unhappytriad

So, I’ve avoided posting about this, but just before xmas eve we discovered a bedbug infestation. It could be worse, I suppose—it’s pretty much localized to the bedroom, we threw out the bedspreads and a lot of stuff, and washed everything else, and have been camping out on the folding couch in the living room while we try to prep for the fumigators to come.

This has so far involved throwing out all the boxes that house Andrew’s comics collection—the comic books themselves seem to be ok, but the corrugated-cardboard boxes were definitely providing the ideal hideout for the disgusting critters. I bought thirty plastic bins and we’ve been transferring the comics and many of the books. Andrew’s been keeping it together better than I could have hoped, at least.

In order for pesticide spraying to happen, we need to 1. get as many of the shelves as possible away from the walls, and 2. to get the cats out of the apartment for 4-6 hours. This will be the hard part—Nana can be wrangled into a carrier, but in the five years since we brought her home, we’ve never been able to capture and hold Beatrice.

I guess, living in an apartment, it was only a matter of time. Meanwhile, of course, the wider world continues to be even worse.

In slightly better news, last week I read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. An SF novel about large intelligent spiders might seem an odd choice of comfort reading under the circumstances, but I’ve a feeling that in addition to watching a lot of David Attenborough nature films, Tchaikovsky has seen a lot of classic Doctor Who. His spiders are easy to root for, and his desperate human colonists fleeing a doomed Earth are somehow not quite as bad as real-life politics. I’ve also fond of Holsten Mason, the tragi-comic Classicist who, due to only getting woken out of cryogenic suspension when the crisis du jour specifically requires an expert on Old Galactic Empire dialects, is experiencing the whole multi-millenial epic as “a rough few weeks” during which most of the other crew outage him by decades.

I think my own writing is coming back after a rest following my Yuletide fic—I at least managed to make a bunch of notes today for Gentleman of the Shade, which for some reason has decided it needs another flashback, this one set in a 1970s supper club.

This evening’s migraine is being held at bay by rizatriptan, but it included, for the first time in my life, one of those zigzag rainbow auras I read about. Weird.