Tuesday Family Health News
Jan. 13th, 2026 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickBasically, Dad banged himself up even more than we realized when he fell down the stairs, AND it looks like there's stuff on his liver and lung that will need to be biopsied in the very near future. Also his stomach remains fucked up for unknown reasons. *heavy sigh* So we've got all that hanging over our heads for the time being. On the plus side, they gave him even stronger painkillers, and those DO seem to be doing the job, at least when it comes to him getting some sleep, so... I guess we'll see where things go from there. *shakehead* I fucking hate 2026. I fucking hate this whole decade.
Life has not yet stopped because of health issues, though -- and frankly, keeping up with my routine, at least a little, is helping me not lose my mind entirely. So here's the usual daily write-up for your enjoyment:
Work – Another busy day at work – though at least this time it was busy in a quieter way, as we weren’t dealing with a lot of phone calls. I spent my eight hours in the office today:
A) Doing the usual morning reports and answering a few questions on batches that needed posting from our database people
B) Helping my coworker count out and make piles of Spanish Appeal posters to be put into big envelopes so they could eventually be delivered to the parishes with large numbers of Spanish-speaking parishioners
C) E-mailing a bunch of people who’d had credit card failures near the beginning of the year so they knew that their payments/gifts needed to be retried
D) Adding a few more new names from that list of new parishioners for one of the parishes, and updating a few people who we already had on the database accordingly
E) And taking a couple of “Hey, we’re getting back to you about that letter you called about yesterday, it’s approved” calls from parishes
Nothing exciting, but I suppose it all made the day go by. We’ll see what tomorrow brings – other than the first Useless Credit Card Company Check-In Call of the year. (*looks at that* Hmmm – anyone know any synonyms for “useless” that start with C?)
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Fallout 3: Jon & Claire Are Still Sick So We're Speedrunning Fallout Live Special!” The second half-hour of the J & C FO3 Sickness Speedrun featured:
A) Jon running into a Brotherhood Outcast getting blown up on his trek to the garage and gleefully having Player Name (aka “P. N.” for this write-up) loot his power armor before dropping a save because DAMN (this actually happened at the end of yesterday’s chunk, but I rewound a bit to watch it again XD)
B) Jon realizing P. N. wasn’t quite as far west as he needed to be and sending the kid further into the wastes, dodging more super mutants and the like – only to find, instead of the garage he was looking for, Little Lamplight – he decided this was actually a good thing because he would need to come back to this location later anyway, so now he had the chance to tag it for fast travel (“all the best speedrunners go to the wrong place first!”)
C) Jon once again leading a conga line of enemies trying to feast on P. N.’s tasty tasty flesh down the road in the other direction for a little bit before finally locating the garage (aka Red Rocket station) he needed, then getting chomped by mole rats while he attempted to hop and skip and skip skip his way down into the hidden Vault 112 beneath
D) Jon having P. N. quickly chat with a robo-brain to get the correct Vault suit that would allow him to take the spare Tranquility Lane virtual reality lounger, then getting the kid into the simulation before taking far longer than he probably should have to find the correct house that contains the secret “failsafe terminal” (at one point just going straight into the wrong place because he remembered the residents telling him about the correct house and his brain got its wires crossed); fortunately once he DID find the right place, it didn’t take him long to activate the terminal by tapping the correct items in the correct order, set a plague of Chinese Communists on the residents, have a brief spammed-through conversation with Braun in his little girl form, then take his dad-turned-dog and get out of there. This got him up to Level 3, which saw him drop all his skill points into Speech again and take another rank of Swift Learner for more skill points to max that baby out as soon as possible
E) Jon fast-traveling back to Vault 101 after P. N. and his dad managed to escape Vault 112 together and traveling to the actual Capital part of the Capital Wasteland to quickly tag the Jefferson Memorial (where Project Purity is set up) before heading on to Rivet City – the journey there including Jon laughing about the game teaching him about fast travel after he’d already fast traveled; Claire reading out more super chat messages, which included someone asking Jon what his favorite and least favorite seasons of Power Rangers were (because apparently he’s a fan – favorite season is RPM, least-favorite Ninja Steel); and Jon struggling to remember who was in the Jefferson Memorial before admitting he wasn’t sure why the guy had a memorial, before hypothesizing that maybe it was because he helped enslave everyone, in contrast to Lincoln having one for freeing all the slaves (and that the statues fight each other every hundred years or so) – the Americans in the chat were like “...not ENTIRELY inaccurate” XD (for the record, Jefferson wasn’t the one RESPONSIBLE for slavery, but he did own ‘em, and he did apparently have children with ‘em, so…)
F) Jon making it to Rivet City and briefly getting lost (as he modded the boat-based settlement to be bigger and rotated correctly) before finding his way to the science lab and waiting out the conversation between P. N.’s Dad (when he showed up – Jon was a little nervous when he didn’t immediately show up, but nope, turns out P. N. just beat him to the plot-important location) and Madison Li – cue Jon getting distracted by the super chat and answering questions people asked about Power Rangers before Claire could even read them before she pointed out that he needed to talk to his dad to advance the plot
G) Jon realizing as he prepared to send P. N. back to the Jefferson Memorial that the poor kid had like two semi-decent guns and almost no ammo, and it was too late to buy anything (not that P. N. had any money), so they’d have to rely on what the super mutants inside dropped – cue all the super mutants having only nail boards and hunting rifles (which are apparently one of the more shit weapons in FO3), causing poor P. N. to have to rely on the latter to kill them all. Fortunately, since he was such low level, they were too, and were easily taken out with double-tap headshots in VATS – this all got him up to Level 4, where he nearly maxed out Speech (at 98 points out of 100) and took the “Child At Heart” perk because having special interactions with the kids at Little Lamplight would be USEFUL in this run
H) And Jon sending P. N. outside to catch up with his dad and the fellow scientists, only to be told he had to go BACK inside to finish clearing out the super mutants – this caught me up to the bit that I’d watched the day of the stream, with Jon wandering around trying to find stray super mutants and complaining about the lack of quest markers, making Claire wonder if it was Opposite Day (as normally Jon hates having too many quest markers) XD
And that’s another chunk in the can! :) Tomorrow, we finish off Jon finishing off the super mutants in the Memorial, and see how the speedrun progresses from there. He was officially up to fifty minutes of playtime during the hunt for the super mutants – I’m curious to see what the actual time will be!
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” Chapter 6: Check – got another good chunk cleaned up, covering:
A) Caterpillar and Cheshire reassuring her that they knew that Simon’s brain breaking wasn’t her fault, and that Pisha was to blame for him losing his mind – followed by Caterpillar and Carpenter informing her that there was nothing more she could do for or to him, as his bout of madness meant that any babbling he did about monsters would be disregarded and thus he was no longer a Masquerade risk. Alice wasn’t exactly thrilled about the fact that losing his mind saved Simon’s life, but allowed that at least this way he could hopefully recover at least a little and get some semblance of a normal life back. If L. A.’s psychiatric facilities were better than Rutledge or Grout Mansion, of course…
B) Cheshire informing her it was time for her to put her blade to work now that Simon was taken care of...leading to her surprising Victor, on the couch reading a book, with her sudden early reappearance. And then surprising him even more by explaining she had to go kill a cannibalistic monster in the morgue of the abandoned hospital that recently ate the crew of a TV show, so she came back to the apartment to get her shotgun to help facilitate that. Victor was like “...I’d offer to help, but I don’t know what I’d do,” and Alice responded that she didn’t want him anywhere near Pisha anyway, so it was best he stay put. *serious nod*
C) And Alice quickly bringing Victor up to speed on Resonance, telling him about how strong emotions “flavor” blood, and how vampires who drink that blood can use those emotions to help with their Disciplines, or learn things about their victim – confirming that the reason Alice saw Victor’s memory of getting Scraps was because he was enjoying being fed on that much. Poor Victor went completely dark pink with embarrassment. XD And then got confused when Alice mentioned it would have been better if she’d fed on him if he was sad, because that would have helped with her Obfuscate more. XD Don’t worry, Victor – Alice will explain more of the details off-screen later!
So that was pretty good, yeah. I left off with Alice leaving the apartment with shotgun in tow (hidden in its usual carrying bag) – next time, we see what became of Simon when he reached the lobby, and Alice goes to finally confront Pisha!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: Check – had just enough time tonight to squeeze in the latest list video from OXtra: “7 Games That Punished you for Playing on Easy Mode!” Ellen and Jane talking about those games that punished you for trying to do things the easy way, because god forbid you maybe want to just enjoy the game and not worry too much about getting your ass kicked. Punishments included:
A) Denying you the triumphant ending cutscene – such as people playing below “Trauma” difficulty in Painkiller not getting to see player character Daniel ascend to Heaven to reunite with his wife, or Easy lovers in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire not getting to see player character Dash super-narrowly escape the killer space station he helped blow up, making them believe he sacrificed himself to save the galaxy
B) Denying you the whole final boss – such as people playing “Beginner” or “Easy” difficulty in Disney’s Hercules the game not getting to play the final two levels where you actually beat up Hades himself, or people playing “Peaceful” Survival mode in Minecraft not getting the necessary materials (often only available from dangerous monsters) to make it to The End and defeat the Ender Dragon
C) Denying you PRETTY MUCH THE WHOLE GAME – such as people picking Monkey 2 Lite as their difficulty in Monkey Island 2 basically getting a walking simulator instead of a traditional point-and-click adventure game, since that mode solved almost every puzzle for the player. Sheesh!
Yeah – some games are just MEAN if you decide you need to take it easy. There was a lot of ranting about that in the comments, especially when it came to game accessibility. Maybe just let people play the game at the challenge level they feel they can handle, developers?
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – Valice Multiverse was dead quiet as usual, but I was able to get my entire queue for Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) sorted tonight, which was good:
A) A gifset by atomic-chronoscaph of Victor running from Emily after waking her up in Corpse Bride for Wednesday
B) Three drawings by unknownjesterr of their designs for humanoid versions of The Smiler, Oblivion, and Toxicator from Alton Towers for Thursday
C) A gifset by nowadayz of Alice jumping and twirling across the little domino path in the Vale of Tears at the very beginning of Alice: Madness Returns for Friday
D) And the music video “the chain by fleetwood mac but it's ao3 titles” (where various titles from AO3 fics are used not only to create a lyric video for “The Chain,” but also describe the instrumental bits, quite amusingly) by Nandermo Nation, posted to tumblr by thats-entirely-too-much-tuna, for Song Saturday
So yeah – don’t have to worry about any of that for the rest of the week, hooray.
*nods* And there we have it. And now I need to get to bed. We'll see what shit hits us tomorrow -- night all.
Life has not yet stopped because of health issues, though -- and frankly, keeping up with my routine, at least a little, is helping me not lose my mind entirely. So here's the usual daily write-up for your enjoyment:
Work – Another busy day at work – though at least this time it was busy in a quieter way, as we weren’t dealing with a lot of phone calls. I spent my eight hours in the office today:
A) Doing the usual morning reports and answering a few questions on batches that needed posting from our database people
B) Helping my coworker count out and make piles of Spanish Appeal posters to be put into big envelopes so they could eventually be delivered to the parishes with large numbers of Spanish-speaking parishioners
C) E-mailing a bunch of people who’d had credit card failures near the beginning of the year so they knew that their payments/gifts needed to be retried
D) Adding a few more new names from that list of new parishioners for one of the parishes, and updating a few people who we already had on the database accordingly
E) And taking a couple of “Hey, we’re getting back to you about that letter you called about yesterday, it’s approved” calls from parishes
Nothing exciting, but I suppose it all made the day go by. We’ll see what tomorrow brings – other than the first Useless Credit Card Company Check-In Call of the year. (*looks at that* Hmmm – anyone know any synonyms for “useless” that start with C?)
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Fallout 3: Jon & Claire Are Still Sick So We're Speedrunning Fallout Live Special!” The second half-hour of the J & C FO3 Sickness Speedrun featured:
A) Jon running into a Brotherhood Outcast getting blown up on his trek to the garage and gleefully having Player Name (aka “P. N.” for this write-up) loot his power armor before dropping a save because DAMN (this actually happened at the end of yesterday’s chunk, but I rewound a bit to watch it again XD)
B) Jon realizing P. N. wasn’t quite as far west as he needed to be and sending the kid further into the wastes, dodging more super mutants and the like – only to find, instead of the garage he was looking for, Little Lamplight – he decided this was actually a good thing because he would need to come back to this location later anyway, so now he had the chance to tag it for fast travel (“all the best speedrunners go to the wrong place first!”)
C) Jon once again leading a conga line of enemies trying to feast on P. N.’s tasty tasty flesh down the road in the other direction for a little bit before finally locating the garage (aka Red Rocket station) he needed, then getting chomped by mole rats while he attempted to hop and skip and skip skip his way down into the hidden Vault 112 beneath
D) Jon having P. N. quickly chat with a robo-brain to get the correct Vault suit that would allow him to take the spare Tranquility Lane virtual reality lounger, then getting the kid into the simulation before taking far longer than he probably should have to find the correct house that contains the secret “failsafe terminal” (at one point just going straight into the wrong place because he remembered the residents telling him about the correct house and his brain got its wires crossed); fortunately once he DID find the right place, it didn’t take him long to activate the terminal by tapping the correct items in the correct order, set a plague of Chinese Communists on the residents, have a brief spammed-through conversation with Braun in his little girl form, then take his dad-turned-dog and get out of there. This got him up to Level 3, which saw him drop all his skill points into Speech again and take another rank of Swift Learner for more skill points to max that baby out as soon as possible
E) Jon fast-traveling back to Vault 101 after P. N. and his dad managed to escape Vault 112 together and traveling to the actual Capital part of the Capital Wasteland to quickly tag the Jefferson Memorial (where Project Purity is set up) before heading on to Rivet City – the journey there including Jon laughing about the game teaching him about fast travel after he’d already fast traveled; Claire reading out more super chat messages, which included someone asking Jon what his favorite and least favorite seasons of Power Rangers were (because apparently he’s a fan – favorite season is RPM, least-favorite Ninja Steel); and Jon struggling to remember who was in the Jefferson Memorial before admitting he wasn’t sure why the guy had a memorial, before hypothesizing that maybe it was because he helped enslave everyone, in contrast to Lincoln having one for freeing all the slaves (and that the statues fight each other every hundred years or so) – the Americans in the chat were like “...not ENTIRELY inaccurate” XD (for the record, Jefferson wasn’t the one RESPONSIBLE for slavery, but he did own ‘em, and he did apparently have children with ‘em, so…)
F) Jon making it to Rivet City and briefly getting lost (as he modded the boat-based settlement to be bigger and rotated correctly) before finding his way to the science lab and waiting out the conversation between P. N.’s Dad (when he showed up – Jon was a little nervous when he didn’t immediately show up, but nope, turns out P. N. just beat him to the plot-important location) and Madison Li – cue Jon getting distracted by the super chat and answering questions people asked about Power Rangers before Claire could even read them before she pointed out that he needed to talk to his dad to advance the plot
G) Jon realizing as he prepared to send P. N. back to the Jefferson Memorial that the poor kid had like two semi-decent guns and almost no ammo, and it was too late to buy anything (not that P. N. had any money), so they’d have to rely on what the super mutants inside dropped – cue all the super mutants having only nail boards and hunting rifles (which are apparently one of the more shit weapons in FO3), causing poor P. N. to have to rely on the latter to kill them all. Fortunately, since he was such low level, they were too, and were easily taken out with double-tap headshots in VATS – this all got him up to Level 4, where he nearly maxed out Speech (at 98 points out of 100) and took the “Child At Heart” perk because having special interactions with the kids at Little Lamplight would be USEFUL in this run
H) And Jon sending P. N. outside to catch up with his dad and the fellow scientists, only to be told he had to go BACK inside to finish clearing out the super mutants – this caught me up to the bit that I’d watched the day of the stream, with Jon wandering around trying to find stray super mutants and complaining about the lack of quest markers, making Claire wonder if it was Opposite Day (as normally Jon hates having too many quest markers) XD
And that’s another chunk in the can! :) Tomorrow, we finish off Jon finishing off the super mutants in the Memorial, and see how the speedrun progresses from there. He was officially up to fifty minutes of playtime during the hunt for the super mutants – I’m curious to see what the actual time will be!
2. Continue editing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” Chapter 6: Check – got another good chunk cleaned up, covering:
A) Caterpillar and Cheshire reassuring her that they knew that Simon’s brain breaking wasn’t her fault, and that Pisha was to blame for him losing his mind – followed by Caterpillar and Carpenter informing her that there was nothing more she could do for or to him, as his bout of madness meant that any babbling he did about monsters would be disregarded and thus he was no longer a Masquerade risk. Alice wasn’t exactly thrilled about the fact that losing his mind saved Simon’s life, but allowed that at least this way he could hopefully recover at least a little and get some semblance of a normal life back. If L. A.’s psychiatric facilities were better than Rutledge or Grout Mansion, of course…
B) Cheshire informing her it was time for her to put her blade to work now that Simon was taken care of...leading to her surprising Victor, on the couch reading a book, with her sudden early reappearance. And then surprising him even more by explaining she had to go kill a cannibalistic monster in the morgue of the abandoned hospital that recently ate the crew of a TV show, so she came back to the apartment to get her shotgun to help facilitate that. Victor was like “...I’d offer to help, but I don’t know what I’d do,” and Alice responded that she didn’t want him anywhere near Pisha anyway, so it was best he stay put. *serious nod*
C) And Alice quickly bringing Victor up to speed on Resonance, telling him about how strong emotions “flavor” blood, and how vampires who drink that blood can use those emotions to help with their Disciplines, or learn things about their victim – confirming that the reason Alice saw Victor’s memory of getting Scraps was because he was enjoying being fed on that much. Poor Victor went completely dark pink with embarrassment. XD And then got confused when Alice mentioned it would have been better if she’d fed on him if he was sad, because that would have helped with her Obfuscate more. XD Don’t worry, Victor – Alice will explain more of the details off-screen later!
So that was pretty good, yeah. I left off with Alice leaving the apartment with shotgun in tow (hidden in its usual carrying bag) – next time, we see what became of Simon when he reached the lobby, and Alice goes to finally confront Pisha!
3. Watch something on FreeTube: Check – had just enough time tonight to squeeze in the latest list video from OXtra: “7 Games That Punished you for Playing on Easy Mode!” Ellen and Jane talking about those games that punished you for trying to do things the easy way, because god forbid you maybe want to just enjoy the game and not worry too much about getting your ass kicked. Punishments included:
A) Denying you the triumphant ending cutscene – such as people playing below “Trauma” difficulty in Painkiller not getting to see player character Daniel ascend to Heaven to reunite with his wife, or Easy lovers in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire not getting to see player character Dash super-narrowly escape the killer space station he helped blow up, making them believe he sacrificed himself to save the galaxy
B) Denying you the whole final boss – such as people playing “Beginner” or “Easy” difficulty in Disney’s Hercules the game not getting to play the final two levels where you actually beat up Hades himself, or people playing “Peaceful” Survival mode in Minecraft not getting the necessary materials (often only available from dangerous monsters) to make it to The End and defeat the Ender Dragon
C) Denying you PRETTY MUCH THE WHOLE GAME – such as people picking Monkey 2 Lite as their difficulty in Monkey Island 2 basically getting a walking simulator instead of a traditional point-and-click adventure game, since that mode solved almost every puzzle for the player. Sheesh!
Yeah – some games are just MEAN if you decide you need to take it easy. There was a lot of ranting about that in the comments, especially when it came to game accessibility. Maybe just let people play the game at the challenge level they feel they can handle, developers?
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – Valice Multiverse was dead quiet as usual, but I was able to get my entire queue for Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) sorted tonight, which was good:
A) A gifset by atomic-chronoscaph of Victor running from Emily after waking her up in Corpse Bride for Wednesday
B) Three drawings by unknownjesterr of their designs for humanoid versions of The Smiler, Oblivion, and Toxicator from Alton Towers for Thursday
C) A gifset by nowadayz of Alice jumping and twirling across the little domino path in the Vale of Tears at the very beginning of Alice: Madness Returns for Friday
D) And the music video “the chain by fleetwood mac but it's ao3 titles” (where various titles from AO3 fics are used not only to create a lyric video for “The Chain,” but also describe the instrumental bits, quite amusingly) by Nandermo Nation, posted to tumblr by thats-entirely-too-much-tuna, for Song Saturday
So yeah – don’t have to worry about any of that for the rest of the week, hooray.
*nods* And there we have it. And now I need to get to bed. We'll see what shit hits us tomorrow -- night all.
