The wind chill when I left today was -16°C. Now it's up to a toasty -9°C and tomorrow it will get to almost above freezing! ...and then on Friday it'll drop down to -22°C overnight. Welp.
This morning I overthrew my entire usual days in the office tradition and, rather than have a traditional Japanese breakfast with rice and pickles and miso soup, I had avocado toast and Greek yogurt with raspberries and almonds on it. Much more filling, honestly, but not something I want to do every day. There's something nice about being able to take the already-made shiozake out of the fridge, crack the rice cooker open to get the already-hot rice... Just enough time-saving to let me enjoy my mornings.
I went to the work canteen today and got a meal from Taste of China and it made me put another category in my Notes app list of work restaurants. Right now I have "Restaurants Yes" (home to places like Tandoor Char House) and "Restaurants No." I ordered mabo dōfu with egg fried rice and...it was fine. Worth the $9 I spent on it, I guess. I'll think about it when I see it in the future. And when I realized I had that reaction, I made a "Restaurants Maybe" list and put it on there. We'll see what else gets put there.
Tomorrow is a soul food restaurant and, well, no thanks. Nothing against soul food, I just don't trust that I can eat any of it. Maybe if Michael Twitty cooked it for me.
he would have interviewed the fuck out of those vampires
I don’t even like the Knives Out movies (nothing personal, they’re fine, just not my taste) and I would still tune into Fangs Out to watch this happen.
Last year I played a game a month, and actually accomplished it! This year...I did not. I had plans but everything was overthrown in the first part of the year. These are the games I played in 2025:
I was originally playing Horizon's Gate and then Vintage Story hit me like a truck and consumed all of my time. I spent the first six months or so of the year playing that, then played some Cataclysm and other games for a bit before picking up Jupiter Hell, played Witch Spring R but didn't beat it--I'm playing in Japanese so it's taking quite a while--and near the end of the year I bought Clair Obscur on sale and played it right through the end of the year. No review yet because I'm cleaning up all the post-game stuff, but soon.
Not as many games as last year, but boy did I enjoy all that time with Vintage Story.
Dearborn was up on my work desk in the bedroom early this morning, pretending she didn’t know that knocking pens and lip balms around on the glass surface would wake me up and irritate me. She doesn’t do it regularly and I try to ensure that by taking an angry tone when I call her name. If I have to get up to physically remove her from the desk, I make sure she doesn’t get a reward in the form of refilling their nearby half-empty kibble bowl. (She doesn’t even eat the kibble if I do that, she just likes seeing it happen. Which, I watch cooking shows sometimes, so I guess I get that.)
But sometimes I will go to the kitchen to make myself a little snack or do some 3am baking, because I’m awake and if I take ten minutes to mix up some dough or batter, halfway through my workday I can make delicious fresh pizza or nice pastry, like a waffle or a popover. Dearborn recognizes when Dad’s morning is about to have a change of venue and she knows there’s a chance I’ll sit down on the sofa, which is the designated Dearborn Cuddles event space, so she’ll excitedly run ahead to make sure I understand her enthusiasm for this possibility.
But this morning, after I dumped her off the desk, she timed it wrong. She started to run ahead of me just as I stepped away from the desk, and my foot as I pivoted was perfectly timed to punt her off her feet.
It wasn’t a kick, she didn’t skid or fall over. My foot came up under her belly between her front and back legs and just hooked all seven pounds of her aloft. She went sailing through the air, much to the horror of both myself and her sister, who promptly leapt off the bed and hid in the closet because Dad just levitated Deebs. That girl got hang time. She might have set a record for longest unaided flight by a cat. I didn’t even see her land because there weren’t any lights on, she just flew into the outer darkness of the bedroom hallway.
I checked her over and she’s fine, now resting across my ankles at the foot of my bed. She doesn’t seem hurt physically or even mad at me. It happened so fast she might not have realized it was me who fired her past the goalposts. She might think gravity just went sideways for a few seconds. Cats don’t always have a firm grasp of physics and it’s not like I habitually attempt to make field goals with mine.
I feel bad, but the sight of her flying wildly into the shadows is less traumatic and more comedic than it probably should be. Poor little tortie kickball.
Mark O. came up today to "help". He has been one of my deer hunters for 25 years and is a really nice guy who is very helpful indeed. At random I chose to work on the tree below the garden. Back in July of 25 several of us cut down a really big blue oak that had been mutilated by PG&E tree crews. We got the tree on the ground and just left it there. A few weeks later I spent a couple of hours cutting off some of the smaller limbs and chopping up some firewood. It barely made a dent. Today Mark piled brush and loaded rounds into the Gator while I cut. I started out using my little Stihl 250 (Belin) which works great for limbing things up but isn't powerful enough to chop up bigger diameter limbs. When the branches got to about a 1ft diameter I switched to Rosie the big 391 with a 25 inch bar. I'm always impressed with that saw's power. It just chewed through that oak like it was nothing. The saw doesn't do anything fancy it just chops down through wood in a straight line. I chopped up limbs until even Rosie was slowing down a bit. Here is Chena very unhappily sitting on the log. There was some critter hiding from her down there...( Read more... )
At various points today while I was slaving away over a hot laptop, I heard various Bruce Springsteen songs floating down from upstairs.
He said on fedi: "I have often noted similarities between the musicians, but I desperately want to hear New Model Army covering Bruce Springsteen's 'Further On (Up the Road)'."
(It was when he first said that he wants them to cover "Badlands," and Springsteen to cover their song "Vagabonds," that I figured I'd probably made a proper fan of him, if he could see the overlap between Bruce and a band he likes as much as he does New Model Army.)
reblogging this again because so many people still do not realize that fat liberation is deeply political. fat liberation is not body positivity. it is not about loving yourself or being non-judgemental. it is about THIS. 👆
Today started with my annual checkup for the SGNT study I am parrt of. The annual checkup is more detailed than the quarterly ones, and hours later my eyes are still dilated.
I managed to work a little anyway, but when I got to the busstop to head home I saw a group chat from a cousin in Wisconsin with the sad news that his mom had died. So now, instead of working on the bus, I will remember my Aunt Nancy.
When my mom was around 18 years old she took a government Civil Service test, and did well enough that she got a job in Washington DC, working at the Pentagon. She lived in DC for six years before marrying my dad and travelling the world. While I have never been to DC, i grew up listening to her stories from that time.
Most of those stories featured one of her dearest friends, Nancy. Nancy was sweet, smart, and beautiful, and when my mom's big brother Jim (her favourite sibling), came to visit Jim and Nancy hit it off right away. I am told that at that first party after they met Jim and Nancy left the apartment to go buy more beer, and when they got back to the building and started up the stairs to the apartment they stopped and shared their first kiss. After that, any time they went up or down the stairs in that building they always stopped on the same step to share another kiss.
Not surprisingly, soon thereafter she was not only my mom's best friend, but also her sister. It was always a special treat when we were little to go visit Jim and Nancy, and their son, called Jimbo when he was little, to distinguish him fro. His dad, but these days simply Jim.
I had many wonderful aunts, but Nancy was a serious favourite. When I was little always took the time to talk to me as though I were her equal, and not simply a little kid, and when I became taller than she was, this didn't change.
It has been years since I saw her last, but I made a special point of passing through Wisconsin on my way to Europe from Australia in 2009, just so I could see her.
Today, I heard from my cousin Jim that news we never want to hear, but comes sooner or later for everyone. Rest well Nancy, the world is the richer because you were, and you had such a positive effect on so many people, and we who loved you will long remember you.
Shane squinted at him. “How many concussions have you had?”
“Fuck you,” Ilya said, flinging an ice cube at him.
It’s still going 😂
I finally published this thing.
It’s a two-chapter short fic.
I also collected my hockey stuff into a series. Not very descriptively-named but there it is.
This is my What Would Shane Hollander Be Like If He Tried Weed fic, which turned out to contain none of the things I had expected, but it was fun to write anyway.
And yes I am going to publish the one with Gritty someday, but this isn’t that one either.
It snowed all day yesterday, starting before dawn, but nothing stuck to the sidewalk until after dark, by which time it was still snowing and I was just not up for shoveling. Which meant, of course, that first thing this morning, after the overnight freeze, there was a layer of ice on the sidewalk. With a great deal of effort and about an hour in two segments (pre- and post-breakfast), I managed to break up and remove enough to make it reasonably safe. I hope. My hands were a little shaky at the end, which indicates I exerted myself more than I should have. Our house is not that wide, thankfully.
The temperature is supposed to go above freezing this afternoon, so hopefully that softens the remainder enough that I can scrape it up. Putting salt on top of ice doesn't help, it just melts the top so it can refreeze in a new and more slick state. Nope!
I have a free ticket for the Orchestra's MLK Day concert this afternoon; I was originally planning to attend with my friend who is now out of town because of a death in the family. We shall see if I recover from my exertions enough to attend. I am not worried about wasting a spot, they generally hand out more tickets than there are seats for these events, and tell you a seat is not guaranteed.
It's possible more snow will arrive in the coming week. Whee. If it does, I hope it doesn't affect our choir kickoff on Saturday, January 24th. Also, I hope the scores get sent out soon, as I need to make a trip to the library to print mine.
Phoebe came over on Friday. We spent several hours pulling her tye-dye tubs off the shelves in the carport and going through them. They were all jumbled up. Phoebe sold tie-dye for a while and had lots of odds and ends that needed to be sorted. Ultimately she took three large tubs of stuff away. The rest of the stuff is pretty well organized and labeled. We were planning to do some dying that day, but decided to put it off to the morning. Saturday morning I dumped old dye bottles and rinsed them out. Shirts, handkerchiefs and a couple of sweatshirts went into the soda bath. M picked out some colors and Phoebe and I began mixing powdered dye with water and urea. Before we could actually start applying dye Dave and Kim arrived. We had a nice, social lunch together which was just perfect. Then we got back to dying. I got 2 shirts done for M before quitting. Donald got a long sleeved shirt tied up in a mandela pattern and dyed. Phoebe, who had more time, got four shirts and one sweatshirt done. Today we washed out yesterday's shirts and I did 5 more. Hope we like them! Donald's shirt came out great. Pics tomorrow. My obstacle day for next month is filling up already, which is very encouraging.
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