"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
--Mal Reynolds, Firefly
I've been relying heavily upon timed posts these last few weeks because my mental health has been forcing me to choose between being able to get essential stuff done (read: work) and, well, anything else. Come the end of the (work) day, all I have the compute cycles to do is goof off with a side of doomscrolling (because when I don't I get blindsided by The Next Damned Thing). Mostly, seeing the world operate on Covid Standard Time is disheartening and the …
I've been asked to signal boost this by AJ, one of the few people whom I would say in public that I trust.
Lapis, a friend of his, is a transwoman who is disabled and is also at this time homeless. Lapis is undergoing a mental health crisis at this time and is actively seeking assistance. However, the mental health system has judged that Lapis is not undergoing a sufficiently bad crisis to warrant hospitalization (which would mean getting her off the street). As far as I know, Lapis is estranged from her family so they are not an option …
This is probably one of the hardest blog posts I've ever tried to write. It's hard to write something like this so that it's not all drama, not all pathos, not all "holiday tragedy human interest story" (which is its own unique flavour of article, to be sure), and yet not come across like I'm trying to manipulate people by tugging at their heart strings. So, to that end, I've opted to write only the facts as I understand them, with a minimum of linguistic ornamentation.
Mylia, Chey, Mika, and Cindy are old friends of the family, and rented a …
While few people will admit to it, just about everyone I've ever met seems to hold one sort of myth or another close to their hearts. Some are die-hard fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and decorate their homes with memorabelia from the show. Others have the full set of (kind of crappy) Babylon-5 action figures in the packaging, and have a habit of asking people what they want. Some find their muse in fantasy rather than science fiction, and are known to dress as medusae, sprites, dryads, or Sidhe nobles at festivals for fun. Steampunk has brought a whole …
If you're wondering where I've been for the past couple of days, I've been busily preparing to go on the road again, by way of the downright amazing Roger Waters concert at the Verizon Center on Monday night. Work's not sending me out and about again, Lyssa and I are on vacation in beautiful Portland, Oregon for the next week or so. We didn't get to go anywhere earlier this year due to work obligations but we have some friends whom we've been meaning to visit for a while (namely, Blue Heron, Teaotter, and Amberite). It took us a couple …
It's been a while since I've had a surreally nervewracking experience to make things interesting, so when the opportunity came to go target shooting at the NRA range in northern Virginia I decided to give it a go.
I found out only recently that The Wrong Hands has been handgun training for a while now (six months, I think), and she extended an invitation to Lyssa a couple of weeks back to go to the range. By all accounts, at the end of the evening Lyssa had had an excellent time, and I was extended an invitation to join them …
Last Friday evening brought with a second attempt at the Chaos in DC meetup in Silver Spring, Maryland. I'd driven out there straight from work because I wound up leaving the office late, and when you factor in travel time it really wasn't a good idea to to do too much driving that night. In other words, there was no way I was going to drive two hours home through rush hour traffic on the DC Beltway, get there when the meetup began to pick up a few things and meet up with Jason, and then drive two hours back …
At 2302 EST5EDT last night, our friend Rhianna gave birth to a 6 pound 14 ounce baby girl at a hospital just outside the DC metroplex. Rhianna and Rab named the baby Skya Danaan MacFadyen.
I realize this is a bit late but between the wedding and guests staying for a couple of days last week, work has piled up such that I haven’t been able to write for a couple of days now.
Two Fridays ago Lyssa and I traveled back to Pennsylvania at separate times to attend the wedding of Seele and Justin at the Stone Villa Winery (1085 Clay Pike Road; Acme, PA; 15610). Like most weddings, the setup was a multi-month affair and took not a bit of planning on the back end to make everything go off smoothly as …
