Ghost-of-a-Chance

You’re not doing anything wrong; that’s actually an option suggested by the program. It just doesn’t work for me. If it works for you, more power to you. 🙂 If what I wrote came across judgy, I’m sorry about that; it wasn’t intentional.

My focus in college was creative writing and literature, but it was long enough ago that some of what we were taught is now obscure if not obsolete. Think following the origin language’s rules for words adopted into English, shorthand as a subject, tab-starting instead of adding an extra line between paragraphs and two spaces after a sentence, etc. It’s left me with some tough habits to break—or cling to like life rafts—and some newer practices make my brain short circuit. (“Anti-Capital-ism,” apparently, is a thing, and it has nothing to do with money or capitalism. It makes my brain hurt.)

Frankly, my college and university didn’t even have programming or computer science degrees until a few years after I left “because these computer things are just a fad” and “nobody is going to spend money on a degree that won’t make them money.” I’m impressed anytime someone can make computers work because my school district, in their stubbornness, raised a whole generation of technologically illiterate students. The other day, I took my (wired, optical) mouse apart to clean out the cat hair and almost couldn’t put the damned thing back together. It had four removable parts. 🫠

what the hell am I supposed to do? Just let your tantrum drag down my writing score because you can’t find any actual errors that need to be fixed?!

I had a boss like that once.  It prompted me to find a new job.

I’m definitely in that “two spaces after a sentence” crowd, and somebody trying to use correct grammar/syntax – which, apparently, is also an indicator of being AI written.  (Think my biggest beef with AI is what the hype is doing to computer part prices!)  My background...yeah, my SAT written was pretty abysmal, it was the math portion that did the heavy lifting.  (At that time, only two components, not the current three.)  And in school, pretty much believed what my mother had latched onto, that “I hated writing”; took Harry Potter fanfiction for me to realize it was directed writing that I hated, thus creative what I want to write on just for fun – got a 2.6M fanfic that’s proof there.

But that was the beauty of those ‘60s pseudo-psychedelic songs.  The artist sang like they had a mouth full of peanut butter, and you picked your own damned lyrics!

In-a-gadda-da-vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm loving you?
In-a-gadda-da-vida, baby
Don't you know that I'll always be true?

Seaman, that’s exactly the song that came to mind when Wilde_Guess mentioned singing like they had a mouth full of peanut butter! 

Poor kitty, trying to get warm. 

We’re having trouble with our furnace. 🥶 The thing would crap out right in the middle of a once-in-a-decade snowstorm. I’ve tried threatening it with the sledgehammer treatment, but with a windchill in the double digit negatives and snow drifts up to my calves, it called my bluff. Cold is coming to hate the nickname he chose. 🤭 Fortunately, we haven’t had any sleet yet, and it hasn’t warmed up enough during the day to melt the snow, so for once, we don’t have ice on the roads. 

Stay warm, and BronxWench, give the pooch some scritches for us!

We are happiest when we’ve stuck our face in the snow...

That may just be the cutest thing I’ve seen in ages. 😂 So much chaos in such a tiny body, and that little grin is perfection!

The furnace is working again, thank heavens. I was about to turn into a Ghost-sicle. Apparently telling the company it’s pushing 40° and you can’t breathe when it’s colder than 50° gets someone on the job fast. (It’s true, too. My inhaler has been getting used hard and put away wet for the last week.)

But I would vote for you…  

Well, with the current administration, the bar of “do better” is pretty low….

Me, I’m early to bed/rise, fell into that habit, and it’s super productive when it comes to writing & similar.

Thanks for your support and kind words, everyone, and thanks for letting me vent. It’s been hard, but I think I’m past the anger stage now. To be perfectly blunt, I can’t express my feelings like that IRL because my husband is suffering too, and according to my dad, “Chances are stoic.” (No the fuck we are not, Dad. Your Silent-Gen parents just punished you for having emotions, and anger is an emotion. Being angry isn’t a substitute for feeling hurt, and I detest you for passing that on to me.) Just being able to do something besides cry on Heiferlump while Cold was at work has helped. 

We’re still struggling. Cold is drinking more often—fortunately, not much at a time—and forcing himself through. I’m using housework to dissociate and isolating from others. It’s not healthy, but it’s getting us through. I keep finding Woozle’s toys and furballs and choking up.

Heifer, by the way, is hanging in there for the most part. She’s finally dislodging herself from my colon for an hour or so at a time. Around the time I first posted, she jammed herself so far up my backside that I could smell her breath and wouldn’t be removed even long enough for a shower unless her dad stepped in as a substitute. It appears she worried that losing her brother might mean losing one of us, too, or maybe she recognized that we need her more than ever. Either way, she hasn’t started crying for Woozle that I’ve seen, and for that, I’m grateful; watching her go through that after losing her first brother broke me.

We’re hanging in there. It’s been hard, but we’re hanging in there.

Cats have a way of knowing when their people need them.  She knew that you needed her.

DemonGoddess, that’s the truth. Heifer’s first brother could recognize when I was experiencing the nastiest of my PTSD symptoms, and he used to react to them like a trained service dog. Fuck if I know where he picked it up from. Neither of us taught him, and his previous owner never mentioned it. All I know is when my PTSD was at its worst in 2011, I would wake up from hellish dreams to find him sitting on my chest and nipping, and I’d come out of flashbacks to him purring and headbutting me in the face. Hard. It was enough to pull me back to the present, and he’d stick around long enough for the shaking to stop. He was a godsend. Losing him was heartbreaking, but watching Heifer grieve him? Having to see her wandering around crying for him? That killed me. 

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned his trigger-recognition and response before. Maybe not. I tend to guard things like that closely in case my family finds my fan-persona and recognizes something. The last thing I need is to have my church-bigot parents demanding if I’m bi because I can’t lie to them save my life. Point is, yeah, Heifer surely recognized that I needed her like air, and she may have realized I’m feeling better enough to not need constant supervision. Unfortunately, she has started looking for Woozle and calling out for him. It had been a few days since the last time I cried – Woozle was my little Mama’s boy, and I feel like we let him down – but when I realized why she’s walking around crying, that reset to zero.

This has to get better. It just has to. I know time will help, but fucking hell, it sucks in realtime.

Think that’s bad, imagine going to the grocery store and being asked if you needed the SENIOR CITIZEN discount.

But yeah, overall, I’ve gone rather soft on the music I listen to as well, it’s easier to write to IMO.

Ouch. Frankly, until Cold started going white in the hair and beard—he’s always been white enough to light up a room if you shine a flashlight on him—people used to address me as his mother. A former neighbor even asked if “my son is single.” That was an awkward elevator ride. Like, lady, he’s older than me! 🤨 I know I started getting greys early for a woman, but good grief. That’s about the time I switched from playing rat pack and big band in common areas and went to oldies or classic rock. Apparently, it’s illegal to enjoy music older than you are and people will card you.

I haven’t succumbed to the lure of Spotify yet, but I do have an elderly iPod with what has to be the most eclectic assortment of music ever. I’m either 24 or 128, depending on what I play.

And never knock a good senior citizen discount.  

Making sure you’re not dead?  Or, an experiment to test how much you love them?

I firmly believe this is an ongoing and extensive test of the pain tolerances of bipeds, and somewhere, there is a dedicated team of feline researchers compiling a database of the frequency of certain responses to specific stimuli. I eagerly await publication of their results.

On a side note, they have occasionally outsourced data collection to corgis.

If this is a test for life, then someone needs to tell Heifer I’m not dead. You hear me, Heiferlump Chance? I’m still alive, and I love you! You don’t get to eat my corpse yet! 

Only sign of intelligence right now seems to be in somebody’s head (talking about the worm).

to paraphrase:

“Two realities diverged in a simulation, and I took the wrong damn turn, didn’t I?”

@pippychick that’s a great way to put it. Also, I LOVE your avatar! Great taste in literature!

At the moment, chat gpt does have filters, but OpenAI is planning to relax and/or remove those filters for verified adult users, tentatively in December. 

I can’t decide if that makes me cringe or flinch, or if it’s something in between. That could go wrong in so many ways. 😬

Exactly how I feel about it. 

Update: I’m a mature, semi-well-adjusted adult, so I’m responding to this awkwardness in the most mature and reasonable way possible: playing opera show tunes in the kitchen and singing along…loudly.

I sing like someone stuffed a cat in a burlap bag and tossed it in a metal garbage can to duke it out with a deaf coyote. Send prayers for hubby. 🥰

I must tell you Cold is utterly brilliant, and your response was sublime. 

He loves saying he’s an idiot, and sometimes the things he does make me wonder how he’s still breathing; then he comes out with something like this (and the Schroedinger’s bi line) and I wonder if it’s all just his way of making sure he’s always underestimated. (And thanks!)

Apparently, it’s all ASD now: Autism Spectrum Disorder. Youngerspawn’s official diagnosis was PDD:NOS, or Pervasive Developmental Delay: Not Otherwise Specified. It’s now listed as Autistic Disorder on his case files, otherwise known as “Can you make a fucking diagnosis and stick with it. please?”

I prefer the diagnosis a friend of mine got from her pediatrician when her child was diagnosed, right about the same time as Youngerspawn… “This child ain’t right, but she’ll make a great engineer.”

Good grief. They change the Autism spectrum diagnosis names even more than they change the name for my diagnosed MI. 🙄 I hope you don’t mind if I don’t share it, because the reason isn’t personal. What it is would probably be obvious to anyone who has experience with it and examines my online habits, but I have to be extra careful to not share information that could confirm to my family, “whoa, Ghost is ____!” The amount of information I share is dangerous enough, but to add something like that diagnosis to the mix could get me doxxed...and if my family found out I’m bi? It would be catastrophic.

Either way, it’s probably a good thing I usually just say “Cold has autism” rather than being specific about it; the last thing I need is some smartass going, “well, ack-shoo-lee, it’s called blah-blah-blah.” Your friend’s kid’s diagnosis is a hoot; one of my family members was an engineer, and if she’s anything like him, she’ll be in good company. My husband’s diagnosis was more like, “Congrats, you’re an asshole AND autistic, sucks to be you,” and a boot out the door. It’s wonderful that we have so many options for supporting autistic kids and their parents, but if you’re diagnosed as an adult, you’re just SOL.

Elderspawn was diagnosed at 28. And we do not let BW talk about the way her otherwise beloved city handles early childhood education on the spectrum. Let’s just say that certain higher-ups at the Board of Education got an education in how mama dragons roll. 

For me, it’s tree frogs who chorus with the cicadas, and one particularly nocturnal groundhog, who likes to thump underneath my cottage at around 2 or 3 in the morning.

The daft one asks me why I’m poking at the laptop in the middle of the night. I’m still trying to understand how he can sleep...

If you ever write your memoir, you’ve got to call it Screaming at the Bugs.

Chapter 1: The Insects Persist, but So Do I

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Today I cussed out a crane fly that kept trying to fly into our kitchen. The damned thing would just get eaten by my cat, which would then vomit on my freshly mopped floor, so who can blame me? If blameless, then why did my next door neighbor stare at me like I’m some crazy person while watering their air conditioner?

Elsewhere on the internet: 

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”Tonight, a suburban housewife phoned the police regarding a neighbor’s mental health crisis over an insect in her yard. ‘She was out there using foul language in front of my peonies. What else could I do? The poor things are scarred for life!’”

The following week: 

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”This morning, a peony bush mysteriously caught fire. Coincidence, or retaliation? Discussion on the evening news, tonight.”