kiya

After some conversations I was having I had to write this one, heh.

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 03:02:57 GMT

Mama

There was in me
A trailing reluctance
To let go
Of what nurtured you—

Even though
It now fed
Neither you
Nor me.

But—

When you tucked your head
Against my chest
To cling again,
I don't think
You even
Noticed
It was gone.

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Minipoem time

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 20:04:09 GMT

Seahorse

I carried you
Even though
I—
I am no woman;

(I will love all things that grow
And are,
And am,
Not barren)

You taught my roots to drink
My trunk to span realms
My branches to embrace the stars:
We were the world,
Together.

You were never as heavy
As how
The world
Saw me.

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I now live with a teenager.

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 17:19:59 GMT

They are over three inches taller than they were at their last physical.

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Yeah I guess I'll use the "too tired" icon even if I'm not so much with the mature wisdom

Mon, 23 May 2022 01:49:19 GMT

Okay so yesterday involved going to the falconry class and encountering pointy murderbirbs and then puttering around Northampton briefly before returning home and briefly hiding before being called upon to help manage the Well of Infinite Drama (otherwise known as 'the monkeys').

Today was another up-early day to run to church, where the Coming of Age kids were giving their speeches, and opened up with the hymn that was the ... basically the theme song to the religious education module that I happened to assistant-teacher those specific kids, so I have a sort of warm fuzzy about that. "Something I did somehow made an impact on those kids! Which ... well, I wasn't sure it did at the time because the 12-13 year set is, um. Well, it's hard to tell if one's making an impact...."

After the service was the church picnic which was supposed to have happened last week but was called off for different weather. KJ and I performed "Stand By Me" at the 'parishoners sign up to do a five-minute gig', I have a video (taken by FM) that I haven't done anything with yet, the tent we were under attempted to depart partway through due to wind which led to me grabbing it, slamming it back onto the ground, and proclaiming "stand by me!" before several helpful gentlemen arrived to seize the relevant poles and hold the thing in place. There was much chatting. A polite I-read-a-book Wiccan enquired about the symbolism of my hat, which ... well, she's got decent instincts there. (Also I came up with an excellent summary of the core problem of IRAB paganism chatting with her.) The kids ran around making giant soap bubbles and playing in a sprinkler on the town common and eventually we went home (and made the relevant children change into dry clothes).

After about 40 minutes downtime we packed up and all went out again to a cookout at some friends' new house, slightly complexified by a plague exposure at work but we are dealing and there was masking. ER apparently picked up heat exhaustion while running around earlier and spent much of the evening asleep on an ice pack. Seeing friends was good.

I am very tired. Also I sunburned the tip of my nose yesterday and it's remarkably distracting.

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I just have to laugh

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 01:18:19 GMT

FM is a bundle of anxiety at the best of times, which means I was not precisely surprised when she came and said "Mama, I found something scary in the bathroom, I want to show it to you."

I was surprised, however, when I went up and found that the terrifying item was a handwashing guide (you know how there were thousands of these things going around early in the pandemic with different recitations attached? one of those).

Specifically a handwashing guide printed with the Litany Against Fear from Dune.

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Definitely my child, really.

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 23:28:56 GMT

So there is a custom among certain of my people that the test for someone being Excessively Punchdrunk is to say "A stick!*" at them and see if it makes them fall over, under the principle that the relevant joke is really only funny at about 3am.

KJ is bouncing around being kind of hyperkinetic and chatterboxy so I addressed her with "A STICK!" and she cracked up, but of course then I had to explain why I had addressed her with "A STICK!"

Long story short, we have now determined that dogs are assistive devices for disabled boomerangs.

* "What do you call a boomerang that doesn't come back?"
"A stick!"

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An Assortment of Miscellanea with Traditional Timing

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 05:54:27 GMT

Last night I was having a very pleasant sort of LARP-esque dream up until midway through it when I realized that nobody in this situation was wearing masks and my backbrain tried to frantically backfill in sufficient justification for the absence of basic public health concerns. It was on the one hand funny and almost enough to kick me into lucid dreaming and on the other hand completely wrecked the premise of the story that was ongoing, which I have since forgotten.

This morning the smaller monkeys crawled into bed with me, first ER for snuggles, then AR joining for... well, rampaging about obnoxiously, to be honest. At one point they both hid under the blankets, so I suggested that they play groundhogs since it was Groundhog Day, at which point ER, quite affronted, declared that she was not a groundhog, she was a burrowing owl. So they played groundhog-and-burrowing-owl instead and had an argument about the correct procedure for tunneling and asked me questions like "which digs deeper, groundhogs or owls?" to which I did not and still do not know the answer. (Okay I shared this paragraph with jenett and she confirmed my suspicion that the answer is groundhogs because she cannot make a will save vs. random research.)

I have now spent a pleasant while looking at Red Dwarf gifs and giggling because of this joke for which I am absolutely in the very specific niche, so that's nice.

I am working on a short story for which I have a title and that's very exotic; I am, however, pretty sure that the words I have for it are at least half wrong but it's one of those things I have to write enough of it to know what to fix, so. (The title is "The Emancipation of Felix d'Carabas".)

And now I wait for the traditional Appointed Time Tee-Em for the posting of an entry, because it is that time of year again.

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There continues to be a lot of everything

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 05:08:22 GMT

ER vomited suddenly a few days ago, or maybe yesterday, I genuinely have no conception of the passage of time here, startling nobody more than herself, I think, but that has meant keeping her at home while flailing about trying to get her plague-tested so she can go back to school even though we have no real plausible vector other than school and she's otherwise fine. (I am reasonably comfortable with her school's precautions at the moment though who knows what the future will bring; I am not comfortable with the older kids' schools' precautions, so.) Fortunately she and AR are playing nicely together, mostly.

I, of course, keep showing signs of having another cold, because life is just like that. artan's meds are keeping the sore throat punted down, mostly, but I just took my last NyQuil.

I am... keeping chapter-a-day pace on Nano so far, amazingly enough. I really want to finish ITS so I can edit it and CP together, at this point, and I'm pretty sure a Nano push can finish it. Need to work on my Cinderella inversion some more, that has a deadline that is real.

I have been rewarding myself occasionally for finishing things by playing Hades, and on run 16 I managed to get past Meg (and nearly got the Hydra as well). Sheer luck in boons, honestly.

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Update to last

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 14:43:35 GMT

Actually it took ER 41 minutes to make it to my bed from posting time. :P

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Entirely too much day in today

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 03:48:36 GMT

The plan was fairly straightforward: church service, maybe take KJ to RE (and picnic sushi if I did), back and work on the office. That is indeed a thing that happened, and also I grabbed some curly fries from the pizza place next door to the sushi place, because I didn't get any last week and I like curly fries a whole lot.

While I was doing this there were other things going on: getting AR a zombie plague test (not that we believed she had it but it was due diligence and also, y'know, general paranoia) and artan going to get supplies for the sukkah. There were complexities with the plague tester with the paperwork (I probably typoed or something when setting it up, or put the date in European order instead of USonian order or something) but I wasn't the one to fix them. But also artan's car broke down.

So on the way back from zombie plague test, the children were dropped here and Teine went up to jump artan's car, which ran for a bit and then decided Nope. The world is complicated, AAA was called, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. I couldn't do anything useful about that (the car I had access to is a hybrid and the last time we needed to jump something we tried that and determined that it was not plausible with our accessible tech) so I went to work in the library. whispercricket came home with the kids and expressed her state of angst and stress so I handed her curly fries because I could not do anything useful about the rest of it but knew she has a love of curly fries too and so that was a thing that would help. Also I fed the other kids some 'sushi egg' (tamago is a favorite, obtained for them when I was getting lunch) which staved off some amount of chaos.

I decided the shelves were probably cured enough to not stink up the place and so I started putting things in the deeper shelves. And then I did some rearrangement of things on the shelves in the office-that-was, and measured space. And AR was driving her sisters batty so I brought her up to help me with things like "bring me four shelf pegs and hand them to me one at a time" and "could you put this pile of magazines on that shelf". The tall/oversized books have been pulled onto the deeper bookshelves; some shelves have been consolidated and rearranged; the obnoxious four-inch-tall shelf has vanished from the center unit of the shelves from the office-that-was, though there is still one on the left one. Various things have been moved around to new and improved locations so that I have a hope of unpacking the remaining boxes. Anyway, there is progress (I think that should be visible). (Three white boxes remain, bottom center, and then I found two other boxes of miscellaneous books to put away.)

Chinese food was ordered for dinner because there was too much day. ER actually ate some of my dish and declared it really tasty so that is exciting, actually, since she is extremely food conservative and mostly wants to eat apples with cinnamon on them, bread, plantain chips, and cookies. (We had drama earlier in the week where the three younger set demolished an entire challah during FM's Hebrew school because the bread consumption was not being monitored and they decided they wanted more than the one piece they were permitted. FM appears to feel that if her little sisters tell her to do something she wants an excuse for that is sufficient.)

Bedtime routine was interrupted by ER having a coughing fit, staring at her hands in bewilderment, and proclaiming, "I fink I lost a toof. My first one!" and then having to parade her around to show all the parents the hole and the tooth, with the tiny herald that is AR shouting at the top of her (very loud) voice about how ER has a hole in her mouth. Eventually they were herded into bed and I went and did more shelving.

I am very tired now. Also, sore throat, so I've clearly caught whatever AR had.

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I feel like I oughta update some stuff

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 22:47:17 GMT

The grinding progression towards the possibility that I might be able to unpack the Despair Boxes as soon as next month continues.

(artan: We might be able to put things in your office as soon as September!
Me: Ha ha... wait... that's... in less than two weeks. What is time.)

The current status of the project that is in my room is something like:

The holes in the walls in the office are repaired; the office has been painted; the bedroom has been moved into the office; the wallpaper around the holes in the bathroom wall has been stripped. artan has gotten the wood for the desk/shelves construction as of this morning.

Tomorrow, a plasterer comes to fix the holes in the bedroom and bathroom (and around the front door, and over the dining room table, and whatever else we've turned up). Then there will be sanding in the bedroom, and painting, and then putting the shelves back up, and then cleaning the floor of all the dust and debris, and then! We move the bedroom furniture back in! We clean the floor on the other side! We theoretically start moving things up from the basement! The desk/shelves get built and installed! I have an office! Theoretically.

Also tomorrow morning, the mason! For ongoing stonework shenanigans! Because that whole project is a slow-rolling nightmare of stress all around that I haven't even had the spoons to talk about effectively!

Also there's a bunch of other things.

( The children )
( Writing and such )

I am pretty sure there was more but it has fallen out of my head in the deluge of all the everything while I have been trying to write this. I have not yet resorted to day drinking.

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Small Theology

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 01:43:55 GMT

Today FM led the junior monkeys in some sort of extended fantasy scenario (there was a The Floor Is Made Of Lava sequence, and a ... rope bridge timing challenge? and some other things) in costume (giraffe for FM, dragon for ER, and cat for AR). This was fabulous in many ways, not least because it occupied them entirely for I think about two hours.

Before they embarked upon this fabulous journey, I heard FM in the other room carefully herding her sisters with a "Before we begin, we need to make a prayer to the god of adventures, to keep us safe."

I do not know who the God of Adventures is but I can totally see her setting up a shrine to it.

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