dragonlady7 | Apr. 17th, 2017

Apr. 17th, 2017

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Easter with dude’s family is always entertaining. Today’s Easter Revelation was Dude’s 75-ish-year-old Latvian aunt telling us that until the day he died (last year? or so?) her husband wouldn’t let her wear red because of its associations with Communist Russia. (Indignantly, “And I look good in red!”)

Also I had a pavlova for the first time and ZOMG. So that’s a thing I need to add to my repertoire.

Finally, dude’s cousin was there with her German Shepherdish Mutt Hound and that was lovely. (Gita is about 70 pounds, mostly tail, and has floppy ears, German Shepherd coloring but not proportions, and paces nervously a lot and wants to be Everyone’s Friend, but is not jumpy or licky which is nice. She also destroys things with her tail and snout; this trip’s casualty was an empty wineglass that she accidentally snooted to the floor whilst simply turning her head too fast. She is a Good Girl.)

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ugh i have a tummy ache

it woke me up at like 4am and has been feeling oogy since.

I was all set to ignore it and get on with my life today but I just tried to take a drink of coffee and it started to cramp up and I’m in some alarm. i’m not going to try to function without coffee. No sir. If my stomach isn’t well enough for me to drink coffee then I’m not well enough to attempt to do anything with my life.

I didn’t even eat like a hog on Easter! I did so well. I thought.

We’ll see. If i can get coffee into myself then I can go to work. Otherwise, no dice.

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leralynne:

little jyn and her lantern

#tiny orphaned child all alone #(I have to believe that for the first few weeks jyn refused to fall asleep unless she was physically touching saw #her hand gripping sleeve; his back pressed against her back; his arm around her waist #just because she had been abandoned in the dark before. every time she shut her eyes she saw her mother— #“shh little cat” saw would whisper and rest his hand on her head so she knew he was there. “it’s over. it’s done.”)

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asgardreid:

murkmen:

maxiesatanofficial:

ottomantwerks:

2017

I like the implication that using bones to make broth is a Wacky New Trend rather than a concept that has existed for centuries if not millennia

that person who stole those bones in 2016 started this trend

Honestly a caffeinated broth stand would be awesome if not connected to this bullshit trend.

so here’s the thing, when we process chickens on the farm, we discard the feet. Three years ago, when I started, the older woman who still owned the farm would go through and take a few of the nicest ones off the discard pile, to make some bone broth. The rest went into the compost, because it wasn’t worth the time to clean them and package them; not enough people would buy them to justify the effort.

Now we have two women who come and work at every slaughter day without fail, and the only payment they will accept is all of the feet, and they bring their own clean buckets to discard the feet into, and spend our mid-way break skinning the feet and cleaning them for ease in later processing.

Seriously it’s the only payment they’ll take. Because they know they couldn’t buy chicken feet anywhere else. If they ever stop, we’ll probably start packaging the feet for sale. That’s how precipitously the demand changed.

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oh i know! since i’m feeling wretched and can’t really function today, today is the day to finally push the button on the dang Sled Dog Guy Mystery update I’ve been sitting on for no actual reason since last week.

Let’s see if I can figure out why I haven’t felt like I could publish it.

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Sled Dog Guy Mystery, chapter 5: Kaytoo Is Helpful. Contains unexpected backstory revelations and explicit sex, in perhaps equal proportions, plus life lessons about whether it’s creepy to have sex while the dog’s in the room or not.

“In another life Kaytoo was a princess,” Cassian said.

“Have you had him since he was a puppy?” Bodhi asked. Since he was getting answers to stuff, and not being asked anything in return, he felt like he should continue the streak.

“Sort of,” Cassian said. He ruffled the dog’s ears, then scritched more forcefully with both hands at the loose skin at the base of the dog’s neck, where it met his shoulders. Kay half-closed his eyes and looked pleased. “I mean. I might have sabotaged his training so I could keep him.”

“No,” Bodhi said, delighted.

“I didn’t mean to, if I did,” Cassian said. “But– I just– I taught him a few things on the sly, and I really didn’t mean for it to happen but I think I kind of. Reprogrammed him, kind of? I really didn’t mean to.”

“Sure you didn’t,” Bodhi said. Kay opened his eyes and regarded Bodhi with an uncannily knowing look, as if he understood what was being discussed.

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i am so bad at being sick. See, i feel like I’m playing hooky and faking it, no matter how bad it is. And then I feel like simultaneously I have to #1 not enjoy myself so as not to reward my own bad behavior for faking illness for attention/time off, and #2 I have to get as much done as possible and be productive to “earn” the time off, and also #3 if I am capable of doing too much, I’m clearly going to prove that I was faking, and there’s some authority or person who will notice and Disapprove.

#3 is the diciest, because there probably is; I have many people in my life over the years who Disapprove of how Lazy I am, and I know that’s not just in my head.

So I made myself get up and get dressed before Dude left for work, to prove #2 I think, but worried I’d seem too #3ish for him, but staying in bed would violate #1. I put a load of laundry in so I could #2, and am thinking I really ought to go grocery shopping because otherwise when will we. But #3 is kind of rearing its ugly head in that getting up off this couch feels actually impossible.

My battery is going to die though so I’d better. Still, though. I suck at this, and at many things in life, in unexpected ways.

Reminds me of the time I sprained both ankles and had to go to the ER and couldn’t put weight on the one ankle for a solid week, and was still about half-convinced that I was just faking it and kept trying to sneakily get stuff done while no one was watching. The result is that I would just lie on the floor because my ankle literally could not hold weight, it wasn’t that a doctor had told me not to try it, it was that I actually could not use it for walking, no one had to tell me anything, I couldn’t actually stand up. But I was so sure that I could just– sneak up when it wasn’t looking, or something, I don’t know.

I wasn’t even really on painkillers. That’s really just how my brain works.

So I can’t even drink coffee without stomach cramps, and I’m convinced I’m going to feel worthless if I don’t get a bunch of work done today, so, welcome to my fucking premature dementia or whatever my fucking deal is.

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yeahhh not possible to use the health insurance website without calling on the phone, now there’s an error and the written chat people said i had no choice but to call, because i can’t open the message they sent me through the website and there’s no other option.

very first thing that happens is that after having to type in my name, my zip code, my social security number, innumerable things, the rep picks up and asks me to spell my name, and i do, and she says i’m sorry, i didn’t understand, so i spell it again, and there’s an awkward pause, and she says, i’m sorry, once more? and I try again, and I go slower, and she says “Tee Are Ah Jay Ay Eye Tee?” and I’m like BEE ARE EYE DEE GEE EE TEE and she’s like T what and I’m like you HAVE to be fucking with me, also I have typed it in twice, are you for real, and i almost hung up, but instead I started crying and said “I have a real problem talking on the phone and I don’t know how else to spell my name for you please I’m begging you let me do this in writing,” and she confirmed that there’s no way to do any of this in writing, but she was nicer after that. I couldn’t remember the way you do a thing. “B as in Boy. R as in Ride. I as in, you know, the letter I? D as in dog. G as in, what starts with G? I don’t know what starts with G. I don’t know how to do this, this is why I try to do things in writing because I’m really stupid out loud!” and she said “oh! I get it. I get it. Sorry!”

Then I had to tell her my ZIP code, and she couldn’t understand me, also I had to type it in to get through the phone tree, obviously they don’t see that and so it’s just for their records, but she really had to know, and she was like ok I got the first two digits, so I just said the next three really slowly four or five times, until she said “okay that worked”, so I have no idea what her system looked like, and I feel bad but I don’t have a weird accent, I swear to Christ, it’s just that phones are the devil and everyone hates them and I don’t know why it’s absolutely required to use them, but it is! It just is.

But for the record. Thank God I’m only faking this disability or whatever it is that makes me such a fucking waste of space on the telephone. I cried and cried through the whole phone call, though I was trying not to, and she confirmed that the website seemed to have a glitch for just me, and also that the thing I had been trying to do was the right thing to do, and she’d file me a ticket and put a note on the account to look for the thing I’d faxed on Thursday, and the notice they sent Friday was about the previous thing not about the thing I faxed Thursday so maybe they hadn’t rejected that, but it was a rejection notice that I wasn’t able to read, but maybe they’ll fix the website, maybe, so– she was very kind and I felt like I understood what she meant but I always end up having fucked something up when on the phone so I have no real faith this will help at all, but I guess at least I can continue my practice of refreshing the website and trying again every six hours (she said “sometimes if you wait 24 hours and try again–” and I said “I did that, and then did it again, and then did it again, because it was a holiday weekend and I had no choice” and she was like “oh yeah no that’s broken”)… at least I’m not in suspense.

I’ve just been crying and crying ever since I hung up the phone, which is really stupid, nobody was even mean to me, it just all hammers home that there’s a really basic human function that literally everyone else finds so trivially easy to do that it’s absolutely required and is the only way to achieve certain things or access particular portions of required things for living, at which I’m utterly and completely incompetent for no goddamn reason. And it’s not like i can explain it to anyone else, it just sounds really stupid. Every time I talk on the phone I freak out about it because I know someone’s going to say things I don’t understand, and they won’t understand me when I talk, and I don’t know, for no reason I’m anxious and upset and sobbing to the point of gagging over it, but there’s no actual reason, I can hear and speak just fine, I don’t know, I must just be nuts, I go to extreme lengths to avoid calling people on the phone– and yet, at work, I can answer the phone and mostly be fine, it’s only when it’s on my own behalf, so clearly that’s me being insane but that doesn’t mean i can just not do that. Except, clearly, if it’s just me being crazy, then– I could– just– not do that.

Right? But how???

I don’t know. Still no health insurance. Yet more proof that I’m some kind of idiot. What the fuck is wrong with me? We Just Don’t Know.

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Good Thing Of The Day: I bought this umbrella-style clothesline as a lightning deal on Amazon and didn’t warn Dude so it showed up in an 8-foot box while I was out of town and the mailman was like “bet you’ve been waiting for this!” and dude, bewildered, at the door, was like, “uhhhhh I bet!” and texted me “WTF” with no context, which was hilarious.

It rained most of the weekend (I did manage to dry two loads of laundry on the old bit of rope strung across my yard that’s been there twelve years) so I didn’t set it up, but I just did, and now I’m delighted. It was easy enough for me to do, I think, though there were parts left over I’m a little concerned about. And it’s what I’ve been wanting for a solid decade. So– yay!

Clothes dryers are not my favorite thing. I’m like, the only person I know with a clothesline like this, though. You gotta get the German ones apparently!

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assam-wow reblogged your post and added:

this fic has been an unending source of joy for all of the time since i found @bomberqueen17‘s ao3 page and read literally everything she wrote in one week; pro-tip: this is a bad idea if you have deadlines to meet, i’m lucky my boss is me or i would definitely have fired me for my productivity that week

ANYWAY, what i am saying is, this fic is great and it makes me so happy the end

Aw! PSA, don’t do that, I’ve written a lot of really long stuff, LOL.

Like i can talk, though, I’ve absolutely done that sort of thing on more than one occasion. Vividly remember staying up one night before starting a new job just to reread my very very favorite fic at the time, which was like 400,000 words long and excruciatingly detailed…

Thank you for the rec, it means a great deal. <3

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Sick day fuzz therapy

via http://ift.tt/2nW3yIF:librarychick94 replied to your photo “Good Thing Of The Day: I bought this umbrella-style clothesline as a…”

We had one when I was a kid. Now I use the dryer because I’d rather not have pollen all over my clothes! Make me very allergic. :)

Oh no I never thought of that! I’m exceedingly fortunate not to have any pollen allergies. Also this neighborhood has, like, no trees, so– just enough trees that it’s not super dusty, but.

For reference, that photo includes my entire back yard, so it’s not like I’m using the space for anything else.

torrilin reblogged and added: I do some. It’d be better if I did it more, but the condo association has zero clotheslines outdoors. And in multi family housing, there’s a lot of stigma about hanging wash outside. Not sure why, but it’s not very sensible financially. Granted, weather wise hanging out wash doesn’t make much sense here 6 months out of the year. But.I added a retractable clothesline to the hall bath when we moved in, so I can dry wooly stuff just fine. I should probably get another one or two, they’re very helpful.

Here’s how indecisive I am: I have a retractable laundry line and haven’t worked out where to put it, even though in the winter I hang up an awful lot of my clothing inside the house. I only have one bathroom, though, so my choices are limited. Outdoors, I literally just have a rope that I tied one end to the phone pole, and the other to a hook attached to the garage that the previous occupants surely used to hang decorative plants from. I keep the line from sagging too much by using one of those iron shepherd’s hook things people also hang decorative plants from, if they’re people who have that sort of lifestyle, which clearly I don’t.

My sister in Georgia is actually barred by the homeowner’s association from hanging out laundry of any kind! And Dude’s sister, in California, used to complain about how her neighbors hung out clothes and then left them out to get dusty– but it was clear that a lot of her complaint was them hanging stuff out, period, which she clearly found bizarre. Lady, you live in San Diego, which as far as I could tell was one giant clothes dryer, I’d never seen so much sun!

On the farm, they hang laundry out in all seasons when they can, but yeah, between November and February you’re really not going to even try it, and outside of that, it’s not going to work super well. I hang occasional things out in the winter, but mostly stuff goes on hangers off the backs of all the doors in the house. I just hate using the dryer– a lot of my clothes simply don’t survive it, or come out shrunken.

Socks, though, and towels– yeah, line-drying those kind of sucks, you can kind of use them as hammers afterward, for whatever reason. But sheets– omg, I love line-dried sheets. They smell amazing.

archifist reblogged and added:

my mom has one of these. her favorite thing about it is you can hide your underwear in the inner layers.

I was just thinking that, as I hung out my stuff– the inner lines are so short, and hidden, and clearly designed so you can put your little stuff in there and still have it get decent sun. I’m quite pleased with this thing– but nobody can see in my backyard, my one awesome neighbor put up a big palisade fence, and the other neighbors are never in their yards.

greenglittercat replied:

My family had one of these too! the german name translates literally to laundry spider

LAUNDRY SPIDER. I love that! This one was labeled in German but I didn’t actually look that close.

via http://ift.tt/2oF3lXc:millicentthecat reblogged your photoset “bodhijyns: I was protecting you.”

#gif set#rogue one#saw gerrera#jyn erso#i need so much more of this#i almost put a prompt on the kinkmeme but i worried that people would interpret it as underage#when really all i want#is just a story about Saw ordering his squid-faced partisan radicals#to procure tampons for his fierce daughter#so many feelings

YES Y E S that would be such a great story!!!!!

God I have too many WIPs and I wasn’t previously super into this but now I really. I really want. I really want to read that story!!!!

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The crystal was…interesting.

Breha had wandered over to the cluttered table out of vague interest—amid the looming structures and finicky-looking equipment, the table was the only thing she trusted herself not to damage. It was a chaotic mess, tools and rock samples and notes scrawled on flimsi all scattered, stacked haphazardly. But Breha’s gaze had been drawn to the innocuous white crystal immediately. She couldn’t help picking it up, turning it over in her hand. Someone had drilled a hole through one end, and threaded a cord through it, as though it was meant to be worn as a pendant.

It felt oddly warm against her skin, like something living.

Breha thought of Leia inexplicably, and for a moment she panicked—but Leia was fine, stuck in yet another strategy meeting. She would be there in the mess for dinner, probably arguing with Captain Solo, or trying to bite back a grin as Luke teased Lieutenant Antilles. Leia was fine. She was—

Breha startled at the sound of a loud grunt, too-close behind her. When she whirled around there was a helmeted sentient sticking out of what had previously been a gaping hole in the ground. The faint sound of hammering, voices, could still be heard drifting up from depths unknown.

“Oh!” the human woman—at least, Breha was reasonably sure; it was hard to tell under the layer of grime—said. She hauled herself up and out of the hole, stumbled to her feet. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was here. Have you been waiting long?”

“Only a moment or so,” Breha demurred. Now that she could see all of her, the sentient was definitely a human woman, dressed in something that may have, at one time, been a Rebel uniform. (It was encrusted with entirely too much dirt to be called that anymore.) She had repurposed a blaster bandolier, and stuck it full of what looked like laserscopes and spectrographs.

There was a pickax at her hip.

Breha cleared her throat, tried again. “I was told Lyra Erso—”

“You must be with Acquisitions! They said someone would be coming by for the wishlist.”

“It’s not a wishlist,” Breha said, but she couldn’t summon her usual fierceness, the accompanying lecture about the importance of resource planning.

So this was Lyra Erso.

Your husband killed my husband, Breha thought dizzily. She’d forgotten how to breathe, what came after exhale.

“Yes, yes,” Lyra Erso said, waving a hand dismissively. She had come to stand beside Breha, and was sifting through the cluttered mess of the desk with purpose. “I swear on the Force, the Rebellion has become almost as bad as the Order was when it comes to paperwork…”

Breha blinked. “The Order?”

Lyra Erso froze, a sheaf of flimsi in her hand. Breha watched a complicated expression flicker across her face, and then slide away. “Oh. That’s—I mean the Jedi Order,” she finally said, stiltedly. “I was…a youngling. At the temple on Coruscant. In another life.”

Now that Breha was looking, she could see that the lines around Lyra Erso’s mouth, her eyes, were not cracks in the dirt—she had to be just older than Breha, and that was a strange thought, that Galen Erso’s widow was the same age as Bail Organa’s.

“AgriCorps?” Breha hazarded. She wasn’t sure if there was a politer way to say, so you never made it to padawan.

“Engineering division. Mining geology and geoengineering, mainly.” Lyra Erso straightened up, and looked Breha in the eye. “You?”

“I was not in the AgriCorps,” Breha retorted dryly. Lyra Erso pulled a face, and Breha found herself adding, “But I knew many Jedi.”

“Ah. From Coruscant, then?”

“Alderaan,” Breha said, and Lyra Erso jerked, stumbling a few steps back, away from Breha. All the blood had drained from her face, and Breha watched her throat work as she swallowed.

“Oh.”

“My husband was a senator on Coruscant for many years, though, and counted some of the High Councilors his friends.”

“I know,” Lyra said weakly. She looked as though she wasn’t breathing. “I—heard stories of Senator Organa. Though more from…My husband was a engineer. He worked on military contracts, so he—”

“I am aware,” Breha said, and she wasn’t able to keep the ice and fury out of her voice this time, not entirely. Lyra flinched.

Keep reading

via http://ift.tt/2oPWix5:jemmaprophet replied to your post “librarychick94 replied to your photo “Good Thing Of The Day: I bought…”

A lot of it is racial; it’s much more common for people who grew up in other countries to dry their clothes outside, so it quickly gained a stigma due to being seen as “lower class” and “not our kind of people”. tl;dr people are awful. As usual.

oh, I don’t doubt that– but around here, where many neighborhoods are very monochromatic white with little recent immigration, it’s classist too. I don’t know when electric and gas clothes-dryers became de rigeur (a quick Google suggests the 1950s) but anyone who didn’t promptly adopt one was looked down on for being low-class and unsophisticated. My mother had one, but she was a hippie, and also we lived in the middle of nowhere so nobody’d see it. You see them out in rural areas still, but in the suburbs, everyone here is so class-conscious.

I think it’s almost been long enough that to people of my generation and younger, they’re sort of a quaint curiosity. But the homeowners’ association rules and such have fossilized the previous generation’s view, that they’re low-class; that’s probably compounded by race considerations in areas that are less segregated than mine, I’m sure.

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‘this is supposed to be simple and I Just Can’t’ is such a hard feeling. hands down my worst ever crying-in-a-public-bathroom was because I got temporarily deferred from donating blood. my heart rate was too fast, and the person told me to take deep calming breaths. and I just had to take a few minutes to have a Thing about how sure it’s supposed to be that simple but I Just Do Not have the ability to control my heart rate. so like. I understand the crying.

ohhhhh my god. Oh! my god! Like. I get so impatient with myself but what the fuck, sometimes I just can’t do things, and why is anything ever anything, ugh.

torrilin

*hugs* I hate this kind of thing.

s-leary

I’m sorry that was so unnecessarily awful. I’m glad you did it, though! *hugs*

meeee tooooo thank you for the sympathy.

deputychairman replied: Oh I’m so sorry that sounds horrible, I always get super nervous at Official Phonecalls in Spanish which I speak fluently and yet on the phone I need everything repeated 6 times and my accent collapses so I sound like the most Foreign Foreigner in the world. Is there any scope for getting a friend to call on your behalf? My colleague has done this for me with driving license & child 1’s passport stuff and I have never been more grateful to another human being.

Ugh at least, like, you have a second language issue. That’s a starting point from which it’s sort of understandable to ask for help. For me it’s like, well, this is a basic life skill I need to perform, in my own native language, in the state where I was born no less, which it’s literally impossible to get by without doing, that for no reason I can explain, always goes awfully wrong, and now I’ve become completely unable to be reasonable about this thing because I have so much negative reinforcement of it going horribly wrong, and if only I could just be chill somehow, but I don’t even know where to begin being chill about it because even phone calls that go well, I obsessively replay afterward in my head for hours (I mispronounced my own name, what the fuck), and then somehow forget entirely so that when the thing discussed becomes relevant I’m completely unprepared. My memory’s pretty bad even for written stuff, but for spoken things, it might as well not have happened, except for the part that ten years on I’ll be able to recite for you the way I misspoke during the greeting and made an absolute ass of myself, in my native language, in my native accent, to people from my native culture.

oh my God.

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I never can manage to do challenges because I can’t remember when they are and my relationship with prompts is shaky at best but I had meant to finish up a little Bodhi and Shara bit I was working on, because they were both pilots before the war, might have moved in some of the same circles, and I thought it would be neat if they met up, but I haven’t finished it and it’s apparently Bodhi week now, so I guess I’m just… still… working on it, and it doesn’t really… fit any of the prompts… and I still haven’t decided if I should keep it platonic or have them bang. I sort of feel like nobody cares but I also sort of feel like I feel that way about everything so that’s no fair as a judgment. I do miss being able to do polls and things though, that was a fun and cool LJ thing that now you can do on almost every other platform but this one.

Anyway I’ll probably miss the deadline and odds are good I won’t ever finish the fucking thing but if I mention it here, maybe some time in the future I’ll remember that it was a thing I was doing.

Three months later, on a new contract, she was waiting for the loadmaster to sign off on a cargo when she saw an Imp pilot in the distinctive dark jumpsuit passing by. She still sometimes flinched at them, a little, but she mostly could control it. She’d won, and she didn’t have to dwell on how narrow a margin it had been, or how the Imps thought they could get away with anything because usually, they could.

Something was familiar about this fellow, though, so she watched him approach. He saw her looking at him, and looked back, and clear recognition crossed his face.

She still couldn’t place him, but he made his way over to her. “Hey,” he said, with a tentative smile. “I’m glad to see you’re doing all right.”

“Yeah,” she said, baffled, “thanks,” and then it hit her: he was the honest pilot. “Oh! You! Hey!”

His smile turned shy and pleased. “I wondered if you’d remember me,” he said.

She grabbed his hand. “Of course I do,” she said. “I never learned your name, though.”

He looked startled, but still pleased. “Rook,” he said. “Bodhi. Bodhi Rook.” His hand was cold, in hers; long, tapering fingers, and after a moment, he curled them around hers.

“I’m Shara,” she said. “Shara Bey.”