(i’m the sort of person that uses all my sick days, most of them for actual sickness…)
So the problem with getting sick currently is that everyone, including yourself, goes “ack is this The Sick?”
I don’t think this is The Sick.
But I definitely came down with something somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday, and by Thursday I felt shitty enough to email in sick and crawl back into bed.
And then get up for a couple hours and go back to bed.
And again.
and again. Continue reading
“There’s no way.” All of Ethan’s stings seemed to have been cut. “We can’t make it, we won’t.”
“We’re not.” Jackson looked at Lina, jaw set, expression serious.. “Okay, you’ve gotten some food in you, that’s a good start. Dylan, you gotta go way over to that side of the parking lot. Ethan, over there. And we need someone else, we’re gonna need more power. Are you ready?”
Lina blinked. She blinked again. “Ready?” She swallowed hard. The power plant… “Ready to stop – what a nuclear explosion?”
“The power plant’s not nuclear. It’s – ah, I promise I’ll explain later. But here. Get the forcefield started with those two, and once it’s visible, I’ll see if I can get some more people in. If I can’t, I’ll be right back here. I promise.” Continue reading
Content warning: this is set in my Planners setting (a very large organized family of preppers) and involves the current pandemic situation
~*~
The Family had a plan for nearly everything, and they created at least two new plans every year.
They had a plan for this.
Small catastrophes – something that was small by the Family’s gauge at least – they were more than set to deal with without barely blinking. They did their normal grocery shopping, did their normal gardening, and when the orders came to minimize social contact, those few family members who weren’t comfortably set up to work-from-home were quickly set up to do so. Cases were Family were furloughed – some jobs you just can’t do home – there was a Family emergency fund to support them, or, in many cases, there was something for them to do.
An organization like the Family always had work that needed to be done. Considering the bad experiences they’d had a time or two with outsiders who came to work for them and then wrote or recorded a tell-all- some lies, some truth, and some truth as badly skewed as possible – the family preferred to keep those jobs close, preferring Family and Friends-of-Family for everything possible.
So they, as a family, and as individuals, were set. Continue reading
Began here.
Chapter 2 here
Chapter 3 here.
Chapter 4 here.
Chapter 5 here.
The Princess of the very long name and her adviser, the sand cat who had offered no name, sat together, finishing a dinner of small fruits and cheeses for her and meats for him.
Only as she had nibbled up the last fruit did Malina think to ask. “This place is abandoned. The sand leaks in the gates, pours over the walls. It’s been empty a long time. So where does the food come from?” She looked at her plate, wondering if it were some strange sort of oasis-illusion.
“Where does the food come from?”:
Oli would like you to know that I need to rearrange my desk.
I mean, he’s not wrong, but if you could see the way he tries to get settled in the morning – So he jumps up on the middle right of the desk, behind the Laptop “Stand” (Carcassone on top of a book on top of a board game I have a writing credit one), to the pile of things I have to deal with – some book tape, some paperwork, and what looks like the sealer for big mylar bags, then behind the monitor “stand” (Complete Works of Shakespeare and then a stack of cookbooks through – I don’t normally look back here – muslin?, a 3×5″ spiral notebook, a half-burned candle stack from when my mother was getting a lot of teacher gifts…
…Mom taught 4thish grade for several years, from after I left home ’till she retired, so probably about 4 years ago, and I never actually knew teacher gifts were a thing growing up, but Mom certainly had a lot every time I went home for Christmas. T. likes the Ferrerro Rochers and I like the containers they come in, but there’s also the scented candles, the mugs, the hot cocoa mixes….
…I kinda like this one, it smells like cinnamon.
Okay, so over the cinnamon candle and the cute corner punch – oh, that’s where that went! – and now he’s to the far back left corner, so he wends his way through two pen cases and a take-out soup container of pens, two books and right now a piece of 2×4 and a box of screws, and then he’s got to deal with my bullet journal, whatever pens I haven’t put away, my keys and cell phone (both of which I sometimes need to get into work programs), and of course, breakfast. Continue reading
The Eshadra had been wearing masks long before the Empire had discovered them.
At first (for a long time, actually), the Empire, or at least the Imperial would-be scholars1 who attempted to treat with the Eshadra2 believed that the masks were simply a guard against the weather. After all, the Eshadra lived in a cold, dry climate which was unbearable on the naked face and would quickly rip ones lungs to pieces without some sort of filter; in this weather, the Imperial explorers gladly took the gifted face-masked, lined with the softest fur, and did not ask too many questions.
Of course, in that time and in that place, they were not inclined to ask questions as much as they were to make assumptions anyway. The Eshadra greeted Imperial people only in the small front room of their houses – houses which Imperial people first thought were that small, little huts built into mountainsides. When they realized the huts were only the fronts of the home, they assumed that the Eshadra cloistered their women.
When they realized a few of the Eshadra they’d been talking to were women, they assumed then that the Eshadra cloistered some women. Perhaps there was an exception for certain trades? By this point, there were certain trades that the Empire, if not all its client components, had declared were to be open to people no matter their gender or rank.
Meanwhile, they had studied the form of the masks, the style of them, and realized that there were patterns of beading on the outside, or fur trim, or embroidery, or all three. They asked what the decorations meant, belatedly, but because they did not understand the answer, they assumed it was superstition and chalked it up as such.
One particularly interested scholar, who was unnoted in their own time but later considered remarkable, asked more questions.
The scarf, ah, the fleoioa-
ffle-e-o-ioa-a, the guide corrected. Helloanei was, according to this scholar – we will call them by the name the Olleaiaelloa gave them here, Loearanni3, the-story-bringer – not only a willing guide and very quick to pick up both Imperial Standard and (as the Imperial folks learned later than they expected), several of the home-tongues, Helloanei was also an attractive and clever young woman and an amazing hunter.
Ffle-e-o-ioa. This wards off demons. The ice?
The ice is one demon. See here, these lines here. If I need to take a mask, this mask tells me it protects me the most from cold. But if I am sick, this mask here, it keeps the sickness demons from bothering others. And this one, if I visit a sick relative, see?
they all have a similar central pattern.
ah, well. Here, Loearanni’s notes tell that Helloanei laughed. Well, when one is covered head-tip to toe-tips, those tell people who one is.
Ah. What do ours say?
yours, yours says Lo-e-ar-ran-ni, that is, story-bringer. The others,. and here she giggled. One can tell from Loearanni’s notes that already the Imperial scholar was smitten. The others, they all say ‘stupid stranger’. That tells us that we should make sure they stay away from steep cliffs and wild dogs and not let them go into the desert alone.
Her, Loearanni’s notes say “I did my best in Helloanei’s language to thank her for her care to my idiot kinfolk.”
Loearanni was the first, as far as we can tell, to connect the Eshadran demons to then-speculative theories on disease transmission. Loearanni was also the first to be able to document the ceremony with which an Eshadran removed their face mask.
For many years, Loearanni was called a liar, among less kind things – because the notes on this said when Helloaneei began to remove her mask, she explained matters to me which are secrets in the Olleaiaelloa and in the Hafeallo as well. I will not relay these secrets, but I will say: if an Olleaiaello-eh-a takes off their mask for you, take it very, very seriously indeed. There is no more serious thing for their people.
It would have done the whole world a great deal of good if more in the Empire had heeded this. Less than a century later, the Empire found itself in a tricky situation when an Emperor demanded that the Eshadran envoy remove his mask in the presence of the Emperor.
Due to some careful verbal footwork by the translator, seeking to avoid offence, the Eshadran envoy took this as a request, which led to the envoy believing the Emperor had just proposed marriage.
And ever since, the Eshadra have been part of the Empire.
1 The scholars of this point were not the Informers. The Informers were already a nascent organization, but they would not reach the Eshadra for many years yet.
2 from a word in the home language of one of those scholars, which referred to mythical ice demons; they called themselves the Olleaiaelloa.
3 While the reasons for such will not be clear here, we can state this one: that this is the name that Loearanni themselves preferred in later days.
This story brought to you by:
Current events, gasp
Listening to Today I Found Out, something about Miasma Theory, and something similar (it all sort of merges togther)
The Inuit, although not directly.
Today starts the 4th week of my work-from-home adventure, and tomorrow is my birthday (Happy birthday to my cousin C today, who is a day and a year older than me and is at home with 8-year-old triplets and a child a year or two younger… here’s hoping she’s kept her sanity!).
(Shh, I know what it says on all my profiles. That’s … a thing. )
That means Thursday is T’s birthday, and that makes Wednesday the holiday we usually celebrate as Our Birthday. I often take off either My Birthday or Our Birthday off of work, but I’m sort of wondering what the point is this time.
I mean, maybe I can find out if one of my favorite Thai places is still open & doing take-out, that’d be nice. I haven’t had Thai in a while…. Maybe I’ll make myself a cake. 😀 😀
And then make T a cake 2 days later…
Yesterday, I met Mom & Dad halfway at a park at the top of Seneca Lake & we had a rather chilly picnic and a nice walk. Mom made veganized German Potato Salad (It was really quite good) and the sweet rolls I love and never make because Extra Steps.
We were a nice Social Distance away from the fishermen fishing up and down the river. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_River_(New_York) )
There were also people walking their dogs, people biking, and people doing something that looked like parasailing maybe? Paraskiing?
Ah! A google tells me it was probably kitesurfing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiteboarding
For a windy, grey day before the park even opened, when all the bathrooms and playgrounds were closed, it was a rather busy day at the beach – and everyone kept their distance.
We’re not going to have picnic weather again this week or next, it looks like, but maybe we can come up with something.
Anyone else marking holidays or landmarks while in lockdown? How’re you improvising?
Grocery shopping was not, in theory, a novel sort of thing. Lina did it every second week for the family back home.
But when she was doing so with three rich boys who had never had to do that sort of thing – “Why not just have a grocery service?” – it turned into an adventure.
It helped, or possibly made things worse, that it being late at night, they were nearly the only people in the store. It helped that they were actually buying things, although Lina’s mental list appeared to confuse everyone but Jackson, who actually knew how to cook.
“So why are we shopping again?” Dylan asked, when the cart was half-full. “I mean – there’s already food up there.”
“But is it good food? Also, I want to make pizza.”
“Make? Make pizza?” Continue reading
Today, in lieu of a work blog post, I’m going to present a couple scenes or snippets from my morning dream, which was weird.
Class was in a huge room -a cathedral? Possibly a former cathedral. It had that feeling. The professor was unkind, short with anyone.
And as if the words had been presented on a script, I found myself cutting in. “Professor, if you think that we are idiots, the reasonable thing to do would be to explain things to us when we ask questions. If you continue to berate us, we won’t ask questions, and thus we’ll stay ignorant.”
The professor ignored me completely.
I fled up to the choir loft. Here things become a little obscure, because I believe three things happened at once, but my dreams do like to overlap scenes.
Angels came crashing in from the highest window, from the skylight, and landed in the choir loft. Other people examined them, finding they were covered in lash marks, dead, fear on their faces.
What could make the angels fear? people murmured.
The man-who-was-courting-dream-me brought me a bag of chocolate and told me he thought I was crazy, but it was all right.
In another place, an Emperor forced a prisoner to tell him who he’d been.
In the Cathedral, the Emperor walked down the stairs and declared himself returned. He declared the man-who-was-courting-me to be his heir, because such was needed now, in this time of chaos.
The Emperor was back, he declared, and there would be Changes.
I watched the man I loved – by this point I was no longer me, outside of that person, but we’ll stick with “I” for the moment – walk out to greet the crowd, a smaller crowd at a rural church. He’d been adorned, wearing the golden headpiece and torque of a pharaoh, although his lovely curly hair was still visible.
(Was the scene where a ninja-warrior girl broke in and stole some clothes from a statue, the golden headcloth and the complicated torque and some clattering head-beads, was that part of the dream, or was that in something I watched?)
“He’s not all that good looking,” murmured Missandei in my ear, but I disagreed. He was perfect – but the Emperor had stolen him from me to make him a god.
I was watching as the now-High-King-and-Savior (the man who had courted me) took off the headpiece. “Is this what you did to them?” he asks the Emperor, in private. “When you came the last time? Did you trick them into making them think you were a god?”
“I did what was necessary,” the Emperor told him. “And so will you.”
The overarching story appeared to be one of someone who ruled over a huge empire but rarely made a showing, who used trickery a la Wizard of Oz and special effects when he needed to, especially on backwards worlds.
And then, of course, I woke up.
I miss small talk.
I didn’t realize this until Monday, Tuesday, when people were walking, running, jogging by and I would be far more chatty than I normally am with strangers-walking. And then picking up pizza last night (we have finally run out of things that Must Be Cooked in our fridge), and I wanted to talk talk talk.
Not about anything important. Not to form any meaningful connection. Just to chat. Just to have intercourse with another human being that was in no way Important, or tricky, or anything. Just Chatting.
(Husband is not great at Chatting. Even social media these days is fraught with traps, although cat pictures are safe everywhere (which is good; Oli has taken to camping out on my desk and sometimes directly in front of my laptop camera) and my realization yesterday that I could make masks and skirts that met was met with lots of favorites… but little interaction, even at the small talk level.
I want to chat with people about how their day was and what they had for dinner, you know? What their cats are doing even when I don’t care, so I can talk about what my cat is doing (sleeping on the back of the chair next to me, like she does every morning; Theo is stalking the house looking for something and Oli is probably looking for more food.). Or you know, what our plans are for the weekend (Same thing we do every night, Pinky.) or the yard chores we can do now that the snow is hopefully gone.
We need to repair our garden beds. I suppose at some point we’ll actually have to GO to Lowes, since they do not deliver peat moss, even when you’re having a fridge and a lawn roller delivered.
Oh, and then of course we’re going to roll our lawn (roll your own… ♪♫) and we bought lawn timbers (we had to measure our lawn to buy a fridge!).
And firewood.
And more firewood.
Last night was moving firewood to clear a spot to put the car in the Spare Driveway (so our house has 2 driveways – one in front of the garage, and then, 50-100 feet away, one in front of the house. The garage one is currently, and often, filled with firewood.) so the ‘fridge could be delivered.
So! What are you up to?
What are you doing this coming weekend?
How’re your yards, if you have them? How’re your cats?
How are you doing with socialization and interaction?
Did anyone else scroll through two weeks of XKCD comics to find the CORRECT coronavirus comic?1
…OH that’s part of why I keep listening to podcasts.
NOISE
