fox

I'm working (slowly!) on a fairly elaborate cross stitch cushion cover - and part of the reason it's so slow is that there's a fair amount of dithering, so each color has blocks and then random confetti nearby so they can blend together. Fine. But for an added complication, the fabric is not aida cloth; it's a tightly woven cotton canvas, so when I worked out that I get 14st/in if I do three threads vertically and two horizontally, that meant I have to count threads the whole time my own self. There aren't more prominent holes where the stitches go, I mean.

So naturally at some point I miscounted something and about a dozen stitches were half a column off, which needed fixing or the stitches coming to meet them wouldn't fit. Annoying, but not devastating, because it was only about a dozen stitches. Still kind of a drag to find as close to the midpoint as possible in the offending thread, snip, pick out, redo what I could, secure the new ends (where there didn't used to be ends at all), and finally get new thread and redo the last of the stitches in the correct column.

I showed it to Himself and we had this conversation:

me: See? Isn't that better? [of course I don't expect he has the first idea what he's looking at]
him: Sure, honey.

And what's super funny about that is that I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in our relationship that he has called me by anything but my name. (This is the second time. 😆 His family of origin are not a pet-naming people.)

Himself's aunt came over from the UK for Thanksgiving and asked for my pecan pie recipe. I've made that pie in the UK twice, once successfully and once not, and the difference was the availability of corn syrup; when I couldn't get it, I tried to cook down brown sugar to substitute, and either I didn't boil off enough of the liquid or it just doesn't behave the same way, because that pie never did set properly. Tasted fine, but it was soup.

So. For a pie whose filling's ingredients are butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, pecans, and dark corn syrup, if you couldn't get corn syrup of any sort, what would you do? I've been thinking about using brown sugar instead of white and golden syrup instead of Karo. (The aunt said "oh no, golden syrup is such a sticky mess," and I had to point out that corn syrup is as well and that's sort of the point.) Any more expert bakers have other thoughts?

Himself is heading out of town for a couple of days this week, so although I usually go to the office Tuesday and Wednesday I'll have to be at home this Wednesday and was waffling about whether to make my second in-office day Monday or Friday. Ultimately decided I might as well get it out of the way, and then promptly forgot about it, so when he woke me up this morning and said "Weren't you thinking of going in today?" all I could say was UGH. But I did, I got up and dressed for going in and got all the way to the train and went to lock up the scooter and realized I didn't have my lock, because I didn't have my bag, which meant I couldn't even haul the thing in with me and charge it at the office because I didn't have my computer. Sigh. Scooted back home, picked up the work bag, and did it all again.

I've been fighting off a sinus cold thing and I think it's making me stupid.

The prince has had some white flakes in his dark hair lately (not nits, thank god, despite a lice outbreak in his school a few weeks ago), and it turned out to be a patch of cradle cap about the size of a quarter, though he's six years old. I didn't want to go straight to medicated shampoo, because he's still going to get it in his eyes, so I did a home remedy Dr. Google told me: I rubbed some olive oil into his scalp and then washed his hair normally at bath time.

And then afterward, oh my goodness, friends, the dead skin was clogging the comb. I'd told him we might have to do this a few times until his head is better, and I might have lied: it might be entirely cleared up in one go.

If someone you love has seborrhaic psoriasis, consider this an enthusiastic data point in favor of olive oil. Holy crap.

[eta: Yeah so when I put him to bed his head still kind of smelled like a salad (look, of course I sometimes smell his head, I'm his mother), and this morning his hair is still quite stylishly oiled. Put another way, the shampoo didn't really get all the olive oil out. Might have to try to persuade him to do it in a running shower tonight instead of a bath. Still glad the scalp is less crusty, which was the point of the exercise.]

I'm back in my office one day a week these days, for Reasons (mostly having to do with the fact that because there's nothing about my job that can't be done remotely, there's actually no reason they should pay DC money for a job that can ostensibly be done by a 10-point veteran in an inland state unless one "requirement" of my job is periodic attendance in our actual building in Our Nation's Capital), which is always a fun time getting out of the house in the morning now that I'm absolutely more accustomed to the three-minute daily commute. This morning I had time for coffee but not breakfast, but no problem, I thought, I'll stop in the grocery store and get eggs and bacon off the breakfast bar like I used to to sometimes in the Before, it'll be great.

I got to the actual cash register with the hot bar box in my hand before I realized that I'd left my wallet in my other bag, the one that's big enough to hold my music folder, after I got back from rehearsal Monday night. Curses. Off I go to the customer service counter, where I ask the nice lady if I can give her my credit card details so she can put them in manually. Alas, this store doesn't allow that; they used to, but they got too many bad transactions, is probably why they put a stop to that. Oh!, I say, I remember that for Reasons (mostly having to do with a local pizza place changing its affiliated online delivery app), I now have Apple Pay. No good; this store doesn't take Apple Pay. Uh, I say. What can I—here's my frequent shopper card, is there any way that number can be linked to an account and I can pay that way? Nope, I have no card and no cash and am about to have no breakfast, not that this is a complete disaster—there's a Starbucks across the corner where I can indeed order and pay with my phone—but I don't want to waste the food, and also, ugh, how stupid I feel.

Finally the nice lady at the customer service desk offers to pay for this herself and have me pay her back via CashApp. (!) I don't have CashApp, but she doesn't have Venmo or PayPal or any of the other such things, so I download CashApp, which is taking forever because the wireless reception inside the store is wretched. So she says go ahead and come back to square up later when I've got the app set up. (!!) She draws my attention to the customer service number on the receipt, where I can tell Corporate how helpful she was. I confirm that it is indeed okay to tell Corporate how what she did that was helpful was basically let me leave the store with food I hadn't paid for (because she'd advanced me the money herself), and she said it was, so I promised to do this.

I note that the whole time we've been talking, there's a binder on her Customer Service counter open to a page of training about How to Spot a Flim-Flam. And I mean I assure her that I am not trying to get away with anything here, but at the same time, she has no actual basis on which to believe me. And off I go.

So at lunchtime I go back to that store, and she's gone for the day. The nice lady doing Customer Service at this point says she's happy to put the money I owe her in an envelope where she can get it tomorrow; when I say I was going to have to do it electronically she offers to give me the first nice lady's number so we can get our CashApp accounts sorted out. (!!!) I say maybe it would be better if she contacted the first nice lady herself, because if I were her and got a text from me I'd ignore the hell out of it, a complete stranger texting me in the middle of the day after I'm off work, are you kidding me? So she texts her friend to say "A customer is here who says she owes you money from this morning, can I give her your number?" Sure enough the first nice lady says "Can you get it from her and I'll get it from you tomorrow?" as I expected she might. So now I'm trying to CashApp the second nice lady, and CashApp doesn't want to hear it—I've linked my bank account but because I can't give it my debit card details, I guess it's not ready to let me zap money around? I text Himself to ask him to send me photos of my debit card, which he does, and it is expired, so I can't even enter the details in CashApp (it won't allow me to enter an expiry date in the past, nor should it). UGH. Fortunately, the second nice lady also has Zelle, which I have and use all the time! So there in the terrible reception, I Zelle her more money than I owe the first nice lady, and I wait until she gets the alert that she has money incoming, and I thank her probably embarrassingly profusely, and off I go to get lunch somewhere I can pay with my phone.

And then of course when I get back to my desk I go on the corporate website and fill in a Contact Us form praising both of them to the SKIES for their absolutely unnecessary help that I had no right to expect. I hope they both get bonuses for it.

• September 15. Himself's aunt dies following an illness of several months.
• September 18. We bury her.
• September 19. Himself flies out on a business trip. He is apparently one of two people consistently wearing a mask at company-wide events this week.
• September 20. The prince is pukey after dinner and (worse) in the middle of the night.
• September 21. I keep the prince home from school. He is fine. On the other coast, Himself has to remove his mask at dinnertime in a poorly ventilated area with other people.
• September 22. The prince goes back to school. On the other coast, Himself is notified that someone at his company tested positive for covid that morning. He himself tests negative. He flies home, arriving in the middle of the night.
• September 23. Himself tests negative for covid. I receive a jury summons in the mail; my boss and I agree that if this were a movie, the critics would say "The main character's Stuff is a little too concentrated."
• September 24. Himself tests positive for covid. The prince and I test negative. Himself puts a mask on and doesn't eat with us at meal times; we open practically every window in the house and turn on all the fans; I sleep in the guest room. (The bed in there is much softer than in our room, which I can handle but himself finds uncomfortable.)
• September 25. The prince and I test negative. Himself feels fine. He keeps his mask on, we keep the windows open, I sleep in the guest room.
• September 26. The prince and I test negative; Himself feels terrible, but not sick enough for antivirals, apparently. He keeps his mask on and all the windows open. I go to the pharmacy to pick up his prescriptions so he doesn't have to bring his known issues indoors. I get my flu shot while I'm there, though later in the day I regret this decision, because I do get some side effects, and what I don't need right now are ambiguous headaches and other upper respiratory symptoms. I feel kind of cruddy at the prince's bedtime and take a Sudafed, which does what it does vis-a-vis opening my sinuses but also contributes to an extremely jittery night of sleep. In the guest room.
• September 27. The prince and I test negative. Himself feels a little better. (Eleven people who were at the Wednesday evening dinnertime thing are now down with covid. His boss, apparently, feels incredibly guilty—as well he should, in my view, and this company is now three for three on all-staff whatnots that turned into super-spreader events, so although Himself wasn't wild about going to this one but ultimately felt like he kind of had to, if they do another I think he is going to Respectfully Decline.) I close my thumb in the front door when the prince and I get home from school, and it is not that bad, but I'm scraped so thin I just sob for a few minutes. Himself keeps his mask on and all the windows open. I sleep in the guest room.
• September 28. The prince and I test negative, which if my math is right closes the window? That is, if Himself was exposed Wednesday evening 21st and first tested positive Saturday morning 24th, that's the morning of the third day, and our last unguarded exposure was Friday evening 23rd, so the morning of the third day was Monday morning 26th; but if Himself was exposed on the plane on the way out, then his first positive test was the morning of the fifth day, and the same period for us would end today, right now, this morning.

Except for the day the prince was home from school, I'm also working full time, right, and there's end-of-fiscal-year rigmarole and some general utter lack of common sense from some higher-ups we'd like to think would have stopped making these particular bad decisions after the literal years we've been asking them to do that one thing this other way for the general benefit of everyone, but you know how work goes, so. Normally I'd probably have been gnashing my teeth a bit over that. This year, ha.

The doctors also told Himself he would likely no longer be shedding virus five days after his positive test or his last day of symptoms, whichever is later, so because he's still coughing a bit I can't move back out of the guest room yet. But I think . . . I may have dodged it? Again? Because the prince had it six weeks ago, and when he was crying his tears went into my eyes, and yet I remained uninfected; and now Himself spent two nights breathing in my face from the other side of the bed, and yet here I am. Maybe the fact that my bivalent booster had a few days longer to cook than Himself's kept me safer? I don't know, but it feels like a lot of dice rolls I've come out on the winning side of, for which I'm very grateful, although after the couple of weeks we've had over here (and about to turn the corner into October, which is annually the month in which I feel the crappiest, as it contains the anniversary of my own dad's demise), I feel like I deserve it.

Himself is on a business trip for the first time since February 2020. Naturally he was nervous about this, partly because the last three or four trips he took before the plague were unpleasant experiences for reasons relating to why he's not at either of those jobs anymore, and partly because, well, plague. So here's how our past few days have gone:

( Sunday, we buried his aunt. )

( Monday, he took the prince to school as normal. )

( Monday also had language research. )

Tuesday, I took the prince to school early to drop in at the morning edition of the extended-day program he already always goes to in the afternoons, came home, had a whole workday, answered the phone like a chump when my mom called exactly at quitting time, and went to pick up the kid. There are always some people being jerks on the road at the evening rush hour, but this was a particularly unanimously obnoxious experience, and at a red light I even posted to Discord about it:

AgentReynard (Fox) (she/her)
must everyone operating a motor vehicle in my community this afternoon be an utter ass?

I should have stayed quiet.

What happened next was we got home; I put the kid's bookbag and jacket (which had been in the bookbag) and lunchbag in the laundry because they were rank from watermelon juice having spilled out of one of his tupperwares; we had dinner, including sharing a slice of walnut povitica my father-in-law had brought over on Sunday; I took out the trash and the recycling, as Tuesday is Garbage Eve in our neighborhood; and meanwhile I excused the kid from the table when he asked, and he went to play games on the iPad, as is his habit. The second rabbi friend replied to the all-clear, saying "Oops, missed the initial message completely, glad it's sorted, how are you doing?" and I said "Oh, you know, handling the camera at a funeral that was a long time coming, followed by several days of solo parenting a kindergartener in a plague while managing long-distance tech support for my brain-injured widowed mother. Basically living the dream." Sandwich generation, after all.

I should. have stayed. quiet.

( A few minutes later, the prince said Mommy? I don't feel good. )

( So okay. )

( Luckily I didn't bother actually drinking any wine. )

( Wednesday )

I am unlikely to complain about traffic on the school run ever again.

We went blueberry picking with a friend of the prince's yesterday. Himself, myself, the prince, his classmate, her little sister, their mom, and a babysitter who used to be one of their preschool teachers. We're all picking berries, as are many other families, the kids are running around and playing but not getting too far away, it was about 70 degrees and sunny, with a brisk breeze blowing—gorgeous. Nearby is a family with a kid who's about three or four and a toddler the dad is carrying, maybe 15 or 16 months, and we chided the prince for going and picking berries off the bush they were using; dad said oh, there's plenty to go around, and we said well thanks for being cool, but we do also want to teach him to, you know, be aware of other people. It was all very pleasant.

Ten or fifteen minutes later a little girl comes up the row looking between all the bushes calling "Come out, come out wherever you are!" She does not seem upset and takes absolutely no notice of any of the people she's passing, even as every single adult she goes by turns their head to watch her and wait to see if a more-grown person is with her. Doesn't appear to be. Finally I hand the blueberry basket to Himself and follow her; she's at the end of the row by the time I catch up to her, and who knows where she's planning to get to next.

"Hi," I said. "Do you know where your mom and dad are?"

"Yeah," she said, waving vaguely back down the row she'd just come to the end of. "Back there."

"Do they know you're all the way up here?"

"Yeah, I told them."

"Sounds like you're playing hide and seek," I said. "Who are you looking for?"

"My brother."

"Cool. Can I help you find him? What does your brother look like?" She tells me about how he has a lion on his shirt and he has curly hair. "Okay. Is he bigger than you or littler than you?"

"He's bigger than me. He's six."

Awesome. So there's not likely an even smaller lost child around here somewhere. That's something. "Why don't we go back this way to look for him," I suggested. "I bet he wouldn't have gone farther than this."

"Okay." Little girl happily turned back and started leading me back down the row, looking for her big brother between the blueberry bushes.

"What's your name?" I asked. She told me her name and spelled it, which was pretty impressive, I thought. She must have been about three, three and a half. I asked her brother's name, and she spelled that, too.

At this point, we're getting back to within earshot of where my family and our friends were picking berries, and I become aware my husband is calling to me and asking if the little girl's name is what she just told me her name was. He points even further back down the row behind him to where this kid's adults have been looking for her. "Hey," I say to her, "it looks like your mom's calling you, do you want to hurry back to her so she knows you're okay?" Little girl runs back to her mom, who practically faints when she sees her coming. I tell her the kid had been looking for her brother; mom says the brother had gone the other way, probably up the aisle in the middle of the rows, so he'd apparently kept the radius a lot smaller. The little sister had told her folks she was going to find him and then had just missed the turn and got much further away than anyone had intended. The mom hugs her girl and thanks me and back we go to the berry picking. The mother of the family whose blueberry bush my son had horned in on tells me if I hadn't followed the little girl when I did she'd been within seconds of doing so herself. (I'd taken the opportunity because I was the "extra" adult, the only one not directly matched up with a child precisely then, because our family had two adults and one kid and the kid was at that moment with his dad.)

• We've arranged to have some work done on the house and had signed the estimates and returned them to the contractor - and now I've also paid him the deposits required by those contracts. (Okay we were a little late on that, oops.)


• I ordered some hardware with which to adapt the KN94 masks the prince doesn't like so they will fit the way his fabric masks do in the hope he will be prepared to use them instead. (A fabric mask he will wear is better than a better mask he won't; still I'd like to find a way to get him using the masks that work better.)


• I placed an order with a British foods website so in a week or so we should have some honest-to-god Cadbury instant hot chocolate in the house for the first time since who knows when (I don't know why Cadbury's drinking chocolate (add hot milk) is readily available in this country but their instant hot chocolate (add hot water) is not, but the latter is what I want, because mixing the former with powdered milk and then adding hot water is a vaguely viable workaround but I've never got the ratio exactly how I want it) after having the tab open on my phone for literally months and months).


• I am experiencing a fandom Renaissance, which is great because I've missed fandom!, but less great because while I was experiencing my own personal fandom Dark Ages apparently everyone migrated to Other Places and thank god for those of you I know in person because otherwise I wouldn't have a way back in. I'm learning how to use Tumblr (just as it's apparently collapsing; nice timing, self) and I'm on Discord now as well, but speaking of Discord, where the servers at? I got on the Yuletide one in time for this year's Yuletide and I'm on the Bujold one as well. Where else are folks congregating where I could slip in and lurk until I have the hang of the place, as one used to do back in the days of bulletin boards? (I'm not new! It just feels a little bit that way.)