gwyn | Under pressure

I was already a big ball of stress trying to get ready for Vividcon but it seems like life is trying to give me a nervous breakdown before that. The capper was coming home last weekend and getting ready to feed my kitty only to discover the food left in his bowl was...moving. I've never encountered ants before in any of the places I've lived, and I've been here for over 20 years and never had them before, either. It's been a week. Nothing I did seemed to have an effect and I was losing hours trying to find where they were coming from and get them out of stuff, but just when I thought that the cooler weather and a teeny bit of rain had gotten rid of them, they came back (I lost a whole brand new box of Raisin Nut Bran! Woe).

So I got the bait traps minim calibre said she used and put them out last night, and I admit it was giving me major heebie-jeebies to see hundreds more ants everywhere, but I'd zip-loc bagged a lot of stuff and they warned you on the package it'd be like that. Every time I got up at night though I felt like I was walking through a minefield. But in the morning there were no ants anywhere. Well, a couple stray ones here and there who clearly didn't know where to go. I guess you have to leave them out and I'm a bit nervous about that while I'm gone, I don't want Blues to get into them if he gets bored or something, but I also don't want to have to keep putting his food bowl in a moat, which was the only way to get them out of his food initially. He's a messy eater now that he's missing so many teeth, and that was gross.

I also got an air conditioner window unit. I didn't want to, and didn't have the money, but I couldn't handle the heat anymore--it was clearly making Blues sick, and I couldn't sleep, so it was just something I had to do. I ended up settling on this thing that looks like it comes from an Apple store, it's all white and rounded corners and has this cool mesh grill, and a digital readout . There's an app, although everyone says it's shit, but I don't really need that so I'm not worrying about it yet. The main reason I got it was that you could remove the grill easily (it attaches magnetically) for cleaning, and it got better reviews than almost any other unit. The big problem was that when it arrived I found out that you were supposed to drill holes in the window sashes for installation, and not one person nor the specifications mentioned that, and everyone I'd talked to about window units said you just used the window to hold it in place.

Fortunately friends rode to my rescue (I don't even have a drill anymore and no way could I have lifted it by myself). Though I had to put it out in the kitchen/dining area, which means it's very cool in the kitchen but not the living areas, though I can use the box fan to channel some of that into the living room. So it's not ideal in the sense that the whole place cools down, but it's helped tremendously and I love coming back to the house and the air being tolerable, instead of an oven because I've had to close the windows.

My BFF Keith has moved back to Washington DC for work, so I've been very depressed about that. My other friend Michael has moved even farther away from where he was living the past couple years, so now I'll probably see him even less too. I'm trying not to feel as lonely and down as my heart wants to, but it just seems like my world is constricting more and more all the time.

I forgot to mention in my last post about stuff I watched that I'd finished the second season of The Expanse and liked it a lot more than first. I might go back and watch first season again to see if it holds up any better, but that aspect of there being only one woman allowed per group of guys just...gah. I am so tired of it. I don't care how great the women are if they're not being represented like the more than half the population that they are. Second season felt a slight bit more balanced (not great, still, but better) with the addition of Bobbi and Drummer, and I fell totally in love with Drummer. I can't wait to watch S3, actually, just to see her again. So I'm sort of stalking Amazon waiting for it.

I loved Ant-Man and the Wasp. Honestly, I was surprised, since I wasn't that fond of the first movie because of that tiresome bullshit of having the obviously superior woman forced to train the inept dumbass solely because it has to always be a guy who's the Chosen One. There were cute things about it, but in the end seeing it for the Steve/Bucky tag at the end and the appearance of Sam Wilson was all I really thought about with it. I liked the secondary characters (Luis, Cassie, the two cops) more than the primary, and that's always a problem. My favorite thing in this new one was the hugging, and of course, Cassie. It was such a pleasant surprise to see a healthy relationship between divorced people and their new families, and the different parents & children relationships really made me happy. Fathers-daughters are such rare stories in Hollywood, and I liked all of them.

I also saw Ocean's Eight, and I don't know, I found it pretty lackluster. The trailers didn't impress me at all and I felt weird about that, because everyone else was orgasmic about them, but I'd hoped the movie itself would surprise me. I mean, I was still happy to sit there for an hour and 45 minutes and watch a caper movie with all ladies, and it was good summer entertainment, but it was instantly forgettable for me. Some of the storytelling was exasperatingly nonsensical too, and I kind of resented James Corden's mugging, although he did have my favorite line in the whole thing ("Oh to be you"), and I did love that whole thing with Anne Hathaway needing friends. That was definitely something I could identify with.