mmm mm mm mm mm okI did paw through some bins of old clothes that i set aside to remake into other..

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mmm mm mm mm mm ok

I did paw through some bins of old clothes that i set aside to remake into other garments, and I am still! too! attached! to dumb old tshirts! that don’t fit me! to cut them up! argh! but. BUT. I did find one shirt that I was like, My mom bought me this in 1994 at JC Penney and it never fit me right, I CAN CUT THIS UP, and so I laid out the pattern for the balaclava I was going to make, and cut it out, and immediately remembered how I had planned to alter it, so I cut another piece to make room to put my hair up in it.

So now that’s ready to sew. I also found another old shirt I had cut intending to remake it in a specific way, and looked at it, and it’s an old Old Navy shirt that had that clear elastic stuff in the shoulder seams to prevent them stretching out, and it’s gone cracked and weird, so clearly, I need to give up on that shirt as well, it is literally from the early 90s and is deteriorating from sheer age and hasn’t fit me this decade. SO I also cut a couple of strips out of that cut-up shirt, and those will be made into a headband to wear while walking.

So I just have to get the serger dug out of the pile of detritus it’s in, and I can sew those.

I also found a couple of shirts I was planning on making into a dress, so I should do that. I’m going to do that. They’re lovely and soft and new, and have software company logos on them that I don’t care about, and I’m going to completely dismantle them and that’s fine. I should go ahead and do that.

Did I write anything today? Ha, no. 
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ms-demeanor: ms-demeanor: luna-and-mars: Executive dysfunction gothic - You have to shower. You...

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ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

luna-and-mars:

Executive dysfunction gothic

- You have to shower. You cannot shower. You are standing right in front of the shower. You want to shower. You cannot shower.

- The meeting begins. “Did everyone see the email?” There is a chorus of nodding heads. You nod, too. You think you may possibly have checked an email account before, on one single occasion, at some unknown time, probably in a past life.

- You are hungry. You have been hungry for three days now. The hunger has not spontaneously resolved itself. How inconvenient, you think. How rude.

- You depend on your planner/calendar. You loathe your planner/calendar. You can’t function without it. You live in constant fear of it. It’s an unhealthy relationship. You think you both should start seeing other people.

- There is a pile on your floor. It is a treasure trove, the Room of Requirement. It has everything. You look for something specific. It has nothing. There was never any pile.

- There’s been a change of plans, they say. You don’t understand. They repeat: “there’s been a change of plans.” You don’t understand. The mere suggestion causes a buzzing in your head that drowns out everything else. You don’t understand.

- You’re in class and you don’t understand the lecture. You look back at your past notes. You look at a calendar. You have not been to class in two weeks. You have no memory of this supposed time. Where did it go? Why did it leave?

- “Organizational tips for success: Keep a planner! Write it down! Stick to a schedule! Make a list!” You are torn between deranged laughter and ugly crying. You choose both.

- You type a few words, your phone rings, you answer. You frown and type a few words. A text, you open it and respond. You forget what you were doing. You type a few words. A text, you ignore it. You type a thousand words. A text, you open it. “Why haven’t you responded?” It’s been a week.

- You need your medication, you call to renew your prescription. You’re out of refills and the doctor needs to see you before you renew. You don’t get your medication again for six months.

- You want to RSVP to your cousin’s wedding but there’s no email address or phone number, just a card in an envelope that you have to put in the mailbox. You put it somewhere that you won’t forget it. The wedding was yesterday.

- “Look, it’s just one more stop before we head home, why are you making such a big deal of it?”

- “Hey, I invited our friends over to hang out for the day and maybe get lunch. You said you were free today, right?” You’re always free but you never have time. It takes an hour to decide what lunch will be.

- You write the shopping list. You stand in front of your door holding your keys while you tape the list to your phone. You step outside and realize you don’t know where your keys are. You step inside and they’re in your hand. You go to the store and pull out your phone. There never was a list.

- You’re meeting someone for what you’re sure is the tenth time. They say their name and all you hear is a high-pitched ringing. You carefully avoid interacting with them for the rest of the evening so you don’t run the risk of having to introduce them to anyone.

- “C’mon, you were in ceramics with me, we made clay boxes together. I sat next to you for two years!” You’ve never seen this person before in your life.

- You have to be somewhere at 6AM. You can’t be late. You don’t sleep the night before to be sure you can make it. When you’re late to work the next week your boss says “you can be on time when you want to be, you’re choosing to show me that you don’t care.” You don’t sleep to make it in to work on time tomorrow. You never sleep. You never sleep.

- You have to pee but if you don’t finish typing this sentence you’ll forget what you were saying. By the time you finish typing your body doesn’t notice that you still have to pee.

- “Uh, did you know you’re bleeding?”
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221cbakerstreet: thededfa: glumshoe: glumshoe: What would it take for someone to sell you...

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221cbakerstreet:

thededfa:

glumshoe:

glumshoe:

What would it take for someone to sell you three “magic beans” for $10 at a farmer’s market?

Specifically, what kind of person would you buy magic beans from? You have no way of knowing if the beans are actually magical - they probably aren’t. But just how colorful a character would a magic bean salesman have to be before you willingly spent $10 for the experience of buying magic beans from an eccentric stranger?

I wouldn’t buy $10 magic beans from a young man with an undercut and suspenders with sailor tattooes on his forearms. He might be a nice guy - maybe I’d be friends with him. But I would not spend $10 for the experience of purchasing magic beans from him, unless they were actual real magic beans and he could prove that.

I might buy $10 magic beans from a small child in a wizard costume. It depends. Maybe if they’re really committed to the role - then I’m purchasing the privilege of interacting with them.

I might but $10 magic beans from an incredibly sexy, mysterious lady with long opera gloves and glittering eyes, but probably not - I might give her money just for smiling at me but I don’t think she’d really have the right vibe for selling magic beans. Potions, yes. Not beans.

I’d probably buy magic beans from a wild-haired, cheerful witch in overalls and mud boots, but that wouldn’t really be about the beans, it’d be about finding excuses to talk to her.

I’d absolutely buy magic beans from a toothless old person dressed entirely in hot pink or chartreuse who answered my questions with rambling non-sequiturs and told me long, scandalous, scientifically impossible stories about how things used to be.

I would buy three magic beans from the white haired woman who sits on the back of her pickup with dozens of jars of jelly laid out on a table in the abandoned fair ground. She doesn’t sell jelly; she sells potted plants. If you compliment her on her wooden sandals though, she will give you a jar of jelly. She asks if my children are twins every week, and is disappointed they aren’t twins every week. I would buy three magic beans for $10 from her.

On another note, I have traded a crocheted snowflake for ten acorns with a small, barefoot, blonde child in a white dress I encountered in the woods. Two of the acorns sprouted on the way home and I now have them growing in pots.

dude at some point the signs for the goblin market and the farmer’s market in your town got switched but your fae are too polite to say anything when you keep coming back

This is the post that keeps smacking me in the back of the head and being like you need to write that fic set at a farmer’s market and I just… don’t have a hook for it. Sorry. But. 

OK maybe my experiences aren’t typical, it’s a biggish market (100+ vendors, 10,000+ visitors, year-round, on the streets of a city in the summer and in a dead mall in the winter), but let me tell you about some of my regulars, as a vendor. Cut for length, but there’s no fairies or goblins, alas.

1) Super Jumbo Lady: she came while my sister was at the other end of the counter, and bought a dozen eggs from me and paid with SNAP coins, which I hadn’t seen before and so had to read the writing on, but her cheer never wavered, she just said “they said I could use these here” and by then I’d read them and said “why, you sure can! Great!” (we get reimbursed, it’s no skin off my nose) and also “wow your umbrella is fantastic!” because she had a really cool inside-out umbrella that looked like a flower, and after she left my sister said “That was the crazy lady who used to make us go through our jumbo cartons and repack them to have only the largest eggs and when I finally told her I wasn’t doing that anymore, we don’t charge extra for jumbos so there’s no particular size guarantee on them and our regular eggs are huge compared to grocery store ones anyway, she kicked up a huge fuss and hasn’t been back for like a year”, and we realized that either she’d gotten herself on better medication or had gotten food assistance which clearly had reduced some of her anxiety around food, so in the end we both wound up feeling sort of warm-fuzzies around it. 

I guess I could try to recast that story with some sort of romantic fairy something around it but I don’t know how. I wish we had fairies that helped people sign up for SNAP and put hexes on officials who try to take it away.

2) A man dragging one of those wheelie wire-basket carts laden with those insulated freezer bags, who produced a piece of paper and then hesitated and said, “Just how many packages of chicken legs did you bring today?” My sister recognized him and said, “Did she have the baby??!!” “No,” he said, “but she’s so exhausted, she gave me the list this time,” and then I recognized– not him, but the cart, it had been pushed the previous week by a very pale, very pregnant woman, who BIL had spoken to at length; she was clearly having a difficult pregnancy and was eager for it to end, which date was rapidly approaching, and this was her husband. We sold him about $250 worth of frozen meat and fresh eggs, and asked him what else was on his list, and he read it off to us– it was every kind of meat, it was so many vegetables, they were hoping it would last them through the first few weeks of the baby’s life. It was very sweet and sort of impressive: these aren’t people who go to the grocery store, if they can help it. The fact that I’d worked a grand total of three markets and recognized the cart testifies to how regular they are. I have not heard the update, so I don’t know how it all turned out with the baby; this is the thing about social acquaintances that you know as customers! You get a lot of inside news but rarely are the one with the scoop.

3) One rainy morning a fellow who is a member of our CSA, but his wife does the pickup so we don’t see him much (though he came out to help work on the barn a couple weeks ago), stopped by right as the market opened. “I thought you guys might be lonely,” he said, and stood there making conversation until another customer came. “These kinds of days,” he said sagely, “you can tell who really relies on the market for shopping, and who just comes to see and be seen.” He’s not wrong; there’s a collection of elderly men who set up shop in the lawn chairs on the grassy lawn nearby under the monument, and just people-watch, and hold court more or less, with petitioners coming to speak and exchange the gossip with them. (In winter, they sit on one of the landings of the big decorative staircase of the dead mall, overlooking all of the first floor.) (They’re not the only ones; there are other groups who clearly meet at the market to perambulate.)

4) Soup Pack Lady, who buys a whole chicken and two soup packs every week. Her (adult or nearly so) son has a damaged digestive system from some kind of autoimmune disorder, and she has been determinedly healing him with bone broth made from our chickens. Apparently it eases his allergies. She’s very sure of this, and isn’t the sort of person it would occur to someone to disagree with; I like her because she always asks for the biggest chicken we have but if we don’t have a very big one, she doesn’t fuss much, and buys an extra package of wings instead. [There’s a hint for you single people– if you want to make chicken soup but don’t want to eat a whole chicken, wings are the thing to get, they’ve got the connective tissue you want for good broth, and the skin that has the fat that makes the broth nutritionally dense.]

And then there’s the other vendors. Next to us is a kid whose uncle makes pesto. sometimes the pesto guy himself is there, but mostly it’s the kid, who has a Subaru hatchback whose hatch won’t open. He’s like, 19 and apparently works on Subarus and clearly got this one for free. The uncle tends to leave his stand unattended, but the kid generally just sits there on the cooler looking at his phone. They do sell out, and then leave the stand unattended because there’s nothing to steal, but it means people come over to us to ask why they can’t buy pesto, because having a sign that says “sold out” is apparently too difficult for these guys. (and to be fair, if they did, customers still wouldn’t read it, so.) I like them fine, but Sister kind of resents them because they charge $10 for a little container of pesto that’s way less labor and materials cost than the dozen eggs we get bitched at for charging $6 for. He doesn’t even grow the basil himself, she grumbles. It is hella good pesto, though. [And that’s why I’ve tried to explain to her that prepared foods is the way to go, because a little bit of labor goes a longer way, and people pay a higher price.] [It’s currently moot, as we don’t have a commercial kitchen, but it’s relevant.]

Two tents down is The Pickle Guy, and there’s apparently a long story about who started the company and who it belongs to now but he’s apparently a solo shop by now; he’s not the guy whose face is on the label, but he is such a nice dude I don’t care about the details. He helps everyone set up their tents, and is always the first to run over and grab the other end of whatever heavy thing someone’s trying to move, and Farmkid loves to just eat all the samples of his pickles that he puts out, and he absolutely doesn’t mind because she learned early about not putting the same toothpick back into the clean plate of samples. 

Last year we were across from a particular bread vendor, and on rainy or slow days, they’d have a lot of bread left so we’d go ask them if they wanted to trade, and so we’d give them a couple of chickens and they’d give us a flour sack full of loaves of bread. This year we’ve moved spots, so we’re far from them, but on the last day of the outdoor market, a cold and wretched day with few customers, we asked if they wanted to trade. Well, BIL asked; I was back at the stand trying to wiggle my toes enough to keep circulation, when suddenly two burly young men carrying a stack of laden bread trays approached me and gave me an expectant look like I’d have any fucking idea what was going on. I stared at them, and they set their bread trays down, and it suddenly clicked and I said “OH do you want a chicken?” But fortunately BIL showed up then. We had to find a place to put the bread, though, since this time they hadn’t provided a bag, so I wound up with a tote bag full of baguettes over my shoulder as I walked to my car afterward. It was somehow nothing like those scenes in movies, possibly because I was in heavy rain gear and it was a tote literally full of baguettes rather than with one protruding romantically. (You have giant coolers, you might say, why not just fill one with bread, well, those coolers were full of meat when i got here, including raw chickens, i am not super eager to just… go for it. But the egg coolers obliged; we don’t clean them that often because only the outsides of the egg cartons touch them, but I have minor OCD so I had actually just cleaned and bleached them, so it wasn’t quite so horrifying as it might have been. Listen the eggs come in their own containers and we wash those containers, don’t get at me about hygiene here.)

The bread lady between the pesto kid and the pickle guy fucked up at the last market, and took the weights off her tent, but then left the tent up as she went to go get her car. Of course the wind picked up, and of course she came back to me and BIL and the pickle guy clinging to three of the legs of her tent as it headed for the hills. (The pesto kid was long gone; his teardown takes about three minutes even with a hatchback that won’t open.) 

She’d had a miserable summer; the yellowjackets loved her, and she was not friends with them in return. There was a post going around this hellsite a while back about someone’s Ethereal Experiences at the Farmer’s Market and there was a honey vendor who was like, feeding bees honey from his stall, and they were just chilling and the OP was like how romantic and I was like if the vendor next to me was attracting bees on purpose for any reason i would murder him with my teeth and nobody would testify against me. The bees liked our fresh flowers and stung one of our customers, this summer, it was not awesome, but yellowjackets are even scarier than bees and No Thanks You Guys, it is not a romantic experience. We have bees on the farm and my relationship with them is very much that I leave them to it, thanks. (The bees aren’t ours, there’s this Russian-Ukranian guy who keeps bees all over the area and pays us rent in honey, and we’re chill with that but like, those are aggressive fuckin’ bees, they chase the tractors sometimes, yikes. Veg Manager has been making ground-bee houses to attract native pollinators down by his orchard, instead.)

At the end of every market, there is a particular vendor who we see powerwalking down the sidewalk behind us, to go and get his van to tear down: he is eager to be first not out of impatience, but out of a particular love of rules. See, he goes and gets his van, and then he drives it right up to the partition, and then he sits there with his watch braced on the steering wheel and watches for it to tick over to 2:15 precisely, which is when the street opens to vendors’ vehicles, and then and not a moment before he will get out and move the partition and then drive in. He has decided that he is the enforcement of the rule, and he will not let anyone pass before the Appointed Time. He’s very friendly about it, very precise, very cheerful, but also very inflexible. 

And then there’s the guy who is the reason for that rule, who I met incidentally; he was bitching about the rainbow flag on another vendor’s sign, which I happen to know is actually just a rainbow, it’s an old straight married couple with let’s say unsophisticated sensibilities who run the stand, and he was complaining to BIL that vendors are not allowed to have political statements in their signage, and he thought it wasn’t fair that these people had a rainbow, and BIL was diplomatic and noncommittal and said “it’s just colors, man,” and did not mention that his own house has a pair of huge rainbow banners on the front that are absolutely gay pride banners because my sister felt it was important; they swap them out twice a year for red white and blue ones and then for holiday wreaths [because they sell holiday wreaths, it’s an ad], but then after the guy left, smugly informed me that the guy was off the list for the indoor market, for unrelated reasons, it was genuinely not political and he hadn’t had to get his hands dirty at all over it, and if he’d been on the board at the time he never would have allowed that asshole back in as a vendor– the man had gotten drunk during the market, and had gone and gotten his truck and torn down his stall an hour before closing time, and when a customer had yelled at him for driving recklessly in such a pedestrian-crowded area, he’d told the guy he’d find him and kill him. BIL felt that was pretty open-and-shut in terms of never letting the guy come back, but whoever was in charge then had felt the guy deserved a second chance. Which second chance, BIL said happily, had coincidentally expired, and so we weren’t going to have to put up with that bullshit at the indoor market. 

I have not yet worked an indoor market, for more than a few minutes at a time giving other people breaks, so we’ll see. Usually the stall next to ours at winter market is a fellow farmer from just up Rte 40, a pair of sisters with a controversial service dog (a nice enough but not very well-trained companion animal named Good; I like her, but the food vendors Do Not); they have a biodynamic practice and their vegetables are “Cosmicly Grown”, and sometimes they show up with kittens that they try to give away.

I fuckin wish cool fairy shit happened at our farmer’s market, but honestly it would in real life probably just annoy the shit out of me. I don’t want to know about your magic beans, man, I just want to sell some of this pork and go home with a cooler light enough for me to lift myself. Please just sign up for a turkey. Yes you gotta pick them up at the farm, I’m not bringing it to you. 

Ma’am, you are the third person today to tell me it’s crazy for me to charge $6 for eggs when you can get them for sixty-nine cents at Wal-Mart, and since you are the third I will simply repeat that the shit you get for sixty-nine cents is not the same as what I’m selling at all, and caution you that had you been the fourth person to say this, I would have simply punched you, so maybe exercise caution in the future when denigrating someone’s livelihood.
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meadowslark: ‘Farming While Black’ is a

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meadowslark:

‘Farming While Black’ is a Guidebook to Dismantle Systemic Racism

“ At first, Leah Penniman’s new book, Farming While Black, reads like any other aimed at new farmers. In it, she writes about finding land, crop planning, seed saving, and raising animals. When readers get to the chapters called “Healing from Trauma,” “Movement Building,” and “White People Uprooting Racism,” it soon becomes clear that Penniman set out to write much more than a handbook….. Penniman weaves together her experience on the land with the rich, untold history of Black and Latinx farming against a backdrop of what she calls food apartheid. The result is a revolutionary work that opens important doors of opportunity for life and livelihood on the land.”
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Im getting set up at my back porch table to do a 1 hour 1k challenge at 1pm with @clotpoleofthelord.

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Im getting set up at my back porch table to do a 1 hour 1k challenge at 1pm with @clotpoleofthelord and Chita has some Opinions about what I should do instead.

Thanks, bb. 

She is Persistent. 
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clotpoleofthelord:Anybody up for a 1k1hr at x:30? Trying to get some NaNoWrimo done so I have a...

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clotpoleofthelord:

Anybody up for a 1k1hr at x:30? Trying to get some NaNoWrimo done so I have a little wiggle room…

yes! count me in!

my girl is (still) ready to Help
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Copyright Office Ruling Issues Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

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Copyright Office Ruling Issues Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms:

star-anise:

kitswulf:

argumate:

Repair of motorized land vehicles (including tractors) by modifying the software is now legal. Importantly, this includes access to telematic diagnostic data—which was a major point of contention.

the end of the tractor hacking legal saga!

@star-anise @algorizmi @queerpyracy aaaaaaaaaaa

\o/
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Did more stuff today. I sewed a 15-inch seam on a

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Did more stuff today. 

I sewed a 15-inch seam on a project that had been sitting in the basket by the couch for about a year, meaning that’s now almost a wearable garment– I need to hem one little thing, and then I have another altered jacket to wear. 

Then I rethreaded the serger from white to black. I couldn’t find the fourth black cone, so I put the rainbow cone back in the upper looper spot, so it’s mostly black but the binding stitches, which are the most visible, are rainbow. It’s the little things. I should do it fluorescent, but rainbow will do for now.

I then sewed the t-shirt balaclava, and hemmed a strip of t-shirt to be a headband, because I have a shortage of winter hats that actually accommodate my hair, and somehow I don’t have any proper winter headbands. 

I still have to cut the eye opening in the balaclava, and hem it, but I figure I’ll do that by hand. Photo below the cut of how hilarious this thing looks with the eye hole not really cut.

I also dug out another jacket I had seam-ripped the sides of, meaning to add panels to make it fit better, and measured to figure out what side the panels need to be. I should write a fucking book about how to alter clothes to be bigger; all people ever do in refashions is cut big garments down and that’s really not something I’ve basically ever had to do, so. How To Make Two Tiny Shitty T-Shirts Into One Big Enough T-Shirt could be, like, my master’s thesis. Ugh.

I did write a bit, I got about 2700 words. I’d feel more bad, but I mean. I’m way behind, that’s not usual for me, but it is what it is. I broke 5k, which puts me pretty far behind schedule, but I’ve proven in other years that honestly if I’m not too busy, I can write 50k in a week, so. We’ll see. 

And I dug out some snow pants that I had set aside last year, meaning to similarly alter, but not quite knowing where to start– they’re blaze orange, entirely, and extremely insulated, so I don’t know how I’d add a panel, or where. And I tried them on, and… they… fit. I’m not any smaller, I think I’ve just given up. They wouldn’t be comfortable to sit in, but I honestly don’t care. So I have blaze orange snow pants. I will need them maybe once, at the farm, if I go hunting. I probably won’t wear them to walk to work unless it is hella fuckin cold. They’re visible from space. They’re overalls but they fit my bust because they uh, don’t go that high. It’s kind of funny. Anyway. I also ordered rain pants, which I ought to be getting next week, which will guarantee that it won’t rain anymore, but. They were only about $45. And the orange snow pants were $17 on clearance last year, so. 

I also cut out and assembled a printout of a pattern for a vest, which maybe I”ll actually make now that I have actually assembled the pattern. I want a quilted wool vest, and all the ones I could buy are either nylon, or for men. Fuck that. So I’m gonna make one out of scraps and patchwork first, just to test the pattern, and then I’ll maybe cut into some nice wool yardage I have.

Anyhow… Now I have a chicken in the oven, which I thought was going well until I checked on it after 30 minutes and discovered that the oven, set to 400, was at 225… I lit a burner experimentally and the oven roared back to life. It’s working just fine now, after that unnerving hiccup. The chicken is going to be only two dinners this week; it’s a tiny one that was too small to bother cutting up when it came up damaged during processing, so I stuck it in a baggie and froze it. I’m making progress on cleaning out that freezer; I threw out some sausage patties from 2013 today, and am going to bring a big hunk of beef Dave’s mother bought us (weirdly?) to some friends next weekend for a lovely homemade dinner at their house. (It’s my bestie, and she was like, come and craft, and I was like my craft is going to be cooking you dinner, guys, because otherwise we always get takeout which is fine but honestly I’d rather cook just this once!)
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