Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been a long week already. Work continues to be bananas and we’re short several people this week, which feels particularly rough. I’ve also been fighting some sniffles and a headache all week.

In the midst of all of this, I’m trying to look for the bright spots. Here are some of the things that have brought me joy this week:

• A potential new D&D game! After realizing a couple of weeks ago how much I miss having a local queer gaming community, I saw a Facebook post in a local queer D&D group that’s not usually very active. Someone was willing to DM a game but didn’t want to do the logistical side of coordinating schedules/food/etc. I realized I don’t have the bandwidth to run a game, but I can manage scheduling just fine, so I stepped in, and now we’re chatting on a Discord server and hopefully will start playing in a couple of weeks! I’m very excited about this.
• I had a great therapy session this morning where my therapist and I talked about ways I could show my body more care, and I came up with a plan around food that I can make more of. This felt like a big deal, because I’ve been in a weird place lately where the foods that had been “safe foods” for a while suddenly lost their appeal, and I’ve been having a really hard time figuring out what to replace them with that will feel good. I was able to work with my therapist to think of things more in terms of texture, and that really helped. Learning how to navigate around my increasing awareness of my own neurodivergence is an adventure.
• Tonight The New Standards are playing at the park across the street from our apartment (there’s a Thursday night concert series all summer), and we’re going to try to make it over there for that. I’m looking forward to it!

I think I’m going to wrap things up there for this week, but I’ll leave you as always with some doggos: