Category: Document Your December

Monkey Man

December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 · Leave a comment ·

I was going to make a plain diary entry, try to find something witty or wise to say now that it’s officially the last day of the month/year/decade. I gave up about half a paragraph in, when I realized it was going to be some kind of angst driven bullshit, some poor me the decade is gone and I can’t remember half of what happened during it.

Fuck that. Instead I listened to whomever was poking me and put on a brand new pair of Bose wireless OTE headphones, poured a small shot of orange liqueur into a cup of fresh coffee, and picked up the DSLR camera that still manages to make me feel like a monkey let loose in a camera shop. I turned off the lights and sat down with my Holiday tree – my very first not-Christmas-tree, that is already stripped down to the lights in preparation for being taken down some time in the next 18 hours or so – and started monkeying around with dials and settings.

300 pictures later I quit, not because I was tired, only because the battery was running low and I wanted to get the pics downloaded before it winked out completely.

(While I’m waiting for the pics to finish transferring, I’ll take a moment to say everything I expected from Bose was spot on. Hfs do these fuckers sound *good*)

Okay, let’s see what I got, and if I can remember what setting goes with each pic …

Well, pretty much what I expected, monkey with a camera.

Most of the pics I’ve taken have come out like this, but can I just say as amateur as they are, I really dig the orange wall bits.

M setting, I think, probably with a high ISO? I just like the way the lights pop out of the dark.

Has to be auto cos I always turn flash off. Ugh, somehow worst of the lot. Maybe just because it shows how badly my walls need painted.

So there’s a resolution, of sorts: by next year I want to be able to take better pictures of something that means so much to me. That gives me 11 months – even a monkey should be able to learn a thing or two by then, yes?

~*~

The gratitudes, cos even though there will be a more bloggy post at some point after I wake up, I still don’t want to get in the habit of leaving a post without them.

So today I am grateful for:

Hard work

Motherfucking Bose, and Idec that they aren’t technically mine. I’m happy to share them with the boy (cos he won’t hardly use them anyway, it seems).

Scallops and rice

The bills are paid

Two more days until all this shit is out of my house.

~*~

It’s Been a While

December 30, 2019March 24, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

Or a week, but it’s been a long one. It certainly feels like it’s been awhile.

“I stretch myself beyond my means“

I’ve spent the last week crying, trying not to cry, digging in, digging out. I made it past Yule, made it past the 25th … and then promptly found myself as scared and overwrought as I was in September. And just when I think I have a handle on that I wake up to a day like today, to the grinding, grating fear that I am not strong enough to actually get myself out of the hole, not determined enough to bloom in the dirt I was left in … just not enough, in any shape or fashion.

So I did the only fucking thing I could think of and grabbed my camera and started snapping pictures.

That Fucked Up, In-Between State Where You Have To Trash It To Fix It:

Pretty much the whole house looks like this, from one end to the other. I’m packing up everything I possibly can, to stick in a truck and send home with my sister. To be honest I’d empty the whole motherfucking house if I could but sadly, not an option. Still, you can bet that truck will be slap full when it pulls out of my driveway. I only wish I could be sending the bed in my room along with everything else. Soon, I tell myself. Sometimes it even helps.

When All Else Fails, Read A Fucking How To Book:

I’m not all the way through it, and I’m not sure if I really grok the whole thing but I managed to get these pics after reading the first several chapters:

AV setting with mostly auto tweaks. It’s the first time I’ve been able to do that first ornament any justice.

And Will You Look At This:

Motherfucking DoF that I didn’t have to cheat to achieve.

I won’t swear that the DoF wasn’t more of a happy accident than skill or knowledge but I don’t even care. I got the effect without having to use Gimp to do it and I’m so damn proud I could bust. It really makes up for some of the bullshit I’ve had to wade through today.

~*~

I probably should add more but it’s late and Today Has Been a Fucked Up Day, so why not just go on to the gratitudes?

Today I am grateful for:

That the bad thing in the back room wasn’t any worse

Motherfucking depth of field

Having enough

Remembering something I’d long forgotten

Each day I get a little more done

Solstice Night

December 22, 2019December 25, 2019 · Leave a comment ·

I don’t know where to start. What do you say when it’s everything and nothing?

12-21 Proof of life, post-blot

Because selfies are still easier with the phone

~*~

12-21, proof of effort, post-log

So this is the first year I’m celebrating Yule and I may as well do it right, yeah? As right as I can which means a Yule log – which is completely unavailable this year. Everywhere I looked I was told ‘no, we can’t get them this year’. My three options were a place I can’t get to, a place I can’t afford, or making it myself. So tonight I taught myself how to make a rolled sponge cake. A motherfucking Yule log, if you please.

~*~

12-18 Proof of determination, post-work.

It’s worse than trying to get a snap of a Sims bathroom. At least with those you can drop a wall to get the shot.

A bathroom? Yes! A very ordinary GD C* bathroom … but it’s clean. It doesn’t look worse than a truck stop bathroom. I don’t get the heebies while I’m in there. I don’t feel gross, or hopeless. Or helpless.

Cleaning it was pure therapy. It made me think, made me look back on the last few years – if not the entire decade – and understand just how bad off I was. I mean, I knew I was in bad shape, knew I was being eaten alive by depression and hopelessness. Every so often I’d have an epiphany, or a burning coal dropped into my lap, and off I’d go, running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to fucking fix things … only to wind up back in the hole because the one thing that would actually fix me wasn’t available. Or I didn’t think it was, however you want to put it.

But anyway, the biggest thing I took away from spending the whole day cleaning that small space was the idea that I haven’t been as chronically sick the last few years as I have been brutally, massively depressed.

Which is both a horrid thought and an incredible relief. Like, on the one hand it’s truly awful that I chalked it up to a set of incurable illnesses that I couldn’t afford to treat when maybe it wasn’t such a hopeless thing. On the other – hfs, does that mean I won’t wake up six weeks from now and find myself coming out of remission?

~*~

There’s more, of course – how it felt to once more stand before my Gods and cry, reach out and touch faith; how bad the pain and tingling is getting in my leg and the swelling that water and compression socks aren’t helping and I think I better get my ass to the doctor here soon – but it’s 2:17 and I’m exhausted. Time to move on becasue tonight all the lists are long:

Today I’m grateful for:

Bacon wrapped scallops

Trying new things

Being moderately successful at them

Determination wearing a meat suit

These words:

Our hearts bring back the light as all the earth must do.

May stars fill up our sight with wishes coming true.

My wish this Solstice Night is grace and peace to you.

If You Believe

December 7, 2019December 7, 2019 · Leave a comment ·

I keep trying to find something to write here and … I got nothing. Or a bunch of hot garbage. No in-between.

He’s back, a month early when I didn’t even expect him to come back at all. I don’t even care why, whether it’s because he wants to be in on this Grand Adventure, or he simply missed me, or even if it’s becasue he Has Plans For Me.

(I hope he has plans for me. Truly.)

I am a votary who once more has an occupied altar to tend.

The presents just keep on coming. The presence.

Ok I’m getting nowhere with this – too much to say and not enough words to say it. Besides, I have a God to go worship.

So on to the gratitudes:

Today I’m grateful for:

The Liesmith

Good friends

J’s progress

Telling someone I haven’t seen in a few years that my husband left me and not even thinking about crying over it

Rice and gravy

You Can Buy It At Wal-Mart For $1.98

December 7, 2019December 7, 2019 · Leave a comment ·

Shot with a Canon Rebel T7 by someone with zero experience

The ornament, that is, although the joy can come free with purchase if you want it to.

I didn’t know I did until I saw it hanging on the tree.

I had a plan, if you can call it that, maybe just an idea – unless I find the missing box of ornaments the tree will stay bare until I can afford one of the wonderful bee ornaments that can be found at Amazon or Etsy. With that in mind I took a chance when I was ordering groceries, to see if ~~Hell~~ Wal-Mart might deliver me a bee along with my dinner. No, but they did offer glittery wings, and hey, why not? $1.98, might as well.

They are way bigger than I expected – full hand size, palm to tips – and they look like, well, 2 buck wings from Wally World … but once they were on the tree, once they were nestled in with the greenery and lights, beautiful. Joyous even. Simply joyous.

So yeah, I didn’t expect the first ornament I would buy for my tree to be glittery wings, but they fit, somehow. Cheap and a little gaudy, until you give them some love. Kind of like Charlie Brown’s tree. Kind of like me.

The Blissful Bee

Blissfully Buzzing Through the Adventure of a New Life.

Category: Document Your December

If You Believe

You Can Buy It At Wal-Mart For $1.98