This is probably going to be super rambly.
I am just feeling all kinds of rambly today, and I haven't posted in a bit, so this is just going to be a kind of random collection of things that have been happening and thoughts I have been having.
So.
To start with: sometimes, I hate plants. I don't think whatever I have is poison ivy, but it's poison something, because there are welts and bumps and LOTS OF ITCHING. After a few days of the welts and the bumps, but not very much itching, I woke up early this morning with the new and thrilling urge to chew my own arm off, if only it would stop the itching. I slathered it with anti-itch gel, and have been periodically coating it with calamine lotion in the hours since; so far, it's working decently well, if not perfectly, and some of the worse bump-welts have diminished. (I would like to make a joke here about how they will soon be sailing to the West, except it seems so wrong to compare my favorite summertime curse to Galadriel.)
However, weeding recently has not been all bad. The cat who was the antagonist in that chipmunk drama a while ago has forgiven me for thwarting her plans for chipmunk murder, and warmed up to me; she came climbing up the slope to visit me on Friday, and graciously allowed me to pet her into a near-coma. A small, silvery, extremely soft-looking creature whom I have since tentatively identified as a mole came bumbling along to within arm's reach - part of the reason I have identified it so is because it appeared to be totally unable to see us, but as soon as I had the cat properly secured and got a hand free to bump the plants near it, it ran like hell.
Or, okay, it was (most likely) a mole, it trundled like hell.
In a similar vein (that vein being nature! yays!), after basically dipping my arm in calamine this morning, I took a walk with my sister and my dad, up the road to the top of the hill and then over and down. The whole thing took about an hour. And my god, it was absolutely beautiful out; it has been horrid and rainy and damp all week, and then today, it was sunny and very breezy and the sky was fantastically blue. I spent a good portion of the walk staring up at the patterns the leaves made against the sky, and against each other, in lovely sunlit shades of green that varied depending on the amount of overlap. Gorgeous.
There have also been fannish pursuits, though, as per usual, none that are going to end up anywhere where anybody but my sister can see them. Cliché bingo has taken my soul and run with it, despite the fact that I did not actually sign up for a card. I took the masterlist of clichés and have started typing out fics - not whole ones, just paragraphs, moments of things that could become fics if I filled in the spaces. So far I have a set for Hellboy (mostly Hellboy/Myers) and a set for Harry Dresden (more on the gen side, I don't ship anybody in those books super hard), and I keep coming up with more things I want to do.
Interestingly, the Hellboy ones have been fun because I have a ship for them and yet have read very little fic, because I'm pretty sure there is very little fic, and so it's pretty awesome getting to put Hellboy and Myers through all the clichés when I haven't seen them go through them before. The Harry Dresden ones, by contrast, have been fun because a fair chunk of them have been quasi-fixits for things I didn't even know were bugging me in canon. I love the Harry Dresden books, and part of that is because, despite the adherence to noir genre norms, there are a lot of kickass women; however, they don't always get to do as much asskicking as I'd like, and they don't interact with each other nearly enough (have Murphy and Susan never had a conversation in canon, or am I just forgetting something?). I've actually gotten a little carried away pondering an AU where Luccio, Murphy, and Susan team up. Together, they fight crime!
Also, I kind of want to try a batch for Harry Potter. But I should save the energies of the HP sector of my brain for the massive AU, and the accompanying Irrelevant Shipfic.
I haven't fiddled with my conlang in a while; maybe I'll work on that this afternoon.
So.
To start with: sometimes, I hate plants. I don't think whatever I have is poison ivy, but it's poison something, because there are welts and bumps and LOTS OF ITCHING. After a few days of the welts and the bumps, but not very much itching, I woke up early this morning with the new and thrilling urge to chew my own arm off, if only it would stop the itching. I slathered it with anti-itch gel, and have been periodically coating it with calamine lotion in the hours since; so far, it's working decently well, if not perfectly, and some of the worse bump-welts have diminished. (I would like to make a joke here about how they will soon be sailing to the West, except it seems so wrong to compare my favorite summertime curse to Galadriel.)
However, weeding recently has not been all bad. The cat who was the antagonist in that chipmunk drama a while ago has forgiven me for thwarting her plans for chipmunk murder, and warmed up to me; she came climbing up the slope to visit me on Friday, and graciously allowed me to pet her into a near-coma. A small, silvery, extremely soft-looking creature whom I have since tentatively identified as a mole came bumbling along to within arm's reach - part of the reason I have identified it so is because it appeared to be totally unable to see us, but as soon as I had the cat properly secured and got a hand free to bump the plants near it, it ran like hell.
Or, okay, it was (most likely) a mole, it trundled like hell.
In a similar vein (that vein being nature! yays!), after basically dipping my arm in calamine this morning, I took a walk with my sister and my dad, up the road to the top of the hill and then over and down. The whole thing took about an hour. And my god, it was absolutely beautiful out; it has been horrid and rainy and damp all week, and then today, it was sunny and very breezy and the sky was fantastically blue. I spent a good portion of the walk staring up at the patterns the leaves made against the sky, and against each other, in lovely sunlit shades of green that varied depending on the amount of overlap. Gorgeous.
There have also been fannish pursuits, though, as per usual, none that are going to end up anywhere where anybody but my sister can see them. Cliché bingo has taken my soul and run with it, despite the fact that I did not actually sign up for a card. I took the masterlist of clichés and have started typing out fics - not whole ones, just paragraphs, moments of things that could become fics if I filled in the spaces. So far I have a set for Hellboy (mostly Hellboy/Myers) and a set for Harry Dresden (more on the gen side, I don't ship anybody in those books super hard), and I keep coming up with more things I want to do.
Interestingly, the Hellboy ones have been fun because I have a ship for them and yet have read very little fic, because I'm pretty sure there is very little fic, and so it's pretty awesome getting to put Hellboy and Myers through all the clichés when I haven't seen them go through them before. The Harry Dresden ones, by contrast, have been fun because a fair chunk of them have been quasi-fixits for things I didn't even know were bugging me in canon. I love the Harry Dresden books, and part of that is because, despite the adherence to noir genre norms, there are a lot of kickass women; however, they don't always get to do as much asskicking as I'd like, and they don't interact with each other nearly enough (have Murphy and Susan never had a conversation in canon, or am I just forgetting something?). I've actually gotten a little carried away pondering an AU where Luccio, Murphy, and Susan team up. Together, they fight crime!
Also, I kind of want to try a batch for Harry Potter. But I should save the energies of the HP sector of my brain for the massive AU, and the accompanying Irrelevant Shipfic.
I haven't fiddled with my conlang in a while; maybe I'll work on that this afternoon.