thedarlingone: black cat in front of full moon in dark blue sky (Default)
[personal profile] thedarlingone
So as some of you may have noticed, I have put up a sticky post with screened comments to serve the general function of a Tumblr askbox. Somehow that feels less intrusive than having to message someone, I don't know why. I was going to do an ask meme to sort of inaugurate the new askbox, but frankly the only person who really tends to answer my askmemes is [personal profile] brin_bellway and I still owe her from the last three I did on Tumblr, so uhhh. XD



brin-bellway said:
A selection of questions from the two ask memes you posted, uh, eight days ago (oops): "What unusual talent do you have?"; "Describe your aesthetic"; "What is the best fandom you’ve ever been involved in?"; "Who was your first OTP and are they still your favourite?"; "What is your all time favourite fanfic?"


...oops. XD This was from back in August. Timing is not one of my strong points.

* What unusual talent do you have? -- Proofreading for sure. Words have such a specific shape in my head. When I'm properly rested, I can glance at a whole page of text and a misspelled word will just nag at me. I try to use my superpower for good instead of being a nuisance... ^_^

* Describe your aesthetic: "Insufficiently organized to have a consistent gender presentation". Also insufficiently rested, too poor, and the wrong shape. It's very expensive to have an aesthetic when you're fat. ;P If I wore anything besides t-shirts and sweatpants, though, I'd like to aim for this one silhouette that's sort of like a fusion of the Dior New Look and lolita fashion. It's tailored on top, styled like a shirtdress or uniform, but full-skirted with the hourglass waist. But I'd need a lot of understructure for it, and I don't even know where to start looking, anyway.

* What is the best fandom you've ever been involved in? -- Aww, I'm gonna be really sappy and say my current fandom, Star Wars: X-Wing. It consists of something like six writers, three artists, and an indeterminate number of readers who don't leave comments (I am also guilty of not leaving comments, I will admit), but it's lovely and adorable and super friendly and the Discord is this super tight-knit community.

* Who was your first OTP and are they still your favorite? -- Uhhhh. I've never really been much of a shipper? Like I guess I am more now but um. My first OTP. Uh, I read a lot of Sam/Jack back in SG-1, but I'm not sure that was as much an OTP as... you know, the only available het ship, and me being a good little homophobe and not reading slash. *pulls hair* Maybe Doctor/TARDIS? Sapphire/Steel? There's a reason [personal profile] thisbluespirit once wrote me a computer orgy. I tend to go for pairings where the definitions of sex and/or romance get very blurry. Honestly Wes/Hobbie is one of the most... normal pairings I've ever shipped, in that both partners are definitely human and not in any way superpowered, and even they have a near-telepathic connection that makes a scene of them flying together a hell of an intimate thing to write. Also Wes is probably the closest to a canonically aromantic allosexual character that I've ever seen. That probably didn't answer the question.

* What is your all-time favorite fanfic? -- Oh dear god. I can't pick! I have way too many fandoms, let alone fanfics in them. Uh. I've been thinking about doing more rec posts, I'll just let those stand in for this question for now.

brin-bellway said:
7 ("What did you last eat?"), 12 ("Have you ever stayed up 48 hours?"), 58 ("Favourite weather?")


* What did you last eat? -- Black olives. I'm trying to eat low-carb because of the diabetes, so my snacks are... interesting.

* Have you ever stayed up 48 hours? -- Uh. If I did, it was because I was extremely depressed and not really forming memories. My depression tends to come as either staying up till all hours or sleeping all the time, there's not an in-between.

* Favourite weather? -- I like lots of kinds of weather! I used to always cite the sort of "October's bright blue weather" kind of days, when everything is very clear and the air is just a little crisp and the leaves are bright, but we get so much sunshine here that I'm becoming a lot more fond of the mizzling sort of days where you stay in and drink hot cocoa and it's just gray and rainy out. "A soft day", somebody used to call it. And I always love me a good windstorm, not a sandstorm but just super windy, like you could blow away on it. And when it's raining so damn hard that you can go outside and just get immediately soaked to the skin. And snow, I miss the fuck out of snow.

brin-bellway said:
For post/180289372721/get-in-my-business-please: 9, 17, 28, 63, 87


* 9. Tattoos I want: So I keep thinking about this one. I'd like a grayscale tattoo of the M-8 Avenger from Mass Effect, probably the ME2 version with the scope rather than the ME3, and I can picture it really clearly, about three inches long and sort of shaded with a pointillism effect, but I don't know where to put it. One option is on the inside of my forearm just below my elbow, pointing along my arm with the muzzle toward my hand. Another option, which would be a little less of a problem with Looking Professional, is horizontal on my ribs an inch or two below bra-band level, but I like that idea less because then it would be harder for me to see it. Honestly, given how badly I reacted to having my ears pierced - I left the piercer earrings in for two years and they never did heal up properly - I'm a little dubious about trying to get a tattoo at all in case I turned out to be horribly allergic to something in the ink or my body would just outright reject it. Like it would be awful to have a constantly infected tattoo after I spent all that time and money and effort trying to get it just right. I also haven't decided whether to have just the Avenger or like some kind of a banner with a quote around it, "A stubborn enough person can survive just about anything." Like in my head the tattoo kind of means the quote, I don't know that it needs the quote also, but having just a random tattoo of a video game gun... seems a bit odd. Like I'm not sure what kind of a message it gives.

Then the other one I keep thinking about is some kind of a yin-yang or similar symbol, something about chaos and balance, but I haven't found quite the right design yet. Also that one goes on the inside of my left wrist (I'm not sure why), so I suspect it will hurt like all hell. And it might need to be red, and I know a lot of red pigments are really fugitive so it would probably need a lot of touching up.

* 17. A fact about my life: Brin already knows this, but the oddest fact about my life that fits into one sentence is that I once officially lived in four states, three of them noncontiguous, within the same calendar month, and had mailing addresses in all four. (I also spent two days of that month entirely on Greyhound buses. It was a weird month.)

* 28. Favorite ice cream? -- Uh. It used to be peppermint crunch or Butterfinger. Ben and Jerry's does a couple of versions of mint chocolate that I really like but can't usually find. Not that I'm able to eat a lot of ice cream these days anyway.

* 63. Have you ever touched a snake? -- Yes! I always worry that I'll hurt them, but it's a very interesting texture and feeling. And some of them have checkerboard tummies. SNEK :D

* 87. Have you ever sat on a roof top? -- Yup. My aunt's roof was flat and I helped her paint it, or coat it with some sort of rubberized sealant that acted like paint. I hate working on roofs though. Anything over my own height above the ground sets off my fear of heights / that irrational impulse to jump.

Date: 2019-01-14 04:50 am (UTC)
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
From: [personal profile] brin_bellway
I, too, have been thinking of putting up a screened askbox sticky and doing an ask meme to inaugurate it.

---

>>If I wore anything besides t-shirts and sweatpants, though<<

Every so often I see people refer to T-shirts and sweatpants as being generic casual clothing, and I always find it odd. How does that work? The outdoor temperature ranges at which I wear T-shirts and at which I wear sweatpants do not overlap at all, unless I'm going for a medical procedure for which they need easy access to my arm (in which case I put a hoodie over the T-shirt as *well* as the winter coat, so it's almost like wearing a suitably wintery shirt but easier to take off when you get there).

I can handle indoor sweatpants pretty well unless it's a weird indoors, but otherwise I overheat wearing sweatpants if it's more than about 55 - 60 F.

(And for that matter, I don't get how anyone wears any pants *other* than sweatpants in winter: if it's below freezing or so nothing else will do, at least not comfortably or for long periods of time. On days when it's only a little below freezing I walk to work in my uniform leggings and suffer (sometimes jogging just so I can reach the warmth faster), and on particularly cold days I wear snow pants on top of the leggings.

...maybe the lack of sweatpants in cold weather would make more sense if I wore jeans? Are jeans good at dealing with cold?)

---

>>I'm trying to eat low-carb because of the diabetes, so my snacks are... interesting.<<

Would you like some ideas from my mom's selection of diabetic-friendly recipes, and if so, with what restrictions? (Like, almond-cheddar biscuits are great, but almond meal is a bit expensive (and so is cheddar if you don't replenish your cheddar stock during sales) and there is some mixing and baking involved.)

---

>>Brin already knows this<<

:)

That was a very strange month, yes. At least you got to participate in Rolling Up the Rim to Win during what little time you spent in the vicinity of a Tim Hortons.

Date: 2019-01-26 02:53 am (UTC)
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
From: [personal profile] brin_bellway
>>I carry most of my body fat between my waist and my knees, so what kind of pants I'm wearing doesn't really... affect how warm my legs feel, at least down to knee level, because I'm insulated anyway.<<

Good point. Mom's around your size, and her pants *are* rather thinner than mine.

---

I have no experience with preparing pork, so I can't help you much with that part. Though I *do* know that Mom has been known to buy cans of deviled ham and treat them pretty much like she would canned tuna (mix with mayonnaise, put on whole-grain tortilla or bran cracker).

I recommend a bit of caution with tuna: as I understand it one can safely eat it once or twice a week indefinitely, but Mom has been eating it ~6 - 8 times a week for decades and last week we found out that she may in fact have chronic mercury poisoning, oops.

Mom buys Margherita brand turkey pepperoni in New York. She likes to eat it with cheese. It's refrigerate-after-opening, so you'd only need space in the mini-fridge for at most one 4oz packet at a time.

---

I asked Mom what she would advise, and received this email in response:

Is this the sort of thing you're looking to send her†? I can't really think of any recipes for someone who only has a microwave. I know in some locations there are low carb frozen dinners she could microwave but they are expensive and the portions are not very big.

Nuts - macadamia are the lowest carb, but expensive, peanuts are the highest carb but probably the cheapest nut on the market. Peanut butter is ok, but some brands have a lot of sugar in them, so read the labels.

Seeds - pumpkin, sunflower etc

Canned meat & fish - tuna only twice/week because of the mercury content (feel free to tell your friend about my newly discovered mercury issue)

Jerky and other shelf stable meats like pepperoni or beefsticks - like peanut butter you have to check the labels because some of them have a lot of sugar in them

Deli meats - check the labels for the same reason as above, some of them are fine and others are not. Avoid anything that says it is honey roasted or teriyaki flavored.

Hummus

Cheeses - most cheeses only have a trace of carbs in them. Read the labels on cheese spreads. Most of the savory spreads are ok, but something like strawberry cream cheese has a lot of sugar.

Eggs - some stores sell hard boiled eggs near their quick meals/take out section.

Low carb crackers - look for ones high in fiber. My favorites are Bran-A-Crisps or Swedish crisp bread, but Wasa cracker and Finn Crisps are pretty good, too. You can put peanut butter, hummus or cheese spread on these.

Low carb tortillas

Pickles and olives

Veggies - most vegetables are ok, avoid the starchy ones like corn, peas and potatoes, and the other root vegetables like turnips, parsnips and beets. Substitute scallions where you'd use onions and go easy on carrots. Summer squashes are ok, winter squashes MAY be ok, depending on how you react to them.

Fruit - most fruit is not good when you're trying to get your blood sugar under control. Cut it all out initially, then add in avocado and berries. If those don't cause blood sugar spikes, you can add in melons, except watermelon. Fruit has been a very "trial and error" category for me.

Fats - use them, a lot. Don't buy fat free or reduced fat products.

Avoid - pasta, rice, bread and anything sweet.


The mention of sweets reminds me of the existence of Lindt 90%-cocoa chocolate. If you haven't adjusted to low-carbing yet it can seem bitter, but I hear once your tongue has lost its sugar tolerance it's quite good. There are also special low-carb candies made with sugar alcohol, but note that sugar alcohol is a laxative so you can't safely have more than one or two a day. Mom tends to eat 2 - 4 squares of Lindt most evenings, and only buys sugar-alcohol candy on special occasions.

---

†The way conversations involving you usually go pronoun-wise is that I call you "they" (and "Jesse"), she calls you "she", I do not correct her but continue calling you "they", she eventually notices that I am calling you "they" and tries to switch but immediately forgets again. This time Dad was around and I trust him somewhat less††, so I ended up following suit on the "she".

††Dad is liberal, but has not always kept up with advances in liberal thought since the 80's.

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