seaglassgarden | Reading

"'We have to call the child's legal guardian,' the policeman explains calmly.
'I am also the child's legal guardian! I am the child's grandmother!' Granny fumes, rising slightly out of her chair and shaking her unlit cigarette menacingly.
'It's half past one in the morning. Someone has to take care of the child.'
'Yes, me! I'm taking care of the child!' she splutters.
The policeman makes a fairly strained attempt to gesture amicably across the interrogation room.
'And how do you feel it's going so far?'" (p6)

I'm re-reading this book because someone persuaded me to read the sequel, and I randomly spotted the sequel at the library and took it home with me, so now I have a deadline to make (the due date). But I never really liked this book, to be honest with you, and I could never figure out why when I'm madly in love with Anxious People and A Man Called Ove, two other books by the same author. This book is no less silly and chaotic and hilarious and well-written. But a couple pages in, I think maybe I know why? It's two parts:

a) I've never been close to my grandparents. (Truthfully, I've never been very close to anybody except my mom.) This is inherently a novel about a little girl and her chaos incarnate grandmother. This grandmother is beloved and well-meaning and a little bit crazy in the best of ways. But I've never had a connection like this, so I can't really relate as much as I'd like to.

b) This grandmother is CRAZY. She's such a rule-breaker, such a rebel, such a pirate. She smokes, she apparently climbed a fence and broke into a zoo, and she throws out the wildest politically-incorrect statements. (She compared not being allowed to smoke to 1984.) I hate pirates. I'm the goodiest-two-shoes you've ever met, and I'm not a fan of this lady's utter disregard for her granddaughter's safety. It just makes me uncomfortable. I get that she has good intentions and has helped Elsa in many ways, but she also seems to be a bad influence.

To be fair, I don't remember the ending of the book at all (or anything in between), so maybe these pirate issues will be addressed. But right now all I'm seeing is a slightly-insane grandmother who's about to send her granddaughter on an equally-insane mission that will put her in harm's way. It's maybe not ideal. There may have been easier ways for Elsa to grieve and commemorate her grandmother.

Current Mood: discontent

malymin

Trying to finagle a way to make a more considered version of this guide... it seems some of the information I got from the Sims Wiki was... inaccurate? Or at the very least outdated.

Hmmm.

leejooheon

yesterday was a bit of an exhausting day. i had a therapy appointment, so i was waiting for my therapist to arrive... but she wasn't. so i double check and i got the date wrong. i felt so embarrassed after that, and the way back home was tiring so i felt soooo irritated.

it wasn't all bad though. me and my family went to this seafood place i like and the food was great. i felt exhausted after such a big meal though. i love that place, i hope we can go back soon!

anyway, i called with a friend last night and we had a lot of fun together, it was nice :) so overall i think i had a good day.

ysabetwordsmith posting in

birdfeeding

Today is mostly cloudy and sweltering.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds. Bees are visiting the small metal birdbath again.

EDIT 7/6/25 -- It's raining, so I won't have to water anything today. :D

.

Current Mood: busy

ktea

I have returned from my Tumblr rabbit hole to actually post something! It's good to be back!

I might be the least patriotic person I know (especially these days--do I really need to explain why?), but I hope my fellow American friends had a safe and happy holiday weekend. We did absolutely nothing to celebrate (not that there is anything to celebrate, in my opinion), which is exactly what I wanted. At the very least, I enjoyed my day off by playing Pokémon, reading, and taking a long nap.

Has anyone watched The Pitt? It's my newest hyperfixation, and the main reason I have stumbled back into my Tumblr rabbit hole. Dr. Mel King is the love of my life. I have neverever enjoyed a medical drama before, but there's something special about this one. The writing is brilliant. We can't all relate to being doctors or nurses, but I think we can all relate to waiting in an emergency room, or worrying about a loved one, or being frustrated with the state of our healthcare system. The more I work in veterinary medicine, the more I realize how connected we all are, and The Pitt is a beautiful reminder of that, too.

On an unrelated but very happy note: my coworkers were kind enough to throw me an early birthday celebration (I'm turning 33 this week, holy shit), and one of them baked a vegan cake! So, naturally, I am about to enjoy a piece of chocolate cake for breakfast. :3

Until next time,

ktea

Current Mood: nerdy

halfcactus posting in

cnovels

Watch on YouTube

(If subtitles don't automatically appear, please tap the CC button.)

You can read the translation transcript here and my translation notes here.

ABOUT:
哑舍 Ya She (Silent House) is modern-day fantasy novel by 玄色 Xuanse. It is about a magical antique shop and has a customer-of-the-week format.

A donghua adaptation came out last year, and a radio adaptation is currently airing on Missevan where chapters are broken into 10-minute segments. The audio adaptation has a full-cast format, so it's kind of like an audio drama with narration.

I haven't read the novel, but based on the audiobook version of this chapter, the donghua adaptation seems to diverge from the novel in terms of how it handles the cases. In the donghua, the bronze mirror case is the second case.

-

This was a one-off translation project (mostly to show some donghua-novel differences) and I currently have no plans of continuing, but I'm open to feedback on translation / writing / grammar / subtitle timing etc! I have a tendency of trying to match the onscreen subtitles with what I'm hearing and I'm not sure it's readable that way.

soricel

Teaching:

NA, yay

Learning:

Nothing formal/intentional

Listening:

A few podcasts about Trump's budget bill. Fucking bleak. I had a feeling the thing would pass, but when I saw the news that it actually did, I just felt deeply shitty inside. While the austerity plan that's kicking in here in Romania, which will also fuck people over in many of the same ways, feels like more a symptom of incompetence and indifference, Trump's budget bill just feels truly villainous and deliberately, maliciously future-killing.

Also listened to some La Dispute. I've always wanted to enjoy this band, mostly because I appreciate and admire and in some sense maybe take some inspiration from Jordan Dreyer's approach to lyrics, but the actual music has never really grabbed me and at times really put me off. Maybe I was just in a particular kind of mood the other day, but I listened to the available tracks from their forthcoming album and found myself liking them quite a bit...then listened to a few other songs from some of their more recent releases and found myself getting into them. May revisit.

Reading:

About halfway through the fourth and final book in the Raven Cycle. Still enjoying these books but at this point I feel like maybe I'm a little saturated with them. I can feel myself kinda moving a little more quickly through The Raven King and just sort of wanting to be done, even though I think I'll miss this world and these characters.

Watching:

BBT still.

Writing:

Managed to keep up with my two main RPs while we were away again this week, though that belle epoque Paris board continues to languish. Also marked the one year anniversary of my cyberpunky dystopian android/human buddy adventure RP--whoa! My side is about 130,000 words, making this the longest piece of writing I've ever done by far, and it shows no signs of slowing down! I don't think a week has gone by without my writing partner and I posting, and having this story as such a constant fixture in my life this past year has been really comforting and grounding. I can't say that my writing has been very *good* overall, but this story has really pushed me creatively, and it's been so cool to see it sprawl out in terms of lore and world-building and themes and everything else. Yay!

Also got some lines down for a new poem, so we'll see what comes of that.

Other:

This week I tagged along with T. at another conference. This one was in Sibiu, another small city in Transylvania. It was a pretty charming place! Some medieval towers and walls, lingering traces of German/Saxon presence/influence, etc., and probably most notably, a very particular style of roof dormers that make the buildings look like they have half-lidded cartoon eyes. A little touristy, and not much going on outside the center of the town, but still, a pleasant place to visit. T.'s presentation was great, though unfortunately a little rushed because of poor time management from the moderator. The conference ended with an intense student performance of Mother Courage, which I found occasionally moving if a little heavy-handed, but which T., who knows and loves Brecht far more than I, and who's way more familiar with contemporary Eastern European theater, found pretty awful and frustrating.

mousme

My schedule is such that the week of night shifts has the unenviable feature of having the bulk of the week's hours scheduled in the last three days of the rotation. Because I work seven nights in a row and the weekend shifts are twelve hours long, it means I work thirty-two hours from Monday to Thursday, and then thirty-two hours from Friday to Sunday, and so that last weekend stretch is pretty brutal. The good news is that, since we are now early Sunday morning, I have made it past the halfway mark, and am now at roughly the 3/4 mark. Five-ish more hours left tonight, and then tomorrow's twelve hours, and then I am done!

Starting Monday morning, I will have two weeks to get my shit together before I go back to work, and sixteen days before KK's surgery is scheduled. That means getting the house fully unpacked and functional, but also getting to the old house in order as well. I need to bring over the rest of the stuff that's still there, get the place cleaned from top to bottom, and find someone to fix the walls in the basement that my cats damaged back in the day, and the wall that KK put a hole in when we were moving.

I also need to book my car to get my wheels aligned *again*, this time at Canadian Tire, at the suggestion of Steve the Wonder Mechanic. Hopefully they can get it done, unlike the dealership who were content to let the misalignment wreck my brand new winter tires and then gaslight me about it. If it does turn out that it can't be done, then I have to consider whether it's worth it to get the car fixed (the dealership quoted me about $6,000, which I think is inflated bullshit), or if I might finally have to bite the bullet and get myself a new or new-to-me car. I cannot emphasize enough how much I DO NOT WANT another car. 1) I love my Yaris. 2) I haven't had to make car payments in 9 years, which has been really good for my finances. Having to devote anywhere from $300 to $600 a month on car payments would take a serious chunk out of an already incredibly tight budget (I honestly don't know where I'd get the money), and I'd really rather not do that the same year I bought a freaking house.

God, being an adult sucks sometimes.

Because I'm on night shifts, I need to resist the temptation to draw up a Grand Plan(TM) for how I'm going to get everything done in the best and most perfect way in the next two weeks. My reach always exceeds my grasp, and then I just give up when things don't go to plan, which I can't actually afford. I need to get stuff done and can't let myself get paralyzed by whatever nonsense my brain decides to come up with in the meantime.

I don't want to curse myself, but so far tonight's shift has been on the calmer end of things. I've been listening to audiobooks again this month, after falling off the wagon for a couple of months. I started with the King's Lake mystery series, continuing with the stories that originally only starred D. C. Smith and which now feature most of the supporting cast from those novels. In the last couple of days I allowed myself to be "influenced" by advertising and started listening to a horror/mystery series called Oracle and narrated by Joshua Jackson, which has been surprisingly a lot more enjoyable than I thought they might be (which is why I'm still listening).

So on that note, I shall go back to my listening and wait for this night shift to finish. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: working

dismallyoriented

Sometimes there are influential old people in your life, or even just old people who were around as a passing fixture of your life because they were fellow members of your community. A good several of mine were teachers - the old Chinese man who taught me violin since 5th grade and hosted student recitals in his backyard, the Russian woman who taught me piano and did her damndest to teach expressive body language when I didn't understand why it mattered or how to feel it in my performance, the other old Chinese man who ran an art class at my local Chinese school and gave me unexpected gender and life goals. They're important parts of your life but only for as long as you're doing the thing that keeps you in contact. And then you quit, or get a different teacher, or graduate and move away, and you leave each other's orbits. You look at the calendar year and remember how long ago it was when you knew them, and you don't know exactly how old they were when you were last together but you can sure do the math on the odds of life expectancy.

I have no way of knowing if these people are still alive, or how their lives are going. For some of them, I'm not sure I deserve that information, in the sense that we were only tangentially connected and a next door neighbor who you never really talked to Isn't the kind of relationship you get intimate life details for. But the fondness is still there, the well wishes are still there. Even if I don't know that anyone is there to receive them anymore.

leejooheon

Just had the biggest dinner of my life and im so exhausted from it... i have chores to do but i need to get some rest.

operasteers

honestly speaking, anytime it gets brought up that i could monetize my hobbies by family, my main two thoughts are:
1) but guahy
2) to Who

but as i've been finishing up this current project, i wonder if maybe i can try to make small batches of the felted dolls and sell them, like maybe 4 pre-made and 2 customs or something? esp now that i have more accessibility to crafting materials at a discounted rate

like, personally, i don’t like monetizing my stuff bc it just doesn’t feel good? but if i do it in this way, maybe it can be a happyish medium that let’s me work on stuff i love and save up for the day i (finally) move + build creative confidence or something

also i just really want to make more custom felted dolls

maybe i can even do “toy” photography with the one’s i complete, like setsunyan on the rocking horse

felted black cat wearing a blue suit sitting on top of a red rocking horse

felted black cat wearing a blue suit sitting on top of a red rocking horse

yeehaw

she is almost done… who wouldn’t love a gal such as she tee-hee

i'll debate on it some more before making a final decision, esp right now with the way everything is + flex terms (almost done with this set! then just two more classes left for the summer yes)

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: machete barking he is very cross right now keepy uppy is no longer enough

ysabetwordsmith posting in

birdfeeding

Today is partly sunny and hot.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, plus some brown birds that might be female blackbirds.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I refilled the thistle feeder.

I picked up the concrete paver that we used for fireworks last night, along with scraps of paper and cardboard left behind.

Volunteer sunflowers are blooming under the fly-through feeder.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I picked a handful of blackberries in the prairie garden.

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I watered the telephone pole garden and some of the savanna seedlings. A sunflower in the telephone pole garden is close to blooming. :D

EDIT 4/5/25 -- I pulled some weeds from the septic garden.

Fireflies are out. Cicadas are singing.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

pauraque

sunshine_revival's next challenge is:

Tunnel of Love
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.
Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like.

This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately. As an aro-ace person growing up in a time before we really had labels for those things (and, frankly, even now when some people still just don't get it), I've had a lot of experiences of being told that the way I loved people was wrong or not good enough. I'm... well, I was about to say I'm lucky to have people in my life now who don't see my love as lesser because it isn't romantic and never will be, and that is true, but also I have worked damn hard to accept myself as I am and to put energy into relationships with people who get me. So it's part luck, part skill. :P

I recently got a formal diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum. (I promise this relates.) This was something I had suspected for a long time, but having it confirmed has led me to take stock of a lot of past experiences and shine a different light on them. I've always had intense "special interests," but early on in life I learned to downplay them because of other people's disapproval. I think I am a much more... passionate person than others might suspect? I've only been able to let it show a little in fannish spaces where it's more accepted to fall in love with a fandom, or become infatuated with a character, or be swept off your feet by a storyline. Those aren't metaphors, it's really what it feels like, and I feel that way about a lot of things!

When I was a kid one of my special interests was ancient Egypt. I remember flipping through history books and feeling a physical level of joy and contentment as I pored over photos of pyramids and papyri, because I just loved loved loved what I was seeing so much. When the prompt asks about what gets my heart pumping, I think of things like that. But I learned to hide that part of myself because people didn't get it. I want to work on changing this. I know that kind of love is still there and I can still tap into it, and I want a future for myself where I'm proud that it's a part of me. That feels far away right now, but there was also a time when being proud of being aro-ace also felt very far away, so I think there's cause for hope.

soricel

I think because I've been traveling a lot lately, with more travels still to come this summer, I'm thinking about how much I love coming home after being away, even for a short time. Sometimes coming home is the best part of going out! I just love the comfort and coziness and cleanliness of our space, and settling into familiar routines and rituals again after having them disrupted for a time (even if the disruption was pleasant). And I love being here with my partner T., even if we're just in our separate spaces doing our own things. I love that our home is a place where I can truly let my hair down, and I love that I share it with a person with whom I can truly just *be.*

mousme

There's a lot of emphasis put on various practices these days that are meant to lend themselves to being a healthy, functioning person in society, and I am bad at all of them. You're supposed to have a number of personal practices: mindfulness, gratitude, journaling, the works, and I have yet to be able to do any of these things regularly or consistently. I don't consider posting to DW/LJ a journaling practice for myself, because I don't write these entries with a goal of better understanding myself or anything.

I think I'm lacking something fundamental that allows other people to do this. I find breathing/mindfulness/meditation horrendously boring a lot of the time, and even when I try to do it regularly, I inevitably forget after a couple of days, even with alarms set on my phone. The thing with setting alarms is, if I set too many of them to remind me of things, they just become more background noise after a while.

I've also never had any of the skills that other people seem to have. I can't keep house, I don't enjoy exercise or indeed a lot of other things that most people seem to find enjoyable. I don't cope with stress in socially acceptable ways. Some people compulsively clean, or go for a run, or channel their stress in positive ways. I just overeat or disappear into some storytelling medium (books, movies, video games, television, whatever). Ignoring reality is a lot easier than doing anything about it.

I don't even like people the same way that other people seem to. Many years ago I came to the conclusion that I'm asexual, but recently (somewhere in the past five years, maybe?) I've decided that I have to be aromantic as well, because I don't think I've ever experienced romantic attraction in the way that other people describe it. Have I been romantically involved with people anyway? For sure. But I feel the same intensity of attachment to my friends as I do to my romantic partners, and I don't particularly differentiate between the two.

Anyway, it's 3am on a night shift, so I'm thinking weird thoughts. Usually 3am on night shifts results either in weird thoughts or else in grandiose plans to change everything about my life for the better, usually in the form of new planners or to-do lists, but I think that since I moved I don't have the brain space to create brand new plan to live a perfectly organized life.

So right now I'm just wondering how the hell "normal" people can have their shit together the way they do. It can't be THAT hard if millions of people do it every day without thinking about it, but also I appear to be incapable of getting my shit together in a meaningful way, so it does appear to be pretty hard. I don't know, I just find it all very perplexing.

I've been fighting a headache since I got to work, and although Tylenol is taking the edge off, I am really looking forward to going home in a few hours. I still have two twelve-hour shifts ahead of me this weekend, and I am tired just thinking about it. The longer commute has been a challenge because I've been so sleep-deprived for so long. I'm hoping that, since I have ten days off work starting Monday morning, I'll be able to "catch up" on some sleep and get myself better rested, just in time to be relegated to the cot in the living room for three weeks, but beggars can't be choosers, I guess.

So, yeah. Apologies for the very disjointed entry. Maybe tomorrow I will have something better and more coherent to say. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: sore

leejooheon

i feel super tired today just from doing basic chores :( but at least i was productive. i was hoping to watch some house md today but no luck, and i didnt get to play with my dog. tomorrow maybe.

ive been looking into options for gardening clubs near me, and i found something promising! it's not gardening per se, but they do have classes on growing your own food which i'm interested in!

today i've been watching this deep dive on shane dawson by nikki carreon and it's so insane and fucked up, but i'm so interested. def recommend, but big tws for racism and pedophilia (among other things).

i haven't had luck with lucid dreaming :( but i'm staying optimistic. if the week ends and i'm still not seeing any success i'll see if there's any new things i can try that might help.

fred_mouse

I need some down time this weekend. I have any number of things I want to have done, but I'm restricting myself to things that can be done sitting on the bed, minimal movement. To whit:

Finish reading The Dictionary of Lost Words - DONE! Highly recommended fictional account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary
Read Attached - book on romantic relationships. in progress (started Saturday)
Finish Creating a Second Brain - collected from the library yesterday, read a chapter on the bus
Finish Library of the Dead - this one is due back on Monday, and being Libby, will get autoreturned.

Which, not actually outside the bounds, as long as I am actually doing those.

stretch goals, of which I'm hoping to achieve at least one

close tabs (current: 526, goal: <500) in safari
finish reading the fic I'm part way through (there might be more than one of these.
progress Eldest's quilt (this is not an 'on the bed' activity; it is added so that if I need to get up and move around, I have a task)
write up my goals for the next 6 months
blog post about how the study is going.

megaskunk

There have been years in the past where I felt a little iffy about celebrating the 4th of July, but this is the first year I felt like...sad about the 4th of July. Not to be a drama queen, but it really feels like America is dying. The amount of new bullshit every day is just overwhelming. I feel like I had more to say but it kind of just feels pointless. I'm just tired of being sad about current events.

Hopefully next year will be a happier 4th of July.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: Home
Current Music: YouTube

beehaiku

Homonculus // Knife Play (2002) // Xiu Xiu
https://open.spotify.com/track/4w3IchRF8CEeZ52y7xw0L4?si=RREnMTugS8yqnvXDr1zRFA

glitteringstars

Sugar Sugar Rune anniversary animation: As a magical girl enthusiast, I've know of this series, but I've never gotten around to watching it. However, I got this animation in my Youtube recommendations, and it's so well done! The 3D animation is so, so good! I love the character acting that really highlights the main girls' relationship.

ALIEN STAGE: Alien Stage released it's last episode last week, and I'm still not over it. I love the toxic and tragic yuri VIVINOS gives us. I also heard there are comics, so that's something I'll need to check out.

Scientists Built A Canoe with Prehistoric Tools and Sailed 140 Miles: I fucking love archeology and science.

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seaglassgarden

June 2025

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Page Summary

bookishghost - my grandmother asked me to tell you she's sorry by Fredrik Backman || thoughts 2
malymin - (no subject)
leejooheon - (no subject)
ysabetwordsmith in birdfeeding - Birdfeeding
ktea - cake for breakfast
halfcactus in cnovels - Subbed: 哑舍 Ya She (Silent House) full-cast audiobook ep 1
soricel - Week notes: June 30-July 6, 2025
mousme - Past the halfway mark
dismallyoriented - Sentimental well wishes
leejooheon - (no subject)
operasteers - to pesos or not, that is the loaded question
ysabetwordsmith in birdfeeding - Birdfeeding
pauraque - Sunshine Revival Challenge #2
soricel - Sunshine Revival challenge #2
mousme - I am bad at being a functional person, I think
leejooheon - (no subject)
fred_mouse - Ridiculous weekend plans
megaskunk - Happy 4th of July?
beehaiku - ♪
glitteringstars - On Fridays, We do Link Spam

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