chanter1944: paratroopers Talbert and Smith in Carentan, Tab looking delighted, Smith embarrassed (BoB - Carentan: Tab and Smithy - ack!)
([personal profile] chanter1944 Oct. 17th, 2025 11:21 pm)
Instead of the Brewers kicking the Dodgers' butts, they kicked our butts. Paraphrase from the original Charmed is go. Well, dang it. As I texted my sister, it was still a hell of a run. Thanks for an amazing year, boys. Now everybody stick around for 2026, please! I don't want to lose a one of this roster to a trade.

Got my [community profile] seasonsofdrabbles signup in under the wire, whew! That always intimidates me, far more than writing the actual work(s). I think it's the number of offers and requests that does it.

Tonight, there has been cursing both at the baseball game and series score, and at bluetooth keyboards and their habit of randomly unpairing from the associated laptop. Grrrrr! Pain in the backside! This one took a maneuver attempted purely on hopeful chance to sort out. Seriously, quit doing that, otherwise perfectly nice keyboard.

Tomorrow, there will be an enormous, peaceful rally. I hope our turnout, both nationally and locally, knocks June's numbers out of the park -ouch, yes, phrasing. Dang Dodgers.
My answers to this week's Friday Five don't feel enough for a post, but three things proverbially do make a post so...

- Current reading quote i: "There was no burial save in the ruins of the houses, or in the bellies of the beasts and birds."

- Eat all the things! I saw a Strawberry Tree, Arbutus unedo, in fruit while I was out for my daily constitutional so I ate one of the red spiky-but-soft fruits but "I only ate one" as is reputedly traditional. It was sweet with a mild flavour and a creamy + grainy texture. The fruit bruises easily enough not to be worth collecting except for preserves or same day stewing (although I don't know how that would turn out - possibly good for a crumble because of the texture unless the pippy bits soften when stewed?). The local birds, who appear to be spoiled for choice, have left the fruit alone even after it dropped, which made me double check for edibility before I tried it. 8/10 would eat again, but only one.... Feeling MOLTO ITALIANO now, obv. Or possibly Spanish: it me. ;-)

- Current reading quote ii: "When we ride to the Fairgreen on the Friday evening led by My Lord Whipman, we ride with ghosts beside us."

- This week's Friday Five is stalking you on LJ / DW !!1!! )
sineala: Detail of Harry Wilson Watrous, "Just a Couple of Girls" (Reading)
([personal profile] sineala Oct. 15th, 2025 05:35 pm)
What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

Captain America #4, Iron and Frost #1, One World Under Doom #8 )

What I'm Reading Next

I have read eight books this year. I do not have enough brain to read anything except, apparently, a couple comics a week.
96. Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms, by Alistair Moffat, 1999, non-fiction popular history, 3.5/5

Mostly notes to self tbh. Soz not soz. :-)

Blah blah yadda yadda my door is always open ::slams:: (bet nobody gets this reference) )

In conclusion: very pop history, but for me an interesting overview of several aspects of late Roman and post-Roman history I didn't know enough about and which slot into what I did know to expand my understanding, i.e. the book did what the author intended (even though the marketing ruse was the short section of Arthuriana).

P.S. When I googled for the plural of "bonus" in English the AI threw a sickie, lmao.
mecurtin: Daniel agrees reading is fundamental (reading)
([personal profile] mecurtin Oct. 14th, 2025 09:59 am)
Purrcy was inside, enjoying the sun and breeze, when suddenly there was a human outside! Taking pictures! And it's Mommy! Hi Mommy!
Hi fuzzzy baby! What a loving face you have

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby looks eagerly through the screen toward the camera taking his picture from outside the house. It's a sunny day, he's sitting a white window ledge, his pupils are just slits. One front paw extends towards the camera, he looks intent and happy.



It was a really chilly night a couple days ago, so there was a VERY cuddly #Purrcy next to my legs & feet all night. Very choice.
#cats #CatsOfBluesky #Caturday

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby lies on his side looking at the camera, with his front paws curled up against his chest and his back paw extended toward the viewer. He is endlessly adorable.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby lies on his side looking at the camera, with his front paws curled up against his chest and his back paw extended toward the viewer. He is endlessly adorable.



There is too much. I will sum up:

I'm having to reduce social media AGAIN due to The Horrors, but also I'm promoting stuff the Oct.18th No Kings protests, so I see more than is good for me. PLEASE come out if you can, we need this to be overwhelmingly large, peaceful, joyful. Wear yellow, it's the color people seem to be settling on as the No Kings "movement" color.

They say that old people need less sleep but in order to actually feel rested I need 10 hours of sack time -- in part because I have to get up to pee so often. So I've started putting myself to bed at 10 (!!) and using my Happy Light in the morning, which is definitely needed at this time of year if it's going to rain like this, I was starting to feel Depression creeping back in. At least that's going back into its cave, hissing.

One reason I need so much sleep is because I'm often in pain, from sciatica or otherwise. I frequently have to lie down to stop it hurting, and all I can do is read, so I read a LOT. SO MUCH.

All of Us Murderers, KJ Charles: Trademark KJC steamy m/m sex with great characterization as Zeb Wyckham, called to the family pseudo-Gothic manse, tries to patch things up with his ex Gideon while dealing with his horrible relatives and their bizarre demands. I was never able to suspend my disbelief, because this is set in the 20s yet WWI doesn't seem to have happened.

I think of it as taking place in an "Agatha Christie AU", because IIRC Agatha Christie's stories written in the 20s & 30s mostly happen in a world where WWI doesn't seem to have happened (when you look at timelines, backstories, etc). I strongly prefer Dorothy Sayers, all of whose Lord Peter novels have the long-term effects of the War as at least subtext if not text. And Gaudy Night is a useful witness to the coming storm, whereas Christie's "The Moving Finger", written during WWII and featuring an injured pilot, seems to take place in Jo Walton's Small Change universe, which is actually that of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar.

But I digress! The point is, All of Us Murderers didn't work for me, because I couldn't feel like I knew when it was actually *set*.
- Lexicophilia: I think the terms related to "popular kids" should be "populist kids" to help people think about the system they're buying into.

- In the hood, wearing my hoodie, interacting with the neighbourhood....

Me, outside in black trousers and a black hoodie with the hood up because it's raining.
Neighbour, apparently having indulged in a liquid lunch: "Has anyone ever told you that you look like a Dark Lord?"
Me, in amused retaliation: "And you look like Fred Dibnah, mate."
Neighbour: "Fred Dibnah? That's really hurtful!"
Me, still amused: "You said I looked like a Dark Lord!"
Neighbour, explaining that he didn't mean any of the cool evil geniuses but one of the second tier inadequates....
Me, now actually offended instead of mollified, lmao.

P.S. Also love the fact there's a long Fred Dibnah, aka Дибна, Фред, page on Russian language wikipedia.

- Continue musing on whether the Romantics did us more of a cultural service or disservice by reinventing castles, medieval military architecture as phenomenally expensive display of power and resource-hoarding, in their ruined and slighted state as sublimely beautiful if viewed through an approved lens (sometimes a literal Claude glass), and reinventing chivalry as graciously heroic, thus giving a sort of closure to otherwise unresolved history of war and mass violence. Interesting as a Brit to remember castles were still in use as defensible fortifications during the Second English Civil War, and later elsewhere in Europe, only 150 years before Romanticism was peaking.
skygiants: Yankumi from Gosuken going "..." (dot dot dot)
([personal profile] skygiants Oct. 13th, 2025 12:34 pm)
I'm thinking even more fondly of The Mune in retrospect also because although I don't know that I feel that Sue Dawes is always 100% succeeding at her Victorian pastiche she has definitely done her research and is making a solid effort. Meanwhile, the book I read immediately afterwards, Jen Fawkes' Daughters of Chaos, is a Civil War-set epistolary novel that has no interest in trying to sound like something written in nineteenth century. This is of course a choice an author is free to make, but not one that I personally welcome -- although this turned out to be in the broad scheme the least of my problems with this book.

entirely problems )
newredshoes: Watercolor Hebrew chai, French "this means we will live" (<3 | nous vivrons)
([personal profile] newredshoes Oct. 13th, 2025 01:32 pm)
I thought I might stay up last night to watch the hostage release, but I started flagging after midnight and thought it might be better to take it all in first thing in the morning anyway. Then Gingko woke up around 5:30 needing very badly to go out, and I didn't go back to sleep then. I went straight to Twitter, where the first video I saw was Bar Kupershtein reuniting with his family.

Bar is related to a close friend of mine. He looks so, so much like my friend's kids. He is one of three hostages I am two or three degrees removed from (that I'm aware of, it could be more), and the only one who's alive. Bar's father was unable to walk or speak because of a stroke following a car accident, but he was determined to do both by the time his son came back, and he did.

I've spent hours watching every reunion: Noa Argamani and her partner Avinatan Or, who the hospital says lost 40% of his body weight. The Horn brothers from Argentina, the Berman twins whom Emily Damari loves, the absolutely ridiculous Cunio brothers whose partners and very young children were also hostages, Evyatar David who looked like a skeleton forced to dig his own grave in a tunnel on camera. More, more, more, more of them. Two people especially stand out.

One is this video of Segev Kalfon reuniting with his parents, who didn't know if he was alive for a year and a half after 10/7. I have never, ever heard a sound like the noise his father makes. The fathers are the ones losing it, in so many of these videos.

Then there's this one — not of a hostage, but an anonymous? guy alone in what looks like a highway tunnel somewhere in the desert around sunrise. He takes the coolest drag of his cigarette you've ever seen and then launches into the Shema like I've never heard it. Just incredible. Thrilling, beautiful, defiant, gorgeous. Takes another drag in the middle!

Now for the dead to come home. Hamas has only released four of the promised 28, including Eli Sharabi's brother Yossi, including Nepalese ag student Bipin Joshi. I wish I could take a nap (Gingko is snoring softly beside me on the bed), but I'm working until 7. I can't stop trawling for videos and images and information and stories. I can't believe they're finally, finally (almost, mostly) home.
thefourthvine: A weird festive creature. Text: "Yuletide squee!" (Yuletide Woot!)
([personal profile] thefourthvine Oct. 13th, 2025 11:09 am)
Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi!

I am going to provide you with all the details I can, because that is who I am as a person. Thank you so, so much for writing in one of these fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Likes/DNWs and General Stuff )


Between Silk and Cyanide -- Leo Marks, Leo Marks, Forest Yeo-Thomas )


blink-182 )


Blue Prince, Worldbuildling, Simon P. Jones )


Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )
skygiants: Nellie Bly walking a tightrope among the stars (bravely trotted)
([personal profile] skygiants Oct. 12th, 2025 09:44 am)
While I'm talking about Books That Surprised Me, The Mune is a book with a killer premise and some interesting speculative ideas that I don't think really comes together but did take Several turns! that I did Not expect!!

The killer premise: a group of 'surplus' pregnant Victorian women sourced from asylums and workhouses, en route to the colonies, get shipwrecked on a island with their newborn infants and develop their own society with the limited resources available. Also, there is Something Weird About the Island; also, there are monsters in the water; also, although most of the women are learning to thrive in their new circumstances, Depressed Betty Keeps Causing Problems! !! !!!

I was really excited about this book because I have some friends who love Robinsoniads and this was the most interesting-looking Robinsoniad I'd hit in a minute, so I was hoping to recommend it to them ... as for me I don't tend to gravitate towards a solo Robinsoniad particularly but I do love a collective Robinsoniad, when a bunch of people are stranded in a Situation together and have to make a community happen. I didn't end up fully convinced that the society that comes about on this island was a plausible outgrowth from the socialization that the women bring to it -- I needed some more steps on the ladder to show how this group of people not only decide to communally raise their children without gender distinctions but name them all things like 'Lightning' and 'Rainbow' -- but it is certainly doing something new with lonely island survival tropes and I also quite like the interspersed bits of Pastiche Victorian Science Fiction that counterpoint the island events and ring changes on the themes, mostly in the mind of Betty.

Betty simultaneously feels like a bit of a caricature and like the only actually Victorian person in the book. She's a thirteen-year-old kitchen maid who was favored and given some education by her master before he raped her, and she cherishes dreams of going back Exactly to the way life was before All That Unfortunate Business. She's not only the only person on the island who's still concerned about maintaining the rules, religion and mores of the mainland, but after a while the only person who thinks about being rescued at all; while everyone else dutifully do their various survival tasks, she sits on the shore optimistically next to rescue flags and whispers stories to the children about the paradise they left behind on the mainland. She also has a real eugenicist streak. Midway through the book, as the kids start getting older, Betty starts Making Choices and things start getting real weird! major spoilers!! )

I left the book feeling a.) somewhat confused about the import of all of this and b.) somewhat unconvinced by the character beats (and also by the dialect choices) but despite this I didn't actually have a bad time. Maybe it's just that the book feels like it's reaching for a flavor of 70s Literary Feminist Science Fiction for which I have a fondness. It's nice to read something written in 2025 that's this unabashedly weird! I appreciate it!
chanter1944: an older house and surrounding autumn scenery (Wisconsin autumn: smells like fall)
([personal profile] chanter1944 Oct. 11th, 2025 10:15 pm)
The Brewers just punched their ticket to the NLCS! Boom, my dears! I was more than a little nervous that we weren't going to pull that off, but I'm delighted I was worrying about nothing!

Yes, I've been following the season all the way along. Folks who know me RL have heard me squeaking over baseball all summer. There's more squeaking to follow, now! My youngest sister and I are batting around (pun totally intended) getting tickets to one of the NLCS games in Milwaukee, if we're able and prices aren't too high for us. I know, and she knows, that I'll be bringing a portable radio for the play-by-play if we do go. Right now, I'm just going to roll around in the warm fuzzies for a minute. XD
Name five…

1. ... things you can't live without.
Air, water, protein, fat, minerals.

2. ... of the best moments in your life.
The only thing in your life that you can control, although not all the time, are your reactions so you might as well choose to live your best life whenever possible.

3. ... celebrities you can't stand.
I'm going to let you into a secret here: celebrities don't exist. Just stop paying attention to the useless distractions tempting you away from focusing on your own life in your communities.

4. ... books you enjoy(ed) reading.
See my book reviews, literature, and poetry tags. :-)

5. ... items in your purse/backpack/on your desk.
Desk
- Most recent desk rock: a "water stone" lump of pale coral / salmon-flesh coloured beach alabaster with many variously-sized wave-smoothed hollows on the surface of a very irregular eccentric ellipse. Because of its shape it can easily be balanced in multiple orientations.
- A mixed herd of offbrand "lego" dinosaurs, which I was idly playing with last night when I needed a couple of minutes idling.
- A painted stone, found at Bae Cemaes, depicting a white ghost saying, "BOO!"
When I first found this I showed it to a passing binman who mimed being terrified - love him for this, obv. :D
I also found several other painted rocks and relocated a Minion under the recently closed Menai Bridge, leading to a stranger on book-of-faces commenting to the artist, "We've just found one of your minions hiding near the Menai Bridge!!!" :-)
- A 2cm diameter 1948 sixpence I found amongst the spoil in an abandoned limestone quarry, which must be an incredibly statistically unlikely find.
- A pile including my planner - the list of lists - and associated ongoing paperwork, various paper maps, and books on parasitology, geology, marine biology, and botany.

6. Show me your tells?
Tags:
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
([personal profile] camwyn Oct. 10th, 2025 10:12 pm)
ME: *making ramen and fake meat in the microwave*
CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER: Hey, Cam. Which would you rather have to live on, squirrel meat or raccon meat?
ME: Are we talking about squirrels who live in proximity to human households, or deep wilderness squirrels?
CIO: The wilderness ones.
ME: Squirrel then. One, I have more recipes for them, two, my mom used to work with a guy who ate squirrel in his native country and wouldn't touch American squirrels because they mostly ate human garbage, and three, raccoons carry at least two different things on the Wikipedia article about 'diseases and parasitic infections with highest lethality rates'.
CIO: Good choice.

Worth noting, he's told me in the past that if an apocalyptic event happens he's going to try and find me because he thinks I have the best chamce of anyone he knows of surviving the apocalypse long-term.
sineala: A close-up photo of an uncapped fountain pen, a 1955 Sheaffer Sentinel Snorkel in burgundy. (Fountain Pen)
([personal profile] sineala Oct. 10th, 2025 09:46 pm)
I know it's weird to delurk with a random pen review but, whatever, hi. I have a bunch of half-finished posts from like six months to a year ago that were going to be about the book I read or the game I played but then I got like twenty migraines in a row and the plot details became less memorable. I am still getting like twenty migraines in a month but a pen review has no plot. I have no idea if I will keep posting anything at all (possible topics: more pens, fandom, more dead languages) but I'm here now and I have enough caffeine that I can't feel my current migraine.

Also, this isn't a fountain pen -- it's a ballpoint pen -- so the people reading this who aren't fountain pen nerds might actually want one. It's the Fisher Space Pen! I really like it!

The Young Wizards fans among you might be interested, although I actually didn't buy the one I probably should have bought. More details below.

Fisher Space Pen )
skygiants: Enjolras from Les Mis shouting revolution-tastically (la resistance lives on)
([personal profile] skygiants Oct. 10th, 2025 06:13 pm)
Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide surprised me in several ways, some good, some bad, and some just very funny.

For a start, for a book titled Notes from a Regicide, it is really pretty minimally about regicide. I would have liked a bit more regicide. On the other hand, it is maximally about living on after dramatic events, about Having Done something world-shaking and then becoming just another person moving the various broken-and-put-back-together pieces of yourself through a life like anybody else's, and that I liked very much.

It is also, I cannot help but think, about what happens when an author sits down and thinks 'I want to write trans Grantaire but am I more interested in transmasc Grantaire or transfem Grantaire ... well! actually!! Who needs an Enjolras, why NOT trans het Grantaire x Grantaire!' I can't in any way prove this but once I started thinking it I couldn't un-think it and it did absolutely bring a particular lens to my reading of the book that heightened both my appreciation and my irritation ...

Okay, so the plot. In the novel's present day, Griffon, an NYC journalist, is arranging the papers of his deceased adoptive parents, Etoine and Zaffre. Etoine and Zaffre are immigrants from a Ruritanian principality named Stephensport; in their younger days, they were instrumental in bringing about revolutionary change to Stephensport, subsequent to which they fled to NYC and lived out the rest of their lives as mildly notable elderly emigré artists. The novel moves back and forth between Etoine's narrative of his life in Stephensport -- as written during a time in prison post-regicide when he thought Zaffre was dead -- and Griffon's notes on his own life with these people, how he came to be a part of their lives as a trans teen from an abusive home, his various attempts and failures to understand them and vice versa.

The other reason I think Les Mis is integral to this novel, by the way, is the fact that Zaffre is compared on like the second or third page to Jean Valjean because of her strong back and shoulders, the first reference the book ever makes, and I do think that if you're turning around thoughts about revolution and post-revolution and traumatized children rescued by traumatized people you might get end up with something like the shape of this book. The Griffon chapters are about how Griffon loves his parents and is fascinated by them and is also really often deeply annoyed by them, the way they often don't recognize his various attempts to gain their approval, the way they have their own private history that they will not share, the way their house is always messy, the way they behave really embarrassingly in art museums. And sometimes he lashes out at them, and sometimes they lash out at him, and sometimes they do provide exactly what's needed and sometimes it's exactly the opposite. I enjoyed seeing this domestic-but-not-at-all-cozy narrative juxtaposed with the fantastical revolution story; I've never seen it done quite this way before, and it's not what I expected, and I liked it quite a bit.

The revolution story itself -- well, this is the part, I think, that perhaps needs a bit more regicide. All the backstory is from Etoine's point of view, and Etoine has gotten all the not-caring-about-the-revolution-except-as-it-impacts-his-beloved bits of Grantaire. Zaffre, despite clearly being a fellow Grantaire -- she's severely, schizoaffectively depressed and introduced by Etoine as a fellow art student who's awkwardly obsessed with him before the feelings later become mutual -- is also the Enjolras; she's passionate about the revolution and deeply involved in the logistics of it (and blonde, and majestic, and compared at one point to the Marianne.) But we know very little about why she's passionate about it or what kind of logistical activities she's doing for it because Etoine barely talks about it. Etoine really just wants to talk about his alcoholism and his trans journey and his romance with Zaffre, until circumstances eventually slam him into the regicide situation. Griffon, annotating the text, complains about how little Etoine talks about the revolution, and I think Isaac Fellman thinks that because he's pointed at the lacunae and drawn a circle around it as Intentional he can dust his hands off and feel satisfied with it. I disagree! I think if you are titling your book Notes From a Regicide it is perhaps incumbent upon you to put at least a little bit of politics into it!

Also, speaking of politics ... NYC hasn't got any. This bit is technically spoilers but really just worldbuilding spoilers )

That said, I do like the little bits of worldbuilding we get about Stephensport, though I wish there were more of it -- the disintegrating electors buried in the stone yard who rise every couple of decades to choose a new king is really very good as a bad system of government -- and I like also that Fellman is one of the few contemporary authors I've come across who's both written a speculative society that supports a form of trans identity, and then instead of stopping there written about people in that society who are queer within that context, who want things that their society's particular allowed form of gender expression doesn't support or condone. So: an unusual book, an ambitious book. An interesting book, I think, on gender and identity and transgenerational trauma. Not a particularly interesting book on revolution. But revolution sells, I guess, so Notes from a Regicide it is.
Fic or Treat
[community profile] ficortreat

Chanter1944's Door


DW username: [personal profile] chanter1944

Light is on for: Anyone who feels like ringing the chime.

What's in the Bowl? Fic! You're likely to get a short(er) fic, anywhere from a drabble to something longer, depending on how the muse strikes and what it says. I'm also game to link folks to family-friendly critter videos if so desired, on the order of purrful cats or goofy retrievers.

Let Me Know: Fandom, pairing if so desired (I'm fine and more with gen or friendship too, for the record) and anything I should avoid. Current fandoms are Star Trek TOS (including Pike's captaincy and the Vulcan's Glory era), TNG, and DS9, Band of Brothers, Miraculous Ladybug (no spoilers beyond season 5, episode 9, please!), Dragonriders of Pern (Anne's work, not Todd's, sorry folks), Sapphire & Steel, Diane Duane's Young Wizards (I've read through GWP, but haven't gotten to the short stories yet), many an oldtime radio series (feel free to ask), and I'm up for writing queer and trans-friendly Harry Potter snippets.

Other info: I will not write dubcon/noncon, graphic animal harm (rescuing critters from harm is fine), humiliation/degradation, telepathic violation, major character death, or in the case of Pern, dragon loss. On the flip side, I love minor characters, subverting expectations and stereotypes, and worldbuilding that bolsters aspects of canon. I'm the girl who's got a whole series in progress about barely-seen Pernese characters and another featuring TOS's Yeoman Mears quite prominently, so! I do plan to post what I write to my AO3, and if you'd like your fic gifted to you over there, let me know your username and I'll happily oblige.
gwyn: (bucky & steve alley purple)
([personal profile] gwyn Oct. 8th, 2025 06:36 pm)
A while ago, [personal profile] minim_calibre asked me if I'd read any Kate Atkinson and I said I had, but it was very long ago--I read Behind the Scenes at the Museum and the first Jackson Brodie book after I fell in love with the Case Histories TV series with Jason Isaacs. She ended up buying me two books she'd read, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, and I finally had the chance to start on the first one, which is like four inches thick so felt pretty daunting. I'd been so busy with work (some truly awful, awful books [mygodihateYAsomuch] and one really good one that I wasn't sure I could do it, but I really wanted to keep my reading streak going. It's been so wonderful to reclaim the reading part of my life, I can't even tell you. It's also hugely inspirational to my own writing when I'm reading really good fiction--or heck even nonfiction.

If you've never read Life After Life, I can highly, highly recommend it. It'd be easy to say it's essentially a time loop story/multiple timeline tale, where little decisions or events have history-altering effects both personal and global, but that barely touches on the story. I just loved it and I'm looking forward to the related book about one of the characters, I hope it's as un-put-downable as Life After Life.

I discovered there was a BBC four-part limited series of it a couple years ago, on Prime in the US, and it was...okay. It should have been at least six episodes, though, because a book that sprawling requires a lot more time--there were significant cuts to the story that I think any fan of the book would be a bit twitchy about, and a major change to the ending. Still, a lot of good actors and it was nice to see some of the characters come to life.

It's just so nice to feel like I can read again after all these years. Like when I have my nose in a screen, it's because it's something that adds a little value in my life, rather than the horrible garbage of everyday life.

Yesterday, a friend and I went to a pumpkin patch and U-pick farm, because she's very into the gourds and cucurbits for art, and I wanted to have a nice outing. We lucked out and got the most spectacularly perfect, sunny day in the 70s, and I found a couple of beautiful pastel pumpkins (one kind of a mottled salmon and blue-green and the other a pale blue) as well as a starfish-shaped gourd to buy, even though I've never been into Halloween at all. I'm not sure if I'll put them out on the back porch or the front, the front's pretty crowded and small, but I think that's the "obvious" place for a Hallloweeny decoration. I also bought some apples from the farm's produce side, and the best sweet corn on the cob I have ever tasted in my life. It was so good we were texting each other about it. If I didn't live over an hour away, I would have driven right back there for more corn.

Everyone always says fall is their favorite season, but I think if you live somewhere where it is relatively dry in October, and the leaves change early, sure, it'd be fine, but in the PNW it's just suddenly cold, super wet, and miserably gray. The leaves are just soggy masses, so you don't get to wander outside in piles of dry leaves, wearing your woolen sweaters and scarves, feeling the sun on your face while you drink your punkin spice bullshit drinks. Nope, instead you have to wear your Gore-Tex jackets and waterproof shoes and hope your street won't flood when the heavy rains have nowhere to go because everything's clogged with slimy leaves. Bleh. Give me spring any day.

My numbers have been holding steady at a place where it looks like remission, though no one wants to say it is. I could have a bone marrow biopsy, and may still do that, to determine whether I really am there, but honestly, then I'm just going to be doing pretty much the same thing I'm doing now, because I'm essentially doing what Dr. Li does for maintenance on people who've gone through stem cell transplants or the new hotness, CAR-T cell therapy. I am sure there'll be some fiddling with drugs, but considering the nightmare of the insurance situations right now, I don't know what will happen.

I had a mammogram today and a DEXA scan (which just seems so nuts to me, as it's for osteoporosis and I feel like having bone marrow cancer means that osteoporosis is kind of a silly thing to worry about), and next week I go to the dermatologist, and hopefully I will get some of these things done before the nazi pricks can take everything away.

As always happens, at the mammogram, the technician, who was nice and did a pretty good job of not hurting me, mentioned knowing someone with multiple myeloma who's had it for 18 years now. I cannot tell you how often someone tells me about their family member/friend/co-worker who has it and who's lived with it for X years, and I just...I have to smile and say oh wow. I HATE IT.

It used to be a death sentence, but until just recently, there were new drugs being approved constantly so the survival rates and times have been increasing constantly, but it's by no means an easy survival for most, and there is no such thing as a "cure" where it disappears completely. It always comes back, and I've been confronted a lot lately with that because some people in our support group have died, both of whom had lived with it for a long time, going back into treatment each time it returned. It always does. Ugh, I wish people would shut the fuck up about it. I know they think they're being positive for me, but it's just not as simple as they think.

Otherwise, I just keep plugging along. Blues is definitely getting pretty frail and fragile, but his appetite is great, so I'm hoping he hangs on for a while longer. He has a concerning thing on his lower jaw that might be a cyst or might be cancer or anything in between, but it's in a tricky spot, so all we can do is watch it for now.

I know there are other things I wanted to talk about--including my rewatches of everything from the X-Files to the Good Place--but I'll save that for another post, this one's long and boring enough!
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