Today’s our wedding anniversary! 13 years, I think. We usually celebrate the anniversary of our first date, which was just over 21 years ago. We’ve spent almost half our lives together and I’d totally do it again.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I started and finished Vivian Shaw’s Grave Importance, the third and final volume in her Dr. Greta Helsing series. I really enjoyed it and I’m sad that it’s the last one (at least for now). Up next is Valerie Valdes’s Chilling Effect.

I both love and hate the fact that SFF is in what appears to be another Golden Age–love it because more good books and stories is an excellent thing and hate it because I can’t keep up!

Work

Lots of PowerPoint. So much PowerPoint. And helping people with project authorizations because apparently engineers and accountants are incapable of reading.I am seriously out of patience with some of the nonsense.

Making

I’ve actually been painting again–small pieces with very clearly delimited borders–and enjoying it tremendously. It’s nice to have something I can do because I like to do it and not worry abut the final outcome. Well, not worry too much.

Medical

Paracentesis tomorrow! I am so bloated right now, I’m expecting them to drain at least 5L from me. I also have an appointment with my vascular interventional radiologist tomorrow, where I will get to see pictures of my garbage veins and hopefully hear what he’s been talking to vascular surgeons about and if they have any proposals for alternate ways to get my portal vein open. My GI doctor also got back to me–he’s spoken with doctors at Penn and Jefferson and send my records to them for review.

I also had an appointment with a nutritionist which was not very helpful. She wanted to talk to me about carb counting, which is a thing I will have to do eventually but I have too much going on the spare the bandwidth for it right now. She was also a bit shamey about some of my food choices and told me that if I “deal with bad eating by taking more insulin” then that would affect my weight in a negative way. I do not need my food choices judged and I’m taking less than ten units of insulin a day. Considering that some diabetics take way more than that per meal, I think I’m okay.

Productivity

I’ve been noodling around with Notion, and while there’s a bit of a learning curve, I think it’ll be super helpful for a project I’m planning for next year. I’m also using pen and paper for the planning, which is also useful for more nebulous things than lists and tasks. I actually took the time to make a 90 (ish) day plan for this particular project and broke it down into sub-projects per 30 days. I’m feeling pretty pleased with what I’ve worked out, but the challenge is going to be execution. I’ve given myself a fair bit of margin, so I’m hoping that will help on the execution side of things, since my health (physical and mental) definitely is a complicating factor.