dragonlady7

via https://ift.tt/uFwBZnp

So this whole time I’ve been on break– farm work ended at Thanksgiving and I came home and have been doing basically nonstop house work since then– I haven’t done much writing. I’ve sat down a few times and banged on things but have achieved little. But yesterday was a snow day and Dude was wfh set up in the kitchen, and so I couldn’t really do work on that room, and it was fucking Freezing so i wasn’t going to do tidying work in the attic (which is where I need to tidy next so things can get moved), and I said y'know what I’m gonna spend it writing. so I posted myself at the desk in the back room for like twelve hours and I have managed now to join up some disconnected bits through what I think will be the actual end of FFT, and begin the sequel. (I’m trying not to have any one work be like, So Huge, and I always try and always fail but. Listen there should be story breaks.)

I might change my mind, but as it stands now FFT is nine chapters total, of which I’ve posted uhhh four or five, and then the next thing I have a bunch of and am excited to get to the next part of.

so I have promised myself I can post a snippet (and a chapter tomorrow!) so let me find something. Probably something short so it’s not spoilery.

This is likely from FFT’s sequel but again let’s see where the chips fall.

“What are you doing?” Luliana asked. Ciri grinned, then darted a glance at Morvran. “Now, that’d be telling,” she said. Geralt sighed eloquently. “Please don’t make the head of the Intelligence Bureau think you’re engaged in subterfuge,” he said to the ceiling. “His job is hard enough.” “It is,” Luliana put in, a little reproachfully. But Morvran rolled his eyes, an uncharacteristically unrestrained gesture from him. “It’s not sedition if you do it,” he said. “Subterfuge all you want. It’s none of my business to tell you what’s in the national interest or not. It’s just that when I don’t know about it, it’s hard for me to make coherent reports to prove we’re doing it on purpose, which is my job. And I certainly can’t requisition you military support if I’m not informed of the need for it.” (Your picture was not posted)

subuwoo

via https://ift.tt/F6s3DrQ

So I wanted to make myself the kind of organizer that hangs over the back of your car seat to hold your stuff, to keep the things that ought to stay in my car in, because with my old car, I hauled so much cargo and loaded and unloaded the thing so often and wound up with so much random junk in there that I lost my tire inflator, foldable shovel, and most of the rest of it. I thought, if I just attach those to the back of one of the front seats then it doesn’t matter what I do with the car, if I’m hauling baby chicks or small humans, passengers or cargo or what, I don’t have to worry.

I shopped around but I didn’t see anything like what I wanted, so I went down in the basement and poked around.

Thus follows not exactly a tutorial, but a description of my thought process. This took forever but if I had to do it again I could do it faster, I think.

I had a weird but perfectly-sized rectangle of heavy-duty polyester canvas (twice as long as I needed, but exactly as wide, so I could use it double thickness), some suit interfacing, and then several yards of an all-plastic but beautiful brocade I bought from Jo-Ann’s back when I didn’t know how to shop for fabric.

So I bought myself a new tire inflator and folding shovel, and then measured the jump-start powerbank I already own, and made pockets exactly sized for those three things. I also guesstimated a pocket for my motley collection of ratchet straps. And then I laid those out on the bit of canvas, and figured I had room for a wide short pocket across the top– gathered the bottom, and put a channel at the top and pulled elastic through, then sewed two seams down it to hold it into three separate pockets.

I did french seams on the first square pocket then realized that made it too small so I had to piece a little extension around the back of it. Then I realized that all-plastic brocade ravels horribly… unless you run a lighter along all the cut edges. Bickety-bam instant selvege. So I melted the edges of all the rest of my fabric, and no more French seams means no more excessive seam allowances.

(I didn’t exactly follow this method but I did find a good tutorial here for how to make a cargo pocket https://sewmesomethingcourses.com/courses/cargo-pocket/making-a-pattern-for-your-cargo-pocket/. It might have worked better than what i did, LOL. I only made one pocket pleated, and one gathered, the others I tried mostly to make to size.)

[image description: a black panel of canvas lies on a table, with three pockets made of brown/black/gold polyester brocade lying atop it, chalked around like crime scene bodies.]

Laid them out, traced with chalk, futzed with the placement. Realized I didn’t have to center that top one, and if I off-set it, I could fit the ratchet strap pocket next to it.

Attached the pockets to the canvas, then spray-adhesived the interfacing to the back, then folded the canvas in half, sewed it right sides together leaving one short side open, turned it right-side out, gingerly ironed it (everything is plastic). I had some of those huge thick plastic strips they seal around big boxes sometimes in the garbage in the basement so I pulled those out, carefully ironed them flat under a press cloth, and then cut lengths of them– it was heavy-duty stuff, I think a dehumidifier had come in the package, solid plastic an inch wide– and used those as horizontal boning at the bottom, middle, and top, securing in place with a line of stitching above and below wherever there weren’t pockets. The top, I closed up by just folding the front over the back; it was the selvedge edge, so I left that raw, and zig-zagged it shut with the piece of “boning” inside, then pushed the boning up against the seam with my fingers and sewed the other side of the channel with a straight stitch.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to measure the straps. so i went out and sat in my car with a lighter, scissors, needle, thread, a pair of old shoelaces, a length of 2" wide elastic torn out of an unsuccessful earlier make (i have a roll of the stuff… at the farm, not here), and a length of heavy-duty twill tape I don’t know where I got.

I held the organizer up to the seat, safety-pinned the twill tape to the top, threaded it around the headrest, safety-pinned it to the other side. Decided it needed more support, as the upper corners wanted to flop. Used a drawstring threader to pull the shoelace through the flap at the bottom of the seat, where all the cabling for the heated seat is stored– there’s upholstery covering it, open at both sides, so I threaded the shoelace through that, just to pull the whole shebang in taut against the seat instead of letting it swing freely into the knees of whoever might sit back there. Sewed it down on one side, safety-pinned it to the other. Cut the shoelace off, then sewed the remnant to one upper extreme corner, wrapped it past the headset, safety-pinned it to the other side. Finally took the 2" wide elastic, sewed it firmly down on one side, passed it around the seat, measured it, then passed it behind the seat to sew it down un-stretched to the other side, then put it on properly. So the non-stretch fasteners are only sewed on one side, and can be unpinned on the other if I need to take the thing off.

Then I loaded it up with stuff.

[Image description: the rear of a car driver’s seat, taken from the rear seat behind it, with an organizer hanging from the headrest, brocade pockets stuffed full of objects. There’s a green object hanging from a keychain at the top left– it is a folding knife patterned to look like a leaf.]

Now the things that ought to just always be in my car can (mostly) just always be there. I should check that the tire inflator works, and I should periodically charge up the jump pack, but I already checked if the foldable shovel works (it does), and I carefully bundled up the ratchet straps into bags I made out of the cuffs of old crew socks, which sewn shut where I cut the threadbare foot off make perfectly-sized padded stretchy storage bags for light duty ratchet straps.

Top left to bottom right, it’s got:

Ratty old work gloves, a clipped-on keychain with a decorative rosary and a functional folding knife, a sock-cuff bag containing a multitool screw driver, a little baggie of tampons, and some Kleenex The tire inflator kit, the jump pack kit three ratchet straps, a folding shovel multitool thingy, and a bag of toiletries with spare socks, chapstick, hand cream, a travel toothbrush and dry toothpaste kit, and a couple other things– most of it is shit that was handed out the one time I flew business class on Icelandair.

Then, to the right, around my center console, I took a vintage like circa 2004 Old Navy nylon drawstring backpack, threaded those heavy-duty twist tie things they use to close disposable coffee bags through the drawstring bit of the mouth to keep it open, sewed some of the twill tape to the top, and added a magnetic catch to hold a plastic bag in place. The magnetic catch didn’t do enough so I have some half-broken old hair clips holding the plastic bag in better position: that’s now my car’s trash bag, and the backpack’s two tiny zippered pockets hold spare plastic bags.

Now the last thing I want to do is to get some hooks to hang from the passenger headrest, and get loops attached to my snow brush and squeegee, and hang those from the hooks, because otherwise they are always scattered around the floor of my car in the way of whatever I want to do.

Anyway. Ready for the inaugural road trip Sunday, when I drive back to the farm. (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/kPrItyO

It’s been a long couple of weeks, I worked six ten-hour days the week before last, and then this week I started off working hard and mildly fucked up my back on tuesday, and all day wednesday i suffered thru it, and then i was sitting at the kitchen table talking to my non-farm sister and suddenly my back went cr-CHK and was all better, which was disconcerting. It has remained a little sore and clicky but it’s better, mostly.

i’ve been sitting down whenever i can because i just. feel. like i’m real tired. is all.

but yesterday and today i kept finishing my work and not having more to do right away, which has been awesome, and in the middle of today i took three hours to take my mother to a follow-up appointment because yesterday she had this kind of newfangled cataract surgery on her second eye, so now both her eyes are bionic and have plastic lenses in them now forever and I sort of didn’t realize that’s what was happening? but it means that she doesn’t wear glasses anymore. she’s worn glasses since 1959. This is weird. I don’t recognize her.

“I need to draw eyebrows on now,” she said. “There’s just nothing to my face.” We both have very pale eyebrows on pale skin and pale blue eyes and pale eyelashes and our faces just melt into white blobs without the anchor of glasses frames.

I told her my trick. Just For Men moustache dye, the color of your hair or a shade darker. Use it for a minute or two. Make sure you put vaseline under your brows in case it drips. it won’t though. rinse it out. voila. you have eyebrows now. “I"m going to try that,” she said.

“There’s a ton in the little tubes and you can mix it up a tiny dose at a time,” I said. “Then it takes you like. Five minutes if you count washing your face. And then you don’t have to draw your eyebrows on for a month.”

Eyebrow pencil is such a racket.

Anyway. Now it is drizzling rain slightly, and I just put on Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See” (1993) real quiet so I can still hear the birds and the rain and it’s really peaceful.

and OH did i say i went to an estate sale last weekend with my middle-little non-farm sister and bought myself a cushy comfy chair and an ottoman so i can sit in a comfy chair in my cabin instead of a folding lawn chair. i’m really cozy now. i’m contemplating making the chair a linen slipcover for summer though.

i probably won’t. but it’s cozy and the birds are enjoying the rain and the field is enjoying the rain and mazzy star is fading into you, quietly.

Happy Midsummer. The strawberries are finished but the kohlrabi’s first planting is going gangbusters, there are sweet crunchy things to eat and i’ve worked out most of my schedule for the summer and next weekend i am going to maine with my beloved and it is all going to work out just fine and i will get enough rest, someday. but tomorrow i have to work the farmer’s market in the rain again, though not all day, so probably it will be fine.

and yes i am getting some writing done and it is going to be good, i promise. (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/3wIDlsh

well so i’m in new york city and it poured for the whole time but the sun has risen this morning so that’s nice.

i’ve had a covid exposure so i gotta isolate when i go home but i’m not terribly worried about it, we’ll see if that bites me in the ass. i gotta take the train so i gotta mask but like. it’s okay. i can isolate pretty easily so it’ll be annoying at mealtimes for a couple of days but it’s not like. the end of the world.

yesterday we went on the ferry to ellis island etc, which i had done before for school trips but didn’t remember and they’ve absolutely redone the whole place since then anyway. But when we got back it was absolutely bucketing rain, and i’ve discovered that the shoes i brought are like anti-waterproof somehow. they’re Børn boots and they absolutely fucking suck, the insoles have disintegrated and the sole supports are starting to go after wearing them a handful of times, and they just sponge up water from the ground through the soles as best i can tell, absolutely the worst shoes i could have brought. I’ve spent a bunch of time on this trip wearing flip-flops in fifty-degree weather because those were the only other shoes I brought and it’s better to just get your bare feet wet.

Anyway we went for lunch at the Fraunces Tavern which is a general-washington-ate-here kind of deal, and then when the rain had not let up we sprinted around the corner to the Dead Rabbit which is a bar on that same block, and I wikipedia-spiraled about the dead rabbit riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Rabbits_riotand the bowery bhoys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery_Boys_(gang).

Our first night in town we discovered that there’s an Uzbek restaurant https://www.farida.us/ in the financial district and it’s set to open more locations around town so like. Double thumbs up. We had a shashlik sampler platter and an order of the manty dumplings and it was so good but it meant we were too full to try the lagman or beshbarmek and so i want to go back but idk when i’ll be in the area again. but if you are, you need to try that out.

Anyway it’s been a fun visit but I gotta get the train back now and isolate for a while. (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/kgyHIFA

i don’t know if i’ve discussed this on here or what but i’m leaving the camera store job to do just farm things. I’m not getting paid a lot at the farm but I am getting paid so that’s something. Kind of a stipend. The farm work is… ostensibly not full-time so I will still have time to come back to Buffalo and like, get Chita snuggles and you know, be in my house, see my guy, that kind of thing. We’ll see how the schedule works out; the main thing for me is to free me from the tyranny of ten hours a week of being on the Thruway, which tends to take up all of my weekend time and a lot of my mental energy.

So tomorrow’s my last day. My supervisor has called out for two days so far this week, which has completely shattered my already-nebulous ability to wrap shit up, so this place is entirely a disaster and I have no idea what kind of condition I’m going to wind up leaving it in, but also, it’s not my problem and I’ve done my best. I do think they thought my leaving date wasn’t final and that like a sensible person I had left myself time off between jobs, but I did not not do that, I will be leaving Monday morning before dawn.

I’m trying to write checklists for whoever’s taking over my job. They’ve made no moves to replace me. My supervisor has been polite to me but has said to the store manager dramatically that he’ll never be able to take a day off again. (Before I knew I was leaving, he’d told me a date he was taking a vacation and I’d said that was a date I couldn’t cover and he’d said too bad he did enough to be flexible for me, and like…… no there are other options, sir, but as it happens I managed to force the issue out of my court entirely.) He’s out this week, so I have trained people he has previously refused to train. The only reason I’m trained is that I taught myself, but it’s also not that hard. So. Now I’ve trained several people and they will be filling in when Supervisor takes days off, because he will take days off, such as over Thanksgiving when he had a fucking heart attack and it was a crisis because I could not be urgently recalled and he could not leave the hospital. Christ so now three other people know how to do some of the basic shit around here. This does not require an advanced degree. I wrote a checklist. Calm down.

Anyway am I chill? No. Am I excited about my future? No. Let me get there and get a minute to do some decompressing maybe and I will be but at the moment everything is hectic and I just want to go lie down.

Anyway I haven’t gotten much writing done either. Or sewing. But. Maybe there’ll be time in the future, when I’m not spending most of the time when I’m at my own house sitting in this windowless room doing busywork.

I did the math, I’ll be two months short of having worked here fourteen years. (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/smCnfl4

the new post editor loves to have me type in the title and then take me immediately to the tags field. am i not meant to put any content in this. why are you like this. i won’t know what to tag it until i’ve written it, will i? idk. idk.

it’s only to be expected that i should have spent the weekend thoroughly useless, given all the givens, but i had many things i’d wanted to get done– needed, in some cases– and i’m incredibly annoyed by how much time i spent wandering around the house unable to focus. i didn’t even get any sewing done, though i did cut out and assemble the paper pattern from PDF of the new puffer vest from Cashmerette, which I am going to make out of I think reclaimed dress-wool scraps that Dude’s mom was given as a donation for her quilt guild and of course they quilt in cotton, so she gave it to me. They’re not large enough scraps for me to make anything out of like a dress or trousers but they’re perfect for this vest, which has smallish pattern pieces. And then I can quilt it.

I’m also back messing around with the 1.25" English paper piecing hexagons, which was a thing I got super into a couple of years back and recently found a bag full of. I stopped because Dude’s aunt pointed out I was doing it wrong, but then I was like well, it’s not wrong if it works, so. I don’t know what to make with th. em. A quilted something. Also a puffer vest? I don’t need two, I already own a number that fit acceptably. So I’m just going to keep collecting hexies I guess. A bag maybe. Who knows.

The poll– I want a silk slipdress for layering while it’s cold, whereas the wool trousers are actually– well I’ll have to make a muslin in ponte knit first, which I have some of in whatever that’s usually made of. They’re yoga pants. I still have to assemble the paper pattern. I should do a proper bracket of what’s on my sewing docket, LOL.

I had, when I was frantically sewing lightweight linen dresses for Cartagena, been daydreaming that in those precious two weekends at home between that travel and the next travel– I’m going to a ski place with MM and DF and the kids– I’d knock out some kind of rad winter-wear, but then I had to travel last weekend too and now this past weekend I was a lump. so. That’s not happening. BUT. If I get the puffer vest cut out, I can bring the pieces with me and hand-quilt it, which would be kind of fun and cool and cute I think?? Maybe?? So that’s my new goal.

Failing that, i can just bring a huge pile of paper hexagons and a bunch of fabric and make more hexies for my eventual whatever-the-fuck-that-will-be project.

I had a new idea though, which was that a quilt-as-you-go series of embroidered panels that were the Pokedex would be really fun to make as a wall hanging for some kid. I don’t think I could stay patient enough to do it in real life but I am enamored of the idea. This would be a case for machine embroidery if only I were good at that. And like, you could have some that were just the numbers like when you haven’t seen them, and some that were just silhouettes, and some that were critters. It would be cute!

Maybe something small-scale, like a shoulder bag or something. We’ll see what I manage, if I ever do– it can go on the list with all the other things.

If I had a ton of free time I would also be making myself t-shirts that really fit, since I have that pattern, and I want to then print them as if I’d bought them various places, and I have a mile-long list of slogans I’d love to put on shirts. But I don’t have that kind of time.

Anyway. There’s another round of smubbles going and I’d love to say I’m cranking out fantastic works for it but I am still so stuck on writing, and making only the slowest progress if any at all. Bleh. (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/mPFMNqf

well i’m back from vacation and farm work and time away. the snow has melted, so i don’t know how much there was in my neighborhood. at least one person i encountered at the farm could not believe that i would not have abandoned my obligations and driven 300 miles home into the snowstorm to make sure my house was all right. it’s snow? no? stay away from the state of emergency? if it collapses my roof it collapses my roof but i like just had a new roof put on it’s not exactly likely.

Rescued the cat from her imprisonment at the expensive cat spa yesterday and she has clung to me pretty much ever since, but then i had to leave her to come to work.

For some reason I don’t think Dude thought to take today off, though he could have. I cannot. It is Cyber Monday. And what’s more! I have not mentioned this but the only other person in my department at work, the Online Sales Department as it happens, suffered from a medical emergency while I was gone– Wednesday in fact– and so there’s a large pile of work left for me here but what’s worse, it’s in total disarray. And this is the busiest day of the year. And possibly the very worst part is that my coworker has been attempting to work from home during his extremely serious medical emergency, and like I get and appreciate that but I wish he would not do that, as it is stressing him out and I also am now unsure of what I am meant to be doing.

I came in an hour late to overlap a little more with his normal schedule but for the record I generally start at 6:30 am and he usually rolls in at noon, which means on days when i cover for him i routinely get calls from the warehouse guy when i’m at home at 4pm. so.

This week is going to be hell!! jazzhands Love it! (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/8Q2PkDo

hokay

so the turkeys the farm raises are all 1) processed, on saturday, which went smoothly, and was fairly exhausting but nothing we haven’t done before, lovely 2) packaged, which went…. well it was going sort of smoothly, none of us could remember how it quite works, rocky start because while Farmsister is the one who knows how it works best, she was off getting the vegetables set up because VegMan could not miss a week of church services to be present for the busiest day of the year but he said he’d be back by 11:30 which would be great because vegetable-only pickup was going from 11-1 and then 1-3 was turkeys for people with vegetable shares and we had to have the turkey package-and-sort done by then so if he’d be able to cover most of that it’d really super help. But he didn’t get back from church until after 1, as it happened, so that sucked and we had to just be short-staffed. Anyway, we were making reasonable progress and then I went to get more bags and the box had one more sleeve of 100 in it. And I didn’t know how many we’d already done but I knew our total number was around 180. So that precipitated a crisis of where to get more turkey bags, underscored by both Farmsister and BIL being absolutely positive they’d counted and determined there were enough bags for this year so how could they have been caught short like this??? 3) sold. We did get everything packaged– some turkeys just had to go into kitchen garbage bags, clean ones, and not one customer batted an eye so that was good. The problem was that BIL ran in to do the sorting– people are matched with their size preference of turkey in order of precedence of when they placed their order, so it’s really critical to know the weight of each final packaged turkey– and when he did the sorting he worked into the wrong spreadsheet and so it was only the people who’d used the online order form and so a solid dozen customers who’d mailed in an order form or called on the phone or emailed separately were not included, and that customer base was most of the oldest and most loyal customers. So that was a fucking crisis. Also he printed out the spreadsheet and gave it to me to use as the customers came up to the table, and the sheet he gave me was not alphabetized, was not in order of when they placed the order, was not in order of size of the turkey even– it was arranged by NO criteria at all, it was completely randomized, I didn’t even know you could do that with a spreadsheet. And it was four pages long. And the first customer, who showed up fifteen minutes early to stand there, elderly and tottering, shivering in the fucking 20 degree gale-force winds, was not on the list; she’s on the edge of dementia and literally never actually places her order but is always convinced she did. (She’s vaguely aware that she’s not quite getting things right, but that doesn’t change that she’s been buying things here for years and expects to buy things here and yet consistently forgets to actually make her arrangements.) (We had to have her come inside and sit down while we worked out what turkey we could give her.)

The other thing is that the spreadsheet is supposed to tell me whether the customers paid the deposit on the turkey or not. They’re supposed to pay a $20 deposit. Sometimes they forget, sometimes they’re sure they did but they did not, and sometimes, fucking obnoxiously, they pay a deposit of a different amount of money, which we then have to know about somehow. One of them I was like “why the heck did you pay a $39 deposit” and she was like “oh that was the money i had, it was easier for me” and i’m like “cool do you see how confusing that is though” and she went off on her way and I know next year she’s gonna put down a like, $43 deposit or something, why the fuck. Anyway, usually that’s on the spreadsheet– and in fact it was, on the sheet he was supposed to use, but anyway. It was gale-force winds and 20 degrees and the turkey juices that leaked onto the table froze instantly into sheets of ice and the THREE DIFFERENT COPIES of the spreadsheet we had printed out (one that included almost all the customers, one that actually included all the turkeys but wasn’t in any order of any kind, and one that said whether the customers had paid a deposit and if so how much) all kept blowing away and had to repeatedly be chased down.

But we sold all the turkeys we were supposed to sell, by and large, and now that huge stressor is gone and done and packaged up and the checks are going to the bank today and that’s like. $20k.

Today I get to clean and re-set the slaughterhouse so tomorrow we can process 115 more turkeys, 90 for one farmer and 25 for another.

I think I have Wednesday off though.

As an aside, it’s 18F out, and I did finish insulating my cabin but we didn’t get the heater installed so instead I have a little propane heater that clips onto a 20-lb propane tank and has no thermostat, so i’m struggling to get it up above 45 so I can get dressed, as I type this. I think I gotta just give up and get dressed now, lol, and also, brr. (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/JjXcoV3

i am alive, i promise, sorry it’s been all queue of late

i made 28 quarts of chicken stock today– well, packaged it– actually i made it too, we’d cut the chickens up yesterday and stuck the stock pot in the walk-in cooler overnight but today i put the water in and plonked it on the stove, an enormous stock pot, and simmered it all day while we cut up the rest of the chickens. (yesterday’s chickens we cut up were for sausage, today’s were for sale as parts.) tomorrow we’re ostensibly making the sausage, we’ll see how that goes.

since CSA is over, Farmsister was available to help us today– but just like last time she helped us, mostly what we needed her to do was to take everything out of the upright freezer in the commercial kitchen and find other places for it to go, which was a heroic undertaking and took her like two hours. it was a lot. she had to restock the farm store just to make room. so it was good, things are beautifully restocked, everything is organized and beautiful, but like, good lord, at what cost.

anyway i just stuck 28 quarts of chicken stock in there so tomorrow we’re gonna have to ask her to do it again, but i believe in her.

i have done like. zero writing this week. lots of 10+ hour days of work, so. oh the insulation in my cabin has been great though. i know it’s november now so i should expect it to be chilly but it’s been like– warmish during the days mostly, and then in the evening it’s fine and i have actually woken up too hot and sweating twice in the last few days because i was still wearing pajamas and dressing my bed like i expected it to be in the mid-40s in the room where i’m sleeping and… well it’s not.

there’s a mouse making so much fucking noise though, and i haven’t been sleeping well because the fucker like, pitter-patters around the room while i’m trying to sleep. he’s louder because he has to rustle in through the insulation. the roof edging isn’t on properly yet so i cant’ exclude him. so a side project is that i’ve had cayenne steeping in water most of the week, and today i set it up with coffee filters and rubber bands over the mouths of jars, and filtered it into a spray bottle, and i’ve just sprayed cayenne water all along the bottom of the insulation where he’s been coming in. (I know because i can hear him and also see him.) so we’ll see how much noise he makes tonight. i don’t know that cayenne will actually deter him.

anyway i’m gonna have my queue post this tomorrow morning so idk, i’ll hopefully know by then. but i’m so tired, using the queue gives me a minute to proofread and then if i wake up in the middle of the night like “i used that word wrong” i have time to look again when i wake up.

i have so many writing projects underway and no time to work on them. i spent a bunch of time today while i was packaging cold dead raw meat thinking about various projects. it was a nice escape.

here is a surprise snippet from a background bit i’m working on, going slightly back in time to before Ciri re-established the Upper Aedirn Free State, featuring a new OC i’m going to make room for– a very elderly elf named Faerveren who has aged out of the concept of gender, to give us some unexpected backstory.

Faerveren leaned in the doorway, giving the dh’oine who had so rudely knocked a once-over. He was tall, handsome, self-assured, though he looked a little tired and travel-worn, and the haughty arrogance of his expression was covering a bit of uncertainty.

“I’m looking for Caerulia Fitzhugh,” he said.

“I bet you are,” Faerveren said. “Since she lives here.” Faerveren xerself hadn’t lived here terribly long. The Fitzhughs had kindly offered xer a place to stay after xe had come to them injured and ill after the battle for the city. Many elves had needed treatment, but only Faerveren had merited the permanent invitation. Perhaps because the Fitzhughs could appreciate xer age. It was restful, being among others with a similar perspective on the passage of time.

Faerveren watched the dh’oine’s expression go through disbelief into indignance, and relented slightly. “Are you here on behalf of someone who is sick?”

“No,” he said, frowning, “I need her help.” His frown deepened. “I believe it is not a matter that your kind could understand, elder brother.” He used an Aen Seidhe term, showing that he wasn’t entirely ignorant.

“Ah,” Faerveren said, “I’m no one’s brother. But I see, you are not the dh’oine you look.” Neither were the Fitzhughs. This was vampire business, then. Another of the reasons Faerveren had been invited to stay was likely the complete lack of reaction xe’d had to the revelation that both Fitzhughs were bruxae. But Faerveren’s people had lived in peace with higher vampires, never their prey and never their antagonists, so it hadn’t been alarming to figure it out. It wasn’t as though they were particularly secretive about it. They tended not to shift or fly where anyone could see them, but Caerulia had a habit of gliding around without touching the ground because of an old foot injury, and nobody seemed to notice. The dwarves of Vergen were singularly unconcerned about vampires as well.

“No,” the man said. “Can you tell her, Dettlaff is here? She knows me, though it has been years since we spoke.”

Faerveren sighed. “Perhaps you should come in and sit down,” xe said. (Your picture was not posted)

via https://ift.tt/KcFkZbd

back in buffalo.

i am like mentally super done with this job, which is a problem, as i am not physically or financially or logistically or really in any way done with this job, so i am doing my best, but it is hard to be motivated when like. my mouse was unplugged. for no reason. why would someone do this. why do this to me. don’t do this to me. :( (Your picture was not posted)