Rainbow Dragon's Lair

[Mianevem]

Congrats on 1000 days!

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @CODawn @PetiteSheWolf @Fremen @aku-chan @TopNotch @Anek @daejamurrachan @JohnStrong @Maly @NancyTree @mavie @BetaCorvi @Mianevem

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Monday - Sunday, January 16-22 2023

Writing:
500 WORDS - total 7/6 days -
CREATIVITY - total 60/60 min. -
GAME S&D - total 60/60 min. -
Total Writing Time: 10 / 10 hours -
STUDY - total 3:37 / 3 hours -

French:
FLUENZ
NETFLIX (not counted in time)
Total: 3 / 3 hours -

Artwork:

Total: 3:47 / 3 hours -

Fitness:
W/O w. NORMA
STRENGTH TRAINING - total 7/6 days -
RUNNING - total 20/20 km -
HIKING - total 21 km
YOGA - total 6/6 days -
MEDITATION - total 7/7 days -

COMMUNITY CONNECTION - total 7/7 days -
Total workout: 6:50:10 / 5 hours -

Strength Training: I completed all Challenge days as planned, plus did some extra workouts for The Runes of NorthRoy.

Yoga: Supposedly I am doing the OMStars Feel Good Flow Challenge this month. But it is more drills than flow. Which is fine some of the time, but not what I want to be doing every day (not with everything else that I'm doing as well). I only did the challenge one day this week, one day I did DAREBEE's Back Pain Relief yoga workout with my mother (with Dragon Protocol), and the other days I did restorative yoga.

Reading:
FICTION - The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal), You Sexy Thing (Cat Rambo)
NON-FICTION - This Is Your Brain On Music (Daniel J. Levitin)

Streaks:
EXERCISE - 1005 days
FRENCH - 803 days
WRITING - 130 days

Time Management:
GOBOT (3 x , 1 x )
WORK BEFORE PLAY
GBOT (1 x , 5 x )

 

[Whirly]

Congrats on 1000 Days!

 

[BravoLimaPoppa]

1000 days?! Awesome!

 

[Giant48]

Congrats on 1000 days

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @Whirly @BravoLimaPoppa @Giant48 !

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Monday - Sunday, January 23-29, 2023

Writing:
500 WORDS - total 7/5 days -
WORKED ON - total 7/6 days -
Total Writing Time: 9:12 / 10 hours -

French:
ACTIVE STUDY - total 7/5 days -
EXPOSURE - total 7/7 days -
Total: 3:57 / 3 hours Active Study -

Artwork:
DID SOME - total 7/5 days -
Total: 1:28 / 3 hours -

Health & Fitness:
W/O w. NORMA
STRENGTH TRAINING - total 6/6 days -
RUNNING - total 20/20 km -
HIKING - total 22 km
YOGA - total 6/6 days -
MEDITATION - total 6/7 days -
COMMUNITY CONNECTION - total 7/7 days -
Total workout: 6:04:05 / 5 hours -

Reading:
FICTION - You Sexy Thing (Cat Rambo)
NON-FICTION - This Is Your Brain On Music (Daniel J. Levitin), Envisioning Exoplanets (Michael Carroll)

Streaks:
EXERCISE - 1012 days
FRENCH - 810 days
WRITING - 137 days

Time Management:
GOBOT - total 4/6 days -
WORK BEFORE PLAY- total 5/5 days -
GBOT - total 6/6 days -

I've streamlined my tracking somewhat. Mostly w.r.t. my writing work. I still aim to work on my writing daily (with an allowance for one Do Watcha Wanna day per week to feed my artist's soul), and I still want to be crafting new words regularly, but other than this, I need to be free to work on what I need to be working on at that time, not trying to fill quota's for different areas of the work. I've also added in some additional days/week targets in several areas. (Because procrastinating all week and then attempting to squeeze everything in on the weekend is not my best course of action!)

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

I am feeling simultaneously worn down by my life in the BM and yet afraid that it will not go on like this for much longer. My mother is also clearly afraid and taking her stress out on me. I'm struggling to get my work done under these conditions. Some things I'm going to try to help:

1. I am using this playlist as a morning meditation. This will help me to at least start my day off on good footing.

2. Try to give myself more short-term rewards. This is tricky because I cannot afford a lot of rewards that cost money, I'm not going to use social events as rewards because anytime I'm given an opportunity to socialize with people I actually like, I'm going to take it, no matter how messed up my behaviour was earlier that week (turning down opportunities to spend time with friends for any reason right now would not make my life better in any way), and I don't want to use food rewards because I eat healthy food every day anyway and I don't want to inflict the damage on my body caused by eating unhealthy food. So... I'm still trying to parse this one out. This week's reward is one that will cost me money: If I get all of my planned work done for the week (meeting writing, French, and artwork goals) by 10PM on Sunday night, I'm going to back the Kickstarter for my latest boardgame obsession. This is a pretty expensive reward for me. Not something I can afford to do more than a couple times a year. But seeing as playing the prototype obsessively on TableTop Simulator is what has been keeping me from getting my work done this week, this is the reward most likely to help me kick that habit and actually get my work done. So this is the plan for this week, and I'll hopefully figure out a plan for crossing next week's bridge when I come to it.

3. Daily journalling: One thing I'm grateful for that I have in my life right now, and one thing I want that I will have in my life once I've achieved my longer-term goals. (Most of the latter tend to be angry/frustrated "I'll no longer need to put up with X crap that is a part of my life right now" notes. I definitely need the gratitude notes to balance them out! But this is where I'm at.)

That's all I've got for now. Baby steps, work-in-progress, and all that.

Thank you for reading.

 

[NancyTree]

Looks like you had a pretty effective week. Good luck with next week and the stress

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @NancyTree

 

[Lallafa]

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @Lallafa

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Monday - Sunday, January 30 - February 5, 2023

Writing:
500 WORDS - total 5/5 days -
WORKED ON - total 7/6 days -
Total Writing Time: 10 / 10 hours -

French:
ACTIVE STUDY - total 7/5 days -
EXPOSURE - total 7/7 days -
Total: 3 / 3 hours Active Study -

Artwork:
DID SOME - total 7/5 days -
Total: 3 / 3 hours -

Health & Fitness:
W/O w. NORMA
STRENGTH TRAINING - total 1/6 days -
RUNNING - total 20/20 km -
HIKING - total 23,5 km
YOGA - total 3/6 days -
MEDITATION - total 7/7 days -
COMMUNITY CONNECTION - total 7/7 days -
Total workout: 3:05:00 / 5 hours -

Reading:
FICTION - You Sexy Thing (Cat Rambo), Department of Mind-Blowing Theories (Tom Gould)
NON-FICTION - This Is Your Brain On Music (Daniel J. Levitin), Envisioning Exoplanets (Michael Carroll)

Streaks:
EXERCISE - 1019 days
FRENCH - 817 days
WRITING - 144 days

Time Management:
GOBOT - total 5/6 days -
WORK BEFORE PLAY- total 5/5 days -
GBOT - total 3/6 days -

Crap time management on the week overall, as noted previously, but I did pull things together in the back end of the week and got my writing, French, and artwork done. So reward earned! The writing I did was not what I had set out to do at the beginning of the week. But this is a good thing. I have been floundering with my writing lately, putting in the time, but not liking the results I was getting. This week I finally figured out what I want to be writing and started working on that. By the weekend I was enjoying myself to the extent that the work became its own reward. Yeah!

The same cannot be said of my workouts last week. I purposely decided to take a week off from my upper body strength training work as I was feeling tired and a little overworked in my upper back and shoulders. Yoga continued to flounder. I did not enjoy the challenge I tried for January, but I'm looking forward to getting back to my regular yoga practice this week. My mother decided to blow off her workouts for most of the week for various reasons, so I didn't do much with her either. I did get my running done, however, which was no small feat. It was cold and windy here, and it took a lot of willpower to get out there for some of those runs. There were a couple of days when even just walking Shelby felt like a workout due to the mental fortitude required just to be outside on those days. So workout time was low overall, but I kept up my streak and I am proud of myself for getting my running mileage in and Shelby's walk done every day.

My new Morning Meditation is helping (although it doesn't always get done in the morning, due to interruptions.)

One thing that is helping me to be more successful with my artwork is that I have stopped being so precious about it. When I was taking online art classes the past couple of years, the instructor was always lecturing us on the importance of using quality supplies, including quality surfaces, if one wants to achieve professional-level results. He's not wrong. So I invested a bunch of money in professional level materials. But then I was always hesitant to use them, because they are expensive, and my finances are limited, and I'm not producing professional-level work yet anyhow. So recently I've started sketching with a rollerball pen on cheap paper that I got for $1 for a pad of 100 sheets. The result is that I have now worked on my artwork every day for three weeks. Sure, the results are sketchy and splotchy and don't allow for any fine gradations of value. But I'm getting my practice done, and I even quite like some of the results.

Sometimes I sketch things from old photographs:

Some days I have just sketched random things from photos I've found on the Web:

Some days I try to sketch Shelby. (She is not a fan of this, so I need to be pretty quick.):

I thought this tardigrade in a book I've been reading looked cute:

Humans are hard to get right! But I think I don't look completely like an alien in this sketch. I love this photo of me and Trudy and want to build my skills up to the point where I can do a really nice rendering of it one day.

 

[PetiteSheWolf]

True wooooo-ve Great one!

 

[Lallafa]

I really love that sketch of you with Trudy! So cute!

In general, your art teacher is probably right in that better materials generally make for better artwork... On the other hand, I'd like to offer a counter argument:

Spoiler: cheap bic pen

artist: Oscar Ukonu

Here's how he started out:

There's another really good artist that started out with the humble bic pen also who seems to have evolved into more "advanced" materials (washes, etc), but still often posts beautiful bic/cheap pen sketches. Here's a link to Dibujante Nocturno's instagram. He has a really good quote about sketching.

Draw daily and everywhere, anywhere, carry your notebook and always take it with you, whether you're standing in line, if you're on the train, having coffee with friends or family lunch, no matter where you are. That's the motto I live by daily, it doesn't matter if you get it right or wrong, the key is to always keep the constancy and enjoy the drawing so you can practice with more passion! This made me love the process.
Drawing is my way of living in the present moment, having a coffee in a bar while I draw, I am really there, with my mind focused on the now. Relaxed listening and conversation while drawing gives me peace.
The importance of practicing daily in the skechtbook, that constancy in drawing is what makes us advance as artists, that's why I see of vital importance to keep the illusion, think about our projects and practice every day in our notebook. getting this habit to be part of our life helps us to grow, to be better in our art and to achieve our goals...
I am happy drawing every day and that's why I have been able to achieve many of my goals.

Keep it up Rainbow Dragon! Daily workouts are to fitness what sketching is to art! You're doing great. Use what feels good to use. Thanks for posting some more of your sketches. Looking forward to seeing more!

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

I really love that sketch of you with Trudy! So cute!

Thank you.

In general, your art teacher is probably right in that better materials generally make for better artwork... On the other hand, I'd like to offer a counter argument:

Holy crap! That is stunning! I had not seen Oscar Ukonu's work before. Thank you for sharing.

Keep it up Rainbow Dragon! Daily workouts are to fitness what sketching is to art! You're doing great.

Thank you. And yes, this was my idea: to find a way to do the work regularly, so I can improve.

 

[aku-chan]

Nice pictures!
I'm always jealous of people who can draw.

 

[TopNotch]

Excellent work with the writing! You can't write well if you're not enjoying what you're writing.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @aku-chan .

Drawing is a skill that almost anyone can learn. All you need is to be able to see (in some fashion. This guy is legally blind--he has 9% vision--and makes his living as a performer and visual artist) and to have a method for manipulating a mark-making tool. (I hold my tools in my left hand, which is my dominant hand. My paternal grandmother learned to paint with her non-dominant hand after a stroke paralyzed her dominant side. There are also many people who hold their mark-making tools in their mouth or with their toes.) The rest is learning techniques and practising.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Excellent work with the writing! You can't write well if you're not enjoying what you're writing.

Thank you @TopNotch . And indeed (although I'm not certain which is cause and which effect. When I am writing well, I enjoy it. When the writing feels like a slog, it's a good sign I'm doing something wrong with the writing to begin with.)

 

[GentleOx]

Beautiful pictures!

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @GentleOx

 

[NancyTree]

Lovely drawings!

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @NancyTree

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Helloooo! Sane people: are you still out there?

I fear I have fallen into some strange rift in the space-time continuum in which the people around me are behaving in bizarrely socially unacceptable ways yet I am supposed to find a way to not get angry at them for this because they don't understand their behaviour is unacceptable.

Spoiler: Spoilered so anyone who doesn't want to read a long rant of me screaming into the void right now can easily skip past it.

Started my day yesterday by walking to my local medical clinic to have some blood drawn. Used to be the blood clinic operated out of a room in the main medical clinic three mornings per week. One checked in at the same reception desk as one would to see a nurse or GP, then waited in the main clinic waiting room until the phlebotomist called them in. Now the blood lab has their own suite of rooms in the basement, with their own reception and their own waiting room. And they only come to town one morning per week. I arrived right at 8AM--the time at which they reportedly open--and there were already eleven people ahead of me in line. No worries. I'd brought a book to read while I waited. It was difficult to concentrate on my book however, as they had a radio playing in the blood lab waiting room and said radio was tuned to a foreign station that bills itself as a "news" network but actually broadcasts overtly-political, cuckoo-bananapants, far-right propaganda. WTF? Since when did it become acceptable to subject people to that tripe while they're waiting for a medical procedure?

Anyhow... after hunting down the receptionist (who had wandered away from the reception area--even though new people were showing up every couple of minutes--and was in a back room pushing papers) and asking if it would be possible to not have to listen to the whacko conspiracy theory network while waiting to have my blood drawn, I survived the 45-minute wait and came back home to try to get some work done.

Trying to get writing work done in my home is always a challenging prospect because I really do need large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to get into the flow, and my mother just does not respect this. She is a talker, and my father has been sleeping a lot these days, which means I am the only person she has to talk at. (Not that it really matters whether or not my father is awake. If he is awake, my mother will talk at him first, but in a loud enough voice that I can hear every word she says. Then she will come down to my room and talk at me, re-telling me everything she just said to my father.) My mother will literally talk at me about anything and everything and nothing. If she goes out to fetch the groceries I am treated to blessed silence while she is out (although she will try to screw this up for me too by choosing to go out at times when my father needs to be fed or given medication, so I need to do these things for him instead of her). But when she returns she feels the need to tell me every item that she purchased, how much of each item she purchased, why she purchased each item, from which store she got which items, and whether any of the items were on sale or "exorbitantly expensive". (I know this sounds like hyperbole. Sadly, it is not.) I have asked my mother literally thousands of times now to please not interrupt me while I'm working unless it is an emergency, all to no avail. If she wants to talk at me, she's going to talk. (Last week she actually said to me, "You're not working if you're not earning money." I did not even try to not get angry at her for that piece of outrageously ignorant bovine excrement.)

Anyhow... on this day my mother wanted to talk at me about something she definitely had not said to my father first. Apparently, the previous night, my father's PSW (the same one who said outrageously inappropriate things to me about Trudy when Trudy was in her final days) had told my mother that she (the PSW) had told "the girls" (her colleagues) that she did not think they would be providing services to my father anymore by the end of this year because she has "done a lot of work with palliative care patients and [she] knows the signs."

WTELF?!!!

This PSW is here for an hour a couple of nights a week. (Less than that, lately.) My mother and I live with him! We wait on him all fucking day long every single fucking day. We give him his drugs. We spoon-feed him. We clean him up when he drools what we've tried to feed him back out onto his beard. We take him to his medical appointments. My mother does his laundry. (NOT a fun task.) When he's too weak to operate his own electric wheelchair, I do it for him. When he's uncomfortable in bed (which he has now not gotten out of in a month save for one day, which he regretted) I have to climb onto his bed frame and attempt to drag him into a more comfortable position. Does the PSW honestly think my mother and I are so obtuse that we cannot "see the signs"?

Honestly, if my mother had interrupted my work to tell me what the PSW had said because she was so upset by the inappropriateness of the comments that she just needed to rant about it, I would have forgiven her. But no. This was not her intent. My mother instead felt the need to repeat the PSW's words to me "to help [me] prepare for what is coming."

To which, of course, I replied that I live with my father and wait on him every day and I'm not a complete moron. I don't need a PSW who is here less than two hours a week to tell me what is happening.

To which my mother replied, "Well, I didn't need her to tell me what is happening. I can see it for myself." (Like she understood that the PSW didn't have anything useful to say to her, but yet still thought that I might be clueless and need to hear what the PSW had said.)

I want to scream.
But I know that would only hurt my throat.
And I still have a roof over my head (for now).
I know things could be a lot worse. (And likely will get a lost worse for me in the not-too-distant future but still won't be as bad as what some people have to face on the regular.)

Thank you for reading.

P.S.: For any of you who are in the London, Ontario area or know of people in that area and have any information about rental housing opportunities in London that:

1. are smoke-free
2. allow large dogs
3. won't be scared off by the fact that I'll be paying rent out of my savings, not current income
4. won't turn me down because I obviously don't have references from previous landlords, having lived with my parents for over a dozen years now and owned my own home for five years before that

please DM me. I may well be in need of such a situation any day now.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Also:

• Spoiler: Something's gotta give.

  [*]our dishwasher isn't working (It won't close! I have pulled the unit out from under the counter and still cannot see how to fix the problem.)
  [*]the backdoor--which we just had replaced in the fall--is sticking again. It's so difficult to close right now my mother will be saying she isn't strong enough to do it within another couple of days.
  [*]it's recycling day, and it's pouring rain outside and very windy and is going to remain so throughout the whole day. I expect to have to go out later today to collect plastic bottles and soggy cardboard from all over the lawn, driveway, and up and down the street.
  [*]one of our toilets isn't flushing properly. I'm going to need to replace the fill valve today and hope that solves the problem.
  [*]my mother just had a fight with my father about whether or not he should get out of bed today. Then she came and fought with me about the same topic--as if either of us has any say in the matter.
  [*]I just begged my mother, once again, to please leave me alone so I can get some work done. I told her that I know she doesn't believe what I do is work, but that it most definitely is work to me and that getting a large amount of writing done and published now, before my savings run out, is literally the only hope I have left of not being destitute in my old age.
  [*]

 

[Anek]

 

[Tileenah]

 

[Haleth]

 

[TopNotch]

I hope you found the rants cathartic.
Do you live with your parents because you are their carer? Here, you can get financial support if you're someone's carer.
Nothing to say about writing not being "real work" - you know it all! I generally get to bed around 1am because by about 10, everyone else is in bed and it's quiet. But then everyone gets up around 7, so...
What happened to your own home?
Probably being too intrusive here.
Anyway, chin up.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Do you live with your parents because you are their carer? Here, you can get financial support if you're someone's carer.

Ha! Ha! Here you can get a break on your income taxes--if you earn enough money to actually need to pay income tax, which I do not. (Also: only one person would be able to claim it. I'm pretty sure my mother makes the claim for my father, since she earns enough money from her various pensions that she does pay income tax.)

In the campaign for our most recent provincial election, the NDP party (our most left-wing party) promised to introduce actual pay for caregivers if elected. They were not elected. (The NDP have only governed in Ontario for one term in the entire history of the province, during which time the realities of the early 1990s recession pushed them into enacting austerity measures which were seen as a betrayal by many in their traditional base. The party was crushed in the next election and has never been a contender since.) In any case, the money the NDP was proposing to offer caregivers would only go to people whose entire household income was less than half what ours is. (My parents have pension income. I'm the only person in the family with a financially precarious future.)

I generally get to bed around 1am because by about 10, everyone else is in bed and it's quiet. But then everyone gets up around 7, so...

I cannot function on only six hours sleep a night.

What happened to your own home?

This: http://princesskendal.blogspot.com/2007/07/grotesque-miscarriage-of-justice.html

 

[Maly]

 

[Mianevem]

 

[TopNotch]

I cannot function on only six hours sleep a night.

Neither can I!
As for the rest, well, there's nothing really useful or appropriate to say, is there? Pity you didn't have some big friends to scare the crap out of him! Some people just ought to be ... well, you know.

 

[PetiteSheWolf]

Reading all that and ... Wow. Hugs. We're here for rants, and hugs.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @Anek @Tileenah @Haleth @TopNotch @Maly @Mianevem @PetiteSheWolf . I appreciate your support.

@TopNotch I did have a couple of friends offer to wait behind my bushes with baseball bats. But that's not exactly my style.
Another online friend from Texas said to me, "It's a pity you don't live here. Then you could just shoot him."
Again, not my style. I cannot say I didn't fantasize about gruesome things happening to Uber Creep for a long time, however. I have lots of fodder for villains in the space opera series I'm currently writing!

 

[Tileenah]

I (very) recently discovered that air-kicking people is both good for my health and my angryness at them
But you've been a darebee longer than I so you probably already knew that
for everything else, it's a lot...

 

[HellYeah]

Impressive,
how you kept all that positivity in your life.
​

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @Tileenah . I have definitely done my share of personifying the air in martial arts workouts. Also: pretending the pavement is someone's face when I am running.
It's a good thing we have imagination! I shudder to think how violent we might all be without it!

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Thank you @HellYeah .

P.S.: How do you make the red emoji heart print as red? It creates a black heart for me.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Updates:

• our recycling got picked up on Thursday before the high winds blew everything all over the street. I only had to collect one soggy bit of paper from the front lawn afterward.

• I fixed the toilet! It only took me 3 hours and 10 minutes longer than the 15 minutes the manufacturer suggests should be more than sufficient to install their "easy to install" "universal" fill valve.

It might have helped if the instruction sheet wasn't total crap. Like maybe include a diagram with labelled parts? I can quote employment standards legislation for you, explain how "stage right" and "stage left" differ from "camera right" and "camera left" and name dozens of yoga poses in both English and Sanskrit. But I'm not a plumber. To me, a "washer" is a machine one puts clothes into to clean them. Well, okay: in a plumbing context I do know I'm probably looking for a rubber ring. But when you manufacture the shank seal and the cone washer as all one piece, and leave it up to the end-user to cut the two pieces apart, you could maybe at least explain that in your instructions! These instructions don't mention the cone washer at all, and the only reference to the shank seal says, "With the tank washer attached, insert the threaded end of the valve through the hole..." (They actually call the part a "shank seal" in the parts list, but a "tank washer" in the installation instructions.) It took me a bit to figure this out.

Then, after I finally installed the part, the wretched thing didn't work! No matter how I adjusted the water level adjustment screw, the thing either tried to fill the tank higher than the overflow pipe or it didn't fill the tank at all. My eyesight is not what it used to be, and it took me a while to realize that the problem here was that the massive float on the fill valve wasn't floating because it was jammed up against the styrofoam lining inside the tank.

So... drained the tank again. Removed the fill valve. Attempted to re-install it with my mother holding onto the part while I tightened the locknut, to ensure it wasn't pressing up against the foam this time.

Me (lying on the bathroom floor, wedged between the toilet and the bathtub): "Is the yellow plastic touching the styrofoam anywhere?"

Norma: "No. But it will be if I leave go."

A fill valve that doesn't work unless one removes the lid from the toilet tank and stands holding the valve pulled away from the side of the tank isn't really going to work for us. So out came the valve again so I could shave the styrofoam down with a kitchen knife. This operation also required my mother's assistance since, even with reading glasses on, I could not see what I was doing well enough with just the bathroom lights. So I asked my mother to shine a flashlight on my work for me. A simple task, one might think. Except my mother is easily distracted. And she constantly worries about the wrong things. She kept moving the flashlight away from where I needed it so she could check out where the bits of styrofoam I was shaving off were falling.

Norma: "Why don't you put down a piece of paper towel so the styrofoam doesn't fall on the floor?"

Me: "It's styrofoam! It won't hurt the floor!"

I had to cut right through the foam in one spot. So we'll likely end up with condensation on the outside of the tank now. But at least we have a working toilet again.

(The previous fill valve I installed was not this much grief! But it came packaged with good instructions that actually included a labelled parts list, and it had a nice, compact float that fit our tank. I gave my mother the packaging from that fill valve to take to the store last week so she would know what part she needed to buy. But the only store in the Booming Metropolis that sells plumbing parts no longer carries the brand of fill valve we got last time. The only one they had was the too-big one with the crap installation instructions.)

• After years of using a condom catheter that has caused (mostly my mother, but sometimes also me) no end of grief, my father finally agreed to have a foley. This was inserted on Thursday morning, and on Thursday my father actually got out of bed! And he was comfortable in his chair all day! Friday he got out of bed again, and again was comfortable. He did not take any kind of pain med all day, and in the evening he told my mother he was "almost euphoric" because it was so nice to not be in any pain. My father being up in his wheelchair is also good for me because having to lean over his bed to spoon feed him hurts my back. He is still too weak to feed himself in his chair now. But I don't have to lean as far to feed him in his chair, so my back is okay. Also: if I need to reposition him in his chair, I can do so standing on solid ground (not precariously perched on the thin rails of a bed frame) and the wheelchair is much more adjustable than the bed, so I can use gravity to help me more. Everyone was excited for this progress we had made. Then my father's PSW showed up on Saturday morning to get him out of bed and discovered that the foley was leaking.

So now my father is back on a condom catheter until the nurse can get the supplies she needs to redo the foley and have it not leak this time.

The good news is that a foley is going to need regular attention from a nurse. Which means that my father will need to stay on the home nursing service forever. (Previously, they kept cutting him off the service. Then, inevitably something would go wrong within a week of them cutting my father off which meant he needed the service again, but there are always delays and hassles for my mother to get him reinstated. Our idiot provincial government, in their desperation to pinch pennies wherever they can so their rich corporate buddies don't need to pay much in tax, keeps hamstringing our home care system. Which is stupid. Caring for my father in a long term care home would be much more expensive for the province than caring for him at home.) Aside from needing to remain on the nursing service because my father has ongoing needs that require the services of a nurse, a further benefit to my parents is that they don't need to pay for my father's medications while he's on the service. They also will not need to pay for any ambulance rides he might need while he's on the service. ("Universal" healthcare in Ontario doesn't cover drugs or ambulances for most people. But it does cover these things for patients in hospitals. Patients of home nursing care are for some reason considered the same as hospital patients in these regards.)

• still no dishwasher. But a contractor is supposedly coming to look at that tomorrow.
• the back door is still messed up. Since it's current state is the state it was left in by the guy who installed the door the time we already had to call him back to fix the problem that the door had stopped locking, it seems we are stuck with it the way it is.

 

[HellYeah]

Thank you @HellYeah .

P.S.: How do you make the red emoji heart print as red? It creates a black heart for me.

I used the hearts in the Gboard, nothing special.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

I used the hearts in the Gboard, nothing special.

Gboard?

 

[HellYeah]

Gboard?

The Google Keyboard on android phones.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

The Google Keyboard on android phones.

Ah. I don't have a smartphone. I just have a Windows computer w. keyboard. Windows key + "." brings up the emojis selector, which includes all the symbols that you used in your post. But when I select the red heart, it writes to the screen as black.

❤

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

❤❤❤❤

@HellYeah I can write a red heart to the screen by copying and pasting your red heart. Weirdly, if I then press the backspace key once, it doesn't delete the pasted heart, but it converts it to the black heart I get from my emoji selector.

 

[Laura Rainbow Dragon]

Charcoal and White "Charcoal" Ostrich:

Nothing I have tried will give me a point on my charcoal pencils. Manuel sharpeners on both the coloured pencil and graphite sizes, knife, sanding paper--everything just grinds the tip down to nothing. Maybe I just need to give up some control and accept that charcoal drawings are going to be looser?

 

[Tileenah]

Wow! From my perspective you're quite the hero for all that plumming and making it work
And even if there's a setback for your father's foley it's so good to know things are gonna change a little bit for the better in the future! Caring for someone at home is so much work and so challenging, everything that makes things better go a long way!
Also I really like your ostrich, it has calm and kind eyes

 

[Lallafa]

A magnificent ostrich!