dorinda

Okay, so ECLIPSE. Wow. Let me just say: what everyone said is true, totality is not the same as 90% or even 99%. My friends and I were hanging out in the backyard watching the light dim and taking peeks at the disappearing crescent of the sun through filters, and watching the sliver vanish, and when that black disc totally covered the sun all of us kind of lost our shit.

It was super cool and in seven years when another eclipse hits this continent I encourage everyone on this continent to go check it out. It's worth it.

Of course, it's easy for me to say it's worth it, I only had to drive an hour north and then two hours back home again to see it. Ha! (I kid, it was only about an hour and a half on the way back, but damn was traffic awful on the way out of Salem for most of the day. The only reason my drive back was so reasonable is that I waited eight hours after the eclipse ended to start moving.)

I did not take any photos. I was busy staring at where the sun used to be and would be again and mildly freaking out.

Random thoughts about The Defenders (whole series, positive and negative):

( You know, after all these years, I still start to use the LJ code )

Tonight's dinner is vaguely adapted from Mario Batali, and it's simple and tasty and should feed me for several days, so I'm saving the recipe here.

If you keep kosher and do not regard chicken as pareve, or if you don't do dairy, you won't want to add the goat cheese. (In that case you might add some olive oil, for mixing purposes.) And if you are gluten-free, you'll want to use gf pasta. But aside from those things, this recipe ought to work for most folks, I think, assuming that you eat pasta in the first place. Clean-up is also easy: one skillet, one pasta pot.

( Pasta with broccolini, chicken sausage, and goat cheese )

Many thanks to everyone who donated over on my Ko-fi page. ♥♥♥

I'm still going to be putting up a virtual garage sale post later in the week, after I more time to go through things and get a list together, but thank you! I very much appreciate it.

If any of you would like a fic from me as thanks, just leave a comment or send me a message. As long as it's a fandom that I'm familiar with, I'd be glad to write something for you.

1. My friends. Even those whom I don't get to see often enough.

2. The place where I live, which is mine, and is filled with art and photographs and things that are meaningful to me.

3. The glorious green world. I always want summer to last forever, and it won't, but I'm doing my best to enjoy it while it's here.

4. I got to take two and a half days of vacation last week, and they were really lovely.

5. There is rosé chilling in my fridge even now. :-)

How are y'all?

Perfect morning: Iced tea, bowl of cereal, cat, back deck lounge chair, nearly total eclipse of the sun. We had 92% totality in Seattle, and I could just sit on my lounger and watch. It was amazing. I guess a lot of people in my area got fog, but it was clear as a bell at my house.

I'd been so focused on the cancer stuff that I missed the opportunity to get glasses--the last time we had an eclipse visible here, there was no such thing as fancy glasses, and when they started posting about places you could get them it was too late to do mail order (also they were fakes) for me, and people on our local blog were driving around and calling, desperately trying to track more down. I wasted a lot of time, and mentioned it on the thread--that I'd been so busy with my health I hadn't thought about the eclipse at all and was bummed I couldn't get the glasses (I've done pinhole viewers, but…they're not as cool).

A really nice guy told me he had some spares, and his wife, who works at the Y where I'm a member, brought them with her and I picked them up last week. I'm so grateful to them, so grateful. It was amazing to be able to watch through the glasses. I stayed till every last piece of the moon was gone. Even with sunscreen I'm sure I'll be burned. It was totally worth it.

I've seen two other solar eclipses, but was too young for the first one to really appreciate it, and like I said, the pinhole boxes don't have the same view. I feel like if I croak in surgery next week or afterwards, I'm good. Got to see a big one, and it was wonderful.

I can see why ancient people were spooked by these: the shadows got really long, the sky was dimmer while at the same time the sun was pouring down, the temperature dropped by a few degrees. Blues was definitely confused--he could tell something was going on, and he ended up under the bed for a while. It was eerily silent, too, at totality. This is garbage day in my area, there is always construction going on around here in summer, there are usually people walking dogs and cars driving by. At peak time, it was utterly silent: no noisy, smelly trucks, no people walking, no construction noise. Everyone was watching the eclipse.

As promised, I've got a slight limp from slamming my knee into the table last night while making my pinhole viewer.

9:03 — Go out to test my magic box before the eclipse starts at 9:06 am, and it works; there's a full circle of light inside my box, though the circle is more of a...square? I attempt to round out the pinhole with the tip of a pen, and now it's larger and more of an octagon. It's okay, I have time to fix it if necessary. It's a bright sunny day with no clouds.

9:10 — Already hearing sirens in the distance. Have to assume it's eclipse related.

9:18 — Try again. Light from pinhole now rounder. No visible slice of sun missing. Do I have it aimed in the correct direction? I can't turn around to look or I'll burn my eyes out.

9:23 — The internet goes down.

9:30 — Two neighbors stop in front of my house to stare directly at the sun through their cardboard eclipse glasses. I hope they don't go blind.

9:31 — Refresh the router. Go back to browsing Tumblr.

9:49 — Try the magic box again. Now seeing two round dots of light, one full, one with a chunk out of it. Science, or just a random hole in the corner of my box? No one knows. Still bright outside, but with a grey tone.

9:52 — Dad borrows a look through neighbor's eclipse glasses. Says there's a dark thing going across the sun, covering about a third.

9:59 — Box totally has two spots of light in, but one is definitely science. Now occluded by more than half. Still bright and greyish out, but flat. I get that silver nitrate feeling that Annie Dillard talked about.

10:11 — Getting dim out. Not a lot of confidence in my magic box. Too many holes. Who knows what I'm looking at.

10:15 — Ditch my pinhole viewer for a piece of stiff paper with a hole punched in it with a pen. Works much better, can see the crescent of the sun projected on the driveway in front of me. Weird waves of shadow buffet the asphalt, like water vapor, or wind made visible. I feel a chill, and get goosebumps on my legs. The light shining through the trees acts like hundreds of pinholes, projecting nested crescents of light on the house and garage. My dad has a pasta colander and achieves the same effect, hundreds of little crescent suns shining on a white piece of paper held at arm's length. The cat is staring at us through the window. The neighbors introduce themselves in the street. It gets darker as it nears 10:18, a few crickets start up, the streetlights come on. It's dim, muted, shadowy, but not dark.

10:20 — Starts to brighten.

10:21 — Assholes setting off fireworks.

10:30 — Still limping. Blame the eclipse for my injury.

{also posted to Tumblr}

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Radio Free Monday!

Ways To Give:

Sarah is raising funds to help save her family's house, where they are facing eviction. They are dealing with her mother's illness and recent unemployment, and they are trying to raise $100K to cover hospital bills and mortgage payments. You can read more and support the fundraiser here.

Anon linked to a fundraiser for the legal fees for protestors in Durham, who pulled down the Confederate statue. You can read more and support their legal defense here.

spasticat has been unemployed since October of last year, and while she's been actively looking for work, her benefits and savings have run out; she's raising funds for utilities, medication, and rent. At the end of September she is also moving back home, and needs funds to cover the move. You can read more and support her YouCaring here.

rilee16 is struggling to cover medical expenses after two head injuries last year, and has a fundraiser running to cover living expenses, previous medical bills, and a recent rent increase. You can read more and help out here.

Buy Stuff, Help Out:

magpiesmiscellany has a selection of tree-of-life pendants in various shapes, colors, and sizes for sale, with proceeds going to Planned Parenthood, Lambda Legal, the ACLU, Doctors Without Borders, Earthjustice, Sierra Club, and the National Immigration Law Center. You can read more and purchase them here.

Housing:

in_the_bottle is looking for a new housemate in London, in Fulham SW6, bordering Hammersmith. Two professional females, at least one fandom friendly. You can read more and get in touch here.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can post items for my attention at the Radio Free Monday submissions form. If you're not sure how to proceed, here is a little more about what I do and how you can help (or ask for help!). If you're new to fundraising, you may want to check out my guide to fundraising here.

Okay, so I was sitting here, exhausted, thinking, "Fuck, I have to force myself to care about the fucking eclipse tomorrow."

Except I do care. So I found an old shoebox and made a pinhole viewer with these instructions (pdf) my pal kormantic sent me. And I even wrote ECLIPSEPOCALYPSE 2017 on the side, so it's super official. And I REALLY banged my knee on the table when I sat down to make it, so that'll be a nice memory.

I guess I'll go stand out in the yard around ten o'clock with my shoebox and see what happens.

This felt like an 8 hour movie. For once, I wouldn't have minded if they'd stretched things longer, but everyone got great character development and it was a rollicking good time.

( spoilerific! )

Posted in full at: http://ift.tt/2fWV40z on August 20, 2017 at 08:19PM

Mysteries of the Force http://ift.tt/2x4mCVM

Tags:IFTTT, Fauxthentic History, DWCrosspost

Tumblr post (this is likely a reblog, and may have more pictures over there)

I would like to state, for the record, that I seriously hate having finances that are in a state where all it takes is one unexpected larger expense to send me panicking. :-/

So, yes, it's looking like my tentative plans to make it to PAX Unplugged are crashing and burning at the moment. And there's a very good chance that I'm not going to have enough money to cover some bills that will be popping up in the next 2-3 weeks, which means I'm probably going to be going through my belongings and putting up another virtual garage sale post in the next few days.

Mainly because the universe fucking hates me right now. Apparently, at least.

It's been awhile since I posted it, so here's my Ko-fi page if anyone has an extra couple of dollars to spare. If anyone makes a donation, I'd be glad to try to write you a short fic in a fandom that I know. And, like I said before, I'll probably be posting a bunch of books and DVDs (and probably some other stuff as well) for sale in the next few days if anyone's interested in such things.

The thing about not posting for a long time is, it makes it seem ever harder to post something again.

The thing -- well, a thing -- about the state of my native country is, it makes almost anything I could post about my day-to-day life seem picayune.

But my life is my life, and I live it day to day, and that, especially fannish aspects thereof, is what I generally write about here. So I'm going to try to do so again.

( I went to VividCon, and it was great )

( My lay chaplaincy had a sort of epilogue today )

( Kayaking continues to be tremendous fun! )

( My cat is hanging on, amazing our vet )

( And we have another big trip coming up! )

( thoughts (somewhat spoilery) on fannish TV: Orphan Black, Sense8, The Handmaid's Tale )

Aside from all this, I'm reading lots of light fanfic, lots of heavy stuff on Twitter (although I don't post much there either), and the occasional book. And now I'm going to wrap up this enormous post and go lie on the couch. My evening plan!

Well, I didn't hate it. There were a couple things I liked? But mostly I came away from this needing some fic where Falcon and Luke Cage run across each other in Harlem and have coffee and admire each other's muscles. Or maybe a fic where the Winter Soldier and Black Sky fight to a draw, make out a little, and commiserate about being amnesiacs with annoying fight-loving do-gooder boyfriends who won't give up on them, and then go their separate ways. Is that too much to ask?? *checks AO3* Yep, it's too much to ask.

( Defenders, the good and the bad )

♥♥♥

( !!!!!!!!!!!!! )

The problem with Goodreads is that now I have two places to talk about books and I'm never sure if I posted here about finishing something. I really enjoyed the rest of The Inheritance Trilogy, the second book hit my buttons more than the third did but I liked both of them. I guess I found the relationships in the third one didn't quite hit my kinks the way I wanted them to, while the first and second ones did.

[Insert current gripe about superpowered woman/unpowered dude shipping and lack thereof. This series just had an absence rather than having it and "fixing" it, but I'm now on the lookout.]

Did I mention I read Roses in Amber and it was lovely? It was lovely. Queer and magical and full of awesome women and "I have to do this awkward thing because magic so we're both going to agree to live with it" which I love love love as a trope.

I also just finished The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe which was terrific. I would normally like more dialogue but the author is doing a Lovecraft pastiche, so I'm grateful for the dialogue we did get! Sharp in all the right ways. I liked the ending but now I want more! (Not literally, but I'd like to see something set in this dreamworld fifty years out or so.)

I'm still in the middle of The Goblin Emperor, and maybe when I have a little more brain space I'll pick it up again.