Owlbearelf

Inspirational song: Escape (the Pina Colada Song) (Rupert Holmes)

It's possible that I am responsible for sending us down this ridiculous alley. A few hours ago, when we gathered for our Wednesday night game, I showed the youngest of the group a tweet from Wil Wheaton, for an "Owlbear Conservation" t-shirt he is selling to raise money for an animal rescue operation in Pasadena, California. We have a running gag about owlbears in our D&D campaign, from several weeks ago. What followed the first few nights was that same young man in our group buying an owlbear plushie that has a zippered pouch to hold dice. Naturally, when I saw the t-shirts, I had to show him.

Our group was completely unfocused and made excruciatingly little progress. By the time the evening was drawing to a close, we were starting to act out, and be weird. We found a room where someone was brewing a potion, which sat in a glass vial, over a candle flame. The abovementioned man's character impulsively grabbed the potion and drank it. It was hot and burned his throat. Then bits of his skin went translucent/transparent. We could see into his insides. Through all of this, it was hurting him, and in a frantic hope to stop the damage, he tried to transfigure himself into an owlbear (which he has done before, without telling us so he ended up getting attacked by the rest of the crew). He didn't succeed. He had one elfen arm and one wing. He had bear legs and human feet. He had fur on his humanoid head, but with a beak. He was a total freak of nature, somewhere between SouthPark's infamous man-bear-pig and the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror frog prince who begged for death. We all laughed so hard we nearly blacked out, and Mr S-P, who was trying to lead this game just shook his head trying to control the direction of the event. Needless to say, he failed. It has now been more than an hour and my head still hurts from all the laughing.

I had an idea planted in my head this afternoon that I never expected. I have wanted to upgrade my car for one slightly bigger so that driving clients to real estate showings is a little easier, but I don't feel like I'm to the point where I can afford or justify such a purchase. At the same time, Mr S-P has started actually enjoying this time-waster side hustle where he uses my current car to drive for Lyft. He does it compulsively, putting in way more hours than we thought this would be, and he's putting more miles on my car than I want. In two weeks, he's put almost 2,000 miles on it. I don't like that at all. (Also, I get creeped out when I drive it, feeling like my own skin is unclean. Every time I drive it now, I run it through the car wash. This doesn't feel like a healthy reaction, but it calms me down.) I have been nagging him for two weeks to get a dedicated car he can use for this if he's going to stick with this much longer. He and I wandered through some small dealer lots this afternoon, just to see what's out there. At the third dealer, there was a car that seemed to fit both needs. It was all wheel drive, the correct vintage (younger than 2012), in great shape, big enough to hold passengers comfortably, reasonably close to what he wanted to pay, and the exact car I was thinking of changing my cute little blue car out for. We didn't leave the lot owning it, but we did take it for a test drive, long enough for us both to sit behind the wheel. (To be honest, I sat in four different seats, to get a good idea what passengers would feel. I approved.) So the big question now is, if we decide tomorrow or later in the week that this one is the right car, who gets it? Does he use it for Lyft, or do I give him my beloved Focus and take this Escape for my job? Or do we just wait a few weeks and see what gets turned in when people start getting their tax refund checks and a flood of gently used cars hits the market?

Unanimous Consent

Inspirational song: Mrs Robinson (Simon and Garfunkel)

There is a line in "Mrs Robinson" that always jumped out at me, as a quintessential detail I always assumed would be a part of adulthood. When they sang "going to the candidate's debate," it gave me this crystal clear picture of people who look like Anne Bancroft and Murray Hamilton, dressed smartly in 1960s chic, tailored clothes, with a cigarette in one hand and a tumbler of scotch in the other, in the living room of a big-time donor to the Republican party, rubbing elbows with mayors and DAs and whatnot, making all of the behind-the-scenes decisions in their little town. That's how I thought being active in politics would look. It's not how either political activism or even generic adulthood has turned out for me.

Two years ago, when I went to the caucus meeting for the presidential nominating process, it was a gigantic nightmare, front to back. The line to get into the building wrapped all the way around the high school where we met, and there were thousands of people trying to get in and go through the process all at once. It took forever, and by the time we broke out to our precinct rooms, everyone was tired, hot, and cranky. That foul mood carried over into the meeting. When we learned we were an "orphan" precinct, without an official leader, I raised my hand and said I knew how to run a meeting, having a passing acquaintance with Roberts Rules of Order. I had no training, and when it came down to the weird math required to figure out how to divide up two delegates when our room was split basically 66-34% between the two major candidates, and each side was desperately passionate about their love of their preferred candidate and their distrust of the other, I barely prevented the 40 or so people assembled from coming to blows. Eventually we found the correct formula online, and we forwarded one delegate for each candidate to county convention. I left there thinking the entire room hated me.

I didn't know then that they were serious when they said I had just signed up for a two-year commitment as a precinct leader. They called me and emailed me and sent me loads of paper through the USPS. They made sure I went to the central committee meetings in Boulder, and when candidates called me to chat, they spent far longer on the phone than I really wanted them to, just to court my vote for party leadership. Over the last month, I've had three scheduled meetings with a supersite coordinator, made it to one big training and missed another, all to run another caucus meeting tonight. I was absolutely terrified that it would be some of the same faces from last time, and they would still be mad at me. I genuinely expected a mutiny, an overthrow of me as precinct leader. I was stressed out.

My worst fears were not realized. Only eight people, including myself and the young woman who recently volunteered to be co-leader, preregistered for the caucus from our precinct. This time, it was held in a small events ballroom a few blocks from my house, for just four total precincts. None of the people from last time showed up. In fact, the other six people who preregistered never showed at all either. We had two other women register on-site (and I had brought my laptop to be the ones to sign them in), and that was it. Four women for a precinct that could potentially be comprised of up to 2000 registered voters. The meeting was ridiculously cordial and collegial. I was elected to a second two year term as precinct leader by unanimous consent. We discussed the five gubernatorial candidates on the caucus slate, sent two forward over the threshold poll, and then all four of us settled on the same candidate. Three are going as delegates to the county assembly in two and a half weeks. One was happy not to have to go. It was almost scary how easy it all was.

It wasn't quite the swanky, smoky picture I had of the back side of politics when I was growing up (although I did dress a little nicer and even wore makeup!). I'm okay with it the way it was. I'm a more casual sort of grownup. This way I am living up to my values without having to put on an act over who I am on the inside. This is the kind of politics I can handle.

The Cost of Doing Business

Inspirational song: Don't Do Me Like That (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)

I'm really hesitant to write this post, because once again, I'm going to complain about something that I know I have better than an enormous number of people in this country. Still, the impact on me personally is significant, so I am going to take the plunge and whine anyway.

On January 1, the service provider who handles claims for military health care changed. It used to be United Health Care, and it was okay. For the most part, they kept up with all the twists and turns I threw at them, only screwing up billing a couple times over the two years since we went on Tricare Prime for Retirees. Considering how mind-bogglingly many medical visits I've had in the last ten years alone, the fact that they did all right with my complex case was impressive.

I do not know why they switched the contract to Health Net. I wasn't consulted on that decision, and I doubt they would have welcomed my input had I tried to offer it. So far everything I've heard, Health Net was not prepared for the massive contract that this is. They had not hired enough case workers or claims processors before taking it on. They've already had to waive referral requirements for the first half of this year. It stresses me the hell out knowing I have an appointment with my gastroenterologist on Wednesday, and there is no document backing me up that my primary care doctor has sent me there.

Here's the part I'm afraid to admit I'm really upset about: My copays have gone up. My primary care doc now costs 60% more. All of the specialists she sends me to have gone up by 150%. The raw dollar amount is small, especially compared with what a lot of people with shitty private insurance pay, but when one views economies of scale, I am paying a ton more than I can afford. When I was going to physical therapy for my neck/shoulder several weeks ago, the office manager sighed that she wished she could have a tiny $12 copay like I had. Well, I no longer have that. PCP is now $20 and specialists $30. I average a minimum of three doctor visits a month. Bad months and it's five or more. I also take six prescription medications daily, along with nine supplements. Generic copays have gone up 10% from 10 bucks to 11. That should have been okay, but for a year my PCP has been losing her mind over the fact that the anti-malarial drug I take for lupus is generic not name brand. She wants me on branded Plaquenil, which will increase that to $28 a month. She also prescribed a name branded inhaler last week, when she decided my oxygen saturation has been chronically low and she doesn't like it. Another $28. And that last prescription I added in from the rheumatologist, the one that is supposed to trick my brain into forcing me to produce more of my own endorphins? Yeah. Totally denied by insurance. It has to be compounded, so I am paying $55 a month for that.

You know, I don't want to do all the math to add this up. It will freak me out even more than I already am. I am barely able to work, and I have no clients under contract yet this year (thus no real estate income yet this year). I'm not ready to start the nightmare that is disability. I have yet to hear anyone get through it without lawyers and appeals. I am highly unlikely to be willing to call a lawyer, so as far as I am concerned, that door is closed and locked. (It's not just the cost of the service -- it's the actual telephone part. Yes, this is part of the chronic illness. No, it isn't fixable.) Two years ago I signed up with Patreon, but I never activated anything. It steers you strongly into creating bonus material for people who sign up as your patrons, especially at higher levels. Dude. I write every single night without fail, five years running next month. I don't know what more to give. I don't know that I can physically do more than I do. I'm really starting to wonder if I can continue to afford being myself at all.

La-La

Inspirational song: Hooray for Hollywood (Doris Day)

Once upon a time, it was a really big deal. I watched the Oscars with all of the wonder and secret hopes of a girl who dreamed of finding a way to be there.... someday. My ideas of how or why changed several times over. I was going to be a costume designer. I was going to be a supporting actress swept from obscurity by some director who saw hidden talent in me that even I didn't know was there. I was going to sing a nominated song. I don't have the energy to pursue anything like that now, but I still sort of dream about writing a story that could eventually be adapted to a screenplay. (There are very specific style guidelines for screenplays that I never learned. I'd leave adaptation to professionals, given the chance.) I never missed the show when I was younger. It was hit or miss while the kids were growing up, because sometimes we were just too busy. I skipped the last couple of years, because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to bother. This year, I needed it more than I care to admit. I've been overwhelmed by chaos, as have probably two thirds of the rest of the people in this country. Non-fiction life has been stressful, yet horribly addictive. It was time to put some space between me and it, so I could breathe.

I've only seen a few of the movies nominated tonight. I saw Dunkirk and The Post. I saw Star Wars: Last Jedi and Bladerunner 2049. I have Get Out on my DVR, where I've been meaning to watch it for months. I think that's it. Lots of them looked really good on the awards show. Not sure where I need to start (other than finally watching Get Out). I'm open to suggestions for which movie of the last year is mandatory viewing.

Watching all of the gorgeous dresses, or even just thinking about them before the show started, pushed me to make progress on the design that has been flummoxing me for weeks. I need to make a robe that completely unzips, and I have been stuck on how to do the lap and facing to blend with the basic design we settled on. I sat in the hot tub and watched videos on different methods of zipper placket construction, and now I think I'm past the worst obstacle. Not quite ready for my Oscar closeup, but progress nonetheless.

I've been thinking this for a couple weeks, and as of tonight, it is confirmed. Lupita Nyong'o is the most perfect human of her generation. In a world of botox and collagen implants, her natural beauty is all the more startling. I think I found my new Hollywood crush.

Not So Bright

Inspirational song: It Ain't That Pretty at All (Warren Zevon)

There was a training in Boulder today, and I was supposed to be at it. I missed one last Tuesday, because I didn't get my car back in time. (I could have rushed and gotten there late, but by then I was tired and didn't want to push it.) I tried to make it today. I drove in circles trying to find the building. It took me ten minutes past the start time just to put eyes on the sign in the ratty industrial complex that pointed in the general direction of the right office. I drove around the parking lot for another five minutes, looking for an open parking place. There were exactly four. One was handicapped, and while I'm having more trouble getting around than usual, I do not have legal permission to park there. One had a sign for a different business in the complex, with a "violators will be towed" message. A third had a fire hydrant in it. The fourth was next to a rolling dumpster. Strike four. There were no side streets where I could have driven a little distance and walked. I could have gone back down to the next industrial complex where I got lost the first time, where there was a pot shop and a thrift store, but I would have had to have walked across an overgrown field of dead weeds and a drainage ditch. By the time I had to make the choice, I was fifteen minutes late for the training, and I was starting to realize how bad my headache was and how little interest I had in sitting through a powerpoint presentation on computer troubleshooting voter registration for the caucus. I gave up and drove home, feeling like crap.

There was not a cloud in the sky today. The sunlight at a mile above sea level is brutal. At least it is for a person like me. All the cyclists were out today, to take advantage of a warm, sunny weekend day. Me, I was glad I had the muscle memory to get me home from Boulder as the intense light made me feel worse and worse. I had to stop at Staples to buy a specific sort of paper, and walking the twenty-five steps across the parking lot was more than I could handle. I ended up at home, cranky, and unwilling to do anything for the rest of the day. I can't tell you how much I loved having a roof over my head today. At one point, at sunset, I saw Athena grooming herself in the yellow light streaming in from the sliding glass door. She looked so pretty in the Golden Hour glow, but I was glad to be tucked away in the shadows.

I was sitting here, with a sleepy kitten on my lap, pondering writing about the light, when Mr S-P started texting me about how beautiful the moonrise was tonight. He was down in Boulder, and took a quick detour up Flagstaff mountain to take a picture of it. This is the kind of light I can appreciate. Forget that sun nonsense. Give me a pretty moon over the horizon, and suddenly I'm a happy girl.

Fool Me Once

Inspirational song: Won't Get Fooled Again (The Who)

Many years ago, when the girls were preschoolers, and we had not yet moved away from Boulder for the very first time, I tried my hand at gardening, without having any clue what I was doing. I'd spent most of my life reacting violently to touching plants, with my skin breaking out in hives that stung like crazy if I got near pretty much anything green. But we had moved into the basement apartment of our friend's house, and for the first time since I graduated college, I had access to a back yard, and the time and interest in planting things of my very own to grow. The yard was sloped, and Mr S-P and our friend/housemate/landlady worked on turning over a section on the hill that someone had vaguely terraced. (I don't remember whether they did it then or it was already done that way. I suspect Mr S-P did it.) The dirt was rich and dark, like coffee grounds. I couldn't wait to grow flowers and vegetables.

I had never tried to plant in Colorado at that point. I had only mildly been aware of the weather averages growing up in Oklahoma. By the time late February and early March allowed a few warm, sunny days, I was itching to put seeds, bulbs, and bedding plants in the ground. Everyone tried to slow me down, but I went ahead and tried to get things going. I think by Easter, I had already sown seeds. I remember watching daily, wondering how long it would take to see sprouts. Of course, the middle of March is NOT the time to plant in Boulder. As everyone knew it would, more snow came, and killed everything that I had put out. I was crushed, and I heard "told you so" more than once. Eventually, we managed to get a few flower beds to grow. I remember a mound of yarrow, some stunted celosia, and a plant we giggled over for days called "red hot poker." I became jealous of the neighbor's well-established phlox, and have been determined to grow it whenever possible ever since.

Here we are, at the very beginning of March. We turned off the heat and opened the windows for most of the day. My car was uncomfortably warm when I drove home at 2 this afternoon. I went out looking for something to take a picture of for this space, and found exactly what I thought I would: bulbs are emerging. Two decades ago, I had no idea when to plant, nor when things ought to emerge from dormancy. This year, I know a whole lot more, and I'm freaked out to find hyacinths and daffodils well on their way out of the ground. I looked around the beds and bushes, and most things were still winter-crispy. But the lavender looked like it did around early November, and the nandina I didn't expect to survive outside of Charleston was leafy and very much alive. Am I ready for the garden to wake up? What happens when the cold weather snaps back and shows us all we had been fooled?

Saucy

Inspirational song: Oklahoma Song (Hoyt Axton)

It's so rare that I'm outside close to sunup. I'd forgotten that birdsong is so loud and enthusiastic first thing in the morning. This morning, as I left for my monthly sales meeting, it was one particular bird who was throwing up a ruckus. There is a house, about four blocks from here, where there's a large fenced area with several chickens. It's my favorite house in the greater neighborhood, as it is an old farmhouse sitting on an acre of land, in the middle of the 1950s-era development of the city. It's the one that last year had the hand painted sign out front that said, "FREE ROOSTER." I can't say for certain that it was for the same particular rooster who I heard this morning, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one they were trying to re-home. He had a whole lot to talk about this morning.

One of my fellow agents led a tutorial today about how he and his business partner find houses for their fix and flip operation, and what sort of cost analysis they run to decide whether any opportunities they discover along the way have a chance at being profitable. I have wanted to do fix and flips for so many years, I can't remember a time when I didn't. I'm finally in a stable situation where I could do this sort of thing, without Uncle Sam telling me that we were going to be moving on short notice. Yet I'm also less strong, with less stamina, and more pain than is required to do the project hands on, as I had wanted to do all along. My friend's presentation gave me an inkling of how it could be done without swinging a hammer myself (much), but there's still a lot of organization and decision-making that sounds emotionally taxing. It's still something I'd like to do at least once, but it probably won't be in the next six months. Fun to think about, though.

Tonight was the night I brought the exchange student over to meet the gang, to see whether she really wants to stay here for a couple months. I decided it would be best to show us at our most rowdy, so she has an honest view of what life here would be like. We were loud and goofy and no one held back a single bit. When I drove her back to the current host family, I asked her whether she was scared off. She said no, she liked the chaos. She's with very quiet people now, and she looks forward to the other extreme. I hope she is serious. The die is cast, and I don't think there's any turning back now.

I fed everyone an ultra American sort of meal, for her benefit. I'm not sure she liked it as much as everyone else. We smoked ribs (3-2-1 method), and I made a homemade glaze unlike anything I've done before. I can't decide whether to give away the recipe. It was incredible, to a point where I think I could compete in pro-am BBQ cookoffs with this one. I wrote it down right away, and took a picture for my own reference, but I think the only image I will share at this point is the picture I sent my neighbor to tell him dinner was ready. I'll let you know if I decide to try my hand at a contest with it.