Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: January 2023

  • Pileup: or, In Which an Old Lady Complains About Aches and Pains

    I have shirked all responsibilities the last two work days and now I’ll probably be ducking out on weekend responsibilities too. I’ve got four concurrent problems going on, ordered by when they showed up: Tingly leg – Leg tingles in the morning. This stops about noon. This is standard issue MS stuff, predates any other…

  • YouTube Training

    Last week I realized the top rack of the dishwasher is broken. Literally, the wheels have come off AND it’s off the rails. (I looked to see if there might be more idioms that might apply literally to my top dishwasher rack and I find that Austrailians say “There’s a kangaroo loose in the top…

  • Thursday Paint Progress: 1/19

    This week the sea went from this: … to … the exact same thing, because … well, even through I’ve spent the week fixing up basements and dishwashers, I haven’t been well. After last week’s dental appointment, my jaw did not recover from all the stretching as I would have liked. It left a visible…

  • Basement Complete

    I really should wait for the spring floods before I set the basement to rights again, but I can’t take the chaos. Evidently I rearrange the basement once a decade. See here for how little I had in my basement in 2013. In 2013, Gary’s ping-pong table took the prime spot in the center of…

  • Rewriting the Novel: Soft Heart

    Right now I am tweaking the phrasing and ignoring the elephant: the climax of the book is a mess. The tension doesn’t build, it just ping pongs. Problem, solution, another problem, another solution. I know how to fix it, too, but I don’t want to. I am tired of torturing this imaginary woman. So I’ll…

  • Easter Egg

    Recently I read a Facebook post on secret messages that some fun-loving companies have put on packaging. This led me to my pantry, where I pored over all my items. I only found one. It was on the bottom. Above the expiration date Bear Naked granola printed, “Don’t hibernate. Get your paws on it before…

  • Car Hunt Continues

    What did I tell you? Gary is back to square one in the car hunt. He found a seven page list of nothing but electric vehicles. So here we go again. I’ve given up mentioning the government tax debate; they made that way too complicated, and all the rules change in March anyway. And now…

  • The Beauty of Forgetting

    A few days ago I tried to make homemade pork egg foo young. I got all the elements, except for the sake for the gravy. “Like I would have sake,” I scoffed. “But I know I have mirin.” And then while hunting for the mirin at the top of the liquor shelf, what was there?…

  • Rewriting the Novel: Editors

    I am now friends with someone who has almost had a book published. I was surprised to learn some of my assumptions about publishing were very wrong. The editor doesn’t necessarily edit. I don’t know when they changed this, but her agent does the editing. I can see the agent suggesting improvements so it would…

  • Thursday Paint Progress: 1/12

    This week the sea went from this: … to this. So now I feel better about the clouds and the mountains. Perhaps they look good in comparison to my amateur second pass.