Day of the day

I haven't gone over the categories of the day in quite a while.  I started out doing that on this blog and it kind of fell by the wayside when I had a medical scare.  I think I'll pick it up again, although not every day.

What I wore today

A denim skirt and a white tank top, which has rather become my winter uniform,  I wore a flannel plaid shirt over it.  Around here we have decided that plaid flannel looks both feminine and bad ass.

Dinner/supper today:

We're going to be out running errands, so we'll likely stop at Denny's.  Very lowbrow, I know, but I rather like their salads.

 Knitting of the day:

Fuzzy purple socks for my kitty of a husband.

Sewing of the day:

An Xmas stocking for my husband.  Also purple furry leg covers for his Halloween costume.  He is sucking down much of my crafting these days.

Book of the day:

I need to crack a new one tonight.  Likely something disaster related.

Exercise today:

Shopping counts.  I've been having knee issues of late, which has caused me to take it easy, but it seems to be resolving.  Back to the gym on Monday, I swear.

Schoolwork today:

I keep thinking this is possible.

Housework today:

I have laundry drying.  More will start later.  I do paperwork on Fridays, thankfully that is done.

Words written today:

None so far,  I'll catch up tomorrow.

First world problems

I cannot shop in the Rogue Valley.

It seems like anything I want I have to order.  If I want a book the one chain bookstore in town will have to special order it.  If I want a headband the local stores won't have anything in the hard style I prefer.  I might get lucky with yarn in Ashland, but there's a better than 50% chance I'll have to special order.  Fabric is a total crapshoot.  And don't even get me started on clothes.

I tried ordering a bra.  It didn't fit well.  The cut was funny.  It didn't sit well on my shoulders.  The material bunched under my boobs.

It was a three week process to get it here.  It will be another three weeks before I can try on another one.  And another three weeks after that if I have to try on a third.  Over two months just to buy a bra.

It is what it is.  But it is everything.

I'm so heartsick over this that I cannot write today.  I blink out 1500 words like breathing most days.  Today my inability to simply go out and find something enjoyable to own is choking the words out of me.

Except for food.  I can always find some kind of yummy delicious food.

I'm trying to get healthier.  To keep my blood sugar under control.  To take some weight off my knees.  To burn enough stored fuel off my body to qualify for surgery to cut the loose skin away so maybe I can have a body that fits commercial standards before I die of old age.  The last thing I need in my life is more yummy food.

Someday they will cut into my body, all the way around my torso, once just above my hips and once somewhere not far under my breasts.  They will remove close to thirty pounds of skin.  They will use over a hundred stitches to close this massive incision.  They will install drains to allow my skin to weep as it heals.  They will wrap me in tight bandages for six long months that will likely force me to remain in my home for months on end, safe in my air conditioned bubble.

They will remove more skin from my thighs.  More skin from my arms.  They will remove most on my mons and outer labia.  I have no clue how they will handle my ass.

They will cut beneath my breasts, from armpit to center.  They will cut around my areolas.  They will cut a line connecting those two, remove pounds of skin, cut another line well up my breast, shift my areola up, and somehow stitch the whole jigsaw puzzle back together,  Then they will put plastic bags full of saline under the muscle behind my breast to fill it back out into a rounder, higher, perkier shape.  I may well lose all sensation in my breasts during this.  I may well never use them for love again.

This is because I do get infections in the places where the skin hangs, and there is no good treatment.  This is because the dangly bits are already getting in the way of movement.  This is because there is a good chance some of those dangly bits are full of toxins that will not keep well as I age.

But make no mistake, this is also because I would like to walk into a store and buy clothing off the rack just once in my life.

Quite honestly I'd like to skip the breast bit.  I can live without a naval but I am rather fond of my nipples.  But that would require finding a bra that fits and functions to keep everything up and secure and keep the infections away and all of that.  Which would require fitting said bra.  Which looks to only happen east of the Mississippi, or so says the Oracle of Google.

Granted it's entirely possible that removing the stomach bit will make bras fit better.  Funny but possible.

There is still something entirely wrong about having to contemplate surgery in order to shop.

And may I point out that it's not just me, and not just fat women.  There is no place in town that fits mastectomy bras anymore.  I feel horrible for the women with cancer, having to go through the 2-3 week ordering process over and over again to try to get a prosthetic to fit.  That's a geometric progression in the level of suck there.

At the moment I would be soothed by going out to pick up any dammed trinket that was not eatable.  A bar of soap.  A jar of lotion.  A skein of yarn.  Unfortunately nothing is reliable.  And I do not know how to sooth myself.

 Looks like I was able to write after all.

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Update:  Looks like losing weight actually works.  I tried on one of mu old underwires and it actually fit comfortably.  I have a roll/love handle under my breasts that used to push up on the wires when I sat, ramming them up into my armpit and into the skin of my breasts in a very uncomfortable manner.  But that roll isn't tight and hard anymore, it's loose and flabby and empty and it no longer pushes up when I sit, so the bra remains reasonably comfortable.

Still takes 2-3 weeks to get here, but at least now I know it will fit when it arrives.  And with a well-fitting bra I can avoid a breast lift.  I have truly wanted to avoid a breast lift.

I'm happier.  Life isn't perfect, but it never it.  It is however once again good enough.

Hot flashes, air ambulances and aliens.

Last night was rough.

I'm 43.  Now technically the average age of menopause is 51 in the US and technically it doesn't officially start until 12 months after your last period, but I've been getting my hormones in little brown bottles for a while now so I figure all bets are off on me being average about anything.  Hot flashes are slowly becoming more and more of a thing in my life, compounded by the Rogue Valley deciding not to do fall this year in any noticeable way.  Again.

So last night I went to bed at about 9:30.  It being a Sunday night I didn't take my evening anti-inflammatory because the week-end always throws my schedule off.  Skipping Sunday night resets it nicely and usually I'm asleep by the time the morning dose wears off, so I don't even notice.

Not last night.

At 10 I decided I was tired enough to put down my classic non-fiction book shut off a too-embarrassing to mention Reddit forum, pulled sleep braces over both wrists (yay carpal tunnel syndrome!) and drifted off.

At 11:30 I had my first hot flash of the night.

Of course I immediately pulled off my night shirt and every cover I owned and tried to cool off.  Then I remembered that Smokey, our 14 year old bastard of a cat, tends to have nightmares and wakes up fighting,  When he does he'll bite anything living, including any uncovered human limbs.  So I had to pull the burning hot sheet back over me and suffer for a while.

I spent the next two hours a) sweating and b) trying every combination of pillows I could find to attempt to not wake with a crick in my neck and shoulder.  I wake with said crick every morning and have for decades now.  But of late said crick has been disturbing me.  It use to be that I'd wake with the crick, stretch my shoulder down and back, and feel a joint somewhere around my shoulder or collarbone kind of slide back into place with a "thunk".  At which point the crick would go away and I'd go about my business.  But about a month ago it didn't go away and so I kept wiggling and I found that if I pushed down on my collarbone right at the nape of my neck a bone/joint in the back of my neck, aka my spine, went "thunk" back into place and made the crick go away,  Ever since it's been two thunks every morning, which is an easy fix but one in the spine simply cannot be good.  Last night every combination hurt my neck, which seemed likely to lead to The Crick, so I kept trying new ones.

The one thing I was not doing this time was sleeping.

I finally gave up, got up, remembered to put milk in my oats for later today, ignored the slugs on the floor (This has been a thing this summer,  Waking up to 2-4 slugs around the kitchen.  Still haven't figured out where they're coming from.) and checked the thermostat.  It was 78º in our house at 1 in the morning in October.  I cranked it down to 60º, then decided that the adult thing would be to not freeze the AC over by overworking it, again, and put it back to 65º before attempting to sleep once more.

It was only because I had sweated through the sleep braces I was wearing and they were stuck to my arms that kept me from hauling my shotgun out and shooting down the air ambulance that buzzed our neighborhood right about then.

At 2am I sent my husband a grumpy e-mail saying that if he woke me when his alarm went off at 4 (Mine was set for 3:30.  Not a chance this side of hell.) he'd be sleeping in the laundry basket with the other cats, but then I realized that breakfast comes with a side of anti-inflammatories so I got up.

Total sleep:  2.5 hours

During the process of getting dressed I realized that the Sunday bra really doesn't work for Mondays.  The Sunday bra doesn't have any holes, so I'm loathe to throw it out (I wear my clothes to rags, and then turn them into quilts if I can.  It's a Puritan thing,) but it doesn't support anything so it's only good for preventing headlights while lolling about on the couch and knitting.  Given that I did that yesterday today my kitchen looks like a bomb went off and support is needed.  So I went to the laundry closet to fetch a better bra.  This took me right past not one but three open windows, in full view of the back yard.

In my childhood I used to be scared of the dark.  I would never look out a window at night, convinced that if I did I would see creepy little alien things with big heads and long, skinny arms set about on mysteriously evil alien errands around our neighborhood.  And what's more, they would see me, and come after me because I knew something somehow.  So I never dared look out.  I figure I saw something once and it stuck with me in a strange way.  Odds are this was either a hallucination caused by medication (I took a lot of phenobarbital as a child.) or I saw some relatives of a sort off doing illicit things and buried the memory.  No desire to sort it out now, as an old friend Zeke once said if you don't remember you probably don't want to remember.

This morning I stood there in front of open windows, looking out over the dark of the backyard and thought that if the aliens were really that interested in my flabby, sagging, middle-aged menopausal, sleep-deprived tits they could come in and have a good look.  I was entirely out of fucks for aliens.

I consider this a sign of mental health.

That said the cats are currently whispering in the corners, which either negates the previous sentence, means I really need more sleep, or both.

I'm going back to bed.  Wish me luck.

Never certain what to say

Crafting continues apace here, but it never seems like there's enough progress to share pictures.  I'm currently working on a pair of socks for my Dungeon Kitty/husband, a cozy for a teapot with a difficult shape and a Xmas stocking in needlepoint that's also for my Dungeon Kitty/husband.  Just luck that he gets all the crafts this month.  Since it's past the midpoint of the month and I'm only finishing the first sock today if all goes well I doubt I'll get the pair finished by the end of the month, but next months projects promise to be simpler and so a little overlap is acceptable.  Less so on the needlepoint stocking, I'm woefully behind on that one and it must be done because next months needlepoint is even more complicated and will take the entire time and then some.

The other projects I'm working on around here are costumes for the holiday coming up.  (I have to teach the Dungeon Kitty/husband to use my sewing machine to sew faux fur.  Universe help me.) and then planning a holiday party for the first of December.  Things have to be ordered.  Things have to be acquired.  A tree must be found.  And festival is the same week-end.  In fact there is a ten day stretch starting with Thanksgiving which could have as many as seven events.  I'm going to have to start planning at the first of the month for *that* one.

I was considering something like a planner post, showing what I use for scheduling, or perhaps something like what the Modern Day 50's Housewife posts, chore charts for public accountability.  But that means drawing up the charts which would take away from knitting time today, and I am behind.  Perhaps when I catch up I'll do that here.  Day to day life in a Reverse 1950's Femdom household.   I don't know if anyone is actually following this, but if you are would you be interested at all?

There are no knitting elves, or at least there are no knitting elves in Oregon.  If I want things to show off I have to go work on them.  I'll check in again in a few days time.

Zelda's Fancy Hat

This project took all of September to finish.  That's a lot more embroidery than I was anticipating when I started.  I forgot you had to do all the seams as well.

Of course I didn't follow the pattern to the letter...

I used DMC instead of Weeks Dye Works, converting colors by the expedient method of looking up the Weeks color on line and picking a color that captured the spirit from my DMC stash.  I also used beads in place of the french knots, since I can't seem to french knot to save my life.  And I ended up winging some of the patterns, the chalk I was using to mark the embroidery patterns kept rubbing off.  For some of them I ended up going almost free-hand.  The beaded "lavender" on the cone being the best example.

And I didn't used cotton velveteen ($10.49/yard) for the base, I used poly "craft" felt ($4.79/yrd) instead.  Since I wasn't going to put a full cardboard bottom on the thing, for ease of storage, I cut a circle the size of the brim and sewed it on, turned it inside out through a slit cut in the middle of the felt, and topstitched around the edge of the brim and where the cone attached to the brim.  Then I stuffed the cone, slid a piece of template plastic cut to fit the base of the cone in there, and slip stitched the slit in the felt closed.  The felt won't unravel, the plastic will hold the stuffing in place, and the brim will fold down to fit in a storage box.  And since it sits on my coffee table the brim doesn't have to be perfectly flat.  (It sits flatter than it does in these pictures.

All in all I like it a lot.  It was a big, complicated project for me, the kind of thing I wouldn't have attempted a few years back.  But I decided to give it a go and it came out better than I expected.  I am quite happy with Zelda's hat.

Atheism, Dystheism, and the news today

Which is why I came back to this in the first place.

First off, a few definitions.

Atheism:

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which, in its most general form, is the belief that at least one deity exists.

And Dystheism:

Dystheism (from Greek δυσ- dys-, "bad" and θεός theos, "god"), is the belief that a god, goddess, or singular God is not wholly good as is commonly believed (such as the monotheistic religions of Christianity and Judaism), and is possibly evil.

So how does that work? You don't believe in God and yet you think God is evil?

I don't believe there is a great, intelligent, SkyDaddy up there running things and making good and bad things happen. I do believe in the concept of the Meme:

A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem) is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture". A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

(See also the evolutionary psychology of religion)

Memes tend to pass along like a virus. Not conscious, not sentient, not even truly alive, but very much there.  And the "virus" we call American Christianity is entirely evil.

I'll set aside the discussion of how I got there as it gets a little strange, and get into today's topic.

I'm sure everyone has heard of Kim Davis, a county clerk from Kentucky who is a believer in American Christianity and who is refusing to do her job and issue marriage licences to same sex couples.  Or to any couples.  Or to any couples if she has to sign it.  It's a little confusing at times but the big takeaway is that she's rabidly homophobic.  

She's also the darling of the followers of American Christianity,  She was invited to speak at their big political summit recently, along with many other examples of people poisoned by these evil memes.  They adore her for being their champion, and so on.  If you want to curry favor with the rest of the infected at this particular moment in time cozying up to her is a good way to do it.

In the other corner of today's triangle is Pope Francis.  While he is the leader of the largest Christian denomination on the planet he doesn't seem to be infected by the evil memes I call American Christianity.  He seems like a modest sort who genuinely loves everyone as Jesus loved everyone.  While he is still against gay marriage as far as Wikipedia can tell he's not rabidly homophobic. And he is not the sort to support a rabid homophobe.

So why on earth did he have a private meeting with Kim Davis on his trip to the US?

Apparently someone set him up:

On Friday, the Vatican’s press office reiterated that the meeting with Davis was not meant to be interpreted as an endorsement of her views, but rather a simple exchange of pleasantries between the Pope and a group of admirers, one of whom happened to be Davis. The Vatican also emphasized that the only one-on-one meeting that Pope Francis had during his time in Washington, D.C. was with Yayo Grassi, a gay man and former student of the Pope’s. But the Vatican appears to go one step further to make it clear that the Holy See in no way endorses Kim Davis’ bigotry. 

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who arranged the Pope’s meetings in Washington (including the one with Kim Davis), is expected to be held responsible for blowback resulting from the meeting with Davis. According to the New York Times, Viganò is “likely to be removed at the first respectable opportunity” if blowback from the meeting with Davis continues to build 

“The pope has to be able to rely on his own system, and in this case the system failed him,” theology professor Dr. Massimo Faggioli told the Times. “The question is, was it a mistake, or was it done with full knowledge of how toxic she was?”

I cannot imagine anyone living in the US and not knowing how toxic her belief system is. 

So who is this Archbishop?  Good question.  There's not a lot out there about him that predates this incident.  But according to the Times he's a cultural conservative and is a associated with National Organization for Marriage which is a major disseminator of the American Christianity meme.  He's also the one at the top of the org chart for dealing with all the multi-million dollar sex-scandal lawsuits.  Offending the American Christianity people is a good way to turn off the donation money tap.  

But an Archbishop trying to pull one over on the Pope to cozy up to the American Christianity leaders?  That's kind of a big deal, no?  I think that's a prime example of how infectious these toxic memes can be.  They can turn an Archbishop against the Pope.

Here's to hoping this shocks Pope Francis into realizing that not all of his advisers, especially those from the US, are reliable.  Maybe it will make him look at the topic of gay marriage with fresh eyes.  And here's to hoping he can keep these toxic memes from spreading beyond our borders.

Time to catch up a lot

Like I said, it's not that I don't do things, I'm just crap at blog keeping.

So what have I been up to all summer.  Well....

I finished the Log Cabin quilt.

I made up a little cross-stitch picture I have been carrying around with me since 1985, or thereabouts.

More on that when I talk about being an ACoN.

We bought a couch.  I made some pillows for the couch, and finished two of them,

There's a third but it's not finished.  The back is going to be a whack-load of garter and I have other whack-loads of garter that are a priority right now.

I finished the embroidery on Zelda's Fancy Hat.  It's due to be made up tomorrow, I'll share picts when it's done.

I wrote roughly 250,000 words of fan fiction, and published a lot of it:

Of The Blue - which is a rift on Templar fiction 

XX - Which involves my take on a trans character.  (I took some personal experience and blew it up by about a million or so.  If you don't like it, well, not your story.) 

The Willow Tree - My take on how the Dominionists might try to set up the perfect society. 

The Gift - Aliens and unexpected relationships 

Percival's Dominatrix - A not-yet finished, likely epic length, cross-over between CM and CSI, with lots of kink.

And two others still unpublished.  Still haven't made it all commercially viable.

I spent a lot of time at the gym:

That's just over 100 lbs gone, and down to approximately 30% body fat.  It's also a work in progress, but it's going well.

I read books.  I watched porn.  I spent too much time on Reddit.

And the husband and I finally decided to make this a formal Female-Led relationship, in the alt-sex sense, so I collared him.  We've gone more or less 24/7 into it and have joined the local community.  And we're both really, really happy with the way this is working in our lives.

And since that's out I might as well come out about religion. politics and all the rest of it, which I will do in the near future.  Hopefully I will be a better blogger in the future.