Introduction

Am I doing this a week into Blaugust? Yes. Is it because talking about myself in a way that makes me seem even remotely interesting makes me want to crawl into a hole? Also yes. but that is neither here nor there.

Hi! I’m Tart. I’m an almost 40 year old queer enby chicane, who currently lives in Buffalo, NY, which we affectionately refer to as Diet Canada. I’ve been here just over a decade, though I’m originally from SoCal (the 90951). I work in end user tech support via social media, which means I wind up with a lot of Tales From Tech Support, mostly revolving around kids who try to yell at me online because their parents blocked their internet access. I am late diagnosed autistic, with multiple chronic illnesses, and a hefty dose of CPTSD, so dark humor is definitely my coping mechanism. I have two kitties: Raven, a tiny void who is pretty much glued to me at all times and Sammy, an absolute unit of a tabby who now after 5 years finally tolerates me even if she shows her affection with her claws. I also have a sausage of a dog, Little, a beagle/rat terrier mix. I adore her even if she’s getting a bit elderly and prefers to spend a majority of her days sleeping on the couch and trying to steal timbits.

While my special interests can often change weekly, the ones that have stuck around for a long time are reading, knitting, and music. Reading wise I average 50-60 books a year and I will read almost anything you put in front of me as long as it’s not high fantasy. Sorry Brando Sando and Tolkien fans. I read a lot of romance and a fair bit of scifi. Since I am a polytheist pagan, there’s also a good chunk of folklore, historical research, and magical theory books. I am very much pro-DNFing, annotating, and reading multiple books at once, though I totally get why some people don’t do any of those things. We do not speak of how many books are on my TBR currently.

I joke that I have never met a craft I didn’t like, but fiber arts tend to be where I’m happiest, whether that’s knitting, spinning yarn, cross stitching, or embroidery. I used to like crocheting but since I have Rheumatoid Arthritis, it often hurts my hands and wrist too much to be feasible. The project I’m working on the most currently is a Beekeeper’s Quilt, so making approximately 500 tiny hexipuffs to use up my scrap yarn. I’m also working on spinning up some fluff that a friend sent me that’s a combination of BFL and recycled sari silks.

Since my job doesn’t really require me to talk to people face to face or by phone, I spend a lot of time either listening to audiobooks or music. I know it’s almost a trope at this point to say that you listen to anything, but it’s incredibly rare that I find a genre I don’t like, though I think right now it’s a lot of indie rock/folk, whether it’s in English or Spanish. Growing up my mom had a MASSIVE music collection. Like, multiple 400 disc cd players and a few hundred records massive. It was so big that we had a spreadsheet of everything because she was prone to forgetting what she owned and buying albums multiple times. My collection isn’t quite that big, though there’s a few hundred gigs of mp3s and I’m slowly gathering quite the vinyl collection.

I also enjoy a variety of art related things, though I can’t claim to have much talent at any of it. I do a bit of watercolor, a lot of nail art, and I’m currently trying to learn color pencils. I’d like to learn to draw better, but there are only so many hours in a day! I love to cook as well, though I don’t get to do it nearly as often as I wish I could.

I think I’ve blathered on enough for now, but I hope that gives those of you who don’t know me from my WoW blogging days a better idea of me.