That reminds me, I gotta take a bag of stuff to Goodwill today.

Erin, bodies heal at their own pace. I was on Percoset for almost a month until that stupid kidney stone passed, and you had a serious surgery.

Doctors can give such conflicting advice. I'm grateful my sister's BFF is an experienced critical care and cardiac nurse, because I'll often call her and say "The doc says x amount of time, or whatever," and she'll be all "Yeah, no; more like y," or confirm.

It makes me feel much better.

I hate weekends. Friday was our day to do things. Now it's two days in the house surrounded by my old life and trying to carve out something new. I bounce between cautious anticipation and so much of "why the hell bother."

I know this is all standard and that it will get better--I hope--but damn.

I ask myself "What would you be doing if he was here?" And honestly, not much more than what I do do. With his health, I'd always be worried, and in all fairness, I expect this only happened a few years earlier than it would have anyway.

Nobody wants to go through the coping, we always want to have coped. I just have to keep telling myself that I will get to Have Coped. But he was my bulwark against the world. Having him around didn't change events, but I had him at my back. This being in the midst of Coping sucks.

Nobody wants to go through the coping, we always want to have coped. I just have to keep telling myself that I will get to Have Coped.

Yes, this. Very much this.

Nobody wants to go through the coping, we always want to have coped. I just have to keep telling myself that I will get to Have Coped.

You will. You are facing this bravely and it's going to get easier. It's not going to go away but one day it won't define every hour.

What Cass said, Connie. You are incredibly brave.

Argh. The kitty is sneezing a lot more blood. We have a vet appointment at 3:00 today, which I probably can't go to because of work*, and if we end up having to have her put to sleep because it's something horrible, I'm going to be so angry I can't be there.

*(I'm really not sure what the deal is with work. My boss -- who is generally absolutely fantastic to work with -- has told me one thing about when assignments are due, but then keeps asking me WAY before that date if I've been able to return them. And I've asked her for clarification once already, and she clarified the original time frame, and then goes back to asking me "Did you return anything over the weekend?" I finally sent her an email this morning saying, look, here is the exact text of what you've told me about due dates, and I've been working under the assumption that that's correct, but if you need me to work weekends, I need to know that now so that I don't miss deadlines that I didn't know I had. Which is really frustrating. And just, you know, stressful.)

Argh. Boss emailed back, "Oh, [original time frame] is correct!" THEN GET OFF MY SHIT LADY.

Plei: yes, that's the site. I didn't link it, but thought the posting would give Jilli and any other gothily inclined a chuckle.

Steph, my boss does that to me all the time. "Why isn't this done?" The deadline is 2 weeks from now! "Have you finished this yet?" The deadline is NOVEMBER! It's very stressful. I say, go to the vet with your cat. Work can wait.

She assigns manuscripts on a Thursday (or sometimes Friday) and explicitly said that they can be returned on Monday (if she assigns 2, then one can be returned on Monday and one on Tuesday; if she assigns 3, then Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, etc.).

If she sends me articles on a Thursday and I don't have any other work, I start right away, and I can often return stuff the next day. I think she got used to me returning things early, because when I've had other work (as in, work the AMA assigned, which she KNOWS ABOUT) and couldn't return things early, she gets antsy and asks, "Did you return anything yet?" (What I really want to answer is, "You know goddamn well that I didn't because you can see on the database that there are no completed articles under my name, so stop with the passive-aggressive shit.")

But then when I ask her to clarify (yet again) when things are actually due, she'll say "Oh, Monday and Tuesday are fine!"

Apparently when she sends me something, I'm going to need to reply right away with "I WILL RETURN THIS MONDAY."

(And the REALLY annoying thing about this situation is that when she assigned me this article, I told her that I couldn't start on it until Friday *because* of other AMA work, which she knew about. AND this is an exceptionally long article -- realistically it's almost 14 hours of work. And yet she wanted to know if an article I told her I couldn't start until Friday, an article that was 14 hours of work, was returned Friday. NO WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.)