Ahhhh the Hugos! So many awesome winners! So many categories that were completely stacked with great nominees! And so many great speeches–let us make the Hugo ceremony this political every year. And have Afua Richardson host, is there anything she can’t do? Seriously, I was expecting to see her come in on a trapeze at any moment.

Apropos of nothing at all, my favorite poem about bog bodies.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I’ve been watching a lot of the “Science” Channel (which has taken to cramming 2-3 already aired episodes of programs together and call them new) and getting increasingly frustrated with how cheesy and Ancient Aliens-ish a lot of their newer shows are; Contact, I am looking at you.

Also, old episodes of Murder, She Wrote are oddly soothing. Every so often they let Angela Lansbury chew on some scenery, each episode’s set up is vaguely ridiculous, and the guest stars and costumes are the best.

So reading. Not a whole lot of it going on as I haven’t had the mental energy for it. I did read Tessa Dare’s new book, The Wallflower Wager, and liked it quite a bit. A content note on it, though: the heroine has a history of sexual abuse and while it is not discussed in graphic detail, it is discussed on the page (I could see it coming a mile away, Dare was not subtle about clueing in the reader on this piece of the heroine’s history).

Work

Cubicle-land is still going well. It’s still fairly quiet and I’m still enjoying the space.

I am currently stressed out by the bullshit that is intermittent/FMLA leave which HR said I had to put in for in order to “protect myself from retaliation.” Now, every time I’m out for a doctor appointment or procedure, I get to call the company that administers the intermittent/FMLA leave (and short term disability) and they get to amend my timesheet to dock my pay by how much time I’m out. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not. HR, of course, did not mention this little fact when they told my manager I needed to do this (they made no mention of an ADA accommodation, hmmm). I am an exempt employee and I can guarantee you that if I were working 60 hours a week I wouldn’t be getting overtime.

My manager literally does not care if I work 36 hours instead of 40 in a given week as long as the work is getting done–which it is. She’s told me, in fact, that my health needs to be my top priority.

I find it utterly infuriating that I am being nickel and dimed like this–I am essentially being financially penalized by my workplace for being disabled. And that’s some bullshit.

Medical

I go in for a procedure to insert a stent into my portal vein; hoping this resolves the fluid situation which is currently not very fun. I’ll be out of work for three days, which triggers short term disability which is paid, unlike intermittent/FMLA leave.

Saw the NP at my endocrinologist’s practice a few weeks ago and she ordered labs to see how much insulin my pancreas is making and the answer is “not enough.” So I’m on insulin now and will be for the rest of my life. I’m currently only on a long-acting insulin that I take at bedtime, but after we collect more data on my blood sugar levels throughout the day, I’ll also have to take a fast-acting before meals. This is my thrilled face. (Although the needles on insulin pens are much less painful than those on my finger sticky thingummy.)

Productivity

Oh, god. What’s productivity?

Seriously, I’m still married to my notebook/planner at work, but things at home are not super-great in part because I’m measuring my life out in coffee spoons and am often wiped out when I get home from work. But I did spend an hour and a half or so painting yesterday evening, which was nice. No, you can’t see.

 

Oof, it’s been a while. It’s been a hell of a two months chez Natalie and by the time Sunday rolls around I’m not in the mood to update. But this week, I am in the mood! Yay!

Both Balticon and Readercon were fantastic and I’m so glad I was able to go to both of them. So good to see my hoodlum friends.

Reading/Watching/Listening

Been doing a lot of reading. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War is an utterly brilliant puzzlebox of a novella and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve read it and I’m still having feelings about it. I also read Max’s Empress of Forever and it was a ripping great space opera.

I also loved Olivia Waite’s The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics; it was wonderful and I’m glad that Avon is publishing f/f romances.

Bujold has a new Penric novella out, The Orphans of Raspay, which is much in line with the other Penric novellas; that is to say a lovely comforting read where you know everything will be okay at the end. And finally, Fran Wilde’s Riverland, which is a haunting tale of two sisters trying to survive in an emotionally abusive household. With magic. It was a hard book to read, but well worth the time.

I’m currently working my way through The Ruin of Angels and it seems like Max Gladstone is the only male fiction writer I’m reading this year. Heh.

Work

So busy. OMG. I’m manually processing project authorizations and the number of people who are all, “What do you mean, budget?” is making my head explode. We’ve also moved into our new workspace, which is a very nice cubicle farm with lots of natural light and storage space. But we’ve only been there for a week so this may just be the honeymoon period. Ask me again in 6 months.

Medical

And this is where things get complicated.  My portal venogram at the beginning of June went well, but then the day after I was discharged I ended up back in the hospital with a fever of 103 which is no bueno. Turns out I had an asymptomatic UTI and a gallstone lodged in my bile duct. That was five days in the hospital, I think.

Then the week of July 4, I ended up in the hospital again for a day with what the doctors think was a GI bug–there was a lot of puking. And then just last week, I got to take an ambulance ride to the hospital because I had such severe abdominal pain that I could barely walk and there was yelling and full body sweats and puking–and then two doses of Dilaudid later, the pain was gone and we have no idea what caused it.

I was admitted overnight for dehydration, which made me feel a bit like a rock star. The part where I had to poop in a bucket four feet from my bed quickly disposed of that illusion. (I was admitted to a floor with a shared bathroom and because I have a history of VRE, I can’t used shared bathrooms: upside is that I always get a private room, downside is sometimes having to poop in a bucket.)

I’m still accumulating fluid in my abdomen, but not as quickly as before. But because I’m still accumulating, I have to have another portal venogram next month to have at least one stent inserted into my portal vein. Everyone pray that this works because if it doesn’t, then I get to have a (not-permanent) tube installed by which I can drain myself and I would rather not.

So this all means that my gallbladder removal hasn’t been scheduled and neither has my hernia repair–I have an umbilical hernia from all the fluid accumulation and it’s the single most uncomfortable thing about this whole situation now. I look like I’m 6 months pregnant, I have no bellybutton, and while I’m accumulating fluid, I’m also losing weight which is worrisome.

Oh, and I’m diabetic now, too. So that’s a whole new layer of complexity–eat low fat for the gallbladder, but eat low carb for the diabetes; what’s a girl to do? Lean meat/fish and steamed veggies it is. Except when I can’t stand it and we have bacon and eggs and I take an extra Creon just to be safe. I’m also supposed to stay hydrated for one of my diabetes medications, but I’m on fluid restrictions for the ascites. I literally cannot win here.

And people wonder why I’m so cranky all the time. This is why. It’s been a year and I’m still sick and I’ve been fighting this fucking fluid in my abdomen for six months now and there just doesn’t seem to be an end to it all.

Productivity

I’m basically married to my notebooks at this point. Trying to keep track of everything is a lot a lot a lot. I’m trying to step up my game at work because I’ve been out so much recently and I feel incredibly guilty about it (even though my manager says I shouldn’t). Obviously, I’m not going to kill myself for work, but just staying on top of everything would be a blessing right now.

 

Running a bit late on this week’s notes as I spent the long weekend at Balticon, which was fabulous. It was so lovely to see so many of my friends and to meet new people and to just be part of the community. Lovely.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire last week and it was amazing. I loved every minute of it. As I said in my GoodReads review, when I finished it, I had the same feeling I had when I finished Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, and Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit: the beginning of something extraordinary. It’s about diplomacy and where the boundaries of diplomacy are, how corrosively seductive empire can be, and how big (or small) our definitions of you, we, and, us are. It’s also about who gets to be a person–who is civilized and who is not. I can’t wait to read the next book.

I’m still working on Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing but have also started a book which is more on the popcorn side of non-fiction for me: Roma Agrawal’s Built, which is structural engineering for the layperson, more or less. And yes, I have a weird definition of popcorn non-fiction.

Work

I think this pretty much says it all:

Medical

It was kind of a hard week. My doctor’s appointments were fine. But then I had a paracentesis on Monday which pulled 3.5L of fluid out of my abdomen and on Tuesday I had bloodwork. A lot of bloodwork: 15 vials. Because apparently in order to find out what might be wrong with my blood, my hematologist needs all of it. I appreciate his thoroughness, but oof.

Productivity

I only had two full working days last week, so I had to cram a lot in. I was mostly successful, but this week is going to be a real endurance test–I’m running a bunch of training sessions on top of everything else I’m doing. We’ll see if I make it. Lists are going to be critical.

My garden, y’all. It’s just such a source of happiness for me. It’s so green and my echinacea and coreopsis and my roses and hydrangeas are getting ready to bloom and it’s so exciting.

Less exciting is my damn neighbor. While my spouse was dealing with some weeding in the backyard, she came over to yell at him about our lawn mowing guys blowing dust and debris (presumably lawn clippings) into her yard and seriously, she is complaining about dust. She asked that we request they not do that and my response was, “Just as soon as she stops blowing leaves into our yard every autumn,” by which I mean never. There was also something about “black shredded paper” that I don’t even understand because we don’t have persistent litter in our yard and when there is litter, I pick it up.

She also Monsanto’d a bunch of weeds in her rock beds today and put a child–presumably one of her grandchildren–to work pulling out their desiccated corpses with only nitrile gloves for protection. Her annuals look nice, though.

Also! I will be at Balticon this coming weekend! I’ll be there Friday afternoon through roughly noon on Monday. My plan is to take it easy and mostly chill in the bar area and I would LOVE to catch up with people.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I finally finally finally finished Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human. It was pedantic, polemic, and patronizing. It was poorly written and poorly argued.  There are good ideas in it, but it’s like being lectured at by your cranky uncle when you make an offhand complaint about algebra being useless when you’re 12 years old (true story). I think Rushkoff believes he’s organizing the peasants to storm the castle, but the thing is thins: anyone who’s bought the book is already on board with his central thesis. Less lecturing, more action. And more awareness that not everyone is a white dude.

In the same vein, I’ve started reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and while it covers much of the same ground as the Rushkoff, it does it in a way that acknowledges the existence of privilege and varying sizes of the margin available to people. It also feels more grounded–both in the way that Odell uses examples from her home, the SF Bay Area, but also in her connection to other the people carving out what she calls a “third space” in years past. I am still waiting for her to mention that Thoreau’s mom did his laundry and fed him, though. But overall, I’m finding Odell’s approach much more resonant.

Still working on Searching for Sunday, although I’ve taken a brief break to read The Billionaire’s Convenient Bride based on Sunita’s review over on GoodReads. I’m also starting to think I may need to venture into the novels of Betty Neels; I’m finding a lot of comfort in trope-y romances lately.

And I’m still plugging away at Astounding and continue to be astounded by the general douchebaggery of Heinlein and Hubbard and the gee-whiz keenness of Asimov. And appalled by the fact that Campbell’s hard-on for “scientific accuracy” in SF is still something that white dudes prattle on about at conventions. It’s an absorbing read, for sure.

I have such a pile of physical books to read–mostly non-fiction. I’m really resentful of how much of my time the Rushkoff book took to read; I have another book by a white dude in the stack that I’ve been slowly picking at since like January and come one, white dudes, step up your game with the non-fiction already.

Work

Spin is 12 days away. We cannot authorize any projects right now because Finance hasn’t done what they need to do (which they were supposed to do by last Wednesday). I have fallen into the PowerPoint abyss and I may never emerge (you try creating a job aid for an unnecessarily complex tool in fewer than ten pages, I dare you). I’ve been making a lot of tongue in cheek references to the five stages of grief and they’re becoming less tongue in cheek the closer we get to spin. I was in acceptance, but I’ve regressed to bargaining with moments of anger.

Medical

Big week this week: regular three month check in with my psychiatrist and an intake appointment with my hematologist. And I’m getting yet another paracentesis this afternoon; I’m betting on at least 4L of fluid, if not closer to 5L, considering how protuberant my hernia has become (yet another thing I’m going to have to get fixed). I’ve been feeling pretty good most of the time, which has been lovely and which has further cemented my belief that if I can get this fluid situation dealt with I’d be much closer to feeling normal (and maybe able to exercise).

Productivity

The big rocks/top three strategy is working well at work–at this point it’s basically one big rock surrounded by a bunch of pebbles as they come up. Still kind of flailing around at home–I am finding that I don’t want to take the planner out of my purse when I get home–so I need to figure out what to do there. Mainly, things are holding together and we are getting things done that need to be done.