Just got done with my longest dog-sitting gig yet.
I have this living arrangement where I get to be here rent-free in exchange for a small handful of chores, half utilities, and minding three Great Pyrenees when their hoomin is out of town. I’ve now done said dog-sitting… three times now? Possibly a fourth time that comprised maybe half a day, but three longer periods. This time it was L and Neighbor going to Europe so Neighbor could do a sort of European speaking tour. I know they went to Ireland and Belgium. Possibly they went to Croatia. I’m vague on all the rest of it. Possibly I will be caught up later and possibly not. Cannot predict.
It was all right. The dogs are lovely, though Parker has this habit of going down to the end of the driveway and barking out the front gate if she gets bored, lonely, or both. Sometimes she is arguing with the birds. Sometimes she is responding to a distant siren (ambulance, etc.). Sometimes I have no idea what is going on, and sometimes I suspect she’s just trying to draw me down there to pay her attention. I keep telling her all she has to do is come back to the house, but of course I don’t speak Dog, so I haven’t made much headway with that. I do have a reinforcement collar I can put on her when she gets particularly obnoxious, but I realized early on that if I walked down the driveway after her then I was getting exercise, so opted not to use it.
I did have trouble adjusting. The situation threw my whole daily routine out of whack. I’ve even been forgetting my supplements, and I had been really “good” about those. I also wanted to do more writing but it seemed like every time I sat down, someone needed me or Parker started barking. It was a bit like minding preschoolers, if you want to know the truth, and I have only ever had experience with minding one child at a time, since my son’s paternal grandmother raised him. (My kids are almost nine years apart in age anyway.) The dogs having lovely personalities helped a lot. I just have attention issues and was basically in a situation where every coping strategy I had was less possible or impossible.
L and Neighbor got back at around 1am this morning. I slept the fuck in, though “sleeping in” anymore still means up before 8am. That was fine. It was just nice to not HAVE to do anything.
So now I am adjusting back to something like normalcy, though I’m also heading into that usual time of the week where I have to focus on my weekly trip to Oregon. Grumble, and also I have some work I need to finish today, or at least get it more done since Neighbor is now around and may want to do some of it. (If he says he wants to do all of it, I will be completely fine with that, but there’s a fair bit of it, so possibly he’ll like the help.) I intend to be completely useless on Tuesday, once I’m back, except for whatever I absolutely have to do.
I haven’t been sleeping particularly well and it isn’t the dogs’ fault. Okay, they woke me up a few times, but nothing extreme. I am not sure what’s going on there. Hormones, or my lesser amounts of some of them, are likely playing a role. I’ve been suspicious about sleep apnea for a while, but I don’t know if MediCAL covers sleep studies, and thanks to Trump I’m likely to lose it anyway. No point grousing about that, because half of you don’t give a shit and the other half can’t change the situation right now. I feel better today, though, and that’ll have to be good enough. I just hope I sleep enough tomorrow night because driving 199 through northern Del Norte County is no fucking joke when you’re tired, and I will have to be up at 4am Monday. 4:30 at the latest.
I usually do these sorts of boring life updates as paid posts, but I haven’t written anything here in a while so I thought I’d bore you publicly. I also wanted to mention a couple other things.
First up, because this has come up in the past few months, I’ve given it a good think and while I want to do more writing (however bad I am at following up), I don’t want to write “on commission,” as it were. I want a situation where I produce things and people decide whether or not to like or pay for them. It’s the same as for my artwork, when I ever produce that (I may do portraits on commission at some point, but that’s not looking terribly likely). Why? Because I’m a fucking flake, and when I go full-on into Flake Mode, I also get very embarrassed and don’t want to face it, and next thing I know months have gone by and someone’s pissed off at me. Nope. We are not going to put ourselves into that situation anymore. Once was bad enough.
I have a specific reason for saying that and I suspect the message will get where it needs to go (this is me being a flake again), but also, I do have a project I am now starting. If you’re a Facebook friend, you’ve seen me mention it already. That was not idle chatter. I see a need, so I’m going to see whether I can fill it. This should get interesting.
And anyway, I have some other things I want to write too. But this will be the first one because right now, it’s topical and so a lot of people will be interested in said topic. I’m sure you can guess. I’ll just leave it at that.
Secondly, I had this as a Substack for a bit and then torpedoed it, but now it is back: Born With Ovaries. I do not know if I will keep talking about trans things here since I will sometimes talk about them there. I do want to talk about a lot more female-themed issues, though. Also, I have the domain name and I have been debating with myself for a while as to what I want to do with it. I had said (over at the Substack) that it would maybe be an online store and discussion forum. I forgot about something that had occurred to me a while back: perhaps a non-gendergit version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which is now defunct anyway. I might just. It’s a good idea. Either way, paid subscribers at the ‘stack will be supporting whatever I do at the site. Not a bad deal.
I have a couple other feminist-themed things I’ll talk about here eventually, and also have the domain names for them, but see also I Am A Flake, so I can’t make any promises on a timeline where those are concerned. I think you’ll like them if I ever get them going, though.
Okay. Enough babble. Hi. ‘Later.