Category: daily living

daily living, feelings and mental health, quick picks, recommendations

he’s an angry bird: “the mad eyes of the heron king,” and other things

ray brantley
words writtenthing(s) enjoyedstuff accomplished
TODAY: 91/277This incredible blackwater aquascape!Mostly managing my mental health!
TOTAL: 19,437/100,000PseudoPod 717: “The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. DanskyPacking. Lots, and lots, and lots of packing.
Fell just short of my NaNoWriMo goal last month, but that’s all right. Keep trucking along, as someone somewhere probably said at some point. Right?

Watching the retrograde advance of his erstwhile conversational partner, Leonard did not think, “I could have died.” Nor did he think, “I must be dreaming,” or “That’s impossible,” or even “It talked.”

Rather, he held one thought and one thought only to his feverish mind, and held it close with a secret glee: “It talked to me.”

“The Mad Eyes of the Heron King,” Richard E. Dansky

Richard has written a story that’s brimming with a little bit of everything that I love: lush, gorgeous prose; dialogue full of fabulist, atmospheric whimsy; all the dramatic irony of knowing that, while something truly terrible is approaching, the protagonist won’t spot the danger until it’s far too late. And birds. Tall, stately, predatory birds, who know very well who is their equal, and who is prey.

Poor Leonard.

“Fuck all this moving nonsense,” said Jasper sourly with only his eyes.

Literally everything else in my life is up in the air at the moment, and I expect that’s unlikely to change until at least the first week or so of September. Husband and I are spending our last week in our apartment packing up as many of our worldly possessions as we can cram into the cardboard boxes that now compose most of our interior decor. Then next week we close on our condo, and properly move in a few days later. We’re going to be home owners.

I can’t accurately describe how surreal this whole experience is for me, but I will give it a shot.

Six years ago I arrived in this country from Alabama with two cats and only as many personal belongings as I could safely cram into the trunk of my car, in graduate student loan debt to the tune of $70k USD, and unable to afford a place to live in the city of Toronto that would cost me more than $500 CAD/month.

I spent my first winter in an apartment where my roommates and I couldn’t risk running our space heaters at the same time without tripping all the breakers, and my first spring being told by our landlord that we couldn’t use the water for more than five minute increments at a time without risking the integrity of all the pipes in the house. I was miserable. I didn’t know anyone, no one knew me, and there was no way for me to know whether this grad school gamble would pay off–or if I would find myself limping back home two years later. But that didn’t happen, not only because of the support network I managed to create for myself here over the last six years, but because I put in the work to grow those relationships, to succeed at my degree program, and to secure a job that would do the miraculous: let me pay down my debt, and put 20% of each paycheque in savings. Six years later, that figure is half of what it was in 2014.

And, as I discovered recently, I managed to accomplish all of those things with misdiagnosed Celiac’s disease, and ADHD.

Wild, right?

I don’t say all of these things to puff myself up with unearned pride, or to diminish the support I did receive from my father while I was getting my feet under me here in Canada. My dad was, is, and always will be my rock, and he knows it. I say these things because too often I don’t look at the obstacles I surmounted to get to where I am right now, and don’t give myself credit for my successes. I am committed to owning those accomplishments now, even the ones that might look only like partial successes to others–because when you’re going through life like a car trying to speed off in six different with a brick dropped on the accelerator, it is a win to recognize that you’re going no where, and to make the conscious decision to stop. It is a win to ask yourself, “What am I feeling, right now? And what do I need to feel better?” And it’s a triumph to start down the path towards answering either of those questions.

So, for certain values of “describe why buying a condo is so surreal for you right now,” I suppose the rambling words above qualify, right?

daily living, site updates, the creative process, writing

time for a change

ray brantley
Words WrittenThing(s) EnjoyedStuff Accomplished
TODAY:
*sad deflated balloon noise*		PseudoPod Ep. 713: “You Can Stay All Day,” by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)Website redesign + updates. It’s summery! I like it!
TOTAL:
9,753 / 15,000		Cat Rambo‘s Short Story WorkshopSuccessfully administered medication to Mrs. Moo
Trying a new thing here. We’ll see how much I like it later.

(I’m not going to admit to how much time I spent fiddling with that silly table to make it look presentable, so we’ll see if this is a format I stick with going forward in subsequent posts. Anyway.)

During the 5-minute timed writing sessions for Cat Rambo’s Short Story workshop today I jotted down two pieces I rather enjoyed: a hypothetical beginning to a short story set in the same universe as my current project, Companion Animals, and a response to the prompt, “The doll was dead.” I’ve polished them just a hair and so figured I’d drop them here, so that hopefully in a few weeks’ time I can look back on this post and compare my progress.

“The doll was dead.”

The doll was dead.

He found it at the bottom of the ravine, half-drowned under grey water run-off and a discarded soda bottle. The doll’s pale pink dress had discoloured under the malign indifference of the elements. Maybe it wasn’t pink at all. Maybe it had been red, once upon a happier time. He would never know for sure, and didn’t care. It was difficult to care, in that moment, about anything other than the doll’s open, staring eyes, which could not be black plastic buttons held in place by a neat criss-cross stitch of black thread, or beads, or little glass marbles with swirls of too-bright colour for irises, tidily affixed to a face of fabric or porcelain.

They couldn’t be any of those things, because fabric could not bruise, and glass could not bleed.

A Last Defence

Starlight pours through the airlock’s glass porthole and illuminates the crime scene before her torch can catch up. Blood, she thinks, glitters like a scattering of diamonds spilt from some baroness’s upended jewelry box. Viscera is duller, like silverware in need of a polish.

She has an academic knowledge of her shaking hands, like her body feels the fear before her mind does. That is one of many things she does not share in common with the little cat that stands, immutable as gravity, fierce as an entire battalion of Imperial pistoleers, on the opposite side of the airlock door.

The station’s failing bulwark groans when the escape pod door hisses open. She turns to throw herself into it, but not without one last look over her shoulder through the porthole. Her saviour, her last defence against the Emperor’s coterie–so small and brave, and so alone.

daily living, kitten fostering

kitten fostering: my latest adventure

ray brantley

Over the last month and a half, as anyone who follows my dedicated cat-centric account on instagram can probably tell, I’ve taken on some additional responsibilities.

  • Georgie!
  • Thomas!
  • Abigail!

…three of them, actually.

Thomas and Abigail are our current resident foster gremlins, but Georgie was the first to come home with us back in June. The experience of caring for, socializing, and acclimating our entire household to the presence of something so small and precious, and yet so disruptive, was a trial by fire about which I have exactly zero regrets. Managing her care on top of all the other dramatic life changes that are happening behind the scenes here was hard, but not nearly as hard as letting her go early this month. That’s the thing about foster parenting, of course: the goal is always goodbye, but sometimes goodbye happens before we’re ready for it.

Okay, I know what you’re probably thinking. “But Elisabeth, isn’t this supposed to be a speculative fiction writing/review/recommendation blog? What’s with all the cats all of a sudden*?”

My response: listen, it clearly says on the tin that this website suffers from something of an identity crisis, so if we’re all being honest with ourselves here, this post is exactly on brand. Kittens today, NaNoWriMo updates tomorrow, records and information management-inspired free-form poetry on Wednesday–I know what the people want, all right?

*crickets*

Anyway, I said all that to say, as kitten fostering continues to take up a larger part of my time, I want to document some of my missteps, mishaps, and other lessons learned here on this blog, in hopes of helping other fledgling foster parents who might be trawling WordPress reader for support or advice.

So, first piece of advice:

If your vet’s office rings you up and asks you, “So, ready to take on your first foster kitten?” before you’ve had time to order your play pen or other essential kitten containment accoutrements, don’t be an exceedingly obliging Southerner. Say no! Say, “Just give me another day and then I’ll be ready,” because while you can pull a hat trick at the last minute and make do with your mother-in-law’s rejected dog kennel, some towels, and an aluminum lasagna tray as an ad-hoc litter box, you will really, really wish you hadn’t.

Take the time you need to get yourself set up. You’ll be glad that you did, and your new foster baby will be, too.

* I actually grew up involved with greyhound rescue back in Alabama, so this work isn’t entirely new to me. That being said, fostering kittens who need medical care is a much different kettle of fish from looking after fully grown adult dogs who can more or less take care of themselves, so really, I absolutely was in over my head when I started doing this. oops.

daily living, feelings and mental health

gratitude

ray brantley

I got married seven months ago. (Give or take a couple of days, but what is a couple of days in pandemic time anyway?)

“if your man won’t do your wedding makeup for you, is he even worth marrying?” and other extremely queer takes by me. A thousand thanks to Maxwell Giffen for the beautiful photographs.

Prior to the lockdown I made the seemingly inconsequential decision to make my computer desktop background a randomized slideshow of our wedding photos. In retrospect I think I did this a little before Halloween in anticipation of a small family get-together, and figured it would be a nice surprise for my in-laws, who hadn’t seen the polished versions of the photos yet. The slideshow had the desired effect, of course, and everyone enjoyed gushing over the pictures while chatting about how much fun both the ceremony and the reception had been.

(Pro-tip to anyone out there planning a wedding in the somewhat near future: go small. Go to the courthouse. Wear comfortable shoes. You will be handsome/beautiful regardless, and complete strangers will cheer for you. That is a magical experience.)

Anyway, this post isn’t really about my wedding, or my wedding photos. It’s about how now in this time of social and physical distancing, one completely absent-minded decision I made in preparation for a holiday party last October now reminds me daily, hourly, every time I minimize an application or lock my laptop screen, that I am loved by so many people. The people in those photos crossed continents and international borders and, in one instance, even the Atlantic Ocean, out of love for us, for me.

And that love has nourished the shit out me these last three months while I’ve struggled to claw my way up and out of the black pit of despair known as Depression(™).

It’s an ongoing struggle, for the record, and not one that I anticipate definitively ‘defeating’. But I’m going to make time to talk more candidly about my experiences here because the instinct to play one’s cards so closely to one’s chest when depressed is precisely the opposite of what one needs to do to heal.

daily living, photography

a strange and bittersweet time.

ray brantley

I am an American living abroad in Canada. My absence over the past few weeks has been due in no small part to emotional stress brought on by many life changes: turning thirty, the recent general election back home, and of course preparation for NaNoWriMo, which is well underway now.

Did I mention that, in the midst of all this, my partner and I signed a lease on a lovely midtown Toronto apartment together? That happened, too. And, of course, the demands of my challenging day job continue to occupy me.

uoft_autumn_2016
The view down the street where I work. Autumn is lovely in Ontario. (November, 2016.)

So that’s my life at the moment:  the very good, the very bad, and the very beautiful. And a daily wordcount deadline. This NaNoWriMo, I’m so far sitting at 10,094 words. Not too shabby, if I don’t say so myself.

And as always, there’s good stuff on the radio.

Listening to:

  • Golden Fool: Book 2 of the Tawny Man trilogy, by Robin Hobb. Narrated by James Langton.
  • “Russian Folklore: I Pity the Fool,” Ep 49 of the Myths and Legends Podcast.
daily living

reminiscing.

ray brantley

I don’t miss much about the two gruelling years I spent as a graduate student. However…

fromrobartslibrary
St. George Street, Toronto, October 2015.
fromrobartslibrary2
St. George Street and the CN Tower, Toronto, October 2015.

…I do sometimes miss that view.

Listening to: