picked a handful of violets in my name

susanandleonard.livejournal.com are in town (that'd be my parents' shared account, which exists solely to read my locked posts). They got in on Saturday before the snow. We spent Sunday inside. Monday was my last day at my job - until January when I keep working on this collection, for free. solarcat hung out with us for a couple of hours before leaving for Michigan.

Today, we went shopping downtown. I did not get shoes, which is what I need (my usual comfy work shoes having died rather spectacularly), but I did get a sparkly pink shirt and socks and jewelry magazines. And Dad didn't get anything, despite always needing new clothes because he never buys any.

Now we're killing time before heading to a Thai restaurant in Harvard Square, because Ellie wants to drive and then be able to park. It is my parents 36th anniversary, \o/, and they're taking us along for the celebration, \o?

sl1 k2tog psso by carleton97 (MCR, Bob/Frank/Jamia, ~9k)

You guys. Bob owns a yarn shop. Eeeee! (Basically, this fic and Buy Handmade by jjtaylor are the fics of my crafty fangirl soul. Buy Handmade sustained me through "I'm going to learn to make SOMETHING, dammit" - which turned out to be jewelry - and sl1 k2tog psso is going to sustain me through "I'm going to learn to knit, dammit.")

***

Anyone got recs for a yarn shop in or near Boston? T-accessible is preferred, although Ellie has a car and can sometimes be bribed or badgered into driving me around.

Oh look! It's Ellie's phone!

(Context: my sister works for a company whose main thing is superbatteries of the future, or something. Charge faster, last longer, don't explode - that kind of thing. And she's in the market for a new phone since hers (which used to be mine, and is about 4 years old) no longer has any battery life to speak of. And it's a phone shaped much like the one in the photo.)

And now that I've killed the joke with explanation...


Mail! I received a card from harborshore on Thursday, a card and a wrapped gift-shaped object* from thelemic on Friday, cards from solarcat and insunshine on Saturday, and cards from turlough and chaosmanor yesterday. :D

* Which I haven't opened yet, because I'm not sure if I should wait. thelemic?


( My weekend: naked people and nearly-naked people. )

Bandom edition. [Keep in mind that this meme is intended to highlight nifty content on Dreamwidth, so the list below is limited to people posting at least their fic/art/recs on dw.]

( long list is long )

So, uh. *waves*

I had been waiting to post about this until I got some more items uploaded, but. I keep mentioning it to people, and there's thirteen things in there, which is just going to have to be enough for now. (I had so much more time when I had no social life, srsly you guys.)

Etsy shop. I has one. Jewelry and very tiny paintings - future plans include a wider selection of jewelry, larger paintings, and possibly other things. ;)


And some interactive funtimes: jewelry prompts! (I'll take painting prompts some time soon, promise.) Your prompt can be anything, but I reserve the right to engage in some wacky free-association to turn it into a piece of jewelry.

The prompter has right of first refusal on their piece. After that, I'll offer these pieces to my journal readership, and after that, whatever's left will go on etsy.

Even if you doubt you'll buy whatever comes of your prompt, you can still ask me to make something. No excuses or apologies needed. Nobody has to buy what I make from their prompt. I just want inspiration.

Over the course of my less-than-eight hours of sleep, my LJ flist received over 200 vgifts. Needless to say, I disabled the notifications, because I was having trouble finding actual posts and shit.*

Although that doesn't so much matter right now, I guess, since LJ managed to break its own notification system. The whole thing is down until they figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. Although I will kind of lol if the thing that broke it was the umpteen-MILLION snowflake vgifts that people have been sending. Are they free or something?

* I no longer use /friends to read my flist. I have tracked each journal I read, which delivers the full text of people's posts to my LJ inbox (or a "you can't see this, neener" message if you locked it down after the notification was sent) and cuts down on the number of different places I have to go to keep up with everyone and everything. But since notifications are down, I am not receiving posts. I just hope they mean that bit about queueing everything until notification deliveries can resume. Otherwise I will just miss however many hours/days of posts, because seriously.

***

Ellie's car wouldn't start this morning. Seems to be the battery more than anything else, but it's an old, high-mileage car with at least two "fix me" lights on, so who knows what else might be wrong.

***

Bossboss is out every day this week except Thursday.

So of course today was the apocalypse. In the form of sewage leaking through the ceiling in the storage area.

Fortunately, we received warning early enough to save all materials - a few boxes got moved, and Second-in-Command covered some shelves with plastic sheeting, and they appear to have stopped the leak relatively quickly.

The library's water was off for most of the day, and hazmat guys kept trooping through the workroom. All in all, most distracting.

Best of 2009

December 5th: Night out.

Okay, so. I have had a lot of really good nights out. And in, for that matter. So fuck that "best" shit - I cannot choose.

December 6th: Workshop or conference.

Uh. MJ or TIC. It's not like I go to that many conferences. Both were awesome, but for different reasons.

( Marblehead )

Today, Ellie and I will be doing stuff. People will be flyering Bazaar Bizarre, so we'll take a shift at that. And we might go to H&M, because she needs clothes.

I once had to take my glasses off to get a former professor to recognize me. o_O

Best of 2009

December 3rd: article

I'm pretty tempted to do a fic recs post or something, but poor planning on my part means that's not happening. Similarly, you don't get actual specific articles, just blog recs. Three, since it's the 3rd.

I've been really loving geekfeminism_feed, which I have been reading since its inception, pretty much. I've also been reading thecurvature_feed for a while now, and tiger_beatdown_feed recently.

Best of 2009

December 1st: best trip of 2009

Well, if I had needed to travel for it, this would have been muskratjamboree, because it was a good time and it gave me a solarcat.

But since MJ is in Boston and I didn't stay in the hotel or anything...

Unlike in years past (okay, mainly the year Ellie and I were living in that shitty apartment in East Boston), I didn't do that much traveling this year. No running down to New York or further abroad for concerts, which I did a lot of in 2008.

I did spend two weeks in New Orleans with my parents, which was awesome but not particularly interesting to the internet at large - I chilled, ate a lot of good food, and slept soundly every night on my very squishy mattress.

But what I'm actually going to use as my Answer For The Meme is TIC. Not the travel - I had a headache on the way to Vermont, and we got a late start. But the conference was good. I was social and willingly offline for all of Saturday and the travel time on either side. And as much as I joke about smacking down n00bs in my classes, I kept my own damn mouth shut for the conference, because I was there to learn and support my sister and her friends and the other attendees.

But really, 2009 was about burrowing in and making Jamaica Plain my home. Through Ellie, I've connected with local performing arts stuff: Big Moves, Boston's burlesque scene, queer performance art. We've tried a few new restaurants in the neighborhood, like an Indian place on Centre Street and the fried chicken joint a couple of blocks away.

My goal is to get fully unpacked before 2010. (I never managed to get 100% unpacked at our old place, and I still have several boxes in my room. The implied impermanence is probably badly for my soul or something.)