Wasn’t Crying It Was What Can Happen When I Sneeze I Blow Snot Out of My Eyes So Totally Attractive, Right?

I’m in public right now, virtually speaking. I’m fighting tears, thank you, dog, and when I was asked what my goal for the writing session was, I decided, screw it, a blog post is happening this morning, and my overthinking penguins will just need to cope. I will not care if they’re still unhappy with me for expressing so much anger in my last post.

I logged into WordPress, saw this daily writing prompt (“Do you need a break?“), and now here we are. Done!

  1. Say, by the front door, staring at the neighbors through the side glass while being too close to the entryway vent, which blows warm air that wafts upstairs (and downstairs, if the door to the basement is open). Does bathing him help? No, because a bath won’t stop him from eating snow. ↩︎
  2. Notepad++, which I have used for everything for years now. Even when I use an IDE for work or school, a specialized fiction-writing tool, or an Office suite component, I rough out my systems, code, character maps, invented languages, emails, Frustrations With The Universe, lions, tigers, and bears, oh, my in Notepad++ first, in the same way I used to use vi and XEDIT (the IBM 3270 version, not the little-x version used for Bethesda game modding). I uninstalled it after I learned about the hack, and will install a newer version once the dust settles, assuming my husband doesn’t convince me to go back to using UNIX for everything, or I text him from the side of the road somewhere deeper into rural Virginia to share pictures of the chickens and the goats I just picked up for the farmette and chat about the source I’ve found for wine grapes, What?It’llBeFunHoney!

    I roughed out today’s blog post in the new version of Windows Notepad. It made me miss the old one, which I used heavily before I switched to Notepad++. ↩︎

Holiday Post-Game

Last night, I wrote a blog post about hoodies, specifically about how I secretly wanted one for Christmas, because I almost need one (my existing ones are still holding up under the dog’s regime, but they won’t outlast it). I kept the secret to myself because I didn’t want to get one I didn’t like, or worse, one I loved but with a print that encourages my tendency to pre-game public interactions.

The post then spiraled into politics … and that, Y’all’s Honors, is why I decided not to share it, even after spending an hour and change this morning trying to tuck in everything behind a mask of extended metaphors while making fun of myself by cracking the old joke about the functional use of metaphors.1

See, I’m not sure that I’m completely over the hell-fluvidmonia-just-imagine-how-bad-this-could-have-been-if-you-weren’t-vaccinated the entire household picked up during our Christmas trip2, despite our best attempts to avoid it.

We missed a step: failing to recognize that our relatives are now inclined to understate how sick they and their friends have been in order to get us to come visit right at Christmastime instead of postponing it until after the New Year. You would think that everyone would have learned something from at least the Norovirus Family Fun Fest of 2014-2015, but I’m going to cut this digression off before I spiral again.

Thankfully, I had the opportunity to rewrite this blog post before it was yeeted into the world. Fever, fatigue, and concern all increase the chance I’ll look at something I’ve written and published and realize that a penguin had been one hundred percent at the wheel of my meatsack at the time.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope it will eventually be a better (and healthier) one, and so do the penguins. Likely. Unless they’re lying. The bastards can and do. Totally.

  1. “What’s a Metaphor?”
    “Sheep!” ↩︎
  2. My husband and I started going downhill during our visit, and fought with symptoms for a solid week. Our son seemed like he’d escaped everything until two days ago, when he crawled into bed and started refusing to come out except to lurch to and from his bathroom. I’ve been keeping up a steady supply of orange Gatorade and Goldfish Colors crackers, which is all he’s been able (and willing) to eat. Y’all, he’s turned down plain glazed doughnuts. He’s never turned those down in his entire life, even during that stretch of years when he wanted nothing else but fruit and chicken nuggets except on alternate Thursdays during a Full Moon when nothing would suit him but homemade macaroni and cheese.
    You betcha, I’m concerned. ↩︎

Contingent upon Avoidance

So it’s December now. Today’s my personal New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow’s also the twelve-month anniversary of my finally acknowledging that the 2025 family math wasn’t going to work with both my husband and me having weekdaily 120 minute commutes (on good days).1 Fortunately, he’s still right about our being okay.

For now.

Continue reading “Contingent upon Avoidance” →

Avoiding The Subject

I’m deliberately avoiding talking about what I’m working on.

-“Underlining the Ephemeral“, August 5, 2025.

… but in my newly copious free time, in addition to spending more time not doing so well the things I wasn’t doing so well when I wasn’t on this unexpected sabbatical, I’m crawling through the second draft of that rural noir I’ve been hinting at. I also just started(ish) brainstorming(ish) a post-apocalyptic fantasy, because I decided to participate in The Novelry’s The Big Write.

Continue reading “Avoiding The Subject” →

Underlining the Ephemeral

Last week, my husband realized that I’d started blogging again. I thought I’d warned him last fall, but it’s just as likely that I warned his imago, or at least that’s what he’d claim if I suggested that he might have just forgotten, say … like for some completely random example, one of his work shirts stuffed into the couch cushions. It’s also just as likely that his imago would say that. It’s a thirty-year-old response model, and honestly, it’s freaking fantastic … even if my saying that in front of people might…

What?

Er, sorry. Never mind. Hi!

Continue reading “Underlining the Ephemeral” →

Wondering How We’ll Get Down The Stairs

Clowns behind us, jokers in front of us … Happy Solstice!

Next week will mark six months since I stepped off the hamster wheel. I still receive calls from recruiters, but not as frequently as I did when I started this adventure.1 The credible ones2 are beginning to check in to see if my situation has changed. It hasn’t, nope. Maybe by January, when I’ll also be out from under the shadow of my non-compete, but we’ll see. My son is in a holding pattern, waiting for his third and final site evaluation with his employment training provider.

I’m getting an uptick in ‘you should start a business and employ him’ type advice, as if I seriously need to buy an abandoned stable and turn it into an ice cream and monster milkshake place with vintage arcade games and pinball.

Yes, there is an abandoned stable with an intact, great old barn just down the road from where I live, on heavily traveled road frontage, with plenty of land to support parking and auxiliary buildings. Additionally, farmette-sized housing developments are being built all around it. It’s also conveniently located near sports fields and our local schools. It’s not listed for sale, which suggests a couple of things: the parcel is too small to interest housing developers (it could support only one house in the area zoning plan), or the owners don’t want the great old barn torn down, as it likely would be. They might be amenable to a purchase deal to preserve the barn as part of a business operation…

…or so I would advise someone else looking for a business opportunity in this area. That is, if I were back in the business of doing business development. I’m not, and won’t be, unless I have to be.

I’m also not a YouTuber or Instagrammer and have zero desire to start a channel to share the journey of restoring an old stable and turning it into a business and potential community hub. I won’t be, unless I have to be.

I also don’t think building a business around my son will help him out in the long run — but, we’ll see.

On a less uncertain note, I have motivated myself to start the refresher training I need for my expiring professional certifications. The credible recruiters have given me solid advice to expand on those, based on my preference to remain a generalist, so I might pursue those once I finish the refreshers.

Or I’ll snap and look at data (or education) master’s degrees, or take the LSAT just to see how I do.

We’ll see.

The writing’s still going well, though.

  1. While I’ve been keeping an eye out, I haven’t marked myself as being available for work on any site. The folks I know who have are getting inundated with scam pitches, which show no signs of letting up for them. ↩︎
  2. I define “credible” as corporate-direct, or as coming from a legitimate staffing provider. Not a cat and a couple of AI agents in a closet, or people who don’t know how to read a map (or a resume) crammed into a warehouse call center. ↩︎

Looking Through The Back Glass

I was thinking about Mema last week more than I noticed until yesterday. Sometimes I do that with thoughts: I look them over, nod, and toss them onto the library cart for re-shelving. Better than ninety-five percent of the time, that works like it’s supposed to, despite my mental library’s being staffed by penguins.

That less than five percent, though, y’all? When the system breaks down, it can result in ideas I can’t shake for days, or worse, not until I translate the root disturbance into bad poetry to trap its troublesome ass so it no longer vexes me.

Yesterday’s system failure was not so dramatic. Or maybe I’m understating the drama, because it really doesn’t compare to the current drama going on with our septic system, but … that’s another pile of crap. Literally.

Continue reading “Looking Through The Back Glass” →

Recursed?

I haven’t found someone to do the hand-weeding yet. I’m not sure if it’s genuinely too late in the season to schedule such things, or if I’m scaring people off by explaining why I’m not doing it myself.

It’s not that I’m embarrassed about it and want reassurance.

Okay, I’m probably lying. Neither my husband nor I are comfortable hiring people to do things for us, even when reality puts up a billboard questioning our sanity. He grew up actively avoiding yardwork, whereas I was prohibited from using anything that could be considered “dangerous.” The quotes are intentional because ‘dangerous’ was being scoped by people who were religiously opposed to babyproofing.1 For example, it was my job to remove dead vermin from sprung mousetraps, but I wasn’t allowed to set the traps. I was also tasked with cleaning wire tangles and removing pulped frog skeletons from the lawn mower that I wasn’t permitted to operate.

To be fair, the one and only time I used a riding lawnmower, I did take out a fence, and I’ve had some ah, weird bicycle accidents.

I haven’t ridden a bike, except for a stationary one in a gym, since one sunny morning in 1994. I was running late for work on the Mizzou Campus, cutting across the brick plaza beside Ellis Library, when my bike suddenly stopped moving. I went flying into one of the trees that used to be in the concrete planters there. I’m fuzzy on how I got from being sprawled upside down against the tree to collecting my bike and walking it to work, but I do remember locking it in the rack outside Townshend Hall and Leaving It There to Die Or Be Impounded To A Good Home.

Oh, sure, it wasn’t the bike’s fault, just like it wasn’t to blame for me a) crashing into the trunk of a parked car after being surprised by a dog lunging for my back tire, b) cracking my wrist by grabbing one of the iron fences on the edge of the Stephens College campus while I was speeding downhill and realized I couldn’t stop before hitting the intersection with Broadway, or c) snapping my helmet in two when I miscalculated a turn while riding down one of the ramps at Brady Commons.

That said, though, our relationship was clearly cursed, so it had to end.

I’ve gotten a lot of recommendations to try Ivy Block or IvyX, so I’m going to give that a whirl before giving up on outdoor gardening entirely.

What’s one more layer of protection that I didn’t seem to need when I was a kid?

  1. Instead of moving the laundry detergent out from under the bathroom sink the first time I drank Downy as a toddler, or the second time, or possibly the third time, my mother and grandmother chose to keep the stuff there so I could eventually learn my lesson by trying to wash my hair with Woolite. I got it into my eyes, wasn’t happy about that, and started avoiding everything under the sink, including the apparently tasty tasty Downy. As a side bonus, I wasn’t blinded, and I survived to teach my sister that she needed to Not Do What I Did WITHOUT THINKING SHE JUST HAD TO LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE.

    Why yes, I’m Gen X. How did you guess? ↩︎