Hey fibergeeks! What spinning wheel should I be lusting after? Pimp! Enable! Have at!

• 18:37 makin' yarn! #

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• 08:09 The Changeling slept from 8:30 last night to 6:20 this morning WITHOUT WAKING UP ONCE. Kept checking to make sure he was still breathing. #

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• 10:16 Mommying = deep inch-long gash inside one's mouth because one's Changeling thinks one's lip makes an excellent handle to move one's head by. #
• 11:16 Really need to knit myself some fingerless gloves, that my fingers might not be numb when I knit myself some fingerless gloves. Dilemma! #
• 18:42 Really need to dig that History of Costume book out of its pile, that I may have some marginal idea what I'm talking about in this chapter. #
• 21:05 @catvalente Perhaps you just exuded confidence and competence and Sir looked like a lost little lamb? #
• 21:28 Unexpected wordcounts are the tastiest kind. #

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515 words on Blithen's Tarot this evening, and future-scene stuffs have seen fit to resolve themselves while I washed my hair. This pleaseth me inordinately, for just this afternoon I was in a wall-punching sort of mood because I've had to hold a Changeling through his naps more often than I ought this past week or so, and had been forgetting what being able to write for more than five minutes at a time felt like.

Verdict: quite nice really!

• 09:04 Having difficulty switching brain from short story mode to novel mode. Unpack, unpack, unpack! #
• 11:44 Saladfail = bland avocado + an onion that's decided it'd be best for everyone if I perished of sinus pain at earliest possible convienence. #
• 13:19 Dear English-Speaking People: When you say "I could care less," that IS NOT WHAT YOU MEAN. Please stop. My ears are bleeding. Love, Me. #
• 22:30 @foxtailedgirl We don't ALL have it wrong over here! It's just .. prevalent. Ugh. #

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• 07:27 @foxtailedgirl VICTORY #
• 08:51 Free kombucha SCOBYs to good homes! wirewalking.livejournal.com/144167.html #

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Hey crafty people, can I borrow your eyes for a sec?

Did she knit or crochet this? I want to make one for JV but I don't know which is likelier to work.

(Yes, I know! Evil!Crochet!)

Dan's been brewing kombucha for a bit under two years now and it's only just occurred to me that we throw out between 2 and 6 baby SCOBYs (or, as mer_moon has affectionately (?) dubbed them, "floating mold cities") every day and some of you may be able to make use of them. It's the easiest thing in the world to do. You brew super-sugared tea and toss the SCOBY in and let it do its thing for however long it needs to, so apart from the SCOBY, all you need to make kombucha is tea and sugar (most people use black tea but we find green, or halfsies green/jasmine, works much better) and a jar to ferment it in. So it costs about $2.50 for a 2-gallon batch, and that's with organic fair trade tea. Buy it by the 16-oz bottle in a health food store and it'll cost you $4/pint. And that's nowhere near as good as homemade. (Yes, it requires a bunch of sugar, but the SCOBY metabolizes it so it isn't sweet-tasting and is extremely healthy. My dad is type 2 diabetic and drinks kombucha constantly. It actually helps regulate his blood sugar.)

All this to say! We will happily share the love and mail baby SCOBYs to good homes. Comments screened, so hit me with your address if you'd like one!

$1k of thrush treatments later (appointments, prescriptions, supplements, natural remedies, various ointments and creams and suchlike) and the Mystery Ailment may never have been thrush at all.

I want rl rewind button now please.

• 19:24 @leahbobet Yay review! Am sort of ridiculously pleased that it held up for a re-read. Can't wait to see what you have to say about it! #
• 19:30 @leahbobet Oh, not a problem at all. You're a busy bee. I'm just grateful you could squeeze it in. <3 #
• 19:49 The Changeling either has phenomenal spatial memory or x-ray vision. Place your bets! #

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.. and now my new computer has a virus, apparently.

OF COURSE IT DOES.

Oh, and I've been up since 5. To find that I seem to have pulled something in my foot. In my sleep. (WTF?) And the Changeling is so not ready to get up at 5. Though would he go back to sleep? Well, today should be pleasant.

It's a good thing I keep hearing other people's good news. While on one hand it makes me jealous, on the other I'm quite pleased to see that everyone's autumn hasn't been faintly horrifying.

ETA: And now perhaps Julian is getting a cold. This is starting to be almost funny.

Only 300 words or so today.

Transitioning the Changeling from nursing to sleep to rocking to sleep/transferring to a bed is sometimes much easier than anticipated and sometimes not so much. Would love to get to a place where he'll just lie down and let me read him books until he falls asleep, and then somehow get himself back to sleep when he wakes up anywhere between once and fifteen billion times over the course of a nap or a night. Step One is disassociate nursing from sleep inasmuch as I can. Sometimes it gets tricky, like when I nurse him before a nap and he ends up falling asleep there, so I have to then detach him and rock/transfer. La.

All this to say? I had to hold him through all but about 20 minutes of his naptime (read: my writing time) today. I could've had two hours, blight it. I'm sort of impressed I have any wordcount at all!

The good news is that the plague seems to be leaving my mom's house. Jury's still out on whether I still have or have been reinfected with thrush. Am hoping that what I have now is just really, really traumatized skin from the gentian violet. Whatever it is, I will fully endorse its decision to piss off elsewhere-not-on-my-person-(or-on-my-kid's).

Blithen's Tarot (working title)

Words today: 425. There was not so much with the napping, alas.
Words total: Um. 425 more than yesterday. Plus notethings.

And now that last week's medical drama has subsided (I'm actually fairly sure that what Julian had was a gentian violet reaction ON TOP OF a virus of some sort. He never was evincing sick symptoms exactly, but a general malaise that's very out of character for him & can't really be adequately explained away by a mouth full of sores and consequent shitty sleep. Then as the sores went away, he developed a little bit of a rash on his torso, and a couple days before the sores started up, I noticed one evening that he looked flushed, but we weren't at home and by the time I thought to dig up a thermometer, he was back to normal. But this all smacks of virus; plus the incubation time for one would be about right if he got exposed to something in the clinic last time we went .. ) -- anyway, now that that's all done, my parents have some manner of nasty flu (right in time for my whole family to get together for Thanksgiving next week, I might add) and I might be getting the thrush back. WTF, UNIVERSE.

So I was poked to do this, and here it is!

My Nebula-eligible stories, in no sort of order at all, are as follows:

"Notes Toward a Comparative Mythology" Fantasy, August 2009
"Jane" Fantasy, April 2009
"Lady Glory and the Knave of Spades" Farrago's Wainscot, January 2009
"Off the Path" Lone Star Stories, April 2009
"Forgetting" GUD, autumn 2008

and there's also my novel, Desideria (December 2008).

I can provide .doc or .pdf versions of non-online stuff upon request.

Blithen's Tarot (working title)

Words yesterday: 700
Words total: Who knows? Too much of what's in this file is notes (somewhere between 5-10k of those) and old bits which may well end up getting culled or scrapped for parts (somewhere between 5-10 of those). About 3k of not-notes-new-stuff. Yeah, I sort of lost a week there, and then spent a few days mapping out the Shiny New Plot What's Way More Fun Than What I Had Planned For This Book a Few Years Ago When I First Thought It Up.

Working on it riiiight now, too, so hopefully another of these later, Changeling naps willing. (It's looking like a 2-nap day. He's had a few of these since the stupid daylight savings kicked in. Child is not built to get up at 6 in the bleeding morning. Can you blame him?)

I still have a nursling! Woohoo!*

Also I am on pain meds for the first time in what is colloquially known as a long ass time. Today, pain meds are my friend.

*And I didn't faint dead away in agony while he nursed, which is more than I was expecting of myself. Score!

For all of you out there who are just DYING to give me presents (and I know, in your heart of hearts, you are legion) -- hint hint!

In more important news, Julian is doing much better today. He's still not at 100% but he's playing and energetic and smiling for the first time in days, despite having had Very Little Sleep since he woke up this morning. Tylenol is our friend. But he's eating and drinking and everything. He still can't nurse, though he keeps trying to, so here's hoping that once he can, my supply won't have all dried up in the meantime, or that if it has, he can get it going again. And, um, that I don't get mastitis before he can nurse. OH MERCY NO. For about a billion reasons NO. And also that I recover from my own overexposure to gentian violet, while we've got a wish list going. Ouch.

Yeah, I've been asking for a lot of these lately, but if anyone has any good healing vibes to send toward a Changeling, we could use 'em.

(It's nothing serious. The arsing stupid gentian violet filled his mouth up with sores, including a big old canker sore looking thing on the corner of his mouth, which is preventing him from doing much by way of eating or drinking, or any nursing at all, and it's played hell with his sleep, which makes him cry, which aggravates his mouth, rinse, repeat.)