Sing me a story, laugh me a lullaby

Well, it's almost New Year's Eve, which means it's almost 2025 and time for my December update. I did manage to keep my resolution of posting at least once a month this year, so huzzah!

I hope everyone enjoyed/is enjoying their winter holiday celebrations or chilling if they do not have such celebrations. Ours were slightly delayed by circumstances, but we did get around to it on Boxing Day. We usually celebrate on Christmas Eve, but on the 23rd, my mum fell on the ceramic tile at the front door because her wet shoes made her feet go out from under her. She was fine, nothing broken or anything, but literally a few minutes after that happened, I got a text from my brother that Jack, his elder cat, had gone into diabetic shock on the 22nd and had been having seizures on and off. So we decided to postpone until everything calmed down and I am happy to report Jack is doing okay and Mum is extremely sore, but not severely damaged. We went to my brother's on the 26th and had a lovely time despite our woes, and met my brother and his wife's new cat, Jake, who is a 13-year-old rescue they adopted after they very unexpectedly lost their younger cat over the summer. He's a sweet boy and slept on my mum's lap the whole night, and Jack slept in a box in the living room with his face hidden, which was very social for him. He usually hides upstairs when there's company. He seems to be doing much better now.

I am exhausted, which is not unusual post Christmas. I also recently discovered I am slightly anaemic and have low B12, which may explain why I've been feeling yucky lately. I'm looking forward to resting now that the Christmas bustle is done. We had so many appointments through the autumn, and this year in general has just been a lot of stuff happening. I feel like I've learned a lot about myself as a person, but the existential crisis of it all is kind of tiring. I'm going into 2025 with a mindset of focussing on self-care and avoiding doomscrolling and finding joy in the things and people I love and letting what I can't change go.

I wish you all the best of New Year's and I will talk to you in January!

Hello! Here I am for a short August update, just under the wire as always.

It has been a time, I have to say. I do not know what the Bard family has done to piss off the tooth fairy, but my brother's elder cat, my dad, and I have all had tooth infections/extractions in the last six weeks and it has just been one damn thing after another.

The Olympics and Paralympics have provided a lovely distraction from all the stress, and I've been really improving on my drawing/colouring, and tomorrow we're visiting my brother and his wife at the cottage tomorrow.

Hopefully the tooth fairy will chill out soon.

Enjoy your Labour Day if you are in an area where that is a thing, and I hope you are doing well and you have happy teeth.

Squeezing in under the line here in my resolution to post at least once a month. Happy Easter to those who celebrate, and for those who don’t, enjoy your time off!

I write from Oliver IV, my new iPad. Mum’s old iPad finally reached the point where her games weren’t running on it anymore and she reluctantly decided to get a new one. Hers was ten years old, which is like a thousand in electronic years, so kudos to her for her loyalty. My old iPad got knocked on the floor a few months back and the screen cracked, just a hairline crack that was hardly noticeable and not worth replacing it over, but my Apple Pencil kept getting stuck in the crack when I was trying to do art. I got a screen protector, but then the Pencil didn’t glide properly, so Mum and I agreed mine was in good working order and she’d take mine and I’d get a new one for myself. I splurged and got the Magic Keyboard Folio, which turns it into a laptop, essentially, and it was totally worth it. I love being able to write wherever I am and it’s much easier to plug my microphone in for singing, instead of having to take the whole thing out of the case for my dongle to work.

I was hoping it would inspire some creativity in me, but I’m still really struggling in all aspects of it. I’ve long suspected I have some form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I am just toast at the moment. My body aches and I’m exhausted no matter how much I sleep and my brain is foggy. Mum thinks it’s a sort of good thing, that I was too sick before to realize how sick I was. I was in just ‘one foot in front of the other’ mode, and now I’m well enough to want to do things, but not well enough to actually do them. It’s very frustrating. On the bright side, the stones have been pretty good lately, which is probably the reason I’m so tired. All my adrenaline is gone and now I’m beat.

I have been managing to do a sign language course online, though. The Oklahoma School for the Deaf is offering ASL I and II online for free until June, video lessons you can do at your own pace. I did ASL I many years ago, so I signed up for ASL II and I seem to remember most of what I already knew. The lessons are fun, but my only complaint is how much vocabulary they introduce per unit. I swear they teach you thirty new signs each lesson, all in a row, and then you’ve forgotten it by the time you’re onto the next part. I’ve managed to pick up the grammar with relative ease, but when I’m trying to do the sentence exercises, I stumble over remembering which one of the thirty signs they just shoved at me I need to use. I know I can go back and review the older lessons to cram, but I don’t think that’s the way my brain works. I prefer to learn the vocab in context rather than just a list. In any case, I’m enjoying it and it makes me feel like I’m succeeding at something, even if my creative brain is lacking at the moment.

I’m also rewatching due South. I’m about halfway through Season 2 now. It’s probably been over a decade since I last watched it and I’d forgotten just how incredibly good a show it is. So far, it’s holding up really well for a show that’s nearly thirty years old. There are a few jokes that are a little iffy now, but Fraser is usually correcting whoever says them to point out they aren’t appropriate anyway. So much time has passed now and TV has changed so much, it’s making me appreciate even more how great a protagonist he is. I feel like every hero you get now has to be a snarky, dark asshole struggling his way through the world fighting his own demons, where Fraser is positive example of non-toxic masculinity. He’s respectful of those around them, he’s kind, he’s gentle, he only uses violence as a last resort. He has trauma and flaws and vulnerabilities, but most of the struggles come from his interactions with world. I also just like that the show itself isn’t dark and gritty, it’s fun and silly with undertones of drama that develop the characters. It’s lacking in diversity and the female characters aren’t always the best, but for its time, I feel like it holds up pretty well. I’d also forgotten how many car chases are in it. I swear half their budget must have gone into car chases. It’s delightful to rewatch it and remember all the good things about it. And spot baby actors, like, hello impossibly young Mark Ruffalo and Ryan Phillippe, what the hell are you doing here?

That’s all for now. Hope everyone is doing well!

Gracious me! I keep meaning to post and keep putting it off. But I wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving to the Yanks, so I figured I'd take the time to do a proper post while I'm here. Happy Thanksgiving, Yanks!

I feel like both a lot of stuff has been going on and yet nothing's really happened, which is weird. It's more, there's a lot of activity but not a lot of progress, I guess. I have my new mattress and a new fan, and we got my old bed out of my room. Unfortunately, my new bed did not work out. Flat pack furniture is always hit and miss and the central support of this one was flimsy and poorly made. I had two nights before it gave out, thankfully not while I was in it. Much drama was had, but we think we can salvage parts of it to make a new set up. We got it on very good sale, so if we can get anything out of it, the money won't be wasted. Right now my mattress is on the floor, but I'm having my best sleep in months, possibly years down there, so we're thinking we might see if we can rig something lower for me. I feel like my room is a doomed venture; every time I try to work on it, something goes awry. But I am always grateful that I at least have a place to sleep and that we have the means to experiment.

We also had a family friend pass away. My sister-in-law's aunt, Barb, died a few weeks ago. My SIL's family has always been kind enough to include us in their gatherings, so we spend quite a bit of time with her, despite the distant connection. She was developmentally delayed and lived in a care home, and was such a bright, happy spirit, always very fun to be around. She was seventy-two and lived a good, adventurous life. She even went to the Special Olympics as a swimmer, which we didn't know until the memorial service. She will be missed.

Mum's health has improved; she went to the doctor and got some extra meds and is feeling a lot better on them. My stones have been pretty good, but the weather has made me migrainey. Any fellow migraineurs get deja vu or presque vu with their auras? I've had some weird bouts of that lately that I think are related.

Also, Paxie had graduated from the kitchen at last! We still put him in there at night and when none of us are home, but otherwise, he's allowed to wander as he pleases during the day, except in the bedrooms. Mostly because they're messy and full of temptation, which is our fault not his.

I've been watching a show on CBC Gem called "Miss S". It's a Chinese version of "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries", which Mum and I watched all of and loved. "Miss S" is set in 1930s Shanghai instead of Australia, but otherwise the characters and stories are mostly the same, just localized. It's been just long enough since I watched Miss Fisher for me to forget who the culprit is, so I don't mind the stories repeating, and I find the changes they make to suit the culture really interesting. The actors are really great and the leads are adorable and have great chemistry. There's a bit of a cultural gap on my part, not so much within the show, but the differences between Chinese and western media. Like, whenever a character comes on screen for the first time, their name pops up next to them to tell you who they are, and one scene had the lyrics of the song being played on the screen. I had to figure that out by screenshotting and running the picture through Google Translate, because the subtitles were not giving me the names or the lyrics and I didn't know what was happening at first. The subtitles are a little hit or miss, mostly just in that they are awkward sometimes. 'That's very sorry' instead of 'that's very unfortunate' and inadvertently making me laugh when a character describes his brother being murdered in a somewhat brutal fashion and follows it up with 'it really gets me down', to which Miss S agrees 'yes, it gets me down, too'. I feel like there was probably a more appropriate way to translate that sentiment than something akin to 'what a bummer, dude'. There also seems to be a trope that if anything romantic is happening it turns to slo-mo and soap opera-like music plays. They only made one season, apparently, but there are 30 episodes (15 stories of two episodes each), so lots to watch, and I've enjoyed what I've seen so far. CBC Gem is region locked, but it looks like it's on Prime, Apple, and Max, so if you have any of those, you can check it out. It's a lot of fun, not too too violent, and the recurring actors are all adorable and have great chemistry together.

Anyway, hope all are doing well in these continually crazy times. Enjoy your festivities if you are festiviting and take care of yourselves!

Hola!

I've had my new glasses for a few days now and it is a night and day difference to the old pairs. It's so nice to be able to just...see things at all times, without having to choose between near and far. I didn't have too much trouble getting used to them, so that was good. Though my eyes get tired around 7:00 every night and kind of go out of focus, like they're just over seeing for the day. I'm sure it will get better in time.

An interesting development has occurred in the process of adjusting to the glasses, however. I have long complained of text having a kind of 'halo' around it, sort of like when you add an outer glow in Photoshop. I assumed it was a problem with my eyes, which are shitty and have always been shitty. I mentioned it to the eye doctor this last time and she sort of shrugged it off, so I didn't think it was a big deal. I thought it might get better with the new glasses, but it didn't. So, I decided to do a bit of a Google and see if anything came up, and it turns out it can be a sign of dyslexia. And my first thought was 'oh, I can't have dyslexia'. I've always loved to read and read at several grade levels above my own, and obviously, I'm a writer, so it seemed impossible. Dyscalculia, yes, for sure, I've thought that for a while, but not dyslexia. For interest's sake, I did some research and...um, I might have some form of mild dyslexia?

I'm not going to armchair diagnose myself, but I do fit a lot of the symptoms of it. I didn't know text isn't supposed to feel like you were chasing it around the page. I didn't know most people don't repeatedly lose which line of text they're on and have to find it again. Inability to distinguish left and right? Check. Can't tell time on an analog clock? Check. Misses out words when writing? Check. Poor handwriting, pain while writing with a pen, doubles or misses letters? Check. Trouble expressing oneself orally, including using opposite words like chair when you want to say table or fork instead of spoon, or getting stuck on a word or phrase that won't come out? Check. Like, I though these were all either things that everyone did or just that I did. Like Bard quirks that were Just Bard Things.

One of the suggestions I saw for the halo around text was to change the background to red or yellow and see if that helped, which it did so much. I also bought a cheap set of coloured overlay bookmarks from Amazon to see if that made a different reading on paper, and yeah, it just, like, pinned the words to the page, like it was holding them down for me to read. So, I don't know? It could just all be an eye thing. My problem is ambylopia (lazy eye) and the definition of that is my eyes don't work together. It's nice to have the workaround of the overlays, though, it should make reading and writing more enjoyable. It's just a weird thing to discover at almost 36 years old.

In other news, we have hella COVID here again, because our Premier is an idiot who decided to get rid of mask mandates. Masks are now optional, though I'd say about 75% of the people I see still have theirs on, including us. My brother tested positive for COVID a couple of days ago, though, and he always wears a mask. But he's been out at the gym and at restaurants, so more of a higher risk of exposure there. He says he's doing fine, and his wife hasn't tested positive yet, though last report said she was a little under the . They're both vaxxed and boosted, which should help. We're lucky though, my dad had asked my brother to help with something this past weekend and my brother forgot about it, so didn't come over. If he had, we would have been exposed.

The weather is getting nice again, and we're getting a new hot tub installed next Thursday. Ours has been broken for over a year, and I'm looking forward to the pain relief from having one again. Stones have been on and off troublesome, but overall, I think a little better.

Hope everyone else is hanging in there! The world is scary and stressful, so care take of yourselves!

Hello, all! I hope your holiday season is progressing acceptably, regardless of your preferred holiday or lack there of. Ours has been mixed.

Good news: we solved the bathtub situation by running a hose up the the laundry chute and it works well.
Bad News: it's a bit annoying to have to yell down the stairs to turn the water on and off and you have no control over the temperature once it's going unless you yell down again for adjustment.

Bad news: We had a massive windstorm and part of our fence blew over.
Good news: we still keep Pax in a penned area for his own safety, so he didn't/can't escape.

Bad news: we've got hella COVID cases here now.
Good news: still pretty low, like, overall. Just high for us.
Bad news: we can't gather in more than groups of five, so we couldn't go to my brother and sister-in-law's for her family's get together again, which we do enjoy doing.
Good news: There are exactly five of us in our immediately family, so in-person Christmas is still on (barring any emergencies)

Good news: There are now booster shots here
Bad news: They did that stupid thing they've done for all doses so far which is to announce an orderly roll by age group, wait a few weeks, then go 'vaccines for everyone!!' and let us all fight for them. Every. Single. Time.
Good news: I have fought and won! Dad got his today, and Mum and I are going next week. It only took me hours of refreshing and waiting in virtual queues! Do not underestimate my ability to patiently wait my turn. I will queue politely for hours, jerks.

So, all is copacetic, but slightly stressful here. Which is usual for Christmas. We are enjoying our specials and music, though.

Ahoy-hoy! How are you all doing today? Are you watching the Olympics? Because we are. All the time. The Bard Family household is 24/7 Olympics every two years, and I love it. I don't care if I don't know the sport. I learn how Judo works every four years, and Mom and I found out how to play rugby this year, and we talk about the diving like we are experts. We hand off information to each other like we're reporters taking shifts, updating on what happened while someone wasn't watching. When we don't have athletes playing, CBC will show a random event, which is how I found myself watching the table tennis final for the men the other day, and the commentators were so entertaining. There was an American and a Brit and the American one loves table tennis more than any other commentator I have heard loves their sport. You would have thought they held the Olympics solely for table tennis, that everyone in the world was on the edge of their seats waiting for this match, that all that mattered in the world was table tennis. And the Brit was a very calm, interested fellow who was not quite so enthusiastic, but treated it like we were watching a high drama soap opera. It was great. The American one was even excited when the Sweat Squad came out to clean off the table. You go, American Table Tennis guy, you live your Table Tennis life.

It's a good thing we have the Olympics to distract us, because man, have we had a series of unfortunate events around here for the last couple of weeks. It started with a seven-hour blackout during a huge storm, where we didn't have power from 9 PM to 4 AM, and which is inconvenient for my father and me who need CPAP machines to sleep and those need power. Then I broke my toe, or at least sprained it badly, by stubbing it on the dog gate. I let out a scream I have never before screamed. If it is broken, it's not out of alignment, so there's nothing to be done by going to the hospital, according to Nurse Mum. It's very, very bruised, but it doesn't hurt unless I'm wearing shoes. We then found out our much-beloved massage therapist is moving to literally the other side of the country, my dad almost got scammed by a fake tech support person (no damage done, just stressfu), and the new mattress my parents are waiting on didn't come on the truck, so they aren't getting it this weekend as planned. But, at least there's the Olympics.

Other--good--things are happening, too, though. I have Pax's leash putting on licked; he'll do it no hesitation now. We went to see my brother and sister-in-law at the cottage and hung out with her father and his partner, and had a lovely time (we're all double vaxxed). And I'm learning to colour lineart on my iPad, and it's going super well and I'm loving it.

So, that's all. Hope you are well in this continously strange times.

Hello there! Happy Passover to those celebrating and happy almost Easter to those celebrating. I hope you will be doing so in a fashion most safe for your current state of vaccination and/or COVID caseload.

We're still really behind on vaccinations here. Despite the fact that my parents can now both be vaccinated, there is no vaccine to be given, and the one that they will likely get is the AstraZeneca one which no one can decide is safe or not, so yay. My dad is looking at late April for his first dose. I have to say, I think Canada did, like, okay on COVID. Not the best, not the worst. But the way they've handled vaccinations sucks. It's confusing and complicated and annoying.

/rant

We finished our Easter tree! Pic:


It's in our window, so I closed the curtain to get better lighting for it. I think it's cute, and it was super fun making everything.

I have my new glasses. They were a bitch to get used to, but they are helping. I've had way fewer headaches since I got them, though the first four days were so painful I was almost in tears. My eyes were so confused about what I wanted them to do. I usually have something similar with a new prescription, but this was worse than anything I'd had before. Switching between the two pairs isn't as hard as I thought it might be, though I still realize I'm in the wrong ones occasionally. I've made a glasses case to hang around my neck and carry whatever pair I'm not using.

Finally, here is a picture of Pax, being his smiling self:



See you soon!

Hello, world! Another check-in post.

Things are fine here. My area has tanked our COVID numbers again, and we've had several days with no new cases reported, so that's really great. Ontario is still in lockdown, though, and we don't know for how much longer we will remain in it. It's not too big a deal for us, who don't do a lot, but Pax is starting to look shaggy and his nails are too long and we'd like to get him groomed. Not that it matters to him. He's perpetually happy.

I've finally trained him to put on a slip-lead! He HATES putting a collar or leash on, and we've sort of got him going on his collar now, though some days he just nopes out and won't come near us. But we want to get him used to putting on a slip-lead to help brush him, and he was so stressed, it was awful to try to get it on him. So, I invested in a clicker to try clicker training and now he does it without a treat! He's very smart and overthinks everything, and I think he thought that what I wanted him to do was try to steal the treat from my hand. But with the clicker, he figured out he was supposed to put his head through and wait for the treat. I also got him to shake hands with his other paw, which is something we couldn't sort out, either. I love him, but he is a handful to live with. He ate part of a tennis ball last week or at least chewed it to bits, and we have no idea where he got the tennis ball. I thought he had a chew toy, so didn't see what he was up to until he'd torn it open and chewed half of it up. He was fine, not sick at all, luckily, but it was a stressful night. And today he pulled all my computer cables out of the wall. I also don't know how he did that. But, baby steps! Celebrate the victories!

Other than working on crocheting myself a cardigan, I haven't been up to much. I'm sort of frustrated with myself and my health at the moment. I feel a little like I'm stuck in my body and I can't get out. The stones are doing a lot better, so I'm trying to celebrate the victories, there, but I'm just so tired and sore and can't lose weight no matter what I try. I'm not depressed or anything, but I think I'm in the 'anger' phase of recovery, where I'm just a little frustrated about it all. On the bright side, despite the fact that I had to stop the birth control pills due to side effects, my period cramps have been totally manageable with the TENS machine. Hopefully, with both the cramps and the stones on the down low, I can start to properly rest and get myself together again.

Anyway, hope you are all surviving and doing well!

Well, 2018 refuses to leave without a few more 'lol, let's mess with the Bard Family' incidents. I woke up from a nap on Wednesday to find the gas company van outside our house. I thought it was for next door, but then Mum informed me there was a gas leak. Apparently, the patch of dead grass on our front lawn is a sign of a gas leak, which we didn't know. But it's been there for at least two years as far as we can remember, so...yeah, that's a long time. And the gas man didn't think there would be any issues inside, but the gas meter showed gas in the basement. Therefore, it's quite possible we've had a gas leak in our basement for two or more years. Obviously, a very slight one ('small and slow' is how they put it) or something very bad would have happened by now. They didn't even ask us to leave the house while they fixed it. But with all the headaches and dizziness I get, and my dad coughs a lot and he's in the basement way more than Mum or I, we're wondering if that's had an effect on us. Anyway, they fixed the leak. Except while they were doing it, they cut the cable that carries our phone, internet, and tv. According to them, they asked the cable company to come and map it for them and the cable company said it would be cheaper for them to cut and them to fix it then to send a person to map it out. The cable people claim the gas people never call and don't care if they cut lines. Whatever, the line was still cut. And they couldn't send someone to fix it until this afternoon.

So, for the last 48 hours, we've had no phone, internet, or cable. It was an exercise in entertainment oneself old-school style. We listened to a lot of music and the radio, and we went and joined the library, which we had been meaning to do anyway, but we were able to borrow a movie from there for last night and now we have access to Hoopla, which is cool.

But yes, no fun. On the bright side, no more gas in our house! And there are far worse things to be without than TV and Internet; it's important to remember that. Still, 2019 can hurry up and come along any time it wants.