cephalopod

( Thingies. )

Forgive, please. First draft was specific to a degree I didn't intend, and I'll be writing something more suitable by the end of the day. Just not right now, ha. Sorry.

The sun rises as a hideous beast, sets as a priest, rises as a meal
Again the champion hunts it, kills it, consumes it, rises in a vast and terrible piety for the champion to betray its own starving flesh upon
Again it learns its own charm
Again it dies in the teeth of fear.
We have much to learn.

There is no grain and there is no salt and there is no river of sweetness, in truth.
The things that seem to us like these things, they are other things
And they are things no one can eat.
Eating a thing causes a change in it and in the eater of it and the things made of light and joy only, only for us, they can neither be changed or eaten.
We starve in the garden.
The garden starves.

The sun rises as a hideous beast, a meal no one can consume, as light and joy. The air rises.
The waters rise.
The champion rises, reaching for a weapon.
Everything, all of it made only for us, rises past our reach again in a vast and terrible piety.
Among stones, airless, light and joy pass from their place around us, and we are stones ourselves, stones made of light and joy.
We learn our own charm.

I was thinking to myself in an idle moment yesterday, like you do: damn. DAMN. You know what would be great? The Fucking Count of Monte Fucking Cristo in far-future SPACE, kinda like that Lestat thing I did a few years ago! That was fun. He was, like, an actual billion years old. That'd be fun. That would be SWEET.

And then I remembered: whoops. Gankutsuou. It already happened and it's super great.

This leads me to the dual conclusions that I should rewatch it and that space vampires and space wizards (and space vampire wizards) need more love. Pretty much any fantasy thing is better in far-future space I think, with the single exception being werewolves. Werewolves in space are still just werewolves. I don't give a dang about werewolves.

Current Mood: pensive

I've been fighting with a virus of some sort since Thanksgiving; stuffy, tired, coughing, just drecky. I swear there was a ten-minute period today during which I could specifically say: yes, this is what it feels like to kick a virus' ass. The difference in well-being was that abrupt and amazing.

Coincidentally, it happened right after I drank a mug of hot broth and inhaled a hummus quesadilla. Salt and protein? I dunno. But I got this now! I mean there's still gronk in my sinuses but really, that's just staying hydrated and letting it drain. Ahhhhh.

This sudden burst of new energy, coupled with looking back through my old ao3 reviews, has filled me with the urge to spend my day off tomorrow cranking out something weird. I'll havve to think about it.

I'm not even going to do a whole paragraph here. The important thing that happened today is I ordered a plant stand so I could move my old-ass dracacena onto the stairs, and then went off to drop off some old clothes and chanced upon a better plant stand and a 1970s punchbowl trying to look like a fishbowl that's going to get the dracacena stuck in it. And then I cancelled the order for the plant stand.

It's nice when things work out.

*pelvic thrusts*

Yeee, went to con, likewise yeee, no more cons for a while. Good to see old friends, otherwise complete waste of time.

I realized a thing; I am not a nerd and have only ever really been a nerd because I grew up with nerds and for a long time that was the only thing to do and after that the easiest way to be friends. I'm not NOT friends with these people now, I just...

...wow I don't fucking care even a tiny bit about sci-fi or fantasy, whether modern or classical. I do not want to play any board game or tabletop game that is not amusing on its own merits, or to plot strategy multiple turns ahead, or fuck around with tokens of multiple types. I only cosplay people who look awesome and get me attention.

I've been living a lie, haven't I?

Shit.

I've been a theater kid the whole time. I thought I was a nerd for a decade and a half, but no.

EDIT: this is not a fucking joke. This shit broke my world open this weekend. Maybe comment a photo of a soothing landscape or something? I'm shaken.

New boots: nice. Leftover enchilada: nice. Finding out that when I leave for work in the morning, Guitar Solo goes down to the front door to cry for me: nice.....ish? Poor little rock star. She miss her fave audience. <3

Either the HOA sent somebody around to catalog neighborhood transgressions or one of the actual neighbors is an enormous damn busybody and hitherto a problem and a pain--we got a warning letter! I used to have two big terra cotta plant pots in front, and then a neighbor clipped one with their car and busted it up. That neighbor immediately contacted me to apologize, offered to pay for it, etc. Very kind. They're the family that has two beagles and Sammie, an enormously friendly neighborcat. We chat. It's not them.

Anyway, the busted pot sat out there being busted for a month because eh, flu, tired, inertia, fite me. Over the last weekend I did what I'd been meaning to do all along, which was to re-assemble the pieces into a cool fairy-garden thing. It needs to finish growing it, but it looks pretty cool. This was before we got the letter, mind you.

We also keep our trash, compost, and recycling bins in front of the garage, because everybody else does and it's easier and doesn't make the garage stinky.

THE FRICKIN LETTER IS TRYING TO COME AT US ABOUT THE BUSTED POT AND THE BINS. A ten-day grace period and then $50/day fine. Can you fucking imagine.

We have neighbors who have fences made of old bed parts, dead branches, and traffic netting. We have neighbors who park in fire lanes right in front of the signs saying DON'T PARK HERE, THIS IS A FIRE LANE. One neighbor just chucked a couple of dead pumpkins into their yard to rot--not the back one, the front one. By the road. And naturally, pretty much all of them keep their bins out for excellent and well-considered reasons. If they didn't all get letters and we did, then there is a motherfucker afoot.

*please imagine squinty eyes tracking suspiciously back and forth, I don't want to go gif hunting*

One must watch out for this motherfucker. Conversely, one might become a motherfucker if only to get rid of that damn trash fence.

I was all set to come home from work and bake something and then I got home from work and I do not actually want to bake anything! I got an oil change, dangit. I picked up a prescription, dangit. I have done so many useful things today, it's time to pet Guitar Solo's wonderful face and chill now, right?

I think it is. But for tomorrow, or the weekend, or when the hell ever I feel like turning some gnarly old apples into a tasty baked good (and also dried apples, which are wonderful). I found this good basic recipe. It is one of those wonderful tested-over-many-iterations recipes that is all "Okay, you want to make a thing with some stuff in it. Here's the thing part. Pick the stuff you want in about this amount and throw it in." A good chocolate chip cookie recipe and a good oatmeal raisin recipe have that in common--you just swap out active ingredients in about the right quantity and it makes something nice. Anyway, for later. Apple Cake. Reference: www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/easy-apple-cake/5427daa2-21ac-4b09-bb6e-4c24437500ce . Thanks Betty.

I still gotta make a lunch batch though, aaaaagh. The last one was tasty and nutritious but it went off. It's hard keeping up with these basic bodily needs sometimes.

Current Mood: lethargic

Fuck Facebook basically. Get used to me. :D

Anyway. I've been trying to figure out a spring/summer project, since the yard's done or at least the big project-level stuff is, and hell, the bit in front of the house basically is too? Which is weird. This always happens for a while after I finish something--I want to keep working on it but in a big continuing-construction way, not a settled maintenance way. Settled maintenance is less satisfying.

We're set for furniture, the garden's pretty well planted for the time being, and there's stuff inside I could do, like fixing wall dings and moving some art and unfucking the front hall situation, but that's like...settled maintenance, innit.

This is frustrating. I wanna labor and make things wonderful. But only in certain particular ways that are also clearly rewarding! Too much energy is such a problem, right? (I kid, mostly. I feel pretty lucky about that most of the time.)

I dunno. I should probably work on one of the settled things until a better option comes to light. Could build a sweeter cat tree maybe.

EDIT: the garden is planted up, said past me. Slightly more recent me noticed that the flowering currant in the front had pretty conclusively died, and that the weird chrysanthemum thing I put in one of the front pots last summer was 1. hurtin' and 2. I never really did like it all that much. OFF TO THE GARDEN CENTER! :D

Now I have a very pretty little dwarf forsythia where the currant was which will hopefully do better (giving a damn about it over the summer will help) and a sweet little columbine to hang out in the pot with the honeysuckle. Much more harmonious, and relaxing to look at in a way the mum never was. Even just the foliage feels a lot better to see. I don't know how that works, but it's true.

Current Mood: chipper

Getting food down a cat with a syringe is intensely unglamorous. Just saying. Gotta do it, and it's making her feel better after just two goes--wow she hates it while it's going on though. There's medical treatment for you. The vet yesterday didn't find anything alarming, it's just that she's lethargic and not eating and a bit sniffly, which...turns out maps pretty damn well to a recognized pattern of cats losing a companion (my other cat Jones) and getting droopy and non-eaty and catching a cold or flu as a result of feeling crappy.

Jones went pretty suddenly, and I think it took her about a week to realize he was gone. Since then, yeah, she hasn't been eating much. And she's been clingy. And she's been sleeping in places that he liked to sleep and still smell like him, like my fabric trunk. And she definitely has sniffles.

She is an old kitty, she's had a course of antibiotics, and we have fluids and recovery food and love to cram at her until she feels better, which will probably take another week or two. She will probably be fine.

Also, everything I read about bereaved kitties is very stern about DO NOT GO OUT AND GET A KITTEN. Pffff. :D It's like that's a thing that happens all the time somehow.

Current Mood: recumbent

Placeholder post, actual stuff to come.

Damn, I just made the BEST lunch batch. A brief note on which: lunch batches are pretty much always a big batch of bean salad with veggies in which is always vegetarian, often vegan though neither are the point, and composed so they taste good hot or cold and keep safely at room temperature for at least 6 hrs so I can parcel out some in a jar in the morning to take to work. Sometimes I have access to a fridge or a microwave, sometimes both, sometimes neither. Anyway.

THIS LUNCH BATCH IS THE BUSINESS.

Usually I go for lentils because they're fast. But I have a pressure cooker so it was chickpeas today, and just.....mwah. Cooked the beans, dumped a bag of frozen peas in, put some gently-cooked thinslice carrots and onions (just enough to take the raw out) and seasoned the whole mess with salt, pepper, oregano and thyme. Got some olive oil on there. I was going to put some chopped green olives in to help empty out the container, but nah I think I'll just put a few in on top of the lunch jar.

Only thing I really wish I had is fresh parsley, but eh. Not going to the store and yard parsley is all gone to seed. I will deal.

<3 lov lunch batch. I end up eating it for two weeks usually so it's great when it turns out especially nice.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: garbanzos

Ha ha Photobucket, joke's on you, any embarrassment at having placeholder images is outweighed by aversion to setting up a subscription! :D

Yeak k for anybody coming in late, that sure does shit up the page a bit and removes some otherwise very pert pictures (especially of my Glitch, she's adorable) but whatever. Hiiiiii.

Today's going to be a homework day unfortunately, but I'm hoping to be done with it pretty early on so I can hang out, maybe go back down to the kimono warehouse sale, maybe just work on project stuff. First project unfortunately is going to be cleaning up the office so I can do homework in it; it's still a fucking haystack from the last sewing project, which never actually got finished oh well.

Dude and I were out for breakfast this morning, and we passed a shitty little cinderblock house we'd seen first as a half-burnt wreck and then as an auction.com property sale for what, almost two years now? Someone clearly owns it; the enormous hemlock in front that was interfering with the power lines has been professionally pruned within the last month, the hedge of blackberries and actual garbage in the backyard has been cleaned out, and there are NO TRESPASSING/NO SQUATTING signs up in all the windows. There definitely aren't enough windows.

The auction didn't go through, apparently. It's still uninhabited, and the signs show every indication that it's still a bank property and will likely come up on the market again.

I kinda want it.

The house itself is utter crap; it's poorly-built, flat, tiny, and was recently-ish on fire. It's presumably been fixed up a little. I'm having a hard time quieting the voice in my head saying CHEAP LOT WITHIN SEATTLE CITY LIMITS! BIG TREE! PARK! ALREADY HAS GREENHOUSE IN BACKYARD! What the voice isn't yelling about is lots of stuff that makes the lot genuinely kind of crap, primary among them being the fact that it's got a shitty little house on it.

Voice says: YOU COULD BUILD A NEW ONE.

Yes, voice, but I'd have to build it more or less single-handedly. And this is assuming I could get a bank loan in the first place. COB IS CHEAP, it says, AND HOW HARD IS IT TO SCROUNGE UP MOST OF THE WOOD YOU NEED C'MON NOW.

I feel like I'm doing one of those fanfiction.net things where authors argued with their muses. Basically I really really want to build a house but I am in no way prepared to build a house but there's this little place that really looks like it would be great for a house! It's not even for sale at the moment, though, and as noted I have no expectation that a bank would give me a reasonable loan considering I have almost no credit history.

But HOUUUUUUUUUUSE.

Warm and gracious, natural-material, rounded-corners, beautiful scrounged-shit houuuuuuuuse. In which my dude and I must still be able to emerge looking professional and tidy, so composting toilets and laundry shenans are RIGHT OUT.

Hnnnngh. Maybe some day. In the meantime, I'm working on my credit history. While I'm doing that, please enjoy a picture of this tiny shitty house and the big tree. Tree is a little smaller now, house is exactly the same size and degree of shittiness.

Current Location: not that house
Current Music: bump

I'm so delighted with the yard these days. Between a combination of planting, transplanting, foraging, and lucky accident over the last few years, I have a straight-up witch garden. I do! The brickwork I'm still smothering the lawn with proceeds apace, but the plants themselves are ready.

I don't think I've actually tallied up all the stuff that's growing and doing well. I think I'll do that.

(herbs)

feverfew
mugwort
borage
St. John's wort
woolly mullein
peppermint
thyme
rosemary
orgeano HOLY SHIT OREGANO*
sage
nettles
bay laurel
yarrow

(berries/fruit)

strawberries
serviceberries
blueberries
salal
gooseberries
elderberries, red and blue
rose hips
crabapples
raspberries
oregon grape
goji
blackberries (invasive)

Not all of those are bearing yet. But all are alive and happy and established, and I'm kind of gobsmacked by how much it is. My yard is tiny and now that I'm murdering the lawn, the only parts left are parts with useful plants in. I haven't mentioned the useful stuff I only use incidentally, like heather but mostly like dandelions and horsetails, because ha ha good luck getting rid of those anyway. WITCH GARDEN! :D:D:D:D:D:D

Alas, I'm not a witch. I'm a motherfucking sorceror. But I still have a sweet setup.

*it's trying to come inside the house somebody save me and/or send some recipes

Current Mood: accomplished

I'm not working Saturdays for a while! That's pretty awesome and I am full of delight about it.

(was going to noodle along for another few paragraphs about projects and happy things but class is starting, durn--this turned out to be less like a post and more like a tweet but whatevs)

I just played Glitch again. Specifically, Children of Ur and I'm kind of floored by these utterly welcoming tender feelings being able to go back to Cebarkul is giving me. I was on Glitch when it stopped, I was naked and airborne just above that one mushroom in the center of Cebarkul and then the screen froze and that was it. Glitch was over.

I had also been bottling up a batch of homebrew beer that afternoon, and part of doing that is drinking the leftovers, so what I'm saying is that I was exquisitely vulnerable and emotionally compromised (see also: drunk) and when the Giants went back to sleep, it felt like Bina Q. Dry-Roast had died. I cried so much that afternoon.

Bina's standing on that mushroom now.

It's kinda like going to your own funeral but you're the only one there and it's less like a funeral than it's like a load of laundry finishing up in the dryer. So I guess it's basically a laundromat, but in a good way.

This is Bina, still looking a little careworn about the closing but changed out of her mourning clothes.

And this is Bina, a year and some before the closing was announced, having beer and an existential crisis about Glitchen mortality long before I got there in real life.

tiny glitchen mind: blown

The chicken in the second picture, incidentally, was also beer. That was its name. "beer". Because I named it. God, I missed Glitch.

AND NOW I DON'T HAVE TO!

Current Mood: bouncy

My rice cooker is so great. It's one of the cheapie cheap-ass ones that doesn't seal, it's just a wee crockpot that works at a higher temp basically, and this particular one has been dutifully serving me for about fifteen years now.

Bless this damn thing. I'm serious. It is sincerely and literally going to actual heaven.

I was going to post a recipe right here but I am a shambling wreck and anyway I don't actually have one, just 3c dry lentils and 1c dry rice, bunged in with water and a mix of season and whatever veg/pickles/frozen shit/shit in jars that's occupying the fridge. This post does not, therefore, have a satisfying narrative conclusion; I'm just so delighted to have a nice wad of lunch pottage again and I hope everybody is feeding themselves happily. It smells great in my kitchen right now. My rice cooker is magical. Everyone live a happy and beautiful life.

Current Mood: chipper

We've been doing 10-hour shifts at work (I'm an electrician trainee) for most of a month now, and Saturday shifts for almost two months. I'm kinda wondering what I've gotten myself into.

The last few days have felt kind of like a turning point, where finally I'm not coasting on momentum anymore and am just chugging through this junk under my own power. It feels like wearing a heavy coat. Not a huge deal, but everything takes a little more effort and everything's a little slower, a little more don-wanna on every new task. There's a song I thought was a shitty Pearl Jam cover but as it turns out it's actually by Seven Mary Three, called Cumbersome. That's me. It's also mid-nineties navelgazing at its finest.

Oh hey, I can post video. Enjoy this moment of bluesy pre-hipster whiteboy agnst [sic].

"Seven Mary Three - Cumbersome (Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

Anyway, I'm tired as fuck and getting incrementally more tired and this isn't even the craziest that work schedules get during crunch time. There's talk that we'll be working Sundays, too, and this high-gear whatnot is going to continue until May. I know a guy who did 16-hour days, 7 days a week, for three months. One of my co-workers did 7 12s for half a year--thankfully on a different job. He says he didn't know his name at the end of that. I'm just wondering if I can handle this stuff. I got a late start in the trades, and being able to coast through hell on energy drinks is no longer a thing I can do.

This is one of the boomiest boom-times Seattle has ever had as far as construction goes. I stepped into a river at flood stage, basically. Eventually this will end and I will have a lot more money. Still, though. Still trying to figure out how to be happy about life when most of my friend time and nearly all of my hobbies are on hold for a matter of months.

Current Mood: moody
Current Location: couch

Picking this journal back up has made me realize I need new icons. The jellyfish nuke and exulting Tachikoma are timeless, but the rest are a weird sedimentary strata of lapsed fandoms and modding the Homestuck Shipping World Cup. Where the hell are people getting icons these days? I need some Star Wars. Definitely robots.

I'd forgotten I had my current icon, which is a crab fight taken from a webcomic I did back when everyone had a webcomic. About 2004, I think? There was a coconut in it. I keep thinking maybe I'll bring it back.

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February 2021

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go for that crazy sound in the restaurant

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