bodies_in_motion

I have another 'who is this regionalised to' question. I use 'pike' as a verb to mean 'cancel on a social event'. Youngest has learned this from me, but tells me that none of their friends recognise it. Many of their friends are immigrants or children of immigrants, but not all, so you'd think at least the Skips would know it.

So: do you use it? Do you consider it to be a normal regional word?

(I am out of time, so no poll to find out the frequency of use)

urbanoceanix

Watching the tall ships aberdeen instagram stories is making me want to reread copperbadge's tall ships focused shivadh story Pirates of the Riviera - a kid on the story just said he’s volunteering aboard as part of his schooling and made me think of noah? Actually I might just settle in and reread the whole thing. Words: 561,081. Works: 19

Current Mood: contemplative

kaberett

Reading. ( Wells, Lister, Tufte, Brosh, McMillan-Webster )

... I also technically started reading a little bit of Descartes, and more around Descartes, for the pain project -- but really not very much as yet.

Playing. A round of Hanabi with A & houseguest! We were playing with very different House Norms which led to some hilarious miscommunication, but A Good Time Was Had.

A good time was also had following the toddler around a playground, including some time On A Swing where we worked out How Legs Do. :)

Cooking. Several Questionable loaves of bread (mostly "too much liquid, ergo puddle"). Three more recipes from East, none of which were particularly interesting to us. (Piccalilli spiced rice; Sodha's variant on egg fried rice; a tempeh-and-pak-choi Situation.)

And Ribiselkuchen! I have been very very happily eating Appropriately Seasonal Ribiselkuchen.

Eating. A made us waffles for breakfast this morning. I had them with SLICED STRAWBERRIES and SLICED APRICOT and MAPLE SYRUP and also LEMON JUICE and VANILLA SUGAR and I was very happy about all of this.

Making & mending. It is Event Prep Week. There are so many potions.

Growing. ... I got some more supports in for my beans? I have just about managed to break even on the sugar snap peas this year (should NOT have eaten the handful I did...) and might yet manage to do a little better than that, with luck.

Squash starting to produce female flowers (yes I was late starting them). More soft fruit (which desperately needs processing; I will be sad if I wind up needing to just compost the jostaberries that have been sat in the fridge for ...a while, now). Many many tomatoes, none of which were actually ripe yet last time I actually made it to the plot...

Observing. Peacock butterfly at the plot! Tawny owl (audio only)! Bats (ditto)! The Teenage Magpie Persists!

Also a variety of awkward teenage waterfowl in Barking Park, along with a squirrel who was most unimpressed when our attempts to feed it mostly involved accidentally handing it an empty half-peanut-shell. It made it very clear (well before any of us had independently noticed The Issue) that it understood we were willing to feed it but that we were doing a terrible job at this and Should Try Harder. I was delighted.

redbird

We went into central London this afternoon, intending to visit the British Museum, but we made a very late start, and after our late lunch discovered they were sold out of (free) tickets for today.

So we went to the National Gallery, a few bus stops away, and looked at paintings. I wasn't up for a huge amount of walking, but bny the time I was ready to leave, so were Adrian and Cattitude. We spent a few minutes just enjoyong being in Trafalgar Square on a sunny afternoon, then walked to Charing Cross to get the Underground. Annoyingly, while it was (as whichever app Cattitude was using said) only a few minutes walk to Charing Cross, there was a lot more walking underground, and we had to go down several flights of stairs.

ETA: I was emotionally worn out to the point that I was glad it was just t he three of us yesterday, not socializing with anyone else. I hadn't realized that beforehand, only that I was tired enough that committing to anything involving other people seemed imprudent. Being around my brother for most of several consecutive days was a lot of 'there are people here,' even though, or because, much of it wasn't socializing so much as being near each other and sometimes asking whether we needed, or wanted, various items.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little my joints hurt by the time we got back to Mom's flat. I took both naproxen and acetominophen before we left, and wore my better walking shoes and a pair of smartwool socks, and the combination sdeems to have done me a lot of good.

We're flying home tomorrow. I booked a cab, which will pick us up at 2:15, and logged onto the British Airways website and changed the (acceptable) seats it had assigned us to ones we like better (I got us all aisle seats, instead of all next to each other so one person was in a middle seat).

galeogirl

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Strangelove - Depeche Mode

jesse_the_k

fan_writers community -- for meta about writing

Moderated by china_shop and mific

redbird

We are essentially done at Mom’s flat. I didn’t have a lot to do today, but am still tired. We will decide tomorrow what if anything we want to do.

Leaving for Boston Monday afternoon.

We had Chinese food delivered tonight, and it was basic good Cantonese food. They included a small bag of those weird shrimp chips, which I turned out to be in the mood for.

fred_mouse

I have been informed that Tess Williams passed away earlier this week.

Tess was a family friend*, a valued member of the local fannish community, and a gifted writer. I thoroughly recommend their books Map of Power and Sea As Mirror if you can get hold of them.

They will be missed.

*in this case, part of my mother's extended social crowd in my teenage years.

redbird

We expected to finish going through Mom's papers, photos, etc. yesterday, but despite me and \mark both pushing hard, we realized in the late afternoon that we were both badly worn out, so we stopped. He left, and I got Adrian and Cattitude to tale care of me. I was worn out both mentally and physically; Adrian pointed out that \I hade worked steadily for longer that the previous couple of days. Mark will coming back to the flat a bit, but we did not set an alarm, because I needed the rest.

We reached a point yesterday that I could be satisfied just packing everyting the three f us have decided to take--photos, the gorgeous candlesticks Mom left to Adrian (officially tp me, but she had discussed them with Acrian), and a few other s,mall mementoes, but there's a stack of paper that Mark wants to take a second look at: he was lookinmg both for financial paperwork as well as photos and other mementoes. It felt like it might be 45 minutes more work today, but could take tjhree times as long if we had tried to push through last night.

I told Andy and Adrian to go out and play yesterday, so they spent the afternoon at Kew Gardens. It is raining steadily now, and foercast to do so for several hours. I#m thinking I want to do not much today, just finish the tasks here, and maybe go out and do something interesting tomorrow, before leaving for Boston on Monday.

I am very glad we saw

liv on Tuesday, when we were still feeling energetic.

fred_mouse

One of the weirdnesses about being on the current campus is that while I've never studied here, I have a long history of being here.

In either 1980 or 1982 (probably the latter, but it doesn't quite add up) my mother was doing a Post-Grad Dip to convert from being a math teacher to a school psych. For reasons I either didn't know or have forgotten, I would be collected from school one day a week by one of the other students, and taken to campus. There, in theory, I was in the care of P--a friend of my mother's--who was a/the computer tech in what was then the psych building. I certainly hung out in their workshop a lot, learning a stack about computer games, and a small amount about other computer based skills.

I also hung out in two other spots. The first of these is the courtyard of the psych building, which has a water feature and what are now some very well developed trees. I went and had lunch there a couple of weeks ago and got a bit teary, because I lost track of P (who was incredibly important later on) and I suspect at this point they have passed on and I'll never actually get to have some of the conversations I regret not having. (Also, that there is a significant chance that the next I hear about my mother will be their funeral; or worse, post that).

The second was the library. Seven floors, of which I think five were accessible to non-librarians at that time. I used to wander around and find things to read. And books for doing my (primary school) assignments. It was musty and dusty and full of books and absolutely heaven for a book minded child. It continued to be like that for future encounters, including during my undergraduate years, where sometimes the journals I needed were not available at any of the libraries of the university I was enrolled at (there were, if I remember correctly, four libraries I used regularly which were 'on campus' if one counts the Med library as campus) and so I trekked elsewhere.

In the last few years, it has been significantly upgraded, remodelled and modernised. To the point that there are almost no books on floors 3-7. There is a locked area full of compactus on floor 2, as well as a set of borrowable books in an accessible space. The ones in the compactus have to be requested; so far my experience is that it takes 2-3 hours for them to become available, so a quick look can't happen (unless one is lucky and the book one wants is available in ebook, which is, I gather, between 80 and 90% of the collection). I haven't had a good look at the readily available for borrow ones, but it is a smaller area than the smallest suburban library I've been in. So, no just wandering and finding a book.

Except! They have fiction books scattered in sections over most of the floors. And these are borrowable on an honour system. You don't have to do anything to borrow them except pick them up and walk out with them. They aren't catalogued. It is so neat an idea that I've borrowed two (because I ended up in the library for a couple of hours for nothing else to do, so I borrowed a second before I'd finished the first).

fred_mouse

Original plans for today: get brunch (with Youngest and Artisanat), and go past the place that does the good peanut butter on the way home. Achieved! We went to 'The Little Olive'* in, hmm, probably-Melville. They had GF spinach and ricotta rolls, so that was breakfast. They also have an interesting range of sweets, so we got two to share between us. Stopped at Kardinya to get peanut butter; also looked for the good muesli bars in Coles (assumption: they have been discontinued) and got some alternatives; went to the UK Lolly Shop and got rhubarb and custard hard lollies.

And then home. Where my goal for the afternoon is not to waste time on the internet. Being on the internet is fine, just not faffing around. So far I've watched about an hour and a half on Obsidian, note-taking, and related topics while progressing the hat I'm knitting; read some of Room With A View (which I continue to be underwhelmed by) and am now closing old DW tabs (skimming, but not replying) -- there are over 200, because I open what I don't have time to read in the morning, and plan to come back 'later'.

Plans for the evening are date night, which will involve finding something I want to cook. Other wishlist items are cooking stock paste, and making bikkies. Also tidying the bedroom enough that the dog has somewhere to lie down while visiting.

* given I'm now at uni on Fridays, Saturday is the new Friday, and Coffee Fridays happen when they happen. This is the first new to us cafe in some time (not counting Albany, because we didn't actually end up doing brunch).

kaberett

Pilates. Managed to drag myself onto the mat, at gone 9.30 p.m., and wound up smiling to myself and the ceiling.
COOL SHOWER. LOW ENOUGH HUMIDITY TO AIR-DRY.
Listening to the bats as I type this up. (Less active than closer to dusk, but definitely still poking their heads out intermittently!)
Local supermarket has resumed stocking an apple-and-pear juice, and I do in fact prefer it to the significantly more expensive stuff from the ridiculous fancy veg box people. HURRAH for Treats For Me.
Played a round of Hanabi this evening. Enjoyed discovering a Clash Of House Styles, but nonetheless pleased with how we'd done. :)

(I have also made two extremely questionable loaves of bread -- the soda bread I managed to leave out half the flour, which meant it was... not quite inedibly salty, but... definitely Really Quite; the sourdough was just too high a hydration and Wanted To Be A Puddle -- and sent a couple of e-mails I was avoiding. And ordered a Small Treat.)

kaberett

Beginning of last week: experimented with dropping my amitriptyline dose from 75 mg to 50 mg, after a week of having been really fairly good at actually taking it at or around 9 p.m. rather than... later... as an experiment in "does this reduce daytime sleepiness?"

(Prompted by the all-nighter I pulled filling out the EHRC consultation and trying to get the house to cool down overnight during the 35 °C weather: in service of same I did not take my amitriptyline and... felt weirdly good all the following day? With no naps? Like, not even sleep-dep euphoria, just... relatively cheerful and with it and so on and so forth?)

And, see, I'd been aware that last time I tried dropping the ami dose my insomnia got much worse again, so I was alert for that, but after the first night of Fretting I've actually been doing remarkably well! It is possible that I have more or less learned how to go to sleep! I'm super proud of myself!

... and then at the beginning of this week I started going "huh, I'm getting a bunch of endometriosis-y abdominal twinges. that's... interesting. like, it's about six months post-op, and that's when pain commonly recurs, but this doesn't feel like my pre-op pain at all, so what's... going on?"

WHAT IS GOING ON IS THAT I HAVE REDUCED THE DOSE OF MY ONE AND ONLY PAINKILLER.

But the really unfair bit, right, the bit I am actually aggrieved about?

... is that apparently last time I tried this my pain also kicked up a gear and I was also surprised then and I had completely forgotten about this. I remembered the insomnia!!! I did not remember the increased pain. How dare I produce evidence that Sometimes Painkillers Work. :|

rachelmanija

Kelly Ramsey became a hotshot - the so-called Special Forces of firefighting - with three strikes against her. She's a woman on an otherwise all-male crew, a small woman dealing with equipment much too big for her, and 36 years old when most of the men are in their early 20s. If that's not enough, it's 2020 - the start of the pandemic - and California is having a record fire year, with GIGAFIRES that burn more than ONE MILLION acres. At one point her own hometown burns down.

The memoir tells the story of her two seasons with the Rowdy River Hotshots, her relationship with her awful fiance (also a firefighter, on a different crew), her relationship with her alcoholic homeless father, and a general memoir of her life. I'd say about three-fifths of the book is about the hotshots, and two-fifths are her fiance/her father/her life up to that point.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I was WAY more interested in the hotshots than in her personal life. The fiance was loosely relevant to her time with the hotshots (he was jealous of both the male hotshots and of her job itself), and her alcoholic father and her history of impulsive sexual relationships was relevant to her personality, but you could have cut all of that by about 75% and still gotten the point.

All the firefighting material is really interesting, and Ramsey does an impressively good job of not only vividly depicting hotshot culture, but also differentiating 19 male firefighters. I had a good idea of what all of them were like and knew who she meant whenever she mentioned one, and that is not easy. You get a very good idea of both the technique and sheer physical effort it takes to fight fires, along with plenty of info on fire behavior and the history of fire in California. (She does not neglect either climate change or the indigenous use of fire.)

This feels like an incredibly honest book. Ramsey doesn't gloss over how gross and embarrassing things get when no one's bathed for weeks, you've been slogging through powdery ash the whole time, there's no toilets, and you're the only one who menstruates. She depicts not only the struggle of trying to keep up with a bunch of younger, stronger, macho guys, but how desperate she is to be accepted by them as one of the guys and how this causes problems when another woman joins the crew - a woman who openly points out that flawed men are welcomed while every mistake she makes is taken as a sign that women can't do the job.

I caught myself wishing that Ramsey hadn't had an affair with one of her crew mates as many readers will think "Yep, that's what happens when women get on crews," and then realizing that I hadn't thought that about the man who had the affair with her. Even I blamed Ramsey and not the equally culpable dude!

Ramsey reminded me at times of Amy Dunn's vicious description of the "cool girl" in Gone Girl, but to her credit, she's aware that this is a persona she adopted to please men and fill the void left by her alcoholic dad. Thankfully, there's a lot more to the book than that.

vass

Books
Read Cliff Jerrison's short story 'Question 3', which is (as the author himself writes), "an ongoing mood".

Finished Freya Marske's A Power Unbound. Quoting my own reply to

sovay in a comment on an earlier post, after finishing the trilogy: "it tries to do some interesting things with the nature of power and privilege, with reference to land ownership, aristocracy, cultural heritage, but I'm not sure how well it stuck the landing. I get the feeling the author was wrestling a bit with the politics of the system she'd set up, the implications of those politics, and the fact that she had to wrap up an Edwardian period fantasy romance trilogy with a happy ending."

The ending I got was fine for a romance novel, which is what this is. But I wanted more exploration of what the denouement really changed for everyone, and what I wanted would have been incompatible with that romance novel ending.

Started reading R.A. MacAvoy's The Lens of the World. I'm about 3% through and found it a lot rapier than I was expecting, although considering that it was published in 1990 I should have braced myself.

Comics
Tense about current events in Dumbing of Age and Questionable Content, for different reasons. Re QC, what I haven't seen mentioned yet in text is that the worst Anh's father can do to her is not simply cut off her allowance. [after the cut, spoilers and also psychiatric abuse triggers]

( more )

Fandom
Beta-read the latest chapter of

Drel_Murn's 'Wheel and turn'. First time I've betaed in a while.

Games
Unlocked Ascension 5 for all four Slay the Spire characters. The last of them was the Silent, tonight, with a lot of luck, Donu and Deca, and Corpse Explosion my belorpse explosion.

Tech
Finally got a secondhand laptop to replace the one which died. I've been spending a lot of time trying to get it in a condition in which I'll be comfortable using it.

Unfortunately, I made the decision that I'd try switching to Wayland, which necessitated exploring a lot of different utilities, and... yeah.

The most ridiculous shark I encountered, however, was not a Wayland problem but rather a font installation problem. In that when I installed font-awesome (a font package that is mainly symbols, often used for decorative purposes, e.g. pseudo-icons in one's status bar) none of the few fonts I had thus far installed had configured themselves as a default font family. font-awesome... did.

So all of a sudden my app launcher, my terminal windows, and some websites (including the Arch wiki) were displaying in font-awesome.

Some features font-awesome has:
- ligatures which convert the string "OSI" to the Open Source Initiative logo, "windows" to the Windows logo, and of course "at" to an @.

Some features font-awesome does not have:
- visible colons, virgules, or periods
Did I mention this was happening in my terminal?

The solution was just to install another font that considers itself a default font family (e.g. DejaVu) and clear the font cache. I managed to find a post by someone on Reddit who had the same problem, same font, same window manager, in a different operating system (Void.)

Links

UK signal boost: this post by kaberett about PIP/UC reform (the House of Lords is debating it next Tuesday)

Five Lego walkers versus seven different obstacles. They are all very good robots and doing their best.

New Ann Leckie book on the way! Set in the Radch!

Nature
Saw a red fox crossing the road last week.

Current Music: CN Lester, 'Joan of Arc'

redbird

We got a lot done yesterday and today, Mark and I sorted through a bunch of stuff on Tuesday, and talked to Ralph (Mom's stepson) and figuring out which things are his/his sister's, and then which withim that what people actually want. Legally, he and Liz own the flat and some of the contents (specified\). In practice, there are things none of us want, partly because of geography: Ralph doesn#t need furniture, and he's the only one of us who lives anywhere nearby. So it's mostly what has sentimental value, like Simon's family china.

To our London friends: If we get enough done today, we might still be able to see people tomorrow or Saturday, but I don't know yet.

I also got into a stupid argument Tuesday afternoon with Ralph's wife Jenny, who was trying to convince me that my brother and I had some koind of obligation to arrange for clearing out everything that nobody wants, so Liz (Ralph's s sister) can sell the flat. This started with me telling her that we hadn't traveled from the US to be unpaid labor clearing out a flat for someone else to sell, and then on the third time she cirled back to telling her that by insulting my recently deceased mother she wasn't helping. |She said she wasn't trying to help, I told her to at least stop hurting then, and walked away from the conversation. My brother is one of the executor's of the will, so maybe has some obligations here, but Ralph and Liz own the flat now--my mother had a life tenancy and then it went too her stepchildren. I emerged a while later to find that Mark, Ralph, and Jenny had made a bit more progress in figuring things out.

They left here at about five, and Cattitude and Adrian went shopping to buy a few groceries.

liv, who is staying part-time in a flat half a mile from here, came over for the evening, and we had a very good, long visit. Adrian cooked dinner in an unfamiliar kitchen; I'd checked with Live a fw hours earlier about dietary restrictions. The original plan was just for her to come over here, where we can sit in the back garden, but one advantage of that is being able to comfortably share meals with people.

Wednesday was productive, sorting through papers and Mom's jewelry and a few oddments. The will leaves a few specific pieces of jewelry to Simon's daughter and two of my cousins, so we need(ed) to locate those. Beyond that we can do whatever seems good, and had agreed to offer things we didn't want to our cousins. We've found one piece Adrian is taking, and there's a bracelet of Grandma's that my cousin Janet asked us to sell her. If we find it, it's Janet's, as a gift.

After Mark and Linza left, the three of us decompressed a bit. After supper, I sorted through a bunch of [photos, pulling out a few that \I want and/or thought \mark would want to least see. My mother's youth hostel card, signed by her and Grandpa, was in an envelope, along with a 1949 student discount subway pass, which got her free or discounted trips home from school. Thirty-odd years later, they were giving us passes good for free trips both ways, but only after the first few weeks of the semester.

In going through papers, and figuring out what we need, including things the executors and Mom's account might need, we have so far found four social security cards. What seems to be the original has a number stamped on it rather than neatly printed. One of the others makes sense in that it has her second married name on it--Eve Rosenzweig Kugler--but four still seems like a lot.

I'm going to post this and have some breakfast

kaberett

Really enjoying the redcurrant cake I finally managed to make the other evening.
First of the clothes-for-me from the latest Oxfam order showed up and is in fact more or less Perfect, hurrah. (Cargo shorts. Two pairs of linen cargo trousers due tomorrow...)
Mulberries! ewt informed me that they were starting to come ready, so I took a detour via the local tree and did indeed manage to munch a token handful.
I made a batch of mostly-white-some-rye caraway-and-poppyseed bread, and it goes spectacularly well with the cherry plum and vanilla jam a friend gave me at the weekend. I have been having some Very Happy Breakfasts.
My extremely late-into-the-ground squash are starting to produce female flowers!
And I found some more lurking long bamboo to install for the late-sown beans to maybe make their way up.
AND I might actually break even on peas-for-sowing-next-year if the second flush on one of the plants does what it's threatening to, which I would be extremely excited about because I had been mildly regretting eating (instead of saving for seed) the handful we did eat, when my original intention had in fact been to Just Save Seed this year... (... but they were very tasty.)
We are reading Hyperbole and a Half (the book) together a chapter at a time! They are an excellent short Shared Activity.
I have this evening spent a pleasant ten minutes playing around with the dragons game and enjoying getting some very pretty possible dragons out of it. Yes good.
Read about three elephants graduating to the Reintegration Unit run by the Sheldrick Trust and cried a lot. (Also at the accompanying video.) (Good crying.)

duskpeterson

BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket. ¶ Latest installments:

NEWS

About a millisecond before I was about to release my next ebook, a medical crisis occurred in my family (though not to me or my companion). It's the sort of crisis that involves dozens of members of a support team, professional and nonprofessional. I'm one of the two people coordinating all that. I'll continue posting blog fiction here whenever I can, but expect my presence here to be light for a while.

actiaslunaris

Music: "Around the World" by Señor Coconut and His Orchestra
Category: General
Characters/Relationships: C.W.
Concept: Running in spheres.
Info: 1920x1080, MP4, 272 MB.

[AO3.] [Tumblr.] [Youtube.] [Download.]

( Embed. )

kaberett

Specifically I have tracked down a copy of Treatise on Man, which is probably the source of the claim I've seen phrased several ways, most eyebrow-raisingly and also most readily to hand by Steve Haines, attributing to Descartes the idea that pain is

something similar to hearing, it is a fixed signal and measurable response

and it turns out I've got access to a whole entire PDF which turns out to be only 71 pages, including quite a lot of fairly large images, so I suppose I'm going to read Descartes now as a break from working my way through the BBC's Higher revision guides on neurobiology, which is itself a detour from reading the introductory text on nerves aimed at undergraduates...

(The things I've actually been reading today consist of two chapters of Hyperbole and a Half, a partial chapter of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, both as Shared Activities with A, and about half of A Handful of Flour, a recipe book I have owned for quite a while now and am rapidly concluding I might no longer wish to dedicate shelf space to...)

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bodies_in_motion

October 2020

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embodiment, physicality, movement, bodies and minds

Member Posts

Word use question

Tall Ships

vital functions

National Gallery

Will you give it to me?

Nifty New fan_writers Community

Mission accomplished

Farewell: Tess Williams

not quite done

University Library

Saturday plans

some good things

[embodiment] ... well that's just rude

Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, by Kelly Ramsey

Things

London, Thursdauy morning

some good things

UPDATE: Tempestuous Tours + news

BLOG FICTION

NEWS

Fanvid: Around the World (Obduction)

today I have been dragged kicking and screaming into maybe reading some Descartes

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October 2020

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