These words were hard won, between 6 a.m. alarms and dentist appointments and the vicissitudes of bedtime. (I cannot support the awkward adverbs and comma splices in Magic Tree House. And I know I'm judgey, but those kids are only a year apart.)

The Poison Court
Words today: 918
Words total: 5501
Reason for stopping: end of scene, days without 8 hours of sleep
Mean things: Finally made it to the inconvenient corpse.
Deaths: See above.

Finally murdered someone. Now I need to figure out why he was murdered and by whom. And how that ties in to the larger plot I think I have figured out.

Today the stork CPS delivered to us a nine-year-old girl. We spent the rest of the day enrolling her in school, buying some furniture, conducting an inventory of her clothes for the adoption agency*, and beginning the long slog toward bedtime.

Agent F, as I will refer to her until I get the foster care privacy rules figured out, spent much of the day trying to speak cat. She seems to be picking it up fairly quickly. Siggy--always glad to have more monkeys to dominate--seems to have taken her under her iron paw.

I already have many OPINIONS about the medications some genius put her on. Luckily, we see her new psychiatrist on Thursday, and perhaps he will join the litany of WTF that has been uttered today.**

I'm also very glad we only have two weeks of school left, because the hour of 6:00 a.m. and I are not friendly, but will be forced to get to know each other very well for those two weeks.

I'll probably keep further posts about this under f-lock, but if anyone has any questions about the process, feel free to email or message me. If I'm not dead of exhaustion, I'll try to answer.

* How many pairs of socks does a nine-year-old need? A lot, apparently.

** Two caseworkers, both of us, and three different people at her new school all looked at her list of meds and made emoticon faces, including o.0, O.O, and >:(.

After fadethecat agreed to split the take with me, I finally broke down and joined a CSA. Full of enthusiasm and determination to not waste food/eat out less, I actually cooked with this produce today. Breakfast was a green tomato omelette, and dinner was roasted beet and fennel salad and wilted beet greens. (And chicken from the grocery store, because I have limits.) Not only was this all delightful, but I actually consumed more than 100% RDA of potassium today. I don't think this has ever happened before. Either 118% causes organ failure, or I'll be able to fold space tomorrow.

Now I have zucchini, summer squash, and kale to get through, and still more fennel. Luckily, I just found a recipe for Portuguese fennel soup.

---

The Poison Court

Words today: 1028
Words total: 4350
Reason for stopping: end of chapter
End line: "There's a dead man in the garden."
Deaths: That guy in the garden.
Mean things: Inconvenient corpses

I would like Derek Jacobi to narrate all my transitions.

I am a medical marvel. Or at least a dental marvel. I went in today for a root canal, only to have the root canal expert look at my X-rays, poke my tooth, and say "That's some crazy shit*. Go to a specialist. Hang on, lemme call one." He then talked to said specialist on the phone for a while, showed him my X-rays, and reported back: "He can work on it, but there's no guarantee that would be a permanent solution."

Apparently my tooth has something like a hell mouth**, and is disintegrating from the inside out. It's a pit of horrors contained by a thin layer of enamel. No cavity or trauma caused this: I am just that fucking special.

Which is how, dear reader, I came to have an appointment on Thursday for an extraction, and eventually an implant. As exciting as having titanium screws in my skull sounds, the part in between where I spend several weeks toothless does not appeal to me. But the idea of getting a stopgap treatment only to have another abscess later--or worse, to have the tooth crack--appeals even less.

I should have asked if they could just give me a titanium jaw full of shark teeth, but my insurance probably won't cover 50% of that.

* Perhaps he said it more tactfully than that.

** You say root resorption, I say hell mouth. Let's call the whole thing off.

I appear to be even more disappointed in J.J. Abrams than usual. First and foremost we did not need another motherfucking Wrath of Khan! What the hell is wrong with you?!

Secondly, if you are going to inflict this travesty upon audiences, maybe this would have been a good opportunity to find...I dunno...an actual Indian actor to play Khan Noonien Singh. And I say this as someone who thinks Benedict Cumberbatch could play the shark in Jaws.

Someone was wrong on the internet recently. More specifically, someone on Twitter said that Tom Hiddleston stole every scene he was in in The Avengers. While it's true that Tom Hiddleston--and his smile, and his cheekbones*--is a thing of beauty, and a fine addition to any film, I would have to disagree. Actually, Mark Ruffalo stole every scene there was to steal. And that was unexpected. A movie that made the Hulk cool. Who would have thunk it?

And apparently the trick with Whedon is to have one character in any given movie who can reasonably speak Jossisms, and keep them all contained therein.

* Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch combined might come close to the devastating power of Peter Cushing's cheekbones, but only might.

So, if you missed the update to yesterday's entry, my fears were confirmed. I had an abscess in my gum, which has been drained*. I have a root canal on Tuesday. This caused me to miss my father's birthday yesterday, as well as Exquisite Corpse, and will cause me to miss a chance to wear the worm suit for work on Wednesday. This makes me rather crabtastic.

On the upside, my head is no longer a pulsing mass of putrescence and pain this morning, so I can go to work today. This is a positive because a) I'm dressing up for Comic Book Day, and b) I'm seeing Avengers tonight, and I would feel guilty if I did so after skipping work. On the slightly less upside, by 9 in the morning on the 5th of May, it was already too damn hot for my costume. For fuck's sake, Texas. Throw me a bone here.


* Before this procedure:

Me: "There is no optimal outcome that involves a mouth full of pus."

Dentist: "You said it, not me."

The buzzing sound a dental drill makes. At least that is my fear. There is a Bad Thing happening in my mouth, and I will go to the dentist in a couple of hours. Of course, I'm terrified that I already know what it is. That word starts with A. And the A-word leads to the R-word. The R-word sometimes leads to the V-word, which means I would miss Comic Book Day tomorrow.

I'll be over here, keening and rocking for a bit.

ETA: Sometimes I hate being right.

Originally posted by dreamsformortar at Help Us/LJ Support Planned Parenthood

Yesterday--or 2:00 AM this morning, to be technical--I turned my final revision of Dreams into arcaedia. Now all I'm waiting for are her notes, and any comments from my Vancouver native reader. I don't know what will happen to the book next, but for the first time in eight years it's no longer hanging like an albatross around my neck. This feels very strange.

Now I can go back to working on proposals for further Necromancer Chronicle-related works, and trying to think of a title for Dreams 2: Byakhee Boogaloo Debt and/or Devils of Something.