lobelia321 | Reading

what a fucking wild night of sports. the Mets scored TEN RUNS in the TWELFTH INNING and the Nats brought in a position player to pitch, and the umpires had to call the replay officials to find out if that was allowed! Spoiler: It was, because it was after the 10th inning? Or something? If you're within a regular 9-inning game, I think you have to be losing by 8 or winning by 10 before it's allowed, but apparently the rules change in extra innings. who knew? #LFGM

ANYWAY. It was bonkers, and then I turned away just in time to see the Canadiens score the winning goal in OT in Game 7!!! I would have been okay with either team winning, and now I just need them to beat Carolina and whoever comes out of the West to win it all and lift the Cup!

And tomorrow, the Knicks are back in action and will hopefully do well and go to the finals! #go ny go ny go

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Current Mood: shocked

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: amused

osprey_archer

I have ambled through this year’s Caldecott winners, and generally quite enjoyed them! Every Monday Mabel got the Actual Toddler(™) stamp of approval from my three-year-old niece.

Fireworks, Matthew Burgess, illustrated Cátia Chien. An explosion of joy! A hot summer day in New York City, with water spurting from a fire hydrant and a man playing a sax in the park and a juicy red watermelon, all leading up to watching the fireworks from the roof. KABOOM KABOOM.

Every Monday Mabel, written and illustrated by Jashar Awan. Also an explosion of joy! Every Monday, Mabel drags a chair outside to sit on the driveway and watch… THE GARBAGE TRUCK. When the garbage truck arrives the text goes ALL CAPS and there are words for the SOUNDS (gah-dump as the trash goes into the belly of the truck) and you can really feel the thrill right alongside Mabel.

Stalactite and Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave, written and illustrated by Drew Beckmeyer. A stalactite and a stalagmite slowly grow closer and closer together over eons of geologic time. Love the concept, found the spacing of the stalactite and stalagmite’s dialogue weirdly hard to follow. Snorted at the glossary when it defined humans as “the only native species to develop language and culture” (that really depends how you define both language and culture) who have left “a beautiful and sometimes terrible mark on this planet.” I am not convinced that any other species on this planet would put “beautiful” in that sentence first or indeed at all.

Our Lake, written and illustrated by Angie Kang. Gorgeous illustrations, blue for the lake and blue shading into green for the forest and yellow for the hot summer sky, with an explosion into warm gold and orange and red for the brief flashback to the days when Dad used to take the boys to the lake before he died. Yes, death has come for the Caldecotts too.

Sundust, written and illustrated by Zeke Peña. This is not an illustration style to which I am spontaneously drawn, but I tried to look at it through the eyes of the Caldecott committee and decided that it is a style that allows a great deal of movement. And of course I loved the part where the two kids ride the hummingbird.

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You will I’m sure be SHOCKED to hear that I’m contemplating a Caldecott Honor project. I intend to wrap up one of my current reading projects before I add another, though!

musesfool

Usually, I shower at night, but last night, I stayed up too late reading and didn't feel like delaying bedtime so I put the shower off until this morning. While I was in there, I noticed a spider, but it was on the far wall, and I was naked and without my glasses, so I let it live and it disappeared somewhere (the whole room is tiled, floor to ceiling, so I don't know where? but also. I don't want to know where).

This evening, I had to wash my hair, so there I was back in the shower, and I turned off the water and stepped back while I was lathering the shampoo, and there was the spider, dropping down from god knows where right in the middle of my shower!

So I had to get out - with my hair still full of shampoo - grab my glasses and a paper towel, so I could kill it, because come the fuck on, spider, that is not okay! The shower is sacrosanct!

It's a good thing I still have to stay up for an hour to detangle because I would not have been able to go to sleep right away after that, omg.

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Current Mood: shocked
Current Music: if it's a mess you're in, i'm in

igenlode

Wearing short socks to pick elderflowers is a tactical error, since the base of the tree is *always* surrounded by nettles... ( Read more... )
I am not quite sure how I managed to get my wrists and the back of one hand stung as well, but I definitely earned my booty :-p

This is the one recipe where I actually get to use the big 2lb weight, since sugar is very heavy for its volume. I need to dissolve two pounds of sugar in three pints of boiling water and then let it cool down overnight before starting the next stage of the cordial tomorrow...

musesfool

Yesterday, I made these ricotta cheesecake bars, for which I had to shell 62g of pistachios (oh, the humanity!), and they are okay, but either there is not enough butter or I had too much graham cracker crumb because the crust does not cohere. (I used pre-smashed crumbs because that is what I had and probably used too much. Recipes really should give you some sort of measurement beyond "7 or 8 graham crackers, crushed" for these things.)

I also made KAB pretzel rolls (half the recipe) and as always, they are delicious, even if the whole boiling step is annoying. I definitely recommend them, and if like me, you never remember that they have a small amount of butter (2 tbsp) that needs to be softened ahead of time, you can always just substitute the same amount of olive oil, also like me. *wry*

With the LIRR on strike, I'm not going into the office this week (I had already decided that anyway), so I didn't have to do any other baking, and I just bought some spring mix and grilled chicken strips so that'll be lunch for the week.

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Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: the way you changed my life, no no, they can't take that away from me

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: sleepy

silvercat17 posting in

justcreate

What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?

Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

What do you just want to talk about?

What have you been watching or reading?

Chores and other not-fun things count!

Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky.

princessofgeeks

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princessofgeeks

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cimorene

My first curséd sweater was ( Read more... ) Later, purple yarn I bought for myself became the second curséd sweater ( Read more... ) The third curséd sweater is the third of the triplet sweaters we promised to make last summer, originally saying we would try to finish them all by last winter, lol. The other two are done.

1. Wax started this traditional Aran cabled sweater last fall and knitted about 30% of it, but she had modified the pattern to make it smaller, and then decided it was too small (because all the cables contracted it so much).

2. I unraveled it and started over, following the pattern exactly (after Wax had to redo the first few rounds of ribbing for me, because the first time I knitted a couple of inches before realizing I had gotten the stitches twisted and was knitting a Möbius strip). I hated the design. Way too many different cable crosses slowed it down a ton.

3. Then I realized, after working for weeks, and especially right after like ten hours of knitting in two days, that I was using the yarn too fast and we didn't have enough left to finish. This shouldn't be possible, because we ordered the yarn using this pattern as a guide. But it was! And because it was over six months ago, we almost certainly could not get more yarn in the same dye lot.

4. Started over again with a new, much simpler cable pattern, and again got the stitches twisted. It's not like I wasn't checking! Both times I was worried about it and checked twice, then incorrectly concluded they were not twisted¹! At least this time I realized that I was knitting a Möbius strip after only about a centimeter.

Footnote
1. this part is just adhd, not the curse

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: content

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: grateful

igenlode

Election results from the local paper: leader of the Conservative group loses his seat, Reform get no councillors at all, Labour have a slightly increased overall majority. Pre-election leafletting from the Liberal Democrats with the usual faked/misleading graphs: "A Labour vote is a wasted vote! Don't let the right wing in! Only the Liberal Democrats can win here!" This is why I don't vote Liberal Democrat... if I still had a vote, which thanks to the Conservatives I don't.

The two Independent councillors were returned with a sizeable majority (60% of all votes), as was the single Independent member of the neighbouring council, who received the highest number of votes of any candidate. In my view, *all* councillors should be independent councillors representing their own local wards, and not the victims/beneficiaries of whatever national politics happens to be going on.

igenlode

It just just dawned on me that the Russian indeclinable (and hence of foreign origin) noun пальто is of course the French paletot, taken straight out of the nineteenth century -- just as the French redingote is, reputedly, the English 'riding-coat'...!

Another of my tomato plants -- from the first batch this time -- has damped off while actually flowering; they are supposed to be way beyond it at this stage of maturity :-(( Read more... )

The first flower opened on the sweetbriar this morning, and there was a bumble-bee on it. (Sadly these wild roses aren't scented -- it's the leaves that carry the scent, but only when they are fresh and moist, and the leaves on mine are usually pretty leathery.)

At least one of the seedlings potted up as Gypsophila elegans has come into flower and turned out to be alyssum :-p

osprey_archer

It is probably foolish to read a book called Studies in Words and then complain “Gosh, C. S. Lewis is really getting into the weeds here on the fine points of meanings of specific words.” However, I must admit that there were times when I simply couldn’t follow the book’s argument about, say, the fine shades of distinction between different meanings of nature at different times, possibly because I just haven’t spent enough time reading things like Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales to have seen these meanings in action.

However, despite sometimes getting completely turned around in the weeds, I did manage to extract a few interesting general principles.

1. Words always and inevitably have multiple meanings, particularly if the word is culturally important. If a writer from a time period sits down to explain “this is what X word really means,” that’s actually a pretty good sign that X was rarely or never used to mean that. (In fact, in other contexts, said writer will probably use X in a manner that contradicts the explicit definition he wrote elsewhere, because he’s fallen into the general usage.)

2. In general, usage has a tendency to move from descriptive to evaluative. For instance, “villain” originally described a social class (peasant), began to be used as an insult, and at last lost its original meaning entirely and came to mean simply “bad guy.”

3. If a word becomes REALLY culturally important, this can paradoxically drain it of most of its specific meaning. Lewis uses the example of the word “wit” in the 18th century - the concept of wit became the center of such a highly charged discourse that often when a critic says a work or a person is “witty,” they mean little more than that they approve it. (When a word has reached the stage of casting this glow of approval all around it, Lewis says it has acquired a “halo.”) Once we agree that a word defines our cultural ideal, we will therefore never be able to agree on the specific details of its definition until that ideal is dead.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: grateful

igenlode

I potted up the *two* surviving towel-tomatoes sharing a pot from the second batch, namely the 'towel tomatoes (good)'. Every single one of the others appears to have collapsed and died, one after the other. [Edit: no, there is one more that I had put at the back.] The seedling chives have also died after their transplantation -- the hailstorms of the last two days probably didn't help -- and so have five of the six basil seedlings in one tray. The six in the other tray seem fine.
The second of the possible white California poppy seedlings has also now died, so that particular genetic experiment has failed for another year...

musesfool

While this isn't thematic or plot-related or anything, I did remember one thing I wanted to comment on from PoH because it's probably the most relatable* Carl has ever been to me: ( minor spoiler )

*There's a post on tumblr that I think I've reblogged a couple of times, that notes that characters don't need to be relatable for me to enjoy them, but they do need to be resonant. This was a case where something was both. *g*

In more real world news, last I checked (earlier today), the MTA and the various railroad unions are still far apart on finalizing a new contract, so it's entirely possible there will be a strike starting on Saturday and the LIRR will stop running. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there were an eleventh hour agreement to prevent that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if there weren't. In the face of this uncertainty, my boss made going into the office on Tuesday optional (and non-tenable if there is a strike, since she lives out on the island), so I have opted to not go in regardless. So all my cupcake baking will have to wait until next time. (I think our June in-office day is also currently non-tenable because it's a day when there will be an afternoon World Cup match and nobody wants to be in Manhattan during that, but especially around Penn Station or the Port Authority, as required by many commutes, but we'll see what happens when we get there.)

In other work news, they are scheduling our annual summer staff picnic someplace up in Dutchess County(?!) and everyone on my team is like, WTF? DNW! about it (it appears I will already be on PTO for it, so at least I'm well out of it). I also had some charter bus horror stories to share, from my own personal experience, so I hope the folks managing that have great intestinal fortitude, because managing transportation for large groups for an outing is the worst, and they're planning to do it from multiple locations. They're also requiring people show up for the busses at like 8:30 am and they won't leave from upstate to come home until 4 pm (the team planning this had to be talked down from making it 5 pm), and it's at least a 90 minute drive (longer to/from Brooklyn or Queens) and then you still have to commute home from the pickup/drop-off location. I think this is an even worse proposition than the Governor's Island location, which required a railroad > subway > ferry trip from me so I noped out of it repeatedly. The one time I went, many years ago now, was when it was from 1 - 4 pm at Riverside Park, which is super accessible by subway and also not a full day affair. It's also why I dislike corporate events on boats (which I have also had experience with) - you're just stuck for the length of the affair with no escape.

Anyway, now that I've fully exposed my asocial personality, I will hit post. *g*

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Current Mood: surprised
Current Music: The Mets are...winning???

pir8fancier

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Lobelia the adverbially eclectic

put it in the books!

state of the princess

Picture Book Monday: 2026 Caldecott

maybe take me with you, we can hide

Elderflower

the way you hold your knife, the way we danced til three

TV

Just Create - Hammer Edition

Storrie on Criminal Minds

aside

A new curséd sweater appears

Good Omens finale

Heated Rivalry rec

Local elections

Coats

Book Review: Studies in Words

Heated Rivalry fic Christmas

Mortality

and the mets put the hammer down

REC: The Curious Case of the Cloaked Clue, Colin Creevy/Oliver Wood

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May 2026

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