Climbing the Third Stair

I had a disturbing and irritating dream last night. I dreamt that I had a rental car that was stolen by some of my sister's friends and she wouldn't tell me who because defending them was more important than me getting the rental car back, because I was going to tell the police. I was like, "They stole my car!" and she was, "They were just having fun!". I tried screaming at her how much I hated her, but there was something wrong with my voice so I came out sounding all thin and screechy. It was a very frustrating dream.

The dream pretty much mirrors what kind of behavior I expect from my sister. A lot of people I know don't even realize I have one, because I haven't spoken to her in over ten years and thus don't have a lot to say about her. I don't feel like typing out the whole drama that triggered the current situation, but the final act was me having to explain to our mother on Christmas Eve that her youngest daughter wasn't going to be at Christmas dinner that night and, in fact, planned never to speak with her again. My worst Christmas ever, and that tops the one were Mom was going through chemo for her breast cancer.

It's very painful, having once had a sister who now isn't. I have many friends who have good, or at least amicable, relationships with their sisters and I have huge jealousy issues over it. I've been blessed with a friend so close we are sisters in all but blood, but as good as that is (and it is very, very good) it doesn't make me forget that void.

Worse than that, however, is dealing with the people who learn of my situation and take it upon themselves to inform me that I need to let go of the past and call my sister up and reestablish relations with her. This makes me crazy-angry on such a deep level I have trouble articulating it--which is good, as it has saved me from several situations where I might have otherwise been yelling obscenities in public. They are just another voice in the chorus of voices telling me that my feelings don't matter, my pain doesn't matter, I don't matter. (I have felt this weight for years and years, but couldn't grasp its shape until the time I was seeing my doctor about some sinus issues I was having and he said, "We need to jump on this hard--you've been in pain for too long", and I started crying out of the blue. I was not used to having my pain being an issue of concern.)

None of them ever wonder why my sister doesn't grow up and rejoin the human race--no, I'm the one who is somehow at fault here. When I was seven and she was six I can see the value of holding me up to a higher standard of behavior, but when we are both in our thirties I think we should have a level playing field. I haven't changed my phone number since we last spoke, she can call me if she wants. I'll hear her out, if only because I'm gruesomely curious as to why she couldn't have sent her cancer-striken mother a get-well card.

Today was warm. Like, really warm. Like, upper-80s lower-90s warm. A few days ago our highs were in the 40s--welcome to springtime in Nebraska. I celebrated by virtuously hauling all my sheets to the laundromat for washing, and then taking off to my favorite thrift store for some warm-weather clothing. I am not in dire need of new clothing, I just wanted the excuse to be outside doing something frivolous instead of inside doing housework. I ended up picking up a black straw hat, a handful of summer dresses and blouses, and a pair of white dressy sandals, all for under $15. (This is why I try to have all my retail therapy sessions at thrift stores.)

I also spent some time gazing rapturously at my garden. My peas, kale, kholrabi (spellcheck! kholrabi is a word!), mustard, cabbage, and lentils are up now. I am especially looking forward to watching the lentils, as I have never grown them before. I have no idea if the harvest will be of any useful size, but I figure at worst I will have improved the soil in that patch of garden. My spinach, mache and broccoli have not appeared, and I fear they are not going to. I am especially sad about the broccoli, as it is one of my favorite vegetables. I've already bought and planted a 4-pack of broccoli seedlings from a local garden center; if the seeds don't sprout by the end of next week I might go buy more.

I put clean sheets on my bed and cooked dinner, but that may be the end of anything usefully domestic out of me tonight. I really want to take a bath and wash my hair, and after that rewatch Advent Children. I haven't seen a good swordfight in ages.

I had some minor pain today, but nothing like my pre-doctor visit days, so I am ok with that. I might hope that after 18 hours of treatment all of my symptoms would go away, but I wasn't exactly holding my breath over it. Still, I had enough energy this evening to start the allergy test for my hair-coloring; some thing I have been meaning to do for a couple of weeks now. (I plan on being a red-head for my Chicago trip.) Assuming I don't break out in hives or something, which I never have before, I'll do the coloring Sunday night.

This morning I gathered up my courage while getting dressed and stepped on the scale. To my amazement I had lost a few pounds since the last time I checked, meaning that I have now lost over ten pounds since Christmas. I hadn't been riding my bike since I started feeling ill, but I have been trying to maintain healthy eating habits, so I guess that was enough to carry the day. I am planning to start riding again, at an easy pace, tomorrow though. My blood pressure was "average" according to the nurse, but checking the Mayo clinic site it is higher than ideal, so I am curious to see how much my 30-minutes-per-day goal helps if I am dedicated to it.

Yesterday ended up being ok, I guess. I spent the most of the day been fretful and vaguely unhappy, which was partly because of the waking-up-with-mysterious-blood thing but probably more because I was in day 3 of being cooped up alone in my apartment, and with the weather being gray and foreboding to book. So, I did some dishes and made some progress on a story, but I didn't change the sheets, do more embroidery, or get on my exercise bike. *sigh*

BUT! In the afternoon I had a lovely long phone call with Yoon, which cheered me considerably. We spent some time commiserating on writer-things, and it is such a pleasure to talk writing with another writer--I think that is one of the things I miss most about my old writers group. We also discussed arts, child-raising, names and how people mispronounce them, levels of formality, and killing and eating chickens and sea urchins. As you can see, we covered a lot of territory.

This morning is still gray and foreboding, but it doesn't seem to be actively horrible so I will probably load up on clothing and go to Mass. I am looking forward to being in a room with other people in it; it will be quite the novelty. Then it will be more story-writing and dish washing.

I got up this morning at 5 and did a load of laundry before breakfast. After breakfast I gathered up all of my sheets plus my bedding and took them to the laundromat. This is far more sheets than I usually deal with, but between the weather and New Year being on a Saturday I just hadn't gotten them washed before now. I filled 3 double-load washers.

After getting home (and doing another load of laundry) and having lunch I did some reading, hung out on the internet until Fred sent back my story with his suggested edit, fixed it and sent it to Shawn, and then started cleaning and rearranging my living room. This was kind of a way of not doing my dishes, but since I really do need to clean and rearrange my living room I decided this was an allowable dodge.

While at the laundromat I had finished crocheting a shrug that I've been working on forever; all I need to do now is sew up the sleeves and its an article of clothing. (Though I really need to wash it before wearing.) It felt good to get one of my projects done and I suspect that helped feed the living room frenzy because it sure would be nice to have a place to sit and do handwork projects, doubley so since I have found my embroidery stuff.

I took a bath tonight and so I will be clean, wearing a freshly-washed nightgown, and sliding into freshly laundered sheets. This experience is one of my favorite things, and pretty much justifies dragging my sheets through the snow this morning.

On Tuesday and Wednesday my birthday and Christmas gifts from Karin and Ami arrived: a shiny new kitchenaid mixer and a box of attachments. Squeeeeeeeeeee! It was black, the color of several of my favorite dresses. The enclosed gift card apologized for not being able to find one in a rose print, a comment which is only funny if you happen to have been listening to Karin and I shop for clothes last summer.

(In my defense, I'd be quite happy to obsessively collect clothing in something other than floral prints, but it is quite rare to find items with a star motif designed for middle-aged women. I have one--count it, ONE--casual summer shirt with a star print pattern. And swords? Forget it. I'd even settle for battle-axes [now that I think about it, battle-axes would be kind of awesome] but until Coco Chanel gets reborn as a D&D player I think I am out of luck.)

After getting my new toy home I cleared off a section of the counter that runs along the west wall of my kitchen. My clever plan is to give my mixer (and other random small appliances) a permanent home on the counter; this will encourage me to use them because they are right there in the open while discouraging me from piling random junk on the counter because I have appliances sitting there. I have now christened that section of my kitchen 'Battleship Row'.

Then I spent some time petting it. I am pretty sure that most people, upon getting a kitchenaid, says something like "Wow, it is so big and powerful". My reaction was "IT'S SO SMALL AND CUTE!" This is what your brain is like when your workplace has a mixer that is almost as tall as you are. While googling for recipes I came across the information that the original kitchenaids had been manufactured by Hobart, the same company that makes the mixers my bakery uses, which amused me.

So this weekend I start using it! We made macaroons at work today, so I brought home 18 egg yolks. I don't remember how many the Yolk Cookies in the Joy of Cooking uses up, but I can always increase the recipe size. And I can use some to make a really big batch of spritz. This is going to be so much fun!

A number of my co-workers know that I moonlight writing for a game company, and a few of them have expressed interest in seeing my stories. I am compiling here links to a handful of my L5R fictions, with some notes on their context to help readers unfamiliar with the game make some sense out of them.

"L5R", by the way, is the community's shorthand for "Legend of the Five Rings", a game line that started (and remains) a collectible card game and also has a role-playing game based on it. I dabble in writing on the RPG side, but mostly I do fiction and card-related writing.

L5R is sometimes described as being based on Japan's samurai era, but it is much better described as being based on the samurai movie genre. It is a glorious (or horrifying, depending on how you feel about such things) mish-mash of Asian history and culture, containing Tokugawa-style samurai, Heian-style courtiers, Mongol-style horse warriors and the kitchen sink. Oh, and ninja. (That will be important later.)



These stories are all set in Rokugan, an imaginary land where the Great Clans (Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Mantis, Phoenix, Scorpion, Unicorn) make up the Emerald Empire. The Clans cooperate to keep the Empire running, but they also struggle for power among themselves. Individual members of the clans have their own struggles. As most of the adult men of the Empire and an appreciable fraction of the women are running around armed with 3' long razor blades this creates a certain amount of drama.



First, a story from the last Crab-Crane war. There are two minor characters, Hiruma Aya and Daidoji Kojima, who in a previous story were shown to have a "relationship".
The Flowers, The Snow


I think this story pretty much stands on its own, but it is helpful to know that in Rokugan there exists a supernatural disease called Taint. Taint is essentially uncurable (though not completely untreatable) and if left unchecked it devours both the body and soul of the infected and turns them into an enemy of everything they have ever valued. Seriously bad stuff.
Legacies


The following story concerns the conflict between Shosuro Jimen, the Emerald Champion, and Kakita Noritoshi, daimyo (lord) of the Kakita family and the Empire's greatest currently living duelist. Jimen became Emerald Champion (the Empire's chief law enforcement official) by hook and by crook, touching off a bitter feud with Noritoshi in the process. I have written at least 4 stories in this plotline, but I think this one stands alone the best of the group.
Consequences

Today's xkcd is on why airplanes can fly and it annoys me, because at one point I know I knew this completely and now I have forgotten it. I suppose there is something to be said for being able to forget more physics than most people learn in their whole life, but still. I'd be happier if I could have easier recall of it all.

This morning I had the dream where my alarm clock was ringing and I couldn't find the switch to turn it off. None of the controls would do it, and even unplugging it didn't help. I find this dream very irritating, because it always occurs when my alarm is, in fact, going off, and nothing is helping because I am acting in the dream-world, not the real one. Granted, at the time I was in the middle of a dream involving having a man tied to my bedstead (which was highly peculiar, because I don't have a bedstead, but I must admit I preferred this dream to the one I had over the weekend when someone broke into my place and tried to steal my purse)--but that really isn't an explanation, because this is not the first time I have had this dream and I never remember that this is a dream.

The other my-alarm-is-going-off-dream has me on a starship where the emergency claxon is sounding and we need to evacuate the ship. I find this one less irritating, possibly because I don't expect to be able to turn off an emergency claxon with a flick of a switch. But alarm clocks ought to be obedient, right?

I grew up with the understanding that my feelings only mattered to me, and since I was unimportant my feelings were likewise unimportant. As a result, it can take me a long time to realize that I am angry, or unhappy, or in love, because strong emotions can take a really long time for me to process.

Most of my co-workers, who are way too deep in the touchy-feelly end of the spectrum, would consider this horrible and start recommending therapy for me, but I feel the need to point out that there is an upside to this. Take this morning, for instance, when I learned that one of my fellow managers had not only unilaterally made a change of policy regarding something that affected his department tangentially but had a significant impact on two other departments (one of them being mine, as you might guess)--he didn't bother to inform anyone in the other two departments of this. We found out about it via a customer who was expecting us to follow a policy we didn't know existed. You might say I was unhappy about this.

But I didn't do anything then, because I was still processing. I finished bathing the lemon-cake-to-be in lemon syrup and then went up to my desk and sent out a carefully worded email to Mr Unilateral, the other affected manager, and the level of management above us. I expect that there will be discussion on this on Monday (and if there is not there will be another, even more carefully worded email), but by then my rage will have peaked and I will be able to discuss things without battling the urge to lace my sentences with profanity. So you see this disconnect does have a certain utility.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE--I tested two cake recipes today and they were great. The first was a spice cake with applesauce that was beautiful: richly spiced, tender, and so so moist. I might have to tweak the spice level down a bit, because sometimes the flavor grows as it ages, but everything else was perfect. It's now undergoing the fridge test, so we can see what kind of a shelf life it has. If that works out I'm going to put it into production.

The second was lemon cake, which I'm building as a variation of the Gateau au Yaourt we are already doing. I used lemon oil instead of vanilla extract, bathed the baked cake in a lemon-sugar syrup, and frosted it with a white frosting I had lemoned up a bit. It was...lovely. I could not keep my hands off of it. Which was ok, because no one else could either. Sampling cake makes you pretty popular with the staff, let me tell you. It is also going through the fridge test this weekend, and it it works out I might put it into production Monday because I have dreamed about having a lemon cake for years and now it is almost within my reach. A Sith Lord might wait patiently for years, waiting for the perfect moment to introduce a cake flavor, but when that moment comes they strike with absolute power and ruthlessness.

....yeah, it's been that kind of week. I think I'll go work on my dinner. Bacon and tomato sandwiches, made with a Cherokee Purple tomato from my garden. And a slice of lemon cake for dessert.