boxofdelights

Was thinking yesterday about one of the two main Rumpole stories I can recall reading, ‘Rumpole and the Genuine Article,’ and trying to remember if I’d also seen a tv adaptation. I’m still not sure if I watched it, but it turns out one exists, and furthermore the accused forger was played by Emlyn Williams, so now I’ve got to watch it when I get a moment (it’s on Dailymotion https://dai.ly/x5v2ntf).

Meanwhile, Tom Scott has posted his best new episode since the one last month about the bell foundry: ‘Hello From Inside a Tiny Boat.’
https://youtu.be/cMYYcddinkE?si=_EUtwxOGlSK0ZQWz I love how delighted this man gets whenever he’s experiencing some strange mode of transportation; or even when he’s shut in a miniature aircraft-carrier, horizontal and barely able to see where he’s going, yelling “Oh blimey there's a pedalo coming in at speed"or yelping because there’s a large moth inside the tiny Ark Royal and it just landed on his face.

mrissa

Hello, friends. I've got something to show you

It's a book cover! In fact it is my book cover! Because...you can preorder my novella, A Dubious Clamor, directly from the publisher or from an assortment of bookstores of your choice! In ebook or hardcover editions! Isn't it pretty? Isn't it appropriate for the book?

Okay, so you can't know whether it's appropriate for the book yet. But you can trust Naomi Kritzer, friend and multi-award winner, who describes this book as, "No war but class war; also, harpies!" (She also says it's "delightful, unique, and frequently hilarious," in case you were wondering.) Some other awesome people describe it as things too! Wonderful people like authors Ruthanna Emrys and Davinia Evans and critic Paul Weimer! Do you want to know what those things are? You can see them on the pre-order page!

But wait! there's more. (You did the right voice in your head for that, right?) If you preorder, you can not only get this lovely novella (ooooh! aaaaah!), you can also get a really cool sticker of a skeptical sword! You can put this on your laptop, phone, water bottle, small child, or other sticker-bearing device! Be the envy of your friends and neighbors, or at least those of your friends and neighbors who are cool enough to like sword stickers. (As for the other kind, who cares what they think? You are a discerning individual who knows the value of sword stickers, and that's what matters.)

Don't go yet! There's still more. Sadly we currently live in the timeline that has class war but no harpies. (I have improved on this in the novella! Which you can read on September 15 if you preorder it now!) But do you know what our timeline does have? It has harpy eagles. Harpy eagles are so cool. And the lovely people at the World Wildlife Fund allow you to donate to support their habitat. Every person who preorders will be entered into a drawing (subject to sweepstakes laws in your jurisdiction) to win a harpy eagle plushie that also supports harpy eagles in real life! For each hundred pre-orders, we will add another harpy eagle plushie (and its attendant habitat support) to the drawing, so your odds of winning an awesome harpy eagle plushie to be your new cuddly pal and mascot will never be less than 1 in 100. Or you can pass it on to be the cuddly pal and mascot of someone else you know, that part is up to you. Similarly you can also preorder copies of the novella and not read them, if for some reason you're opposed to opinionated weaponry, fictional operetta, and cake in your reading life. I will warn you, there is much cake.

So here it is! Pre-order today! or also other days, that's fine too!

james_davis_nicoll

When a teen schoolgirl stumbles over a classmate's most closely held secret, there is only one course of action open to him.

My Dress-Up Darling, volume 1 by Shinichi Fukuda

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Mark Helprin’s A Kingdom Far and Clear, a single book containing all three books of Helprin’s Swan Lake trilogy, the first of which is a retelling of Swan Lake (tragic mode), and the second and third of which are a continuation of the story based on the question, “But what if Rothbart wasn’t defeated at the end of Swan Lake? And also Rothbart wasn’t just a garden variety sorcerer, but a totalitarian dictator, but in a weirdly whimsical way where (for instance) our ten-year-old heroine spends an entire Joan Aiken-esque sequence working as a yam curler, wearing a special orange and black yam kitchen uniform to roll yams off the yam conveyor belts, and the yam kitchen is so gigantic it has 6000 employees?”

Bizarre. Bleak. Beautifully written! Beautiful but sometimes strangely static illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg. As a retelling I felt this was this not so much engaging with the original as using it as a springboard to deal with its own thematic preoccupations. ( spoilers )

Conclusion: books two and three could have done with a LOT more swans.

I also read Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, translated by Takami Nieda. Like Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursdays, this is a warm, gentle book about a series of loosely linked characters, linked in this case by the fact that they recently moved into a new condominium development near a park with a concrete ride-on hippo named Kanahiko, the eponymous Healing Hippo. He probably doesn’t actually have healing powers (this book has less of a fantasy undercurrent than Hot Chocolate on Thursday), but even just hearing about these healing powers helps people reexamine the problems in their own lives.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m reading Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century. I got to the part where the whole army starts converging on Tampa for the invasion of Cuba (Tampa had only one railway line and no port, but an entrepreneur had suggested using it at a staging ground and Washington said “Yes” without actually checking into the details), and the officers are hanging out at the hotel with thirteen silver minarets… “I’ve been there!” I shrieked. This hotel is now the flagship building of the University of Tampa.

What I Plan to Read Next

Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, which looks similar to Aoyama’s other books in that it is about a bunch of loosely linked characters (connected in this case by a library) who figure out a way forward through their problems. Then I’ll be out of Aoyama books until Matcha on Monday comes out in July.

andrewducker

We've taken this week off work with no children (after Monday's bank holiday) for the first time in 8 years. The idea being that we could spend a bit of time with each other, spend a bit of time decompressing, and do some stuff around the house that was never happening when there were children underfoot

So yesterday we went out and had a relaxed day together at Jupiter Artland, essentially the fields and woods around an old country house with sculptures installed intermittently, so that you can have a lovely scenic walk intermittently punctuated by conversations about whatever you've just encountered. I had been there once before, a decade ago. Jane hadn't been there before at all, so it was a nice morning out.

And then today we had some actual energy to put into making the house nice. The "playroom" has been a dumping ground for kids toys for the last 2 years, since we moved back in. Every bit of plastic nonsense we'd accumulated for the past 8 years, either bought, given to us, or arriving on the front of magazines - sitting in boxes or bags or piled on shelves. Our cleaner Lana had repeatedly done an amazing job of sorting it thematically, only for us to then be too sick, tired, or otherwise incapable of doing anything about it. Turns out what we needed was a few days in a row with no children to let us recharge to the point where we could actually motivate ourselves.

So we just removed 8 bin bags full of stuff from the "playroom" and put them in the bins at the end of the street. And also about 3 bins bag of stuff are in the drive and will go to the charity shops when I pick up the kids at 5pm. And now Sophia's room has a floor and we will be able to put a bed in there.

(Undoubtedly the children will have questions when they get home.)

sabotabby

Just finished: Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story Of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple. God this is amazing. I don't know what to add; I think iI get a similar thrill with the sense of political and cultural recognition that other people get when they see a character like themselves in fiction for the first time (who knew representation was important???). This is one of those "read this book if you want to better understand me" type things for me. Obviously it's not just therapy for curmudgeonly anti-Zionist anarch-ish middle-aged Jewish women—the history is important, knowing about the strategy and failures are important, the narrative of fighting in the face of defeat is important. But it also helped reset some of my despair.

BTW it's a long slog but about halfway through when they hit the end of WWII I was like, huh, half the book is left??? half the book is footnotes.

Wake Up! (Seasons, Book Winter) by Ryszard I. Merey. Ah, let's read something short after the big, detailed history book—oh no this one is fairly brutal too. This is the third book in the Seasons project (the first two are a + e 4ever and Read and then Burn This, which I also highly recommend), all of which have to do with toxic relationships and gender fuckery, if you like that kind of thing. I do. This is about Tian, a down-on-her-luck tattoo artist. Her fiancée has left her after she's come out as trans, and she's left with an apartment she can't afford. Al, a man she rescues one night, has rent money, but that's because he's a high-stakes mahjong player in deep with some sketchy characters. It's a hallucinogenic fever dream with an unreliable narrator and a shifting, capricious timeline. Beautifully written, absolutely tragic, and if you want you can get a special German edition on sparkly paper that's tiny.

Currently reading: Nothing, starting Five Points On an Invisible Line by Su J Sokol next.

troisoiseaux

Read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which reads like how pressing on a bruise feels: poor doomed Giovanni, who you know from early in the first chapter to be fated "to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine" but not yet how he got there; the poor wretched narrator, who's rotting from the inside from internalized homophobia and willing to throw anyone and everyone else under the bus about it. Poor Hella, the narrator's girlfriend turned fiancée, whose brief period of being actually engaged to him reveals her to have such a nightmarish vision of midcentury heterosexual wedded bliss that it's almost a relief when the narrator's secrets blow up in their faces. An excellent novel, but HOO BOY.

In War and Peace, Nikolai Rostov— on facing the inherent contradiction of the top ranks of the Russian army being bosom buddies with the French now that peace has been negotiated between them, while wounded soldiers suffer in makeshift hospitals completely without resources, his friend Denisov faces a court martial for ""requisitioning"" a supply cart to feed his starving division, etc.; so many soldiers died fighting, and for what?— very nearly realizes that war is bad and unfair, but instead he gets drunk about it and insists that obviously whatever Emperor Alexander decides is best!!! So maybe we should all stop criticizing and complaining!!! (To the confusion of his drinking buddies, who literally did not mention the Emperor at all.) On the "paired scenes" theory of War and Peace, I had wondered if the parallel was between Nikolai getting goaded by Dolokhov into gambling himself into massive debt and Pierre getting himself talked out of his grand plans to liberate his serfs, etc., by self-serving estate managers; in fact, the parallel was that "all the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were carried out by Prince Andrei without display and without perceptible difficulty."

andrewducker

1. "Never Just a Period": (tags:menstruation advertising viaLilysea video )
2. Large demographic shifts are upending the social order: (tags:society demographics doom video )

matsushima posting in

3weeks4dreamwidth

fandomocweekly is hosting an adopt-a-prompt amnesty meme. There are lots of prompts without fills any fills. (The quickest way to find an unfilled prompt is to look on the community tags page and choose a challenge prompt with only one post.)

To participate, comment on the adopt-a-prompt post and post your fill to the community by May 15th! Here are the posting guidelines and FAQs.

Current Mood: hopeful

selenak

In which Boyd and Miles share Benjamin Sisko duties - or is one of them Dax?

( Past Tense: The For All Mankind Edition )

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: Berlin

sovay

Counting by months,

rushthatspeaks and I have been together for fifteen and a half years and married for five and a half and missed any formal celebration of our last anniversary because I was on my way to a hospitalization and so when we found ourselves this afternoon at Castle Island where an absurdly stiff breeze was scooting parasailers like hi-vis velella all over Pleasure Bay, the most natural thing when we tired of walking a wind tunnel around the faience-glinting waves was to pursue a meal on the brick-backed patio of our traditional anniversary restaurant, South Boston's ten-year-old Venetian-style bacaro SRV. We found street parking right around the corner. We ordered a smattering of cicchetti—the never-bettered polpette in their velvet of red sauce, the squid-black crostini topped with salt tufts of baccalà, a translucent dab of quince atop a sweetly plush mouthful of ricotta and salumi, an astonishing smear of uni and oyster butter sharpened with mignonette, plus a kitchen gift of lightly crisped eggplant—and a lambent scallop crudo dressed like the jeweled sea with tiny cubes of astringent kiwi and creamy pistachio and torn fresh mint, served on a shell I would have kept if it had come from a beach and not a restaurant I wanted to let me back through its doors ever again. Even the foccacia was bouncy, salt-skinned, assertive enough to eat even without wiping out the bright tomato sauce left over from the eggplant. My amaro mocktail was as darkly herbal as if it could have gotten me high and Rush-That-Speaks' Salt of the Earth was a tongue-spinning concoction of mezcal, fennel, and absinthe that should not have been able to taste so much like green brine. We wrote them an appreciative note and promised to return before autumn, declining their non-negligible roster of desserts in favor of checking out Uncommon Ice Cream up the street, which had not existed the last time we ate at SRV. Rush got the strawberry which really meant its cinnamon toast crunch swirl and I had the savorily flecked rosemary honeycomb. It had been actual ages since I just walked into a restaurant for an affordably luxurious meal with someone I loved, as in the pre-glacial world I could inhabit more or less safely. The two-hour free space on Mass. Ave. was just a present from the parking gods.

Current Music: Jim Ghedi, "The Seasons"

china_shop

Previous poll review
In the Search engine recs poll, 49% of respondents use Google, 46.9% use DuckDuckGo, and 10.2% use StartPage. There were two write-ins for Kagi, a paid search engine that apparently works like it's 2004.

In ticky-boxes, apocalypse fatigue came second to the inevitable winner, hugs, 42.9% to 69.4%. Clumsy parrots came third with 42.9%. Hugs to you all, and thank you for your votes! ♥

Reading
Andrew and I finished Bujold's The Vor Game, and I've downloaded Cetaganda but we haven't started it yet. I've also grabbed the new Murderbot, which might save me from my swamp of easy-listening podcasts.

Still dipping into Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell. Really need to pick up a novel and devour it with my eyeballs sometime, but I accidentally filled my spare moments with something else (see Language Learning below).

Kdramas
Finished Phantom Lawyer, which was enjoyable enough. I wasn't invested in the romance, but the general vibe was good-hearted and cosy.

The Red Sleeve is heavy on the palace politics, so I don't know how long I'm going to last. Ot1h, Junho; otoh, a hundred scheming ministers and princesses. Maybe I should rewatch The King Loves instead?

Absolute Value of Romance is on a collision course with my DNWs, so I have my fingers crossed that it isn't going where everyone seems to thinks it is.

Other TV
We finished Dark Winds season 4 last night. It is a great show with very charismatic leads.

Still watching Rooster, Fringe, Bluey, Deadloch season 2 (no spoilers, please!) and People of Earth. Also original flavour Scrubs, though the comedy is wearing thin on the workplace bullying and constant misgendering, hmm. (Does the reboot keep those elements?)

Not sure what we're replacing Dark Winds with -- probably the latest season of The Lincoln Lawyer.

Audio entertainment
Like, just way too many episodes of Bill and Frank's Guilt-free Pleasures. /o\ Writing Excuses and half an ep of Cross Party Lines, which is diminished by the loss of one of its hosts to offline politics.

Online life
I'm really enjoying

polyamships' prompts for

3weeks4dreamwidth and, similarly,

maevedarcy's memes. Continuing to struggle with keeping up with my reading page, but that's probably the new normal.

The Slo-Mo Rewatch on

sid_guardian has quietened down a little, but it still absorbs about a quarter of my fannish/writing time, and I love it.

Writing/making things
I'm being incredibly slow to make beta edits to my 520 Day fic. Where do the hours go? Never mind, I'm working reasonably steadily, and that's more important to me than output rates.

Life/health/mental state things
Sleep is improving, but my shoulder's been sore for a week... since I downloaded certain apps. Hm.

I have a number of political submissions on my to-do list, each of which require me to think coherent thoughts.

For those following the saga of my car, we called NZAA on Monday 4 May, took it for a long drive (and finished The Vor Game while we were at it), and it's now snuggled against the bank at the bottom of my path, with the trickle charger theoretically doing its thing. I've only driven it once for non-battery-recharging reasons since the oil crisis started, and that outing was at least partly motivated by keeping the battery charged. I'll see how the Warrant of Fitness goes on Monday.

House
The reputtying is complete, and the builders have decamped with the scaffolding, hooray! The next big job will either be [paint upstairs, replace the 1960s gas oven with electric, and refloor the kitchen] or [replace the toilet with a non-cracked, less water-hungry model, and refloor the bathroom]. Neither of these is super urgent, and both require research, decisions, and expenditure, blah, so I'll catch my breath first.

In the meantime, Andrew is filling some gaps in the kitchen wall, and I've ordered an IKEA shelving unit for the built-in wardrobe in my spare room. Which means soon there'll be less random clutter around the living-room, woohoo! In theory, it won't all go into the cupboard; I'm hoping to dispose of some of it while tidying away the rest.

Language Learning
I've spent the last eight years in a Chinese drama fandom, going, "Sunk cost, sunk cost, Korean is my One True Asian Language Love ♥ ♥ ♥" and "I wouldn't have the first clue how to even start with Mandarin" and "argh, tones! argh, characters!" Now, thanks to

starandrea's inspiring/encouraging post about starting their Chinese-learning journey, I have nine-day streaks for both Duolingo and Hello Chinese.

I prefer Hello Chinese: it has a good mix of speaking/listening/reading/writing, a variety of practice options, and occasional audio lessons about usage. I like its focus on teaching grammar-adjacent words like "to be", "this", "possessives", etc, rather than Duolingo's noun clusters (though of course you need both). But I've finished the free portion and am now wrestling with whether I'm actually doing this ~~and whether tracing characters on my screen is what's messing up my shoulder~~. Also, I had a moment of extreme outrage about stroke orders yesterday, lol.

Idk. I'm not sure how much of this I can cram into my aphantasic little head. *dithers with finger hovering over the "one month" (ie, lowest commitment, least cost-effective) option*

Good things
The re-puttying is complete! My sister's coming over tonight. My lemon tree is singing a song of a hundred lemons. My 520 Day fic is nearly done. Guardian, fandom, Dreamwidth.

Poll #34569 Sailing the seas

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

View Respondents

For ship fic, I prefer to:

View Answers

get straight to the romantic smooshing
3 (15.0%)

untangle a thicket of character issues first...
11 (55.0%)

... and/or during...
13 (65.0%)

... and/or after
10 (50.0%)

I don't care for ship fic
1 (5.0%)

other
3 (15.0%)

ticky-box full of giant bumble bees playing trombones
7 (35.0%)

ticky-box full of bananas, nuts, crackers, and fruitcake
7 (35.0%)

ticky-box full of language-learning apps
6 (30.0%)

ticky-box full of baking
9 (45.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs
15 (75.0%)

torachan

1. I got a call from the vet this afternoon and Jasper has a clean bill of health. No crystals in his urine and kidney function is good, so she agreed that it's almost certainly just stress related and we'll continue to try and avoid any possible triggers for him.

2. I actually had a chance to bring up my work decision totally naturally with my former supervisor, as we were talking and he was wondering how much longer I was going to be on this project, so I was like, the thing is, after the project is over, I don't want to go back to being area manager, and explained my decision. He was bummed, but very supportive. I didn't talk to my current supervisor about it because frankly I don't really like him that much and it doesn't really concern him, since once the project is over I would not be in his department anymore anyway (though technically he is now sort of acting vice president so it all concerns him but still). Anyway, I continue to feel good about verbalizing it and making it more real, since having that to look forward to does help to reduce the current stress.

Also last week I felt really stressed and directionless about work, even though it was nice to work from home, but today I had several productive discussions with people and am generally feeling better about the project overall.

3. Yesterday Ollie found (and ate) two spiders! Lucky boy! One of them was under the shoe rack, apparently.

petra

Mind you, I didn't remember till quarter past bedtime, so I am not done reading yet. But I will read!

Current Mood: socially constructed
Current Music: Injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected

sanguinity

Intro/FAQ

My check-in: Broke ground on the new fic to the tune of 650 words. This post went up later than planned because I kept getting distracted by the arithmetic of pounds, shillings, and pence. (And guineas. And crowns. And…)

Day 5:

sanguinity,

ysilme

Day 4:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

glinda,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme

Day 3:

acorn_squash,

badly_knitted,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

dswdiane,

glinda,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

ysilme

( More days )

When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!

china_shop

#mybooks meme via

maevedarcy, adapted by me to suit myself.

This week I'm reading: The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold, read by Grover Gardner; Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell; and a bunch of Kdrama subtitles... ;-p

My favorite book of all time is: What kind of question is this? Completely impossible! I can't even name a favourite author.

My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months) is:

Since February, I've read a bunch of new-to-me Bujold in audio, narrated by Grover Gardner (from the Vorkosigan and Penric series), some Courtney Milan in ebook (Wedgeford series), The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman (hardback from the library), The Hymn to Dionysus by Natasha Pulley in audio, narrated by Sid Sagar, Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell in ebook, Good old-fashioned Korean spirit by Kim Hyun Sook (paperback from the library), and half of Siren Queen by Nigh Vo in audio, narrated by Natalie Naudus.

Of those, my favourite was The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman, mostly because I chose it fairly randomly, and it was delightful, enjoyable, thoughtful, and unexpected. (I love random library finds!) Runner up goes to The Hymn to Dionysus (thanks to

profiterole_reads for the rec).

If we went back another six or eight weeks, it would be Swordcrossed by Freya Marske (secondary-world high-society m/m, with guilds).

The last book I bought was: The Earl Who Isn't by Courtney Milan, in ebook.

The first book I bought with my own money was: LOL, no idea. At all.

The first book I received as a gift was: We're talking 50+ years ago. I do remember having an older (20-something?) penpal who would send me books when I was in my early-teens. In particular, she sent me I Am David and The Hobbit.

The last book I received as a gift was: Siren Queen by Nghi Vo, in audio.

The last book I borrowed from the library was: Hine Toa: a story of bravery by Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku. I only read the prologue before I had to return it. /o\

The book physically closest to me right now is: assuming ebooks don't count, it's Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals from Around the World, edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley, which is at this end of the bookshelf behind me, in the queer section natch.

This or that:
Physical book, e-book, or audio: ebook or audio, depending on the book, the narrator, and my mood.
Used, new, or fell off the back of the internet: Any.
Fiction or non-fiction: Mostly fiction, but I go through NF phases.
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: In ebook, mostly on the couch at home or while I'm stretching after exercise; in audio, while I'm doing dishes, stretching after exercise, walking, folding dumplings, etc.
Paperback or hardcover: physical books can be pretty hard on my hands/wrists/arms/neck, so if I'm reading in hard copy, anything that will lie flat on its own.
Romance or Crime: Romance.

Yes or no:
Literary fiction? Sure.
Sci-fi/fantasy? Yes, please.
Poetry? Not as much as I used to, but sure.
Memoirs? I'm not opposed to them, but rarely pick them out.
Philosophy? Yep. Also, science and pop psych.
Thrillers? Only if there's another aspect to draw me in.
Chronicles? I don't know what this is.
Travel logs? No.
Dialogue heavy? Sure.

Also, I thought I'd add a note on what makes me try a book:

I have a google doc of recs from offline friends and my reading page; I'm definitely influenced by recs. There are some authors and audiobook narrators that will lure me in. I am predisposed towards SF/F and romance, often in combination. I enjoy narrations with a sense of humour and queer rep, and I will generally try Korean books in translation, if I encounter them. As mentioned above, I love browsing the library, semi-randomly choosing a book, and discovering something unexpected and great. But I don't do it very often, because hard copy...

polyrecsdaily_feed

https://polyrecsdaily.tumblr.com/post/815812018955321344

no other version of me i would rather be tonight (Schitt’s Creek):

no other version of me i would rather be tonight, by wardo_wedidit. Nestra: Love languages. Also baseball.

https://polyrecsdaily.tumblr.com/post/815812018955321344

kaberett

The other highlight of the day was my ongoing experiments on myself with respect to movement, which I had intended to witter about, but (1) it got late and (2) when I came to actually look up "neuromuscular/movement patterning" as terms for That Thing about The Process Of Learning Physical Skills I could... only find a bunch of people selling movement coaching services. Working out what the academic terminology for this is: now on my infinite todo list.

(tl;dr I made a back muscle very unhappy a few years ago now; ever since it has been prone to Twinges but not actual dysfunction, which I've been interpreting as Nerves Primed To Go AAAAH; managed to push it past twinge into persistent unhappiness on Saturday, and have spent the past few days playing around with how it responds to various kinds of movement in terms of better/worse/about the same...)

julian

Pepperell has an open Town Meeting, which is to say, Pepperell has the New England tradition of Town Meeting, in which The Populace decides what the town is going to spend and do over the course of the next year. This often amounts to rubberstamping the votes of the Select Board and the School Committee on the budgets, but they do also result in actual questions and actual decisions on some topics, like zoning stuff, so it does involve actual democracy, too.

In some towns, it involves elected representatives being Town Meeting Members (my mom was a Town Meeting Member for literal decades), which is called Representative Town Meeting. Pepperell, as noted, has Open Town Meeting, in which all residents (or in some cases, all registered voters in the town) can deliberate, so I went, rather gleefully, and I was in full Anthropology mode. (I am, yes, registered already. Because.)

I covered Town Meetings for my newspaper, of course, so I went to Every One, and Could Not Vote, had to pay attention to Everything and Be Neutral and Make Sure I Stayed Til The End, so the best thing about last night was I got to leave early.

Aherm.

But I also got to vote! So that was fun. And I identified the people who ask good questions and people sigh in relief when they stand up, and the ones who ask incessant ones forever, about whom other people sigh and mutter about to their neighbors, and I enjoyed the Town Moderator, who isn't as good, Roberts-Rules-wise, as Dedham's long-time one who just retired, but is funny, which is a boon.

They do have Info Sessions the week beforehand (what we called Mini Town Meeting in Dedham), which I did not manage to find out about this time, so I Now Know for future use.

I ran into my neighbor, who works in the Town Clerk's office -- she's one of the people who checks people in, so we nodded to each other in the hallway and I got swept off to the main auditorium. (As is tradition, it was in a school auditorium.) They asked, at the beginning, if anyone was new, and a youngish guy and I waved, and people nodded at us, and the couple next to me said they'd lived in Pepperell 40 years and always came, and I said I was used to Town Meetings because of the newspaper, and it turned out the wife had been in newspapers, too, so that was nice. (Not that I remember their names, but, you know, I can nod to them in future.)

There were a lot of presentations and the thing I was trying to stick around for didn't happen by 9:45, so. I went home. (They have to deal with PFAS contamination in their municipal water supply, and had gotten money for it, but things have changed slightly so they need more money, and I figured it'd be controversial. I don't have to care about the contamination because I have a well, but I do want to Make Sure They Spend Their Money Right.) Alas, I have an early client on Tuesdays, so, as I said, I got to Leave! Yay!

Anyway. Am glad. Like Participating.

stonepicnicking_okapi posting in

3weeks4dreamwidth

For 3weeks4Dreamwidth, I'm offering happy mail, meaning a card/postcard in the post, just message me an name & address, anywhere in the world. I enjoy making/embellishing cards with collage materials.

Examples in the cut:

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boxofdelights

March 2026

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Page Summary

moon_custafer - Video round-up (two videos is a round-up, right?)
mrissa - I think that about covers it
james_davis_nicoll - My Dress-Up Darling, volume 1 by Shinichi Fukuda
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
andrewducker - Life with no children: Art And Tidiness
sabotabby - Reading Wednesday
troisoiseaux - Reading Wednesday
andrewducker - Interesting Links for 06-05-2026
matsushima in 3weeks4dreamwidth - Adopt-a-Prompt at fandomocweekly
selenak - For all Mankind 5.07
sovay - To the green field by the sea
china_shop - Me-and-media update
torachan - Daily Happiness
petra - Happy Murderbot Day!
sanguinity - Write Every Day: Day 5
china_shop - Book meme
polyrecsdaily_feed - no other version of me i would rather be tonight (Schitt’s Creek)
kaberett - highlight of the day: watched a gosling lose its footing and crash dramatically into the water
julian - participatory government, in which I participated
stonepicnicking_okapi in 3weeks4dreamwidth - Happy Mail!

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Base style: Lefty by sarken
Theme: The Trees, The Forest by forthwritten

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Reading

Navigation

Video round-up (two videos is a round-up, right?)

I think that about covers it

My Dress-Up Darling, volume 1 by Shinichi Fukuda

Wednesday Reading Meme

Life with no children: Art And Tidiness

Reading Wednesday

Reading Wednesday

Interesting Links for 06-05-2026

Adopt-a-Prompt at fandomocweekly

For all Mankind 5.07

To the green field by the sea

Me-and-media update

Daily Happiness

Happy Murderbot Day!

Write Every Day: Day 5

Book meme

no other version of me i would rather be tonight (Schitt’s Creek)

highlight of the day: watched a gosling lose its footing and crash dramatically into the water

participatory government, in which I participated

Happy Mail!

Profile

March 2026

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