thedarlingone

fred_mouse

Today (Tuesday)

second day of uni - more focused. Met two other PhD students, and a said hello to another who didn't actually talk to me, so I'm not sure if they are staff or student (we are in a locked office space, because of research reasons, which is quite nostalgic. The card scanner makes the same beep as the ones at the Telethon Institute did)
I'm kind of keeping up with other parts of my life, but not in any way that makes it look like I have my shit together. The lounge has a teetering mound of clean washing, there is a pile of stuff on the bed I need to sort before I can go to sleep (by which I think I mean 'dump back on the floor'). I've taken some of the necessities in to the new office, and tomorrow I'll organise a locked cubby for keeping things in, which means I can bring any books in that make sense.

Yesterday

Didn't quite make it to bed before 11pm last night, but it was close. Awoke naturally at 6:50am, which meant that I could relax for a little bit and laze about until the alarm went off. I didn't, in the end, getting up after about 2 minutes, and getting in the shower.
Past me had a work day morning packing checklist, which was greatly appreciated this morning, as there were a couple of things that I would otherwise have forgotten. There are a couple of items that I've managed to misplace, and maybe I'll have time to sort them tonight, but I'm not optimistic about that. I was enough slow getting ready that I missed the 7:45am bus, so artisanat dropped me at the train station. Youngest gave me two options for public transport from there--either the circle route (longer, relies on Leach Hwy not being clogged), or train to Canning Bridge and either the 100 or 101 bus. I did the latter, and once I found the right stand at the interchange, got the first bus that came past.
Good meeting with supervisors, I have ideas of what is to come. I spent more time sorting out logging in to things than I had allowed for, including a trek to the library IT help desk, where it turned out that what I was assuming was one problem turned out to be four separate issues, one of which was solved by changing my password in Outlook. I also went and asked questions of the Library Helpdesk person, who gave me a personalised tour of all the things on the Library Webpage that might be of use to me, and pointed at things to follow up.

Sunday

Went boating on the river with buggs_jenny, their partner P, and their parents (G, K). This was a somewhat last minute invite, they organised for there to be a kayak for me to use, and I had a lot of fun. I hadn't allowed for the timing of how it would all fit together with the fact that it was a recorder group Sunday so it was a bit of a rush to head off and I didn't help with the clean up. I now have to work out how to get involved and go more often (this is not an every weekend thing; I could at best do the off weeks from recorder) given that the car we are looking to sell is the one with the roof racks, but I can't get our kayak on to it on my own. Although, having said that, it is some years since I've moved that kayak and I have no idea how heavy it is relative to my current strength--it is possible that all the shoulder work that I've been doing would be enough.
Recorder with G and ariaflame; L has injured their shoulder and P isn't yet back from visiting their sibling in the eastern states. G is now calling us the A minors; I gather this is a joke that is related to the name of another group they are in. We worked through several trios that I'm not sure that aria has seen before, with some swapping around of parts so that they were sight-reading the easier of the C recorder parts (ie. soprano or tenor).
Dinner with chaosmanor. One of those weeks where it turns out that we have gone through the veggie stash much faster than usual, and I under measured the amount of cabbage to cut to fill the gap for the stir fry. Fortunately, chaosmanor wasn't all that hungry, artisanat was out dancing and got dinner there, and Youngest and Eldest are able to raid the fridge if they are still hungry. And I had had one serve of each of the options at afternoon tea at recorder - G had made two things, and aria had brought one, and I have no ability to resist that kind of temptation. Particularly when G had made a serving specifically for me, because they had made a Bakewell tart (which is similar to the version I make but didn't have coconut in, which might mean that I've conflated two recipes) but had realised at the last minute that their pastry wasn't GF, and had cooked a generous serve in a ramekin.

sovay

It would be neither entirely fair nor completely accurate to say that the second season of Andor (2022–25) holocausted too close to the sun for my tolerance, but it got a lot closer than I had thought was possible.

( Nervous, tired, desensitized. )

tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.

Current Music: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, "Idiot Box"

viridian5

HBO has a 3-episode documentary series called The Mortician. Episode 1 has some horrifying events and you think you know the basic shape of how things will get worse and who's involved. Episode 2? Mwahahaha. Surprise! I'm curious to see how the final episode goes.

Otherwise, I'm enjoying today's birthday gifts: a top, 3 CDs (Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism and Plans, and Jack's Mannequin's The Glass Passenger) and this keychain.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: "A Lack of Color" by Death Cab for Cutie

sovay

Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.

Current Music: Clover County, "Ultraviolet"

pedanther

I've been experimenting with my journal entries in the last week or two, ( Read more... )

We had a family get-together for the public holiday, ( Read more... )

The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions ( Read more... )

I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. ( The next bit involves injections )

I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: ( Read more... )

( Movies current - Ocean - and upcoming - including ) Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.

I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. ( Read more... )

I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: ( Read more... )

I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. ( Read more... )

I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)

pedanther

#17: Read a book with a title that starts with the same letter as the last name of the previous book's author.

First attempt: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore, a collection of sword & sorcery stories that were first published in Weird Tales in the 1930s alongside the likes of Conan the Barbarian, but have the historical distinction of being written by a woman and having a female protagonist. (The first story has one of those openings where it spends a couple of pages describing a heroic armoured figure before the helmet comes off and everyone, presumably including the original readers, is surprised she's a woman.)( Read more... )

Second attempt: John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant by Raymond Lamont-Brown. ( Read more... )

Third attempt, for the sake of moving things along, was Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, which is a lot shorter and less complicated than the movie it inspired, but still fun. I appreciated the turn it took at the end.

#18: Read a book in the same genre as the previous book.

Taking the genre as "short, plentifully illustrated children's book featuring animals", I opted for The Animals Noah Forgot by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson, which also counts for the June prompt in the Buzzword challenge (a word in the title related to remembering or forgetting). ( Read more... )

fred_mouse

working on Eldest's 21st quilt (yes, it is very overdue). Worked out what is needed, what I have, how the colours are going to be picked for the sections that I'm adding (because the original had a large square of white in the top left corner, so I've started the pattern at the third row, and have to add two rows at the bottom).
today's goal was to identify pieces for four blocks (of the remaining 24), stretch goal to sew them, extra stretch goal to finish assembling that strip (combining rows 5/6 into a single piece). I stalled out at identifying what fabric was suitable for the current set of blocks -- there are so many pieces!
Old Shanghai for the traditional post-con Wednesday gathering. There was some lamentation at the lack of pancakes, and conclusion that the last Pancake place had closed a decade ago.

fred_mouse

With the dramatic change in how I spend my weeks upon me, I'm revisiting Habitica to see what needs doing. I did a bit of a tweak last week, working through my habits list and deciding what was good. I haven't posted that here, because it needed editing, and at this point it is unlikely that I will. However, what do I have in dailies, and how am I going to change it?

Daily journal - this is going just fine, and it is important to my daily process for getting things done; keep
progress at least one to-do - I haven't been making good use of the to-do list, so this has been an issue. Making it optional, possibly to delete.
Tuesdays: weekly update on annual goals - I miss this as often as I achieve it, but it is a useful reminder; keep
read things 'today' list - I haven't been doing this consistently, but it is useful when I do; keep
update the 100 days document with today's small tasks - useful reminder; making it optional
Minimum progress on current project; list of craft projects - delete; make a habit* for 'craft'. I want to keep it, I have a 67 day streak, but I just can't guarantee that I'll be doing it daily, and having it as an intermittent habit is better than beating myself up.
read a book (physical, ebook, doesn't matter) - another one with a good streak, although only 36 days, but can't continue to commit, so moving it to habits.
check notes files for anything I can progress - this is a valuable reminder; I don't want to move it to a habit, making it optional. This is because I have a long term goal of getting everything out of notes and into more sensible locations -- I use the notes app for whatever I need to record Right Now.
Delete anything out of DW inboxes -- useful reminder, but I now at least look at the inbox every day, so deleting
read three emails - useful reminder, does help a little. 53 day streak. Keeping for now, might make optional or delete if it is still too much
update email and safari tabs spreadsheet - the spreadsheet was working as a motivation for while, but now it isn't. I still have it open, and maybe I'll update, but this isn't important. Delete
read at least one page of a drawing book (optional) - I've kind of abandoned this at the moment. I might take the drawing journal to uni with me, and take it places on my lunch break, but I want that to be more relaxed. Delete.
blog post (optional) -- I don't think that aiming to post daily is a good idea going forward. While I wasn't working/studying, it kept me focused on what I was doing, but I'll have other things for that. Delete.

That leaves 7 daily activities, of which journal, reading the to do list and checking emails are required. My notes suggested adding a zotero related task, but I think I'm going to put that in habits instead.

* The advantage of moving things to habits is that on days that I do a lot of whatever, I can tick them off multiple times.

sovay

For the seventy-first yahrzeit of Alan Turing, I have been listening to selections from the galaxy-brained fusion of Michael Vegas Mussmann and Payton Millet's Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (2025) as well as the glitterqueer mad science of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024). Every year I discover new art in his memory, like Frank Duffy's A lion for Alan Turing (2023). Lately I treasure it like spite. The best would be countries doing better by their queer and trans living than their honored and unnecessary dead.

Current Music: Kele Fleming, "Turing Test"

fred_mouse

I really haven't been putting much effort into tracking things here; my last post about it was 10th of May. At that point I had finished 2 projects of the 10 I'm hoping for, and made good progress on three. I've not finished anything else since, but I have made good progress on some

Previous good progress

towel rail - has not been progressed. I need a day a) without rain and b) that I have multiple hours available and c) (most importantly) that I remember this needs doing
door mat(s) - I've used up all the existing 'yarn' and I have half a rag rug. Every time I am surprised by how much 'yarn' it takes. I need to work out where I stashed the rest of the strips while we had a houseguest, and assemble more.
Teach myself to draw - this has stalled. I keep misplacing my drawing book or the sketch book I'm using, or the pencil. I need to get a better process.

Progressed since

pink / white / brown crochet blanket -- crochet finished, sewing in the ends. I think I'm half done on the ends?
brown / green knit -- this gets 4-6 rows roughly every second Thursday (when we game online) plus I've sat and worked on it while listening to podcasts.
T's jumper - a handful of rows. I need to make sure to do this every second day at least
blue / white virus blanket - I've finished the first of the two balls I had left, now on to the last one. It is just shy of 70cm square, and I'm on the 13th repeat of the pattern. I suspect this is the last repeat, based on available yarn. Hopefully I have enough to finish.
Eldest's quilt - I have laid it out, I have worked out what is needed to finish it. I have made and joined four blocks and worked out that I was doing something different from the book, and now those are going to be the front of a cushion, just as soon as they aren't attached to the quilt any more (basically, I'm adding 1/2" to each so the finished size is 9.5" rather than 9", but hadn't noted that down anywhere).
Knitting for Kitties - using up a couple of balls of yarn; the green one is done, and we have handed three squares over to purrdence

I'm reasonably happy with this progress. It is possible that either the knitting for kitties or the virus blanket will be finished next, because those are relatively portable. The former lives in my handbag; the latter is going to go in my uni bag (it is possible I will mostly stop carrying the handbag, because it doesn't fit a lunch or a laptop)

sovay

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Most Wanted Man"

sovay

As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.

Current Music: Sam Fender, "Tyrants"

soc_puppet posting in

queerly_beloved

Power's out at my house, so I'm going extra minimal today 😅

Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

bookblather

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

viridian5

Seeing as how I'm not going to chance gimping around cemeteries in a podiatric boot for a while with how uneven the ground can be in places, I decided to post a bunch of photos I haven't yet from past visits to First Calvary Cemetery, most of them from May 2021, as well as a few more from last week. Thus, I have 15 new photos up at my Flickr.

+++

Anime I'm currently watching:
Oshi no Ko season 2
The Dangers in My Heart [Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu] season 2
2.5 Dimensional Seduction [Nitengo-jigen no Ririsa]
Ao-chan Can't Study [Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai]

I recently finished season one of I Parry Everything: What Do You Mean I'm the Strongest? I'm Not Even an Adventurer Yet!

Current Mood: hot

fred_mouse

This anonymous comment over on fandomsecrets made me laugh:

"But we didn't have cable growing up, just 4 or 5 channels on the TV and kids shows were only on at certain times, plus we just didn't watch much."

I grew up in the city. There were three channels (ABC, 7, 9), until 1986, when SBS launched here. The addition of channel 10 in 1988 brought us to 5. Cable television wasn't a thing for most of that time. I believe that the regional areas had two channels. I presume that most of the remote areas had none.

I have no idea how old that commenter was, but the idea of 4 or 5 channels still feels like luxury. Even though I've (yet again) been reminded about just how long ago 1988 actually was.

ETA: also, the part of the city I grew up in was really close to the transmitters for at least two of those stations. Because of physics, some of my school friends couldn't get at least one of those stations at home, because they lived too close to the transmitters (and sometimes because there was terrain in the way)

viridian5

My right leg is killing me today far more than my sprained and fractured left ankle, because of the boot. Lots of new places hurt today as a result of the boot making me move and handle weights differently. Also, parts of my left leg hurt from the top and struts of the boot.

Around the house, I just tight-wrap the foot for compression and use a cane, because that way it's not too heavy for me to elevate it somewhat as I sit. I have the cane from a prior ankle injury.

Current Mood: tired

sovay

Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls

spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

( Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "A Library Used to Be (Black Hole and Its Concentrated Edges)"

sophia_sol

Since my last non-fic-related update here, there has been.....a lot. A lot going on!

Trialling a new medication that sapped my energy for doing much other than being anxious for two months straight

Started a project on doing a bunch of repainting walls and replacing baseboards which spiralled as projects always do and has been taking over so much of my spare time

Bird migration season, which means any spare time DOES actually need to go towards looking at birds

Redacted for reasons of not providing too much personally-identifiable information on the public internet, but some other stuff that's also been really time consuming

And between all that, it's been harder for me to keep up with dw, which is something that I find I'm only really able to do well when I'm doing well. And then I was SO behind that I was just like.....how do I even come back??

But! Maybe I just need to give myself amnesty. I haven't been keeping up with my dw reading page since early april and that's just gonna be what it's gonna be, and I will be reinvesting myself as of NOW.

And! I am doing a ridic thing to try to do better at handling my dw reading list, so that it isn't so hard for me to keep on top of! See, I really find it easier to keep up with long-form content if I don't feel like I have to commit to reading all posts no matter the length at the time when they're posted, and with dw if like to see what the latest posts are but want to be able to temporarily skip the longer posts when you're going through your reading page, then it's hard to come back later and find them again in the depths of previous pages. So I wanted to be able to add all the journals I follow to my RSS reader. It is technically possible to add someone's journal directly to an RSS reader, but you only see their public posts that way....so now, for ppl I follow, I have subscribed to get emails every time they post, and then (and this is the ridic work-around bit) I have used the newsblur function for adding e-newsletters to rss, to put those emailed post notifications into my RSS feed!

The emails just tell you the post title and tags and author, and don't contain the full text of the post, but I still really think this is a huge step in the right direction for me! RSS is how I am able to keep up with all the tumblrs I follow, and that has been very successful for me for years, so I think the experience will translate to these dw emails-to-rss. I'm very excited for this revolution in my dw experience.

Fingers crossed!

viridian5

Remember what my roommate said? Ha.

I have a sprain and a fracture. I walked around with no support for two miles on that yesterday before I could get home to ice and tight-wrap it for compression. Just tightened my shoe. It felt like usual low-grade sprain pain to me.

Glad I went to the podiatrist for X-rays today because I thought sensation in my toes was a bit off. I've sprained both ankles so many times I have actually lost count. Sometimes I don't even go to the doctor for it anymore.

I've had my ankles and feet X-rayed many times during a sprain situation, but this is the first time they found something. At the doctor's office I went right to the X-ray machine, without needing directions, from being such a veteran.

(In my near 52 years, this is my second fracture. Never had a full break. My first fracture was when a Volvo door closed on my thumb while I was in high school. That was agonizing. It didn't help that it tore off the fingernail and left a long wound that had to be stitched up.)

Today, I walked around with a big podiatric boot on my left foot for a while, and now my right calf is also killing me for compensating. They gave me a smaller boot this time, so it's a little lighter and it doesn't make life even harder by going all the way up to the bottom of my knee like my original did. Soooo, I have to spend four weeks in the boot.

Current Mood: sore

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thedarlingone

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Reading

Daily notes

All that skin against the glass

And try to tell the difference / Between shooting stars and satellites

I stay quiet, but I'm seeing ultraviolet

Week in review: Week to 7 June

Book Chain, weeks 12 & 13

[backdated] daily notes

Habitica

It's morphogenesis

[100 days] Craft project update

Finally, time to write the book on you

On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running

Thursday Recs

fridayfive

Another May

Perspectives

Look what you've done

I know it made your head spin, what we did with money

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