unicornduke replied to your post “unicornduke

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that is so incredibly cool! I thought our house was neat and old, we found newspaper from 1906 in the walls when we were renovating. But 1825!! and so much of it in good condition and/or restored. I follow you on instagram so I think I’ve seen one or two pictures of the inside. That’s so cool all around though. old shit is pretty neat

Yeah the house I grew up in was from around 1905 or so, and when I was a kid I thought that was So Old. (It was also derelict and falling down, and my parents rescued it, but not because of its historic value– because it came with fifty acres of beautiful but worthless-for-farming property, and was super cheap.)

Meanwhile the Europeans are all laughing at us in faint disbelief. 1825, huh? That’s like, two changes of curtains ago, here. I lived in Scotland for a year and there was a 12th-century cathedral I could see from my bedroom window and nobody there could understand why that blew my tiny mind. There was a doorway in the city wall that we walked through to get into town and it was this tiny archway in the stone and clearly had been intended to be a normal size for people to go through and I would touch the wall every time and be like this is, like, super old you guys and they all would laugh at me because who says things like you guys. (And actually, I wouldn’t have said super, that didn’t come into vogue as an intensifier until I was in my twenties; I cannot remember what I would have used as an intensifier in my teens. I might have said way or perhaps even so totally. I hope I didn’t, but I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t have. We all did regrettable things in the late 90s, including regrettable things with language.) (Especially me. My accent was a fucking tire fire the entire time I was there, because I’m an involuntary mimic, and I couldn’t actually speak in the accent they had, and I couldn’t actually remember my own accent, so I just made hideous noises with my face and hoped for the best.)

Anyway. Anyway. Do I ever do anything but digress? I don’t, really.

Is your instagram handle the same as this one? there are a few people who recently started following me on instagram and i get them confused and this is regrettable. There is one person I am quite sure is a Tumblr person who has a lovely dog and posts frequently and I can’t match up the handles and am rather confused. But pleasantly confused, of course. 

the day they handed out Clues as to how to Properly Socially Interact and not fucking destroy every.

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the day they handed out Clues as to how to Properly Socially Interact and not fucking destroy every conversation, i was clearly absent. Yikes. I spent today both in person and online having conversations approximately the way a poorly-socialized hyperactive dog enters rooms full of people. That is, despite my ardent wish for it not to be the case, How I Interact, it just is, and that’s that. 

Mostly I talked to people who know me, and most of whom even love me, so that was okay, but. Sometimes it just gets to you, you know? I wish I had some chill of my very own. That’s all.

(When I’m pretty deep in the weeds with depression stuff, I just stop talking, but that’s not really preferable– my brain just goes dark and while, yes, that means I don’t trample over any conversations and feel like an oaf, that also means I basically cease to function, so.) 

This is my last night in the yurt for the season, and I’m feeling a little melancholy, but also relieved, because I have to worry about the damn thing blowing down or something all the time, and it’ll be nice to know I don’t have to. On the other hand, though. It’s the only space i have that’s really mine, where I don’t have to feel bad about how cluttered it is. My house is cluttered but I’m nominally sharing that space with my dude, and so I am pretty constantly guilty that it’s a mess. 

Turkey slaughter Saturday; we did a bunch of prep work today, and will do more tomorrow, and that’s great and all but it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be a really tiring, hard, long day, and there’s no way to get around that, it’s just going to be like twelve hours of work and there are only ten hours of daylight. So… And then another long day Sunday, packaging and pickup, and at some point I have to draw a line and say ok, I know there’s more work to do but I have to drive 300 miles now so I can go start my busy season at my other job now. (I’m going in early on Monday and will be full-time until New Year’s, with one long weekend to come back out to the farm to wrap up the wreath-making operation as late as I can manage.) 

I hate myself when I’m working at the camera store, but I get to have evenings and weekends off, and I won’t be driving across the state every other week, so. It’ll be a nice break and I’ll probably stop talking entirely after about two weeks of it. I know how this goes. It’s not my first rodeo.

wyomingnot replied to your post “the day they

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I wish I stopped talking when I got depressed. Or even talked less. I swear, the worse my depression is, the more I talk. And, like you, I am a conversation killer. So more talking is never a good thing. <3

Mm, the killer is that the worse I get the worse my filter gets too. When I’m healthy I don’t kill conversations in quite the same way. But when I’m not, the smothering torrent of words sort of tends to plop out onto people, and I can’t do any of the things I do to mitigate it and bring someone else in and reconstruct some kind of interaction. 

So overall I tend to shut down and go sullen, but of course I’m prevailed upon to speak sometimes, one can’t live one’s life in total silence, and when I do, my decaying sense of self tends to just unhinge my jaw and let more shit flop ungracefully out onto otherwise-pleasant interactions. So, while my frequency of doing it decreases, the severity of each less-frequent incident increases correspondingly.

So, i’m there with you. Too big and too loud and ugh. <3 We still deserve to live in this world and have conversations even though we’re not good at it!

(I was whispering in most of the video I posted to Instagram today because I haaaate my accent and voice, but of course, in the face of piggy cuteness, I got squeaky anyway. Whyyy am I so shrill all the goddamn time, I don’t know. And when other people here speak they sound fine, why are my vowels so goddamn knife-sharp, I sound like a caricature.)

I can do this. Slaughter setup, yurt teardown, sort out

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I can do this. Slaughter setup, yurt teardown, sort out what’s going back in my car and what’s going into storage in the barn for the winter. I already dropped the box full of glass lanterns so I’m just throwing that into storage and I’ll sort it out in April, I can’t handle that. All soft goods are going back to Buffalo because mice will eat them here. All liquid items are going back to Buffalo because they will freeze or get mouse-eaten here. All yurt wall and ceiling hangings are going into the granary here to block drafts during wreath-making season, and will come down and probably take a brief trip out to Buffalo for laundering before they come back out to go in the yurt after it is set up in probably April. 

The kerosene heater is going… where? I might offer it to Dad to put in the garage. Hopefully I won’t need it again next year; B-I-L promises that it’ll be almost no trouble to run a power line out to the yurt because the new greenhouse is so close. 

There’s so much to do today and once I start it’ll be nonstop so I’m just taking  a minute to gather myself. 

I was up randomly in the middle of the night last night and actually wrote some Found Cat continuation, which I didn’t mean to do, but that’s because chapter 9 is cantankerously stuck and I need to think about it more. And around here all I can think of is either the cats from Found Cat, which are the sister who lives down in the city’s cats, or transposing Farmbaby’s antics onto a baby Poe.

I haven’t started writing that era yet really, because I need to see Rogue One first, but I can tell you that because when Kes joins the Resistance it’s right after he’s lost a bunch of family members in the Alderaan destruction, all the people he meets there form this impression of him as this very scary, looming, silent, glowery sort of person; he’s so torn-up that he fights sort of overboard-scary, and achieves a ridiculous enemy kill count, terrifying everyone else a little bit. I’m imagining someone finally working up the courage to ask Scary Guy about himself, and the facade slips a tiny bit and he tells them he married far above his station, and they think no way could that be true and then they meet Shara and they’re like, oh, because regardless of context Shara Bey is the baddest bitch in the room.

And their Scary Glowery Blood Knife Man is a big puppydog who wants nothing more out of life than to moon over his wife and snuggle his baby.

Whatever gets me through, right? Maybe I’ll write something again someday. 

Patron Saint Bluebell

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roane72:

ursula-vernon:

Hey, listen. I know the world’s on fire. But listen.
I’ll tell you a thing.
On the day after the election, when everything was worst and all I could do was go numb or cry hysterically, do you know what gave me the most comfort?
It wasn’t the words of Lincoln or Gandhi or Maya Angelou, it wasn’t Psalms or poetry, it wasn’t my grandmother, it wasn’t contemplating the long arc of history. It wasn’t even hugging the dog.
It was the Twitter account @ConanSalaryman.
This is a joke account. It’s somebody who narrates as if Conan was working in an office. Tweets usually sound like “By Crom!” roared Conan. “You jackals cannot schedule a mere interview without gathering in a pack and cackling?!” or “Conan slammed his sword through his desk. Papers and blood rained through the office. Monday was slain.”
I followed it awhile back and have found it funny. (I’m not a huge Robert Howard fan inherently, but whoever is writing these does the schtick well.) But if it had not posted once that day, no one would have noticed at all.
Instead, Conan the Salaryman posted something inspirational. And then replied to dozens of people replying to him, for hours, in character, telling them that by Crom! it was only defeat if we did not stand up again, that the greatest act of strength was to keep walking in the face of hopelessness, that the gods have given the smallest of us strength to enact change, that we must all keep going as long as Crom gave us breath, and tyrants frightened Conan not, but we must look to those unable to fend for themselves. (“Though by Crom! We must hammer ourselves into a support network, not an army!”)
I have no idea who is behind that account. But it was the most bizarrely comforting thing I saw all day, in a day that had very little comfort in it. There was this weight of story behind it. It helped me. I think it helped a lot of people. If only a tiny bit–well, tiny bits help.
I have been thinking a lot lately about Bluebell from Watership Down.
There’s absolutely no reason you should remember Bluebell, unless, to take an example completely and totally at random, you read it eleven thousand times until your copy fell apart because you were sort of a weird little proto-furry kid who loved talking animals more than breath and wrote fan fic and there weren’t any other talking animal books and you now have large swaths memorized as a result. Ahem.
Bluebell is a minor character. He’s Captain Holly’s friend and jester. When the old warren is destroyed, Captain Holly and Bluebell are the last two standing and they stagger across the fields after the main characters. By the end, Holly is raving, hallucinating, and screaming “O zorn!” meaning “all is destroyed” and about to bring predators down on them. And Bluebell is telling stupid jokes.
And they make it the whole way because of Bluebell’s jokes. “Jokes one end, hraka the other,” he says. “I’d roll a joke along the ground and we’d both follow it.” When Holly can’t move, Bluebell tells him jokes that would make Dad jokes look brilliant and Holly is able to move again. When Hazel, the protagonist, tries to shush him, Holly says no, that “we wouldn’t be here without his blue-tit’s chatter.”
I tell you, the last few days, thinking of this, I really start to identify with Bluebell.
I am not a fighter, not an organizer, certainly not a prophet. Throw something at me and I squawk and cover my head. I write very small stories with wombats and hamsters and a cast of single digits. I am not the sort of comforting soul who sits and listens and offers you tea. (What seems like a thousand years ago, when I had the Great Nervous Breakdown of ‘07, I remember saying something to the effect that I had realized that if I had myself as a friend, I would have been screwed, because I was useless at that kind of thing. And a buddy of mine from my college days, who was often depressed, wrote me to say that no, I wasn’t that kind of person, but when we were together I always made her laugh hysterically and that was worth a lot too. I treasured that comment more than I am entirely comfortable admitting.)
But I can roll a joke along the ground until the end of the world if I have to. And increasingly, I think that’s what I’m for in this life. Things are bad and people have died already and I am heartsick and tired and the news is a gibbering horror–but I actually do know why a raven is like a writing desk.
So. First Church of Bluebell. Patron Saint.
Keep holding the line.

I absolutely remember Bluebell. <3

The final assemblage of the turkey flock, driven down the hill...

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A video posted by Bridget Kelly (@bomberqueen17) on Nov 18, 2016 at 6:13am PST

The final assemblage of the turkey flock, driven down the hill from their last pasture to the pen next to the processing barn. A much diminished flock after a season of terrible coyote predation, but majestic nonetheless. (at Laughing Earth)

rookbodhi: here’s the Rogue One Prediction based

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rookbodhi:

here’s the Rogue One Prediction based on my tfa experience:

rogue one comes out. chirrut/baze and bodhi/cassian immediately explode across the internet, spawning hundreds of pieces of fanart and fanfiction every day. jyn/cassian is less loved because het ships don’t have the same mass appeal (especially if one of them is a person of color) but a sizable amount of people ship them regardless. people start watching tcw for saw gerrera and discuss fancasts for steela (his sister). you can’t go anywhere without seeing wholesome posts about the heroes and the cast. and it’s great for like a week

then discourse starts about people’s lazily stereotypical portrayals of the movie’s characters of color in fanworks. the beast, jyn/krennic, rears its ugly-ass head as shippers frantically try to defend their ship against the disgusting antis. edgy fans worship the empire officials rather than the members of the rebellion. all the while galen/krennic insidiously lurks in the background.

after two more months nobody does anything with chirrut, baze, bodhi, or cassian anymore, because they don’t know how to maintain their interest in characters of color or ships involving characters of color. galen/krennic becomes the biggest ship on ao3 with over 1000 more fics than the previous top ship. everyone changes their urls back to xXsteverogers69Xx. the pure age of rogue one is over. we block the grossest shippers and settle in to wait for episode 8

Took the yurt down today.

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Took the yurt down today.

kylostahp: lbr tho the real best Rogue One ship will be Bodhi/K-2SO, as the liberated droid has to..

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kylostahp:

lbr tho the real best Rogue One ship will be Bodhi/K-2SO, as the liberated droid has to navigate his indebted affection for Cassian while exploring his budding feelings for Bodhi in an emotional saga of loyalty, love, and letting go