O mon bon dieu!!! A friend of mine that I briefly dated is on the cover of GQ Style. Ian moved out to L.A. something like 6 years ago to try to make something of a career in music (he's an amazing pianist as well as a songwriter) but while the big city fed his ambition/ego it starved his soul so he couldn't write while he was there so he took up photography and had a good eye started landing major fashion shoots as photographer and was asked to sub in when the male model was sick with COVID and now he's both a photographer and a model in the fashion magazine world.  (This is a different Ian than my coworker, coworker is Ian D. and the only Ian I ever dated is Ian P.) Given I know him from a mutual friend introducing us at a Mutemath show and then me giving Ian a ride back from another punk rock show in Milwaukee we were both at then sitting outside introducing him to Frank Turner songs and talking and making out until sunrise, I can honestly say that GQ model is not where I expected him to land. 😆 He and I are still good friends and hang out whenever he's back in WI and he keeps trying to get me to visit him in Los Angeles.  I actually broke things off before they got too serious telling him that I was too old for him until he figured out who he authentically was and that I'd rather have him long-term as a friend than a short term quick burn boyfriend who never spoke to me again after I tumbled off his pedestal -- but also I know for him I'm his manic pixie dream girl that got away even though he has told me I was right and he still doesn't know his authentic self even though he's now so different than the punk scene emo kid who loved to play Mozart pieces from memory when he couldn't sleep that he was when we met. It's just funny to me that for a girl who has spent so much of her time single, I can now honestly say that I not only dated an Olympic team athlete and a singer-songwriter whose song about me was a Billboard top 10, but now I can also say I dated a guy who became a GQ model.  Which given how infrequently I date is fucking ridiculous as a past history.... Who is even scripting this story at this point?! 😂 But I'm super excited for Ian that he's a GQ model, this is a really big deal for his career not having ever intended it and just stumbling into modeling through the back door. 

As for me, because I didn't go to the Skerryvore show on Tuesday I actually got the last of my 40 hours of work in for the week last night while watering all my plants. (Also, I think my massive tropical plant I inherited and split last summer since it was uprooting itself that Iwas told was a banana plant is actually a bird of paradise....because the leaves grow flat laterally not round a central core. Also a customer just gifted us a much smaller bird of paradise that was too big for her place and it has the same sort of growth which is what made me question the one that's now three pots of massive tropical plant which reach to the ceiling. Our family owned computer store looks like a greenhouse and that's 100% my fault, albeit most of them are plants I have inherited or been gifted or nursed back to health or just won't die like my 12 year old geraniums that I bring in over the winter and threaten to kill if they stop blooming get too scraggly.) Anyway, last night was plant care night and when I added up my hours, I was already at 42.5 hours for this week. Oops. So today I'm having a chill stay at home day. I washed all the linens and bedding (well, duvet cover is still in the dryer), made myself brunch and coffee, took another COVID test to verify given exposure risk from my grandma. I'm currently stretched out on my couch with a cuppa Dark Pearl oolong tea and a book -- Spock stole my reading chair after I got up to check if the sheets were really dry or if the dryer was lying to me because the part by the sensor was dry but the bulk of it wasn't yet. And the cat is so dang adorable and happy curled up sleeping on my chair he stole that I can't even begrudge him making me move to the couch instead.... Later I plan to make some sort of lentil and carrot and potato curry -- mostly because I have some cooked up lentils to use up and I desperately need to go grocery shopping so the only other veggies I have right now are carrots and potatoes. 😆 (Okay, also frozen corn and dried beans, but neither of those would work particularly well with the lentil curry plan. I'll save those for a southwest something in the future.) That's my wild and crazy Libra full moon plans - introvert recharge hygge and laundry and books and tea and piano music and not planning to see anybody but my cat.

Thinking of which! COVID test! I was so excited t'other night about the state Supreme Court vote getting called even though i wasn't surprised because it aligned with the only precog I saw, that I forgot to say that the paxlovid made my grandma significantly better by the next morning --  I know it's science, but her turn around was like magic..... when my da stopped by Mon evening she drank a bunch of ginger ale with fruit punch Gatorade for electrolytes he mixed for her (the combination sounds ghastly to me, but maybe it would be okay if you like sweets as much as they do) and took her paxlovid later on Monday night then the next morning was ravenously hungry when my da arrived so he went to the dining room and had them make her breakfast which he brought her. Her cough is better but still there, but she's still having gi related distress from it. Hopefully she won't get a bad rebound now she's taken her course of paxlovod. For me, my biggest concern is that on Tues she had absolutely no memory of anyone stopping by Monday to help her, not Olivia, not me taking her nasal swab, not my da bringing her the paxlovid and something to drink......  None of it. And given that she has some mild dementia already and covid inflammation is known to cause Alzheimer's like degeneration in the brain for many people (thus the covid "brain fog" which is actually brain damage) this could accelerate her cognitive decline and there will be no way to know what long COVID she has if any until she's better.  There's also still the risk of the "paxlovid rebound" later this week and if that affects her cough/lungs so it develops into pneumonia. But she's night and day better after getting on paxlovid from how she was when i stopped by and took her covid test on Mon.

I'm still testing myself every day just in case, still negative and no symptoms and masking at work just in case. My parents are also self testing because my da is primary helping my grandma and then I'm secondary while she's isolating and convalescing, though they're not masking at work. I can't help taking all possible protections available when dealing with viral and bacterial pathogens given I spent my undergrad years as pre-med and one of my degrees was Medical Microbiology & Immunology. (I only chose not to pursue a medical degree because I came to the realization that my desired goals from med school were to fix people when they break and help people not to break in the first place and the modern American health system with its insurance based health "care" driven efficiency standards doesn't allow doctors to do that -- you have to monetize every minute and rather than deal with finding the root cause you're encouraged to prescribe a medication to mask the symptoms and bill people for everything and deny help you could give if they can't afford the bill...and if you have doctor credentials but aren't actively practicing medicine so that the place you work covers malpractice suit, you're legally required to give aid when somebody needs medical assistance but they can sue your ass for anything and you have to cover the malpractice suit entirely out of pocket so acquiring the knowledge and certification of becoming a doctor while not working for the modern health industry is something you can only do if you are already a private millionaire/billionaire/heiress/trust fund baby, which I am not, able to defend yourself if you get sued for the bruised ribs somebody had to endure after you give them the heimlich when choking or CPR to restart their lungs..... And I wish I was joking but those are real cases that people have brought against the doctor who saved their lives and won because the doctor was practicing medicine without malpractice insurance because they had retired from practice.  So I opted not to go into massive debt just because I want to know how to fix people who are broken and teach them the best ways not to break in the first place and either get mired in a red tape bureaucracy I loathe or open myself up to lawsuits that would further bankrupt me....) 

I do still miss time spent in biochem lab work every single day and my mind is very much trained to find answers to all my questions by seeking via the scientific method of hypothesis-test hypothesis-conclusion-revise hypothesis despite how my intuitive gifts tend to just KNOW things. Even my precogs I like to test rather than implicitly trust -- I can precog that I'm going to one place for a meal with a group of people but they make plans for somewhere else and rather than speak up I just go along to see if we end up where I already know and how it happens. if I'm starving I won't wait to observe, I'll just say, "We can try that, but somehow it won't work and we'll end up at ____ so we could just skip the delay and go there to start" but that always feels like self-fulfilling prophecy work so i don't LIKE to do it unless there's a time crunch or I'm hangry impossible to deal with until I eat something, lol. People who know about my gifts sometimes just stop me and directly ask me if I've had any precogs of where we're going to eat and since I won't lie when directly asked, then I say yes and inevitably they say, "Well I don't feel like playing games trying other places to just end up where you already know we'll be so just tell me what you've seen." And then I do and we just short circuit the wandering time and delays, but it still feels like self fulfilling prophecy to me so I don't count those as REAL precogs despite me receiving the immutable precogs of them. I feel the same way about when I precog me in a given outfit and I just put it on rather than my sometimes stubborn dressing in something else and then staining/ruining the outfit(s) I tried to wear instead until I give in and wear the one I precogged me in. Clothing choices and packing for trips are significantly easier whenever I have precogs of the upcoming adventures. *shrugs* If you had the gift of precogs of petty mundane things like that as your norm, wouldn't you cheat too? And wouldn't you sometimes fight it just to try to prove it wrong even though ultimately it always comes true in spite of your efforts?

O mes bons dieux, how did I wander all the way to there from a simple update on my grandma being better? I should nap or caffeinate or something, my ADHD associative stream of consciousness is very tangential lightning leap right now....

Ya know what, an afternoon nap actually sounds like a really grand idea! I'm going to curl up on my white couch with an excess of throw pillows because muddy dog stains and Mikaela dropping greasy food on it when she was a young kid left grease/cleaning product spots -- but I don't mind those spots and imperfections because they remind me of my dog who is no more and the child version of the almost 18 year old.... I'm weird like that, I look forward to eventually having laugh lines and crows feet and silver strands in my hair because every one of them will mark memories of the life I have lived. And the spots I can't get out of the seat cushions remind me of the life and joy that was in those who stained my white couch. I like worn and aged things that have been loved better than sleek shiny soulless money bought trinkets, I like the stories and the memories they bring back to life once memories are all you have left of the way things once were. I like that I can look at my copies of the Silent Planet trilogy and remember being 7 and my grandpa standing with me at Borders Bookshop insisting he was buying me the first two they had and would find me the last one, in addition to my choices for my birthday shopping, because I had to read them. I like the things that when you see them they bring back alive the ghosts and memories of times past, even the stains on the couch from a dog who is now dead and a lonely small child who is now nearly an adult.  So I love my impractical couch that is spotted by the past but being hand made in Norway is as solid as when I bought it a year or two after college. And for the record, the dog came first into my life as a 12 week old puppy, before I bought a white couch which my mom tried to argue with me was the least practical choice i could have made and i was adamant i wanted to order the Hugo style in parchment and since it was my money I could buy it in whatever color I pleased and spots and stains and spills were a problem for future me to live with. And future me has decided to love those stains and spots on my impractical white couch because they bring back to life for a moment those I have loved who are now only alive in those past moments and no longer exist as they were within the present or future. 

*yawns* nap would be nice though. Nap sounds much better than rereading the same lines of Foucault over and over again because why even am I reading Foucault anyway? Didn't sleep much last night, I don't tend to sleep much during the energy of full moons, just snatches of naps and then overcharged can't hold still to rest because I'm ADHD to the max. Yeah. Afternoon nap on the couch snuggled under my vintage Pendleton wool blanket, until the dryer stops and chimes so I have to go tell it that it lies and the duvet cover is still very wet and put it on a long wrinkle release cycle to get it to dry some more. Don't get into too much mischief or let the world fall apart while I nap, k? Nothing that goes so Humpty Dumpty it can't be mended later once I awake from my nap. Thanks a million! 😘