Category: Rant

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. ↩︎

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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