farwing | Reading

I’ve been meaning to read more Adrian Tchaikovsky for a while now, first because a number of my friends really like his stuff, and then also because I read his book The Doors of Eden and really enjoyed it. (The character work in that one was hit or miss, but the speculative biology was enormous fun in directions you rarely see done well that also aimed directly at my interests, so I had a great time with it.)

The joy of finding a very prolific author is that there’s a ton of stuff to read, but the difficulty of finding a very prolific author is figuring out where to start. Handily for me, this one was on the short list for the Hugos this year! And it was my top pick – I really loved it.

( More details -- no spoilers beyond the first few chapters )

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I keep intending to post and then forgetting to do so. Nothing much is going on. I pan-fried a steak for dinner tonight and it was delicious but it also reminded me why I do it so infrequently - the smoke condition was intense and ongoing despite 2 fans going and the smell is going to linger. But I ate it with a nice arugula salad and it was good.

Here's a couple of links I found interesting recently:

- Sydney’s Choice How The Bear cooked up season four’s best episode.

- After ‘iconic’ Rangers tenure, Chris Kreider opens up about New York departure: 1-on-1 (do not read the comments)

- Why Your Team Sucks: New York Giants - this is an annual event (for every NFL team) and remains hilarious because in the case of the Giants, it's all sad but true. On this one, the comments are great.

*

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: Mets vs Giants on the radio

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Five Musicians Who Owe Their Careers To Stack Moore (And One Who Doesn’t) (394 words) by Resonant
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sinners (2025)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Elias "Stack" Moore, Billie Holiday, Paul Simon, Lil Nas X (Musician), Rhiannon Gidden (Musician), Sarah Vaughan (Musician), Prince (Musician)
Additional Tags: music industry, RPF if you're a real stickler
Summary:

It's who you know.

Beta thanks to

mific and

terminally_underwhelmed.

Tags:

sinners,
stories

My mother has never learned to use computers, aside from a smartphone that she uses for calls and texting with the grandkids. After my father died and she asked me to do something with my father's several desktop and laptop computers, she cancelled their Internet service that she wouldn't be using. But she held onto my dad's newest tablet, thinking she could use it to browse news and look at photos. This requires a network connection, so I set up her phone for tethering, set up the tablet to automatically connect to that network, and showed her how to turn that on and off on her phone. (I described this as "turning on Internet for the tablet".)

In the end she found this too difficult and she's never used that tablet, so this week she gave it to me. It's an iPad Pro (3rd generation, 12.9") and comes to me with a keyboard cover and a couple of Apple pencils. I'd already downloaded his Apple cloud backups more than a year ago, so I could safely reset the tablet. I'm new to iOS (I use Android), so I figure this is a chance to check it out before the next time I need to replace a phone or tablet. I'm happy to accept pointers, app recommendations, and warnings. I do have a Mac desktop, but their mobile setup is new to me.

Apple aims for intuitive user interfaces, but that doesn't mean they always succeed. When deleting personal information as part of resetting, I had to enter first the PIN and then my father's Apple password. That makes sense. After I entered the password I hit return, but there was no visible change. I hit return again, thinking it hadn't taken, then tried delete to see if that changed anything, and concluded that it was stuck. I let it sit there for a while. Five minutes later, I got a "no connection" popup. Ok, yeah, now that you mention it I should have realized I'd need to connect it to my WiFi for that to work, but if it had given me any indication of what it was doing ("connecting...") while it was doing it, I would have known (a) that it was doing something and (b) that I needed to fix that. Instead, the interface just gave me a mystery for a while. Oops.

Those two Apple pencils are an as-yet-unsolved puzzle. My mother gave me one that was with the tablet (there's a magnetic connection) and one in a box that she thought was new (my father ordered it but never got a chance to use it, she thinks). The two pencils look identical to me, except that the one in the box is missing the plastic cap that should be on its stylus. The plastic cap from the other one does not fit it -- so they seem to be different, but that's my only clue. The box says "2nd generation". Something I found online describes the first generation as round and the second as mostly round with a flat side (because it was too easy for the first generation to roll off of desks). Both of these have that flat side, so I conclude that my father replaced one second-generation pencil with another, but if so, I am left wondering why the cap from one doesn't fit the other. I have no idea which of these is actually newer; maybe he did replace it (maybe he broke his first one?) and he put the old one in the box the new one came in? So many mysteries.

The tablet is now busy updating from iOS 17.1 to 18.5. Yeah, it's been offline a while.

Tags:

family,
tech

Last time I updated about my learning to drive stick/standard shift I posted this, you may remember:

Total cost:

Application fee: 25€
Driving lessons: 875€
ADHD tax: 152€

Incorrect. That was my total cost thus far, but I forgot the fees for the theory test and the driving test! I have now reserved a time for the theory test on August 14.

Theory test fee: 40€
Driving test fee (not booked yet): 99€

Total: 1191€

I'll have to take the bus to Turku to take it at the nearest Ajovarma office. ( Read more... ) I have been studying the badly-translated textbook that came with my driving class (and also the good Swedish translation and occasionally the Finnish original, for clarity) and going through the test practice questions. I passed the first full practice test I took yesterday, but at about 70%, so I'm trying to make it so I know the answers to all the questions.

Friday I had a second lesson with the driving simulator, and it was much better than the first one. It was fun actually! But I completely failed to manage to start the car on a hill again (I failed to do this in my first simulator lesson like 8 times in a row and the teacher, after coaching me through the steps and explaining it, just gave up and reset the lesson lol) and had to reset it. Now I've read in the textbook I realize it's because the hill in the simulator was too steep for the instructions he gave me the first time (on a gentle slope you only need the brake, but on a steep hill you need the parking brake as well - terrifying).

BONUS OFF-TOPIC FUN FACTS: READING AND BANNING

After we watched the season finale of the Murderbot show, and I discussed it extensively with both my sister (who is extremely ALL CHANGE IS BAD CHANGE) and waxjism (who is not, but was annoyed because the show felt too YA for her, although she didn't HATE it), I reread the books. I had reread All Systems Red before the show; last week I reread it again, then all the others, and then I read the newest short story, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (about ART and its crew). And after that for days I just wanted MORE and didn't want to read anything else, but the next novel isn't out yet; I reread Artificial Condition again and started Network Effect again, and skimmed through the tags on AO3 and Tumblr to see what people are saying... but it wasn't really satisfying. When I'm interested in a ship that is non-sexual in nature, I rarely find what I want from fandom, and that's what happened again (though there is some gen friendship fic and some queerplatonic fic on AO3). I can't begrudge people their desire to sexualize nonsexual relationships, because I've definitely thought that was fun before. I wrote Finding Nemo slash (and I stand by that). But when you don't want to read that, and I don't, your odds are simply worse, because there's less of it.

Unlike my sister, I didn't hate the show, but I was even more annoyed by what Wax called "YA" writing choices than she was. I'm not sure if she can stand to watch it with me when the next season comes out, because I find it very hard to shut up when I'm annoyed at tv. I am happy with the casting and have no problem with the acting - all the things that I disliked are what I consider objectively bad adaptation and writing choices. But it was still fun and watchable when considered as its own work in isolation from the books! Just weirdly and unnecessarily YA in tone.

For fans of banning/blocking, the action, you'll be pleased that I banned someone from my design blog designobjectory last week! I like all ages and periods of decorative arts, but my blog contains a lot of my special interests - midcentury modern, Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and Swedish and Finnish design (mostly 20th c). Somebody reblogged one of my MANY posts of Finnish midcentury light fixtures by Finnish lighting titan Lisa Johansson Pape (one of the many times I've posted a variant of her 44 cm. diameter metal pendant lamp shade, which is still in production by Innolux)... anyway, somebody reblogged it with a comment sort of like "This is the ONE Scandinavian modern thing I like lol. I hate light birch furniture!" My blog is extremely heavy on light wood because of my strong interest in Swedish and Finnish 20th century design! So I blocked them. First I asked Wax if that was too unreasonable and she laughed a lot and said that it's never unreasonable to block people on your own blog. Maybe a little weird though. I mean, probably. But it's so thrilling and satisfying to block someone.

Ever since DW made it so you can type @ + username to create the little username embed (waxjism), I have completely switched to it and whenever I want to use the version that links to another site I forget what the code is and end up having to google it. I mean, to search the DW faqs. This is the third time it's happened. That's because it's user name, with a space between. I always forget that.

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A couple of months ago, I don't know when exactly, I saw a link on Tumblr to an article about a "new summer trend" of not wearing mascara that the youths were (allegedly) referring to as "ghost eyelashes" (let's take the rant about the majority of people not wearing mascara as a given). Even though I find this kind of reporting (on beauty trends) mostly annoying, I frequently also find it... amusing, in an annoyed way, so I clicked to read it on the strength of my giggling bemusement at the headline.

The angle this beauty journalist chose to take was a Generational Divide one, pointing out how the trend was very young and positing that people older than their mid-20s would be uncomfortable with the shocking exposure of their natural eyelashes in full sun, and the article was peppered with links to other articles in the same website about generational trends that were so outrageous that I did what she wanted and clicked on them:

This publication has alleged in the past that wearing tapered or straight-leg jeans is an embarrassingly Millennial trait (no mention given of older generations: possibly the youth in question have forgotten that there are plenty of members of Gen X just among their own generation's parents, and obviously nobody older than their own parents is relevant, lol).

I went on an emotional journey of laughing, boggling, and remembering how in the mid-90s when the 70s-bellbottom revival was in full swing it became nearly IMPOSSIBLE to buy tapered jeans or even straight ones for a brief time, and how my friends and I used to refer to extant surviving tapered jeans as "boa-constrictor-ankled". Of course since everyone my age was growing extremely rapidly throughout the period from 1995-2001, it was impossible for any of us to own old pairs of jeans that still fitted that we loved; in high school, you're lucky if you fit jeans for more than a calendar year at a time. Everyone who had jeans that were ten years old or older was an adult, and their clothes were a minority of the clothes we saw closely enough to pay attention to, which made them stand out, I guess. I remember being actively amused by tapered jeans in the late 90s. And I clearly remember the few years before 2010, in my 20s, owning lots of pairs of bootcut jeans that were in some cases 10 years old and still fit me, and finding it necessary to get out the sewing machine to make several of them into skinny jeans (but the earliest ones, say, pre-2000, were unsalvageable then, because I couldn't consider wearing mid-high-waisted jeans ca. 2007, when waistbands were super-low). So the end of this emotional journey was laughing again.

Another article in this publication alleged that the crying laughing emoji is also an embarrassing Millennial trait. Apparently nobody who isn't a Millennial would use this emoji. The article didn't contain a lot of detail - I would've loved statistics about emoji use frequency, or a detailed look back at the pre-emoji days of emoticons. I was a heavy user of "XD" before the crying laughing emoji, which is supposed to be a cartoon of it (although IMO XD does not imply tears on its own; that's what X.D is for). But anyway, I have been remembering this stupid article every time I used that emoji for weeks now.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: hey finally a post that's PERFECT for this icon
Current Music: I Say It's Spinach (and to Hell with It)

I've read various books recently that I have a lot of thoughts about, and want to write up as they deserve. (A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Alien Clay, and The Ministry of Time are currently clamoring loudest.) In the meantime, though, here are some recent reads that I managed to be less longwinded about!

( 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff )

( The Twelve Chairs, by Ilf and Petrov, translated by Anne O. Fisher )

( The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington )

( Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn )

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I was taught to sew as a kid in the 90s by my mom (an artist who can do every kind of art and craft practically, and also fix plumbing and electricity and do carpentry). My first clear sewing memory is making myself a gown (of leftover printed cotton curtain fabric) for an ice sorceress costume that I designed and made myself and wore to NASFiC/Dragoncon as a con costume when I was twelve I think - so 1995, maybe? I made myself shorts and a vest that I used to wear to school in the seventh grade (from a pattern), hemmed my cadette girl scout uniform skirt from knee to mid-thigh (and then did the same for two other members of the troop) at age 14, and at 16 made my sister, then 7, a copy of the allover-studded suede jacket worn by Christina Aguilera in the "What a Girl Wants" music video (also from a pattern, and not from real suede, but I did have to buy a literal Bedazzler). LOL that I did that, in retrospect.

Anyway, I learned to sew on my mom's old Singer, but since moving to Finland I have had the good fortune to enjoy the nearly-permanent loan of my MIL's sewing machine (ours since her death; but she didn't feel like sewing anymore before that), a Bernina 1004 made in Switzerland in 1989, fully mechanical, and basically free from problems (apart from those caused by user error). Until a few months ago.

I tried cleaning lint from around the bobbin case, and not only did that not help, but after it the machine stopped advancing unless you manually turn the wheel with great force. So of course I immediately panicked that I had broken it and became afraid to investigate further because I was afraid I'd find out it was all my fault.

But when I finally got around to watching a couple of videos (because I really wanted some new pajama pants and I can't buy any that meet my standards), I realized there's absolutely no way I caused this! But also it definitely is something with the main bit of the motor, and you have to take the thing completely apart to fix that. So it has to go to a repair shop that specializes in Berninas.

There's only one in Turku, and they closed for the month of July the day before I googled them. 😭 Also you have to book the service in advance and can't just drop machines off. The next nearest specialist is... nowhere near.

But I'm very motivated now, because it's been warm, and every day

waxjism wears her percale gingham hobbit (cropped) summer pj pants and looks adorable while I'm suffering with one old pair that are falling apart and are a synthetic blend. And neither of us has pockets!!!

Tags:

sewing

I just realized that all my most favorite savory foods are based on lemon or lime. Also all the cocktails I've liked (though I don't try many because I'm not big on them). I also love every lime or lemon dessert I've had mostly, but they're not my favorites (my most favorite desserts are apple- or coffee-based). It's just weird that it took me so long to notice that.

Anybody want to beta 400 words of light-as-air Sinners genfic?

Tags:

sinners,
stories

Previous poll review
In the Retribution poll, 78.6% of respondents said the best revenge is living well, followed by a tie between "is sweet" and "is served cold" with 21.4% each. In ticky-boxes, an ancient language of shadows and flight (52.4%) came second only to hugs (73.8%). Brain being empty, but not in a meditation way came third with 50%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Still listening to Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, one short chapter a day. It's good! Yesterday's chapter was, basically, stop hesitating at the fork in the road, and take a step one way or another. So I should probably pick a WIP to work on. Heh.

Also listened to Network Effect (Murderbot) by Martha Wells, read by Kevin R. Free. (I've read it before in ebook, but I didn't remember much.) This time I was struck by how the first third or so is a locked-room mystery

spoilers.

set inside the corpse of the victim, ha! The middle is Murderbot-ART fighting/relationship drama, which is delightful. The final part starts out all action/adventure, and I kept zoning out of the logistics, but then we got other SecUnits, who are delightful, and ART cleaning for the in-laws.

Awesome! I've started System Collapse.

Ebook: just Guardian.

Kdramas/Cdramas
An episode and a half of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. We have two episodes to go. And I'm continuing my rewatch of Nothing But Love (AKA Nothing But You), a Chinese m/f romance set in a tennis club. I guess I'm renewing my VIKI subscription after all.

Other TV
About two thirds of The Residence (no spoilers, please!), which is enjoyably quirky in a Knives Out-esque way. Original flavour Lilo & Stitch, just as fun and anarchic as ever. We finished Turning Point: The Vietnam War, which was excellent but, despite having a wide range of voices throughout, ended very much in a US pov. And more Bluey, which is currently my happy place. "Bingo!"

Fringe with my sister (plus a couple of episodes of Bluey).

Guardian/Fandom
Guardian!!! <3 <3 <3 Did I mention that

guardian_wishlist is coming in a month or so?

Also, that

mific and I set up a comm for talking about writing:

fan_writers (original fiction writers also welcome). It's humming away so far. Bring us your writing-meta links and thoughts!

Audio entertainment
A little more Letters from an American (/o\), one episode of Writing Excuses (currently has a very chatty, not very technical vibe, which is not so much my thing).

Offline life
On Saturday I went to the Dowse Art Museum, which had a range of delightful exhibits, including: a) several rooms on the theme of gay cowboys (before I went in, one of the staff cautioned me in an undertone that some of the works were explicit; reader, they were), featuring frilly saddles, large metal dildos, a whole wall of pencil sketches of gay cowboy sex, like seriously, and a short film about a newly het-married man who either decided to live in his gay-cowboy dream or went through a portal to a meadow-by-a-river gay-cowboy paradise, taking the married couple's priest with him, I'm not sure which. It ended with a dance number. b) a collection of latex sphinx cats, with each tattooed by a different local tattoo artist. c) a more sober and traditional exhibition of art made out of stone. d) a collection of "Shoes with Personality". e) some very nice weaving from (iirc) the 1920s and 30s.

On Tuesday, a friend and I went to the National Portrait Gallery for the 2025 Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award, which had a fantastic range of styles and media, and I was particularly struck by one that made me think about my WIP meta, how much conviction it must take and how grounded in the concept the artist must have to be to embark on something quiet and thoughtful and complex, and then keep at it.

Writing/making things
I wrote a last-minute drabble for the Face challenge on

fan_flashworks, but other than that, nothing but meta. And I spent yesterday's Writers' Hour on this post. I appear to be in a fic-writing hiatus, waiting for my creative brain to surface, but today I managed to find a sort-of ending for a WIP, just a few paragraphs, and send it to beta.

Life/health/mental state things
Arms still not great. Otherwise things are pretty good. The sunshine makes such a difference.

Food
I made this lemon chicken recipe twice in three days. So good! (So much sugar, lol.) Am about to make malfatti to stock the freezer with.

Good things
Art galleries and lunch with friends. TV with friends. Sunshine. Bluey. Guardian. New writing comm. Dreamwidth. Plenty of fun things to keep me busy. You all.

Poll #33408 Youtube

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

If you use Youtube, what do you mostly use it for?

View Answers

music
24 (48.0%)

game play
9 (18.0%)

vlogs
7 (14.0%)

instructional videos - practical
12 (24.0%)

instructional videos - creative
9 (18.0%)

dramas and tv
12 (24.0%)

movie and tv trailers
10 (20.0%)

other
22 (44.0%)

I don't use Youtube
5 (10.0%)

ticky-box full of squishable fur-creatures
23 (46.0%)

ticky-box full of the delicate scent of honeydew among beech trees
19 (38.0%)

ticky-box full of grabbing a large hammer and just smashing things
21 (42.0%)

ticky-box full of existential hummingbirds wondering what to do with their lives
22 (44.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
35 (70.0%)

Tags:

weekly update

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

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2 heads of green cabbage
20 pickling cucumbers (!! I would’ve chosen the smallest ones anyway, but this gave me greater incentive)
4 summer squash/zucchini (I chose medium, green zucchinis)
3 pounds of purple-skinned orange carrots
2 fennel
2 pounds of uncured onions
2 heads of red-leaf lettuce
2 big bunches of Bright Lights Swiss chard (I swapped for more fennel, in the hopes of making more relish, plus it’s got a longer shelf life)
10 ears of corn
16 tomatoes (::happy dance of unexpected tomato joy!:: It wasn’t in the email, so everyone arriving exclaimed over them)(medium ones, regular red)
take-what-you want herbs: flowering holy basil, flowering dill, thyme, mint, red shiso/perilla (with enormous leaves, some almost the size of my face!) (I chose dill, a bit of mint, and shiso)

First thoughts: this is salad week (especially given Friday’s forecast of Hell’s antechamber)! tomato-cucumber salad. corn-tomato salad with lime. minty cucumber salad. corn-zucchini-shiso salad [from a Clover email; see below for recipe]. lettuce with any and all of these. dilly cucumber pickles. cole slaw with cabbage and carrot, whether USian (mayo) or Asian-inspired (soy sauce, lime, sesame, etc).

Clover's Zucchini, Corn, Shiso Salad

Cut kernels off 4 cobs of corn. You can do this over a bowl or carefully on a cutting board. (Remember to save the cobs for stock!)

Cut 5-6 zucchini in half lengthwise. Lay the flat sides down on a cutting board. Then cut each half into 1/4 inch half-moons. Place the half-moons in a colander and give them a healthy sprinkle of salt. Toss so the salt gets all over the pieces. Set aside.

Stack 4-5 shiso leaves on top of each other and then roll them up like a cigar. Then slice the tip off the cigar so you get ribbony circles of shiso. Repeat. (You can buy shiso at H-Mart or if you're lucky, at a farmer's market this time of year. If you can't find shiso you can substitute mint or Thai basil.)

In a salad bowl, add a teaspoon of miso paste, a teaspoon of ketchup, a clove of garlic you've minced finely, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, and 2 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar. While whisking vigorously, slowly pour in 6 tablespoons of a neutral oil (safflower, canola, grapeseed). The oil and vinegar should form an emulsion, with tiny droplets of oil suspended in the vinegar.

Taste the vinaigrette and adjust the seasonings. If it tastes too oily or bland, add a splash or two of vinegar or soy sauce. If it tastes too acidic, add a little more oil.

When you love the vinaigrette, add the zucchini and corn to the bowl. Toss so they get covered in vinaigrette. Sprinkle shiso leaves on top. Add more shiso if you like.

PS: This salad keeps well for a day or two - the zucchini gets kind of pickled by the dressing, making it even more delicious.

Tags:

farm share,
recipe

Via

troyswann, this new comm:

fan_writers comm - for meta about writing

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( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Music: Jin, "Rope It"

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Today was my first day back at work after my vacation and I did not sleep at all well last night, despite, you know, working from home and didn't have to get up early or anything. I was tossing and turning until sometime after 4 am, at which point I finally fell asleep.

Work was fine - busy, and kind of a lot, but not difficult despite the lack of sleep - but then I sat down on the couch after dinner to watch the Mets and fell asleep for about 40 minutes. *hands*

I'm really glad I took yesterday off too. I 100% recommend adding an extra day onto your vacation if you can - especially if it's a Monday, and doubly so if you actually went away. It makes it easier to get back into the grind, at least for me. I had 333 emails to sort through this morning, and there is way too much going on, as usual, but I timed it so that all of my regular meetings happened while I was out, so this week should be fairly quiet.

On the home front, I've had my new dishwasher for a week now and it is working really well, though I am still learning how to load it. The tines are much closer together and shorter than in my old one, which makes it difficult to get stuff in between them. But it's so quiet! And it doesn't leak! *knock wood* It does take 2.5 hours to run the full normal cycle, but I can live with that.

On the TV front, I finished Murderbot and enjoyed it - Mensah is still my favorite and I wish Bharadwaj had had more to do because I liked her as well.

I also finished the last 2 available episodes of My Life Is Murder because I read they are doing a new season, though who knows when it will be available here. I enjoyed the s4 2-part finale, and I do kind of low-key ship Alexa and Madison, though I also like that they have not had any real romantic interests for Alexa, and those 2 episodes really focused on her lingering grief for her husband.

In other news, Baby Miss L went to Sesame Place this past weekend and the videos of her vibrating with joy over meeting Elmo and Grover and Cookie Monster are amazing!

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Angels on tv

Tags:

The cake in this recipe is delicious. It could be very successful muffins, like without any icing.

Wax increased the amount of lemon in the frosting to about three times the recipe so it is noticeably tart, but basically it's just way too much butter and sugar for the amount of cake involved. It's fine if I leave most of the frosting scraped off on the plate. But the lemony quality of the strong lemon curd is actually lovely; it's the underlying buttercream that's wrong, so another type of icing with lemon curd might be great.

Basically Wax concluded that she forgot American cake recipes typically have about four times as much frosting as the cakes can hold as well as too much sugar in the frosting itself. I usually have more tolerance for sweeter dessert than she does, but in this case the cake is SO good that I couldn't stand to let it be drowned in excessive buttercream.

Our neighbor across the street who has been replacing the midcentury asbestos shingle on his house with new wooden clapboard at the rate of one face of the house per summer also has a lockdown baby who is a toddler now. We aren't very well acquainted like other people seem to be to their neighbors towards whom they have positive attitudes -

waxjism and I wave hi at them but otherwise only talk about practical issues, like our shared mailbox stand and when their outdoor cat stayed away a few days; though they gave us a bottle of their homemade apple juice a few years ago. But since he has built a scaffolding on the side of the house across the street from our diningroom window and spent a lot of time all summer working there with power tools while our window was open just opposite and a small human was often in the yard demanding his attention, I've frequently heard him speaking to it, and he's definitely a Swedish-speaking finn like Wax. (Today he was teaching it to ride a tiny bike with training wheels outside our window.) (Due to cat divorce, the diningroom is a bedroom; Wax sleeps there with Sipuli and I babysit her there during the day, and before that I slept there with Snookums and Tristana while she was in the bedroom with Anubis.)

The weird part is that when we first moved here, my MIL's ex-boss, a retired high school English teacher and principal who also taught one of my BILs, lived on the other side (they downsized to an apartment last year), and his wife told us that she thought the constructing neighbor's family was Finnish! It's hard to imagine how that misunderstanding could come to be, unless his wife is a finn perhaps; I don't think I've overheard her speaking with the children. The new neighbors who bought the English teacher's house are also Swedish-speaking and have two toddlers and a small dog (possibly two small dogs?). This is a relief to me because sudden use of Finnish can make my language center stall out, unlike Swedish.

The other two houses on this block of our street are abandoned eyesores and public health menaces owned by the city, which has done nothing in the last couple decades of its ownership to demolish them or secure the property. (The rooves and trees AND POWERLINES in the yard are falling down and the guy who they finally hired to do an asbestos assessment last year told us it was appallingly bad, actually risky even to collect the samples that told them it's full of asbestos.)

We got a notice that they are going to build a new fire station there and close the end of the street off from the highway, which is exciting news, but experience with the city government suggests it's not likely to happen this decade.

Tags:

(the rock is on. the second you don't respect this, it kills you. i love this movie.)

happy day after moon landing day! part of me still thinks it should be an actual us holiday. i mean, we put humans on the moon! it was eight years from the first person in space to the first person to stand on another rock besides earth. that's pretty cool. i celebrated by stuffing my face with fried clams with

tamalinn, friend a, and friend a's hubs, then walking around gloucester (cute seaside town and the home of gorton's seafood - trust the gorton's fisherman :D ) and buying chocolate turtles because who doesn't love a good turtle? right? i did not unpack any more but i thought about it. i also did not find a moon pie but to be fair i didn't look that hard.

and saturday i got a pedicure and went outlet shopping with my sister as is tradition before we go on a big trip. i now own slightly more clothes. but one of my toes is already chipped which, seriously? afterwards we went back to her house and watched mission: impossible iii which i liked better than m:i2. possibly i just liked philip seymour hoffman as a villain better than dougray scott. and we meet benji.

and today i did sweet fuck-all at work (ok, i did something altho now i don't remember what) (oh, right, i collected and set up a lunch for admin d who hurt her wrist and was out) and tonight i unpacked one - count it - box because it's the one with the scarves and winter hats and i've been told i might need to bring a hat to iceland.

and i did sweet fuck-all because i spent so. much. time. last week on the summit. like, tuesday i went home at 11:15. oy. wednesday we lost a bunch of name badges which made us look disorganized (program manager m thinks someone took them to make her look bad) and we offered campus tours for small groups of fifteen and that was a mistake because we actually were disorganized - like, one of the tours left without a couple people and the other two tours somehow swapped tour guides - but! we learned from our mistakes (and also begged around and got more tour guides) and thursday everything went much more smoothly. well, except we still didn't have a bunch of name badges. thursday night was a reception which was delicious and i even got to take home some leftover shrimp bao. i do love a good shrimp. overall i think it was a positive experience for the attendees - we had a contingent of teachers and high schoolers from puerto rico and when i met one of the teachers on friday i swear she was so excited she wanted to hug me - but we're not doing it again next year and i am not sorry about that. i made some good overtime tho.

i assume by now everyone has heard about the ceo who was caught on the kiss cam at a coldplay concert snuggling with the woman he's having an affair with. what a fucking idiot. (altho i don't give her credit for brains either.) it's impressive and scary how fast the video went viral and how fast people figured out who the couple was but come on, if you're going to fuck around on your wife and bang one of your coworkers maybe don't go to such a public event together and don't act all coupley where the kiss cam can find you. he resigned - or possibly was asked to resign? - which is the least he can do.

on this date in 1933 the good voters of oregon voted to repeal a tax on... margarine.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: the rock

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I'm listening to Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, which espouses imperfectionism, a philosophy of life where you acknowledge that you'll never manage to do everything, and you stop beating yourself up about that fact. (I'm only seven short chapters in, hence this massive oversimplification.) I was thinking about how this relates to my WIP folder.

I'm serially monofannish. When I move fandoms, my old WIPs generally acquire Permanently Discontinued status. Sometimes I post them to AO3 marked incomplete, and other times they lurk in a subfolder of my WIP folder, where I occasionally mourn their lost potential. But mostly they're easy to ignore.

Over the months and years in a new fandom, I naturally accumulate more WIPs. So how do I choose what to work on next? How do I blow the dust off and get the engine turning over?

( Below the cut: multiple lists! )

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Half of what I say is meaningless

Booklog: Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

and it's one and two

New Sinners story: "Five Musicians Who Owe Their Careers To Stack Moore (And One Who Doesn't)"

inherited iPad

Driving lessons update

Generational Trends

A handful of recent books

sewing machine repair

lemons and spicy lemons

Beta wanted: Sinners

Me-and-media update

reading

Farm share, week 7

For people who miss the Olden Days of writing meta discussions?

I got a job for my birthday!

that's 21 straight successful stolen bases

almond layer cake with lemon curd buttercream

Our Street

i drive a volvo. a beige one.

Why and how to blow the dust off a WIP

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