Oy.

I opened an account on X. It's been...interesting, but it hasn't helped my bottom line as a writer at all. Mostly what it has done has helped ME.  

How?  

It helped me figure out something that's improved my quality of life: I don't tolerate vegetable oils/seed oils.   

There's a specific account that got me started thinking and trying it.  He's a power-lifter coach that endorses a carnivore diet, and points out that the majority of modern medical maladies began after industrial waste started being refined and sold as food.  

Yeah, folks, that's exactly what he said.  And fact checking says he's not wrong, even if it's a little over-simplified for some things.*  Corn oil, soybean, cottonseed oil, canola--it's almost all of it rooted in industrial waste.  

(Note that I didn't include olive oil in that...or sesame, peanut, or sunflower seed.  Those are slightly different, and are best used without heat applied.  When heat is applied...they become toxic.  Especially the fumes from them.) 

Canola, though...that's a bit different.  It wasn't industrial waste, it was lubricant.  Specifically, wet-navy lubricant, because it didn't wash off the engine parts in salt-water-heavy atmospheric conditions.  It actually took a lot of fiddling to make it (quasi) food safe.    

So, I've dumped vegetable oils from my diet.**  As much as I can, I've replaced them with the things humans have eaten throughout history: butter, tallow, lard.  Some things are just as good made with melted lard as they are with vegetable oil.  Some things are better.  

I have had over a decade of increasing levels of joint pain.  Ankles, knees, hips, and hands.  Over a decade of my pain levels jacking up past my ability to tolerate over winters, weather changes, and just because my body decides to be an asshole.  

Last night and this morning, we had a front moving through.  This time last year, daily pain levels would have been around a 4 to a 5, daily.  Weather like last night's and this mornings would have sent it higher.  I'd have had to have a double bourbon to be able to go to sleep because my pain levels seated under a heat pad would have been around a 7, spiking to graying out my vision when I stood up to move.  This year, after six months of minimal seed oils?  Went from a daily 3 to a 5.  Spiking to a 7 when I stood up to do something.  

Yeah, you heard that right: six months of majority animal fats have dropped my daily pain levels by at least a full point on GOOD days.  Even if my bad days are still cruddy, the worst ones aren't as bad as they used to be.  

I can close my hands all the way.  Before, the joints where index and middle fingers meet palms were too stiff to do that.  Pinkies screamed.  

I haven't had as much trouble with gallbladder attacks, either.  Not that I have no trouble, just less.  

Last, but not least...I've been having some real issues with GERD.  That's also tamed down somewhat.  There's still some problems, but I've reduced my OTC 12-hour acid blocker intake to overnight only, and any heartburn during the day comes when I get hungry...and a piece of gum deals handily with that when I'm in my no-food-before-thyroid meds window.  

Overall, this guy's done me a lot of good; however...

...he's got some really weird blind spots.  

Or maybe I have some really weird blind spots.  

He's got this thing, where he assumes that any attempt at keeping people from eating pigs is because the nobility didn't want the peasantry to have anything like what showed up on their table.  Granted, that was probably true for Britain*** but not true for the Children of Israel.  He looks at their dietary laws and thinks power tripping nobility because of the fucking Normans and how they treated the native Anglo-Saxon population that they were trying to pacify.  Points out that nobody knew about the parasites in pig flesh, and how undercooked pork meant that those passed to humans and did awful things to them.  

He is, actually, not incorrect on that point.  He's also not really correct, because Someone did.  I'm not sure if it's just because the guy's British, or because most of Europe in general is a bit anti-religion, he completely misses that most of the dietary laws set forth in the Old Testament have actual food-safety and health reasons behind them (even though some of those laws are actually intended to change how the people thought about life, death, birth, and parenthood.  "Thou shalt not boil the young of any clean beast in the milk of its mother" was exactly that...and it was intended to be a separation from the rather nasty pagan cultures that Israel was meant to replace). 

Shellfish are filters, go rancid really fast, and on top of that, certain segments are deathly allergic to them.  Not that they knew that, because Himself set rules to keep them alive and healthy.  

Pork falls under the same rules: unclean not because it wallowed in mud, but because if it's not cooked and preserved correctly (which they didn't have either the knowledge or technology to do) it killed people slowly, in really nasty ways.  

I believe in the Divine.  I believe that God exists, that He loves us, and that He wants us to be healthy and happy.  I believe that the Bible wasn't just Divinely inspired but an attempt to keep unwashed, illiterate desert dwellers healthy, and to rewrite their culture toward something that would, in time, bring about the world we have today, where His people aren't starving or enslaved, for the most part.  And, in this country, with a few outliers, His people aren't slaughtered just for being His.  

That's the main point where the writer on X falls short: by assuming that the prohibition on eating pork and shellfish is a class thing, simply because we didn't know why it was there until recently.  

That may be his blind spot...or it may be mine because I don't acknowledge a different class's rights to tell me what I can and cannot eat, because I was raised a free citizen, in a culture of "anything not forbidden by law is permitted," rather than a subject in a culture of "anything not permitted by law--which may change without warning or notice--is forbidden."


*Coconut and palm oils, the worst he has to say is that they're harvested via animal abuse.  They're not unhealthy, though.  Not like the ones that are factory made with industrial solvents.  No, I don't eat things that use them, but that's because I seem to be allergic to both--they break me out.  

**There's been a LOT of label reading.  And a lot more cooking from scratch.  SO many things use vegetable oil as a first ingredient that it's not even funny.  Still looking for some sauce substitutes for things that use mayo as an ingredient...

***Fucking William the Bastard slaughtered the majority of the Anglo-Saxon gentry. Then imposed French culture from the top down, including ignoring rights that the Saxons had had from before the kingdoms united under Alfred the Great.  When the Saxons protested losing the rights to gather things their families needed, the kings responded by removing more of their ability to feed themselves the foods that brought strength to do the work required by farming.  If they lacked the foods, they were weak and dependent; if they had the foods...well.  They insisted more on the rights they'd always had.  Took over six hundred years--and the ability for those who couldn't submit to leave for the New World--before they could afford to loosen the choke-hold.   

A month in...

We're a month in for Imp's new educational situation.  He's doing very well, I think.  Today's a day off--the public school has a teacher training day.  

So far, he's passed his OSHA training, and all of the associated tests for certification--which were required before they get into the fun stuff for his Advanced Manufacturing program.  The first in his class to pass all the required tests, and he passed with flying colors.  Since then, he's been playing with Fusion, learning how it works, because the shop teacher was out at a conference.  

He's doing really well at the homeschool stuff, too, but I had to adjust my plans. Hard. Because what I'd had planned...triggered panic attacks.   

I failed him. Egregiously. For years.   

My plans were to provide books, and to blend literature in with history, and blend both of those with the development of the unique form of government our Founders created for us* with books and documents provided for him to read through.  I figured he's actually good at it if he's not required to sit still and be still.  I thought it would be enough.  

It wasn't.  

I've adjusted, hard, on the fly.  Instead of being handed textbooks, I've gotten him audio.  It isn't that he can't read (he keeps up with subtitled anime. He reads well, quickly, accurately, and with better retention of what he's read than probably 80% of his age and education experience).  It's that textbooks trigger the panic reaction.  

So do binders. And any and all organization style that isn't a fucking toolbox.

I had not realized how badly the school he's been attending since he was six actually fit.  They didn't just refuse to adjust for his educational needs and learning style; they worked to break him to fit what they provided.  

So, again, we switched to audio.  He's been focusing on history, Econ (Sowell's Basic Economics is the textbook we're working from) and literature/political science (not that he knows we're focusing on that, not really).  

He's doing incredibly well.  He's choosing what to listen to on which day, and sometimes he stops the audio, and goes away to think about things.  And reconcile what he's just learned with what he'd learned in the past.  Some of it meshes okay, but some has been a revelation.**   

Other than that, he's also begun listening to Starship Troopers.  It was something I wanted him to read not just because I think he should, but because I was pretty certain he'd enjoy it...and that his current favorite computer game is a blatant rip-off of it.  So far, so good, but he's only just started it.  

(I plan to have him listen to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as well, and perhaps Have Spacesuit--Will Travel.  I've got both of those in Kindle, and the audio's heavily discounted if you've already got the Kindle version.)

I'm also strongly considering making him subscribe to Audible (and paying him back for it), and encouraging a lot more reading of whatever he feels like alongside the things I want him listening to so that I can point out tropes, techniques, and things that will be tested over when he goes for his GED.  

Because I am damned if I'm going to hand him back to the people who tried to break him to fit their educational models.  Nor will I trust the public school to not make it worse in the academic classes.   

*"A republic--if you can keep it."--Ben Franklin

**Indentured. Brides. Women bribed from poor families and/or snatched off the streets and shipped over to marry tobacco farmers.  WTAF.  

Goes live on Saturday!

A Sunny Day on Ganymede goes live on Saturday!  Pre-order's live now!  It'll be available as a paperback, Kindle, and on Kindle Unlimited!  

(Yes, I'm excited!)

Kids! Kids in colonies!

 I managed a thing.  No, it's not finishing the new Modern Gods book.  Nor is it the novel about the kid embarking on life befriending Von Newman entity that took over a Chevy Silverado.  

Instead, I've managed to get ambushed by enough short stories to put together a themed collection.  The stories that ambushed me have protagonists varying in age between eight and seventeen, all boys, and all of the stories should be readable--and enjoyable--by pretty much any age or sex. 

How do I know that last?  My daughter's enjoyed the ones she's read.  And she's planning on beta reading the rest.   

The collection's titled A Sunny Day on Ganymede, and it contains five stories.   It's up for pre-order, now, and will be released in late August, to give me time to address any issues Pixie spots in reading.  

Cheers, y'all!

The End of Last School Year, or Why I Don't Have Anything Ready to Publish, Yet

 One of the worst things about parenting, I’ve been told, is that you’re responsible for everything they do, but have no control over any of it.

My observations as a parent have indicated that this is true. It’s absolutely true. You are held responsible for all the trouble your kids get into, and you can’t keep them from doing stupid shit when you’re not around to smack the stupid out of them; however, think about it from the kid’s perspective. You’re told, from day one, that all of your actions and choices reflect on your parents, but you’re shoved into a small room with twenty-five others the same calendar age as you, but with mental and emotional ages anywhere from two years older than calendar age, to four years younger. You have, perhaps, one or two peers—children your age, your maturity level, and your ability level—with whom you get along.

And there’s one adult who plays favorites at the head of the room. Their favorites are cosseted, rewarded, never disciplined if they misbehave.

The funny thing is that the pets are almost always girls.

And the pets, by and large, despise everyone that isn’t one of the favored few. And they target those. They bully, they tattle, they cry-bully—oh, he/she hurt my feelings by saying/doing something I don’t like! Make them stop!

And the pets’ targets? Frequently boys, but they’ll also target girls who befriend their designated target. The point is to try to get the girls to abandon the friendship, to isolate their target, and either drive them out entirely, or keep them in trouble.

Sometimes, they manage to get one of the girls that are friends with the target to turn on them, to tattle something said in confidence expressing frustration that gets twisted into a threat.

(Somehow, though, the pets’ threats are never more than a joke...and never get the same disciplinary action.)

Is it any wonder that schools are deemed torture chambers by some of the kids?

I’m not posing hypotheticals. One of my kids is a designated target. Another has faced bullying to break a friendship with a designated target.

My kids are in private school.

I grew up in public school, where the bullying was a lot more overt, and physical. I have to admit I missed the signs of the bullying my kids were facing because it’s not the same. It’s not open. It’s girl-bullying. All of it. Seraglio politics-type bullying, where the target’s isolated, emotionally targeted, and when they react, the bullies—yes, I said it—work to fully ruin the target: the victims’ reputation is targeted, and the bullies try to get things put on a permanent record.

And nobody halts it because it’s not bullying bullying. I mean, nobody’s hurt, right? And we act on threats, right?

Wrong. My son’s been sexually harassed in ways that’d get a boy bounced—did get a boy bounced, even when it was a prank on a girl whose pants were too low rise and exposing her butt crack, and the boy had no interest in the girl at all.* They push, and they demand attention (well, he’s a child of proud gen-X parents; they don’t normally like the attention they get from him). He’s tried being kind, tried being blunt, tried telling them he’s Ace...nothing works to make them back off, except for cruelty and insults...which gets him in trouble. But not the girls who started it.

Has he reported the harassment? He says he has; the official response is “oh, they like you! You should be flattered!”

He’s not flattered. He’s annoyed, he’s frustrated, he’s grossed out, and this has pushed him so far into being asexual that I’m not sure he’s going to come back out again. And it’s because the school allows behavior from the girls that they absolutely would not allow from the boys.

My son’s had bomb threats made against his house.

Has he reported the behavior? He says he has.** And nobody did anything. Oh, the bomb threats were jokes. Girls wouldn’t actually go through with that. 

(I beg people to do some fucking research on the political terrorism of the ‘70s, and who the terrorists setting bombs were.)

But the instant my son makes jokes about Call of Duty letting him vent, and if he were to go on a spree, the girls targeting him would be at the top of the list? Oh, that’s a threat.***

So, he was suspended. For finals week. And the following school year.

(But they let him make up finals week after all the other students are gone from the building.)

And here’s the kicker. If you’ll notice, I haven’t named/shamed the school. There are some reasons for that. First, it’s against the rules to badmouth the school on social media. And my daughter’s got friends there, and is doing incredibly well (4.0 GPA), in ways my son just...isn’t. I don’t want this blowing back on her.

Second, I also don’t want this blowing back on him. I’ve been...not quite threatened. See, they could have called the police, y’see. And if they were a public school, they’d have had to. I’m not naming and shaming, even though they’ve suspended him now for the next school year. Not expelled, just suspended for the ‘26-‘27 school year.

As if that’s not the same as expulsion. He’s going to be eighteen in October. He’s going into Junior year...and that’s what he’d be suspended for all of. He’d only go back for his senior year, and, at this point, I’m inclined to finish him out with homeschool with a GED and the tech certs.

And even with all the bullying he faced, the anxiety and the difficulties caused by being a smart, ADHD boy in a girl-centric environment, all of that is better than what he’d have faced in standard classes at the local public school. Even if his grades would’ve jumped probably by three letters.

Honestly, another reason I'm not naming and shaming is because, when I challenged the superintendent on different standards of punishment for boys and girls, he claimed he'd never heard about Imp's issues, and was not happy, and would be investigating.  I couldn't tell you whether the principal knew or not, considering he'd been on his way out the door.  This year, the superintendent and the managing director of the school's tech programs will be splitting the duties while they look for another, so I doubt this will get swept under the rug.

But with all of the above happening in mid-May, I've been bouncing around like an unprogrammed Roomba, trying to figure out how to keep Imp's spot in the trade school and figuring out what I'm going to end up teaching him next year.  And how.  I mean, I can do economics (thank you, Dr. Sowell, for your magnificent book), science, and language/literature; Other Half can do History, and we can split government.  However.  I seriously don't have any idea how I'm going to manage any higher maths when I only barely managed Algebra.  And I'm not certain what math program he needs--Algebra 2, or something else--to mesh with the program he'll be going into (Advanced Manufacturing).

So, there you have it: the biggest reason why I don't have anything quite ready for publication, even though it's freakin' July, and the last thing I had out was in March. 

*Kid dropped a pencil down her exposed crack. Expelled for “sexual harassment.” Even though the kid had no interest in that girl, and a noted impulse problem with dropping pencils down cracks...just mostly through vents, or air returns, rather than clothing-exposed body parts.

**Reporting is done via email to an account that the office help has access to. One of the ringleaders is office help. Because the principal is frequently not in his office, and sometimes can’t be found at all for reporting in person.

***Further info: the joke was made during a history presentation. The teacher didn’t report it as a threat. A girl he thought he was friends with reported it over a week later, when she got mad at him. He’d gotten up to throw something away, and she’d taken his seat. School student-culture’s unspoken rules expect them to find an empty seat somewhere else, and be quiet; he absolutely wasn’t willing to get in trouble by sitting somewhere other than his assigned seat, as he would have done.

Shadow

 End of April(ish) 2012-July 7 2026

We adopted Shadow and Cricket on Independence Day, back in '12.  Imp wasn't quite 4, and Pixie was just about 19 months.  And we went to PetSmart to let them look at the critters, since the zoo was over an hour away.  There was a kennel cage with two kittens, about 10 weeks* or so, wrestling.  They stopped abruptly when the kids squealed, and rushed to the bars to scream and reach for the kids.  

We'd lost Binx a few weeks earlier, and I was slowly coming apart without a cat.  So, since those two fuzzballs wanted my kids so desperately...we adopted them.  Both.  So the kids wouldn't fight over a single kitten, and so one kitten wouldn't be lonely.  

Shadow was...Shadow was terribly smart.  Terrifyingly smart.  And brave.  Cricket, when we got her home, hid out for a little while; Shadow explored.   Shadow napped on the kids while they watched Tom & Jerry.  Shadow went to bed at night with Imp (she didn't stay there).  But she slept on Imp every night until about January, when she became too frail for him to want her to jump down from his half-loft.  He hasn't slept nearly as well since then, either. 

Shadow would bap Cricket on the head and then run from her--and then abruptly change direction, while Cricket kept going for a while...I swear she was laughing at her much dimmer sister.  

When the cats were five and the kids were six and eight, we moved into a much bigger house.  

Cricket hid for three days.  Shadow explored, found that she could thunder from one end of the house to the other, and use the hall runner to slide a few feet. She'd do that over and over for years, because it was fun.  She discovered...the full length mirror on the back of the master bathroom door.  Which was fascinating.  And she realized, pretty quickly, that that was her in the mirror.  

She loved this house.  There were mice in the garage that she could catch and eat.  And wow, did she do a LOT of that.  And sometimes, she'd come in from hunting with cobwebs in her whiskers that she had trouble cleaning out, and she'd go to the bathrooms, to one of the mirrors, and use that to clean the cobwebs out of her whiskers.  

A few years ago, she learned to talk--a few words, garbled.  I was not expecting that.  She'd say Imp's name, out, mouse, yeah, and no.  And Mama.  I found out she knew how to say help, one time when she had a hairball: "Oh, no. Oh, no.  Oh, no, no, no."  Hurk.  "Mama, halp!" hurk-splat "ew."   

She'd started losing weight a couple of years ago.  Slow.  And then, this year, right at the beginning she took a hard downturn.  It's been a hard seven months, watching her fade, and trying to fight it.   Watching her struggle and fight it.  She didn't want to go, until suddenly she did.  

We loved her very much.  I suspect she loved all of us (including that irritating dog) just as much.  

I will miss her for the rest of my life.  

It's been a long year...

And we haven't made it to August, yet. 

Imp failed first semester biology.  In spite of trying really hard to not.  Was the teacher and the way the class was structured, not just his information retention and unwillingness to expend effort on a failing proposition.  My stress levels jacked way the hell up.

Then. Back in January, Shadow stopped eating.  Entirely.  I managed to pull her through the crisis, but it took a lot of time, effort, and stress.  Which led to February.  

In February, I got sick. Again.  Flu-adjacent.  I never take viruses to the doctor, since there's jack-all they can do; however, this time, one dose of Anacin really hurt.  And then, the toddy in the evening to knock the virus back a bit felt like pouring rubbing alcohol on a scraped knee.  

In my stomach.  I'd expected it with the sore throat, but not...not my stomach.  That sent me to the doctor.   She said it was eminently possible that I did, indeed have ulcers, but that it was likely stress-induced, in my case (and she wasn't wrong).  She gave me a prescription for six weeks of PPI, and switched my brands of natural thyroid to the one that worked better.  

And the cat had another downturn, just after I finished up my six weeks of PPI at the end of March.  MUCH more stress.  I pulled her through it, and managed to get her to gain a little weight. Not much, but a little. So that was a relief.

Oh, and Imp passed third quarter biology...barely.  As in, one half of a percentage point appeared to bring him up to 60% on his third quarter grades.  Out of nowhere. That was something of a relief, too, but it was very short lived.  

Toward the end of the school year, the cat had yet another downturn, but not as bad.  

The Imp, on the other hand...well.  I'm working on a piece explaining the shit-show that ended the school year, there. 

And so, we're at the beginning of July, and Shadow has decided it's time to go.  I can't get her to eat. I can't get her to drink, at this point.  She's shutting down, and cold, even as she lifts her head to squeak when I go check on her. 

I haven't gotten anything done except rushing around trying (and failing) to put out fires.  I don't have anything finished and ready to publish.  I mean, I've got one project about half done, and a collection of shorts about 2/3 done.  NOT planned shorts, not a planned collection, just...well. I get mugged by stuff that demands to be written immediately, or else it shuts down the main projects until I do. Faster to write the damned stories. 

 Oh, and my laptop's giving signs that it wants to die.  I am going to need a new one.  I'm trying to keep it going at least until we can take advantage of the back-to-school sales tax holiday.  And we're also going to need a new printer.  And a laptop for Imp, since I'm responsible for that.  And textbooks.   

August isn't going to be any better.  I'll still be grieving Shadow (and probably spoiling Cricket a bit), and I'll be pushing to get both kids ready for the school year.  I'm really not sure how anything's going to shake out for the next year, at least, and possibly the next two years.