Category: Monsterkeeping

Feral Celebration, With Uninvited Guest

Left to Mother’s Day being all about me, I wouldn’t bother celebrating the holiday. Sure, I’ve been a Mom for over twenty years, but I’ve never thought a big deal needed to be made out of that. Parenthood was a snap decision that my husband and I made after a decade of whiteboarding the pros and cons; yes, I’m not kidding, actual whiteboards were involved at points in the planning process before we just accepted that the math was too squishy and what-the-helled it.

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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. ↩︎

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!

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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. ↩︎

Unpredicted Predicable Explosions

Last week’s prediction was off by a day:  the loaf of basic white sandwich bread didn’t last until Friday. I said “No problem! I’ve got this! I now know what I was doing wrong,” followed all the same steps, and wound up with a mixing bowl full of raw dough that stubbornly refused to rise after 180 minutes.

Correction:  I followed all the same steps but one. Instead of using a random packet of active dry yeast that I found hanging out at the back of the spice drawer, I used active dry yeast from the bulk lot I’ve had stashed in a jar in the freezer since 2020. The yeast bloomed like it was supposed to (but no more than that) and gave up the ghost while rising.

I gave up hope for that yeast’s still being good or at least inconsistent on the side of evil and found another packet of yeast in the spice drawer. This batch bloomed vigorously. I had a very puffy first rise, and during the second rise, the dough spilled out of the pan. The loaf that resulted was very short, because the rise was so vigorous it ejected a lot of the volume. It looked like a bomb hit it.

Speaking of explosions, I finally lost it at my in-laws.

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