☆paging doctor gorgeous☆

As usual, not much going on here.

I had today off work, and spent most of the day cleaning and organizing my room. Then Blair trimmed and dyed my hair (again). I swear, my hair is a different color every couple of weeks at this point. The pretty blue-green-purple mermaid color scheme faded out, so we redid the indigo/purple and painted some dark blue over parts of it. We'll see what happens.

Tomorrow I work, and then I've got to come home and do more cleaning. Thursday we leave to go on a little family vacation with Blair's family. We'll be staying in a huge cabin kind of in the middle of nowhere, but from the pictures I saw on the booking site, it looks quite pretty.

Anyway, there's no one to watch our dog, so Blair enlisted the help of some friends. One of them will be handling Thursday and another will be handling Friday through Sunday. Both of them will be staying over in our apartment, which I am not pleased about because I don't trust either of them not to go snooping through our things or to make sure the front door is always locked, but it's really the only option we've got as there's no one else, nowhere to board dogs near here that we can trust with our dog's health issues, and the AirBnB forbids pets (and has cameras on the property, I'm sure).

I'll end up prepping all of Velma's food and medicines and writing out a detailed list of what our dogsitters should and should not do that is sure to make me look like an untrusting hardass, but oh well.

Reconnected with my close friend, Nollan.

We've been close friends since 2004, when a mutual friend tried to set us up. We met for a date; I wasn't his type, he wasn't mine, but we had burgers and went ice skating anyway and have been friends ever since. He is the one I lived with for six years, after my family moved out of state and before I moved in with Blair. We're basically brother and sister.

Which is why I felt a little wounded when he told me, just today, that he and his wife are expecting a baby girl and that she is due in just two months. Hell of a long time to withhold information like that from so close a friend, no?

Ah, well. Long distance friendships are often harder. But we're still trading recipes, exchanging tv show recs, and trying to plan an eventual visit.

I've started watching Lanterns. I'm not much of a DC person and I'm a Green Lantern person even less, but I've heard good things about the show and so I'll give it a shot. I'll start Ghosts soon, because Nollan's been trying to get me to watch it for years, and it'll be good to have another thing to talk about. Tentatively diving into the first episode of The Shards. I don't even really know what it's about, but I do know it's a Ryan Murphy project, so I'm down. Also watched the new Ryan Reynolds movie, Mayday, and enjoyed it. What can I say, it's Enemies-to-Friends (kind of) and an American/Russian friendship tale, which reminds me ever so slightly of TMFU, so.

Thanks to Monday being a holiday, I now have three days off in a row! Heck yeah. Maybe I'll actually do something productive, since my piece for the Star Wars zine is due soon and I think I want to sign up for some Halloween events here on DW.

Gave in and started watching the new season of Ted Lasso. I forgot how this show makes me feel. See, I was trying to bank a bunch of episodes so that I could binge them, but maybe having a taste of this every week would be good for me.

I finished Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, and have been working on both Undertone and Disclosure Day, but I can't really get into either movie so I'll probably just give up and pick a few different ones.

Almost done reading Project Hail Mary. Bought a few old books from the 60's online, by an author named Jim Kjelgaard. They're animal novels in the vein of White Fang and Call of the Wild, and they were some of my first big kid books in elementary school. At the time, of course, I had no idea how old they were, but I suppose in the 90's we'd had a few reprints by then. I'm excited to dig into those!

It just started raining, and we've got some thunder and lightning. I hope it carries on all night. I wish I didn't have to work tomorrow.

But we're having Blair's brother-in-law over for dinner tomorrow. He's house sitting for a co-worker in our town, and has been going through a rough time mentally and emotionally, so hopefully we can have a nice time and distract him for a little while.

Today was a pretty great day.

Slept in. Blair and I made a big breakfast with chocolate chip pecan pancakes, fried eggs and candied bacon and ate while watching some tv. There was an apartment inspection that we passed with flying colors and were told "You have a beautiful home."

Went out to the mall to find me a new pair of shoes to replace the tragic passing of my new-vintage Sketchers Shape-Ups that I discussed in a recent post, and ended up with a lovely pair of Hoka Bondi 9's, which I'm told by many are great for helping treat plantar fasciitis. Picked up a couple of goodies at Pop Con, a store that sells comics, Funko pops, backpacks, stationary, snacks, pretty much anything a good nerd loves. Got boba.

Went to the gym and had a great workout. Near the end of it, the storm outside reached a crazy peak; the electricity went out in the gym, plunging everything into darkness until the emergency lights kicked on. It was eerily quiet, which I found pretty cool. You could hear the thunder booming and the rain hammering the roof, which turned to hail for awhile. The rain was so torrential that the gym roof started to leak in some places. Driving home, we saw that electricity was out in most of the city, and none of the traffic lights were functioning. It was great fun!

When we got home, we took Velma for a long walk in the rain and returned home utterly drenched.

Showered up. Blair clocked into her work-from-home writing center gig while I went back out and brought some Subway sandwiches home for dinner.

Lazy, indulgent, intimate evening.

Blair's sleeping now and I'm catching up on some online things. Really trying to update here more. I miss being a part of the DW commmuntiy. Or, feeling like it, I guess.

I wish it would storm some more!

On Friday, Blair and I traveled with a friend of hers, Nicolette, to Milwaukee to go to the Wisconsin State Fair.

We had gotten tickets to see Lindsey Stirling, who was performing at the theater there, and those tickets came with admission to the fair, so we figured why not!

Lindsey Stirling was incredible. I've been a fan of hers for many years and have always hoped that some day I could see her perform live, so this was an amazing experience.

Otherwise, we ate lots of wild fair food (candied bacon cheese curds, hot honey bacon corndog, elote hotdog, peanut butter ice cream nachos, deep fries oreos, ect) and poked around in the Exhibition Hall, but not too much else. It was really fun, though! I haven't been to a fair in like. God, 15 years?

We spent the night down there rather than drive all the way back super late (it's a 3+ hour drive), and it was a rough night. Turns out Nicolette snores like a beast, so I got no sleep at all, and Blair wouldn't have either if she hadn't worked out how to fall asleep with her fingers in her ears.

Still, Saturday morning we traveled to downtown Milwaukee and went to breakfast at this really cool place. Then we tracked down a sort of exhibit called Black Cat Alley, which is an alley that has been completely taken over by amazing art installations and murals.

After that, we had to start home, since Nicolette had work that evening. We were able to stop by Krispe Kreme on the way, which is a boon, because there is not one within hours of where we live.

In other news, does anyone remember Sketchers Shape-Ups from over a decade ago? They promised to tone your calves and improve your balance (which they didn't do, hence the lawsuit and the following discontinuing of said shoe), but they were the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn on my feet in my entire life. I bought pair after pair, because they were a lifesaver for me, on my feet eight, nine, ten hours a day. I was devastated when they stopped making them.

Well, I found a pair on Poshmark in my size, in very good condition, and decided to buy them. They arrived today, and I was so excited. I laced them up and Blair and I took Velma for a walk. I chatted all the while about how much I always loved these shoes, and how badly I missed them, and how excited I was to have found a pair. I was glowing. I've been suffering from really bad plantar fasciitis lately, and these beauties were like walking on clouds.

And then... halfway through the walk, the sole of my left shoe just. Falls off. Like the foam completely disintegrated as I was walking. There was nothing I could do, I couldn't just take my shoes off and walk home that way, so I had to hobble home, defeated and really, really sad as my excitement and joy just evaporated.

By the time we made it home, the sole of my right shoe was starting to come off, too. I guess they were pretty old, and sitting in storage, they just. Rotted??? Fortunately I messaged the person who sold them to me, and she was surprised and apologetic and promised me a refund. I'm really bummed, though. Even if I do find another pair in my size, I'm very hesitant to buy, and I really just have no idea what other brands sell a comparable shoe.

Today was a friend's (well, a friend of Blair's) birthday party down at a local bar & grill. It was all cute kitty decorations, subpar food, excellent cupcakes, and fun chatter. The kind of social engagement I can enjoy with zero anxiety, since it was Blair on one side, a quiet librarian on the other, and two excellent conversationalists across from me.

We've been going to the gym a lot lately, which is great because we've been trying to stay the course and mostly succeeding. We're going again tomorrow, after we run errands at the DMV and the mall.

Therapy is going well. I alternate between going by myself and bringing Blair along with me for some couples' therapy. Not because we're having problems, just because we're both very pro-therapy and this therapist is amazing and no-cost through the LGBTQ center, and we're having a nice time just sort of testing the areas where we're on the same page versus where we could potentially improve.

I'm still neck deep in reading Project Hail Mary. I've been enjoying new episodes of Project Runway,, am excited to see that Ted Lasso has returned, and have seen Disclosure Day, which I wasn't really impressed with.

I've been promised a stormy day tomorrow, so I hope the weather forecast sticks to its word.

Life continues to be pretty tame, boring, and routine. I've got a few fun things coming up, though!

Despite me always saying "Damn I gotta post more" I guess I'm more or less destined to update only once a week.

I don't like this. I want to be here more. I want to be involved. I want to be making friends and keeping up with those friends. Not sure why I'm so bad at this.

Things are pretty normal, I guess? It's been rotten out, hot and humid, and we've had to endure three mayfly hatches. If you don't know what that is, count yourself lucky.

We drove out to Rochester for a Trader Joe's run the other day. Last night we went to this party for a friend of Blair's who graduated recently. We had brats outside and then moved inside when the outdoors got too unbearable, and ended up playing a few rounds of a fun group game before dissolving into separate groups for chatter and whatnot. Fortunately we ended up leaving before anyone got too drunk. I am so severely anxious around drunk people.

Tonight we've got DnD at DM/brother-in-law's house, and we've got to leave in like an hour. Here I am, updating my DW in a towel instead of getting dressed, but there ya go.

San Diego Comic Con was this week, and it's been so bittersweet for me, getting to watch all the goings-on on instagram. I've been attending that con, almost every single year, since high school. It was rough not getting to be there this year, on account of, you know, moving across the country. At least we'll be traveling to LA in October for Los Angeles Comic Con, which is still a really good, big con, but it's just not the same. We'll be getting to go to Disneyland and the beach, too, which almost heals all my psychic wounds. Almost.

Why does time get away from me so quickly? How?

It's already been a week since my last update, and not by design.

Let's see. The 4th of July was fun, despite it being a holiday I high-key despise. We had two friends over and we made delicious homemade meatball subs. We watched two movies: Uncle Sam, which is one of those movies that is deliberately awful for the sake of entertainment, and another called The Bay which was actually pretty good, unironically.

It's been storming a lot, and I love that. Unfortunately it's also been a Biblical plague out there, because of mayflies. I knew about mayflies. I did not know they would blanket everything by the millions to the point where I literally could not get outside and once I figured out how, the only way to take the dog to pee was to load her into my car, exit the garage, and drive up the street to a place where there was no light to let her go.

The other day, while walking the dog, we found a baby bird on the ground. Above in the tree, the parent birds were very upset. We decided to go back home, get some supplies and a step ladder, and come back to try and help. We fashioned a makeshift nest out of a small box and some old shoelaces and tied it up in the tree, full of leaves, then placed the baby inside of it. It seemed to calm the parents, and we were glad that the nestling wouldn't just sit there in the grass helpless and vulnerable.

I just finished the final season of The Bear.

fandomgiftbasket is in full swing again! I'm excited to take a gander at the spreadsheet and see what I can do.

On Saturday night, we did something fun! We bought ourselves tickets to the riverboat that docks here in La Crosse at Riverside Park. Every Saturday night they have dinner cruises that last about three hours, up a stretch of the Mississippi River and back again.

It was... less intimate than we hoped, haha. Instead of every group having their own table, it was assigned seating, and you were forced to get real cozy with a bunch of strangers. It wasn't bad! The people on either side of us were pretty nice! The food was pretty decent for what it was. Spare rib, baked chicken, mashed potatoes and carrots.

The view was the point of it. After dinner we could get up from our tables and go up on deck, where we scored a spot there on the railing. Sunset was beautiful, and it was up there, once dinner was done and we were free to disperse, that we got our romantic moment.

We were gonna get ice cream and walk along the water's edge when we got back, but it was after 9pm and we were ready to head home. Maybe next time!

Today, I invited Blair to come with me to see the therapist I've been going to at the LGBTQ center, since she says she also sees couples and it's no-cost, so we figured why not. It went very well, and Blair even wants to start coming with me every other session or so.

The weather right now is W R E T C H E D. It's 90 degrees with about a billion of whatever you measure humidity by. Back home in California, 90 degrees would make me very unhappy but at least without the humidity, a dry heat was a lot easier to cope with. I don't want to go outside at ALL, which is sad because here in Wisconsin, summer is the time of year you're supposed to go outside and do things, since you're stuck inside during the frozen months. We have AC and all, but it's been on constantly, and I am seriously dreading getting the electric bill. It's going to be hundreds of dollars.

We intend to have plans for the 4th, even though I seriously am not a fan of that holiday, but we aren't sure what they are yet. People aren't really getting back to us about it. Guess we'll see!

Today, Blair went out foraging with her friend Sarah, and came back with a whole basket of mulberries and a little bushel of what is called pineapple weed, which is basically chamomile. After dinner, she brewed a pot of tea using some of the pineapple weed, and yooooo it was so good. The aroma, the taste. The mere fact that it was only hours before harvested directly from the earth.

While she was gone, I puttered around downtown on foot. I poked around in the local indie book shop and purchased Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary (which I really should have read by now), and a surprise romantasy pick I ferreted out called Wolf Gone Wild, by Juliette Cross. Not sure how high on the spice meter it is, but we shall see!

Tomorrow, Blair and I are returning to her hometown so that I can give her grandmother another massage, and Blair can give her a haircut. Then we're all going out to lunch, and on the way home we're going to see if we can find another betta to bring home. I've scrubbed out and re-cycled the late Kyber's tank, so it's all fresh and ready to go.

I've started watching Widow's Bay, and I'm really enjoying it so far!