darxus

It's landing on a weekend this year, and it makes sense to do it tonight, so here we go, I'm doing a proper solstice.

(That means not sleeping until the sun returns. Ideally also having a candle burning while I do --giving the sun a beacon to look for!)

My day had bells and then hanging out with Tuesday for the afternoon, since ke was briefly in town. When ker parents came to pick kem up, we had a lovely 15-20 minutes chatting at and about my bookshelf. It felt very good, to get that kind of approval (even if it's not something I would need).

In the evening, after I fed the cat, I slunk around the block to

verdantry's house for their and Greg's solstice party. It was small and cozy and chill. I drank mulled cider, and ate plum pudding, and had a really lovely quiet time laughing and joking and enjoying listening to the inside-baseball talk of SCD adventures. Sometimes when it's not your circus it's really enjoyable to just watch the monkeys!

Around midnight, Greg gave, in essence, a toast. It boiled down to "Community Is Good", my political stance these past some years. Community _is_ good. People are the thing that make all the rest of this worthwhile.

I hope you have people to hold you up until the sun returns. I love you! <3

~Sor
MOOP!

magid

I made another batch of hot water pastry today that became the crust for two vegetable pies: parboiled beets*, purple-top turnips*, carrots*, and potatoes* with frozen peas, quartered hard-boiled eggs, and onion-mushroom (baby bella) white sauce. There was some dough left, which I used for a sort-of galette filled with apples* and some of the failed apple* jelly I boiled down to about half the volume.

I should make a slaw, but the weather has me uninspired towards salad.

* locally sourced

sorcyress

Today was alright! Work was actually pretty great, which is nice --it is satisfying to have a ~good day~ at the workplace every once in a while (and slightly surprising to occur in this, the last full week of the year).

Not the last week, mind. I have a day and a half of work next week. It's not great!

But yeah, classes 1 and 4 went well-as-expected, class 2 was just fine, despite my co-teacher having meetings literally every class 2 this week, my circle idea went really really well (well enough that I forwarded it off to the circles team and assistant principal to be all ~hey look at this~), I spent class 3 prep hanging in the break room with three other math teachers I like...all good things!

It was the annual "professional development the week before break" PD, which is never very serious. It could be a better meeting: they could give us a longer time to just....hang out and eat cookies and chat with coworkers. But we did a cute little "family feud" style game, which was fun ("what excuse do students give for cutting class? survey says....."), and I won one of the raffle gift baskets for the scholarship fund. It is...uh, the third time in like....four years that I have gotten one of these. I am only putting in $20 worth of tickets, which I feel is a very reasonable and normal donation to the scholarship fund! I am just very lucky!!!

In actuality, the real trick is that my policy is to look at the ~13 baskets, say "no booze, no gift cards (boring!)" and that both focuses my tickets marvelously, and means I'm not going for the "high value" items. Look, I can't help it that all my coworkers like booze and amazon, I will be over here squeeing over my backstage pass to the school play and several chocolate bars and little leather handmade notebook and set of keen gel pens! It's still not as sweet as the year I got homemade cookies every month for the rest of the year, but it's pretty good.

After, I managed to make it to the holiday show rehearsal, which means that I've made it to one rehearsal this year, which might be more than last year. I got to see all the dances we're doing, and throw my name a couple places in the script. Just have to figure out what to wear or whatever (bonus points for something I can rush home and not change before darting off to the train).

After, I spent a bunch of time rifling through email and YouTube to try and put together a bookmarks collection of all the holiday shows I've been in (every year I've taught, including 2020, when we did a socially distanced one over zoom). Eventually copies, and home again home again, where my Getting Things Done kinda ran out in favour of playing video games.

But I did help get the dishwasher emptied and a bit of kitchen task, and I ran my last load of laundry --I haven't put any of it away yet, but it's clean at least. I did a bunch of closing and organizing tabs, and a very little bit of other like, electronic organization. Not, like, dealing with emails or anything (don't be ridiculous) but at least some brain management.

Now I'm upstairs to write my words and listen to music and do some Chrimbo-present-pre-planning. It is....uh....the holiday is quite soon actually, and if I'm going to contribute to my family's usual wretched excess, I should get on that. I wonder if it's too late to just use the heifer international catalog I got sent to buy everyone goats...

~Sor
MOOP!

magid

Apparently, it was much colder in western MA: the shares were boxed this week. More than half the people who picked up while I was there decanted their veggies immediately (I suspect it correlates to whether people had cars with them or not).

a big bag of spinach
2 heads of cabbage
2 biggish white daikon
5(ish?) pounds of carrots
3(ish?) pounds of sweet potatoes
3(ish?) pounds of white potatoes

First thoughts: no alliums, so I’ll have to fill those in. I have three weeks before the next distribution, so hopefully I’ll catch up; all of these are pretty easy to fit in. The daikon is trickiest for me: carrot daikon slaws in a variety of dressings, or with cabbage in okonomiyaki, or pickled (with or without carrots).

magid

This morning I stopped by the credit union ATM to get some cash. I did not think about denominations, which is how I ended up with a $100 bill when I’d expected $20s. Ack.

This gave me an excuse to buy lunch out (in addition to not having brought more than breakfast with me), which, now that Bakey has lost kosher certification, meant I headed to Milk Street Cafe to grab one of today’s specials (tuna-noodle casserole will always be comfort food for me, which I know is definitely not a universal opinion).

Previously, I had a great default route from the Downtown Crossing station to the restaurant through the 101 Arch St. lobby. Recent construction has closed that option off permanently, alas (the atrium is really pretty, with a multi-story internal spiral staircase (that I suspect is no longer used, but looks great)).

On the way back, I decided to avoid the exit I’d used on the way out, which had a bunch of pigeons fighting over chicken bones (I don’t really want to think too much about that…), so went through the non-Arch St. part of the lobby at 101 Summer St., which still has an entrance to Downtown Crossing. Except that the down escalator was blocked off for maintenance, and there weren’t any obvious stairs, which is how I found out that there’s an elevator. You know how when you get into a new-to-you elevator, you do a quick scan for which side has the buttons? Well, both sides had buttons, L for the floor we were on, and… different buttons for the lower level. I pressed M (I’m guessing for MBTA?), while the other guy who got in the elevator pressed L2 on his side. Why L2? why not just L, or L1? These are mysteries. Were there not enough L2 or M buttons to go around? Is this an office plagued with Borrowers? Was there previously an L1 level that aliens sucked out and wiped from our memories except for this one slip? Inquiring minds want to know!

Also, the long-closed Charlie Card Store at Downtown Crossing is no longer empty, but not open to the public, either: it seems to be a supplies depot for cleaners and possibly other workers?

sorcyress

I survived MCing a party!

My program was a little too hard, which was partially my fault for being...challenging, and partly my fault for not being totally up on what dances are actually currently in the Cambridge Class repertoire. I thought Bampton Strathspey was going to be an easier one, sorry y'all!

But I got several compliments from various people, and I genuinely think I did a very good job briefing. I made a couple of stumbles, but I think I redeemed myself out of them nicely, and I think I was quite clear overall. I'm happy about it! Next priority: well, okay, figure out what I'm teaching on Thursday for my class, and THEN my next priority is writing my Pinewoods program. Which is due on the 22nd, so gotta get on it, yipes!

The past weekend with SamSam was lovely! We had mostly very lazy days (which is to say, huddling inside and avoiding the cold) but also walked four miles round trip in the softly falling snow to visit Gather Here. Did you know there's a big lovely (kinda bougie) crafts store in Inman Square? It had so much beautiful fabric! It was nice to be able to show off cool things about my city to Sam, and also to discover them for myself.

Work today was...a lot. I mostly managed to do the things? Which is good --it's like, the first day since September where I actually had all my lessons prepped before I left the building. And I did a little grading. And I am very very tired and all the students are both tired and off the wall and we have five and a half more school days to get through before I can just get on a train and gooooo.

Of course, getting on a train and gooooing will be made more complicated by the fact that there is exactly one weekend left before chrimbo, so if I'm gonna manage to go shopping for any presents, I need to do it like _now_. Maybe it would be nice to buy my mother a chrimbo present? I think they would enjoy that??

(note to self, actually go to bells at least once this weekend so you can a) return your BPL library books and b) go to Q's nuts in the Boston Public Market and buy a bunch of those for stocking stuffers).

Dunno what else there is to say. [CW: gun violence] I am fucking livid at the parts of the universe that are contrasting my lovely weekend at home with, like, multiple major shooting incidents. Can we fucking not? (says only country where this regularly happens). [/CW]

hope you have love and wholeness in your heart and that you are taking care of everyone you meet as much as you can handle doing so.

~Sor
MOOP!

sorcyress

I am having a lovely day!

SamSam is in town, and I elected to play hooky from work (more accurately, use one of my increased number of personal days THANK YOU UNION I LOVE YOU) so that we could hang out today and also because my work-brain is _fried_ and so it's a very very nice concept to just...not be there for a day. Here's some of the things we did:

*We went to Amanda's house quite early to watch the biathalon, since Amanda and Sam are in the same biathalon group chat. I find this extremely pleasantly baffling, but it was very very good to hang out on the couch with some friends and enjoy them being very excited about a thing. Occasionally they would give me context, or I would ask a question, but mostly I just got to watch people be excited about something, which I find splendid. We also watched the kittens be doofuses and just generally chatted, which was splendid!

*Home for a bit of lunch, and then we grabbed our ice skates and headed off to the rink near the school, which has open skate for a couple hours on Friday afternoons. We skated for a little over an hour and it was pretty grand! Sam likes ice skating _immensely_, which makes it a delightful sort of thing to do together, even if I'm not particularly good at it. (I don't really regret that I've fallen out of Tech Squares, but I do miss that particular part of Easthill. I want more dancing on skates!)

*After skating, we walked on to Make&Mend, which I only really went to the first time like six weeks ago. I think going at least every month or two is probably a really good idea for me, in terms of getting to see interesting crafty things and also to support something that I want my neighborhood to be.

*We walked home, which was...not as pleasant as it could be, since cold and windy, but we did swing by Saus in Bow-Street-Market on the way. So cold and windy but also french fries!

*Once home, we collapsed for a while and had good nap. Woke up enough so that they could read me some book and I could eventually make dinner, and this is all a really nice precursor to another couple days of hanging out together.

Currently I am writing words and they are brushing my hair out and we're listening to music and that's all reeeeeeally good. I am happy for this!

~Sor
MOOP!

wotw

From an Amazon page:

Warning: This audiobook contains very explicit sex, including first-time anal sex, oral sex in public, anal sex in public, and sex with a librarian.

milktree

sorcyress

Okay, well, it's not _done_ but my room is a damn sight _better_ and that's pretty cool.

And by "damn sight better" I actually mean "I got rid of two of the boxen that've just been sitting around taking up space all over my room since I moved in in 2020". Which is...fantastic. I'm not remotely done cleaning, either up or out, but progress is happening! That's quite grand! Someday maybe I will have everything tucked away in a place it belongs, having gotten rid of all the things that shouldn't actually be in here. What a good fantasy.

(I am being sharp and salty to cover up the fact that I am actually quite happy to have regained a little bit of space, and irritated at how long it takes me sometimes.)

I am nowhere near finished, of course. My desk is the biggest disaster area (although I've definitely made progress on it, we're like, eight inches deep of shit instead of sixteen). And there's an endless number of papers that want sorting, but that's like, a longterm plan. Not something I expect to get done anytime soon, not even if I'm procrastinating on my grading real good!

That being said, I had a point somewhere in the span of time I've lived in this room where I was trying to sort papers for about twenty minutes a day. Do that for two months and I'd have everything done, I expect. Just....you know. Consistency is hard.

The surface reason I am cleaning is that SamSam is visiting this weekend, but the real weekend is that having my room be a catastrophe is a pretty strong Blues Clue¹, and also _definitely_ one of the ones that chickeneggs² me. So, having latched onto the slight mania of "you have no idea how badly I do not want to do my grading" means actually trying to get my roomspace tolerable?

We're through the long dark November. I made a note in my calendar for November first, next year and all subsequents, telling me that my brain's about to turn into shit and I might want to do something about it. What should I do? No one knows the answer to that.

I mucked with my phone so that it goes into "focus mode" for two hours each afternoon. No games, no internet. Chat is okay, because I almost never am _mindless_ and stuck about chat. So far I haven't broken it, which means that it ~cannot be broken~. Unlike, say, the timers on my various phone games that theoretically say I can only play like 15 minutes unless I go make it longer which is very easy to do. Sigh.

And I'm trying to crawl myself out of the work hellhole --the above is theoretically helpful for this. Man though, I'm looking forward to it being solstice real bad. Arise fair sun, and slay the envious moon³

I hope you are finding the ability to do the things that bring you comfort and joy. I love you!

~Sor
MOOP!

^{1: "what idiot called them depression symptoms instead of..."

2: Did you know that you can just say things? It's ridiculous that language works in any capacity whatsoever! I say so much entirely impenetrable nonsense, and yes, lots of the time it's partly that I'm quoting things, but sometimes it's that, like, I'm just making up weird things that maybe only make sense to me.

So, instead of finding the term "negative feedback loop" my brain decided to hand me "chickenegg", as in "which came first". Am I depressed because my room is a catastrophe or is my room a catastrophe because yadda yadda

3: Case in point, this is a reference! It's a Kate Nyx song lyric.}

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darxus

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Winter share, 5 of 11

101 Summer St.

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Puttin' away boxen do doo

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