Written Sunday, posted Monday

Things progress:

• The cat is eating, the metamour is healing.


• I do have a tenant! He starts March 1 and has signed an 18-month lease, though the deposit money hasn't shown up yet. Something to poke at.


• I finished all my sewing/alteration projects and immediately got itchy for more. I've been intending January as a low-buy month, so there's stuff piling up in online baskets at blankshirts.com and moodfabrics.com. In the meantime I'm realizing that some of my athletic wear is still produced by black magic. I have flat seams that look like the wrong side of coverstitch machine stitches, but on both sides.


• Made progress on several of my handstand exercises, and also more hand-to-hand. We're getting more used to working on it with no extra mats and no coaches.


• The Montana trip is shaping up. The squirrel is going to come along(!), and we barely kept Birdie's dad from also showing up (!), and we found a surprisingly nice AirBnB very near my dad because I guess search results for groups of four are just better around there. Yesterday I told my dad the schedule and the guest list, and he took it pretty well, if with some confusion.


Things don't progress:

• The NYT rejected my third crossword puzzle, which I'd had really high hopes for, with a very nice personalized letter from one of the head editors saying she was sad about them not taking it. But a rejection nonetheless. We are planning to rework it to address the feedback... but I'm feeling pretty down about it anyway. Maybe my taste in themes just isn't aligned enough with the cruciverbalist masses.


• I was going to go to the Fetish Fair Fleamarket with the squirrel this year, but eventually learned that NELA itself has ceased operation and the FFF is no more. Looks like the pandemic killed it. More lost chances, another thing I attended for the last time without realizing it might be the last time. :( My gripe about this on a forum led to a discussion about Arisia also being much smaller than it used to be, about #metoo and Dobbs and covid collectively being extra hard on communities that require the genders to get along en masse.


• Thanks to a giant snowstorm, there was no circus open studio today and no show to attend this evening. Only shoveling, and some stretching at home, although Birdie came over and stretched with me and cooked (we're attempting rosemary-salt bagels). A lot of things will still be closed on Monday too.




I'm having just a few feelings about being unemployed, or I guess about not being considered valuable by large powerful (rich) organizations. Some of this is about an unexpected eldercare expense, some of it is hearing about various perks provided by other people's jobs (subsidized concierge healthcare) and remembering the ones provided by my old job. Somehow the ICE stuff in Minneapolis, which oh yeah I've got to call my congress critters about, is not helping. It's a "what if nobody powerful cares about me" feeling. Of course I have some power of my own.