I live in New Jersey, I love the Internet

Friday 5: Brr!

February 19, 2021

Happy Friday from my day off, which is being spent in the same place as where I am when I work. I took today off because I’m supposed to be receiving my first COVID-19 vaccine. ALAS…

snowy front yard
On Wednesday, there were only a few patches of snow left.

We have had winter storms here for the last 3 Thursdays and this was no exception. Because of this … mess … my vaccine was rescheduled (automatically!) until next Friday. I’m not taking next Friday off – I’ll just zip out there and back and call it a lunch hour. Kim of last April would have been crying for a week about it. Kim of this February sighs and keeps on keeping on. I’m lucky to be getting one this soon anyway.

And I’m also lucky to be living in an area that is (mostly) prepared for winter storms. If you’re in place to do so, please donate to the folks in Texas whose leadership is … subpar … on the best of days. Here is a google doc (via Adriene Mishler) with resources for Texans – scroll to the bottom for donation sites. It’s easiest to be a Millennial here and use CashApp/Venmo for your donations.

And via Lindsay at Bourbon, Lipstick, & Stilettos, here is how to help Eastern Kentuckians.

Fittingly, this week’s Friday 5 theme is Brr! BTW, if a month has an R in the name, I’m cold.

  1. What will you remembrr about this past week?
    My relief at Mom getting her first COVID shot. My cousin’s kid having fat, healthy twins.
  2. What’s trying its best to clobbrr you these days?
    Inertia. ALL I want to do is … nothing. I’m even having trouble reading again. This darkness of my mood is reminiscent of what it was during the early days of the pandemic. I think it’s because March (spring!) is close.
  3. What’s going on in the neighbrrhood?
    Everybody is tired of shoveling. One person keeps trying to “report” cars she doesn’t recognize on Nextdoor. Another caught a meter reader on her Ring camera and wants “info on this guy” – also on Nextdoor. I am BARELY on Nextdoor, except if I need a recommendation on a business and even then you get responses from Moms promoting their sons’ businesses, never realizing that it is not very hard to figure that out.
  4. When were you recently required to summon some brravery?
    Basically any time I have to leave the house. I’m much better with being out in the world but I lately I’ve started with the “how do I even drive? I haven’t been on a highway since October!” willies. I think “suck it up, buttercup” needs going to be my theme for 2021.
  5. Over what will you happily labrr this weekend?
    Most of my seeds arrived (waiting on potato tubers and strawberry starts), so I’m going to figure out when to start them and what kind of fertilizer we’ll need. Oh, and I also need to update my SSL (that’s what gives me an https instead of http in my blog’s address) and I only do that every 2 years so I have to find my documentation. The labrr involved is minimal. It’s “upload this thing to this spot.”

Have a great weekend!
Love,
Buttercup, who is trying to suck all of this up

kim, grumpy out in the snow.

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Life

My EIB award winning post

February 18, 2021

(excellence in blogging, of course)

Rush Limbaugh died yesterday of lung cancer. I’m in with a pretty solid crowd of very liberal people on Twitter and IG and the blogging world. I donate money and time to Democratic candidates locally and across the country when needed. I have a RGB action figure and still have my 2016 HRC “I’m with Her” magnet on my laptop stand. Safe, loved, and warm, right?

When news broke of Limbaugh’s passing and my Twitter feed began its tapdance of glee, I tweeted this:

Unlike many here, I actually used to listen to Rush Limbaugh forever ago and if he had used his presence and talent to build America up instead of bitterly dividing it, today would be a completely different mood.

me, twitter, yesterday.

I garnered only 3 likes and probably lost some followers. I completely expected that because I’m sure people where shocked that 1) I listened to Rush and 2) I admitted it.

But I have never hidden that I have a mildly conservative past. It’s all in the early days of this blog. I voted for Bush 43 and McCain with a super reluctant vote for Kerry in between. The 2000 version of Kim and the 2008 version of Kim had her reasons that she thought were decent. I was a registered Libertarian for a while too, before THAT party turned sour. Or did I sour on the party?

I listened to Rush in the late 90s/early 00s when I had a crappy car with a radio that only pulled in a few stations. One of them was the local talk station, and it ran a slate of conservative hosts. At the time I was convinced that Bill Clinton was reprehensible and unfit to be president (It wasn’t the blow job, it was the lying about the blow job, and that it all happened in the Oval Office. I am about the age of the intern whose name is forever affiliated with him, and ugh.) I am simultaneously still enthralled by and repulsed by Bill Clinton.

But at the time, Rush was ON FIRE with parodies and darkly funny jokes. (and some that were distasteful no matter who you voted for) We were all witnessing the first slow-motion political train wreck of the Internet age. And he had some howlers about Al Gore when he ran in 2000. But as we moved past Clinton into Bush 43 and the post 9/11 era, Rush and the rest took a very cruel and xenophobic hard-right turn.

Or rather, I realized that they were ALWAYS that way.

Shortly after, I left conservative radio behind. I also left behind the conservative columnist in Minneapolis who used to write about awful food recipes of the 60s/70s. If you know, you know.

What changed? I started reading books and blogs from people who were different from me. I began talking to more people outside of my dumb little suburban enclave and as I worked to make my own world larger, I realized that all people are valuable and worthy of love and what I thought was Rush being darkly funny was him being a terrible human being.

To mangle some famous words, I’m not writing this to praise Rush but to bury him. And to put out there that not all of us have an unblemished ideological past, and some of us didn’t emerge from an clamshell fully kind and liberal, we had to put a lot of hard thinking and work to get here. I’m still not perfect, none of us are.

But I’m working toward it.

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Life

Winter Weekend

February 15, 2021

What I used to call Presidents weekend has kind of been forever spoiled by the former president. And you know what? A bunch of Presidents were disasters so I’m renaming this weekend in my brain as Winter Weekend. And I used to be the person who had silhouettes of Lincoln and Washington to hang up in February!

It started off weakly because I was too tired to stay up for Movie Night (which begins at 10pm EST – the time I used to leave my house to go out when I was younger). I had written the Friday 5 post and decided I was too tired of screens for the week.

large paper flowers
My 2 flowers of the 5 flower kit. They’re okay. And very large. That’s a standard pillar candle.

Saturday was Mom’s birthday – she came over at lunch for a Virtual Galentine’s Celebration run by Paper Source (not an ad but I’d take their sweet ad money any day). It was two hours and included a cocktail class run by Mark at Revival Cafe/Bar in Chicago, an instructional session on how to make pressed flower taper candles, and a hands-on session creating paper flowers from a Paper Source Kit.

WM took Ollie to the vet at 3. Ollie’s lungs and heart continue to sound good* and the vet put him back on a steroid to try and get on top of the cough. But it also could be an issue choking on his own drool due to his partial facial paralysis** and in that case there’s nothing to be done. We shall see. Today is day two of the steroids and the cough has almost completely gone away.

Ollie, mostly nose
“will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 94?”

Saturday night we hung with J/K/Nephews A&B at Mom’s for sandwiches and cake***.

Sunday! Valentine’s Day! I attempted to make WM pink heart-shaped pancakes but they looked more like kidneys. He brought some flowers home and we had takeout from Capn Cat’s Clam Bar – it offers exactly the fried fish menu that you’re thinking of. After that I lazed on the sofa and watched the last episode of Bridgerton, which I successfully stretched out one episode a week for eight weeks.

pancakes in a pan. they are supposed to be heart shaped but are not.
Kidneys. Or maybe anatomical hearts?

Bridgerton is full of sexytimes, humor, and not-quite-period fashion and I was 100% there for it. There was a happy ending for who we cared about the most and various deserved ending for others. 10/10, 5/10 if you cannot watch sex scenes.

Today! Monday! The … other day … in the long weekend. Today I took Mom to get her first COVID vaccine which OMG I’m so happy and worried and relieved I could cry for days. I couldn’t go in with her, but the nurse told her, “this is step 1 to back to normal” and I’m almost crying typing that out. For those who are counting, I have been clenched in non-stop worry since September of 2019 (family health issues and other stresses) and wouldn’t it be nice if I could unclench just the slightest later this summer? I do think so!

This will be a short work week for me as I am off Friday. Which is mercifully good, because my left brain feels about as functional as a broken zipper. Maybe I’ll take some time off at the end of March. I have many hours of PTO that I need to use.

* for a 13.5 year old dog.
** happened after a very bad ear infection – you can see it in his pictures once you start looking for it.
*** yes, risky, but we’re all on same page risk-wise.