{"id":11743,"date":"2016-12-04T11:05:09","date_gmt":"2016-12-04T19:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=11743"},"modified":"2016-12-04T12:25:17","modified_gmt":"2016-12-04T20:25:17","slug":"stuff-liked-week-everything-sucks-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/04\/stuff-liked-week-everything-sucks-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuff I Liked This Week, Everything Sucks Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_11744\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-11744\" style=\"width: 1014px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11744 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare-1024x830.jpg\" alt=\"The Nightmare, John Henry Fuseli, 1781\" width=\"1024\" height=\"830\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare-1024x830.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare-300x243.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare-768x622.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.jpg 1085w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-11744\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Nightmare, John Henry Fuseli, 1781<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>You know what? I didn&#8217;t like anything this week. Nothing at all. It was a difficult week, a real dark storm front of a week. I spent a good deal of time in bed, blankets pulled up over my head, waiting for the week to be over.<\/p>\n<p>Heads up, you are in for a few hundred words of whining. If you would prefer not to endure that, and really, who could blame you, take 15 minutes to watch this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/video\/opinion\/100000004769329\/pickle.html?mabReward=CTM&amp;recp=1&amp;moduleDetail=recommendations-1&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=Politics&amp;region=Footer&amp;module=WhatsNext&amp;version=WhatsNext&amp;contentID=WhatsNext&amp;src=recg&amp;pgtype=article\">little documentary film about two animal lovers<\/a> instead. It&#8217;s perfect. And okay, I did like <strong>one<\/strong> thing this week.<\/p>\n<p>Here we go&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>I missed band practice<\/strong>. I love band practice and even on a good week, it can be a real highlight. I missed it because I was completely sleep deprived. The reason I was sleep deprived? Julius had shaken me out of my screaming in my sleep nightmares. I read that nightmares in adults are fairly rare. In my case, they&#8217;re probably caused by stress and anxiety, not the other things like medication or weird food before bedtime. I&#8217;d had a cheese sandwich, and that&#8217;s supposed to help you sleep. Best part? It happened again a few days later. So that sucked.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Julius (my husband) went back to Austria<\/strong>. It&#8217;s complicated. And yeah, that sucks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The days are collapsing. <\/strong>Yep, I have a happy light to keep the SAD at bay, but it&#8217;s not enough. I love Seattle, but when we get to the time of year when it feels like the middle of the night and it&#8217;s only 6:30pm, I wonder what I&#8217;m doing here. God help us, it&#8217;s only another three weeks until the days start to get longer again, but this is so hard. I have got to book a sun break vacation. These short days suck so much.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I could not find travel funding for a story. <\/strong>I sold a story I&#8217;ve wanted to write for a year now, but the tourism board has no budget to bring me in. I can still write the piece without going, but that&#8217;s not what I wanted to do, not by a long shot. Because I&#8217;ll be doing all the research by phone, it won&#8217;t have the sparkle it would have had if I&#8217;d been there in person. I went around and around on this and considered just biting the bullet, but the plane ticket alone will cost me half what I am getting paid. That&#8217;s before the rental car, food, time away from my regular gig&#8230; it&#8217;s bad math for a professional. It sucks that I wasn&#8217;t able to make it work.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Trump is the president elect. <\/strong>I&#8217;m really trying to take actions that matter, even if they&#8217;re small. I called my reps (Maria Cantwell&#8217;s response kind of sucked), I wrote some letters, and I made a fat <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/\">donation to the ACLU<\/a>. I also stopped using Amazon for my affiliate sales. Amazon carries Trump family products and I really want to support the <a href=\"https:\/\/grabyourwallet.org\/\">Grab Your Wallet boycott<\/a>. I make a little cash from Amazon &#8212; now, that&#8217;s on hold. (I did get certified to be a Petco affiliate, so if you&#8217;re shopping for <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/01\/harley-recommends\/\">gifts for new dog owners<\/a><\/strong>, please and thank you.) Everything about the results of the election suck and I am still kind of freaking out.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday night, the back lock stuck and I got locked out of the house after walking the dog. On Thursday, the internet went out. Friday I had to scramble to meet a deadline because I had no internet for much of Thursday. Saturday, I knocked over the dog food, it was everywhere and Harley, he&#8217;s such a weirdo, he was all, &#8220;You&#8217;ll clean that up, right?&#8221; I was lucky, it wasn&#8217;t that much dog food, but it was still one more thing that sucked. I&#8217;ve developed a twitch in my right eyelid. I read that, like nightmares, this kind of thing can be caused by stress. And I&#8217;ve been so busy being glum, I think I missed a friend&#8217;s 50th birthday party. I suck.<\/p>\n<p><strong>December, like much of 2016 thus far, has sucked<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/V6Uo1nNt6LU\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A year ago, I adopted Harley the Dog. <strong>Harley the Dog unequivocally does not suck.<\/strong> With Julius gone, I have taken to walking Harley again, twice daily, and that doesn&#8217;t suck even when it kind of does because it is rarely a bad idea to go for a walk, regardless of what the dog says.<\/p>\n<p>Harley likes to hang out in the kitchen, he&#8217;s got a bed by the heater vent. If I walk over to him while he&#8217;s there, he&#8217;ll roll over on to his back, get this goofy look on his face, and give me Harley sign language for &#8220;scratch my belly, please?&#8221; That doesn&#8217;t suck, in fact, it&#8217;s adorable, and for a few minutes, it makes all the suck go away.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\u00a7<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">I didn&#8217;t blog much in November, but I wrote almost every day. I am nearing a complete first draft of my book, Harley&#8217;s Year: A Dog in Progress. You can still get a copy of the draft in exchange for a donation to an animal welfare cause. ETA, maybe a week, ten days out? Might be two weeks. But I&#8217;m getting there. <strong>Sign up <a href=\"http:\/\/instagram.us14.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=38aa8f5e9c2ee6a0870960c92&amp;id=ef3d6d479b\">here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh December. Why you gotta be so cruel? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":11744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-administrivia","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11743"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11754,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11743\/revisions\/11754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}