Category: Off Topic

Well, it’s 5.45pm at the time I’m starting to write this, and it occurs to me that I haven’t posted my happy mail post today. Or even polished the photos I took this morning for the happy mail post… Yep!

First off, happy Halloween to those who are celebrating. It’s not a real big thing in Australia – nary a costume to be seen this weekend.

So this ^ is a picture of my cat, Asimov. A disappearing act last week, refusing food when he came back, and a call to the vet on Sunday led this little guy to needing a little surgery on Sunday. (Or procedure. I’m not entirely sure where the line is drawn.) The vet suspected he had a small bone lodged in his throat, and he needed some sleep juice so the vet could scope it out and get rid of the bone.

As it turned out, he decided to be like Wanderer. There was no bone, but there was an abscess in there. Though completely unexpected, the vet handled it very well (shout out to vets that work on Sundays) and is confident he’ll be just fine barring any complications.

I put a little shout out on social media about the situation and how any/all orders would greatly help at this time, as the vet bill was… a bit of a kick in the wallet. Getting mail ready to go is part of the reason I’m running so late with everything today. It’s a most excellent sort of work to have, and I wholeheartedly thank everyone who has ordered zines, cards, and/or copies of my novel. It really helps take the sting out of the sizable unexpected vet bill.

I know this doesn’t have much of anything to do with zines, or with the usual happy mail Monday post, but I do like being able to share at least snippets of my life with you. Especially when it impacts my ability to post. I promise I’m getting more organised with everything ‘Sea Green Zines’, so this sort of thing will happen less in the future.

Phew. Coffee break and then back to it. I hope you all are having an excellent Monday!

I’m in this weird space where it feels like it’s been both a long time and no time at all since I last sat down to write a regular blog post for this blog.

Not that this is going to be regular as such. Anyway.

I was going to write a ‘Done, Doing, Dreaming’ post, but it didn’t feel quite right for this sort of catch up. I’m sitting in a strange place, mentally, and I really just want to do with the flow.

Eight days after being admitted for emergency surgery to remove his ruptured and abscessed appendix, I was able to bring Wanderer home. The space inbetween was confronting, to say the least, with Wanderer’s complications both leaving us terrified that he might lose his life. (There were a lot of ‘we’re not sure what’s going wrong with him’ times.) The important thing is that he didn’t, and he’s okay. But neither of us want to pretend that it didn’t happen, so we’re taking the mentality adjustments slowly.

I want to give my heartfelt thanks to everyone who guest posted, liked guest posts, and/or sent best wishes in one way or another. I appreciate it more than words can say.

There is another guest zine review going up this week, and then I hope to get back into a regular schedule – at least so far as the reviews go – next week. I am very thankful to past Nyx (haha) for working so hard on the weekend calls for submissions so those stayed (and will stay) as normal. Regular posts should come back next week as well, but I don’t want to make any promises while we’re not fully settled.

To those who have asked, Wanderer is doing quite well now that he’s at home. When he made (and succeeded) in his third go at recovery, he quickly became eager to come home. He’s settled in quick and is already moving around a lot better than I thought he would be at this point.

Thank you everyone again. I look forward to getting back up to speed here and to applying the lessons learned about not having ‘spare’ emergency posts just in case…

Best wishes.

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful day. 🙂

Why is it that the most popular, longest lasting search on my site is ‘handwritten grocery shopping lists’?

Strange.

If you follow me on Instagram (@seagreenzines), you’ll know that Wanderer and I took a quick drive over the border into South Australia. To talk about building a house.

*gasp*

I haven’t wanted to say much about because I’m a pessimist at heart or, at least, a cautious realist. A home of my own is something that I’ve wanted for a very long time. I certainly never felt ‘at home’ while I was growing up, and renting doesn’t exactly grant the one the flexibility to make a place feel like home. So there is certainly a lot of emotion tied up in this possibility.

But we went, we got the ball rolling (and the paperwork shoved in the right direction), and now we wait for a few weeks to find out if we can do what we’re hoping to do.

Crossing fingers.

If you’ve recently received one (or more – probably more) notifications involving me liking your post(s) and/or replying to comments, well… That’s because I’ve been writing on this blog for yonks and only recently discovered this:

It’s not that I didn’t know it was there, it’s just that I didn’t pay much attention. I get emails every time someone likes or comments on something, so I didn’t see the point in checking that thing.

Nobody told me that I can, you know, do stuff with it. Especially not that it keeps track of the times when someone replies to a comment I’ve made. Or that I can comment back right then and there.

Yep, my mind exploded into a bunch of glitter and confetti.

However, now I can say – with a confidence I’ve never had before – that I’m for real caught up on comments and such now.

It’s the little things. I may be turning thirty soon, but I’m still a colouring with crayons on the wall kind of gal.

So today is the day! I said that my 100th review is this week, and… it’s not up.

I’ve been running on low fuel these past couple of weeks with all the health tests and such, so I fully own up to being behind already when I woke up this morning. It was all going to work out anyway – I have my 100th zine to review picked out and everything – but then Wanderer and I received a phone call this morning…

Wanderer and I have been seriously pushing forward in the journey to move interstate and buy our own house for what seems like at least a year by now. (The interstate part of that being a longer story for another time.) The call this morning started a rollercoaster of emotion that ended in some excellent news.

However, to get there, we had to deal with additional phone calls, lining up times for things, interviews to confirm details, so on and so forth. What was going to be a quiet day turned out to be sooo busy in the best of ways as it’s all looking like green lights for a move this year!

The pickle of it is that I didn’t get my 100th review up. Oopsie. However, it’s kind of fun because my 100th review will go up on Friday the 13th!

Okay, so maybe ‘fun’ isn’t the word everyone would use, but I’m going to leave it there anyway.

For now, I’ll leave that drum rolling for a smidge longer, and I’ll see you tomorrow with my 100th zine review.

I always feel a little strange when it comes to ANZAC Day. Not about the day itself but about my standing within the context of the day. I feel like, for me, it’s a ‘stand back and keep your mouth shut’ kind of day. I may be Australian now, but I didn’t grow up here, etc, etc. Americans aren’t exactly known for knowing their own history (outside of the Civil War, that is) let alone anyone else’s.

It’s one of those situations where I feel like it’s not my place to feel the feels about this. Americans have Memorial Day, after all. But I do feel it, if only in a way that someone who wasn’t born Australian can feel it.

Even so, I chose not to stand back and pretend that it’s not happening. I may feel how I feel about war, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also feel for the people who fought in these wars. For me, it’s about the individuals and what they went through. And regardless of how I feel about the bigger picture of these things, the individuals deserve at least a moment of silence.