smellsgood | Member Posts

Tunnel of Love

Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Since this is what I did most of last Sunday, I'll talk about how much I love baking. I love to bake. It's something I've done since I was a child. My mom was the one who taught me, with box mixes and canned frosting to begin with, before I moved on to making cakes from scratch. I remember taking a whole tray of cupcakes for a surprise party our class planned for our teacher in elementary school (okay, it was the girls. I vaguely remember us thinking the boys couldn't be trusted to keep their mouth shut so we left them out. I think we were, like, 10 or 11?). I also remember making birthday cakes and father's day cakes for my dad. I remember taking things for all sorts of class parties throughout the years really. When we had a project in elementary school on teaching the class "how to do something", I chose baking a cake and I remember switching from mix to wanting to do a scratch cake. My dad carefully measured out the ingredients in the morning before school so it would save me time. So much of my baking memories are tied to my family.

Baking is something that calms my mind. There's a precision to it that I appreciate. I'm someone who likes really exact instructions, which is why even though I have learned to like cooking, I do like baking more. You stick to a recipe and outside of mild variables, like the oven timing, it should come out right. And I like the results too! I have a sweet tooth, but I do like when people around me enjoy my baking. I am not great with taking compliments, but I like hearing them (who doesn't, right? lol)! I do like pretty things so it's been fun learning and practicing decorating as well.

People have made jokes about me starting a bakery in the past, and while there are many reasons I wouldn't, I do just like some thing just being an enjoyable hobby. And I will keep doing it. It's a nice way to spend an evening or a weekend. Doing what I love and sometimes, for the people I love. Because they're the reason I learned to do this in the first place. :)

( cupcakes )

scripsi

Journaling prompt: What are your favorite summer-associated foods?

Creative prompt: Draw art of or make graphics of summer foods, or post your favorite summer recipes. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

My favourite sumer food probably sounds very boring, but if one takes care to use the best quality possible, it’s delicious. Boiled white fish with new potatoes, clarified butter and chopped hard-boiled eggs. When I was a child the fish we used was northern pike, which my father or grandfather had just caught, but nowadays we usually buy fresh cod. The new potatoes come from the garden. The clarified butter must be real butter, and organic eggs taste the best. One can mix the butter and the eggs, but we prefer to keep them separate, so each can take after taste.

Also, for me this tastes best eaten outside the summer house, on dishes called “Grön berså” (green bower) by the Swedish designer Stig Lindberg in 1960.

stonepicnicking_okapi

Today (9 Jul) is the day that is celebrated as the day of the BTS fan (ARMY). 13 Jun is their debut day but this is the fandom's founding day. So happy day to

bethctg and

celli and all the other ARMYs of the world

bts

svgurl

flashexchanges is running size difference flash, a multifandom flash exchange featuring size differences. Nominations/sign-ups close on July 9th, 11PM UTC.

sedoretuex, an exchange dedicated to celebrating the sedoretu (a specific organization of a poly marriage created by Ursula K. Le Guin), is accepting nominations until July 12th, 11:59PM EDT. More info, including the schedule/FAQ can be found HERE.

raremaleslashex, a multifandom fic/art/podfic exchange focused on rare m/m ships, has opened sign-ups until July 13th, 8PM UTC.

relationshipping, a gift exchange for incest ships (ships that are not canonically related are welcome for incest aus too), is open for nominations until July 13th, 9:59PM EDT.

enemiestoloversex, a multifandom gift exchange focused on the "enemies to lovers" trope (though all ships are welcome, not just ones fitting that dynamic in canon), is accepting nominations until July 14th, 10PM UTC.

austenexchange, a fic exchange focused on Jane Austen works, is open for nominations until July 15th, 10PM UTC.

dreams_mayhem is running Hodge Podge, a multifandom challenge where each week players will fill prompts to score points by writing fics, creating poetry, or making graphics. Sign-ups are open until July 19th.

fallingforyoufallexchange, a fall multifandom freeform exchange centered around ships getting together, is open for nominations until July 21st, 8PM EDT.

scaldinghotcibingo is running Consent Issues Mini Bingo. Claims can be made until January 4th, 2026.

stonepicnicking_okapi

1. It is day #2 of my job and I had to call #911 for my client. Talk about being thrown in the deep end! He's okay and I'm okay but it was still a wild second day.

2. Also Minisculus woke up with neck pain enough to make him sob and scream, and I had to leave him. I am being thrown the working mom angst right from the start.

3. But Minisculus placed 7th in his race at the regional club championship so he got to stand on the podium and a bronze medal the size of a dinner plate.

I'm trying to figure out my routine. I will add a second client on Thursday so I suppose I am waiting for that to figure out what I do when (like grocery shopping). I am reminding myself to take it easy and just handle one enormous shift at a time. Being a working mom fand having my kid be a latch key kid is enough for this week.

azurelunatic

Susan visited!

Thorn didn't get carjacked by a Bigfoot.

kaberett

Apparently I'm not writing up a detailed version of this, so in brief...

( Bodily functions feature heavily. )

rydra_wong

Especially while it's at 75% off in the sale, making it 62p:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/406150/Refunct/

For anyone who might want to sample some easy platforming with a very very low entry threshold.

Chill and rather lovely environment (okay, probably depends on you liking brutalist architecture, but still -- there's a day-night cycle! there's sunshine! the water is gorgeous! the music is gentle!) with no time pressure and no penalties for failing a jump hundreds of times (except that, at worst, you fall in the water and have to swim about and haul yourself out again).

N.B. Most reviews describe this as a half-hour game, and there are achievements for speedrunning it in under 8 minutes or under 4 minutes.

It took me over five hours of playtime to beat it, which should be indicative of the co-ordination and skill levels I'm working with here. And yet it did not at any point feel stressful or humiliating for me. It felt like a pleasant, relaxing environment in which to fail repeatedly and experiment.

It started at a level low enough that I could manage it, and then had a really satisfying difficulty curve. If I was stalling on the next objective, I could still run and parkour round the environment purely for fun (and sometimes ended up working out how to pick off the optional achievements in the process).

Towards the very end, I started to think that the last jumps might just flat-out exceed the limits of what I am currently capable of, and it felt like if that did happen, I would still be able to walk away pretty happily having already got way more than 62p's worth of enjoyment out of it.

Will absolutely be playing it again.

harpers_child

1. Brain raccoons in full force in the few days leading up to this trip. In part because I got my period and being in your 40s evidently means you just lose your mind for a few days every month. (This has been going in for like 6? months. Maybe more. I swear every god that knows my name I'm going mad. The internet says this is just what peri-menopause is and suck it up buttercup.)

1b. Brain raccoons are insisting that the new music player is inadequate because it only has a handful of albums and every mashup I could find on my various drives (600-ish). The raccoons say I need to bring my ipod that only holds charge for the length of a shower as well because my comfort playlists are on there.

My music collection is disorganized enough that I don't have the brain bandwidth to organize it and rebuild the comfort playlists on the new device before leaving. My brain bandwidth is taken up with other things

2. New fountain pen owner milestone: have completely taken apart and put back together two of my four TWSBI Ecos. One had the end cap come off during cleaning today and the other had water get in on the wrong side of the plunger. For personal future reference this is the video I used -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPaXQpXOEY

2b. The TWSBI Eco is my current favorite fountain pen. Easy to fill, chunky enough for my hands, and the stub nib works nicely with my awful handwriting.

3. I am running into packing problems mostly because a third of my suitcase is taken up by the collapsible bag I'm bringing for souvenirs.

ravena_kade

Friday morning I record a call that the cousins were having people over. I made overnight pulled pork so I had something to bring. We get there and cancer cousin is asleep. Stroke cousin is in Chair in the living room, lead cousin was at the hospital with the Mother and the last cousin was so stressed out she was practically twitching. Lead cousin left at 10 AM and stroke cousin had had 5 accidents. Last cousin standing had been changing adult diapers for and hour and a half and cleaning up leaks...she was fit to be tied. I suggested that she go upstairs and I could take care of things for an hour. I set up food and chatted with stroke cousin. At 1 PM the widow and kids and grand kids of the passed away cousin came in. The. young girls helped me set up more food.

Lead cousin comes home from the hospital and we all eat. Stroke cousin wanted to be waited on, but I know that her PT people say she needs to get things herself. She is capable. She just doesn't want to. There were words. 30 minutes later lead cousin gets a call that they are discharging my aunt so she has to go back to the hospital. I went with her to help...and to escape ;-)

Got home around 4:30 and headed into the garden for a few hours.

Saturday was a beach day at Cranes in Ipswich/. Yay. There were signs saying that sharks were spotted, but I did not see any. I wanted to. Spent 2 hours on the beach. The only wild found were 2 large lion's mane jelly fish. The beach was crowded where the lifeguards were, but pretty quiet a mile down the sand.

Sunday was spend in the garden and then floating in my spa/blow up pool. It was HOT, but the water was refreshing.

Today was work and more yard chores. I hope to be caught up with all of the yard stuff this week.

tielan

Well, I have employment to March next year. Which is interesting, because usually it would be until January - ie. "6 months". That said, they will be getting 6 months out of me because of the vacation. So...

Anyway, continued employment (shy of colossally screwing up) is assured. Huzzah.

thatyourefuse

... I don't happen to already know any proper fandom olds with functioning Fucking Weird Vibe detectors who are also getting ABSURDLY AND OBNOXIOUSLY invested in the current Dimension 20 campaign, do I? Because Jesus fucking Christ I have got to stop trying to find those on tumblr.

feldman

For a long time the only Orwell I'd read was Down and Out in Paris and London, and the power of that book is the inside/outside view it gives on how the machinery of exploitation functions on the ground. The constant exhausting useless work of being poor was already familiar to me as a teen. All these time-wasting rigged games of survival serve to manufacture and control a desperate labor pool that demeans, crushes, and ultimately indifferently slaughters human beings. A system is what it does, after all.

The slog to find a job continues to grind my very goddamned soul. I feel like a filter trap for cognitive dissonance, crushingly frustrated by such conundrums as how to be charming and reassuringly competent while curbing vast amounts of anxiety and rage at the state of, well, everything being mismanaged to hell and back in a glory of destruction.

"Our interview in 20min is cancelled, as we're suddenly not funding this position after all."

"Can you show me your home office? No, I don't have any technical questions about your set-up, I just want to see it for reasons."

"My camera is 'glitchy' (so weird that this always happens!) so you'll be performing engaging humanity to a default blank pfp and your own strained countenance."

"Oh we're owned by a private equity firm, so we believe we're shielded from the 'current instability' in related fields. I will not take it well when you ask for the PE firm's name."

"I'm actually remote/contract HR, so I can't tell you anything about that location, team, work environment, or current challenges this position is meant to address. Please be specific about how you would contribute to our business."

"Sell yourself to us, why should we hire you?"
That one pissed me off, it totally came off as 'dance for us, monkey'. Real talk here, I give sommelier energy. I care way more for the craftsmanship and artistry of the product than the sale of it. I did well with luxury treats to middle class punters, and both are in short supply these days. So yeah, if you need a successful impromptu sales pitch about the thing we've already been discussing for forty minutes -- namely my interest and qualifications for a non-sales or even development-adjacent role at a nonprofit -- then we should both not waste our time.

But wasting time is partly what this is all about, isn't it?

Current Mood: bitchy

stonepicnicking_okapi

I survived my first day of work! Huzzah!

So we have to play this song.

Watch on YouTube

teaotter

I am knitting the simplest possible* bottom-up sweater, and today I reached two simultaneous milestones:

1. I finished the main torso of the sweater to the point where I divide for the armholes.

2. I finished exactly one third of my total yarn.

Is that an appropriate amount of yarn to have used to this point? Will there be enough to knit the entire sweater? I HAVE NO IDEA!! One of my reasons for knitting a simple sweater is to give myself an idea of a yarn baseline. I want to find out what is the least amount of yarn I can use and make a sweater.

*Simplest possible for me, and yes, I am aware of the irony there. But it's stockinette, in the round, I'm really very close to the stitch and row gauge called for in the pattern, and I'm only making really very very few modifications as I go. (Just the ribbing depth and the body shaping and the total length and the sleeve-cap type and probably the sleeve shaping as well.) Practically no modifications at all!

I'm very happy with it so far, and am looking forward to seeing what happens with the rest of it. :D

kaberett

Reading. ( Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster, Wells, Davies + Jones, Hwang Carrant, Keynes + Aidley )

... all of which adds up to more pain-related reading than I felt like I'd managed this week, huh, I thought I had tripped and fallen entirely into Murderbot and EatYourBooks indexing but apparently not!

Writing. A response to the EHRC consultation, which was... several thousand words. A very, very brief response to the Pathways to Work green paper consultation ("I am too disabled to manage doing this properly. These charities are speaking for me. Please fucking listen to them.")

Watching. The first half of Fantasia, with the toddler, with my hand held through all the scary bits to reassure me, apart from the bit that was SO scary that we had to get up and distract ourselves until it was over. Which had absolutely not been flagged as one of the scary bits, and which was the deep-sea-origins-of-life section.

(I had not watched the film since primary school, I don't think? And between then and now I have played a bunch of orchestral music, for most of that time on the violin but latterly as a French horn. It turns out that when I'm not distracted by playing a completely different part, I have incredibly intense sense-memories of several of the pizzicato sections early on...)

Another Murderbot episode. (I continue Indignant.)

Another Farscape episode, this one Taking the Stone (S02E03), which I think was firmly back to early season one levels of incoherence.

Tragically we have not managed The Old Guard 2, because I have had too much migraine and there have been SO many things Happening, but... maybe this week???

Cooking. Several new things! Four from East, leaving me at 41/120 recipes still to make (two of which are "probably won't happen" for reasons of "grapefruit" and "matcha"); of those this week's meal plan includes two (aubergine larb with sticky rice; Vietnamese coconut pancakes). I appreciated the reminder that fried new potatoes are tasty, and A is notably into the chargrilled summer vegetable salad, though I was not a fan of the faff and think I prefer smitten kitchen's charred corn succotash.

Approximately zero faff was salt lassi, and A is now aware that this Special Treat is available; low faff was a cherry clafoutis with fruit from the plot, which I overcooked a bit but, hey, I do in fact like caramelised crunchy bits.

Eating. FIRST BATCH OF DESSERT GOOSEBERRIES ARE RIPE. A tiny handful of Sugar Magnolia sugarsnap peas. Misc jostaberries. RASPBERRIES. And also supermarket strawberries, because we have hit the stage of the summer where they're down to £5 per kilo :)

Growing. I have been doing small bits of harvest and failing to get support structures in for the beans and tomatoes. The outdoor tomatoes have tomatoes on. The squash are coming along; I put more squash seeds in, on the grounds that they're super late but might still do anything; I have not managed to kill all of the chillis; the pepper has flowers.

Harvested lots of dried peas for sowing next year. Am attempting to develop Plans that might actually let me have a full bed of broad beans and a full bed of peas in the interests of getting Reasonable Quantities of them. ~~If the council doesn't tell me I'm not allowed the abandoned plot next door--~~

I could get so much done if I could coax myself out there for even an hour a day but the agoraphobia is saying No, annoyingly. Gonna try to get A to chase me out more this week.

harpers_child

Decided to just make the next batch of mixes a new post.

( southern gothic )

( more fandom mixes )

scripsi

This is a spoiler-free post.

The Hollow was first published in 1946, during Agatha Christie’s Golden Age. It’s not one of her more well-known mysteries, which I always thought was a bit strange, because it’s my favourite Christie. On the surface the plot is typical for her: A murder in a stately home where several guests have gathered for the weekend. Hercule Poirot investigates. Personally I think this book is rather invisible because it belies a very common statement about Christie, that she only writes cardboard stock characters with no depths and complexity. In The Hollow we have plenty of complex characters and I would say the main theme in the book is obsession. Obsessive love, obsession for science, the artist's obsession towards their work, and so on. If you wanted a stock Christie, you may be disappointed. There is also the fact that even if this is a Poirot novel, he doesn’t enter until halfway, and he is actually not the first to figure out who the murderer is. In fact I’ve always felt this book may have been better liked if there had been no Poirot in it at all. Checking the publishing order, this was the first Poirot since 1942, and Christie had written five books in between. I wonder if the publisher put pressure on her to include Poirot in this one… You also get the POV from more characters than usual. I have never read any of Christie's Mary Westmacott novels, but I’ve read that The Hollow is more like them in writing style.

( Read more... )

scripsi

What I finished reading in June was the first four books in the YA Lockwood & Co series by Jonathan Stroud, The Screaming Staircase, The Whispering Skull, The Creeping Shadow and The Hollow Boy. Husband wanted to rewatch the Netflix show, and as I hadn’t seen it, I joined in. I liked it, and as it ended after one season, which covered book 1 and 2, I promptly started to read the books.

The concept is that the UK is suffering from a spreading ghost infection, and as being touched by a ghost is fatal unless you get medical aid, it’s not a good thing. It doesn't help that only children and teenagers are able to actually see the ghosts. So gifted children work for ghost hunting agencies, which is a pretty nifty device for putting teenagers in the forefront of the action, while still not always being very sensible, because teenagers. The narrator is a girl, Lucy, who starts working for the very small agency Lockwood & Co, and gradually they are getting closer and closer to why this ghost infection has started.

I find the books very enjoyable. Lucy is a pretty engaging narrator, if not always a stellar character. But my favourite character is Skull, a ghost trapped in a jar that only Lucy can talk to.

I also actually counted the books I’m in various stages of reading… Yikes! I think I should focus on finishing some of them this month. Here they are, in no particular order.

The Empty Grave by Jonathan Stroud

Det ockulta sekelskiftet (The Occult Turn of the Century) by Per Faxneld. How occultism influenced a number of Swedish artists in the late 19/early 20th century.

Never Flinch and Fairy Tale by Stephen King

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. (A re-read.)

A Better Man by Louise Penney

Furstinnan (The Princess) by Eva Mattson. A biography over the 16th century Swedish queen Catherine Jagiellon.

Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle

The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg

The Treasure by Selma Lagerlöf

This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer

Midnight Rooms by Donyae Coles

flamingsword

I just gave myself a headache by cracking my neck too hard, and then helped moderate a Virtual Accessible Pride event YouTube livestream for the first time. It was A Lot but I am still here. We only had one troll, too, so that part was cool.

The You Are Not So Smart Podcast did an episode a while back about cultures of genius vs cultures of growth that I listened to this week, and it is rearranging some stuff in my head in helpful ways, explaining why people do the frustrating thing where they compete to tear each other down because in a lot of cultures I was raised in, only the Single Most Correct person got any respect. And I was raised to do this, and managed to train myself out of it once I understood how nonsensical it was, but I didn't understand why it was that way or how we got there. So I will be having thinky thoughts.

Shadow work: ( Read more... )

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It's all about the smelling good

Member Posts

sunshine revival challenge #2

Sunshine Challenge #3

Happy ARMY Day!

more fandom events

News & Views

July has already been busy

[embodiment] some post-surgical notes

Finished Refunct over the weekend and genuinely cannot rec too highly

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work contract renewed

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The Quatloo Economy

Music Monday: Let the River Run by Carly Simon

Today in sweater-knitting news

vital functions

playlist round up

The Agatha Christie reread: The Hollow

What I have been reading, June edition

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October 2023

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