out in daylight, my potential

I spent basically all day today syncing stuff off my old dying desktop, setting up my shiny brand new computer (a winter gift from actuallyclintbarton, which I really don't deserve but is amazing and deeply appreciated), and setting up my bullet journal for the next month and the new year. That last one took... way longer than expected, but I feel a lot more like I got my shit together now.

New computer is named Eliza, and will hopefully be as reliable and long-lived as her namesake. She is perfect and I love her.

I signed up for getyourwordsout again for the next year, this time for the next level up. My word count this year came out to 137,056 (give or take anything I write in the next... hour or so) - short of the modest pledge level I just signed up for, but nearly double the pledge level I was doing this year. A lot of those words are things that only sort of count for various reasons, but fuck it, they went in the spreadsheet anyway. Hopefully next year I can step up my game and I will have more actual stories to speak of, but this year I figured out that maybe I actually haven't forgotten how to write after all, so that's good too, I guess.

...hopefully they post the new word tracker spreadsheet very soon, because I am going to lose my mind pretty quickly if I don't have a place to tally up my words come midnight.

Fireworks are already going off and have been for hours. Olivia Natalia is having a slow, mostly quiet neurotic meltdown over them. I am trying very hard not to join her because the passage of time is scary and stressful and I feel like I am not prepared for it. 2015 tried to kill me. So did 2014, for that matter. 2016 has to be better, somehow.

I'm so annoyed with my brain right now. I've been struggling with a plot for this book for literal months, and then today I woke up, staggered into my office, and my brain immediately went "well obviously it needs to be about X so Y thing makes sense to have in the book".

And I am just... DON'T GIVE ME THAT "WELL OBVIOUSLY" BULLSHIT. IF IT WAS OBVIOUS I WOULD HAVE FIGURED IT OUT MONTHS AGO.

...I mean, I am glad to know what I'm doing now, and if my brain would like to drop any epiphanies about other projects on me, I won't complain, but I do feel a little cheated. At least let me pretend I put in some effort...

*
Iiin other news, I have been volunteering Wednesdays at a recovery center for women with substance abuse problems.

It may or may not lead anywhere re: actual job (which... I will need to be medicated before that is even a possibility), and I am literally too efficient for them to know what to do with (they give me a job that they think should take an hour, I'm done in ten minutes, and then I have to wait around and read or something while they figure out what else to do with me), but. It is nice to get out of the house, it's really nice to not have to work with or around any men, and I haven't had a panic attack or cried in front of anyone yet. Be proud of me.

Went out yesterday to see an old friend who is back in town, along with actuallyclintbarton, thebonesofferalletters, and balsamandash. Lots of fun, and weirdly like being 16 again, but totally exhausting - I came home, meant to take a nap for two or three hours maximum, and ended up sleeping forever. (I woke up for a couple hours around 4 AM, and went back to bed before 7, because nope. My body was not ready for consciousness.)

So, since I didn't get to write much yesterday, I holed up in my office today to try to make up for it. I may have spent some time lying on the floor whining about how writing is hard while Toby sat on my chest and purred, but I'm at over 800 words for the day, so it turned out well. Actually having an office again, even if it's not perfect yet, is definitely helping.

I am even ahead of schedule for getyourwordsout! Not a huge amount, but by a comfortable margin.

( A CHART! Shut up I love charts. )

Been listening to my playlists for Kilgate things while writing, and I am remembering again why I love this series. I need to figure out what I'm doing for those first two books so I can outline and actually start writing again. I am ready to go home to Kilgate now.

So I have been sick for like a week and a half, mostly manifesting in fever, a cough, and bone-deep exhaustion I cannot shake. I'm better than I have been, but still not over it. What is consciousness? What are brains? How do words?

So yeah, falling behind in writing thanks to that (and still not having a freaking desk), and if we were having a conversation that I abruptly dropped... I apologize, I just couldn't communicate like a human and have now lost the notifs in my inbox.

( Boring life updates, mostly )

Nnnngh. I put off writing all day because someone was supposed to come over and set up my desk, and I didn't want to get all settled and then get disrupted and have to move again when they came. Eeexcept they never showed up (for the second time, without telling me either time), and suddenly it's midnight and I haven't written anything. I am cranky as hell.

On the bright side, Medicaid was applied for today. Dunno when we'll hear back, but at least it has been put in motion. So that's my one big accomplishment for the day, even though Mat ended up doing most of it because it turns out we can apply as a family instead of individually. We also need to apply for disability, but that's probably going to need to wait until we've seen doctors, so waiting on that...

And Typhoid Ariel (he of the sarcoptic mange) may be allowed out of isolation tomorrow, pending a phone call from the vet to assure us it's okay. I'm so glad. Poor baby has been in the closet for three weeks and is very lonely, and as soon as he's out I will let him sit on my lap and puncture my thighs all he likes.

So those are good things, I guess, in the middle of all my crankiness. I'm going to see if I can write a couple drabbles or something to make myself feel better. I prefer to be hitting at least 500 words a day, but I technically only need 205 to keep pace. That's doable, even this late. Deep breath, shoulders down, getting shit done.

Uggghhh the dog needs to go to the vet. Not even two weeks after Ariel's thing, but Ace has a recurring problem I really don't want to keep putting off. It looks painful or at least uncomfortable, and it suddenly got worse, so vet.

I mean, we're lucky enough that we technically have the money to take her, we just need to get it, so it could be worse... but we were planning to use that money to help replace my quickly dying desktop, and ugh. Ugh. Excellent timing, animals. Every one of you is grounded.

And meanwhile, Morrigan has been tearing up her neck every time she has a chance to lick or claw at it - probably due to allergies or anxiety, since she's had no chance to pick up anything from Ariel and if she did have anything contagious, there's no way she wouldn't have passed it to Quentin and Toby. We have her in a makeshift kitty turtleneck and an inflatable donut around her neck (like a cone, but less awkward) so she can't hurt herself while she heals and we try to figure out what's going on.

Switching her to a grain-free food to see if anything improves - I think that's all the vet would be able to tell us to do anyway, if we took her. I hope it's just allergies, because the food's expensive, but it could be worse, and there's fuck all we can do about anxiety other than rehome her. Talking a no-kill shelter into taking on that kind of problem is not my idea of fun.

At least GYWO is going well for me so far. Still behind schedule because I started late, but I am catching up fast and having fun with it, so that's nice. I might actually finally finish my first draft of this story in the next month.

I come back to the internet and my journal layout is broken for some reason. I've had this layout for years and nothing has ever broken it. I do not understand. (Other journals with custom layouts are being slightly weird too, but in different, less obnoxious ways.)

But I've been meaning to maybe change it anyway, and that'll be easier than digging into the CSS to see if I can fix whatever's going on, so whatever, Dreamwidth. Whatever.

So anyway, I exist in a house (well, trailer, whatever). It has air conditioning, and it (mostly) doesn't leak when it rains (and that can be easily fixed), and I have an office to myself. It is great.

Slightly less great things include:

• I can't really unpack because I have no bookshelves or drawers or anywhere to put my assorted crap. I miss not living out of boxes...
  
• Still have not heard back from literally any clinic we have called. Still am not medicated. Still very unhappy about this.
  
• We have very little money, and caring about food is hard when I don't get enough variation in my diet. It's also hard when I'm not medicated. I resent the fact that food is necessary to live.
  
• I am so tired all the time I am beginning to wonder if I'm being secretly sedated, or have been cursed by an evil fairy or something.
  
• Our neighbors refuse to feed, vaccinate or fix "their" starving cats (including near-feral kittens), but will come to scream at us and literally call the police when we do something about it. Though I haven't seen the cats outside since the cops came over (the second time), so maybe they are actually taking care of them now that they've been threatened with Animal Control? I hope???

So I went to the doctor's office on Monday, partly just to get settled in as a new patient now that I have insurance, and partly to get a refill on my prescriptions. I spoke to the RN there rather than the doctor, but that's fine with me, because she was amazing. Or maybe I just have low expectations given my experiences with medical professionals over the past... several years, but either way, it was good.

She gave me a new antidepressant (SNRI instead of just SSRI), and when I go back in a month to talk to her about if it's working, I'm getting bloodtests and an EKG and who knows what else to see if they can figure out what's up with my heart issues. Yay for people actually taking me seriously when I tell them something's wrong with my brain/body!

In other news, thatrainbow is heading to Florida for a few days and wants me to drive him to the airport so we can save the cab fare... which means I have to practice driving. We went out last night when there were no cars on the road. I drove around the block once to warm up, and then to the airport and back. Nothing horrible happened and I did not have a panic attack even though it was drizzling, so I am considering it a success. I want to do it a couple more times between now and Monday morning just to reassure myself I remember how, but I think I may survive the experience.

The universe finally remembered it's winter! Yesterday was heavy snow from sunrise to sunset, and it's been snowing on and off today as well, and all is right in the world again.

I am also alarmingly cheerful about everything, if you hadn't already gathered that much. This is probably a result of the heart meds continuing to work, and every single day I notice something new that feels like a goddamn miracle. I actually have an appetite again, and don't have to be reminded to eat more than once a day. I don't hurt as much in random places for no good reason. I'm so much less tired than I'm used to - I've been waking up on my own, after eight hours, and happily rolling right out of bed, and I'm not groggy and exhausted all day long.

I can do anything I want - go grocery shopping, do the dishes, put together some drawers, bake cookies, take the dog out, or even some magical combination of all these things - and not have to weigh how much I want to do it against how much I want to not feel like crap for the rest of the day. Yesterday I went out in the world and was on my feet almost the entire time, and though I got a little dizzy toward the end, I was fine again after sitting down for a little while.

Best of all, I feel like I can think more clearly now. That thick fog I've been fighting through every time I try to do anything creative is lifting, I think, and it's been there so long I forgot what it's like without it. Even out of practice as I am, writing is fun again, not something that brings me to tears.

Everything is just so easy now, and I'm both ecstatic and terrified something's going to take it away from me. I like feeling like this. I like feeling like a person again, and I want to stay this way.

Iiiin other news, I got a box fulla awesome from magistrate, including, among other things, a stuffed Yersinia Pestis, a book of Russian mythology, and a camera! Best addition to an awesome day. Thank you, magi! ♥

( ...and I have no idea how to close this post, so have a picture of my adorable boppy I took to test the camera. )

Bluh. I'm feeling better than the past week or so - less dangerously depressed, anyway - but made of cranky. I pulled up the carpet in the office and moved my desk in there, because the rest of the house is making me too cranky to get anything done, and de-carpeting the office was easier than cleaning everything.

I still need to pull up the staples in the floor before the dog hurts herself on them, but as long as I don't let her race around the house with her ball, I have a little time before that's absolutely necessary. I'm not even going to bother with the fucking carpet boards - those are Mat's job, and I refuse to kill myself trying to wrestle with them.

I am still cranky as all fuck for a number of reasons, but I'm going to try to put that out of my mind and get something done. Writing or tags or a post or... something. I need to find something to focus on, because otherwise I'm going to fixate on the fact that I need to be at the hospital tomorrow morning. The hospital. Because I needed more reasons to freak out.