farwing | Reading

Work today was a lot, but I got done everything I needed to get done and got out. There are stories I could tell but I'm too tired right now to rehash some of the nonsense my coworkers get up to.

Tomorrow, I am heading out to the island for Thanksgiving, and also to see Baby Miss L. She turns three on Monday! THREE! How is that even possible!? (I'm sure I will be posting the same exact thing on Monday.) But they are not having a family party for her, just a friends party, since she has so many friends now! She is quite the social butterfly! So I've packed up the books and clothes that are her birthday gift (and 1 toy - a magnetic tile thing she can build things with), and tomorrow she can open her presents! They go to my niece's in-laws for Thanksgiving (so they spend Christmas day with us), so I might not see her on the day itself, but that's okay I guess, especially if I get some time tomorrow. Plus, middle niece is going to stop by since she is working on Thursday (she's a nurse), so I will get to see her as well. All in all a good time, I hope!

If I don't get a chance to post tomorrow, I hope everyone celebrating has a Happy Thanksgiving! And everyone else has a great Friday Eve, also known as Thursday.

*

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Like a Luminous Girl - Mike Doughty (ha!)

Tags:

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

Tags:

Last week I spent all five days out of the house, 9 am to 3 pm, at a course designed to help job seekers. I was hoping for this to be more immediately helpful to me than it was; the last one I went to had time blocks for comparing positives and negatives to decide what kind of places to apply, compiling a list, and creating separate cover letters and CVs, all with counselor feedback; but it lasted longer. These are all things that I know how to do but which are much easier to do with external structure because of executive dysfunction! ( Read more... ) I did not learn much last week, though I did get a few tips about modifying my CV. I found the week surprisingly nice, though - way too draining (I didn't have the energy to do anything else all week), but it was pretty comfortable. I liked the other people and would have been happy to keep seeing them.

After one week where I was too exhausted to do anything, after having been in the habit of near-daily sweeping and vacuuming of the kitchen/dining Sipuli enclosure where I spend the day and Wax sleeps at night, there were a staggering amount of dust bunnies today. I spent a long time sweeping and vacuumed a bit (until the vacuum needed charging). Then I took the rinsed recycling from the draining cupboard where it drips dry, because it was starting to leap out whenever you opened the cabinet door, and I also washed the counters and the sink. That was extremely fun and exciting for Sipuli. She got the zoomies and zipped around sniffing things and warbling at me and playing for a couple of hours. (She is back inside the duvet tent against the radiator now, though.)

A week ago we also finally gave up on the triplets telling us what kind of sweaters they would like (these are their 18th birthday present from last summer: Sweater of Your Choice. I tried spamming them with pictures and suggestions for months. Ciara picked a mariniere and a color combination, but the others didn't even make a peep). We also could not get a response on 'When can we come to your house and measure your teenagers' or 'Could you measure the length and width of a sweatshirt from each of them' from Wax's brother, so we finally just asked for generic size class (M for all three) and then decided to guess. Wax and I picked the patterns and the colors for the two remaining sweaters. She is working on Ciara's sweater and I have started one of the others, and already managed to knit too many hours in a row (in spite of not even having made it down from the neck opening to the underarms yet) so my right shoulder was feeling stiff. So now I'm trying to knit for shorter blocks of time and do other things in between, to avoid hurting myself so badly that I have to stop knitting entirely again.

Due to the aforementioned exhaustion we've only gone out for me to practice driving our car once so far, and I was disconcerted that it was pitch black and I couldn't see the inside of the car. Everything's different, including the gear shift! Driving in daylight in this season will require a little more work though, since the sun is up from about 8-16:30. Wax is working too late this week.

Tags:

I just watched that HBO documentary about Billy Joel and though it is long and a little repetitive in some ways, I thought it was well worth watching. I learned a lot that I never knew about him.

In a brief work update, they did finally announce the new CEO on Thursday, but for some reason*, the current board chair refused to give a quote for the press release, so they had the person we think is going to be the new board chair (still a secret for some reason!) give a quote instead.

*now my boss and I are speculating that she had backed a different candidate for the job and is taking it personally that she did not get her way, but that is absolutely just speculation and may be unfair to her. We just can't think of another reason why she's been so weird about the whole thing.

Yesterday was busy with committee meetings, and I logged off at about 4:45 and crashed hard into a two-hour nap, and then slept nine hours when I went back to bed for the night.

I can't believe Thanksgiving is this Thursday. Where did this entire year go?

***

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Piano Man - Billy Joel

Tags:

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

Tags:

I got another turkey yesterday. So far, it has become:

turkey wings topped with chocolate-chili spice mix, baked over leeks*, bits of bread, pecans, and sliced peaches (frozen this summer, from the Georgia Peach Truck delivery)
turkey thighs topped with shepherd herb spice mix, baked over leeks*, bits of bread, minced sage* and minced rosemary*
turkey breasts frozen for later use
turkey drumsticks held to be cooked for a future meal delivery
a pot of turkey stock started with the frame and neck
a pan of turkey gribenes sauted with turkey cuts off the frame, bread bits, and spinach*

Also today,

a tray of roasted purple carrots*, purple-top turnips*, and golden beets*
shredded cabbage* and bits of carrot* prepped for whichever type of dressing/slaw I want later

* locally sourced

Tags:

food

In Non-functional public health appointments, part 2, we heard that when I called on the one day (out of 2 weeks) when you can book appointments with an MD, the appointments were all filled well before the end of the day and they told me to call back in 2 weeks as early as possible.

So that was Monday, and I called at 8:05 (5 minutes after opening) and put my message in their automatic callback queue. I didn't get called until after 11:00 and I could hear the receptionist's voice trembling with stress as she tried to gently and politely apologize because "It was so good that you called at eight, but unfortunately all the doctor slots were already full again!"

She asked again how soon I will run out of meds, and since I will not run out in the next two weeks, she told me to try calling back at eight am again on December first.

!!!!!!!

"Really really sorry, it's so unfortunate."

"Well, it's not your fault, I know," I said.

"Even so... yeah."

So. Two weeks. If I call at 8 on the dot, maybe I'll be early enough in the queue... or maybe I can't get an appointment until I'm about to run out and they therefore have to promote me to the 'urgent' (or semi-urgent) queue.

Wow... I'm so mad about this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Remember that this was actually my third call because the first time I didn't call on the Appointment Day at all and had to be redirected (but unfortunately, even though she said they might fill up, I didn't realize it was like, CALL WITHIN FIVE MINUTES).

Tags:

I tried a new-to-me CSA this year, Who Cooks For You Farm. The summer share (which we got biweekly) was great, so I signed up for fall (weekly) which started this week. Their produce is very good, the prices are fair, and the people are very helpful and friendly. When we suddenly needed to leave town the day before a pickup (out-of-town funeral), they changed it for me. They don't do a winter share, alas, but maybe someday? Anyway, if you're in Pittsburgh and looking for a CSA, I recommend this one.

Related to this, any suggestions for ways to use watermelon radish other than raw in salads and roasted? It turns out that if you pickle it, while it tastes fine, the colors run and it no longer looks like little slices of watermelon.

In principle, the Internet is built on open, decentralized protocols. But in reality, an awful lot of the modern Internet depends on some key chokepoints. I found Cloudflare's post-mortem of Tuesday's outage fascinating and very well-done; most companies either don't publish reports like these or skimp on the details, but this one explains what happened and how red herrings made recovery harder. (Their service and the off-site status page went down at the same time; it was reasonable to suspect a coordinated attack, though it turned out to be a coincidence.) I feel for the team.

Today we got a notification from our local water utility about replacing lead pipes. They need our permission to replace the pipe connecting the main to our house, because part of it is on our property. They'll fix the sidewalk, but if they damage anything else, that's on us. Technically we can say no -- but if we do, they shut off our water. Um, great. We actually tested our water several years ago and the lead levels are well within acceptable parameters; left alone, we wouldn't do anything. But they're forcing the issue and I'm not sure why. (If there were bad test results, that would be different.) So, somebody will come by the week after next to look at our meter and plumbing and tell us what's going to happen. Joy.

I am now studying talmud, weekly and separately, with two different rabbis, neither of them my new rabbi. Earlier this year I also got connected to a Chabad Rosh Chodesh group (women only), which has been very nice. I love how interconnected the local community is. :-)

My new congregation continues to be a great fit.

I backed the Kickstarter for Kavango, a board game that we play a lot. The Kickstarter for an expansion is ending soon; I'm usually not a fan of game expansions, but this one looks solid, enhancing the game without making it more complicated or adding to the play length, so I backed it. (You can get the original game as a backer, too.)

We've been playing a lot of other games too. Terraforming Mars continues to be a favorite, including with one expansion (Preludes). Other expansions we've seen are not so appealing, though I'm interested in the alternate maps (other side of the planet).

A recently-published master's thesis on Stack Exchange's alienation of their core community and community responses was fascinating reading. I might have more to say about that later.

I am appalled by some of the shenanigans coming from the federal government of late, and that is about all I have the energy to say about it for now.

Tags:

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

Tags:

From this week’s farm email: ( Read more... )

3 pounds sweet potatoes
3 pounds beets
3 pounds carrots
3 pounds purple-top turnips
1 head cabbage (I chose a large one)
6 leeks
1 pound collard greens
1 pound spinach (swapped with LindaK for her turnips, because I still have spinach left)
take-what-you-want herbs (I picked up some sage and rosemary)

First thoughts: All of these are good, but I’m missing onions, potatoes, parsnips, celeriac, and rutabagas. Perhaps I’ll get some at one of the last farmers markets; I want mashed potatoes, possibly with some of the turnips, and celeriac to add to soup.
Roasted root veggies (or baked under turkey parts). Sauted leeks, sweet potatoes, collards, garlic, and (vegan) sausage. Cabbage and carrot slaw. If I get some mushrooms, make vegan ‘creamed’ greens with a mushroom white sauce.

I’m supposed to bring all the veggie sides for Thanksgiving dinner, and I haven’t decided exactly what that will entail. Mashed potatoes (with or without neeps) are likely, also roasted root veg (a mix of carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, turnips if they’re not mashed with the potatoes, and parsnips if I buy some). Cranberry relish is definite (I still need to get navel oranges). Roasted Brussels sprouts if I buy some.

What are your obligatory-for-Platonic-ideal Thanksgiving dinner side dishes?

Tags:

farm share

I'm up early to call for a doctor's appointment at eight before a "job hunting course" at nine. The latter is something I've seen twice before and am expecting a fair amount of wasted time this week, but they do provide an individual coach to give advice and talk through options and that should help me, not only because of my executive dysfunction, but also because I'm genuinely torn about what to do next.

I don't know how much of the day I have to wait for a call back from the health center, though, so I will have to leave to take the call at some point.

When I was a kid, the Italian bakery in my neighborhood had all the usual types of fancy butter cookies and pignoli and tricolor cookies etc. but they also had a selection of less fancy cookies - like sesame cookies and S cookies and anginetti etc., and what we used to call chocolate sprinkle cookies, which may have started out similarly to butter cookies but were sturdier/crumblier, piped in a swirl, and covered with chocolate sprinkles. That bakery closed a long, long time ago (though you can still get frozen pasta with their name on it at the supermarket), and I have been trying ever since to recreate those cookies, with little success.

Today I baked the butter cookies from the Dolci cookbook (pic), though I didn't bother with sandwiching them with jam, and instead added chocolate sprinkles, and 1/2 tsp almond extract in order to try to recreate the taste of those old cookies. They are pretty close! They might need to be slightly less sweet, and probably cook a couple of more minutes, but they're the closest I've come so far. Also, I had the correct piping tip AND you don't chill the dough until after you pipe the cookies so it's a much easier proposition all around.

I also made the King Arthur small batch focaccia, but it never rises as much as they say it should during proofing. Still rises nicely in the oven and tastes great though.

The timing all worked out really well, even though I didn't plan ahead. Sometimes I get lucky since timing is generally the hardest part of cooking for me.

Ha! The announcer was like, "low event hockey, with only 5 shots" and now the Blue Jackets are getting a penalty shot! Igor stopped it though.

*

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Rangers vs Blue Jackets on tv

Tags:

adventures in cooking

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

Tags:

I’d signed up for two meal deliveries this weekend, and Trader Joe’s got their kosher turkeys in yesterday, so I decided it would be easiest for me to cook a turkey this weekend.

1 13-pound turkey became:

2 trays with a turkey breast and a drumstick each, topped with peach chutney, slow baked over diced sweet potatoes* and chickpeas
1 tray of turkey thighs and tail, topped with Shepherd Herb Mix, slow baked over minced onion*, bits of sourdough bread, and a bit of sage* salt
1 tray of turkey wings, topped with Xinjian Spice Mix, slow baked over minced onion*, sliced carrots*, diced golden beets*, and the end of the peach chutney
1 pot of turkey soup, using the frame and the neck, also leeks*, carrots*, sweet potato*, and purple-top turnips*
1 pan of turkey gribenes, some put away for later, the rest sauted with onion*, spinach*, potato, and the bits of turkey left from a rather imperfect carving job on a not-fully-defrosted bird

* locally sourced

(“tray” here means 9x13 foil pan)

Tags:

food

Recently I watched a random algorithm-suggested YouTube video about that DIY house from the SomethingAwful forums and it reminded me of a Folding Ideas video that talks about the child-obliterating zipline discussion, so I'm rewatching some old Folding Ideas videos (still can't remember which one did that and I haven't found it yet). Today I watched Folding Ideas | An American Tail: Fievel Goes to Video Game Hell (Oct 4, 2018) and came across this striking quote that articulates a lot of what I enjoy about reading bad and mediocre fanfiction.

I wanted to share this with you, not because it's important or good or an underrated gem, but because it's none of those things. This game is bad. It's cheaply made, it's difficult to find, it's largely forgotten, it's not fun, and for all those reasons, it's likely to vanish entirely. And that's why I wanted to preserve it.

I believe in the value of failed art. Art that is driven by carelessness, by unchecked and untalented ego, by spectacularly low-stakes greed. It has a tendency to be novel, to be unpredictable, in a way that deliberate art never can. This is why it's so much fun to watch bad movies.

No one would ever make this game on purpose. Something in the creative process needs to be fundamentally broken to get to this point.

If you were going to sit down two decades later to make a game out of An American Tail because you actually cared about the movie and you cared about making the game, you're not going to churn out a hodgepodge series of disconnected minigames that don't work well.

It is not simply a lack of time or money that produces something like An American Tail the video game, but a profound lack of caring.

The end product of that broken process isn't worth playing for its own merits, but it is worth playing because it's worth remembering.

Dan Olson, "Folding Ideas - An American Tail: Fievel Goes to Video Game Hell" (Oct 4, 2018)

Interestingly, the fact that it tends to be novel, unpredictable, and fun, in a way that is maybe like watching bad movies, remains true even though there are probably many more pieces of bad fanfiction that aren't driven by a profound lack of caring.

On one level, yes, there's an overwhelming carelessness in a lot of badfic and a lot of modern fanfiction in general - I've talked before about the changing norms around beta reading, then editing, then even spellcheck, so that now editing is vanishingly rare and an overwhelming majority of the works you see in the tags I've visited at AO3 in recent years - with the sole exception of Yuletide and other fests - are dominated by things that haven't even been spellchecked, and you're less likely to see betas thanked in the notes than to see a statement that they didn't bother to spellcheck, didn't have a beta, or will maybe proofread later but they couldn't proofread before posting because they just "had to" post from their phone on a train in a tunnel at 3 am to meet a nonexistent deadline. The current norms seem to be extremely casual, and to consider editing and spellcheck and even reading back over what you've written as a fussy optional bit of formality that isn't really needed on comfortable casual occasions like posting fic, but should be saved for very special events.

But on another, of course, fanfiction is not often produced with a complete lack of caring. There is at least an enthusiasm or interest, an effort, however small, involved in putting their ideas into words - even if they've just sort of farted out the initial form of the idea without engaging their internal filters at all, or posted a chat log and not bothered to take out the tags and add sentence-final punctuation to it, at least there was a mental spark behind it that is probably not present in the corporate greed and maze of underpaid subcontractors involved with cheap crap videogames.

In spite of the presence in most fanfiction (I say most because you will still run into things that are like 'this was actually written for my OCs and I've used find and replace with the pairing names from this list of five popular fandoms, you can read this same poorly-punctuated fart with the names from the other fandoms here!') of that animating spark, though, overall, surveying the field of badfic and, tbh, even most of the generically mediocre fanfiction that

waxjism would describe in her spreadsheet as "sub mid"... the vibes of what he's saying here hold true.

They do reek of an often fascinating level of not-caring, whether it's caring enough to use spellcheck or taking five seconds to google an incorrect fact they stuck in that they didn't have to put there in the first place. They do provide a fully perceptible class of novelty - random, bizarre innovations that it feels like nobody could have done "on purpose". They do remind you of very bad movies. And in many of them it does seem like something in the creative process had to be fundamentally broken (perhaps just the steps between the initial brainstorming and any analysis or consideration or planning).

Tags:

badfic

read through story A and return to beta
write story B from the zero draft I made yesterday ✅
catch up on comments ✅
catch up on email ✅
political submission! *stabs things* ✅
read ✅ (briefly)
Yuletide canon review
play with coloured pencils ✅
change vacuum cleaner bag ✅
make/eat dinner ✅
early night ✅

I might manage four of those? The last two are non-negotiable.

ETA: Some of those check marks are from over the weekend. :-)

Tags:

lists

Today at work, they announced that we will be getting a COLA, retro back to July 1! My boss also floated a potential promotion for me (really, the work would mostly stay the same, but the title and money would be better) for after the new CEO is in place. We'll see if that ever happens. It would be cool if it did, but I won't hold my breath.

I thought I had other things to say, but I fell asleep on the couch after I logged off work and now I'm all fuzzy-headed.

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: We've Got You (i - Spark) - Vienna Teng

Tags:

work

Yesterday was the last day the US Mint made pennies, completing a 232 year run. I understand why (the cost to produce being three times the face value), but there will always be nostalgia. Given how many transactions these days are cashless, will it actually affect pricing, or will there be an informal “rounding if you pay cash” (in whichever direction) instead? (I suppose I’ll see soon enough given my day job.)

I wonder whether this will make pennies more collectible, for the numismatists who are enthusiastic about them? I have a *lot* of pennies I’ve found in the streets in the last years, not brought to either of the financial institutions I bank at, because one doesn’t do coins (!!!), while the other switched from a free coin counting machine for customers to one that charges some percent (I’m far too cheap to pay for the privilege of having the coins counted, but haven’t yet picked up the paper sleeves needed to roll the coins myself).

Pandemic life
My mother-out-law's birthday dinner on Sunday was my first meal inside in a crowded restaurant in a long time.

Previous poll review
In the "Time is" poll, 48.9% of respondents answered "relentless", and 31.9% said "elusive". In ticky-boxes, "blue-haired punk red pandas" and "colouring in" tied for second place (51.1%) after hugs (72.3%).

Reading
Finally finished Five Red Herrings. It was fine -- I mean, it kept me reading till the end. I missed Bunter being more active, though. Now I'm a quarter of the way into Have His Carcase.

In audio, I'm still listening to Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, read by Candida Gubbins, and I've also started Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, read by Morag Sims and Will Watt, which is fun so far, though I'm slightly perplexed by the choice to have Alice's dialogue be American but her inner narration to be British. Also, I was hoping Will Watt would get more to do; I've really enjoyed some of his other performances.

Still dipping back into Take Off Your Pants! by Libbie Hawker. And I forgot to mention last week that I tore through Alison Bechdel's Spent! a while ago, before returning it to the library at the last minute.

Kdramas
Typhoon Family is getting a bit "this script was written in crayon", but I'm engaged and I like the main characters. I miscounted the Mystic Pop-Up Bar episodes; we finished yesterday. It was good but didn't quite hit me in the feels. (I'm a bit neutral on Hwang Jung-eum.)

Other TV
Nobody Wants This -- season 2 is less of the cross-cultural stuff and more "addressing psychological quirks", which isn't as interesting to me. Oh well.

Half of the latest season of Slow Horses -- the episodes always feel so short! I guess this is what successful pacing is like. A bit grimmer than earlier seasons, but I'm enjoying Ho a lot. (It helps to have read the book, I think.) We're finishing that tonight.

All of You (Apple+) -- a movie starring Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots, which maxes out on the "pining while fucking" concept. Great chemistry and Big Feels.

Spoilers.

Contains infidelity and an unhappy ending.

Rewatched some Bluey, plus a couple of episodes of Krapopolis season 3. :-)

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, Letters from an American, Tech Won't Save Us, and Ex Urbe Ad Astra.

Writing/making things
I came up with a great title for a fic I'm working on and am now 20% more motivated to finish it up and post it. Other than that, I feel like I'm still juggling a bunch of things, but my general intention is to finish this one, bash out a flashfic for the FISH challenge on

fan_flashworks, and then dig into my Yuletide assignment, for which I've been doing canon review.

Note to self: Don't forget about Guardian Bingo!

I bought a pack of coloured pencils yesterday and have been watching a few Youtube "technique" videos and practising blending. I still can't actually draw, but hey.

Life/health/mental state things
Down Under writers' hour is currently at 10am New Zealand time (8am Melbourne time). In winter, when it's at 8am here, writers' hour is the first thing I do in the day; that means I get started early, spend most of the morning at my keyboard, and sometimes spud in for the afternoon too. In the transitions periods (when only one half of the globe has switched into or out of daylight savings), it's at 9am here, and I generally try to get the dishes done beforehand. This sets the tone for the day -- I do more chores overall, more offline stuff. Now writers' hour is at 10am: I get up and exercise, then sit down mid-morning to write. By the time I'm done, it's 11am, and if I have lunch plans, I have to get my skates on pretty quickly. And because I've primed myself to exercise, I've been going for walks more in the afternoon and generally being more active. Which is great, but... *grabbyhands at keyboard* tl;dr, I am controlled by scheduling.

Good things
Coloured pencils, and colour generally. Guardian and the Slo-Mo Rewatch. Sleep. Podcasts. Kdramas. Biking, TV-watching dates, walking. Chocolate. You all, hi!!

Note: Poll results are private; please vote freely.

Poll #33831 Making friends with chatbots

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 56

In the last seven days, I've used AI

for work
5 (8.9%)

for fun / personal reasons
0 (0.0%)

for interacting with organisations
0 (0.0%)

against my will
14 (25.0%)

not at all, that I'm aware of
37 (66.1%)

other
1 (1.8%)

ticky-box full of fandom-adjacent profic
15 (26.8%)

ticky-box full of fish fish fish fish fish
19 (33.9%)

ticky-box full of vague groaning noises
19 (33.9%)

ticky-box full of alpine octopuses practising their yodelling
23 (41.1%)

ticky-box full of hugs!
38 (67.9%)

Tags:

weekly update

I got my driver's license today on the third test! I was fighting for my life to wake up and fully eat my breakfast and everything, actually walked to the bus stop an hour early by mistake due to setting two of my alarms wrong last night and then had to walk back, had an upset stomach after breakfast and then like three scary random situations and two big mistakes in a row in my driving lesson on the way to the test, so my teacher asked if I wanted to pull over in a parking lot and calm down. Which I did. First time that's happened in a lesson! But then the test itself was actually uneventful. No big mistakes on my part and no scary traffic situations or close calls, and I handled myself well and recovered from the minor mistakes correctly, I was just... DROWNING in stress and white-knuckling it to remain as calm as possible. The examiner told me that my main thing is just that I'm too stressed while driving and have to calm down (YUP, KNEW THAT!!!!). Apparently I was gripping the steering wheel way too hard, which I wasn't aware of but that doesn't surprise me at all.

Aaaaaanyway, on the final drive back from the test to the driving school my driving teacher told me he lived in the US for four years, and I said, oh, where? When he was 20 he moved to the New Jersey area and played on a minor team (now defunct) that feeds into the NHL Jersey Devils, actually, he said, in Albany. And I was like hey!!! I lived in (a suburb of) Albany for three years as a kid [before the disastrous life-ruining move to Alabama at age 6, I did not say, but just try going from Montessori school in upstate NY to shitty authoritarian public school in Alabama some time and see how you like it].

So. Anyway. I told

waxjism this story like "Hahah, and then we met here in Finland! Isn't it funny?" but she immediately was like, "There's a Wikipedia list of all the teams that feed the NHL!" and started combing around through the internet until a few minutes later she called, "Is this him?" and showed me his headshot. Apparently he was also the captain of our local Liiga hockey team in 2015, around the time we were going to quite a few matches, and one of his kids is currently on that team. Welp.

As I mentioned recently, I was planning to buy a milk frother so I could make lattes once passing, originally. But if I can't source decaf matcha and chai tea domestically, I wouldn't be able to make my favorite two lattes (those are the two I've been dying to make myself). I have not gone looking for those yet. I should order some old-fashioned stove black (polish) for our woodstove though, although that will not be nearly as exciting. My caffeine-free trial is still in effect until early December.

Half of what I say is meaningless

then i met you at the station in Ronkonkoma

words!

Last week, playing catch-up, driving practice

it's 9 o'clock on a saturday

the faint sound of bears...

Turkey B and other food prep

Broken public health appointment system part 3

N things make a post

I can haz hot water!

Winter share, 3 of 11

The sun was not up at 7:00

Raddysh reaches in and pulls on Wood

I can haz home?

Turkey A

The value of failed art

this evening (a to-do list)

you're keeping calm, you're aiming higher

Goodbye, pennies

Me-and-media update

Driver's license, upstate NY, and hockey connections

Profile

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags