Viridian5's House of "...What?"

I had my Forte's front brakes replaced the other day, and it feels so different braking that it's made me realize the old ones were really bad. Like, worse than I realized. Oops.

I was told in January there was about 10% of the front brakes were left but it would be about $460 so... I waited.

Mechanic: "You know, your back brakes also need replacing soon."
Me: "Not happening today!"

I also had to replace another brake light and get the oil changed. They also helped removed some chewing gum some ass put on my car on a recent 100-degree day where it was just about molten and strings kept coming off, getting all over the place. My guys.

I put about 45 new window display photos up. (I still have more Saks Fifth Avenue to go, but I gotta take a rest.) You can see them at my Flickr.

Unlike the deeply disappointing run I did May 1, late May netted me some good stuff, even if Bloomingdale's is still using the same sets and concept in its window displays as it did in the middle of March. I start my night trips with Bloomingdale's, so I was worried I'd be seeing an early May rerun with all my stores.

I got so excited that the Gucci windows had mannequins with hair and makeup in them. Alas, I think a lot of the hair and makeup wasn't done well. Look at the hairlines on a lot of these girls! (Also, look at how one mannequin has no lighting on her whatsoever, wtf.) But given how rarely anyone does it anymore, maybe it's becoming a lost art.

I was amused that Paris Theater is holding its "Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair" movie series starting June 5.

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I'm still writing and posting "A Long, Long Way to Go."

It's named after a song, like many of my fics. My go-to when I'm stuck for titles is song lyrics/titles. I go for a long drive or walk with Shuffle on and see what the universe throws at me. My funniest Shuffle run for one WIP where the setting is "apocalypse in NYC due to (murderous) aliens landing" (A Quiet Place: Day One) included “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” “Rx 4 the Damned,” or “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.” I ended up going with a Sade song from the run, finding out that a lot of the Soldier of Love album actually applies pretty well for that canon.

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The last three times I went to the Plainview Trader Joe's, the music selection wasn't the elite, often deep-cut alternative songs I'd loved in my previous visits, just some rap, Whitney Houston, and 70s classic rock. I hope the person who gave me the music I loved gets another chance in a future visit I make.

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The stiff-soled sneakers I bought late August by my podiatrist's demand are starting to come apart already, and when I asked the salesperson and my podiatrist's office about it, I was told that six to eight months is standard for mesh sneakers! I paid $80 for these Easy Spirits but some of the shoes I looked at ranged to about $200, and they have about the same life length! I'm currently Krazy gluing my Easy Spirits as I decide whether to go for more of the same or spring for a pair of New Balance that would be $150 that their salesman said could last five months to a year. I don't have the option to go back to my sturdy but flexible SAS Free Time walking shoes because these stiff soled sneakers have seriously saved my ankles a few times. Like the night I shot these window displays, when my left foot went into a hole in the street I didn't see. A lot of Manhattan's streets and sidewalks are trash.

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I'm still waiting for news on my Medicaid recertification, nerve-wracking given our current administration and the fact that I mailed my recertification paperwork a week and a half before the May 10 deadline. I know the office got my paperwork May 5 by checking with their phone system, so????

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I've been informed that I have to start using a new Medicare ID number and card June 17 due to "problems" with my current ones. What did somebody do?

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I have somehow messed up the pairing between my iPhone 17's Bluetooth and my 2020 car. Before, they paired automatically, now I have to laboriously manually pair them back up every time after I turn off my car or use the USB cord. Like, stopping to get gas with my car turned off is long enough to break the connection. Help!

Due to migraines and ridiculous allergies lately, I've been sleeping much more and haven't been online or writing as much. Pair that with how I wasn't going anywhere as much due to all the snow sticking around and making parking less reliable, I have less new stuff to talk about.

Even with higher temperatures and a lot of rain, we still have some mounds of the stuff, but parking is getting easier to find.

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It's Irish soda bread season in NY. The Stop & Shop version, heretically, didn't have caraway seeds, but Trader Joe's did, even if I cringe at them calling theirs the Blarney Scone.

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I had my annual eye exam last week, something especially important for someone with Chiari, which means they're very concerned with how my retinas are doing. For some reason, the pupil of my left eye stayed dilated hours longer than my right. They can't have put that much more dilating fluid in my left eye. My youngest niece saw it when I picked her up from college and was very concerned for me.

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I received a notice from Kia of a recall for my Forte. It said they first sent a notice for it to the original owner in 2021 but nothing was done. So, I got this voluntary emissions and transmission recall done as well as two anti-theft things for free. The Kia service people seemed decent and competent, unlike all of the Hyundai people I used to deal with.

I don't know what's been going on with the sunsets lately, but damn.

December 19, a sunset between rainstorms







December 20




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I didn't expect the latest iOS update to make such a huge difference to my CarPlay interface.

Recently the one-year anniversary of owning my Kia Forte and the 19-year anniversary of my brain surgery passed.

During last week's pain management appointment, my doctor brought two trainees/interns in and asked me if they could sit in on our consultation. When I said yes, I didn't realize I'd have to explain some things to them about Chiari I malformation, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, my brain surgery, and other ideas/procedures floated to treat me. It didn't help that I forgot the word "vertebrae" during the surgery talk and had to tell them that some of the small pieces that jut out of my spine were shaved down to make more room for my brain. When my doctor asked if they had questions, the woman asked if any other things were suggested to treat me, at which point I told her traction made things so much worse and I absolutely refused to get my neck fused as a result. (She also thought people realized they had Chiari just in childhood, and I had to say that if it doesn't become obvious in the victim's childhood, it often does in your 30s, which it did for me.)

Then an office worker came by to say there was food in the kitchen area and the two immediately disappeared for it, mid-consultation, while I and my doctor exchanged a "looking into the camera on The Office" look.

I told him that I sometimes get numbness, pain, or a burning agony on the front of my left thigh, which he said came from the spine, like the L3 area, and suggested I do certain stretches for it. The office had me take a cognition test, due to possible side effects of some of the medications I'm on, and I scored average in most areas and above average in one. I discovered during it that I can memorize five numbers at a time but not six.

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The "check brake light" dashboard alert is once again randomly coming on and turning itself off in my Kia Forte. Having replaced a wire, which worked for seven months, and replaced the brake light bulb and cleaned its housing, which worked for three months, my mechanics have no other idea what to do, and I don't trust Huntington Volvo, where I bought the car, after they gave me this car with four rotting tires on it and refused to get back to me on anything. Thus, I'm living with the alert when it's there. The way it activates with a loud, distracting ~ding~ every time sucks.

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Since the government is still shut down, I'm not getting my November food money.

The MTA made its changes to Queens buses. They had public meetings where people were telling them not to get rid of so many bus stops and definitely don't get rid of the ones in front of important areas/stores or subway stations so people can switch to the train, and that fewer bus stops would be bad for the elderly and disabled. The MTA ignored all of that, did what it wanted to do anyway, and metaphorically told the elderly and disabled to go fuck themselves. (Their claim is fewer stops will lead to faster buses. Sure.)

I've been personally affected, since my local bus is one of the ones renamed and rerouted. My local bus was the Q38 but now it's the Q14. But there's also still a Q38 that... goes places? Somewhere. Just no longer at my local stops and route.

As a disabled person, getting on a bus and not being sure where it goes can be scary.

More changes to the Queens system coming the end of August! Yes, there's more! (Also, Queens never got many subway lines, so if you're using mass transit in Queens, you're most likely using a bus for at least part of the trip. Queens is dependent on buses.)

And somehow, the MTA is still a law unto themselves, and the corruption and waste keep marching on.

The MTA: Giving Queens residents more reasons to own a car.

I had to take the bus today.


In other news, I use Medicaid for my dental. My dentist thinks I need two crowns and put in a request to Medicaid. Medicaid said it couldn't consider it without me getting more X-rays to show them... but it won't cover those X-rays. Am I going to spend $150 on X-rays when Medicaid could still say it won't cover the crowns afterward? Fuck no.

I made an appointment for X-rays this morning, then got the news and canceled them this afternoon.

I have X-rays of the area. I just apparently don't have the specific, magical X-rays Medicaid demands but won't cover. Sorry, girl, used up all your X-rays until December!

So, my day.

I finally got my car washed yesterday because a few months of dirt became too much for me to handle; even the rains couldn't get everything off, and the white color showed it. First I wanted to get past all the winter filth that got right back on my car immediately after me cleaning any part of it, then it was day after day of new coats of pollen in the spring making me feel like I'd just be wasting my money. But I finally hit my limit.

It was stupid expensive though.

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One of the reaction videos I watched today made me think of movie soundtracks I've loved for having so many good songs on them. (Not the OSTs).

The Crow
The Crow: Salvation
The Lost Boys
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Virtuosity and Strange Days (In some ways I feel like these two movies and their soundtracks were brothers from another mother.)
The Matrix
White Nights
The Saint
Pump Up the Volume
Singles
Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse

(I'm not counting Atomic Blonde because that's basically just 1980s' greatest hits plus a few sad covers--you really couldn't get the rights to the real "Blue Monday" and "Stigmata"?--while Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is just some of Weird Al's most famous songs plus some OST stuff.)

I went into Manhattan twice at night this week hoping for some Met Gala window displays, something that's often done by Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Not a one had a single Met window display this year. Cowards. I mean, there are so many fun things that could be done with men's suit detailing and dandyism. (I wonder if they scrapped the windows from fears of "DEI"-hating protests.)

When I think back to the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty windows, the Punk: Chaos to Couture windows.... (I wish my equipment at the time had been good enough not to do flash flares for the night shoot photos.) These are all the past Met Gala-themed window displays I shot from previous years.

So I shot and posted what the stores had up in their windows instead. You can see those at my Flickr.

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From what I've seen, the Met Gala's attendees this year seem to be a bit more on-target of the theme than usual. (This year's theme being "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.") Considering the ways I expected some of the attendees to go offensively wrong.... But I am so dismayed by a lot of the hair and makeup choices.

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But my drive into Manhattan that last night saw the return of the "brake light problem" alert light on my Forte's dashboard, and Huntington Volvo is being very hard to reach...


Also, I'm still resisting getting a Real ID. I have neither the money nor the spoons for this bullshit, though hearing all the potential ways this thing may become necessary to do things scares me. Like Michael Longfellow said on Saturday Night Live recently, if my government ID is now fake, the government should pay for it.

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The tree chunks have been removed from the Mager site at All Faiths Cemetery! Alas, Irving is still lying in the dirt, but I don't know how much he and the gravestone he's attached to weigh so that may require equipment to put him upright. I can hope that'll happen sometime. I didn't take any photos because it was pouring rain today.

My photos program reminded me of a Bergdorf Goodman series from February 10, 2019 I didn't process and post, but they're up at my Flickr now.

The lighting, the winter shmutz on the window glass, and so much black made these so hard for me to shoot with the iPhone 5S and the Kodak Easyshare M1093 IS I had at the time. This series is one I wish I could revisit with my current camera.

Plus, it's so rare these days to see mannequins with hair, natural skin tones, and makeup in NYC window displays.

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As I was explaining the many dramas of the Emilia Pérez Oscar campaign and nominations to my roommate, I pulled up the clip of "La Vaginoplastia" on YouTube for her and she didn't even last a minute listening to it. She didn't believe me about the lyrics. The fool.

I'm spreading knowledge.

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I was glad I went out today because the ice frozen to the roof of my car came loose in the sun, slid down the front windshield, cracked into several pieces, jumbled to a stop at various angles at the windshield wipers, and refroze together like that. I removed all of that before it started snowing tonight so I wouldn't have a massive problem to try to clear later.

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This is such a Queens thing. "City Fresh Market celebrates grand opening, bringing fresh food and community spirit to Ridgewood" spends three of its paragraphs talking about parking and lauding City Fresh Market for having a parking lot. This might seem like a bit much to outsiders, but anyone who tries to park in Ridgewood knows the deal. Queens citizens complain about the lack of parking... the city rips out more parking spots to put in Citi Bike kiosks and those stupid daylighting curbs. It's not like the city is going to give us better transit when they can make driving suck instead!

I went into Manhattan hoping for some fun, interesting Fashion Week windows but didn't get them. Bloomingdale's hadn't even changed their displays at all. I hoped for more unusual backgrounds for Bergdorf's displays for its 2025 Spring Preview ensembles but oh well. Some of the clothes were eye catching; some just weird. Saks changed out its Lunar New Year windows for Valentine's Day, with a different shade of red, some displays for the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, and a Chanel clothing display that badly split the difference between sexy and granny. The Dior window I posted confused the hell out of me. Anyway, you can find Bergdorf, Saks, and the one Dior window up at my Flickr.

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The music I listen to in my car is saved to my phone, and the songs have various origins and thus sound levels. While parking one night, "The Yawn" by Ballpoint came on loud and that bass was booming. Very audible even with the doors closed. A pedestrian said, "Good music for parking!"