Dandelyon's Worlds

I feel like I spent the last week mostly asleep. At least I'm done with the antibiotics and can go back to eating dairy when I want to. The arm is no longer swollen and the tooth marks seem to be healing, though there is red skin where I was using a bandaid to cover the worst tooth mark, and an extra scab where a bandaid pulled off at least one layer of skin. I hate that my skin reacts so badly to all the glues they use to hold protective things to my skin! I took a photo of a penny on my arm this morning so I can track whether the redness starts to grow again as the antibiotic leaves my system. That's much less crazy-making than badly-drawn marker outlines!!!

At least weeding is a low-energy/nearly no-focus activity for me. The garden is growing. I've had peas, herbs (lots of peppermint this year), one small cucumber, and one small tomato so far. Lots and lots of mulberries! We have other plants too: purple pole bean, some Italian pepper varieties, squash, pumpkin, broccoli, and some purple cabbage that overwintered. One of the cabbage plants sprouted tall and flowered and has set seeds; I should do an internet search to see when to gather those. The pictures on the tags for those plants showed neat little cabbage heads, which is not at all how they're growing; the leaves aren't what I'm used to in the waldorf salad variant I make, but they're ok, especially mixed half-and-half with store-bought cabbage.

But I want more tomatoes and cucumbers! Not just little bitty green ones to look at as they grow on the plants, but ripe ones to eat. Ah, but patience is a virtue, right? (I still say I have no patience, I just pretend. And when there is no one here to pretend to, I don't even have that. It's work to pretend, after all, and even when I pretend, I am not fooled by my acting, nor am I distracted by the person I'm (not) interacting with.)

The weather has been very zig-zag--a day or two when I'm cold and use the heated mattress pad to just get to sleep, a day or two when I'm kind of comfortable, and a day or two when it's super-hot, and then it gets cold again. I'm not so old yet that I can't adapt to cooler or hotter weather, but not this fast!

A neighbor lady gave us one raspberry plant and one blueberry plant (though each box said 2 plants, and we didn't realize they were both half-empty at first), and before the window fell on my cat, we'd gotten them in the ground, but they went in at least a month late, though only a couple of days after the neighbor saw us pruning roses and offered them to us. We got them around sunset, and spent a day clearing an area to plant them in, and then added compost to that area and planted them. So, at this point, I just have my fingers crossed that they survived the delay. We have a lovely volunteer squash or pumpkin plant (based on the size of the baby leaves, I'm pretty sure it's pumpkin) that is growing at the edge of that area now, however, so if we don't get berry bushes, at least the weeding and digging and compost-transport is doing some good this year.

The FAWM-type songwriting challenge 50/90 is starting on July 4, so I will be doing at least some of that as well as the gardening and (hopefully) house-organizing and repair stuff too. My budget is horrible right now, which makes house repairs a lot harder. (Watching people I hired fix things isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than my Angel and I trying to do all or most of it ourselves.)

Oh, yeah, and My Angel found a place to do the emissions testing on our hybrid. There's lots of places they claim can do the test for the state, but they keep changing (it must be a very low profit task) and only some of them can do the test on a hybrid, and the state's website is lacking in that kind of information. So I can have new stickers for my license plate, which is a good thing.

I wonder if I can pretend to have enough energy to record something before Bandcamp Friday? I have no focus after hearing today's news, so not tonight, but maybe tomorrow? That would be nice.

I woke up this morning feeling like being a recluse for a day, and left the TV completely off for hours and didn't tune in to Eurofilk. The quiet was very restful, and I feel much more in a suitable shape to participate in Filk Ontari-No.

I did FAWM again this year, and feel it was very successful for me. I managed even more songs than last year's total, but more importantly, I think the average quality of the songs was better. I feel so lucky that (after Capricon) I was able to put almost everything else aside and focus on writing songs. It was also a lot of fun.

I did post a few of the songs over on my patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Wyld_Dandelyon) during February; I've been setting the rest (or most of the rest) to post there over time. I may post some of them here too, or maybe just redirect people over there. My plan is that lyrics and chords will be posted to that site in public posts, and as I figure out more of this self-publishing stuff, I'll put early copies of stuff I'm planning to put up on bandcamp in subscriber-only posts.

Right now, I'm putting links to the FAWM demos into the posts, with the warning that the demos won't be there forever (In the case of FAWM demos hosted on the FAWM site, the expected day they'll become unavailable is April 1.) Yeah, I ran out of free space on Soundcloud, and decided to support FAWM instead of Soundcloud this year.

Then I got sick, something with post-nasal drip and a tiny bit of low coughing and a couple episodes of dizziness, but mostly just so tired. There was one weekend daytime zoom filk where I got up after what's normally a full night's sleep and could barely keep my eyes open, and had to get up and move around to even be awake enough to play a song when it was my turn. The test said not covid, thankfully. But I went back to bed right after the filk and spent nearly all of the next two days sleeping, which slowly got better over the course of a week.

So now I'm behind on stuff like doing taxes and housework, but not critically so. Soon, I have to start seedlings too. And before that, buy some potting soil and seed starter mix. But life goes on, and that's a good thing.

Oh, and I found a guitar pick that will stay in my hand for a whole song! And it's comfortable for me to hold too. It's so cool when you find the right gear!