Cimorene

Last time I updated about my learning to drive stick/standard shift I posted this, you may remember:

Total cost:

Application fee: 25€
Driving lessons: 875€
ADHD tax: 152€

Incorrect. That was my total cost thus far, but I forgot the fees for the theory test and the driving test! I have now reserved a time for the theory test on August 14.

Theory test fee: 40€
Driving test fee (not booked yet): 99€

Total: 1191€

I'll have to take the bus to Turku to take it at the nearest Ajovarma office. ( Read more... ) I have been studying the badly-translated textbook that came with my driving class (and also the good Swedish translation and occasionally the Finnish original, for clarity) and going through the test practice questions. I passed the first full practice test I took yesterday, but at about 70%, so I'm trying to make it so I know the answers to all the questions.

Friday I had a second lesson with the driving simulator, and it was much better than the first one. It was fun actually! But I completely failed to manage to start the car on a hill again (I failed to do this in my first simulator lesson like 8 times in a row and the teacher, after coaching me through the steps and explaining it, just gave up and reset the lesson lol) and had to reset it. Now I've read in the textbook I realize it's because the hill in the simulator was too steep for the instructions he gave me the first time (on a gentle slope you only need the brake, but on a steep hill you need the parking brake as well - terrifying).

BONUS OFF-TOPIC FUN FACTS: READING AND BANNING

1. After we watched the season finale of the Murderbot show, and I discussed it extensively with both my sister (who is extremely ALL CHANGE IS BAD CHANGE) and waxjism (who is not, but was annoyed because the show felt too YA for her, although she didn't HATE it), I reread the books. I had reread All Systems Red before the show; last week I reread it again, then all the others, and then I read the newest short story, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (about ART and its crew). And after that for days I just wanted MORE and didn't want to read anything else, but the next novel isn't out yet; I reread Artificial Condition again and started Network Effect again, and skimmed through the tags on AO3 and Tumblr to see what people are saying... but it wasn't really satisfying. When I'm interested in a ship that is non-sexual in nature, I rarely find what I want from fandom, and that's what happened again (though there is some gen friendship fic and some queerplatonic fic on AO3). I can't begrudge people their desire to sexualize nonsexual relationships, because I've definitely thought that was fun before. I wrote Finding Nemo slash (and I stand by that). But when you don't want to read that, and I don't, your odds are simply worse, because there's less of it.
   
   Unlike my sister, I didn't hate the show, but I was even more annoyed by what Wax called "YA" writing choices than she was. I'm not sure if she can stand to watch it with me when the next season comes out, because I find it very hard to shut up when I'm annoyed at tv. I am happy with the casting and have no problem with the acting - all the things that I disliked are what I consider objectively bad adaptation and writing choices. But it was still fun and watchable when considered as its own work in isolation from the books! Just weirdly and unnecessarily YA in tone.



2. For fans of banning/blocking, the action, you'll be pleased that I banned someone from my design blog designobjectory last week! I like all ages and periods of decorative arts, but my blog contains a lot of my special interests - midcentury modern, Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and Swedish and Finnish design (mostly 20th c). Somebody reblogged one of my MANY posts of Finnish midcentury light fixtures by Finnish lighting titan Lisa Johansson Pape (one of the many times I've posted a variant of her 44 cm. diameter metal pendant lamp shade, which is still in production by Innolux)... anyway, somebody reblogged it with a comment sort of like "This is the ONE Scandinavian modern thing I like lol. I hate light birch furniture!" My blog is extremely heavy on light wood because of my strong interest in Swedish and Finnish 20th century design! So I blocked them. First I asked Wax if that was too unreasonable and she laughed a lot and said that it's never unreasonable to block people on your own blog. Maybe a little weird though. I mean, probably. But it's so thrilling and satisfying to block someone.



3. Ever since DW made it so you can type @ + username to create the little username embed (waxjism), I have completely switched to it and whenever I want to use the version that links to another site I forget what the code is and end up having to google it. I mean, to search the DW faqs. This is the third time it's happened. That's because it's user name, with a space between. I always forget that.

I was taught to sew as a kid in the 90s by my mom (an artist who can do every kind of art and craft practically, and also fix plumbing and electricity and do carpentry). My first clear sewing memory is making myself a gown (of leftover printed cotton curtain fabric) for an ice sorceress costume that I designed and made myself and wore to NASFiC/Dragoncon as a con costume when I was twelve I think - so 1995, maybe? I made myself shorts and a vest that I used to wear to school in the seventh grade (from a pattern), hemmed my cadette girl scout uniform skirt from knee to mid-thigh (and then did the same for two other members of the troop) at age 14, and at 16 made my sister, then 7, a copy of the allover-studded suede jacket worn by Christina Aguilera in the "What a Girl Wants" music video (also from a pattern, and not from real suede, but I did have to buy a literal Bedazzler). LOL that I did that, in retrospect.

Anyway, I learned to sew on my mom's old Singer, but since moving to Finland I have had the good fortune to enjoy the nearly-permanent loan of my MIL's sewing machine (ours since her death; but she didn't feel like sewing anymore before that), a Bernina 1004 made in Switzerland in 1989, fully mechanical, and basically free from problems (apart from those caused by user error). Until a few months ago.

I tried cleaning lint from around the bobbin case, and not only did that not help, but after it the machine stopped advancing unless you manually turn the wheel with great force. So of course I immediately panicked that I had broken it and became afraid to investigate further because I was afraid I'd find out it was all my fault.

But when I finally got around to watching a couple of videos (because I really wanted some new pajama pants and I can't buy any that meet my standards), I realized there's absolutely no way I caused this! But also it definitely is something with the main bit of the motor, and you have to take the thing completely apart to fix that. So it has to go to a repair shop that specializes in Berninas.

There's only one in Turku, and they closed for the month of July the day before I googled them. 😭 Also you have to book the service in advance and can't just drop machines off. The next nearest specialist is... nowhere near.

But I'm very motivated now, because it's been warm, and every day waxjism wears her percale gingham hobbit (cropped) summer pj pants and looks adorable while I'm suffering with one old pair that are falling apart and are a synthetic blend. And neither of us has pockets!!!

The cake in this recipe is delicious. It could be very successful muffins, like without any icing.

Wax increased the amount of lemon in the frosting to about three times the recipe so it is noticeably tart, but basically it's just way too much butter and sugar for the amount of cake involved. It's fine if I leave most of the frosting scraped off on the plate. But the lemony quality of the strong lemon curd is actually lovely; it's the underlying buttercream that's wrong, so another type of icing with lemon curd might be great.

Basically Wax concluded that she forgot American cake recipes typically have about four times as much frosting as the cakes can hold as well as too much sugar in the frosting itself. I usually have more tolerance for sweeter dessert than she does, but in this case the cake is SO good that I couldn't stand to let it be drowned in excessive buttercream.

After my first driving lesson with a clutch and an expert instructor, I felt cautiously optimistic and a bit excited. I knew I was going to need a lot of practice for the mechanical habits, but I was having fun.

After the first lesson with the driving simulator I kind of feel like I did terrible. I don't say this is a tone of despair, because I know it's partly the fault of the simulator, among other things, but I did get quite annoyed at myself.

I also felt like I needed more repetition of just starting, slowing and stopping, and shifting gear before I tried combining them too quickly the way the simulator was asking. I'd only driven half an hour before the lesson started and was not ready yet to shift into 3rd, floor it to reach 50 kph as quickly as possible, then immediately shift to 2nd and brake to slow while looking over my shoulder for a left turn. This is supposed to be a driving simulator, not a street chase video game! Of course I forgot the turn signal one time and released the clutch too fast another! Also, why would you ever go to 3rd gear and 50 kph in a dense urban environment for less than a block? Why couldn't you practice those skills in a realistic scenario? Like a highway?

But anyway, the point is: there are a fixed number of driving lessons included in this course, so it might not be possible to practice each skill more before moving on. And I've always been terrible at video games. And sports. And coordination, if you don't mean the kind of fine control used for art. Though in retrospect, I did forget to take my methylphenidate first, and it should statistically make a significant increase in how safely I drive.

I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what thefourthvine and norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.

I was making smalltalk with the bus driver along with the other guy at the bus stop and he asked if I was a student, lol. (Wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses took twenty years off I guess.) I said, No, but I'm going to driving school!

And he said close enough and gave me the student ticket rate.

I got a great idea that I was going to make image posts on Tumblr for my top lists of fountain pen ink (favorite inks and inks at the top of my to-buy list), but you need good swatches for that. Or I mean, that was my vision: the whole point is they're pretty.

And so I went to my favorite ink review blog, Mountain of Ink, and discovered that she's got a no-rightclick javascript over all her individual ink swatch images. Obviously, since I'm a 42-year-old millenial who has been using computers since I was a toddler, I could get around this, but I don't want to use her images if she doesn't want people to use them. (I would only have done so in the good-faith belief that normal credit and linkback was all that courtesy required. And I would have earnestly recommended her blog too, because that's what I always do!)

So that means I'd have to make and photograph my own ink swatches. Making's easy (if slightly time-consuming), but taking good photos of them is hard! Like here's some swatches I had knocking around in my folder: my favorite CRAZY expensive ink, Sailor Ink Studio 160 (a light minty green); my favorite all-purpose ink, J Herbin Vert Réséda (a bright teal with a very slight leaning towards green); a lovely dark moody ink, J Herbin Poussière de Lune (a saturated reddish plum purple).


click for bigger

See, it's overcast but bright today - the sky is a solid opaque cool milky white. I took these photos two feet from an open window, with my bright light therapy sunlamp shining from the other side at the same distance. And the color reproduction is still not good! You can see it in the whites - everything looks cooler and dimmer than reality.

Sure, I could color correct them with an image manipulation program, but I think that defeats the point of swatches. And I'm not into it enough to, like, sign up for a Skillshare course in photographing art. So IDK. Maybe I will get more into making swatches. I actually bought a glass dip pen for this exact purpose a couple of years ago, only I broke the tip of the pen the first time I used it and then I didn't buy another (I have regular dip pens though so it's not really necessary).

I can't believe with all our technology there's not a solution to the way low pressure fucks up my brain.

I ran out of OTC antihistamines last week (loratidine) and it's getting a bit uncomfortable. I went over the bedroom floor with a static dust cloth but I can still smell dust in there especially, and it's maddening. I don't usually have this problem in there, and it's not like I'm usually great at dusting, so idk what changed— sinuses just annoyed by going so long without relief? I could have walked to the pharmacy on any weekday, but I don't like to contemplate more than one intimidating task at a time.

There are also flowers now (though I don't think I'm allergic to pollen probably, or not much), although I wish there were more of them. Some of our tulips are finished, and the cowslips, and the last of the daffodils, but the daylilies are opening and forget-me-nots and veronicas are open. A foxglove came back this year - in the same corner where there was one before, so it must've been planted by the old lady who owned this house at least fifteen years ago and planted so many perennials; but apparently it's biennial, so this is a descendant of the one we last saw four years ago perhaps. Possibly we should plant some more there to give them a better chance of continuing to self-seed. Also the striped tulips from the bag of 100 bulbs we planted two years ago are just at the end of their lives, and they're so cool. There are only four of them, and we would love to have more, maybe a whole bed, but I can't figure out what variety they are. I was comparing pictures at the nursery where we bought the bulbs, but they don't look quite right. They sort of look like Tulipa "Hemisphere" based on a web search, and that's a Triumph variety. (Nursery website doesn't list those, but they might not have sold them last year?)


Kind of close shot of a striated red and white tulip in our yard

Last week Wax and I both noticed a low, constant noise coming from the toaster. Sort of high insect humming? This toaster was Wax's mom's and we've been using it since our last toaster broke shortly after her mom died (2020?), but I think her mom had it for quite a long time (2016ish?). It's definitely pretty old for a toaster, so I guess it retires honorably.

We've bought several toasters that broke very suddenly after comparatively short lives before. I went through a period when Smeg appliances started appearing more on social media of wanting one of theirs, though never enough to have paid as much as they cost; but then I read a bunch of reviews of them and concluded they're totally not worth it. And we definitely are not intensive enough toast users to justify the cost of a professional one. I resent the unnecessary ugliness of basic appliances though! There's no reason they couldn't all be reasonably cute, instead of half of them looking like they're trying to blend in on the men's hygiene aisle!

The other night I dreamed we were baking a coffee-flavored layer cake with chocolate icing. I told Wax, and yesterday she made a boiled chocolate cake with half the chocolate replaced with espresso, with 70% dark ganache instead of icing. It came out denser than usual, each of the layers only a few cm high after baking, but it did cook all the way through. Eating a piece is a bit like eating chocolate cake, and a bit like eating a handmade chocolate truffle.

We still haven't managed to take a walk yet on any day that didn't already require an emergency trip to the store in the last... month? Our goal remains walking together every day weather permits, and we continue to not make progress. Forming habits is very hard for people with ADHD, but it's quite frustrating.