Today I am all grouchy and ill-tempered because a back injury I got almost 7 weeks ago still hasn't completely healed. And, while it is true that I should not have skated with it, and I really should not have walked all over Boston and Rockport for four days, it was the last open ice of the semester and my parents were in town, so I did. It's not painful in the way of new back injuries, exactly, and I'm not popping drugs by the handful, but I get tired and achy very quickly, and I'm taking more ibuprofen than I'd like to be. I haven't been able to run since early April; just walking to work is enough to leave me hurting for the rest of the day, and that is not okay.

Also, after the latest reinjury on Friday, my legs keep going numb or tingly at odd moments. I think I have to suck it up and go talk to my doctor. Ugh.

* * *

ANYWAY.

Y'all, y'all, I realize this is hard to believe, but this recipe from Cooking Light involves actual cooking: Falafel-stuffed Eggplant with Tahini Sauce and Tomato Relish. It's like 2003 came to visit and brought dinner!

I am not *entirely* sure that it's worth the number of dishes it creates, but it's pretty good, and let's be honest; some of that's my fault, because I kept absentmindedly stirring other things with the tahini spoon. (People who are reading the recipe and thinking, "but kyria, there are only 2 spoonfuls of tahini, divided, how difficult could this be?" well, you're absolutely right and I just don't really want to talk about it.) This is the sort of recipe you really shouldn't make in this part of the country until mid-August at the earliest, but eggplants were really on sale, and then I was ambushed by those golf-ball-sized little tomatoes-on-the-vine that almost look like real ones while I was in Whole Foods buying skyr with which to culture my own.

So. It was destined. And just imagine what it'll be like in late August, when the ingredients are actually in season.

Making skyr, by the way, involves things like leaving pots of milk wrapped in towels on the counter for 10 to 16 hours - the imprecision doesn't exactly fill me with confidence - so I'm hoping not to become a cautionary poisoning example for home economists (bets on the likelihood of this will be reluctantly accepted).

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

I just finished nearly 400 pages of badly-sourced medieval mercantile history, in which - judging by the notes and bibliography - the author synthesized information gained from a series of seances, augmented by sources published in questionable translation. I would be pissy enough about that (in fact, I have been for the last two days), but also! 400 pages, and not a single woman with a name, although I do know to avoid the whores of Corfu and Heraklion, for fear of syphilis.

Perhaps in our social history we could *try* to include society sometimes?

ANYWAY.

What I really want right now is hockey femslash, because:

1. I've already (re)read ALL OF IT (that exists in places I know about)

2. So then I read through all the chat-scraps of it that I've ever written (there are not nearly enough of them, I should write more)

But, 3. None of that is enough.

Women. On skates. Who love each other. Dear universe, I would just like to point out that this is a great idea.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

when Farrell met the Doctor. The crossover meme: The Folk of the Air and Doctor Who.

---

Farrell has dated a werewolf, picked up a unicorn, vanquished a ghost in battle by poetry, and been held in existence by the grace of a goddess' spare attention.

He's not impressed.

"The Oncoming Storm, the Destroyer of Worlds, the Lonely God, the Bringer of Darkness - call yourself whatever you want; I knew a guy once, called himself Malagorgo the Magnificent - nice kid, played the clarinet - but I have met loneliness and hate and hunger given shape, and you aren't even close."

Nothing in his experience of time travel has been anything but terrible - fear and death and poor confused bastards looking for the express elevator back home. The past should stay there; time is the knowledge of loss, of misunderstanding, of forgetting to remember the noises behind the notes. "I don't approve of flying visits," he'd told Julie.

Before he goes inside, he walks around the TARDIS, and he counts all the windows.

Just in case.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

Look, if the internet is the place designated for the sharing of embarrassing and confessional truths, then I'd just like to say that I really, really want to watch The Cutting Edge right now.

Don't judge me, I will kick you.

ANYWAY.

This, from ellen_fremedon via isis and omens - curse this need to give credit to everyone! it's a lot of typing - looks like a delightful meme:

The Hypothetical Crossover

Choose two fandoms I'm more-or-less familiar with and I'll tell you how I would, hypothetically, do a crossover or fusion between the two.

I'm familiar with many more things than I've written, so tags and books I own should be a decent starting point. (Or, you know, throw something at me; I have a fair amount of knowledge through fannish osmosis, as long as it has nothing to do with bandom, and I happen to think the "explain someone else's fandom" meme is fun, too.)

Because you know you want to know what happened when Joe Farrell met the Doctor.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

I know I'm not the first person to observe that there are Anne-girls and Laura-girls. I'm friends with a number of Anne-girls; they're lovely people, some of the loveliest people I know - kindred spirits, as long as we're talking about Anne - but I'm a Laura-girl.

I've read the Anne books, but I didn't read most of them until I was in college, and I still don't love them. As a child, I stalled so badly in Anne of Green Gables that my copy actually broke in two, at the point where I got bored over and over and over and left it open for days at a time (I suspect it was during or shortly after the Lady of Shalott episode: the embarrassment of being Anne is too heartfelt for me to enjoy it very much).

The Little House books? They don't describe a safe life: the Ingalls family lives through in any number of precarious situations, more often than not of their own making, but somehow it still feels safe. As a child, I read (almost) all of them, over and over; I still do. Every time I visit my parents, they're what I pick up first, despite recognizing their casual racism, their proto-Libertarian values, their simplification of American western expansion.

The three I don't reread often are, oddly enough, Little House on the Prairie itself - too uncomfortably colonial - On the Banks of Plum Creek - too much Nellie - and The First Four Years, which hardly counts and is full of bad monetary strategy, besides. The three I always read are Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, and On the Shores of Silver Lake: in other words, the two mostly about food, and the one with the surveyors' pantry.

So for the heck of it, I picked up Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of "Little House on the Prairie". I enjoyed it, but then, I recognized her; I, too, missed the television show entirely. I, too, tried to play harvest in my backyard - a difficult task, when the backyard is a triangle between the house and the railroad tracks, and the harvest is one row of lettuce, a strawberry patch, and a lot of grass being killed by the roots and shade of the not-so-dwarf Red Delicious that took most of the space. (Also, there was a woodpile. Full of spiders.) I, too, had a total thing for the surveyors' house.

As you'd expect from a title like that, it's an aggressively conversational account of another Laura-girl, but when she's on, she's on. If Anne books are about dreams, then Laura books are about "things, in all their thinginess."

But in between all the soul-searching and the road-tripping across the upper Midwest - and, yes, the very funny homesteading weekend encounter with a sect preparing for the Rapture - McClure has a lot for those of us whose Wilder biography comes mostly from third grade book reports and some New Yorker articles (I think? Yes?). I knew that the books were heavily fictionalized, and like everyone else, I've read the before-and-after results of Rose's editing, but I've got to tell you, learning that Laura was a toddler when her family was squatting on Osage land, and that they went back to the Big Woods - that, in other words, that covered wagon trip came *before* the happy families in Wisconsin book, and there's no way she remembered it - kind of blew my mind.

If you think too much about it, the arc of the books is actually rather gloomy - the relinquishment of dreams, basically. And McClure's far from the first person to read Farmer Boy and realize that it's a fantasy of abundance.

The thinginess remains, though whether it's a description of spinning a hoop skirt down or an explanation of how to make cheese or that amazing scene where Ma slaps a bear. But there's a reason why I prefer Laura forever four and watching her uncle and grandmother dance, or Almanzo eleven and eating, always.

I like fantasies, too.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

You know what breaks all of my late evening No Noise, No Moving Pictures rules? Playoff hockey, that's what. Ye gods.

I may not sleep well until mid-June, and I'm not even following most of the series.

That said, hurrah!

I am completely delighted that Danny B's ridiculous early modern facial hair gets at least two more weeks to make him look like a tiny, ill-tempered Musketeer.

ETA: after serious contemplation of the pictorial evidence saved on my hard drive - DON'T JUDGE ME, I ALREADY HAVE, I KNOW - I'm forced to conclude that he can also look like a happy Musketeer. It's good to have an emotional range.

*

Proposed: when, in the course of evaluating an early summer wardrobe, you say, "this dress will be great, as soon as I reshape and lower the neckline, let out the bust, take in the waist, drop the hem, and maybe move that enormous hot pink lily so that its stamen isn't directly over my nipple," it's time to toss it in and take the darn thing to Goodwill.

Especially if you didn't like the print in the first place.

And only bought it to use while crashing Democratic National Convention events.

(The dress that used to be one half of my very first post-college interview outfit can stay, to become a cute summer party dress, just as soon as it's shortened by 15 inches, taken in, and maybe given a sash. Then all I'd need to do is find a party that deserved it.)

*

What should I write about?

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

Since I've opened and closed this update window 5 times now, it may be worth mentioning:

1. My parents are in town for most of this week.

2. I'm a little depressed right now. I have been much worse, but I'm also very aware of how heavily I'm leaning on lists to keep myself moving.

So if I am here always, or here never, or here and not responding, that's probably why. Sorry.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

I instituted a No Music or Moving Pictures After 9:00; Computer Off By 9:30 rule a few weeks ago, in the hopes that it would prevent me from taking 4 hours to fall asleep every night. It does! I fall asleep in 1-2 hours instead, which is glorious and amazing and completely new.

(Somewhere in the suburbs my doctor is wondering why she's fighting the urge to weep, and it's because her definition of "taking a long time to fall asleep" is 15 minutes, after which point you're supposed to declare the entire exercise useless and get up until you're tired. If I did that, I'd have last slept at...the age of 3 or so.)

ANYWAY.

It's fantastic for my sleep debt, but terrible for keeping in touch with people. I miss you, internet; I don't hate you actually, you're just out after my curfew. Here I am, waving at you from my window: hello! hello!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

[AUGH JUST LOST ENTIRE POST. SUCH A MONDAY. AUGH. RECONSTRUCTING.]

Today has been the very Monday-est of Mondays, starting this morning when my alarm clock did a thing it does every so often, when it decides not to go off until 25 minutes after I set it, and continuing right on through to when I got home and decided that really, scrambled eggs are Almost Exactly The Same as quiche.

I'm not enjoying skating class as much this term: I feel like I'm learning less. I'm not sure whether it's true or not: I might be at a plateau, or I might be getting better without noticing. After all, back in October I basically couldn't move on ice, so any improvement was both immediately obvious and rather dramatic. I feel sorry for the instructor this term, too; she's really trying to teach three classes at once: an advanced-intermediate hockey class (not me!), an intermediate-intermediate figure skating class (still not me!), and a bunch of beginning intermediates (oh hi!). What that means in practice, though, is that she spends all of her time rushing from one group to the other, while those of us who don't quite know what we're doing keep trying until we're tired and frustrated and still not sure what we're doing wrong.

(Of course, everyone else was having the Monday-est of Mondays today, too; I don't think a single person made it through without at least two foot cramps.)

After a friend and I staggered into the coffee shop for caffeine, I'm not really sure what happened to the rest of the morning.

I spent the afternoon with post-Napoleonic propaganda, full of shrill exhortations to slaughter and mayhem, and ending up in doggerel verse about supporting reason and the arts; strangely, it was no more pleasing than it had been in its first incarnation as Napoleonic propaganda, though it was 200 pages shorter.

A couple of weeks ago I had to admit that it wasn't too cold and dark to go running after work, so I'm back to that. I've been known to say that I don't enjoy running, but I do enjoy being able to run. Unfortunately I don't know how you get one without the other. There's a certain sense of pig-headed accomplishment involved, I suppose, and anyway, I cut 30 seconds off my mile in the last week, so that's something.

(Note: this should not be taken as evidence that I run a fast mile. I run a slow mile, a deliberate mile, a mile that would still have been a failing grade in high school P.E., a mile that gives me time to admire the flowers while saving enough energy to escape from unleashed dogs (I was chased by 3 on Saturday alone).)

In conclusion: Things Could Be Worse, because at least I have not been denied a catapult.

ETA: OH YES, OF COURSE I WOULD LIKE TO DISCOVER A HIDEOUSLY FERMENTED SWEET POTATO IN THE PANTRY AND THEN POUR MILK INTO THE BURNER. THANK YOU FOR THE OPPORTUNITY. AUGH.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().

Why is hockey fandom SO INCREDIBLY BAD at understanding that other people check their referral logs just as obsessively as we watch AO3 stats?

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. View comments ().