I Wanted To Crochet Something For My Cousin's Baby, But You Know, Procrastination...

“tumblr ceo sucks too” oh mood my bad I honestly forget we even have a ceo I kind of just view this website as a self governed purgatory that runs on sulfur and spite alone

Drabble Challenge Day 6 - Comedy

hosted by @thedrabblecollective

Stranger Things - 100 words - Rated G

AO3 Link

Robin's shoes are a work of art, period

Converse

Robin watched Vickie leave Family Video, trying to calm her racing heart.

“Jesus, she’s like, totally into you.”

She jumped. Steve was watching her from the Sci-Fi section, a stack of movies in hand.

“You should ask her out.”

“Are you insane? I can’t tell Vickie I like girls, Steve.”

“You don’t have to.” He winked. “Just show her your boobies shoes.”

She blinked.

“Wrong shelf Dingus.”

“What?” He looked at his hands. “No? Alien is Sci-Fi?”

Not the movie, you.” Robin pushed him toward the other side of the store. “This is where clowns belong. In the comedy section.”

site that you can type in the definition of a word and get the word

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition 

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

site that gives you synonyms and antonyms

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

I had some unexpected visitors today when I went out to do goat chores!

That's a nice pair of Spaldings. A BS male and a hen. Some idiot just lost $600+ because they thought peafowl were like chickens and could instantly be free ranged.

If they stick around and you'd like to capture them (and they should be captured even if you don't intend to keep them, they do not know where they are and will not be adept at finding food and water and are susceptible to predators), they can be offered game bird feed or dry cat food or whole corn or peanuts, and led into an enclosed space. Shut the door behind them and capture them in the dark (it will be easier to grab them when they can't see).

If you'd like to keep them I can give housing advice, otherwise either contact your local humane society/ASPCA or drop me a PM and let me know where you are and I'll see what I can do about helping you find a place for them with new owners.