27 January 2026

I’m a little bit of an informal, untrained engineer. Particularly, I seem to want to engineer situations and processes. Most particularly, especially in recent years, I feel motivated to engineer my own situations and processes because I figure out that something isn’t working for me and then I want to figure out why and how to fix it.

I am pretty sure this is one of the things I inherited from Dad, who was forever looking at things and going, “You know where you’re messing up?” and then suggesting alternatives that often actually worked. Depends on how familiar he is with the situation or whether his random biases are triggered, but usually he has a good fix. Or did. Couldn’t fix his own life but if you needed suggestions on how to set up an efficient fish fry with minimal mess, he was your man.

(He is still with us, but I get the vibe that all those years drinking have not exactly sharpened his mental acuity. It’s sad, because he was a lot smarter than he liked to admit. I suspect he never became an engineer because probably he wasn’t a big fan of math. Or school.)

Anyway. It’s always the mundane little things. (Another way I’m like him. I can’t seem to fix my life either, at least not quickly.) Lately my diet has gone way downhill and my personal habits have been crap. And so it’s been a matter of looking at why I’m acting like that and where the failure points are.

Won’t get into a longwinded explanation but one component of the problem would be my drinking habits. I don’t mean booze. I could buy it at this point, but I didn’t even want to at the new year — knew I’d be working, for one thing. No, I mean drinking in general. Hydration. I’ve been relying on diet root beer for the last little while because I’d had to go without it for most of the time I’ve been in California. Too broke. I don’t fall into lockstep with all the idiots who think diet soda is worse for you than regular soda — Jesus Christ, give your heads a wobble — but it still shouldn’t be a substitute for water.

There aren’t good drinking glasses in the house. There are a couple travel cups with silicone lids, neither of which are mine. There are mugs. There are a few plastic cups which I borrow to use in the bathroom as a toothbrush holder and a mouth-rinsing cup, two at a time, because they’re too small to really be practical for anything else. That’s basically it. I follow this Mason jar accessory business (Mason Jar Lifestyle) on Facebook and when they offered a quart-jar size silicone sleeve emblazoned with “Who would want to drink out of a Mason jar?” after something a troll said to them in their Facebook comments, I got an idea. In the end I wound up with a quart jar with that sleeve on it, a straw lid insert, and a silicone straw.

I am not a huge fan of plain water and this is well water and high in minerals, so not that appealing to me. I tried doing the usual water-flavor things but have not been happy with any of them. Either they have dye in them or they have electrolytes when I already salt my food and take a mineral supplement — it is overkill. But I worked out my own little system (sucralose drops and water-soluble dye-free flavoring) which cost less anyway and worked out pretty well for a while.

Except I have this habit of going back to the diet root beer and forgetting my water, which was causing the silicone straws to go yucky. You can clean them and they came with a special brush for the purpose, but I don’t trust it when we’re talking fungus. And the quart jars are too big to fit into a vehicle cupholder, which matters if I want to take one to work. Stainless steel straws clean better and won’t get fungus-impregnated, ever, but they’re also dangerous (people have punctured the roofs of their mouths with the fuckers and I don’t trust I would never find myself in that situation), so I’ve never really wanted one.

So I have finally worked around my workaround: pint-and-a-half widemouth jar for the cupholder, sleeve to fit it, and… as it turns out… you can get kraft-paper straws on Amazon which are sturdy enough to survive a hot drink under 175 degrees F. Those things will rot just fine in the compost pile out in the woods or hey, I could drop them down the woodstove when it’s lit. I’m set. I can still use the quart jars for drinks I keep at home.

I can also do protein drinks in the things, and I probably will. I don’t give myself any time to cook in the mornings, I need more protein than I’m currently getting, and I’m tired of eating crap at work, which I am more likely to do if I let myself go hungry for too long. I did not want to get back above 200 pounds, yet here I am. Time to go back the other direction. Turns out you can buy those metal wire balls they put into the Blender Bottle brand shaker bottles, and the balls are five dollars for two or three balls depending on the vendor. Better than drinking microplastic shakes, for sure.

I am dreadfully mundane. I know.

A further mundane note: When I get my own place, I will likely buy at least half a dozen more pint-and-a-half Masons because they are shaped exactly like a good-sized water glass and then, if you want to make them travel-friendly, there is no end of options for lids that screw on and won’t just pop off. And they’re very easy to clean, unlike most dedicated water bottles, and you can get a sleeve that prevents them breaking. I can’t believe they’re not more popular. Doesn’t help, I guess, that stores don’t usually stock them. Look for the ones on Amazon with “JB” emblazoned on the side. I think it stands for Jar Boss.

—

It is crunch time for health insurance. California has its own ACA marketplace so can set its own open-enrollment deadline; that comes up on the 31st. I am debating whether I should even bother because I likely won’t qualify for MediCAL (California’s Medicaid) anymore, even though I’m minimum wage and part-time, and I don’t know how low one’s income has to be in order to qualify for premium subsidy. But I don’t think qualifying is the same as signing up, so I should just get on with it. I can always refuse to sign up if I don’t like what they offer me. I don’t want to go without it, but I need a car more than I need my entire paycheck eaten up in premiums and copays, and right now I have enough money to go to urgent care if that becomes an issue. The ER will be legally obliged to treat me should I develop a situation calling for a visit there, the ACA was amended and no longer fines people for not signing up, and we don’t have debtor’s prison in the United States. Fuck it. I don’t know why we bothered with “healthcare reform” when it STILL leaves the broke unable to pay for healthcare or to get it paid for. And I have a job. “Work for a living”? When do I get to start living?

Say what you will but it’s more efficient to just publicly fund this stuff and have it paid for the first time than it does to waste all that money with billing and collections and all that bullshit. I really think all this opposition to single-payer healthcare boils down to the haves wanting to lord it over the have-nots. Feel powerful yet? I can’t imagine why. You haven’t actually done anything to earn it. I have a job too. Doesn’t mean I’m better than you. It works that way in the other direction too.

Okay, enough of that.

I need to get my taxes done too. I need to anyway, and I have until April for the 2025 tax year, but one detail they need on the return is a figure from the previous year’s taxes and I haven’t filed since the 2021 tax year (in ‘22… got all that?). I did find the email notification about that, and I may even have the return downloaded. I have to look, and then I have to get going. Happily, I found a free-filing site for federal that’s maybe eighteen bucks for the state return and I’m happy to pay it if it’ll get me all caught up, and it goes back as far as 2018. I may or may not get whatever refunds are coming to me; apparently there’s a deadline for that and I suspect I’ve passed it for a few of those tax years now. The rest will probably get eaten up since I didn’t pay self-employment tax on my 1099 income in ‘22 and ‘23. Whatever. As long as it all evens out and I wind up not owing much. I just want it done.

If I do get lucky and get some substantial amount back, that’ll be a load off my mind because it makes it all the more likely that I can get wheels. But I don’t want to get my hopes up. ARGH.

—

I mentioned my Minnesota friend from my time in the Army in a recent post. I’ll mention John again. John is really stressed out lately. He has PTSD from his time in the second Iraq war — I don’t think he was in direct combat (I need to ask him) but frankly, no one was safe during that time. I can’t blame the Iraqis; if someone invaded this country, a whole bunch of us would be attacking them too. But John worked at the radio station, and he was never the type to bully people in the first place. But he probably came under attack anyway. War is just like that.

And now it’s like Minneapolis has turned into a war zone. And John never had any beef with immigrants that I ever noticed. For fuck’s sake, the U.S. military is wall-to-wall with Latinos. In the country legally, obviously — many are born U.S. citizens, in fact — but if you think there’s a substantial difference between a Latino with papers and one without, you haven’t been around very many Latinos. It’s a piece of paper. The lack of it does not turn a human being into a ravening beast. I wish racists got this upset about homegrown white boys who get up to the same criminal behavior they’re trying to pin on “illegals” now. But here we are. And the situation is so bad that John’s psychiatrist has told him in no uncertain terms that he needs to stay home and out of it because it will not do his mental state any good.

And then the goons murdered a VA nurse.

Let’s make something very fucking clear here.

First off, resisting arrest or interfering with law enforcement are not capital crimes. A capital crime, of course, being one for which execution is ever a legal punishment.

Secondly, even if resisting arrest or interfering with law enforcement were capital crimes, the Fourteenth Amendment is very clear that the government is not to deprive any citizen of life without due process of law. Being angry at a guy on the street helping a woman you just knocked down is not “due process of law.” It’s just you power-tripping.

Thirdly, a cell phone is not a gun.

Fourthly, “the right to bear arms” includes people you don’t agree with. If Kyle Rittenhouse could shoot three people at a protest and then walk away — the only one armed, by the way, was also the only one he did not kill — then a liberal can walk around with a CCW and a handgun on his hip and then walk away. That is what should have happened here.

Fifthly, ICE put Pretti facedown on the ground and disarmed him — by removing the gun from his hip holster — and then murdered him. As in they killed him after he could no longer have credibly been labeled a threat.

There is no argument that excuses any of this. None. If Pretti deserved to die, so did Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse ought to at least be in prison right now, and looking forward to being there for many years to come.

You want me to side with you, conservatives, and you keep having these incredibly shitty takes on politics and human rights. And then you are mystified that you have not convinced me. Exactly what do you think I am? You remind me of my ex-husband being all proud of himself for stealing all that office equipment from the Army and then thinking I was happy that he did it. We had lived together four years at that point. It was like he didn’t know me at all. I turned him in and he got arrested and court-martialed for his trouble — do you really think I won’t act against you, given a good way to do it?

And don’t say the government’s evil and the government wants to control us and then APPLAUD them when they’re evil and they try to control us. Whose fucking side are you on, anyway?

Never mind. Don’t even bother. I already know. Keep telling on yourselves, though. It’s just a shame the wrong people have to die for you to keep proving your point.

I only wish John and I could have conversations about something besides his hometown being under siege. For fuck’s sake, it’s been thirty years. I’m tired of Republicans wrecking my life.

(And Democrats, who wreck it along different axes, but in my experience they give roughly as much as they take, especially at the local and state levels, so it’s kind of been a wash.)

And before you say it ‘cause you know I’m a TERF, no, I’ve never voted for Trump. In fact, I voted for John Kasich the first time Trump ran for the nomination in Ohio, just to fuck up Trump’s campaign. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought of that, because we were the only state Kasich carried in the primary that year. (Ohio has fairly open primaries. You don’t have to register with a party, but you can only vote in one party’s primary. I knew Hillary Clinton had the Dems sewn up, and I was fine with whoever else was running even if she hadn’t, so I did my civic duty elsewhere.)

But I gave up voting last year because it’s clear to me neither party gives a shit about Americans anymore. I’m not about to start again until I see some strong evidence otherwise. And not voting is not the same as voting for the other guy. It is simply… not voting. There are other ways to be political that don’t involve rubberstamping goonery or troonery and I’m exploring those instead. You want my support? Earn it. I’m still waiting. I’ll probably die waiting.

—

Okay, this is my laundry day and I really should quit putting it off.

I have a couple other things I want to talk about and I referred to one of them recently, and maybe I’ll get around to one or the other today. I hope you don’t mind getting multiple emails in one day from me. There are a bunch of new people here and I never know why people come or go.

I also need to write elsewhere. I am neglecting so much at Substack!

But… Sigh. Laundry first. The place won’t be open tomorrow.

(L still hasn’t said anything about if or when she will use that gift money she got last month to get a new washer/dryer combo. I have my suspicions, because she keeps having vet expenses with the Old Men. Also because in general she doesn’t seem to care whether I can get done what I need to get done in my day-to-day. Recently, a friend of hers hauled in some wood to last us the rest of this winter, and L parked her car out of the way in the turnaround space and then… didn’t move it back. Twice in the space of a week I’ve had to back the truck all the way down the long driveway in the dark. Mind you, I was fussed at back in August for parking the truck in the turnaround space when I first started working. This is only the latest example of this sort of behavior, so I’m not holding my breath for new laundry machines. She has Girlfriend Privileges at Neighbor’s. I don’t, of course. At least I can afford the laundromat now and no longer have to handwash, but I hate having to go out in the first place because with the fencing and the gate and the dogs, it’s always a bother. One more motivation for me to get independent again, I suppose.)