Sonia Connolly

"The Sick Times is an independent news site founded by journalists Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis. We report on the Long COVID crisis, COVID-19, and infection-associated illnesses." They redacted the excerpt I had linked here because they found the whole book engaged in Covid denial and promotion of harmful treatments for ME/CFS. (Thanks to silveradept for the heads up.)

Replacement link, by one of the editors at Sick Times: The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better) by Heather Hogan.

(On a lighter note) 6th grader's science experiment answers, 'Do cat buttholes touch every surface they sit on?' by Jacalyn Wetzel, Upworthy staff.

The results? Turns out that, no, cat buttholes do not touch every surface cats sit on. Now, let's all take a collective sigh of relief while we go over the details.

A Culture of Resilience by Lindsey Foltz, a beautifully written and photographed exploration of home food preserving in Bulgaria.

[I]ndustrial and small-scale agriculture; cultivated and wild foods; formal and informal economies; leisure and work do not function as stark polarities but rather in interconnecting, mutually supportive relationships through which home preservers practice, develop, and share their craft. The entanglement of formal and informal economies, domestic and wild foods, smallholders and industrial farms, local and global influences visible in everyday food practices in Bulgaria specifically and Eastern Europe more broadly condense in household cellars. As the cellar tour I describe below illustrates, these uniquely social practices provide resilience in terms of food security and the ability to pursue something more than mere survival.

What the World Got Wrong About Autistic People by Ludmila N. Praslova, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP via andrewducker.

Prejudice is one reason decades of research got autism so wrong. Researchers measured autistic people against neurotypical expectations and called every difference a deficit. They tested empathy by measuring in-group preference and missed commitment to universal fairness. They measured creativity by counting the number of ideas and missed originality. They saw moral consistency and called it rigidity. They saw deep engagement and called it rigidity. They saw sensory richness and called it disorder.

Most critically, they failed to ask autistic people about their inner experiences. They studied autism without genuinely listening to the autistic perspective. For decades, science examined autistic people through a lens of pathology and deficit, rather than dignity, comparing us to animals while missing our humanity. But autistic people don't lack humanity. Research just lacked the humanity to see it.

My word of the year this year was Love. It started out feeling huge and amorphous and flinchy, and settled into being a warm flow in the background. It feels like it gently soaked into some stuck places and loosened them.

batdina commented on last year's post that Marianne Williamson says love and fear are opposites, and for me they have been intertwined. It feels like over the past year they have gotten more unwound from each other. I'm grateful that it's been un-dramatic, and also a little sad that there hasn't been any movement toward a romantic relationship. I did ask a cute friend of a friend to dance at a concert, which was fun, but it turned out he's married.

One of the things that let Love settle into being warm and gentle rather than scary and dramatic is separating it from Desire. I'm warily choosing that as my word for 2026. Sexual desire can feel dangerously overpowering, both my own and other people's, and wanting things in general feels like it makes me vulnerable to manipulation and can get labeled greedy.

I started out this Word of the Year tradition choosing words I desperately needed, and the last few years I've more chosen things that I want to make my peace with, although looking at the list, I still need them. I think of Love as an underlying force in the Universe, and Desire as an underlying force of being alive. We move toward what we want, and away from what we don't want.

While I feel as clear as I ever do in this Word of the Year process that Desire is the next one, I also feel a strong pull away from it. Which is part of my relationship with Desire generally, a strong pull toward and an equally strong pull away.

( full word of the year list )

a knock at your front door by egelantier, Chalion Saga, World of Five Gods - Lois McMaster Bujold. Five Gods in modern times. Vividly written, highly recommended.

The long way out of a dark tower by Enigel, The Tower at Stony Wood - Patricia A. McKillip. I'm a longtime McKillip fan for the RiddleMaster of Hed series and Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and I thought I had read everything she wrote, including this one, but the characters didn't sound familiar at all. I'll have to go back and find it. Anyway, you don't have to know canon, lovely story.

On the mundane side, I ran across FlossGrip a while ago via network, and it sounded like a good idea, but the website is very 90's and I was dubious about ordering internationally, even with PayPal's guarantees. I went ahead and ordered in late October, and received a confirmation email saying I should receive it in 10 days, 30 days at the most. 30 days later had received nothing, so I wrote and asked about next steps.

The proprietor and inventor Gui wrote back and said he could ship again, or I could have a refund. Since I didn't know what went wrong and if it would go any better the next time, I opted for a refund, and got it quickly. Yesterday, almost two months after ordering, it showed up in the mail!

I wrote back to Gui and asked how to pay him again, since I now had the item. I ended up placing another order and paying for it, with the understanding that he wouldn't send anything. He said, "Ps: you are really a lovely person; I can tell you it’s not all the clients who are reacting the way you do."

All I did was pay for goods received, but it's nice to be reminded that my efforts to be a good person do succeed and do make a difference, since it's the mistakes that usually echo in my head.

(I tried out the FlossGrip this morning and it indeed uses much less floss, but it was awkward to use. Maybe I'll get better at it.)

I don't know canon, but I loved this story.
Halfway to Sky by bookwyrm in Almost Brilliant (Singing Hills Cycle) by Nghi Vo. "Up in the hills there was a goatherd, who could spin the dark out of the sky or the soft light of stars."

The comments at the end of the story are delightful too.

In August 2024, I got a heat pump and switched my heat source from gas to electric.

PG&E has an arcane cost structure where not only do they charge more for electricity between certain hours (4-9pm for my rate plan) but they also have a baseline allowance and charge significantly more for usage over baseline. Neither the contractor nor my neighbor with a heat pump advised me that I needed to call PG&E and tell them I had changed heat sources to change my baselines, so I overpaid a lot for electricity last winter.

I was aware that I was paying a lot even though the heat pump wasn't maintaining temperature. I asked the contractor. I asked my neighbor. Neither mentioned the baseline amounts.

PG&E sent me a message earlier this fall saying I might pay less on a different rate plan, and when I called them (Oct 9, for my records), I found out about notifying them I now had electric heat. One agent told me the was refundable as much as 3 years retroactively, but it turns out he was blowing smoke, and it isn't. :-(

The new rate plan is even more complicated and I still had a really high bill this month despite not keeping the place very warm (and I have double pane windows and everything!), so I spent a long time on the phone with an agent today digging into the numbers and figured out the new rate plan is actually slightly more expensive than just having the right baseline amount, so I'm switching back.

*sigh*. I guess some lessons are just expensive. Looks like they instituted this whole baseline thing right around when I moved back in May 2022, which explains why I wasn't aware of it before, and maybe I missed both the existing customer education and the new customer education.

( Last year's missing baseline credits )

I'm continuing to send updates to the contractor who installed the heat pump system, which is under warranty for 3 years. At the end of last winter, he replaced the thermostat, and a control board in the downstairs indoor unit where he cut a jumper that it didn't make sense to cut. Now he says he's going to replace the whole indoor unit, and install one that's more powerful. It's supposed to arrive early-mid January. We'll see if that fixes the problem. He will also have to replace all the coolant, so if he had the wrong amount in there, that will also fix that problem. I suppose if that doesn't help then he replaces the outdoor unit. One step at a time...

Kids Deserve a New Gender Paradigm by Kai Cheng Thom.

[I]n the trenches of trans health care, there is a growing idea that pushes back against the “one true gender for each individual” framing altogether—one that could allow us to resolve the bitterly divisive culture war over the psychological and medical care of transgender children. What if, instead of viewing gender as a fixed trait, we started to think of it as something that could evolve over the course of a lifetime? Or if detransitioning wasn’t considered a sign of failure and was instead regarded as a natural and healthy part of the gender development process?

I made another appointment with the eye surgeon and went in this afternoon. I told her about the theory of my pupil getting bigger than the opening in the capsule, but she said no, it looks clear, she doesn't see any obstruction with the pupil enlarged, and my pupil isn't that big. Good to know! All sorts of variations in bodies.

I have been paying attention to when it's worse and tried to describe the direction of it but she didn't seem interested. She did honestly say she didn't know the cause, which I appreciate. Dry eye was her best theory, although I don't know why my eyes would suddenly be so much drier than before the procedure.

She offered to refer me out, so I have another name, and we'll see if I can get in to see him. I suspect I'm just going to have to live with it, but I'd at least like a better understanding of what changed.

I sang in a concert tonight. We got to sing in a local synagogue with fabulous acoustics because the synagogue's event director joined the choir this session. It was great to be able to hear each other and know that the audience was hearing us sound better too.

I had a small trio part in a Serbian song, and then a solo verse in a Ukrainian song where there were 17 (!) short verses and we each had one, except the last one we all sang together.

It all came together! I was nervous, but it all flowed, and I'm getting better at being able to open up and sing even with an audience there. As the sessions go by and we all get to know each other and get more comfortable with performing, the ambient nerves settle down and I have an easier time managing my own nerves. I used to outright panic, and now I worry a fair amount beforehand, but by the time the concert itself rolls around, I figure I'm as prepared as I'm going to get.

So grateful to get to sing with this teacher and these singers every week. This is a big piece of what I came back to the Bay Area for.

About six months after cataract surgery, I had an annual eye exam. I had a similar experience to when the cataracts started seriously affecting my vision, where I wasn't seeing 20/20 through the new glasses I got a few months before. But the cataracts were already fixed!

I remembered that the surgeon had mentioned I might need a laser procedure after the surgery, so I made an appointment with her for the end of October. I figured she would tell me I had to wait since my vision had only changed a little bit so far, but she agreed to do it the week before Thanksgiving. She said the risk was negligible.

( Simple procedure, but... )

I feel like I tried to push things too far to fix my eyes. Tried to get rid of one disability and ended up with another one. There's grief and disappointment and fear of limitations. My friend says hers have gotten somewhat better over the years, so maybe mine will too. It's only been a couple weeks, so maybe my eyes are still healing, although I would think it would already be diminishing if it were a short-term issue.