spuffy

Bye

I have decided to turn crossposting off as of now. Back in 2017 when Livejournal was bought out by a Russian company and started cooperating with the Russian government to crack down on LGBTQ and dissident bloggers, there was a mass exodus to Dreamwidth. I had already moved my journal to DW, due to the whole Strikethrough business back in 2007, but I seriously considered stopping crossposting at that time – I had already let my paid account lapse. I wish now that I had.

As of 2020, LJ is directly owned by the Russian state bank. The second post in LJ's English language Top Posts is pro-Russian, pro-war propaganda. I can no longer justify giving LJ content, meager though my content is these days. I will still be around on Dreamwidth and occasionally on Tumblr.

If you're still staying, think long and hard about why.
spuffy

Ouch

So Churro got out today. We're not sure when or how, but when I went out into the back yard to take the laundry off the line, I saw Stripes, the stray who hangs out in the back yard, come trotting up for pets, which I dispensed... and then a big cream-colored cat snuck around the corner of the house, and holy shit that's Churro. Churro started freaking out the minute he saw Stripes. (I do not know why this cat keeps trying to get outside. Everything in the outside world terrifies him.) Stripes did not freak out, but he considers the yard his, and does not take any bull from interlopers.

I went over to see if I could grab Churro and get him inside before anything happened. I almost managed it. But then Churro, who was screaming the cat equivalent of "SO HELP ME GOD IF YOU TOUCH ME I'LL KILL YOU!" at Stripes, panicked and bit the hell out of my hand. I dropped Churro, Stripes jumped him, scuffling ensued. Churro is fine with harassing smaller/older cats, but he's an abject coward when it comes to a strong young tom his own size, and he was not getting the best of it. Churro retreated, and I ran to get the hose, hand streaming blood.

Kathy came out to see what was going on at this point (I'd been yelling for her, but I don't think she heard me). I managed to get to the hose and turn it on while she sort of herded them towards the back door. I spritzed Stripes with the hose, and once he was out of the way, Churro ran for the back door and I let him in. He was filthy from having rolled around under the cars, but despite having lost some fur in the scuffle, he didn't have any scratches or bites (nor did Stripes.) I, on the other hand, have a nasty puncture wound in my left hand. Churro has his shots and I am up to date on tetanus, plus it bled a LOT, so I'm not worried about it, but damn, it hurts. And now of course both Stripes and Churro, in their separate spheres, are both purring and making up to me as if they'd never caused me grievous bodily harm. comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

A superfluity of information

A comment on a BtVS Facebook community I follow sent me off on a chase for a reference, and now I've just spent a couple of days fruitlessly plowing through old LJ entries, trying to find the one I was thinking of. It was a poll about whether people preferred Spuffy fic where Spike was souled or unsouled, and I cannot for the life of me remember who the author was. Not me, apparently. Maybe St. Salieri, or Gabriellabelle? I can search my own entries on DW for keywords, but there's no way to search individual journals on LJ. There used to be LJSeek, but that appears to be pushing up the daisies. So the only option is to pick a journal, go to its archive page, and start clicking links. Needless to say I was not successful, since I can't remember for sure who posted it, and I can only narrow down the posting range to "Some time between 2005 and 2010."

I mean, I remember that it came out about even, with most people picking "Either is fine," but I want to be able to cite my sources, darn it. comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

Ho ho ho

Christmas has been accomplished. Kathy's mom flew in today; luckily her flight was not one of the many that got canceled. She'll be here tomorrow and leave Monday. I'm glad she was able to be here. It will be four years since Mom's death in a few days, and I've been feeling a little melancholy.

The pomegranates are ripe – at least, the ones on the oldest bush are. The ones on the two new bushes didn't ripen at all last year – they looked red on the outside, but the arils were still white inside, and stayed that way till all the leaves fell off the bushes, at which point it's basically hopeless. This year they're at least pink, but due to the leaf-footed beetle infestation, there aren't many of them. I picked some of them, and will see if I can peel them in the next couple of days. I'm halfway hoping that they're no good, because I peeled half the ones from The Good Bush a few days ago, and peeling a dozen-plush pomegranates is really hard on the fingernails. And there are still at least a dozen left on The Good Bush. Either way I need to let my fingernails heal up before tackling more.

(Yeah, I know, there are all those Youtube videos which purport to make deseeding pomegranates easy and fast. They never work for me.)

In any case, once I have them all peeled I'm going to attempt pomegranate jelly. Fingers crossed. comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

Christmas is barreling at us at the speed of an oncoming train

I don't recall if I mentioned it here, but last January we hired a contractor to build a porch on the south side of the house, the side that faces the street our address is on. Our house is one of those corner houses that is built on a diagonal, and for reasons beyond my ken, it was built so that the front door faces the cross street rather than the address street. Our long term plans are to enclose the existing front porch to make the living room larger -- we can't afford to do that right now, but in preparation for that glorious day, we can at least add the porch that the front door will some day face. It took for freakin' ever to get the plans approved, and a second forever to get the materials (supply chain, blah blah blah) but they finally got the lumber and concrete, and finished in November. While they were doing that, we also have them replace a couple of interior doors, and our kitchen faucet, which was getting corroded and leaky. (Phoenix water: you'll never need to take mineral supplements again!)

So anyway, they finally finished, and for the last several weekends we've been painting the railings and hauling off stray bits of leftover concrete. My back is not happy, but the new porch looks great. Unfortunately, spending weekends on porch stuff means we didn't get any cookies baked, and I haven't mailed out cards yet. Maybe I can get the cards done before Friday, at least... comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

Interesting times

Today at work we got the email expanding the company's vaccine mandate to all employees (the first phase had excluded retail and warehouse workers.) They'd strongly hinted that this would happen when they notified us of of the first phase, so it was not really a surprise. Despite all the screaming and posturing on the company intranet when phase one was rolled out, we apparently had a 99% compliance rate. I'm not sure if that includes people who applied for a medical or religious exemption, but those people with exemptions will have to wear PPE and get tested at least once a week, at their own expense if the company has anything to say about it.

This makes me feel somewhat better about having to go back to the office in January. Not super better, because the new office is going to be very noisy in comparison to the old one (instead of being in a room of our own, my team now has to share space with the team making calls) and the new cubicles have basically no walls and feel hideously exposed. At least it's only every other week, and my commute is relatively short.

We got the shed doors put together today, and will try to hang them tomorrow. Saturday we're going to look at another dog, presuming it isn't adopted by someone else first. The last couple of dogs I've been interested in have been snapped up very quickly, because of course everyone wants the easy, friendly dogs. And it's not really practical for us to go look on a weekday, as most of the rescues I've been checking are located on the outskirts of town and we're in the middle. comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

Tired

I didn't mean to fall off the face of the earth, but, well, you know. Over Thanksgiving weekend we have 1) cooked a big dinner, 2) assembled 3/4ths of a shed (the remaining 1/4th is door assembly, which, judging by the illustrations in the manual, is as complicated as the entire rest of the shed put together.) 3) Moved all the tools and paint cans and whatnot which we had moved out of the old shed on the previous weekend back into the new shed, 4) Built a rack on the wall of the new shed to hold shovels, rakes, etc. 5) Moved a bunch of edging blocks into the back yard (they used to edge a flower garden in the front yard) 6) put away the Thanksgiving decorations and put up the interior Christmas decorations, and 7) gotten my covid booster. I'm tired today, but it's impossible to tell if it's from the shot, or the fact that we've been working our asses off for the last three days,

We've gone out a couple of times to look at prospective dogs, but none of them quite clicked. And I don't want to get a dog just for the sake of having a dog. comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

Back to the real world

So I logged in to work today after getting back from my vacation. I knew we were losing one of the people on my team, but while I was gone another person on a related team has decided to leave, my boss's boss is mostly incommunicado due to a family emergency, the Major Issue with one of our databases is still Major, I still can't log into one of the reporting tools I need (it freaked out after a server change, and I put in a help ticket a month ago) the other person on my team is buried under trainings for the New System we'll be using next year, and transitioning to said New System is still in a state of mass panic.

My boss was thrilled to have me back, though, so yay job security. comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

Vacationing with the MIL

For the last week we've been in Florida, visiting Kathy's mom. She's 86 now, and starting to slow down a little -- she was a heavy smoker for many years; she quit thirty years ago, but her lungs are starting to give her trouble and she runs out of breath easily. She had surgery on one shoulder recently, and is going into physical therapy this week to increase the strength of her arm. For all that, she still gets around very well, and we had a mostly very nice vacation.

I say 'mostly' because the MIL can be taxing to deal with. She's very extroverted -- her idea of fun is plunging into crowded bar full of drunk, yelling strangers. Which is not really our thing. She never reads directions or listens to instructions (and I suspect that she feels, deep down, that the rules shouldn't apply to her anyway) and then gets frustrated and upset when things work the way they're supposed to, instead of the way she thinks they ought to. Part of this is due to her being increasingly hard of hearing, but she's always been like this to some extent. She's also a Republican -- not a Trumpy one, thank God, but prone to anti-immigrant and anti-tax grumbling nonetheless. So any time politics comes up, we end up arguing, which is very uncomfortable when she's the one footing the bill.

MIL's the kind of person who always has an immaculate house, with a minimal amount of tasteful modern furniture and decor items. We, needless to say, while we do not live in abject filth, have pets, and we collect stuff (Kathy much more than me, but I'm responsible for some of it.) Our house is, admittedly, small and somewhat crowded. We were cluttercore long before it was cool. But it's our house, and our stuff, we've put a lot of work into it. MIL finds this baffling, and is constantly suggesting that we get rid of all our stuff, which is irritating. Although this time, bizarrely, her idea was that we sell our house, buy a piece of land, and put a mobile home on it. When I asked her why on earth she thought we'd want to sell a perfectly good house and move into a mobile home, her reply was "But your house has all that stuff in it!" (Like we wouldn't take the stuff with us when we moved???) I don't think that she's ever really accepted, deep down, that we're adults capable of making our own financial decisions. Granted Kathy got into some fairly bad financial scrapes in her youth, but that was thirty years ago. She learned her lesson and we are both gainfully employed, making the median income for our area, with 401ks and everything.

Sigh. This makes MIL sound awful, and she's not, really. She's very kind and generous, and truly enjoys giving us things. Her personality is just finely calculated to make me (and Kathy) crazy.

There's so many mixed feelings because we also realize that she is 86, and is definitely slowing down, and she's doing the "OK, when I die, here's all the paperwork..." talks. And yes, it's good to deal with all that, but we have to bite our tongues a lot because like all parents she wants us to take all her stuff -- but A) her taste is definitely not ours B) we have no room for an entire condo's worth of furniture, and there is no way I am getting rid of my great-grandmother's bedroom set in favor of one she bought last year, no matter how nice it is C) she replaces all her furniture every few years so who even knows if a given piece will still be around in ten years D) shipping it all from Florida would cost a fortune.

But she is in relatively good health, and I would be surprised if she didn't live at least as long as my mom did, so we don't have to deal with that for a while yet.

We had a friend coming over to feed the cats while we were gone, and she reported all well last night, so we thought we could come home and just kick back. Of course, when we got here, we discovered that the cats, tired of being fed a mere once a day, had gotten up onto the counter and knocked over the jar of Greenies, along with a jar of very expensive artisan honey. There was broken glass and honey all over the kitchen floor. There were NOT Greenies all over the floor, except for a few which had gotten drenched in honey, and were therefore unacceptable to the cat palette. comment count unavailable Rants Talk to me
spuffy

The Last Graduate (spoilers)

Novik is an excellent storyteller in the the sense that she's got very decent pacing, dialogue, and characterization. Her major flaw as a writer is that she doesn't seem to think through the logical consequences of her Cool Idea, until someone points them out, and then she has to retcon. You can see this in the Temeraire series, where the Cool Idea is "The Napoleonic War, but with dragons!" As many people pointed out, if intelligent dragons existed, then why did they not exercise a huge influence on European history prior to the point the books are set? When the series later moves on to other continents, we see that the existence of dragons has changed their histories vastly, which makes the closeness of European history to our own even weirder.

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