command_liners | Member Posts

Boy am I late with this...

I did a LOT of knitting in a very short timeframe in November, and TBH it pooped me out and I think I'm still recovering. BUT! I successfully knitted a pair of legwarmers to wear to the A New World concert! Here they are:

A pair of cabled legwarmers. Yes, one's bigger than the other.

A pair of cabled legwarmers. Yes, one's bigger than the other.

[Image Description: A pair of knitted legwarmers. They are Aran colored (think natural undyed yarn) and feature a folded ribbed cuff at top, with lazy cables on the body and an intricate cable at the back. One is larger than the other.]

So yeah, this pattern comes in small and large sizes. Small wouldn't fit me, but large was TOO big. I altered the pattern some for my first one, taking some stitches out to make it smaller. Well, I finished it and tried it on and nope, too big. So for the second I took even MORE stitches out of the pattern. This one felt like it fit well, but as soon as I started walking, it drooped.

I didn't have time to reknit them, so I made do with them as is, and used elastic headbands under the cuff to keep them up. That worked well! Also, I shortened the pattern because in the pattern pic, the lower edge was dragging on the ground and I didn't like that. Unfortunately, I shortened it TOO much. I might unpick the bind off and knit them a bit longer, but for now, they work. And no, I am likely not going to reknit the too big one. TOO MUCH WORK.

I also made progress on a hoodie!
Central Park Hoodie November 2025 Progress

Central Park Hoodie November 2025 Progress

[Image Description: a sleeve in progress for a knitted hoodie. It's mostly gray in color and features deep ribbing at the cuff. A center cable panel runs up the middle, in teal.]

At the beginning of the month, I had one cable cross done. Now I have two. So not much progress, but hey, progress is progress.

I also did some work on the Versailles Scarf, a small true lace knitted scarf. I wanted to finish this for the concert as well, but decided the legwarmers were more important. It'd be nice to get this done for Christmas, but with the lack of crafting I've been doing so far this month, it's not gonna happen.

FOLKS! I had a cat for 20 minutes!
A photo of a calico kitty who visited our house for about 20 minutes.

[Image Description: A photo of a calico kitty visited our house for a bit.]

She came up to our patio door before the snow hit, when it was still decent out, and we decided to let her in for a bit, once we closed the bedroom doors. I, of course, was enamored. Mom less so. Being a cat, she did cat things, like scratching at an area rug (mom yelled at her, poor thing, but I can't really fault mom for that) and jumping on the kitchen table to try to get to our Christmas cactus. I kept a close eye on her the entire time she was in the house, so when I saw you going for the plant, I gently picked her up and deposited her back on the floor, because well, I don't know if those plants are safe for cats.

She was inquisitive and explored a lot, and liked to rub against legs. At one point, she was in our living room and started trotting towards the kitchen, so I called out to mom to let her know she was headed mom's way. Unfortunately mom was distracted and didn't hear me, and the cat, being friendly, came up behind her and rubbed her legs and mom almost tripped on her. :(

We considered calling an animal shelter, but due to her friendliness, decided to just let her back outside. Not before she jumped on the table AGAIN, though. I tried to grab her to deposit her back on the floor, but she jumped on the back of one of our chairs, and well, the chair tipped over.

Which means mom has declared NO CATS. :( I had really hoped she'd come around and we could, like, adopt a senior kitty, and my older sister made noise about us doing just that at Thanksgiving, but I don't think mom would be happy with a cat. Alas. But at least I had one for 20 minutes.

Current Mood: cold

tcpip

Last night I hosted the annual Murdoch University Alumni meeting for Melbourne at the Arts Centre with plenty of excellent and intelligent conversation, as would be expected at such an event (well-catered too, I must add). As part of the formal proceedings, we held a panel discussion on what Murdoch University meant and how it changed us. Our panel, quite remarkably, had graduates from every decade of the university's existence, including a foundation student, Dr. Trevor Hogan, and the remarkable story from Lem Bagout, who came to Australia as a refugee from Sudan; he now teaches physics.

For my own part (representing the 1990s graduates), I made the point that the radical parts of Murdoch's original educational objectives ("the Murdoch ethos") are now accepted and mainstream: encouraging mature-aged students and lifelong learning, allowing for part-time and external studies, encouraging interdisciplinary studies, and alternative entry based on experience. I also made a point of mentioning Bruce Tapper, who died a year ago on the day; not just because he was such a huge influence on my life, but in particular, because he was such a fierce advocate for Murdoch University's progressive education and egalitarian access.

In many ways, my alma mater sometimes stands in stark contrast with my employer, the University of Melbourne. Prestigious and conservative, the UniMelb is recognised as the top university in the country, which is really due to the excellent and well-funded research sector, standing on the shoulders of giants past. At UniMelb in the past fortnight, there have been two social occasions of note: an end-of-year potluck lunch for Research Computing Services (I brought along the Polish duck soup (Czernina), and an end-of-year social event for all of Business Services, this year held on campus at the Ernie Cropley Pavilion, a better location, and superior catering to previous years.

As another example of contrast, last Saturday I attended the Thangka Art Exhibition on Tibetan Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Development hosted by the Australian ReTeng Charity Foundation, associated with the Buddhist ReTeng Monastery in Donvale. I was somewhat surprised and impressed by the sheer number of dignitaries from the Melbourne Chinese community in attendance, and extremely impressed by the artworks on display. There was some juxtaposition of this aesthetic event, and the one attended in the evening, with Carla BL, at a little bar in Fitzroy to see a group of post-punk musicians (including my favourite local coldwave artists, Cold Regards) perform. For reasons of international travel, this is the end of EoY Melbourne activities - next stop, Santiago!

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: The Rookery

vaxhacker

THE world of computing has no shortage of tribal factions, some of them more fanatical than others. Emacs vs vi, Windows vs Linux, which programming language is the One and Only to rule them all, the list of things we will pile up hills of old CDROMs and unread manuals to then die on are endless.

Some people are content to leave these choices to more pragmatic matters of selecting the right tool for the job at hand, and quietly allowing others to do the same.¹ Others, of course, see their choice of language (*cough*)Rust(*cough*) as superior to all others and are baffled why anyone still bothers using any other language. There are many technical reasons why that is absurd regardless of how amazing that language’s strengths are, of course, but that attitude is kind of interesting psychologically. Why are humans driven to be so territorial about things like this?

And we, of course, see this with Linux distributions² as well. Sometimes I’m amazed Linux got as popular as it has with all the in-fighting between the distro camps (or, perhaps, it owes some of that to the competition created there).

But in terms of smugness, it’s hard to beat the legendary Arch Linux tribe and their viral tagline, often injected unnecessarily into conversations, “I use Arch, BTW.”

And I get the appeal of Arch, personally, if not the attitude. I like working closer to the bare metal of the computer, given my history of starting there and working upward to higher-level languages and operating systems as I learned. I like administrating systems and have even written a device driver or two of my own. I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty and don’t need a computing “appliance” or someone else to keep it working for me.

On the other hand, I don’t have the spare time at the moment to have to do that all the time. I’d prefer it to be a hobby, not a daily necessity.

But nonetheless, I took the plunge a couple of years ago to “use Arch BTW.”

Purists may object, saying that I didn’t truly use Arch. I did, briefly, and it was fine, but eventually settled on an Arch derivative called Garuda Linux as my daily driver on my desktop system (while my laptop stayed with Pop_OS! that came factory-installed on it).³

It was fine, I liked the fact that the package manager was called pacman, so creativity points to them for that. Generally, it was Linux, and it worked, and I was happy with it. I could bend it to my will more or less as I needed to.

However, over time, the cracks started to show in ways that got too much in the way for me to want to use it every day.

Arch is a “bleeding-edge” kind of system where people tend to always keep the system patched to the latest versions of every package and every system update. But unfortunately that’s not just a tendency, that’s essentially a requirement. If you go too long without updating, things get unhappy.

And unlike other distros, you can’t easily do selective updates or backrev individual packages and apps. You must upgrade everything on the system every time, always, and often. Which means, quite frequently I’d find that someone had made a change somewhere that I had to accept and now my system was broken until someone fixed it.

And that’s really ok if you’re running a Linux system because you like experimenting with computers and aren’t relying on it to be stable to get real work accomplished. But I was. I had personal stuff to do, and research experiments to run and couldn’t afford random downtime arriving like lightning strikes out of the blue.

So a couple of months ago I decided I just had enough and wiped the whole system to go back to my actual favorite operating system, that has always been my favorite since I discovered it as a teenager (i.e., when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth).

Unix.

Specifically, BSD. Specifically specifically, FreeBSD.

Yeah, there’s a bit of a snarkiness there too, but usually it’s a lot more low-key because it’s a smaller, and I think friendlier, community. The only memorable tag-line I remember being viral over time was an old USENET signature line that went something like, “Linux is for people who hate Windows. BSD is for people who love Unix.” (Again, I have more to say about what it is compared to Linux that’s long enough for its own post but for now it’s not Linux but is similar in that it’s also—like Linux—an open-source operating system based on the older Unix operating system but legally and technically a separate codebase and distinct from it.)

After getting it all set up and having moved my data back on to the system, getting reacquainted with ZFS, and settling in, I’ve been pretty happy with it. “They” say BSD isn’t a great choice for a desktop and is best suited as a server OS. That’s not entirely wrong (and to be fair, the same is said of Linux, but a lot more has been invested in getting Linux working better in that space), but it seems to be good enough for me to meet my needs. And it’s better than I recall it being last time I used it.

Rock-solid and stable, too, which is what I need, while also being an OS that’s not remotely interested in holding my hand with administrating a Unix-like system, which I also like.

And having got that all working with version 14.3 of the system, I see that they just released 15.0. So maybe after Christmas I’ll upgrade it. Maybe. I am in the middle of a metric ton of work on my research so maybe it’ll be Christmas, 2026.

There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.
—Jeremy S. Anderson
UNIX systems administrator

__________
¹Even if—for whatever reason—they insist on running Windows.*
²If you’re not familiar what a Linux “distribution” is, or why it matters here, I think I have another entry in mind that explains that a little more but for now just consider that Linux, as a computer operating system, is packaged up in a wide variety of different “flavors” from different vendors to distribute to you, each with a little different look, feel, collection of apps pre-installed, etc.
³Mostly because that (Ubuntu-derived) distro is made by the hardware manufacturer, with their hardware in mind, which, for laptops, saves a fair number of headaches.

__________
*Although TempleOS remains one of life's unsolved mysteries, I admit.

Current Mood: productive

ursamajor

Okay, after rehearsal last night, I think the ship is feeling a bit more on an even keel. Even if we are only 10 days out from the annual holiday concert, and we just finished getting all of our music last night.

I'm most nervous about the Magnificat, of course, never having done it; how many trills can you possibly fit into 45 measures? ALL OF THEM, says Bach. But the Hallelujah Chorus is old hat. The new arrangement of Break Bread isn't too difficult, aside from some truly weird close harmony chords in the third round; I do need to record that with a keyboard before this weekend so I can send it out to the sopranos.

And then the Whitney Houston stuff is easy, at least to me, at least partially because these are childhood car radio songs for me, especially the finale medley of So Emotional, Where Do Broken Hearts Go, and I Wanna Dance With Somebody. I mean, I even sang the last of those three for the third grade talent show, and can still get just about every nuanced ad-lib at karaoke today; restraining myself to the choral part is gonna be the hard part here, hahaha. (The tenors and basses get to do the DANCE! spoken word at the outro, though,

hyounpark is gonna be so stoked.)

Speaking of, right now, he's in Boston (well, okay, he's about to get on his plane back from BOS), and I'm a little jealous, even if it is for the most last-minute work thing possible and it's not like he got to see anybody but work people, though he did squeeze in dinner at Abe and Louie's. And turns out Boston hasn't quite yet gotten the snow, though Western Mass did, so at least I don't have to be jealous that he got the first snow and I didn't. (Him: "You can have all the first snow you want, I've had enough for a lifetime!")

And he got his Flour sticky bun, so all is well there. :) He tried to pick up their Bakers Gonna Bake sweatshirt for me, but they didn't have any in stock at Clarendon which was his closest option, though they don't have that much room for merch (Central Square is much bigger).

He did manage to stop by Burdick's and pick us up some drinking chocolate and chocolate penguins or mice, so that'll be good for the truly frigid nights we've been having lately (I know, I know, by Bay Area standards). I do need a slightly more windproof solution for night biking; when I was biking home from choir last night, I had a fleece on over a puffy vest over a wool sweater over a long sleeve top, but my arms were still chilly. It wasn't quite cold enough to require pulling out the puffer (which, admittedly, is showing its age because it dates from Eastern Mountain Sports still being an intact company); I think I really just need a windbreaker shell. We'll see.

*

Note to self for Thanksgiving next year: PEANUT SAUCE FONDUE. I mean, it might not wait until next year, peanut satay is a regular guest at the table chez us, but the reminder that we could make a vat of it and do it all fancy banquet style is a good one. :)

Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: DANCE!

vaxhacker

EVERY year at this time, I observe the tradition of posting a sample of the past year’s events by quoting aline from one post each month. It often surprises me how such a reckless random sampling still manages to capture enough of the flavor of the year that is now coming to a close.

And so, while I still may have a thing or two left to say before closing out the year completely, we’re close enough to post the usual summary for 2025:

Jan: As is our custom, we rang in the new year by getting together as friends and family to pursue the most noble cause of saving the lives of everyone from the encroachment of unspeakable evil, making the world safe again. You’re all welcome.
Feb: Adventuring is a dangerous activity by definition. That’s what makes adventure stories exciting to read, and what keeps us on the edge of our seats as we shovel popcorn into our faces as we sit in a theater as our heroes fight monsters on the big screen. There is always the risk that certain doom waits around every corner, and it’s that tension of ever-present danger that keeps the story exciting.
Apr: Something I have seen come up from time to time over the years before (and even since) games like Dungeons & Dragons have entered the mainstream is the question of whether it is “appropriate” or “good” for a person to get themselves involved in that sort of entertainment. Usually this is asked in connection with a particular demographic or faith tradition, such as, “Should a Christian allow their kids to play D&D?”
Oct: Today I was doing a crossword puzzle during a few precious minutes seconds of spare time when I came across this abomination: “CB Enthusiast.”
Nov: November. Already? November. It was just November a little bit ago…. Trouble is, there’s so much going on … I’m deep in the middle of work toward a deadline looming for my degree, so I can’t guarantee a post a day here, or that they will all be any kind of pithy or deep thought-provoking ideas but I’ll try to post something and maybe with luck a few bits of humor or interest will show up, purely by accident.
Dec: In hindsight, I was probably lucky I made it three-quarters of the way through November managing to keep up posting something considering the workload I’m juggling. I had to give a very high priority to my research for school and in the end that just had to win out.

I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.
—Sophocles
Œdipus Rex

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Colette Cherry—Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Reaction

ursamajor

Dad: "You look much more chill this year. Fewer rebellious menu elements?"
Me: "AHAHAHAHAHA."
Mom: "I still remember the year you did the Peking duck. That was stressful."
Me: "We learned our lesson. Outsource cooking the bird.*"

* unless it's roasting a chicken, something either of us could do in our sleep

Happy Asian American Thanksgiving, year ... uh, whatever it is since we've been doing this formally, composing our Thanksgiving banquet menus to be primarily if not entirely recipes by Asian American cooks and chefs. Year 8? But we've been perfectly happy to give up on the turkey and just eat something yummy and celebratory, along with a bounty of sides.

- Main: Knowing both that Leonard and Sara were doing their own experimental turkey roast and planning on sharing if it worked out, and that there would be at least one additional meat sauce option on the table, we went with pork belly again. This time, we did Kristina Cho's Chop Shop Pork Belly, from her Chinese Enough cookbook. Lovely crispy skin on top, succulent meaty bottom, served over jade pearl rice (which was pretty and interesting and just a little sweet to balance; I'd be curious about making a horchata out of it!), and it paired incredibly well with ...

- Cranberry Sauce: Kay Chun's Cranberry-Asian Pear Chutney, always and forever. (Forgot to pick up mandarins to make another version I've been meaning to try, but I'll probably do that later this week.) This year's amusing highlight, though, was that the last time I bought raisins, they were "giant" ones from the bulk bin at Berkeley Bowl. Leonard: "Um, Lynne, are those grapes in your cranberry sauce?" Me: "No, they're raisins, I swear!" Said giant raisins rehydrated enough in the cranberry sauce to look like full-on grapes.

- Stuffing: Mandy Lee's Red Hot Oyster Kimchi Dressing has been on my bucket list bakes forever, and now I'm mad at myself for waiting so long. "Oh, but I have to get oysters, and I really want to do it with the gochujang bread, and what if some people think it's too spicy?" Everybody loved it. We will be repeating this before next Thanksgiving, maybe as soon as Christmas. Maybe even with oyster kimchi to make it extra oyster-y. If you haven't had oyster dressing/stuffing, with or without kimchi, this recipe has completely convinced me of its deliciousness. Even the Chron had an oyster stuffing recipe this year. Time to bring it back!

- Orange Veg: After several years in a row of squash soups, it was time to shake things up; we called on our old fave, kaddo bourani. Sweet pumpkin echoing the sweet potato casseroles of our younger days, tempered with a meat sauce full of warming spices and a garlic-mint-yogurt topper.

- Potatoes: Likewise, with the potatoes, I wanted "not cheesy scallion, not maple miso, make something up, we're both Asian American, it'll still count for Asian American Thanksgiving!"

hyounpark took that decision off my plate, thank you dear, and made mashed potatoes with toasted ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It tasted good, but note to our future selves: when you run out of regular soy sauce, substituting dark soy sauce is going to result in mashed potatoes the color of gravy, just be warned. :)

- Green Veg, Cooked: Made Andrea Nguyen's Sesame Salt Greens again (from her cookbook Ever Green Vietnamese). This time, with collard greens; probably should've cooked them a little longer, but that's okay.

- Green Veg, Raw: Leonard and Sara brought a salad with pomegranates and persimmons from their tree and it was exactly the right balance to all the other heavy stuff on the table.

- Dessert: the triumphant return of Alana Kysar's Liliko'i Chiffon Pie (from her cookbook Aloha Kitchen) to the table. We get our arm workout in every year making the passionfruit curd, but the results are well worth it. Even when yours truly realizes at 3:30 pm Thanksgiving Eve that actually, we *are* out of gelatin powder, and I'm going to have to go Brave The Grocery Store. Didn't find gelatin powder, but did find gelatin sheets, and learned a new thing, so it worked out!

*

Things that did not make it to the table this year, but hopefully will next year:

- Cornbread. I really did want to solve the custard cornbread problem. I was trying to de-dairify the custard-filled cornbread that used to be on our Thanksgiving table every year until our collective lactose intolerance got to be too much for even Lactaid to help with. But having talked to

ladyjax's professional chef spouse, there may not be an alternative milk out there that's going to behave the same way heavy cream does from a chemistry perspective, alas.

I made two batches and both were big enough fails we weren't going to inflict the results on anyone. One used coconut cream, the other used A2 cow milk cream. In both cases, the cream that was supposed to sink below the top layer chocoflan/impossible cake style, forming its own transverse plane surrounded by two layers of cornbread in the vertical center of the cake? Pooled in the center of the pan like creamy lava in the horizontal center of the cake, with a ring of perfectly normal cornbread around the outside. It tasted fine, but the texture was obviously wrong.

I'm going to go back to basics and try making the original recipe with bog-standard commercial heavy cream to make sure even the original still works, sigh. Maybe in a few weeks. When I can stand to look at cornbread again.

The cornbread part itself came out just fine, though! I've wanted to make a cornbread with the same flavors as Betty Liu's lemongrass corn soup; I added lemongrass and shallots and scallions and used coconut milk as a base for our cornbread, and that part was great.

- Deviled eggs. I forgot I was going to use up most of the eggs on the chiffon pie, so didn't follow through. But I want to put chicharones on my deviled eggs the next time I make them! Just trying to decide what else should go into the filling or as a topping.

- Cheesecake. Following up on my successes with burnt Basque cheesecakes, I wanted to try to make one with the truffle cream cheese from one of our local bagel bakeries. I will in fact do that, and probably bring it to coffee ride this week! But the pie was enough for everybody.

*

Ten days out from Break Bread, trying to cram the Bach Magnificat into my brain, somehow having never performed any part of it before in four decades of choral singing. This is a CRAPTON of trills, peeps. At least I already have one of the Whitney Houston songs we're singing down flat (I can absolutely get up on stage right now and sing I Wanna Dance With Somebody from memory, and could have done so any time from 1987 on), and the same with the Hallelujah Chorus. Which leaves three other newer songs to learn quickly. Tis the season!

(We survived Verdi, but that's another post entirely!)

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: ma-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-agnificat! magnificat!

jadelennox

For this week, for everyone who makes a donation to the BIJAN Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund, I will write a drabble about some character or show I know enough about to write. Since I've only written one fic since 2014 it's going to be rough, but BIJAN desperately needs the money and I'm going to try.

The Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund (the Bond Fund) raises money for immigration bonds to free people in ICE prisons in Massachusetts and Rhode Island or those detained elsewhere who are from or returning to MA.

Donate.

Tell me you made a donation and give me a prompt! If I don't know the source material we can negotiate.

(If you can't give money to a US org, make a donation to an org in your country that helps refugees and undocumented migrants stay.)

Current Mood: tired

tcpip

A kind friend once introduced me as "This is Lev, he's one of those people who holds society together". A former partner, when I was juggling time and tasks, reminded me that every one of the tasks I was trying to arrange in some order was a voluntary role. This has been an approach for most of my life; even in my teenage years, I would take up volunteer roles, and at university, I helped start and organise some notable clubs. In my mature adulthood, this has continued over the decades, with several bodies of note (UniMelb PGSA, Linux Users of Victoria, Prosper Australia (Henry George League), the Melbourne Unitarian Church, all come to mind, for example). Currently, I'm the (volunteer) president of three non-profit incorporated associations, and that means being responsible for those groups, along with other voluntary roles, of course. "Responsibility" is a key term here; although the commitment is voluntary, once it is made, it is effectively a promise to others, and one that must be honoured.

Last weekend, for example, was the Annual General Meeting of the Australia-China Friendship Society. It was well-attended with excellent discussion, and we have three major projects in the near year: a concert with Shu Cheen Yu and the Lotus Wind Choir, an anti-racism survey, and an incredible trip to Guizhou and Sichuan is being organised. Another example is that next week there is (again) a contested election for the executive of the local ALP branch, entirely from the enthusiasm of members. As the Returning Officer, I have to arrange ballots and engage in the task of counting up the votes using the multi-member proportional representation with the affirmative action method. But that's not all; I'm also the convener of the Murdoch University Melbourne alumni chapter, and we have an end-of-year social event at the Arts Centre arranged as well, which will included a panel discussion of how Murdoch's educational objectives ("the Murdoch ethos", as it was called) transformed our lives.

In each of these activities, I find myself supported by excellent committee members and other volunteers. People of a like mind and disposition who see the worth of freely working together with others on matters of a shared interest. The Ancient Stoics called this "sympatheia" (συμπάθεια), the connectedness of individual parts to the whole community ("The universe made rational creatures for the sake of each other, with an eye toward mutual benefit based on true value and never for harm", as Marcus wrote), and even beyond as the Stoics saw their ethics as a subset of their physics; the interconnecting logos touches all things. In a more modern and less metaphysical sense, Hannah Arendt waxed lyrically about what she called "action", when a public would engage in activities together that went beyond the satisfaction of necessities ("labour") or the economic incentives of exchange ("work"), but rather with the motivation of shared understanding, which she interpreted as freedom in its fullest sense.

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Albinoni, 12 Concertos, Op 9

vaxhacker

IN hindsight, I was probably lucky I made it three-quarters of the way through November managing to keep up posting something considering the workload I’m juggling. I had to give a very high priority to my research for school and in the end that just had to win out. C’est la vie. But, abbreviated though it was, It still provided a few brief moments here and there to take a break from that work to jot down a few thoughts and read those of a few friends who were also doing NaBloPoMo.

I did start the Orion questionnaire, so I’ll go ahead and finish that at least, and will try to keep up some kind of trickle of entries as I can, but I’m still deep in the research work, so we’ll see….

Happy belated Thanksgiving and happy upcoming holidays to everyone.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and leave us only grief and pain for promised joy.
—John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Ginny Di—All I Want for Christmas

althea_valara

✨ holiday love meme 2025 ✨
my thread here

If you're not familiar with this: you comment on the post with your username(s), and then people ANONYMOUSLY leave comments on why they like you.

azurelunatic

The new dryer is just fine, except the top is ever so slightly slanted in a way that makes it a bad place to set your dryer balls.

Have I mentioned that especially after Colonoscopy Week I've had more trouble than usual walking? I've been using my cane inside the house for the first time in quite a while, and I'm limited in how much I can carry without (more) pain. It sucks. Belovedest has set up the short ramp against the shortest outside stairs, and while going up it is Bad, going up the stairs without it is Worse. (Both outside doors have stairs.)

I wasn't available to assist with any of the Thanksgiving cooking. Belovedest did it themselves! Including: turkey, the epic tray of dressing, biscuits from the mix, and instant potatoes made the way that erases the taste of Box. (There was also salad available, but there's quite a bit of vegetable in the sausage-cornbread dressing.)

Today we had some roof inspectors. The inspection's free; the quote for fixing things up is *sigh* very much not free.

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Command Liners

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Crafting Update, November 2025 + 20 Minute Kitty!

Murdoch Uni and Other End-of-Year Events

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don'tcha wanna dance, say you wanna dance, don'tcha wanna dance

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