Wow tonight got unexpectedly chaotic! (But then,  can things ever get expectedly chaotic? I mean,  if you can predict the chaos, can't you at least a little prepare for it?) 

Anyway.  Around 8pm Mikaela texted me her grandpa had died.  (he's been in the process of dying and knowing he's dying for a month or two.  He was diagnosed with heart problems several years back but stubbornly refused both medicines and surgery until the point his heart was too weak for it.)  So it's been a matter of when,  not if,  but this is also the first person in her life this life who has died.  She has lost dogs she has loved and my birds as they died,  but this is the first person she loves who has died.  Which is hard at any age.  So I asked her if she needed Dani time this week and she immediately said "yas!!" so she'll be coming over to my flat on Weds (her day without online classes, because I don't have internet at home just for myself) and we'll have a fire in the hearth and a cozy chill day. And if she comes in with her mom other days,  she and I will hang out at my work. Tomorrow (today now?) was supposed to be her first in-person Tues/Fri half days, but given the fact it's currently -11F getting down to -14 and staying there til after 7am with wind chill warning advisory of -35F til noon, both her mum and I expect the in person to cancel. So Weds won't yet be me balancing her mental health but risk exposure with my grandma's physical health covid risk exposure (and after 10 days after the 26, so March 4, my grandma's second dose of the covid vaccine will be fully effective so I will worry less about me carrying it to her so I'll relax a bit about that balancing act.)  I also asked her if she wanted to make plans,  like a zoo day once it warms up slightly, so she could see Crissy,  Alana, and Maddie (3 of my close friends, we refer to each other as the Celtic Sisterhood after our fav Irish and Scottish bands teamed up for a mini tour referring to themselves as The Celtic Brotherhood tour,  and who accept Mikaela love her welcome her to our concert going group even though she's not quite 16 - she's especially close to Alana,  they're both Tauruses and just click.) She got very excited about that and I was able to arrange it for Saturday the 20th. 

Then,  the temperature which was supposed to steadily decline from 1F at 9pm to 0F at 1pm and -2F at 2pm quite suddenly plummeted to -8F at 11:30 so still had to go home in stupidly cold but didn't want to stay at work even another hour as it was still falling rapidly and overnight lows/hourly temps kept shifting as well.  

Then I got home to discover an emergency plumbing service van parked in front of our building with flashers on (there being no free spaces available) at midnight. I ran into one of our maintenance guys as he was turning off the water downstairs and he said there was a water leak in units a and e (unit a also had an exploded pipe a few years back because they went on holiday during the last polar vortex and decided to turn the heat all the way off in their absence to save money... On an exposed corned unit the wind hit directly...) This wasn't that he said,  and I didn't ask for more details because he was clearly quite busy,  but since he was also heading upstairs to unit e on my floor,  I did thank him for coming to deal with their emergency in the middle of the night when it's this bitterly cold.  I mean, people deserve to be thanked for things like that even if it's their job and not your emergency.... Getting dressed to go deal with midnight emergency water flooding issues when it's -10F out is a bitch of a job - it just is.  And most people in the midst of emergencies are so anxious/upset and often angry they forget to be grateful in the moment for the person going out of their way to help.  So even if not my emergency,  I always make a point if I get a chance without interrupting the work to express gratitude to those handling the crisis and fixing it, in case nobody else does.  Even if it's your job to stay calm and fix things when they break, you deserve gratitude and recognition for doing the work of fixing it rather than ignoring it or waiting for someone else to clean up the mess - especially if it's a clusterfuck or how to fix or timing/conditions adds to the stressfulness of it.   Just seems right to say thank you for someone choosing hard work as their reaction to a crisis,  y'know?  I've never understood people who fail at such an easy thing as gratitude for help to deal with an emergency.  

So anyway,  unexpected chaos swirling around tonight.  I'm headed to bed now though.  Very tired and cold - but curling up with my dog and cat on me while I snuggle between my 600ct Egyptian cotton sheet, under my down comforter with fair isle polar bear printed flannel duvet,  lambswool blanket,  merino blanket,  and fleece unicorn running on a beach comforter I've had since I was a kid will solve both those problems, lol.  

P. S.  Just finished Octavia Butler's novel Kindred. First time reading it and dang it's good! Written in the 1970s, it's about a Black woman dragged back in time every time her slave owner white ancestor is in mortal danger... The first several times when he's still a child. It's a fascinating inversion of ancestor protection traditions, free will versus fated, "altering" the past paradoxes,  and the insidious nature banality of evil of how easy the descent of accepting social norms while living amongst them EVEN WHEN you come from a time/place you should know better for the cruelty it is. It can definitely get very Toni Morrison-esque brutal and graphic truth telling about casual violence/abuse from the victim's perspective, but like Morrison it's in an honest acknowledging the horrors exist in humankind not gratuitously thrown in way.  It's really well crafted, and I don't think it's one that a perspective a white person could ever write (any more than a non-Jew can write about a Jew during the Holocaust) because it comes from a place of grappling with one's own complex emotions over difficult and painful ancestry. 

This is the first Octavia Butler novel I've read - I felt Black history month was the time to fix that mistake I've been making since she's the first Black woman of scifi but I'd never read her before. She was mostly publishing while my da was in Israel then piss poor new dad trying to run/keep afloat a nascent computer business so he never heard of her and couldn't have afforded to buy her books when first published.  Then by the 90s and 00s, when I was actively building my own library voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on, she'd fallen out of the canon wasn't available in libraries or bookstores.  Beacon press has been reissuing all her books over the last 7 years or so and I've been making a point of buying them new as I find them - not just because she's impossible to find used but also so they keep publishing and stocking them. 

Another Black female scifi/fantasy author I HIGHLY recommend is N. K. Jemisin (living, currently writing/publishing author.) She has a very unique voice in the genre. Many of her works are grappling with racial,  environmental, and tech related societal breakdowns.  Also her twitter account is well worth following as she's got her finger on the pulse of a lot of important contemporary socio-political ills and some very sound philosophical critiques on contemporary problems.