Home Archive by category "Bloggish Things" (Page 6)

Category: Bloggish Things

Thoughts, essays, and comments from the writers of Turtleduck.

Happy birthday to me…in 6 days.

Technically five, actually, since it’s almost 2am on Wednesday as I am writing this, but let’s just pretend it’s still Tuesday, okay? I actually remembered to do this, then got busy with work, then looked up at the clock and realized that a whole two hours had gone by and…oops? So here we are. Almost 2am on Wednesday-pretend-it’s-Tuesday. Sooooo my birthday is March 27th (in case the math didn’t make that clear enough). Smack between winter and spring. the weather is usually crappy, but the one year it was nice, I was unable to walk due to the Great Surgery Adventure of 2019. Hoping for good weather this year! I will be forty-seven years old. Three years away from a half a century on this lovely planet. Seventeen thousand one hundred fifty five days old, not quite exactly, because I don’t feel like figuring for leap years. I just looked it up, actually. It’s 17, 165 days, just ten more. Wow. And 564 months. There are a bunch of other figures, which I won’t bore you with, but I liked this one: 15.7 years sleeping (approximately). Seriously? Wow. That’s seriously mind-blowing. So I was thinking back to my childhood. I’m sure you’re all aware that my generation is the last that never had cell phones, or internet, or any of the technology that we enjoy today. Cell phones came around — well, technically in the 80s because I remembered a friend of mine in middle school, her dad had one…

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Midsize Style, Instagram, and Me

I’ve blogged here before about my evolving relationship with style. This year I decided to lean into it as a new side hobby (besides writing, of course). One reason is that I needed a new side hobby: gardening hasn’t been doing it for me, contra dancing has been scant although that’s about to change, travel has still been mostly on hold, and I like rotating hobbies but it’s been a while since I picked up a new one. Another is that [CW: weight…..] like many people, I’ve gained weight in the past few years, so I wanted to tap into ways to feel good about my body as it is now. Instagram has turned out to be a great source for that, interestingly enough. Yes, yes, the evils of social media and so on, but it’s all about who you interact with and follow/friend. I’m now following a variety of folks of all sizes, some style-related, others exercise- and outdoors-related (more aspirational than inspirational at this point, alas). I’m staying away from “how to flatter your body” and “how not to wear…” accounts, focusing instead on people with a wide range of personal styles, both trendy and not. “Midsize” is a term originating on TikTok, meaning folks who, like me, aren’t quite plus size but are near the top of “straight” sizes. Following midsize style accounts gives me a sense of how things might look on my body and encourages me to be more daring. I’m also following people who…

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New Friend

Surprise! IT’S ME because I switched weeks with Siri. HaHA. (I have not been sleeping well and I think it’s starting to catch up to me. Does it show?) In the continuing saga of buying random crap in a sad and misguided attempt to improve my life, I have bought a new friend. (Well, technically I used a gift card from my birthday to buy a new friend. Is shopping therapy more or less affective if it’s not actually your money you’re using?) Anyway, here he is. Aw, look at that! He’s so happy to see you! OR NOT Anyway. I saw these advertised as tools to help neurodivergent children who might otherwise have difficulty properly displaying, communicating, or understanding their feelings. (They sell different expression combinations.) Now, I am not a neurodivergent child (that I am aware of) but they’re super cute and it also seemed like maybe I could use it as a writing tool. Hear me out. The project I’ve been working on has been a bit slow going, because I’ve been working on it forEVER and now it has emotional and mental baggage attached to it. And something that can help when you’re running into issues is designating a trigger object, whose basic use is to tell your brain that it is Writing Time and since the object is present it is time to Be Writing. So, I thought to myself, here is a trigger object I can use. It’s cute, it’s small, it’s distinctive. ALSO…

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Birthday Adventures

February is my birthday month. As a child I loved my birthday, but as I got older, it came to mean less. Lately, though, I’ve come back around. Who cares if anyone else is celebrating? My birthday is for me. My birthday, however, falls in the week Tucson celebrates the yearly Fiesta de los Vaqueros–aka Rodeo Break. Schools are closed Thursday and Friday. So instead of taking my birthday off, I’ve been taking the Friday of Rodeo Break, and going camping. Last year was the second time we went to Roper Lake during Rodeo, and friends, it was blinking cold. This year, I decided, we would go somewhere else. A little south of here! A new park, a new adventure, not so cold! I reserved a cabin at Kartchner Caverns State Park, back in August (you have to reserve way ahead.) Then my work adopted a new policy as of January 1st–everyone gets their birthday as a paid holiday, but you have to take it that day. Use it or lose it. You are darn tootin’ I am not going to lose out on getting paid to celebrate my birthday. I went to the desert museum for the Avian Adventure, and met this charming fellow. It was a great time! I will be showing off that picture for a while, let me tell you. Then Friday, I went camping. Poor me, already paid for it, can’t get out of it, sorry to take two days off in a week but…

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It’s Alive!!

…And no, I’m not talking about Frankenstein. Although I could draw some very interesting parallels — stay with me, here. Okay, so let me start from the beginning. Every January (or in the case of this year, February because reasons), I pick a languishing novel out of my pile to start the new year off with. I don’t actually continue working on it, but I give it a bit of time, just to keep it in the background of my mind, refill the well, remind myself that it still exists, and experience the magic again. It’s tradition. Currently, I have three such novels. So I wanted to work on a different one from last year, so I chose Survivor, my oldest work to date. For those of you just joining the madness, Survivor is a psychological thriller/horror novel I started way back in 2004 for a two-year novel writing class I was taking at the time. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It ended up being one of the best books I’ve ever written — and the most maddening, for a variety of reasons. But I love it, believe in it, and this book haunts me. YES. So the goal is to get it published, naturally…except…um…it needs a major rewrite because 2004!Erin just wasn’t as good a writer as 2023!Erin. And well, the book’s in pieces, and — (Frankenstein reference, anyone?) well, it’s been majorly intimidating me for years, but…in 2019 or so, I decided that…

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I Bought a New Water Bottle

Hello, friends. I’m trying to take steps to become more healthy, and the first thing I’m doing (one thing at a time, so as to not overwhelm myself and to make sure I’m actually making new habits before adding new things) is working on my hydration. I tend to be a binge hydrator–not drink any water for hours and then drink a couple glasses at once–which makes me feel sick. Also, I’m likely not getting enough water in general. So, to take steps to remedy this, I bought a new water bottle. It looks like this: You’ve probably seen these before. I’ve been using it for two weeks now, and I’ve got to say, it’s working great. I’ve more or less stayed right where I’m supposed to be according to the markings every day, or if I’ve had to leave it for a few hours, I’m still aware of where I am for the day. And I do feel better. Like, just generally better. More energized. Better mood-wise. Less achy. Like my parts are well lubricated and working better. Step 2 is eating more vegetables, which I’m less sure about how to manage, but we’ll see. Anyway, I highly recommend regulating your water intake. I’ve seen such a good improvement in such a short time. Maybe after a month everything else will fix itself too. Thoughts on vegetables, friends? We normally have them with dinner (and hence sometimes with lunch, which is often leftovers) and I’ve been trying to eat…

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Cozy and Cheeseless

It’s that time of year again…the dead of winter when not much else is happening, so I do a cooking post! Like my other hobbies, my cooking interests keep evolving. Six months ago, I would have said my spouse and I were cheesetarians. We ate pasta regularly, and salads regularly, with plenty of cheese featured in both. Now? Again, it’s the dead of winter, so I don’t feel much like big leafy salads, and for some reason pasta has fallen off the rotation in favour of quinoa. We haven’t even been making omelets. So…next to no cheese. (Except cheesecake. That’s different.) Instead, we’ve been rocking stews and soups, the ultimate in coziness. We bought each other a Dutch oven for Christmas — those are the ceramic pots with an iron core that can go both on the stovetop and in the oven. Which means it’s perfect for browning your meat or sauteing your aromatics (new word for me!) and then throwing everything else into the same pot. Having a new kitchen toy, of course, has revitalized our kitchen game — at least temporarily. Disclaimer I: Those things are heavy (or maybe I’m just weak)! Ours is a 5 qt. pot, and I can only lift it when it’s mostly empty. Disclaimer II: We are not superhuman! We cook something big and ambitious once a week, twice at most. The rest of the time, we order in, or else we eat leftovers or premade food or something else that’s dead easy.…

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Technology, Y’all

Am I right? You know I’m right. Currently, I’m right about my fitness tracker. Which, you know, is a misnomer, but we’ll go with it. It has a silent alarm feature, which I’ve decided I don’t like. At least, not how I’ve been using it, to go off between 6:10 and 6:40 every morning. It’s supposed to be a smart alarm, but it never wakes me up because it only activates when it figures out I’m already awake. So it’s just annoying and I want to turn it off. My tracker, however, has been refusing to open the “alarm” app so that I can. So I went hunting on the internet, and the only thing that seems to work is a factory reset. Oh geez. Am I that annoyed by this alarm? Well, maybe. It’s been a long time that I’ve been meaning to fix it. The fact that I’m actually remembering at eight at night about something that happens in the morning, is a good sign that I do indeed find it that annoying. Factory reset, then. I steeled myself, and I did it. Now I’ve put my wifi password in three times, but my tracker can’t find my wifi (the router is five feet away, through open air.) So it’s updating through Bluetooth, and it keeps restarting. Currently we’re at 13% on the third try. Let us all pray to Saint Vidicon… Microsoft has been giving me similar hassles at work lately. Similar as in, not working. I’m…

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What are you manifesting?

So, if you’ve been around for awhile, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Law of Attraction. Well, I’m not talking about that. Not exactly. See, a year ago, I took a “bootcamp” in a manifestation technique through author Heather Hildenbrand that is similar, but is quite different, too. Actually, I have yet to totally finish it, as I got super busy during that period. She is running the bootcamp for a second time, and I am an alumna, so I get to take it again (and again and again…) if I want to. So I will probably do that. But the parts I did take were extremely helpful. But I’m not really talking about that, either. It’s the backstory. See, I’ve always been curious about it. Can you really manifest anything your heart desires? The one thing they say is that you have to put the work into it — you can’t just say, okay, I’m going to be a millionaire by next week and wait for the dollar bills to fall from the sky. We and the universe are co-creators — we work together. You gotta do something to help that come together. The universe does its part; you do yours. So in my Lenormand class, we touched on a manifestation technique with the cards that I tried recently with a duplicate deck I kept just for this purpose. It’s basically waiting for the right moon phase (for setting intentions and manifestation – the new moon) and laying out…

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Why Does My Brain Hate Productivity?

Howdy, friends! How’s the new year treating you? We’re supposed to have a massive snowstorm starting tonight, so that’s fun, she said sarcastically. I think I told you guys this at some point, but at the end of 2021 I sat down with myself and had a heart to heart about what I was doing with my life, and I came out of that knowing that a lot of the things I’ve been working on for the last decade have been to either avoid or to justify a story I’ve been working on for literally ever. (Decades.) Because it’s scary, to put something you’ve put a lot of time and heart into, in case it fails. Because sometimes it’s hard to separate what you create from yourself, and if something you worked really hard on does badly, you can take it as a reflection of yourself. Anyway. I have, traditionally, set many different goals, normally on a monthly basis. Writing goals, drawing goals, reading goals, video game goals, workout goals. We’re talking, like, twenty goals per month. But what I’ve found, recently, is that I do these other goals instead of working on the above story, because hey, I’m being productive still! But I’m also still avoiding the main thing for the same reasons. So, for January 2023, I set just a single goal: work on my revision. Surely putting all my focus onto my main goal would make me do it, right? Well. I mean, I am working on…

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