AUGH CHIGGERS

So, as you might've guessed if you saw my last entry (offers still open, btw! We might actually end up getting a half-dozen or so internet people together on Saturday, or something) Mom and I were going to fly up to Boston for a week starting today in order to go to stellar_dust's graduation and things. It was going to be my first plane ride in about twenty-five years!

I say "were", because the flight was cancelled so we're home again already. I should have expected this. The thing you have to understand, see, is that my mother has magic powers. We've known this since I was pretty small: our family likes camping and hiking and such things, and every time Mom goes camping, it rains. It started to be a running joke once we got into Girl Scout camping, and if Mom went, it rained; if we couldn't go, it didn't. I didn't really think it was much more than an observer bias sort of thing until I got old enough to go on a few camping trips with no parents along, and I scoffed at the boys who brought sleeping bags with no tents assuming they could sleep under the stars, and then it didn't rain.

My whole life I'd just assumed that part of planning a camping trip was assuming that, regardless of forecast or length of trip, you would spend at least one day and/or night dripping and miserable (not counting that time it snowed. In April.) I've had to readjust my entire packing strategy now to the idea that if I am going camping without Mom, there is actually a possibility that it won't rain, that if I plan ahead the weekend might actually turn out clear, that if the forecast a day before says dry it actually will be.

Well, we are slowly discovering that Mom's magic weather talent extends to plane trips, too. As in: if Mom is flying, her flight will be delayed substantially, and even odds you'll have to switch flights at some point. While we were sitting in the terminal tonight waiting to see if they'd ever let us board I asked her if she'd ever been on a flight where something didn't go wrong, and she couldn't come up with any.

On the plus side, we got to spend four hours sitting in the air-conditioned terminal rather than sweating it out in 97° at home.

Also, it gave me a chance to pull out my diffraction grating to take on our rescheduled flight tomorrow morning!

I decided that since this is my first flight since I've been old enough to really enjoy it, I was going to, and screw acting my age. So I pulled out my copy of Science from your Airplane Window by Elizabeth A Wood, and had enough time while waiting through delays that I read the whole thing this evening. Now I just wish the flight was going to be longer! (Also unfortunately having to switch flights means a later boarding and small chance of a window seat, but I can hope.)

( Science from Your Airplane Window )

1. Here is your silly-but-good improvised cocktail recipe for 2011. I am calling it a "Sonic Shark", mostly because I can:

Make a basic Sonic Screwdriver with lemon-lime soda, blue curaçao and plain vodka, without shaking or stirring. (If you want to do a non-alcoholic version, you could use the lemon-lime with blue raspberry soda and skip the vodka.)

Then add freshly-made whole pineapple juice, nice and pulpy, about as much as the curaçao and vodka combined. (The host of our NY party got a juicer for Christmas, you see. There has been much juicing in that house of late.) The pineapple pulp should nucleate the soda-pop, causing a sudden uprush of foam like a toy volcano, and it will also make the foam persistent, so that your drink keeps a head. Also the pineapple juice makes it yummy. :D

(Why yes, we have watched the DW Christmas special.)

2. Also finally went to see the latest Harry Potter movie yesterday. I was not unimpressed - I know you all have been saying it's good, and it was: it somehow managed to follow the book pretty much exactly and yet still make a good movie, which considering my mixed impressions of the book is saying something.

Mostly, though, it made me want to go on a long backpacking trip around Britain. (I was possibly the only person who read that book and said "I wish she'd gone into more detail on the camping!) :D Especially combined with the fact that I got A Walk in the Woods for Christmas and have read it already. (In which our author attempts to walk the Appalachian trail and spends a fair amount of time whining about how hiking in the US is so much harder than hiking in Europe. And he skipped my state entirely and *didn't even mention it*. BAH.)

Also, I spent most of my Christmas gift card money at Target on a 20°F 2.5 lb backpacker's mummy bag, marked down to half-price, which has only been on my wish list for years, and I have slept a night in it already, and we loves it, precious. (Now what is replacing it on my backpacking wishlist is a Kelly Kettle-type stove, but apparently Americans, being addicted as we are to fancy distilled-and-refined fuels, have no need of such things, because nobody seems to make them for us, which means my chances of finding a cheap used one are about zip, and the import ones are out of my budget >:| I have heard rumors that dirt-cheap samovars can be bought in some ethnic neighborhoods in big cities here but I bet they're all electric.)

Anyway I think my official goal for this year is to do a solo backpacking trip at least once. You know, once it is not winter any more.

1. I am going through today and subscribing back to a bunch of people who've been subscribed to me for a while; I've been letting my reading list sit, partly because I'm lazy, partly because my reading list is already very close to Dunbar's number*, and partly because quite a few of the people who subscribed to me recently are folks who I've gotten used to thinking of as way out of my league, too smart and too popular for me. But I have got to the point again where I am spending time reloading my list saying "why are there no new posts?" (I realize the answer is 'holiday weekend already' but I am ignoring that.) So. Um. Hi?

*I have issues with Dunbar's number as a hard limit, but for a single network, it does seem to make sense. And to be about where I settle naturally when it comes to active posters on a reading list.

2. Three fics which I recently found which I must share! And one of them isn't even my fault in any way!

• Sherlock Holmes, Petticoat Detective by verity, which I linked in my yuletide letter, but deserves to be seen above a cut. Remember how back when BBC Sherlock was first gaining steam, I posted about how my issue with a modern!Holmes AU is that without Victorian!Holmes, modern culture would be very, very different?
  
  Apparently while I was off ignoring the fandom for my own sanity, some of them decided that the answer to that problem was that, instead of Holmes being the trope maker and archetype of the genius detective, in that universe, Madelyn Mack was. THIS IS BRILLIANT AND MAKES MY HEART SING.
  
  And verity has actually writ fic about it! Linked above is just a short ficlet, but what she manages to cram into the ficlet about what this means for Holmes - that the archetype he's built his self-image onto is one that pop culture thinks is a girl's - is amazing and I am in love with it. And verity tells me that more is coming, yay!


• The Lambda Quadrant by peapods24. I repeat my comment to the author: OMG Bill of Rights fic! With Rachel/Ana! Luring Keith into a gay bar of shiny! !!!! This is sheer beauty! ...and I love particularly (well, after Keith getting pinched by the bouncer. And Anderson's drooping anntenae.) the commentary you've worked in here on what being gay means on this Earth. I think it's a bit fluffier than I would have written it, but it's definitely the way things *should* be on TOS!Eearth. Proving that Earth understands IDIC better than Surak does, one glittery gay bar at a time. :D


• The World That You Need by dira. This is a Vorkosigan-verse series, up to about 50,000 words total, set during the first half of Vor Game, about how Cordelia Vorkosigan talked her husband into seducing his (male) secretary, because his happiness delights her. It is the best exploration of what it means to be homosexual on Barrayar that has ever been written; it is one of the best stories about poly relationships that I have seen in fandom, period; it is just a really good story about Cordelia and Aral and their marriage, and about Jole, the minor canon character that Dira has given amazing depths to; and it is just full of joy and love, even as it delves into some really dark and painful things on the way to happy-ever-after. This fic is now canon to me, but I really recommend it even to people who aren't Bujold fans, if you like reading fic that addresses LGBT themes deeply - it's just that good, and I want it to go on forever. I have read it about six times since it was posted.

3. The other day I went to The Star Toys Museum and donated five boxes of Star Wars crap to them, ( in exchange for a tour )

4. I finally finished listening to the audiobook of A Wizard Of Mars, after being unable to acquire a copy of the written book without using money. I was... kind of disappointed in it? Maybe it's partly because it was on audiobook, which meant that when I came to the bits I disliked, I had to just slog through, instead of skimming or skipping, so they seemed even longer. But the reason it took so long was that there was a long section in the middle where Nita and Kit aren't telling each other, or their supervisors, things that they really should, by their established character from previous books, be telling them. It is one of those annoying "if they talked to each other there would be no narrative tension, so they are just going to keep secrets for no reason other than angst" things. DD seemed to expect people to buy it just because Nita and Kit and proper teenagers now, and hormones do strange things? Maybe it's just that I was never a proper teenager, maybe it was hitting my embarrassment squick a bit, but I didn't buy it at all, even though ( spoiler cut )

5. Last night, seeking to prove that there really *wasn't* anything good on any of her hundreds of FIOS channels (she was wrong from the outset, 'cause there was a Top Gear rerun on BBCA, but still), Mom put on an episode of the old live-action Hulk TV series. It was - bizarrely - not terrible. It was actually really fun, in that seventies-TV way. And I am thinking of submitting Dr. David Banner to the crushes of shame on hot_daily, because wow, if there was ever a character designed to appeal to little fangirl hearts! And I love love love the oldschool special effects, too. Where is the fic for this?

This morning, my mother met up with several people from church to do a normal maintenance work day. When they got there, they discovered that ( Actually, if you have *any* sort of triggers at all, you probably shouldn't click this )

So, that happened.

Well, at least the local homeless people seem to have gotten the idea that our church is a place you can go when you're at the very end of your resources. So we must be doing something right.

ETA: Right, probably not the right night to finally watch Shaun of the Dead then, oops.

...although to be honest I would have seriously considered going just so I could jump for Adam and Jamie. :D

Some notes from the Rally, mostly covering things that wouldn't have shown up on the TV coverage:

( Some random notes on the Rally )

Anyway: Jon and Stephen live are adorbs. I hope Mitchell and Brooker are that adorable when they get their live show. And are forced to sing just as much.

( 12 photos, mostly crowd shots )

Here is the list of things I need to do before leaving for the Rally in DC tomorrow:

( list )

Sorry about that, but I was working at church for most of the day today, so I know I will be up until all hours getting ready for tomorrow, and at that point I need to make a very detailed list of things while my brain is still working, so I thought I'd share the joy with you.

Also while I am doing all that, I will be listening to the rest of the A Wizard on Mars audiobook I got from the library when it became clear they were never going to order a paper version. I'm about halfway through, and all I've got so far is ( Do I still need a spoiler cut for AWoM? )

1. I am back from Pennsic War! I survived!

2. The mosquito problem back home is completely unacceptable. I just spent two weeks living basically entirely out-of-doors, wearing as much or (given the heat, more often) as little clothing as I felt like, and got 0 bug bites. Within five minutes of opening the car door upon getting home, I had 12. (And for me, mosquito bites are a large welt and >10 days of itching. yaye.) I hadn't realized just how much I'm held hostage by the little suckers until I actually lived somewhere in which I wasn't.

3. Much like before, I am having difficulty believing Pennsic War actually exists now that I'm not there any more. Surely the whole idea that such a thing might actually happen is ludicrous.

4. I have brought back with me one mysterious rash, a significant quantity of mud and ants, way too much sewing/fiber arts stuff, a vague idea that I might actually join the SCA this year, the burning desire to immediately go camping again (somewhere with no mosquitoes), a book of camp recipes that came out unexpectedly yummy, zero photographs and 281 mb of audio recordings. (Mostly of ambient/background noise, because the ambiance, the immersion, is part of what makes Pennsic ... what it is, and I feel like static photos can't capture that, so I thought I'd try sound. Also, I've still been listening to too many BBC Radio documentaries. We shall see if I ever get around to editing it into something reasonably short and shareable.)

5. I went two weeks without internet! And loved it! But now I am caught up on my internet stuff...up to, um, Sunday before last. With the help of DW's ability to read your flist by date, which is amazingly awesome but still so poorly documented that I still have to search the newsblog every time I want to remember how to do it.

6. There was another fic writer in my camp! (Well, let's be realistic - probably more than one, but she was the only one I talked about it with.) Only I completely failed to get her LJ name. Oops. I wonder if I can remember her fandoms well enough to find her anyway?

7. I have signed up for remixduello! And you should too! It is the remix challenge for people who don't have the fannish attention span to qualify for remix proper - you pick which of your stories gets remixed, and your assigned remixer has to do that one. It still has to be a story in one of a short list of large Western media fandoms, but you only have to have written one story like that in your entire career to qualify!

(crossovers still don't count, though. I would qualify so hard for a crossover remix. I dream of one day having it together enough to run a crossover remix challenge. Everybody would put in a list of all the fandoms they can write, and then get assigned a story to remix that contained some subset of fandoms in that list.)

8. I just made myself a linkedin account. I kind of hate myself for it, but apparently some employers want that these days? And in general they want to be able to turn up *something* about you with a web search - "I'm security-conscious and responsible enough to keep my online activities separate from my professional life" apparently doesn't cut it anymore. (ATM the only result for my legal name and town is my Save The Internet testimonial - which is not the worst thing for potential employers to find, I guess, aside from the embarrassing uneditable typos in the first paragraph.)

9. Please tell me someone has written the fanfic where Highlander characters are active SCA members (or regional equivalent)? I've seen fic where they use medieval reenacting as an excuse for carrying swords/duelling/etc., but not where they actually participated. Surely Methos would make an effort to develop a real cover by actually joining and going to events! And Amanda would just think it was all adorable.

10. The thing that is hardest to get used to after my longest-ever camping trip (aside from the mosquitoes)? Artificial lighting and lack of natural light. Yeah, we had a battery-powered lantern and there was some on-sight lighting, but it was always really clear you were surrounded by the dark, and 90% of it was fire. When I go off artificial light (or at least go for red-spectrum, dim as possible lights), I always sleep better and more consistently, am generally happier, eat better and feel better. I should make a greater effort to do that.

Back from con.txt! I survived! Okay, I came home on Sunday, fell in to bed at about 6 PM, and slept though until Monday morning, but still, I survived!

...and now there are two years to wait until the next one. ):

I went to sixteen panels (and modded or co-modded six of them); still managed to go out to an excellent lunch with starlady and an excellent dinner with zana16, erinptah, and nakedbee; taught my self to fold dirty origami at the dance, then some stitch'n'bitchery downstairs with synecdochic, sarah, and some of the other usual suspects; then there was the vid show, the Dr. Who viewing party, and the late-night trivia quiz; cosplayed, dropped off and took some stuff at the swap table, sold something at the art auction; got a lead on Dr. Who slash 'zines from a dealer, stayed for Dead Duck, and even did a little bit of freeform socializing.

I think I used up all my extroversion points for about two months. There's a reason I've spent all my free time the past two days basically lying on my bed watching UK Parliament.

Also, my laptop didn't *technically* completely die! I had to stop using the heavy-duty replacement power cord (which now emits sparks and smoke, and never quite fit the socket) and go back to using the original power cord (which atm transfers current only through creative placement of electrical tape and bulldog clips) but at least the cooling fan motor didn't actually burn out like I thought it had! I mean, unless I'm wrong about that and the whole thing's going to melt into my lap as soon as I post this - I'm not sure how I'd tell, given ambient temperature around here.

( A few more details under the cut, through Friday )

Anyway. That's Friday. I think I'll stop here - there's a werewolf book I pulled off the swap table that's calling to me. And precious sleep, of course.

I have been having a very Fortean sort of a week.

We went on a road trip out to Michigan, and there's something very Fortean in general about an American road trip; it doesn't help that the reading material I brought along was two books by Loren Coleman, including "Mysterious America". And then I actually wrote a thousand words or so of the Great American Werewolf Novel, which surprised me.

We came back by way of my sister's archeology field school in Boston, and while there, I saw three UFOs, and I also saw a real, honest-to-goodness pair of concealed shoes (and then embarrassed myself by regaling them all at length over supper about the history and folkore of concealed shoes, oops. I have settled myself so nicely into my current niche of people - RL and online - who are totally groovy about people who know things, and are enthusiastic about the knowing of things, that I've forgotten the knack of, you know, not spontaneously being Quite Interesting all over everything.)

Anyway, then, just this afternoon, a friend of a friend called me to tell me about how she's been hearing this weird hum, intermittently, when she's in houses in her neighborhood, and some of her neighbors can hear it and some can't, so as my good deed for the day, I sent her to the wikipedia page on The Hum.

...possibly this is the universe trying to tell me I should do something more than just idly wonder about the possibility of graduate school in folklore.

Anyway, that is not what you're interested. What you're interested in, obviously, is pictures of cats. ( so here are some pictures of cats. )
The cat above - aka Miss Georgiana Darcy - has decided that I am never to be out of her eyesight. I don't know why. But I thought I was done being creepily followed around by cats. At least this one leaves me alone on the toilet. And at night, where my bedroom is under the paws of her dear sister, Miss Caroline Bingley, who perches on the one square foot of clear space on my top bunk and surveys her domain.


*Well, they *were* unidentified objects. Until one of them landed at the dig site, and several of the students braved life and limb (and stinging nettles) to haul it back to camp, and it turned out to be an elementary school class project. Still kind of weird and creepy looking though. :D

So, as I do live in, you know, the place that has just broken about half of their all-time snow records, we were without power for about twelve hours today, and we're now hoping it will stay on.

I was expecting that when I got back online you would be flooded with snow pictures and sick of them! But no, there hasn't even been anything on urban_nature. So you get to look at mine.

We got very close to exactly 24 inches before it stopped in late afternoon, as near as I can tell, though it's drifted as high as three feet in a lot of places. The landscape passed Thomas Kinkade levels of threat quite a while ago and is now well in to what can only be described as Seussian.

*Nice* snow-fort making conditions, too. I think we may be attempting to build a full-domed snow shelter tomorrow if the freeze holds like it's meant to. Today was half shoveling and half just wandering around marveling at things.

( 20 photos under cut + 2 more )

Part two of copying my sister's post: photo update.

I haven't taken many for awhile, because my camera is only partly working. And the bits that seem to be really going bad (as opposed to just needing to be smacked around a bit to behave) are the lighting adjustment and the flash, so a lot of these needed a fair amound of futzing after I got them on the computer, and are still slightly pink, but they came out suprisingly okay for all that.

Also, I decided to play with Flickr as my host: I've had an account for years, because it's the default on LT, and doing it through my webspace has gotten substantially more annoying since they made it impossible to see directory indexes on the web. So you can see all these pictures at my flickr account, with slightly different descriptions and more image sizes.

( Colonial Williamsburg, cute puppies and kitties, and Native American sites in Ohio. )

The reason I decided I want to go see the mounds again was that I was going to continue my yuletide story by having Jane and Lambert (of the College of Magics books) autocamping down the National Road and visiting moundbuilder/Fort Ancient religious sites along the way, learning about how Native Americans did their own sort of magic within North, South, East, and West. But as usual I got distracted by the fun of doing the historical research and only got the first bit of the story written. I bought a book at Hopewell Culture National Park, though, Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians, which should be excellently helpful if I ever *do* write the story about European magic meets the Moundbuilders.

Day Four of road trip and we're just south of Boston! We've done most of Acadia National Park over 24 hours and Southwest Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, Old Orchard Beach ME (and last night in Saco on the highway), Mystery Hill NH (aka America's Stonehenge), the largest collective of witch kitcsh in the country (aka Salem MA), and Boston by night. Yesterday is our Weird Stuff day, considering Mystery Hill, Salem, that flight of black helicopters we saw, and UFOs over Saco.

Night before last in Saco we finally saw Harry Potter 5 in Saco. It was better than the book, but maybe that's just because I saw it at a drive-in theater under the stars. :D

Tonight we need to get to Manhattan because Sister got us Daily Show tickets for tomorrow, wheee!!! Which means seven hours of driving, since we're hoping to do Cape Cod national seashore on the way. So I should probably get of the hotel internet and get us moving.

(ps I've only bought six books so far! That averages out to just two a day! And only been to three used book stores and one used book sale....)

We have lots of pictures and a few audio recordings: make me post details once I'm home.

Hello everybody! I am in Maine today, on a road trip with sibling. :D We drove 16 hours yesterday and hope to camp in Acadia National National Park tonight.

(What? Didn't I mention road trip before? Oh. Been busy with packing and planning and also other adventures. Oh, and I'm a lazy, lazy person, too.)

Have still not got her to watch SPN.

The whole thing with p_p over on lj getting suspended made we want to get back into HP fic-writing - I have some stories that I've been meaning to post to that comm since 2004, no lie, still unfinished. I still like those stories, though, the characters and situations I came up with. And when I do a periodic re-reading of all my old unfinished stories, those are some of the ones that make me think "Wow, this is suprisingly good! Who's the author, and how can I bug her to update? ... oh wait."

The problem, though (beyond my ongoing difficulties with finishing *anything*) is that I haven't re-read the whole series since before book six came out, and I've only read five and six one time each. I tried to sit down and re-read yesterday (okay, sit down and re-listen, since we have the unabridged book on tape and I needed to finish some embroidery) and ... it just wasn't fun.

The HP fandom has ruined the books for me.

It isn't even the fandom's fault, either. I'm glad of the time I was really active in HP, and I still love the corners that I lurk in, and I like the people there and the stories they write. It's just ... the books don't really fit the canon all that well. I mean, they do, but. It's not that the books that have come out since I joined the fandom are *bad*. I quite loved Six at the time I read it, but I read it while on an Indian reservation in the middle of Tennessee after several weeks without regular Internet or being at home. Five was, I believe, in Iowa somewhere. . . hey, wait, that's what a journal's for! I can go back and check.

Book five: Yes, probably somewhere around Iowa. We spent the night in that tiny little family-owned motel in the middle of a cornfield, which must have had a name like "The American Eagle" or something and had the cutest little swimming pool. I was on that road trip with two people who are now dead ...

Book six: Cherokee Reservation, South Carolina: well, just over the river from Tennessee. Also that post from almost two years ago says a lot of the same things I'm trying to say now - I just didn't expect that feeling to last as long, because usually the magic recharges after awhile. But here it is almost time for the new book and I can't even get through the ones in front of me. :/

I think I should arrange to be elsewhere when book seven is out, and keep up the tradition! Hmm. That sounds like a good time to finally do an overnight backpacking trip.

I really to think it's not so much burnout, or being more invested in the fic, as that I've come to associate the books with stress, and arguing, and thinking too hard, and taking things way too seriously. Not that HP fandom in general is particularly bad about that, but when I'm just hovering on the fringes it's most of what catches in my memory, alas.

Strangely, this doesn't apply in the same way to non-book fandoms, though. It did burn me out a bit on the books of both of my last two yuletide stories. But even the tv fandoms where I pretty much *only* go back to the canon for fandom purposes - like XF and HL - manage to suck me into the story right quick.

Although it is happening a bit right now with SGA. Especially after I heard everyone groaning about the last few episodes for six months before they appeared in my area. Maybe it's just that I'm not built to follow ongoing series. Hmm. What d'you think?

So we're back in Maryland. I've typed up and backdated three entries I wrote on the trip. They are rather whiny because I wrote them when I had time-- generally when I was bored and tired. But I *did* have fun. Mostly. The most exciting thing that happened was when we stopped at a little gift shop at Sunset Beach and this black cat with lighter dapples poured himself out from the crawl space under the building and I swear he looked just like black oil creeping over the ground.

And we stopped to see Pop-pop on the way back on Father's Day, and he and Aunt Carolyn swapped artifical knee stories, and that reminded me of the last time we were there with someone with a bad knee and Pop-pop was making a huge batch of sausage balls so I asked Mom if we had the recipe and that inspired her to go out and buy all the ingredients and make me make some for the pot-luck church ladies' meeting tonight, so I did, and then she made me go to the meeting, where I explained viruses and defragging to Miss Jerry, who is annoyed at her computer, and thinks you have to take it to the shop in order to wipe the hard drive.

There has been a funeral every week this summer. Mom's going to another one tomorrow for one of the church ladies.

Aunt Carolyn said I should get a part-time job at the church this summer like she did when she was a kid. I told her I'm there three or four days a week anyway, and Mom said no I'm not, I'm exaggerating, this week I'm only going to go to quilting and the meeting on Monday. And church on Sunday, of course. And oh yeah, Game Night Tuesday night. Oh. She supposes that is four times. I keep asking Mom what inspiration I have to get a job when it seems like every day she comes up with something else we can do this summer "unless my daughter gets a job." We can go to NJ-- unless I have a job. We can go up to RI to see Sister-- unless I get a job. We can go on a long camping trip-- unless I get a job. We can go to Ohio to party with her sister-- unless I get a job.

Not to mention I took a long nap in my hammock this afternoon because it was so nice out that I couldn't bear to do anything else. I dreamed that stellar_dust was still home and she was teasing me about fic and she thought my current idea was really stupid. Well. Just because Mom got me thinking about childrens' books this weekend and I started thinking to myself:

( Mulder and Scully and the ABCs )

Today I learned: It isn't "Always a little and never a lot,/ or something may happen, you never know what."
It's actually "Never feed him a lot./ Never more than a spot!/ Or something may happen./ You never know what."

Current reading: A Fish Out of Water, by Helen Palmer, illus. by P. D. Eastman