the fics are on lj but lj keeps fucking up the post, so the list is on dw.

if by some freak chance you want to remix/rewrite/artify/podfic/pick-your-transformation any of my fics, go right ahead. :D just let me know when you're done, so i can admire your work. you may also feel free to repod any of my podfics, but i'd ask the authors first.

i do not remember what i wanted to share with you lovely people. there was a very cute small child on my bus this morning but is that really necessary to repeat? anyway, have a poem.

I like how Stevie Nicks speaks like a Martian sometimes.

“I came here for a reason,” she said in a 1983 interview.
As if simply relaying the directive from her mothership.

“I didn’t come here to be a mother ...” Bet that sounded
pretty alien then. Coming from a young pretty woman.

Like a Trojan horse. Feminism disguised in a frilly dress.

It makes me think about my birth mother. Like Stevie,
she didn’t come here to be a mother. Unlike my mother,
who couldn’t get pregnant but wouldn’t let that stop her
from becoming what she came here to be. My mother,

as passionate about adoption as she was about choice.

I like how that confuses some—those who like to point
out that abortion might’ve prevented her from adopting.
I suppose those dimwits came here to be ... well, dimwits.

Still, bet they can’t help but hum along when they hear
Stevie Nicks songs. Failing to realize that all those songs
are her children. That she gave birth to them for us.

“Because,” she said. “I want to enhance this planet.”

--"'I came here to be a poet ... '", Michael Montlack

oh my flist i am so tired. i want to sleep in tomorrow but i have to work from work because i have to set up a lunch. i'll get fed (thai food :D ) which is never a bad thing but at the same time... sleep. why can't i just be independently wealthy. why.

there was a guy on the t coming home who looked a lot like ben whishaw and that was very distracting.

a bunch of states might be able to see the northern lights tomorrow and saturday. sadly mass isn't one of those states. but if your state is you could perhaps see the bright lights and that's pretty cool.

The best ones
I ever ate I ate

that summer, him dead
six months, me not yet

forevered again
to anyone. Tomatoes

the only fever, many-
chambered, jelly-seeded

—probably slicers,
nothing rare. Dissected

into the same glass bowl
night after night for a dinner

date with the pulpy sun
on its way through

my yard. Fayetteville,
Arkansas, city of wreckage.

Mozzarella, basil, salt.
Oil, the August air

humid, nearly liquid.
One evening I sat

on my back stoop
in a puddle of light

and knew I could live
without him, and was.

I ate the same dinner
from the same bowl

until the decision
ceased to be a decision.

--"Tomatoes", Katrina Vandenberg

we get the new york times at work and i must have signed up for their email newsletters at some point because i get them every morning. because today is tax day - think sympathetic thoughts at any tax professionals in your life - the newsletter opened with "it's tax day. i wish you many happy returns." oy.

today was also the big support staff lunch at work, which the admins had to organize. (it was our turn.) that means we order the food (it was delicious, especially the little lemon squares and the rolls) and figure out what to do for half an hour - we've had guest speakers talking about their research before so that's what we did. said guest speaker was someone who works adjacent to one of my groups, which meant i didn't just know her but knew something about the subject of her talk. which is a first! talk was good, food was good, it's always nice to schmooze with my fellow admins, and did i mention the lemon squares? i do love a good lemon square.

i also took a brisk walk with one of the admins m and one of the admins a - it was getting cold and cloudy so the walk was bracing. but fresh air is good for me, so.

All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads,
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge,
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say,
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it,
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy.
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs,
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around.
Parades, in spite of—. Pride, in spite of—. Please, someone answer all these
questions I have about hummingbirds and the little futures we are
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on.
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.

--"Our Book of Delights", Arielle Hebert

weather was beautiful today and i waited an hour at ben & jerry's for a nice scoop of phish food (because i love a chocolate fish) because it was free scoop day. the line was very, very long but did i mention the weather was beautiful? so it wasn't a problem to stand out in it. also one of the admins m brought babka for lunch - a cinnamon and a chocolate - and any day with babka in it is a good day.

you know how the pope is originally from chicago and is a white sox fan? apparently at a recent white sox game the team handed out pope hats to i think everyone in the stands. and then because that wasn't enough they announced they're going to do it again in august. so any baseball/white sox/pope leo fans in chicago or environs, here's your chance to acquire a white sox pope hat.

stephen colbert is amused by the way the new york times measured the distance artemis ii traveled. like, they used dachshunds.

because deep down i'm really seven and i find farts HYSTERICALLY FUNNY, i need to share first of all chatgpt offering its musical critique of farts and second farts set to music. especially the last video. i laughed so hard i stopped breathing, seriously. the only issue is that i was at work and listening to fart sounds without headphones or earbuds and i've never been so glad that my corner of the building is so deserted. no one needs to hear me choking laughing at musical fart noises. so, uh, make sure no one's around who you wouldn't want to hear all the farting.

a guy named aadam jacobs has taped 10,000 concerts in his life and now volunteers are putting them all online. that is a lot of concerts.

"The cashier at the gas station asks me where I'm from"

and when I say Ohio, he says Go buckeyes
which I understand as a stranger offering
language that can be shared. The way starlings
roost on a power line, scooching over
so the other can sit, flocked and fanning
feathers against rain and never in my life
have I seen a football game, but still I reply
Go buckeyes
which is a way of saying: I accept.
I would root with you in imaginary stands.
Cheer at the same time in a darkened bar.
We are more alike than not, us two.
Here, let me shift, shuffle. Shelter a moment
beneath this wing.

--J. Sullivan

the car update is that it was the battery. >.< the guy from the garage who's been working on it this whole time actually came over - i'm around the corner, it's not far - used pliers to get a better grip on the little emergency key that comes with the clicker, got the door open (yay), and popped the hood. where he hooked something up to the battery to learn... it was dead. he charged it enough for me to drive the car over and called towards the end of the day to say the battery - which wasn't even that old - was defective and he put in a new one. so i went back to pick up my car and drive it home. there's still an issue - every time you open the driver's side door you get an alert that the car isn't in park even tho it is - this alert is accompanied by the kind of binging noise the car makes when it wants you to fasten your seatbelt and it is exceptionally annoying - but i'm tired of leaving my car at the garage so i can be told "we don't know what's wrong with it and no it won't be ready by the weekend" so i'll just bring it back some time in the near future. and in any case i have it back and it works and i'm relieved.

that's all the news that's local. :D in exciting international news the good voters of hungary voted authoritarian viktor orban out after sixteen years (and i somehow doubt he was helped by jd vance showing up to stump for him). it was the highest voter turnout since 1989.

watch the artemis ii splashdown if like me you missed it the first time. space travel and return will never not be fabulously cool.

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

--"Vita Nova", Louise Glück

so i picked up my car (finally) on friday, right? and saturday i'm all ready to take myself to one of my favorite coffee places for a nice bagel sandwich and some time spent on the story i'm working on for writing group and... i can't get the car door open. for whatever reason the garage needed a second clicker (it's a keyless entry) when they reprogrammed the computer so i have two new clickers and neither works. and i know it's not the clicker batteries. there's a little emergency key in the clicker and that doesn't work either. i'm standing in the parking lot next to my car that sat in a garage for a god damn month and cost me a lot of money to fix and i can't get into it which means i can't drive it. (and also means it wasn't entirely fixed either.) and i need to be able to go places - not just the coffee place which would've been nice but wasn't necessary but i also volunteered in the kitchen for the last bonspiel of the season (so i have to be able to drive half an hour to get to the curling club) and last night i met my sister for dinner and a movie twenty minutes in the other direction. i briefly consider calling aaa and getting them to break me into my car but what if i can't get the door open after i'm done at the curling club? i don't want to have to call them to get me into my car every single time i need to go somewhere. for one thing, it takes an hour for them to get to me and i don't have that kind of time.

so i end up with a rental. for the nth time. tomorrow i get to call the garage and tell them what's up and ask them how they're going to fix it. yay.

so that was my morning and part of the afternoon. kitchen volunteering duty was fine - i washed and dried a lot of dishes and also helped assemble charcuterie plates and prepped chicken for cooking (rinsed, trimmed, patted dry, tossed with seasoning, stuck in the fridge). one of the other volunteers made brownies and the whole kitchen smelled so strongly of brownie that people could smell it out in the main room where they were sitting around snacking and drinking and watching whoever was curling. several people stuck their heads into the kitchen with varying degrees of "do i smell brownies?" why yes, yes you do. :D

the movie was you, me, & tuscany which is a romcom with absolutely zero surprises but a really attractive setting. i mean, tuscany. also regé-jean page with his shirt off. there's a point in the movie where a conflict appears and practically the entire audience went "GASP!" and then we all laughed at ourselves because it was such a loud collective response. the movie was more rom than com - i mean, it wasn't that funny altho it definitely wasn't a drama either - and was overall very light and fluffy and reminded me of while you were sleeping except in tuscany during the summer instead of chicago in the winter.

and today i walked to the grocery store because did i mention i can't get into my car? and did my taxes! ooh. i owed the fed and got a refund from the state and it even almost balanced out. mostly it's done and i don't have to worry until next year. and i didn't wait until the last minute, go me.

two things i must share about the artemis ii crew:

victor glover's message to his wife - it's extremely sweet - and an introduction to the crew as if they were the stars of a "bad 80s sitcom".

Maybe it ruins the story to say at the start that no one was hurt
the day Scotty Forester swung open the door of the family car,
climbed up, put one hand on the wheel and, then, while pushing
and pulling on buttons and knobs, he found and released

the brake, and it started, the silver-blue Mercury, to roll
down Robin Street, best street in the neighborhood for sledding,
for coasting on a bike with arms waving above your head,
Scotty gaining speed on the long sweep of that block, heading

toward the intersection, then into it, then speeding
through, the car beginning to slow as the street leveled out,
although, toward the end, Scotty going fast enough
to jump the curb before stopping, three feet from a gas pump.

Maybe knowing the ending ruins this story, but sometimes
we need a break from dread. We need to know that the car
did not crash, the child did not die. We need to briefly forget
that we live in a world where a car is gaining speed, and

no one seems to be at the wheel. We need to be more
like the dog Scotty drives past, who barks, and runs in circles
as he barks some more, driven by some circuitry we have lost
for loving this dangerous life, living it.

--"Mercury", Suzanne Cleary

today did not get off to a fabulous start but i'll tell you about it tomorrow when it's not late and i'm not tired. but i do have a poem.

—after Frank O’Hara and Katy Porter

Dear, I wished you heavens.
If not heavens, earths.
And if a little hell, I prayed the tears
I hid as wet, incandescent smiles
were an ocean on brimstone.
You are one of one.
I never said: Good morning, my heart
but I was the indigo in your hair.
I was keeping time when you danced.
I was stillness and tremor,
break and breach,
your pen and your cane.
No, I never said: I’m in love with you.
I said: I dreamed of a child
with your eyes, with your hands.
You are one of one.
The unrenounceable.
Do not fear death.
You’ll be beautiful
in the grave.
You’ll be beautiful
in the Judgment line,
the sun recounting sins
against our siblings for eons.
And the shadow I cast
standing outside your garden
will be our cover.
Dear, I was never lonely.
I was never cold.
I was wreathing our canopy.
Some day you’ll love Ladan Osman.
After the hours. After all light.

--"[ ]", Ladan Osman

i finally got my car back, yay! the change oil light was on which was absurd because it really doesn't need an oil change yet and one of the guys at the garage turned it off by going to youtube and looking up how to do it. whatever works, i guess.

other productive things i did today include laundry and lots and lots of dishes and important work shit (by which i mean i submitted a lot of expenses for reimbursement) and i took a walk after work to a. get some fresh air but more importantly b. find something for dinner because i did not want to make anything or dirty any more dishes. seriously, i'm always washing dishes.

the artemis ii crew splashed down in the pacific and is home safe and i missed the livestream because i was talking to my sister. >.< that must be so weird, to spend ten days floating in a tin can and then bam, back to gravity. nervewracking for the folks watching from mission control too. but still, extremely cool.

I am a child
of wonder again and
rain tells me to watch
for snails and slugs.

I gather dirt, sand, and sticks
for the terrarium
where I make a safe home
away from footsteps, fast cars, and ditch water.

I don’t want them to die
so I make them
a space for living.

I ask my ma to buy lettuce
because in the book I got from the library
I learned they will eat lettuce.

I am
greedy to learn
what keeps everything alive.

Their spiral shapes leave shiny trails behind.
I imagine I am a snail leaving
magic everywhere I go.

--"Memory Poem", Marlanda Dekine

passover is over! which means i can have bread again. :D the holiday felt weirdly short tho, maybe because i spent four days of it in atlanta. and i have A LOT of matzo left. >.<

I’m sorry I’m taking the car to the airport that is closer to,
rather than farther away from, the oncoming hurricane.
In the parking garage of my love for you, I circle around
quietly, looking for a space to put the day’s best guesses,
one not too far from the kiosk of you, standing mute and
ready to hand me a small slip of paper that reads I’m sorry
I can’t tell you what I want. So we’re both mildly apologetic
all the time, which is a small courtesy, two pulsars fanning
light at one another in bursts detectable years later. Why
won’t you take this bundle of daffodils. Why have the
daffodils turned into dirty forks. I’m sorry about my socks.
See, there I go again. In the backyard, a vine from next
door has crawled up and over the fence and has flourished
there, a great nest of green six feet off the ground. I’d
trim it, but you’re holding the hedge clippers against your
hair. You’re saying that your hair is morning glories and
you’d like to keep the morning glories if possible. I don’t
even know what morning glories are exactly; my mother
is an excellent gardener but I have neither her memory for
color nor your cataloguing tendencies and it’s late in the day
and I’m sorry for that. It’s difficult to hold you in this
shaft of light when you keep taking three steps away and
sitting down in the nearest chair, one hand on each knee
like a monument. It’s difficult to feel your body against
my side in sleep, the desires it holds distant and tired,
like an animal that has walked too far in an inhospitable
climate. I am full of water but as thirst is a form of
suffering, I would not wish it upon you. Instead, I will
work my way through your dreaming, which I know is of
endless snow fields. I will wait in this puddle of melt.
Perhaps, one day, you will come to me with your skin
near to brittle from the cold you love so much. Perhaps on
that day we can begin to think together about the seasons,
about how spring can also arrive in precision, if you let it.

--"Poem in Which the Poet Ventriloquizes the Beloved", Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

today is national empanada day. i pass that on to my fellow americans without comment. :D

at work the admins had an opening day lunch even tho opening day was last week and i'm not sure when the red sox played their first home game. in any case it was a very baseball lunch - hot dogs, potato chips, cracker jack. the admin who organized it got salad and pizzas for any vegetarians who might be around, plus the makings of s'mores. it's not really a s'more unless your marshmallow stands a good chance of falling off a stick into an open flame but it wasn't campfire weather and we can't have open fires on campus anyway (i know you're all surprised) so we made them in the microwave. with peep bunnies instead of marshmallows. not quite the same but still fun. i made matzo crack - like christmas crack except with matzo instead of saltines - and it went over VERY well. it's sweet to rot your teeth (i mean mine had a cup and a half of sugar) but also chocolately and crunchy and delicious and i managed to get rid of almost all of it so i didn't have to take too much home.

you've probably read about this already but if you haven't i must share that artemis ii had problems with their outlook such that reid wiseman, mission commander, couldn't get his email. from space. nasa fixed it remotely but seriously, of all the things that could go wrong in that tin can, it was the email.

philadelphia broke the record for longest line of cheesesteaks by lining them up at the airport. it required almost 1300 cheesesteaks and after the record was certified volunteers handed out all those sandwiches to travelers and tsa workers and assorted airport employees. that's... a lot of cheesesteaks.

The music was turned up too loud for talking
but everybody talked. Someone I barely knew
was drinking wine and had an arm around me.
The liquid in my glass trembled. This was the year
the chokecherry in the yard grew tall enough
to find the wind, a thing like itself, shifting
and invisible, feeling all the leaves and turning them,
like once you turned my coat collar at the door
to make it even, and then I was ready.

--"Touching and Being Touched", Jenny George

I GOT SNOWED ON THIS MORNING. WHAT THE HELL. if you know anything about me you should know i love winter and i love snow but it is APRIL and it should NOT be SNOWING. what the fuck, i mean SERIOUSLY.

in more exciting basketball news, at least exciting if you're me, the u of michigan won the men's ncaa championship for the first time since 1989. i was in fact a student at um in 1989 and swarmed the streets with the entire rest of the school. we collectively went a bit apeshit - a bunch of people climbed onto the awning of a restaurant and, er, brought it down. oops. so i imagine there was much rejoicing in ann arbor last night. (they beat uconn 69-63 which implies a close and thrilling game.) and in equally exciting news for women's basketball, ucla won their first ncaa championship ever. they wiped the floor with south carolina, 79-51.

(when i was in atlanta we watched south carolina beat the pants off uconn to get to the final game. one of my local cousins is a huge fan of the uconn women's team so i really wanted south carolina to lose to ucla for his sake.)

do you want more pics from the artemis ii mission? of course you do. :D this set includes the eclipse the astronauts saw while they were up there, plus a random pic of a random jar of nutella randomly floating around the cabin.

on day 6 the astronauts woke to the voice of jim lovell, mission commander of apollo 13 and (along with his fellow astronauts jack swigert and fred haise) previous record holder for farthest distance ever traveled from the earth. don't forget to enjoy the view.

artemis ii was out of communication for a bit as they swung around the moon and afterwards christina koch had some words for earth. we will always choose earth. we will always choose each other.

I remember walking through the morning
after a night of heavy snow and drink
with headphones on and they played
me the most perfect song: no one
was awake and I was hungover
young as clean as a piano
I thought and at any moment
someone might fall in love with me I was
that woven into the electric
cold bright air and for weeks
after I went through the album
in search of the song but could not
find it and later much later I saw
that what I had taken to be the song
was in fact the joyous concordance of
a moment that would not come again

--"Perfect Song", Heather Cristle

because you all need an update from last night's post. :D

so artemis ii, huh? halfway through its turn around the moon and on the way home! the four astronauts having gone farther from earth than any humans ever! the first people to see the far side of the moon! (other moonshots having crossed the far side when it was dark on the surface, so the astronauts couldn't see anything.) we got the first woman going to the moon! the first black astronaut in deep space! and, uh, a canadian! and the mission commander asked for and received permission to name one of the craters after his late wife! (she died of cancer in 2020. is that love, or what?) they have five different hot sauces aboard (but also only five canadian products)! you can even watch live! or check out views of orion in space! and read the updates here! (that should be a guest link. we get the new york times at work.) have some photos!

*gets a grip* i just think the whole thing is extremely cool.

in less nationally important news my mom will apparently need surgery - her elbow is, and i quote, "smashed" - and work offered me a position as one of the new team leads that are replacing the admin manager and i'm going to say no. i'm just not prepared for the extra responsibility and i don't want to be put in the position of mediating between admins (i trust my ability to be fair among people i work with and like but it would be awkward and i don't want to do it) or between admins and faculty. it's a senior admin position, just with some extra responsibility tacked on, and while i do want to apply to be a senior admin eventually - it's more money for one thing - i'm not ready to do it now. tomorrow morning i get to figure out how to explain this to the executive director in a way that sounds professional and thoughtful and isn't just "i don't want to".

i finished paradise and i think i understand the ending but i'm not sure i could explain it to someone else so maybe i didn't. i really hope it gets a third season tho because i desperately want to know what happens next.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

--"High Flight", John Gillespie Magee, Jr

happy easter to them what celebrate, happy *counts* fourth night of passover for them what celebrate, happy late birthday to ephemera (my battybrain), and a lovely sunday to everyone else. :D i went to my cousin's in atlanta for passover and it was a great time (as usual) and i even made some progress on my cross stitch which has been sadly neglected (it's this pattern and is kind of a lot more blackwork than i'm emotionally prepared for) and we ate a lot (no one should be surprised by this) and it would have been overall an excellent few days except my mom kind of tripped over herself in the atlanta airport, fell flat, and, uh, fractured her arm just above the elbow. >.< so we spent wednesday in the er instead of at my cousin's house for the first seder. she got a bunch of x-rays and a ct scan and they wrapped up her arm and it wasn't what we planned but everyone there was really nice. at least she didn't a. break anything else, or b. hit her head. she just needed a lot of help because there's a limit to the things you can do with one arm. she kept saying she hated needing help and my sister and i kept telling her WE ARE YOUR DAUGHTERS IT IS OUR JOB LET US DO THIS. she did however manage to play a lot of mah jongg at my cousin's house because apparently all the women in the family play it (including my sister but not me) and my cousin got a set for her birthday. but otherwise mom tried not to sit around and be an invalid and the rest of us cheerfully told her to sit her butt down and not worry about it.

and now she's home and the boyfriend is taking care of her and tomorrow she'll see the orthopedist and she'll probably need surgery and that will suck but did i mention the boyfriend will take care of her? because he will. so she'll be in good hands.

overall a good trip and it's always nice to see the cousins but wow did it start off with an adventure. there will be no visits to emergency rooms next year.

i didn't have time wednesday morning to post a poem for poetry month so you get it today. the dog poem, as per usual.

They have a daughter now. She loves us
as he and Elizabeth once loved us,
and as we still love them,
as we love all three of them now.
If there is one word a dog has the right to use
it is that one.
People pull their punches, refer to dogs' love
with words such as loyalty, obedience, or even submissiveness,
but it is love.
    We take long naps in the mountain sun, now,
or try to, while the baby tugs on our ears,
covers us with leaves, grass, and dirt:
trampolines on our ribs, just to hear us grunt.
We all go for walks, each day, the five of us.
    He plants trees. They both do, on special occasions:
birth-trees, birthday trees, anniversary trees -
Maple, apple, cherry, ash and lilacs;
Larch, ponderosa pine, spruce fir and cedar.
As we walk, he talks to Elizabeth about their daughter,
being thirty years old someday and seeing these trees he's
planted for her. He talks about how he'll be
sixty-five, then, and she, thirty, and how she can look at them,
knowing he planted them for her: how big they'll be, then.
He strides from tree to tree, looking up.

We will be thirty years gone, at the time of which
he speaks, casting his thoughts into the future, and sometimes,
as he walks and says these things, he forgets
to look down at us, looks only ahead and beyond.
    When we sleep for good, I would like a tree.
I would like Ann to have a tree, too.
We can be side by side,
on one of the hills that we used to explore.
    My tree will be bigger. I loved him more.
Ann is the one he picked first. But he came back for me.

--from The Odyssey, by Rick Bass

so it's been a while, huh. can i blame it on the fact that it might finally actually be spring out here? a week ago i woke up and there was snow on the ground and then it was cold and then it warmed up a bit and now i think it's spring for real. yay.

also i caught a cold last week but seem to be on the mend which is good because i'm going to atlanta on wednesday to spend passover with the cousins and the last thing i want to bring with me is a headcold. i mean, just having to get on a plane with all that congestion is bad enough, nevermind potentially giving it to someone. my cousin with the twins who are old enough to be adults, the boytwin is in a band - have i mentioned this? boys go to jupiter, highly recommended - they played around here on thursday and i did not go because a. i felt crappy but more importantly b. i did not want to feel crappier. it was sold out! which is very exciting but at the same time i'm bummed i couldn't go.

also also my car is still in the shop because they fixed it and then something else went wrong and they're trying to figure out what it is. sigh.

other things worth mentioning:

went to a book fair with one of the admins m and one of the admins a (plus admin a's hubs) from work and bought a couple of bookmarks and a magnet of tomatoes making faces. and a book, ok (the space between worlds, by micaiah johnson). sunny, warmish, a good day to hang with some of my fellow admins under non work circumstances.
watched the immortal man, the peaky blinders movie, which felt oddly detached from the series (altho there were a bunch of returning characters) but i think you kind of needed to have seen the show to fully understand what was going on. not sorry i saw it, also not sorry i didn't see it in a theater. ( spoiler!Collapse )
attended approximately half a million meetings with my fellow admins over what we want to happen now that the admin manager's gone even tho it's not actually our decision. we just kept chewing on the same ideas over and over until finally one of the admins n pointed out that we can talk all we want but if hq wants [whatever] then we're getting [whatever]. they're going to replace the admin manager with three "team leads" - all admins - and we've seen the job description but no one's been asked to do it yet so who knows what's going on.
saw how to make a killing with my sister and it was fine mostly because i like margaret qualley (altho she played an awful person) and some of the killings are inventive. i think glen powell is overrated tho.
watched the first couple episodes of wonder man and liked it! super curious about the super powers.
watched the entirety (minus the last episode) of paradise which i also like! altho it can be a really hard watch and i have a lot of questions about the worldbuilding.
met tamalinn for lunch and had mac&cheese which was yummy and extremely comforting but could have used more cheese. altho let's be honest - even the cheesiest mac&cheese could use more cheese.
curled a lot, made some decent shots (last week my last two shots were perfect) and more not-so-decent shots, as per usual. last night was the last game which means i need something else to do with my sundays besides talk to the family unit and go to the grocery store.

because it's almost passover i must share the story of the house of maqswel haggadah for the jewish trek fan(s) in your life. it's less a haggadah and more the klingon flavored story of one. (there's an excerpt on amazon if you're curious.)

japan has an interesting way to combat loneliness for folks who live alone - yogurt delivery women. yes, really.

there's a world championship cheese contest which honestly should not surprise anyone. this year's winner was a dutch gouda. a goud gouda. :D

400k kitkats were stolen in europe en route to poland from italy. the whole truck just... vanished. poof. someone is going to have an absolutely insane crispetty chocolatey easter.