Reading

(no subject)

Face of sadness & rage: the public library here has had to cut its streaming services, likely in part because of the destruction of the IMLS, which funded a lot of that. This is a fucking travesty.

It's been too hot to bake, so I picked up a loaf of bread and am basking in the season's first tomato sandwiches. Bliss.

One thing I want to do before the end of the summer is borrow the ice cream maker and dehydrator from the Thing Library; my ice cream quest continues (Dutch Chocolate is perfectly fine but not a standout); blueberrying has not been scheduled but I have agreement that it sounds like fun from the people I want to go with. I am up to H.M.S. Surprise in the Aubreyad and enjoying myself thoroughly.

I love summer so much. I feel like a person.

Rebuilding journal search again

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

Entry tags:

dream theater

dreaming in billboards, as kass says

Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.

And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.

idle contemplations

Very pleased at how fast my ankle's been healing; it barely hurts at all except when I flex my toes, and I assume that will get better next week. Ice and rest doing their job as advertised! The knee is — I don't want to say getting worse, that's not true, but as the scab gets thicker and more attached to the skin, it feels more uncomfortable to move my knee through flexion/extension, and that is not fun. Botheration.

I have a dark feeling I should get PT after this; I can feel my gait getting fucked up by having both legs injured in different ways. A new adulting experience, and I already do not like it because it will involve insurance. Maybe I'll call the EAP and make them give me a to-do list or something.

While lying in bed and icing my ankle, I have re-read Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and Fledgling; I know we've talked about it before, but wow it gets more and more noticeable how she just doesn't think of queerness as related to desire. The stuff she's interested in about gender and sexuality forces her to acknowledge the existence of same-sex sexual interactions, but nothing about them is ever anyone's first choice or pleasurable except in the ways her worldbuilding allows her to impose on the characters.

I am idly fantasizing about a shopping app that lets me:

manually add items from a variety of independent vendors (i.e., not Amazon);
once a month (or whatever time period I set), checks if any of the items on the list are on sale;
if it finds an item on sale, it stops going through the list and purchases that item, removing it from the list;
if nothing is on sale, it picks a random item from the list, purchases it, and removes it from the list;
repeat next month.

Note: steps 2-5 do not involve me making decisions or receiving alerts.

Things to Get Me [referral link] is perfect at #1. Google Shopping kind of does #2 but only kind of. The rest of it, I'm fairly sure it doesn't exist and I understand why, I can easily see where this could go very wrong, but I want it for myself and I'm mad that either I gotta build it (no) or outsource to a human. Further botheration.

Current Mood: working

Entry tags:

two, two, two reviews in one

In the past two months I have been fortunate enough to read not one but two ARCs for upcoming novels by KJ Charles. One was Copper Script, which you'll notice has already been actually published. The other was All of Us Murderers, out in October 2025. So here we go, two reviews, one tardy, one timely, happy to separate them into two different posts if someone official would prefer that I do that.

( Copper Script )

( All of Us Murderers )

Both titles: A+ would recommend.

lolsob

I tripped coming back from the garden after watering and skinned the hell out my left knee and twisted my right ankle, plus minor scrapes on my palms. Ow.

Hobbled home, rinsed everything off (because of course I had some dirt on me from wrestling the garden hose and whatnot), smeared on antibacterial ointment, iced both joints (not super successfully), taped bandaids to my knee, and ordered delivery of a bento box. Now I need to put on enough clothes to get downstairs to receive said delivery, and get back up the stairs to eat. Ow ow OW.

This was a perfectly pleasant heatwave until then! I got the window unit into my bedroom window yesterday, have been eating popsicles and drinking various flavored waters, and made summer rolls last night. I was going to make peanut noodles. But no. Did I mention OW?

Current Mood: okay

Entry tags:

it's happening slowly, but it is happening

When my mother moved into assisted living last summer, we got her a landline phone with big buttons and six presets where you can put pictures to make it super easy to tell who it is you're calling. Alas, the pictures are hard for her to make out because the contrast isn't great at that size, so I turned them over and just printed everyone's initials, black on white, easiest thing. Her brother, her sister, her um-friend, and her cousin all have different initials, no problem. My brother and I have the same first initial so all our lives we've been designated on family calendars and things by our first and middle initials together.

She can't remember our middle names.