I feel called out by the characterizations of *both* daughters in "Pieces of April" which seems unfair & also should not be possible.

"In dulci jubilo" for religious & "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" for secular.

Talking about strong floors reminded me to do my pelvic floor exercises, & *that* reminded me of the Cardassian Union:

Accents have become so flattened & homogenized that when I hear someone with a bit of a twang or a honk or a lilt or a chirp my ears light up.

Realized the other day that I have completely missed my window to have a Problematic Age Gap Relationship: I'm not worldly-wise enough to be the older person & people who are so much older than I am as to make the gap problematic are getting ready to retire! It's fellow forty-somethings or nothing!

The ground *isn't* frozen & I got some land cleared but now I'm so wiped I almost want to go back to bed. Help me, Proferrin, you're my only hope! (I have this vision of planting out my shrubs along the edge of our land so both the neighbors & our household have some screening from each other.)

My Mom & I are going to try for Dry Advent again this year; life is just trying & failing & trying again & falling & getting back up & seeing what you made destroyed & picking up the pieces & rebuilding. Here is some nifty art you could get to this effect: www.inprnt.com/gallery/kati...

It is at times like this I feel the lack of the Wellesley FB group. It would be nice to find some fellow alumnae with whom to go to this next week. www.wellesley.edu/events/chris...

We went for a walk today (good) but I totally wiped out because of my dodgy ankle (bad) & got a bunch of bruises & scrapes & they *hurt*.

ICE DETAINED MARILYN. Fuck these people. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

LL Bean has stopped making my sister's favorite raccoon slippers so I am trying to find a pair somewhere else & finding a surprising number of slippers Made Of raccoons :( (Odd that my Mom must have Giessweins & I must have Haflingers & my sister must have Beans. 3 women, 3 different foot shapes.)

It would be really soppy to get these & take them to work & say the blonde one is me & the one with the dark bob is my colleague who's also my friend, yes? (Unsure whp the redhead is) www.vermontcountrystore.com/ceramic-cand...

I think the ground might have frozen already? A real "congratulations, Sarah, you played yourself" situation if so (come on, global warming, come through for your gal so she can get her bulbs in, she's been wanting to all weekend but had to do lots of food & housekeeping-related tasks.)

Is This Lady Having a Mental Breakdown, Did She See Ghosts, or Could It Be Both? You Decide!

The death of browsing is part of the reason art is the way it is now. Our opinions are largely fed to us by algorithms. Spending a spare 15 minutes wandering around a bookstore or comic shop or video rental place was how you found stuff you wouldn't ordinarily pick up and thereby expanded your taste

My sister came up with this one: Mr Rochester has a problem attic relationship with his first wife.

The worst AI is autocorrect

We get so much from literature but it's poorly paid work for the most part, even for people who are good at! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

Muscular Christianity. “Wear some headphones, kid. And put your shoes back on”

Oh, this is good: www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Writers where you can just put on The Outfit & everyone will know who it is: Emily Dickinson (white dress) Mark Twain (ice cream suit & the hair) Lord Byron (big white shirt & floppy dark 'do) Samuel Johnson (brown homespun suit & the wig) Edith Sitwell (dramatic floor-length dress & turban)

Taking advantage of the Zenni sale (I also use my benefits to get glasses through my local optician but it's good to have options) & thinking of poor Anna in "The Golden Pince-Nez" getting read for filth in absentia by Mycroft for her poor vision & what it causes. I would also be stuck sans specs.

Eleanor Estes won the Newbury Medal for "Ginger Pye", a dog book in which the dog DOES NOT die. Another example of a librarian pulling off a seemingly impossible task!

Reading about the Romanovs (history marches on & we know more about what happened than we did when I was a teenager reading obsessively about them) & they'd have been so much better off as a nice middle-class suburban family somewhere.

My sister & I got the air conditioner out of the kitchen window (it's one of those big, unwieldy ones shaped like a wide, flat upside-down U so it really is a two-person job.) Thank you for your 2025 work, a/c unit. This concludes your duties for this year. We will see you next Spring.

I am making such good soup stock right now. It smells so good. Also I got a green sparkly top in the Talbots sale, so someone should invite me to a party. And I told my sister about Total Wine's delivery service so she doesn't have to go out & shop for wine & beer for her church's reception.

We moved on to "The Golden Pince-Nez" & we're seeing Russian dissidents & intellectuals brutalized & slaughtered by the Imperial forces & *this* is why everyone was angry at Nicholas II, not Rasputin using demonic forces.

We had a good dinner & I have the carcase boiling for soup & you're aware that I made the pie crust with baking soda instead of powder but it doesn't *ruin* it. We are watching "Anastasia". Just hearing Angela Lansbury's *voice* makes me cry at this point. It's beautiful; it's Tsarist propaganda!

Posting something random to avoid a bad December:

I am so accustomed to people's pie pics that at first I thought his head was one.

Patriotic holiday selfie with North Bridge in the background and the mirrored shades the other chaps wear

Trying to figure out what kind of dance the Turkey Trot *was* (it didn't have the staying power of the Fox Trot; it's a predator animal's world) & listening to recordings of old 78 rpms. www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Mn...

"Cannot bear to be beeped at by machines" & "Barely notices being beeped at by machines" are another two categories of people who always seem to end up living together.

Something deeply moving about Lincoln making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the midst of the Civil War because we may “expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom” and “God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

During all this off-the-wall food discourse, the British are pushing back at us by pointing out that we make wonderful sandwiches on-demand for $11 in a restaurant but we haven't mastered the art of a mass-produced pre-packaged sandwich that doesn't make you want to hurl & they have, & good for them

We've hit the Holmeses where he looks *haggard*; the story reason is presumably that Holmes was hitting the 'caine but I fear the real reason is how ill Jeremy Brett was.

We are watching the American Revolution show again so my sister (who is home for Thanksgiving) can see it. This country was worth fighting George III for & he wasn't even as bad a man as Trmp is.

If your argument involves referring to Americans as “USians” it doesn’t matter how cogent the rest of your point may be tbh

Ahahahaha the pie crust recipe called for baking powder & I used baking soda. It was under a teaspoon so things may be all right? I checked multiple times to make sure I was using the right one & used the wrong one anyway!

The kitchen's cleared & the pie crust is rolled out but the cream, which was fine two days ago, has gone off. Does anyone need anything at the grocery store?

This has made YouTube think I need red meat & advice on how to quit p-rn.

Cue-ing up a queue of Puritan music to listen to while I clean the kitchen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Ir...

I am off work for today! So my to-do list is: 1. Make sure my Mom eats breakfast (DONE) 2. Clean off the kitchen table 3. Make pumpkin pie 4. Plant some bulbs 5. Tidy the living room Stretch goals: gather fruitcake ingredients & maybe make a pecan pie as well

Ohhhhhhhhhh, this is a great thread!

Thinking about how in fiction the Reformed Traitor Sincerely Trying to Redeem Themself is often one of the most attractive characters in the narrative & how in real life...do we even get any of those any more?

Part of the problem here is nobody knowing how to read any more (also the local news keeps showing photos of the oil-flooded basement & if the tiles were really red instead of covered with red oil they would look so cheerful! I wouldn't mind red kitchen floor tiles.) www.boston.com/news/local-n...

Friends, was someone looking for Christmas crackers stateside? The Smithsonian is selling some: www.smithsonianstore.com/search/?sear...

Sorry! It was Summer 2023 (I remember because after going home sick & going to bed I finally had a chance to watch "Planet of the Bass" & see what everyone was talking about.) Time just stopped working properly for many of us in March 2020.

Thanksgiving traffic is so bad & dangerous & full of college students home for break & driving for the first time since summer that placing a wine delivery order for tonight would count as asking someone else to risk their life, so I should just get something at the store, y/y?

(this may be entirely unrepresentative but like 2/3rds of the trans guys I know are devout Anglicans. No idea why!)