Seen on a t-shirt on a woman of a certain age
Sunday Secrets







I opened PostSecret this morning and I think “well thats relatable – I hate Christmas too”
Then “wait, that’s my handwriting — I made that secret!” I sent that postcard many years ago. So strange that it wasn’t postmarked.
Over the years, I have sent you 5 postcards, and you have now published all 5. I feel incredibly seen and I thank you for that. I still hate Christmas for many reasons and that’s not going to change. Skipping the holiday season is not an option but I would in a heartbeat. I am hosting a brunch today for 14 people and I will put on my happy face and make the next 11 days magical for everyone.
I can’t wait for December 26 when I can take down all these decorations and stop pretending.




The post Sunday Secrets appeared first on PostSecret.
Cataract surgery writeup
It makes sense to be worried about any surgery, but this one is well-understood, superficial in the body, and the surgeons are well-practiced.
( Barely more fuss than going to the dentist )
I hope your surgeries go well and that you're happy with the correction you choose.
Various Links 12/7 - 12/13
~ Cate Blanchett in a suit - photo
~ Halle Bailey looking like a real life barbie doll - photos
~ James Stewart and Hedy Lamarr in COME LIVE WITH ME (1941) - gif set
~ Narnia: The Magician's Nephew in production - wiki link
~ let's talk about Emperor Palpatine's last week leading up to the conclusion of Episode IV - text post
~ Modern day chatelaine with tutorial - pictures and text
~ Better late than never (Saiyuki [Manga]) - fic link
~ A doctor starts seeing patients as people and taking notes - text post, poignant
~ Hellboy cosplay - video
~ Art by Science - video
a random weather poll
i read once that people really didn't care if they had a white christmas (a.k.a snow on christmas day) until Bing Crosby sang the song white christmas in the movie holiday inn & then people started looking forward to having one and getting annoyed when they don't get it.
do you want snow on christmas day?
do you live in a place where it could snow on christmas?
Just one thing: 14 December 2025
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Still the shapes fill my head
I finally found a warm-ish night when I was available to go, so I traveled into Manhattan on a window display spree. I've posted Ralph Lauren, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Kleinfeld Bridal Christmas/holiday window display photos to my Flickr.
I'll be going through, processing, and posting Saks Fifth Avenue's haul in the near future. They made things so hard on me...
+++
I'm still adjusting the arrangement of ornaments on my tree to my taste and wondering if the (non-thieving) roommate ever notices.
Life lived in dot points
- surgical recovery continues apace. The incision has mostly healed, although the knot of dissolving stitches at one end got caught when I was trying to clean it and pulled it slightly open, so I've now cut off the knot, put a fancy steri-strip over it to hold it together, and a little circular sticking plaster over that. Internals still noticeably sore, externals are itchy; have been putting 'scar therapy gel' on which seems to help (it was in the cupboard; I do not know what any of the ingredients are). I see the surgeon on Tuesday for follow up.
- reviewers comments for my candidacy proposal are in (received late on Friday). I'm not actually sure what the next step is -- I'll work it out tomorrow. I think it said 'no edits' which is a surprise, given that I have been reading and annotating weekly since submitting, and there are a lot of 'this could be clearer' and 'what did you mean here?' notes. Also, I found another answer to one of the reviewers questions from the presentation about why books and not films/tv, which is that I'm hoping to get a wider range of cultural influences (and I have a paper from Italy in which almost all of the TV/movies that the kids reported was from the USA, which very much supports my 'this would be an issue' argument)
- there was an HDR and supervisors lunch run by the school I'm in on Monday. This was very interesting and I met a lot of people. Including one who I was unsurprised to discover is an acquaintance of Youngest. Very queer (not very surprising) and neurodiverse (should not have been surprising) bunch that I met.
- weather has been Warm. To the point that
artisanat has been volunteering to put the air-con on. - There have been some changes to the mix of South Asian grocers on High Road. One of the two north of Bunnings has gone (and the one still there no longer stocks palak paneer in their shelf-stable preprepared meals; not the regular nor the tofu/vegan option. They do, however, still have some vegan options). There is a new one that is further south than the ones I was aware of -- nearly to where the petrol station is. To the point that it is still so new that not all the shelves are stocked; we couldn't find the box meals there at all, but we had to rush because we ran out of time. Thus there are still three that I'm aware of.
- Monday's rehearsal I went with the intention to play pizzicato, which was mostly fine, but I got there to discover the C string broken (spare was at home) so had to transpose some of the work up an octave, which ah, that needs practice. As does one of the sections we hadn't got to that I'd failed to realise has a lot of fast notes.
- craft has stalled
- reading - one of these week's I'll get around to doing another reading post. Over on the
Book Club of HabiticaDiscord I've joined the TBR Bingo challenge for Dec/Jan and set myself a bingo card of 16 books from my 'paused' list. So far, I've finished 1, which is progress but not as fast as I want.
[IN PERSON] Are you registered for Escapade 2026? Are you sure? Panel suggestions close on Tue 12/16
Boots I have bought in the quest for warm and dry feet
2. Xtratuf rainboots. Fell apart within a few months catastrophically - cracks from ordinary walking that ran completely through the material which made them not waterproof. Threw them away. So sad because they were very easy to get on, very comfortable, and a fun rubber-ducky yellow.
3. Rubber boots from Hunter. Pretty OK condition but about 20% they're fine, 80% they make my feet hurt so much I cannot walk. Can't really break them in because rubber doesn't, and it's been more than a year of wearing them on and off. Almost got frostbite in them once despite wearing heavy socks and those toe warmer pads. The outside is flawless though and they are a gorgeous red colour, and being rubber they are waterproof.
4. Bean boots (unlined) in the classic rubber lower, leather upper. I just bought these. So far breaking in nicely. Kind of tough to get them on but it's improving/I'm getting better at it. The tongue is fully sewn to the upper (for waterproofing), so it can't swing fully out, and it doubles over where it's sewn, but I'm not actually getting any pain when walking around in them. I think I trust them enough to go on a few hours' hiking now.
And now since it's winter I really want another pair of lined/fleece boots. I've managed to get by, good lord, the past decade or more without snow boots, because I feel like it just doesn't snow much since I moved east. I almost never have to step over snow drifts or break trails, and I just wear sneakers. But I spend a lot of time outside and every year or so I do have an occasional outdoor day that IS very cold on the feet, and I have to flee when I feel frostbite setting in...
After some digging
第四年第三百三十九天
弋 yì
式, type/style (pinyin in tags)
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=56
词汇
标志, sign (pinyin in tags)
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/
Guardian:
这也是我们守护大家的一种方式, this is another way we protect everyone
[no 标志]
Me:
她穿中式衣服的时候很漂亮。
你看得清楚那条标志吗?
National House Inn in Marshall, Michigan

For nearly 200 years, a quaint bed and breakfast in a nubilous, Halloween-obsessed small town has watched the state of Michigan grow up. The Mann's Inn opened the New Year's Eve prior to Michigan being granted statehood, hosting the first ball ever held in the town of Marshall. It had been constructed with local clay and timber, making it a point of local pride. Its business model: to host weary stagecoach travelers making the long and exhausting journey from cities like Detroit and Toronto to Chicago. For roughly a decade, it succeeded wildly in doing just that, as well as hosting miscellaneous civic functions such as county meetings.
The hotel changed with the times when the Central Railroad of Michigan, originally a doomed private rail project, was bailed out by the newly formed State of Michigan and lay tracks past the hotel on the same route the stagecoaches had taken. The National House Inn, as it had been renamed by that point, also hosted travelers on another kind of railroad. Though it was too far from the Civil War's front lines to contribute much, the town of Marshall acted decisively to protect those who arrived there escaping from slavery, even installing a secret room into the basement for them to hide in.
After the Civil War concluded, the National House Inn fell behind the very technologies which had once delivered its customers. Sleeper cars and other comforts replaced the need for hotels on the railway, and faster trains meant even those competitive opportunities were less common; why stay at a hotel when the trip would take less than a day?
As the Victorian era came to a close, the National House underwent a radical transformation. It spent the waning decades of the 19th century serving as a factory for windmills, a popular commodity in the region, as well as making other axled objects like wagons.
With a new century came new opportunities, and in 1902 the building changed hands and purpose for yet another time. From the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt to the dawn of household computers, the National House was "Dean's Flats," a set of luxury apartments. Unfortunately, those apartments grew less and less luxurious as innovations like the air conditioner left the already-septuagenarian building behind. Bootleggers took advantage of the state of the facility, stashing liquors and other illicit substances in the secret room.
Dedicated preservationists and historians rallied to protect the building, successfully soliciting investments from the community to restore it. On the day of Thanksgiving in 1976, the National House was officially back and ready to resume serving as a cornerstone of the city of Marshall. Today, its prices sit over $200 per night - a far cry from the $2 per week it cost at its advent - but that new price includes amenities like running water, working outlets, internet access, and like any good hotel a coterie of ghosts.
Farmer's Market -- 13 December 2025 (Reed Plant Day, 23rd of Frost, Year 234)
I talked briefly with an elderly woman who had just moved into the area and was attending the market for the first time -- she was trying to find organic apples. I don't think you can really grow apples here as a market farm organically. There are just too many critters that love to chomp on apples here, but I hope she finds something she is willing to buy.
I plan to make another apple-shallot pie tomorrow; I'll be working extra to get ready for the quarterly report at work, but I am also likely to be snowed in, since the forecast is snow, 1 to 5 inches.
My fridge failed Monday and it took the housing office until Wednesday (2 maintenance requests, 2 follow up phone calls, and 1 email to the property mananger cc'd to the county councilor's aide for housing issues) to get it replace. I had to throw out everything but hard cheese and vinegar-based condiments, so I shopped a little more aggressively than usual this week.
Recent reading
Read The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir (translated from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal), a novella about a woman who is either having a mental health crisis or in the throes of something more supernatural when she finds herself waking up each morning to the increasingly violent aftermath of apparent sleepwalking episodes. Shades of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest & Relaxation, but darker/creepier/gorier. Do not read if you are particularly fond of cats. I picked this up after seeing a review from
Have made some progress in the audiobook of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and this is hardly a new/unique observation, but it really is wild to read the classics that have become so diffused into general pop culture, because you'll be like yeah, yeah, we get it, it's a famous book and then you'll actually read it and it really is That Good???
(no subject)
Hi, there's an active shooter situation on my campus; I'm safe and a couple of miles away. ♥


























