playswithworms, posts by tag: rl - LiveJournal

1. Today's traffic jam podcast: David Tennant (10th Doctor) interviewing Jodie Whittaker (13th Doctor) - so much fun! I could listen to them all day. The accents! Just give me delight, although I listened to it again on the way home because I couldn't quite catch everything the first time through. Here's the YouTube link - no video, just the audio, and if you do podcasts just look up the latest episode of "David Tennant Does a Podcast With..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL…

So far I've made it through most of Matt Smith (11th Doctor) and as I suspected, it just took me a few more episodes to like him very much! All the convoluting plots and River Song, very fun, too.

2. In other news, discovered last week at a vet visit that our educational groundhog, that I've been calling "she" for three years, is actually a boy! Field guides don't go into that much detail on sexing groundhogs XD

3. Had to start over on my "Couch to 5K" exercise project - took a few weeks off due to a bad cold, and then polar vortex temps, and even though I scaled it back to shorter run segments when I started back up again, my knees started hurting almost right off the bat. And I kept going thinking "maybe they'll loosen up" - they did not loosen up! Knees were very unhappy afterwards, so gave it all a rest and thought I'd try glucosamine supplements. Seems to be helping! It might be psychological, but I do feel very springy, and knees are mostly fine now - one has a bit of soreness once in awhile, but I've started over back at the very beginning with the running app, with the little 1 minute runs, and it doesn't seem to be making it worse. I do like my little running park - I get to hear water gurgling in the icy creek, and there's a kingfisher that rattles every time I go by, and there's fun sand patterns and raccoon tracks on the trail.

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1. I have made a Pillowforte. fort. thing. Haven't done much yet since it's running super slow due to being a little overwhelmed and still a baby site, but it is there and I've found a few folks and added them, and I know there've been a few others on there that scrolled past on tumblr that I lost track of - feel free to look me up if you're on there - playswithworms is the name, I have no game, or something. (Also, if you have changed names on tumblr several times I may or may not have any idea who you are, lol - I still think of everyone as their original LJ handles for the most part).

2. Have been home with a cold for a few days and binge watched "The Dragon Prince" on Netflix, super cute! Things I like:
More than one female character! It's...not quite 50:50, maybe, but I believe it's approaching it quite closely!
A plotline I mostly follow!
A kickass awesome character who is deaf and they use sign language and have an interpreter, and it's not heavy-handed (ha! I meant to do that) or overdone, just part of the story.
All the characters are fun and interesting and quirky and I like getting to know them
Everyone, including kings, baby-talks to their animal companions
Affectionate step-family and sibling relationships
Season 1 doesn't resolve all the threads (Season 2 is in the works), but ends on a satisfying note.

3. I have been running! Sort of, anyway. This is in an attempt to avoid having to take blood pressure medication, which doesn't seem to agree with me very well. My job keeps me pretty active, except for this time of year, but it's not usually aerobic-type activity, just a lot of continuous walking around. I downloaded one of those "Couch to 5K" apps that steps you up with gradually increasing bits of jogging vs walking and (until I came down with cold) have been heading out to a tiny local park to run(ish). The trail is soft enough it hasn't bothered my knees or feet so far, and I get to check out trees and plants and a nice burbly stream and occasional wildlife, so it's fairly easy to convince myself to do it. The only thing is it does have a huge stand of around 20 or so mature dead ash trees, wiped out by the emerald ash borer the last few years, so that adds an extra spice of danger! Yeesh. I don't go if there are high winds. So far I've made it to three-minute continuous runs, and it's fun to feel like I've developed a wee bit of stamina. The boobs are a bit of a pain - I have a jogging bra that isn't too bad if I put it on over my shirt and the whole kaboodle, instead of wearing it right next to my skin, but this time of year my coat works just as well to keep everything from flopping about too much. I'm a little self-conscious because I don't have any "jogging" clothes, and the park is right behind a big fitness center and there I am jogging around in my khaki work pants and hiking boots, lol, but usually there's no one else on the trail.

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Took the lads in for vaccinations and check ups yesterday - had been trying to get Mr-Food-Vacuum-Gandalf’s weight down a bit since he’s been having more trouble jumping up on things, so started putting the dry kibble in ice cube trays to slow him down a bit. And it worked! Gandalf is down half a pound. Toast however has dropped a full pound that he really didn’t need to drop, hrm. The first day I tried the ice cube tray thing he scooped the food out with his paw right away, but then he seemed like he just totally forgot how to do it and now he just sticks his nose into the cube tray and gets the top bits and gives up on the rest. So, may have to figure out something else, scheduled mealtimes in three different rooms or something.

Miss Bones will get her check up in spring, but as far as I can tell by manual squooshes (when she’ll let me, which is only when I’m talking on the phone which = cuddle time for some reason) she’s maintaining her weight - she only comes out to eat after I’ve gone to bed and everything’s quiet, which presents its own challenge.

"What is this new devilry?"

In other news, I just deleted three porn blogs that started following me on tumblr since yesterday - penises, vulvas, dildos, strap ons, blow jobs, gifs of real people and cartoon people having sex, the works! So the "no adult content" algorithm whatsis is doing a bang up job there, lol.

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In the last few days I've had Actual Days Off In A Row and gotten to use some nifty new thingamabobs - it feels like a lot, but I guess it's really only two and one I haven't tried out yet, lol - still, I've been having fun!

1. Leaf blower-mulcher which I got last spring when they were on sale, but haven't had a chance to use it until yesterday - it was still in the box in the garage! I don't really need the blower, but I wanted to be able to mulch the copious dead leaves I get from my neighbor's three ginormous beautiful oak trees and put them on my woodland wildflower planting in the back (whole leaves tend to just blow around, and can smother teeny seedlings, so mulched is supposed to be better). It works great! Sucked up all the leaves along the edge of the driveway and chopped and funneled them into a backpack tube, which I could then detach and dump. Got three loads, and will hopefully be able to get the leaves from neighbors when the rake them up (there's a bit of a language barrier, and they think I'm a little nuts to WANT their dead leaves, but that's how I started my wildflower garden originally is by dumping the 10 or so big bags of leaves I mooched off of them a couple of years ago).

2. Wi-fi extender - actually haven't used this one yet. Mom and I share a phone data plan and mom has been very worried about overshooting our data because the wifi doesn't reach back to her bedroom, so her phone keeps switching to data. Going to see if I can stair-step it back there for her - it's a minimal charge if we do overshoot, and more likely to be due to me doing work stuff on my phone, but she does worry lol.

3. Vitamix blender - this is apparently like the fancy sports car of blenders - I've been using a little tiny Nutri-bullet to mix up wildlife smoothies to sneak in veggies to my opossums and raccoons that don't like veggies (and even, on occasion, food for me!), and it takes forever to mix and freeze a big batch that will last awhile and makes a big mess trying to keep the little blender cup from dripping all over the place with each blend cycle. I have a bigger blender that I've had forever, but it leaves chunks and clogs all the time. I found a refurbished + on sale one for around $180, which yikes, but normally even refurbished these puppies are $300 or more, and...I nabbed it! Tried it out today to mix up opossum smoothies for the week, and whoo hoo! At top speed it sounds like a jet engine taking off - it's a little scary lol, but it doesn't clog! And no chunky bits of veggie that the opossums will just spit out! And it took me maybe 20 minutes instead of an hour! So...money well spent, I think. And I still have the Nutri-bullet for mixing up frozen mealworms and crickets and any other weird stuff.

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Finally gave in a couple of days ago and turned on the heat when nighttime temps started dipping into the upper 40's, and now tonight I just turned on the air conditioning again because the house it still all hot and stuffy from the 80's today.

In other exciting news, I gave the bathroom a good deep scrubbing on Saturday and moved the stacks of baby bottles and feeding tubes and formula back into the spare bedroom/wildlife room - it's so nice to have one room in the house all clean and organized! Now I just need a couple weeks off to get the rest of the house tackled, lol. And the yard. And the garage. I still have half a pile of mulch from this spring sitting in the driveway that I didn't get finished moving before baby season hit - I've been trying to move at least a wheelbarrow a night, but with road construction going on right now (they shut down a whole section of interstate) my daily commute is taking closer to two hours than one - doesn't leave much time after ingesting foods and taking care of the wildlifes. Hopefully I can get some of these kiddos released soon - the raccoon babies are absolutely trashing their pen every night, they need MORE ROOM, like a whole forest!

Ended up on emergency (human) baby sitting duty on Sunday morning - niecelet was running a fever and mom was watching her, but had a church thing she had to go to. Poor kiddo, she's a little cranky pants when she's sick - everything was the End of the World, including but not limited to: taking her temperature, taking medicine (mom finally mixed it with melted popsicle and snuck it in that way), assisting her with taking her sock off, giving her a paper towel so her popsicle didn't drip, being dripped on by the popsicle because she wouldn't take the towel, and her aunt going to the bathroom in the WRONG bathroom (she wanted me to use the big bathroom, not the little one). That was Saturday night - luckily by Sunday morning when I was on duty the medicine had kicked in and she was her normal silly funny self, some occasional stubbornness, but not sobbing-on-the-floor meltdowns every few minutes. We even played for awhile with the thermometer and took each other's temperatures (it was an armpit thermometer - the night before she wouldn't even let us touch her with it, let alone stick it in her armpit, and the under-the-tongue one was right out. I think I'm going to invest in one of those remote thermometers for mom that scans from a distance, where you don't even have to touch them, pricey but it might be worth it!)

I did manage to find enough time to catch up on a few things on my watch list on Netflix (and hide from the news): Wrinkle in Time (fun characters! Didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would though) Golden Compass (enjoyed this one more than I thought I would, although I fell asleep for the last part, so not sure what the recommendation is there, lol), and Lost in Space reboot (also very fun, although I found some parts hard to watch - fake psychologist lady freaked me out! I suspect it's just a me thing for that though).

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Teeny bits of it, anyway - finally feel like I'm starting to get some sanity back, as daycamps are done and I've had a few no-program days at work to get my ducks in a row. Or possums. Or something. Wildlife season hasn't slowed down one jot - still bottle feeding three late-season baby raccoons twice a day, and got in 12 teeny opossum orphans that need tube-feeding three times a day. The raccoons are nibbling on bananas and hard-boiled eggs tonight, and the opossum babies opened their eyes yesterday, so they should get the hang of lapping from a dish probably in the next week - light at the end of the tunnel!

We had major wind gusts in a storm earlier in the week, and my power went out about 2am, which means my baby wildlife incubator stopped incubating, and I had no way to warm up formula to feed anyone in the morning. Spent the rest of the night with 12 baby opossums bundled in a pillowcase under my shirt to keep them warm - it was a very squirmy night! Mot much sleeping, lol. Packed them and the three raccoons in the car first thing in the morning, along with their formula in coolers to keep it warm, and drove everyone to the nature center - was able to get the opossums fed before first program of the day, but raccoon babies were old enough that they were too freaked out by the new environment to eat anyway, so they got their breakfast later in the afternoon. Happily the power was back on by the time I got home - threw away a few things in the fridge, since I had to open it in the morning to get the formula out, but it was mostly vegetables for critters rather than human food, so not much lost. Normally losing power isn't a super big deal for me, but with teeny wildlife babies it's a logistical nightmare - really considering getting a generator, although I don't think I'd want to leave it running unattended so would probably end up carting babies to work with me anyway.

Had my usual Saturday night hangout time with niecelet and mom - niecelet is attending preschool a couple days a week and learning to write out her name. I wrote her name and my name and my mom's name and her dad's name in chalk on the back porch, and oh, the complete and utter earth-shattering joy and delight when she discovered that some of our names had THE SAME LETTERS! Hee ^_^

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That 'minor' cold from way back when progressed to a sinus infection that knocked me flat for a couple weeks - I had all kinds of programs and volunteer trainings at work, so I dosed up on cold medicine enough to stay functional, but didn't have much energy left over for anything else, and the house was really showing it! Finally started feeling human again this week - my head doesn't feel like a bowling ball, which is lovely :) And have had three days off in a row, whoo hoo!

House is now back to minimal standards of civilization, and I was in a cooking mood today now that the kitchen is clean(ish) - I've been resorting to fast food and mac-n-cheese way too much lately. Made a veggie omelet for breakfast, some pear-oatmeal bars to take as snacks to work next week (smelled lovely while cooking, but not particularly tasty - maybe they'll grow on me), rolled up a bunch of mini bean burritos and put them in the freezer to take for lunches, sliced some potatoes and baked with soup mix seasoning and mozzarella cheese and gobbled them up for dinner tonight, they turned out quite tasty. On the wildlife food prep, mixed up a big batch of "raccoon glorp" - peas, carrots, bananas, nuts and seeds, blueberries, yogurt, etc. and froze it into baby food jars - keeps raccoon girl occupied for awhile eating them.

In other news, someone brought in a big brown bat last week with a broken wing bone - I have another one I'm hibernating and will release in the spring, but this one I'm not sure will be releasable. Dropped her off at the vet this morning but they didn't get a chance to look at her today, will find out the verdict tomorrow if they can do surgery on the wing (it's one of the hair thin "finger" bones, but the ends are sticking out from the wing and it's been that way for awhile) and if there's any hope of regaining full flight. I'm pretty doubtful, so have been brushing up on my long-term captive bat care since odds are good she'll have to stay as a non-releasable education bat. She's an older lady, her teeth are worn instead of pointy-sharp like on my hibernating bat, but she's super feisty and is starting to get the hang of eating mealworms from tweezers.

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Since posting photos on DW is kinda tedious, but on tumblr I can just stick 'em directly from my phone:
Color changing betta Legolas-the-fish

I also got two new bettas, since my little Bluestreak betta died several weeks ago, after a good run of 4 or 5 years, and I had an empty tank: Two new feesh

My little zinnias are sprouting, yay!

Caught a cold, after dodging the germs all year, so not so yay *snorfles and snuffs* My voice survived the 100 first graders and two hours of showing them pond bugs this morning (and they all went out and scooped - had to break through the ice on the pond to do it, lol, and we only caught algae and muck for the most part, but I was impressed - they all did it and they all had an awesome time!), but I am now left with nothing but a a piteous raspy whisper. Happily tomorrow I can just snuggle in and not do much, maybe my taxes if I get ambitious.

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Finally got dryer repaired this afternoon, so I can catch up on the big backlog of critter laundry. I've been doing my human laundry and just hanging up around the house to dry, which works fine, but would be pretty tedious to do with all the critter towels and blankets.

Also got a dental filling replaced this morning - all of my fillings are from at least 25 years ago, and apparently after awhile they start to need replacing. This wasn't bad at all, except I've got a cold sore in the corner of my mouth and it was not happy with me holding my mouth open and now it's really sore! So, I'm considerably poorer, and my mouth is a little bit cranky, but all in all a productive day (I have not, yet, accomplished any laundry, being a little worn out from several longs days at work this week, but instead have spent the evening snugged on the couch watching a PBS documentary on The History of China, which caught my fancy and was fascinating! I knew there were huge gaps in my grokking of Chinese history and I was right.)

While I was waiting for the repair person (who turned out to be a Very Tall Person, and I had to warn him to duck under my low hanging light fixtures and the low ceiling going down the staircase and other hazards of my Very Short Person house, lol) managed to get some zinnias and Mexican sunflower seeds started for spring, now percolating in their dirts on my hopefully out-of-reach-from-raccoon table by the window, and also planted some shooting star and cardinal flower seeds in milk jugs and put them outside - they're native wildflowers so they need the cold temps first before they'll decide to sprout. I put my big poofy winter coat away too soon! After two weeks of warm February, we're back in the lower 20's F for March - I was way under dressed today in my lesser winter coat, brrrrrr

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A new thing, not just a repost even!

Happy Prime Chapter 4

In other news, all my wildlife permits and reports are due next week - every year I plan to get them done early and every year I'm right down to the wire - I just need about 8 uninterrupted hours, but work has been one thing after another. Thinking I might sneak in and hide in the office on Saturday and try to get them hammered out, because I have a feeling next week is not going to cooperate on the uninterrupted front.

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