I’m at an amazing conference right now but feeling introverted at the moment so I’m here instead of interacting with flesh and blood people. :)

My niece, who disappeared months ago (she lives off grid, in an anarchist community), has reappeared. I’m going to spend the day with her.

Apart from that, I’m using my vacations to help my partner in her craft business to prepare a fan convention.

Busy week for me so far and I am knackered. Been out and about with work which is nice but it’s so tiring being sociable on a Monday, usually I work from home in my pyjamas. Finally got an answer regarding my salary, it’s not going down in April after all. I think appealing to my director did it, for a manager she is pretty great.

Performing in a concert on the weekend as well as doing a choral workshop so I will be amazed if I can speak on Sunday. Going to a work conference up north(ish) next week which will be fun. Staying in a relatively posh hotel overnight and cannot wait.

Not too shabby. Weather is cooling off, days getting shorter, I love it. Work is good. Hired some random cat off the street a couple weeks ago, and while he may not be the most productive member of the team, he’s fitting right in.

I’m so busy with my work that I tend to forget to talk more on here 🙃 but other than that I have hope that thing will get better for me. Mentally and financially!

Hope you all are doing ok or better soon.

I miss my mum. She’s been dead a few years now, and was elderly and in poor health. And I am a grown up. But sometimes I just want to be able to lay down next to her again and feel safe. I really miss her.

I will be ok. Just needed to tell someone. And if I tell anyone here in my real world they will want to make it better or something and it can’t be. It just is.

chuck was adopted on wednesday! he’s doing well with his new family. i’m back down to two dogs in the house, and we’ll probably stay that way for a couple of months.

the weekend was full of multiple parties including a block party across the street which featured the local professional wrestling troupe. they’re always very entertaining!

i’ve come down with some kind of nose/throat thing, but at least the covid test came back negative. this is the third time i’ve been sick this year, and it hasn’t even gotten chilly here yet. i’m usually one to get sick maybe one a year in the wintertime, so i don’t know what’s got me all outta whack this year.

I’m on my first vacation since 2015. Decided to treat myself to three nights at the ocean and the weather was perfect. I stood in the waves and just took it all in. Then I took a scenic train ride on a steam train and it was magical. No complaints.

Not so great. My Grandma passed away a few days ago due to breast cancer. I got to see her and say what I wanted to say to her about a month ago but it doesn’t make the hurt go away.

Magical, which would take too long to explain, and am off on an unexpected road trip later in the week with some new friends.

Feeling good, which is… weird but very welcome.

The fairies are real, people. The fairies are real.

{screaming intensifies}

There is a guy on my degree course who actually made me consider crashing my car, because that seemed preferable to having to keep tolerating him. Given that I’m not generally prone to such thoughts, that says something about the severity of my reaction to his behaviour. I have met lots of arrogant people, and I can cope with those. I have met lots of stupid people, and I can cope with those. But the combination of this guy’s incredible arrogance and his profound incompetence at virtually every task is having a severe impact on my mental health, in large part because he’s a team member on a group project and I’m the team leader, which means I can’t ignore him and it’s me who has to fix his many, many fuck-ups so that the whole project isn’t derailed.

When I assign him a task that is actually within his abilities (and where it won’t matter much if the output isn’t great), he refuses to do it because he considers it beneath him. He insists on doing something important and central to the project, and literally won’t stop doing it when I tell him to stop (and it’s not like I have the option to physically stop him). When he fucks it up, which he does every single time, he argues with me when I tell him to do it again and do it properly. Repeat two or three times until he’s actually done it right. Or, you know, until I give up and just fix it myself, because that often takes less time than arguing with him.

On top of this, he constantly interrupts me to try to tell me how to do the things I’m working on, because he’s under the erroneous impression that he knows more than me. He doesn’t. We come from different subject backgrounds prior to starting this degree, and in short, the tasks I’m working on for the project relate to my subject background, not his. A particular task he was lecturing me about today is one I was graded over 95% for last year. The way he was telling me to do it was flat out wrong, and I had to be ruder than I like to be in order to get him to back off, because “no, I got this” wasn’t cutting it.

I am not the only one who is frustrated. 30% of the class have expressed annoyance or anger. One fellow student bought noise cancelling headphones for the sole purpose of not having to listen to him. Pretty sure he was a contributing factor in another student dropping out. The others are probably just too polite or shy to say anything. But we are currently teacher-less due to an unforeseen medical emergency, so largely in an “independent study” phase, which makes it difficult to get help.

So there is screaming into the void.

Son started having trouble breathing on Saturday around noon. Nurse line said take him to urgent care, urgent care doc looked at him for just thirty seconds before saying “Take him to the emergency room. Don’t bother with the local ones, go straight to the children’s hospital, they’ll just transfer him anyway.” Then we had a very busy four hours at the children’s ER where everyone was very serious and urgent and we’ve been in the PICU ever since.

So, not well.