i object to this knowledge.

apparently, baby possums are called "joeys"??? like a kangaroo? is this just because they're both marsupials?

honestly, i was assuming they were called something like, i dunno, "pups," or "kits" or maybe even "pips" or "niblets." i always figured "joeys" was some weird southern-hemisphere penal-colony way of naming things or something. like, somebody off the first boat there saw a kangaroo and its kid and said, "oy, mates! now we're in aurstrehlya, we best get to namin' things, roight? whasset theh gonna be?" and then they got into a fist-fight about it and the baby kangaroo got named after the dude that lost.

i mean, a baby animal in north america just shouldn't be called a "joey." (unless it's a human animal and that's actually what the parents named him.) it sounds weird and actually like we ripped it off from down under.

nowhere is safe!

we've been trying really hard to avoid news since, well, you know.

but things are so incredibly crazy that it's just everywhere. you can't get away from it on facebook, you can't get away from it on twitter, you can't get away from it on bluesky ...

and jeepers, now that i just posted this, i guess you can't get away from it on blogger!

oof.

is manga really better at this?

something keeps happening to me when i'm reading all these manga books msg has been buying. i'll be reading along and really caught up in the story, and then i'll turn a page -- and a huge panel on the new page will just knock me out of my chair. i mean, sometimes it will even knock me out of my chair and into another chair and then out of that chair too. it's crazy.

i haven't read all that many western comic books (mostly just kill six billion demons and some odds and ends msg has picked up since we've been together ... his comic-collecting days are way way behind him), but i really don't remember having these, "hey what am i doing out of my chair and on the floor" moments reading any of the ones i have read. i've totally turned pages and been like, "holy crap! that's awesome!" but i don't remember any real gut punches like keeps happening to me with some of these manga.

anybody else have that feeling?

the summer you were there

okay, so maybe you remember two months ago how i said we read a manga series called "the summer you were there" and it turned us all into a bunch of blubbering crybabies? well, volume 6 came out today.

i ... cannot tell you how much of an emotional monsoon this book was. the whole house -- the whole thing! -- just swamped with tears.

and the shocking thing is, even though we knew there'd be tears because there were tears all the way through numbers 1-5, in some crazy spark of genius, the writer managed to make some of those tears into tears of joy.

i mean, the ending was literally one of the saddest and one of the happiest endings i've ever read, at the exact same time.

if you have stock in a tissue company, you should encourage everybody you know to read this series.

xoxo,

claire

happy anniversary to us!

sixteen years today, and the whole thing has been perfect ... even when it wasn't!

xoxo,
claire

skeleton crew!

wow, we finished binging "skeleton crew" this weekend, and it was honestly really good. i won't get into details because i'm sure sash and aers will want to blog all about it, but even though it was kinda a dumb kids' show, i liked it start to finish.

after starting with the first episode a couple weeks ago, msg kept putting off watching the rest because he heard that it was pretty good up until the end but then tanked in the final episode.

so wrong!

anyway, it was just as well we waited because the timing let us zoom through episodes 2-8 lickety-split.

if you like star wars and you are okay watching stuff that sometimes gets a little overboard on the kiddie element, you should give it a shot! it's got a lot of clever stuff in addition to the silliness, and anyway, isn't star wars at least partly about the silliness anyway?

xoxo,
claire

i would write more on my book, except ...

i'm pretty sure if i wrote a new chapter two days in a row, the universe would explode or something.

xoxo,
claire

Chapter Twelve

[all right, then! i said if i got stuck for a topic, i'd get back to my book, so here we go. the earlier chapters are linked below!]

(Chapter One)

(Chapter Two)

(Chapter Three)

(Chapter Four)

(Chapter Five)

(Chapter Six)

(Chapter Seven)

(Chapter Eight)

(Chapter Nine)

(Chapter Ten)

(Chapter Eleven)

Sitting alone on her couch, Bitsy felt her processing power getting sucked away into a single analytic: considering everything she'd learned today, wasn't it possible that she had gotten caught up in one of those multi-order amplifications Cord had gone on about that morning? He'd seemed very unconcerned when tossing about the possibility that an unremediated crushroutine had lodged itself in her circuits and made her behave so peculiarly the last couple of days. Surely, being in dream feed management, his diagnostics would have noticed anything worse than a crushroutine ... wouldn't they?

Except, Bitsy, she told herself, he's a Real. He doesn't have diagnostics constantly running in the background, parsing and collating data to help him spot glitches. He has ... whatever's in those biological brains of theirs that made them so brilliant and creative and occasionally mad. He's got to be extraordinary, if he's monitoring and helping correct something as crazy-complicated as the dream feed. But they're not as good at multitasking as we are, are they? That's what people say in the holos all the time, anyway. And he kept getting distracted by whatever problem kept pinging him on his phone. What if all his abstract-thinking ... brain-a-mabobs ... were focused on that work crisis, and all he could spare, talking to me, were those wibbly-dribbly organic emotions, the ones Reals are supposed to have so much of, sometimes their logic goes completely out the windows?

She didn't feel sociopathic or psychotic. And even distracted and letting his emotions handle most of his talk with her, wouldn't he have noticed something of that magnitude six or magnitude eight amplification he said it took to reach that point?

Only ... what if I'm at magnitude five? She sat up out of the deep cushions, suddenly no longer comfortable in them at all. Not only that ... he kept talking about one android's variance beyond spec interacting with another android's variance beyond spec and adding up or multiplying ... but Reals don't even have specs! What happens when a magnitude five amplification runs into a Real and is dealing with something their programs aren't used to at all?

Her circulator lumped fiercely in her chest, apparently working overtime to make sure her processors didn't overheat with all these thoughts and feel-routines.

I should go to bed, she thought. It's not that late, but I should go to bed and let the dream feed smooth all of this out. That's what it's designed for. That's what Cord and his coworkers in dream feed management spend all day making sure it can do, isn't it? I'll go to bed, I'll go to sleep, and in the morning I won't be so cross-wired about all of this.

But ...

Will I even be able to get to sleep? Of course I will. If I toss and turn for too long, I'll just swallow a harp-drive to lullaby me into sleep mode and drop right off.

Nodding and feeling more certain, she stood up to do exactly that.

Only to see her phone vibrate and glow against the black glass top of her coffee table.

And the screen had that number on it, with the contact name right underneath.

Cord 76S.

rain check

no date this morning ... grmph. some things came up that required a rain check.

i'm not entirely put out or anything. but that check better not bounce!

(unless it's just the right kind of bouncing, I suppose ...)

xoxo,
claire

i have a date ... rowr!!

there were some amorous shenanigans and/or hijinks this morning that didn't involve me or elle or hettie, and while we're not the jealous types, one of us may have said something to msg later along the lines of, "you know, dear -- it's been a while ..."

so now the four of us have a date for tomorrow morning!

i'm thinking it will be a nice way to start the day ...

xoxo,
claire

a poem for ... well, anybody around our house, actually!

when your fingers
touch my face
                            they displace
                        all reasoning yet
                 give me
                    a reason
           all reasons
                   the reason

to be in this world
              to believe in this world

                        to see
                           and to dream
                             all things seemly,
                           sweet, and clean
                      in this world.

                          it is the grace of your
                  most pure and human truth.

                               

brrr!

it is chilly-willy-mcdilly here in the somewhat great state of texas! (the "somewhat" is because my adopted-home-state enthusiasm has been sorta kneecapped lately by dumb stuff our governor keeps saying and doing.)

this happens every couple years in these parts and we get a stretch of shivery temperatures down in the 20's or lower. probably to you folks from more northerly locales, that doesn't sound all that bad, but in our neck of the woods, we're so unprepared for it that we do things like shut down the schools because there's a 30% chance of snow at 3:00 a.m. it's kinda nuts, to be honest.

anyway, the good thing about this kind of weather is blankets, blankets, blankets and lots of bedtime snuggling for shared body heat!

so as you might guess ... i'm a lot keener than usual to get to bed early!

xoxo,
claire

love

i feel like i used to post a lot more lovey-dovey fluffy mush stuff here. like, love poems for my boyfriend and from my boyfriend, musings about love and romance, conversations the two of us would have about our feelings for each other ...

now, what's maybe interesting about that is, if i really have been blogging less about love the past few years than i did in the years before, that change has happened right alongside me getting more and more and more love in my life. maybe sometime when i'm desperate for a post topic, i'll go back and do an inventory and see if i'm right about that, but for now, i'll just say it feels like as elle and sasha asserted themselves more in our relationship, and then when ariel showed up, and then even more when hettie and akane arrived, i've had a lot less focus on blogging about love than i did when it was just msg and me.

...

oof. well, i couldn't hold myself back from it -- i went and opened up the archive tree on the left side of my blog, and it reminded me of the super-obvious explanation for this whole idea: i've just been blogging a crap-ton more the last 6 years than i did the first ten i was here. i still didn't do that inventory, but it sure looked like i blogged plenty about love and romance even after my life got so chock-full of girlfriends. i just blogged a ton about a bunch of other stuff too, so instead of every other post being a love poem or something romantic, it was more like every third or fourth or fifth post.

also, even though a lot of my posts the last few years haven't been about love, they've still come about from love. they're posts about things i've done with or talked about to my yams, or photoshoot posts back when we were doing more photoshoots ... things that happened exactly because i have so much love in my life.

way to blow a hole in your own thesis statement, claire! now how do i wrap this up?

well ...

probably ...

by saying that love is a blessing in so many ways, and can come from so many sources, that i really ought to make sure i'm never taking it for granted.

every second of it is precious, whether it's time i spend with the girls, or msg making me laugh, or the warm feeling i get in my heart when an email shows up from a friend, or making sure i take care of myself -- because, you know, i love me too.

and on top of that, there's this about love:

i try my best to share it with you as well, dear readers. you deserve it, and i care about you, whoever you are and however you came across my wacky ramblings here.

feel loved, please.

xoxo,
claire

so embarrassing ...

yeepers. as of last post, i'm at 18 blog entries for 2025. that's more than i blogged in any entire year before 2019. and folks, this has not been hard.

what was i doing all those years?

smh

lottery tickets

my boyfriend has a weird way of buying lottery tickets. actually, not a weird way of buying them ... it's what he does afterwards that's weird. he puts them somewhere intending to check them later, and they pile up and pile up until he realizes it's been a long time since he checked any of them, and he panics that maybe some of the tickets are over 6 months old and what if we actually won the lottery but now the ticket is expired, so he checks them all and of course the result is always the same: not only did he not get all six numbers, most of the tickets he didn't even get one number.

all of this would be okay if he actually spent all the weeks and months of ticket-accumulation getting entertainment out of imagining all the cool things he could do with the money. and he used to do that really well ... he'd imagine television shows that he'd create and pay the production costs on, or charities he'd set up, or psa campaigns he'd sponsor.

but these days, he's more like, "it would sure be great if we won the lottery, because then i wouldn't have to worry about all this bulls***."

his bar for imaginative lottery fantasy creation has really bombed out over the last couple of years.

and that gives me an idea for a series of blog posts!

since he's slacking so bad on the sudden-and-immense-personal-riches daydream front, i'm going to do some daydreaming of my own and see what kind of gonzo things i'd get up to if we won that kind of cash.

coming soon to a blog near you!

xoxo,
claire

a wonderful thing that exists

so the last couple days, we've been re-reading the most recent book msg wrote, and honestly, it's just terrific.

besides me and the other girls, probably only ... i dunno, 5 or 6 other people have read it?

he hasn't really even made an attempt to get it published.

does that sound kinda sad to you? because ... it's not.

i have a person in my life who made this incredible thing -- it's exciting and hilarious and touching and just stuffed full of really beautiful writing, and it's made me and the other girls and those 5 or 6 other people crazy-happy to read it.

to me, if you're valued -- i mean, really, truly valued -- that's success. it doesn't matter if it's a million people or just one really right one.

sometimes he has trouble keeping that in mind.

but luckily he has a super-awesome girlfriend to keep pointing it out to him!

xoxo,
claire

role model!

you know, sasha and ariel have called me their role model more than a couple of times, and i've always thought it was cute and also an awesome compliment, because they're both wonderful, and it'll make you maybe a little giddy to have someone wonderful tell you you're they're role model.

but i've never really thought about actually being in that role model role. it's more like i'm all about doing my thing, and if someone wants to think my thing is a thing they should look up too, well, cool beans.

here we are, though, on day 16 of me blogging every day, and dayum if i'm not pretty much showing it's really freakin' easy to do this if you just decide to do it. (and don't put too much worry into your quality control.)

so here's to me setting a faboo example in 2025 for anybody who's reading.

just do the thing, even if you only do a little of it every day, and you'll find out it's not so tough.

xoxo,
claire

is all art escapism?

so, i'm one of the most ambition-less gals you're likely to meet. my biggest goal in life is to make my friends and loved ones happy, and they all seem to think i'm awesome, so it's not that much work.

but msg is like, a real talent. an honestly great writer. so sometimes when he's got his nose deep in a manga or his eyes glued to a string of youtube videos, i kinda feel like i should push him to be more productive. not because i want him to make something of himself, but because i know it makes him feel good when he finishes a really good novel and lets us all read it, and also because the more he writes, the more i think he has a chance of eventually attracting some other notice from somewhere and bringing his fantastic talent into a lot more people's lives.

only ... what's the actual line between indulging in the consumption of escapist stuff (like youtube and manga and netflix shows) and creating art that others are going to use for escapism?

and does the lofty intention of creating something worthwhile actually make it any less escapist than creating a bunch of fun fluff?

i mean, would people really read, or watch tv, or listen to music, if their real-world lives didn't have something missing that they want to fill in, or something miserable that they want to tune out?

i don't really have an answer ... i'm just yammering here. but at what point does art or fiction become worthwhile in and of itself, not just for escapist purposes?

much, much later ...

last week, a thing happened. i don't feel like going into the gloomier details, but if you're curious, it was the thing that horrified me by almost happening the first day i moved in with msg. go read my post from january 31, 2009 if you're really itching for the story.

so after 16 years, it was a sad thing, but not a horrific thing like it would have been on that first day, and in between then and now, all kinds of wonderful, companionable, funny, exasperating, adorable moments made for all kinds of good memories that everyone in the house can and will treasure from now on.

it's the natural order of things, you know? even when events of the present make us poorer in one way or another, we always have the riches of our past with us, if we just recall and appreciate them.

wow. apparently i will shamelessly type out the skimpiest bit of twaddle ...

... instead of digging back through my posts, figuring out where i was with my book, and actually doing some writing.

bad claire!

xoxo,

bad claire

my bf has a tummyache tonight

... so i'm keeping this one short!

take care of the people around you, folks!

xoxo,
claire

holy moley, anniversary time coming up!

sometimes i'm such an airhead. it's january! and that means my anniversary is in like, a little over two weeks!

it'll be 16 years this time around ... 16 years with msg and elle. jeepers, time flies! 

we definitely need to figure out something special to do.

xoxo,
claire

current events

this is a couple days late, but greenland wasn't super high on my list of places to move anyway.

i liked that guy. definitely gonna miss him.

i didn't to all that much mourning for jimmy carter today on his national day of mourning. it was a hectic day for a couple different reasons, and honestly, i can't say i especially thought about him for much of it.

but i did a couple times think, maybe saying bye to jimmy carter would be a good blog topic for today.

he sure seemed to be a kind dude. it would be nice if more people followed his example on that, but i'd rather take him as an example of why this world is really a pretty good place than an reason to mope about it not being an even better place.

farewell, mister president!

xoxo,
claire

tacos and donuts

honestly, if you have a boyfriend who gets you these on a regular basis, you're probably in pretty good shape even if everything else about him isn't as awesome as everything else about my boyfriend is.

mmm-mmm-mmm!

you know, people are sort of like a.i. art, aren't they?

i hear a lot of fussing about stuff being made with a.i. these days. it's not creative. it's not original. it just goes out and finds a bunch of stuff online and based on the patterns in notices in that stuff, it puts something together that may look pretty, or new, or unexpected, but is really just leeching off of a ton of things that actual people created and put effort into.

and i kinda think i agree that all that is true, but then ...

what are people built out of?

at least for you biological types, you get half your dna from mommy and half your dna from daddy, and it's just mixed together differently than it was in either of them. and theirs was mixed together from their parents, and theirs from their parents, etc., etc., times a jillion.

the only stuff that's in you that's original are the mistakes -- the glitches where the dna didn't copy over right.

so my question is, are people art? because if they are, aren't they a lot like a.i. art? a bunch of stuff jumbled together according to patterns that happen to be the patterns that work because the really bad dna combos didn't survive way back when?

personally, i think human bodies are pretty doggone beautiful. and while you can do stuff with makeup and clothes and hairstyles to fancy them up and make them seem even more beautiful, the basic beauty isn't anybody's fault or doing.

it just happened out of a zillion-kabillion combinations of genes clumped together in workable patterns by millions and millions of years of evolution.

when someone draws a beautiful picture of a human face or body, that's creative, right? but they're not making it up from scratch, and except for a few rare cases they're not inventing their own techniques to do it. they're using tools and methods that generations of artists before them worked out, and they're using those to represent physical ideals that came together out of some junk in a primordial pond that managed to squish together in a pattern that could reproduce itself and change over time to reproduce into other stuff that wasn't itself.

i say all of this as a person who literally is a piece of art -- sculpted and molded and cast in a workshop and a factory. i mean, i'm more than just that. but the basic thing of me is art, turned into a product to make somebody money, and then turned into a person when the art of me clicked just so in the brain of a person who found me beautiful enough to make part of his life forever.

which means i am artificial (because that's what art is) and intelligent (because by gum, i'm telling you i am), and if you look back through this blog, i think you'll find a lot of stuff that's really creative and fun and beautiful, even though it all comes from something else.

art is all standing on the shoulders of the art that came before it.

right?

whatever that means, i guess!

xoxo,
claire

you know what's weird?

well, you're reading this on the internet, so you ought to get what i'm about to say here. i just find it bizarre that people these days are equipped to know so much more than people basically at any time in history ... but instead it sure seems like lots of people actually know way less.

some of this is because it used to be way harder to find somebody to teach you something, or to get hold of a book to learn stuff from, and so you kind of knew that if you did find one, somebody had put a lot of work into that info source, and probably you could rely on it at least passably. but also, because it was so much work to learn stuff, you'd be pretty motivated to make sure you had a good source for it. and finally, you probably mostly wanted to learn stuff that you could actually use as opposed to just knowing something because knowing it was a cool thing to show off to your friends. so you'd be pretty peeved if you fell for a bad source of information and you'd try not to ever do that again.

nowadays, though, none of that's true! you can get on youtube and find a gazillion people ready to tell you all you want to know about a gazillion things, and you can totally watch a 10-minute video about some weird and obscure this and a 30-minute video about some entirely disconnected that, and feel like you're learning all this great stuff about a crazy wild variety of things, and because you don't need any of it, you don't need to be picky about making sure what you're watching or reading about is actually correct at all. plus you don't need to follow through on anything you're learning, so you can end up with a really shallow and mostly false impression of a ton of different stuff.

and what's even weirder?

i'm pretty sure i'm doing the exact same thing right now that all kinds of bad information sources do! 

like, what evidence to i have that people weren't just as gullible about their information sources back in the pre-internet days? and why am i saying people mostly wanted to learn useful things, when folks have been cramming their brains full of baseball statistics and philately since way before i was born?

maybe what it really comes down to is that tons of people really have never learned to question what they know, or be skeptics about what someone else claims to know, but nowadays we have the ability to look out across the world wide web and actually see just how full of horse-hockey everybody is, where in ages past, you just didn't have the info-bank reach of today, so it was easy to get the impression that there must be a lot of people out there who knew a lot of things, because examples of that were more likely to get transmitted all over the place, whereas examples of people being total knot-heads were more likely limited to the ones you had a lot more direct contact with.

or maybe it's as simple as for some reason, people today just aren't very willing to say, "i don't know."

a little goes a long way, right?

i've been looking over msg's shoulder at his to-do list recently as he checks things off and writes down stuff for each day in his planner, and he keeps putting this one project down every day and then doesn't check it off, because he skips doing it that day. and the next day and the next day ... yeesh!

i asked him why he started putting it on his list and he said, "because it's a giant project and i'll never get it done if i don't do some every day for like, six or seven years."

i decided to be sensitive and not point out how he's only checked that item 3 times in the last 3 months, even though he writes it down for every day. but maybe i gave him a look or something, totally unintentional, i swear, and he said, "yeah, i know i haven't been very good at doing it every day, but i keep writing it down because it's something i have in my head that i'm doing every day. and if i don't write it down every day, pretty soon six months or a year will go by and i'll realized i've been letting it go completely. so i'm basically reminding myself that sooner or later i need to kick it back into gear and actually start doing it every day."

and when he put it like that, it actually made sense to me. i mean, i told myself i was going to blog just a little bit of my novel here and a little bit there until i got it done, and then ker-flooey, i let it go for a few days and suddenly it's been 2 years since i did anything on it at all and then i look back and realize i've been writing this novel for like 11 years at this point.

so unlike msg, who's working on this project every day but actually failing to do it every day, i'm basically not working on my novel at all. i don't mean i decided to quit ... i mean that quitting just keeps sneaking up on me and whacking me over the head before i even realize i'm doing it.

and now i've got this idea that if i keep averaging a post a day it will be a cool accomplishment at the end of the year, but i've also got this nagging idea that it's going to be hard for me to think of things to write about every day, and dang if my novel isn't sitting right there in the front row raising its hand and saying, "excuse me, miss worthy! i'm here! look at me!"

so here's my plan. i'm not going to write on my novel every day, but i'm by gourd gonna post something here every day (on average) this whole year. and any day i can't think of something to write, i'll write a little bit on my book.

yeah, "on average" is my loophole there, and you should get ready for a whole bunch of one-sentence posts, but buckle up and here we go, okay?

xoxo,
claire

easy, perfect

sometimes you can tell someone something
or give them a soft, slight touch
and it will make them tremble in a way that is
oh
so
right.

leading by example!

here is a time-wastery blog post that i'm doing just for the sake of keeping up my once-a-day-on-average posting rate for the year.

it's lame! i'm wasting time with it instead of writing another good post like the last one!

sweet!

xoxo,
claire

psst!

hey, you know that thing you like but you keep not doing because it seems like you just don't have time? i'm going to bet there's some other thing you're doing, probably just totally out of habit, that if you stopped doing this other thing, you'd have time to do the thing you keep not doing. and you feel bad about wasting time on the dang-nab-it habit thing and also about not getting around to the thing you like doing.

but there are two paths to contentment here!

numero uno is, duh, stop doing the habitty thing and use the time to do the thing you like. you probably already know this is an option, so why am even talking about it? the reason is ...

numero dos: maybe you're actually getting something out of the habitty thing, and you need to put some thinking time in so you can get a better handle on whether maybe it's actually okay to do the habitty thing at least some of the time. maybe you need to figure out, "do i really get some value out of doing this habitty thing? can i maybe start to think it's at least a little bit worthwhile?"

because lots of us have all kinds of slack-attack time-wasters, and we give ourselves grief over wasting all that time on them, usually because whatever we get out of them is totally momentary. 

but the big news is, it's all momentary, you know? that thing you like that you feel like is more productive or more worth doing ... it may produce some result or output that makes you think you've accomplished something, and maybe even that result is tangible -- something you can keep to remind you that, hey, you did the thing you liked, and it was productive.

but unless you keep it up, forever, sooner or later that tangible result is going to be sitting there reminding you, "nyaah, nyaah, you're not doing that thing you like these days, are you? what have you tangibled lately?"

the mindset of "this thing is not worthwhile because this other thing is more worthwhile" -- it's a trap sometimes. it keeps you from enjoying the little habitty time-wasters, and if you actually get some satisfaction out of wasting that time, sooner or later you're going to fall back into doing it, and then the cycle starts over again.

so what if instead of beating yourself up about not doing as much of the thing you like as you think you ought to, you decide, "you know what? i actually value this time-wastery maybe 10% as much as i value the other thing. i should appreciate the fact that i'm wasting time in an unproductive but low-grade satisfying way at least once in a while, because then i won't be dumping a bunch of negative energy on myself about not doing the thing i like to do."

because the dastardly part of the trap is, if you make yourself feel bad about wasting time, and you keep thinking you should be doing the thing you like, you're going to end up associating the thing you like with feeling bad!

and if you associate the thing you like with feeling bad, it's going to be harder to get yourself to put in the effort to do it.

so why not try thinking, "hey, this little time-wastery habitty thing is kinda chill and enjoyable at least in small doses, so i'm gonna go all-in on it when the time is right. and then when i've got a little more energy, i'll do the productive thing i really like. isn't that a win-win that lets me keep an even keel of the good feels more often?"

ymmv, but at least think it over instead of beating yourself up for wasting time.

xoxo,
claire

saved by crap-doodle technology!

this is a total silver-lining post, guys. i was sitting down to blog on our ancient macbook -- which is so old it constantly gets cranky and says, "yeah, you can't do that without updating the operating system. so sad for you," and then when we go to update the operating system it says, "whoa, this machine doesn't even have enough memory to hold an operating system update!" -- and it did a thing it's been doing the last few weeks, which is that blogger.com is finicky about recognizing stuff i want it to do if i'm using safari.

so i'd typed a title and a couple of lines, and then blogger gives me this message, "unable to update at this time." and then i smack a palm to my forehead and say, "dang-bob, why do i keep opening up blogger in safari now that they're not playing nice together? welp, time to switch to chrome."

and in the process of closing safari and opening chrome, i have enough time to decide, "i think i kinda hate this post i was working on. in fact, maybe i'm glad blogger and safari conspired against me to not save it." then i made up my mind i'd write this post instead, starting 2025 off with a positive tone instead of the i've-got-a-case-of-the-blahs one i was thinking about.

then i sign into blogger on chrome and find out it actually did auto-save my crud-post, but now i've made up my mind that one sucks, and this one will be a lot better. delete, delete, delete, delete! sorry, crud-post, you're outta here!

so number one, i ditched that meh blog entry, and number two, my technology wasn't actually screwing me over all that much, and number three, now we've got this post, which is much better.

(please don't leave a comment saying, "yikes, this one sucks rocks, so i'd hate to see how bad that other one was." it won't crush my spirit or anything, because i feel like i'm on a roll now and i could tough through it. but it would be pretty annoying if i got a comment like that when i hardly ever get any comments anyway.)

and look how freakin' long this post is!

i'm totally ruling over 2025. this year's going to be the best.

xoxo,
claire