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In The "False Alarm" Stage Of PMS
May. 26th, 2026 11:46 pmYeah, my body sent some panic signals my way earlier this way about impending period, resulting in me wearing a pad for the entire day -- but of course the damn red curse didn't actually show up. *grumbles* I hate when this happens -- always feels like a waste of a pad. But it's impossible to concentrate when your body is yelling at you "OH MY GOD THE BLOOD THE BLOOD IS COMING YOU'RE GONNA RUIN YOUR CLOTHES IF YOU DON'T DO SOMETHING" so...damned if you do, damned if you don't! *sighs* Stupid uterus...I'd just yeet you if it wasn't such a pain in the ass!
Anyway -- you didn't come here to listen to me rant about my stupid body. You came here to read the write-up of my day:
Work – It wasn’t too miserable a return to work this Tuesday, I’m happy to say, though I did have a couple of annoying phone calls...my time in the office can be summed up thus:
A) Doing the morning reports, the check deposit, and then the GLs for Friday and Monday (the latter being bigger because stuff was actually uploaded that day) because my coworker was out today and thus couldn’t help me with any of it
B) Getting the checks that came in the mail from my supervisor...and then promptly getting distracted from them by Annoying Phone Call #1, from someone trying to change their payment method on their pledge online – I ended up spending a good 15 minutes with them on the phone directing them to the right website (as they were on the main giving page, which only allows you to make new gifts as far as I’m aware), then helping them link their bank account to their pledge when the site wouldn’t allow them to do it themselves for some reason (they got a weird error message when they tried). We got it all sorted in the end, but MAN did it take longer than it should have!
C) Spending the rest of my time before lunch crafting an e-mail to the credit card company to tell them about Annoying Phone Call #1 and asking them to look into why that error message popped up (can’t have it affecting other donors)
D) Talking with my supervisor about an issue that we had with pledge billings and how to resolve it now that the person in charge of helping create them got back to us to explain what was going wrong
E) Putting on the checks that came in the mail now that I had a free moment
F) Getting a call from one of the parishes to add a new parishioner...and discovering that the guy apparently already had three records in our system, leading me to just note down the new information the parish secretary gave me and do a bunch of research to see if any of them were duplicates (two were – I merged them and added the new information from the parish)
G) Making Annoying Phone Call #2 to a guy who’d called my coworker previously about the aforementioned issue with his pledge billings and trying to explain how gifts end up credited to particular Appeal years (basically, we go by a fiscal year, so everything received after July 1st has to go to the NEXT Appeal year unless it’s a payment on a pledge) so he’d get why he had gifts already credited to 2026 Appeal when he made them at the end of 2025; I don’t think he fully got it, but we came to an accord that we wouldn’t add any of those gifts to his current pledge as he already had his bank set up to send us the checks to pay it off starting June 1st. So it all worked out, it was just a little frustrating on both our ends
H) And going through the meager obituaries in the last couple days’ worth of newspapers and discovering that most of the people weren’t in our system – and the one who was was already marked dead
*looks up at all that* As you can see, I kept busy, at least! XD But it wasn’t overly stressful except for those two phone calls, so I can live with it. We’ll see what happens tomorrow with my coworker back!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with James Turner’s “Let's play Paralives for the first time! Full Build & Gameplay!” Tonight’s third of the video featured –
A) James finishing up Semaj’s little two-story alley house! Which wasn’t his best build, he fully admitted, but he was trying not to get too wrapped up in playing with all the Build Mode stuff so he could actually get to, you know, playing the game. XD Still, he tried to make it a nice place to live for his self-Para, and thus Semaj ended up with:
I. A first-floor bedroom with a nice double bed, a little closet in the corner, a dresser, and a shelf above his bed with a cute little plant (James happily showing off how every bed came in both a single and double variant, and could be stretched and squashed to your heart’s content, along with how you could make lamps straight-up float if you wanted them to XD)
II. A first-floor bathroom with a toilet, sink, shower, and mirror (he was pleased that there were a couple of “built into the wall” showers for you to choose from, and THRILLED that you could place mirrors on the wall WHEREVER THE HELL YOU WANTED – Sims 4 is SUPER strict on mirror placements unless you cheat, as I well know myself!)
( More building and even a little bit of gameplay underneath )
2. Continue writing Chapter 1 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Hollywood’s Deluded Depths”: Check – added another page-and-a-bit to the story today, covering –
A) Alice returning to the cab after a scene break, smoothing out her rumpled top (Kate was a bit enthusiastic) and apologizing to Victor for being a little late, as she had to get a snack. Victor quickly realized what she meant and awkwardly asked if it was tasty – Alice said that she enjoyed it, but wouldn’t say it was anything special. Before adding with a smirk that it was nothing compared to his cooking, making him blush. XD Still the best she’s ever drunk, buddy!
B) Alice giving the cabbie the address for Abrams Golden Age Jewelry in Hollywood (on a slip of paper so I could avoid putting an actual address in the fic :P) and buckling up as she told Victor that she had indeed found Knox, and he’d been able to tell her that Victor’s “condition” was just, in her words, “a rare thing people of your persuasion can pick up.” It’s fun being circumspect in front of (or, well, I guess more accurately behind) the cab driver! :p Anyway, she added that Knox hadn’t had any tips on dealing with it, but at least now they knew Victor wasn’t the only one with the condition. Victor agreed it did help to know he wasn’t alone, but that it was funny he’d have something so rare –
Then had a thought and wondered if one of his previous misadventures had somehow made him more susceptible. Alice quickly realized he meant the incident with Emily and admitted that was a possibility, given how she’d turned his life upside-down. Victor agreed she had, then gave Alice a smile and said that he couldn’t be mad because it had led him to her. Alice teased him for being a flatterer in response. XD Damn it, they’re so cute together, seriously…
C) Alice deciding they could talk about Victor’s “condition” in more detail later and declaring she had to concentrate on her business in Hollywood – Victor asked if she thought she’d have any trouble with Isaac, and Alice replied she hoped not, but since trouble did seem to follow her around, she was fully expecting all sorts of unnecessary complications. She was firm in her conviction that she could handle them, though – mostly because she didn’t have any choice as “LaCroix’s premiere errand girl.” Victor tried to comfort her by telling her that he had to cut her loose sometime, but Alice wasn’t so sure – mostly because he could always afford to pay her, and he did seem to love ordering her about. She was of the opinion that she’d have to wait for him to get bored of her, or fake her death and flee on a moonless night. Victor wasn’t sure how much she was joking about the latter possibility, and frankly, neither was Alice. XD
D) And Alice turning the conversation to what Victor had been drawing before – turns out he was sketching Mercurio’s apartment, having been inspired again by the shapes the buildings of Santa Monica make against the sky...and unlike in his first appearance in “Downtown Queensland,” NOT distracted by his desperate thirst for Alice’s blood. (Or, well, at least not so distracted.) Alice admired his handiwork with a pen, saying that her preferred drawing implement was a pencil and admitting she didn’t think she could give up the ability to rub out mistakes – Victor confessed that he’d gotten a LOT of practice in disguising accidental lines as something else, but added that he just preferred the smooth flow of ink on a page. Alice said that he should draw how he liked and asked if he’d drawn anything else while she was away, causing Victor to reveal he’d done some rough sketches of some of the people on the sidewalk. He confessed he didn’t do humans often, and Alice admitted that they weren’t quite up to the quality of his butterfly drawings – though she thought they were still nice. Better than she could do, anyway…
And that’s where I left it! Tomorrow, we continue with Victor and Alice deciding to draw each other on the trip to Hollywood, and me deciding if Victor’s going to do a Londerland Bloodlines version of the “Alice fighting an Army Ant” picture that was so important to her in the Forgotten Vows Verse. I mean, given this is the story where the romance starts, it feels appropriate...we’ll see what happens when I actually write things up!
3. Watch something on YouTube: Partial Substitution Check – I didn’t watch anything on YOUTUBE, but I did watch someone’s short compilation of funny B. Dylan Hollis (the guy who bakes old recipes on TikTok) clips and an old one-minute video of him making a Jello Poke Cake and promoting his Baking Yesteryear book on tumblr while having my ice cream, so – that has to count for something! It was audio-visual content and I enjoyed it!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check – both my blogs now have something in their queue for Wednesday –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here, I spent some time tonight finishing up the “Valicer Headcanons: Your Name is WHAT???” post about how Victor and Alice (and other polycule members as appropriate) find out Smiler’s birth name is “Marmaduke” – tweaking some phrasing here and there, adding a few last links, and doing the tags – before popping it in the queue. Hopefully people enjoy it!
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I dropped into the queue my answer to this anon ask: “Alice, have you run into any supernatural creatures since moving to Hill Valley?” I naturally took this to mean that they were talking to Londerland Bloodlines!Alice, since she moves to Hill Valley at the end of the nonsense in LA, and had her reply that she hadn’t really, as Hill Valley was very quiet in that regard. Like, she had a couple of Nosferatu contacts in the sewers, but she hadn’t seen any other Kindred, or werewolves, or ghosts, or anything like that. Which she found quite nice, honestly, as she liked the quiet.
...And then she admitted that she would not be surprised if her landlord, Doc Brown, was a wizard of some kind, because there was something odd about that man. XD As I said in the tags – not a wizard, Alice, but a mad scientist with a talent for time machines. Small but crucial difference. :p
Yeah, not bad for a first Tuesday back at work -- especially one where I kept worrying about my period. And now it is time for me to head to bed and try to get some sleep despite it being kinda warm. Fingers crossed for me, folks! Night all!
Anyway -- you didn't come here to listen to me rant about my stupid body. You came here to read the write-up of my day:
Work – It wasn’t too miserable a return to work this Tuesday, I’m happy to say, though I did have a couple of annoying phone calls...my time in the office can be summed up thus:
A) Doing the morning reports, the check deposit, and then the GLs for Friday and Monday (the latter being bigger because stuff was actually uploaded that day) because my coworker was out today and thus couldn’t help me with any of it
B) Getting the checks that came in the mail from my supervisor...and then promptly getting distracted from them by Annoying Phone Call #1, from someone trying to change their payment method on their pledge online – I ended up spending a good 15 minutes with them on the phone directing them to the right website (as they were on the main giving page, which only allows you to make new gifts as far as I’m aware), then helping them link their bank account to their pledge when the site wouldn’t allow them to do it themselves for some reason (they got a weird error message when they tried). We got it all sorted in the end, but MAN did it take longer than it should have!
C) Spending the rest of my time before lunch crafting an e-mail to the credit card company to tell them about Annoying Phone Call #1 and asking them to look into why that error message popped up (can’t have it affecting other donors)
D) Talking with my supervisor about an issue that we had with pledge billings and how to resolve it now that the person in charge of helping create them got back to us to explain what was going wrong
E) Putting on the checks that came in the mail now that I had a free moment
F) Getting a call from one of the parishes to add a new parishioner...and discovering that the guy apparently already had three records in our system, leading me to just note down the new information the parish secretary gave me and do a bunch of research to see if any of them were duplicates (two were – I merged them and added the new information from the parish)
G) Making Annoying Phone Call #2 to a guy who’d called my coworker previously about the aforementioned issue with his pledge billings and trying to explain how gifts end up credited to particular Appeal years (basically, we go by a fiscal year, so everything received after July 1st has to go to the NEXT Appeal year unless it’s a payment on a pledge) so he’d get why he had gifts already credited to 2026 Appeal when he made them at the end of 2025; I don’t think he fully got it, but we came to an accord that we wouldn’t add any of those gifts to his current pledge as he already had his bank set up to send us the checks to pay it off starting June 1st. So it all worked out, it was just a little frustrating on both our ends
H) And going through the meager obituaries in the last couple days’ worth of newspapers and discovering that most of the people weren’t in our system – and the one who was was already marked dead
*looks up at all that* As you can see, I kept busy, at least! XD But it wasn’t overly stressful except for those two phone calls, so I can live with it. We’ll see what happens tomorrow with my coworker back!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with James Turner’s “Let's play Paralives for the first time! Full Build & Gameplay!” Tonight’s third of the video featured –
A) James finishing up Semaj’s little two-story alley house! Which wasn’t his best build, he fully admitted, but he was trying not to get too wrapped up in playing with all the Build Mode stuff so he could actually get to, you know, playing the game. XD Still, he tried to make it a nice place to live for his self-Para, and thus Semaj ended up with:
I. A first-floor bedroom with a nice double bed, a little closet in the corner, a dresser, and a shelf above his bed with a cute little plant (James happily showing off how every bed came in both a single and double variant, and could be stretched and squashed to your heart’s content, along with how you could make lamps straight-up float if you wanted them to XD)
II. A first-floor bathroom with a toilet, sink, shower, and mirror (he was pleased that there were a couple of “built into the wall” showers for you to choose from, and THRILLED that you could place mirrors on the wall WHEREVER THE HELL YOU WANTED – Sims 4 is SUPER strict on mirror placements unless you cheat, as I well know myself!)
( More building and even a little bit of gameplay underneath )
2. Continue writing Chapter 1 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Hollywood’s Deluded Depths”: Check – added another page-and-a-bit to the story today, covering –
A) Alice returning to the cab after a scene break, smoothing out her rumpled top (Kate was a bit enthusiastic) and apologizing to Victor for being a little late, as she had to get a snack. Victor quickly realized what she meant and awkwardly asked if it was tasty – Alice said that she enjoyed it, but wouldn’t say it was anything special. Before adding with a smirk that it was nothing compared to his cooking, making him blush. XD Still the best she’s ever drunk, buddy!
B) Alice giving the cabbie the address for Abrams Golden Age Jewelry in Hollywood (on a slip of paper so I could avoid putting an actual address in the fic :P) and buckling up as she told Victor that she had indeed found Knox, and he’d been able to tell her that Victor’s “condition” was just, in her words, “a rare thing people of your persuasion can pick up.” It’s fun being circumspect in front of (or, well, I guess more accurately behind) the cab driver! :p Anyway, she added that Knox hadn’t had any tips on dealing with it, but at least now they knew Victor wasn’t the only one with the condition. Victor agreed it did help to know he wasn’t alone, but that it was funny he’d have something so rare –
Then had a thought and wondered if one of his previous misadventures had somehow made him more susceptible. Alice quickly realized he meant the incident with Emily and admitted that was a possibility, given how she’d turned his life upside-down. Victor agreed she had, then gave Alice a smile and said that he couldn’t be mad because it had led him to her. Alice teased him for being a flatterer in response. XD Damn it, they’re so cute together, seriously…
C) Alice deciding they could talk about Victor’s “condition” in more detail later and declaring she had to concentrate on her business in Hollywood – Victor asked if she thought she’d have any trouble with Isaac, and Alice replied she hoped not, but since trouble did seem to follow her around, she was fully expecting all sorts of unnecessary complications. She was firm in her conviction that she could handle them, though – mostly because she didn’t have any choice as “LaCroix’s premiere errand girl.” Victor tried to comfort her by telling her that he had to cut her loose sometime, but Alice wasn’t so sure – mostly because he could always afford to pay her, and he did seem to love ordering her about. She was of the opinion that she’d have to wait for him to get bored of her, or fake her death and flee on a moonless night. Victor wasn’t sure how much she was joking about the latter possibility, and frankly, neither was Alice. XD
D) And Alice turning the conversation to what Victor had been drawing before – turns out he was sketching Mercurio’s apartment, having been inspired again by the shapes the buildings of Santa Monica make against the sky...and unlike in his first appearance in “Downtown Queensland,” NOT distracted by his desperate thirst for Alice’s blood. (Or, well, at least not so distracted.) Alice admired his handiwork with a pen, saying that her preferred drawing implement was a pencil and admitting she didn’t think she could give up the ability to rub out mistakes – Victor confessed that he’d gotten a LOT of practice in disguising accidental lines as something else, but added that he just preferred the smooth flow of ink on a page. Alice said that he should draw how he liked and asked if he’d drawn anything else while she was away, causing Victor to reveal he’d done some rough sketches of some of the people on the sidewalk. He confessed he didn’t do humans often, and Alice admitted that they weren’t quite up to the quality of his butterfly drawings – though she thought they were still nice. Better than she could do, anyway…
And that’s where I left it! Tomorrow, we continue with Victor and Alice deciding to draw each other on the trip to Hollywood, and me deciding if Victor’s going to do a Londerland Bloodlines version of the “Alice fighting an Army Ant” picture that was so important to her in the Forgotten Vows Verse. I mean, given this is the story where the romance starts, it feels appropriate...we’ll see what happens when I actually write things up!
3. Watch something on YouTube: Partial Substitution Check – I didn’t watch anything on YOUTUBE, but I did watch someone’s short compilation of funny B. Dylan Hollis (the guy who bakes old recipes on TikTok) clips and an old one-minute video of him making a Jello Poke Cake and promoting his Baking Yesteryear book on tumblr while having my ice cream, so – that has to count for something! It was audio-visual content and I enjoyed it!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check and check – both my blogs now have something in their queue for Wednesday –
Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Over here, I spent some time tonight finishing up the “Valicer Headcanons: Your Name is WHAT???” post about how Victor and Alice (and other polycule members as appropriate) find out Smiler’s birth name is “Marmaduke” – tweaking some phrasing here and there, adding a few last links, and doing the tags – before popping it in the queue. Hopefully people enjoy it!
Valice Multiverse – And over here, I dropped into the queue my answer to this anon ask: “Alice, have you run into any supernatural creatures since moving to Hill Valley?” I naturally took this to mean that they were talking to Londerland Bloodlines!Alice, since she moves to Hill Valley at the end of the nonsense in LA, and had her reply that she hadn’t really, as Hill Valley was very quiet in that regard. Like, she had a couple of Nosferatu contacts in the sewers, but she hadn’t seen any other Kindred, or werewolves, or ghosts, or anything like that. Which she found quite nice, honestly, as she liked the quiet.
...And then she admitted that she would not be surprised if her landlord, Doc Brown, was a wizard of some kind, because there was something odd about that man. XD As I said in the tags – not a wizard, Alice, but a mad scientist with a talent for time machines. Small but crucial difference. :p
Yeah, not bad for a first Tuesday back at work -- especially one where I kept worrying about my period. And now it is time for me to head to bed and try to get some sleep despite it being kinda warm. Fingers crossed for me, folks! Night all!
