and taste your tinny blood

Our dog, Nonsense, is what is what called an Extreme Chewer.  When we were crating her, we went through a series of dog beds, including ones with lifetime warranties (it turns out once you void that first lifetime warranty, they give you a second bed or your money back, but you don't get another warranty.).  She is, fortunately, not an ingester for the most part, she very delicately destroys things and spits the tiny pieces out.  The only thing this isn't true for is sticks, which she will happily consume and then vomit back up after coming inside. 

Doubling down on this, our cat Brat has a weird vendetta against laundry baskets and dog beds and once, memorably, a suitcase.  (she has also peed on both Light and myself.  we've been to the vet multiple times, we have good litter box hygiene, as far as medical professionals can tell, she's just occasionally an asshole).  So, if we leave the crate open while the dog is not in it, Brat pees in it.  

We eventually seized upon cardboard.  Enough layers and it at least soothes my conscience about not being able to give her a fluffy bed, if the cat pees in it, it's pretty easily replaced, if she wants to eat it she's totally allowed to. 

We stopped using a crate eventually, she seemed calm enough.   However, the very few times that all three of us have been gone in the past couple months, she's found things to destroy that she oughtn't, and ifwhen all this changes again and some of us start leaving the house more often, we'll need to crate her again.   Also, there's a puppysibling in her future, and I suspect I'm going to need them both crated at times. 

So, we've been building something in our back room that I've been calling Box Mountain.  This is one of those things in the weird intersection of my sense of humor and depression occasionally making me something less than a stellar housekeeper.   Instead of breaking boxes down as they come, we empty them out and toss them in a corner.   And Abundance has always relied heavily on what we call mail santa (amazon)  but these days we're all getting more online, so box mountain grows quickly.

This morning I decided to start breaking box mountain down, mostly because it had started to seriously block the bookshelf I'm using as a canned good pantry.  I found myself evaluating each box as whether or not it was a size a cat might appreciate and ended up saving like eight boxes (twice as many as we have cats) just in case the cats might want to sit in them.  I'm not entirely sure what my criteria was,  or why I felt the need to save so many, but there it is.

I've been building an online agrarian empire a lot lately playing Stardew Valley.  It's scratching the same itch that other games I get into does, achievable goals, very obvious cause and effect, things predictable and repeatable.  I've been listening to books while i do so (gaming and reading simultaneously is possible even better than crafting adn reading or cleaning and reading).  

Today, I decided to try a podcast.  I've always wanted to be more into podcasts than I am, and I suspect a little bit of the reason I'm not is the same reason I feel bad when I read what I think is too much fanfiction, the same reason if I get too far into a book, I'm probably going to finish it unless it really pisses me off.   My TBR list is so long, and I like having a long long list of books read, so listening to things or reading things other than books feels like I'm wasting time.

So I cherrypicked another episode of Hilarious World of Depression, giving it another chance.  I picked an episode called Your Amazing Therapeutic Jukebox, which was a bunch of listener submitted songs that helped them in dark times.   And it was pretty awesome, some I recognized some I didn't, only a couple overtly religious ones.  And then it kicked my teeth in.

There's a band I listened to A Lot during the Asshat times.  Like, sat in the Harvard subway station listening to a specific song on repeat, sobbing my eyes out after some elaborate drama involving him, me and Bitchface. At this point, I blessedly don't remember which song it was, but I sure as fuck remember the band, The Hold Steady. (yeah, I'm not proud).  And of course, not only did a listener recommend one of the songs, but the host interviewed the lead singer.  So I noped the fuck out of that, but not before getting a little mopey.   I don't remember what I saw in him and that's definitely blunted a lot of the edges on the pain, but it was not my most gracefully weathered storm.  

There's more here, about rejection and being wanted and that sort of thing, and that sort of goes slantwise into thinking about the idea of "working on one's self" as if it was a thing one could sit down and do (which maybe some people can.)  But a) it's bedtime and b) there's a cat contentedly drooling on me, which makes taking myself seriously very hard.