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Month: December 2021

A Soothing Ritual

Recently I saw a comment pass by wherein someone asked how a person could “hate tea.” There are about a billion different kinds, so how could you know that you hate all of them? And it’s true. One can know if they hate coffee. If you only drink it with a ton of sugar and milk added (hello, roommate, child, other child…) you hate coffee and you need to stop drinking mine. No, seriously. Go get a cup of tea. We have all the choices.We do. We have a piece of furniture devoted solely to tea. We have a wide selection of teas. I usually start my deciding with considering how much caffeine I feel the need for. I try to avoid coffee every day (because I don’t want to have to have it every day, and also to keep it special.) So yes. Choices. Black, green, white, herbal…our vendor of choice is Harney & Sons, for the dual reasons of delicious tea and pretty tins. (We are almost to the point of building a house with tea tins.) Sunday morning I enjoyed a delicious Florence blend. H&S sells most teas either in sachet or loose. I usually prefer a sachet (easier), but I wanted to try this one and the cheapest way since they were out of samples was to buy a small tin of loose. Also, I do enjoy the whole process of making myself a cup of tea, on a Sunday morning when I have the time.…

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COVID Christmas, Year 2

Things are a bit different than they were last year. For one, we’ve gotten vaccines and boosters, whereas last year we did not. We’d had a full lockdown in March, and this year, we didn’t. Masks are not required now in Michigan but are “recommended.” And yet, COVID-19, the “virus in Seattle” from December 2019, is still very much with us. We’re on our, what, twelth variant now (second Variant of Concern) with omicron? There was a tweet the other day from a doctor about not wanting to learn the entire Greek alphabet due to the virus. I don’t mind that. I find it kind of interesting; kind of like the tropical storm/hurricane naming. I just want it gone. Last year, my family made the heartbreaking decision to not see my in-laws for the holidays. They’re elderly, and we were concerned about them catching the virus. We did a FaceTime thing on Christmas Day to open gifts and that was okay…and we made the best of it….but let’s be real. It just wasn’t the same. They were missed. Terribly. This year, we’re all vaccinated and boostered, so we’re going for it. We’re seeing them both days, actually. It is great to go back to some measure of normalcy, although the specter of this thing is still hanging in the background, always there. Siri Paulson, my fellow Turtleducker, posted on Facebook a meme about in the future, how we’ll be going through old stuff and run across a mask and it’ll…

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2021, A Liminal Year

Hello again, friends. Did you miss me? I at least know what day it is this month. Small steps. It’s December, in itself a liminal month, where the old year is essentially over but the new year hasn’t yet started. So it’s almost the time of year when one starts to think ahead to the one coming up. 2022. Can you believe it? We’re firmly into science fiction time periods now. But hasn’t 2021 just felt like a weird extension of 2020? Like, I can’t easily differentiate what happened when. A lot of that is the pandemic, but things I’m remembering happening last year are really from, like, February of this year. And who knows what happened last year. I don’t. But I also don’t feel like I can be optimistic about a new year. I’d like to think that I’ll get on top of everything again. I’d like to feel like a new year brings new opportunities. But I don’t. I’m just tired, and it feels like the world is falling apart around me. Anyway. Enough of that. Yeesh. My point is that 2021 doesn’t really seem to have happened. Or exist. It’s just 2020 part 2. So here’s hoping that 2022 feels like it’s own year, amirite? Anyway, I won’t see you guys again til the new year, so here’s hoping you wrap up everything you want to and make happy plans come 2022. Best of luck, take care of yourselves, and remember that the holidays are about…

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The World’s Tiniest NaNoWriMo

Last time I mentioned that I was going to attempt the “world’s tiniest NaNoWriMo”. I wrote it casually, offhandedly, to avoid the notice of the “No you can’t” voices. No, you’re too busy; you’re too stressed; the pandemic is still taking up too many brain cycles; you haven’t written any fiction since well before the pandemic began. That was all true…but I was determined to try. I picked a work in progress, a lighthearted fantasy novel that I had started for NaNoWriMo 2019. I’d written 20,000 words that November (an official NaNo is 50K words, and most novels are between 80K and 120K, depending on the genre). I’d written only a few thousand words on it since then, but I had an outline to guide me, and I thought I could manage to pick up from where I’d left off. I set the “tiniest possible goal”, 100 words a day, which has worked for me before when trying to restart the flow of creativity after a writing drought. (Those happen to me regularly.) Writing that slowly is not a great way to get a coherent story, especially novel length, but sometimes there’s nothing else to be done. Then I did the smartest thing: almost every evening I went and hung out with my online writer friends, and we challenged each other to “word wars”. You both start writing on your own projects at an agreed-upon time, and stop when the timer you’ve set goes off (usually 10 or 15 minutes,…

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A Piece of You

by Siri Paulson Your “hand” arrived today. Okay, okay, the haptic feedback glove that you programmed at our home on Mars arrived today. Strange to think how many months it’s been since you touched it, Marisol, and yet the pressure of its fingers on mine feels exactly as if you were here with me. The glove is supposed to make me feel less lonely – just me, myself, and I, Sophie Runningdeer-Lopez, out here in this tin can of a communications array for another year, with the Sun so far away it’s just another star. Funny thing is, I was doing just fine until it arrived. I have my embroidery and my book-reader, and I talk to the techs operating the next array over in each direction – except Karl, who insists on misgendering me – which gives me several ongoing conversations even if there’s a half-hour lag on each. Of course, conversations hum inaudibly through the array all around me; the irony of my solitude is staggering, she says dryly. It was easier when I could just put you in a little mental box, and pull you out every once in a while to think about our life together, and then shut you away again. But you would want me to use the glove, even if it wasn’t required for all solitary workers. I imagine you with the holographic sensors covering your skin, thinking of me as you went methodically through all the motions that the glove recorded. Methodical…

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