be brave, my sage little toaster!

books
The Impossible Fortune (Thursday Murder Club #5) by Richard Osman. This one just didn't grab me. Too many criminals, not enough Murder Club.

Xmas
was good, though delayed until Monday. I had a nice time, even if one of my gifts to my parents was redundant. The food was pretty great, though.

yarning/etsy
My Rock Star Lestat art doll sold on Christmas Day! Yay!! After which I finished a donation hat. And then another hat while reading Yuletide. I missed yarn group due to traveling for Xmas, though I got a commission for a Kermit green kickbunny, so I worked on that over my belated holiday. And I got a commission for an Older Daniel Molloy art doll yesterday, yay, so I'll be working on that over the next couple of days.

yuletide
reveals are tomorrow! Yay!

#resist
Tuesday, January 20: #50501 Free America Walk-out, 2pm local time. https://www.FreeAmeri.ca

Happy New Year, everyone! Please be safe as you enjoy kicking 2025 to the curb! <333

Merry Christmas, if you celebrate! Happy Hanukkah starting tonight, if you celebrate! Happy Wednesday, if you celebrate! I hope you're all having a lovely day! <333

Happy Yuletide! After several revisions, I'm pretty pleased with how my fic turned out, and I hope the recipient likes it. the recipient left a glowing comment, yay!

books
- Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky (2008). There was much less revision than I'd hoped for, and so this was mostly a rehash of the tribulations of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua during the Carter and Reagan administrations and how the NY Times handled it. They excoriate the propaganda but they also demonstrate the methods used, which are essentially the same as those used now, substituting social media and the 24 hour news cycle. Unfortunately nothing I didn't already know, having studied these things in depth in undergrad.

~ The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Overhyped. Not terrible, but not as great as advertised.

+ currently reading: Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. A tightly written analysis of how the global system of neoliberal capitalism is ruining the world. Eat the billionaires, indeed.

etsy
As of Dec 13, I had to stop selling to the EU due to a law there requiring all businesses doing business there to have a representative THERE. Which I don't. Which nearly zero non-EU etsy sellers have. It's stupid. I can still ship to GB, though not to Northern Ireland. It's all such bad policy. Also, a bunny I shipped took three full weeks to make from here to Ohio, wtf. Also, I don't know how long I'm staying with my aged parents, so I packed up my entire shop and brought it with me. Last, my after-Christmas sale starts tomorrow. Get $25 off orders of at least $65. That's a great deal if you want to buy a bunch of stuff or nab a vampire doll at a good discount.

yarning
Sunday was the holiday party. It was full of things I'm allergic to, but that's all right. It's nice to hang out with them. I finished the latest kitten academy kickbunnies and another indigo and denim kickbunny. I'm working on a turquoise one now.

Again, I hope everyone's doing well! Safe travels and happy holidays! <333

Juneteenth
Happy Juneteenth, from a white person who spent some formative Juneteenth weekends on Galveston Island back in the 80s.

( cut for length )

I hope everyone's doing well! If you're under the massive heat-dome, please remember to prehydrate, cover your couches in beach towels to save your upholstery from sweat, and stay in the shade. Take care! <333

1. I'd spoke too soon about the AC getting fixed. It never cooled off after the Wednesday repair, so Friday they sent an emergency crew to replace a dead capacitor. So: new thermostat, new disconnect box, total rewiring of all the things, new fuses, and new capacitor. It works now, so it isn't total agony to be upstairs in my office where the laptop is.

2. I bought a tv. I haven't had a tv in nearly a decade and hardly watched it for the five years prior, but I've been turning my downstairs into studio space and wanted my default youtube stream on with the option of Prime and PBS. So that is a thing I've been getting used to. I had a conversation with Therapist about it, because I used to watch tv constantly, before it became a migraine trigger, and I don't want it to become an addiction again. She then stopped me and disputed the term "addiction," describing how ADHD and television are their own complicated thing that needs specialized structure and active management. I'm only a year and a half into my ADD diagnosis, even though I've had it my whole life and still feel wildly underinformed. I've been tracking down books on how ADD works in female-bodied humans (I don't have the hyperactivity, thus deleting the H) so I can educate my damned self. Book recs welcome!

3. Ironically, I am writing this after fighting a migraine all day, but the tv is no longer a migraine trigger unless it's strobing. Thank somebody. Now if only I could get more than a few minutes into anything before I hit pause and wander off.

4. Mercury stationed direct yday, tonight is solstice (~10:32pm CDT, I think), and today is Father's Day in the US. Much love to everyone who finds today challenging due to absent or awful dads. Please remember that their bullshit is on them and was never ever your fault.

5. Juneteenth
When I was a kid we used to go camping at Galveston Island every other weekend, which many years put us there on Juneteenth Weekend, sitting in tourist traffic in the midst of a freaking glorious street party. My parents never explained, because Deep South upbringing and still being scarred by growing up caught in the horrific racist backlash to the Civil Rights movement, but it was always featured on the local Houston news (which always sent a crew over to Galveston for live coverage), so I learned the history at the source. It was joyous. It was about celebrating the elevation of Black people from property to humans with rights and personhood and dignity. Which seemed completely obvious to me in my very-integrated, high-immigrant school system, but I was a *child* and still completely naïve to the underlying powder keg.

Note: I did not learn about Juneteenth in school, because Texas. And yet, back when I was in White Collar fandom, I found myself in the really weird position of being a white person educating other humans about Juneteenth. I posted this as the Juneteenth entry for the Month of June fest & am still ridiculously proud of it for both managing to portray an empowered Black woman being awesome and to sketch in enough history to ring true. No knowledge of canon needed.

That's Why the Lady is a Tramp (1378 words) by sageness
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: White Collar, DCU
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: June/Byron, Batman/Catwoman
Characters: June, Batman, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Community: month_of_june, Crossover, Canon - TV, Canon - Comics, 1960s, Podfic Available
Summary: (June as Catwoman.)

He steps out of the gloom after she's glared at him for a ten-count. "Catwoman," he says.

books
On the drive to the parents' this weekend, I listened to Pratchett's The Shepherd's Crown. Not long after I arrived, their neighbor from Scotland came over to visit. I was SO CLOSE to asking him to say "Crivens!" for me, but in the end I just kept asking him questions about his life so I could keep listening to his accent. *g* Really lovely old man who's led an amazing life, really lovely chat. And he hugged me when he left. I think maybe he was touched to have someone express an interest.

holidays
( unexpected things are unexpected )

wildlife
Sunday evening there was a flock of more than 100 robins out behind my parents' house. I've never seen anywhere near that many together. Astonishing. There was also a line of ripped up turf along the driveway where feral hogs came through...again. To say nothing of the wallow way out back. Also, barking that could have been dogs gotten loose or, more likely, coyotes. Wish I'd remembered to take the camera.

healthcrap
This has been the worst month for healthcrap in recent memory. I am so impatient to feel human again. And get my brain back.

new year's wishes
In 2018 I did not do a daily wish jar as in the previous two years. I'm planning to do one for 2019, though. I have a long list of wishes/intentions ready to copy out, 365 slips of paper, and a jar for them to go into. And I think I remember how to do the origami fold to make each one sekrit until unfolded. Also, tape and a notebook to log them each day next year for proper serendipity tracking/navel-gazing. Looking forward to it.

dirt
I gave the parents some plants, including mom a $5 pachira aquatica (money tree) from the discount rack at Lowes, which she was more excited about than anything I can remember. My decapitated adenium (desert rose) is finally putting out new growth! Maybe it will recover! My arugula pan is even more full of sprouts than last week. And I got a proper light rig for the terrarium so I can redo things in style. \o/

Hope y'all are well! <333

first, some terrible news
Lucy, my parents' cat, passed away on Friday night after a brief illness. I am really broken up about it. She was about to turn thirteen. I helped my parents pick her out at the adoption fair when she was seven weeks old, the same event where they got her giant canine sister, who died last May. I wish I knew what happened. I hate feeling so helpless and angry when it's too late to do anything about it anyway. RIP, tiny fierce predator. I loved you bunches.

second, the health crap
Lungs saga update: Turns out last week's relapse was allergy-related, not viral. My body was freaking out because I wasn't quite over the existing bronchitis when tree pollen sent everything back into active infection mode. (I hate doxycycline and albuterol is magic.) However, last night the fever & sinus infections returned and I got almost no sleep. This morning I woke up feeling as if I'd fallen down a flight of stairs, and pain meds have only slightly taken the edge off. (WHYYYY? OMG WHY CAN'T I BE WELL AGAIN?)

books
A Royal Pain (Her Royal Spyness #2) by Rhys Bowen. Kind of regretting this one as it falls apart with a single completely obvious logic fault, and that sort of thing drives me crazy. I'm also over the rich white English people historical mystery genre (again) and craving...IDEK what. Feminism. Low suspense. Magic. Absence of the stupid stick. Got recs? Pro or fannish would be equally lovely. *hopeful eyes*

yarning
Prior to yesterday, I'd been going all out on the commissions, using a time tracker to find out how many hours I'm actually putting into them. I had forgotten how much longer custom work takes, much less complex color work. Still, it's been a really fun challenge so far! I just wish the remaining work didn't require super close attention to detail.

valentines
For me, Valentine's Day is for celebrating ALL the positive relationships in your life and banishing the negative ones to the Void, never to return. I'm wishing you all a day filled with love, kindness, fun, and just the right amount of time spent with Other People. 💕💖💕

yuletide
Sunday, about 16 hrs before the deadline, I closed the lid of my laptop to go downstairs & when I opened it 30 seconds later, Windows was updating itself. I said, "Okay, this will be fine," and then reopened Scrivener, where my ##,### word story was down to 1200 words. And so were all five of the backups. Cut for losing my shit and wailing on the Yuletide Discord Bears channel (so much gratitude for them), and then after deeper poking into all the various scrivener folders I could find on Dropbox, I dug up 100 tiny rtf files with all the little scenelets I'd written and outlined. WORDS RECOVERED! It took 45 minutes to paste everything into a new doc (on Libre Office, not scriv. Sorry, Scriv), and then I spent the next 10 hours working on the last section. Bus pass draft posted. Final draft still...uh. Well. I'm still going all out to make it something I can stand to have my name attached to...except I spent 4 hours at the orthopedist today and am incoherent with exhaustion. I'm hoping food will help.

holidays
Solstice is TOMORROW! It is exact at 16:28 GMT, 10:28am CST. Tomorrow will be one second shorter than today in my time zone. I'm not sure if the nights are of equal length. Perhaps I'll just burn candles both nights. Oh, and, this morning the sun came out and burned off the fog. I hadn't seen the sun in a week. It was delicious.

Now to fling myself back into the salt mine and get the last third of the fic rewritten. And then I can beg for a speed Britpick and possible beta. (It doesn't need SPAG. More like gathering up the dropped threads and inevitable plotholes and no that is not how one uses the word "whilst", sorry.)

Best of luck to everyone doing final edits! <333

yuletiding
+ I has words! They're still in my outline instead of proper text, but still. Words. Words I can work with.
+ The Yuletide Countdown Clock is incredibly motivating.
+ SO MANY WORDS.
+ So many questions because I'm writing Britfic for the first time in my life and that is a place I have never been.

holidays
+ 15 Days Til Solstice! I am all on board for a Mesozoic Solstice. (Exact 12/21, 10:28am CST, 16:28 GMT)
+ I spent yesterday decorating the porch for the holidays. It isn't done yet, but it's going to be 40F and raining all day today, so it can wait.
~ family holiday shopping: amazing how quickly parents get their wishes together when I text them, "You're all getting charging cables and lumps of coal if I don't see some wishlists soon." Brother is still giving me "hmm" emoji, which may be a dare to actually give him coal. Fun fact: terrariums use activated charcoal. Maybe I'll make him one.

books
There's a new T. Kingfisher book out called Clockwork Boys -- *cue grabby hands* -- but no books for me until after Yuletide is finished. Woe!

( dirt, cut for image )

because of course it did
Mercury turned retrograde Sunday at the tail end of Sagittarius and will remain ret until Dec 22, 7:51pm CST. Sag has innate challenges with communication anyway (oversharing, garbled meanings, tangents, etc.), so this will be an interesting 3 weeks to see what happens. The AO3 has had an error where Yuletide comm members' fics were revealed on posting, which, oversharing, hah! Politically speaking, please gods let the current US administration {continue to} confess to everything. On the record. With evidence. And no defense. Sag is the natural ruler of all things legal and judicial, ftr, so if there is a gross miscarriage of justice such as the firing of Mueller, then prepare to see rioting and mass protests in defense of the law. (Cops, they will be so confused. Let's hope things stay peaceful.)

yuletide
Nothing quite like the ONE MONTH TIL DEADLINE post to get me moving. Of course, this is a daily pendulum swing between researching ALL THE THINGS and, oh, moving furniture around the house while I process. Still no words on the page yet and that's freaking me out a little. I need to be further ahead in the process than I am.

house + health
( wherein I did something foolish and dangerous and survived and now have awesome news )

dirt ( plants log )

RL news cycle
Can we finally stop glamorizing Getting Away With It culture now? Running a stop sign when there's literally no one else on the road is one thing; systematic predation of other human beings by the amoral is another matter entirely.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who are observing it!
This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for Bob Mueller and his staff, all the courageous women who have stepped up this year, Danica Roem, WaPo, Kitten Academy, and all my healthcare ppl who've gotten me to this place. It is so freaking weird to be feeling this good, so I'm just trying to enjoy it without any expectations.

I'm wishing all of you a safe, patient, and kind holiday weekend...or, you know, the rest of your week, if you're elsewhere. <3