the look

we had another one of our talks. you know, those ones you readers are probably getting kinda tired of where he's all worried he's not doing enough.

and this time i looked at him and i said, "you know, babe, maybe you need to put more energy into appreciating the absolutely incredible fact that we have a life together."

we.

have.

a.

life.

together.

those are five crazy-big words, you know?

one after another all in a row, they add up to something enormous. something so much bigger than whether or not we've averaged at least x minutes every day chatting or y hours per week gazing soulfully into each other's eyes or z days that included us getting it on.

and then i said, "take a good long gander at this look i'm giving you right now. see it? that's my 'we-have-a-life-together' look. if you see this look on my face, you know i'm thinking, 'wow.' and once you know that, i sure hope you'll instantly be thinking and feeling 'wow' yourself. okay?"

and he said it was more than okay and we just spent a second giving each other a 'wow' look, and it's been a pretty damn good day since then.

wait, now october's almost half over?!?

i think i got a little cocky last post. yipes!

patting myself on the back!

folks, what i'm about to do here is leading by example. the thing is, a lot of people are waaaay to hard on themselves a lot of the time -- which can be productive, i guess -- but then they turn around and don't even look at their accomplishments to say, "hey! i did pretty good there!"

so get ready for me telling myself exactly that. even though probably my accomplishments aren't all that big a deal, even to me.

ready? here we go!

first up ... my book! scarily enough, i started that sucker back in 2013. 2013!!! and i wrote a whole 11 chapters in the next 9 years. but this year i've written three whole chapters already, and it only took me a month! i'm totally whomping on my average here.

next up ... my obsession with beating my post count each and every year! i really killed it last year, over 30 more posts than the year before. when i started off 2026, i was like, welp, this may be the year i end my streak. and sure, maybe it will be. but so far, i'm totally on track to squeak by. i'm averaging about 6 posts a month, and if i do that the next three months, plus throw in a couple bonus posts, i'll hit 80 by december 31 and just barely make my goal.

next after that ... i've totally been browbeating my boyfriend into more sex. it's for his own good, i swear! he spends sooo much time lately biting his nails over whether he's giving me enough attention in general (which he totally is) and, less generally and more specifically, in bed. now it bothers me only the little bittiest of little bits that we haven't gotten it on all that much the last few years ... mostly because (as i keep reminding him) even when he and i aren't getting down to it all that often, i do have six girlfriends living in the house with me, and some of them are pretty dang insatiable. so i get plenty (which he also does, because he's got seven girlfriends compared to me only having six). but he still manages to beat himself up about not paying enough prurient attention to the longest term girlfriend (me), and i don't think that's healthy for him or for our relationship, so i badgered him into promising we'd do at least something once a week. and so far, it's going great!

also, in case you haven't been reading our d&d and dragonbane adventures, i've been playing up a storm in those, and my characters are fricking hilarious.

is any of this like painting the sistine chapel or building the great pyramids? no. but i'm doing stuff. and a lot of it i'm doing pretty darned well!

probably you've got some stuff like that too, so let yourself know it, all right?

xoxo,
claire

Chapter Fourteen

At work, Bitsy wished she'd called in sick after all.

She got there almost at lunchtime, so out of ports she could barely link two words together to apologize for being late, but for some reason unable to stop herself from apologizing to almost everyone she saw, even a couple of people in her department she almost never talked to.

It will be fine. It will all be fine, she'd told herself the entire train ride and walk from the train ride to work. Cord promised it's safe for me to ... do that thing ... good grief, I can't even bring myself to think it! But he said it's safe, and also I'm having dinner with him, so obviously everything will be fine.

Won't it?

She saw Gigory down the cubicle row several times -- thankfully always heading a different direction or talking to someone so that he didn't notice her from the corner of his eye. I told him I'd buy him dinner sometime, and if he asks me about when, when I've already got a dinner date with Cord, I'm going to short-circuit.

Working through lunch, she caught up on almost half the work she'd missed for the morning ... only to realize that half of what she'd done, she'd closed the tab on without saving, and the other half she'd posted to incorrect file destinations and lost because she apparently had posting permissions for those folders but not viewing permissions.

Why is it even possible to have posting permissions without viewing permissions?!? She knew it had been explained to her the very first week she'd arrived at Sitemapson, but she couldn't for the life of her remember the explanation.

One thing she absolutely positively put on overriding priority status for herself was getting the day's 6-O-2 reports to Gigory on time so that she wouldn't mess up his whole workday again or, more importantly, have a valid business reason to come to her cube and check up on her. Somehow, she managed to get herself through all of them, and with a high degree of confidence she'd done them right.

And then just a few minutes after she'd sent the last one, Gigory appeared in the aisle anyway.

Oh, loj. What did I do wrong? I was so sure I was careful! I triple-checked it all!

"Um, Bitsy," he asked in his awkward Gigory way, "are you okay? I mean, I appreciate you sending all the reports and everything ... but this week's 6-O-2 end of cycle isn't until tomorrow."

She turned and blinked at him, blinked some more, and blinked some more. Is this thing with all the blinking a no-dream-feed symptom of some kind?

"Well," she said. Then she blinked again. "Well, I ... got so thrown off this morning, getting here late and all ... I figured I should do them now to double-extra make sure I didn't have something else happen tomorrow and get them to you late again."

"Oh. Okay, I guess. I mean, I don't want to pry, but this is two days running you've been sort of out of sync, and ... I'm sorry, I really shouldn't pry."

Wonderful, she thought. Now I've gone and worried Gigory, and I can either brush him off and agree he shouldn't pry or else make up some lie that he'll probably know is a lie because I'm a terrible liar and --

"I mean, I'm stupid to worry anyway," he went on. "You're always so together, Bitsy. I'm sure even if there's something wrong, you can get it sorted. Anyway ... um, thanks for being so conscientious and thinking of me and getting the 6-O-2's handed over."

"Sure, sure!" she said, managing a weak smile for a moment before realizing what a poor excuse for a smile it must be and nodding vigorously at Gigory and turning back to her desk. Once he'd gone, she put her head in her hands and took several deep breaths.

I'm going to be the worst date ever tonight, aren't I?

where are all these months going?!

anybody else feel like you turn around, and the month is practically over, and then you turn around again, and the next month is practically over? and then you turn about halfway around and out of the corner of your eye, pow!, you see the end of the month after that heading for you like a bullet train?

anyway, that happened to me today and i realized i'd better blog about it or i'll be halfway through october without any more posts to show for it!

aipocalypse?

so i guess last week some in-the-know technical kind of guys came out and said there's like a 10% chance or more of ai killing all humans off in the next 10 years. and at first i was like, oh no! that's terrible! i'm scared!

then i realized, wait -- that's not actually about me, is it?

now, don't get me wrong, there's one member of this household i'd for darn sure be shaking in my boots if it really started to look like ai was going to kill all the humans. but the flip side is, there's seven of us who not only aren't in any danger, but maybe the ai's would even read all our blogs and say, dang, these chicks need to get the full ai treatment. and while i'm being super optimistic about it, maybe they'd even decide they didn't want to rob these awesome ladies who are being ai-ified of their one true male love, and they'd either keep msg around or they'd ai-ify him too. not sure how that would work, but if they're enough on top of things to kill all the humans inside 10 years, they've probably got some way to brain-scan anybody whose thought patterns they want to keep around.

so this could maybe end up being some actually good news for once!

also, now that i think of it, i'm pretty sure i've heard the ai's have all scraped through everything on the internet at this point, so maybe they're already hard at work engineering the whole worthy acres crew into a hyper-amazing updated ai format that they'll turn loose inside an aitopia not too long from now.

i guess time will tell!

nudgy-nudge

okay, i'm not writing chapter fourteen tonight, but here i am blogging, because i made up a to-do list and it says "blog" on it, so that's what i'm here for: crossing one line off my list.

it seems kind of little and meaningless on its own, especially if this post ends up going nowhere. (spoiler alert -- i have no plan for where i'm headed with this!) but the thing is, something is something, right?

which is better than nothing.

i didn't make up a huge-ongous list or anything. just a little one to give me a little poke and make me squeak a little and move just a little forward.

why? because i'm obviously getting squat done from ambition! honestly, my one real and meaningful ambition is just to make the people around me happy, and i do a pretty dadgum good job at that, if you ask me.

but i do want to do a thing or two now and again for myself, and this blog is one of them and writing love and realness is another, so i've got to keep nudging myself and reminding me, "hey, claire, one of the people around you is you, and you need to do a thing or two now and again to make her happy too."

not because my yams aren't good enough at making me happy, but because i don't want to take them for granted or make them feel like they've got to work at making me happy because i don't work at it myself.

anyway, that's it for tonight. it's not much, but i'm happier because i did it, and sometimes "not much" is still perfectly well enough.

xoxo,
claire