aldersprig | Entries tagged with personal

http://www.lynthornealder.com/2020/05/03/this-post-is-a-test-2-2-2/

Chew the plant meeeeouw pelt around the house and up and down stairs chasing
phantoms Cat ipsum dolor sit amet, stretch out on bed. Swat at dog push your
water glass on the floor eat an easter feather as if it were a bird then burp
victoriously, but tender yet roll over and sun my belly, or steal mom’s crouton
[…]

While I was looking up how to, and then proceeding with, washing my reusable shopping bags, or at least the portion of them currently in circulation (they accumulate, like single socks, or shopping trolleys at the bottom of a steep hill…), my husband kindly suggested that the reasonable thing to do would be to make some.

I grabbed this idea with both hands and both feet and ran with it (sort of a stumbling run, since I was holding onto that idea…)

So, things I want in reusable shopping bags:

* Washability (since that is what started this whole thing) – I want it to be washable and then look decent afterwards. And I want it to be throw-in-washer washable, not something fussy.

* Durability – able to stand up to the sort of shopping run where we get 2 bags each of flour, white sugar, brown sugar, & confectioner’s sugar. And then other stuff.

* Size – not so big as to be unwieldy, either for me or for the cashiers loading the thing, but big enough to hold an 18-pack of eggs without tipping, or a rotisserie chicken, or that flour & sugar mentioned above.

* Nice – Why bother making something like this if I don’t like the way it looks? No more feeling awkward because half my bags advertise either a liquor/wine/beer place or a business I barely remember giving me the bag.

* Pocket – super useful for keys when I don’t have a purse or pockets on me.

* Foldable/packable – one of the things I really like about the store-bought reusable bags is how they fold back down into a nice flat package (at least until they get too rumpled or they’re washed or..) Some of the good ones have the fold line on the sides pressed in & sometimes even sewn in; not sure I’ll go as far as sewing it in, but it would probably help. Maybe I’ll try it on one.

Since none of the patterns were everything I wanted, I drafted my own pattern.

Webbing handles that go all the way around, doubled on the bottom.

A double layer of fabric on the bottom, with interfacing in between.

A pocket of something I have around the house sewn in between/under the webbing handles on each side, or at least on one side, depending on fabric scraps.

The bag itself made from mediumweight cotton duck.

Now… I need to find a place to mail me canvas where the shipping isn’t as much as the product.

Please note: The below is a planning pattern that I have not tested yet at all.

The idea is to get two bags on one yard of fabric (or one bag on a 1/2 yard). There’s some left over, if it’s the 67″ wide stuff from the place I liked a lot until I read their shipping prices, so I may make a tote to hold the folded bags.

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

I’ve been impressed with several of the youtubers I follow for their isolation/work from home/pandemic videos. Sort of making lemonade from lemons sort of situation.

Today I Found Out is the podcast I’ve been listening to the most lately, and they did a show on pandemics.

Binging With Babish is a pretty awesome cooking show (also, he’s from Rochester!) He did a pantry staple show on chickpeas and then, once he got sick, did the Cold Cure from Kenan and Kel.

Speaking of Pantry staples, check out Alton Brown’s most recent videos, including his hand washing video (go with “no cleaver.”).

And then Bon Apetit did a Cooking from Home episode which was pretty awesome.

Is there’s any working-from-home content you guys’ve been enjoying?

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

One of the first things I planted here – at House Thorn – were chives.

I got them off a freecycle or plantcycle (same idea), back in the days when those lists were doing well here in Ithaca.

(The concept of either is that you post “I have this thing I don’t need anymore” or “I have this thing I need, does anyone have it?” I’ve used it to get: a scythe, cat litter buckets (Our cat litter comes in sort of cartons and I wanted to try cat litter bucket planters), air mattresses, a broken breadmaker… We’ve gotten rid of a safe, a burn barrel, a turtle sandbox…)

I also went and got the earliest-blooming crocuses that were available.

Of course, since we moved into the house in mid-September, we discovered the next Spring that the people who had owned the house before us had been of a similar mind – there are spring blooming bulbs all over this place, so it’s a riot of color from the first thaw through the end of day-lily season.

But CHIVES.

I hate March, I’m afraid. Really dislike the month. (T was explaining why to a friend and he summarized it as “the color.”) It’s grey and muddy! And it’s a tease; you want to plant but you can’t.

The last freeze date in our area is mid-May, just for reference.

But CHIVES. Chives are food. They are fresh and they really taste good only fresh. And when the snow is just starting to melt, when it’s just thinking about melting, then you have chives.

This little bit of green pops up in your garden (I have an “invasives” bed I’ve mentioned before, where I let various chives and mints duke it out. I tried oregano once and I ended up with hybridized mint-regano.) and it’s like All Is Not Lost. Things Will Grow Again. Here, have some Food.

It’s amazing. Alliums are a gift and we should cherish them forever.

🧅

Want more?

🧅

Other Chive Posts:

Gardening! March 23, 2012

Life in the Country, Tuesday edition (Actually Monday edition, just really late). March 21, 2012

On Chives April 9, 2014

Spring! Chives – May 16, 2013

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

So you’re going shopping because you’re concerned that you may be forcibly cloistered or you may self-cloister for two weeks.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

Warning: the below discusses, among other things, death and funerals.

Last Monday I got an email from my mother telling me that she & Dad were off to Death Valley for their annual “get Dad away from the cold” trip. (Dad says he doesn’t have Seasonal Affective Disorder. Pretty sure he’s wrong.)

Three emails into the chain, she tells me my cousin Marilyn has passed away.

Marilyn was my mother’s older cousin (as I track the family tree, I think she was my grandmother’s brother’s daughter), 78 years old, and it turns out she’d been in intensive care for 8 months.

She was also the woman who taught me horseback riding and something of one of my queer icons growing up, long before I actually realized I was bisexual.

I started horseback riding because our Girl Scout leader was horse-mad & her daughter, my nemesis from elementary through middle school (same church, same Girl Scout troop, same school…), got to ride, so I wanted to ride.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

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T found some baby pictures of the boy cats and I am on a rampage of nostalgia, remembering them when they were wee little kittens.

We went to visit them — and their equally fluffy mother cat — and brought them home the same night. They were little grey puffballs then, small enough to fit on T’s lap together with room left over.

I remember thinking — saying, even — that I couldn’t wait for them to grow into their personalities, because at that point, they were… mostly babies, adorable but not really doing a whole lot except being hyper and adorable.

Drake & Gatsby had been such personality-filled old men that having these little infant kitties around again was, well, weird.

But they pretty quickly developed or showed us personalities, probably even before we named them (They were Thing One and Thing Two for a while, or Lefty and Righty for the arm that has a full white sleeve (As you look at them, if I recall correctly.).)

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

I’ve been thinking about goals, as one does at this time of year.

Yearly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals – the whole shebang.

Some of this comes from finishing up last year’s Wordcount spreadsheet and moving on to this year’s, but “wordcount” is, while a lot of fun, not a very important goal.

(okay, that’s not entirely true, ’cause if you-all want to read, say, Spoils, Purchase, and two other things every week, then a serial once/month and four other stories, a recipe and a partridge in a pear tree on Patreon and I want to write a novel and submit some stories, there needs to be a certain base wordcount. That, by the way, turns out to be approximately 2000 words, 5 days a week.)

We did this seminar at work on “SMART” goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant/Realistic, and Time-Bounded (or something like that).

So when I’m setting goals – okay, I’ve tried for this for years but now I have a metric – I try to make them things that I can count and work towards. Not “Sell 12 stories.” That’s a) not my choice, b) not realistic and possibly not achievable, and c) not actually all that time-bounded. But “Submit a story every other month.”

I’ve been trying to apply this to all aspects of my goal-setting, but when it comes, to, say, fun (someone suggested I have a section of goals for fun) I’m still sort of struggling. The best I’ve come up with is “pick a day, and on that day every week, try to communicate with at least a couple of your distant friends.” And also “do a trip that involves a museum.”

Those are not really uh, specific, but fun sort of gets wedged in the sides of things, doesn’t it?

I mean, other than uh.

When I spend three hours minecrafting and netflixing, which is… um. It’s own problem?

Have I shown you my Minecraft railroad system? It’s pretty amazing…

I know not everyone does or likes resolutions, but what about goals? How do you go about setting goals?

And, of course, also, how do you go about moving towards those goals? Do you check in with yourself monthly? Daily? Never? Do you bribe yourself? Punish yourself?

…Spend an hour playing Minecraft and THEN do your goals?

Burn all your goals down after a month and start again in March?

If I had a resolution in 2020, it would be Get Stuff Done. I’m hoping that setting goals will help me get there.

How do YOU get stuff done?

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

Hello all! It’s wintertime!

And I have a SLED!

Have I mentioned this sled before?

I mean, it’s nothing exciting; it’s a plastic molded sled of the sort you buy your kid so they can go down the hill, or at least it’s really similar to the one I had to go sledding downhill at the nearby park (Rochester is on the plain that used to be in Lake Ontario, so the option is the park with a hill (which may have been manufactured, I never asked) or… well, that’s about it. In Ithaca, I could sled half my commute, if I was feeling daring.)

What it is, for me, is just about the size of the totes we use to haul firewood.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

Best part of a rather weird and long dream:

I was in a slow elevator and someone grabbed my ass. I turned around and shouted at this old white man not to do that.

He said, “do you know who I am?”

I looked at him and realized, and said “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sir.” (there was a respectful pause to his office) “Don’t grab my fucking ass.”

He did not, for the entirety of the rest of the dream.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

How many of these did I write up and then forget to post?

Well, this one was written after the weekend of 10/11-10/13 of this year, so that’s the weekend I’m referring to.

🚌

I went to NYC this weekend!

And I got sick.

I also got lost!

Okay, let’s start at the beginning.

I have been to NYC once before in my life, and that time, the marvelous B (from Brasilia) very nearly literally held my hand through the whole thing.

Yes, I grew up in upstate*/North Coast**/above-thruway NY State, but I grew up on my grandfather’s farm, in an area that I have to describe as outside of Churchville*** to be most accurate in location.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

Warning: the below contains frank discussion of cats being tiny predators, and also sometimes dumbasses.

Also, while I cannot find this in my posted blogs, I wrote this in mid-July of this year, so if you have read it before, a), I apologize, and b), please let me know.

Na-na-na-na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na…

🦇

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

So, the first year we were in our house, someone came onto the property and just started picking apples. Claimed they knocked, but T. was in the garage and they didn’t, say, leave a note or anything, they just started picking.

T. told them to Get Off My Property and, as far as we know, they’ve never come back.

I giggle about this sometimes.

Couple years ago, this guy who looked like a hipster except with a thick Eastern European accent stopped by and wanted to photograph our tree. I told him only if he took some apples. 😉 He took like three reusable-shopping-bags worth and came back later for more.

Last year, a nice guy brought us a gallon of cider BEFORE he started picking apples, and brought us some maple syrup too, and then more cider. Took a lot of apples – we did not have any shortage, let me tell you.

Just got a note from him the other day and, in addition, there’s a nice older lady who stopped by with her grandkids to pick some apples. Hooray! I am super thrilled by people who come to me to get apples. (Especially when they leave cider behind).

But only if they ask first.

Or, you know, happen to bike by while we’re picking apples.

Or come with a good recipe for something we haven’t done with apples yet.

(And we still have more than enough for ourselves, let me tell you, even without breaking into the weird apple trees in the hedge row).

Also, tonight for dinner: Kale Apple Soup.

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

Yesterday, I did not bring a cat home.

This was… tricky.

One of my co-workers brought four kittens into work. They were *tiny*, and my only picture is pretty blurry, but they’d been abandoned under her porch and she was taking them to the SPCA.

You could hear them (down the hall, around the corner) in my office, and their little squeaks and cries just hit me in the gut.

They weren’t cuddly; they were scared and crying and altogether not interested in bonding, and that was probably the best thing, because, well.

We have three cats.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

It’s possible that I mentioned that we got a water softener a little while ago.

And by that, I mean my mother, sick of me putting it off, found a plumber in Ithaca, picked out a softener, had it installed, (SCHEDULED the installation), and paid for the whole thing.

Um.

Sometimes I manage to stop Mom from getting carried away. Sometimes.

Not always, clearly.

So, the problem was, before that we’d installed a toilet.

And hard water – and our water was both orange and REALLY HARD – and toilets are a bad combination, it seems. Our toilet wasn’t really flushing the way it oughta anymore.

So we took the tank off the toilet and scrubbed iron residue off of every bit we could find, put it back together – nope . Still not working.

That means, as far as we can tell, that the problem is in the bowl, probably in the interior bit where the water swooshes around before shooting into the bowl proper.

Thus, tomorrow or Saturday I’m buying a new toilet. Le Sigh. (by the time this posts, I may have already bought one. Still Sigh)

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

This weekend, we had one of those heart-stopping moments, and we had only ourselves to blame.

Actually, that happened twice in the last few days, one far less bad than the other, and only myself/ourselves to blame in both cases.

So, Sunday, we were hanging laundry, so we let the boy-cats out on the patio, as we do sometimes. They can hang out there and eat grass (their favorite activity) and roll around on the concrete (second-favorite activity) for 10, fifteen minutes and all is right with the world.

Except T & I got distracted talking about which trees we were going to prune. We headed back to the house – and Oli was looking guilty and Theo was nowhere to be seen.

I wasn’t worried right away. Theo likes to hide under the lilac near the corner of the house and sniff out chipmunks.

No Theo.

No Theo under the car, behind the heating-oil tank, under the patio chairs.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

We’re still on the attic… of course we are, we’re going to be on the attic forever…

Well, okay, maybe not forever.

It stalled for a while, due in large part to a combination of physical and mental illness on my part, but we’re back!

And we’re making things I insist on calling keystones, even though they’re not nearly that important.

We took each rafter (the things that go /\ to make a gable roof) and we “sistered” a long 2×4 to the bottom of it, to provide depth for insulation and some extra structure (considering that the rafters are… not as deep as they oughta be, no matter how long they’ve lasted.

But these /\ joins are in many cases imperfect, so now, with the aid of a hammer, a chop saw, and a sander, I am taking little wedges of scrap lumber and gluing them in between the / and the \ where they meet.

This means that any pressure from the sistered rafters will have something to push on, rather than just pushing into the air (If the rafters have pressure going –> that way or <– that way. Pressure going up and down is handled by glue, nails, nails, glue, and three braces nailed to each rafter & sister, and side to side by braces nailed between each pair of rafters)

(we have probably doubled the structure of this attic, to be honest)

So the process goes: note a measurement on a scrap of lumber, cut the piece, fit, sand down, fit, sand down, fit, glue, hammer into place… repeat.

This is really not that time-consuming a process; I think sweeping down all the cobwebs from the roof took longer.

But man does it involve a lot of up and down on that step ladder.

Next after that: framing in the tiny bit of ceiling /–\ that we’ll be putting in there — just enough to put in some new lighting once this is done.

It’s starting to look a lot like attic….

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

I don’t talk about my health a lot, well… on this blog, at least. But it’s been, uh, on my mind a bit so I thought I’d sort of talk stuff out

The below: warnings for mental health, physical health, some dark humor, probably, and weight issues. And Parental/family issues.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

I’m beginning to worry that my boss is going to think that I’m accident-prone.

I mean — looks at bruises — I AM accident-prone, but that’s different. That’s what my dad liked to call “navigating by the bump method.”

I mean more, “oops, it’s been a year, Lyn got in another car accident.”

I’m fine! I’m fine, Mr. Thorne is fine, the people in the other car are fine, everyone is fine.

(Balrogie, my car, is… not quite so fine, but he’ll be okay!)

In short: the intersection was a mess, nobody could see anything, and someone ran a red light into me.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

It’s playing in the dirt time of year, and I’ve been doing a lot of it.

Well, not as much as SOME years, but a decent amount.

A couple few weeks ago was the local high school’s annual plant sale, where most of the local nurseries show up to sell you plants (go fig, what with it being a plant sale and all 😉

That was – well, not the start, but the lion’s share of our plant buying.

We have a bunch of brassicas, some peppers (poblano, mostly), an eggplant, a couple tomatoes, and some sweet potatoes. Also two kinds of summer squash and four cucumber plants.

The two beds on the south end of our garden were already full — one is a now-permanent perennial bed with asparagus and strawberries, and the other is growing garlic we planted last year. It’s nice to have stuff up and ready to eat while everything else is just barely thinking about being tall enough for the chipmunks to eat.

(The damn pests pulled up my ONE habanada plant! Killed it! Again!)

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

When I was in college, I learned a planning style that occasionally I re-remember.

This was during my Technical Writing class, and it was designed for planning a writing/publishing project, such as an advertisement brochure.

Turns out, it works pretty well for actually plotting out things like… renovations, too.

And spring is sort of coming now. So I’m starting to figure out the planning for some of our extant projects.

They’re big ones. I mean, it’s a house and I want to redo everything in it eventually.

(probably even the bedroom that we did first, because the walls still need redoing and we still don’t really have a closet.)

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1551011.html

I'm still doing LetterMo (and InCoWriMo)! As of today I have mailed out 22 letters/postcards/cards (with one ready to go in the mail), received 3 replies and one letter-not-a-reply, and drawn castles, maps, lava, clouds, and barns.

I've talked about the weather a lot, Ithaca, winter activities, and whatever else came to mind - including often the paper or card I was writing on.

And Friday and today, as a reward for finishing my work self-evaluation and then for getting the taxes done and sent, I bought a bunch of stationery.

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1548713.html

This month — as I did 2 years ago — I am participating in A Month of Letters / International Correspondence Writing Month.

The goals of these two remarkably similar things are, respectively:

Mail something every day the post runs in February; reply to every letter you get.
handwrite a l

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1547900.html

(A Blog Post)

I am wrapping up my fifth bullet journal — all but the first holding 6 months each; for the first I used the back of an old notebook I’d had lying around (everyone has those, right?) as a test.

I love it.

I mean, considering I've kept something up for over two years

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1542847.html

Content Warning: The below discusses family issues, death, disconnection, drama, and pain. It's as close to unfiltered as I get on a public space.

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1510226.html

I’ve been thinking about audience lately.

(Hi, Audience!)

So some of what I’ve been thinking is how things like Rin & Girey started out as this entirely self-indulgent story, and how now it’s one of my most in-depth worlds (Addergoole/Fae Apoc is THE most in depth, but that’s because of t

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1484438.html

Spring is coming! Dun-dun-dun.

I know this because the calendar says so, even if what the yard says is “hey, have another two inches of snow, since you haven’t had any in a whole day and a half.”

My yard is very helpful like that!

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1480355.html

This morning, around 6 a.m., I woke up to a silent house, a blank display on my alarm clock, and a cold nose.

Last night, while we were making dinner, I got the robo-call telling me that my university job (which “never closes” and has closed twice in the two winters I’ve worked there) was close

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1479689.html

This is, more or less, just a little babbling about my kitty.

We have a feral cat.

I mean, she says that all the time. “I’m feral! Zoom!” and she runs all the way up the stairs. “I’m feral! Oh no!” Zip, under the bed.

She’s really sure she’s a wild feral cat.

You know, like “here’s the WWI Ace Fighter Pilot…” Yeah.

We got her from outside, where she was semi-feral, a barn kitten from down the road who had been eating out of our compost bin.

T. took months of feeding her and coaxing her closer, until she was willing to let him handle her.

Then we shoved her in a carrier and left her at the vets for three days.

That was four years ago. (editor’s note, no, that was 5 years ago, since we brought her inside 7 years ago… nowish, i.e., November 2019)

When I tell her “Merit, Nap time!” She comes and jumps up on me on the couch and sleeps on my hip/stomach.

When I go to bed, she sleeps to the left of me; when I wake up, she’s either on me or tucked against my right side. T. taught her to cuddle for food and now, when she’s hungry in the middle of the day, she will jump up on his lap and nap there for a little while.

She still says she’s feral, but you can pick her up without any complaint, she tolerates brushing and likes petting, and she talks to you when you ignore her.

(also, she yells at you when you sneeze).

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

DialMforMara suggested that I blog about plants, and here I am.

Plants.
I bury my toes in loam-dark soil;

I walk barefoot through the dirt my ancestors farmed.
That is the part I easily remember of a poem I wrote in high school, when the assignment was roots.

Yeah, but it took me more

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1472772.html

Everyone gets their inspiration from somewhere; every setting has its seeds in something.Stranded – well, Autumn – came out of the book Blue Highways.

According to Wikipedia, this book came out in 1982. I don’t think I read it that early at all – I would’ve been six – but someone recommended it to my father, and I read it. I was probably in my early teens.

The story, as I remember it, involves someone making their van into something like an ad-hoc RV and driving around the county – specifically on the back roads, the non-highways, the ones marked blue on old maps.

The idea really spoke to me, lodged in my mind. Sometimes I would fantasize – who am I kidding, would? – Sometimes I fantasize about loading up a van and doing travel writing, meeting people in small-town diners and taking pictures of little waterfalls you can only see if you take the back roads.

Autumn started out that, that and my wish to be able to draw and the small fantasy of living in a Ren Faire that I sometimes still indulge in. I mean, Autumn as a character in a story started with a three-word-Wednesday prompt (abrupt, kernel, wield; I have no idea how I got from there to

“I heard you did divinations.”

“You want the blue tents over in Psychic Alley.”

“Not that sort of divination, not those fake-Rom shams. You do the skin-painting.”

But Autumn, travelling around to small towns and solving problems –

– she came from William Least Heat-Moon’s stories, traveling around the blue highways of America, meeting people, being harassed by the police, building stone walls.

I can’t promise it’s a good book. I read it probably 2/3 of my life ago. But it definitely stuck with me, and in sticking with me, it gave us the core of Autumn and her travelling, mystery-solving ways.

But here’s a fun map of where he travels – I didn’t realize it was so large an area – http://littourati.squarespace.com/storage/moon-files/moon_map.htm

And here’s the Wikipedia page on it – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Highways

This paragraph:

Stories that arose from Least Heat-Moon’s research as well as historical facts are included about each area visited, as well as conversations with characters such as a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist hitchhiker, a teenage runaway, a boat builder, a monk, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a rural Nevada prostitute, fishermen, a Hopi Native American medical student, owners of western saloons and remote country stores, a maple syrup farmer, and Chesapeake Bay island dwellers.

That almost sounds like a set of prompts for Autumn, doesn’t it?

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

Ever weekend for several years, T. & I have been making this oatmeal. A few months ago, we actually settled it down to weights, because it was getting kinda variable in size.It’s not really a recipe, more of a formula, so I’m offering it here free.

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Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

@DialMforMara prompted me
Write about the sensory experience of drinking your favorite tea or coffee.

Comfort.

If it’s my mug, it’s the best. I tested every mug in the craft festival until I found one that my hands wrapped around perfectly.

The pain in my joints fades. Any chill - there is often chill - is banished. I put the mug against my sternum and breath in the steam and my breathing is easier, my chest hurts less. Everything is calm.

The taste, when it cools enough to drink, is slightly bitter, a tannic brew that clears my throat and wakes my brain. The smell is lighter than the taste - it smells mostly of the steam, most days. Even with the cool enough to drink, the mug is comfortable, nice against my hands. Thick ceramic, it holds the heat for a long time.

Coffee is a drug and a calorie delivery system. Tea is slower, clearer, feeling more like clearing out, cleaning out. My lungs feel more open. My brain feels more open. I take another sip. I take another moment to hold the mug.

Comfort.

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1438978.html

So, let me tell you about my summer!

🌞

So far, Summer 2017 has involved medical foo, home renovations, surprise!funeral and not-a-surprise godbaby.

Medical Foo I have blogged a bit about in That Was Spinal Tap and That Was Spinal Tap Two. I’ve also fic’d and freewrote about it in Diagnostic Machine and Just A Little Structural Rot.

The long and the short of it: After more doctor visits, blood tests, and spinal taps than seems reasonable or even probable (and two MRIs), I have a diagnosis and will start drug treatment soon. It’s not a thrilling diagnosis, but, to quote Arnold, it’s not a tumor. (It’s not a baby either. I don’t think they’d need a spinal tap to tell that one).

I now have three weeks without blood draws or doctor visits, and if my dentist calls, I’m going to tell them I’m out of the country for a while. Or something. No more co-pays kthnxbai.

Did I really just say kthnxbai? Please forgive me.

read on…

Crossposts: https://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1430593.html

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Summer is cranking on and it’s nearly August!

July was a bit of a mess for me — see That was Spinal Tap — but I’ve been trucking away!

Read On!

The poll has spoken! And Magical Dates is the motif for August.
This can be about magic on the calendar, dates that get sparkles, dating a magical girl/boy...

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It’s going to be a sparkly month!

Read On!

Originally posted April 17, 2012.

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"So what are we doing again?"

"Lost Day!" Raquel, Smith Tertia Vestis, grabbed Ward, Jones Secondus Ludicrum, by the hand, dragging him down the hall of the megacomplex.

Read On!

Crossposts: http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1422209.html

(I shall try to get a photo, I promise)

We have a sink and faucet!

(New ones, that is, and finally installed.)

This project, like all home improvement projects, expanded and expanded and expanded - but it's done. Well, at least for the moment.

So, problem one: Our walls are nearly-solid wood, not studs. They're 2"x~15", 16"-on-center.

That means the sink plumbing does down, not into the wall and then down.

That means our solid-bottom pedestal doesn't fit, 'cause the solid bottom would go right over the encased-in-cement drain!

So, fix one: we bought two ~4"x4x"x24" pieces of very pretty maple, sanded, stained, and polyurethaned them. Instant (ha) stand-out.

Then we got food poisoning.

Then the P-trap didn't have a down, because plumbing goes into the wall.

Then the hot water didn't work.

Fixed!

It took - well, don't ask, but it took 2 weeks of working on it regularly, but now we have a beautiful functioning sink.

Next step: toilet. Wish us luck!

Crossposts: http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1226416.html

Because I wanted to, I wrote up my witch'sona

Picture her in the woods, because that's where she was born.

There's a giant maple tree there, with roots that have pushed out of the surrounding loam, and that's where she's sitting. Communing.

Her hair is brown-and-ash, the color of the bark, and her skirts are green-and-brown, like the moss and the fallen leaves. Thistle-purple lace peeks out from under her skirts, and from under her sleeves, which are long and leather, to fend off the sharp things that live in the woods.

Her feet are bare, because some sharp things are worth enduring to know what the lay of the land is, and her stocking cap is long and striped, the pompom at the tip getting lost in her hair.

She doesn't smile, but her expression is calm, and her hands are still. This is where she belongs.

Crossposts: http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1163878.html

When I wrote this for Capriox_B & talikan yesterday, I told Cap I was having trouble keeping Addergoole and other inappropriate things out of it. So here's the speech, with a few [additions]. All my love to both of them once again.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1110875.html

This weekend, I went on a wine tour (my first like official, someone-else-drives, lots-of-people wine tour) for a co-worker's birthday, and she took pictures of me I actually like!

And thus my

thornewrites (twitter) and Patreon have shiny new pictures of me.

In blue, of course. Because blue.

Crossposts: http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/1110314.html

The Meme Master Post

G is for Gifts, both given and got

When I was a kid, my maternal grandmother gave my mother striped pastel towels for Christmas. My mom responded politely, and I don't think I noticed until we got home (Because *I* thought they were awesome) and my dad was ribbing Mom. But Mom didn't like the towels. "Oh. Thank you. Striped towels."

In our house, it became code for gifts you didn't really want.

I remember an earlier situation - two, actually. One year, my maternal family gave me a Raggedy Ann doll for Christmas, and then my father's family gave me a similar Raggedy Ann doll later in the day. I don't remember /doing/ it, but I clearly remember being teased about throwing the second doll aside, being completely non-interested.

That's when I learned you weren't supposed to be less than enthusiastic about any gift.

A later time - Cabbage Patch Doll time, for those who remember the time and theme - my maternal family gave me a knock off Cabbage Patch. I remember being sort of disappointed by it, because the way the face was molded looked like it had a runny nose. But I remember naming it and trying gamely to love it. And then my paternal family gave me a real Cabbage Patch doll, one my father's step-father had stood in line for - and the woman in that family gave him shit because it was a boy doll. I didn't care. I loved it.

Quite some time later: we were helping a friend move, a friend who we'd given quite a few years of New Years' gifts. Among the "discard" piles were at least two of these gifts. Now... some of his gifts had gotten quietly regifted, too. But it still stuck with me as a bit of a slap, even though I know it hadn't been intended that way.

When I pick out gifts for people, I am always thinking about striped towels and trying, hard, not to be the person giving tone-deaf gifts. When I get gifts, it's - well, you know, sometimes people do give you striped towels. Sometimes it's because they don't know you, sometimes it just doesn't hit as well as they expected. But you still smile, and you're still pleased. They tried, after all.

I wonder how much of this Amazon Wish Lists help mitigate, for everyone involved. It always feels a bit like cheating to me - like you couldn't Know the Right Gift. On the other hand, it means you're unlikely to be giving striped towels. Unless, you know, you've got pastel striped towels on your wish list.