I did not go downtown today. I hadn’t slept well (waking up at 3am with all the things running through my head), so I went back to bed after Pip left for work.
I visited mom and helped clear the paperwork off the table so we had room to eat on Christmas. (Which mainly involved creating stacks of toss, file and shred, and then tossing and filing; shredding still has to be done, but at least it’s still off the table).
I did two loads of laundry, hand-washed dishes, emptied the dishwasher and ran another load, went for several walks with Pip and the dogs, baked chicken for the dogs’ meals, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, and scooped kitty litter. I hit the bank drive-thru for mom and made banana bread for Christmas. Supper was leftover chuck roast.
I marathoned three more eps of The Pitt. Secrets of the Zoo was once again my evening background tv.
Temps started out at 32.9(F) and reached 40.9 (once it did, it immediately turned around and started down again). The TWC app originally called for 1-3 inches, but today it said less than an inch over the course of the entire day. Guess which I was rooting for? Thankfully the updated forecast was the correct one. We had very light snow over the course of the day, but not enough to accumulate.
Turns out one of my uni hockey friends has a long-standing history channel on YouTube, and of course he made a video about ice hockey history. I think I'd have liked it even if I didn't know the creator, enjoy:
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Will saw there only a gap in the crowd, with beyond it the group of musicians. As he stood there, they struck up once more 'Good King Wenceslas', the carol they had been playing when first he entered the room, through the Doors. Merrily the whole gathering joined in singing, and then the next verse came and Merriman's deep voice was ringing out across the room, and Will realised, blinking, that the verse to come was his.
He drew breath, and raised his head.
Sire he lives a good league hence, Underneath the mountain ...
And there was no moment of farewell, no moment in which he saw the nineteenth century vanish away, but suddenly with no awareness of change, as he sang he knew that Time had somehow blinked, and another young voice was singing with him, the two of them so nearly simultaneous that anyone who could not see the lips moving would have sworn that it was one boy's voice alone . . .
[...]
On Christmas night, Will always slept with James. Both twin beds were still in James's room from the time before Will had moved up to Stephen's attic. The only difference now was that James kept Will's old bed piled with op art cushions, and referred to it as 'my chaise longue'. There was something about Christmas Eve, they both felt, that demanded company; one needed somebody to whisper to, during the warm beautiful dream-taut moments between hanging the empty stocking at the end of the bed, and dropping into the cosy oblivion that would flower into the marvel of Christmas morning.
And it was the same as it always was, as he lay curled up happily in his snug wrappings, promising himself that he would stay awake, until, until...
... until he woke, in the dim morning room with a glimmer of light creeping round the dark square of the curtained window, and saw and heard nothing for an enchanted expectant space, because all his senses were concentrated on the weighty feel, over and around his blanketed feet, of strange bumps and corners and shapes that had not been there when he fell asleep. And it was Christmas Day.
I was too tired to have the focus for Dark Souls-ing in the last few days, so binge-played 1000xResist and now I feel like I'm been punched in the head.
Basically a walking simulator/visual novel, so don't go expecting complex gameplay, but HOLY FUCK.
For all of you looking for fiction with fucked-up complicated women who are somewhere on a spectrum from "morally grey" to "evil but sympathetic" (with the odd dip into "idealistic but destructive") having fucked-up dynamics with other fucked-up complicated women: 1000xResist has SO MANY of them. It has almost no characters who don't fit that archetype, in fact.
(I considered whether it passes the reverse-Bechdel test -- i.e. two male characters have a conversation that's not about a woman -- and I think it may juuust scrape past in a 5-second exchange in one of the flashbacks, but barely. There are very very few men in this story, for plot-related reasons.)
I found out afterwards that the development team were a devised theatre group who decided to start making a game when everything was shut down during the pandemic, and somehow this fully checks out (complimentary).
Do note the content notes from the devs: Photosensitivity Warning: Flashing Lights, Cursing and Crude Language, Generational Trauma, Acts of Violence and Terrorism, Disease Outbreak, Mention of Suicide, Mention of Animal Cruelty/Pet Death, Blood, Body Horror, Emotional Abuse, Bullying, Dead Bodies, Vomit, Drowning, Fire, Gore, Needles, Racism and General Mature Content.
(I would also add a specific note for torture, and for fucked-up mother-daughter and sister-sister relationships, that being one of the core elements of the game, along with the aforementioned generational trauma.)
I forgot to finish my retrospective! I’ll do it soon (probably!) (maybe!) (hopefully!)
Instead, I am going to talk about how my kobo has made me better at using the library, because it has good Libby integration, and the primary upshot of this so far has been for me to DNF several books.
Historically, I don’t even start reading library books, really, before they are due back. I just check them out, the spirit fails to move me to start reading them, I read some other book instead, and then return the book unread to the library. (The beginning of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, where Calvino describes all the piles of books including the ones judging you for not getting around to reading them, really speaks to me!)
Anyway I searched for recommendations of books like Piranesi, or A Deadly Education, or Ancillary Justice, or Tombs of Atuan, or Constellation Games, or The Locked Tomb or Count of Monte Cristo, and got a bunch of recommendations.
So far the best of those was the Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang. A messily plotted novel that works despite a lot of narrative jumping around, partially because the world building is clearly fully developed but not over exposited on the page. I was left wanting more, some threads didn’t go anywhere, or felt like rug pulls, but sometimes a messy interesting thing is better than a neat boring thing. (Usually. Always? Definitely usually.)
The worst, for me, for sure, was The Memory Police, which had a super compelling premise (an authoritarian island culture where the government disappears things physically and from people’s memories). The premise was hampered by completely incoherent logistics/worldbuilding. The narrator, for example, does remember things that have been disappeared, and tells us about them. But the narrator is explicitly not immune to the memory erasing powers of the authorities. So how can the narrator remember birds, the ferry, etc.? Good question! Distracting question! I read some reviews where I learned that the opening scene where the narrator finds out about perfume (which just seems like water to the narrator, having been influenced by the disappearance of the category “prank gifts” I guess?
I went out the other night with my friend and was like “do you think this shirt would help me pick up women?” And he was like “no what the fuck” and frankly I think he was wrong for that and doesn’t understand the raw power a shirt like this holds. Alas. It was $70 so I didn’t get it. But the energy…immense…
I know that I’ll certainly never be someone they’d build a memorial for, but if I could get one, I’d like to get one of those park bench statues that are sitting on the bench. Specifically of me sitting casually looking towards the other seat at an angle, looking intrigued with a “surprised but not disappointed” kind of a look on my face. Kind of a “huh, won’t you look at that.”
I want that specifically so people can make it a meme to post pictures of themselves showing me stuff. Like memes off their phone.
Or maybe things that they are proud of but don’t have anyone else to show them to. Like your school graduation papers, this cool knitting project you finally finished, your baby who’s never going to see their grandparents.
And I also want a clause that they will absolutely fucking never put those anti-homeless things of any kind on my damn bench. So if there’s ever someone who’s got nobody else to keep them company, they can at least spend the night with me.
@copperbadge I feel like this would also be a very fine and apt memorial for you as well, Sam.
Aw, what a compliment! And while I was in the Rijksmuseum I found a painting with the exact face I’d make.
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
Bought carton egg whites to make the pav with. Didn't realise they'd overbeat so easily.
Ugh.
So I've made two pavs and neither one got to stiff peaks. Second time I actually looked up what went wrong and went "ARGH".
Do I try making a third?
Honestly, the last few years, my pav attempts have been somewhat substandard. They collapse and fall - I don't think I can get the gas oven cool enough for long enough to keep them from collapsing. It only goes down to about 120C before the dial cuts out and if possible you're supposed to leave it at around 80C for an hour.
Not an option in my oven.
I have a guest coming, too - invited a woman off a FB group "host a sister" who was bouncing around Christmas Day.
ETA: I ended up whipping up a third batch, and it's now in the oven. We'll try to bake the shell hard (high temp), then fluff the inside (long low temp).
In August 2024, I got a heat pump and switched my heat source from gas to electric.
PG&E has an arcane cost structure where not only do they charge more for electricity between certain hours (4-9pm for my rate plan) but they also have a baseline allowance and charge significantly more for usage over baseline. Neither the contractor nor my neighbor with a heat pump advised me that I needed to call PG&E and tell them I had changed heat sources to change my baselines, so I overpaid a lot for electricity last winter.
I was aware that I was paying a lot even though the heat pump wasn't maintaining temperature. I asked the contractor. I asked my neighbor. Neither mentioned the baseline amounts.
PG&E sent me a message earlier this fall saying I might pay less on a different rate plan, and when I called them (Oct 9, for my records), I found out about notifying them I now had electric heat. One agent told me the was refundable as much as 3 years retroactively, but it turns out he was blowing smoke, and it isn't. :-(
The new rate plan is even more complicated and I still had a really high bill this month despite not keeping the place very warm (and I have double pane windows and everything!), so I spent a long time on the phone with an agent today digging into the numbers and figured out the new rate plan is actually slightly more expensive than just having the right baseline amount, so I'm switching back.
*sigh*. I guess some lessons are just expensive. Looks like they instituted this whole baseline thing right around when I moved back in May 2022, which explains why I wasn't aware of it before, and maybe I missed both the existing customer education and the new customer education.
I'm continuing to send updates to the contractor who installed the heat pump system, which is under warranty for 3 years. At the end of last winter, he replaced the thermostat, and a control board in the downstairs indoor unit where he cut a jumper that it didn't make sense to cut. Now he says he's going to replace the whole indoor unit, and install one that's more powerful. It's supposed to arrive early-mid January. We'll see if that fixes the problem. He will also have to replace all the coolant, so if he had the wrong amount in there, that will also fix that problem. I suppose if that doesn't help then he replaces the outdoor unit. One step at a time...
It is still sleeting more than snowing here, but it sticks in the occasional patch of shadow. Farther from the water, it's frosting up like winter. The Ursids were washed out by this year's weather, but somewhere beyond the clouds they are still streaking light.
I spent a remarkable portion of this day having conversations related to employment, but one of them was a thorough delight. I hadn't known about the practical, ritual links of the Jewish Association for Death Education.
We lit the candle for my grandfather's yahrzeit, our ghost story for Christmas Eve.
Dear Miss Manners: Several years ago, a divorced woman exactly my age moved in next door. I liked her very much and tried to become friends with her.
( Read more... )
Yesterday I flew home from Minneapolis. My bag got lost, for the first time in ages, so I slept CPAP-less (poorly) last night. When the bag deigned to arrive this morning, it was missing one of the zipper sliders. Same thing happened to an identical bag last year. Time to stop buying and recommending Travelpro suitcases, no matter how nice the wheels are.
I also had a crown break and pop off on Saturday. And my dentist is on holiday until the fifth of January. Argh. At least it's not hurting. I did speak with him briefly and got "yeah, just keep it clean and be gentle with it, and DON'T PUT THE BROKEN CROWN BACK ON."
We lose our use of colour Just water on the brush
Minneapolis had snow and sun, which were both a nice change from the overly typical wintergrey here. Contrariwise, it remains nice to be back at home with my kitten.
Small changes, small improvements, day by day. Sunreturn.
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awesomeers
