Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 10:56 pm
Today Belovedest had to bust the teenagers for playing "the penis game" in the library.

[You say the word increasingly loudly, in turns, until someone loses the game by being told to cut it out or being asked to leave.]

The weather's getting colder, but I have evolved myself an outfit to wear outdoors for lounging while the weather's in the high 50s F -- my slightly ratty plush bathrobe underneath my much more windproof corduroy floor length duster. And the ta'al fingerless mgloves Mama knitted for me, in rainbow stripes. They're just the thing for keeping my hands warm while I'm on the phone.

I've discovered I do enjoy cauliflower "wings", even though I don't enjoy chicken wings.

The scooter has arrived. I am plotting how best to bedazzle it. It does have its own USB power outlet! It also has head and tail lights. It's better for approaching counters than the wheelchair, since the tiller is so close to me.

[personal profile] norabombay points out that given all the poorly supervised international visitors who have been in and out of the White House, they're going to have to take it down to the studs when they refit it for #48 to use. So the general devastation in the East Wing is small potatoes as far as outrage fodder. And anywhere that the last major update was 1947-ish must really need some yanking out of the century of the fruitbat.

My legs are doing better. In part this is because I stuck ibuprofen in my nightly pill box, since I'd been waking up with aching legs and shouting knees pretty consistently.

Medication: the medication definitely has some activity. The main activity seems to be that my appetite has been fading in and out of "did we recently have chemo?!" mode. I'm tempted to give myself a week off every few weeks.

Makeup: currently waiting on a liquid formulation of the eyeshadow that promised to match the eyeliner, because the color is fantastic and I want it in a wide brush. I guess the powder can work for blending it out. (The powder just does not want to cooperate and layer on thick enough to get the color shift effect, even with a wet brush.) My skin continues to behave itself better than my ability to use foundation; there are only a few spots where I want to color correct if I'm doing Full Battle Makeup.

Games: keeping up with all the Gems of War events is sometimes tiring, but it does make winding down my brain at night much easier than other things I could be doing.

Perfume: went through my massive perfume spreadsheet and filled in the formulation for all the BPAL (which is the same except for that one spray). Cracked myself up at some of the descriptions I've left. One particular exceedingly long-lasting one
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 09:27 pm
We had a roast chicken a few days ago, then [personal profile] adrian_turtle used some of the leftovers to make a salad with greens, pieces of chicken, and grapes. [personal profile] cattitude just turned the remaining leftover chicken into matzo ball soup.

There will be homemade chocolate cake later, because Adrian wanted to check whether the springform pan would hold cake batter. We eat well around here.
Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 09:12 pm
I took last Wednesday off of work to haul and winterize the power boat, because I was going to be busy the next several weekends, and I'm tired of winterizing it in late November when it's 30° and blowing a howling gale.

I had the usual trouble with everything. Starting with not being able to find the right socket that is needed for installing the hitch. Turned out we had a same size socket from a different set. It said it was an impact wrench socket but it fit on the extra large handle from the main socket set, and so even though it didn't stay on properly, I was able to make it work. Then I couldn't find the waders that I wanted to use. I only found the ones that are too small and the ones that leak. I made do with the ones that are too small. Eventually I got the boat out of the water without any further unexpected trouble (I always expect a little trouble trying to back up the trailer).

Then the winterizing job just takes forever. You have to drain the oil out of the lower unit and the main engine, and this takes a long time, even if you warm up the engine first so the oil is less viscous; the lower unit oil is very viscous. And then you have to try hard not to spill it anywhere. I was especially concerned because this is the first time our brand-new garage floor has been threatened with oil when I was draining it out of the oil pan into containers for taking to toxic waste next spring. I managed not to stain the floor. We have a special gadget for getting oil into the lower unit which is supposed to have less drippage, and I had notes from last time that said that the old one was starting to fail and so I bought a new one, and the new one is much worse and much less useful and I'm sad about that.

I got the neighbor to agree to take the extra gas from the tank and put it in one of his cars, since we no longer have any other gasoline burning vehicles.

Finally it was done and I got help to move to the other trailers out of the way (both of them had flat tires and had to be pumped up) and towed it into its winter home and covered it. The cover is getting kind of shabby, but the previous week I had tried patching some of the larger holes with iron on patches, which surprisingly worked and did not melt the material, mostly nylon I think. Some of my iron on patches were clearly from the 70s, based on the packaging. I did use one of those, and I think it's going to peel off. It proudly said it cost 29 cents!

Then over the weekend there was some beautiful waterskiing weather, and I had no boat. I knew that would happen, though. And I was pretty busy this weekend with No Kings Saturday and a game party Sunday.
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 08:33 am
My maternal grandmother's birthday was October 14. She died 30 years ago and wasn't particularly famous, so no celebrations occurred this year. But I've had three dreams in the past week set in her house or the vicinity. As I was growing up, it was just my grandparents' house and my parents' house in woods, mostly, plus yards and my grandparents' gardens. * The bit that I remember from last week's dream was that Arthur and I were both living in her house (in separate bedrooms) and were arguing about how high to set the thermostat.
First dream last night: Arthur and I were throwing meat out into the woods but before the wild boars could get it, a bobcat showed up. This makes no sense in any context - we wouldn't have had meat to begin with, and while there were woods, there certainly were no wild boars or bobcats. The second dream had some members of Stray Kids in my grandmother's kitchen. That is at least as implausible as the wild animals. I don't think I need to notify Audrey and her family (who live in that house now, although the kitchen is nothing like my grandmother's) to watch out for global stars.

*after she died, my mother and her brother sold most of the land, and now it's a 20+ house development.
Monday, October 20th, 2025 10:01 pm
日本語クラスの宿題のために、俳句を作った。先生は「格好いい」と言いた。良かった!


松の影 子の笑い声 雪玉よ

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毛布から 尻尾がみえる 寝る猫か

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日照り日々 乾いた土に 一草よ

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(haiku and English translations both by me)
Monday, October 20th, 2025 02:36 pm
 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Nothing lastingly bad happens to the dog in this book.

Sorry but not all that sorry to those of you who wanted that suspense, but Brandy is a lovey good big boy and I think most of you will have a much better time if you don't have serious worries about the mastiff. This is a debut novel, so Serra Swift doesn't have a lot of trust built up. This is the beginning of building it. Brandy gets a nice chewy in his nice bed. He is fine.

The humans...well. The humans are a bit more messed up. A bit more tangled in grief, a bit more vengeful, a bit more desperate. The Beast has been slaughtering humans since time out of mind, and after Lyssa Carnifex (Cadogan) loses her brother she swears that she will put an end to it no matter what. She manages to dispatch a large and varied number of magical beasts, but The Beast eludes her. But when she meets Alderic Casimir de Laurent, it seems like she's found someone who's just as dedicated to helping her slay The Beast as she is to doing it. She just has to put up with Alderic's annoying fashion sense and weird priorities.

...or so she thinks. Obviously, "or so she thinks," there's not a book if there's not an "or so she thinks." I don't feel like the twist is one that will surprise most experienced fantasy readers, but if you're looking for an engaging and well-written adventure fantasy, this may well suit.

Monday, October 20th, 2025 10:11 am
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 07:43 pm
It's been two years since I signed up for Yuletide, but I'm looking forward to it this year!

Thank you so much for writing for me, and I hope you also have a fantastic Yuletide exchange, whatever that looks like for you. I've included both what I particularly like about each canon and a couple of prompt ideas, but I'm up for anything that doesn't hit my DNWs and includes the characters.

General notes, things I love, my do not wants )
All Of Us Murderers - K.J. Charles )
Greta Helsing Series - Vivian Shaw )
England Series - K. J. Charles )
The Odyssey - Homer )
Saturday, October 18th, 2025 08:49 pm
First part of today's schedule was the No Kings assembly in Lexington Center. I took lots of pictures. I think this was my favorite sign.



The combination of a joke (orange monarch being Trump and the butterfly) with a positive action (planting milkweed) seemed ideal to me.
I didn't see many people I knew very well, but passed folks I hadn't seen in a while, including some I probably hadn't seen since our daughters were in Girl Scouts. Some people look just the same, some look so old to me. One of the speakers was Ed Markey. He seemed full of energy as always when he's doing public speaking. He's 80. I kind of agree that there should be an age limit (or term limits?) for public office, but I'm not sure what it should be.

The buses were running late due to traffic (no marchers in the streets, but many cars), so I left early enough to walk two miles to be on time to a memorial service. Packed church, almost no masks. Fond remembrances, moving music. Same thing - people I hadn't seen in a while, some visibly older, others pretty much the same. The person being memorialized was 81 and had been in ill health for several years.

After that I went to the river for some Head of the Charles experience. One of the races I watched was mixed gender quad (four people, each with two oars, no coxswain). Many of the crews were family groups. In one of them, the announcer made it a point to say that there were three generations, including someone who was 81 years old.
Saturday, October 18th, 2025 07:32 pm
[personal profile] cattitude and I went to the No Kings rally on Boston Common. It was a large crowd, large enough that we couldn't really hear the speeches, but that's OK, we were there to be part of the crowd. I saw some good signs, including "Of course he hates veritas" and "America runs on dissent", for local flavor, and "No kings [large image of the One Ring with a slash through it] to rule them all." Almost all the signs were homemade, and different.

Happily, it was warm enough for me to unzip my hoodie and show off my Boston Dyke March T-shirt, and for other people to wear t-shirts, some of them more relevant than others. I was amused by the person in a football jersey: the local NFL team is called the New England Patriots.

There were also a bunch of inflatable animal costumes, including at least three chickens, a dinosaur, axolotls, an octopus, and a pink unicorn. The unicorn was blowing bubbles. I bought a T-shirt with a drawing of a frog and the word "resist."

The above paragraph would have made no sense a month ago, but we are living in weird as well as scary times, in which the administration apparently sees the Emergency World Naked Bike Ride as a threat.