Susan

Good morning everyone! Hope you're all okay!

• I'm APPALLED that I'm someone who gets things done as long as I get out of bed before 6:30. I thought I was free of that when I got furloughed! Why is this still a thing! ... Okay it's probably still a thing because if I get up before 6:30 I'm the only one rummaging around and my inner brownie can come out and let me do housework before anyone else is awake to see me. Today I cleaned the kitchen counters and the stovetop, and scrubbed all of the congealed fat out of the grill tray! And I took my meds, got dressed, and managed to play Animal Crossing and Pokémon Café Mix without being sucked in for hours! Is this an upswing?!


• Watched the How to ADHD video about clutter and... I feel like this might have helpful stuff in! Clutter in motion and clutter in stasis certainly bears out with how I turn the entire house into a mess in five minutes flat. I don't know if I'm going to do the whole worksheet they link to, but I think the third step (looking at your clutter, breaking it down, and brainstorming ideas for how to fix it) would be really useful. ... Is skipping straight to the part that involves DOING THINGS instead of THINKING ABOUT THINGS an ADHD thing? Because I feel like that's an exceptionally ADHD thing to do.


• I spent a fair chunk of Tuesday unpeeling most of the stickers I'd put in my diary and rearranging it from a day on two pages to a week on one page with notes. I know this is one of the reasons that I use stickers, but also... Brain. Why. Could we not have done literally anything else.


• Please assume that I'm spending the entire week lurking creepily by front door waiting to ambush the postie because I... Apparently soothe my frustration about one online order not arriving by making MORE ORDERS. (LexGarrett is definitely not getting back into Warhammer as his quarantimes hobby. Definitely not. But I am absolutely getting jealous at his parcels arriving before mine.)


• The advantage of this is that I had another crack at weeding the front yard, and I defeated most of the plants that were growing out into the street! Before I realised exactly how many weird bugs had been living in there and had to strategically retreat before I wigged out.


• Utterly fucking bamboozled a couple of doorsteppers yesterday because they were like "Hi, we put a letter about [service] through your door a while ago —" and I immediately went "Oh good, because I tried to sign up for it and the website said you didn't serve my area! So I can sign up now, right?" Of all the reactions, they were expecting, I don't think that was one of them!


• Have actually downloaded the Netgalley app and I'm slightly in love?
  
  • IT DOES INFINITE SCROLL. THAT'S LITERALLY ALL I EVER ASK OF EREADERS. I FOUND THAT OUT AND NEARLY HAD TO TELL LEX THAT I WAS LEAVING HIM FOR AN APP. Listen, if I want to turn pages I will read a hardcopy book. I have spent long enough reading fanfic that I expect digital text to just let me scroll!
  
  
  • The only other app I have that does that is MoonReader, and it has EVERY SINGLE POINT OF THE SCREEN mapped to a function, okay, which is terrible for me and my constantly wiggling the screen up and down. Yes I've tried to turn them off, yes I have broken things by doing it.
  
  
  • It only seems to give me the option to download books with actual DRM rather than social DRM, but apart from that it's doing what I want? It's INCREDIBLY bare-bones, but I am easily distracted and/or confused so that's a positive for me! And it also shows my progress in percentages AND page counts, which fewer ereader apps do than you'd think. Good work Netgalley, thank you for this meal.
  
  
  • (Is it luring me back into reading by being a new shiny thing? IF IT WORKS I DON'T CARE.)


• LOUNGE KITTENS RELEASED A LIVE ALBUM! I love how so much of the commentary is "Okay, we're doing our normal set list IN A CHURCH, it has Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo AND Gloryhole, we're definitely going to hell." ... Yes I found this while digging up a link for Gloryhole, Canada knows what it did.


• I am playing a Very Enthusiastic 9'1" Minotaur barbarian in a 5th ed campaign (she is literally made of beef!), who tends to call upon her ancestor spirits like she's giving a pep talk at a sports event. This week her summoning call was "Hey ancestors, WE GET TO FIGHT A TREE AND THE SUN! THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!"
  
  • She is starting to get offended that people keep hiding next to the party's camp and then running away when she asks if they want to come sit by the fire and have a sandwich instead.
  
  
  • The person hiding in the bushes this time was Definitely A Satyr, and his panicked excuse for hiding in the bushes was "I was just! Fastening my shoelaces!" which led to me asking very confused questions about whether fae sold shoes for people with hooves, and then being THOROUGHLY WEIRDED OUT by the concept of toes.


• Current video game circuit is Animal Crossing, Pokémon Café Mix, and Paper Mario: The Origami King! I'm up to the fourth boss out of five in Paper Mario, which isn't bad going considering I only bought it a week ago today. ... But seriously please be my Switch friend so I can give you bells, I need to get rid of this turnip money. (Code: SW-7705-1297-3990)


• Currently reading: Cinderella is Dead by Kaylinn Bayron — Queer YA fantasy romance that is basically "What if Cinderella was used as the model for a fantasy dystopia?" I've managed to guess every twist so far, but not in a frustrating way? Just in a "Cool, this is a walkthrough of misogyny-based dystopias and structural oppression, I can just let this wash over me" way. No I don't know why I can do that either, I assume because I'm still excited about people taking stories that have been done a lot and rubbing queer little mitts over them to make them ours.


• I have a lap desk now! Lex is using my regular desk for work and painting minis, and I need space to lay out all of my stationery while I'm faffing with it, so this seemed like a good idea! It is absolutely going to get covered in paint and stickers, this is going to be great.


• Apart from that... I've not really done much! Mostly been rolling around on the sofa playing on the Switch. Hope you're all okay!

Well look at that, we made it to 2020 after all!

D&D & New Year's Party was pretty great – sithe lost his character sheet somewhere because it's been about a year since we played, so his old character got lost in a freak teleportation circle accident and his new one is a unicorn-themed magical girl. No really. The fae queen of the unicorns sent her to ask Lex's character awkward questions like "Why are you summoning 1d4 unicorns every eight hours?" and "What do you even NEED that many unicorns for?"

(Me. He needs them for me, because summoning unicorns to heal me is more cost effective than actually just healing me.)

The unfortunate part of sithe's new character is that she's level 13 and has 34 hit points total. And we ended up slightly rumbling with an angry tree that could slap things 60ft away, deal about 20 damage per hit, and drain five con each time they hit. Two hours wasn't QUITE the shortest character lifespan I've encountered, but it's not far off. I mean, she's fine! Unicorns saved her life, I got to stand there with my 198 hit points and my AC of 42 trying to bait a tree into blowing all of its attacks of opportunities on me instead of on the squishy not-a-druid trying to exorcise it... Also, it turns out that if your exorcise a dryad's tree, that is REALLY BAD FOR THEM.

But there was SO MUCH FOOD and madebyjenni and I got to play the new Overcooked 2 levels, and I got to smooch Lex at midnight, and that's exactly what I wanted! Plus, got to play more Colt Express, AND more Pokémon, AND decorate the gingerbread house I got for Christmas with some of Jenni's funky decorating supplies, AND hug Lex a lot. Good start to the year, good to establish that I am going to be squeeing hard about Pokémon for a while.

Downside of it being the new year though is that I've gone back to work, RIGHT after I'd muddled my sleep cycle. It's fine, work is dead so I don't mind being here, I'd just forgotten what 6am looked like. I've got a few extra shifts this month, but I'm trying this weird thing where I don't take every extra shift that's available so I have some afternoons free to actually, y'know, DO stuff. I've got some writing days (and some tax days, woe) scheduled with captainraz, so we're going to get together and cry into our planners, and I'm designating a couple of cleaning rampage days to see if I can get the house back to a presentable state. Ooh, ooh, that reminds me! We're getting a new bed! It should be arriving in the next fortnight, and it's going to be a fun adventure trying to find somewhere for all of the books CURRENTLY under our bed to go while we sort it out. >_>

Anyway, yes, I will be joining the 2019 recap party soon, I just need to finish working out what exactly it is I want to do THIS year. I've taken a bunch of my diary's guts out, made some lists, and now I'm going to try to turn all of that into something actionable. The plan is to try to scale down for a change – I know I usually keep pushing myself for BIGGER BETTER MORE WORDS MORE PROJECTS, but that's not been working out for me so well, so let's try something different. In the mean time, I'm going to the pictures with splend to heckle the newest Guy Ritchie movie, so I'll tag out now and see you all later. Be safe, everyone! See you later!