Reading

reel WIP

Music reel. :3 Thoughts/feedback welcome (although I'm still learning industry norms for composition/orchestration); I graduate in 2028 but figure I'd hit the learning curve accreting a reel starting now.

Note: it's the norm for people in composition/orchestration to have audio-only reels (unless, I suppose, you have some gigantic AAA-videogame or Star Wars-level movie credit you have permission to show off as a video clip!).

Entry tags:

weekly update

Me-and-media update

Pandemic life
( Nothing to report, really. )

Previous poll review
In the Cluedo poll, by far the most popular weapon was the cassowary (53.3%), followed by extremely elegant clothing (33.3%). In ticky-boxes, musical frogs and the wishing abyss tied for second place with 42.2%, after hugs with 75.6%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
More of Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, read by Candida Gubbins (I'm enjoying it, but it feels like it will never end), more of the latest Rivers of London (also audio), and more of A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall (library book). A browse through Low-FODMAP and Vegan: what to eat when you can't eat anything by Joanne Stepaniak (library book), of which more below.

Kdramas/Cdramas
I'm still going with Nothing But Love, eking it out. Pru and I watched two episodes of Mystic Pop-up Bar, and it's pretty great. I don't know why I bounced off last time. It does help that Choi Won-young, one of the dads from Family by Choice, is main cast and I love him.

Other TV/movies
Wow, almost no TV. Some Vir Das standup (very good), finished The Sympathizer with our tv-watching friend (fascinating, dark, very black comedy), two episodes of Fringe season 2 with my sister. One episode of new Magnum PI (very woohoo the military!). A ton more Bluey.

Bluey observation; ignore if you prefer to watch unquestioningly.

Andrew: Why is the mum always hanging out laundry, when none of them wear clothes?
me: .........

Jaws at the cinema for its 50th anniversary rerelease, so fun!

Guardian/Fandom
Everything is happening everywhere all at once. We're wrapping up the readalong, and the Slo-mo Rewatch starts this weekend on

sid_guardian!

guardian_wishlist is in sign-ups!

fan_flashworks stuff is happening behind the scenes! And I have a ton of

fan_writers comments to reply to! \o/

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses are doing a deep dive on Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky. I haven't read it, but I still enjoy their analysis. The last episode gave me ~writing thoughts~, and I scrawled a bunch of extra stuff for my WIP, which I then immediately took out again because it didn't fit, but I'll use it somewhere else. Letters from an American is really good, and 12ish minutes of US politics a day is about all I can take. I started Alba Salix, Royal Physician but am still not sure.

Online life
After I posted my last

fan_writers post, I got a ton of great comments, and... hit a wall with things to reply to. I'm kind of paralysed by my inbox, now, overwhelmed, and not keeping up with my reading page either. Tabs continue to propagate. Also, my arms are such a mess, argh. I'm going to need them for Wishlist, so I'm trying to slow down, but <speech tone="wail">I don't waaaaant toooooo.</speech> :-( tl;dr Sorry if I haven't replied to you! I still plan to! <333

Writing/making things
After a week and a half of brain static, I tried to write a last-minute drabble for the FFW amnesty round and ended up with 1300 words of "srsly, nobody asked for this." Still working on my DNW-kink fic and having a ball.

Life/health/mental state things
Overwhelm plus sore arms, dohhhhhh. But my mood and energy levels are pretty good, despite that.

Korean
I have a theoretical plan to read the Guardian subs in Korean (진혼 자막 한국어으로) as we go through the rewatch. I'm completely 100% expecting to fall behind, but still, any reading is better than none, right?

Food
New things I've made in the last week:

a carrot, walnut and sultana cake, recipe from the back of the sultana packet; as I added a cup of this and a cup of that, I started going, "I'm going to need a bigger cake tin." Then I got to 1 cup of oil and three eggs, and looked at my mixing bowl. "I'm going to need a bigger bowl!!" Ended up cooking it in two unevenly distributed cake tins and taking one out early, lol.
vegan nutty gravy from the vegan low-FODMAP book; I used so many substitutions (regular miso for light miso, soy sauce for low sodium tamari, etc) that I'm not sure what it was supposed to taste like. It was good but a bit strong.
baked lemon tofu (ibid); Very Tangy. I tried this twice, and the first time I didn't have enough lemon juice, used some lime instead, and thought that was why it was So Tangy. The second time I followed the recipe more closely (just switched out thyme for oregano and added some maple syrup because yum), and it was still a bit overwhelming. Overall, not unsuccessful, but I don't know how to turn this into a meal.

Conclusion: I'm enjoying my experiments. It's fun flailing around, all "Stand Back, I'm Going To Try ~~Science~~ Cooking!" :-) Also, I feel like recipe books are like fan reccers: for best results, you have to find the ones you click with.

Good things
Bluetooth earpieces. Sisters. Reading glasses (but not the needing of them). Libraries. Unexpected story developments. Recipe books. Bluey! Biking.

Poll #33572 Spice tolerance

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

I can handle

View Answers

mild
19 (44.2%)

a vague tingle
18 (41.9%)

a distinct tingle
21 (48.8%)

hot
16 (37.2%)

searing
6 (14.0%)

call the fire department
2 (4.7%)

depends on the cuisine
12 (27.9%)

other
4 (9.3%)

ticky-box full of Michaelangelo's many naked dudes
22 (51.2%)

ticky-box full of someone else is cooking dinner
23 (53.5%)

ticky-box of ducklings debating the merits of existentialism
23 (53.5%)

ticky-box full of chocolate (hot or solid)
27 (62.8%)

ticky-box full of hugs
34 (79.1%)

Entry tags:

What I'm Doing Wednesday

( books (Dunnett, Dunnett, Herron, Tierney) )

media
I finally finished watching Murderbot S1! (It only took forever bc I suck at visual media.) I loved it and want more! I'm hesitant to dive into fic, though, due to the "murderbot has a penis" and "Gurathin/Murderbot" tags. I want canon-compliant Murderbot adventures, not forcing it to behave in any manner like a sexbot. So, those are 2 things for me to filter out of search... But re the ending, wow, evidently they spent their whole series budget on ep 10 & it became a whole different show. Really satisfying.

( dirt )

yarning
no yarn group this week, as too many people were sick or busy. I haven't crocheted on my own in well over a month, as I'm not at all motivated. It's SO frustrating. I'm hoping I can get off one of my meds that affects creativity & regain inspiration. I did at least get 3 kickbunnies listed on etsy...though I haven't promoted them on social media yet due to lack of motivation. OTOH, I have a potential customer waiting on an address to send a bunny to? That's something.

healthcrap
Still having frequent headaches and rationing triptans (I'm not low on them (yet), just being frugal with the stash). The vertigo/feeling faint is bad. Generally, I'm getting 2-16 minutes of Deep sleep per night and not feeling rested at all. ( cut for discussion of weight loss )

yuletide!
noms open in less than 2 weeks, on the 15th, yay! Get your fandoms ready! \o/ And they've upped the number of fandoms you can nom and request! I need to have a look back at the books I've read this year and see what I can manage to offer. Hrm.

#resist
10/18/25: No Kings Day #2

And then there's this

I sent copies of my exchanges with my former aunt to my cousin Susan, the only one on that side of the family whom I'm in contact with. She told me in response that she nearly snorted her coffee when reading them. She hasn't gotten along with that aunt for decades, and manages to avoid dealing with her by being the youngest of her sibs (the aunt likes the two older ones.)

She and I are now the Two Black Sheep of the family, which makes me happy.

YULETIDE!!!!

It's that time of year again!

Yuletide is still my favourite multifannish exchange, and this year's schedule is out - nominations start on the 15th. And they're running an experiment with giving us more nominations and requests this year! Very cool, and I hope it works out well!

What's new this year:

The deadline is 12 hours earlier than it was the last few years. (First time in a while that the deadline will be when I'm actually awake, but I'll try not to cut it too close. *g*)

Reveals are also 12 hours earlier than they've been the last few years. (First time in a while that I'll be awake when the collection opens!)

We get 5 fandom nominations instead of 4. (Woohoo!)

We get 8 requests instead of 6! (And again, woohoo! It's so hard to choose between rare fandoms.)

Who else is doing Yuletide? Have you thought about what you're going to nominate/request/offer this year?

Entry tags:

Life is being only moderately odd today

I seem to live between odd dichotomies these days.

It's hard to go to sleep, in part because of lack of noise. I have just enough tinitis that when I can't hear the traffic it's hard to sleep; think of permanent mosquito in your ear. I found a technique in FB reels for tapping hard on the bone behind the ear that gets rid of the worst of it, but it doesn't always work. So I use an app called Calm, which has 'soundscapes' including things like six different kinds of rainfall, waterfalls, forests of various kinds and white, pink and brown noises, find whatever works for me that night and leave it on all night. That helps. Or I could stay awake till nearly 4, when the noise from the Capital Beltway a quarter mile south of me cranks up to its general daily roar.

A friend suggested that I get a night light for the bathroom in the shape of a capybara, or in her words, 'an imperturbable capybara'. So I did get it, and have it set to the lowest level of light, but I am not yet used to any light there. Normally I have my Kindle nearby, and when I need to get to the bathroom I flip the cover open and use it as a night light. Last night, the capybara was sitting imperturbably on my toothbrush holder, but its light shone out on a wall that I'm not used to having lit, so I had to remind myself that I had a friendly and non-aggressive critter there shining the light (I need reminders when I'm almost asleep but my body discerns something different.)

That meant that I slept on my left side last night, with my face away from the lit wall. Which, for most other people, would not be a problem, but I have all my life had a slightly curved spine, leaning to the left. (During the 2000s, I was doing deepwater running twice a week and the supported floating combined with gravity straightened my spine out, but I have not done it in several years now bcC (because Covid) and it is leaning a little. When I sleep on that side it leans more. As a remedy my husband put up a bar in one of the doorways that I can reach up and grab and dangle myself from, and my own weight straightens my back out painlessly. A side effect of the bar is that my grip strength has increased a bit, so I could do better at pulling out vines yesterday.

Much more of this balancing and I may start thinking of Philippe Petit balancing on the rope between the Two Towers, long ago.

also presented without (much) explanation, default!Jedao explores default!tavern

a.k.a. I haven't had time to code anything yet lol.

cf.

telophase's once-upon-a-time of sketch featuring BUSTY BLONDE CHERIS with her SPACE FERRET. (I still have the pic,

telophase, not sure if I have permission to reshare or where there's a link? XD)

Birthday Prep!

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We're going to Wales!

Back in the Before Times, Geoff and I tried to take a trip every year. Then COVID hit, and we haven’t done any significant travel in six years. (I mean, that was New Zealand, so if anything was going to have to last us six years, that would be it.) But it’s six years later, we’ve had ten vax shots each, and tomorrow we are leaving for Wales!

travel blather herein

I am, of course, still paranoid about getting ill.

But I have a strategy, because I perseverate a bit on these things

We plan to mask as much as possible in public indoor space, just as we do at home; on my last trip to visit friends I perfected the eating-indoors-in-public method of

1. inhale
2. hold breath
3. unmask
4. take bite
5. replace mask
6. exhale
7. chew and swallow

and while it’s troublesome, on the other hand it seems to have worked. So that’s the plan for the plane flight and long UK train rides. Plus I have a mask with a SIP valve, so I can drink with it on. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to eat many meals outside, but we’ve reached the point of being okay with it if we can’t sometimes on this trip. (I mean, I say that now. I warned Geoff that he’ll have to expect that I’ll freak out a couple of times, that’s just part of the process. I have spent six years deliberately inculcating a phobia in myself! It took me a long time to get over the phobia of semen I deliberately inculcated in myself in the mid-1980s, too, but hey, I have never had either HIV or COVID, so I’m okay with harnessing neurosis, it works for me.)

Also I keep reminding myself of this post that I made long before COVID was a thing; it’s not like it’s the only risk involved in travel!

We’re doing a weeklong hiking trip with a company we’ve traveled with several times before, the kind where they move your luggage from B&B to B&B and you walk all day with a daypack and a lunch. (And hiking poles and raingear and their awesome GPS navigation app.) We love them; in fact, in March 2020 we’d already paid a deposit for a trip that summer, which we never got to take! (They refunded us, of course.) Their system is efficient and clear, we love the places they offer to stay and the routes they have us take, which are sometimes delightfully off the beaten track and are described wonderfully. “Watch out for the muddy bit”; “turn right just past the house with a chicken mural”; “there’s a great spot for a picnic lunch just over the rise”; and so on. Also I have no idea what kind of customer-management software they’ve got on the back end, but in arranging the trip we’ve corresponded with a number of different people, and every single one has been fully up to speed with what we’re doing, what our few special requests are, exactly when and how we’re arriving at the start and departing from the end, and so on. Nobody who has ever navigated customer service hell will take that for granted. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re the most reasonably priced such company I’ve ever found, in the admittedly limited comparison shopping I’ve done.

This walk is quite challenging, and we’re a bit uncertain we can actually do it! They tell you the cumulative uphill distance for each day’s walk, which is sometimes a lot (the worst day has an 820-meter total rise), and some of the days’ hikes are expected to take as much as eight hours, counting rest breaks. If we punk out, though, we can generally arrange to ride with our luggage to the next stop instead of walking to it, and they always make clear when there’s a local bus available, or a way to cut off a loop, or some other shortening option. Geoff and I have both been exercising pretty hard to get in shape for this, but I do think I could have done more.

We leave tomorrow: a friend will give us a ride to the train station, we take a train to Montreal, and then hopefully a free shuttle bus to the airport, but I’ve heard stories that the shuttle is often late or overfull. We can always take a cab, but if the weather is good -- the forecast has been iffy, but right now it looks okay -- we might just walk it. It’s only about half an hour, and it will be the only exercise we get for a couple of days, so the prospect has some appeal! But man, I miss living a twelve-minute drive from a major airport so much.

After we finish that week of heavy hiking, we spend two full days (three nights) in a pair of small coastal towns called Fishguard and Goodwick, where the plan is to spend one day rambling along the coastline, which is supposed to be gorgeous, and the other sea kayaking! There we’re staying on a smallholding that rents out one (1) bedroom as a B&B, and the couple who run it have been incredibly friendly and helpful with recommending activities and restaurants, offering rides (rural public transit is pretty thin on the ground), and so on; also their breakfasts sound amazing, and that’s a thing we always look for when choosing B&Bs! I’m bringing them a half-liter of local maple syrup as a thank-you gift; I don’t generally do that, since it is a business relationship, we exchange currency for goods and services, but they’ve really gone above and beyond, and I mean, they’re only barely a business.

Then we have another three nights in Aberystwyth, and I have very little idea what exactly we’ll do there ~~other than collapse~~, except that the National Library of Wales is there and I want to see what exhibits they have on, and there’s a scenic railway that might be worth checking out. Then one day on the outskirts of London, in a place chosen only because we can catch a coach from there direct to Heathrow the next morning. We’ll land in Montreal in the evening and spend the night in an airport hotel, before catching a train home the next day.

I am the main planner of our trips; Geoff calls me Logistics Girl. Which is fine with me, because I enjoy it, I’m good at it, and when I leave bits for him to do I always want to micromanage anyway, which is stressful for everyone. (But, I mean. I asked him to manage our getting to and from Montreal, while I took primary responsibility for everything on the actual trip; managing the domestic side included deciding whether and how to see his family there and/or ask them for airport rides and/or an overnight stay, and I didn’t want to be the person making those decisions. And he said sure, and absolutely understood that that should be his job. And then he sent me essentially a Google search link for airport hotels and asked which one I’d prefer. And I was like, which part of “I want you to do the work of researching options, weighing them, and choosing the best” did you not understand? I can do a damn Google search myself! I mean, I understand that he wants to be sure that I’m happy with the final choice, and I appreciate that, but then he can do what I do, which is narrow options down and present my top two or three choices, with a quick overview of the pros and cons of each, for him to consider.)

ANYWAY. He did do that after I cranked at him. And in fairness, I've found that I’m quite out of practice at logisticking, myself! Trying to track everything and figure out infinite options and piece together itineraries was unexpectedly stressful: where do we want to go, how will we get there, which railcard is our best option and how do we get it, is the layover time we have a reasonable amount of time in which to navigate this specific station, and on and on. Also so much has changed in the last six years; I never used to have to download umpteen transit apps, but on the other hand it's way easier and cheaper to get a foreign SIM than it used to be. And there has been a ridiculous pile-up of last-minute craziness:

I got a new orthotic this summer, and that meant that my hiking boots didn’t fit, so I needed new boots. Also, usually when you have a prescription orthotic you take the original insole out of the shoe or boot to fit the new one in, but I didn’t want to do that, because that’s where a lot of the padding is, and with the amount of walking I’m going to be doing I did not want to be doing it only on the unpadded sole and the fairly hard orthotic. So I was looking for boots that could fit both. I ended up buying three pairs in a week! First I went shopping and found a good enough pair; not great, but they were there and the store had a generous return policy, so I bought them as a stopgap and kept looking. Then in another store I found a fabulous pair that fit beautifully, but the pair in the store was damaged and they couldn’t get me another one, because the style was discontinued and remaindered. So I searched for it online and found what seemed to be the only pair of women’s 10s left in Canada, at massive discount because discontinued and remaindered, and ordered them with rush shipping -- and when they arrived they didn’t fit, because it turned out the salesman had given me a pair of men’s 10s to try on, instead of the women’s 10s I’d asked for. No wonder there was room for both insoles! And there wasn’t another men’s 10 of that brand and style to be found. But with that info I went back and tried on some other men’s 10s and found a really good pair of Merrell’s, a brand I’ve always had good luck with. The first pair of new boots got returned; the second pair, being discontinued and remaindered, were final sale, but they turned out to fit a friend who also needed new boots; and my old pair, which are still in decent shape, went into the thrift-shop-donation pile.

So that was one bit of craziness. Our long-delayed front porch project is finally going to begin construction while we’re away, which means we had to find somewhere to leave the car because our driveway will have a dumpster in it for construction waste and we’re not allowed to leave the car on the street; but fortunately a house across the way is empty and for sale, and the owner said we can park in his driveway. I started developing a stye like the one I had in the spring that got so bad I needed antibiotic ointment; but happily I still had half a tube of ointment left so I prescribed myself another round of it plus all the hot compresses I could manage, because I did not want to be dealing with an eye infection in rural Wales! I discovered by the merest fluke of luck that a bus service we're relying on was canceled as of Sept. 1, but I managed to find the replacement service, run by a different company, that is mentioned on the new company's Facebook page and nowhere else including not on their website or on any of the travel planning sites, and confirm that we can still make the train we're taking it to. The new bus leaves fifteen minutes earlier than the old bus, so if I hadn't stumbled across that notice we'd probably have been screwed. And then a few days ago I somehow managed to wrench my knee rolling over in bed, I don't even know. But although it hurt like fuck for a few minutes, by the next day it was just a vague ache, and the day after that it was fine. Thank god. I mean, a week before we leave? Argh.

Anyway, my do-before-leaving list has seventy items on it and just over sixty of them are now crossed off; and my packing list has sixty items on it and fifty of them are crossed off -- and many of the rest are things I plan to wear on the plane rather than pack.

All that said, though -- and it’s a lot to say! -- I’m really looking forward to this. Traveling together used to be one of Geoff’s and my great pleasures, and not being able to do it has been one of the great losses of COVID. I want to see amazing sights and eat amazing food and encounter new people. I want to hear Welsh! I want to exhaust myself and feel accomplished about having done so! I want to share all of the above with Geoff!

I also hope to blog the trip here, as much as I can. Stay tuned. But now I gotta go polish off a couple more of those to-dos...

Entry tags:

reading,
viewing

wednesday reads and things

What I've recently finished reading:

Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio went back to the library, because my hold on Summer in Orcus came in. Sorry, Chris, I might try it again sometime.

Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher - again a book that someone on my flist recommended. 11-year-old Summer gets whooshed to another world by Baba Yaga, supposedly to find her "heart's desire", though she isn't really sure what that is or how to get it, and oops, the world she's ended up in, Orcus, is in crisis. Other reviews compared it to Narnia (as a more-realistic version), although I didn't really see that - though that's probably because I'm not super familiar with Narnia other than having read it ages ago and mostly forgotten it, as the author's afterword actually mentions the Narnia influence. To me it felt almost like a skewed retelling of The Wizard of Oz: a girl and her pet dog (er, accompanying talking weasel?) pick up companions with issues on a road trip (following a road of a particular color!) to see a powerful being who turns out to be a lot less powerful than everyone thinks. It's even precipitated by a witch and a house! Anyway, I enjoyed it okay, though I kinda wish

spoiler

the Forester (or Summer, or Baba Yaga, or even Reginald) could have actually helped the Queen-in-Chains - I felt sorry for her, trapped by a rash wish made as a teenager. Some people, like the Forester, can grow (maybe literally!) to live with their limitations. Some need help.

What I'm reading now:

I'm rereading Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe, which was given to me by a friend years ago, and I read and enjoyed, but after trying and failing to find the sequels at my library, gave up on. Now one of my library systems has the sequels, so I am going to read them, but I figured I should first reread the first book since I've mostly forgotten it.

What I recently finished watching:

The Leopard, the Netflix miniseries, which is apparently a remake of a 1963 movie; both are based on a historical novel published (posthumously) in 1958, by Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. It's basically one noble family's drama around their (for the most part) inability to cope with the 1860 revolution that led to the consolidation of Italian states into the Kingdom of Italy. The family and the titular "Leopard", a minor Sicilian prince, are fictional but apparently based on Lampedusa's ancestors.

It's a costume drama with gorgeous dresses, heaving bosoms, and horses, mostly, plus a little history. It was enjoyable enough to watch, anyway, and it did inspire me to look up some of the actual history.

What I'm watching now:

Just started S2 of Wednesday! We giggled through the entire first episode.

New Substack post --the unhappy bones are showing

What's behind the cruelty of this government? A lot of unhappy people whose lives have been cruel to them, who are feeding their addictions to stifle their pain? Sure looks that way.

Entry tags:

wed 2025

Write Every Day September 2025 - Day 3

Quote of the Day:

"It is a mysterious business, creating worlds out of words. I hope I can say without irreverence that anyone who has done it knows why Jehovah took Sunday off."

--Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (from the introduction to Rocannon’s World, 1977).

Today's Writing:

351 sort of mostly okay kind of meh words. 8-/

Tally

( Day 1 )

Day 2:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

the_siobhan,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Current Mood: quixotic

Postcards from the bureaucracy

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presented without (much) explanation

Current Mood: awake

Fall is falling, the TBR/W pile is growing

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latest spinning WIP

Sorry about the laundry in the background. Meanwhile, it's not even 8 a.m. and it's too hot already to stay outside. Nice sunny day means at least the laundry will dry quickly?!

Entry tags:

life series smp

Past Life

Past Life ended, and it was great. The teams were fantastic, the gimmick was fun but more in the background than in the previous too which was a nice change of pace, the improv was on point, the stories came together so well again.

I watched several videos each week, sometimes more sometimes less, and there's plenty I still want to watch eventually and some I want to watch again. I wanted to go over my notes again too to clean them up and add some more, but if I don't post them now I don't know when it will happen, so here is the first draft. (Which is already at 7k.)
I'm typing this while admiring my shiny new Life series desk mat btw, very pretty.

( #1 Early early on )

( #2 Tango with a mustache )

( #3 The Secret Society )

( #4 Joel with a mustache )

( #5 The Proposal )

( #6 Fire! )

( #7 - Records are made to be broken )

( #8 - The Finale )

Entry tags:

ephemera

Going back to work

I start my new job tomorrow! My brain is a hive of bees.

I've been out of work since I was laid off in July 2024. It would have been really inconvenient to be working for a lot of that time, as I was helping my brother see our mother through her decline and death from dementia and also having some serious health issues of my own. (And Mom left me some money, which allowed me to say "I'm too stressed to job-hunt" and then not job-hunt, a rare luxury that I'm very grateful for.)

But I have to admit I've also been bored and restless and lonely. It will be nice to have co-workers, and tasks, and a paycheck again.

On the other hand, it's been thirteen months since I consistently had to be any place in particular in the morning. And the cat is going to be sad.

the stinking flower

This past Saturday was the day that four thousand university students arrived in town, making it an excellent day to not be in town! Happily, there's an annual garlic festival on that day, about half an hour north of here, so just as we did last year, Geoff and I headed on up.

it's basically a small farmer's market, only focusing on garlic. I hadn't realized, before we went the first time, that there were that many varieties of garlic! I mean, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, I'd just never really thought about it. In any case, my palate is not refined enough to bother about the subtle differences in taste among them: slightly sharper, slightly sweeter, slightly earthier, and so on. Also some are better keepers, but I don't try to store garlic for months, I just buy less of it more often, because I'm not farming it. But it's very fun to look around!

Although it's focused on garlic, there's other things on sale as well. Many of the garlic farmers bring a few punnets of veggies as well, and there's a lot of canned and pickled veg for sale. A beekeeper comes with a hive in a glass frame, so it's fun to watch the bees and look for the queen (she's always smaller than I expect her to be). We bought some honey from him last year, which was very good. There's also a soapmaker, and a couple of woodworkers; the friend we went with this year bought a beautiful turned elm bowl from one of them, and also a bud vase of . . . chestnut, I think? a darker wood, anyway, and then he gave her a second bud vase for free! One or two people were selling various knitted things, and for some reason there's also somebody selling bamboo sheet sets.

I tried black garlic, which I would think would be very much the sort of thing I like, and yet I did not like it. One dealer sells honey-garlic tarts, which Geoff tried last year and rather liked, and got another one this year to munch on, but I think they're vile. (And there's not a lot of food I think that about!) On the other hand, someone was selling jars of candied jalapeno slices, which have nothing in particular to do with garlic except I imagine they would go well with garlic; they're not candied in the sense of being entirely sugar-coated and sticky, they're more a very sweet (and spicy) pickle? We tasted them (all the dealers give out samples, because they're not dumb) and they were delicious. I asked the seller what he does with them, and he said they were great on nachos and grilled cheese sandwiches, and I said, "I guess I'm making nachos this week!" and bought a jar. I did indeed make nachos the next night, and they were indeed fantastic. Next I'll try them on on barbecue chicken pizza...and they look pretty easy to make as a refrigerator pickle, so I'll be looking up some recipes!

Beauty

There was a time in my life where I would not articulate what I wanted or needed from people, and then would take their "inability" to provide what I wanted or needed as evidence that I was fucked up and broken.

This coalesced a lot around birthdays, especially in my 20s. I wanted to be made a fuss of, but never told anyone that yes, I would like a card, or yes, cake would be great, or yes, why don't you come over, and then I would feel lonely and isolated and sink further into dark places when there wasn't a 76-trombone parade on September 3rd.

I learned over time to state my needs and make plans. Buy a cake! Invite people over. Life is so much simpler when it's not an elaborate guessing game you're secretly making people play. And I no longer worry that I won't have a fun day on my birthday because I not only tell other people "hey come on over!" but I do things for myself too! Bonus!

This is all by way of saying I have an enormous bunch of flowers in front of me which I bought for myself for tomorrow, and they are making me so happy. Because not only are they gorgeous, and richly scented, they match the color scheme of my living room because that's what I asked for - purples, creams, and lots of greenery. And my neighbor is the florist, so it's a lovely celebration of her artistry, too.

Other happy things - a plumber has been here all day working on my downstairs bathroom. Said bathroom is literally a former coat closet - there are still coat hooks on the wall (which I should take down). My plumber's best guess is that it was changed to a tiny little toilet nook in the 60s, and that the toilet has been there since at least the 70s. There's no sink, and so for the last several years I've had a little Japanese-tank sink, where you hook it up so that the clean water coming into the toilet tank first flows through a faucet so you can wash your hands. It's neat, and it saves water, but washing your hands with ice-cold water in, say, January is not awesome. And the toilet tank is enormous - newer toilets are so much more water efficient.

So I'm having the toilet taken out and replaced with a taller, efficient model, and a tiiiiiiny little sink plumbed in. The sink is 7 inches wide and 12 inches long, and it is adorable. I'm having hot and cold water plumbed in, and the bathroom will be so much more usable as of tomorrow!

Plumber has worked super hard all day, and has so much done. All the basement work is finished, and he's finishing up the water lines before he leaves for the day. He was listened to Eminem earlier this morning, but then switched to The Andrews Sisters. He is maaaaaybe 30 years old, and was singing harmonies with 1940s hits. I am so charmed.

And lastly ( I watched Thunderbolts yesterday and adored it. Spoilers ahead )