the girly who shall end all girls

five questions returns! request five from me in comments and you shall receive!

from sara:

1. Is there anything you've done to your living space in the last while that you found particularly pleasing?
in the late 90s our favorite local bookstore was a dealer for Windstone Editions, and we are a certain kind of nerds so we own several dragon and gargoyle functional pieces - bookends, candle holders, a pair of sconces. the sconces have been gathering dustsitting on a bookshelf since we moved into this apartment. as part of welcoming in-person gamers back into our home we moved some bookcases around and finally mounted the sconces on either side of the door into our bedroom and put little LED candles into them. i think we waited to put them up because we thought they were too heavy for command strips (rental rules) but they are not. i love them.

2. Do you have any morning (or waking-up-time) routines, and if so, what are they?
weekdays: stumble to kitchen, pull overnight oats from fridge. eat oats and take pills while getting dressed. due to time zone fuckery i've had to stop going in to the office, so go to desk, throw down padded mat, lift to standing height, move the keyboard plug and throw the monitor switches to move from personal to work computer. around the time i finish reading my emails and switch to catching up on Slack messages C has placed a hot caffienated beverage by my right hand.

weekends: wake up when i wake up. if early enough, walk dog with C and get breakfast along the way. (otherwise C walks dog on his own and causes breakfast to appear.) since restaurants first reopened and we wanted to intentionally support local businesses, we've gotten takeout from neighborhood bar Hattie's Hat every Saturday. on Sundays it depends - if i'm meeting varina8 at the pool i wake up, eat some cheese, throw my pool stuff together and go. if i'm home it's pastries and what-have-you from the Sunday Farmer's Market.

3. What is the best dessert?
my Mom's apple dumplings - her flaky pastry with butter and cinnamon and Northern Spy apples, preferably with some whipped cream and a cup of tea. setting aside the love and associations it's hard to say; i'm a sucker for citrus and so far i've never met a lemon bar or key lime pie that i didn't like.

4. What are you reading this weekend?
a popular history of Victorian home life by Ruth Goodman. i have the new Freya Marske but i've been dithering about starting it because i suspect i should reread the first one.

5. If you were going to buy a new pair of shoes, what kind would they be?
comfortable shoes that have a sense of style or something unique about them.

i just bought a pair of waterproof breathable pull-on chelsea boots to replace the role of my waterproof hikers with the worn-out (therefore leaky) soles. of course it has not rained since i got them so i have no idea if they are actually fit for purpose, but they are certainly comfy and look like part of a near-future SF costume.

the shoes i want to buy are the John Fluevog Starfleet boots, which are part of the uniforms for Strange New Worlds. delta on the ankle! i've been waiting to go to the store downtown to try a pair on - historically my calves have been too chonky for their tall boots but there's a stretch panel in the back and reviews on the calf sizing are inconclusive enough that i have hope.

Dammit. I caught up and then went and missed yesterday anyway. It was a slightly disconcerting day due to a minor support ticket turning into a voyage of the damned into an abandoned GitHub project and motherfucking npm. (I don't know much JavaScript but due to years of making local builds of preproduction code, I hate node.js dependencies with the fire of a thousand suns.) Then I ran to Monday night yoga to discover a dark and empty space. So I went back to work for a while since I lose time on Tuesdays. Got home at the same time without having done yoga. Anyway, routine destroyed.
* * *
Perfect score on my first Python assignment. This Canvas thing showing your grades in real time is pretty compelling. (Because I am old, I've never had an online hub for school.)

My struggling seatmate was missing at tonight's class. I wonder if she dropped out.

first: our desk chair is a cheap-ass task chair. it's pleather. and the pleathery coating has lost its integrity. we were finding flecks of the peeling coating all over the house. so i started looking for a new chair. i was poking around amazon, seeing if while i was replacing the chair i could get one that wasn't black, and that's how i discovered that you can get slipcovers for office chairs. bada boom bada bing, ye olde chair is now olive green (and not shedding) for a tiny fraction of the cost.

second: you guys, i finally watched Always Be My Maybe. i am not a romcom person; what sold me on watching it was a reviewer going on about the end credits song: I Punched Keanu Reeves. i adored this movie. i laughed a lot and i might have teared up at a thing. do watch. (it also happens to be set in the US with very few white people in it, which i didn't think much about until it was over because there was no reason to miss them.)

we're home.

the trip was insanely good. i think it took less than a day in Berlin to start talking about our next visit. and so on.

emails are all dealt with (mostly listservs and bacn; everyone else knew not to write - i used it as an opportunity to set up some filtering rules and labels)

i read all of my back "journals only" filter because i'm obviously too jet-lagged to have more sense. data point: if you try to tell lj that you want to see more than 800 entries in the past, it throws a blank page.

we had the magic satellite tv on our seats for the US leg of the trip home last night. of course it froze up as soon as the debate started.

much to write about, too much. i hope at least some postcards beat us home. scarlettina, i have a smashed penny for you.

now to bed, and tomorrow i work on pictures.