Reading

Entry tags:

books

but of course, books

Oh hey, I meant to write this all up last week. Well. It's more interesting this week.

What are you reading now?

The Count of Monte Cristo, translated by Robin Buss. Someone, presumably on Mastodon, recommended this translation specifically a few years ago, and I made a note of that but not of why. An internet search reveals that it's the only translation of the complete book; all others are working from an ~~abridgement~~ bowdlerization from 1846.

It's great, of course. The Three Musketeers is Dumas's most famous novel, but I would bet money that there have been more adaptations and retellings of Monte Cristo. It's a universal story. Heck, The Crow is a Monte Cristo retelling.

I read it once in the late nineties and enjoyed it. Sometime in childhood I read the chapter detailing Edmond's escape from the Chateau d'If, where he disguises himself as the dead abbé to get the jailers to carry him outside. I froze in delicious terror at the absolutely chilling line "The sea is the graveyard of the Chateau d'If." Unclear why I didn't seek out the rest of the book at the time, when that one chapter was so great.

What did you just finish reading?

Emily Tesh's latest, The Incandescent, about a teacher at a contemporary Magic School. It's spectacular. It's not quite as vehement as Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy but it still gets in some solid criticism of The System, and I think the worldbuilding hangs together a bit better than Scholomance's. It shares with Scholomance a feeling that the latter third is suddenly very different, but in Incandescent that's more obvious and with a very very good reason. Highly recommended. I suspect I shall reread soonish so I can figure out whether I think it all hangs together metaphorically as well as ... whatever the opposite of metaphorically is, in-the-world-of-the-book.

(I have a theory, which is by no means an original theory, that if a writer does not consciously direct her themes and metaphors they will tend to reinforce the prevailing social order of the time she is writing in, which may or not be a desired result.)

Before that, Elizabeth Bear's Lotus Kingdoms trilogy. These are ... fine? The characters are great (I don't entirely believe Chaeri's heel-turn but that might just be me), the first book has a lot of moving everyone into position but once they're there the trilogy does not drag. I think this just caught me at a moment when I am spectacularly disinterested in powerful people complaining about how stressful it is to be powerful, and there is a lot of that. But: if you're looking for some colourful secondary-world fantasy, these are absolutely that, and excellent examples of it.

What do you think you'll read next?

I'm nine chapters into the 117 of Monte Cristo. "Next" seems like a very long ways away. Having said that, I'm carrying around a paperback of Morgan Locke (Laura Jo Mixon)'s 2011 shoulda-been-award-winning SF novel Up Against It in case my devices fail me, so hopefully not that but maybe.

Entry tags:

doing things, mostly foodish

When I hit up the dollar store for wax paper for my Ogre gluing, so I wouldn't drip glue on everything, I also picked up a long roll of aluminum foil. For reasons that are unclear to me the grocery store will only sell foil in rolls that are slightly shorter than the short side of a (half-pan) baking sheet.

Normally when I make bacon I do it in the oven, on a baking sheet covered in foil. Normally I have to fold up the edges of the foil manually. Normally some bacon grease leaks out anyway and I have to carefully clean the baking sheet.

This morning I used the long roll of foil, and it covered the entire sheet with overlap on all sides. Near as I can tell no grease leaked through.

It's kind of astounding how having the right tools can improve one's life.

Ogres remaining: one that requires surgery, five more that require colour choice and thought, and three that require both. I'm honestly a little startled that it's almost done. This has been an enjoyable project: it's not so fiddly that I get frustrated at my inability to do fine motor work, and it's producing tangible objects.

This afternoon I decanted the vanilla extract I put up last summer. I'm less optimistic about this. The cinnamon extract I did in the fall was cinnamony enough but also pretty harsh, due I assume to using cheap vodka. Half the vanilla is likewise cheap vodka (though a different kind), so maybe that will turn out alright; the other half is spiced rum, and I have no idea how well that will do. At least it's only a dozen small bottles, instead of the twenty-odd of cinnamon that I need to do something with.

French toast tomorrow morning should give me some indication of quality, at least.

I also spent an hour or so scraping/squeezing "caviar" out of the beans to make vanilla sugar. This was an extremely annoying process that I do not recommend to anyone: removing sticky goop from slick wet beans is not a good time. But I am now prepared to make an awful lot of vanilla sugar. Just need to figure out where I'm storing it. Probably in one of my tall plastic bins: making one smell faintly of vanilla is unlikely to be a downside.

Next steps there are to let the scraped caviar sit until tomorrow so it dries out (possibly with an assist from the oven on low heat), blending it all into a small amount of sugar, and then mixing that into the full amount. The recipe I have calls for "one cup of sugar per vanilla bean". Online varies between one and two cups per bean, so that's a good starting point. Thing is, I undercounted woefully last time; I used eighty vanilla beans in the extract. These are small beans, so, sure, cut that in half. I used forty full beans to make the extract, that's twenty cups of sugar, at 200g a cup that's four kilos of vanilla sugar. That ... should tide me over for awhile. Get some pint or half-pint jars, that's much of xmas sorted.

Then I have the mostly-empty bean pods that I should do something with. I'm currently letting them air dry as well. I guess I could snip them up small and mix them into some (more) sugar.

Onward.

I'm in love with a goddess <3

The last time I saw SJ Tucker perform live, so many things about my life were different.

Last time I saw her live was in 20176, at New York Faerie Fest (an event I'd really love to get back to someday, and I'm kinda bummed the timing just never works out, but end of the school year is _hard_ with burnout). I hadn't realized it was that far back --I did some checking of dates and the like, because sometimes it is very nice to have your entire history stored online¹ in an easy-to-access format.

So wow, I can add to the "things that were different last time I saw my favourite artist perform live" that I was technically still employed by the fucking private school. It wasn't just "before the weekend that Everything Changed", it was a whole year earlier than that.

The last time I saw s00j perform live, I was still dating her ex². :P

And I wasn't dating 60% of my current partners. I was still dating Sparr. I was living not in nBs or DanzaHausa but in ARSES. I did not yet have a therapist, which means Jenn is gonna get a hell of an infodump next week because have I mentioned s00j to her before? not sure!

But anyways, the me who was seeing her tonight was not the same as the me who saw her last, and yet and yet and yet. I didn't cry through the entire show, which is good (there wasn't a space for me to dance, so I couldn't manifest proper my own power to counter hers). I did cry uncontrollably through Little Bird and Wonders, which is good.

She was double-teaming with Ginger Doss, who I'd not heard before, and who has a beautiful voice, the kind that makes fellow enbies perk up and think positive thoughts about what that can mean for them. (The last time I saw s00j perform live, I didn't sing and that's such a fascinating and important shift in my own life).

And the thing that is the same between me then and me now is that she is still my favourite artist. Pretty sure if you'd asked me at any point in these nine years "hey Sor, who's your favourite musical artist" her name would cross my lips. That hasn't stopped or changed. She is still passionately important to me, and her music is still a huge part of who I am.

So it was really fucking good to see her, but honest-to-god, nothing made it as clear how much I have grown-the-fuck-up in the last decade as doing so. Because yeah, I still cried, but after I could hug her and exchange banter and be friendly (she said "hi Kat!" and even if she just got a reminder of my name from the very short guest list, that kicks ass). I'm not ever gonna match a goddess on her own turf, but I've reached a point where I no longer have to be weird about visiting her there.

It's nice to not spend the entire concert sobbing, yanno?

There's another concert tomorrow night (they said, at an hour small enough that tomorrow starts to feel meaningless) and I think it will be nice to go to that too. And it's a good reminder that there've been concerts and livestreams in between and I've been not as good about attending those as I once was, and I should really get back into it.

The me is different, and the her is different (hell, last time I saw her she had not yet made a whole-ass human) but sometimes the mood stays. The good parts stay.

(Persist, resist, and bloom <3)

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Okay, not my *entire* history, but I did see the post I made where I was first squeeing about kissing Austin, and boy, I never have really been subtle about that sort of thing, have I?

2: A thing I'm not sure I've ever connected publicly in this journal, but yeah, if you've been a long time follower and remembered some particular cryptics, that's what it was? Iunno.

SetList:
Roses in the Rocks
Little Bird
[two Ginger songs - She Wolf and Hippie Pocket]
Wonders
Believe in Lullabies
[two Ginger songs - Talisman, Gaia Lives]
La Sirene
Chalk on the Sidewalk
[Ginger/s00j collab - Ma Belle]
Wild Times
[Ginger song - Thankful]

(I originally wrote "as best as I can remember" but hey, when you are crammed up in the very front row, and you notice someone holding a notebook that looks like a setlist and then they foolishly put it down on the ground, you're gonna take a picture. The only memory part was remembering the bits s00j swapped out and what for, but I've got that)

(no subject)

I am visiting my mom, and it feels good to help them actually accomplish things around the house.

See, my grandparents died back in March, and that means that my mother currently owns a substantial amount of their _stuff_ that needs going through. Some of it is being kept, because it's cool or sentimental. Most of it is going to the thrift store because we don't actually need, like, all their clothing or whatever. This is a hell of a sorting task we've got on.

And I helped out going through everything in the garage! There's now a large pile of things to go directly to the dump (which is a Saturday project) and there's one bin full of laptops/electronics that need to go to Aunt Sara to go through, and one bin full of papers that are (probably) super recycleable but might not all be. And everything else got hauled in one of two van-loads to the thrift shop! We did it! There is still heaps and heaps of this project to do, but we actually did one substantial piece of it.

I'm going to be taking just masses of pens and some pairs of scissors and a few rulers, which is wonderful to have good classroom stuff. And a few other neat things --I continue to collect my grandfather's handkerchiefs, and I may be about to own my dead-grandma-Ruth's copy of the Joy of Cooking¹, we have to check with Sara.

Tomorrow I'm going to wander over to Veronica's house to hang out and co-work --possibly that looks like doing useful digital tasks like organizing photos, plausibly that's me playing Stardew Valley while she does real work. We'll see. And then Saturday evening I'm going to an itty-bitty s00j house concert (omg so excited) and then Sunday and Monday and Tuesday are just working days again to keep going through boxen from the shed. It's a nice project to be a part of, because I am always nosy and like looking at _stuff_.

And it feels good to be helpful, yes I have it to a sin sometimes, but sometimes it's just a virtue to be able to make other people's lives easier. To look at someone and continually say "let's do something productive", to help encourage those jobs that are continually in want of being done to actually be so. It feels nice that I am helping!

That's what I've got. Goodnight, friends. Keep taking care of each other.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: Dead-Grandma-Ruth is not Grandma Brin, my grandda's second wife who I knew. She's my mom's mom, who died when my mom was in college, because fuck cancer, and never met my da or me. She was, by all accounts, fucking cool as hell.

Entry tags:

i once had lots of pride, the world was in my hands

Still here. Still applying for jobs, now including tech writer jobs. So far I've gotten ... a single initial-phone-screen. The economy really is shit.

Marker-edging and gluing all the Ogre Designer's Edition models proceeds apace. I've discovered that, mm, around ~~ten~~ twenty-five, sheesh percent of the tank models were miscut in ways that will require Surgery. The models are constructed out of cardboard punch-outs, with notches in them that slide together to go at right angles. Except that for some of them, the die didn't punch straight down, it punched down at an angle. Which results in leaning, drunk-looking cybertanks. I've maybe another dozen to do that were cut properly, including ... eight? eight where I'll get to be Creative on the marker-edging colour. Then I guess I take a craft knife to some of the notches, and hopefully manage to adjust them to be less drunk, with minimal bloodshed.

Depending on how I'm feeling I may consider marker-edging all thousand-some counters as well. When I write it out like that it seems less likely. On the other hand it would look really good.

I am managing to keep myself more or less functional, mentally/emotionally as well as task-completion-y. I've been going out biking several days a week. Today I made it out to Central Park, a ride of 8 mostly-uphill km that takes me about an hour (and forty minutes to ride back), and sat under the trees and had a picnic lunch and a bit of a meditation. It was good. Getting out is a struggle, especially when it's been over 25C most days, but it's always, always, worth it.

Been doing some yoga as well. My tolerance / ability to convince myself to do yoga seems to cap out around 30-40 minutes. So I'm getting through the entire standing sequence but only a couple of the floor sequence stretches, and none of the cooldowns (except savasana, of course). Might benefit from accepting that this is how long I can talk myself into this, and shortening the sequence so I get the whole thing, even if it's less of it.

I got out my bass last night as well. I am unsurprisingly terrible, but surprisingly less terrible than I'd expected. When I was teaching myself back in, jeez, 2021 I guess, I developed some rudimentary technique, and that seems to have stuck at least a little bit. I'm curious as to whether I'll be able to get anywhere with self-teaching.

Reading, too, but that can wait til tomorrow as is proper.

I hope you're well.

Entry tags:

Booklog: Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ve been meaning to read more Adrian Tchaikovsky for a while now, first because a number of my friends really like his stuff, and then also because I read his book The Doors of Eden and really enjoyed it. (The character work in that one was hit or miss, but the speculative biology was enormous fun in directions you rarely see done well that also aimed directly at my interests, so I had a great time with it.)

The joy of finding a very prolific author is that there’s a ton of stuff to read, but the difficulty of finding a very prolific author is figuring out where to start. Handily for me, this one was on the short list for the Hugos this year! And it was my top pick – I really loved it.

( More details -- no spoilers beyond the first few chapters )

Further Massachusetts small town adventures

Austin and I decided to do MORE ADVENTURES today!

(look, as mentioned last post, it's basically the only _weekend_ we have in common, it's nice to try and make the most of it!)

Today's plan was to do morning service ringing, and lunch with the bellringers, and then at 2:30 go to Salem on the....ferry? The weather's plan was ...not worth taking a $35 per ticket private ferry when we already have active weekend passes for the commuter rail, making the train ride essentially free. And the train left at literally the same time. We hopped on the 2:30 and were in Salem just after 3! The biggest difference between yesterday and today was that we didn't bring our bicycles today, we were operating on blue bikes only...which works, because they have a Salem/Lynn network!

(they do not have what you would call "continuous coverage" between Lynn and Boston, mind. But taking the train to Salem and then blue biking around up there is an excellent plan!)

We spent the first bit of Salem Adventure wandering around and going into little shops in order to mostly sightsee/windowshop. There was a really lovely crystal shop that was just chockablock full of shiny things that I didn't get, and then we stopped in to my absolute favourite of the witchy shops. It is one that feels most...not touristy? I mean, it's RIGHT on the main strip, but it sells way more herbs and bones and dried flowers and antler tips and shit like that than most of the competitors. Pretty sure it's The Coven's Cottage. It's where I bought the bone that sits on my altar (since 2019) and today while browsing their "random bones, $3.99" bin, one basically fell into my hand and my fingers curled around it exactly like it belonged there and that was that.

I was explaining to Austin that I don't really read spellbooks or books about magic or anything like that, because the woo I work with is pretty seriously on the "it will show itself if you let it" method. Bones that look like a knife and then slide into your hand are definitely on the right track. It will go nicely next to the little iron bell I got at the Joie de Vivre end-of-things garage sale.

We also stopped by "Goodnight Fatty" which is a cookie shop selling omg decadant cookies. (At the very end of the day we had just enough time to swing by again so Austin could get a box to take home). Delicious stuff!

After an hour, ninety minutes, of this, it was time to get bikes and go on the next stage adventure: biking up to the tip of Salem and seeing the ocean at Salem Willows beach. It was a lovely ~1.5 mile ride along mostly bike lanes (!) and very little car traffic. And the first thing we saw when we arrived was a huge arcade!

Austin talked me into "look at the ocean first" and so we sat on a bench and stared out across the rocks and seagulls to all the boats, and we waved at Beverly and generally just filled our souls.

(spoiler alert, we did several discrete rounds of that, including the one where I finally got Austin hooked into the Merlin app. He is currently two birds behind me and I fully anticipate coming back from MD to find him forty birds ahead.)

After some ocean we went to wander the midway strip and see what was there. We peaked into Kiddieland and watched some children on the car racing ride, and admired the beautiful wooden carousel. The arcade was huge and classic --maybe 1.5 times as big as the one at Scandieland, which is my usual yearly "play skeeball and throw things to knock down the clowns" event. It was a nice mix of old and new (and Austin was astonished to learn that modern arcades are all just phone games from ten years ago)

((okay _modern_ arcades are all Japanese style gachapon variety, and there were a small number of those too))

But it was also loud and crowded and overstimulating and hadn't we passed a mini-golf place back on the strip a bit ..?

Yes, we had. It was the smallest miniature golf course I've ever seen, and I was absolutely thrilled with it. I doubled par in the first half, did rather better on the back half, and got two holes-in-one in a row. There was one other family playing through, and we very much enjoyed watching them in between our own banter and fun. Seriously the course was so tight and tiny and fun!

After that, we got dinner at a place we believe is named "crab shack" which was the prime exemplar of the beast. Seriously, I had the thickest most delicious clam chowder and Austin had a delicious crab roll and there were onion rings that we couldn't finish because we were full of other stuff and I had a corn on the cob and so happy! So round! So delighted!

...and then Austin looks it up and says "well, the 'Holy Cow' ice cream parlour has amazing reviews" so OFF WE WENT to become even more full and round and happy! While standing in line looking at the flavour board, we note it says "National Ice Cream Association (or something like that) #1 flavour of the year" next to their "Ritzy AF" --a butter ice cream with toffee-ritz brittle in it. Uh. Yeah. Absolutely yes. Austin got his paired with their Key Lime Pie, I got mine paired with the Easy Peazy (as you might expect, a lemon curd ice cream that was apparently the #3 flavour), it was GREAT! Dang dang dang!

We made it back to the train in just the right amount of time, and then had a lovely cool bike ride home from North Station. I am very happy!

~Sor
MOOP!

(no subject)

Today Austin and I had an ADVENTURE!

We've been planning something for a while, because it's literally the one weekend this summer where we're both around and in town and not busy with other life things or partners or what-have-you, but our plans hadn't really coalesced until this week. Initial plan: Let's take the train to Salem (or Ipswich, whichever would be nicer) and bike to Crane Beach!

And then this morning we checked the weather and the air quality was _abundantly_ shit and it didn't really feel like a "spend the entire day outside" sort of day. So we punted and replanned and decided to take the train to Lowell instead, and explore the museums there! And we even decided in time to go to bells.

At bells, we were explaining we needed to leave early so we could catch our train to Lowell, and someone very reasonably said "oh, so you can go to the folk festival?" Cue us being all "??" and indeed, the Lowell Folk Festival was this weekend. uh, sure! We can add that to our general plan of "take a train a place and then bike around the place or maybe walk some and go inside or hang outside and kinda play it all by ear."

It turned out to be a really great plan and a really great adventure! Here's some of what we did that I remember:

*Right off the bat, we went and got lunch from this random banh mi place that was highly rated on google maps, and by _god_ was it good. Every bite of that sandwich was _excellent_, the veggies were perfectly pickled, it was absolutely delicious. Do recommend!

*I had seen on the website that one of their art vendors was a company I'd backed on pintopia last year who I was _really_ happy with, and so we went and looked at all the art vendors first. When I told the girl I really loved her pins she was SO HAPPY to hear it, and also I got a sick new Medusa pin ("Silence those who fail to silence you").

*I also got an absolutely *gorgeous* weird oil painting from a strange little artist who was incredibly excitable and kept trying to negotiate her art cheaper entirely unprompted by me. It's a stag beetle with an eye in its back, and Veronica is nodding along immediately, because she's maybe one of the only people here who knew me well enough both in high school and now to see how that's the perfect piece of art for me. I'm so excited to add it to the wall of weird art!

*Later we wandered the streets and wound up spending like 10-15 minutes at the booth for the Kinetic Sculpture Race they have in September, and it sounds ENTIRELY DOPE! The dudes running the booth were all in on enthusiasm and goofiness and the human instinct to do very stupid things because we can. I am incredibly excited to go see this event (September 20th!) because it sounds fun as hell, and they said audience is welcome/encouraged to bike alongside the track to watch!

*We stopped in a weird little witchy shop that would've been one hundred percent at home in Salem (except that it was more spacious than the best Salem witchy shops, which tend to feel crammed in the best way possible). I did not buy a hundred crystals (despite them being quite reasonably priced). Austin did quite possibly buy me a chrimbo present that I've been wanting for _fucking ages_. We'll see when I get that!

*We made it to the very end of Solas's Irish set, which was delightful tunes. Later we were off to try and catch the bluegrass, and instead encountered Cecilia, a Quebequois band that absolutely slayed. Austin and I waltzed on the sidewalk and polkaed in the street and I couldn't really keep from dancing. (I did also get to polka with Laura a bit when we ran into her, which was grand!)

*There was also lots of other really good ambient music just everywhere as we wandered around, and that was really lovely! Street festivals with good music or different music or interesting music are a delight!

*We found a train car cum museum maintained by the Boston & Maine rail society, and Austin especially had a wonderful time poking around the inside and looking at everything they had. They had a telegraph playing on a loop, which was a reminder of how utterly impressive people who are _good_ at Morse are (I could get 2-3 letters and then absolutely couldn't differentiate fast enough to find the spaces). As we were leaving, and examining the rest of it, we heard a passerby say "that's how you can tell the real train nerds, they're the ones looking UNDER the train!" which was very charming.

*Also in absolutely primo stranger relations, while hanging near the booth of a bookshop, a man decided I was the correct person to ask "do you know which pride flag this is?" about one of the many pins on display, and I did! (It was the aromantic one, and yes, I am very proud of myself for looking sufficiently queer that I was judged "the right one to ask")

*I did the biking parts of our journey (about 11 miles, all told) on my Brompton folding bike that I got a year ago as part of cleaning out Grandpa Perks's things, and hadn't actually touched since receiving it. She rode very well, and it meant that when we parked our bikes in Lowell, we were able to join two other bikes at a rack that was clearly meant for Red Bikes Only. I even folded her to take her upstairs to Old North, which was nice to be able to do. She needs something to join her a little better when she is in folded mode (the clicky-together-bits don't quite work) but other than that, she's a beaut.

It was a real great adventure day and I am sleepy and sticky from sunscreen and sweat but very satisfied.

~Sor

MOOP!