Arduinna

The downside to group living is cats who are endlessly sorting out territory. Had to go upstairs with a broom at 1:30 am to flush Dari out from under a bed where he was growling nonstop at Xander. Got him out, chivvied him to my room with food, went to brush my teeth in the dark. Saw him go past the bathroom then come back, so I checked for white paws and picked him up, brought him back to my room, showed him the food. He seemed very confused.

... wrong white-pawed cat. Brought Xander back to his mom. Fingers crossed that the cat I saw go under my bed was Dari, and we can all have some peace...

I've been writing (and rewriting) up a post about this for a solid week and more now, trying to get it Just Right. Perfection, man, the enemy of the good. So screw it, I'm just gonna wing this right in the posting interface in one shot.

kass asked what it was like living with friends, and shoshanna asked me to talk about the move where I started living with friends.

We start with today's first example: I was vaguely awake and poking at things on my phone in bed this morning (...ish) when therienne showed up in my doorway and said "Get up, or I'm feeding your bacon to the cats!" So I got up and got dressed and went downstairs to where she and mollyamory were sprawled in front of the tv with plates of bacon, shirred eggs, and toast, with a plate of the same waiting on the coffee table for me.

I loved living by myself for 30 years, but it must be said, the fairly regular appearance of bacon and eggs on the weekend for me to eat just because therienne believes in weekend breakfast is a pretty damn good tradeoff.

(I fed bacon to the cats as I was eating. I'm not a monster.)

And honestly, that's mostly what it's like. Yesterday we had friends over for a potluck/hangout kind of a day, which we started doing well before the move; the difference for me is that I don't have to drive over to it, or drive home after. Today was that lovely breakfast, then hanging out in my office doing my own thing while mollyamory gamed in the living room and therienne ran errands. Supper was a joint effort at tacos, eaten on the couch in front of a couple of episodes of this year's Great American Baking Show Holiday Whatever. Then there was the nightly cleaning-up bustle where between us we get things generally tidy for tomorrow before bed. After that mollyamory and therienne head upstairs to wind down so they can get to sleep at a reasonable hour, and I head off to my office to putter around for a while later, since I'm on a later schedule than they are.

I'm making the biggest adjustment on this end of things with never being able to leave and go home to my own place, but they already did the seriously hard work a decade ago when they moved in together and sorted out how to be roommates. I had that whole decade of having their house as my second home, getting used to the rhythms of things. We've been on vacations together, been on roadtrips together, roomed at cons together; we've sat in hospital ERs and waiting rooms for each other; we're used to each other's ways.

It's a little weird not being 100% responsible for everything - meals, cleaning, trash, you name it - but it's also nice not to have to be 100% responsible for EVERYTHING. And it's really nice living with other people who were socialized as female growing up; none of us actually ever wants to clean the bathroom or scrub stains off of things or empty the trash, but we all know those things need to be done regardless so we do them as we see them. We never run out of milk or toilet paper, even though there isn't a single one of us in charge of those things. We check in with each other before any of us goes to a store in case someone needs something, even though we're each responsible for our own groceries. We each provide dinner at least one night a week, more if we're in the mood, so no one has to do all their own cooking.

It's good!

As for how we got here:

I had pretty specific requirements for moving in with them; mostly, I needed space. I had a 4.5-room apartment to myself for 25 years. I didn't want such close quarters that I couldn't get some space and alone time if I needed it. We'd been sort of idly thinking about it for years -- the big retirement commune we'd get one day, where I'd have a wing or an outbuilding to myself but still be close enough not to have to drive over for bacon or tv. (While you're thinking idly, you may as well think BIG.) I'd been amused by the idea originally, then had come around over the years to thinking it would probably happen someday on a smaller scale as we all got older - it makes sense to combine households to save on expenses and make chores and such easier. But it was all way out there in the distance someday, because they were perfectly happy in their little house and I was perfectly happy in my little apartment and we lived less than 2 miles away from each other anyway.

Then this past February, therienne decided it was time to move to a bigger place, for Reasons. I was ready to help them look, when somehow the planning turned to "big enough for us and Arduinna". ... Okay? Sure? I didn't actually think we'd find someplace that big within budget, but agreed in general to the idea, figuring if it didn't work out I still have a very comfortable apartment I was happy in.

Three weeks later we'd found two places: the first was charming but needed some reno work to get it to tick all our boxes, and the second ticked all our boxes but had no charm. Being practical women, we decided to go for the practical house that met our needs. ... For a couple of hours, until actually thinking about living there cause therienne to break and admit she wanted the charming house, which mollyamory and I were both totally on board with, with bells on, because seriously SO CHARMING. The timing on everything worked out pretty much perfectly, and by June it was ours.

It's not perfect, but it's pretty amazing, with enough space for all of us to have our own areas as well as shared space that's really comfortable to hang out in. The previous owners were meticulous about upkeep and improvements, so we have some things we would never in a million years have done ourselves but that are awesome, like the complete de-leading they had done when their grandkids were born a few years ago.

The reno work we need done involves some plumbing, which I'm braced for being a nightmare. Parts of this house go back almost 240 years, and the basement was dug out sometime after the main house was built. It's tiny and cramped and doesn't extend under the entire house, so running pipes is, uh. Yeah, it will be fun.

It's going to be weird in a good way for me this winter. At my old place, I only had street parking, and winters were grim. I tried to leave my house as little as possible, and when I did leave, I did my damnedest to have someone come get me, because I hated losing my parking spot. Like, hated. Got insanely anxious about. Ugh. (The endless snowy winter of 2015 consisted of my car not budging from its spot for three months - even though I paid to have it dug out after every storm just in case - while therienne and mollyamory came to get me every Saturday afternoon and bring me shopping, then back to their place long enough to do a couple loads of laundry, then home again as the snow started back up for the next round.)

Now, though, there is a driveway. With space. Enough so we don't even need to shuffle cars around for someone to get out. We can just... go. My god, the luxury of not having to worry about being ticketed because I forgot to move my car. <3 On the downside, now I have to worry about people being able to get out to work in the morning, which I just... don't do in bad weather. But again, being practical women, we looked at the driveway and what winters around here are turning into, and bought the biggest snow-blower we could, so hopefully it won't be too awful.

Anyway! Living here is just nice; it's a good house with good friends and it feels right. Which I admit is a bit of a relief; I thought it would work out this way or I wouldn't have done it, but it would have really sucked if this had sucked. *g*

I'm winnowing out a bunch of stuff, including books - which I've already repeatedly winnowed, to the point that I now have hundreds instead of thousands*, and it seems to get easier with every pass; I'm better and better at deciding how much I really love something vs. how much I just like having it on a shelf. ... To a point. Apparently that point is my now-smaller reference section, which was originally (years ago) the easiest thing to weed out. There are books on those shelves that I completely forgot I owned, whose research is sometimes decades out of date, and that I've never read beyond flipping through them in the store and then later in my office deciding whether to keep them. But they look so INTERESTING, argh. But I'm moving soon, and are they interesting enough to pack and lug, with the whole internet at my fingertips?

Answer: That decision is too hard to make so instead I will post to DW about having to make it. *headdesk*


* I should note, all this winnowing started after e-books started being a real thing. So lovely and non-dusty and portable! So the hardcopy books that are left are supposed to just be the "I can't bear to not have a physical copy on hand". Supposed to be.

(Wow, assignments came out fast - apologies for not having this up in advance!)

Thank you so much! The thought of a story in any of these fandoms is already making me happy.

I love all of these fandoms unreservedly, so if you have a yen to explore the universe, or bring in additional characters I didn't list, it's all good.

If you want more information about my requests, read on - but please don't worry if your ideas go in a different direction. Optional details are optional! I would much rather read the story you wanted to write than the story you felt you were obligated to write because of something I said. As long as it's for one of these fandoms, and uses the characters, you totally win at Yuletide. \o/

( my fic tastes )

Why I love these fandoms

(Alphabetical, not ranked by preference! I love them all. :)

( Boston Legal )


( Peacemakers )


( The Slipper and the Rose )


( Tango & Cash )


( Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey )

I adore all these fandoms, and will be happy with absolutely anything you write, as long as you enjoy writing it.

And thank you, again!!

I got a new external drive and did a full backup, OS and all, of my laptop, so now if it dies it should be fairly painless to just swap in a new SSD and copy the info over. Yay! It hasn't done that weird shutting-down thing since, so maybe that was just a desperate cry for a backup. Computers are weird.

Alas, the next day I was woken up by a cop ringing my bell to tell me a neighbor had called them to report a hit-and-run. With my parked car as the hit-ee. Dammit. It was a hard hit, crunching up the entire back end. The initial estimate (on damage visible from the exterior) came in at ~$8,800 (omg) and the claims rep told me that if the supplemental estimate (after the body shop opened it up and looked for hidden damage) came in too much higher, they might have to total the car. /o\ But it's been a week, and I haven't heard that they're totalling it, so I am cautiously hopeful that they can fix it and get my wonderful little car back to me. It's only two years old, and I love it to bits, so I wasn't thrilled at the thought of having to buy something else. (OTOH, the fact that it's only two years old is pretty much the only reason that $8,800 wasn't enough to total it right out of the gate...)

Whichever neighbor it was did get the plate number of the guy that hit me, so the cops have something to investigate, but my insurance co doesn't seem to be following up on requesting the police report to get it. Which I would like them to do, as I would like my deductible to be waived, and also I would like someone to reimburse me for the rental car I've risked renting for the duration, since I'm not getting my car back for another few weeks regardless. So I think this week I'll be taking myself off to my police dept to get the plate number from them, so I can tell my claims rep directly and have her run it for me to see if the other person has insurance. (Which is likely - we're a mandatory-insurance state, thankfully.)

I'm not actually using the rental much, which seems silly, but just knowing it's there and I can get to a grocery store is a big help.

Meanwhile, today is a quiet day, wherein I am actually managing to get a little cleaning done around the house. Go me!

This is old, but always lifts my spirits, so in honor of the day, have an extended boom de yada song:



And I'll take a cue from movies_michelle and dorinda, and offer to write commentfic if anyone's interested. Give me a fandom and a single word prompt, and I'll see what I can do!

(I'm not adding a list of fandoms because I know I'll forget things; ask for whatever you want, and if I can't do it, I'll say so.)

(icon not exactly Anne, but certainly bosom friends!)

Reading Anne of Green Gables a couple of weeks ago put me in the mood for the 1985 (... okay, wow, it really doesn't feel like it was that long ago) miniseries, which I couldn't find streaming anywhere. So I put the little yen aside until tonight, when I noticed that at some point recently my TiVo recorded the 2016 TV movie version. Which, I admit, I never had the slightest interest in, having thoroughly imprinted on the earlier Megan Follows version.

Still, it was Anne and it was on my tv, so hey! It was good - it's hard to go really wrong with that story - but sort of watered down, with all the prickly edges softened up, which was a pity. It also felt a bit rushed, with a run time of about an hour and a half (rather than the ~3 1/2 of the miniseries).

Also, much though I love Martin Sheen, wow is he the wrong actor to play shy, retiring, practically invisible Matthew Cuthbert. He did his best, but can't exactly hide his presence under a bushel. *g*

Anyway - glad a new generation has an Anne of their own, but I have to admit, glad my generation had the Anne we had. <3

kass asked me to talk about my first fannish love, and I've been mullling that over since she mentioned it. I'm not entirely sure how to define it.

It could be Lord of the Rings; I read it for the first time when I was 12, and wow. It was an annual re-read for me for years; I learned some Elvish; I memorized some of the poetry. It sparked my interest in Nordic legend and myth, and shoved me full-tilt into the SFF side of genre. ("It's just a phase," my parents thought. "She'll grow out of it." Hahahahaaaa not so much...)

Or it could be ST:TOS, which I watched in reruns starting god knows when, and bonded with my soon-to-be sister-in-law over when I was 13-14. I could recognize episodes from the first few seconds; I bought the novelizations and the fotonovels and the tie-ins as soon as they started appearing. I discovered my embarrassment squick through Plato's Children when Spock was forced to behave ridiculously; I started down the path of seeing humanity as a whole and being totally confused by nationalism. I found the Star Trek Concordance at the library and read it cover to cover, marveling at the stories about the first Star Trek conventions in New York and wishing I was brave enough to go to a con. (It really did have that little moving wheel on the cover, too – so cool!) TOS zines were the first I ever bought, and were my introduction to slash. ♥ No other ST series ever worked for me as well as the original.

It could be Star Wars, which came out when I was 12 and oh my GOD was I the right age for that. I wanted as much as I could get and then some; I saw it many times in the theater that summer and dozens of times in the theater over the next year or two. When my family got cable for the first time a few years later, I got up at 6am to watch it on HBO. (Dad: "... haven't you seen this before? Why are you awake?" me: "shhhhh!!!!!") I wanted the novelizations and the calendars and the t-shirts (... I still have the t-shirt *kof*) (... and the novelizations). I dressed up my dolls and stuffed animals as Star Wars characters. (You haven't lived till you've turned a stuffed skunk into a stormtrooper with careful application of tissues and scotch tape.)

It could be Battlestar Galactica (the original). This is the first canon for which I consciously made up stories, mostly about how Apollo and Starbuck were meant to be together, or how one of them needed to rescue the other, so that makes it a first as well. I hadn't quite gotten all the way to slash on my own yet, but I was right there on the verge.

Or it could be Forever Knight, which I watched religiously no matter how hard it was to find, and taped regularly (first show I ever taped for keeping!), and went looking online to see if anyone else watched it, too, when I first got online. I've talked about my early FK days here before – hah, actually, because Kass asked about it a few years ago. <3 That was what pushed me from being in SF fandom proper to being in media fandom, and man, I loved it. I loved the people, the energy, the creativity, the fan theories, the riffs and in-jokes, all of it. It was the first time I'd interacted with people who were writing fanfic, and it made me think that this was something I could maybe do? It wasn't the first fandom I wrote fic in (hah, I checked this time – usually I get this wrong and say FK was the first), but it was the second, and I made some really strong connections with people in that fandom.

So, uh. My first fannish love was sort of ... everything? Heh.

Both dorinda and rosaw asked what I've been reading lately, so it seemed like a good one to tackle next. I've gotten weirdly out of the habit of reading novels in the past few years, but started picking up nonfiction. Sloooowly, though; and huh, I just realized it's because I have a mental block against getting too involved in anything in case I need to drop everything and Go Do The Thing (whatever the thing may be). That is an incredibly useful thing to know, so yay for this question!

Anyway. Novels/fiction may finally be working their way back into the mix, as I settled in a few days ago with Anne of Green Gables (♥) on the theory that I could really use something gentle and charming to sink into in the midst of this political miasma - and wow, good call, I felt much better afterward. I have oodles of fiction on my to-read list, so am looking forward to getting back into that. I got Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others for Christmas, after loving The Arrival, so that will be up soon.

But other than that, it really has largely been nonfic for a good while now. I am still reading Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton - I was going great guns with it but put it aside and haven't gone back to it yet. I will, though. It really is that good. (And then up: Chernow's Washington. Good writer, Ron Chernow!)

I'm also reading (about 3/4 done with) And Then I Thought I Was a Fish by Peter Welch. I got there via a metafilter post about something else this guy posted to his website, and in the comments someone linked to his essays recording his psychotic break. I went to read them (still online for free here) and got so sucked in that when I hit the point where he posted a link to the $2.99 kindle version, I had to buy it.

I'm ALSO reading (well, listening to - it's good highway listening) Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance. She does the Audible narration herself, which is sort of fabulous. I just kind of want to follow her around like a puppy, really. She is amazing.

As for stuff I've finished more-or-less recently (past couple of years):

I'd been hearing about 1491 and the sequel, 1493, off and on for years, and finally pushed 1491 to the top of my list to see if the hype was really justified. It was; I have to force myself not to shove copies in people's hands and tell them to read them. I knew I'd been taught mostly incorrect history, and had picked up bits and pieces of better information as I could, but these laid things out as a cohesive whole I'd never seen before. It was one of those worldview-shifting experiences for me.

A whole bunch of epidemic/disease-related books, of which my favorites were:

* The Great Influenza: The Story of the Greatest Pandemic in History

* Polio: An American Story

* On Immunity: An Innoculation

* The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

* The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

And not a disease but my favorite of the disaster books I read during the same phase: Dark Tide: The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 (true story!)

And finally to lighten things up a bit, two books by Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess). Both draw heavily but not exclusively on her blog, and her writing just cracks me the hell up.

* Let's Just Pretend This Never Happened

* Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things


... and now I've written this list up and am suddenly re-interpreting the request to be "talk about the actual content of things you're reading", but it's nearly midnight and that will have to be another night. *g*

dorinda asked a question that I had actually just been thinking about recently myself, so I'm gonna start with that:

Do you think it would be possible to have a story, written today, centered around the Night Court episode "Best of Friends", or would the period-accurate (& therefore sometimes transphobic) handling of some of it make it a non-starter or drawerfic?

So, for background: ( the Night court ep 'Best of Friends' )

There is just so much scope in this episode for fanfic, looking at Dan's willingness to move past at least some of his rigid way of looking at the world, and how when he loves someone it's intense and real, and how maybe that's why he doesn't have friends - he knows how to do transactional relationships, but not really how to do casual friendships; it's all or nothing with him, and he anchors himself to his real relationships, so he's at risk of being set badly adrift if something goes wrong.

But that said, this would be really dicey to write about today, because even though this episode at heart is about accepting people for who they are, regardless of who that is, it's still done in a mid-80s way, which is 30 years out of date.

I think it could be done, but drawerfic or a locked-down posting might be the way to go. I would hate to see someone looking for trans tags stumble into 80s transphobia (and even 80s trans norms - lots of things were different) without realizing it.

My brain is all aswirl with caveats and but-ifs, but yeah: in this particular case, I think an episode-centered story should be kept more private.

I had an embarrassment of riches this year, with three gifts written for me, two in the main collection and one in Madness.

Two absolute charmers were in Boston Legal, written for me by debirlfan:

Names and Other Irrelevant Labels (1073 words) by debirlfan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Boston Legal
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Denny Crane/Alan Shore
Characters: Denny Crane, Alan Shore
Additional Tags: Post-Finale, Yuletide
Summary:

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Crane, 2015 (100 words) by debirlfan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Boston Legal
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Denny Crane, Alan Shore
Additional Tags: Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational
Summary:

You just know Denny would do it...

Boston Legal is a fandom of my heart, largely because of Denny and Alan, and I was over the moon to get two visits with them this year. ♥

The third was in Jumpin' Jack Flash, full of the awesome that is Terry Doolittle:

Old School for New Tech (1091 words) by BardicRaven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Terry Dolittle/Her Imagination
Characters: Terry Dolittle, The Russian Lady Fitness Instructor, James Page, Miscellaneous I.T. semi-professionals
Additional Tags: Banks - Freeform, Finance, Money Transfers, Money, fitness, exercise, Russian exercise telly ruining data-entry scores, Data-entry, Soul-sucking jobs, Job Disatisfaction, Employment, problem solving, Old School, New Tech, Misses Clause Challenge
Summary:

Sometimes, ya just gotta handle it old-school.

Basically I spent Yuletide reveal night beaming my head off.


I wrote Invisible Man for Ark, who asked for "smutty and in love", so I was pretty much beaming my head off on assignments day, too. Right up my alley, that. I had a few false starts, but in the end I'm really happy with what I wound up writing:

A Day Like Many Days (1875 words) by Arduinna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Invisible Man (TV 2000)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Darien Fawkes/Bobby Hobbes
Characters: Darien Fawkes, Bobby Hobbes
Additional Tags: Partnership, downtime, Dinner, after-dinner fun
Summary:

Sometimes a dinner invitation was just a dinner invitation -- but sometimes it was more.

I managed to forget to put the quote that explains the title in the end notes like I'd planned, but oh well, so it goes. I think it works anyway. :)

In the past few weeks I started randomly watching Endeavour, mostly thanks to therienne. Over the weekend, I caught up with a few first-season eps I'd missed, including Rocket.

( I was not expecting that. )

ETA: *facepalm* I forgot that this year's YT was being based on midnight UTC for major stuff, and have been sitting here sorting finances to have everything from 2014 done before 2015 instead of wallowing around in the archive. Which I just virtuously closed up the checkbook and the budget and was about to go do, and spotted people doing reveals posts already. Whoops!

Many thanks, merryghoul! <3 <3
/ETA

----

I should have spent today running an errand that I couldn't finish yesterday, since otherwise I won't have time for at least a week or two. But it consists mostly of driving for about 3 hours round-trip to stand in a line for probably 15 minutes to return some equipment, and I admitted to myself when I got up that I just didn't want to. I took a few days off this week (after months of incredibly busy RL between work and family), and it has been bliss to (mostly) just stay home and not worry about anything. I wanted one more day of that, so screw the errand; it's worth it.

That busy RL has meant that too much stuff has piled up around my house to let me actually dive into Yuletide and not come back out the way I wanted to, but I've managed to do some poking around without the usual pressure to squeeze in as much reading as I can between other obligations. Again, bliss!

Starting, of course, with my own gift. My request wound up going out as a fairly last-minute pinch hit this year, so I was completely bowled over when it turned out to be something targeted so closely to my likes:

Duck and Cover (1470 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Burn Notice
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sam Axe/Michael Westen
Characters: Sam Axe, Michael Westen
Additional Tags: Backstory, Missions, Missions Gone Wrong, Escape, Caves, Kissing, Pre-Series
Summary:

Sam and Michael are together on a mission in Thailand that goes wrong. What happens next involves a lot of running.

I mean, look at those tags! ♥

The voices in this are bang-on, and I could totally see this happening. And the ending leaves them in such a solid, together place. *happy sigh* Mike/Sam is woefully rare in Burn Notice, so I'm doubly chuffed to have gotten this.

Now, as usual, I just wish there was another week till author reveals, so I could work my way through more of the stories while they're still anon; there are whole fandoms I haven't touched yet as I've bounced around the list. c'est la yuletide.