Brain currently booting in Safe Mode

(Stolen from a Discord conversation with clawfoot.)

I went for a walk yesterday mostly to get some sun, fresh air, exercise. My route took me past the bridal shop on a busy corner and I slowed down to look at the dresses in the window. Aside from the usual wedding dresses, the others were bridesmaid dresses in whatever colours are hot right now.

The first one was a lovely plummy purple. The second? THE HORROR.

It was fucking taupe. I can't even.

(As an aside, there was one in the window that was taupe and okayish. It was a 20s-30s Art Nouveau inspired one with mesh sleeves and beading. It would be a lovely mother-of-the-bride/groom dress, and in that case, perfectly acceptable to be taupe.)

I went out to see two movies yesterday, at two separate theatres, which happens so rarely I can count the times that it has happened on one hand and still have fingers left over.

First up, we took Declan out to see Cars 3. If you completely ignore Cars 2 (or think of it as an unfortunate direct-to-video Mater movie), this is the actual sequel to Cars. It's funny and touching and FEELS like the first movie, which the second never did. And yes, at one point there were onion ninjas in the theatre. Declan flaps his arms when he gets super excited. There were a few points where I was convinced he was going to fly away he was flapping that hard and fast. Worth watching with, or without, kids in tow.

Later, I went out with clawfoot for Spider-Man: Homecoming. I wasn't expecting much, which is probably why I enjoyed it so damn much. The acting was superb and the casting was pretty much perfect. Tom Holland is spot on for Peter Parker, and Michael Keaton made the Vulture human. One other thing that I noticed was this: the cast was MIXED race. Not everyone who was named/part of the comic's rich and varied history was white. They found the best actors for the roles, skin colour be damned. It made me believe in Spider-Man's universe just a little bit more. It's also funny and heroic and the end-credit scene is probably my favourite of the lot thus far.

Ganked from clawfoot

Aside from the broken heart bit (I've never had one. Yes, I know that's weird), ( this is pretty accurate. )

Bedtime, soon, methinks. I spent the evening with clawfoot, eating burgers and junk food and watching Black Hawk Down (plus American Dad on Global, as it just happened to be on television once the DVD player was turned off..it was amusing, however). It's odd. After two weeks of not eating crap, I feel slow and sluggish now. I guess I did before, but never noticed. If eating too many potato chips and having an ice cream bar and drinking one can of gingerale makes me feel like this, then it's time to stop. I haven't really missed it up until this point (well, except for ice cream...I can eat that stuff for breakfast and have done on occasion), so it will be good to just keep it up as a rare treat and not buy stuff like that every time we do groceries.

Bed time now. Work tomorrow. I need to get quarters and bus tickets and I have to get the bedding washed sometime this week and still finish my costume. Busy week ahead. Busy busy week. I should get some sleep if I'm going to tackle it.

I feel better today. I dunno. I guess I just needed to get the ick out by letting others know that I was feeling bad.

Thank you to clawfoot, lovecraftienne, the_daily_rant, robertom for the kind words, and also to joncanuck and meowster for being on Messenger when I needed someone to be there. Damned near everything about this entire experience is a great big bowl of ass sucking cherry pits and being in limbo only emphasizes the bad bits.

So. Um. Yeah. Thanks and all that. :)

I'm so stressed out my eczema is coming back on my left pinkie. Just what I need. :P

And until the wee one is in hospital, no movies for us. Sorry about that, clawfoot. :( But if you want to stop by and hang out or something, that can happen. Just give us a call.

In other (and probably more important) news, Shannon rolled over for the first time yesterday. It seems like she's late, but if she's anything like my sister, she's doing things in her own sweet time. :)

fuzzpsych wants me to make him an icon. Not sure what I'm going to do yet, but I'll give it a think an see what kind of inspiration hits.

I am pleased, though, that both robertom and clawfoot got a kick out of the icons that I made and are actually using them. It's one thing to go "that's neat" and completely another to go through the bother of downloading. It's a nice ego boost and it makes me feel like preening, but I'll refrain and just say thanks. :)

joncanuck and the_daily_rant were over last night for a movie. Live action anime with none of the cartooniness lost or downgraded to something more serious and/or less appropriate. If you can find it, Cutey Honey is good for a laugh if nothing else and the ending makes a heck of a lot more sense than the one for Stacey: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies.

I'm doing some laundry and I noticed that the furnace was on AGAIN! WTF? It's not that cold, even in the basement apartment. And if you are cold, put on a sweater or something, but for the love of Pete, don't turn on the fucking heat until October.

With the last of the money from fuzzpsych's grandmother, I went to Zellers and bought a Jolly Jumper. Shannon's not quite sure what to make of it, but she doesn't scream when she's put into it, so I'm going to take that as a positive sign. She should figure it out soon enough, and then she will scream, but only when we're taking her out! :)

The surgery date is looming ahead. We're both under constant stress and unease. The next two weeks are going to be maddening...not all anticipation is good. Adding to this is another layer of stress coming from my mom. When we told both sets of parental units about the surgery and about our wish to not have them come down to the hospital and wait with us, my in-laws agreed to that without argument and will only come down when it's a good time for Shannon to have visitors, but my mom is being argumentative.

Let me set the stage for Shannon's first heart surgery (PDA Stent and Bilateral Pulmonary Banding...also called the Hybrid Procedure) on 2004 Dec 07: the grandparents (my in-laws and mom) want to be there. I would rather that they didn't, but fuzzpsych wanted them to be there for support, so I relented. I don't play well with others at the best of times, and being under so much stress, I couldn't handle anyone, so I went into the CCU waiting lounge across the hall alone. fuzzpsych felt like he was being pulled in two directions and he also felt that he had to entertain the grandparents while at the hospital. I felt pressured and high strung for most of the day until my sister stopped by in the late afternoon. I started to calm down. While my sister was there, the grandparents left to go home (thank the gods) and after seeing Shannon one more time, we went back to my sister's place with her on the subway, had a bite to eat, then met up with clawfoot and epi_lj for the Spongebob Squarepants Movie.

All in all, not a very pleasant experience. We both had enough on our plates with the Hybrid procedure without fuzzpsych having to deal with family and me trying to avoid them. It clearly didn't work very well. This time, we decided to do this one alone, calling with the result as soon as we knew what was going on.

But that's not good enough for my mom.

When we told her the surgery date, she argued against our explicit wish to not come to Sick Kids. She's even using strong arm tactics to guilt/pressure my in-laws (who are being incredibly supportive about this) into changing their minds so that she can be there. I understand that she's terrified. But she has no right to make this all about her. She made the case that if something happens, she wants to be there to say goodbye. But this is open heart surgery with a heart-lung machine and the whole works. If something happens (touch wood that it doesn't), it will happen fast. There won't be time for the kind of goodbyes where Shannon can hear them. It will be too late for that.

I know it's morbid and negative to think like this, but this is why they have survival rates for surgeries.

I want her to understand that we're not doing this as a punishment or to marginalize her importance in Shannon's life, but that as her parents we have to be as focused as possible and we can only do that without distraction from the parental units. fuzzpsych is going to talk to my mom about this sometime this week. If I went with him, it would become a heated argument and it wouldn't get anyone anywhere.

I'm just don't want this to turn into a grudge. My mom and her brother no longer speak to each other because when he needed her to be there for him, she was too busy with something else (this was 7 years ago!). It's stupid, but that's all it takes, and I'm worried that this whole surgery thing is going to cut me off from my mom and poison the it's-now-finally-a-good relationship I have with my sister (which is very bad, since we'll be staying with my sister and her boyfriend while in Toronto).

Now my tummy is urpy. :P That's enough or I will get an ulcer.

It was such a lovely day. It would have been a lot nicer if I could have sat outside in the back garden and read or something, but not having a garden or the time to read, really, killed that quite nicely.

I'm currently working on my character history for the Elder's LARP. It's going fairly well, but it's getting out of hand already. I'm eight pages in (twelve was the set maximum on account of a character history that I wrote for another game being a mere thirty-six pages!) and no where near done. At least clawfoot, one of the storytellers, is willing to read it in its entirety. But I still have to include a reference sheet for both her and the other storyteller, wildelf, for dates and times and such. The irony of this is my previous character for this game had a character history of a mere three pages, because I was keenly aware of wildelf looking at me when the page limit was announced. *sigh* Infamy...who needs it? :P

That aside, it was great to play again. It was even more fun to dress up a little and wear a pair of boots that I hadn't had on since before I was pregnant. My feet were unhappy by the end of the night but I just didn't care...I felt good.

Right now, the baby's trying to decide if she wants to sleep or cry. She fusses for a bit, then settles and looks ready to drop off into dreamland. But, can't have that! So she fusses again. Silly tired baby. Sleep now, sweetpea.

Rabbit Sabbath was fun. We brought two more to the ceremony last night, so that meant that it was me, fuzzpsych, clawfoot, the_daily_rant, joncanuck, Robigus and Tabula Rasa. Tabula Rasa cried throughout the entire ceremony, including her baptism, but that was expected by hare_mengele and his lovely wife, so no worries there.

She was pretty freaked out, actually, so fuzzpsych spent the majority of the evening in another room keeping her calm. At least he got a piece of the Guinness Chocolate Cake that I made for the event.

I will post pictures of Tabula Rasa in her outfit when I get them. She was adorable. :)

And now onto the ranty bit...

Today, I was coming out of the local Tim Hortons with coffee and goodies when I noticed the old man who exited afer me go to his car. Now he was parked in the handicap space and I know that the asphalt gently slopes up towards the sidewalk leaving a very minimal (about 2 cm) lip between them. And old guy had to lean on the hood of his car so he could get to the driver's side door!

Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong, but if you need support (the arm of another person, a railing, etc) to go down a slope that a just-learned-to-walk toddler can manage, do you really think that you should be driving?

clawfoot dropped off the coolest baby gift this afternoon. After not getting one and unable to order one online 'cause they were out of stock, we finally have a Ramones sock hat! Hurray!

Since it has a little slate blue bow on the back of it, it looks like it will be two pictures, one for family (black hat, blue-ish bow) and one for friends (Ramones all the way, baby!). My mother-in-law will more than just a little disapprove of black on a newborn (like she did with my wedding dress), but it's not her baby.

So extra special thanks go to clawfoot for ensuring that our kid has the coolest winter hat in town!