В жизни как обычно нет гармонии
There was a birthday in there.
What I usually get for my birthday is mostly depressed, and have to work quite hard to forestall utter despair, but this year had its decks extra stacked against me.
Spouse had an opportunity to go to New York that weekend, and a month ago that seemed like a grand idea - I might take time off and run around town and we'd have evenings in the city together. Then with Omicron this seemed like a bad, bad idea, and I asked him if he could decline the trip and resigned myself to the notion of a quiet weekend in.
Then his work situation became more dire, and he'd had to un-decline, such that he'd leave town the Wednesday before my birthday and return on Sunday after it. But given Omicron it seemed like a very bad plan to go with.
I still took a day off on my birthday, because last year I hardly took any time off and I feel like work owes me, so I've been looking for excuses, and had asked for it along with my usual annual standing requests of Jewish holidays and conventions and the like.
So I settled in for a mostly quiet solo weekend.
A party was definitely well beyond what I thought reasonable in Omicron Times, and the weather absolutely precluded anything but lurking indoors. But a pair of my equally cautious friends were willing to come and keep me company for the evening, so this was nice. (One of them even offered to drop by early given my day off. He didn't actually manage to get here until nearly off work time, but that he had a thought in the first place was appreciated.)
The evening prior I had a craving and obsessively made a flourless chocolate cake with a rum glaze. It kept me occupied, I suppose. I read a bunch, too. Later in the evening I tossed up a last-minute zoom to see if anyone might join me to usher in midnight. A pair of folks I rarely get to talk to dropped by, as did NoLabels, so that was nice.
Spouse worked an overnight shift in NYC and got off work around 9am. His plan was originally to get some sleep and work a regular shift the next day, but evidently the final workday was no longer necessary, so he was hoping to get some sleep and drive home in the afternoon. By 10-11am he realized that sleep was not happening and decided to hit the road then.
My father called me in the early afternoon and asked if I wanted to have a drink with him over zoom. Sure, why not. I concocted a beverage of rum and sour cherry syrup. (Did I mention clafoutis are really easy to make? Well, if you use jarred sour cherries you end up with lovely cherry-water-sugar stuff you've gotta do _something_ with). I pre-gamed with him a bit and nursed the drink and a book for a while.
Spouse came in eventually utterly exhausted and tried to go get sleep. He failed. He went back to bed. He got up meandered the house. He was too wired to sleep. He was too tired to be awake. He alternated between these two states for the rest of the day. The rest of the weekend, really. Or even more really I'm not sure he's entirely recovered yet.
The Favorite Ex made me a batch of decadently fudgy brownies and, not being up for being Indoors with People, dropped them off. (The next day his wonderful wife also dropped off her excellent noodle kugel which she knows I'm fond of, and I was able to hand them some samples of Ex's brownies, my cake and the clafouti)
My guests showed up eventually. We drank and ordered pizzas and watched the Macbeth movie and talked until the silly hours of the night, and if what I needed from the evening was for my mind to be elsewhere, with their help I succeeded eventually. I went to sleep by 4am.
I woke up entirely too early the next day and was an exhausted zombie. I puttered about and read and went to sleep early and slept for 14 hours, which is pretty much unheard of for me, and puttered around and read some more through the whole long weekend.
One break from the read-and-puttering was visiting a friend who had less-than-week-old puppies. I'm really not a dog person, but she had a theory that it might do me good to interact with pre-velociraptor-phase dogs, and perhaps it was. I did pretty ok with the mom dog also. (But the other household dogs are high strung and freak me out a bit).
Meanwhile I am volunteering for the virtual side of Boskone, which is not my usual, but it's running hybrid and they need remote crew. And in person in April for CostumeCon which is in my town this year - here's hoping it's safe to have a con by then. Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/355436.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.
What I usually get for my birthday is mostly depressed, and have to work quite hard to forestall utter despair, but this year had its decks extra stacked against me.
Spouse had an opportunity to go to New York that weekend, and a month ago that seemed like a grand idea - I might take time off and run around town and we'd have evenings in the city together. Then with Omicron this seemed like a bad, bad idea, and I asked him if he could decline the trip and resigned myself to the notion of a quiet weekend in.
Then his work situation became more dire, and he'd had to un-decline, such that he'd leave town the Wednesday before my birthday and return on Sunday after it. But given Omicron it seemed like a very bad plan to go with.
I still took a day off on my birthday, because last year I hardly took any time off and I feel like work owes me, so I've been looking for excuses, and had asked for it along with my usual annual standing requests of Jewish holidays and conventions and the like.
So I settled in for a mostly quiet solo weekend.
A party was definitely well beyond what I thought reasonable in Omicron Times, and the weather absolutely precluded anything but lurking indoors. But a pair of my equally cautious friends were willing to come and keep me company for the evening, so this was nice. (One of them even offered to drop by early given my day off. He didn't actually manage to get here until nearly off work time, but that he had a thought in the first place was appreciated.)
The evening prior I had a craving and obsessively made a flourless chocolate cake with a rum glaze. It kept me occupied, I suppose. I read a bunch, too. Later in the evening I tossed up a last-minute zoom to see if anyone might join me to usher in midnight. A pair of folks I rarely get to talk to dropped by, as did NoLabels, so that was nice.
Spouse worked an overnight shift in NYC and got off work around 9am. His plan was originally to get some sleep and work a regular shift the next day, but evidently the final workday was no longer necessary, so he was hoping to get some sleep and drive home in the afternoon. By 10-11am he realized that sleep was not happening and decided to hit the road then.
My father called me in the early afternoon and asked if I wanted to have a drink with him over zoom. Sure, why not. I concocted a beverage of rum and sour cherry syrup. (Did I mention clafoutis are really easy to make? Well, if you use jarred sour cherries you end up with lovely cherry-water-sugar stuff you've gotta do _something_ with). I pre-gamed with him a bit and nursed the drink and a book for a while.
Spouse came in eventually utterly exhausted and tried to go get sleep. He failed. He went back to bed. He got up meandered the house. He was too wired to sleep. He was too tired to be awake. He alternated between these two states for the rest of the day. The rest of the weekend, really. Or even more really I'm not sure he's entirely recovered yet.
The Favorite Ex made me a batch of decadently fudgy brownies and, not being up for being Indoors with People, dropped them off. (The next day his wonderful wife also dropped off her excellent noodle kugel which she knows I'm fond of, and I was able to hand them some samples of Ex's brownies, my cake and the clafouti)
My guests showed up eventually. We drank and ordered pizzas and watched the Macbeth movie and talked until the silly hours of the night, and if what I needed from the evening was for my mind to be elsewhere, with their help I succeeded eventually. I went to sleep by 4am.
I woke up entirely too early the next day and was an exhausted zombie. I puttered about and read and went to sleep early and slept for 14 hours, which is pretty much unheard of for me, and puttered around and read some more through the whole long weekend.
One break from the read-and-puttering was visiting a friend who had less-than-week-old puppies. I'm really not a dog person, but she had a theory that it might do me good to interact with pre-velociraptor-phase dogs, and perhaps it was. I did pretty ok with the mom dog also. (But the other household dogs are high strung and freak me out a bit).
Meanwhile I am volunteering for the virtual side of Boskone, which is not my usual, but it's running hybrid and they need remote crew. And in person in April for CostumeCon which is in my town this year - here's hoping it's safe to have a con by then. Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/355436.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.