Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

Surprise #1, bad: Tacoma Girl has some kind of respiratory ick, thereby putting the kibosh on the coven gathering for which I'd just bought munchies and beer. (Foreshadowing!) I decided to wash my sleeping bag, which requires a laundromat's high-capacity machine. The nearest one open was a couple of miles away, so I took the bus.

Surprise #2, bad: I got so busy downloading and then working the app to do contactless payment that I forgot to add detergent. Oh well, at least it doesn't obviously stink and it's fluffier than it was. It is, however, a little damp now because...

Surprise #3, bad: ...it rained hard, twice, and instead of bringing an umbrella I brought detergent – which I didn't use. I decided on beer once I put the sleeping bag in the loft.

Surprise #4, bad: I thought I'd gotten hefeweizen, but what I bought was IPA, which is the style of beer that I like least. Now I really miss Tacoma Girl, who has no such qualms.

Surprise #5, good: On the way to the laundromat, though, I thought I saw a familiar pair of eyes above a mask seated near me. As luck would have it, he got off at my stop, so I asked if he was [Dr. Gaydude]. He was!

You probably don't remember that he caught COVID very early in the pandemic, showed what I believe to be signs of long COVID, and then decided to switch practices a few months later. Right before he was due to start at the new practice, to which I was planning on following him, he announced he was quitting medicine. This necessitated a scramble on my part, but I never held it against Dr. Gaydude. I was just sad and mystified.

Until today! I found out he's back to practicing with the Indian Health Service. I offered endorsements. He declined them. He said that when he was trying to determine if I was me, he looked at my boots and decided they weren't kinky enough. I told him today's boots were for warmer weather.

Also, dude lives near the top of Phinney Ridge, not far from the practice he was supposed to join. That neighborhood contains what cupcake_goth's artist hubby once dubbed "real estate porn". I guess he's doing all right. But really, seeing him made my day, and made up for all the bad surprises.

I'm one step closer to closing on the house. My agent tells me that I have the certificate of occupancy. Yay! But there's one more hurdle before I can move my actual body in: there can't be any liens, i.e. the contractors need to sign something saying they've been paid. That can, in theory, happen by tomorrow afternoon, or it could happen by Thursday. I'm, uh, running low on clean underwear over here. Tomorrow would be very, very nice.

In a separate development, the building manager showed up late this morning. I don't remember his saying he was going to, but whatever. Yes, I told him I've got the 'rona. I masked up and stepped outside, and he briefly poked around the place. He wasn't displeased with its condition, but he said I need to spackle the nail holes in the walls or I'll be charged for it. I think a COVID infection is a pretty good excuse not to hit the hardware store for spackle today, don't you? He did lend me a hammer to pull the few nails that I'd coincidentally hammered into studs*.

I'm actually getting work done despite having the plague instead of a chair. Go me?



*Sadly, that's not gay.

So here's the good news: all my stuff is indeed in the new Devil Girl House. The movers came, loaded in an hour, and unloaded in not much longer.

Now here's the bad news: on Saturday evening, right before I was supposed to don my red latex dress and join Comfy Lady at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival after a month apart, I tested positive for COVID-19.

To say that the timing is unfortunate may be the biggest understatement I've ever typed here. I told my agent this morning, and he says we'll make it work for closing on Tuesday at the Devil Girl House.

How am I feeling? Not too bad. If I hadn't taken the test I'd think I had an odd cold. Some dry coughing, some light-headedness, and my sense of smell wasn't so keen this morning but it seems to be better now.

Where am I? Inside the empty Devil Girl Pad, which was filthy this morning. It's more presentable now. I still have a little cleaning and packing to do before I bug out, but I think it's manageable, even in my current, infected state.

Ex sweetly put together a needed care package – my emergency food is all packed at the other house, remember? – and sent the Wendling to drop it off and fetch the car from me. He knocked on my window. I acknowledged. He put the bag down in front of my door and ran.

I'm wondering which deity I angered to bring this down upon me with such pessimal timing. And it's not as if I was my usual party girl self, begging for trouble, for the second half of April.

Someday I'm going to look back at this weekend and laaaaugh. That day is not going to come soon, though.

This morning my mother tested positive for COVID-19. This afternoon she tested negative. In the meantime, Good Sister fought slack-ass hospital staff to get Mom into a rehab facility. GS sounded optimistic that she could get Mom into the place she'd been talking too most recently.

The only minor annoyance is that it's in Trenton, FL, in the county just west of Gainesville's. It's not far from Rosewood, FL, the site of a massacre of Black people about a century ago. I don't plan on exploring.

Which brings me to an observation: Evil Sister made it her business to explore the area. She loved it and knew it well, and she wasn't pleased when she had to leave five years ago after living there for nearly fifty years. Good Sister & I? Not that curious, which I now regret a little, and eager to bug out, which I don't regret one bit. We three used to joke that we don't look related: different hair colors & textures, and only GS can tan. The dissimilarity isn't skin-deep.

I've been feeling my eyelids and eardrums twitching all week. I've lost a couple of pounds. Neither of those things surprises me.

My company planned an office move two years ago. Unfortunately for everyone involved, between the planning and execution of this move, the pandemic started. That means that for the last year, our floor of a downtown Seattle office building has gone mostly unused.

Goodbye to all that. Employees were told to remove any personal items from the space by the end of the month, because we're subletting it. I was one of the very few employees who brought personal stuff in. We're "moving" to a smaller space with hot desks next month. It was surely the right business decision.

I know a lot of people are doing a victory dance now that COVID has slain the commute dragon for many people, but I'm one of those weirdos who liked going into the office. Why?

• I'm a social butterfly, in case you hadn't noticed. Interacting through screens alone just isn't satisfying.
• Often you can get stuff done faster by walking to somebody else's desk and talking to them.
• As much as I love the Devil Girl Pad, leaving it and coming back are good for my mental health.
• That place may have saved my life during the lethal northwest heat wave last summer. I'll have to cool off elsewhere the next time it happens.

Allow me to make a prediction, worth what you paid for it. Once the pandemic ends for real and not by governmental fiat, there's going to be at least a partial rush back to permanent, shared workspaces. There are too many paranoid bosses and lonely employees out there. When will that happen? Well, that's to be decided by the whims of viral mutation, but if 1918 is any guide, I doubt we're in for another full year from now.

That's a mighty fine subject line. Good Sister actually said her symptoms ended a couple of days ago, but I didn't want to count my chickens before they rip my lips off. She's back in the saddle again, on hold with the long-term care insurance company and texting me to talk about Mom-related stuff.

I had waking nightmare visions of having to go over Mom's labyrinthine financial, medical, and elder care arrangements with Good Sister while she fought to breathe, but that's not going to happen any time soon, if ever.

Edited to add: I eventually got on the phone with GS. She has tested negative. She also had a lot of venting to do about handling Mom's affairs, which happens from time to time. I'm happy to be her moral support.

I have to say, my reaction to the Moderna booster has been mild, almost as mild as my reaction to the second Pfizer shot in late July. Is that because I'm a Pokévax? Who knows?

Weird fact: I've sneezed a few times a day all week – until yesterday. It's not the season for botanical allergens, which can make me sneeze a dozen times an hour in June. It's been below freezing and I've been out and about as ever, so a regular cold is a possibility. However, it was surpassingly mild and lasted under a week, ending yesterday.

Hmm.

I did another sticker patrol around Green Lake early yesterday evening. Somebody had slapped an anti-communist sticker on top of another one based on a Pride flag. I'm not that big a commie, but no way do you mess with my people. I started removing it when another boomer dude walked up and asked me why I was doing that. I just told him, "You put an anti-communist sticker on top of a gay sticker, I remove the anti-communist sticker." He kept walking the way he'd been walking.

I ran into ocicat just seconds after that, and we got to chat around the lake, especially about rigel_p. I was able to verify that the stickers have not returned.

Oh: I am not the only person removing right-wing and anti-vax stickers from Green Lake. I'm certain of it, because I didn't get the south and southwest stretches of the trail last time. I'm also more thorough about rendering stickers illegible.

Last night La Fashionista & I hit Oliver's Twist. It was jumping! If I weren't a maniac about punctuality we might not have gotten a table. The cocktails are right on as ever, but the truffle popcorn has been replaced with southeast Asian eats. Not that the new eats are bad at all, but I miss that popcorn; I think I could still smell it near the restroom. Next weekend the two of us are resolved to introduce Tacoma Girl to the Wildrose. It's surprising and appalling that she's never been.

Phinney is returning to pre-pandemic behavior by stealth. It looked like all of the bars & restaurants on Phinney Ridge were busy last night despite vile weather. People were almost as masked up as they could be, but when you're eating and drinking...

On the bus to get my legs sugared today, I ended up sitting across from a woman about the Wendling's age with Goth-adjacent fashion – I remember the blue & green plaid bell bottoms and platform Docs especially – and truly impressive makeup with two-tone hair. As I got up to get off, she complimented my outfit*. I of course had to return the compliment. That kind of made my day, which has otherwise been filled with napping and laundry.



*Shallow fashion details: black patent 14-eyelet Docs, red velvet broomstick skirt over a black tiered velvet & satin skirt, short black trench coat, vintage black patent collar from Sin, black wishbone earrings. Zero makeup because I left the Devil Girl Pad in a mad rush.

I did the quarterly number-crunching thing for Lambert House, which I was dreading because there was new stuff to do. Asking the director over the phone to clarify a few details turned into this little job becoming much easier than I thought for a completely different audience. Moral: ask questions first, monkey with the database later.

I told the director all about my trip, natch, with an emphasis on all things queer and... not vanilla. And speaking of London, ( what's under this cut isn't very kinky but it is sexual. )

I was happy to see that the US has basically reciprocated on easing travel restrictions on people from the UK & EU. I like to think that as I type, there's a European somewhere in the US who's never been here before last week, and they're going "WAT" every few minutes as I did last month.

Remember when I was planning on firing Ms. Zappy for an egregiously gross Facebook post? Well, she's taken it down, or at least rendered it invisible. I'll seize this excuse not to fire her, not least because that would be an expensive pain in the butt for me. She may very well have seen the error of her ways, at least this time.

Do I want to bring this up with her or not? Maybe not until after she works on me. I will, however, be telling her London stories, especially about how flying to and clubbing in the UK requires proof of vaccination and gosh, how very grateful I was for that!

Oh by the way, it's 0351 local time and I'm writing a DW entry. Goddamn jet lag.