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stationery

[stationery] contemplating a self-indulgence

In My Ridiculous Pen Collection, I have a Lamy 2000 (largely inspired by Ant Newman of UKFountainPens waxing lyrical). I got it second hand, as with all but one of my pens; the one that showed up cheap came with an F nib.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished

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Kinktober 2025: Limericks of Jedi gettin' it on - update

There are now 8 days of limericks in the Kinktober 2025 series. The Blindfold poem is even more deliberately vague about the pairing than the others. I would love to know how people read it!

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What I'm Doing Wednesday

books
Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles #6) by Dorothy Dunnett. 1975. cw: war, murder, offscreen sexual assault, subsequent PTSD. The exciting conclusion to the series. No lie, this one was rollicking, despite an overuse of untranslated French.

still reading: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. Book one. So charming.

still reading: Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed. 2023. Graphic novel. Shubeik lubeik translates to "Your wish is my command" in Arabic. This version of Egypt is modern except it has wishes that come true, and are regulated (and black market). Great concept. I'm only 20% through, but it's a good book so far.

yarning
finished a yellow bunny and the above calico Cat Stitch scarf. The scarf sold this morning (without even me listing it first) & another person wants to get a custom one made! Yay! I worked on a grey and black kickbunny at yarn group Sunday and had a nice time. I'm nearly finished with it, though now I have a commission to recreate a cat's favorite turkey leg toy with wool and catnip. And scarf customer reminded me that xmas is coming and it's time to to work on stocking the shop! I ordered more catnip & hopefully won't run out of silvervine yet. All in all, a productive week!

healthcrap
The drooping eyelid is making me crazy -- double vision, blurry vision, the eyelid being in the way of seeing. ( more healthcrap )

#resist
October 18: No Kings Day 2!

I hope all of y'all are doing well and can see with your regular number of eyes. :g:

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Elizabeth Taylor - Taylor Swift

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sometimes it doesn't feel so glamorous to be me

I meant to post last night, but I fell asleep on the couch right after dinner and slept for almost 2.5 hours! So I didn't post, or organize my laundry, or take out the recycling, or watch the Rangers (lose) or any of the other things I intended to do last night. Losing that hour of sleep because I had to go into the office hit me hard, I guess, since I also didn't go to bed earlier as intended on Monday night. *hands*

I did frost the cupcakes after work on Monday - I made a 3x batch of the Smitten Kitchen American buttercream since it would use up the whole box of powdered sugar and make measuring less difficult, and only had a little left over once I piped all 72 cupcakes. They disappeared rapidly at work - a lot of people were in and they enjoyed them! As always, people ask if I bake professionally and I'm just like, "nope! Then it wouldn't be fun!"

I also got a couple of Teams messages asking for confirmation that I was the one who brought them so they could be trusted. Only one person opined that the SK ones were better than the Sally's ones, so I'm pretty sure I'm going to do a double batch of the Sally's, with the SK frosting, for Christmas. My co-workers also suggested that if I'm ever invited to give a spontaneous talk, it should be about the different types of frosting that you can make and the pros and cons of them. I may have given them a preview of such a talk. *g*

I also confirmed that there are no nut allergies on the team, so I am planning to do candied pecans as my gift this year. They are SO GOOD. I mean, I've never made them, but my brother-in-law makes them for the holidays and they are seriously addictive. I just ordered some mason jars to put them in, and I think that will be a nice gift. I just have to order the pecans from Costco.

Assistant J is corralling the party planning committee this year, but the COO has decreed who the caterer will be (we are combining the legal dept party with all the operations departments' parties this year at her suggestion), so that should curtail some of their insanity in terms of party planning. I hope. I told J that with the food selection taken care of, they could concentrate on decorations, games, and music, which they were all into last year.

Anyway, as always, people are happy to see me when I show up, but I already told my boss I won't be back in until the day of the party and she is okay with that. Whew.

*

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The better to trust you with, my dear

New story! What a Big Heart You Have is out in Kaleidotrope. The more I thought about the Red Riding Hood story, the more I thought that the grandmother/granddaughter relationship was pretty sketched-in...and it's been one of the most important ones in my life. Hope you enjoy.

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bundle of holding

Bundle of Holding: Mystery Flesh Pit

Welcome, visitor, to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG, the Cypher System tabletop roleplaying game rulebook from Ganza Gaming about the Permian Basin Superorganism.

Bundle of Holding: Mystery Flesh Pit

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silly body, this is not helpful!

Today does not need to be a trigeminal neuralgia day. It really doesn't.

Where is it happening? It's on the right side this time.

How bad is it? Three instances so far, so I am braced for more, since that's usually how it goes. Wait, four. And it's not super-bad, just the little dungeon map of tiny passages filled with pain, leading outward and upward from my right upper jaw. Much of the upper cheek is involved, with what feel like lines curving downward from the outer right eye, and this time it's also doing the Monocle of Pain trick, where my eye is ringed in a weird hybrid sensation of ache/pain/coldness/tightness/tickling. That last bit is even more annoying than it sounds.

What set it off this time? Temperature differential (cold). One accidental touch of cold against the right spot was all it took.

We shall see. Meanwhile I am going off to look again at the pattern of the trigeminal nerve in the face, so as to check whether the stuff on the cheek and the lines from the outer corner of the eye match where the nerves are.

Got a decent rest since the last wave, so maybe it will get bored and wander off.

Silly body.

Anybody else deal with this nonsense? Several people in my family have.

Good news for Canadian orange growers!

Current Mood: delighted

The Cop Slide of Boston, MA

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Current Mood: amused

Kristi Noem Bravely Confronts Enemy Combatants

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Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami

Three short works by Kawakami.

Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami

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books

Reading Wednesday

Finished The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; it was really, really good!!! I wish I had articulate and insightful things to say about it, but it was just really good. Eleanor Vance is a character of all time and she's going to be rotating like a rotisserie chicken/bouncing around like a screensaver in my head for a while. I'm now in that sort of discontented post-really-good-book state where you bounce off of everything else you try to read afterwards. Tried re-reading Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle but even that didn't take; suspect I will have to read something actively mid in order to reset my brain.

Current Mood: awake

Hydration

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Fanfic: Uncle Spester

Title: Uncle Spester
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author:

veronyxk84
Characters/Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: some coarse language
Word count: 100 (Google Docs)
Spoilers/Setting: Set in a post-series future where Buffy and Spike are an established couple.
Summary: Buffy and Spike are decorating their house for Halloween as a treat for their niece Joyce (Dawn’s daughter).
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction created for fun and no profit has been made. All rights belong to the respective owners.

Challenge: #493 - Garden

Also for: Carve by

anythingdrabble, End in -ay by

100words, Melodramatic + Uncle + Wednesday by

sweetandshort

—
( READ: Uncle Spester )

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Multifandom Poetry Fest 2025

A couple of months later than usual, but it's finally here--the ninth annual Multifandom Poetry Fest, a prompt fest for poetry for all fandoms! Have fun, and feel free to promote it on your journal/community/tumblr/discord server/whatever if you want. You can copy the code in this box wherever HTML applies:

Rules

1) Leave a prompt in the form of fandom, characters or relationships, prompt. If you don’t want to specify the fandom or characters, you can say "any." One prompt per comment. Leave as many prompts as you like.

2) Reply to other people’s prompts with poems. The poems can be any length or form, or no form. Quality isn’t important--the point is to have fun, not to produce deathless works of art. (Any deathless works of art produced are just a bonus.)

FAQ

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Amperslash, and new B5 fic

I have a bare-bones signup in for

amperslashexchange, which I will try to add to over the next few days! Fandoms remain unsurprising as usual.

Completely unrelated to that or Whumptober, I posted something new for Babylon 5 over on AO3 just now: Balance in Duty, a slightly canon-divergent missing scene for 5x06 "Strange Relations," in which I lean into the episode's completely averted presumed-dead potential.

Girl Genius for Wednesday, October 08, 2025

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20251008

The Girl Genius comic for Wednesday, October 08, 2025 has been posted.

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20251008

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Whumptober Day 5: Dream Journal | Phobia

No. 5: “My panic’s at the ceiling, but I’m face down on the carpet.”
Quivering | Dream Journal | Phobia

Babylon 5, post-canon, Londo, gen (700 wds)
This is the one I was having trouble with a few days ago. Set in some kind of nebulous fixit universe.

( 700 wds under the cut )

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food,
medical

blood draw etc.

I woke up at about 7:30 a.m., had a cup of black tea, showered, and went to my doctor’s office for a fasting blood, which I wanted to do before I see her in a couple of weeks. There was a little bit of annoying delay: Mt Auburn Hospital is being moved to a different MyChart system, and some balls are being dropped. Specifically, the order for my lab work wasn’t on the new system, so they had to copy it from the old system, which is in read-only mode for a few weeks, after which it won’t be available even to medical staff. Carmen said her office is going to be sending an email to all patients, advising us to follow up on existing referrals and orders for lab work before the end of the month. I hope that doesn’t miss too many people, but I made a point of telling Adrian about it.

Once they had my test tube of blood, I stopped at a couple of stores on the same block as my doctor’s office, to buy (frozen) ground lamb and some more cannabis edibles. Then I treated myself to an apple, grape, and brie crepe for breakfast, which I ate at an outdoor table. After eating the crepe, I went to CVS and got a flu vaccine, then took the subway home. I am feeling very accomplished, and a bit tired.

The flu and covid tests I mentioned in my previous post arrived yesterday.

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[growth] SAFFRON

This morning I had Physio at The Hospital Up The Road, which is a really good way to get me to actually go to the allotment (which is round the back of the hospital site, so the way this usually goes is I cycle to the allotment, drop my bike off, and then cut through to the opposite side of the site where Physio Happens, thereby not needing to faff about with bike locks).

Upon my return from physio (which was not... great; I got probably-a-cold two and a half weeks ago and my cardiovascular-respiratory situation is still Distinctly Not Happy) I actually paid slightly closer attention to my saffron bed -- the last couple of trips I've been all "ugh, nothing doing, I should really weed but UGH clearly the saffron has all DIED yes I KNOW that this is the traditional time of year for me to be convinced that The Saffron Has Died only to discover--" and indeed not only were there multiple clumps of saffron, most of them have flowers that are clearly going to happen Any Moment Now.

So today I have come home with six saffron strands, and am expecting A Bunch More, and have reinspected the saffron containers on the patio and established that one of those has them starting to come up as well -- and so now, obviously, I need to work out what to do with the RIDICULOUS RICHES represented by... maybe like two dozen strands of saffron. (Yes I also have a stash of shop-bought.)

Saffron & bay custard tarts with sticky blackberries? More saffron and cardamom panettone pudding (which we know we like)? Saffron rice pudding? All the saffron recipes from Sweet, which is possibly going to be my next cook-(almost)-all-the-way-through project? Lebovitz's saffron ice cream, to go with the planned quince sorbet? Saffron buns? Literally any of the obvious savoury options??? SO MUCH CHOICE.