I will die on this hill

 

family don’t end with blood and that’s a hill I will die on

Too many thoughts running around my head… but let’s face it, there are a lot of people living here rent free this year.

As I grow and let go, things resurface.

Things reopen wounds that still haven’t fully healed.

But, hockey’s back in my life.

So that’s something.

Happy New Year, all.

May your NYE kisses be safe, sane, and consensual.

When it’s smoking it’s cooking. When it’s burnt it’s done.

#selfcaresaturday looks a lot like death by food poisoning

I may have inherited a lot from my mother’s side of the family… except a woman’s innate ability to cook.

Nope.

My failures in the kitchen are all my father’s DNA.

Let’s put it this way, my favourite breakfast growing up was Super Duper Eggs.

How does one make Super Duper Eggs, you might ask.

Two eggs, half and half, salt, and a LOT of whisking. You want the eggs beaten within an inch of their life. Really fluffy and ready to be put to death in a frying pan drowning in butter. Preferably a cast iron skillet, but I don’t have one of those. (I can barely season food and you want me to season a fucking pan?)

Dump the eggs in and let them set like you’re making an omelette.

Walk away to make toast / coffee / whatever. As long as you forget about the eggs, you’re golden.

Remember the eggs. Try to flip the omelette.

When it falls to pieces, flip every bit over and behold the amazing, burnt, mess.

Let the other side burn.

Dump in a bowl and cover with ketchup.

Feed it to your daughter like it’s gourmet food and not eggs you fucked up.

I decided to do him one better and trust the auto setting on the microwave for the bacon.

Yeah. I probably should have checked on it at least once, but I, uh, forgot about it.

Burned eggs, burned bacon… at least the coffee was good.

 

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Chrome continues to be the bane of my existence.

First it broke the public view of my blog.

Then it broke the back end.

Apparently, you need to use https:// in the file path to the CSS file. And it can’t be a relative path. It has to be https:// myblog dot com/I hate the internet/style.css

The back end is still broken. For whatever reason, it is absolutely fucked in Firefox right now. Chrome and Firefox on a PC are equally fucked. It’s working on Chrome on the Mac at the moment, but I can’t upload files. Nothing I like more than messing with an FTP app while eating Super Duper Eggs and, um, extra crispy bacon.

I did get the file upload to work. Finally.

But, whatever Chrome is doing lately is also fucking up the work shit. Because, of course, everything is fucking web based now.

We can’t download files without Office 365 continually opening in safe mode.

We can’t access files that are stored on our local server via Dynamics365 - the link to the file needs to be the one to OneDrive in order to open them within the app. (DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY FILES WE CANNOT ACCESS?!?!?!)

IT’s answer is to use Firefox.

Um, OK. Not a fix that anyone even wants to try, so yeah. Good luck with THAT.

Any way, I refuse to spend the day troubleshooting the back end of the blog, so I decided to upgrade Expression Engine.

(While I may adore the person who named it - yes, I know her - I hate WordPress with an intensity I reserve for spiders.)

FYI, Expression Engine is on version seven. SEVEN.

I am running v2.6.1, build date 20130506. Yes. 2013. The software is a decade old and has finally shit the bed. I’m pleased and amazed at the longevity of what Rick built. He should be proud of himself. (I’ve been using Ellis Lab products to run my blog forever; we’re talking pMachine and being invited (!!!!) to beta test Expression Engine. Ellis Labs doesn’t exist any more, sadly, but again, this will always be Rick’s software. (I say that like we were besties…))

This is not going to be fun and it is definitely not a project I’m in the mood to take on today.

Eventually.

 

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Speaking of things I’m not in the mood to deal with today, EA just released a new Sims pack.

The Sims 4 For Rent. (If that’s not the stupidest name, I don’t know what is.)

Guess what?

It changes the entire back end of the game again.

It broke build mode and it broke normal game play.

It was to be expected - the pack now allows you to build multiple lots on one. You can build rental units now - and manage them as a landlord or live in them as a tenant.

That’s a major change.

Just like when Growing Together was introduced.

The majority of my important mods are completely borked. I’ve already spent several hours trying to update them and I’m half way done.

Two of the mods I love are broken and no ETA on when they’ll be fixed. One has been broken for a while - the modder has health issues and can’t continue coding right now. The other mod’s main programmer died a few weeks ago. Cancer. He was young. Too young. They’re working on finding a replacement, but how do you replace the reason that mod even exists? They have a death mod where you can have a funeral instead of just the grim reaper… obviously that’s not going to be updated for a long time. I was thinking about trying it before the news and now I don’t know if I can.

I’m bummed I have to put my legacy on ice again while I wait for all the bugs to be fixed. I was thrilled that I got to pick up with Nathan and Bryce and their kids / grandkids. So weird to think that if my legacy founder were alive, she’d be hanging out with her great great granddaughter!

I play alphabet legacies and we’re on generation E.

Bryce and Nathan had kids via the same surrogate, so the kids are half siblings.

Cora married a vampire and had a vampire baby. I moved her out and let story progression do its thing. SP is absolutely crazy bananas. She had moved out to live with Caleb and when I went back into the household, she was no longer a vampire, no longer married to Caleb, and had a shitty relationship with her daughter. And she was shacking up with a townie. What the fuck?!?

Chase was a bit of a manwhore and had three kids with three different women.

I unalived one of them testing out the Sims’ version of the Bloody Mary urban legend. Whoops.

Then, because that wasn’t enough drama, there was the woman he married, divorced, and remarried. Then he cheated on her with baby momma number three. What can I say? I love chaos.

Dayna became Dylan and moved out, Daniel and his girlfriend just had baby Emily (teen parents because why not?), and Derek’s just aged up to a teen.

All this because Johnny Zest brought fruitcake to Aubrey.

Thank FUCK you can only have eight Sims on a lot.

 

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In other news, I still can’t make the words go easily, but they’re coming.

After I crashed and burned in November, December is going to be the month I hit 50K words.

I give up.

 

Wherever I am, I will not forget home

Я так хотів пожити по-новому

Quick entry… because guys! (Gals! Non-Binary Pals!)

I. AM. WATCHING. MY. SECOND. HOCKEY. GAME. OF. THE. NIGHT.

OF!! THE!! NIGHT!!

I watched the BU / Maine game - and got to listen to the BU announcers. (*sniff*) BU won, barely. I might have jinxed them… they were doing really well before I logged into ESPN+.

Now, I’m watching the Boston feed of the Bruins / Habs game. I’m hoping it inspires me to pick up what I’m lovingly calling the Drarry Hockey AU Disaster.

I haven’t been writing very much and I’m pretty sure finishing 50K words this month just became impossible, but you never know.

Instead, I’ve been bouncing between The Sims and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I’ve invested in a gaming PC because the Sims and the (disturbing) amount of CC I have is killing my little MacBook. The Sims is playing great on it, I have a smexy new keyboard, and I can revisit my favourite legacy. Their save file used to crash non-stop on the Mac, but it lives again!!!!

Stuff’s been on my mind, partly because of reliving happy days that turned sour, and partly for other reasons.

I got swept during the half marathon again. Asthma / panic attack at mile 8 did me in. I managed to keep going and got pulled at roughly 11.5 miles. The sad thing is that the new asthma meds were working. I PR’d the 5K and 10K. Which is almost nearly impossible at Disney if you’re a back of the packer. I was doing really well on the half until I wasn’t.

I have the Turkey Trot 10K on Thursday and the Space Coast Half on Sunday. We’ll see how those go.

But, in happier news, KALUSH fucking kicked ass. I needed their chaotic live show in a way I didn’t think was possible. Of course, it being Florida, it fucking poured that night. In the five minute walk to the parking lot, I was as drenched as if I was pushed into a swimming pool. Also, the drainage in the parking lot sucked and I was walking through almost knee deep water at points.

But. I got my live music fix and now… it’s all quiet until February.

(Although there are a lot of new Ukrainian bands I want to see coming through Miami. Guess it’s a good thing I’m done with runDisney!)

Psst! Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes? AMAZING. The book was still better than the movie, but the movie was definitely excellent.

‘I say fuck a lot’ might be the understatement of the year.

I just like the word fuck.

I stumbled upon this completely fucking adorable book on Thursday and DEVOURED it on Friday, since I didn’t have anything (not a single fucking thing and not an exaggeration) to do at work.

Upside Down by N.R. Walker completely captured the asexual relationship I was trying to write perfectly. So, that’s totally my roadmap if I ever go back to that fic.

I’ve gotten into the habit of taking screenshots of my favourite bits as I come across them, and this one?

Holy. Fucking. Shitballs. Batman.

Thankfully, I got to this part at lunchtime. (Or unfortunately?) I laughed so hard, I choked on my sandwich.

It was doubly hysterical because I’d just gotten done having (roughly) the same conversation about my usage of the word with a coworker.

Fuck is one of those amazing words that fits just about any sentence. Intonation fills in the blanks that context doesn’t, too.

It’s just a fucking magical word.

- - - - - - - - - -

I am still riding the high from the Антитіла show.

I might still be watching the videos I took.

And I might still be listening to their albums and only their albums. At this rate, their music will be my Wine & Dine soundtrack.

Fuck my BPM playlist.

While I’m on the topic of live bands and concerts, next up is KALUSH. I’ve already seen them this year, but I do like the chaotic energy of their live shows. They remind me of Studio 158 and Gabe setting fire to his trumpet back in the day. It was always fun hanging with Scott-the-Roadie and getting to see the backstage shenanigans.

Hey, Mr. Soundman, I think there’s something on fire.

But anyway.

I forgot to mention that when I see SKOFKA in February that he’s splitting the bill with two other artists. One of which is KOZAK SIROMAHA. You might remember him from the video on this post. I might be looking forward to seeing him just as much as SKOFKA. (And what is up with the caps? KALUSH, SKOFKA, KOZAK SIROMAHA… *sigh*)

WHY THE FUCK is half the music I want to buy not available on the iTunes store? This might make me a shitty person, and probably a thief, but I’ve reverted to using Audio Hijack and pulling the audio off of YouTube. I mean, how do you add a YouTube video to a running playlist?

So… that’s my day sorted: pulling music off of YouTube, creating a new Ukie music running playlist, and world building.

Somehow, Aeon Timeline shit the bed and fucked up my hockey schedules. The dates have all shifted and it’s the weirdest thing. I’ve been using AT since version 1 and beta tested v2 (sort of - I didn’t have a lot of reasons to use it during the beta period but I did download it and play with it.)... I have never had a problem with it. NEVER.

But, you know, there’s only 82 hockey games in a season, and like 6 preseason games… for two teams. Granted, I ‘borrowed’ the schedules from Montreal and Boston, but they still had to be entered by hand because I couldn’t export them to a csv file or anything remotely useful. Annoyed doesn’t begin to describe my current mood. It is such a pain in the ass to go back and fix them.

And it’s not even getting the scheduled dates correct. It’s about remembering that for a 19:00 game, the players have to be there at 16:30 and they spend about 5 hours at the arena. There were a couple of games where the time shifted, too. So I had to do the fucking maths AGAIN to make sure I was getting the game day timeframe correct.

I’ve never been part of a team where the players didn’t play shinny somewhere in the arena as part of their warmup, so that’s an important detail I’m not leaving out, nor the fact that usually the ‘puck’ is a tennis ball. In college, sometimes the boys played with a ball of stick tape. The first time they did it was during a road trip because SOMEONE forgot a tennis ball (apparently, I only had ONE JOB and it wasn’t worrying about the boxed lunches, the uniforms, the extra blades, sticks, torches, the water jugs/bottles, nor the skate sharpener…). Joke’s on them, though, because they enjoyed whipping the tape at each other. Don’t think I didn’t notice that they played with the tape more than once. Even when I remembered the fucking tennis ball.

- - - - - - - - - -

I never seem to talk about when englishing is not hard and the words go good, but I am SO HAPPY with this that I’m going to share this as a reminder that I’m not a completely shitty writer…

Families are messy. It’s one thing when the people who are supposed to build you up only want to tear you down. It’s another thing entirely when the people who are supposed to love you can’t fucking stand the sight of you.

Write what you know, right?

- - - - - - - - - -

And finally, this is my new favourite song. Enjoy.

 

If the words won’t come, make the characters.

the secret to a successful nanowrimo is porn. lots of it.

As I’ve said before, I’ve never been the type of person who creates an outline and a plot.

I’ve been plotting like a madwoman. Pages and pages of plot bunnies. It’s insane.

Who knew writing a hockey au would actually be enjoyable?

We all know my history with hockey and how the last experience absolutely fucking broke me. (Still broken after all these years, thanks. Vegas put a nice band-aid on my boo-boo, though.)

So… it’s been weird to actually dig into things like the NHL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Rule Book.

To remember things I thought I’d forgotten.

A skate blade to the back, the severed pinky, the slapshot to the nuts (the player was NOT wearing a cup… but that’s a story for another day.), the singing on the bus, Cooperstown, the dentist fixing a broken nose, the Stanley Cup, the octopus… that fucking mascot.

Reading all these stupid hockey romances has reminded me what it’s like to be part of the team, not part of the back office.

And THAT is where my love of the sport truly lives.

In the camaraderie of the players. Not the knowledge of how to write the Salary Cap journal entries.

I almost watched a Bruins game the other night.

Almost.

But before I could change the channel, I had a panic attack and decided it was safer to watch Simmers on YouTube.

I’ll get back to being able to watch the games and probably sooner rather than later.

But in the meantime, I’ve noticed some other things that are changing.

- The hubby took care of Guinness, not me. And G wasn’t a cuddle pup. He was sort of detached, aloof. I take care of the kittens and they are not like that at all. Sophie is still ridiculously skittish, but holy shit. When she wants love, she will NOT be denied. I need Sophie lovin’ more than I would have thought possible. Finn’s, too, although he’s grown way more independent.

- I’ve been listening to Bowie and the Stones. A LOT. I’ve struggled with their music in the past because they remind me of people who ripped me apart and then stomped on the pieces. Somehow, I’ve managed to get past that. Although, I do not recommend singing Star Star at work because it is very NSFW... whoops.

OH! Fun fact: R.E.M.‘s “Star Me Kitten” is named Star Me Kitten because of “Star Star”. Another fun fact: It is one of the very few R.E.M. songs that uses the word fuck.

- I’ve also been listening to a playlist I call BLG. BLG are the initials of the one, the only, Soulmate Boy and it’s all music I associate with him. Some of it is great for running and, I don’t know, kind of… comforting? Yeah, that’s the word I keep coming back to.

- I’m becoming less afraid to go places on my own. This became a HUGE issue after moving to Florida and then having the whole pandemic thing happen. I certainly don’t have the kind of life I had in New England, and I fucking miss it, but I’m trying to make a life here. Finally.

 

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And for something completely unrelated, I finally got my two breathing tests done AND scored a follow-up with the pulmonologist before Wine and Dine. (I couldn’t get an appointment with the doc until DECEMBER. I lucked out when there was a cancellation for next week.)

I failed. Miserably.

So, exercise-induced asthma is real and not in my head.

That actually makes me feel better.

I have an inhaler, but it’s not working for me. The therapist who did the test thinks I’ll respond better to steroids, but didn’t go into more details. Google’s not telling me much, so I’m excited to have the follow up so soon. Nothing new on race day… except asthma meds. Should be an interesting weekend.

 

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I also saw Антитіла on Wednesday.

So. Fucking. AMAZING.

It was everything I wanted and more. I had chills and tears. The first and only time I ever got emotional at a concert was Paul Simon, so that should tell you something.

I really hope I get to see them again.

KALUSH is up next and then, in February, it’s SKOFKA… who I only know because of the collabs with KALUSH.

I’m trying to see as many Ukrainian shows as possible so, even if I’m lukewarm on the artist, I’ll go.

I get to support Ukrainians and experience live music. It’s a win-win, even though I hate the fact that they’re on tour fundraising for shit like first aid supplies.

And on that note, I need to go research some more hockey things. November 1st is coming way too fast.