2023 in snippets

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Here it is, another last-minute roundup of things that I was doing this year or that were happening when I wasn’t publishing here, which was essentially the entire year minus two days, including this one. 

Teddy Bear

Teddy Bear passed away at the end of June.

In April, he began seizing on our walks in front of a neighbor’s house, always in front of that specific house. I leapt to the frighteningly dysregulated conclusion that these neighbors were doing something to trigger his seizures (which were otherwise well-managed with medication)–that they had some kind of anti-dog sonic device or were spraying a chemical on or near the sidewalk or something that was hurting my boy, and I was ready to fight them immediately. It was significantly easier to get angry and feel like it was a situation I could control than acknowledge that his time with us was coming to an end. Yes, our walks were more often ending with us needing to carry him the rest of the way home because he was tuckered out, but I reasoned it was a matter of overexertion, what with all the joyful barking at the world for the first couple blocks and the frenzied challenging of any dog he saw or heard on the way. He simply didn’t save enough energy for walking! We’re just getting closer to the day where we might need to take him out in a stroller, is all. IS ALL, because we definitely aren’t going to lose him any time soon! Sure, he was losing his vision and his hearing and had already lost most of his teeth and his internal clock was getting wonky, but he was still well-muscled and brimming with enthusiasm for life. 

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Xena: The Warrior Princess: The Cosplay

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Xena’s Journey to Hades and Back in Cosplay Form began as an ambitious Halloween costume idea in August 2022 and “finished” August 2023…so, well past Halloween and yet also in time for Halloween. Despite not being quite finished, it’s now “old” so in true Sisyphian fashion I’ve started on another ambitious cosplay that will almost certainly not be finished in time for plans I don’t have. I could learn my lesson, but why?

Xena: The Costume Base

I decided to construct this cosplay from leather, primarily because I wouldn’t then have to go shopping to find just the right brown vinyl fabric. Especially when I already had some damaged hides on hand that I’d purchased at a deep discount for just this type of experimentation and I could get started right away. Leather also offered the benefit of durability and the beauty of natural material; the dings and scuffs of bargain bin leather add character to a project like this. Leather has visual weight.

It also has physical weight. I absolutely, positively, 100% cannot flip around like Xena regardless of what I am wearing or the power of trampoline upon which I might hop, but the added weight of this leather armor keeps me extra grounded.

Using leather in the interest of saving time turned out to be an exercise in self-delusion. With fabric, you just cut it out and sew it together. With leather, the cut pieces need to be dyed on all sides, multiple times if you want deep, dark color. The excess dye needs buffing off the surface. The edges need burnishing. Places where attachments are made can need skiving to remove bulk. You need to align pieces that are to be joined so stitching holes will match, and then you punch all those stitching holes by hand and sew it all together by hand. Leather also needs conditioning and finishing. And if you screw up, if the pattern was not quite right? Sometimes you’ll have to cut a new piece of leather and start the process over while feeling guilty about the animal who died so you could suck at cosplay.

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Season’s Greetings: Squeaking in under the wire

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Merry Yulesolsticeweenmas!

A lot has happened these past two years while also not much has happened these past two years. I keep drafting and nothing feels right or complete, even as it expands far beyond its scope and the attention span of any reasonable human being, boiling ever outward but largely full of nothing, like a universe but comprised of navel-gazy pessimistic ill-informed bullshit. Or as Yoast SEO calls it, “unreadable.” Like this one is, two paragraphs from now!

What has there been to write about, when I’m largely either at home or a barn? The pandemic? Travel? The business I started? More horse stuff? Regular life stuff?

The Pandemic?

No one in my household has caught it, which is no small feat given that some half of Americans have had it at least once. We’ve had both the privilege which allows caution and the human hardship of living in isolation in a world that is determined to move on despite experts warning that we are not yet in the endemic stage. Particularly now, given the “tripledemic” going on this winter and what appears to be humanity’s total exhaustion with safety precautions. At Fred Meyer yesterday, nearly every elderly person I saw had their fingers in their nose, on their mouths, or were just open mouth coughing into the air because??

I’d experienced a brush with covid very shortly after it first emerged in the US: at first, it felt like a timely subject about which to write, but as “fifteen days to stop the spread” expanded into months and then years of fighting over masks and vaccines, with communities of color suffering and healthcare workers pushed to their limits, who cares about the two weeks I spent in my house, running on my mini elliptical and focusing on the day I could again go outside? I didn’t even get sick! The biggest hardship was underdeveloped grocery delivery infrastructure–the horrors of eating expired food from the pantry!! Riveting.

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