also we sent a message to the tree trimming service! fingers crossed

Today we finally moved Wax's WFH setup to under the window (2 weeks after beginning this furniture-rearrangement!). In the process of doing this, this conversation happened:

waxjism: What are you doing?
cimorene: Just sweeping under the radiator before we move the desk, with this squeegee from the bathroom, since I didn't see a broom.
wax: It's gotta be up here. [NOW IN THE OTHER ROOM] Neither of us WOULD take it downstairs though!?
cim: But, honey, we both know that either of us would put anything anywhere when our brains are turned off.*
wax: No! [SHE RUNS DOWN THE STAIRS]
[A FEW MINUTES LATER] wax: But how many places can a broom GO?!
cim: [LITERALLY TURNING AROUND RIGHT WHERE I'M STANDING TO LOOK AT WAX]... Oh wait, this broom? It's leaning against your desk.
wax: [STARING] It must've been there for months.
cim: And we both looked right at it and didn't see it even though we were actively looking for a broom.
wax: And I looked at it every day.
cim: And you went downstairs to look for a broom and I went in the other room to get another tool that wasn't a broom to sweep with, and given that, don't you think either one of us would probably put anything anywhere?
wax: Yeah.


*Most memorably when I lost my favorite mug for a few days and later found it under the bed, the several times we've lost things and found them in the microwave, and the time I walked into the bathroom and found a bicycle pump and a small shelf I had never seen before on the toilet.

🌞 Another thing that happened was that we thought she might need some curtains in the window, to protect her eyes from the sun. The wooden valance with the curtain track has been leaning on the wall next to the window waiting to be put back up for several years, so I went and got the hardware, only for Wax to remember that we haven't been able to find the charger to our Ikea electric screwdriver for several years? It's one of the things that got lost in the move, along with one of my favorite sweaters. So just now I finally ordered a rechargable Ryobi One+ one so that it can share the same charger as our palm sander and minivac and (weirdly) lawnmower. That window faces west, though, so it's unlikely to become an issue in the meanwhile.

🍫 We felt like baking something today. We made the recipe I have previously referred to as "Chocolate Cake of DOOOOM" because it is extra chocolatey and which I once accidentally made with like 3x the proper amount of sugar. It's still a good cake, but I think making it layered makes it necessarily too sweet. It just can't handle two layers of frosting! (We ran out of cocoa powder and Wax haf to use a different recipe of chocolate glaze for the top layer, one that uses melted chocolate instead. That might be contributing, but I remember this problem from before too.) We thought that we had never tried the other chocolate cake recipe in our recipe database, but that's not true - in April 2020 we tried another one and decided it would be our default from now on! Best Chocolate Cake recipe from that post is what we should have made.

Snookums likes to sit on my bedside table like this when he wants something, and I call him a gargoyle when he does, but it's usually at night. I happened to get this great picture of him being a gargoyle this morning though. ♥ his adorable David Bowie eye

Apparently a trailer for the Star Trek show about Pike's ship dropped...

...I haven't hunted it down yet; I just saw the announcement on Wax's Twitter feed.

In all fairness, I have to say I didn't have high hopes for this show in advance because I've been disappointed in every new Star Trek venture in recent years. I'm glad they're making them, but they aren't leaning in the directions of what I like about Star Trek, and in addition to that they've taken a looser approach to contradicting existing canon and characterization than I can really understand and sympathize with (because you could always just NOT do that and then it would all make a lot more sense... but I'm not going to write that post because it's obviously not for me). And more importantly, perhaps, their wardrobe and makeup design have been deeply disappointing to me because for the most part, alien makeup design aside, they've been modern-day trendy/sexy/pretty in a way that not only doesn't make logical sense in the verse of the show... but also isn't hokey and silly in an entertaining and interesting way.

Anyway, though, every new show that comes along will presumably have to hire some new writers, so there's always a new chance that I'll like it. I suppose hoping for better costume design when they've got a multi-show thing going right now would have been pointless anyway: they're bound to stick to the same philosophy that's already going in Discovery.

Right. What was I saying? Oh, yeah.

Somewhat uniquely, now, we have the original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" and the later recut two-part episode "The Menagerie" in TOS canon showing flashbacks to Pike's bridge with Number One and Spock serving on it, and we see Number One (and also Yeoman Colt) wearing the exact same uniforms as Pike and Spock - knee boots, capri pants, gold velour tunic shirts with shawl collars. There aren't any skorts in the original pilot; those came later (after the studio made Roddenberry remove Majel Barrett from her position of authority and reduce the number of women on the bridge). The uniforms weren't gendered, and they looked great, so I can't help thinking it's an ominous sign that the teaser image shows Pike and Spock wearing standard TOS-era uniforms and Number One apparently in some sort of dress or tunic with princess seams and black side panels that thus outline the point of the breast on both sides. Is there even a shred of a legitimate reason for this? I cynically doubt it. Of course, it's possible that I'm just being overly suspicious, but then... it's been so disappointing before.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I have the emotional energy to try to watch this when it comes out. I wasn't emotionally prepared to attempt to watch Picard when Wax wanted to see it (with her lower emotional investment in TNG, but also she just works completely differently from me and she always wants to see something new even if she knows it's going to suck, and also she has an appetite to watch like what feels like 150 hours or so of tv per week), and I ended up seeing the second half or so over her shoulder while she watched it. I think I watched... about 30-40% of the last few eps before deciding I didn't want to see the rest.

And of course, I hated the first season of the She-Ra reboot so much it took me like a year just to calm down enough to finish watching it, and I eventually formally gave myself permission to not watch the remaining seasons. (I was more fundamentally emotionally tied to She-Ra than to Star Trek, though. She-Ra was definitional for my tiny identity and fannish life from like, age 5 to... 8 or so? While my interest in TNG was strongest, probably, as a preteen. Though I did already like it as a kid. I definitely remember that when we finally found a convention to go to in the South, age... 11 or 10?... my primary mission, apart from books, was to get a Troi action figure, followed by a Data, and then a Picard.)