Susan

There needs to be a subgenre of "ohhhhhhhh~ the veneer of humanity that separates us from feral beasts is paper thin~" but it's ADHD people (me) discovering that their meds are the only thing stopping them (me) going full "I have one (1) topic of conversation right now and I'm going to make it EVERYONE'S problem." By which I mean guess who forgot to reorder their ADHD meds in a timely manner and is now getting caught out by national shortages! [flaming elmo gif intensifies]

(My current one (1) topic of conversation is Baldur's Gate 3 and believe me the only reason you're saved from me yelling about Karlach and Astarion right now is the yelling is in a different document.)

ANYWAY, better living through chemistry to one side: HI EVERYONE! I continue to exist!

• It was my birthday last Monday and I spent all of it playing BG3 and eating cake. Excellent day, 10/10, would recommend. LexGarrett got me cute Pokémon plushies, so I now have a munna to protect me while I nap on the sofa. \o/


• I'm back at work now, and more importantly the kids are also back. The building continues to fall apart around us, one of the lecturers told students they needed a book that we don't have enough copies of, and I had a beautiful customer interaction that started "Why can't I read this book" with no context or clarification. Ahhhhhh, libraries. I get to see my favourite lecturer though, and that's really nice! We chat for like ten minutes before she goes off to teach each week, and it's always the highlight of my morning.


• All of my craft projects have stuttered to a halt because a) hyperfocusing on Baldur's Gate 3, and b) I made a mess in the living room and now I can't do anything until I clean up the mess in the living room but I can't clean up the mess in the living room because the mess is too overwhelming and and and and — yeah. Brain is in a bad boot cycle, gonna try to use my mum visiting this weekend as a way to brute force escaping it.


• My diary arrived for next year! It's a Midori Hibino, so an A6 gridded day on two pages diary. The grid is miniscule. I'm not kidding, it's 2.5mm, that is RIDICULOUSLY small, and I looooooove it. My handwriting has always been "It's not neat, it's just small," so the squares make it look nice. Currently copying over some of the 75 charts and lists and tables I've drawn up, which is probably going to keep me occupied until new year. I can see filling it in might be a problem though, because the book is genuinely an inch thick. Gonna need to figure out how I'm actually getting the front pages to be a usable writing surface considering that they don't actually reach the table if the book is properly open. ... The solution is not just practicing writing left handed until I can do it small enough, brain, stop trying to make that happen.


• (I CAN write left handed, it's just messy as all hell. Random fact: I used to be able to knit both left and right handed! My mum taught me and she's left handed, and at some point I realised that I never needed to purl if I just switched active hands. That is a skill I might try to bring back.)


• Me: Maybe I don't need to keep using the public library, I'm not making it through all of the books I borrowed.
  Also me: That thought may have looked more convincing if I hadn't immediately discovered that my library expanded their manga collection. DANGIT.


• I need to book my covid booster! I keep picking up my phone to do it and then getting distracted by nothing at all. I'm still the only staff member regularly masking at work, sooooooo trying to stave off being a plague-beast.


• Nottingham Central Library re-opens next month! It has been EIGHTY FOUR YEARS of rebuilding it where a carpark used to be, and soooooooooon there will be a library in town again!


• Got a steam deck because they were on sale and I'm good at self-control slash it was mine and Lex's birthdays, and it's been really useful! I've missed handheld gaming, somehow. Suddenly I've been playing a bunch of games that work better with a controller, without being tempted to just rebuy them on the switch. Funny how that works!


• Got a haircut and now I'm back to looking like a super curly version of my icon. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!


• Crave chicken, going to cram pizza into my maw, I love you all very much. <3

Hello darlings! I didn't realise that I'd dropped off the face of the internet until faintdreams messaged me to check if I was still alive, so I'm sorry about that. (I have had some variant of "Post x on dreamwidth" on my to-do list every day, and I keep forgetting that this doesn't automatically translate into you all knowing that I am fine and yelling as usual.)

I've been a bit up and down! Seasonal depression can once again go eat a wasp nest, and oh my goddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd can my family keep it together for FIVE MINUTES PLEASE, but I'm alive!

(The niece who married someone like fifteen years older than her is getting a divorce and I am SO HAPPY FOR HER! Anecdata seems to indicate that 25 is the age where people dating older-yet-less-mature creeps realise what's going on, and she's bang on target for that.)

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Hello~~~~! I don't know where to start with what I've been up to, because it's been a while, but the long and short of it is hi! I'm back at work after the summer, we're super busy, and I have survived another rotation around the sun! My birthday was at the start of the month, and I spent it dossing around in my pyjamas and eating cake. The cake came with a tiara.

(Lex is the BEST husband, accept no substitutes.)

The summary of other stuff going on is: we've been in this house for A YEAR. A LITERAL ENTIRE YEAR. Where has the time gone?! Why are there still boxes here?! And work is apparently giving out raises at the end of the month – union negotiations have bumped everyone's pay brackets up, but no one knows how much the raise will be. Not even management. When your grandboss is asking if your payslip has come out in case you know what the pay bump is: oof.

So yeah, I'm okay! I hope you're all okay too, be safe and I'll see you all later! ♥

HELLO FRIENDS, it feels like it's been a million years! But today I sat down and suddenly went "... If I don't write words I'm gonna flip an entire table" so I think I'm doing okay? It was my birthday at the start of October (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa) and I had a really nice, quiet weekend! My mum paid for a new fridge as mine and Lex's joint birthday present, Pseudotwin got me Unstable Unicorns, Lex bought me fuzzy house socks and a Sailor Moon colouring book, and we went to Hobbycraft so I could buy MORE FABRIC! Excellent birthday. Although jilliferium made it even better! I compared her to a Tonberry, so she spent a LITERAL WEEK messaging me at random times just saying "Step."

And then that Saturday she rings me. "What are you doing today?" "Shit all?" "GREAT."

FIVE HOURS LATER, SHE IS ON MY DOORSTEP TO YELL "DOINK!"

We got to be Horrible Geese together and she was our first overnight houseguest and just! WHAT A GOOD BIRTHDAY!

As for everything else:

House: The house is down to about 60% box by volume instead of 80%! \o/ No seriously, I feel incredibly smug about this. Hung lampshades all on my own, built bookcases with LexGarrett, captainraz, and hardlyaverage, cleaned the heck out of the kitchen... We're making progress! Next goals are to get rid of all of the aslgfasjbdsg cardboard, because it turns out that moving house just spawns cardboard boxes somehow? But between that and sorting out books for shelving/selling/donating, we're going to have so much space.

• Me: I did THINGS!
  LexGarrett: I'm impressed that you sound both proud and like you're making a threat.
  Me: I am and I was. :)


• Yes I am ABSOLUTELY mapping out my bookcases, who do think you're dealing with here.
• 
  
• Pinterest level: got plain black stickers for kitchen jars because I couldn't find pre-made stickers that I liked! Is that pinterest-y enough?


• We have a not-roomba, her name is Dorothy and she is my beautiful daughter who eats dirt. I left her unsupervised in the kitchen for less than a minute, and somehow she unearthed a plastic butterknife that I didn't even know we had.


• Cycled back around to using Tody again, and once again I'm like "... How do I forget how useful this is?!" Especially because I've got LexGarrett using it as well so we can both tick things off.


• I have met three of the neighbour dogs and one neighbour cat! I don't know the names of any of the humans connected to these animals, but I'm pretty sure I've prioritised this right.

Work: So it turns out that having more than five hours of sleep a night and being able to just walk to work is good for you???? Sounds super fake. But honestly that's good, because term has started and it's been rammed. Everyone's been nice! But this is the first time since February or March 2020 that we've been running at full capacity and I forgot what it's like! We've gone from having a maximum of about 300 people in the building total to having about 800 people coming in and out over the lunch hours. ... It's a bit of a shift, is what I'm saying. Especially because we're actually getting the newbies in and they have actual honest-to-god questions about how everything works! It's so bizarre. But also my line manager turned round to me and went "Didn't we have some reasonable adjustments for you written down somewhere?" and oh yeah, that was a whole entire thing that we negotiated pre-pandemic that I just. Forgot about. THANKS BRAIN.

Me: Apparently I have hobbies and can get excited about media?????? WHAT MADNESS IS THIS. But yeah, I'm slowly getting back into my crafting, and looking at things and going "Oh, actually, I do want to put that in my eyes right now" and I'm kind of at a loss. Wanting to do things and actually enjoying them? Couldn't be me.

• Tentatively getting back into sewing! Have figured out how to circle skirt at long last – I tried using this calculator before but couldn't grok how to actually fold my fabric for maximum skirt? But I got a king-size bedsheet and sacrificed it to the sewing gods and now I MAYBE understand what I'm doing! Maybe! ... Obviously the next step is moving onto the sewing patterns I paid money for that are infinitely more complicated than this. It's the only thing to do.


• I am crocheting earrings! I'm a little sad that the stuff I ordered to make halloween-y earrings didn't arrive before Halloween, but that's fine! Spooky earrings can be an all-year thing if I'm not a coward!


• Got a bread machine, am now filling the house with bread. So far my favourite is the raisin bread recipe, because if you toast a slice it basically turns into a toasted teacake, but more science to follow. Especially with this cinnamon bread recipe that apparently thinks 1/5 of a cup of cinnamon is a reasonable amount to go in anything.


• I need to actually start making people's xmas presents. I've got as far as Jilliferium being VERY CLEAR that I'm not to make any more ginormous shark plushies for her house, they have Too Many, and that's it. Hmmmm.


• Oh and I've started taking all of my ADHD meds in the morning and it... Seems to be doing something? I don't know if that something is good, but it's definitely something!

So yeah, that's what I've been up to for all of October! I don't know what my plans for November are because I'm still getting back into the habit of using my goddamn diary but I will report back!

Hello friends, I promised a longer update, which I wrote, and then uhhhhhhhh put off posting it for so long that it no longer applied? BRILLIANT planning on my part!

The main takeaway of it was that I am very excited about the contract and very bad at waiting, therefore jilliferium is MVP of this house-buying process. She has put up with so much of me messaging her going "We need to wait for x before we can do y and I understand WHY we need to wait but also: I am made of anxiety and bees!" But that no longer applies, because!

WE SIGNED THE CONTRACT! It is all filled in, we've posted it back to the solicitor, hopefully she doesn't kick up a stink about us getting sithe to sign it because I am not finding someone else to be a witness in a global pandemic. We are so close to the end! SO CLOSE! I think there's only the... Exchanging contracts? And then we can have a completion date? WE ARE SO CLOSE TO GETTING THIS DONE! *\ (TT_______TT) /*

There's still a chance that everything could go horribly wrong, but I'm starting to pack up some of our things! The plan is like... Boardgames and books, stuff that I can be sure that we're not going to need immediately, and hopefully I can cram them into the storage unit to free up more space for us to tidy and pack.

... Oh yeah, I'm going through our storage unit as well, and it's a fucking weird experience. I've been describing it as a depression time capsule, because 2014 was Not a Good Year. I didn't sort any of this shit out before we threw it into the unit, and it's all things from three jobs/two diagnoses/one apocalypse ago! It's like a museum exhibit of a person that I haven't been in years! The upside is that it's a lot easier to strip out whatever I don't want, but it's certainly A Thing.

Anyway! In other news, LexGarrett had a week off, and we spent it hanging out and watching movies! I went in a bookshop for the first time in over a year! And we watched the Dynasty Warriors movie, which Prince Water Buffalo from Nirvana in Fire as Cao Cao. He drifts a horse like he's in Initial D, 10/10, would let Lex pick the movie again.

HELLO INTERNET, it has been a while since I wrote a proper post. I've been trying to write an update since mid-May, but to quote the poets: new things keep happening!

• I've officially broken up from work for the summer, and don't have to go back until September! I survived a whole academic year of working during the pandemic! ... It was really fucking weird, and I'm not sure I'd like to repeat that experience. Best news though: I don't have to get up for work at fucking 5:45am anymore, so I might actually have enough energy to do things!


• Lex and I are in the process of buying a house. I know I already posted about this but I'm still confused that this is happening.


• Finally got my act together and reposted (most) of my earliest fic from FFNet to AO3 for archival purposes. Teen!Susan was having fun and doing her best, and I'm gonna try to respect that instead of cringing myself inside out.


• I figured out how to install Firefox browser extensions on my phone! Which means that I can install userscripts, which means that I can use the Kudosed and Seen History AO3 script on my phone! Now I can harvest the dopamine straight from my phone by ticking off fic! I feel like a genius.
  
  There is definitely a way of doing it that doesn't involve installing a beta version of firefox in developer mode and applying like eight different sets of instructions, but I didn't find it, so here we are!


• hardlyaverage has started running his Pathfinder game again! I AM HYPE!
  
  • This is the game where I'm a high-octane disaster lesbian who keeps fisting gods, splend is a disaster pan drummer living the high int/low wis dream, captainraz is a very confused agender aroace fishperson who is the only sensible person in the party, and envexenveritas is a tiny gnome cleric whose alignment on the scale of "disaster" to "sensible" changes depending on exactly how much tech there is for them to be a disaster about.
  
  
  • Q: Is this the game where you tried to play an allosexual and actually just flirted extravagantly with every woman who ever tried to kill you?
    A: I'VE SEEN MEDIA, I KNOW THAT THIS IS HOW ALLOS WORK.
  
  
  • Reason 453 not to run games for me: hardlyaverage asked for an elaboration on one specific part of my character's backstory, and got back 800 words of "Thirsty sword lesbian has never had a decent coping strategy in her life and isn't about to start now."
    
    • It included a section on how it was historically socially acceptable to be horny for St Sebastian, because I am a serious roleplayer who takes things seriously.


• One of the ADHD books I've read had a little slogan that I remember as "Before adding one thing, subtract two," to remind you not to pick up new things without making space for them. And I've found a way of doing this that works for me! I've got a list in my notebook now of things that I've gotten rid of/finished, and I can trade in ("trade in") two finished things on this list for one shiny new thing. It's helping! It's giving me motivation to actually get rid of things, and helps to put the brakes on when I'm considering buying new ones, because do I have a slot for it?
  
  I know myself, and I know that this system is going to last EXACTLY as long as it takes me to go "Oh, well I'll buy this thing and figure out the trade-in later!" but I've not done it yet! STAY STRONG, ME.
  
  On the plus side, the list DOES look like someone's comp titles mad libs. I don't know what would have Skip Beat and Black Wolves as comparisons, but I'm enjoying the image.


• I'm keeping my plans for the summer very loose until I've caught up on all the sleep I've missed, but I'm hoping that I'll be around more often! I have a buttload of video games to play, and there's a new episode of Kingdom coming out next month, so maybe I can hang out and be excited about things!

I am feeling... Weirdly okay! I think I might be hitting the point where all of the boring stupid things I was doing to get my brain back to functional have kicked in and now I have enough action points to do the slightly more complicated tasks! Or I've freed up more action points because everything is taking a little less effort than it did, one of those two. The level of progress we're talking about here is "Able to interact with people again" and "Making myself beans on toast for lunch instead of cereal" and "able to send/answer emails about freelance stuff" and "most of the way through a craft project" and "started doing freelance stuff," and honestly: I WILL TAKE THIS. I am living the dream right now, because I feel okay!

(I am trying to be responsible about how quickly I start picking things up again, because I don't want to Hyperbole and a Half myself! LOOK AT ME LEARNING FROM MY MISTAKES.)

Things that have happened since I last posted:

• The UK has come out of lockdown! My coworkers are very excited about going shopping and getting haircuts again, and I'm happy for them! Went for a walk around the park with Lex, and had a socially distanced picnic with friends last weekend. I do want to go to bookshops and craft shops so I can touch everything! But I'm gonna wait a bit longer, both for safety's sake and because I get a bit jangly when my bollocks o'clock tram to work has all of seats filled, so let's not risk it!


• LexGarrett is excited about maybe getting to go back to his office, because it has aircon and our house does not! I am doing my best not to get in my feelings about this, because if he's not working from home then I get my desk back and there's a chance I might remember to clean the house! But my four hours of being able to exist in Lex's space while we do our own things!


• WHO HAS TWO THUMBS AND MOVED AN ENTIRE BOOKCASE! This is very exciting to me, because now we've got all of the furniture in our bedroom in the places they're supposed to be! Now I just ("just") need to declutter and tidy up, and we should have something that approaches a liveable bedroom! ... Also I've applied card and duct tape to the door latch to see if that solves the problem of the door sticking and trapping me inside, so I think that's all of my good house karma for the month.


• MATES I WROTE THAT LAST BULLET POINT, AND THEN OUR BEDFRAME BROKE. WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THAT HOUSE KARMA.


• I finished my first playthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses! It was a Black Eagles run, and I have DEFINITELY missed a huge chunk of plot somewhere, but that's fine! I have unlocked the New Game+ mode, so I'm gonna do it again but better.


• THERE IS GOING TO BE AN OXENFREE SEQUEL!!! Thank you for telling me about this bookishDi! My reaction to the trailer is very ALEX NO DON'T DO THIS but I'm going to buy it and wig myself out, because Oxenfree was SO GOOD. ... In related news, Oxenfree's on the switch, so I guess I know what I'm doing when I finish Fire Emblem again.


• New series of Great British Sewing Bee, AND a competition show about making jewellery? Why thank you, BBC, I think I shall.


• On the work front: I'm getting trained for a NEW mindless data entry task, I am SO HYPE! Apparently one of the people who made the library management software we switched to in 2019 just forgot that the cataloguing team might need updating when our e-journal access changed, and forgot to turn that on for six months. Which somehow spiralled to the point where there's now a year's worth of updates that need checking and it's being passed on to library advisers! ... For context, a year's worth appears to be 64 thousand updates, because academic publishing. This is going to take forever to check and I! Am! Ready!


• Oh, and I'm doing stuff that I can totally wrangle as "developing new procedures" when it gets to performance review time, because I've convinced my manager that we need an actual system for tracking all of the chasing we've done about lost items, and now I'm bodging that together.


• Man, I forgot how much I love trashy romance manga. Like, I know every March/April I rock up like "'Sup, I read twenty volumes of BL manga in a week, ask me anything," but also: I keep forgetting how much better my life feels when I can actually read! Next trick: gonna try reading new-to-me fanfic instead of reading the exact same twelve fic I've been reading for the last four months!


• The sticker release notebook I bought have arrived and I'm slightly in love, because now I have a tiny little book that I can just plaster my stickers in! I'm a little in love, this is so convenient.


• The last Heaven's Feel OVA came out, and my overwhelming reaction is RIDER YES. Like. I appreciate there was other stuff going on apart from Rider cutting loose, but RIDER YES.

So... Yeah, I'm okay. Not sure how it happened, but I'm glad it did!

Hey sweetpeas! I live! I am very tired in my emotions, so my ability to do things and talk to people has just... Stopped? But I live! It was my birthday last week, I am officially an even older fandom auntie than I was! I had to go to work in the morning, but Lex baked me a birthday cake and bought me a copy of Promare! A+++ afternoon and evening, got to nest and cuddle. (Theoretically my mum is going to drop off my presents from the family over half-term, but there's a really high chance that Greater Manchester is going to be locked down by then, so... Mum no?)

I saw a thing going around twitter positing that people aren't getting the deadline stress that motivates them through their ADHD anymore because the apocalypse, which makes sense! Definitely matches how I've been experiencing it! I haven't written much of anything since July, probably between the apocalypse and basically lighting my entire diary structure on fire, so I've cracked out the 600 page notebook as the obvious solution. If nothing else, it'll give me an idea of scale!

But yeah, nothing much has really been going on for me! I made a bunch of tiny bag-of-rice handwarmers for people at work because the heating is broken and we have to stand outside for at least half an hour each day, and we found out that the reason the plant room in the (multi-million pound) (award-winning) (toured by architects for ?reasons?) library floods the back offices is literally just that the drain is in the highest part of the room and the doors are in the lowest! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And someone apparently left the automated "mark books as missing after sixty days" process running during lockdown, so I've been going through those! There is something incredibly satisfying about waiving off £400+ replacement fees, okay, it's great. Halls of residence being locked down on campus because of covid exposure: less great.

Apart from that, I've been playing Legend of the Phoenix and Arknights and reading a lot of dubious Scum Villain fic because apparently eight different smut/kink/??? challenges are going on this month. Hope you're all okay! ♥

Did August happen? Really? Because people keep telling me it did, but I don't remember any such nonsense, so...

In fun news: so you remember that I mentioned builders would be in to F I N A L L Y fix our bathroom, two years after we reported the shower leaking through the kitchen ceiling and sithe put his foot through the floor? Yeah, that's been happening this week and Lex and I have spent most of this week in a hotel, but here's what's been happening with that!

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On the unironic plus side, they've put some weird electronic air vents in our ceilings, so hopefully that's going to solve the mould problem! Fingers crossed on that, because I am really hopeful about it working.

But yeah, that's the current state of the house! In theory they're putting the floor down right now, and they're going to be plumbing everything back in tomorrow? Or at least that's the hope anyway, as far as I know none of the builders have been offered tea, which means that they're not bound by the rules of hospitality so ANYTHING could happen.

Hey everyone! Tomorrow, our landlady is sending a builder around to inspect our loft, with MAYBE 24 hours notice, which is honestly pretty good for her. But as all lofts are cursed spaces and/or where the horror movie plot points are usually hidden, anything weird that happens tomorrow can be blamed squarely on a) the landlady, and b) this dude. I'M JUST SAYING.

(Disclaimer: ... I don't THINK there's anything weird in the loft, but housemate can't go up the ladder because of vertigo, I can't go up the ladder because I'm terrified of heights, and Lex has no interest in the loft, so none of us have ever seen it. If this goes full Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and it turns out that some of the weirdly shaped mould patches on the ceiling in our room are actually due to ceiling corpses, I officially quit.)