Shelf status

Jun. 11th, 2025 08:32 pm
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Three shelves (10' length, more or less) have been assembled, put up on the north wall, and filled to great effect. This emptied 1 entire Billy (with slight double stacking). We therefore need bookends.

The empty Billy is now in the living room, with the top few shelves embookinated and various plastic craft-adjacent boxes on the lower shelves. This is making a significant dent in the chaos by my desk.

The shorter bookshelf is currently at the end of the hall, for lack of a better place to put it. I expect that if it stays there long, I will start racking up another set of incredible bruises, and I still don't know where the one on my right arm CAME from. (I remember that I walked into some corner on my sleepy and unstable way to bed and then went "well, THAT'll leave a mark!" but do I remember what that something WAS? No more than I remembered what things I'd rammed into when I was taking Drama in high school, and my legs were forever dotted with black and blue marks.)

Today after work, Belovedest has put up all the standards (upright rails) on the south wall, embracketed them with however many brackets we currently have, and has started to assemble board pieces into full length shelves.

Coincidentally, today I also got a notification from the hardware store that they are shipping the backordered brackets.

There is one free-loving* free-standing bookshelf remaining in the room, where it is cheerfully getting in the way. I suggested a different method of assembly which neither requires turning the boards lengthwise nor doing the assembly behind the Billy, which suggestion was well-received.

Eventually there will be enough Shelf in the media room that some of the things taking up floor space will be able to go on them.

Today I roused in the morning long enough to feel bleugh, then woke up in the afternoon feeling competent to Lounge. Still craving bacon at intervals.


* My high school freshman Biology class had a crucial typo in a sentence about free-living organisms. We reacted about how you'd expect.

delight of the evening

Jun. 11th, 2025 11:54 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Okay. So.

Admin: the LRP has a variety of in-game resources. One of the more valuable ones is mithril, which gets used for all sorts of things, like armour and weaponry and building works, particularly military ones.

This event we are seeing the launch of The Cow Stock Market. This inevitably was a topic of discussion over this evening's pizza: discussion of the designs of the I Promise To Pay The Bearer On Demand One (1) Cow slips! speculation over Cow Futures! debate over the impact on the gold mithril standard!

It'll be fiiiiiiiiiine, says A. It'll all be TOTALLY fine. You can absolutely build fortifications out of cows!

-- and at this point, for those of you who are abruptly cackling, I need to point out that A has not read Nona the Ninth.

I also need to point out that I am in a specific groupchat, specifically set up following the event where someone managed to get their hands on some copies of Nona a few days before official release and there was consequently significant in-field bartering for who got to be next in the queue to inhale them, that is named after. well. the cows. did you know that cows have best friends.

But A had no idea why I was abruptly losing it, and I decided that rather than attempt to explain I was in fact first of all going to Depart Our Table, find my Nona dealers, and relate unto them the story of The Thing A, All Unawares, Just Said.

The reaction was extremely gratifying.

In which I read therefore I am

Jun. 11th, 2025 04:03 pm
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
[personal profile] spiralsheep
- Reading: 66 books to 11 June 2025.

63. Faith Fox, by Jane Gardam, 1996, 3/5: her most depressing novel? My favourite Gardam novels are Bilgewater then Crusoe's Daughter then The Flight of the Maidens (but Old Filth is probably her most popular work).

64. The Geographer's Map to Romance, by India Holton, 2025, fantasy romance novel, 3/5

A "marriage of convenience" romance novel set in a fantasy version of Victorian Britain (supposedly 1890), peopled by characters with 21st century sensibilities and international English language. The plot, such as it was, would have been enough for a much shorter story, and the magical trappings are arbitrary, but the prose is lively and full of in-jokes and meta-humour about romance and fantasy tropes which entertained me enough to read on. I was excessively pleased that the solution was to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, lmao. Warning: if you dislike "only one bed" scenes then be aware that's a running joke and Holton crams in as many examples as possible.

Quotes and commentary )

P.S. Can confirm Much Marcle is the sort of place where a rain of frogs would seem normal.

65. [Redacted: acquaintances kept telling me this novel is "not good" but that I should read it, with the same delivery as, "This smells terrible... go on, sniff it!" They were correct. 'nuff said.]
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
[personal profile] spiralsheep
Aurora Australis readalong 8 / 10, An Ancient Manuscript by Shellback (Frank Wild), post for comment, reaction, discussion, fanworks, links, and whatever obliquely related matters your heart desires. You can join the readalong at any time or skip sections or go back to earlier posts. It's all good. :-)

Text of An Ancient Manuscript by Shellback (Frank Wild):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aurora_Australis/An_Ancient_Manuscript

Readalong intro and reaction post links:
https://spiralsheep.dreamwidth.org/662515.html

Links for next week, this week's vocabulary, quotes, and brief commentary )
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Two things:

  1. I keep (especially post-surgery, cotemporal with relearning how to walk) finding more small ways that how I've been doing my various physio exercises isn't quite right. This is a good thing! Isn't it fascinating to be learning more about embodiment and how my body works and how I can best deploy my various muscles!

  2. Up until the hypermobility clinic, all the physio I was ever prescribed made me worse, not better.

It abruptly dawned on me, all at once, that the subtlety of the changes I'm making with adjusting how I'm shifting my weight around and so on and so forth? Are almost certainly not actually externally visible. Like, yes, people not understanding hypermobility and problems with it was also Definitely A Problem, but -- the part where I'm still, mm, not necessarily fixing things but certainly developing them, finding places where even with What The Hypermobility Clinic Told Me To Do I wasn't getting quite right... well, the hypermobility specialists clearly went "eh, good enough", and in terms of the effects on my ability to Things I think they were clearly demonstrably provable correct, but -- yeah, okay, sudden understanding of some of just how difficult it would have been to correct some of this stuff.

(I'm very sure that all my various epiphanies will turn out to be about things that still aren't quite right, that I can still refine further -- I'm having an extended phase of that with Pilates right now -- but this is a good thing, actually. It's really nice to have such clear evidence that I'm getting to know and understand myself better.)

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. FINISHED:

  • Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson. I can see why people like her! I have also remembered why I wound up unsubscribing from her blog. Very interesting proof of concept in re audiobooks, though.
  • Prophet, Helen MacDonald and Sin BlachΓ©. Very enjoyable reread in which many things landed differently, in service of...
  • a word you've never understood, [personal profile] rydra_wong. EXACTLY the post-canon follow-up I wanted but would have absolutely failed to articulate. Have already tried to lure one more person into reading the book so I can then make them go read the fic. Now I just selfishly want Even More Of It.
  • Pain is really strange, Steve Haines. Reread for the purpose of making notes, this time. Sparked at least one useful thought. Following up references is a work in progress.
  • How to cook... Desserts, Leiths Cookery School. Read all the way through for the purposes of EYB indexing first pass! Go me.

STARTED:

  • Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. Borrowed from library on a whim for low-brain non-fiction.

Writing. First pass through indexing a cookbook on EYB!

Some Actual Notes re pain for The Book, including (and I am very proud of myself for this) actually writing down my questions alongside the bare "here's what it contained".

Watching. Murderbot S01E01. I am dubious but expecting to keep watching. If you encourage me I might say more when it is not past curfew.

Cooking. ... apparently I have not managed Much Of Note this week.

Eating. POTATOES at the ALLOTMENT courtesy of ALLOTMENT FRIENDS. Also finished my choi sum and had my first AMAZING broad beans and nibbled kohlrabi speculatively, all on Tuesday.

Today I have nibbled: a cherry; the first few redcurrants; a pod's worth of Kelvedon Wonder peas; half a tiny tomato.

Making & mending. Made some progress on A's left glove. Realised, belatedly, that I'd done the same thing with picking up stitches unevenly along the two sides of the palm. Ripped back most of the way to where I started from and Sulked. BUT HEY I've remembered the pattern and where I'd stowed all the bits for it!

Growing. See Eating for my biggest excitements. Sugar Magnolia (purple sugar-snap pea) now setting pods; my main intention with it this year (given that I planted a whole packet of seeds and have wound up with ...fewer plants than that) is just to get myself sorted with a significantly larger number of seeds for next year, but hey, maybe they'll all be super productive and I'll actually get to eat some too.

Stockings now at the plot to go onto the cherry tomorrow, hopefully.

Tomatoes planted out when tiny not doing so great (i.e. have mostly disappeared). Tomatoes planted out when larger Actually Flowering. Desperately need to stake the lot of them.

Tiny single solitary surviving oca has started to Go.

V grumpy about how poorly the squash I got started A While Ago have coped with getting put outside given that they are in biodegradable fibre pots so I'm not even disturbing their roots. Getting the rest of them in the ground AND THEN SOWING MORE very much also high on tomorrow's priority list. (And the beans, augh.)

Observing. Met a neighbour!

spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
[personal profile] spiralsheep
- Bee log: 2 June, rescued a de-powered female worker Red-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius, from inside a library by holding it in my bare hands while it vibrated vigorous warning buzzing. Then, when I put my hand next to lavender flowers outside, the bee grabbed a flower to drink the nectar but wouldn't let go of my hand (probably because my body temperature was warmer than the air temperature). Re-powered bee eventually transferred to the plant before flying away, but not before a librarian had appeared to ascertain why I'd set off the alarms by carrying a tagged book through the detector gates. Librarian was very sympathetic to the bee and wanted to know which book it was "reading".

- Birb log: 27 May, 11+ jackdaws and very low-bowing courting male Wood Pigeon (a few days previously I suspected a Wood pigeon had been taken by a bird of prey but there are 5+ today).
3-5 June, latest I've seen a Goldfinch stripping last year's Teasel heads for seed.
8 June, by behaviour I'd say I've seen at least one juvenile Dunnock and one Blackbird this last week but neither was in pre-adult plummage.

- Citizen science: still biologging &c.

The Shelves

Jun. 7th, 2025 09:20 pm
azurelunatic: Operation 'This will most likely end badly' is a go. (end badly)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
I got the standards and brackets for that shelf system, and we are currently at Home Depot, after buying what I sincerely hope is the right configuration of board feet for eight shelves. It's secured to the roof and we're using surface streets.

It's too close to bedtime to start on repair plating the 8 foot boards to the 2 foot boards, probably.

some joys of the day

Jun. 7th, 2025 11:57 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. goslings! (Canadian; one still very yellow and fluffy, several more rather larger.)
  2. SNAILS. so many excellent snails. we went out on a couple of stupid little walks and saw MANY snails.
  3. ate the last of my birthday cake, with discounted raspberries courtesy of one of said stupid little walks. <3
  4. the post brought Several more books for me (two pain-related, ...some cookery) and I am very pleased with them. particularly looking forward to warm bread and honey cake, though given that I've still not actually read Salt Fat Acid Heat I don't rate my chances of getting to it any time soon...
  5. current borrowed-on-a-whim-from-the-library book: Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. First chapter was paperclips; current chapter is a whistlestop tour of The History Of The Pen, including a much more loving biography of the BIC Cristal than I am normally exposed to via fountain pen fandom!

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