Bringing it up to date
Some months ago, as part of the Fandom Snowflake Challenge, I did a cryptic list of the fics I intended to write in 2016 ( here). Posting it that way was my attempt at commitment: it would be harder for me to let it slide it was there for people to see.
That was the theory, anyhow. With one thing and another, it wasn’t until this week that I posted the first fic - “ Curious Poses”, the ‘CP’ on my projected fic list - which doesn’t at all accord with the one-per-month average I needed to maintain. (More positively, I’m already a few hundred words into ‘tONIDoK’, the next on that list.) Because I was genuinely serious about the commitment, however, the more tardy I was in finishing that first story, the less inclined I was to let myself indulge in anything else on LiveJournal. The result is that, except for a few comments on other folks’ posts, I let my LJ presence lapse to near-nothing for three months.
Since my last Fandom Snowflake Challenge post, then, the following things have occurred:
My wife ultimately spent five weeks off work, some before her surgery but much of it in the necessary period of recovery. She’s dissatisfied with her job these days, though, plus she’s nearing retirement age and wants to enhance her eventual pension by getting in a “high three” years of advanced pay. For this purpose, she’s put in applications at other VA facilities, with possibilities (so far) in North Carolina, Texas, San Francisco, and Seattle. If she gets one of those, she’ll move there for three years while I stay with our house. (Texas is the one she wants, because it’s either the highest-paying or nearly so, but with cost-of-living nowhere near that of Seattle or SanFran.)
On the other hand, she might hope to get Seattle after all - high COL notwithstanding - because our son Kevin plans to move back from China to the States this summer, with Mei-li and Amber following shortly, and Seattle is their preferred destination. (Opportunities there, according to Kevin, plus a surprisingly large Chinese community.) I don’t particularly care where they end up, as long as it’s back in the USA.
At my job, I had a formal complaint filed against me by a Social Justice Warriorette co-worker because I said some things about Islam that she didn’t like. We got along fine before then - in fact, on-the-job interaction had been a pleasure for us both - but she’s apparently one of those people so dedicated to Tolerance that she isn’t willing to grant any to anyone who doesn’t agree with her on her Sacred Subjects. (To give some indication of the intellectual rigor of her reasoning, the actually cited - in an argument defending Islam - the kind of treatment that ‘she as a lesbian’ would receive from people literally following certain passages on the Old Testament. Remind me again: in which Christian and Jewish nations today are people routinely executed in public for the “crime” of homosexuality? because I’m positive I’ve been seeing something similar in recent news reports …) In the end we both got negative counseling statements, on the principle that we should have had better sense than to get into an argument over sensitive subjects at work. My mistake was in thinking that I was talking to someone I knew, rather than a dedicated and inflexible ideologue. At bottom, I disagreed with her exactly as much as she disagreed with me … but my response to the disagreement was to say to myself, Okay, clearly these are things we don’t need to be talking about with each other, and hers was to try and get me fired because she “didn’t feel comfortable” being around someone whose opinions weren’t the same as hers.
That isn’t the only thing going on at my work; sales are down from last year, there’s pressure on everyone to turn that around, we have new management and have had half a dozen people quit or transfer (with two more already in the process of doing same). It’s been a decent enough job, but I’m finding myself more and more dissatisfied, and have been giving serious consideration to a return to trucking. In fact, that may happen even within the next couple of months, because as a driver I spent a lot of time away from home but the pay was much better and I didn’t get micromanaged so much. Or, I might just try and find something better-paying that doesn’t have me out on the road all the time; I have the classified ads right next to me, to start checking things over.
The house where Susan and I are living (and on which we’ve been paying for seven years now) was either built or heavily modified by the previous owner, a man who had a great deal of ingenuity in do-it-yourself stuff but no serious knowledge of the proper way to do things. On the back deck - which he also apparently built himself - one of the supports was rested on a heavy timber piling … which spent the last several years rotting out of sight, because it crumbled last week and had the support go straight through it. The result is that a part of our floor is bowed upward (by the fact of the other side being pulled down by the part of the back deck that dropped nine inches) and now a few of our doors won’t open all the way. One of a number of things that will have to be repaired, when there’s really no money to spare. Life continues to insist on being interesting.
Probably some other stuff, but that’s all I can remember just now.
I can’t afford to wait so long between posts.