long drive

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So we spent a lovely Saturday doing all the vacationy things at once.

My parents, and sisters, had been going on about this lovely vineyard that’s just north of the main bit of the town where the central school I attended elementary through middle school is, and where my sisters all went K-12, and Mom taught. If you just keep going past the main crossroads with the county fairgrounds on one side and the school on the other, and just head north a couple more miles, there’s this vineyard, kind of incongruously– all around is dairy farms and suburban-sprawl houses duking it out, and it’s not really wine country. But this guy worked for the state his whole career and saved up and when he retired, bought the land by his house and put in grapevines and sure enough! He makes decent wine.

So they’re open, in all this COVID nonsense, for tastings– instead of in their tasting room, they’ve converted the beautiful sweep of lawn out front into a series of patio tables with shade umbrellas, and they just run around pouring wine and giving out little cheese plates. (The current regulations specify that for alcohol to be sold, food has to be sold along with it– the rationale is that you won’t barhop quite so much, won’t be so much of a super-spreader, if you go out and pick a spot and stay there to have food with your beer. What this means in practice is Andy Chips, which is a free side of cheap potato chips thrown in with your beer order. This isn’t too bad for a wine tasting joint, which always offered locavore cheese plates, but it did make it hard sometimes to concentrate on tasting the wine when there were pretzels and blueberries right there to nosh absent-mindedly.)

The wine was better than I’d expected. I mean, I’d had it served to me at several recent family dinners, and I had quite enjoyed it, but I’ve been to a lot of tastings at tiny wineries where it’s clear the focus is rather more on the local grapes than on actually being good wines, you know? I was perfectly prepared to be polite about one or two of the offerings. But in the end, when we bought a case (and between my two sisters, six of the bottles were already spoken for), we bought at least one of each of the wines, because we genuinely did enjoy all of them.

The only downside is that it was quite a hot breezy day, and while the weather was perfectly pleasant for sitting, the heat and breeze meant that we kept getting vague whiffs of what had to have been a large dairy operation nearby, and while it wasn’t concentrated enough to be at all unpleasant, it does make it hard to appreciate the finer notes of a wine when there’s a subtle odor of cow manure in the air. Like– I hadn’t realized it, but those are related scents, a wine’s local terroir being next to cattle pastures and all; it’s a sweet earthy sort of smell, and so is wine.

After that we drove six more miles north, and stopped at the Ice Cream Man in Greenwich. I rarely got to go up there as a kid, but it was a huge treat. It’s right by the Washington County fairgrounds, and is on the way to various of the northerly attractions in the area.

Of course, I meant to order a single-scoop cone, so I ordered the “small”, and got about three giant scoops of really decadent ice cream, probably a pound of ice cream all told, which I then had to eat in the car because of course they don’t have any seating just now, it’s takeout only. We managed, somehow.

And then we headed the 28 miles back south to Troy, where we met Middle-Little sister, and we ordered takeout from a restaurant and then while we waited for it to get ready we went to the brewery next to her apartment and ate some Andy Chips and drank beers and watched, rapt, as the table full of hipsters playing cards next to us also had one of their cats there on a leash. (I am so old, these kids were half my age and were drinking legally. Well… Also the cat was so delighted to be in a bar, and lay on the table and watched the wall of ivy overlooking the patio raptly– it was alive with sparrows– but didn’t try to climb it.)

We ate our takeout dinner at the restaurant– we hadn’t realized, they did have patio tables, and didn’t mind us sitting at one, so we did that– and then went back to Middle-Little’s apartment so I could use the bathroom.

Her apartment… sigh. Her fridge died so she had to pull everything out of the kitchen to let them get the fridge out and a new one in, and while she was at it she decided to paint her kitchen, but it means that 1) there is not a single chair available to sit on in her apartment, the living room is stacked floor-to-ceiling with STuff and there’s a narrow passage you can walk through it, and 2) her bathroom door can’t shut because there’s stuff piled in it. Yes, I know. What. Oh my gosh.

No matter what squalor I live in, it doesn’t compare to her, and it gives Mom panic attacks because her brother died in a horrible hoarder apartment that she then had to clean out like ten years ago and all she can think is how she’s going to have to do the same if something happens to Middle-Little and like. It’s okay, Mom, we won’t leave you alone to deal with that again, and also M-L is going to be fine, but also, CHRIST M-L, CLEAN YOUR GODDAMNED APARTMENT. I spent a solid week cleaning it two years ago, last year Farmsister and I spent a week working on painting and cleaning it, but we haven’t done anything this year and it’s just… like we never did anything. You can’t move and there’s crap everywhere and it’s all junk and she can’t bear to part with any of it and God, it makes me look tidy, by comparison.

Ah well.

After that we went back to Farmsister’s house and went to bed, and the next morning i stripped the bed and washed the sheets and hung them on the drying rack indoors to dry– Farmsister and the immediate family went camping, so they’re off in Vermont, and I cleaned a bunch of the house so they’d come back to it as tidy as I could manage. We took the dog for a walk, repaired a corner of the broilers’ electromesh that had apparently gotten run over on someone’s way by doing chores earlier, and then hit the road.

Dude did all the driving, which let me attach the ties onto two more masks, which was great. Now I’ve finished the embroidered one with buttercups on it that I started the week before last, my experimental one with the linen interior and the silk filter interlining.

I ordered myself more silk fabric from Dharma Trading, because I like having that extra layer– it’s breathable, doesn’t fog your glasses, but it ought to be good at filtering both directions.

I also ordered myself a bunch of notions from Brunley and Trowbridge, because I wanted to, and that’s my birthday present and my break-the-streak-of-being-terrifyingly-profoundly-broke-for-six-months purchase. It had arrived while I was gone, so now I have some silk and linen threads to work with, and a book that explains how to make Dorset thread buttons, ha ha (yes, the kind I nerded out about in my Goblin Emperor fic; now I will have them all, ha ha ha).

No, I have no particular desire to do 18th century re-enacting; every group of re-enactors I’ve hung out with has wound up with the assholes in charge. But, I do like historic sewing. Maybe I’ll just be one of those people who has historically-sewn garments in their daily wardrobe. I might as well, it’s not like sustainable fashion comes in my size.

So I’m going to sew myself a bedgown, which sounds like something more casual than it is– it’s sort of loungewear and sort of workwear and I’m just going to have it as a tunic/overshirt I can wear whenever, and i’m going to probably entirely handsew it because why the fuck not.

Anyway I’m back at the camera store job so I should go look busy.

pssst sorry but it’s spelled “Keira”

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LOLOL thanks! No time like the present to fix that.

fic snippet

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the thing about being at the farm and ALSO having Dude there was that I had pretty scant leisure time and then when I did have any I wanted to spend it with him, so I got like, negative writing done.

But yesterday I was seized by inspiration in the shower and ruminated on it in the car on the way across the state while I was sewing, and then at home sat and banged out uhhh fuck 7500 words between yesterday evening and this morning on … no, not any of the stories I wanted to be working on, a random Kiera Metz / Lambert piece that doesn’t fit into anything.

So I’ll discuss that one behind the cut, but first, I’m not posting a snippet becasue I can’t remember what I’ve posted, but a reassurance that I am really truly working on the Baby Lambert and Not-So-Baby-But-Nearly Geralt story, really I am, and hope I can get a chapter up on my birthday (Wednesday) this week– so we’ll see!

behind the cut is the Kiera Metz excerpt and discussion, and while I’m still too in the I Just Wrote This So I THink It’s Genius, I do actually think there’s some good character work in here. I’m presenting it sans context, though, as there’s a spoilery premise behind the whole thing.

(I mean, if I do ever post it, the very tags and summary will be spoilers, but whatever.)

Anyway here’s the intro of it. I can’t fucking believe it’s 7500 words, I really thought it was like 2000. Fuck.

“Do you trust me?” Kiera asked Lambert, and she had her hands behind her back for two reasons, maybe three– firstly, because then she wouldn’t twist them together and show her agitation, secondly, because that meant her chest was the frontmost part of her and she knew he wouldn’t be able not to stare at her tits, and thirdly because then maybe he’d think she was hiding something in her hands, something either dangerous or fun or maybe both, which was the thing she knew he liked most about her: she was both dangerous and fun.

Oh, if only this was about hiding something in her hands.

“Do I– what the hell kind of a question is that, huh?” he asked, looking at her tits, but he looked up into her face quicker than she’d thought. From the crooked smile, he was definitely trying to decide whether this was about something fun or something dangerous, but in his book, that was a fuzzy line anyway.

“It’s the one I’m asking,” Kiera said, giving him a teasing smile, biting her lip a little, and twisting her body from side to side in a childishly flirty gesture that happened to give him an even better look at her tits.

She didn’t wear them out on display like this not to show them off.

“Well,” he said, “I mean, part of our deal is that I’m a cynical bastard and I don’t trust anybody, but I also am well aware you could pretty much squash me like a bug at any time that you cared to do that, so. The answer is that no I don’t trust you but yeah I’d probably let you do whatever you wanted to me because it isn’t like I could stop you and if I didn’t like that, I’d probably have stopped coming around before now.”

“But if I were going to squash you like a bug, I’d already have done that,” she pointed out.

“You could always change your mind,” Lambert said, sunny and breezy and bitter all in one. “Everyone does eventually.”

That was– that stung, for some reason, and it didn’t sting her pride, it stung some other part of her she hadn’t really known she had, some weird bit that was upset on his behalf, that everyone else in his life had let him down.

But they weren’t in love and they weren’t soulmates and that wasn’t really her business.

She gave him another teasing smile to cover up how much that had stung, and how much she hadn’t expected it to. “I promise,” she said, “if I decided to squash you like a bug, I’d give you a running start.”