thefourthvine | Reading

The heat index is going to hit 42C/103F here today, omg, this Canadian is not used to this. Good thing I made out like a bandit at the thrift store the other day (took in a load of donations and therefore went shopping): three cute little dresses and a pair of shorts, plus a Columbia rain jacket that was only $10 so I'm also ready for the tropical downpour that is predicted here.

I sanitized my devices to go through US border control, and then I was not only not inspected or interrogated, I didn't even have to speak to a person at all! I have Nexus/Global Entry, and all I had to do was unmask for a photo and be waved through. Which is pretty cool, except for the part where it's terrifying.

The friend I'm visiting is under a lot of stress these days (I mean, aren't we all) and last night she wanted to watch something enjoyably distracting, so we watched Conclave and she loved it. Yay! For me it was a repeat viewing, and definitely held up. I do still wonder what Sister Shanumi was doing in the cardinals' quarters that evening, though; I feel like there's a lot more backstory there than we saw. (Also I highly recommend this story https://archiveofourown.org/works/62100625 ("Oh, Sister" by veganthranduil) to anyone looking for more of Sister Agnes.) Next up may be Kpop Demon Hunters, about which I know very little (ditto kpop itself) but which I keep seeing people praising. On the face of it I wouldn't think it would be my kind of thing -- I've never been much for animation -- but I wouldn't have thought that about a movie of old men arguing about how to divvy up power amongst themselves, either, so you never know.

My latest haircut is not great -- sometimes my stylist knocks it out of the park, and sometimes she fouls out -- and I am sad that my first time in five years or more with two other friends I'm seeing on this trip will be with bad hair!

cimorene

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.

torachan

1. Today was a very long, but very good day. The grand opening was a huge success. Extremely busy, high sales, everything went smoothly.

2. Then in the evening I went straight from Irvine to Dodgers Stadium to see My Chemical Romance. Next year is the 20th anniversary of the Black Parade, so the tour, which started this month (I think this is only like the third date), is doing the entire album plus a second set. So it was long, but awesome.

3. Tomorrow I have to help out with the second day of grand opening, too, so I'm just finishing up this post, having something quick to eat, then getting to sleep as soon as possible as I have to get down there by eight to help set up, but while I'm not looking forward to that part of it, or the fact that I didn't get any weekend off (and can't take tomorrow off as planned because I have a meeting in the afternoon), it is a huge relief that this store seems like it will be successful.

4. Chloe!

dine

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brokenframe posting in

vidding

Title: Bad Moon Rising
Character: Peter Hale
TV Series: Teen Wolf
Music: Bad Moon Rising cover Mourning Ritual feat. Peter Dreimanis
Length: 3:29
Streaming/download at: DW | Tumblr

mecurtin

Who's that? #Purrcy being adorable? I was walking by and I had to ask ...
#cats #CatsOfBluesky #Caturday

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby, lying on his back with his paws in the air, turns his head to look over his shoulder and behind him. He looks vaguely embarrassed.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby, lying on his back with his paws in the air, turns his head to look over his shoulder and behind him. He looks vaguely embarrassed.

Under the breakfast table, up against the sunny window, keeping an eye on the human while cleaning his paws -- it's a good life if you're a cat. And you get to rest your head on a metal window crank, which is apparently choice.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby lies on his side on a broad, sunny windowsill. He's licking his front paw with maximum tongue while side-eyeing the photographer.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby lies on his side on a broad, sunny windowsill. He's licking his front paw with maximum tongue while side-eyeing the photographer.

We've now finished the online WSFS Business Meetings, it's just a question of how much Business Meeting stuff will get down in-person at Worldcon. But at least this time, unlike Glasgow, I can plan to spend most of my Worldcon time *at Worldcon*, which should be much more fun.

One of the things the Business Meeting did was vote for a Trial Committee to decide what to do about those accused of mis- and malfeasance around the 2023 Chengdu Hugo Awards, and ... I'm on it. So I guess I'm officially a BNF now 👀! That'll be an adventure, all right.

One of the things I'm looking forward to at Worldcon is that Martha Wells is the Guest of Honor, so there will be *lots* of Murderbot content, it'll be more or less the first Murderbot con. I'm not really *in* Murderbot fandom, yet, I read some of the fic but I don't really have time/brain cells for fannish immersion right now. But it's just so nice to have something that makes both halves of my fannish life, the SFF half & the fanfic/AO3 half, so *happy*. And when we all know Wells is a good person who's worked really hard for her success, and who's had to deal with a lot of crap in the last few years and now a ship full of money has come in for her.

azurelunatic

As sent to my primary care, who I actually do like:

United Healthcare, in their omnibenevolent wisdom, sees fit to drop the One Touch Ultra from my preferred drug list as of September. They have offered several alternatives.

My primary goal with a glucometer is to not require a smartphone to do the simple task of marking whether any reading is before or after a meal. Out of their list of suggestions, the Contour Plus Blue meter meets my requirements and is not discontinued.

Joy. And happiness.

(This is the primary care who, upon learning which insurance I had, while we were trying to solve a problem, asked whether I was up to date on the then-recent news about their CEO, then said "You'd think they'd have learned their lesson." She's from Canada.)

[Edit: I am not currently in need of a CGM, I just want to be able to enter whether a reading is before or after a meal without involving an app.]

cimorene

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)

dine

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azurelunatic

After Belovedest and I got our Home Depot errand finished, we went out to the car.

Belovedest: 6'4", white, short clipped brown hair, receding hairline, white Honeywell dome type N-95 mask, white T-shirt reading" Classically Trained" with a bunch of old-school video game controllers (but not any as old as the ones they started with), khaki colored cargo shorts, dark plastic slide type sandals.

Me: 5'6.5", white, shoulder length dark brown and variously blue fine 2c wavy hair held back with a grey rhinestone headband, violet eyeshadow with black liner behind blue frame rectangular glasses, black Breath of the Nature KF-94 mask, black chain necklace with spikes, silver star necklace, dark blue velour cardigan over a full length flowing embroidered black Holy Clothing dress, smartwatch with rainbow band, several medical bracelets and a medical necklace, some silver bangles with black, violet, and labradorite semiprecious gems, toeless black compression stockings, and a charcoal and violet pair of serious business support hiking sandals, just done driving a motorized grocery cart.

Him: sitting in his candy-colored Tesla, medium colored hair, with a full mountain man beard.

"You fuckin' weirdos," he muttered, deliberately loud enough to be heard inside the open windows of Belovedest's Toaster.

"Same to you, buddy!" I called as he started to pull out, waving my hand out the window.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: 🎵🎶I wish that you would just leave 🎶🎵

torachan

1. Second day of soft open was a wild ride. People lined up before the store opened. We made double the sales of yesterday. All without any advertising about the soft open. The only advertising was about the grand open tomorrow.

2. Some of you may remember a couple years ago I was working on a project to transition to a new inventory system at work and really dialing back my area manager duties to focus on that. Then they put it on hold because they were redoing the whole thing from scratch. Now they are back at the point where the IT side needs feedback from store operations, and they need more time devoted to it than anyone can do while juggling other job duties, so I was told today that I will be fully working on that for the next year or so and only lightly helping out with area manager stuff (currently there is no one who can actually take my place). I will get a bigger raise than the small annual raise I just got, and I can work from home if there's nothing I need to go in to the office for. I will miss all that audiobook time from driving but will not miss all the actual driving.

3. Look at that perfect Molly curl!

mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: Teyla Emmagan, John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Rating: Gen
Length: 1934
Creator Links: Punk on AO3, DesireeArmfeldt on AO3, DesireeArmfeldt on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Working together, Teams, Friendship

Summary: The sun is high overhead, the sky a brilliant, cloudless blue.

Reccer's Notes: This is told from Teyla's POV, on a somewhat frustrating off-world mission where John and Rodney are being particularly dense and snarky. Luckily, Ronon's there to unexpectedly save the day! I especially love the strong sense of place and of the natural world in the story.

Fanwork Links: A Hundred Hundred Bolts of Satin on AO3, and the podfic read by DesireeArmfeldt

mific posting in

fanart_recs

Fandom: Sinners
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Annie (and Annie and Smoke's baby)
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital art
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: chanafehs on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: Annie! One of my favourite characters in Sinners, reunited with the baby she and Smoke had together and lost, in the past. Lovely work, capturing the transcendence of the scene.
Link: Annie

teaotter

Watch on YouTube

I've been dancing to this all day!

twistedchick

An immigrant experience of 83 years ago, compared with today.

petra

I love hearing about the phrases people have incorporated into their family dialect (familect) that require explanation.

Here are some examples from around my house:

A "fuzzy" is a polar fleece jacket. (source: unknown)

Cat food comes in two varieties: gooshy (wet) and crunchy (dry). (source: Two Lumps webcomic)

"Bloop bloop?" means "Would you care to engage in sexual intercourse with me?" (source: a Tumblr post from someone who heard elk mating calls, parsed them as 'bloop bloop,' and started using the noise with their partner for the purpose, which cracked us up)

"One day... when you least expect it..." means, "I am contemplating taking you to bed." We almost never say the "I WILL HAVE SEX WITH YOU!" bit. (source: the second linked George Takei PSA)

The cat, as is the way of cats, has a zillion nicknames, including "Bunny," "[The] Fur," "Miss Fuzzbutt," and "Catface." T. S. Eliot violently underestimated the number of names my cats tend to accumulate, and none of the options are effin' ineffable. (reference: not how he officially spelled it but what we all heard)

Current Mood: linguistic
Current Music: Jellicle cats, as I said, are small

cimorene

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!!!

omens

I've definitely done this before (and not super long ago, I think) but oh well, a lot of the answers change! Evergreen!

Last song I listened to: I woke up to Lor's $hrek 2 in my head on a loop, so that, I guess.

Favourite colour: nature colours

Currently watching: a terrible playthru of Stardew Valley, S5 of Lower decks (halfway thru, have four days to finish it), episode 2 of Amphibia (lol, also halfway)

Last movie: *consults the document* oh dear, it's been a while. C'è ancora domani (There's Still Tomorrow), from April. (There are 4 movies that I planned to see in July but lbr, it’s the 25th.)

Currently reading: I just finished Piranesi, and I'm just starting A Sweet Sting of Salt

Coffee or tea: both

Sweet/savoury/spicy: savoury-spicy

Relationship status: married

Looking forward to: September, I think. Seeing the Murderbot show. A couple books. Not being responsible for 424892482764 plants at some point.

Current obsessions: a terrible playthru of Stardew Valley?? LOL, not really. But it is language learning 24/7.

Last googled: I tried to find out if anyone else is annoyed by that no Caesars shirt that bsky is selling in the comments of basically every popular post. I love muting shit and I muted that bsky shop 20000000000 times before I realised it was unmutable. Which is rude. Anyway, it appears no one else is bothered, lol.

Last thing you ate and really enjoyed: gochujang chicken last night, w/cucumber salad. Cucumber from my garden :D they're kinda sweet ones, these mojito cucumbers.

Currently working on: no writing, no embroidery, only language suffering :D also working on cleaning a lot bc strangers thru the house today and my uncle visiting in a couple weeks.

I went to add a picture to this post but I spent 10 mins taking 40 pics of a very goofy looking robin today and they are all just ART (VERY goofy) and will have to be their own post at some point!

dine

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torachan

1. The first day of the new store's soft open was a huge success. We didn't advertise it at all, but the store was very busy all day (only open from 10-4) and we made over three times as much as the first soft open day of the store that opened in December, so hopefully that is a sign that this store will be a success.

2. Look at Tuxie in his little house! He doesn't sleep here at night and doesn't ever seem to use it during the day, but sometimes he likes to go in there in the early morning between waking up and leaving wherever it is he sleeps at night and coming up to the porch for breakfast.

jadelennox

This essay was alluded to and quoted from in several of the essays I read about Edna St. Vincent Millay. I correctly suspected I could find the journal issue (The Outlook, vol. 147 no. 10, 1927) on the Internet Archive, and I'm very glad I looked for it. Here's a couple-few excerpts.

This is also in reference to Sacco and Vanzetti.

( Read more... )

If I could meet one person from history I've always said it would be Millay, but right now I'm so enamored of her prose I can't even think what I'd say to her. To be able to write like that...!

Current Mood: thankful

jadelennox

Conscientious Objector

I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.

Current Mood: just getting started

jadelennox

I posted "Justice Denied In Massachusetts" in poetry, and that led me into an absolute Millay spiral. (Also I ended up reading a few pieces like "On Edna St. Vincent Millay's 'Justice Denied in Massachusetts'", and I don't think I realized how many of the poems I already knew are Sacco and Vanzetti poems.)

I didn't feel like inflicting a whole bundle of Millay on everyone who reads poetry but I don't mind inflicting her on all of you. So here goes.

Two Sonnets In Memory

(Nicola Sacco—Bartolomeo Vanzetti)
Executed August 23, 1927

Ⅰ

As men have loved their lovers in times past
And sung their wit, their virtue and their grace,
So have we loved sweet Justice to the last,
That now lies here in an unseemly place.
The child will quit the cradle and grow wise
And stare on beauty till his senses drown;
Yet shall be seen no more by mortal eyes
Such beauty as here walked and here went down.
Like birds that hear the winter crying plain
Her courtiers leave to seek the clement south;
Many have praised her, we alone remain
To break a fist against the lying mouth
Of any man who says this was not so:
Though she be dead now, as indeed we know.

Ⅱ

Where can the heart be hidden in the ground
And be at peace, and be at peace forever,
Under the world, untroubled by the sound
Of mortal tears, that cease from pouring never?
Well for the heart, by stern compassion harried,
If death be deeper than the churchmen say,—
Gone from this world indeed what's graveward carried,
And laid to rest indeed what's laid away.
Anguish enough while yet the indignant breather
Have blood to spurt upon the oppressor's hand;
Who would eternal be, and hang in ether
A stuffless ghost above his struggling land,
Retching in vain to render up the groan
That is not there, being aching dust's alone?

Current Mood: melancholy

petra

"Honey, why does the person you're playing a game with and watching a stream of look like that?"

"He's wearing a Mickey Mouse skin."

"I didn't know you could skin Mickey Mouse in your game."

"Yep."

"And you're the one with the socially acceptable hobby."

Current Mood: what the fuck ever man
Current Music: You're so cute, I want to wear you like a suit

wychwood

I meant to post yesterday, but I was distracted by reading a season and a half of transcripts of Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, which is a delight. I don't do well with podcasts, but I am a big fan of transcripts.

I'm currently having a very frivolous week off; S came up with her baby on Tuesday, and we went and visited my parents and then had lunch; I have read some things and eaten many things and done all the backlog of ironing and washing up (the kitchen was a very sad post-graduation place). And played many more hours of ME:A.

Have also cleaned the worst of the dust from the inside of my computer and am now transferring my Steam library to a new hard drive because apparently 2TB is not! enough! and I see no prospect of kicking my game-buying habit and also everything is 60GB a game now.

I also bought several new and secondhand books and have run out of money until payday, because "frivolous overconsumption" is apparently my motto for July. Except that I promised Miss H cinema snacks for Superman on Friday (in return for a lift!) so I can't stop just yet. I am getting £9 back, though, because Rebellion sold me three 99p ebooks, charged me four times, and then told me that the order had failed so I couldn't download them. They were both polite and rapid at sorting it out though! I've bought plenty of books from them before with no issues, so not entirely sure what went wrong...

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

1. Dear Care and Feeding,

I’m getting married next year, and my mom is helping me with a lot of the planning. She’s great at this stuff, and super excited to help (and I’m glad to have her—she’s one of my best friends!). But we’re worried about squabbling—or to be honest, yelling at each other—during the process. We’re VERY close, but prone to fighting about nonsense things. Any tips for avoiding a repeat of my (very loud) teenage years while we plan?

—My Fiancé is Very Calm, By the Way

( Read more... )

**************

2. Dear Prudence,

I am an only child and my mother has always been … let’s call it “involved” with my life, and I have done my best to deal with it. Two years ago, I met my now-fiancée, “Arista,” and we are getting married in November. Last week, my mother came to me demanding that I call off our engagement. As it turns out, she had had a professional background check done on Arista, and she really did not like what she’d found.

After her little snoop-about, my mother discovered that she used to be in adult entertainment. The thing is, Arista was up front with me about this early on in our relationship and it doesn’t matter to me. However, I had intended to not say anything to my mother because I knew she would react like this, but more importantly, it wasn’t her business.

When I told my mom as much, she blew up and told me that I couldn’t sully our family by “marrying a whore.” I told her this wasn’t her decision and that she could either treat my future wife with the respect and decency she deserves or sit out the wedding. Now she’s told everyone in the family. Many are supportive and think she’s nuts, but some have shared her reaction. Is this grounds for removing her from my life for good?

—Pilloried By the Past

( Read more... )

conuly posting in

agonyaunt

My mother-in-law, “Hannah,” is a retired pediatrician, and self-appointed captain of our kids’ health care. Whenever we take our kids to the doctor, we have to have a post-visit debrief with Hannah, who demands every detail before offering her own (unsolicited) advice. Often, her advice contradicts the pediatrician’s recommendations, and she will get upset when we take the doctor’s side over hers.

My husband, “Tom,” says it’s better to humor her and pay lip-service to following her recommendations. I get that it’s his mom, but I’m the one fielding the questions! (Tom does what he can, but I’m usually the one taking them to the doctor and talking to her after.) I’m just sick and tired of dealing with this.

—Enough

( Read more... )

petra

Watch on YouTube

If Jeangu Macrooy gets two new fans today, one of them is me. If they get 1000 new fans today, I hope some are them are because

buggery linked me to this video and I passed it on.

It's an earworm.

Current Mood: it's a bop
Current Music: Dancing in their pink parades

firebatvillain posting in

agonyaunt

Dear Carolyn: I have five children, two daughters. “Lynn” is 40, and “Emma” is 29. Lynn got married 15 years ago, and since she was the first bride of the younger generation, a big fuss was made over her wedding by me, my two sisters and especially my mother.

Emma is getting married next month, but since she is the fifth and last bride in our family, it’s not as big a deal. That’s the way it was in the previous generation, too, because this happened to my sister, the sixth bride that time around.

Complicating matters is the fact that Lynn is a stay-at-home mom of four whose husband recently left her for another woman. She is in a tailspin and requiring a lot of support. The whole family of women are pulling together for her, cooking, cleaning, taking turns sleeping at her house, etc. Except for my mom, we all have full-time jobs, which two of us didn’t have 15 years ago.

All that leaves us with little time or energy to focus on Emma’s wedding, which I thought she would understand. When she asked when we would all be making the usual desserts and decorations for the reception, no one felt they could commit.

Emma was hurt and pointed out what everyone did for Lynn, but we can’t even “do the minimum” for her. I was blindsided by her anger. I’m sorry we did more for her sister and cousins, but Lynn has the greater need right now.

I told Emma her father and I are paying for everything just like we did for her sister, and she could ask her friends to help.

Am I/are we being unfair to Emma?

— Blindsided

( Read more... )

rachelmanija

A solid, well-written, and generally engaging book about migraine and cluster headaches. The author suffers from the latter, with suffer being the operative word - cluster headaches are called "suicide headaches" because people with them are known to kill themselves because of the intractable, excruciating pain.

The first-person account was the best part of the book: what it's like to have cluster headaches, how you're driven to hoard medication because you're not allowed to have enough (which leads doctors to view you with suspicion as a drug-seeker - NO SHIT you seek painkillers when you're in pain!), how you cling to any doctor who will take you seriously, and the psychology of chronic pain generally.

(In Zeller's case, he wasn't seeking opiods or anything that could get him high, but a medication that does nothing to anyone but stop cluster headaches if you have one. But his doctor didn't believe that he actually got them as often as he did, and his insurance company didn't want to pay out for his medication, so he was forced to hoard and ration his medication for no good reason, and then looked at with suspicion when he asked for more.)

The book gets a bit into the weeds in terms of the biological mechanism of cluster and migraine headaches, which is not yet known, and the reasons why there's little research or funding devoted to them. But overall, a good book that will make people with chronic headaches, or any chronic pain, feel seen.

omens

I love mourning doves. Not many babby pigeons last year, at least not yet. There were so many last year but we are making it up with babby robins, I guess!

( 15 more birds and bugs )

cimorene

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.

lunabee34

I made a Substack to talk about my chronic illness journey if any of y'all are interested in following me there:

https://lorrained558511.substack.com/?r=35wee3&utm_campaign=pub-share-checklist

Please, no crossing the streams! Don't refer to me as lunabee34 over there or link to my fandom identity in any way. :)

dine

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mific posting in

fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: Genfic. John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Evan Lorne, Ronon Dex, Carson Beckett, Teyla Emmagan, Original characters
Rating: Teen
Length: 79,623
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply. Grim at times, as it depicts an aspect of WWII.
Creator Links: kristen999 on AO3, everybetty on LJ
Themes: Working together, Action/adventure, Teamwork, Friendship, Genfic, AU: historical, Novel-length

Summary: WWII-based AU. The Team as we know it has been transplanted to the South Pacific.

Reccer's Notes:
This tour de force is a novel-length story by

kristen999, assisted by everybetty, an historical AU set in Papua-New Guinea, in WWII. It's pretty male-centric because of that, but does include Teyla as a local liaison with intel about the enemy. It's got lots of plot, great action and adventure, and an excellent sense of place - you can almost feel the tropical heat making you sweat and hear the mosquitoes whine. The story is illustrated throughout with lots of period photos from the time. It's told from all of the team's POVs, particularly John's (he's a pilot, of course, with Rodney and Ronon on his flight crew). Naturally, John gets thoroughly whumped, in the best genfic tradition. There's tons of atmosphere, friendship and teamwork, and it's a really great read.

Fanwork Links: Long Ago (and Far Away)

starwatcher

I internet-know a guy who's really struggling; he's fighting cancer, his wife is on dialysis for kidney failure, and his mother-in-law is dying, but the hospital she's in wants to send her away. Todd writes:

I don't know what to do. It seems that Valerie's Mom is beginning the dying process but the hospital is trying to force her out and into a nursing home which isn't covered. She doesn't have the funds, but nor can she qualify for Medicaid.

We have funeral costs that we have set aside-we tried to be frugal and she even chose to do cremation to save costs but there are still a couple of thousand left.

We planned for that. But the hospice process I don't understand. That is hundreds a day I guess upfront, we are trying to figure that out now. If we do in-home Valerie and I will have to be responsible for something she we aren't trained for and with her on dialysis, that is scary. The hospital doesn't seem to care. I don't know what to do. I am sad, and scared, and need advice. Any help is much, much appreciated but I really need to know who to talk to. And please share this, if you can. I will be doing an update later on detailing everything we have been through, and it is just so much..so much.

I didn't think a hospital would do this when she is in this much distress.

Todd has a GoFundMe; I don't know if it's possible to contact someone through that.

If you have any suggestions, and can't contact Todd through the GoFundMe, leave your suggestions in a comment, and I'll send it to him via email.

torachan

1. Last day of relative calm before the new store opening. Tomorrow and Friday is the soft open and then Saturday and Sunday are grand opening weekend with a ton of events planned. I'm going to have to help out at least some of the day all four days, but I'm planning to take Monday off to recover.

2. Jasper is such a handsome guy.

resonant

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

starwatcher

You all know Murphy's law, right? (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.) It's so apt that many corollaries have been written for it. Like: "Anything that goes wrong will go wrong at the most inconvenient time and in the most difficult manner." Or: "Any job you plan will take twice as long as you expect. Even if you plan for a longer than expected time, the job will take twice as long as that."

(Google Murphy's Law corollaries; there are lists of dozen. Here's a fairly comprehensive example.)

I ran afoul of the last one I listed. Went out to check the water level in the pond, discovered that the pump that feeds the birdbath wasn't running. <sigh> The pump is encased in a homemade filter (one of these days I'll make a long, explanatory post about it), but some mud oozes through and clogs it up once in a while. I suspect the mud is about 50% duck poop (the neighbor has free-range ducks and geese) which is [a] more liquid, so [b] easier to ooze through the filter, and [c] much yuckier.

If I just change the filters, it takes about 10 minutes -- cut the twine that holds two round filters in the top of a bucket, put two new filters in, tie them in place. But last time, I tried to devise a filter around the output hose; it doesn't fit tight in the exit hole, and the pump draws water through there as well as the filters. It was obvious that the hose filter wasn't working as I'd hoped, so I tried to modify it by sewing the slits tight at the sides of the hose. (I had thought the suction of the pump would draw the slits inward, but no, they seemed to have separated instead.) Sounds easy enough -- but I was working in a restricted area (at the end of the hose, so I couldn't lift it up to a higher working area), in 95^o temps (35 for those who use Celsius), with flies swarming my legs and arms. GAH!!! So, the 10-minute job took 80 minutes.

But I'm cautiously hopeful that I've make the filters more efficient. We'll see...

china_shop

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%)

celli

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the_shoshanna

It's always been a while. I wish I posted more regularly. And who is to blame for that, I ask ~~you~~ me?

Yesterday Geoff and I went kayaking for the first time this year -- almost; he went with a friend last weekend while I went hiking with a different friend, but this was my first time this season and our first time together. This was also my first time with my new kayak! He wanted to upgrade our kayaks but couldn't find one he fitted comfortably in, so in the end I got a shiny new one -- longer and lighter than my old one, cuts through the water more cleanly -- and he is taking my old one, which although a bit clunky is still lighter than his old one. He's trying to sell his old one, but no bites so far, apparently. Anyway, we got out on the water for two hours and saw goslings, and cygnets, and even a baby loon with its mama! We've only seen a loon once before, so that was really special. (The chick was swimming on its own, not riding on its mom.) Also, the first clutch of cygnets we saw were young enough that one parent huddled at the edge of the reeds with them while the other came out to meet us and warn us off; when Geoff got a little closer than it liked, it rushed him with great flapping wings! No actual contact, but the message was clear and we rapidly paddled away. The second clutch we saw were a little older and were out on the water in an adorable toddling line between the parents, and we were able to pass by them rather closer than we'd been to the first family without anybody getting upset.

(Loon chicks don't seem to have a special name? We tried to think of one: Geoff suggested "lunatics" and I counterproposed "lunettes," French for "glasses.")

I've just finished going through the most recent season of Yellowjackets for the second time, since I've been watching it with two friends on slightly offset schedules. It continues to keep me riveted without being what I'd call "a good show"? I love how Shauna has been slowly revealed (yes, I know it's probably more like "how the writers have slowly changed their minds about Shauna" but I'm living in Watsonia here, okay) and we keep hoping that all the spouses and kids are safely off somewhere starting a mutual support and therapy group, never to be seen again. I'm dying to know where Melissa will turn up next, and what Jeff and Cally are going to do. (Poor Jeff and Cally.) I'm still not entirely sure which Taissa we've been seeing all season. And I love it when the teen and adult versions of the characters get to interact. I admire how the show has managed to hedge its bets on the supernatural-or-not? question for so long (I hope it's not), I'm delighted that we've finally wrapped around to the beginning of the show, and I really hope the mystery of the weird symbol does get explained in the end. The show was originally planned for five seasons, but it's hard to see how they could keep it going that long; I will be quite content if they wrap it up in the fourth season, especially since the alternative will be biting my nails hoping they actually get a fifth! I just hope they do actually wrap it up...

Having finished YJ, I'm now watching Interview with the Vampire with one friend (new to both of us) and Shetland with the other (a rewatch for me, but it's been a while). IwtV is slow-moving and sometimes I wonder why I'm interested, but I am, and now that previously unadmitted mysteries seem to be being hinted at I am more intrigued... (No spoilers, please! I read the original novel in like 1982, and saw the original movie when it came out, but remember basically nothing of either of them [except that I remembered for decades the stupid way in which movie-Claudia's hair curled when she was turned].) And I love Shetland and the way that (after a shaky bit at the end of the Perez stories) it refocused to center on my girl Tosh and our new DI Ruth Calder. I mean, it basically did what I wistfully hoped the fourth season of Ted Lasso would do: waved goodbye to the dudes and settled in to tell a story centering women. I absolutely adore Tosh.

I'm doing a bunch of traveling this summer, which used to be par for the course but is excitingly new since the pandemic! I had that brief trip to Virginia in May, and then my inlaws had two (TWO) family reunions in Quebec, and now I'm leaving on Friday for almost three weeks in the States, visiting friends, some of whom I haven't seen in years. I'm excited! And then (after my stepmother visits here for four days) Geoff and I are going on our first big trip since the Before Times, spending two weeks in Wales! I'm even more excited about that, and also somewhat intimidated; I'm out of practice at managing logistics for this kind of thing, plus the first week is going to involve some rather challenging hiking. And of course I am still afraid of COVID. But we're both over sixty, we won't be able to travel like this forever even in the best-case scenario, and COVID isn't going away, so we want to do this travel while we can. We're still going to take as many precautions as we reasonably can.

And I'm not reading much that's meaty, but last night I remembered that I was halfway through World War Z and picked it up again, which was a mistake at ten pm; I read for a while, freaked myself out, and had to do crossword puzzles for a while before trying to go to sleep, so today I am le tired.

vaguely political stuff

I mentioned to a Canadian friend the the day that I was about to go to the States, and she got that look you get when someone tells you someone has died and said, "Oh, I'm so sorry." I keep thinking I can't reel any more and then there's more. The volunteer work I was doing so much of last year for the Movement Voter Project is slowly beginning to start up again; two different people in the group have independently asked me to develop a training program to teach other people to do the kind of Zoom tech support that I do for them. (I'm not the only person who does that work, but they tell me I'm the best 😊) I don't have time to do that right now -- look at all my travel! -- but I brain-dumped a whole bunch of tips and advice for the first person, who has written them up and will incorporate them into a training she'll do, and told the second person to connect with the first. And the work itself will really start up again in the fall, when I'll be back and ready to take it on.

runpunkrun

A good old fashioned young adult novel about being stranded on an inhospitable planet and struggling to live off a steadily declining cache of resources. In one case, it's an alien world far in the future, and in the other, the dying Earth those colonists left, where the last inhabitants are about to extinguish themselves through nuclear war. Ah, children's lit.

This is actually a sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, but if you're a chaos demon you might be able to read this without having read the first. Partly because it stands on its own while gently reminding the reader what happened in the first book, but also because it fully retreads some of the same ground.

Because half of this book was telling me stuff I already, basically, knew, I was much more interested in the sections on the alien planet with its frontier survival vibes and foreign mysteries. I wanted to spend all my time there rather than on Earth, since I already knew that was a lost cause, and any new information we got in those sections could have easily been worked into the future segments and much of it, in fact, was. But it wasn't a chore to spend time with the original versions of Ambrose and Kodiak as they come to terms with the lies they've been told and try to undo some of the damage they caused, and together the two parts of this book tell a full story that comes to a satisfying conclusion, whether or not there's ever a third book in the series. But if there is, I'll be there.

Contains: queer dads; child harm and references to child death; wild animal harm/death; mental illness with intrusive thoughts; gun violence; nuclear apocalypse; climate disaster.

vaznetti

On Wednesday, even!

Almost finished: Ombria in Shadow, Patricia McKillip: This is one of my favorite McKillips and one I reread frequently. I feel like the worldbuilding is more distinctive than some of her other works from this period, maybe because it's set in a decaying city which is vividly sketched in. It also feels a lot more dangerous and high-stakes than some of her later work, at least to me, and I love Mag and Lydea and Faey. I still do not entrely understand what is going on at the end but that certainly is typical of this phase of McKillip's writing.

Midway: Cato the Younger, Fred K. Drogula. I forgot that I owned a copy of this so I was particularly delighted to find it on the shelf. I think it's very good; Drogula does a fine job of maintaining his impartiality while making it perfectly clear what kind of person Cato was, and how much responsiblity he bears for the collapse of the Roman Republic through sheer bloody-minded assholeishness. But he also isn't presenting Cato as a simplistic, moralistic figure: he was also very good at navigating and directing Roman politics in his lifetime, and Drogula also does a good job explaining why the system was perhaps particularly vulnerable to manipulation by men like Cato (or Caesar, his nemesis.)

fox

Nobody, boss included, wants this, but it's not impossible I will be laid off in a month's time.
My mother's mental acuity is slipping; my brother thinks he may think it's worse than I think it is because I see her every week and he, although he talks to her every day, only sees her in person every few months. Likewise the director of her assisted living facility has just returned from a short vacation and called my brother yesterday to say if they were seeing her for the first time now, they'd think memory care rather than assisted living was probably the best place for her. Put another way, the call scheduled for the three of us tomorrow afternoon is definitely going to be about how it's time to plan to move her over to memory care when a place in that wing opens up. She's not going to like that, of course, but I was surprised by how strongly I didn't like it—the wave of NO that I felt in my whole body, a physical wash of Kubler Ross denial. It was something. Rationally I know it's happening and I know keeping her safe and getting her the best care is going to involve changes and adaptations and so on, but wow, the fact that the ego and superego know that didn't stop the id going MOMMY!
On the up side, one of my favorite co-workers came in to talk about a work thing yesterday, in the course of which conversation I mentioned #1☝️, and at the very suggestion that the big boss might let me go, favorite co-worker said "Jeeesus Christ, he's lost his mind." That doesn't affect whether or not I'll keep my job, but it is good for the ego.
My brother's mother-in-law is also not well, so my sister-in-law is going out this weekend to help her (because her sister, who lives near their mom, happens to be away this weekend), meaning my brother is going to have to bail on a family wedding; he and I were both already going to leave our families behind, as the bride is our cousin's daughter and our spouses nor kids don't really know almost anyone up there, so now it looks like I'll be the sole representative of my mom's node of the family tree. (The bride's-grandmother's-sister node is often not well represented, I'm sure.) My nephew is almost 15 and would be perfectly safe in the house by himself for a couple of days, but he wouldn't be comfortable with it, and of course it's right for his father not to know that and ditch him anyway. I said "You could bring him with you?"—but a last-minute plane ticket and an extra guest the caterer hadn't known about, nah; I said "You could ship him to my house?" (because the prince would love, love having an unexpected visit from his cousin, oh my gosh)—but even as I said it I went on to say that wouldn't really be fair to spring on Himself, outside of a true emergency—I could totally say "Listen, Nephew is coming to stay with us next weekend," and Himself wouldn't say "Why wasn't I consulted about this?", he'd say "Oh my God, what's happened?!" In short: My brother is staying home with his kid this weekend, which is the right decision but a bummer all around. (The much, much bigger bummer being that my sister-in-law's mother is doing as poorly as she is.)
The other bit of up side from yesterday is that when I got home from work and told Himself that my sister-in-law has to go be with her mom so my brother can't go to the wedding because nephew, etc., almost the first words out of his mouth were "He could come stay here?" ❤️❤️❤️ He went on to have a whole text-message conversation about that with my brother while I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and the end result was the same (my brother is staying home with his kid this weekend), but the fact that Himself went directly to "I can take him" without even the merest hint of a suggestion from me made me so happy. SO happy.
Only then I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and on the way home I started feeling a sort of light-headed vertigo feeling that does happen to me sometimes—most recently on the way home from grocery shopping on Saturday—but usually just for a split second, which I don't like, especially when I'm driving, but it really is normally less than the time it takes to blink twice and I don't think an awful lot more about it. Yeah but: Yesterday it came on partway home and didn't go away. I was able to see clearly and concentrate on the road, and my reaction time was fine with respect to signaling, steering, braking, all the things you need to do to drive safely, but it was absolutely terrifying and the minute we got home I told Himself about it and insisted that he do the driving this afternoon (and maybe all the driving until I know what the fuck is happening to my head?!). He suggested maybe my blood sugar was low and asked me to eat about a teaspoon of sugar straight, which in his experience is like a shot of adrenaline, so I did, and nothing happened. I ate a little dinner, though I didn't have much appetite, and that didn't help. I drank some water and that didn't change anything either. Took my blood pressure: 128/86. No fever. I emailed my doctor to tell her this whole tale and conclude with "?!!!?!??!?", and Himself said if I wasn't planning to take an Ativan at bedtime he really thought I should.
[gestures at the world in general and at our federal government in particular]
Someone in one of my Discords mentioned that in a recent protracted panic attack of theirs, one of their main symptoms had been vertigo, which reinforced Himself's Ativan suggestion. I told my usual Tuesday evening dS-watching Discord that I was going to bail and go to bed early, and they offered to punt this week's episode to next week, and I said no need to do that because of me (the responsibility of everyone else's plans changing because my stress levels are making me crazy was also kind of stressful), and they said hey look, everyone who isn't Fox is fine with shifting to next week, decision made, off you go, feel better—and that made me cry a little, people being nice to me, which just goes to show that taking Ativan and going to bed early was the right decision.
Reader, I took the Ativan. I made up a little song to the tune of "Sodomy" from Hair, and then I slept soundly for the whole night. And this morning I feel—well, none of the stressy things have changed, but I feel like I slept well and I know I'm going to be making dinner this evening instead of driving on the freeway with my son in the middle of a dizzy spell, so that's a little better.
Here's my song:

Ativan,
Lexapro,
Gabapentin,
Buproprion,
Doctor - what pills am I even on?
Medication
Can be fun!
Join the Holy Order Pharma Sutra,
Everyone!

You're welcome.

lunabee34

( House of Mirth, Courtesans, Janisse Ray, medieval poetry )

rydra_wong

Via

troyswann, this new comm:

fan_writers comm - for meta about writing

A grey-scale banner showing a handwritten page with edits on one side, and hands typing on a laptop on the other. The centre text reads '@fan_writers.dreamwidth.org - talking about writing'.

dine

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torachan

1. Long day of driving going to San Diego today, but it was a much more pleasant visit than the last few times as things do seem to be improving in the store.

2. The guys came and fixed the back screen door today. I'm so used to dealing with the broken door that it's weird to have it working properly again, but I'm sure I'll get used to that again soon enough.

3. Ollie is such a chonker.