In which I guess I haven’t posted for two months?! What the hell, man. How is anybody this lazy?

Twitter permabanned me.

No idea why. I replied to some Stonekettle tweet or another with “lol don’t hold your breath” and Twitter permanently suspended my account. (Probably got mass reported by some asshat enraged that Stonekettle called him a sissy or something; who knows.)

I appealed twice, but their idiot algorithm says I violated their TOS. With “don’t hold your breath.” Computers are stupid.

My account was something like 13 or 15 years old, and they deleted it for no reason. This is why you should keep your content where you can control it! If you want me, I show up here once a week or so.

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The cheese convention was awesome. My bosses paid my entry fee, drove me to and from, paid me most of my missed regular hours, and covered my (very nice) hotel room. Unbelievably generous! I enjoyed myself a great deal, learned a lot, and bought a couple books, a t-shirt for the yeti, and a pair of convention socks. Brought home a pretty bitchin’ swag bag (it’s an insulated lunch tote) full of brochures, stickers, samples, a water bottle, and even a bento box.

Work is awesome. I have an amazing and fantastic job, but (you could feel the ‘but’ coming) I need a goddamned vacation. My attitude is slipping, but this isn’t the time for it because we just lost our assistant cheesemaker and a couple part-time employees so we really do need to be pulling together. I keep having to come in on my days off for little things and normally I’d love it but lately I feel grumpy about it. So I think I’ll book another October trip to the coast. We had so much fun last year! I was considering going the other direction this year, back the way we came, into Idaho or Montana, because it’s gorgeous out there and a cabin vay-cay would be nice, but, like, THE OCEAN IS BETTER. So I’m thinking a week in maybe Seaside or Bandon or something, or Astoria and Ilwaco?

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I reactivated my Ipsy subscription and they sent me an amazing razor (it’s got four blades and a moisturizer strip that actually works) so I’ve been shaving my legs for the first time in most of a decade. It does feel nice, really.

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We had some severe weather last week. Thunder, lightning, high winds, and 1/4″ hail. It blew our entire fucking shed off its foundation, over the fence, upside down, and into the irrigation ditch. We had to have it hauled off!

RIP, shed. We didn’t really need you, but I hear you’ve been there, according to our ex-landlord, “for thirty or forty years.”

UPDATE: They put it in the local paper!

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The neighbors to the rear put up a big-ass privacy fence.

I hate it, but at least it’s wood rather than plastic! Fucking people and their dumb privacy fences. YOU’RE NOT THAT INTERESTING. NOBODY’S LOOKING INTO YOUR STUPID FUCKING YARD. THIS IS THE GODDAMNED DESERT, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU BUILD BARRIERS TO BREEZES.

Today they’re having their back yard graded with a little tractor.

Why the fuck they’re doing all of this in the wrong order I’ll never know, but apparently they’ll be re-doing the entire yard before cutting down and hauling off their very big, very dead tree? (You can see the big dead tree in this very photo, taken before the stupid new fence went up.) I mean, why the fuck would you put up a brand-new fence before having the enormous dead tree removed?!

People are dumb as hell. And now I have to figure out what to plant along the entire goddamned fence to hide it so I don’t have to be enraged every time I go outside!

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We have too much yard. I need to put at least a third of it into gravel or native grasses or something. It’s too big for non-gardeners.

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It’s official: I’m menopausal. My last period was a year ago last week.

I was just looking something up in my old Flickr account and was reminded that a few years ago (okay, six years ago actually) I was too exhausted and/or low energy to walk a single block to I Am Coffee on Lyndale and 28th. My desire for an iced coffee that I didn’t have to make or clean up after was nothing in the face of overall inability to work up enough enthusiasm to throw on some shoes and walk the short side of a single city block and back.

Most of the peri-menopausal experience was like that. No energy. No interest. No desire. I spent most of it at home, fucking around on social media, and much of it feeling guilty about not doing any hobbies or having a social life. No reading, no knitting, no journaling. Some cooking, a little baking, and the bare minimum in terms of domestic chores. Worst of all: absolutely no desire to do anything about it. Awareness of having gone in the space of a year from a person who biked everywhere and had adequate energy and a giant social life to someone who just… spent all her time at home, doing effectively nothing but recovering from work.

Occasionally, very occasionally, like, maybe twice a year, I’d get a wild hair and get The Yeti to take me out for a meal, but most of the time I didn’t even have the oomph for that. (What luck to live in the era of Door Dash and Bite Squad! I can’t even begin to estimate what I’ve spent on delivery fees and tips in the past five years.)

But lately, it’s been lifting some? I want to do stuff sometimes now? Sometimes it’s reasonably easy to get my to-do list done. I’m starting to get over giving a fuck about how my body is now: fat, achy, triple-chinned, weak, slow, and in no way vigorous or youthful. (I’m not over how terrible it is to lose all sense of vibrancy and vitality — that’s utter bullshit — but I’ve started to not care as much about the injustice of becoming a crone against my will.)

I’ve heard symptoms described as “a fog,” so I’m tempted to say that “the fog is lifting,” but I don’t know that I ever felt vague or foggy as much as just utterly devoid of energy or drive. My intellect worked the whole time, and I don’t think I felt brain fog, per se, so I’ll say it’s more like light the end of a tunnel. I woke up today feeling refreshed and capable, and got up and started acting like a normal person: made the bed, put on music, wrangled the laundry, sang to myself, make an iced espresso, did two sinks of dishes!

Of course I did all this in a body that looks like a potato and feels half as strong as I think it should.

But it’s better than it was.

I think.

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Apropos of nothing, I really miss hash brown patties. My local stores have been out of them for half a year. My kingdom for a stupid oval-shaped greasy potato thing!

I suppose I could just, you know, go to McDonald’s or something.

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The Yeti won’t eat goddamned leftovers any more, so now that I’m caffeinated I’m off to clear half my fridge straight into the trash!