forecast said it’d be 39 last night. i fell

via http://ift.tt/2dBjgzt:
forecast said it’d be 39 last night. i fell asleep before 10pm and woke around 11:30 (believing it to be like 4am) to some cat drama (Whiskey was already in the bed, Beans wanted to come in but couldn’t figure out the door, climbed up to the roof of the yurt and crinkled around on the insulation and cried piteously at us, and Whiskey hates her so she was growling back; I kept petting Whiskey. Beans eventually figured out the door, which now that it has insulation across it is quite tricky to get through; she came in and hopped up on the bed and Whiskey hissed at her, and then started purring louder than I’ve ever heard her purr before, probably to reinforce that she was right by my hand and was thus getting petted. Beans stared balefully at her for a while, but settled down near my feet). It was so cold I thought about getting up and putting the heater on, but I decided that wouldn’t do any good. 

I woke up at like 3:30 or 4 as Whiskey left for the night, and at first I sniffed experimentally and thought, well, it’s not really so bad in here after all. And then I pondered that for a moment and thought, hm, how would it be warmer just before dawn than just before midnight? No way. And then I opened my eyes a little more and realized that it was because I’d pulled one of my fifteen comforters up and over my head, and had made kind of a mini-blanket fort by stretching it across the corners of the pillows.

Ah. So I poked my head out and sniffed again, and oh yeah, it was cold. Getting dressed at 6am was a real treat; I remembered my childhood experiences of living in a damn cold house, and took the new clothes and pre-warmed them by sticking them between my thighs before putting them on, because brrr. 

My phone insisted it was 38, but the reasonably accurate thermometer in the house insists 33. 

Tonight it’s supposed to be 32 so we’ll see. 

margotkim: more fics about friendships that are structured just like ship fics specifically...

via http://ift.tt/2e2A8QZ:
margotkim:

more fics about friendships that are structured just like ship fics

specifically like pining ship fics oh my god

forced to share a bed becomes “accidental sleepover, I didn’t realize adults could do this and I should be chill about how happy it makes me, but no one’s ever braided my hair and gossiped with me before, but I gotta play this cool because I don’t want to be pathetic, and I don’t want to be the person who likes the other person more, but g o s h, I want us to be friends, and not just friends, besties”

the coworker at your bakery/coffee shop/library/spy organization who smiles at you every day and asks about your weekend, but you can’t tell if they’re being nice or what, or if they’d actually say yes if you invited them out to coffee to talk about that hiking trip they went on, you don’t want to make things weird but work would be a lot easier if you had a friend

you’ve just moved to a new city and you cannot believe how many times you’ve had to knock on your neighbor’s door, but you didn’t pack like any of the things you need, and they don’t seem effusively happy that you keep asking to borrow shit like a vacuum or duct tape, but they also don’t rush you out of the door, and when you return what you borrowed, they ask you how it went, and one time you told a joke that made them laugh and you felt so good about it, you kept riffing on the joke for the next ten minutes and it isn’t until you went back to your place that you realized what an embarrassment you are

enemies to friends where you have to work with someone that you hate oh my god you hate them, and then you spend time with them, and then you don’t hate them quite so much, but stopping hating them? almost feels like? defeat?? you’ll stop acting like you hate them when they stop acting like they hate you, and honestly you’d really like them to stop acting like they hate you because they are the only other person you know that’s ever shared your interest for cold war spy thrillers and maybe this is the time for the book club of your dreams

your partner has a best friend and you’ve never hung out with them without your partner but now you are coordinating with the best friend for your partner’s surprise party and they are just the funniest, the sweetest, the nicest, the coolest, and suddenly your partner is concerned because you and your best friend are hanging out all the time, which is…great…awesome…….suddenly becoming the third wheel is just the funnest because who doesn’t like wheelbarrows (it becomes a whole Thing, and ends up resolving in a disney channel esque lecture of someone being like “Guys You Can Have More Than One Best Friend”) 

you’re lonely and it sucks and it’s not the kind of thing that you can admit because you’ve got your pride, you don’t want to look desperate, you can’t tell people about loneliness without making them wonder what’s wrong with you because shouldn’t you have friends? who doesn’t have friends? but it’s gotten to the point where you look forward to buying groceries because you can make small talk with the clerk, you look forward to work because maybe you can slip in something personal in the course of talking about business, but if anyone asked you how you were doing and if you wanted to hang, you’d panic and say that you were busy. and you want to change. you in fact need to change, but. yeah. it’s not an easy thing. and there’s no easy solution. and this is a 100k fic about you slowly assembling a friend group, while having really zero practical experience with friendship, and it’s a gentle epic with the highest stakes, oh my god, just the highest

you and an acquaintance become friends with benefits. things become unexpectedly awkward when you learn that the real benefit………..was friendship 

deputychairman: deputychairman: My mum’s cat

via http://ift.tt/2edmmJM:
deputychairman:

deputychairman:

My mum’s cat Tibby has gone missing, he is small and black and has a microchip (which tragically does NOT have a ‘find my cat’ function, someone in tech get on that?) but no collar. I know it’s vanishingly unlikely that this post will reach whoever it is in the Hills Road area of Cambridge, England, whose house he’s moved into, but my stepdad died last year and mum really loves that cat so if the mysterious ways of the Internet could help get him back for her, it would mean a lot to us. Or give me the illusion of control over something I actually have no control over at all, one or the other.

Breaking news: she just found him! “He was in the Rock Road pub for 2 days!” she says. Thank you so much for reblogging the thing everyone, I really appreciate it: while we were all worried about him, the little furry bastard was just out on the lash!

This having a happy ending pretty much made my day. I’m so glad. You never see the happy ending follow-ups to this sort of thing.

I just watched my brother-in-law trying to put a pair of mittens onto Farmbaby. He kept having to...

via http://ift.tt/2e2Jkov:
I just watched my brother-in-law trying to put a pair of mittens onto Farmbaby. He kept having to pause to turn his head and sneeze violently and repeatedly. (He suffers from terrible allergies.) Then he’d have to pause while she sneezed similarly. 

“Baby girl,” he said, wiping her nose with the clean side of the handkerchief he’d just wiped his own nose with, “do you think maybe we’re related?”

She put her head on one side, considering this, flexing one mittened hand. (It’s not really cold enough for mittens but she saw them while her mother was digging through a box looking for a slightly larger coat to outgrow the one they discovered this morning she’s outgrown.) “I think so,” she said, with great solemnity, and nodded her head so emphatically that her tiny ponytail wobbled.

Reblog this if you had to learn cursive writing as a child

via http://ift.tt/2dSSNCO:
epeeblade:

emilysidhe:

akamarykate:

out-there-on-the-maroon:

prettyarbitrary:

out-there-on-the-maroon:

athos-silvani:

trebled-negrita-princess:

thelastunicorg:

maryjfoxx:

colettel04:

If you were ever told or were made to learn cursive writing when you were in grade school.
I wanna see how many of you suffered like I did.

“Oh , you need to know this.Everything in high school needs to be turned in In cursive.”

“Everything you write in university has to be in cursive”. -high school

“I don’t give a shit as long as I can read it.” -university

“THIS ASSIGNMENT MUST BE TYPED” – University

Ok, so I’m a college professor, been teaching for more than 5 years, have had *does quick math* about a thousand students, and graded approximately 1800 hand-written exams and assignments. 

I dread when students write in cursive, because I can almost never read it. 

And I remember when I learned cursive in elementary school, and the loops and arounds were inefficient and I didn’t like them but I was told that I had to learn it because “cursive is standardized writing so everyone will be able to read what you write.”

THEY LIED. 

They teach us to write in cursive. 

But they never teach us to read in it.

And then we never use it except for signatures.

What is the point of cursive? Does anyone know?

Before the ball point pen was invented, writing with quills or fountain pens means that lifting the pen from the paper and then putting it back down was courting an ink blot.  When you’re proficient at it, it’s also faster than printed letters.  Because of this, for a long time it was culturally considered the proper, adult way of writing.  A neat cursive hand was a saleable skill!  Not just anybody could copy over a manuscript well enough to make it worth spending money on, or take down somebody else’s dictation in a way that’d be readable and usable.

It’s still useful for purposes of research!  We’ve had a bunch of students doing research in the library who’ve been stymied by their inability to read cursive script.  Which is pretty notable considering that hand-written documents–letters, diaries, lab notes, recipes–that date back only a couple of decades are still often written in cursive, so it’s a really sudden and still pretty painful gap.  As cursive falls out of the educational system, people are suddenly losing access to things like family historical documents.

But it looks like the time is not long in the future when the cursive alphabet will become primarily a historical artifact, a dead knowledge preserved mainly by specialists for niche purposes.  Kind of interesting to watch it happen.

Ah yes, that explains it!

Yeah, growing up I had trouble reading the cursive letters from my relatives and had to ask my mom for help reading them. Otherwise it’d take me ages to read letter by letter. 

I imagine we are moving to that point when this will be an archival problem. Hopefully someone will invent a scanner that can decipher cursive quickly to help with this process and preserve historical documents. 

Writing in cursive also engages different parts of the brain and helps build connections between the linear verbal and visual areas of the brain, and develops tactile and fine motor skills (one summation of studies is here). Which doesn’t mean I think everyone needs to learn it or develop a perfect style. But there are schools that still teach it and I think that’s part of why.

Also, as a writer there are times (early rough draft stages especially) when I can get my ideas out better writing with a pen and paper than I can with a keyboard. I can stare at the screen for an hour and get maybe a hundred words out, but if I pick up a pen and notepad all of a sudden everything’s flowing and I can do a thousand words or more in the same amount of time. 

Proficient cursive writing is quicker than proficient print writing, and I remember my teachers telling us it was important less for formal writing (because we were already typing everything by the late nineties), but because it would be necessary for taking notes.  Which it was for me, because I started college in 2003, which was back when it wasn’t very common for professors to allow laptops in class for taking notes (some did, most didn’t) and being able to write quickly by hand was a big bonus.

Interestingly, I’ve had to train myself back out of cursive writing because my students can’t read it.  I still write more quickly in cursive when I remember that I’m writing for myself and can use it (all my shopping lists start out in print and then shift when my mind goes “Wait, only I’m reading this!  I can do cursive!”), but now that I have such little practice with it, I’m starting to make weird mistakes in joining the letters that I never used to.

(fyi I’m about to turn 32 now, so I’m right on the edge of the last generation to learn cursive well.)

I hated being graded on it, because my handwriting was always terrible.But I do think it’s important for the above reasons listed. That’s why my 5-year-old son can read it - but he learned how via an Ipad app.

They taught us cursive writing first, when I was in kindergarten, because it’s supposed to be harder for kids to accidentally reverse the letters. I sure showed them; I reversed entire words. Now they don’t teach it at all, and haven’t in long enough that the high school students my mother works with at the historical society are totally unable to conduct research on primary sources, because they’re all written in a cursive hand they no longer teach children how to read. Those documents are now inaccessible unless transcribed, for anyone under about 25 years of age. Transcription *was* what they used to have the high school volunteers do, but they can’t anymore, and have to find retirees to do it.

yup yup just changed the name of a character in The Lost

via http://ift.tt/2dpNaZT:
yup yup just changed the name of a character in The Lost Kings so he doesn’t get killed off (Tito, who Kes just mentioned as dead in Never Wrote A Letter, is now a different, new character, who I just invented and already love so much it’s going to hurt a lot to kill him off. That’s the thing about dealing with a fandom with world-obliteration in it). The artist formerly known as Tito may still get killed, but I couldn’t bear to have it a fait accompli. 

Also, edited a scene to remove a dog because it would surely have gotten shot in the later-to-come action sequence and I would rather have the dog have never existed than get shot. 

When family/friends "tease" me about my interests

via http://ift.tt/2e4wQgd:
What they think they're doing: good harmless fun :)
What they're actually doing: making me more paranoid, making me ashamed of what I like, more distrustful. More likely to hide all my interests and not want to open up to anybody.

Dinnertime again… I never get a video with

via http://ift.tt/2ef1n9s:

A video posted by Bridget Kelly (@bomberqueen17) on Oct 14, 2016 at 3:27pm PDT

Dinnertime again… I never get a video with Cookies because she staked out the pig house and there’s no light in there.

Mom and dad are in Georgia with the family down there. The 4-year-old niece down there is obsessed..

via http://ift.tt/2ebyZdH:
Mom and dad are in Georgia with the family down there. The 4-year-old niece down there is obsessed with owls, and gave her grandparents an excellent recitation of assorted owl facts, all of which was well-researched except that she opened with the assertion that owls are reptiles.
She remains very convinced that owls are, indeed, reptiles.