summercomfort

We have 1 rat left. Given that we've locked down all the food and cleared out most of the potential rat resting places in the downstairs, we have no idea where it can possibly be hiding or eating, but somehow, it keeps emerging from *somewhere*. At what point do we give up and acknowledge that we just ... have a pet rat that we have no control over?? o.O;;;;


Finally the insurance guy got back, so we will hopefully have construction in next week and get Miss R's room fixed by the end of the week, and then the following week we can get all of Miss R's stuff moved in (also need to put in new rug and put together the new loft bed).


I spent this past week really focused on doing school prep, which felt good. Downside, of course, is that I've neglected a bunch of the household stuff.

Oh! I did come up with a good cover design idea for the Captain America comic multi-prints, so I'm pretty happy about that! And the Spaceship anthology is mostly set, too! And I just came up with a good way to resolve a Payhip issue. So lots of things at are 80% done, or have some clear next steps on.

Things to work on:
- finish setting up Payhip
- finish Cap alternate covers and do test print
- keep working on living room bookshelves, etc
- finish summer make-a-thing gift
- get Miss R school-ready (hair cut, school supplies, summer homework)

home from the Visit Family trip -- Chicago, Philly, Ithaca, and Connecticut in 11 days. Held bro's new baby!!

Well, actually, we got back Wed night, so we've actually been home for 4 days, but a lot's been going on at home -- the rats continue to plague us, and Miss R's room is still in a state of construction. There was a moment on Thursday when we actually regressed in House Disrepair because the guy installing our new dishwasher (old one was leaking and has destroyed the kitchen floorboards) ended up breaking a valve on our hot water heater. And now the plumber is saying that our heater is >20 years old and should really be replaced. I think we're going to go with a gas tankless one, though we might be able to make a heat pump one work if we keep the utility closet room open???? To be discussed.

Have spent the last two days in our continued war of attrition with the rats. I think we've finally closed all the holes (the latest being the one behind the dishwasher), and we found a rat nest with 5 baby rats. I think our final nemesis is one more rat that is somewhere in our living room. Our cat, is, of course, completely useless in this occasion. I read that it takes rats 4 days to starve, so we are on day 2?? Unless they have a secret food stash that we haven't found yet. The war continues. Hopefully tomorrow and Tuesday will involve rebuilding Miss R's room, and then we can at least repopulate that space and get enough junk out of the living room that we can do a proper rat hunt. (We have so much clutter, oops)

I hate the smell of rat pee.

Let's see what else -- found out mom did a kidney stone surgery without telling me, but also got a Tesla??? anyway, Mom is full of surprises. I did manage to get Cap birthday comic done before heading out on trip, but haven't been able to reply to comments. Posted a fluffy Tim Drake birthday fic today. Gonna work on spaceship comic tomorrow -- shouldn't take too long.

oof, 2 days of camping starting this afternoon. I've basically only done single nights before, which means that food is much easier to handle (especially for a family of picky eaters like us, haha)

Dinner tonight: chicago style hotdogs, s'mores
Breakfast tomorrow: omelettes, cereal for A-chan (Miss R)
Lunch tomorrow: guac and chips? A-chan just told me she likes granola bars?!
Dinner tomorrow: canned soup, grilled veggies? (Does A-chan have canned soup preferences? Mac n Cheese?) Maybe A-chan would want to stir-fry some mushrooms?

The other thing is charging. Gotta make sure all my stuff is fully charged. And... I should really find where my larger power banks are? God, I'm so not designed for the outdoors, especially with my foot problems (which my doctor got back to me and said it's probably plantar fascitis and I should stay off it and do more stretching). But it's okay, some outside exposure is not too disastrous. :)

Gotta clean the car

Down to the last week of classes and then 1 more week of school beyond that!

- I got some comic pages re-laid-out last night, which I'm feeling pretty good about -- now I'll just have to do the panels and words, then ink, then etc etc.

- Only slightly behind on Chinese School stuff -- tomorrow is the finals and the teacher dinner. Tonight I need to make sure there's enough gift cards for the raffle, get the final workbooks graded, and probably just postpone the payment envelopes until the following week. Except that tonight is also Miss R's 4th grade culmination, so we'll be home a bit late (though... maybe not excessively late?). Oh! What I can do is walk to Michaels around 10am to get some gift cards.

- I need to get essay revisions graded. Maybe try to plow through all the revisions first, and then read the new essays?

- Had a pretty good meeting on Wed re: revamping the webapp, so I think that's my main "todo" this summer, though maybe only in the mornings. (And mostly it'll be some manual data processing and taking lead on the visual revamp).

- I definitely want a mostly comic-free summer, since I've been grinding so hard on it all year (my goal is to get the citizenship comic done by the end of June, and then do something quick for my weirdly still annual Cap July 4th comic), so maybe after that I want to do some fic writing and drum-making instead?

- Reading about Tim Drake suffering continues to be a delight

Wow, only 5 more weeks left of school (followed by 1 week of writing evals, etc). o.O

And apparently in that time we're also wrapping up Chinese School and also helping our taiko group move to a new location??? As usual, things keep happening.

I'm finding it hard to find the motivation to keep working on my citizenship comic, but maybe I just need a break from it. I do want to get the rest of it done before the end of June.

Started watching the One Piece live action yesterday, and omg is the actor for Zoro hawtttt. Maybe spent a little too much time watching cast videos, etc, for him, but it's fine -- I still managed to get the major pieces of the summer trip planning done. As well as some casual drawing. I just didn't get to do some of the Chinese School work (send email about character database, double-check reservations, figure out graduation speech), but I can get to that tomorrow or Tuesday.

In other news, spouse and his job had a mutually-agreed-upon parting of ways (as in, he was dissatisfied and thinking of leaving in June, and then they told him that they'd prefer a resignation, and will pay him until end of May.) In the long run, this is good because spouse is honestly pretty disenchanted with his field and this will be a good opportunity for him to consider potential career shifts. And I'm pretty excited for him to spend some time figuring out what he wants to do next (maybe cobble together some artsy incomes? maybe go to school to learn a trade?). This is also a good opportunity for him to help improve our Chinese School webapp. But also, there's some short term things I'll need to set up (such as the webapp development stuff). But overall good. Just... another thing, I suppose.

In the meantime, here's Zoro fighting 100 guys in 12 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDIj2sp5orM ugh such a fun fight :3

woooooo survived until spring break!!!

The faculty Shakespeare play was fun! There was so good disco music, everyone wore things that were far too shiny, and I was able to make a program Tuesday night that I'm pretty pleased with. One of the things that I've enjoyed about this play and last year's, is that I got to cut up some of my old pants and "upgrade" them to be something wearable again. Last year it was by putting in safety pins, and this year it was by flaring my old jeans with leopard print. It really brought home this sense of "oh, the new fashion is really just taking the tacky stuff in your closet and doing things to it" -- like, cut your parents' old work shirt and sew it to your jeans, etc. But like... we don't do that as much anymore?? It's like ... new fashion is about buying new stuff off the rack. Is it the curse of fast fashion making all of this more accessible? Is it the decline in basic sewing ability? I wish more people felt comfortable just modding their clothes.

One of my big goals this Spring Break is to work on the Citizenship Comic.
- Quest week is week 16 of the year, and by then I should hopefully have 15 pages done.
- What's left to do before Quest week (in 10 days) is to ink 4 more pages, shade all the pages (15), then ideally add historical text, or at least a title page for each section. I think if I spend ~3 hrs per day working on my comics this week, I should be able to get there? Maybe I can do some sort of deal with Miss R re: she gets youtube time while I get drawing time?
- After Quest week, I'll have 10 more weeks until the Supreme Court decision comes down (my self-imposed deadline), and ~11 pages to do (plus the historical notes pages). Which means I need to do 2 pages on a few of those weeks.
- And then I'll be done!!

General tidying/logistics I need to do this week:
- pile next to my bed
- tabletops downstairs
- get haircut for self and Miss R!
- move phone photos to computer
- laundry
- sent out Quest panel slides

Gross things that I need to do this week:
- call the car people again to tell them to register my car insurance (UGH)
- taxes
- call dentist and make appt
- get plane tix for summer

I think what would be helpful is to have at least 1 activity to do with Miss R every day so that the week doesn't turn into a big blob.

omgggggg that was the cough that wouldn't leave, urgh.

Let's see...
- whirlwind week of interviewing 3 candidates was horrible, but we have actually successfully hired 2 of them, and I'm pretty excited!
- then it was a week where Miss R got sick about halfway through the week, which threw everything off-balance. I was coughing a bit and descending into illness, but it was also the weekend of the comics pop-up so I just kind of .... pushed through it.... which is ultimately not great, because this week I really should have just called out from work, but instead I dragged myself into school and taught my classes while hacking my lungs out, yay. (I was masked and made sure to stay 6+ feet distant, and I only had to teach 3 classes, so it's actually not *that* bad. And I stayed in my car in-between classes so that I wouldn't infect anyone.) Wed-Friday was parent teacher conferences on Zoom, which was its own flavor of miserable, but at least I wasn't infecting anyone, and I did get to catch up on some work on Thursday. Friday afternoon (yesterday?!!) was when I finally started feeling better and getting energy back. And Miss R finally felt good enough to go back to school after missing 9 days, so ... yay!
- Just in time for the resumption of Chinese school today, and tomorrow Miss R has a joint minecraft-themed birthday party! Wow she is entering the double digits!!! I printed a bunch of minecraft block textures at work and last night I made some minecraft cubes (crafting table, furnace, cake, and chest).

Spouse is awesome and has made a Creeper piñata :)

So tomorrow is the big party!

Gotta remember to do tomorrow morning:
- make Minecraft cake
- buy candy to fill into Creeper
- maybe buy some chips/salsa? uncertain
- maybe buy some gluesticks and tape?
- disambiguate and put colored cubes in bags?

Gotta remember to bring:
- tape!!!
- boxes, made
- boxes, raw
- scissors and maybe exacto knife. ruler
- markers for folks who want to draw directly on the boxes
- cake!
- creeper!
- bandana for piñata hitting
- picnic blanket or tablecloth
- foods and snaxxx (cheese balls, chips & salsa)


Oh, I finished the Community Center in Stardew Valley on Year 2 Summer day 10, so now.... I've got nothing to do except to wait for Grandpa's approval, I guess. (I'm so disinterested in the late-game stuff lbr)

the last update was actually my annual Spring Gala links, so here's my actual update (I guess I'm doing weekly ones now instead of daily, which... I guess I'm fine with. Maybe when I get less busy I can do daily ones?)

Anyway, it's been 10 days since my last update. Let's see what's happened...

- Mock Trial kids didn't make it to county finals, so that's mostly done. I should sit down with the other teacher some time and plan out some coaching timelines, etc, but other than that, the "season" is over

- Met with the learning specialist at school, and she says she's going to recommend Miss R for a neuropsych eval, and the school is going to help pay for it, which is pretty exciting. Still need to send a follow-up email to ask for specific deets, but at least ball is starting to roll???

- Last couple of days have been pretty busy -- we were originally planning to drive up to snow zone for Mon-Wed with a different family (her newfound bestie), and do Chinese New Year in the mountains, but then we find out on Saturday night that there's a big storm sweeping through, from Sunday night to Wed night, basically making it impossible for us to get up there. Unfortunately, this meant that we've had to cancel our reservations, which are non-refundable. :( And also I had to scramble to find something else to do. So Monday night we did New Year's at our place, and then yesterday and today we drove to a random weird treehouse that I found on AirBnB -- it's apparently built in 1925 by a smuggler. Pretty cool, very quaint/rustic, but surprising comfy, despite the sloped floors and odd layout. Got back around 5pm today, aiyah. Miss R still wants to do snow play, however, so tomorrow morning I'm driving her and her bestie to the snow line. It's gonna be a ~3 hr drive each way, so ... kinda rough, oy vey. I hope to queue up a bunch of music to listen to, I guess? Or maybe an audiobook? egh.

I've got a bunch of to-dos, but this February break has been more full of logistics management than I'd expected. I did manage to finally send last year's photos off to print, which was something I'd been planning to do since Thanksgiving.

Hopefully after the drive-a-thon tomorrow I'll have some time on Friday to work on comic???

oops, 2 weeks have passed. yikes, I thought it's only been a week? And to think that I started the year with daily posting ambitions. But then again, it's been a busy month+. Hopefully things will be better from here on out, but I guess I shouldn't hold my breath, given our tendency to just ... keep doing more lol.

Quick accounting of what happened in the past 2 weeks:
- last last Tues I didn't go to mock trial, but I still had to drive the other teacher to mock trial, which led to a very hectic post-meeting hustling. But child was appropriately picked up, yey!
- last last Wed and Thurs were all days involving a lot of lesson prep and running around. Including a bonus trips meeting at lunch.

- last last Fri had the parent teacher conference, which went ... better than I'd expected. It seems like the math teacher is finally on the "Miss R has challenges and needs accommodations and support" train, instead of the "Miss R is underperforming due to unfathomable defects" train, so that's good. (note to self: send follow-up email about possibility of getting another evaluation earlier -- Kaiser says we're not allowed to retry until May, but the teacher said they may be able to move up that time frame?)
- oh yeah, last last Fri was also when the Mock Trial drama dropped, which was that the Mock Trial county organizer accused us of rostering in bad faith. In fact, we were just rostering in ignorance -- we didn't know about a rule that the Varsity needed to be staffed with 18 distinct people (last year was the first year of our team and there were barely enough to field a JV, double-rostered). Anyways, a lot of terse back-and-forths, as well as a lot of last-minute scrambling to rebalance our rosters and slot people into new roles at the very last minute (as in, the day before the trial)

- last last Sun was the taiko workshop, the last one in our current location! (Sad that we'll be moving, but there's thankfully both a new interim location and a new long-term location lined up. The new interim location probably won't be able to have Saturday AM classes, which means that we probably won't be going to taiko for a bit. But honestly that's fine -- mom is headed to China anyway, and we can have some chiller Saturday mornings. (oh wait, I just checked the slack channel, and we ... might be staying in our currently location until the new long-term location is set up? Which would mean no interim??)). Anyways, yes, taiko drama, but thankfully lots of competent people are on it. :)

- last Tues was Mock Trial, which of course meant I got home around 11pm. Really proud of the kids, though -- we got to semi-finals! Despite the last-minute re-rostering! Which, on the one hand, go team! But on the other hand: more time spent at Mock Trial practices, etc. Mock Trial has taken over my Tues/Wed/Fri afternoons for the last 3 weeks, aiyah.
- last Wed was our school's annual MLK day celebration. I ran a workshop about Confucian vs. Hollywood expectations re: "Asians", which was actually pretty fun, but also: tiring.
- Friday I was gonna have a chill day to catch up on stuff, but then Miss R didn't want to go to the all-day aftercare, so I had her along with me all day.

- Yesterday (Saturday) was long, but fun -- Miss R attended a friend's bday party, which meant Spouse and I got to eat some momos for lunch and do some grading at a different boba shop. Then, after Chinese School, I went to the birthday party of the Mock Trial coach. It was the first time in over a decade since I've gone to a party with adults who I don't know, so that was pretty exciting. Everyone prepared powerpoints to rant about their various pet topics, so that was very fun. After some thought, I decided to talk about the history of Chinese Romanization, which led me down some very fun rabbit-holes on Friday night. Watched a lot of people get very drunk, learned about Filipino monsters (and the fuckability thereof) and eggnog as a tiki drink. There were some very funny presentations about polyamory, the diversity of desserts, a loving roast of someone's shorts, and goats as the superior species. But also: got home at midnight.

Basically it's been back-to-back full days until basically today, sigh.

But hopefully things will even out! I don't foresee our Mock Trial team winning County (the top-ranked team in our country was 2nd in State last year), so Mock Trial stuff should end next week. I've already drafted a plan for next year to make Mock Trial more sustainable for me (main goal: I personally need to stop being at mock trial by 4:15pm so that I can get my post-school day downtime.) Taiko drama seems to be mostly evening out, and there doesn't seem to be any new major events for the next few weeks. I re-re-re-drafted page 3 and 4 of my Yamashita comic, so now I can re-enter the inking stage, which feels good. (phew! finally!) I want to power through a bunch of it in the coming week, which will hopefully mean I'll be caught up on my 1-page-a-week goal. (Currently I just finished page 3, and it's week 5??? of the new year).

I think the big thing that's been really draining lately is just the amount of executive function energy and teaching energy it takes to herd Miss R through her homework every day. This morning, it took her from 9:30am-12:30pm to do 1.5 pages of math problems. It was about 20 minutes of actual doing of math, and the rest is just ... focus challenges. And there's going to be more tonight. And it's a thing where the more tired I am, the more snappish I get, which then leads to Miss R shutting down more. I think we need to have a clear talk about this, and come up with some better recognition of what's going on, to wit:
- a way for her to clearly evaluate and indicate her level of spoons at any given time. Right now, sometimes she's able to focus for 5-10 minutes, but sometimes only 1-2 minutes, and that sense of "backsliding" is very frustrating to me.
- once we figure out her level of spoons, maybe there's different methods that trigger at different levels? Like, if she's only able to focus for 1-2 minutes, she really needs some non-screen-time rest so that she can bulk up to 5-10 minute focus chunks.
- also, we need a way to shortcut the avoidance/resistance chunk of time. Like, that time could be much more productive on both our parts -- I have better things to do than sit there and wait for her while she curls up in a ball or does all sorts of avoidant behavior. Maybe a "you clearly need some time to ramp up to this. How many minutes do you need?" And to make it clear that that time isn't spent avoiding, but rather doing something else??

I think it was Wednesday when I last posted? So what's happened since then? Well, Wed afternoon I went to my first Mock Trial practice, which was a scrimmage, and it was very cool to see the kiddos do lawyerly things. Thursday was a lot of lesson prep and lesson delivery, followed by going to comickers. I got a panel done! Friday was more class and then I was able to be helpful during the Mock Trial prep, which I was happy about. And then I rushed home because me and mom had our annual "retreat", aka we have dinner, gossip, talk business, and stay at a hotel overnight. It was pretty good -- I pitched my idea for a full app version of the Chinese curriculum, and mom tentatively okay-ed it. Saturday we went to our taiko class, and found out that we'll have to move dojo locations again. This tends to happen every 3-ish years, because we're big and loud, oops. Thankfully there seems to be a decent option available. It'd mean some changes to the weekend schedule, but it doesn't seem like we'll be immediately homeless, whew! Saturday had the usual Miss R angst around Chinese homework, followed by Chinese school. Then, we thankfully had a relaxing Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon was our taiko workshop, and then Sunday night Miss R had a sleepover. The two kiddos ended up staying up until midnight playing minecraft :3. Which brings us to today, which is a Homework Day. Poor Miss R, needing to force her ADHD-inattentive brain into grinding through so much homework!

I've been making steady progress on my comic, which I'm feeling pretty good about. If I continue at the pace of 1 page per week, I should be able to get it done by June. Ideally I can hit get a little more than a page done every week, in which case I'll have some buffer time, which would be amazing. :) It feels nice to have a focused project with a concrete deadline, even if it means setting aside some of my other projects. I'll re-evaluate how I feel come February.

And I think I have a way to make the Chinese homework slightly less onerous, which I'm also hopeful for. (Basically: getting Miss R to do the character writing portion in the car on Thurs and Fri, and doing the app recording section at home). That said, tomorrow I'm going to be going to the mock trial evening competition, which means I won't be there to help shepherd Miss R through her next chunk of English homework, alas.

Things I keep intending to do but not getting around to:
- cleaning out the car
- cleaning out my side of the bed
- prepping Chinese school checks and W2s