I had weird post apocalypse dreams about having colonized a grocery store? It was odd. And then I dreamt about being at a wedding and people were dancing and it was fun and all…and then I realized I hadn’t gotten to eat any of the cupcakes (there were tons of them in lieu of cake?) and was v disappointed when I found out they’d all been put away. Oddly I did not wake up hungry for breakfast, though if a cupcake showed up I’d probably go for it.

Rain overnight, it is a wet and drippy morning, and I have a new visitor -- a somewhat bedraggled juvenile downy woodpecker showed up on my little balcony, trying out the suet feeder.

Can fly, but not very well. Can clamber around the soft pine of the balcony rails, but not skillfully. The tailfeathers are still too short to do a good job of bracing any vertical poses. [link]

I like to think it is a chick of the adult pair who have been entertaining me all winter.

I'm on my way back to Pigeon Forge. I might be out there until Memorial Day. Glad to have the work, but this project is adding up to a lot of time out of town.

Oof, that's a long stint, ND -- do you mean there the whole time, or back and forth? I mean, either way...

I'm... here. Nothing really to report. Some general ~ma this way toward DH on the job front would not go amiss. Two sort of promising leads this week, one going to phase one, and the second, we shall see. It's tough out here.

About to head out to Aldi for a grocery run. Such is the excitement in my life. We did have a super yum dinner with friends at Mamma Chang's last night (Peter Chang's is a chain, right? Is Mamma Chang's? They're related. Anyway, it was really quite good!) -- social ties keeping me afloat, basically.

I think I will work from the library this week. I need a change of scenery. And by work, I mostly mean look for work and do a little contract stuff. Ay, ay, ay.

I'm still taking all the drugs, and improving. My sister arrives tomorrow, and my niece on Tuesday. Both coming to FL for my other sister's 75th. She doesn't know about them coming. She only expects to see me and my brother. Family tradition of surprising each other.

M's mom has started smoking again . But she really pissed off the cousin who had been sleeping on our couch and we don't hear from him again.

So AO3 got scrapped to train some AI called hugging face and they scraped pretty much every public fic.

Carpal tunnel surgery is tomorrow morning at 8:15 -- I have to be there at 6:45, which means getting up around 5, which is not my favorite of the a.m. times. But then it'll be over and done with and I should be home before noon and can nap the afternoon away.

I know that the pins-and-needles feeling won't go away immediately, because the nerves need to re-grow, but still, I can't wait to have feeling in my hand again.

Easy peasy, routine surgery-ma, Tep!

Surgery ~ma, Steph!