Category: life

In which some was gotten

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

As I have become sadly accustomed to when attempting to sell things, we did not make a ton of money at our garage sale. We made enough to cover the tables we had to rent and probably the gas to get to and from the place we had to rent them from, and the rest will maybe get a delicious McDonald’s meal for two of the three of us. During the last hour, we switched to “get this stuff the fuck off my driveway” mode, however, and my wife posted on a couple of come-get-free-shit groups on Facebook, and indeed, people came and got free shit, to the point where there was very little left by the time we closed up shop, and nothing that we’d have to make any phone calls to get hauled away. Which is good! We did this to clear space, not to make a ton of money, and the space is cleared, and some folks got some stuff they need. I’m good with it.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day. My wife and I just had a brief conversations about my expectations re: said holiday, and really, all I need/want/care about is to be acknowledged. And, like, even that doesn’t require much, but I’ll admit that last year I was a little upset, as my father, my brother, and three former students all said “Happy Father’s Day!” to me before my son or my wife did. I don’t need presents or a special meal or anything like that; we’re going to a local art fair for an hour and a half or so in the afternoon, assuming either of us can make our legs work, but that’s something we both want to do. I’d just like it if my ten-year-old manages to remember.

(“But what about Mother’s Day?” I can hear you asking. And the answer is: for reasons that are hers and therefore I’m not going to get into here, my wife loathes Mother’s Day, so beyond the perfunctory Acknowledgment of Holiday Status it is generally best ignored. And she’d probably be just fine without even the acknowledgment. I want that much, but not more.)

Let’s see, what else? I’ve now seen two episodes of Ms. Marvel and it continues to be the best thing Marvel has ever done. Yeah, I said it. It’s maybe not up to the emotional level that the first Iron Man and the first Avengers got me to, but it’s coming close. I fucking love this show.

Okay. I’m tired. Books and chairs for the rest of the night.

Let’s see if this works

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

My internet has melted, and has been at best intermittent throughout the day, so lemme just throw up a quick proof-of-life before it goes down again: it was brutally hot outdoors today; I think the heat index reached somewhere in the 105-110 range, with tomorrow expected to be just as bad. Amazingly, though, it wasn’t nearly as humid as I was expecting, meaning that outside was unpleasant but not the immediate death I was planning for. We spent the evening in the pool. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.

Basement update

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I’m not showing you pictures of the actual basement until it’s done, but this is what we did to our garage today:

If, uh, you happen to spot a wedding present in there, I promise it’s just the box. Really. Honest. My car is also completely full of cardboard– any cardboard still in this picture is going to get dropped off on Tuesday– because my son is attending something called Cardboard Camp for the next week, unless it gets cancelled because the roads between here and Hogwarts have melted. The one really bad bit of decision making here is that since we’ve filled the garage with stuff we’re going to get rid of in the garage sale we can’t put our cars in there, and as a result my car is going to have to be outside during the impending heat wave, which means if the boy’s camps aren’t cancelled for those two days transporting him there and back is gonna be super fun. I’m psyched about it. Honest.

Also, my knees hate me right now, and there’s still more work to be done downstairs. My wife and son hit the pool for the first time since we put it up after we were done working, but I didn’t because I didn’t trust myself on the ladder. Two days of too much up-and-down on stairs have got me hobbling more than I’m comfortable with at the moment, so I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I’m gonna land on my ass. I think I’ll be living there for most of the next few days, though.

No basement talk tomorrow; there are books to be reviewed!

In which I am old and fat and out of shape

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Spent a few hours cleaning out the basement again, and I’m ready to collapse into a puddle and die. In theory, some of the things that will be replacing the years of cruft we’re tearing out of the basement will help with that, and there’s probably going to be a garage sale next weekend, but … yeah, I’m unhealthy. To a degree that’s frankly kinda scary. My stairs aren’t the friendliest either, mind you– there ain’t a damn thing on ’em cushioning any of the shock to my knees when I go up or down– but today shouldn’t have been as hard as it was.

There will be more tomorrow, including a great amassing of cardboard for a camp the boy is going to next week. At least in theory. My understanding is that it is supposed to be about 700 degrees on Tuesday and Wednesday, so we may have some heat cancellations in our future, which apparently has to be a thing now.

Anyway, I’ll post some pictures of the basement when we’re done with it. And probably of the garage sale too, next weekend. We’ve been here 11 years and haven’t ever done one, so there ought to be a LOT of stuff to get rid of. And very possibly a big-ass dumpster in my driveway the week after. I may have said all of this yesterday; my apologies if I’m repeating myself. I’m fucking tired. 🙂

On the news

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Politics5 Comments

I don’t know, as I’m typing this, whether this will end up being a thousand-word post or two paragraphs, because I really don’t know how much I want to talk about this and I won’t know until I start typing. So here we go: I do not intend to watch a single second of the hearings about the January 6th insurrection tonight, nor do I plan to watch them in the future, and in fact I’m not even sure how many days of hearings are currently scheduled. There is nothing– nothing— that these hearings can actually teach me about what happened that day; as near as I can tell all the committee has managed to do is confirm stuff that was perfectly fucking obvious from the day it happened. Of course the shitstain knew what was happening. Of course the highest echelons of the Republican Party were involved in planning it. The closest thing to a surprising detail I’ve heard in the last six months was that Pence’s staff knew that he was in danger, and Pence is such an indescribable coward that he has continued to cling to this wretched creature anyway.

Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I spend all day every day angry and I’m not going to deliberately add to it. I’m just not going to do it.

What I will do, of course, is keep an eye on fucking Twitter, which will no doubt keep me appraised of everything happening in the most anger-inducing manner possible. Or maybe I’ll just turn everything off and shoot Nazis all night again. I am a hundred percent not alone in this, but I would love to find a way to balance knowing enough about what is going on in the world to be able to consider myself an informed citizen with shutting off the absolute fucking fire-hose torrent of horror and evil the world has become. I can feel myself becoming Col. Kurtz over here, y’all, and no one needs that. Least of all me.

I’m going to shoot Nazis to bleed off some stress and then I’m going to watch the first episode of Ms. Marvel, and hopefully I’ll be able to do that without thinking about how fucking awful most of the people who share my hobbies are. We’ll see.

Some updates

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

The YouTube channel is dead; long live the YouTube channel.

I’m not deleting it, mind you, but after a couple of weeks of not updating, initially caused by Covid and then a couple of very busy weeks at home, I find that I don’t miss having to spend an hour or more every single day playing video games in a room by myself where no one is allowed to talk to me and where any noise or, God forbid, a bathroom break meant that I was going to have to spend more time after the video was done editing it. I want to spend some time just playing games when I want to and not worrying about some sort of schedule.

I’m not abandoning the idea altogether, mind you, and in fact I still have a couple of games I want to record. But I can tell already that Horizon: Forbidden West is, of all the games I’ve done Let’s Plays on, the one least amenable to the format I’ve chosen, and I want to just play it without having to worry about breaking it up into digestible chunks. The channel wasn’t making me any money and I was probably years away from enough subs to be able to make any money off of it, so I’m going to shove it back into the realm of “hobby” and stop taking it nearly as seriously.

Today was the first day of summer vacation, and speaking as someone who Does Not Know How To Relax, I feel like I used it pretty well. The front lawn is mowed, some cleaning was accomplished, weeds have been whacked, and I delivered some things to Goodwill that have been sitting around the house for a while. We need to finish clearing out my father-in-law’s apartment before June 1, so I’ll likely be up there tomorrow for a while, and then … well, who knows after that.

Playing around with the 3D printer continues apace; I have made five useless objects, one of which broke while trying to remove it from the print bed and another of which broke because of what I’m pretty sure was a design flaw in the model and not actually either user error or the printer being weird. This little axolotl I printed is pretty cool, though, and right now I’ve got it working on what will be a fourteen-hour, high-detail print of a hook horror from Dungeons & Dragons. The boy has announced that he wants a 3d print of every final-evolution Pokémon from Generation 1. There are, apparently, 81 of them. No word on whether he plans to pay for the filament, and I have to admit I’m also wondering what keeping this little nozzle at 200 degrees Celsius and the bed at 90 degrees Celsius for hours at a time is going to do to my electric bill.

This one’s a big deal: I had an interview scheduled at another school Friday afternoon, and was setting one up at another school for next week, and then had a long talk with the remaining members of my team Friday morning about next year. It is rumored that we’ve finally got a principal (and, to be clear, we have a name, not just a “they have found a warm body” rumor) and it’s amazing just what a difference the simple rumor that they’d named someone actually made. At any rate, after that conversation, I went back to my classroom, looked around, reflected on the fact that I’d been up very late Thursday night thinking about this interview, and emailed both the principals involved and cancelled. I will, for better or for worse, be returning to my current job again this fall, and I have closed out all of my various job-seekery accounts again for the time being. I’m about to go into year 19 of teaching. There is, unfortunately, a strong likelihood that my school will be closing at either the end of this year or the end of next year, and there is also a rumor that the middle school math teacher at Hogwarts will be retiring at the end of this year. If that happens, I plan to do everything in my power to get that job. But that’s a year away, if in fact it actually happens, and you best believe I’ll be keeping a close eye on it. But for now? I’m coming back.

I expect to regret this decision by September. We’ll see.

Covid Update, Day 5

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Reading2 Comments

This kinda sucks, y’all.

I’m taking at least one more day. The earliest I could go back is tomorrow and I’m not going to; I still have a fever, or maybe have a new fever, and the fatigue over the last couple of days has been intense. I’ve taken three naps today. That’s not a joke. I probably could have spent the whole day asleep today if I’d really wanted to.

Part of me feels like I ought to suck it up and go in, and part of me is like 99.5 is a fucking fever, dude, and you have to stand for eight hours. You can’t even lie down for eight hours right now. The really weird thing is that I genuinely don’t have a hell of a lot right now in terms of other symptoms. I had the one night of nightmare chills, about a day and a half of a rough cough, and today there’s been some digestive stuff, which is weirder than it sounds because I haven’t been eating all that much.

I dunno. I’ve been sicker. I’ve been a lot sicker. But this reminds me of going on to brain drugs right now. All I want is to sleep.

I’ve been promising book reviews for a couple of days now, and I haven’t had the energy for them, so let me do this at least: I’ve just read Hunger of the Gods, the second book in John Gwynne’s Bloodsworn trilogy, and The Rage of Dragons, the first book in Evan Winter’s The Burning. The second book of The Burning is out and on my Unread Shelf; I’ll probably get to it pretty quickly. I’ve already reviewed the first book in the Bloodsworn quartet, and the short version is that the second book absolutely lives up to the promise of the first; right now these two books are my favorite things I’ve read this year and I don’t know how I’m going to make it a year (at least, as there’s no release date yet) for the third book.

Rage of Dragons actually scratches a pretty similar itch to the Bloodsworn books, only with a culture inspired by the Xhosa and the Zulu instead of the Norse. I kind of feel bad discussing it in the same post as the Bloodsworn, because it’s not the achievement that those books are– but it’s important to point out that this is Winter’s debut novel, and John Gwynne has been around for a good while now. This book focuses on a single main character rather than employing rotating POVs, and it’s pretty explicitly a revenge story, to the point where it can feel a little one-note at times. But it’s done well and I’m looking forward to the sequel. Honestly, if you enjoyed Bloodsworn, you’ll like this one too.

I slept all day

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I definitely owe you two book reviews, though, so I’ll try and get those written up tomorrow if I can. In the meantime I’m sort of half-assedly watching Our Flag Means Death and reading. But damn, I’m tired today.