Cimorene

Our beloved floofy bun, Rowan, passed away a week ago. He was ten years and four months old (the average lifespan of pet bunnies I saw quoted some places is 2-4 years, and 10 years is the expected upper limit for his type of bun) and was healthy, cheerful, friendly, and sweet his whole life; he died very suddenly at home, apparently of old age. I miss him - he was always more friendly and cuddly than Japp - but I'm glad he had a long, happy life.



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and yet this ice cream truck has the fucking cheek to drive by playing its little tune.

It's not time for ice cream!!! The ground is frozen!!! Stop mocking me!!!

Cats when Wax is working from home:

6.30 Sipuli wakes Wax up demanding breakfast and refuses to let her sleep
7.00 Wax feeds the cats breakfast and Sipuli doesn't finish hers before going back to sleep
9.30 Wax gets up and eats. Sipuli doesn't even come out of her blanket tent.
10.30 I wake up and Tristana follows me to brush my teeth and then goes back to bed while I'm moisturizing my face.
11.00 Sipuli emerges from her tent to lick leftover yogurt from Wax's breakfast bowl and wants some kisses and hugs. She hangs out with me for 5-10 minutes but goes back to the tent before I can even finish my breakfast.
11.30 Tristana wakes up and comes downstairs to yell at me until Wax calls her from upstairs. She sits in Wax's lap for a little while or (more often) goes back to bed.
16.30 Sipuli wakes up and comes out of the tent to get cuddled for 10-30 minutes, then gets sleepy and goes back in the tent.
17.00 Tristana wakes up and comes downstairs and starts yelling incessantly for attention. This wakes Sipuli who also comes out and wants attention.
18.00 Wax finishes work and comes downstairs.
19.00 Cats get dinner.

Cats when Wax has to go into the office:

6.30 Sipuli starts breakfast campaign.
7.00 Cat breakfast.
8.30 Wax gets up and eats breakfast, ignored by Sipuli.
10.30 I wake up and Tristana goes back to bed while I'm moisturizing.
11.00 Sipuli cleans Wax's bowl and wants cuddles.
11.10 Tristana comes downstairs and starts yowling for me to pay attention to her. This eventually wakes Sipuli and they both complain constantly or intermittently every time I'm in the other half of the house until sometime in the afternoon when they finally both fall asleep, presumably from exhaustion.
17.30 Both cats wake up and start dinner campaign, usually while I'm trying to prepare our dinner.
18.45 Wax arrives.
19.00 Cat dinner and then our dinner.

1. Wax Sent to Customer Service Jail

Yesterday I asked waxjism, "Hey, don't you want to make a dreamwidth update about being sent back to jail?"

"Nope," she said.

Wax has been feeling sick (?) since we both had a nervous breakdown a year ago last September after losing two cats. She finally went to the doctor a month and a half ago and had a bunch of bloodtests but they found nothing and, I gather, said the next step is to check whether it's hormones or something and she needs to see a different doctor (a gynecologist, maybe?). But they didn't just give her a referral - apparently she has to call back to ask about how to get a referral, or what, because she doesn't actually know how to get that next appointment. Annnnnd she hasn't accumulated enough spoons again yet to do that (including when she had a week of vacation a few weeks ago).

Feeling under the weather has snowballed into near-total burnout and exhaustion and she has been having trouble focusing at work, and as a result her boss called her and revoked her Work From Home privileges, as of two weeks back. She's going back to the saltmines (the customer service mines) every day, and as a result she's even more tired the rest of the time.

On the plus side, it's good for her mental health to leave the house and have a schedule that makes her walk around and breathe fresh air everyday. Not sure if it's as good for her as the extra exhaustion is bad though.

2. My Dad Hospitalized for Copious Hallucination

My dad (69), a quadriplegic wheelchair user who has been recovering from a series of antibiotic resistant infections and other complications and in and out of the hospital constantly for like a year, has a sudden, brand-new, unusual problem. Friday he apparently woke up feeling odd and started hallucinating, at first things like a pool of water on the table or a black webbing on his own hand, then a lizard under the chair and a cat jumping onto the ceiling; they took him to the ER, and the hallucinations got more vivid and numerous very quickly. He was seeing people and animals in the ER and asking my mom if there were really kittens on the floor. By Saturday he was talking to my favorite aunt and uncle (who weren't there) most of the day and by the end of Saturday he was no longer aware that he was in the hospital. My dad has no mental disorders except anxiety, and the doctors were ruling out various kinds of dementia at first, but they thought it was likely to be something acute. He was having urine tests and x-rays and EEGs yesterday, and being interviewed by various doctors. He spent the early part of Sunday keeping my mom awake talking to hallucinated people and asking her to interact with things that weren't there (some tax paperwork on the table he said he had to file, a book he said he saw, stools and tables he wanted her to move); later he was in the house I grew up in (they moved out something like ten years ago), my grandparents' house (sold almost ten years ago), a restaurant, and imaginary places; and he had a brief spell not recognizing my mom, but he remembered who she was a minute later. The psychiatrists were saying they thought it was probably not neurological, and might be metabolic. He seems to be in less danger than he was at several points last year, but this is very stressful for my mom and sister. They both seem scared. I wish I could go there. My parents live with my sister in Louisiana.

3. Loss of One Bunny.

Rowan died Saturday night, fairly suddenly, we think basically of old age. 10 years is thought to be the maximum life span of our type of bunny, and they're 10 years and 4 months right now, but of the two, Japp has been sick several times and Rowan's never had a single health scare and has also been much more active, playful, and happy in recent years. He only seemed sick on Saturday, but he had eaten his most recent meal (which is usually the first sign of danger for ailing bunnies). I've been trying all morning to get in touch with the vet to take him to get cremated: I got up early to call them before Wax left for work with the car, but couldn't get through (and still can't). I will make a separate memorial post about him, but I have to collect pictures first. It's very sad, but we're relieved that it was quick and he didn't seem to suffer and that he had a long happy life and basically died at 101. Also relieved that he was the one to die first: he was much more clingy to Japp, who has always been more independent and not particularly sociable. I am less worried about Japp getting lonely.

One of the many things we learned by doing them wrong when initially renovating this house when we bought it was that you can't just go to the hardware store and buy an affordable faucet for a sink.

I mean, you can, but you shouldn't. There are cheap, crappy faucets at these stores!

What you should do is buy the reliable, standard, plumber-recommended workhorse brand of faucets, even if they cost a lot more.

So we have three faucets in our house, and two of them are ones we picked out at a hardware store and which have given us trouble from day one, and one is one that the plumber brought with him, and is a standard model of the standard brand that is in all the apartments around here.

The crappy kitchen faucet finally, after being a headache for the last six years, reached the end of its usable lifespan a couple of days ago when I turned it on and there was a loud KACHUNK! noise and then the two little plastic screen-thingies that were apparently just GLUED in the opening shot out into the sink. They were broken and impossible to put back. Since then the faucet has just had a big round open end like a garden hose (lol), and when you turn it on the water shoots out and sprays across whatever you're wearing unless you very carefully turn it on only a little tiny bit.

We have learned our lesson and are going to buy the same brand that's in our downstairs bathroom sink this time. We are not 100% sure if we can install it ourselves, in spite of having watched people installing sinks so many times in videos. I guess I need to watch a few more of those and then if we give up we can always call a handyman (we hope to avoid this because we don't like calling people).

‘Sir,’ intoned Dr. Fell, drawing the napkin from his collar and sitting up in dignity, ‘let me assure you I have been listening with far closer attention than my admittedly cross-eyed and half-witted appearance would seem to indicate.'

—John Dickson Carr, The Dead Man's Knock (1958)

(I rate this book 2/5, however.)

I find it trying when it's 17° indoors (63), but manageable (with sweaters and wool socks etc) for the most part. But right now it's 14° (57) in the warmest room in the house.

It's too cold to knit, or sit writing or using a keyboard for very long, because all those things require my hands being outside the blankets. The only things it's not too cold to do are being inside a cocoon of blankets, or moving around so briskly that it warms me up temporarily. That's tough, though, because I hate the part before you warm up.

Yesterday I sat down to make a consecutive list with ratings (by hand, because it's just nicer to write with a fountain pen) and it took three hours.

I have read a total of 19 by John Dickson Carr, counting the first one a few years ago (Castle Skull) and The Hollow Man, from the bookclub list in Wake Up Dead Man. Several more of his early books have the same irritating features as these, but his later books frequently do not. He has other weaknesses - most strikingly, his focus on surprising puzzle solutions sometimes leads to endings that are flat, thin, and/or ridiculously silly, like in the acclaimed The Judas Window (1938, 4/5, rec) and the less-beloved The Ten Teacups (1937, 3.5/5, rec). I can recommend about half the ones I've read so far. The only ones I would rate 5/5 apart from the previously mentioned Till Death Do Us Part (1944) are 1939's The Black Spectacles, 1944's He Who Whispers, and 1938's To Wake the Dead. I give 4.5/5, however, to 1935's The Red Widow Murders. Yet I nearly DNF 1942's The Emperor's Snuffbox (2/5) and 1935's Death Watch (3/5) and I ranted about 1937's The Burning Court (1/5) for a good ten minutes.

As a fan of Golden Age Detective stories I have incidentally read a huge variety of locked room mysteries, even though I don't especially like them more than other mysteries. Occasionally some of them are quite fun, actually, but as you read more and more of them a distinct pattern emerges, and you start just immediately going... Okay, was the murder actually done before the room was locked, or after it was unlocked?

And especially after reading two of John Dickson Carr's exasperating mysteries that are shrouded in heightened spookiness intended to make you wonder whether the solution is supernatural or faked to just LOOK supernatural, only for it to turn out that the corpse was stolen from the locked room before it was locked by the last guy in there, and then that the guy was killed by the last guy to leave before the room was locked (in this case before he was left alone on top of a tower with people watching the entrances).

This must get old even quicker for real fans of the locked room. My impression, without doing any tabulation, is that roughly 95% of locked room murders in GAD are done either before the room was locked or after it was unlocked. This has to take some of the excitement out of it, even if the fan is occupied in theorizing which person did it and exactly how.

Duke’s certainly did not rely for its popularity on external display. It was approached by three flights of narrow and rickety stairs, and the visitors had to satisfy two rather seedy-looking janitors, not in uniform, at top and bottom. And, when they entered the Club itself, Ellery had a still greater surprise. The famous Duke’s consisted of one very long low room—or rather of three long, low attics which had been amateurishly knocked into one. The decorations were old and faded, and the places where the partitions had been were still marked by patches of new paper pasted on to hide the rents in the old. The ventilation was abominable, and what windows there were did not seem to have been cleaned for months. The furniture—a few seedy divans and a large number of common Windsor chairs and kitchen tables—seemed to have been picked up at secondhand from some very inferior dealer. Tables and floor were stained with countless spillings of food and drink, and a thick cloud of tobacco smoke made it quite impossible to see any distance along the room. There was only one redeeming feature, and Ellery’s eye fell upon it almost as soon as he entered the place. Near the door was a magnificent grand piano, on which someone was playing really well an arrangement from Borodine’s Prince Igor.

—GDH Cole, The Brooklyn Murders (1923)