I have returned

The Thanksgiving break has ended and I have returned to New Haven once more. The double Thanksgiving with my family and my husband’s family was delightful and lovely, though I found most of my time monopolized by my little sister, who attached herself to me like glue and plaintively called out “Where are you, Veronica?” whenever I got up to get some food. It was very cute. Four is such a cute age; I remember when my little brothers were four as well and they were just as attached to me. I can’t help but indulge because soon my little sister will grow up and perhaps come to realize that I’m a boring person… A boring person who edits a website for fun…

But that won’t happen for another ten years!

I found out that my insanely musically talented brother attributes the start of his taking music seriously to me teaching him how to play the piano during the pandemic. I didn’t realize this, because he had been taking lessons before as an elementary schooler, but apparently it was me teaching him how to play a song from “The Legend of Zelda” that made him want to play the piano… And now he’s applying to a summer program at Juilliard. The student has surpassed the teacher.

Sure, I studied music in college, but I didn’t take it nearly as seriously as my little brother does. And I studied more music history and theory instead of performance, so even at my most dedicated in practice I only got an A- in musicianship. And then the incident¹ happened, and everything fell apart.

I hope nothing bad like that ever happens to any of my little siblings. I know that’s not really up to me, but I still hope for it.

During my spare downtime, I learned how to do cross-stitch with a little kit my mom had lying around but hadn’t started herself. My little sister liked to watch me work on it and kept asking me to “knit the cactus,” so within just a couple of days, I completed the project. I also made a little friendship bracelet out of the leftover embroidery floss, but I only know how to do a diagonal stripe pattern. Maybe if I have a lot of free time I’ll figure out how to do all sorts of friendship bracelet patterns. When I was in fifth grade I used to make diagonal stripe-style friendship bracelets for the girl I was in love with (she didn’t know about my feelings) and all my other friends. We’d tie them to our wrists so they’d stay on until they fell apart.

When I think about it, I think about 50% of the people I’ve fallen in love with have been girls/women. But only one of my loves has been reciprocated, and that’s the person who ended up becoming my husband!

It’s a really wonderful thing to love someone and be loved in return.

I’ve added a hit-counter and last site update to the footer of my site, using the tutorial from Dannarchy. I wish that I could access the Neocities API directly, but it doesn’t seem to work for me! Hopefully the script will work once I take my site off the local server and onto Neocities.

There was some sort of bug earlier this week where Neocities accidentally blocked iframes for all recently created (within the last 2 years or so I think) non-supporter accounts in their CORS policy. A lot of people on the Neocities subreddit and Discord server talked about switching to Nekoweb if the problem didn’t resolve, or maybe even if it did. I understand why, because having this sort of thing happen without warning, breaking a lot of people’s sites, is really disheartening to say the least. I considered mirroring my site on Nekoweb, but I really need to have a command-line interface with Nekoweb and don’t know which one to use. So maybe next time Neocities bugs out (and I’m not on vacation) I’ll consider it.

Finals are approaching… I’m almost done with the semester. It’s been such an awful semester because of my disease. My mom took me to a bunch of alternate medicine people like herbalists and acupuncturists, and they are convinced that I have “long Lyme disease” and I need to get a Western blot test to confirm whether I still have Lyme right now. It could be possible, because I took a really short cycle of doxycycline back when the urgent care doctor thought I had been exposed to Lyme, and maybe that didn’t actually kill all the potential Lyme bacteria. And the test they do for Lyme antibodies is not the most sensitive test in the world, so I could have a false negative. But looking back, I was getting sick before I was bitten by the tick too. So who knows… I guess I’ll bring it up with the infectious disease doctor because there are really no answers right now. I’ve been taking colchicine and getting nasty side effects from it but so far I haven’t gotten sick again. I’m a little scared that if I want to have a baby in a couple years from now if I’m still taking colchicine that it will hurt the baby, since it hurts me right now just to take it. And colchicine is a mitotic inhibitor that crosses the placental barrier… Isn’t mitosis all a developing fetus really does? Agh, if it really does work I don’t want to stop taking it, but I also don’t want to take something with such a narrow therapeutic index for the rest of my life either.

Well, I’ll get a biopsy in the new year and hopefully it won’t be cancer. I’ll sign up for spring semester classes too and hope to not have to medically withdraw as well. It’s good to stay optimistic.

Oh, and I’ll take all these random traditional Chinese medicine herbal tinctures my mom gave me as well². I’ve heard in China they prescribe herbs along with conventional medicine, so it’s probably fine.

It’s the first Sunday of Advent, so I changed out the confetti. I’m also putting in a festive theme for the site. But only if you use light mode!