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book group
I made broccoli & tofu with peanut sauce, a tomato-lentil dish, spiced nuts (sweet and not sweet), and served salad, bread, cheese and crackers. My friend Karen made mojitos.
I also had door prizes: a stack of books. Six of them went home with someone.
( pics )
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Purrcy and the snake
a milk snake!
( cut for snake pic )
Purrcy was very excited, but wary--he clearly has a "snake instinct" that says this isn't normal prey, but something possibly dangerous. We weren't able to catch the snake, but we're pretty sure it went out the way it came in, it was pretty scared of us (& Purrcy).
Purrcy spent the next half week sniffing & searching for it everywhere, & also being v suspicious of all the cords & any long or snakelike toys. It's like his "snake instinct" was dormant & had to be activated.
The bad part about Our Inside Snek Adventure is that I mentioned it to the housecleaner ... who turns out to be *horribly* snake-phobic. So much that just knowing there'd been a snake in the house, she was too scared to come this week. We're blocking up the Snake Holes, hoping that helps, & she'll try to come back next week.
I'm not going to tell her that this is the 3rd *species* of snake we've seen close to the house, which is made of stone, 100 yrs old, on a stony NJ hillside (others are garter & black racer). Mr Dr Science & I love it! He in the Atlanta suburbs, I in Champaign, IL, we were the kids who caught snakes & brought them in for show & tell in elementary school.
Gloria, our housecleaner, grew up in Jamaica, but she's a city girl through and through. She's prob. too old for snake therapy, I hope this works.
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The Day in Spikedluv (Friday, June 27)
I stopped at Stewart’s for milk after dropping Grant off at the garage. I threw a load of laundry into the washer, hand-washed dishes, cooked hot dogs for Pip to heat up for supper, stirred together two cabbage salads for Ian’s graduation party (one with pineapple and one without to put on pulled pork sandwich if they want to do so) and scooped kitty litter. (I also had to cut up chicken for the dogs’ supper and pack my ‘lunch bag’.) (As you might imagine, it felt like I was running a race to get all of this done before I left to relieve my sister.) When I got home I tossed the wet clothes into the dryer, did up more dishes, and took a shower before I sat on the bed with a towel wrapped around my hair to decompress a bit.
I finished the current Amelia Peabody and started a new book, and took a short nap (which was just enough to reinvigorate me, rather than leave me lethargic).
Temps started out at 58.8(F) and reached an unknown high; it was 66.4 at 6pm when I got home. It was overcast all day, but I felt lucky we hadn’t had the forecasted rain, which then came in late afternoon. Thankfully it had finished before I needed to carry all my bags out to the car.
Mom Update:
Mom seemed tired when I arrived. I think yesterday’s activity took a lot out of her. ( more back here )
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P!ATD Drabble: Mismatched Magic
Title: Mismatched Magic
Author:
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Fandom: Bandom, Panic! At The Disco
Pairing: Ryan/Spencer
Tags: Drabble, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Witches, Familiars, Best Friends, Fluff
Rating: G
Word count: 100
Summary: For a witch with a cat familiar, Ryan does a lot of water magic.
Author notes: Prompt = the title. This is a little snippet in the Magic In The Making series.
Mismatched Magic on AO3
( Mismatched Magic )
***
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Daily Happiness
2. This evening after I got home Carla asked if I'd be interested in going down to Disneyland for an after dinner trip and even though we just went yesterday, I decided going tonight and then having Saturday and Sunday just for staying home and resting would be nice, so we went down there tonight and had dessert and watched the parade. I'm super tired now but I had a great time.
3. It's the weekend!
4. Yawn!

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some good things!
- Went on an Adventure to post a lost item back to someone (hopefully in time for the next thing they want it for...), and was rewarded with DUCKLINGS.
- Not too warm to achieve fallback dinner of I Don't Know, Bake A Potato, with the result that we finished the lurking salad leaves and also stuck some of the cook-from-frozen pasteis de nata into the oven once potatoes were done.
- Ridiculous organic greengrocer had an option on sending us rainbow chard this week, which means I might actually manage to cook one whole new recipe this month (!), which was otherwise... not looking likely. (I have been comprehensively failing to sow any, but there we go.)
- Went fossicking in sofa to try to at least rationalise my horrid piles. Found one (1) of the two (2) fancy watch chargers I own, and not the one I was expecting to turn up (because I thought I'd probably mislaid it in a field), which hopefully means that given a leeeetle bit more fossicking I might even find the second.
- Really enjoying playing with pens for the purposes of making notes on the pain reading. (Today has been Mindfulness for Health, with detours to read up more on the gate control and [neuromatrix] theories of pain; I was surprised that Model First Proposed In The 1960s is still apparently more-or-less the best we've got for "how the fuck does psychology and emotional affect and other sensory input actually affect how pain is experienced?")
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SKZ Drabble: Summoned
Title: Summoned
Author:
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Fandom: Stray Kids
Pairing: Bang Chan/Seo Changbin
Tags: Drabble, Pining, Power Dynamics
Rating: G
Word count: 100
Summary: There’s nothing even close to an order in Chan's tone.
Author notes: Forgot to post yesterday because Hamilton but fear not, you'll get two drabbles on Sunday to compensate. Prompt = summon.
Summoned on AO3
( Summoned )
***
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The Day in Spikedluv (Thursday, June 26)
I filled my gas tank after dropping Grant off at the garage; hand-washed some dishes and scooped kitty litter before heading to mom’s. (I also cut up chicken for the dogs’ meals and packed my own ‘lunch bag’.) After I got home I threw in a load of laundry to wash while I did up the dishes in the sink and then got ready for bed. After ‘decompressing’ for a while with some games on my phone I got to bed just before 10pm, which is late for me. I slept like a rock, though.
I read more fanfic and more Amelia Peabody.
Temps started out at 66.6(F) (which is weird since the high is only supposed to be 68) and reached an unknown high, as I was never home to check. It was much cooler than the previous 80s/90s days. Yes, I can complain when it’s too hot AND when it’s too cool! I want a nice median temperature. It’s already summer and we never got spring!
Mom Update:
Mom was feeling a malaise this morning when I arrived. ( more back here )
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June Update
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2. I know one of my requests for Yuletide already. Mom and Dad watch westerns on True Grit pretty much 24-7, and this visit featured The Posse from Hell--the gayest cowboy movie that doesn't realize how gay it is of all time. I mean, y'all, the seasoned gunslinger tends lovingly to the greenhorn's butt wounds at one point, and they frequently stare into each other's eyes and kinda pant into each other's mouths, and THEY ARE SO IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER.
3. I also want to request Star Trek Prodigy. We just finished the two-season series when we got back from my folks. I can't say enough good things about this show--from the callbacks to every Trek franchise and the little Easter eggs to all the voice actor/character cameos, this show is just a delight. I love that it is joyful and hopeful and kind; it's firmly a kids' show, but who cares? It's just an excellent watch. I highly recommend it.
4. Mom and Dad's was fine. They didn't turn on that horrific American Family Radio even one time, and there was zero craziness (which proves to me that when they're scared of losing contact with their grandchildren they do possess the ability to keep their mouths shut for a couple of days). They are clearly on the back foot and concerned that we're going to cut them out of their lives. Not gonna lie; it made for a much more pleasant trip.
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Fun with kanji: 参照
Today I learned that the Japanese word for reference (as in bibliographical reference) is 参照 (sanshou). Breaking it down by kanji, it means "nonplussed" (参) "illumination" (照). So if you're nonplussed by what the author said, checking the reference should give you some illumination!
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Daily Happiness
2. I got a little storage cabinet to organize all our extra legos. The sets usually come with an extra piece for all the small ones. I guess they figure those are most likely to get lost. Up until now we've been putting them in ziploc baggies with the name of the set they belong to, but that's gotten out of hand and also they don't need to be separated by set. I just started sorting them out today and I imagine that will take some time, but it should make everything more organized and save on space once it's done.
3. Love those big Chloe yawns!

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Me-and-media update
Pandemic life
( Protocol slippage. )
Previous poll review
In the Impending doom of the natural variety poll, the most common natural disaster threatening respondents is drought/heat (55.6%), followed by flood (44.4%), then blizzard (40.7%). Twelve of us (including me) are at risk of earthquakes.
In ticky-boxes, hugs won by a landslide with 70.4%, followed by "ticky-box made of Möbius strips and Escher staircases" with 48.1%. Thank you for your votes!
Reading
A little more Neurotribes, but the focus on kids and parenting is not holding my interest. Nothing wrong with it; I'm just not the right audience. A chapter of Guardian. A smidgen more of The Book of Three, and the first few hours of Incandescent by Emily Tesh, read by Zara Ramm (very heavy on introductions and the nitty-gritty of school administration so far, but I like the POV character - no spoilers, please).
TV & movies
Four episodes of The Expanse season 6 with a friend; we're watching the other two tonight. Murderbot (really enjoyed the last episode). Poker Face (haven't seen the latest). Andor S02E06 (maybe we're watching this too slowly? so far this season isn't clicking for me).
Episode 2 of Stick, which... I enjoyed watching Lydio Ko play on TV, one time, but I just don't know how much golf I can engage with, especially in fiction. Swings all look the same to me, so after the first three or four, there's none of the physical competence porn you get in more overtly active sports. And I don't find Owen Wilson inherently charming or interesting. I think the biggest appeal of the show is actually that so much of it is set outside with trees around, and that's still a very manicured, artificial setting. /fussy /tl;dr, We're in the market for a new show.
Our Unwritten Seoul (Kdrama on Netflix). I'm enjoying this so much! Two episodes and several revelations yet to go.
Materialists at the movies. We went to this because a friend and I have a running conversation about the death of the romcom, and this nominally was one. But it turned out to not really be rom or com, and the title should have clued me in that Andrew wouldn't like it (he disliked the main character and wasn't at all invested in the outcome). It's interestingly structured, and the cast is good, but it's mostly about entitled people approaching dating in terms of checkboxes (age, height, income, etc).
Spoilery things about the structure.
The main character, Lucy, is a professional matchmaker in NYC, and the film is in three parts: the first third is a wealth-porn romance between her and Pedro Pascale; he pursues her after they meet at the wedding of his brother, her former client. They go to a lot of expensive restaurants, have sex on satin sheets in his $12m penthouse, and talk a lot of numbers at each other. He wants to take her to Iceland on holiday. The middle third (or possibly third act of four? I wasn't timing it) starts when one of Lucy's clients is sexually assaulted on a date Lucy set up. This all happens off-screen, and I don't think we even see the assaulter. The victim is the nicest, warmest of Lucy's clients, but the film is mostly concerned with Lucy's crisis, as the assault brings home that the checkboxes don't matter. The final third or act is a second-time-around romance with her struggling-actor/cater-waiter ex-boyfriend, Chris Evans. Lucy broke up with him over money, and now at the culmination of her character arc, she decides she loves him enough to make it work after all. Conveniently, he is still extremely hung up on her.I don't think I've ever seen a relationship movie that starts out focused on one pairing getting together (they feel pretty well-matched, and Pedro Pascale's character is smart, open, attentive and kind), then transitions to another pairing. Huh.
The Wild Robot on Netflix. Okay, this was really cute and funny. I especially enjoyed the possum babies. (I kept missing quips, though -- poor sound mixing, or is my hearing going?) As an aside, I was amused that the corporation was called Universal Dynamics, given Global Dynamics in Eureka (2006) and Massive Dynamics in Fringe (2008). What comes after "universal"?
October Sky on Netflix. Fictionalised biopic about a kid in a coal-mining company town in 1957 who is inspired by Sputnik to create a rocket, learn trigonometry, and get a college scholarship. Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, and Laura Linney. It was fine, but wow, I wanted the story to be about overthrowing the company.
Audio entertainment
I spent four or five hours over the weekend listening to Melanie Nelson of Coherent podcast interviewing politicians, academics and a disability activist about the "Let's Make Everything Libertarian" Bill for which submissions closed lunchtime Monday. (Locals, it's not too late to weigh in! Talk to your MP!) Since then, Writing Excuses and a bunch of Midnight Burger. (I bounced off Midnight Burger when I first tried it a year or two ago, but now I'm really enjoying the physics and other science aspects, and the characters are growing on me. Ava is my fav. I'm most of the way through episode 11.)
Online life
Catching up on comments. Still have a billion unread emails, and let's not even talk about my tabs.
Writing/making things
I spent the weekend juggling multiple urgent things. Now I have some breathing space, of course, when I sit down to write (aiming for a combination
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Whining.
A contributing factor is that I'm having another "argh, my prose sucks" crisis of confidence. This happens periodically. You can't be on a roll indefinitely without hitting a bump, I guess. For me, usually it means it's time to read a particular type of literary novel, preferably in paper format. The one I remember being most successful is Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible; the very close, very voice-y rotating POVs, the playful intricate language use, and the thoughtful exploration of context help me to sink into whatever POV I'm writing, rather than skating over the surface and Lego-ing together tired phrases. I wrote some really good fic after re-reading it a few years ago. Whereas re-reading Byatt's Possession just meant I produced endless run-on sentences, heh. Anyway, I guess I should get on that soon...Finished and posted an old outsider POV writing exercise for
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Life/health/mental state things
I got my political submission in (thanks to
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In general, I've been feeling needlessly stressed and vaguely sick, but today my alarm didn't go off and I slept an extra hour and a half. So much better.
Good things
Un-punctured bike tyre. Kdrama. New intermediate glasses making it easier to do crosswords and to read while I exercise. New bathroom sink taps.
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Night-time getting-ready-for-bed routine
I brush my teeth
44 (84.6%)
I lock up and switch things off around the house
27 (51.9%)
I tend to pets
16 (30.8%)
there are a few skincare- and/or haircare-type steps
17 (32.7%)
kind of a lot of steps, of various kinds
7 (13.5%)
it takes me more than half an hour
13 (25.0%)
sometimes it takes me an hour or more
4 (7.7%)
what routine? I'm always ready for bed
8 (15.4%)
other
9 (17.3%)
ticky-box of it's normal to have strong opinions about taps (AKA faucets)
23 (44.2%)
ticky-box of how stressful it is to ask tradespeople to change things they've done
30 (57.7%)
ticky-box of wondering if today is the day you'll unexpectedly step through a portal into another time or world
21 (40.4%)
ticky-box full of sitting on a mountain ledge in the moonlight, listening to owls
30 (57.7%)
ticky-box full of hugs
40 (76.9%)
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2025 Disneyland Trip #44 (6/26/25)
( Read more... )