Yesterday and the day before I was tired all the time and ended up losing consciousness rather unexpectedly while I was in the lump of inactivity being tired leads to. Yesterday that wasn't a problem, the day before it meant I slept through when school got out and thus didn't pick up a kid it was, basically, my one and only job to pick up.
There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth. But I've probably done useful things elsewhere, you think. Nope. Not even close. I've washed maybe three to five dishes and two sheet pans and other than that . . . I got nothing. For almost a week.
And just to make sure we're covering all the bases, my failure includes two states. I fucked up notifying the right people of the right things and my cat apparently got locked outside for days. A nosy neighbor who has apparently, without my knowledge or consent, been doing up close photography of the view through my windows (nothing creepy about that) announced (to someone else) that she didn't like how I was taking care of my cat, and my cat has not been seen since.
Also, she claims that there's a family of raccoons in my attic. Whether or not I have an attic depends very much on what you mean by the term. If you think of an attic as a place where things can be stored or anything even remotely like that, then I very much do not have one. If you're more of a strict definition person then yeah, there is empty space between my slanted roof and my flat ceilings. I have not, in fact, filled that space with some form of solid matter. So, by definition, there is an attic.
What there is not, is a floor. Now the rooms of the house all have ceilings, so there's something there that will hold up a lighter animal even if a human foot would punch straight through, but there's a thing about the windows the neighbor would have to look through to see anything up there.
They're basically a facade to make my slant roof give the impression of a non-existent second floor (or at least the kind of attic in which [plot relevant thing] containing cardboard boxes can actually be stored) so that my house, which faces an entire street of two story homes and (on the same side of the street) is next two a three story apartment building, doesn't come off as pitifully small. They weren't placed with any kind of care because they're nothing but decoration. We've already established no floor anywhere up there, but for where the windows are there's no ceiling. They're over the open air porch which isn't a room, wasn't built like one, and does not have a ceiling so much as a centimeter or so thick loose conglomeration of boards that are intended to serve more as part of the roof ventilation system than any kind of load bearing structure.
You can literally stand on my porch, outside of the house, look up, and see out of those windows through what passes for a ceiling to the porch.
There's basically nothing there (there's not supposed to be much of anything there), which is fine if you're a squirrel or small bird, but the weight of a raccoon could conceivably bring the whole thing down which would be bad. It is, quite literally, the single hardest part of my house to make repairs to. That's why I've never got around to fixing the whole "You can see through the house from here" thing. That's basically a cosmetic problem (remember, it's not supposed to be airtight) repairs would need to be done from the inside, and the inside is where there's zero support. (The underside at least allows the possibility of a ladder.)
Then again I'm not sure how much I have to worry about the claims of someone who admits to peeping through my windows and taking pictures and may have stolen my cat.
But, back to matters of the self, as opposed to one adult and three baby raccoons that may or may not exist.
I haven't just been tired and generally lacking in any kind of usefulness.
I've been feeling hopeless, and helpless, and worthless.
Though, I do have a small backlog of fiction fragments so I should be able to put some more content on here regardless of whether or not I start feeling better.
There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth. But I've probably done useful things elsewhere, you think. Nope. Not even close. I've washed maybe three to five dishes and two sheet pans and other than that . . . I got nothing. For almost a week.
And just to make sure we're covering all the bases, my failure includes two states. I fucked up notifying the right people of the right things and my cat apparently got locked outside for days. A nosy neighbor who has apparently, without my knowledge or consent, been doing up close photography of the view through my windows (nothing creepy about that) announced (to someone else) that she didn't like how I was taking care of my cat, and my cat has not been seen since.
Also, she claims that there's a family of raccoons in my attic. Whether or not I have an attic depends very much on what you mean by the term. If you think of an attic as a place where things can be stored or anything even remotely like that, then I very much do not have one. If you're more of a strict definition person then yeah, there is empty space between my slanted roof and my flat ceilings. I have not, in fact, filled that space with some form of solid matter. So, by definition, there is an attic.
What there is not, is a floor. Now the rooms of the house all have ceilings, so there's something there that will hold up a lighter animal even if a human foot would punch straight through, but there's a thing about the windows the neighbor would have to look through to see anything up there.
They're basically a facade to make my slant roof give the impression of a non-existent second floor (or at least the kind of attic in which [plot relevant thing] containing cardboard boxes can actually be stored) so that my house, which faces an entire street of two story homes and (on the same side of the street) is next two a three story apartment building, doesn't come off as pitifully small. They weren't placed with any kind of care because they're nothing but decoration. We've already established no floor anywhere up there, but for where the windows are there's no ceiling. They're over the open air porch which isn't a room, wasn't built like one, and does not have a ceiling so much as a centimeter or so thick loose conglomeration of boards that are intended to serve more as part of the roof ventilation system than any kind of load bearing structure.
You can literally stand on my porch, outside of the house, look up, and see out of those windows through what passes for a ceiling to the porch.
There's basically nothing there (there's not supposed to be much of anything there), which is fine if you're a squirrel or small bird, but the weight of a raccoon could conceivably bring the whole thing down which would be bad. It is, quite literally, the single hardest part of my house to make repairs to. That's why I've never got around to fixing the whole "You can see through the house from here" thing. That's basically a cosmetic problem (remember, it's not supposed to be airtight) repairs would need to be done from the inside, and the inside is where there's zero support. (The underside at least allows the possibility of a ladder.)
Then again I'm not sure how much I have to worry about the claims of someone who admits to peeping through my windows and taking pictures and may have stolen my cat.
But, back to matters of the self, as opposed to one adult and three baby raccoons that may or may not exist.
I haven't just been tired and generally lacking in any kind of usefulness.
I've been feeling hopeless, and helpless, and worthless.
Though, I do have a small backlog of fiction fragments so I should be able to put some more content on here regardless of whether or not I start feeling better.
I'm sorry.
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