Some of our medical benefits are changing at the end of the year (no choice -- the company changed providers), and we got a letter telling us to call to notify the new provider of the ongoing treatment. It says, call this number between Dec 1, 2009 - Jan 31, 2010, choose option X, and you are all set.

Fine.

So I call. Option X does not exist. I end up at a representative, who says she can't help me, and I should call back after the new benefits kick in in January, and aren't my benefits through someone else, and I'm not listening to her and I need to call someone else entirely. I read her the letter. She tells me she can't help me and can't transfer me to someone to can.

Look, health insurer, if I can't find the option the letter tells me to pick, I'm going to end up at a human. If the human cannot tell me how to find the option, AND cannot transfer me to the appropriate place, AND cannot help me herself, YOU HAVE FAILED.

Also, your employee is an incompetent bitch.

(I did eventually, by guessing, find the option I needed, buried in a sub-menu.)

Ombria in Shadow was my favorite of the 3 McKillip books that thwomp lent me. It's a fantasy story, centered around palace intrigue, and I think it's hard to talk about without spoiling it. The basic cast of characters is: the aunt of the dead Prince, the mistress of the dead Prince, the son of the dead Prince, the bastard nephew of the dead Prince, the royal tutor, a girl made of wax, and a sorceress.

I loved that things did not turn out as I expected -- I suspected the nephew & the mistress would become lovers, for example -- and that, at the end, you have come to a completely new understanding of how the land of Ombria functions. It is not like in Riddle-Master, where all the characters share a certain assumption about the world that you must figure out; in Ombria in Shadow, it's clear how the world is structured -- until it's not. And that "not" is powerful, and wonderful.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

I appear to have completely failed to post any new-books-read this year. Which means I'll probably forget a book or five as I try to catch up.

thwomp loaned me a bunch of her Patricia McKillip books. I don't know how I'd managed to never read McKillip before, but I really enjoyed all of them!

The first one I read was Riddle-Master. This is an omnibus reissue of the Riddle-Master trilogy: The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and Harpist in the Wind. McKillip was quite young when she wrote these -- I think they were her first novels? -- and sometimes the worldbuilding is vaguer than I like. I don't need everything spelled out for me, but in particular I felt like all the characters had a central assumption about how their world worked that I could tell existed, but could not determine what it was. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I hadn't had to spend a lot it figuring out what was going on, there.

The book made me think about mecurtin's daughters, in a "I wonder if they would like it" kind of way. The way the central romantic relationship is drawn is unusual and charming; it started out in an ordinary way (the Prince of Hed, Morgon, has won the hand of Raederle of An in a contest), but I loved that they were already friends, and that she was not the "sit at home while men go do things" type. None of the women are, and in fact Heir of Sea and Fire (spoilers in link) is mostly about three of the women: Raederle, the title character; Lyra, the heir to the rule of the kingdom Herun; and Tristan, Morgon's sister.

Ultimately, of course, the trilogy's about Morgon (the Riddle-Master), but that Raederle got a nice fat chunk of agency and presence made me happy.

eta: this Amazon review talks quite clearly about the central assumption issue!

I've got a Mac, and I've been using Twitterific. Problem: if you get a nasty spam message, it just sits there in your feed, even though it's blocked at twitter.com. So if I go to twitter.com, it's gone, but I still have, e.g. porn avatar'd spam sitting on my screen, even after reloading, etc. I can kill the app from the terminal and restart, but that's the only thing that gets rid of it.

Any recs for clients that either let you delete that stuff from the on-screen view, or "obey" the twitter blocking?

Y'all, the baby is over FOUR MONTHS OLD. I don't know where the time went.

We're cosleeping, but I think that may be coming to an end soon. Last night, he discovered that if he wants me to wake up, pulling my hair is at least as effective as crying. Further, he has discovered that he can reach over and grab blankets and sheets to wake me up. Oh, and then squeal and try to get me to play peekaboo. At Oh-Dark-Thirty.

He's still primarily breastfed, but judging by his attempts to get to our food, he is plenty ready to eat anything he sees us eating. The time he tried to levitate out of his high chair to get to a bowl of beef bourguignonne was particularly entertaining. Neither nlanza nor I have food allergies, and neither of us are (a) alarmist (b) particularly wedded to modern delusions about baby food. In practice, this means that if we are eating something soft, I often give him a taste. Sometimes I chew up a bit of dinner and then give it to him. Other times, I use the food processor to convert a cooked food into a mushy food. (Beef bourguignonne, by the way, was a major hit. I have never seen him quite so happy about a foodstuff.)

I think I'll get him a ball. My mother says I liked a ball at his age, despite my inability to do much with it.

Your email address is NOT jacquez at gmail dot com. I PROMISE YOU.

nlanza's office was given an unexpected day off today, because they'd been working hard to make a deadline. Yay!

Original plan: sleep in, cook dinner while baby took his early nap, go to museum in afternoon, stopping to pick up cat's meds on the way. Yay!

Only, shortly after the baby woke this morning (not letting me sleep in), I determined he was...not ill, really, but under the weather. Cancel museum. Got dinner cooked, though.

New plan: nlanza will pick up the cat's meds while he is out bumming around shopping for music & video games; I will hang out at home with baby.

Only, before we could implement this plan, I went downstairs to change the laundry, and noticed some water...running...across...the floor. Greywater pipe? No. Leaking from the line to the fridge? No. Leaking from...the big freezer. Blood and berry juice all over the floor and interior of the freezer, and the meat that was supposed to last through the winter almost all completely defrosted.

New plan: Cook 80% of what was in the freezer. Throw out 15%. Keep 5% that was still frozen or mostly frozen. nlanza will pick up the cat's meds while he is out getting emergency supplies for some of the things I need to cook.

At least the poor baby is napping.

...and while I was typing this post, an ominous noise came from the kitchen. I ran in to find that the bourbon glaze on the stove had boiled over and caught fire.

New plan: when I've done the cooking, start the drinking. Hell, take page from Julia and start the drinking NOW.

eta: what the flipping blue blazes mother of frogs helling hell is going on that the fire sirens and police sirens have been yowling for 5 minutes solid and WOKEN UP THE BABY?

My mom came over today and helped me rip up the last full room of wall-to-wall carpet in my house. It was...much grosser than we'd thought.

Well, it's gone now. My hands hurt. Oh, and the rest of me.

But the house smells better, and there is noticeably less dust in the air. I'm glad it's finally done.

Freshpair is an online retailer with a pretty nice selection of guys' and girls' underwear. I found some of nlanza's favorites there and ordered them; while doing so, I signed up for an account -- figuring that since some of his favs are hard to find, I'd probably order from them again in the future.

Word of advice: if you order from them, either do NOT create an account or don't use a password you care about. These idiots send you a welcome message with the password in the body of the email.

I used Paypal to pay them instead of a credit card, and now I'm pretty glad of that, because CLEARLY they don't know thing one about security.

I also sent their customer care address a nasty note, because what the hell.

mizufae is looking for folks going to PAX who will be/would be interested in Backup Project activities.

I went for a walk with the dog and the baby and found some worms that some neighborhood kids had clearly victimized.

4 worms plopped in the middle of a baking-hot sidewalk, with nowhere they could easily have come from. 1 of them was already dead, 1 of them so close to it that at first I thought it was, and the other 2 struggling pathetically towards a small patch of shade.

I moved all the living ones to a nice shady patch of weeds and then sprinkled the weeds with water, because DAMN. Poor worms.

Last night, sirens and flashing lights. Nat went outside to see where they were going -- I was trying to rock the baby to sleep. He didn't come back in.

I went out. I could hear screaming and sobbing echoing from the end of the block.

Jimmy, our next-door neighbor, was walking slowly down the street towards the lights. Fran, his girlfriend, came out of their house. "Jimmy? Jimmy, who is it?" She looked at me and Nat. "My niece and nephew live down there," she said. "Jimmy?" Jimmy kept walking, not saying anything.

One of the other neighbors, standing across the street, turned. "Fran, it sounds like them."

Fran started to run. I watched her go, down to the end of the block, until I couldn't see her anymore in the shadows and the milling of people at that end.

But I heard her cry out, and then someone who sounded like her started sobbing.

Two more EMT vehicles pulled up. The street was now impassable.

The door of Fran's house banged shut behind me, and one of her daughters -- I think the older girl, Sam -- came out. "What's going on?" she said. "Who is it?"

"Your mom's down there," I said.

"Oh God," she said, listening to the echoes, "tell me she's not crying -- " and she started to run.

From down the block, I could hear Fran calling: "Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!"

And then Jimmy came back, at a run. "Jimmy, what do you need?" said one of the neighbors. "Jimmy, what do you need?"

"They want me to find Gary," he said. "He's not answering his phone."

"You want me to call the bar?"

"Yeah."

Jimmy went into his house. Five minutes later, he came out, jumped into his truck, and drove away.

I waited on the porch for fifteen minutes, but Fran and her daughter didn't come back.

Whatever happened down the end of the block last night, it wasn't good.

Hm. Wearing shorts from last summer. They're a little tight but not too bad. After weeks and weeks of wearing nothing but soft jersey with stretchy waistbands it's a bit odd.

It damages the children, says Dale O'Leary, author of "One Man, One Woman: A Catholics Guide to Defending Marriage." She says that all children have a natural desire for a parent of each gender. [...] O'Leary says she doesn't personally know any same-sex parents or their children.

Yeah, no fucking crap. I could tell that by the lunatic nonsense coming out of your idiot mouth, lady.

I've missed the Great Warning Debate this time around, and frankly: have a newborn. Not going to catch up on it.

Still, I thought I'd best state my warning policy:

In my own spaces, such as on my website or in my journals, I do not attach warnings.

When I archive elsewhere, I do*, and so archives or community journals are safer places for people with triggers to read my work. I also will answer questions; if you-the-reader have particular triggers, feel free to ask me if I think the story will trip them. I will answer you honestly and to the best of my ability. Of course, also feel free to ask for non-triggery stuff, such as personal squicks or just not wanting to read something depressing that day.

---

* There are some archives that didn't require warnings, and some old work of mine is archived at some of those places without warnings. This is especially true of old work originally posted to newsgroups or lists prior to 2000, so if you find some of that stuff, you may wish to use the "ask Laura" method if you need any warnings.

This entry was originally posted at http://laurajv.dreamwidth.org/3983.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Yesterday in the mail we got that awesome cephalopod baby set. It was in an envelope that had "gift bag refunded" written on it, which I take to mean that whoever sent it INTENDED the company to gift wrap it, perhaps with a note telling us who it is from.

If it was you? Please let me know so I can thank you properly!

R. arrived the morning of Monday, June 22. He was 7lb 14oz and had a big head. Troublemaker.

Does anyone have copies of Robbery Homicide Division, or know where I can get them?* It was apparently never released on DVD, and my mother would love to have it; the only thing she's found is a guy selling bootlegs on a suspiciously scammy site. I figured I'd ask if any of y'all have it.

Comments screened.




* I hope I don't need to say this, but YES, I have Googled around.

Last night I had the late-pregnancy equivalent of sleeping like the dead: nearly 6 hours without waking up.

It was really, really awesome.

The kitchen is not quite done. jlkgyre and his crew have done totally awesome work (but I am sure that safya is ready to kill me to have her husband back)! What's left is mostly trim & finish work, so it's mostly-usable at this point. Yay! Tomorrow I can break out my skillet (oh, how I have missed you, skillet) and my Dutch oven and THERE WILL BE COOKERY. Oh yes.

Out of the ridiculous gallery of photos I have taken of the project, nlanza picked the best comparison shots:

before
after

My mother-in-law, who designed the kitchen, said "it looks like a before and after magazine ad!" I cannot say she is wrong.