Slowly Improving
My body’s doing what it says on the tin. I am very, very, slowly getting better.
My hemoglobin is up to 12.1, which is on the low end of normal for people with uteruses. I am still very disappointed with my hematologist and his practice for their lack of follow-up after they punted me over to gynecology; at the very least they should have been consulted when I was hospitalized and they should have been monitoring my various blood counts and hemoglobin.
This past Thursday, I had yet another Mirena installed–it was uncomfortable but not painful, but I still crashed when I got home. If the Mirena works and if I’m able to taper down from 60mg of progesterone a day to 0 mg a day and if the embolization works (it takes up to 3 months to see the full effect), then I won’t need a hysterectomy. I am not feeling optimistic. Especially since it would be a very high risk surgery.
I am not, alas, feeling particularly energetic in general. Yesterday was a holiday for work, so I was off and apart from therapy and getting blood drawn, I literally slept all day long. I’m feeling better, but it’s frustrating to lose a day like that. But I also have Monday off–my birthday is Tuesday and I wanted a long weekend. And I have a lot of Lego flowers to build.
And I have either had a string of bad infusion sites or a bad bottle of insulin, as the last three days have been a rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” over here. But I seem to have rectified that and as my endo keeps reminding me, it’s not the individual days, but the overall trend that matters.
Today’s been kind of foggy, but I did get caught up on an online class I’m taking (huzzah) and I have finally ordered my planner inserts for next year. I use a regular sized travelers notebook for my planning and rely very much on both the weekly and monthly layouts to keep everything straight. I also keep a digital calendar. This tear, I’ve been using the vanilla TN inserts and they’ve been okay, but I really wanted Tomoe River (TR) paper (I am not going to get into “new” versus “old” because I don’t give a fuck.)
I looked on Etsy and wasn’t very impressed with the TR paper offerings there, so I decided to go ahead and buy the undated inserts from Baum-Kuchen. I figure I can sit down and get the monthly calendars set up right away and then do the weeklies as I need them. And since I can’t buy just one thing at Baum-Kuchen, well, hm. I’m calling the rest of it a birthday gift.
The weekly layout is a little different from what I’m used to, but I think I can adapt. And since it’s TR, the weekly book is a full year, not just 6 months. Which will be very useful.
I’ve also picked up some charms and other decorations, including a completely ridiculous fox and acorn themed charm with so very many beads. But it makes me happy and foxes keep sort of showing up in my life so that probably means something.
I’ve also been reading, albeit a bit slowly.
I finished Mur Lafferty’s Station Eternity and enjoyed it tremendously, especially the Pandora bracelet as a tell. And then I was utterly delighted to see that Kareem Abdul Jabbar recommend it in his weekly-ish newsletter. Kareem Abdul Jabbar! I am hoping there are more books in this setting because there’s clearly Unfinished Business at the end. Also, I want to know more about the sentient space station and rock people who can turn themselves into shuttles if they break a taboo.
I also finished Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man which starts off slowly and by the end, it’s unputdownable. I did find Tesla’s privilege a little bit unbearable and her awareness of it only tempered it a bit. I found her spouse, Shal, to be a much more interesting character. Gimlet, who is Tesla’s service dog is of course the very best dog who ever did dog. Just like all dogs in fiction (the dog does not die).
I’m not sure what I’m going to read next. I have some fan fiction that’s been recommended to me and the sequel to The Hands of the Emperor, At the Feet of the Sun is coming soon soon soon so I don’t want to get wrapped up in anything I can’t drop to read that.
Non-fictionally, I have started Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote, which is about self-help books and happiness and I’m still working my way through Byron Katie’s Loving What Is which is honestly hard going for me because it feels very est/Landmark Education to me (it’s a cult!).
I’m also in the process of moving this site from Hugo to 11ty; but it’s taking some time because I’m trying to make the site be more “me” than this template is. But y’all, it’s gonna be aggressively bisexual and hopefully have an option to be aggressively non-binary and I can’t wait to get it all moved over.
The main reason I’m moving is that I find Hugo more complicated than I have brainspace for most of the time and 11ty just seems to make sense–also, I can mix html and markdown in the same post file and it just handles it. Nunjucks is an interesting template engine and again, it makes more sense to me than Hugo, which is coded in Go and while i could learn Go, I don’t want to.
This is a tiny blog, where I’m mainly concerned with recording what’s going on in my life and only engaging in the SFF Discourse when I fucking feel like it. Which, most of the time now, is fucking never.
Which is also why I’ve essentially left Twitter for Mastodon. I can be found at @eilatan@wandering.shop and at the moment, my account is unlocked and I’m letting most folks follow me, but that can change at any moment. One of the things I like about Mastodon is that the lack of any sort of algorithm that measures engagement means that 1) virality is not possible and 2) neither is brigading. It’s been a lot of fun seeing familiar faces showing up in the Shop.
I want the space to chat with my friends in a well-moderated space and also to write about my life. By getting away from the WordPress ecosystem and the way it forces SEO on you whether you want it or not (and it’s constantly breaking) and from the algorithmically driven web, I think I’ll be much happier. Less abuse and harassment, more fun conversations. And no one has to read this unless they fucking want to.