After many years of hiatus, the Infrequent Buyers Club has been restarted, thanks to sponsorship by Quartz Family Hardware. This repair and repurposing society provides community-owned tools, like sewing machines and welders, to wring every bit of use out of anything a person owns, with monthly prizes at meetings for the oldest functional piece of equipment brought in for demonstration. And for those who truly can’t let go of a belonging, members are experimenting with animate object necromancy, using the club’s old beverage fridge as a case study.

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LL#1253

Hi, hello, yes, I am absolutely done with travel for at least five years. I just spent the week in a hotel in order to attend a robotics training seminar for work. The training was super interesting, and I fully intend to carve out time for me to do interesting thing with the robots at work now.

However! I am reminded again that I hate traveling, I hate staying in hotels with no ability to cook my own food, and I hate being away from home for more than an afternoon. Constantly having to eat restaurant food does hideous things to my body. Even if taking it back to my room at least avoids the anxiety of eating alone in a room full of strangers, that means all my food becomes a lukewarm mediocrity. The pillows are weird! The soft water lacks the proper mineral content to give me the showering-with-sandpaper experience I am accustomed to! None of my animals are with me, and I can’t do anything if something goes wrong with my mother!

*roaring and gnashing of teeth* *old man yells at cloud*

I’m such a homebody, it’s a wonder I haven’t put taproots down from my ass by now.

Also, the power once again went out, this time probably due to the wind downing something. Even though the last time was caused by human error, so this hardly constitutes a pattern, it’s hard not to think this bodes ill for what the summer heat waves will bring.

There was a sporting field of some sort visible from my hotel window, in which there were a dozen Canada geese hanging out. I got to hear them, and a single duck overhead, honking a few times on the way to my car.

Lewisia: no new pieces written, time to play catch-up

Day job: I don’t know how to calculate this (＠_＠;) nine-hour lecture sessions + two days of six-hour drives + being semi on-call the rest of the time since these were work days and not PTO = ???

Cleaning: replaced one of the wiring disconnects to install a new battery for the electric fence

Gardening: succulent club meeting, garden club post, phone consultation with another club member to coordinate our tech upgrades, moved a big planter into place to receive incoming sunchokes

Reading: System Collapse by Martha Wells (my entertainment for the long drive, finally caught up on Murderbot audiobooks, still need to read the little side stories)

Watching: MURDERBOT~~~! I am so goddamn excited to have this as a show as well.

Listening: Even In Arcadia by Sleep Token (wasn’t aware of this band until Anthony Vincent/Ten Second Songs did a cover of Bastille’s “Pompeii” in the style of Sleep Token and found myself smitten, it reminds me of early Dir En Grey with the mix of pop/rock and metal elements), This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway by Lola Young (one of those rare times when I listened to the radio, heard something new I liked, and managed to track it down afterward, “Messy” roped me in and the rest of the album is pleasingly in that spirit)

Clock Mouse: 1167 words, and the protagonist has officially acquired a name 🎉

“Listen, you remember in the seventies,” he began coaxingly and, despite her expression of disbelief at even that early stage of the argument, pressed on ever more earnestly, “when they were making unicorns out of goats?” During this circuitous history of surgical mythologizing, the pony paid them entirely no attention, being much more interested in charging the fence separating it from the cows pastured next door, followed by laboriously extracting its collection of sharp horns from where they had embedded in the fence posts. “While I admire your commitment to the principle of ‘more is more,’” she said from a location safely near the gate, “what you’ve made is less mythical creature and more miniature equine murder beast.”

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LL#1251

Welcome to the May edition of Pandemic Garden Club! Growing good things in strange times!

Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.

As for myself...

( Read more... )

Many of them were blind, fully or partially, though some, like her, simply couldn’t bear the overwhelming light of the world and so wore blindfolds to block it out. None of them needed to see in the fog banks, where all was glaucous and shifting, and none of them could afford to be distracted from more vital senses. They moved in careful formation, weighted nets gathered in their hands, and waited for the telltale pressure shifts that would indicate a passing school of fog fish.

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LL#1249

The Lake Lewisia habitat improvement project is looking for volunteers to assist with reweirding a largely defunct strip mall in the next town over. Having driven out its locally-owned competitors, the strip mall ownership has abandoned it to time, the elements, and fortunately, our tender and bizarre attentions. With volunteer help, we plan to establish an incomprehensible junk shop, a foundational alley cryptid population, and a wall of street art rife with hidden messages, which will greatly improve the conditions for our neighbors.

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LL#1247

You’re getting The Ballad of the Earbuds this week. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So I have this issue. At work for the last five years, I have been listening to music and audiobooks by way of a little Walkman mp3 player. I love this thing; it does exactly what it is supposed to. And since I didn’t used to carry my phone with me, because the production floor has terrible reception and searching for signal nuked my battery, it was the only way to have entertainment.

The problem is that it can only be used with wired earbuds, ie with a jack. It couldn’t be paused except by taking the thing out of my pocket, which isn’t allowed on the floor. So I needed to know I was going to be left alone if I wanted to listen to something narrative, rather than music.

Also, I work an extremely active job, so having a long headphone cord trailing down my torso has proven to be an issue. I regularly get it snagged on my cargo pant flaps when stooping down to pick up some piece of equipment, thereby wrenching it out of my ear and sending it clattering to the floor. This is annoying and, arguably, a little dangerous. You don’t want to be reacting in surprise and discomfort while suddenly holding eighty pounds of steel, for example.

Now that I’m working primarily off the production floor, and now that I carry two phones at all times anyway (for my sins), it seemed worthwhile to at least try using my phone as an entertainment venue. I’m still just loading files onto it--I don’t do streaming for much of anything unless it’s unavoidable. But the important thing is that I can use my old, half-dead bluetooth earbuds with it.

Now this has solved my issue of clotheslining myself regularly. But it also introduces earbud-located controls. I can pause. Which means I can at least attempt to listen to audiobooks again. I spent many happy hours this week, wiring plugs into place whilst listening to stories. This is all I really want in my professional life. I probably won’t ever get back to the rate of a novel a day I sometimes hit while working as an operator--I have to talk to people way more these days. It’s nice, though, to feel like I can carve a little more mental space for myself out of the day.

The weather has been swinging wildly between hot and foggy, with occasional burst of rain and thunder. We had a vehicle-induced power outage (jackass hit a pole). And the corn, pumpkins, and sunflowers have all sprouted. So it feels like summer, for good or ill.

Lewisia: 3 new pieces written

Day job: 42.75 hours

Cleaning: had the septic tank cleaned out, scheduled necessary repairs

Reading: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Primary Phase (this is the BBC radio production, Libro.fm had the first part on sale, the differences between this and the published stories falls somewhere between refreshing and disorienting)

Listening: the third Dan Avidan & Super Guitar Bros album (my bonus album for the week, it just released and I needed a pick-me-up on Monday, lovely and exactly what I needed), cry about it by houseguest (more Bluesky recs, I don’t have the technical knowledge to properly describe what I hear, but there’s a watery effect on the vocals, combined with very bright, forward percussion and a specific bass[?] sound that is precisely the punk/alt sound of a mix CD given to me by a classmate in 2000 of bands I still don’t know the names of, which is a very specific nostalgia token, “somnambulist” is just fantastic)

Playing: Spirit Swap on Steam, a match-3 game with queer/trans characters and lo-fi background music, really chill and lovely with beautiful art, and it’s still on sale this weekend if that sounds like your jam too

Clock Mouse: 1126 words, a much slower week because I didn’t actually want to write anything :/

Other: donated blood 🧛‍♂️

For creatures consisting primarily of teeth, they posed little risk to explorers even in the deepest, most unwelcoming caves, but they could hardly be described as harmless. The roots of mountains surrendered slowly to their gnawing, like granite-fueled gophers tunneling through a planet-wide garden. Legends said they would, one day, unmoor those mountains and set them floating up to become cloud islands, leaving fallow fields far below after that strange harvest.

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LL#1245

The Big Softies Club is a makers club for large gentlemen with tender hearts and crafty hands, specializing in plush toys. They are conducting a membership drive to bolster their spring/summer project, which is creating small plush companions for children who will be starting school in the fall for the first time and need extra support. As always, there is special emphasis on local fauna, so check out their next meeting with your ideas and questions for crocheted cryptids and felted figments.

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LL#1244

Easily distracted, she learned to set alarms and timers for just about everything in her daily life, so it didn’t strike her as odd when something in her bedroom started chiming. That it proved to be coming from the pocket of her winter coat, so recently put away for the year, stirred her curiosity, however. She looked inside the pocket, and found herself transported to a snowy landscape under a woolen sky, in which ominous bells were tolling out warnings of some great task forgotten.

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LL#1243