Am I writing blog posts because we put Nikki down last week and I want to bury her picture on my feed so I don’t cry every time I look at my website? No, why would you think that?

Also, there’s a pandemic. It’s severely cut down on my out-of-home activities because I’m still trying to be cautious. So I don’t have cool adventure posts to share either. Would you like pictures from the daily walks I’ve started to take around the neighborhood with Darcy? It’s very not exciting. We get barked at by neighborhood dogs. Occasionally I wave at the mail carrier and she waves back. Darcy is Very Interested in the corner bushes about half a block down and has to be dragged away from them every time. Riveting stuff.

In March of 2020, they sent me home from work with my desktop and a promise that we’d be back in a few weeks. It’s January of 2022, and I’m still 70% work-from-home. I go into the office with the night shift every night for a couple hours to handle a task I can’t do at home¹, so I see a couple coworkers and I get to say hi to people and be a tiny bit sociable. I have two siblings that share my house with me and I talk to them every day.² But it’s a lot of time in my office with first dogs-plural and now dog-singular to keep me company. I talk to online friends a lot, and try not to sound manic when a coworker calls me over Skype to discuss documentation.

So yeah, there’s not a lot here to consistently blog about. Does anybody have any ideas of what they’d LIKE me to talk about? I can tell you about books I’ve been reading.

Right now I’m working my way through Shonda Rhimes’s Year of Yes as an audiobook while I’m doing the mundane tasks at the office. She narrates the book herself, and it’s been a really fun listen. The book is entirely about saying yes to challenging things and the experience of going through those things, and it's put some interesting ideas into my head. One glaring thing about it is that she assumes the reader (me) is making a lot of judgy assumptions about her, whereas I’m usually laughing along and saying “Yeah, I know that feeling.” But I don’t know how much of her audience is composed of other writers. She talks about her connection to Cristina Yang (played by Sandra Oh on Grey’s) and the entire time, I was nodding along because I have similar feelings about Gail Godwin (character, not the author).

I’m almost done with it. Nobody spoil the ending. After I finish that, I’m going to attempt another audiobook, maybe this time in fiction. I haven’t really given audiobooks a try in a few years, but now that I’m spending 10+ hours a week doing a very mundane work thing, and I’ve discovered audiobooks are great for doing dishes, I’m going to jump in again headfirst.


What other updates are there? Hm. I’m still bullet journaling, and it’s helping out quite a lot. I haven’t returned to dicemaking yet, but when I do expect more posts about that. My secret project with friends is deep in the works and hopefully we’ll have some announcements for you by the end of the month. I’m still sad over Nikki, but have moved on to allowing my typical morbid humor room to blossom. Her current replacement is the shoulder porg I purchased at Disneyland, that now sits behind me in my room and stares at me all day, just like she used to.

Anybody got any fun updates? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments. I’d love to talk to more people.

Until then, stay sexy!

Lexie



¹ Shout out to my coworker who, after being out last week with COVID, was walking around with his mask pushed down his chin when I came in during regular hours on Monday. Am I going in during the night shift to avoid that guy particularly? Absolutely. What the fuck, dude?

² One of them is trapped in the basement with COVID right now. The other one and I have been poking our noses with swabs and testing negative in the meantime.