Cimorene

Why writing badly is not that bad compared to writing without checking Wikipedia

2026-06-12T12:26:22Z

As you may remember, my wife, waxjism, is currently into Heated Rivalry. She's reblogging the same gifsets twenty times a day and she's reading nothing but Heated Rivalry anymore. It completely displaced her previous fannish interest in 9-1-1, by the way, and she didn't even watch the end of the season of that - which is probably an improvement for her because Heated Rivalry, the show, is well written, meticulously planned, brilliantly acted, and made with extraordinary care to every detail of photography and editing and visual design. In contrast, while 911 is a good time, it's a network prime time soap opera churned out by an underpaid writers' room and a questionably reasonable showrunner. Of course 911, (sociologically) intriguingly, seems to be in the midst of making their male BFFs a canon pairing ( Read more... )

So anyway. Wax is now reading fanfiction for Heated Rivalry, which is a miniseries made out of a romance novel about gay hockey players. Wax and I are veterans of hockey RPF, having both read it and followed NHL hockey for maybe 5-8 years (I started to get fed up with the evil ownership and conservative culture around 2016-18). In hockey RPF the level of hockey knowledge is obviously high and sports fandom was the canon text. But this show's broad appeal has brought in a lot of fans with no knowledge of hockey at all, and as always with a very popular fandom, a critical mass of the ones with no knowledge of hockey also lack any sense that any knowledge about hockey is necessary to writing about professional hockey players. (It would totally be possible to write fic about this show with no knowledge of hockey beyond what is shown onscreen, provided you simply paid attention to what was onscreen and used it; but this would probably require more attention to detail than is plausible in a person who is so enthusiastic that it doesn't occur to them to look up even a Wikipedia article's worth of information on the world and setting of the story they are writing.)

So there's apparently a huge range of mistakes about hockey, and even though this problem is so endemic that Wax is reading mistakes egregious enough to upset her multiple times a day and has been for months, the pain never dulls.

You know what this reminds me of? The last time I was reading for an extended time in the same fandom: I spent about a year intensively reading almost every last scrap (at the time) of Steve/Eddie fic in the Stranger Things fandom after season 4 (Here's my 75 bookmarks, mostly from 2022-2023). Stranger Things is about teenagers in 1980s midwestern America. The fandom appealed overwhelmingly to young people (although the show had a lot of nostalgic appeal for adults as well, they were definitely a minority of writers represented in fic). Also, less predictably, the plurality of the writers seemed to be from the UK (???). Like Heated Rivalry writers who don't know about hockey, these youngsters didn't know about the culture, technology, or slang of 1986 (including the parts that actually were shown onscreen, which again mirrors the Heated Rivalry writers).

After a while I was far more annoyed by ridiculous errors in technology and British dialogue that they didn't bother getting American-picked (it's a small percentage of young fanfic writers who think having a beta reader is worthwhile now; in fact it's quite popular and socially acceptable to post without rereading) than by anything that you could call bad writing in the traditional sense. At some point I got so annoyed with it all that I would have gratefully used a filter that only allowed fic by writers born before 1985 in North America (that's when I knew I needed to stop reading it, probably).

People have to start writing and keep writing to get really good. People have different taste. People have different skills. So there's no point holding it against anyone that they're young, or haven't been writing for that long, or are writing a different kind of fic than the kind you like because they're interested in different things than you.

On the other hand, everybody who doesn't bother to look it up when they don't know what a trade is, or how a cassette player works, or how hockey games are scored, or queer terminology in the 80s, is making a conscious choice they didn't have to make. They could have left it out if they didn't want to look it up and weren't sure! So it's absolutely fair to hold all of those things against them.

Of course, it would be difficult to filter, even theoretically, for writers who look everything up, so the quickest way to this more-relaxing reading experience is a writer who already knows. Hence "writer was alive in the 1980s" and "writer has been a hockey fan for years" would be highly useful filters if they were widely adopted.

(But they would also narrow the pool so much that most people wouldn't want to - be able to? - stick to them very long.)

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It's tired girl summer I guess?

2026-06-08T13:21:11Z

They are constructing a new fire station across the street. The empty houses they demolished to make space were a hazard and an eyesore, so it was lovely to see them gone! On the other hand, they cleared most of the trees on those lots, and we didn't really realize in advance that once they did that the entire north face of our house would be exposed to view down the highway all the way across the roundabout, even though our house is a block away from the highway. The view from all the windows on this side of our house is now full of neon signs, which makes it extremely ugly. I suppose the absence of the empty houses, which were ruining the view in a different way, is probably still worth it, though. And we're enjoying following the progress of the project. The site has been leveled and excavated and filled with gravel and groundcloths and now they're pile-driving.

The first episode of the new season of Interview with the Vampire, which has now had its name changed to The Vampire Lestat to reflect which books they are adapting, is out! We watched it yesterday. People were saying that it had 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I think is deserved, but still surprising. It was a very good first episode, and a very fun time.

Wax's brothers are planning to help us build a catio for Wax's birthday, and she wants to put it on the balcony, which currently doesn't exist. You might remember that we were in the midst of removing the rotten boards from the steel frame of our balcony nearly two years ago when Snookums died and we had to part with Anubis. Last summer we did not do any work on the balcony, so it is still just the steel frame waiting to be rustproofed. I suppose it's good if this spurs us to finally attaching the new decking to the balcony. On the other hand...

The original wooden front door to the house has been getting worse and worse and now it's so bad that the screws holding the handle fell off because the wood is rotted. Bits (nails from the outside face, splinters of wood around the improperly installed locks from the previous owner) are falling off it.

This is not a weatherproofing or security emergency, because the proper door is between the cold porch and the house - modern, insulated, with a lock. This outer door just needs to open and close and looks cute. But on the other hand, we do want to keep the rain out of the cold porch.

We're gonna have to do something about this door, but we don't really have the skills or the collection of power tools, or enough money to splurge on having it refurbished by professionals. (A couple of years ago before it was this bad, Wax's brother and SIL were here with her mom and stepdad and her stepdad - that is, Wax's brother's wife's stepdad - was like "You should let me fix your door! It really needs it! I know just what to do!!" and we were like "No, haha, it's fine!" because we don't really know him all that well etc. OTOH we translated his doctoral thesis for him and he was able to get several papers out of it, which I also helped him translate (for money though, but he was grateful); maybe that's enough. We should've said yes, because it got WAY WORSE after that. The door presumably needs to have multiple dutchmen, as well as needing to be thoroughly stripped and the outer layer of wooden paneling probably replaced at minimum (totally possible that more pieces of it - like the outer vertical frame piece - will need replaced as well). Even when I was thinking that it could be our main project over Wax's summer vacation this year I was not sanguine about our ability to fix all these things on the door, but if we are actually spending that time on the balcony...? And yet we have to be able to open and close this door... if only by removing the lockbox so it no longer latches. Replacing this door would probably be even harder than fixing it, though, because in 1950 when our house was built they weren't standard sizes, and the house is stucco, which would make any change in the doorframe non-trivial.

I've been struggling for weeks to get together the energy and executive function to bake cookies. I haven't baked cookies for... maybe a year? I keep getting tripped up by the need to take butter out to soften several hours before you start. And today I FINALLY did it! I haven't decided what kind of cookies to make yet though.

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Brave Sipuli in the great outdoors

2026-06-05T12:41:35Z

Sipuli has been getting gradually more comfortable in the yard and she now spends most of her time there exploring. She wants to check everything out, walk out in the street, climb through the barbed wire in the hedge into the woods, sneak into the neighbors' yard, and crawl under the tenants' table while they're sitting at it.

But she still runs away from the tenants' kids, who are in the yard at the same time as her multiple times a week, if they talk to her. Last week a lady walking by in the street asked if she was having a nice time outside and she whipped her head around and cringed down in the grass and tried to slither away. She also panicked and ran and got tangled in a chair when one of the tenants said Pspsps to her a few weeks ago. In her jumpy moments she has wiggled out of her harness twice now. I guess we need to get her a more secure harness.

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The biannual houseguest bonanza

2026-05-28T08:43:23Z

Wax's favorite aunt is here! She came for the triplets' graduation party Saturday. We love to have her.

However, I'm out of paracetamol (acetaminophen) because last time I was in a pharmacy I accidentally bought the small box of 10x 500mg instead of the normal one of 30. And I am completely exhausted after cleaning strenuously the last three days: vacuuming, tons of laundry, sweeping, scrubbing floors, dusting, shaking rugs and moving bunny furniture, and scrubbing two bathrooms yesterday (mirrors and glass, chrome and porcelain, and toilets). My hands, feet, shoulders, back, legs, and arms are all separately sore. It's also extremely windy and the wind is very cold. I do not want to walk to the store! However, I'm about to run out of Earl Grey as well as painkillers (we have plenty of ibuprofen, but I don't take it often because I don't want it to destroy my sensitive stomach).

I also had cause to search the web for tips for removing limescale from toilets and floors and glass shower walls and chrome fixtures. The glass got much better, and with magic eraser some of the scale came off the floor tiles where there's a drip that has made little white rings around their edges (they're cobalt blue Japanese glazed porcelain tile), but all my cleaning products and physical friction made no impression on the other named surfaces. I found insane stuff like people with hard water chipping the calcium out of the toilet bowl with a screwdriver or filling it up with hydrochloric acid. The post I found about limescale on glass was from a woman who has been trying to remove it for ten years and the only things that have worked for her were razors and steel wool. The internet wants me to fill a plastic bag with vinegar and rubber band it around the faucet, but it's a shower mixer that looks like this... do I even have a big enough bag?

I have mostly a pleasant feeling of accomplishment. But also... sore.

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Cursed sweater 3 (triplet sweater 3 2025) update

2026-05-24T09:27:29Z

The knitting is going fine and the sweater looks good. I've knitted 35 cm so far.

The pattern is a 90s Drops design pattern with an inverted triangle shape to make the shoulders wider than the hem (not doing that) knitted in pieces and seamed (like basically all mainstream patterns of that era, but not doing that) (I will seam the shoulders because those are functional seams that help keep the sweater in place and prevent it stretching out of shape, but there's no benefit to side seams on an oversized simple pullover, or seams where the sleeves attach ever) with set-in sleeves (not doing that)... and I already ruined the bottom hem by following the directions to start with three rows of reverse stockinette between the ribbing and the body, and will have to unknit that part backwards and redo it upside down after I finish the body.

But overall I guess it's going well. Very quick and easy to knit.

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Reading high fantasy

2026-05-20T21:33:35Z

I am resisting reading the new Murderbot book still because then I will be out of Murderbot again.

But that reminded me that I had another book by Wells waiting. I bounced off Witch King the first time I picked it up because it starts with a three page glossary of characters with exotic fantasy names, and those always annoy me. It's useful to have a list, but I think I prefer it as an appendix. I don't have any patience for homework that I'm supposed to do before I start reading. If your book is prose, and it's elaborate enough to require reference lists (is my feeling), you'd fucking better be able to write exposition skillfully enough to introduce your characters and places in the text! And Wells is skilled enough to do that. You don't need to read the list before you start reading.

Not knowing how to pronounce the names is also very annoying, but I have to say that on balance, the fantasy novels that try to explain the pronunciation in a folksy way are even more annoying, so I think I agree with her choice. It would just be nice to have an appendix with actual phonetic symbols, or a whole thing explaining the phonology of each invented language (Wells isn't Tolkien. I don't think she actually invented the languages). In things that are set in the real world, or very close to it, it's usually possible to identify the places and languages and thus get at least a good guess at pronunciation, but Wells' fantasy cultures are not (to me) merely identifiable Earth ones with the serial numbers filed off (which is a point very much in her favor in terms of world-building, but it does make pronunciation more challenging). But my mind's ear has to decide what it thinks for each name or I'll be stumbling over them every time, and I cannot actually stop myself from getting distracted wondering about it nearly every time the names come up. Of course this is a set of eternal dilemmas in high fantasy.

This book is more recent than the Ile-Rien trilogy and much more mature and well written, but I still prefer her sf to her fantasy.

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A new curséd sweater appears

2026-05-16T10:19:07Z

My first curséd sweater was ( Read more... ) Later, purple yarn I bought for myself became the second curséd sweater ( Read more... ) The third curséd sweater is the third of the triplet sweaters we promised to make last summer, originally saying we would try to finish them all by last winter, lol. The other two are done.

1. Wax started this traditional Aran cabled sweater last fall and knitted about 30% of it, but she had modified the pattern to make it smaller, and then decided it was too small (because all the cables contracted it so much).

2. I unraveled it and started over, following the pattern exactly (after Wax had to redo the first few rounds of ribbing for me, because the first time I knitted a couple of inches before realizing I had gotten the stitches twisted and was knitting a Möbius strip). I hated the design. Way too many different cable crosses slowed it down a ton.

3. Then I realized, after working for weeks, and especially right after like ten hours of knitting in two days, that I was using the yarn too fast and we didn't have enough left to finish. This shouldn't be possible, because we ordered the yarn using this pattern as a guide. But it was! And because it was over six months ago, we almost certainly could not get more yarn in the same dye lot.

4. Started over again with a new, much simpler cable pattern, and again got the stitches twisted. It's not like I wasn't checking! Both times I was worried about it and checked twice, then incorrectly concluded they were not twisted¹! At least this time I realized that I was knitting a Möbius strip after only about a centimeter.

Footnote
1. this part is just adhd, not the curse

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Localized tweeness event

2026-05-11T19:21:17Z

I want to see Project Hail Mary, but not enough to go to the theater for it.

Fine, it'll reach streaming soon enough.

The problem is that it has become one of those fandom epicenters of twee. I am seeing an explosion of nauseating sentimentality and noxious preciousness about it on Tumblr, just an absolute flood of posts from people too excited to remember to tag, and a large quantity of spoilers and eye-watering takes still get through before I manage to scroll past them. These are blogs I don't want to unfollow for other reasons, obviously. I might reach critical saturation before the movie reaches streaming at this rate.

When was the last time this happened? I cannot put my finger on an example fandom that predictably yet undeservedly became this kind of tweeness vortex, yet I am bothered by the feeling that I've seen this happen before.

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Journey to Bad Vibes Mall

2026-04-29T19:36:40Z

Today I finally made my expedition to the mall with rancid vibes! The plan was: 5 min. walk ➡️ 33 min. on bus ➡️ 10 min. walk to suburban shopping center.

Right away, on the way there I missed my bus stop and had to walk back a kilometer from the next one. The signs pointing the way to the mall just petered out when the huge fortress came in sight, and so did the sidewalk; and having never approached it other than by car, I couldn't see a way in. I ended up hiking around half of it and walking into the parking garage, and I arrived overheated even though it was cold and so windy my eyes kept watering behind my sunglasses.

At the mall I did find the main things I was looking for, but I also got confused trying to say my phone number out loud in Finnish and could only recover it by writing it; and also later got flustered and went to a café with mediocre baked goods instead of the bakery I had been planning to eat at. There were TWO sets of charity facers camped out in the main intersections of the mall, too, which added random anxiety that the day didn't need.

When leaving I found the route back to the sidewalk, which requires walking through the grounds of the apartment block next to the mall. (There's a taxi stand on the opposite side, so you must be able to reach a sidewalk there, but that's useless for my bus route.) My hip and knee both started feeling slightly stiff as I was walking back to the bus, something that has never happened when I was out walking before, and I had to slow down a bit because I couldn't stop and do range of motion exercises there. And then I got lost trying to follow the map to the bus stop, and ended up at the wrong bus stop and had to look up directions from there, and missed the bus, but that all took so long that by the time I got to the right bus stop the next one was less than 10 minutes away.

The part of the edge of Turku where this mall is has very little pedestrian infrastructure - it's highways and overpasses and no shade and parking lots. It does have paved sidewalk/bike paths beside the road, but they are plainly a grudging afterthought. It FEELS hostile there. In future if I need to go to a mall by bus I will definitely take the hour trip to downtown Turku instead, even though that will mean lots more people around. (And if you're going by car, Mylly is a much nicer mall than Skanssi.)

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Nut brittle

2026-04-28T18:01:17Z

Anybody have a favorite recipe for nut brittle? I guess I'm just never going to be able to buy it in a store again and making it would be much easier than ordering it from far away.

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The cat separation dilemma

2026-04-28T16:54:08Z

Just imagining talking to a new therapist or new friendly acquaintance, like...

"Oh? Why do you think you've been in that depressed rut for so long?"

"Well, I haven't been in the same room as my wife in two years because of our special-needs cat."

(I have been, but not to sleep, and usually not for more than half an hour or an hour at a time.)

This situation all happened a bit at a time and seemed reasonable all along, like the boiling frogs. But taking a step back and looking at it every now and then is disorienting (and even more depressing).

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Should I have cleaned out my bookmarks before? Yes, but now's not the time!

2026-04-21T13:48:39Z

I finally got around to reinstalling Linux Mint on my laptop last week so that I could back up the last two years of photos. Going through the photos of 2024-2025 was wild. Wax and I have both been in such a fog of depression that we sometimes barely remembered the things in them, and it all feels vague and like a long time ago. Haha, great.

Anyway, the process of updating my laptop didn't go as planned.

First Tristana threw the external on the floor while it was in the act of copying, thus more-or-less bricking it (a computer repair store MIGHT be able to recover the data). It's possible that there wasn't very much on it that we don't have elsewhere, but I'm not quite sure without taking apart both desktops to access my hds from Wax's to check.

And then signing into Firefox went wrong and it failed to sync my bookmarks, even though they're all there still in the mobile version. The backup of my ff profile that contained the bookmarks was on the external but had not copied before The Incident. So I need to try removing and reinstalling the browser before I have to give up and move them manually, because apparently even though sync refusing to work is a not-uncommon issue, going by the support threads everywhere, they actually removed the "export bookmarks" button! ( Read more... )

Needless to say, I did consider switching browsers, but that feels like too many more steps to tackle at the moment.

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Green pants (trousers) saga

2026-04-17T09:43:28Z

Here's another fun ADHD story. I bought a pair of pants that are a lovely jungle green over two years ago from Freddie's of Pinewood (no longer there; they were limited run) (sorta-splurge, because they're "slow fashion" + customs fee from England). They close with a button but not a hook, and I immediately ordered a hook to sew in them, but then I didn't get around to doing that for the last MORE THAN TWO YEARS because I never planned an occasion to wear them. (They aren't dressy occasion pants. They're just cotton twill.) Today I thought to myself, "I might as well sew it in, or I'll never be able to wear them once I decide to."

Then I looked in my sewing kit, my spare needle and thread and button case, the sewing table in the living room, and the little basket full of embroidery tools, which was all the places I could think of where it might be. But no luck. I can't find the hook&bar. I'll have to order another because there's not a sewing shop in town (you can buy mending materials like thread, patches, low quality needles etc including regular hooks and eyes and zippers at supermarkets and the Finnish equivalent of K-Mart, but the larger flat hook and bar that goes on waistbands is apparently less in demand).

I am planning a trip to the big mall with rancid vibes next week, because Wax wants more fun socks and you can't get those locally; but I'm afraid I'm unlikely to find one there either. The last time I ordered from an online shop that would carry them was less than a month ago, because I finally started knitting socks to give to Wax's family next winter! But of course I had no memory of the issue then.

This is obviously not just an ADHD tax, though; it's also hardly having left the house in that time (burnout, depression?) and putting these pants on a pedestal (what a distracting metaphor... pant pedestal) because I'm so jazzed to have found pants in such a great color. And feeling that I don't have any tops that are as good, though I now know what I want to knit to go with them (a striped zigzag or ripple tee something like this, with lavender and green and blue).

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Antique clocks are a problem because you have to wind them

2026-04-11T11:00:42Z

I think a clock that chimed every hour would be really helpful to me. It would be like having an alarm that goes off once an hour, but totally benign, instead of making me jump like an alarm. It would be nicer if the church belltower did - belltower chimes are the best ones, I think. Meanwhile lots of clocks don't even tick now, which I find very annoying, because I like to listen for the ticks and count them.

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False spring is here at last

2026-03-25T11:57:11Z

Ughhhh. Panic again (Finnish government bureaucracy), and trying to make important decisions, and trying to build healthy habits, and feeling too exhausted for any of it - we're barely ahead of laundry and dishes. I want to take myself and all three pets for checkups and I cannot make the appointments.

At least my dad isn't sick! My parents and sister's shared house is experiencing a plumbing emergency where the shower won't drain though. We have had so many drain problems here that that looks minor to me, though it is quite expensive.

Our wonderful Ukrainian tenant-neighbors in the other half of our house asked politely if they could trim the apple trees, which we've been thinking we need to hire someone to do because we have tried and failed and didn't have the tools. The husband there works, studies, cycles, takes his kids out, fishes, cooks, and is constantly buying and selling things through fb marketplace and fixing furniture with power tools. (His wife does too, but not the fishing or power tools; she swims and does other stuff.) The instant we said yes please 🙏 he thoroughly trimmed both trees, and the kids have gathered the brush into piles already. They are so active and involved and extroverted and successful that we feel inadequate in comparison, but we're so lucky to have them.

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My beloved e-reader app with the custom Solarized css

2026-03-24T11:02:50Z

Over ten years ago I researched and read articles looking for the right e-reader app for my phone, got attached to one called FBReader, and paid a tiny fee to upgrade it. I have configured my own font families, sizes, and colors; can adjust the screen brightness in the page; and can advance pages with the volume button. I am attached to the library views as well, although they're not ideal. I've used it to read every ebook I've read in that time — I convert them to epubs — and thousands of works of fanfiction. I won't put up with proprietary interfaces; they get in the way so much that I'd rather not read the book in question, or read it on paper.

But it's started to give me trouble! A few times last year I had to delete books that would freeze the app every time they were opened, but I attributed this to file corruption or a bug. But now it's happened several times in a row with several different books. I'm afraid I will have to look for a replacement! And I dread that.

I can't embark on a project like that until I finally get around to backing up my last two years' worth of photos. And I can't do that until I repartition my laptop harddrive, which will require reinstalling Linux Mint. I have stored all my files in a separate storage partition for like twenty years, so nothing but ADHD can account for the fact that I forgot to create one the last time I upgraded the laptop OS.

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Knitted wardrobe for the hand-painted doll my mom made me when I was 3

2026-03-20T18:26:54Z

I don't have a lot of toys from my childhood with me here in Finland, just a few stuffed toys that were made by my mom. This doll is the first thing my mom made for me: a Cabbage Patch replacement. (I wanted a Cabbage Patch as a toddler, but my mom made me this doll instead, which was even better - she was so beautiful to me, and my mom hand painted her eyes!) This doll has been lying flopped over in a basket on top of a bookshelf for a few years, and she caught my eye as I was going to bed one day a few weeks ago and I started thinking that it's a pity that a work of art that my mom worked so hard to make isn't being played with.

It's possible there will be a toddler in the family I could give her to in the next few years. But in the meantime I felt sad about her, dusty and poorly dressed, so I examined her and knitted her a little outfit.

The doll needs washed as well, but I want to wait for summer. Her body is light pink cotton that has gotten rather grimy, but her face isn't machine washable. My mom says I can take off her head and wash the body in the washing machine; and I wouldn't want to do that until it's warm outside, and sunny, so it would dry as quickly as possible. The face definitely needs washed too, so I'm going to have to try to spot wash it.

All three of these wee garments took me only about 6 days to make, and they're made of leftover scraps (the striped shirt and the yellow cardigan) and a bit of cheap sock yarn (the jungle green pants). But I got that feeling of excited accomplishment with a finished project three times! They have the details of bigger garments, and they're so cute and tiny, even more so than making sweaters for small children.

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RIP 30% of #3 triplet sweater

2026-03-14T20:07:10Z

Wax informed me that it was definitely coming out too small and would need to be started over, so this morning I spent several hours unraveling it after I finished weaving in the ends on the Bumblebee Breton (#2).

The three skeins rolled together into one yarn ball are the size of a baby's head, according to Wax. (Close enough I guess.)

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Knitting update

2026-03-13T12:42:02Z

The state of triplet sweaters when last checked on was that I finished #1 (a traditional Guernsey using PetiteKnit's Storm pattern in navy blue dk-weight Norwegian wool Sandnes Peer Gynt). Then I took over #2 (a mariniere using PetiteKnit's Marseille pattern in yellow stripes on black in dk Drops Merino Extra Fine) from waxjism, who had already knitted the body, and knitted the hem ribbing and sleeves and the neck ribbing while Wax started #3 (a traditional cabled Aran in forest green heather Peer Gynt). Wax got halfway up the body of #3 before stalling out in the cold snap while I knitted a little bit on a pair wool shorts for myself before giving up knitting in the cold as well.

Nobody knitted for a month or so. But all that time I knew I was going to have to unravel the neck ribbing on #2 and redo it, because it came out too tight/small.

After I ran out of wool for the shorts the other day, I unwillingly went back to the sweater. Knitting in black wool is very annoying because it's difficult to see the individual stitches. Yesterday I unraveled the collar and started over, getting through 17 rounds out of a planned 21, before I realized it was still too small and started over again. The third try is now at 18/21.

I need to order more wool for the shorts and some more needles and sock yarn and sock blockers.

We still haven't replaced the kitchen faucet, either. I asked Wax what she thought about ordering it a week and a half ago, and she said she could pick it up on her way home from work, but this hasn't happened yet.

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It may be an amiable egg

2026-03-11T18:23:37Z

"A nice fried egg, sir."

"And what, pray, do you mean by nice? It may be an amiable egg. It may be a civil, well-meaning egg. But if you think it is fit for human consumption, adjust that impression."

—PG Wodehouse,"Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo"

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Memorial Post: Rowan (Halloween 2015 - 28 Feb 2026)

2026-03-09T12:43:42Z

Our beloved floofy bun, Rowan, passed away a week ago. He was ten years and four months old (the average lifespan of pet bunnies I saw quoted some places is 2-4 years, and 10 years is the expected upper limit for his type of bun) and was healthy, cheerful, friendly, and sweet his whole life; he died very suddenly at home, apparently of old age. I miss him - he was always more friendly and cuddly than Japp - but I'm glad he had a long, happy life.

( Read more... )

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My dad is freed!

2026-03-07T20:59:47Z

The UTI was the cause after all, but they had to try different medications before they got an effective one, which is apparently why he had a couple of partial relapses. He got to go home for dinner Friday, though.

Wax had the shift that lasted until 7 pm yesterday, and she had to work today and was too tired to go grocery shopping, so tomorrow will be ruined too by knowing we have to leave the house. Tristana continues to complain any time I am with Sipuli up until about 4 pm. I am trying out alternate hours.

Now that it's been above freezing for a week, it's even above 15° in the coldest room in the house, and there have been sunbeams daily. I've swept under all kinds of furniture that we usually don't, and put away Mt. Laundry that has been covering the office daybed all winter, and scrubbed the kitchen cabinet doors, and checked on the bunny four or five times each day.

He seems to be doing well as a lone bunny, but I can't help being concerned about him. Tristana greets him, but they've never figured out how to play together like she did with Rowan. I keep trying to rearrange his bunny furniture to spark his interest and giving him enrichment boxes (a box that teabags come in filled with hay with some dried fruit and a used dry decaf teabag hidden in it: he's crazy for teabags). We ordered him one of those hay cubes, but it hasn't arrived yet. They haven't had one of those in a few years (we've mostly bought a series of hay tunnels more recently).

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It's 9 pm, the ground is covered in sheets of ice,

2026-03-05T18:54:43Z

and yet this ice cream truck has the fucking cheek to drive by playing its little tune.

It's not time for ice cream!!! The ground is frozen!!! Stop mocking me!!!

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Another dad update

2026-03-04T15:06:56Z

They thought they had solved Dad's hallucinations but it was a false alarm.

The sequence of events so far is:

He starts hallucinating mildly, images of animals etc

The visual hallucinations escalate steadily and include audio - first talking to absent people, then thinking he is in a variety of different places, finally briefly not recognizing my mom, though he did a minute later

A new antibiotic is discontinued

They find a UTI, but all mental symptoms stop, so they think the cause was the discontinued antibiotics

He starts hallucinating again, more mildly, before the medical team has had a chance to agree to release him from the hospital

He briefly recovers almost completely, but then gets worse again

It seems his medical team is dealing with a mystery again. 😔

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Am I gonna have to start leaving the house in the middle of the day just to hear myself think?

2026-03-03T12:12:08Z

Cats when Wax is working from home:

6.30 Sipuli wakes Wax up demanding breakfast and refuses to let her sleep
7.00 Wax feeds the cats breakfast and Sipuli doesn't finish hers before going back to sleep
9.30 Wax gets up and eats. Sipuli doesn't even come out of her blanket tent.
10.30 I wake up and Tristana follows me to brush my teeth and then goes back to bed while I'm moisturizing my face.
11.00 Sipuli emerges from her tent to lick leftover yogurt from Wax's breakfast bowl and wants some kisses and hugs. She hangs out with me for 5-10 minutes but goes back to the tent before I can even finish my breakfast.
11.30 Tristana wakes up and comes downstairs to yell at me until Wax calls her from upstairs. She sits in Wax's lap for a little while or (more often) goes back to bed.
16.30 Sipuli wakes up and comes out of the tent to get cuddled for 10-30 minutes, then gets sleepy and goes back in the tent.
17.00 Tristana wakes up and comes downstairs and starts yelling incessantly for attention. This wakes Sipuli who also comes out and wants attention.
18.00 Wax finishes work and comes downstairs.
19.00 Cats get dinner.

Cats when Wax has to go into the office:

6.30 Sipuli starts breakfast campaign.
7.00 Cat breakfast.
8.30 Wax gets up and eats breakfast, ignored by Sipuli.
10.30 I wake up and Tristana goes back to bed while I'm moisturizing.
11.00 Sipuli cleans Wax's bowl and wants cuddles.
11.10 Tristana comes downstairs and starts yowling for me to pay attention to her. This eventually wakes Sipuli and they both complain constantly or intermittently every time I'm in the other half of the house until sometime in the afternoon when they finally both fall asleep, presumably from exhaustion.
17.30 Both cats wake up and start dinner campaign, usually while I'm trying to prepare our dinner.
18.45 Wax arrives.
19.00 Cat dinner and then our dinner.

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