Tues. Oct. 27, 2026: Still Shambling Around Like a Zombie
image courtesy of icholas Panek from Pixabay Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Last Day of the Full Moon
Neptune, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Venus, Mercury Retrograde
Sunny and cool
Yessiree Bob, Mercury is Retrograde again. Try to avoid signing contracts or buying anything big. Find cool stuff in thrift shops. Think A LOT MORE before you say a word – even more important when Mercury and Venus are retrograde at the same time.
Friday was sunny and cold. I was out of the house on time and at CVS for my COVID shot. No worries, no hassle this time. Getting home was a little fraught – more delays than usual, things slower, etc., and I started feeling the effects of the shot faster.
I usually feel it within 20 minutes, then it steadies out for 6-8 hours, then I’m miserable for however many days I’m down.
This time, I started feeling it in 10 minutes. I made it home, but my arm was quite sore within the first half hour. I’d drunk the 16 oz. of water the hour before the shot, as instructed. I continued to be thirsty, and by noon (my shot was at 9), I had consumed a gallon of water, and wanted more. So that was new and different. But I went with it. I’m not much of/enough of a water drinker, but I craved it and trusted it.
I started feeling weary early on, and my nerve endings were on fire. I imagine this is what a fibromyalgia flare feels like. My joints also ached, and creaked loudly every time I moved, to the point it woke up the cats. New and different. I’ve always had muscle aches (which I also had), but not the nerve/joint stuff to this extent. I had some sense of brittle joints last go-round, but it was different than this, and moved through in about 5-6 hours. All of this will go in a document to the John Hopkins study in which I’ve participated in for the last handful of years. That’s why I paid such close attention.
I took care of some business that needed attention while I was still coherent, drank as much water as I wanted, and took up residence on the sofa in the sunshine with the cats.
I’m usually ravenously hungry on the first day of the shot, but was not. I was mildly nauseated for a couple of hours, but it passed.
I wrote while I still could, and had books still close at hand for when I started to wind down. The headache came in faster, too, this time around, within three hours instead of the usual 6.
I hoped that symptoms coming in hard and fast meant they’d flow through faster, too. But that’s why I blocked out several days. So that the only thing I needed to do was heal.
I was actually functional enough to cook dinner using some CSA ingredients. I went to bed early, so tired I could barely drag myself there.
I woke up a little after midnight on Saturday with severe chills. I added the featherbed to the blanket cover, which helped. Charlotte even allowed Tessa to come on the bed and help warm me.
Then the muscle aches began. Everything hurt as badly as the first vaccine with Moderna way back in the day. I couldn’t take Tylenol because it made me so nauseated. I finally fell asleep, waking up a few hours later with a fever. Got back to sleep, woke up with chills.
At one point, I could swear Charlotte and Willa were swinging from the ceiling fan in my office, but I could have had audio hallucinations.
I moved to the sofa around 6 and slept there all day. I woke up every 3 or 4 hours for about 15 minutes or so, and went right back to sleep. I did manage a few sentences of free-writing, so I didn’t miss a day. I couldn’t even tie my hair back, because it hurt too much.
I tried to eat, but everything tasted like wet cardboard, and nauseated me even more. I couldn’t eat more than 2 or 3 bites of anything. I drank as much liquid as possible, although I could only stand a few sips of coffee.
You know it’s bad when I don’t drink coffee.
At least when I was asleep, I wasn’t aware of how bad I felt.
I was back in my own bed by 6 PM.
I woke up around 1:30 on Sunday morning, feeling a little better. I managed to get back to sleep, and even had a little bit of dreaming, a good sign.
I got up at the usual time and slowly fed the cats. I wasn’t up to yoga or much meditation, but I did a bit of free-write.
I managed to eat a little breakfast. By mid-morning, I could do the Community Tarot Reading for the Week, which you can read here.
I spent most of the day on the couch, reading. I read a book by one of my favorite authors that was a disappointment. It focused on the pain without the whimsy or joy that her previous novels have. While I respect her trying something new, and it technically had a happy ending, I missed the small moments of beauty that I love so much in her work. I read a book by a different author whose work I’ve read for years. Some of her work I’ve loved, some didn’t do it for me. This, sadly, was the latter, and it was in present tense. I realize she’s changed her style for market reasons, but she’s also lost the complexity that drew me to her work in the first place.
So not a satisfying reading day!
I heated up some leftovers for dinner, and could actually taste the food again, which was an improvement.
I was in bed again by 6:30.
I woke up around 1:30 on Monday, feeling a little better, and plotted out a good bit of the next ghostwriting assignment.
Fell asleep again, and dreamed I was at a conference center. There was a poetry convention in one section and a mystery convention in the other, and I kept running back and forth between them. Not the most restful of dreams, but an improvement over the weekend.
Woke up again at the usual time, and fed the cats, and that just about did me in. I did a few yoga poses on the floor, with Tessa snuggled beside me, and then the 40-minute meditation and the 15-minute free-write.
I played with some of my out-of-the-box ideas to protect my sites, as well as collecting some practical tools.
There’s also this: Theft is a crime. A company putting it in its “terms of service” doesn’t make it less of a crime. So I’m filing with my state AG, and also contacting my state and federal reps about it.
WP won’t allow me to install an AI blocker on this blog without paying a subscription fee, so I’ll be using one of the out-of-the-box solutions for the blog. I specifically don’t want this to be part of one of my websites, although I considered making a subdomain and exporting everything.
Again, during a Mercury Retrograde? Big mistake.
I am looking at some alternative social media platforms. Both Upscrolled and Monnett look good. Those would be sites where I wouldn’t have to keep posting about new releases cyclically for promotion. I could post once and be done. Cara, Joust, Curate, and PeakD don’t seem to be the right fit right now. I might try Curate at some point, when I have more visual work. Haven sounds promising, but isn’t even in Beta yet. Eh!, the Canadian social network, sounds like fun, but they might not want Americans at this point. I really miss Ello.
I think when curation is too narrow, you miss a lot of cool stuff.
I will spend more time on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Tumblr, too. I have accounts, I use all three in different ways, but I need to use them better.
For now, I’ve switched my accounts on Meta to personal, rather than business. I removed my lkn.bio. When they decide to expand the theft to personal, I may well just delete everything.
Maybe I just need a few months to pull back from many things, and figure out new ways of rebuilding. It means a financial hit, and it probably isn’t worth it to release a new holiday short this year.
And I’ll do my out-of-the-box protections which are designed to have a ripple effect over time with serious consequences for assholes. No, I’m not going into detail. I will start using either Glaze or Nightshade for images.
All of that took more time than I would have liked, but that’s the way it goes. Retrogrades slow things down.
And, I noticed that when I was responding to comments on other posters’ IG accounts about these issues, when they replied to me, I could not reply back and continue the conversation.
Really makes me want to delete all the Meta and just suck it up. I’ve successfully lived without the dystopian version of what used to be Twitter. I miss what it was at its best, not what it became.
I’m going to lose touch with a bunch of people. I’m not doing monthly subscriptions to anything. Not because I don’t want to, but as a freelancer, I cannot commit to anything monthly beyond my bills when I never know when I will get paid. Bills must be covered first. Then I spend money locally and with individual artists. Even a small monthly subscription can put me behind, so I don’t do them. Not only don’t I want to live by subscription. I can’t. I literally can’t.
I remember how devastated I was moving off Twitter. This just makes me angry. I’m not surprised, but I’m angry.
I’ve never given up analogue everything – writing, music, etc. So it’s just time to hunker down for a bit. I’m selling books locally over the holidays at a few places. I’ll put sell sheets into the books, too, with information about the rest.
And I need to find something for when the ghostwriting contracts are done, which will be fairly soon.
Speaking of ghostwriting, I had a really good session on it, and I hope I can keep that momentum up. I even got ahead of where I hoped.
I also read the scripts for tomorrow’s literary committee meeting.
I was wiped out by then.
I’m not one much for frozen meals, but I hate making lasagna (weird, I know). I found a frozen lasagna by a company out on the other side of the state in Quincy, MA, so I bought one last week, figuring there would be days I wasn’t up to cooking post-booster. I slapped it into the oven last night and hoped for the best.
It was actually pretty good. And my taste buds are working again, so I wasn’t imagining it. I would buy it again, and try their other products, and have one or two on hand for nights I can’t face the stove.
I read a little bit in the evening. I’m caught up on all the library books, so it was time to dig into my own TBR pile.
Went to bed a little earlier than usual but later than I have been, and couldn’t sleep. So I guess I’m getting back to “normal”?
Finally got to sleep, only to be woken up when Willa pulled a Houdini and my mom couldn’t find her. We found her, got her back into my mom’s room, and I went back to sleep, and then overslept until 6:30 this morning to start the routine.
The routine felt better this morning, even the yoga. I had a good free-write session, jiggling a lot loose.
After breakfast, I will get a crockpot marinara sauce going, take out the garbage, pick up the mail, vacuum, get some writing done, and then switch over to the ghostwriting in the afternoon. I will take breaks as I need them, and not push too hard.
My friend’s surgery went well yesterday. She has a long recovery ahead of her, but excellent care, and that’s always a relief.
Have a good one!
#CovidBooster #freelance #health #life #metaTheft #research #socialMedia #writing
