Tuesday, I've got nothin' to offer you.

Monday, Captain Expensive the chinchilla, aka Jonesy, was supposed to go to the vet for her very late (5 months late) liver values re-check. It was at 5 p.m., so I slept right through it.

This is her in all her one-eared, pissed at the world, love of my post-poodle life, glory. 

She has her own chinchilla, an NWI-bred extreme mosaic named Miranda, and she stole my Christmas baby, Blue, the minute we walked in the door from Connecticut with her. 

As soon as I figure out what to do with those domains I bought, expect to see installments of my first comic (I use that term loosely) about her, Captain Expensive Goes to the Vet.


In case I didn't mention it before, I excel at being an unemployed slacker. Even 23-year old me wasn't this good at it, and she is generally my watermark for all things lost up until the current 40-year old me was told in January that my job of seven years of fantastic benefits and intermittent dead-end misery was no longer a job. Libraries don't get much money these days, sadly not even private academic ones from their own people, and if someone had to go, better me than anyone who had actually bothered getting an MLS (yes, Library Science is a Master's degree), or even worse, my near-70 daytime counterpart who devoted her high-strung life to this last library of mine. I do miss the college kids who worked for me, but they had a tendency to graduate and leave me behind, anyway.

Lovers of words, I have an important piece of advice for you: remain a library patron. Never believe that a life spent reading in libraries means that you should leap to the other side of the counter. At first, you'll save an insane amount of money checking out instead of buying books, but after a while, you'll forget that there's any magic or wisdom at all inside them. It isn't at all like getting the employee discount at your favorite store.

Maybe public libraries are different.

Now, when I say I excel at being unemployed, I don't mean I excel at being idle. In fact, I suck at it. My binge-watching habit, while interfering with the amount of music necessary for life that I listen to, allows me to knit an accessory or two a day, sell a few of them, look for impossible-to-find jobs that look like fun in movies (lawyers I've known have convinced me that said profession is not one of them): I want to work for a PI. I wanted to join the FBI, but in spite of all my other societal errors, it's defaulting on a student loan that prevents me from that career path. 

I can't find any more indie record stores or indie arts/crafts/picture framing places to apply at. 

So I make things, mostly hats of late. And chinchilla toys, which I don't sell, because too many of my friends are already toy vendors. 

Unfortunately, today requires terrifying practicalities, such as finding out why Marketplace turned me down for insurance. The thought makes me feel deeply passionate about doing laundry.

Yeah, Tuesday, you are no friend of mine, not this time.

This is not a blog, because I don't even write much.

This is really, really not my scene. When I write, I do it on paper (the stuff made of trees, not the app), and I can't say anything more significant than what you'd put on a Post-It at work unless I use a medium-point purple Flexgrip or a pencil (not the kind you click, but a proper Ticonderoga that you have to sharpen after every page).
I have an iPad Mini so I can draw badly, play word games, take decent pictures, and find out who That Chick in That Movie is and why I recognize her (Jena Malone, because of Stepmom and Donnie Darko), but I don't own a computer and haven't in three years or so. My phone isn't even smart.
So it's unlikely at best that I'd start another blog, let alone buy two domains, but I did just that this past weekend.
I really, really want to blame my sister, the writer who actually writes, but if I want to do that, I have to blame 23-year old me first.
My sister was just north of 30 when she had her daughter, and so,e months later, she announced that she'd never write again. That part of her life was over. She was a Mother, not  a creative conduit. Now, I was very good at being 23, even better than I was at being 22.  A kind of What's My Age Again, quintessentially 90s slacker-rock girl.
Slacking did not, however, apply to my creativity. At one point, I decided eating and sleeping were interfering with my ability to fill two or three notebooks a month and cut back extensively on both. So not surprisingly, the idea that the big sister I'd trailed after mimicking every move was "done" writing was not acceptable. My friend Jeff and I had just started an informal writers' group, so I insisted she attend. Somewhere along the way, she actually started writing again. Then she stopped showing up, stalked Rick Springfield (in a very professional manner, though), wrote a fairly successful biography of him, became a stringer for our  local newspaper (teaching a lawyer the inverted pyramid in under 30 minutes is not challenging, in case it ever comes up), wrote more stuff, and kept getting paid to sit around in her pajamas writing things.
In the meantime, I went back to school, the 90s ended, I became unnervingly likely to succeed, worked for and learned from one of my all-time favorite writers (Laurence Gonzales--if you missed him, you missed a lot), watched the Clintons leave office and my friends start pairing off and mating, and finally sank into a no chance of living up to everyone's expectations/best years of my life are over depression.
A lot more stuff happened in between, but not all of it is worth mentioning. The car fire is, but that's another story, one that didn't happen on 294, though it was a Chicago area car fire.
So now I have some domains. I wonder what I'm supposed to do with them. Pending a clue, I think I will go knit another hat.