lydamorehouse: (nic & coffee)
 If people are specifically looking to reconnect to their former Tumblr mutuals, there's a new community just for you (and me): the_great_tumblr_purge.  I haven't posted there yet, but I think I will. I'm not exactly a refugee from Tumblr, but I sure would love to be able to recreate the sense of community in fandom that I found there.

Meanwhile, I spent much of today baking. I got up early only to discover that we had no coffee in the house. MAJOR EMERGENCY. So, even though I had to take Mason (my son) into work at the Science Museum at 10 am, I made a mad dash out to my coffee shop and then picked up some extra baking supplies on the way home.

Shawn's friend Liz, someone she's known since kindergarten, came over and we made many batches of cookies. 

These are cookies that Shawn calls "sand tarts." They're a kind of chewy cookie that has an egg wash on the top that makes them somehow even more tasty.

solstice velociraptor cookie

I always sneak in a few non-traditional holiday shapes. I think this year I got both dinosaurs (we have a velociraptor and triceratops) and a dolphin. 

I just finished up a batch of spritz, as well:

red and green spritz cookies

You'd think with as many cookies as we make that we have plans to give them away. But, no. We hoard them and eat them throughout the dark winter months, which, in Minnesota, last until late March.  Shawn will take half of each of these batches and put them in Tupperware and put them i the freezer. That way in the middle of March when the snow drops on us unexpectedly, at least we'll have a few cookies to assuage our deep and unending suffering.

Mason and spent part of the day playing Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. As I am a button masher, I can not hope to defeat Mason. However, I found great joy in picking very pretty characters just to watch capes swirl and whatnot. I am easily amused.
lydamorehouse: (crazy eyed Renji)
 I'm NOT the best Duolingo user.

I don't always respond to guilt-trips, so their "Hey, you know you can only learn by constant practicing!" reminders get ignored by me nine times out of ten. They are also pushing me to learn new words/units, but I keep circling back to previous ones because f*ck if I can remember the kanji for 'inu' from one day to the next. 

Obviously, I'm not supposed to be using Duolingo as my sole source of language study, and, yet, I sort of am.

I mean, I legitimately have flashcards at home, but do I use them?  I bought a subscription to Japanpod101.com, but do I listen to a lesson every day, like I should?  I have Pimsler CDs in my car, but do I pop one in the player instead of listening to news that makes me want to pull my hair out?

No.

Also, if you can't tell from the above, I am a 100% auditory learner (thank you, mild dyslexia), which may be another part of my general problem with Duolingo. However, I do need to be able to read/sound out words in Hiragana, and Duolingo is the ONLY way I have learned any of that consistently.  So, for that, Duolingo has been good.

Probably what I need is a routine. I should have some set time, every day, where I sit down and do ten minutes of study there and follow that up by listening to a podcast and make Mason do flashcards with me. My brain resists foreign languages though, I swear.

Anyway, that's just me complaining. I know what I need to do. I'm just lazy. And, it's not like I have some kind of deadline. I'm learning Japanese just because I want to.  There is no trip planned for the future. I'm sure that's a big part of why I haven't managed to actively carve out space for study.  

Today, I'm going to go to the coffee shop and hang out with a bunch of my writer friends. My friend Eleanor has been trying to get me to commit to another day during the week (Mondays?) where we get together and actually write, since Fridays have become more about socialization than actual writing.  It's a good idea. I have a project I need to start working on, as I got a invite to an apocalypse themed anthology. It's a small press deal, but an invite is still an invite, so I'll take it. My deadline is April 2019.

I've been writing a TON of fan fic, but if you're a follower of junko on AO3, you're probably thinking, "No, you haven't, you big fat liar." But, actually I HAVE. I just haven't posted anything yet, because it's a collaborative project with Josey (cestus) that's an Aizen + Ukitake/Kyouraku (Bleach) epic. Unlike me, Josey doesn't like to post WIPs while they are in progress. So, we are waiting for more to be written before we post. She has given me permission to post one of the pieces because it's nearly a standalone in that it tells some of the origin story of how Aizen discovered Kyoka Suigetsu's shikai.  But, in the last few days I've been kind of struggling to put word on paper at all, and I have no idea why.  Normally, winter is my best writing time.

Last night I went to Tumblr just to see what was happening there. I scrolled quite a ways down my feed, and my personal feed now almost entirely consists of memes about Tumblr's implosion/random explicit tagging policy AND porn bots. Seriously, I hit three porn bots with live-action porn happening right in front of me with all the female presenting nipples being groped in a way I actually don't find very hot, and YET when I go searching on the #yaoi hash tags....

Tumblr's "oops nothing is here screen"

It's possible that all the NSFW yaoi artists and reviewers and text posters decided to go through their entire user history and delete the #yaoi to preserve their work, but somehow I doubt it. I would much rather be able to read someone's review of the latest yaoi post than see an actual, real life dick on my dash, personally--not that I have anything against people who want both (or neither.)

Sigh.

lydamorehouse: (more renji art)
Now that I'm no longer in training, my hours at the library have been drastically cut.  I'm working probably a totally of four times this entire month (though I was told by my colleagues at Roseville that that's actually pretty good when you're first starting out).  At any rate, I was at Maplewood last night.  I happened to decide to shelve things in the teen area, mostly for selfish reasons, mostly being that I wanted to see what kind of manga Maplewood had.

I'd finished shelving the manga and was starting on the YA novels when I overheard these two teen boys talking.  "Oh, you really need to follow him."  I glanced over my shoulder to see them admiring a Tumblr blogger who apparently does a lot of Power Ranger cosplay.

Suddenly, it hit me.  Tumblr is full of teenagers.

I guess I knew that, but listening to this desperately nerdy kid talk to his friend… uh, I dunno.  It made me feel old.

Speaking of feeling old, Mason came home the other day to grumpily inform us that there was a school-wide (Science side) assembly put on by Radio Disney featuring a presentation on….

…corn.

Yep.  He said he missed library in order to watch a woman dressed at Maizey discuss corn. Here, in case you're curious is, Maizey's Facbook Page: https://www.facebook.com/maizey.mn

From there, I lifted this shot, because, really, you have to see Maizey to believe her:

1379765_211097429068647_1635018572_n

Doesn't she just kind of give you nightmares?  I think possibly more disturbing are the temporary tattoos and stickers of her that I keep finding around the house, because in those pictures the person under the costume is clearly WEARING HIGH HEELS.

Because, you know… corn is… fancy?  Well heeled?  Deeply creepy?  I'm really not sure.

When Mason came home and said he learned about "corn" I had a flashback to when he was in first grade and had been moved, for the first time, into an advanced reading group.  He was reading a packet about "jeans" but I misheard "genes" and though, "Oh, cool, the science magnet is living up to their name, getting him going on all the cool genetic stuff right away!"  But, then he had to shake his head and say, "No, Ima, not 'genes' 'jeans,' as in denim."

I was like, "Oh."

And Shawn heard that they'd had a Radio Disney assembly about 'porn.'  We were shouting, "NO!  CORN!"

Although… the high heels.

*shivers*

Okay, let's talk about one more thing so we can all banish that horrible thought from our  minds…. hmmm, let's see.  Susan, the loach, is still alive.  I'm going to call the tank reconditioning a success.  Now I just have to find time to get some more tap water conditioner (I ran out after the last tank water change) and we're good.  I think maybe weekend after this one (since this weekend is MarsCON), I'll get her a companion of some sort.

Also, today I get to make another trip to the laundromat.  Whee!  Although I'm secretly looking forward to losing a few quarters to the pinball machine.

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