The Hailey Chronicles: Saying Goodbye

Get ready to cry, y’all, because this story is a sad one. 🙁 (TW: pet death) One week ago, we had to say goodbye to our sweet furbaby Hailey. I’ve talked about her before. She had kidney disease. We were taking her to the vet three times a week for fluids and had her on a regimen of medication to keep her comfortable and functioning well, as she was nearing nineteen and a half. We knew her time was coming to an end — but by the beginning of this year, she was still mostly stable. Her bloodwork looked okay — not fantastic, because kidney disease, but not horrendous, either — and she still had fight in her. She’d still play, get on my mother’s lap, eat, drink, get on our kitchen table when we cooked to try to get scraps (or, spend time with her favorite humans), and hung out with me when I worked at night, often battling me to be allowed to walk on my keyboard. Damn, she loved it. It’s backlit in a rainbow of colors, which I think was the attraction. I have several Google Sheets that she’d completely bork if she did her little stroll across it, so there was always this panicked, “No, Hailey, no!” thing with me grabbing her gently and placing her next to my computer, encouraging her to just sit there and let me pet her instead. Sometimes it worked, and I’d work one handed, petting her with my free…

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Family Status: It’s Complicated

Surprise! You get me this week. Who will you get next week? Who knows? We’ll figure that out later. Anyway. Due to circumstances, I’ve been thinking a lot about my family this week, so I’ve been pondering the fact that there’s a reason I love to write and read books about found family. My family is actually pretty easy to explain–I found me some. My roommate is my dear friend. We met online, then met in person, then took up residence together first because she needed a place to stay, and then because we got on really well, and two incomes are (good lork, are they ever) better than one. I’m old enough to be her mom, so sometimes just to make things easier, I say I am. Sometimes I call her my “internet daughter.” Sometimes, when I want to make bio kid yelp, I call her “my good daughter.” My second kid, of course, I found by the side of the road after a rainbow fire tornado tore through and demolished–kidding! I actually birthed her. I have the scars to prove it. On the other hand, my son is not biologically my son. He and my child have been best friends since they were 16-ish, and at a point he needed a place to stay, and he’s been here off and on since. Mostly on. It does make it difficult sometimes to talk about my family–last week I was talking to a coworker who has known me for years,…

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Comfort Everything, Take 3

A little bit of everything that’s been giving me comfort lately, because why not. Reading I’ve blogged about comfort reading before (one, two), but here are a few I didn’t mention… Becky Chambers: To be honest, I bounced off her space opera series, but I gave her a second chance with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built and her writing worked much better for me in a shorter format. Hopeful, inclusive futures that don’t have giant stakes, just quiet travels and conversations and tea. Will definitely be picking up the sequel (A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). Angel Martinez: Another author of hopeful, inclusive futures, with a good dose of humour and adventure. My favourite of the three I’ve read so far is Safety Protocols for Human Holidays, a sweet and funny queer romance novella. Elizabeth Peters: I don’t know why I didn’t devour her entire Amelia Peabody series long ago, because it’s right up my alley, but I finally read the first one this year. British lady adventurer! Ancient Egypt! Archaeology! Banter! Unreliable narrator! (Not that she’s lying, but she misses things, especially things to do with emotions. Not unlike Murderbot — another comfort read.) I grew up on a steady diet of E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and the like, along with an Egypt obsession, so it would have been a natural progression. Oh well, I’m hooked now… And I still go back to England for comfort reads like To Say Nothing of the Dog by…

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