weird little real-life updates
Feb. 26th, 2020 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2T3liQe
I’ve been so sucked into writing fic that I don’t think i’ve recorded the various goings-on in my life currently. Hmmmmm. Time for a boring Life Update post. In bullet points, for amusement value. No, not real bullet points. Asterisks like a savage. (Who once designed an entire website in nested tables? Ha ha ha. I know how to do bullet points properly, by and because the WYSIWIG editor always fucks them up [do kids know what that acronym is??] and I’m not going to. Unordered Lists my ass.)
* Workmen are coming to my house today, to replace all my exterior doors, which are original to the house (1950, which you’d think was cool? and is not) and in bad condition. New storm doors too. I am excited for less rattling and less air-leaking (everything is currently covered in insulating drapes, which makes it very dark), but I am never excited to have strangers see the interior of my home, which, well, has a hoarder and a slob and a cat living in it, so. But, this weekend I did bully Dude into helping me, and the entryways are at least free of debris, and the kitchen and bathroom are like, objectively clean, by real-person standards, at least partially, so. Also I won’t be home so if the workmen are like “what lives in this sty” I won’t hear it.
* I met my coworker’s dog yesterday. We’ve worked together 12 years, he talks about her every day, she is his baby. This dog is 14 years old. She is a pitbull. She is a huge chonk, about 80 pounds, shaped like a barrel. She wagged at me and snurgled me. That’s the good part. The bad part is that she visited because she’d just been to the vet, and she has dementia, which is sad. It’s not as sad for a dog because all it really means is that she sundowns and forgets she’s eaten, forgets it’s time to go to bed, forgets what the routine is, and gets mad at her people when she doesn’t understand what’s going on. But she doesn’t forget her people, at least, and the vet recommended a strategy of feeding her at more frequent intervals so she doesn’t get agitated as much. And the other good news is that she literally has nothing else wrong with her, which for a 14-year-old dog of that size is pretty dang good. (She’s had both ACLs repaired, and was a rescue from a dogfighting ring, so like, this isn’t a dog that’s never had troubles.)
* The hens at the farm are laying like crazy and it’s Egg Season, after a winter of terrible shortage. They’ve started up the greenhouse. I want to go help, there, but I have so much to do at work. It’s kind of stupid; we made some changes and upped our sales in my specific department by a lot and now I’m busy all the time and so going to the farm for a week is more problematic than it was, and it’s all me shooting myself in the foot really because I very much don’t want to be full time, but I also want the store not to close so I want them to do well so I want to do everything I can to increase my department’s sales. This is the problem with sometimes accidentally being competent.
* semi-relatedly, the Scenic Hudson Land Trust paid a filmmaker to come to the farm last summer for a bit and he filmed a documentary and it’s going to be released soon? Super excited to see that. I will definitely link to it here.
* I have had a minor breakthrough in banjo after attending a jam session with my teacher and without Dude. Not being distracted by Dude being a sourpuss (he enjoys music best as a solo endeavor, which is really genuinely eccentric of him I think), I had a great time and learned a ton. So tonight is the next session, and I’ve been working kind of hard and it’s nice because I feel like maybe I’m prepared. The other great outcome of that session is that the teacher realized I can sing and so has started giving me the lyrics along with the tabs to learn songs, and that feels nice. I feel like it doesn’t matter how skilled one is as a singer, one is never quite certain that one’s singing is welcome anywhere, so I really like to be reassured of that. Anyway, this week we learned Wildwood Flower, and he taught it to us in G and was like “we’ll have to modulate to C to sing it” because conventional wisdom is for a woman you play the song in C (”C is for Chicks,” he said, a little self-consciously) but I said actually this would be easier to sing in G? Wildwood Flower has a pretty wide range to the vocal line, and soars up for the whole second half of the verse, and since I can sing low enough for the start in G I’d rather do the high part in that lower key. I have a pretty high range but it gets shrill real fast and I don’t like to use it.
the thing about Wildwood Flower is that it’s a really old song and a bunch of people clearly learned it orally from one another and so a lot of the versions of the lyrics are absolute gibberish. I finally Googled it and was like why does this make no sense, and the answer is that it did in older adaptations. It used to be called “I’ll Twine Mid The Ringlets” and it was a parlor song circa 1860. Good to know. But it’s sort of annoying that so many really incoherent versions are what’s recorded. HOWEVER, as a bonus, it is NOT a song about a woman whose jerk boyfriend knocked her up and left her, but is in fact a woman saying he’ll regret leaving me because I’m super hot now with all these flowers in my hair, even though I’m real sad, but like, fuck that guy. So, relatable. I’ll allow it.
(I made my teacher laugh when I admitted that the one song I sing at irish sessions when I can’t remember anything else is a super-feminist Dolores Keane number about being knocked up and abandoned. I’m like, that one gets allll the chicks. Listen I’m requesting a proper murder ballad for our next song of the month.)
I’ve been so sucked into writing fic that I don’t think i’ve recorded the various goings-on in my life currently. Hmmmmm. Time for a boring Life Update post. In bullet points, for amusement value. No, not real bullet points. Asterisks like a savage. (Who once designed an entire website in nested tables? Ha ha ha. I know how to do bullet points properly, by and because the WYSIWIG editor always fucks them up [do kids know what that acronym is??] and I’m not going to. Unordered Lists my ass.)
* Workmen are coming to my house today, to replace all my exterior doors, which are original to the house (1950, which you’d think was cool? and is not) and in bad condition. New storm doors too. I am excited for less rattling and less air-leaking (everything is currently covered in insulating drapes, which makes it very dark), but I am never excited to have strangers see the interior of my home, which, well, has a hoarder and a slob and a cat living in it, so. But, this weekend I did bully Dude into helping me, and the entryways are at least free of debris, and the kitchen and bathroom are like, objectively clean, by real-person standards, at least partially, so. Also I won’t be home so if the workmen are like “what lives in this sty” I won’t hear it.
* I met my coworker’s dog yesterday. We’ve worked together 12 years, he talks about her every day, she is his baby. This dog is 14 years old. She is a pitbull. She is a huge chonk, about 80 pounds, shaped like a barrel. She wagged at me and snurgled me. That’s the good part. The bad part is that she visited because she’d just been to the vet, and she has dementia, which is sad. It’s not as sad for a dog because all it really means is that she sundowns and forgets she’s eaten, forgets it’s time to go to bed, forgets what the routine is, and gets mad at her people when she doesn’t understand what’s going on. But she doesn’t forget her people, at least, and the vet recommended a strategy of feeding her at more frequent intervals so she doesn’t get agitated as much. And the other good news is that she literally has nothing else wrong with her, which for a 14-year-old dog of that size is pretty dang good. (She’s had both ACLs repaired, and was a rescue from a dogfighting ring, so like, this isn’t a dog that’s never had troubles.)
* The hens at the farm are laying like crazy and it’s Egg Season, after a winter of terrible shortage. They’ve started up the greenhouse. I want to go help, there, but I have so much to do at work. It’s kind of stupid; we made some changes and upped our sales in my specific department by a lot and now I’m busy all the time and so going to the farm for a week is more problematic than it was, and it’s all me shooting myself in the foot really because I very much don’t want to be full time, but I also want the store not to close so I want them to do well so I want to do everything I can to increase my department’s sales. This is the problem with sometimes accidentally being competent.
* semi-relatedly, the Scenic Hudson Land Trust paid a filmmaker to come to the farm last summer for a bit and he filmed a documentary and it’s going to be released soon? Super excited to see that. I will definitely link to it here.
* I have had a minor breakthrough in banjo after attending a jam session with my teacher and without Dude. Not being distracted by Dude being a sourpuss (he enjoys music best as a solo endeavor, which is really genuinely eccentric of him I think), I had a great time and learned a ton. So tonight is the next session, and I’ve been working kind of hard and it’s nice because I feel like maybe I’m prepared. The other great outcome of that session is that the teacher realized I can sing and so has started giving me the lyrics along with the tabs to learn songs, and that feels nice. I feel like it doesn’t matter how skilled one is as a singer, one is never quite certain that one’s singing is welcome anywhere, so I really like to be reassured of that. Anyway, this week we learned Wildwood Flower, and he taught it to us in G and was like “we’ll have to modulate to C to sing it” because conventional wisdom is for a woman you play the song in C (”C is for Chicks,” he said, a little self-consciously) but I said actually this would be easier to sing in G? Wildwood Flower has a pretty wide range to the vocal line, and soars up for the whole second half of the verse, and since I can sing low enough for the start in G I’d rather do the high part in that lower key. I have a pretty high range but it gets shrill real fast and I don’t like to use it.
the thing about Wildwood Flower is that it’s a really old song and a bunch of people clearly learned it orally from one another and so a lot of the versions of the lyrics are absolute gibberish. I finally Googled it and was like why does this make no sense, and the answer is that it did in older adaptations. It used to be called “I’ll Twine Mid The Ringlets” and it was a parlor song circa 1860. Good to know. But it’s sort of annoying that so many really incoherent versions are what’s recorded. HOWEVER, as a bonus, it is NOT a song about a woman whose jerk boyfriend knocked her up and left her, but is in fact a woman saying he’ll regret leaving me because I’m super hot now with all these flowers in my hair, even though I’m real sad, but like, fuck that guy. So, relatable. I’ll allow it.
(I made my teacher laugh when I admitted that the one song I sing at irish sessions when I can’t remember anything else is a super-feminist Dolores Keane number about being knocked up and abandoned. I’m like, that one gets allll the chicks. Listen I’m requesting a proper murder ballad for our next song of the month.)
