When the road appears white, there are some things that you should do.

1. Turn your headlights on.

2. Go a little slower than usual.

3. For God's sake hang up the phone.

4. Plan ahead a little more than usual.

5. Don't make any sudden changes in speed or direction.

6. It's called winter, guys. It happens every year at about this time. Had you forgotten?

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I have the week between Christmas and New Year's off, but only if I can get that week's work done now. Which means I spent today working on the January newsletter and the Jan. 3 bulletin. Which means that when I came home, it was actually an hour or so before I remembered that, no, Christmas hasn't already happened!

So here's several months' worth of eavesdropping:

Me: "It's raining."
Kidlet: "I know. I was watching the sidewalk dalmatian."

( Read more... )

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Man, I'm gone for 24 hours and it snows on the profile page. Surely someone coordinated this, right? Well, at any rate, thanks to painlessj, sapote3, not_sally, reedfem, krossero, laceymcbain, ninasis, geeklite, and two anonymous people.

I was away because I couldn't get my ancient iBook to boot up (if this happens to anyone else, remove the battery, attach the power cable, and hit the startup button).

Today was the day of my semi-occasional Solitary Expedition, which is when I, with breathtaking environmental irresponsibility, drive long distances to hang out in malls and buy not a huge amount of anything. (Last time, I went to an outlet mall outside Indianapolis -- that's like a four-hour drive, one-way, in order to buy two pairs of pants, one shirt, a belt, a packet of socks, and some chocolate covered dried cherries.)

This time I went north. There had been a half-inch of snow last night, and as I was driving past the nature preserve, I could see stretches of prairie grass and coneflower plants (the cones are of course bare this time of year), and every seedhead and cone had its own little cap of snow. Beautiful.

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Tonight the three of us went to a madrigal dinner -- do they have those where y'all are? I'd never heard of one until I came to Illinois, and it's an odd combination for Illinois: food plus a strolling chamber choir singing Renaissance music.

And after dinner, the lead tenor demanded that all the people who had a ribbon tied around their chair leg should go up front for a little game. The kidlet would have loved to go up front, but I was the one with the ribbon. So I went up, dreading the worst. The last audience participation stunt I saw involved antlers.

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I made roasted peaches a couple of times this summer (an absolutely marvelous dessert -- you cut them in quarters -- a little butter, a little sugar, a little lemon juice, maybe a sprig of rosemary), and the spouse and the kidlet have been asking for them again, but there are no fresh peaches to be had.

Who has recipes along those lines? Mostly fruit, lightly sweetened, reasonably low in fat, something that a spouse with high cholesterol can eat multiple times a week?

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I was recommending books to the ten-year-old, and I mentioned Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger. "I think I remember it being a pretty good book," I said, "but I'm not sure, because she also wrote books for adults, and as I remember it, the gender politics were pretty awful."

"What do you mean, gender politics?"

"Well, it's been a long time, but what I remember is that all the women were beautiful and tempestuous, and mostly they were there to be prizes for the men to win. The books weren't very interested in what they wanted, unless it was a man, and they fought over men, but aside from that they didn't really have relationships with each other."

"Oh, yeah, I've read books with women like that," she said. "Sugarboxes."

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Well, I began to worry that a life of happy perversion might be more difficult for the ladies than it was for the gents. So here: have

( a sequel in thirty-two words )

Continuing my trend of only writing in fandoms with twelve or fewer members, I've posted a new story to my website, based on Georgette Heyer's novel The Foundling.

Natural
Gilly/Gideon -- NC-17 -- 3,300 words
Once again, Gilly fixes everything.
Warnings, if any (highlight to read): No particular warning.

Thanks to astolat and Tradescant for beta.

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A new mural is going up on the wall of a running-supplies store I pass on my way to work. It's going up very slowly, which may have something to do with the fact that it never stops raining omg. So for about a week there was only a parchment-looking background, and then for a while there were three pairs of roughly outlined running legs. Then some of the musculature was roughed in, and then running shorts were added (allowing us to tell that the runners were two men and one woman).

And then one day one of the legs had been painted out and a prosthesis had been added instead.

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The Ladycat is nearly eleven years old. When the kidlet got a new room this summer, the Ladycat claimed one pillow of her bed, and now she hardly ever leaves that spot except for food, water, the litter box, and the occasional tussle with the Boosh, who outweighs her by 50%.

I have a constant undertone of guilt because I don't really like the Ladycat very much. I'm crazy about the Boosh because he's a cat without dignity; he's happy and dumb and loves everybody. The Ladycat is Siamese, and like many of your highborn noblecats, she's difficult. Things are not as she would wish them to be. She is dissatisfied with the world. When you try to pet her, she ducks her head away from your big filthy peasant hands.

Today I said to the kidlet, "Do you think she's happy living in your room all the time? Do you think she likes the warmth and the peace and quiet and knowing that nobody but you is going to touch her? Or does she feel like the Boosh has trapped her in that little room and won't let her out?"

The kidlet sighed at my obtuseness. "It's her retirement," she said.

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I am just generally and comprehensively annoyed. Annoyed with the traffic, annoyed with the kidlet and her distractible ways, annoyed at the spouse (whom I haven't even seen all day) because it's his genetic heritage that makes her leave socks all over the floor. Annoyed with the woman who requested an emergency box from the food pantry yesterday, didn't show up to pick it up, then called up today to try to guilt-trip me: "My children went to bed hungry last night." Hey, lady, it wasn't me who didn't do what I said I would do.

Annoyed with the soon-to-be new pastor, because he's not even here yet and he's already showing distressing signs of being high-maintenance. He called me at home during dinner, which is a habit of which he will have to be broken right speedily. And about money, which isn't even my department; I can neither issue a check nor sign a check, and that's the way I like it.

He had damned well better not bring those three big dogs of his into the office, that's all I can say.

We're out of eggs, there are dead Japanese beetles on the carpet, and my ankle hurts. My computer is too slow to show the new Sherlock Holmes trailer without horrible skippage. Boycat wants more than his fair share of the chair.

Fandom hasn't annoyed me yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

(In news that's not annoying but just kind of wtf, our odd next-door neighbor, who lives alone and can't keep his dog off our lawn (and out of our garage and off our porch) and who we found out last year is a therapist, apparently died suddenly this week. He probably wasn't over 55. His wife quietly moved out six or seven years ago, and nobody seems to know if he has any family. Just weird and unexpected.)

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This week's lesson: To qualify as a door, an object must both open and shut. If it does only one or the other, it's worse than useless.

We live in an old house with beautiful cut-glass doorknobs. They were all nice and tight when we moved in, but over the years, some of them have begun to slip a little, or to rattle a little. I always meant to get around to tightening them all up, but it never seemed like a priority.

Last night the spouse and I were lying in bed talking, and when I got up to use the bathroom, the doorknob came off in my hand, leaving us trapped in the bedroom.

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The kidlet has a friend over to spend the night. We had videos rented and activities planned, but the two of them decided they'd rather act out "The Sound Of Music."

Two lines of the title theme -- two lines of "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria" -- the scene where Maria arrives at the mansion and is welcomed by the butler -- the scene where the children step forward and announce their names (and these two ten-year-olds know all the children's names) -- and then suddenly they get bored, and the friend announces, "This is a remix! The captain's nice and Maria's mean!"

Now the kidlet (as Maria) is in handcuffs and the friend (Mother Superior) is slapping her around. It's like the musical theater version of Calvinball.

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I've long contended that spam contains a philosophy -- that you can look at it and gather what impossible dreams people are dreaming. Our world's philosopher's stone and fountain of youth seem to be larger penises, money for nothing, easy weight loss, and reliable Microsoft Windows.

I wasn't aware until I started working in a church that churches get their own kind of spam. (For one thing, in our version of the Nigerian scam, the person who needs help getting her husband's money out of the country is the widow of a pastor.)

The top three impossible desires of churches, based on the spam index:

1. A redesigned website.
2. Cheap health insurance for part-time employees.
3. Recruit volunteers with the click of a mouse!

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A recent conversation reminded me of a strange pattern in my friendships, which I'll discuss further under the cut. But first, a poll:

Edited to add: When I say "an addiction," I mean other than tobacco.



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These are not my beautiful fandoms, but last night I dreamed a crossover romance between Ianto Jones and Adam Lambert.

The romantic complication was that they met in Discworld during some great religious celebration, and due to the large amounts of religious adoration that were in the air during this time, people were subject to something called "prayover," in which their emotions were artificially heightened by getting caught in the crossfire of other people's prayers.

Now, Ianto knew he was immune to this effect because of the years he spent studying with the History Monks in the Ramtops. But he was fairly sure that anything Adam might feel was the artificial result of the prayover, so he was resisting, though the story held promise of eventual defeat and consequent angst.

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If this were a story instead of real life, it would actually be finished instead of just inspiring me to speculate. But it's a pretty cool story anyway.

St. Sapient is involved in a lawsuit with the city. It's a long story, but to sum up: in the 1950s, a parishioner gave the church an adjacent lot with a house on it; the church didn't have a pressing need for the land and didn't have the money to tear the house down; in between, the neighborhood became a historic district, and now tearing down anything requires permission from the city's historic preservation commission; and they say no way.

So the house sits there, costing the church several thousand dollars a month in utilities and security and the sort of minimal repairs necessary to keep the roof on and the raccoons and drug users out, while the lawyers try to persuade the city to allow it to be torn down.

Pastor Fixit has left the church and is now a chaplain at the local hospital, but she has to stay in touch because she's heavily involved in the lawsuit. Meanwhile, we hired a sweet but slightly corny retired guy to be our new interim: Pastor Singalong.

So Pastor Fixit stopped by yesterday to give us the latest lawsuit update, and the Head Monkey dragged a dusty, smelly box out of his office and said, "This might interest you."

The box contained two old-fashioned leather binders full of mostly hand-written pages. Here's the story he told about it.

( Read more... )

Today I was thinking about Benton Fraser, Severus Snape, and Sherlock Holmes.

I am kinked so hard for male characters like these guys -- the ones who ought to have "Serious Intimacy Problems" tattooed on their forehead as a warning to others, the ones who might be steamy volcanoes of untapped passion or might be cold fish through and through -- that I evaluate potential fandoms based on whether any of the guys in them are emotionally unavailable enough to suit me.

I'm so very lucky that I'm not attracted to the same kind of guys in real life as in fiction.

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Some songs I'm enjoying lately -- lot of trad folk and acoustic string stuff, heavy on the harmony. Just because.

Malinky, "The Light Dragoon"
Tom Chapin, "Wheel of the Water"
the Carolina Chocolate Drops, "Sourwood Mountain"
Love Hall Tryst, "Jack in the Green"
Sons of Andros, "Dry Bones"
Marley's Ghost, "Turtle Dove"
Dicey Doh Singers, "You Ain't Hurryin' Me"
Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (from "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," a Pete Seeger tribute CD -- I've discovered that one of the things Amazon downloads are good for is letting you listen to samples of all the songs on a tribute CD, find the one or two decent ones, and not be stuck with all the crappy ones)
Martin Carthy, "Hard Cheese of Old England"

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... and yes, I'm serious about that crossover. This is for the cliche_bingo square "Unmixy things: weird crossovers."


Appetite
Snape (sort of; it's complicated)/Horst -- NC-17 -- 2,700 words
Snape's happy ending requires him to start again in another story.
Warnings, if any (highlight to read): Um, cartoon characters having sex? No particular warning.

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