Somewhere Over The Rainbow

A category-3 tornado ripped through my city last Friday. Fortunately, our apartment wasn't in the path of it. I went out to the north side of the city yesterday to drop off some donations and the devastation was incredible. I got lost on the way to the donation site and was driving around a park in the area and it was just tree after tree that had been uprooted in the storm. The other amazing thing was all of the people who came out to help- there were people on street corners handing out meals and water and the line of cars heading to drop off items at the donation site was quite long. There were already roofers up at the community center making repairs. It was great to see so many people working to make things a little easier. They were asking for donations of tarps today as it is raining here tonight with the possibility of another tornado as well.

In all my years in the Midwest, I have been around my share of tornado warnings, but I can't remember a storm like this in my lifetime. It was a beautiful day until around 2pm, then it started to get dark and grey and the wind picked up. It blew the power out at my office and the wind would rattle the doors and windows. The building the office is in is like a storefront and the front wall is mostly big windows, so not ideal to be sitting there when the wind picks up like that. There were no sirens, the cell phone warning never went off, and even the radio didn't have a tornado alert. That's how fast it happened, and it was over just as quickly.

Everything else is going okay. I haven't written much of anything. I've been reading a lot. I'm now working on "The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley. It's not too bad. I'm a little miffed that there only seems to be one team worth cheering for left in the NHL playoffs. My favorite team, the Ottawa Charge, has made the PWHL finals and I'm thrilled about that. It'll be nice to watch that for the next week.

That's all I've got for now. Hope you all are doing well.

Still chugging along. Not much happening. Here's the rundown.
( Update )

Happy New Year!

Spent most of yesterday and part of today doing my traditional clean/purge/organize. It's at a point where I'm satisfied with the outcome and have the best intentions of keeping it this way for the foreseeable future. I boxed up or donated several of my old CDs and have made space on that shelf for more books.

Goals for the year:
Health - exercise more regularly, make healthy choices in what I'm eating (re-establish the 8pm cut-off), get to sleep at a decent hour, and make a concerted effort to lose 20 lbs by the end of the year.
Social - attend more social activities sponsored by my church / reactivate my involvement in some of the online communities here / make weekly check-ins and give and reply to feedback on DW & LJ
Reading - read 10 new-to-me books this year
Writing - write more. 100k is the goal. I fell way short of that last year, so I need to make a plan and stick with it

That's it for now. I'll do a recap of my 2023 writing soon.

Had to take the computer to the shop today. Second time in two weeks. It's doing a bizarre thing where I'll get the black screen o'doom. And then when I turn it back on, pixels arranged in the shape of castles randomly appear. Last time they did a 24 hour scan and couldn't get it to show up.

Things may be moving in an odd direction in my personal life but I'm trying not to project too much. Just let things go how they go.

Haven't written much but I'm keeping myself busy with some painting and coloring projects.

That's it for now. Hope your lives are going well.

So in addition to watching my beloved hockey team get eliminated last Friday, the game also seemed to have gifted me with a bout of Covid.

(Not really sure if it happened at the game or at the family reunion on Sunday, but the latter was outside and didn't have 18,000 other people there)

My sister sent me a text this morning that she was down with it and I wasn't feeling bad so I went to work (minimal contact with folks there, so I'm not really worried about that) but I decided that I should be responsible and take a test before choir this evening.

They say it could take 15 minutes for that second line to come up on the test, but BOOM it was there pretty much before the third drop settled.

My parents are in denial and not taking the test until tomorrow.

The funny thing is that I feel better now than I have the past three weeks.

Such is life.

And how are you all doing?

So, the procedure went smoothly. Nothing found, which in itself was a bit of a pleasant surprise. For the record, 2.6 pounds lost between yesterday morning before prep and today before the procedure. I saw a number on the scale that I'd like to see again, so I'm going to have to start working toward that.

Other than that, since my last "real" update, I've been able to go to choir practice a couple of times, which has been nice. I'm helping my dad to get more secure with his walking so that when we're able to go to the hockey game next week, he's able to go with me. I've been writing, but I haven't been particularly happy with a lot of it.

I did start vacation planning for Chicago in mid-May. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be nice to get away and see a couple of friends up there. The American Writers' Museum is having an event that I'm hoping to attend when I'm there, so that'll be fun (I spent about 5 hours in the museum the last time I was there.)

I think that's it. Hope you all are well.

Happy March! It's beautiful weather here in the Midwest right now and it's going to be closing in on 75 tomorrow- makes me wonder how many a/c calls I'll get at work. All that is good because I went out of the building to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air today at lunchtime and when I got back my passenger side window would not roll up. Yikes. I had a similar problem when I first got the car so hopefully it's a fairly easy (and inexpensive) fix.

Still the sun is shining and nothing too allergy-producing is flying around yet, so that's good.

I did my weigh-in today and the last couple of weeks may have done me in because I'm up a pound. I'm only doing it once a month because I'm not a fan of the up and down (I will do it this month on the 13th and 15th just for fun.)

Prodigal Son fans- did you know there's a virtual season on Ao3? Scripts for each episode are being added every Monday. There are three episodes so far, so if you're a fan of the show, check it out.

Is anyone watching "Resident Alien"? It's the only show I'm really dedicated to right now. So good.

I'm a bit bummed that the baseball season won't start on time, but it's something that I could see coming when the owners were so inflexible about things last year. Oh well, at least the hockey season is still rolling.

That's it for me. Hope you all are well.

Thought I'd dip my toe back into the updating waters- it seems like all the cool kids are doing it and sometimes it's nice to catch up on everything. I'd like to get to a point where I'm at least posting something that's not a fic on a weekly basis, so let's consider this post 1 of season 16, I guess.

( The Update )

In your own space, Interact with someone.

When I saw this challenge, the first thing I thought of was doing an AMA. So throw me a question in the comments and I'll do my best to answer.