unmowngrass

The Friday Five
1. Do you like to spend time outdoors?
Oh, yes. Providing I have sunscreen!

2. What is your favorite flower?
I really like roses, but I think it's a toss-up between the blue iris and the stargazer lily.

3. Any favorite warm weather activities?
Biking and hiking, ideally only in warm-ISH weather (it gets horribly hot here).

4. Have you ever kept a garden? If so, what did you grow?
Yes, many times. Tomatoes grow well in this climate, and we have cherry, orange, and mandarin trees. I've grown canteloupe in the past, as well as zucchini (eh). But ever since we moved to this house some 26 years ago, nothing but the zucchini has grown well (and it goes from thumb-sized to baseball bat seemingly overnight). The soil in our garden area appears to be really crappy. :O

5. Do you know how to swim?
Yes. Not in an impressive way (I hate to put my face in the water), so I usually dog paddle or do the breaststroke with my head up. OTOH, I can backstroke for days...

halfshellvenus

I managed to avoid running over a snake today, which is a plus. It was around 83F, and they tend to come out in the heat... and then lie on the pavement in the shade. Most of the time, I wind up running over them because I think they're a stick and it's too late to avoid them anyway. :(

This one was not a rattlesnake, thank goodness. And it was a chonk! Wow.

I also saw some turklets. It's that time of year! These were young enough to be cute (which doesn't last long). And I spotted the aftermath of a fish hoping to chomp a black butterfly that was hovering over the river.

Being early May, the wild grape buds are out. They have a sweet, peppery smell that is nothing like actual grapes. The cottonwood trees are also releasing fluff into the air, and that can come and go for a month depending on how often we transition back into winter weather. Soon, squirrel mating season will be running full tilt, and I'll have something else to dodge while biking out there. But in the meantime, I hope the sweetness of spring lingers a little bit longer. :)

halfshellvenus

I saw a turtle at the edge of the bike path on my ride today. I'm not sure what it was doing there, though turtles have been spotted in that area before. But it's a crawl of maybe half a block to the river, where the water supply is. This was a decent-sized specimen, about 7" in diameter, though they can get bigger.

I dodged a fair number of fuzzy black caterpillars out there, but it was nothing like 20-30 years ago, when they were everywhere! We also don't get clouds of orange ladybugs anymore. I spotted one in flight last week, and I've picked up hitchhikers before, but there are so few of them now. The enormous increase in turkeys, egrets, and Canadian geese in the intervening years seems a likely cause.

I occasionally get actual red ladybugs at the house, probably because we have so many roses (50-60 plants). People buy them for aphid control and release them in their yards, and they migrate to our house. ;) The ones that occur naturally in our yard are more of a yellow-brown color, and sometimes they pinch. Rude. :D

Speaking of plants, I got ZERO daffodils this year. The shoots came up, the same as always, but no flowers. I have a clump near the front door (where we can see them from inside), and another across the walkway. That second group has never flowered. I planted them maybe 8-10 years ago, and I even dug them up once and replanted them at a more shallow depth, but Nada. I'd like more daffodils, not less. Maybe it's too shady where I have them? Or maybe it was that endless fog earlier this winter?

I hope to get out this coming weekend and do something about the weeds and all the roses that need dead-heading. I would have liked to do that last weekend, but it rained again. I didn't get much of anything done, TBH. A lot of my TODOs involve dealing with the extra framed family pictures that we don't have places for now. It's as much an emotional task as a physical one, which is why I can't seem to do it. Give me strength!

halfshellvenus

another staged assassination attempt. :( What's really at issue? Distracting peole from the war in Iran and the Epstein files. Not to mention grift and treason, but who's counting?

In lighter news, Sacramento is still in the off-again/on-again rain cycle. A few days of biking outdoors, a few days in the garage. This is keeping the summer heat at bay, though, so I'll take it. May is coming, and that can be the start of hell. Or not. We got married on May 20, some almost 37 years ago. It was a beautiful day, about 80F. On our first anniversary, it poured all weekend. Other years? 90-100F. There's no way of knowing until you're in it.

We watched Beckett last night with The Boy, which was entertaining but another reminder that Denzel Washington's son will probably never have a huge career because he looks like his mother rather than his father. Pleasant, but not distinctive. Then HalfshellHusband and I watched Happiness For Beginners, which I always thought was a Simon Pegg movie. It was not— different flavor altogether— but we enjoyed it. Gorgeous scenery.

( Books )

Speaking of which, there are ads now for eyedrops you can use to temporarily remove the need for reading glasses. Ullhhhh... That seems kind of risky to me. I used to have daily contact lenses that would sharpen my right-eye vision and make my left eye work for short distances. But I always wound up taking the left lens out when I biked, because otherwise I couldn't see the traffic behind me clearly enough to know if it was safe to merge left. And most of my reading now is either computer screen or Kindle, and the Kindle lets me adjust the font size up and down!

The medical miracles I want have to do with weight control (currently ineligible) and shedding less hair. I've seen a little improvement on that last issue. My sister bought and then didn't use about 6 months' worth of Nutrafol, which she passed along to me. AFAIK, it isn't helping the corners of my lower eyelashes grow back, but it HAS reduced the amount of hair that comes off in the shower. Possibly due to the extra iodine— added to my multivitamin, I'm at 250% RDA. \o? My doctor won't raise my thyroid levels (which I think would help BOTH issues), so maybe this is a small workaround? It may also be helping my energy levels and mental clarity a little, both of which can suffer with low thyroid.

What's everyone been doing this weekend?

hafnia

Hello to the new people. The last time I made an intro post was, well, about three months ago, give or take, so I'll just use it, honestly.

Stuff that's maybe not mentioned explicitly on there, er:

1). I'm on Mastodon as titania@retro.pizza. If you're also on the fedi you're free to follow me, though I haven't really had the bandwidth to post there much of late. Most of what gets shared there are sourdough bakes and/or other cooking/baking stuff.

2). I'm on AO3 as hafnia. Most of what's up there is E-rated original work. I am never going to pressure anyone to read it, but I like writing and sharing what I write, so!

One of the things I have been working on in therapy is trying to be more open and vocal about the work I do that I'm proud of, allowing myself to take pride in it and identify with it. Without going too in-depth about it: a good portion of my childhood and adulthood was a lot of, "no one wants to hear from you", both about hobby stuff and professional stuff. So, I'm trying to actively refute that, both because that's no way to live, and also because I am proud of a lot of what I've done.

To that end, there's a post up that talks about recent writing. If you want a T-rated (for language, solely) example of what I write about, A Spacer's Guide to Xenovarmints is probably a good place to start :)

3). I run a a lot of tabletop. Like, truly, a lot — ttrpg is one of my main hobbies, though I try not to talk about it much here, because I feel like hearing about campaigns you're not actively involved in gets pretty dully. Still, to that end, I am pretty much always happy to welcome new people to the table. If you have any curiosity about tabletop and where to start, I'm happy to talk to you about it. Everything I run is done via Discord (I'm hafnium_iv_oxide on there), and I run a small community where we talk about games, run stuff, and just generally hang out. (It will likely be moved off Discord sometime this summer, if I can get my shit together to make it happen, but, well, for now....)

I think, er, that's most of it. Will say that I try to generally be a friendly person, so if you are left going, "er...?" and have questions, just ask.

I am pants at commenting a lot of the time — I mean to, when I have something to say, but autism + mild social anxiety (as a result of being on the spectrum, ha) means that I occasionally have a difficult time making myself hit "post". Please know that I do read regularly — I check my reading page at least once a day — and I will never go, "what, you?" at someone commenting on my journal. ♥

hafnia

3weeks4dreamwidth will be starting soon!

There's a friending meme up now, if you want to join in:

Colorful image that says 3weeks4dreamwidth friending meme

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

hafnia

See also: oh right there's a bunch of stuff up on AO3 and I should probably talk about it solely so I don't forget that I, like, did it.

( Beneath the jump, since not everyone's interested in this. )

I...think that's it? At least now I can feel less weird being like, "oh yeah, I haven't been posting, because I've been doing other stuff" when that "other stuff" is, like. THE ABOVE. Ha.

halfshellvenus

What a fantastic movie! We finally got to see it, and absolutely loved it. Funny, heartfelt, sad at times, and really, really good. I was glad I hadn't read the book beforehand, because that made the entire story a surprise and I enjoyed discovering it. I've became a late fan of Ryan Gosling, thanks to his work in Bladerunner 2049 and Barbie. Who would have thought?

We also watched a Netflix preview screening that I can't talk about. This is the third one, though, with the first one being about 8 months ago. Do they ever rework those movies based on beta-group feedback? Or just scrap the projects? :O

Saturday, we saw My Oxford Year, which we both liked quite a bit. Romances are really hit and miss, but this one was good. Our son was out of town this weekend, so this was a good opportunity. Romances and romantic comedies are not his thing.

In TV series, I've been watching an older detective procedural called Blue Murder on BritBox, which I quite like. But I've veered off temporarily to binge-watch Our Flag Means Death on Hulu. What a bizarre show. Kind of cracktastic, really. I'm mainly in it for Taika Waititi and the weird minor characters. :O

We had quite a bit of rain and wind last week, so I've been biking in the garage more than I'd like. More thunderstorms and lots of rain today, so I'll be in there again in a few hours! There will be a river or two running through the garage, and now that the floor is epoxy instead of the concrete it used to be, it's really risky to go in there on bare feet. The floor always looks wet, which means you can't see when it actually IS wet, and it's as slippery as glass. :(

Time to start a new hour-long series in there, now that I've finished another Harlan Coben thing. Will it be Season 2 of Beef? Season 3 of The Night Agent? Or will I go back to Hulu for Euphoria, despite having to deal with the long commercial breaks?

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