cupcake_goth | Reading

I got it in my head to go to the Mercury in my Lizzie Borden outfit, the 1890's walking suit in blue velvet that I made, with considerable effort, in around 2002. The trouble is, twenty-four years ago was also about ten pounds ago. I couldn't get the skirt to fit through the waist even with my oldest corset laced as tightly as I could, which probably would have been too tight for a full night out anyway. Sadness.

So did I switch outfits and go out anyway? No. As soon as I got out of the corset my body was all, "Stay home and get some sleep, woman." So I did, and now I'm super perky for doing my Sunday chores.

On the upside, I arranged a second date with Red next weekend. Also, Adrian Tchaikovsky doesn't suck; all credit to the Tickler for recommending him.

And by the way, when I first made Lizzie I didn't have boobs, like, at all. Now I have enough.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: my dishwasher

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Cool weekend. Friday the 13th, followed by 'Pi Day' [3.14] - sadly, still not feeling that well - due to pneumonia & the healing tooth area - & now it's the Ides of March.

Read that what Caesar said was Greek, 'Kae su, teknon' [that Shakespeare translated to 'Et tu Brute'] but which means 'you too, child' - and this ...

https://www.greece-is.com/ides-march-julius-caesars-last-words-really-greek/
[summary quote]
Among modern scholars, the most widely accepted theory is that Caesar either said nothing as he lay dying, or uttered the Greek phrase “Kaì sý, téknon.” Upper class Romans would have moved easily between Latin and Greek in everyday speech, but while the oft-used translation of the Greek is “You too, my son?” others have argued the phrase – commonly used in ancient Greek comedy – could have also meant, “Screw you, kid!” – reminding us that Caesar, a seasoned soldier, was defiant to the last.

Current Mood: blah

Ugh. I've been feeling like a lump of unbaked dough since...my birthday?...the clocks were changed? I did make it to PT the day after my birthday, so maybe not that long. But yeah...sluggish, unmotivated, lazy, etc. Today was the first day I've felt semi-human.

So of course, the car's passenger side window motor broken, leaving the window permanently in the 'down; position. All we did was go to brunch because Himself was worried about potential theft - mainly of my Handicapped placard, he says.

We are currently waiting on an Amazon delivery of a part he thinks is the problem and he checks for it almost every half an hour. Heh.

+++

Livia is Back. I had to say goodbye to my birthday flowers before it was time because Someone got on the table, nibbled on the leaves, and knocked the vase over. Water all over the table and dripping on the floor. A day or 2 later I SAW her on the second highest built on bppksje;ves munching on my spider plant. I had to spray her TWICE with the water bottle to get her to move away. The poor plant was really chewed up, so it;s now out on the balcony with the roses.

Foolish me for hoping I could have a cat AND indoor plants.

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cats

A few days ago, somebody from Planned Parenthood came to my door asking for money. I'd given before, and since I am, as Good Sister puts it, "a soft touch", I donated. Like, a fair a mount. Since Comfy Lady works there in a fairly senior position, I texted her, natch.

She arranged dinner at Kedai Makan (Yum!) forthwith. That was last night. She reminded me that Trump and his lackeys have prevented Medicare & Medicaid* from buying services from Planned Parenthood, thereby depriving the organization of about 40% of its revenue. I feel better about donating now.

That wasn't the only shitty politics-related thing we talked about, but I wouldn't want to leave the impression that dinner was unpleasant. In fact, look for a locked entry right after the first weekend in April. Comfy Lady should make another appearance, even if minor.

But what's something else that's related to politics**? Global warming. The entire western half of North America has just had its warmest winter on record, but you'd never know that from recent weather in Seattle. It snowed yesterday, just enough to stick for a few hours, and today it sleeted. The sleet started while I was grocery shopping, miles from home, having gotten there on Miss Indigo Bike.

You want to know what sleet sounds like when you're wearing a bike helmet? Plastic popcorn. Bonus: I realized I'd forgotten something after riding maybe a quarter mile through the slush and hail. Yes, I went back and got it, because I needed it. Hey, at least I'm all set for any potential snow tomorrow.

*The US's health insurance schemes for the old and the poor, respectively.
**Everything is. If you don't like that, tough noogies.

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: KEXP archive, the Mechanical Breakdown show with Sharlese

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Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

hi there. i haven't posted anything in a long time. actually, i haven't been journaling that much. i made a few updates in my physical diary, but that's about it. my life changed so much in february that i don't even know where to start. i'm also not sure if i like where my life's going, but i want to see to where i'll be leading myself.

the best thing that happened, by far, was the fact that I SAW MCR!!!!! they are my favorite band ever and against all odds i saw them live last month. best. day. ever. nothing will ever top that. i still get misty-eyed and lightheaded from thinking about it. take me back!!!! i must've watched my own footages 100+ times now and i still can't believe I WAS THE ONE WHO TOOK THE VIDEOS. I LOVE MCR SO SO SO MUCH >0<

one more thing... i'm in college now... which was kind of an impulsive decision. but let's see how this goes. worst case scenario, i end up killing myself or something. but i'm feeling positive!!! everything will be fine. the only thing that bothers me is all the money my parents are spending on me. i own them so much...
seriously though, uni is going well so far.

ps.: BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH!

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Location: not my hometown anymore
Current Music: now listening: Kicking Your Crosses Down - Circa Survive

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I have worked. Uh. A lot. Over the past three weeks. o_o But now it's the weekend, and I don't currently have a rewrite to work on, and March Break lies ahead; the spring crunch isn't finished, but it's on hiatus for the week, and a normal workweek is a breath of fresh air at this point. (Also I'm taking a couple of days off during it.)

Yesterday work wrapped up early enough that I had an actual evening, so I was finally able to start Butterfly Effects, the fifteenth (!) InCryptid book. ("Finally" is a bit of a stretch, I guess, since it's still the release week, but this is a Sarah-narrated book. Mostly. SARAH.)

So my hopes for the weekend are pretty much: avoid napping (I don't find naps restorative and feel groggier after than before I started); finish reading Butterfly Effects; watch this week's The Pitt and hopefully the temporarily-streaming production of The Importance of Being Earnest with

scruloose; get

scruloose to redo my undercut; and (also with

scruloose) do a second round of advance-prepping ten or so bags of the dry ingredients for my breakfast banana bread while also baking up a new batch of loaves. I think that last will also require decanting cinnamons from bags into jars, so maybe we'll manage a bit of other spice decanting/sorting while we're at it.

Current Mood: groggy

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I finally got some Minute Maid frozen orange juice concentrate and Orange Julius take 2 is way better than the watery version I made last month. Woo!

Tomorrow, I have to get up early and bake Irish soda bread to take to the family - we are going out for St. Patrick's Day dinner (and also the NINTH[!!!!!] anniversary of my father's death - it is his recipe I use; I miss him a lot).

TV quick takes:

Shrinking: ( spoilers ) Anyway, the first few episodes of this show are a little tough to take but it has morphed into a funny, endearing, poignant hangout comedy and I recommend it! Harrison Ford is SO GOOD in it too.

The Pitt: ( spoilers )

I am very interested to see where the rest of this season is going.

*

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Korea vs DR in the WBC

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I have 61 Heated Rivalry icons to share. In the post you can find:
- 32 Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
- 15 Ilya Rozanov
- 11 Shane Hollander
- 2 Svetlana Vetrova
- 1 Scott Hunter/Kip Grady

Preview:

Here @

love_sacrificed

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tv: heated rivalry

As I have referred to obliquely before, I am Doing Something with regard to the events in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Signal

I was pulled in as a volunteer, oh, perhaps a month and a half ago. I was asked to set up the project, and despite my genuine nervousness at the responsibility I was handed, I did. I analyzed what needed to get done, wrote documentation to describe the process, and handled it alone for three days. Then more volunteers were added, and I was asked to train them. Then the team was doubled again, and I had to train them, too, and incorporate them into the team. Then I had to set up a couple of subteams, hold standup meetings, and start thinking about process, team building, donor relations, technological security, resource sharing, and budget.

Rather to my astonishment, now that I have retired, I have become for the first time in my career, no kidding, an actual manager, overseeing a team of ten people.

Over the last week, things have ratcheted up, and the phrase "It's like herding cats" has definitely floated across my mind.

I've been told I'm rather good at it. But it's a bit daunting. I'm definitely spending more hours at it than I spent at my job at the Synod.

Wow. I'm an actual manager. Who knew?

Image description: Lower third: a double monitor showing a world map, and a hand holding a phone, also showing a map. Center: a hand holds a marker writing the words "Project Planning" in red letters. Just below stands a row of cats, lurching forward in an uneven line. Upper right: a partial view of a woman with the word "Manager" superimposed over her. Upper left: Signal icon.

Manager

10 Manager

Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: accomplished

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Watching: Alternating Rotten Mango and Private Nightmares
Listening: BE by BTS
Working on: general tidy up, head sorting

The New (to me) car got here on Tuesday and it's SO PERFECT. It's weird to feel proud about a purchase, but I bought it outright (using my savings) and I'm so pleased. I've been driving a 2006 for about 7 years now (it was my dads) and before that I was driving a 1996. The difference between the cars is...Wild. Like, the tech is light years apart. The comfort in the new (to me) car is outstanding. It's a 2021, so it's probably the newest thing I've ever driven.

I have a lot to work on in the house, and I need to order the plants for the garden (we're aiming for firefly / pollinator habitat), as well as ordering the raised beds for the vegetables.

Not working is weird, and I'm having a lot of trouble deciding what to do with my days. Being able to just be chronically ill without having to force myself through 8 hour work days is really nice, and if in the middle of the day I'm too tired to keep going I can just take a nap.

I do need to enroll in classes for certifications (I need to learn SOME kind of marketable skill so I can get a new job) but right now I'm just going to enjoy not having a schedule.

State of the world is .... so dreadful, honestly. there's just so much going on.

Current Mood: tired

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I feel like every email would be improved by signing off with "enjoy the large inflatable colon" tbh.

I picture some doctor trying to hang up the handmade banner reading WELCOME HOME COLON ... and the frustration after it came back from the printer's as "WELCOME HOME :" for the third time.

Next attempt = WELCOME BACK : THE WORD NOT THE SYMBOL

*looks at pic*
That's not a colon; that's a semi-colon!

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A French children's book in translation from 1961, in which five children are trapped in a cottage by a landslide.

14-year-old Laurent's family is concerned that he spends all his time reading and doing chemistry experiments, and isn't engaging with other people. So they dispatch him to stay with his younger brother and sister in a cottage only occupied by a 14-year-old girl and her younger brother, who are alone because her mother is having surgery. The idea is that Laurent will have to take care of the other kids, and this will make him come out of his shell more. His parents do leave him the out of being able to pack up his siblings and return to Paris if he really hates it.

I am honestly not sure if it was even vaguely normal in 60s France for five kids ages 14-5 to stay alone in a remote mountain cottage for ten days, or if this was just a literary convention. Anyway, Laurent unsurprisingly hates it and packs up his siblings to leave. But while they're on the train platform with the other kids, he has a change of heart and they all head back to the cottage. But they stop in the cottage of a family friend, who is out at the time.

It gets buried in a landslide! They're all trapped in pitch darkness! In an only vaguely familiar house! They can't use the stove because it already nearly suffocated them with carbon monoxide! Their only air is from a narrow shaft leading to a giant canyon! There's very little food! No one knows they're in trouble because one of the kids wrote ten postcards dated for every day of the vacation, then arranged with the post office to send one per day!

The kids having to do everything in total darkness for most of the book is a really cool twist on this sort of "trapped in a space" book. (One of my favorite moments is when enough dirt slides away that some light gets in, and they see that they've been half-starved in pitch darkness with two huge hams and a lantern hanging from the ceiling.) It has some cozy elements - they're trapped with goats, which they can milk but which also get into everything and poop everywhere, and one goat gives birth to twin kids - but gets desperate quickly when Laurent gets an infected cut and the main milking goat drowns in a flooded cellar. But it all ends up okay when they first signal with Morse code in a mirror (in a nice touch of realism, it takes a long time for anyone to figure out the message as the kids get some of the letters wrong, including signaling OSO instead of SOS) and then make and set off gunpowder!

Not an enduring classic, but an entertaining read.

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I've been vacillating about whether to buy an induction stove, and I've been keeping my eye on one particular model from one particular local dealer. Its price has risen nearly 16% in less than two weeks, in two steps.

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Location: the living room of the Devil Girl House
Current Music: I need better ear worms.

Tags:

energy,
politics

Fandoms: 9-1-1, 9-1-1: Lone Star, 1923, A Discovery of Witches, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Echo, Elite, Fallout, Heated Rivalry, Stargirl, The Order, Yellowjackets

rest HERE @

mundodefieras

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Gyre explores the tunnels of an alien world in a mechanical suit, her only connection to the outside world the voice of Em, her handler who she’s never met, who may or may not have her welfare in mind, and who definitely has boundary issues.

Gyre has less experience caving than she claimed, and caving is extremely difficult. There are sandworm-like creatures called Tunnelers that will kill multiple parties of cavers for unknown reasons, so cavers go in alone, unable to take off their suit for weeks on end, with their handler as their only link with the outside world. Em can literally take control of Gyre’s suit/body, can inject her with drugs, etc - and not only has little compunction about doing so, but won't tell Gyre what the actual purpose of the mission is.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

This is a type of story I don’t see very often, in which there’s one main science fiction element – in this case, the mechanical caving suit – which is explored in depth and is essential to the story, and it’s also set on a (very lightly sketched-in) other planet. Generally the “one science fiction element” stories are set on Earth. Apart from the Tunnelers, this novel actually could take place on an Earth where the suit exists.

The Luminous Dead, like The Starving Saints, has a small cast of sapphic women and takes place almost entirely in the same claustrophobic space; if it was on TV, we’d call it a bottle episode. I normally like that sort of thing but unlike The Starving Saints, it outstays its welcome. It has about a novella’s worth of story, and while it’s very atmospheric and any given portion is well-written and interesting, considered alone, as a whole it’s very repetitive and over-long. I would mostly recommend it if you like complicated lesbians with bad boundaries.

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If you get a chance and don't mind sentiment(or musicals) you might want to stream "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist" which I missed during the pandemic. it's cute, but also pulls your heartstrings too.
thought I'd be back here faster, but some virus or allergy attack had me literally sucking on a lozenge for week so, you know.
WIP: A revamped version of "My Friends Think I'm Crazy", which I'll put a sample of under a cut.
( Read more... )

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I don't love that Nolan McLean gave up 2 home runs in the same inning in this game, but I do love that Team Italia celebrates with an Armani blazer and an espresso (they literally have an espresso machine in the dugout and if someone hits a homer, he gets a shot) and then the team captain kisses the guy while everyone else does this: 🤌

*

Work is currently bananas. Listen, I have a whole document I wrote on how to change/streamline board stuff to foster discussion and engagement, but we were supposed to do it methodically and not implement it until the June meeting, except now we are doing it NOW, and everything got upended in the stupidest way possible. I maybe kind of couldn't control how irritated I am about it because it is basically making me do double the amount of work and is seems to me like it is just going to achieve the exact opposite of what we want it to, but apparently this is coming directly from the new board chair. I told my boss that if I am right, and that this doesn't do what they think it is going to, I might not say it, but I will be thinking the world's biggest "I told you so." And she was like, that's fair. Sigh.

*

Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Team US vs Team Italia on tv

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---RESIDENT EVIL 4 (REMAKE)
[x]55 leon scott kennedy
[x]3o luis serra
[x]o2 leon & luis
[x]o2 ingrid hunnigan

---RESIDENT EVIL: INFINITE DARKNESS
[x]23 leon scott kennedy

---RESIDENT EVIL 6
[x]o6 leon scott kennedy
[x]o9 helena harper