badgerbag

Well after watching this...
READ A BOOK
If I wake up in the morning with BOOK sharpied across my ass then you will know the ambien walrus was at a great party.

GOODNIGHT SWEET WISCON.

I had a really relaxed morning, dozed a little after breakfast, then said hello to a zillion people, ran into my friend from techie conferences D. who it turns out has taken down her thinky sort of blog and who is the mastermind behind Feminist Ryan Gosling. ahahahah. I imagine it is bittersweet to be famous for that but on the other hand everyone ADORES it. As do I! I went and got some shampoo (and some tiny 50 cent disco balls...) at the drugstore, ran into tons more people, got my head shaved nicely on the sides (for incredibly cheap) and then crashed debbie and laurel's lunch. (Laurel who wrote Growing Wings.) We talked about kids and personalities and mothers and so on. and science fiction and the singularity and my new Fabulous Theory of Everything about which I will say more later! They had good ideas! I found myself saying much more intelligent things than I expected or than I had written yet (as sometimes happens). I hope I can remember whatever it was or recreate it. Right now am too tired.

Zoomed into the art show (too early... mistakenly) Greeting behaviors with another 100 people. I am now holed up in bed again with a cookie and some tea and will play Glitch for at least an hour before venturing forth. Two hours would be better... maybe a nap.

I am on a panel tonight which will be recs of books by women writers -- 9pm.

Not really! But WisCon started in the Denver airport as I ran into whump and cynthia1960, raanve and boxofdelights and many other obvious WisCon-goers! Then I finished reading Code Name Verity on the plane (crying at many points) and very happy because it was a FABULOUS book. I kept thinking it was about to end and then the story kept going & kept deepening. I also wrote a giant essay on the plane about SF-ish things which I want to add to and then post on my other blog ... I felt very excited and inspired to be coming to WisCon suddenly and felt THE MAGIC. My ankles swelled up a lot on the plane. I took some painkiller, put on the cream stuff and put my feet up and had a drink with my roommates and other people wandering in and out of our room. Fun conversations with charlie, coniraya, nojojojo, tempest, alberto.... hederahelix relentlessly graded papers all the way through this and I think she was up almost all night! gossiped a bunch about our actual rl neighborhood with pat murphy. and about her book projects and maker faire. I fell asleep around 1am. I already have a giant list of books and movies people have recommended or talked about and here it is so far: G. Willow Wilson Air, Cairo The Butterfly Alif spec fic novel Starter Good Christian Bitches (tv show? not for me ...) Last Resort Duet (worst movie ever? or strangely enjoyable ? OR BOTH) Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld (YES) How to train your dragon Xmas special (with caveats) some classic sf... an old anthology: Adventures in Time and Space Enemy Mine (a trilogy) The Roads Must Roll The Weapon Shop Who Goes (another classic short story) Princeless (new comic, sold out of print but being reprinted) Shadow & Act (something something... I missed this) Castledown (Joyce Ballou Gregorian - a trilogy - must read) Tonight I will be on the Karen Axness memorial panel and I have a giant, fun list scribbled down in my notebook which I will try to type up and print for handouts! I plan on getting my summer side-of-the-head shaving somewhere around here this morning. It is like 85 degrees and muggy. sweat is trickling through my over-mullety ex-mohawk. Time for someone else to tackle this as I have been utterly crap about cutting my own hair for the last 6 months since I don't want to stand up long enough in front of a mirror to do it. Had breakfast with tempest, terry g, then a giant conglomeration of more people then Timmi and tom showed up and then I met andrea c. and s.e. smith but was in mid-allergy attack so have retreated to mouth breathe and honk in my room while wating for a giant horse pill of a claritin D to take good effect.

Yay, exciting!


Here is my WisCon schedule! Three panels, a reading, and then the Sign-Out.

p.s. If you like to give neck massages .... I have a neck!



Fri, 9:00–10:15 pm, Conference 5

Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing Science Fiction
Karen Axness Memorial Panel: Women Writers You've Probably Never Heard Of

Panelists recommend the best books by new women authors. This panel has been offered every year since WisCon 2. Come see why the audience won't let us have a year off! (This is the Karen Axness Memorial Panel...)

Tom Porter. Liz Henry, David Peterson, Sheree Renée Thomas


Saturday, 10:00–11:15 am

Imagining Radical Democracy (though we all are gonna talk about ANARCHY I believe)
Alexis Lothian. Timmi Duchamp, Andrea D. Hairston, Liz Henry

The General Assembly has become a familiar practice since the growth of Occupy Wall Street. Anarchistic and radically democratic organizing processes have a much longer history, though, including the Zapatistas, the Spanish student movement, and movements in the history of feminism. For WisCon members, a familiar feeling might have bubbled up in watching, reading about, or participating in Occupy: wasn't this a bit like what they did on Le Guin's Anarres, or in DuChamp's Free Zones? This panel will discuss the possible growth of a kind of democracy other than our current party-based political systems, using the ways it has been prefigured and imagined in feminist science fiction to help make sense of radical histories and futures.


Feminist Open Source Fandom
623
Sat, 4:00–5:15 pm
M: Liz Henry. Beth Andres-Beck, Molly Aplet, Piglet

Track(s) Science and Technology (Feminism and Other Social Change Movements)

There have now been several excellent Open Source projects that both adopted explicitly-feminist policies and addressed pressing needs of fandom, most notably Archive of Our Own and Dreamwidth. It is proposed that fandom offers an alternative to the established open source software culture, one that is more welcoming of feminist ideals. How have these projects succeeded? In what ways did their feminist stance enable that success? In what ways do their products reflect these same ideals? How do open source and feminism complement or conflict? What can we, as both participants and users, do to extend, build on or replicate these successes? How can we extend this consciousness to other axes of oppression and under-representation?


Sunday 4:00–5:15 pm

Aqueduct Press Reading I

Description Readings by Aqueduct Press authors.
Location Conference 2
Panelists Eleanor A. Arnason, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Liz Henry, Alexis Lothian, Kiini Salaam


Monday

The SignOut 11:30 am–12:45 pm

Description Come and sign your works, come and get things signed, come and hang out and wind down before you leave.
Location Capitol/Wisconsin

Panelists Will Alexander, Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, Barth Anderson, Eleanor A. Arnason, Elizabeth Bear, F.J. Bergmann, Alex Bledsoe, Dr. Janice M. Bogstad, K. Tempest Bradford, Richard Chwedyk, Timmi Duchamp, Pamela Dyer-Bennet, Sigrid Ellis, James Frenkel, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Eileen Gunn, Andrea D. Hairston, Liz Henry, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Vylar Kaftan, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Ellen Klages, Ellen Kushner, Rose Lemberg, David D. Levine, Claire Light, Malinda Lo, Kimberley Long-Ewing, Josh Lukin, Brit Mandelo, Neesha Meminger, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Allison Moon, Nancy Jane Moore, Deirdre M. Murphy, Pat Murphy, Larissa N. Niec, Jennifer Pelland, Julia Rios, James P. Roberts, Madeleine E. Robins, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Kiini Salaam, Catherine M. Schaff-Stump, Fred Schepartz, Nisi Shawl, Delia Sherman, Caroline Stevermer, Cecilia Tan, Lynne M. Thomas, Amy Thomson, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Vanessa Vega, Phoebe Wray, Patricia C Wrede

I am not really feeling ready to reenter the world at large! Especially today as I am still shaking and nauseous from these stupid meds. But, I had to encounter the world for this Unicorn Panel and it turned out to be kind of nice. I just wish I didn't feel so crap.

I was also going to caltrain down to see Moomin but I can't handle taking a bus and two trains and then doing it again hours later. So I thought of asking rook to drive him up but that seems both heinous and stressful for everyone. Then i realized i should just call him. That would maybe be a good idea.

Am not ready for WisCon, am not sure how i can deal with lots of people, I love people and miss everyone but am so weird and sad and hermit-like and unready. Maybe I will hype up! Usually that happens right? It is my magic! But I am in pain and feel like I suck and all I can really think of most of the time is "Ow" and "Must check out of reality kthxbye". My ankles hurt, my feet hurt, my leg hurts. I will need to lie down a lot. I won't have ice packs, booo.

holy shit I want this bad ass scooter!!!!!!

Behold my (future) glory!!

15 mph here I come!

X-Treme's XB-420M Electric Bike is a 3 Wheel High-Power Mobility Scooter using a 1-piece mobility Electric motor / rear axle and differential unit. This E-Bike runs on 4-20Amp batteries, and comes with a wheelie bar for the not so old drivers. At full power the XB-420M can get up to 15+ MPH, easily the fastest mobility scooter on the market! And for those faint at heart a speed control unit can be used. Also included in a reverse gear, arm rests and a stylish cargo rack. Extra storage under the seat as well. Our line of XB-420M's comes in a slick Black color. With the rising gas prices these days Electric modes of transportation are becoming an ever more affordable necessity versus traditional transportation. Note* This mobility scooter is fast. It will ride a wheelie if the speed limiter is turned up to maximum. We don't suggest this fast scooter for the elderly due to it's high speed (15 MPH) ability.

I would take off the arm rests tho, not my style.

My prescription comes in 2 bottles every month and somehow I have lost the 2nd bottle. I called it in and called my doctor. This morning (and I think last night) I took some from a sample bottle from some years ago which I'd found while moving. Ahhhh yeah. It seems to have truly expired! Not just made up! But not working. I seem to be in withdrawal from it.

I swam this morning, feeling pretty cruddy but managing, but then could not stop shaking and felt really nauseous. Also, twitchy. I slept from about 1 to 3. The shaky feeling is the pits. I am going to cuddle up with this giant heating pad and maybe later have a very hot bath. It should get better by tomorrow. I hope.

The pharmacy finally refilled the scrip for a week and a half without insurance coverage (which was the problem holding up them filling it).

I feel horrible... hanging in though.

The compounded topical cream with every known pain drug in the universe continues to be pretty awesome. Way better than Voltaren. I can have my "bad" leg exposed to air, even fairly cool air with a breeze, without it feeling like an itchy ice lava attack. Amazing. My calf and foot were less painful in the cold of the pool. I would like to smear the stuff on all the way up the painful stripe of my leg if the ortho says it is okay. It is also lovely on my hands (since I am smearing it on with my hands anyway).

My bus adventures have included daily encounters with very nice peopel and very horrid ones. I meant to record the really bad bus drivers and the nice ones, or report them (but never get around to the reporting.) A bad one: the guy who yelled "what stop" several times before he would lower the lift to let me on. He was already angry at me before we had interacted! And then when I got on finally a lady in a ponytail and baseball hat darted from the back to pat my shoulder and say something. "Um, what?" i said, turning to see who it was. "I *SAID* something somethnig nice hybrid vehicle you've something something got there! It was a COMPLIMENT!" and she stormed off. Okay dumbass! Jeez!!! Apparently I wasn't grateful enough for her pat and her condescension! Actually, I just didn't hear her the first time she said it, but since it was stupid, yes, I would have scoffed in her face.

Today I had nice bus drivers, a man on the platform who was singing very beautifully and was clearly a real soul/r&b musician just having a nice day. He sang on the train too and everyone smiled at him. I had a complicated chain of thought analyzing his song which was a lot of variations of "end of the road" but not quite the boyz2men song. I think he was improvising. It was all sort of girl, love is hard, but somehow, none of it was specific about why it was so hard to be together to the end of the road; it came off as a really bad non specific passive aggressive apology for having been a bad boyfriend rather than the boyz2men song which is very specific about the Girl having cheated and run around. It was amusing because it so clearly was this evasion of responsibility in the guise of a love song. Anyway his singing was lovely.

At 3rd and Palou there is often a fascinating scenario in progress. A lot of people stand at the corner in front of the shuttered nail salon and next to the convenience store/sandwich shop. People walk by and hang out, everyone knows each other and there is a lot of affection and brotherhood. I have never seen grown men hug each other so much outside of a football game touchdown. Cars pull up and people hop out and talk or just talk out the window. In the triangular plaza just across 3rd street there are a lot of old people and disabled people just sitting in the sun hanging around on benches. I wish it were nicer benches and made more park-like. There are a bunch of kind of crazy or drunk people wandering but they seem to be known and acknowledged by everyone else which I think is nice. But today, there were like 6 bicycle cops roaming around conspicuously and no one but them was outside the nail salon.

A lot of people get on the T with chihuahas. I don't like dogs but these little dudes always look so terrified. So I pet them.

A note from my time in the pool today. I have done my share of necessary noseblowing in swimming pools which I hope (pointlessly) has been discreet. But I swear to god the man swimming laps who every lap would stop and noisily hork up a big lugey and spit... OMFG. How! Why! Gross! I'm glad he was in the deep end. The rasta sunflower tattoo lady and I would just exchange eye widenings every time he did it. holy $%^!#$@! later in the dressing room we had a nice conversation and she said her doctor wants her in a scooter. Her speech is a bit hard to understand and I'm a little deaf, but we got by. Privately I guessed a stroke or parkinsons after talking with her (at first I thought CP... maybe...) She is scared of having a scooter. She uses paratransit and complains they are not reliable. Sometimes they come hours early. Her son is 16 and is in private school in upstate NY which he got a special scholarship to go to and he loves it and she is very proud but misses him. I like her and also the very smiley lady in the hair net whose name I forget. The older very tall guy who I witnessed get into the water for the first time still looks terrified, but is gaining confidence. He lets go of the side sometimes now. Also, he says good morning to me and the various pool ladies nowadays. I think he would not at first because he was super freaked out and embarrassed. The nice DJ lifeguard made such a difference for him. It amazes me how different people's affect can be. He lights up the room when he's there and makes everyone comfortable like a good host without even saying anything. The other mean lifeguard, the white guy in sunglasses, glowers and you just want to hide and don't know where to look. Like I always am conscious that I'm trying not to look at him or make eye contact or that I am looking at him.

Zond7 is on his way to DC where he will give a training talk to some activists. yay! And i'm off to WisCon on Thursday. Can't wait. Not sure how I will really be able to keep up with things but I am excited that I will have a rental scooter there, which will make going out to eat from the hotel much easier. A pang of regret for last year's WisCon when I rode a rental bicycle all over, around the capitol building and beyond, and on a massively brave/scary excursion a couple of miles down a trail by the university along the lake. Flying down the main drag to the university campus... like nothing! It was great. Okay not crying about that. I shall scooter around gloriously and eat at that nepali place a million times and have Very Intense Conversations with Timmi and be on several panels & hug everyone! I also look forward to chilling out with my roomies hederahelix and ladyjax!

I woke up around 6 and read "Are You My Mother?" by Alison Bechdel. Amaaing! Beautiful! It built up like a beautiful concerto. I felt the weird bug-office-home and Stonehenge fortress internally... and cried at the end of the book... And was so happy at all the Anne Bradstreet & Woolf & Rich references & quotes that I could hardly bear it.

I want to buy nice copies of both her memoir books and put them up on my shelves of favorite important books.

Okay! Wow! This new cream I have is a compound of ketoprofen (an NSAID), baclofen, cyclopenzaprine (aka flexeril, a muscle relaxant), Gabapentin (for nerve pain) and lidocaine. The anti inflammatory and muscle relaxant part seem very useful on my ankles and knees! The nerve pain and skin sensitivity (painful and any air feels burning cold) on my right leg have a bit of the edge taken off. Usually my skin is too sensitive to the air to be in the air unless it's 90 degrees out with no wind. I wonder if the orthopedist will get me one with a stronger nerve pain concentration?

It is helpful enough that I'm feeling a lot of hope and cheer. More like this please! More actually helpful stuff that doesn't dope me up. I cried at how much less it was because i realized how desperate I am to stop feeling the rest of the pain. I dread doing anything or going anywhere because that makes it so much worse.

But, anyway, it is better to have some life going on and not be in bed all the time. Tomorrow I'll go on 2 buses and a train and then a long way over bumpy pavement and then sit up for hours and do it in reverse to go to maker faire. I will be at the noisebr1dge booth most of the day with zond7! I plan on lying down behind the table if we have a nice big space behind there like we did last year. It is amazing how a lie down on the floor can perk me right up as it takes the pressure off my low back. Moomin will be around in the afternoon so at around 3, so we'll run around looking at everything! My sister will be there too helping to run bazaar b1zarre. By the middle of the day I might be kind of out of it and need to take painkiller. The end of the day I will be slogging through in the mode that I think of as being like some plane crash survivor hiking grimly out of the mountains maybe after having to chop her own leg off after it was crushed by a piece of the fuselage. One... more.... step..... That is the state where I snap at children who make any kind of fidgeting or jostling anywhere near my right side.... BEWARE. Beware and get away.

Today I did low key housecleaning in between lying in bed or sitting on the porch playing games nad reading. I had coffee on the front porch in the morning and laid out in the sun in the back yard in the afternoon while zond7 works on an article on various international internet things. I cooked some fish with potatoes with sesame seeds. I fiddled with my houseplants and potted the extra marigolds left over from the Cortlandia community garden. There was also a lot of important cat petting to do.

As convalescing goes this has been amazingly cosy and pleasant... this house is awesome for it.

Amazing compounded pain drug cream.... I want all the varieties! I want the kind with horse anesthesia in it! Bring it on! please! Why has no one given me something like this before? Instead I had to order my own Voltaren gel off the net from some sketchy pharmacy in Vanuatu. WTF.

Almost caught up on Game of Thrones episodes!

Read a bit about the JP Morgan thing which I can barely understand anything of but if you're curious... Felix Salmon is the reporter to read!

Also reading suddenly and thinking about the evolution of Hunga Dunga commune and Free Food Conspiracy and People's Food System to a huge corporation (Greenleaf). Huh. Even just typing that made me feel slightly nauseated. But I would love to know the history of how that happened.

Starting on Cat Valente's Habitation of the Blessed which looks quite beautiful and complicated... it'll be a treat to disappear into this for a the next couple of days.

Must get up and go swim. I spent yesterday almost entirely in bed.

Waaaaay too much walking yesterday. I went up the stairs to the community garden and walked around messing with trowels and sticking my hands in the dirt. I need a little stool to sit on to go there If I scooter around the hill to the upper entrance, I can get in with less stairs and it is right next to the plot. yatima and yarnivore and i planted tomatoes and strawberries and some flowers in the sun & it was SO lovely. Dear opossums, please ignore our veggies!!! The kids looked at snails. Moomin managed to plant things without putting his hands in the dirt. He has been fastidious since before he could walk. Will he always be that way and never know the joy of dirt and mud... paint and so on?

Came home, everyone came over to eat bread and have some lemonade.... moomin went off with rook to his dance practice. i took painkiller and stayed in bed the rest of the day. I don't have to swim today and I don't have PT so I can recover decently. Tues/Thurs will be swimming (and maybe Friday) and Wed. is PT.

I loved the WWD reading on Saturday & had a blast getting up to read. was not sure if i could pull the audience into my long poems but i felt successful at it. it is a trust issue in some ways. I didn't want to start with short punchy poem to establish that trust (a risk) and merely launched into a long one. anyway it was lovely. a guy from a little mag said send him stuff and gave me a copy of the very nice looking journal. two very excited women came up and babbled and bought the book "i have a millenium falcon bedspread! i'm a chemist! i understood your SCIENCE WORDS!" ahahahaha yes. Well that made me happy. part of the point of the fractal baroque is to speak a particular true unexpected thing to a wide spectrum of people who do not otherwise feel or get spoken to in that way, in public voice, in writing, in the context of a grand sweep of vision or history so it is like little tendrils shooting out looking for a support to hang onto. when they grab on they do seem to really grab on. That's very satisfying! yes! you! i wrote that for you and you understood.... Actually there is a bit of that one poem that I thought, oh i know who will know this... gordonzola. I should go give him a copy! but if not actually him someone like him.

Read (kind of randomly from the library) Starbound by Joe Haldeman. I thought oh well let me go read the dinosaurs a bit to see what I think of them now. and he did win the tiptree with that one book so let's give it a chance. OMFG .... I am sort of enjoying it but how ponderous and how deeply annoying the gender stuff is. deeply! i feel a little bit contaminated. Ugh. also it switches pts of view and the character voices are all the same and you can hardly tell who is talking. I know many writers have this flaw.. but i always am annoyed by it.

Glitch is still down for an upgrade so I have had to look at the "real" world. I finished Constellation Games last night and found it excellent! Swoony, even! And so relevant as... obviously... I am awash in ludic splendor. Read it.

In the middle of my Korean War book I started reading Wikipedia articles that were related and found two really interesting lines to explore -- one about the Jeju Uprising and massacre, and the other about Dimples Cooper.

About the Jeju Uprising. So in the late 1940s keep in mind the Japanese occupiers are just barely kicked out of Korea which is now full of MORE foreigners and all these many years most of the guerilla fighting and resistance to the Japanese were communist nationalists. There was a commemoration of kicking out the Japanese on Jeju, which police fired on. Then rioting people attacked all the police stations on the island and destroyed the voting centers. I would presume because of extreme poverty, and anger at the people they were having to vote for being the same elites who knuckled under to the Japanese. The island people wanted a unified (communist /populist) Korea. Okay I'm a little hazy on what happens next but the south korean army and police burned down and destroyed nearly every on the island and killed at least 15,000 people, gang raping the women first. They sorted everyone into A, B, C, D categories of politics and then killed C and D. It was HIGHLY illegal to even refer to this event up until about the 1990s.

Fascinating... and horrible.

Oh also I learned that during WWII in Japan about 25% of the workforce was Korean. The populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very heavily Korean when they were bombed by the Americans.

Onward to Dimples. Isabel Rosario Cooper aka "Dimples" aka Elizabeth Cooper was a silent film star known for having the first on screen kiss in a movie in the Philippines. She became General MacArthur's mistress.

According to one biographer of MacArthur, William Manchester, MacArthur "showered [Cooper] with presents and bought her many lacy tea gowns, but no raincoat. She didn't need one, he told her; her duty lay in bed."

That wasn't going to last.... Yeesh! After they broke up, Dimples became a hairdresser somewhere and then moved to L.A. She died in 1960. I found a photo of her!

To post a pic or two of the piñata.





It was a lovely birthday party and my nephew was awesome. Cuddly and endearing, even. But I confess for me it was all about the mantas.

We sang this song to the tune of Mighty Mouse.

Here comes Super Manta Ray!
Swimming in the Bay!

When you see his cape of kelp,
you'll know that Manta Ray is there to help!

With his mighty stinging tail
He fights the Baron von Whale!

And he flaps his speedy wings
To lash bad guys, with his sting!

With his friend the Leopard Shark,
She fights evil in the dark!

She brings power to the fight
With her fin, and mighty bite!

We love Super Manta Ray!
He looks a little bit like a tray!!!!!

SUPERSONIC!!!!
TAIL POWER!!!

I'm a bit lonely! My everything hurts! I need takeout food! Oh help!

And my online game is down for an upgrade till the morning so I have no handy anesthesia. There is only so much oiling myself and bathing that I can do in one evening.

There ARE no other games. 8-(

So what should I read tonight as I decadently eat my hypothetical and delectable takeout food?

I need some book recs! That I can get on the Kindle!

I was thinking today that people who have the skills and drive to systematically test and document stuff drive other people up the wall (this, as i watched people yelling at some others in the game I'm playing.) To the non-testers they seem to be perseverating (SUCH a good word) & won't shut up. But what they do is so valuable and I learn a lot from what they say. Anyway I"m just thinking about that as a set of personality traits & how it plays out in online communities.

I have learned how to take naps! It's the best thing ever!

Today swimming was enjoyable instead of nastily painful. So warm and sunny... and I could stand on the bottom of the pool and kind-of-walk. My hip and leg got nice and stretched out. The nice lifeguard was there. No one pestered me.

About halfway through the nice lifeguard got into the pool and was engaging with people and I realized that he had realized that about half the people in the pool were terrified and didn't know how to swim. I thought they were just hanging on the edge because they were disabled too. No. They didn't know how to be in the water *and* they were disabled or had surgery or whatever, so he was teaching them things (with many floaties attached) like that you can swing your legs forward and back to get your balance and stand up. That was very interesting as no one wanted to admit they had never been in a pool before or just didn't feel comfortable much less "I don't know how to swim" but then people started admitting it as he had them all in a circle with music going and was individually helping folks. What a nice cheerful guy!

I got home, made some tacos for lunch and the jicama salad I have been living off for days, and then had a glorious nap. OMG I am loving this newfound skill. SO MUCH.

Then I laid out in the back yard in the sun and read my giant book about the korean war.

Yesterday was quite stressful as I went to the new doctor that the nice doctor recommended. I want to see dr. #1 but he isn't really taking new patients. Dr. #2 who i saw yesterday was kind and seemed smart but after she asked me a lot of questions and I explained my medical history and we went into all the ankle stuff and sciatica, she said she hated to tell me this, but.... she is leaving that medical practice and can't take me as a patient. OMFG. I burst into tears and felt very foolish. But she understood it was stressful to have to explain myself to a new person.

I was saying that to Ron and he was like, yeah, try doing it with every new floor or shift of nurses in the hospital while they're almost killing you.

Lonely.... But it is very peaceful and cosy here.

I feel so hopeful and excited. I swear I won't do too much but it is so nice to be in less pain. It is still there but it isn't taking me completely over. And I can walk around the house a very little bit. It's so encouraging.

Okay -- back to my very boring big fat book about the Korean War. I got it from the free box outside the bookstore. Korea: The Untold Story of the War. The finger of blame is pointed at everyone -- but especially MacArthur! And finally (in the description of the opening days of the war) I found a description of the scene with the trains and people getting on top of them (that rook's dad was embroiled in with his family)

So! I have done all the things once again!

I mailed bills, hired someone to come help me by moving boxes around in the garage, shaved the sides of my head freshly for summer, renewed library books, got some things for salad and some green paper for the pinata on the way back from PT, sorted things from a big bag of Junk from the Medicine Cabinet into plastic bins under the cabinet. Note most of that was done from bed. Yet I feel so very on the ball and productive compared to my days of solid game-playing and reading. Hurray!

I obtained 3 weeks of summer camp for Moomin -- one for marine science camp and the other for 2 weeks of acting camp in which they do a play about pirates.

Allergies are kicking my ass completely today. Took some claritin, benadryl, then some sudafed, then after hours of my nose dripping have taken some sort of other chloropheniramine thing. My eyes are less itchy but snot is just dripping out of my nose. I have had to resort to stuffing plugs of kleenex in each nostril. I'm glad no one is home to see this. Flashback to my childhood... when i was like this quite a lot of the time. Remembering days where i just brought an entire box of kleenex to school in my book bag. nothing seemed to help. Except going to an actual dr. office or hospital where the air was all clean and filtered.... and it was like MAGIC.

For the last 2 days I have noticed a big difference in my ankles. I think they are in an "almost calm" phase. I said they had Calmed to the physical therapist. She got wary eyes and said they were "in transition... in the MIDDLE of getting to the next stage... Do not overdo things!" From my point of view though, I can walk to the bathroom and stand up while brushing my teeth *not in the boots* without giant consequences in pain. I can get my tea in the morning... NOT in the boots. Then I lie down again of course. It's very encouraging! I feel hope that my ankles will get a lot better and I won't have to adjust to this level of functioning and pain forever.

Sciatica is still bad but I can bend over all the way now as long as I do it slowly and carefully.

Zond7 is in NYC and then Oslo for the next week and a half. A. is with her other dad. Moomin is with Rook till the weekend. So I have the next few days where all i need to do is obtain food and entertain myself. Though I miss them all, I think it will be kind of pleasant and if I get lonely there are lots of people to call up and meet in cafes. I may bring some zines to the SF library archive (I found one of my old ones in there!) and also would like to go back to the awesome burrito place and sit in the hipstery cafe on 24th and write if my back feels okay for me to sit up for that long. Tomorrow is swimming and Wednesday I have PT again. Thursday I will also swim!

Okay! We have a new, mostly working fridge! huzzah!

I woke up cheerful and hopeful. Last night I talked some more things out with zond7 and felt weirdly better and was like, I feel guilty for everything and like it is all my fault and people will blame me and be angry but THAT DOESNT MAKE SENSE. And this whole leg/back/sciatica thing seems SO clear cut and the root of many of my other cascading ortho problems. Surely they can at least make some sense of it. The orthopedist wrote me back in a nice way. And I walked around a fair amount this morning in the house without anything bad happening. Then iced my ankles twice. Ordered the proper kind of lawn chair for the back yard. (cheap from kmart!) Got presents online for my nephew and bro in law.

Made new ortho appt. for my back. Booked 2 poetry readings. Posted about the book. Paid bills. Hung up some laundry that was draped over a stack of boxes and in the way.

Now I am going to have a brief outing in the sun, on the scooter, to return library books and get some groceries. I will cook some chicken taco stuff (sitting down).

My back is not good, but not hideous either so I am super super hopeful. Patting myself for doing All the Things this morning!

I had a nice day but the sciatica is being extremely horrible. I can't predict whether I'll be able to take a step with my right leg from one moment to the next. It's painful. Sometimes I just can't use the leg very well. Back on crutches in the house. I'm trying not to walk around. The PT warned me to be very careful and not bend over and reach. Yeah I know. I am having trouble putting on my socks especially the right sock. Right now I'm just very scared it will flare up and get worse. At its worst it is unbearable pain and it takes me 20 minutes to turn over in bed or to get up from bed. Okay. Fear is the mindkiller, etc etc, right? I am doing the stomach muscle exercises (which I do constantly! every day! )

Today was nice anyway and I went out to get a massage from hazelbroom. I took a different bus (the 67) and definitely prefer the Mission buses because they don't lurch and twist around (hard on my back).

I sat in the Haus cafe for a while. It is so hipstery! And... very nice. Then got a burrito at Las Palmas (PERFECTION!!!!!)

Dudes on 24th and on Mission tend to really want to bond with me. Not in like a super bad way but I am assumed to be socially available when I'm on the scooter in a way I haven't quite been experiencing otherwise.

I shook hands with a very sharp dressed old old man named Eloy on the corner of 24th and something while waiting for the light to change. He walked with a cane. He showed me his leg which "they" had wanted to cut off and said he would die. It was indeed very scarred up! He told them, "You can't cut off my leg! I'm going to live!" and they didn't and he did. I remarked on the leg and he remarked on my boots. I said it was a beautiful day and he went, "But you are MORE BEAUTIFUL by far" in a courtly way. Then he apologized. But most of the random stranger encounters it is more like grifters who think I might hang out and share a pint of jack daniels. Eloy I can respect.

I am enjoying my encounters with other disabled people on the bus, even just the nod hello. And the bus drivers who nicely leave the seats up in a spot or two during the middle of the day which is cripple on the bus prime time. (I now see why.) I had a bit of a conversation with an older lady with I think Downs or some other issue who was a bit scruffy with ID around her neck on a string and a big bag of cans clearly going down the 24 to the recycling dropoff. "I sit right here, and I hold on, and I've got my bag" was basically her conversational content. "You've got lots of cans!" "It's okay, as long as I sit right here, and hold on. I've got my bag..." etc. Then we just sat. But I felt like the other riders warmed to her a bit after that.

I ended up feeling that I shouldn't have gone out at all but I am still glad I had a nice time and some sun. Tomorrow I might just stay here, sun myself in the back yard, go from bed to couch and back, ice my low back and do very gentle stretches.

I wish I had some prednisone.

Ankles still suck but it's amazing how much I don't even care and just wish the sciatic pain would go away. It's good that I can't actually make that kind of devil's bargain. Oh, I won't 'care about THIS pain if only this other one will go away forever! Yeah right!!!!!!

The manta ray piñata proceeds apace. It dried a little bit wonky on the underside so I will try to build it up tomorrow.

I can't bend down to pick things up off the floor. Just remembered the kids have robot claw toys! i need that immediately!!! today i kept dropping my phone. God forbid I should cough or sneeze. omg the pain. I will probably have vicodin and a shot of vodka tonight... because I can't take it... and I need to be able to sleep. Surviving by reading and gaming non stop.

Yesterday I worked on poems a little and had really good thoughts so I know there is hope and my brain isn't dead.

Hanging in there!

Another day in the park - Dolores Park perfectly sunny and beautiful and FULL of people. Moomin walked a tightrope tied between two trees. My nephew was cute as hell doing animal wrestling. All 3 kids rolled down the hills. A. arranged the back yard with me. she and Moomin measured its dimensions for me to draw on graph paper. zond7 and a. built a birdhouse so now there is an "animal corner" of the yard with the bat-house, birdhouse, birdfeeder, and an apple for the opossum we saw on the fence. coming soon in the animal corner: birdbath and worm bin. Mostly though I have alternated lying in bed or in the chair in the back yard with light housework. No progress on box-unpacking as I was not up to it.

I have PT today and A. has a doctor appointment for her toe.

I am going to make a manta ray superhero piñata for my nephew's birthday! I had the idea last night to put a blue sort of canopy over it with streamers coming down as if Super Manta Ray were under water!

Dreamed last night that my friend Ron gave me a fantastically great 6 wheel drive wheelchair that was tough and fast and could turn on a dime. It could go up stairs. I loved it. I went to a movie theater, dinner, a pet parade, and my old co-op in it, had some fights where people asked me stupid questions or patted me and I told them to fuck off (with my sister muttering bitchily in my support by my side) and was side by side holding hands with zond7 in it. It had motorcycle style handles with holes to put your fingers into. I went over giant potholes and ruts in it and hopped curbs. In the dream Ron explained to me how it was made by this guy in Maine as one of a few experimental models. Each one had a cool funny name something like "Wintermute" or "The Bullmaster".

Listening to some really nice music, ate some food (yay microwave), mailed my letter & got a knob that fits the kitchen cabinet. anothe thing i did yesterday was take the cabinet doors off one of the most inconvenient cabinets and stash them up on top of there so they won't get lost or messed up. Now we can reach the dishes, and open the dishwasher. It was good to go out and scoot for a little bit.

I realized I didn't want to eat in a restaurant or have to interact with anyone.

Playing Glitch again and icing my ankles much more diligently today. Also hazelbroom can massage me and that is good to look forward to. So I am already cheered. and am thinking to have a really good bath before a. comes home from school. Maybe that will help the twitching.

Reading depressing and upsetting Achilles tendon stuff. Chronic Achilles tendinosis: recommendations for treatment and prevention. And Treatment of Tendinopathy: What Works, What Does Not, and What is on the Horizon. And miscellaneous others from pubmed.

One thing with all these papers is that anything beyond "three weeks where you can't do your usual running regimen" is chronic and all the outcome things seem to suck. And they don't really talk about what happens next or how people cope, just that the things that are available aren't particularly proved to work.

Emailed the PT and the ortho. Ortho talked to the PT and they both wrote me back to say that she wasn't iontophoresising (whatever) my ankles because the area is too big and they like to do it just in a limited spot so was waiting for it to get a bit better. Arrrgh. But no one said that, it is different from the other things she said.... And does that mean they are going to do it based on whether or not I wince at them poking my ankle? Because I can react to pain or not depending on how tired I am if it isn't off the scale extreme. And wouldnt doing it maybe reduce, even if temporarily, the ... w hatever? no one, also, clear on whether it is inflammation or not. -itis or -opathy?

I am feeling a bit hopeless and horrible and keep crying, though yesterday i was euphoric. So I wonder also if i'm dealing with the effects of not taking cymbalta for 24 hours on Sunday (by accident - because i forgot it when I went back to RWC).

I had a bad night waking up a lot with leg and back jerking and twitching and pain. So i'm also exhausted.

I didn't go swim because of exhaustion and also -- it was so cold I couldn't face the thought of the pain of my right leg and my knees and toes and hands being cold. So am mad at myself for not swimming.

Made a new dr. appt with the new internal med doctor but her first available was may 7th.

I keep kind of hearing the PT sayhing i had abused my body and the ortho saying that in may i would walk (in boots) in to the office instead of wheeling and feeling angry and hopeless. It isn't may yet. so maybe. But I can't picture it. It hurts and I'm tired of it. meanwhile all this being in bed just can't be good for my health in general. I get up a million times a day and am as active as I can manage.

At this point I guess i am doing better than a couple of months ago so will just hang in there. in Feb. i couldn't put on my pants standing up and now I could, but think it is best not to since it hurts. But I have to remind myself not to. Surely I'm walking around more, and with bigger steps too at least in the morning.

Looked at the EDD papers again because I checked the card balance yesterday and it was 0. So that means they haven't been paying out to me. Ack! It turns out that in all the papers they sent that look just alike, one is different: you have to sign it saying you are still disabled and mail it back. Uhhhh ooops. I completely missed that. Going to go mail it now. I hope it isn't too late.

Calling the PT to make an appointment but their phone system is messed up, sends me to voicemail, and then hangs up before I can leave a message.

Emailed our work HR person to "touch base" or whatever. Not sure what to say. Just making sure "things" are still "okay" I guess....????? Am I on leave? Do things change past some time frame? I don't know... whatever...

I unpacked some boxes. Going out now to mail the letter just so as to put on pants and have left the house. I can't cope with people right now as I keep crying a bit too much.

Paid bills. discarded things. forgot to say that I did d's taxes and mine and rook's and filed all of it on time. go me.

if i have to keep coping with this level of disability and pain how am i going to go back to work? but i have to...

Need therapy or something maybe? maybe go off cymbalta ? ugh... I don't know what to do and don't want to deal with therapists and going to more appointments.

I accidentally went off the cymbalta for 24 hours and some of the horrible side effects disappeared. Mostly.... that means chewing on my own tongue uncontrollably and twitching adn jerking in my legs and arms and neckand i think a facial tic on one side. Am going to make a new doctor appointment and ask about going off cymbalta. i am not sure if it's worth it espcially as my tongue is getting kind of ... chewed and the twitching seems worse. I do think it helps with nerve pain/buzzing/electric shock feeling but I can't remember if how it was before is really worse than what i have now.

Moomin and Ada did a play for us yesterday in 3 acts, one act at a time as they were developed and practiced. Act 1: Hour of Meeting Act 2: The Chase Act 3: Secrets Revealed. A magician from Bordallo University and a cat girl from a far country meet up, fight, then combine forces to figure out what the heck is going on with the Hourglass, an attacking invisible flying wizard, and the Morph 2000, an ancient machine.

I am back in RWC to see Moomin off to school & then taking the train up to SF again. Last night coming down on the train we met a guy who needed internet and directions and then noticed my tshirt & enthusiastically discussed hackerspaces. he is part of the one in Toronto. Then he pulled thing after thing out of his little black bag, all 3D printed and each more amazing than the next. a telescope lens! a tiny vacuum cleaner! a very beautiful head of broccoli that had been cat-scanned then converted into an stl file then printed! I realized I could take the cat scan of my brain and print my brain.

Moomin, in mid-Two Towers:

"He's really racist, but it's still a really good story". He noticed that the East and South people are always swarthy and evil... etc. We made fun of Gandalf and Shadowfax a little bit (My little pony...)

Yesterday was fabulous as we just hung around and cooked and went to lunch with gilbert & heather and heath & max and then to the playground. I laid in the sun feeling way happier.

I read a book of Dashiel Hammett's "lost stories" ie worst and forgotten ones, laid out chronologically along with very interesting biographical details. It was a very well done book in all the framing and explanations & editorial work!

Read "Ivy: Homeless in San Francisco" by Summer Brenner. It was not what I expected but I enjoyed it and am still thinking about what it did. It's a fable where a child in difficulties meets kindly old quirky rich people and cheers them and she and her dad are just what they needed and vice versa in the most unrealistic but weirdly satisfying manner. The heroine is not an urchin from long ago but a nowadays kid who with her dad ends up homeless. The book made me think at first (partly from the book jacket and comments about it) that it was pitched as a gritty "this is what it's like to be homeless" story for non homeless kids. But it isn't that and instead more reminded me of "Seven Spells to Sunday" which felt like a book about magic things happening to and told for the kids who are its protagonists.

total chaos today as i cleaned up in the morning (more) and then my sister came over with mr.pants. We went to the cafe... .running into the tail end of what might have been bad moms coffee. just a word to say how much I love and adore the 2 sisters who run that cafe. <3 <3 <3 and all the lovely people who work there who have fed me for the last 10 years. I love that place! They're so nurturing and it is hard work that they do so well.

we sorted through almost all the bins of things in moomin's room. boxes to the hackerspace... to donate & to give to mr. pants who is nearly 5. He liked the spiderman suit! There are 3 bins of animals and dinosaurs which i am asking Moomin to go through and weed.

Many bags of trash were removed as well!

Then the cleaning co-op people came and dug in. At the same moment we got back with Moomin from his school and Squid showed up with her 3 kids in tow so it was complete chaos. I think Mali liked the gold dress. hope so! We took her and Iz to ice cream and the amazing action figures and hot wheels store across the street from it. it was LIVELY. at the ice cream place they filled up the GIANT balloon that is the air swimmer remote controlled shark blimp. So you must now picture me scootering home in Blue Steel, the scooter, with a giant shark floating over my head....

then we laid in bed all a bit stunned while cleaning continued to happen and the house became oddly sparkly. I am still glad I dusted and swept as much as I did and scrubbed the bathroom and counters in the kitchen or i would have died of embarrassment. 3 women worked their asses off for 3 hours and there really is still plenty that could be done. but it is much much better.

hotspur the cat likes his electric heating pad cat bed very much. he has barely left it all day. he still wants to sit on me but it is not so insistent.

Emotionally I am very weird and tired and burned out and not feeling myself. Not like "nervous breakdown" level of weird but very much that I want to curl up in a ball and withdraw. So that is what I am doing. I'm fine... Sort of. ON some level I feel like a total mess and I don't know how to feel better. Ankles freaking me out, etc. I thought about guilt and love and trying to make nice environments. I am having a good time with Moomin on another level while I am not either freaking out or suppressing being freaked out. We read through the Entmoot today in Two Towers. He likes the shark... and he liked having my sister and nephew visit... he did his homework diligently and studied... So nicely. We petted the cat in his cat bed just constantly....He says hilarious things a lot and is making more double entendres and slightly off color jokes. I can feel it when we both just need to stop interacting and go off and read. Like all of my family... he is just the same. and it's so companionable and nice!

Sleep now.... so lonely and homesick and hurty.

i'm lucky to have such good friends, and family... Also i rely on everyone who comments and IMs me, which is very comforting to know I am not actually alone. which i'm not... but I feel it. Not making any sense! I appreciate everyone though! Feeling this way it is hard (but possible) to make things nice for Moomin and not suck as a parent. if you know what i mean. but i'm doing it.

I have thrown away several giant bags of trash, have 8 boxes and big bags full of stuff for donation or to give to people, and have cleaned Moomin's room so that nothing is on the floor and the surfaces have been dusted. The under-bed bins now are full of stuffed animals so that the top bunk is clear and usable if anyone ever wanted to use it.

Cleaners come tomorrow and I am not sure if I'll get anything else done. my sister is coming over to visit with mr. pants so maybe he will play with things while she helps me out. but really i would like to just go to lunch with her and chill out first.

Meanwhile I am playing glitch in between my forays into sweeping and sorting through clothes.... still pulling 5T stuff out of there but now i think everything is gone that is not size 8-10. The actual toys and things in bins I have not sorted through. But it needs to be done. most of it, no one has touched in years.

We went to basmatiheather & household's eastover brunch, ate lots of great food and loafed around... Had a lovely lovely nap afterwards. I seriously just passed out in bed like drifting away on beautiful clouds. Naps! My new goal in life.

Then I came down on the train with the scooter and moomin. I am taking care of him in rook's house while rook is in Finland for a week for a game con. OMFG I am having HORRIBLE allergies down here. Am about to get up and rummage for benadryl or something. In a pinch I can take moomin's at double dose. Snot is pouring out of my face. I think it is trees blooming. Hotspur the cat is very yowly and won't get off my lap so i am typing this sideways around a lump of curled up cat.

yesterday ummmm can't remember what happened.... ummmm... i laid in bed, unpacked some boxes, and played glitch... hazelbroom's son came over. I had cramps and didn't want to move except from bath to heating pad.

day before we went to Dolores Park with everybody and kids and watched them run around. YAY ELECTRIC SCOOTER alias Skidbladnir but I think I've decided to call it BLUE STEEL instead (from Zoolander). I now start it up with THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO launch theme in my head.

Plan for the week is do my physical therapy, play glitch, go to the library with Moomin every day after school so he gets used to walking there and can see if it's an option for doing his homework instead of the gazillion dollar after school care which is mostly just sitting in a room doing homework along with the 6 other kids from the school who don't have their nannies driving them to soccer practice. They do go out to play I guess. And it is familiar. We'll see!

Am going to taskrabbit someone to clean the house. I can't do it and just having some of the layer of grime and dust taken off will be a little more cheery.

It's been really lovely hanging out with Moomin during his spring break. We have been reading and playing computer games in the morning, very low key, then going out in the afternoon. We went to the library, bookstore to sell back books, and kids' clothing store to sell back clothes on one day, and grocery shopped, which maybe sounds boring but which was nice in the sun with the scooter -- and Moomin got the store credit for the bookstore and a star wars hoodie too.

Then he came with me to physical therapy on Tuesday which also may not sound exciting but which was a fun bus ride & we went to Cliff's Variety on Castro which impressed him a LOT as the store with everything & everything fascinating. We got clip-on lamps for the bunk beds and a house key for him and A. with LED flashlights built in. His keychain is a tiny retractable measuring tape. As we cruised around Castro (he got me a lattee at a place I couldn't get into, and then got us cookies at Hot Cookie) he was skipping happily next to me with his Martin the Warrior book under his arm... Looking very cool in a black turtleneck and skinny jeans. About a million people complimented us, our hair, my scooter, and chatted to us in a friendly way. "I LOVE SAN FRANCISCO!! IT IS THE GREATEST CITY!!" Onward to physical therapy...

Yesterday another boring errand was nice from its shopping potential... we took the J downtown to get my computer fixed at the apple store... Lots of "How to take the train, alertly" lessons.... speculation on Dolores Park... passing Mitchell's ice cream... & then adventure in the seedy underbelly of the Powell station as the elevator was out. We got back on a train and went to Montgomery instead. On the street we gave someone directions, gawked at the octopus fountain statue thing, and the great fire fountain that was a reunion point for years, and all the shops. I explained why the signs have nails on top. (pigeon poop.) The apple store was glitzy & hive-like. Afterwards we went to Jeffery's Toys & Comics and bought a Defenders comic (reprinted from 1971 - Dr. Strange and crew!) a small Mouse Guard, Amazing Ant Man and Wasp origin story, and another I can't remember. Oh, Static Shock from the new 52. "Hmm, kind of interesting!" to the new 52. We commented on how you can easily tell which section of the shop is the one to avoid. I called it the blood and boobs aisle. Moomin kind of wants every action figure of every obscure hero like Icicle Jr. and Aqualad. He's very, very shocked when I don't know who the main villains of The Flash are.

Then to a very, very fancy shop with japanese sweets where I bought a green thing with mugwort and bean paste and some other amazing stuff. worth going into to gawk at how they set everything out. I wish I'd taken pictures. & onto the train again.

We got off at Dolores Park and checked out the new playground -- which is super accessible and AMAZING. Then home to read and have dinner.

We have had good success with "5 minute hate" where we all tidy the house for 5 minutes by the timer. Moomin also learned to sweep the floor and empty wastebaskets.

He and A. invented a game with water, desert, mountain and forest, laid out all over the floor, using dragons and cats which has complicated economics and reminded me of Glitch. They plan to put it all down on paper for the 2-D version which will come in a box and they can sell. "If we give it away people might think it's crappy" said A. sagely...

Today hazelbroom is taking me to the boat to get the last things and drop off my keys & make sure all is well. Then physical therapy which I am dreading. It hurt last time, I don't like being shoveled off onto a new therapist though he was perfectly nice, but it means i have to explain myself all over again. And i feel like they're giving me the runaround on iontophoresis. first they said best to wait, then they said ordering the meds, then Tuesday the new guy said that insurance doesn't cover it usually, then that they don't really do that at their clinic anyway!!!! Bullshit! So for the last 2 months they haven't been doing it.... Total bullshit. So I probably have to call around and look for a new PT clinic. I'm going today anyway and will ask them to recommend someone who will do it.