pennswoods | Reading

So the night before as I was nearly falling asleep, there was a loud thunderstorm that went on for about an hour. It felt like the gods were playing ten-pin bowling above my neighbourhood. 😱

It was probably a bit worse than usual because we've had ex-tropical cyclone Tam roaming over the North Island in the last few days. There's been rain and occasional howling winds but luckily the power didn't go off like it did further north.

No I don't like thunderstorms, how did you guess this.

pegkerr

This month I will be celebrating a very particular birthday. With my new health insurance, I am now eligible for a program that enables me to go back to the YWCA.

I am absolutely overjoyed about this. I had to give up my Y membership when my job was cut in half with the pandemic, five years ago, and I've missed it dreadfully. I dug my Y membership card out of a drawer (I even had an old towel card that still had some punches left on it) and presented myself at the Y membership desk with my new Silver Sneakers number and was duly reinstated.

Now I regularly use the treadmill, rowing machine, weight machines, and especially—oh joy—the sauna. I am sore, because I have not been diligent as I should about using weights, but I am determined to do so now.

This is definitely one perk that has come with growing older.

Background: a sauna. Underneath the sauna light are the words "Eliminating racism, empowering women, YWCA. In front of the sauna bench is a rowing machine. Hand weights rest on the sauna bench. Lower center: A silver sneaker.

Silver Sneakers

15 Silver Sneakers

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: excited

tjs_whatnot

And before I begin, this is where I beg you to join Fable (and give you a cool invite code that gives us both $$ for one of their interactive ebooks). Fable is AWESOME! ❤️

( March 2025 ) And that was my March. How about you all?

arcanetrivia

Title: sweet chocolate
Fandom: Monkey Island
Pairing/Characters: Guybrush/Elaine
Rating: General
Words: 222
Summary: Guybrush eschews the straightforward way in favor of the silly (but in this case, sweet) way, as usual.
Additional Tags: Fluff, Kissing
Notes: From OTP Prompt #7 by

dont-call-my-name-alejandro. Yeah, this is weightless saccharine fluff. Nobody send me their dentist bill. 😂 I've just been struggling to come up with anything lately and was looking for prompt lists.

sweet chocolate

$radiantfracture: Gouache portrait of my face with jellyfish hat (Super Jellyfish 70s Me)$

radiantfracture

Congrats to the Wizards & Spaceships podcast for making the Aurora awards ballot!

Their season finale episode with Robert J. Sawyer just came out.

Also I am particularly stoked about their upcoming season, for reasons.

§rf§

azriona

I haven't written anything akin to poetry in years, but oh man, I saw the funniest thing on Tumblr this morning and I've had one of those weird non-rhyming beat poems bouncing in my head ever since. Someone's blog was listed as "Minors DNI"... but they also listed their age as 24. And all I can think is, Sweetie, I am literally twice your age, and you are telling kids six years younger than you not to interact with you. Maybe you shouldn't be interacting with me.

I didn't say it was a good poem. 🤣

It's spring break here, and 10yo is in an art camp every morning for three hours. So far he's really enjoying it: they are painting and drawing and making a mess, and he's made a friend and has a couple of much younger fans who clearly think he is Coolness Personified. (Which he is.) The rec center where the class is has a pretty awesome skate park next to it, too, so we spent about 45 after class having a picnic while he fretted over going down the inclines on his skateboard, after which he confessed that he likes watching better than doing it himself. Which, fair. I like watching baseball, I don't particularly enjoy playing it. But I did go down one of the smaller inclines on his scooter, and I did not die, so I think that's one point for setting good examples.

15yo is dying to get out of town; at this point, the only time we have is this coming weekend. Not that any of us particularly care about Easter, beyond the scope of "do I get any presents." I'm a sucker; I'd rather give them each Playstation or Roblox gift cards than another chocolate bunny that they'll invariably ignore and which I'll end up eating myself because it's there. Which is also fine -- no candy, that is -- because it's not like any of us need any of that anyway. Anyway, he wants to go to Philadelphia; I'm not entirely sure why, I'm a little worried he has ideas about seeing all the sports games he can, but that's not something I really want to do with 10yo in tow because 10yo has limited patience for sports games (and frankly, so do I). But the Revolutionary War museum is really good, and I think they'd both like that, and I can drag them to the Liberty Bell where they will be unimpressed and I can thoroughly embarrass them, which let's face it, is the whole point to having kids anyway.

I do wish taking the train was easier/cheaper. There's a station near us but it only gets one train a day (and it's not particularly a convenient time), plus using it doubles the cost of the ticket. And the ticket's not that inexpensive to start with. Times like this I miss Poland.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

I was trying to use the word "sillion" in a word puzzle, which meant that I had to pick up Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is always close to hand, so that's what you get today.

It might as well be "The Windhover," source of the sillion (which means dirt), though I think I have posted it before.

(A windhover is a kestrel.)

You really have to read it out loud to hear the great sweeping wingbeats of it.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

oracne

Philadelphia Dance Projects presents Dance Up Close: Seeds and Sounds and Jumper Cables. I attended this performance with my friend Camille, who is a reviewer. The entire performance is captured below - you can even catch a glimpse of me sitting on the left, wearing a dark KN95 mask, when I leaned forward a bit before the performance started.

Watch on YouTube

azriona

I promise I'm not going to blather endlessly about writing things, but sometimes, I just gotta.

So there's a post that popped up on my Tumblr feed this morning, and had me spinning in circles. It's yet another riff on the "writers want engagement, please reblog/comment, likes and kudos do NOTHING" song and dance that has been around for... well, ever.

And generally speaking... I do agree that a lot of times, it feels like engagement is down and it's hard to get traction on a story in the immediate aftermath of posting it. If one of my Tumblr chapter announcements for NAFTK gets more than 30 notes, I consider it a success. And that's with two or three people who are guaranteed to reblog it.

But this person... this person, who posted the post I saw this morning, they went another step further. They said that they plan to start blocking readers who only like their stories, and don't comment or reblog them.

Yeah. They are blocking active readers.

And I just... my jaw dropped. I can't... I can't even. I don't know where to start with that. Except that it's pissing. me. off.

Because they were basically outright threatening readers with: If you only like my story and don't talk to me, then you aren't allowed to read them at all.

And went on to say, and I quote: "I am not a free content mill."

I'm sorry, what the fuck.

Sweetie. Darling. Sugar pie. YOU ARE WRITING FANFICTION, AND YOU ARE NOT CHARGING FOR IT. THAT IS THE ACTUAL LITERAL DEFINITION OF FREE CONTENT. The only person making you into a "mill" is YOU.

So I wrote this in response. Not a direct call-out, because I don't really want to call them out (although I also kinda do). But seriously? You don't get to threaten readers with blocking if they don't respond the way you want them to.

I am a free content mill*, and you know what? I'm proud to be one.

(*The actual definition of "mill" here is probably debatable.)

Just... ugh. Yes, I'd like comments. Yes, I'd like reblogs. But you know what? If all you have to give me are likes and kudos, then I'll happily take those too. And anyone who says otherwise maybe should rethink the reason they're sharing at all.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

musesfool posted a poem by Li-Young Lee that I had not read before and that is so beautiful, painful and loving, that in response I'm just going to post another of Lee's poems.

And I'm going to choose it because there's already a Poetry Unbound episode about it, so you can go (re)-listen to that.

From blossoms
Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

pegkerr

I went to the Hands Off protest on April 5. The one I attended was a smaller one across the river in St. Paul, but not the one at the capitol--that one drew about 25,000 people, I understand. I chose to go to a closer one, where I hoped it would be easier to park, and that indeed turned out to be true.

naomikritzer was there, too.

The weather was cold and breezy (I'll know next time not to big a big flimsy card for a placard, because the wind kept trying to take it away like a sail). But the sky was a brilliant blue (I used it at the background for this collage).

There were several hundred people there, and I saw no counter-protestors. Many cars honked in support as they drove by (although one yelled out the window, "Get a job!" and I thought to myself Dude. It's a Saturday.). We all interspersed our chants with friendly chatting. We all found comfort in our solidarity of purpose and trading of experience. What can we do?

I made the deliberate choice, which I never have before, to blur the faces in the collage other than my own. What a strange world we are entering, where that feels necessary.

The headline in today's newspaper read, "Students With Visas Live in Fear," and I thought about the quartet of Norman Rockwell paintings "The Four Freedoms," especially the one entitled "Freedom from Fear." How have we come to this point, where we are losing these basic freedoms?

Image description: against a brilliantly blue sky background, various people hold protest signs.

Hands Off

14 Hands Off

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: determined

azriona

Neighbor K took the day off work and we spent the morning going to two estate sales and then coffee afterwards. It was good to have a nice chunk of time; she's had to go back into the office since February and so we only see each other on weekends, and I was used to seeing her every morning after the bus pick-up to walk Stella and K's dog Mabel. (Stella decided a few months ago that Mabel is Acceptable, despite being twice her size and technically a Belgian Mal mix. But Mabel's also very pale for a Mal, so I'm not entirely sure Stella sees her as one.)

Anyway, the sales were good, both in a part of Arlington County that has tons of big, fancy houses with big, fancy price tags, and thus we saw a weird mix of fancy furniture and really really really old stuff. One house was of the McMansion variety, and the vast majority of the stuff was overpriced, but I did find a couple of useful things (a blood pressure monitor for the 15yo, and a door hook, and a never-used football, also for the 15yo). And then the second house was straight out of the 1960s, including the crazy gilded wallpaper and paneled walls and faux Asian furniture. But I scored with a cheese slicer and a whole bunch of light bulbs, because apparently I am totally That Person who buys light bulbs at estate sales for half the price.

And then we drove around Falls Church for fifteen minutes before finding parking and having coffee at what is apparently the hippest coffee joint there, judging from the fact that it took fifteen minutes to find parking. The coffee was good, though. I know where to go for coffee the next time I'm in Falls Church, anyway.

oracne

Actually, one of these was before March but I somehow never wrote it up. This month, I am trying to get my reading mojo back. Currently, this is involving a mixture of library books (read them before they have to be returned, especially if you had to wait for your hold to come through!) and re-reading (the first couple of Murderbots because of the upcoming tv show; I know it's only the first one being adapted so far, but who can stop there? Not me.).

Passions in Death by J.D. Robb is fifty-ninth in this series and yes I am still reading it because every once in a while I crave a mystery because the point of mystery novels is for justice to prevail. Also, reading J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts is a masterclass in providing just enough information for readers new to the series when you're more than fifty books into it. The series is also topical; Roberts' feelings about current events and social change surface in the murder plot with both victim and killer. A young woman artist is murdered a few days before her wedding to another woman; suspicion fall on friends and ex-lovers of both partners, both male and female, and one trans woman. The motive seems more personal than simply homophobia, and Roberts skillfully juggles two equally likely suspects until close to the end of the book. I felt this was one of the better entries in this long-running series.

Rosebud by Paul Cornell is science fiction in the weird vein; the characters seem to be prisoners in digital form in a miniature space ship. The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects. They encounter a mysterious spherical black ship and decide to gain favor with The Company by exploring it. For some reason, this involves them taking on different forms that lend an element of humor as well as horror to subsequent events. I am not really sure what happened in this story, and I had a hard time holding on to the plot. But it was definitely a cool experiment in narrative.

The War Was In Color by boopboop is a Captain America story set during World War II, but not trying very hard to stick to historical diction and details. While being ahistorical is not usually my cup of tea, I found it interesting that the author explored the time between Bucky Barnes being experimented on by Dr. Zola and his supposed death in detail, including some recaptures and graphic torture (which I skimmed as I wasn't up for reading it). I didn't love the story, but I do respect it, if that makes sense.

and my glory shall be love by Lake (beyond_belief) is a slash AU of the show Generation Kill in which Nate Fick is the Vice President and Brad Colbert has been assigned to help the Secret Service protect him from credible death threats. Otherwise, it's a Romance. I am unfamiliar with the original canon but still enjoyed this story a lot!

Falling by Nikki Pond is MCU canon divergence in which, post the first Thor movie, Loki falls to Midgard and lives among humans, eventually becoming a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and falling in with familiar characters in a totally different way. I enjoyed that the author grappled a bit with his character flaws and Asgardian morals.

Will You Stay Just a Little Bit Longer? by Bedalk05 is a no-powers contemporary AU of The Old Guard focusing on the romance between Joe/Yusuf Al-Kaysani and Nicky/Nicolò di Genova and how they make a new family including widower Joe's twin children. It is a very slow, gentle, kind story of supportive partners, loaded with Found Family and coming to terms with trauma via therapy.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

This one was hard. This is the second version I did. The first one came out so lumpy and messy I was worried I'd never paint again. The second one was like that too, until I remembered that paintings always feel like that halfway through.

Pileated woodpeckers are gorgeous in coloration, but super dinosaur-looking close-up.

ETA: I know the movement (smell?) lines are super silly, but I ran out of blue paint so I can't fix them.

oracne

October 4:
"He must hypnotise me before the dawn." Very poetic, Mina! A contrast to Van Helsing's "English is not my first language" dialogue which, to me, does not feel realistic most of the time. Did Stoker actually know any Dutch people?

The phonograph diary, as well as Mina's short hand, are contemporary technology but feel a touch science fictional in this novel. I am confused, though, by why Jonathan has to "read" Van Helsing's phonograph diary to her...is it not a voice recording?

October 5:
This chapter has a ton of infodumping. Mina is beginning to show early signs of becoming vampiric. Quincey Morris finally has something useful to do; he's a hunter, and proposes Winchester rifles to fight off Dracula's wolves when they pursue him to Varna.

October 6:
"...I must go. I can tell you now, whilst the sun is coming up; I may not be able again. I know that when the Count wills me I must go. I know that if he tells me to come in secret, I must come by wile; by any device to hoodwink—even Jonathan." Mina is definitely the best character in this book.

Profile

pennswoods

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 05:01 pm

Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

Lover of snarky assholes, high-functioning sociopaths, and their loyal friends

Reading

Storms

2025 52 Card Project: Week 15: Silver Sneakers

March 2025 Reading List

fic: sweet chocolate (Guybrush/Elaine, G)

people I know do cool stuff, get recognized

(no subject)

Lazy poetry month part 3

Dance Up Close: Seeds and Sounds and Jumper Cables

(no subject)

Lazy poetry month continues

2025 52 Card Project: Week 14: Hands Off

(no subject)

Wednesday Reading - All of March Edition

Art Post - Woodpecker

Dracula: October 4 - October 6

Profile

April 2025

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags