python

Books
So far this year (since January 1) I've read Margaret Killjoy's The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, listened to the audiobook of Alexandra Rowland's Running Close to the Wind, am reading Victoria Goddard's Plum Duff, and started Evelyn Araluen's The Rot.

Games
Quoting my own complaint elsewhere: the worst part of Hollow Knight is the runbacks. Each time my desktop switches itself off I need to turn it on again, restore my browser tabs and do other "just booted" chores, see what troubleshooting data I can get now, check what steps I can take next, then start the game again to find out whether whatever I tried this time worked. Then two minutes later my computer crashes.

Have also been doing Redactle and Squardle with

kaberett, and cryptic crosswords with

shehasathree.

Tech
As you may gather from the previous section of this post, I am having technical difficulties. So it goes.

Crafts
No active progress yet, but the yarn I ordered arrived. This is for weaving with my mother's old knitter's loom which she gave me for my birthday last year.

Actually, no, I'll share the complaints I emitted while trying to decide what yarn to order (huge thanks to Iphys on the Lays server for sorting me out on this.)

( cut for length )

Garden
No ripe tomatoes yet, but they're still alive. Raspberry bush looking very sad indeed. Harvested a little bit of parsley and oregano for cooking purposes.

Cats
Didn't enjoy the hot weather last week. Neither did I.

Nature
Hot and windy. (This is an understatement. Last week there was a heatwave and my whole state, as well as those nearest it, was at either "extreme" or "catastrophic" fire danger. I was in one of the "extreme" parts, and unpleasantly aware that on the fire danger scale they use, "catastrophic" is 100 out of 100. Meaning, your area can be at 99 and yet not catastrophic.)

It cooled down after that, but summer is very much not over, and there are places all over the state that are still on fire.

elainegrey

Disclaimer: my new year for goals and growth and change starts at the beginning of March because, ugh, darkness.

But happy new year! (Again) Because this is the first day back to work and so on, the year feels restarted even more today.

I celebrate that using strong ("Super-potent Ultra-high") steroids and antibiotics have brought great relief. I am cautiously optimistic, although i look forward to seeing the relief persist in the summer and in the midst of work stress.

I celebrate an insight from therapy that i may be bringing the sense of last year -- emergency on emergency -- to this year with C's upcoming surgery and the trip to Ohio. Instead of interpreting the energy of my colleagues as urgent critical -- thus emergency -- energy, i might try to interpret it as excitement enthusiasm.

Christine and i took a slightly delayed junket to Raleigh for a little more anniversary observation. The Gregg Museum of Art + Design had some powerful exhibits. The "In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers" wasn't as cool as i had hoped, but the cyanotypes on glass with gold gilding -- https://www.leahsobsey.com/thoreaus-flowers -- by Leah Sobsey were wonderful, as were also all the insects and pines that graced the entrance. I suspect my botanical interests wanted more; Christine thought it was great.

I hadn't expected ‘the halls of a changing sea’ and WORDS = POWER to be as moving as they were. WORDS = POWER was probably moving more in a meta-impression: queer and trans focused works up in a state (affiliated) institution stirred hope. ‘the halls of a changing sea’ also was a strong meta resonance with strong connections to plants and soil as well as queer identity. I look forward to experimenting with the soil of this place in my own way. Currently, what i want to do is carve a large chunk of the saprolite, rock so chemically weathered it is almost clay, soft and cuttable, yet still distinctly not clay. I want to set it on a raw log plinth and photography it regularly as it dissolves in the weather.

The museum had not existed when i was at State, but i had helped raise funds for it (as an undergraduate participant in the visual arts committee of the student activities program). As an undergraduate employee i did data entry, with the Avon perfume bottle collection most memorable. They still have them: http://searchgreggcollection.arts.ncsu.edu/mDetail.aspx?rID=1983.004.127a-b&db=objects&dir=GALLERYOFART&osearch=avon&list=res&rname=&rimage=&page=1

We also stopped at the used book store and exchanged a box of books we'd been hauling around, and then went to Krispy Kreme, which no longer has the diner-like counter, which i will always remember due to a poem someone wrote about meeting their best friend Jim Beam at the counter, and the professor Not Getting It. Much memory, very fun.

From oursin:

Grab the nearest book. Turn to page 126 The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

Phenology, Theresa M Crimmins "You can do this at your home by tracking daily temperatures and calculating accumulated growing degree days..."

Nifty!

vass

via

sanguinity

Grab the nearest book.
Turn to page 126
The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

Immortalized in ballads, they became a central part of the mythology of the Australian past.

Current Mood: i didn't try to game it
Current Music: i swear

vass

Heads-up re LiveJournal, if you haven't heard: if you still have stuff you care about there, you should probably save it now.

Yuletide reveal: I wrote A Night at the Opera for

mage-pie. I already knew them from Discord, and their prompts were very much in line with what I wanted to write. Good experience.

Tonight I unplugged my desktop, opened up the case, and gave it a clean. I am happy to say that it booted again afterwards. I haven't yet dared to try Hollow Knight again since, though. (What prompted me to do this was having the computer spontaneously shut down twice while I was playing Hollow Knight. In the same region.[*] It's a hot day, and heat plus not having cleaned the case since mumbleevermumble plus spontaneous shutdown while playing a game made me think "overheating".)

[* City of Tears, near the Watcher's Spire.]

elainegrey

Happy New Year! I had an overly quiet and still day yesterday, distracted by electrical bills and all the confusing riders and charges. My major accomplishment for the day was updating expiring debit cards across a variety of billing systems.

TIL that a satellite maximum altitude of 67° feels like it is going straight over my head (which would be 90°). Wow, are there many starlink satellites up there. I stepped out to open the deck door -- although Marlowe has no interest in being out in the dark -- and observed a satellite going overhead and through the big dipper. And another . I checked my watch and then after tea was made and pet feeding staged, checked Heavens Above to see what i saw. Fortunately it's passage through the big dipper was concrete enough that i could compare tracks against the stars and be confident.

Yesterday i made a chickweed and other yard green soup. There's an "earthy" quality -- spinach and beet greens have it too -- that is not my favorite. I added amchoor and pepper, which helped, i think. I find the plant annoying, little fiddly leaves and stringy tender stems, and soup where it is well blended seems the tolerable state. The other abundant green this time of year is Potentilla indica (Indian strawberry -- that's India Indian, not some mistaken notion of native American). It's also fiddly, and it's easier to get 100g of chickweed quickly compared to picking the leaves.

The cut leaf coneflower has some leaves out, but not really enough to do anything. The "forage kale" i tossed out as a cover crop -- turns out to have a really sharp mustardy taste. OK, that's why it's a cover crop seed. It was fine in small quantity garnishing my blackeyed peas last night. For Christine, i garnished with sorrel, which might have been not tender enough to be interesting. I have some endives that are surviving -- yowsa, bitter! Too bitter for me and i like bitter!

It's a good thing i'm not relying on my yard for food. The first few years here i had some good brassica beds: i would enjoy having some nice collards again.

claudeb

I was hoping to make this post in December, but there were too many distractions. Let it be my first journal of 2026.

Best thing I can say about last year is, I survived! That's a good energy to bring into the new one, because things are going to get worse before they get better.

Second best thing (almost forgot) was starting a paper journal, with a good old-fashioned fountain pen. Makes me feel more alive than in a long time.

My biggest regret in 2025 was failing to complete even one work of fiction. The furthest I went was 5K words into a new novelette, that looked extremely promising before it fizzled out. Wrote a lot of worldbuilding material for The Dream though, and made a lot of art as well. Some of the art fell flat. It can't be helped.

On the plus side I did a lot of web design, and grew my site network considerably. Changed my homepage to reflect that, too, but otherwise it meant largely neglecting it.

Last but not least, over the holidays I learned a new old thing. Resolving to learn even more in 2026, then use it all to make more cool stuff.

Enough talk. Let's get this party started.

P.S. Check out Dreamwidth's own small web community. It rocks!

Current Mood: awake

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February 2024

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