hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

So my Thursday dice rolls, which I need to put on a different day starting next week, were 1:12 - yoga, 40:100 - “Elim”, and 19:20 - List Recent Accomplishments. So this is me doing the thing.

( a tangent )

Annnyway! This last little while I have:
•knitted a bunch of little hexipuff-puffs to make a quilt out of. I have made about 30 of them in slightly more than a month.
• knitted a double knitting fractal scarf! Pics or it didn’t happen. It looks so cool and is currently wet-blocking in my bathroom.
• started looking up plants, and nurseries, and native plant societies both for here and for the part of WA where I hope to be living after summer 2026
• set up a time to talk to bestie R’s mom, who we’re going to be living with and taking care of, about what she’s going to want plant-wise and how she wants to do that
• got Valentines presents for Merlin and my Boston spouse,
• got some of my people tiny stickers and things for Yule
• gave myself a haircut
• learned lots of recipes and new ways to cook things I’m not used to
• kept up with my friends online
• got all my ducks in a row for starting school this month.

That’s been enough to keep me busy.

I have been a bit busy I guess.
( Read more... )
And that’s what I’ve been up to.

Maybe if I just braindump All The Things, I can figure out what I want and why I want it? ( Read more... )

So I guess I want to be someplace emotionally safe? I want to be around people and animals that are emotionally present and reciprocal (inasmuch as anything can be).

A friend recommended a fair while back that I could make a numbered list of 20 mentally healthy things for me to do to care for myself, and then roll a die to pick a random one so that I never get burned out or bored. And then I got eleventy million headaches and forgot until today. So here:

My D20 Self-Care List:
-1. Go outside
-2. Look at paintings online
-3. Read poetry
-4. Meditate
-5. Smellgoods
-6. Pet kitties or rub silk
-7. Hot bath
-8. hugs and snuggles
-9. Read something comforting
-10. Listen to music
-11. Ask for help with something
-12. Make a pot of decaf
-13. Connect with a loved one
-14. Stretch
-15. Eat a tasty food
-16. Finish something
-17. Blog
-18. Rub my feet
-19. List recent accomplishments
-20. Crafting projects.

In this vein, I have also created a D100 table of (so far) ten people to call, text, or email and say something nice about them. We could all use the extra mood boost to know that someone is proud of us, or trusts us, or is delighted that we exist. And the act of gratitude and finding good things about others or that they mean to me is good for my mood, too. If you want to be on the list, lmk?

In personal news, my nasal swab fungus test came back abnormal, so we may have a cause for what, exactly, is going on with these headaches. Fingers crossed. 🤞

If you ever want to make something that sounds really fancy that requires very little actual prep: chutney. If you like sweet / tart things to go with meats and savories to keep leftovers interesting, it's your friend. And since I’m not great at eating the same thing with no variation, I kind of have to have tricks like this.

You can make chutneys out of:
• jams or cranberry-type jellies, preserves, marmalades, honey, and even pie filling,
• those "fresh" herb pastes like ginger/basil/garlic etc.,
• dried herbs, spice mixes, or actual fresh herbs that you threw in the blender
• and raisins or most kinds of dried fruit (recipes always tell you to use fresh fruit and simmer it in sugar yourself, but who tf has spoons, really?).

The herbs and spices you mix into the jelly and leave in the fridge for a few days, then taste-test the mix for flavor intensity so you put in the right amount of dried fruit, then leave it in the fridge overnight, and that's it. That's all of it. You mix stuff together and wait.

If you use a lot of herbs and spices you may want to go lighter on the dried fruit, but you do you. There’s no real recipes that I use and I haven’t had anything come out bad yet. Orange marmalade with a little ginger and rosemary on chicken is fuckin' amazing? Dried cherries and rosemary in cranberry jelly with dried minced onion? Goes great on turkey or ham or any other medium flavor intensity meats, and it's "holiday appropriate" or whatever. For beef or venison or strong gamey flavors, my mom does chili sauce and grape jelly.Someday soon I'm going to try putting fresh basil through the blender and mixing it equal parts with lemon pie filling and honey and pomegranate juice, but that is untried as of yet, and I don't know that it would keep very well in the fridge, which the rest of these chutneys do, since they're basically spicy jelly.

Challenge #8
In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Things I won at this year:

I wrote a character fairly believably, even though her personality diverges from mine at most points? Yay for reading enough Darcy Lewis-centric fanfic to have a handle on how fandom portrays her.

I think I’m learning how to give up on stuff that is bad for me in my personal life? When my friend broke off our friendship, I did not immediately fight for getting back a friendship that was emotionally draining and slightly toxic on both sides. I recognized that we both have other, better friends and let go, and I am really proud of that.

I have blogged way more this year than last, even though it’s my own stuff and not therapy content. (Which admittedly I should get back to.)

I have still not gotten covid. A lot of that is luck, but some of it is also choosing to do almost all stuff online that I wanted to do in person. I’m so grateful to past me for being a paranoid little shit.

I hope you, too, are proud of yourselves, for making it through another hellish year. You survived! Thank you!



In other news, the waking up in the middle of the night insomnia is trying to come back. Welp! Time to figure out what my brain is doing now!

Challenge #4
In your own space, make a list of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, and/or that you'd like someone to create or do for you. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

1. I want fandom to have a plotbunny foster home/abandoned work amnesty clearinghouse. I want a community where you can go there and say, “Look, I know that I have written 80k of this 100k fic, and it has a thousand kudos, and 45 subscribers. I know a bunch of people are invested in it. But I just can’t do the rest of it, so if anyone wants my notes for the rest of the fic, they are on this Googledoc. Feel free to write the rest, if you want, and I will gladly link your continuation from the original work.” We need one of these, IMO.

B: I want some fic where Padme Amidala Naberrie pulls out the whips and chains, and spanks the Dark Side out of Anakin Skywalker. It can be an OT3 fic, you know I love those, but I am tired and aggrieved of someone who was the queen of a planet at 14 being written as helpless and lacking agency as an adult senator. I don’t care how Lucas wrote her, that shit does not fly in these skies.

Å: I want a working stargate so I can visit all my friends. And since SGA and SG1 fandoms are the only places I know of that are both creative and overeducated enough to make that happen, I am expecting this soonish. C’mon, y’all.

A friend of mine is having a bout of insomnia, and I figured I would share my collection of tricks that get my brain to STFU and sleep, despite it’s natural inclination to Be Like That.

• If you are sensitive to being woken up by intense smells or flavors, brush your teeth after dinner instead of before bed.

• Set a bedtime alarm to take your pills (melatonin, Benadryl, valerian root, most prescription meds) a couple hours before you want to fall asleep. Pills are not instantaneous. Plan ahead instead of laying in bed while your anxiety replays all the mistakes you’ve ever made while you wait to fall asleep.

• After that alarm goes off, get off social media and do something that slows your brain’s rate of stimulation. No edge of your seat TV or books that get you really engaged in suspense. You want your brain to calm down and ease into getting sleepy.

• Don’t take too much melatonin. The dose you are looking for is .3 to .5 milligrams. Yes, that low! The doses they sell for adults are ten times what your brain produces for itself, and having too much can cause your brain to dump what it doesn’t think it needs. And sometimes it yanks you out of your sleep cycles to do it. (I recommend taking the children’s kind, which are the proper dose … for adults.)

• Blue, high spectrum lights also tell your brain to kill your naturally occurring melatonin, so get a color temperature changing app for you phone and computer if you use them within three hours of falling asleep. Keep your room dark also, Bc moonlight is enough for sensitive people to have trouble falling asleep, wake them up in the night, or otherwise not get them good quality sleep.

• Stimulant behaviors like listening to loud music, intense house cleaning, exercise, very hot showers, dancing, and some BDSM practices are not recommended during the last two hours before bed. Dial down the intensity to get your best sleep hygiene.

• Meditation, journaling, writing tomorrow’s schedule in your day planner, or setting out outfits and things you will need for the next day can ease anxieties related to preparedness, and if done consistently before bed can become a ritual behavior that helps the brain wind down. Rituals like brushing hair, rubbing lotion into dry skin, or petting animals are also good bedtime rituals.

• For some people, taking a cool, but not cold, shower at the end of the night can help lower your heart rate and body temperature, preparing your brain for sleep.

• If your pets like to climb on you or jump onto the bed, try sleeping with them contained in a different part of the house. (I bribe mine to leave the bed with treats.) Sudden movement and noises can lower sleep quality and cause more restlessness and a higher resting heart rate, so your full night’s sleep should get even more restful without the fuzzbutts.

If you have any tricks that have worked for you, I would love to hear them.

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Depression, noun: a state of mental health characterised by guilt, sensitivity, sadness, irritability, and despair.
Anxiety, noun: the feeling that something terrible is going to happen.
Shame, noun: the feeling of being bad or wrong inside
Self-hate, verb: the act of treating oneself poorly, the act of encouraging hate for oneself.

Terrible things happen to almost everyone, statistically. But if you believe the Just World Fallacy, it will convince you that you deserve the terrible things that happen to you if you have even a smidge of self-hatred. Thus:

Step 1: dismantle your belief that people get what they deserve. It rains on the just and the unjust alike. People do not "victimize themselves". The rich do not deserve their wealth any more than the poor deserve poverty. The healthy and the unhealthy are decided by circumstances and genetics. Life is unfair unless we make it fair.

Step 2: treat yourself well. If you do not, you will continue feeling like you deserve terrible things/abuse. You have to treat yourself well in order to be able to think well of yourself. Start by treating yourself neutrally, as one would treat a polite stranger, if you must. But gradually begin to talk to yourself as though you are not the loathsome creature your shame, anxiety, and depression tell you you must be. Refuse to do the capitalists work for them in grinding yourself down.

Step 3: stop comparing people. Not just yourself, but all people- no two persons or sets of circumstances are exactly alike, and it is largely useless to compare their personalities, accomplishments, or progress. It is a tool of shame, and a stumbling block propping open the door to self hate and hatred of others.

Step 4: forgive yourself. To work on the roots of your shame feelings, it is needful that you forgive yourself for all the times you were not perfect. Guilt, the feeling of having done something bad, motivates you to grow and do better. Shame, the feeling of being something bad, is paralyzing and not useful. So forgive yourself and work on the beliefs supporting the structure of your shame until it is a dried husk of itself.

Step 5: be free.