It isn’t paranoia if the universe is really out to get you, is it?

Let’s recap 2026 so far, shall we?

January – the Great Wall of of Sudden Valley (go read all that up in its own blogpost. I wrote the whole damn thing up). Here’s a summary. Watching them dismantle the failing ancient retaining wall holding up my house from tumbling down the steep slope it’s on…  watching them build the one that is there now, out of rocks the size of small Pacific islands… watching them take out and replace three out of five support poles holding up my upper deck (on which there’s a catio, remember?) in real time… and having to scramble to pay for all of that. And it isn’t just paying out $$$$. Care to hazard a guess as to how many spoons alloted for this entire year that used up…?

Also January, my doctor wants a neurosurgeon to give an opinion on my lower back MRI. I’ve been trying to chase THAT down. THe local outfit “doesn’t take my insurance”. The next closest one in Seattle and I’ve been trying to set up a phone or a video appointment for that – it’s just their OPINION for now, they don’t need to see me, they have pictures of my apparently not so lovely innards. More spoons, on fretting, on spending time on phone calls (“your wait time is longer than 30 minutes” the lovely mellifluous voice on the phone warbles cheerfully…) Still in progress. Spoons haven’t finished being counted. That’ll happen when the other shoe drops and they render their “opinion”. Suffice it to say that between the janky hips and the more and more frequent back pain… things are not looking great for this meatsack that I am in. Oh, JOY.

February, i replaced my front door (had to be done. It was metal, it gave no insulation, in wintertime waves of cold air come off it and if you touch it you get frostbite blooming on contact, and the weather insulation stuff at the bottom of it was in shreds (visible ones) to the point where I had to remove a slug from my INDOOR front door mat before the cats made things worse (thank god i saw it first). I have a wooden door now and the house temperature has measurably stabilised. But I would like to invite you to go price wooden front doors and their installation. Go on, I double dare you. Do the math, in terms of spoons.

Enter March. A large bill lands with a thud (property taxes are due by mid April) That’s going to take some juggling. In other March Madness news, my laptop suddenly decided to ask me for a password, which it had never done before, and I didn’t have one and it said too bad you ain’t coming in then. THat, coupled with some other computer problems, necessitated a visit from a Computer Guy – i’ve known this fellow for many years, he dealt with my mom’s computer issues back when she was still using the computer, he knows his shit. So he came out and spent nearly four hours here dealing with my computer’s megrims. He says my hard drive is a tad elderly and probably fixing to fail at some point in the not too distant future. But on the plus side, while he was here trying to figure out that, he took the data off of Deck’s old computer – which was only still sitting here because it had that data on it and I wanted it but it hadn’t been turned on for literally years at this point) and, well, back when the tariffs were starting to hit I bought a new computer to beat the rush to the rising prices. That had stood in its box for a while, but since Deck’s old computer was now done with, while he was waiting for MY computer to do its “fix disk errors” dance he basically used the down time to set up the new computer in Deck’s old computer’s place, with the scraped data on that. So I guess that is a gain. The new one has teething problems, which we won’t go into here, but yeah. There’s that. More $$$. And then he left. Days after he left, my main computer blinked and said to me, camera? what camera? you don’t have a camera. I called the computer guy and asked if he hadn’t inadvertently unplugged something or knocked something loose while he was here before and he said he didn’t think so but since this involved a USB hub and those could be in his words “finicky” he was going to come in at lunchtime on Tuesday to look at it and fix it.

Monday night I came down to the computer for a final goodnight pat… and my monitor was dead dead dead. No lights on it. not a stir of life. NOTHING. I couldn’t figure out what had happened and a few twitchy attempts to rectify the situation failed miserably. I finally dragged myself upstairs ostensibly to bed, and I lay there crying quietly for a long time. The cats were deeply worried. THe Little EMperor kept circling me uttering soft whimpers. They could sense that something was terribly wrong but their “Can i help” attempts were not nearly enough to rectify the situation.

I think I got maybe two hours of sleep. I know, because I was watching the clock tick by oh so slowly. I got up because the cats wanted breakfast despite catastophic tech failures in the offing, and then I crawled back downstairs. Hoping, dreading. Nothing. Still dead.

I somehow connected with a friend on the phone that morning, and I kind of sobbed at her for nearly two hours. She said that she would try to help but she is in GEORGIA and that’s a little far for practical aid (talking helped although at some point I just hit a real crying jag and couldn’t stop and she basically told me to go and put myself back together inasmuch as I could (her suggestions were a hot shower, a large glass of water or two, and then going to lie down somewhere horizontal for half an hour and just let my body unclench. I suppose it helped but the monitor was still dead when I was done…)

The computer guy arrived around lunchtime. He looked at the monitor and sucked his teeth for a moment and then he went to the back of it and unplugged something I hadn’t dared to TOUCH and then rebooted the computer (which I was also too afraid to do, because at this point I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole damn thing BLEW UP IN MY FACE.

The monitor came back on and blinked and said, oh, is THIS what you wanted?…

The camera/USB hub problem was solved by a stray loose connection.

I was left, having used up a WHOLE LOT MORE SPOONS, feeling a little like an idiot for having overreacted – but people, you just don’t understand how much of my life this computer is. The prospect of losing it – and its connection to the world – and the stuff on it that’s irreplaceable, not the least of which is that new novel I’ve been working on and which I am a handful of chapters from finishing and i’m telling you if I had lost that I would have just… well, never mind, let’s not get graphic.

It’s half past three PM as I write this and I have done NOTHING with the day except panic, freak out, cry, scream, whimper. I am underslept and undercaffeinated (this coffee addict got her first cup of coffee well past 1 PM today. Figure that one out by yourselves.) The day is a total loss. THe computer lives another day. The cats are still upset because I am upset and the energy in this house is soul-shattering and bone-breaking. (yes, I mean that, all the bones in my body which are usually aching are currently screaming in pain. I took a pain pill which I hardly ever do, but I needed it today. I purely needed it.

And March isn’t even halfway over yet. And when it is that’s only a quarter of the year. What’s next? What’s coming next, from which direction do I expect the next foray from the horsemen of my personal apocalypse? I’m telling you, it isn’t being paranoid when the universe REALLY seems to be out to get you…

I’m pretty much fit for nothing today. Needless to say no writing has been done. It’s hard to find coherent story words when your back brain is screaming incoherently into the void.

Maybe tomorrow (at least if we aren’t in WOrld War III yet) will be better.

But I honestly don’t know how deep in spoon debt I am going to have to go before this year is halfway through….