An ass out of you and umption

Crowded Culver's in the middle of Wisconsin. Table of four guys in their mid-twenties dressed in hunting winter camo and orange jackets, eating burgers and cheese curds and frozen custard. As I stood there propped against a wall waiting for a table to open up, it became clear what they were discussing:

"Like Mirror Dance? I liked that one, with the crazy clone brother."
"No, not Mirror Door, Mirador. It's a place. They're all places, all the titles. Fake word places."
"I just read Melusine."
"Well, you gotta borrow the others. There's this actress...."

I did not jump in to tell them that truepenny had put trains in the last volume, but oh, was I tempted.

Fifth Christmas: the unpackenating

We are in that phase of Christmas where everywhere I look there is something to be sorted or washed or recycled or thrown away or stacked or shelved or hung up or folded or arranged or put away or paid or fetched or dropped off or made note of or replied to or replaced or mended. And the travel kicked my vertiginous ass, I'm sorry to say. I had to get up to be sick in the night, and I hardly ever have that. And I'm still filled with relief that we have pepparkakor in the house, because it's a ready source of ginger for my stomach.

We haven't seen everybody we're going to see or done everything we're going to do for the holidays yet this year, but we're definitely on the home stretch now. I don't know how much or how long the increased vertigo is going to interfere with the rest of the season's plans.

All of my relatives who took ill earlier this month are in some way on the mend, albeit slowly. I think that's sufficiently vague for a public lj post and sufficiently reassuring for people who have more information and want to know.

*kerthump*

Oh, man, kids. My proprioception is shot clean to hell today. It's disturbing as all get-out. Earlier I had to open my eyes to see where my hand was. Like whether it was up by my shoulder or down by my thigh--I knew I could logic my way through it, but the thing is you are not supposed to have to logic your way through, "Where is my hand?" It's one of the ones you're supposed to get for a freebie. It is always in the last place you put it. You should not have to try to estimate how bent your arm is by figuring out how many centimeters of inner elbow are pressed together. If you close your eyes to type, you should not have to reason that your hands are at the same level because you know you left the desk level when you closed your eyes. It is an extremely wrong thing what is wrong with its wrongness.

I don't like to whine, but this is the third Christmas that's been like this, and I could really do something else now.

One of you-all wished me a better ratio of happy niece time to nasty vertigo time, while I was in Wisconsin, and I had to say no, that's not how I do this. Because if I think of the two in ratios, in comparisons, then in some sense the vertigo is canceling out part of the niece time. (Or the time hanging out having dinner with people I love, or the time reading a good book or etc.) And I really need for it not to cancel. I really need for all the good stuff to still be here when I'm done doing the math. Because so far we have been only intermittently successful at making the bad stuff go away, and so if I make the good stuff into the antimatter form of bad stuff instead, that's no good at all, and I might explode.

There was lots of Christmas stuff with missing my grandpa that I expected to be hard, and it was hard. The bit I had not thought about at all that nearly undid me was that Grandpa always collected the trash, the torn wrapping paper and like that. He was the keeper of the bag. Mom hadn't thought of it, either. She immediately passed responsibility on to Daddy, and Christmas could continue. But it's always like that with grief: you think you have a handle on where it'll be hard, and you're always not quite right enough. Right enough to get through, and right enough to have the good memories, and right enough to have Orange Julius and gjetost. But--you never think of everything until it's right there.