Your damsel is absolutely covered in midge bites. Western Scotland + opened windows due to heat wave = itchy all over.

Dana and I passed through Glen Coe the other day, so obviously we took a picture for our Bluesky mates!

I just ruined 1000 years of the history of Dana's family by buying them a fan for the farm. Ye cannae no ha' a fan! It's boiling oot!

Me: What is Yellowstone about? Dana: It's a princess show for boys. Men get on horsies in their pretty costumes. Me: You always explain things in ways I understand. =)

Reading about Karl Bushby's 28 year walk around the world, it strikes me as incredibly instructive of the state of this world that the hardest part wasn't the walking, it was waiting for visas again and again. Visas are harder to get than walking thousands of miles. Open borders now.

I keep seeing perplexed articles about Scotland football fans putting parking cones on Boston statues, so I'll just tell everyone that it's a recreation of the meme of Glaswegians putting a cone on the statue of Duke Wellington in Glasgow.

A Romanian man bought drinks for me and Dana at a queer bar in Inverness and hit on us for 45 minutes.

I found this book of Trilingual Poetry (presented in Gaelic, English, and Scots). I thought @consume.red would like it!

My granny and Dana's granny are coincidentally from the same village in the Scottish Borders, but we've worked out that, at most, we'd be like third cousins once removed or some such thing. So we're fine, don't think about it too much.

Hello from Inbhir Nis (Inverness)!

Went to that famous bookstore today and picked up some books in Gàidhlig.

Finally, a chocolate bar made for me!

Apple art in our Highland cottage.

As to the question of the greatest social site, for me it was probably all of those avatar dress up forum sites. I made a lot of great friends there for a while, with the added benefit of dressing up your character. You could make hangout chat threads and talk about anything.

I don't understand the puppygirl thing. Bramble (Dana's family dog) is an adorable sweetie pie who falls asleep with his head on my lap, so I get that. But he also just spends all day lying around grumbling and passing gas that stinks up the room for 10 minutes.

Teach kids about zines before they get banned from printers

Tomatoes, but specifically on sandwiches. It always just makes everything watery and tomato-tasting. It also usually makes a sandwich/burger too thick to enjoy and makes everything slide around. Tomatoes are a menace.

New chippy opened in the village and apparently the entire village showed up. Anyway, after waiting in queue for two hours, we have fish and chips!

Me: I admit that I do like McNuggets. Dana: Aye, they are good, but here in Scotland we just call them Nuggets. The Mc is assumed in all things. Cracking me up over here.

Me: I heard something scratching in the wall last night. Dana: Aye, there's a moose loose aboot in the hoose. How are they so cute, dēgōmes?

“There is something divine in mindless beauty”

As Goddess of Flowers, I can confirm.

Visiting some enormous trees at the village of An Càrn Dubh near Loch Fìne. They make me and Dana look tiny!

Dana and I are in Argyll! Here's the Isle of Arran from Skipness.

In Glasgow today with Dana and my father-in-law! 🥰

The mail van broke down in our drive and they just left it here lol

Cape Cod below, but I'm already back in Scotland and jet lagged.

Everyone talks about Bob Ross and Mr Rogers, but no one talks about Norm Abram from The New Yankee Workshop and how he calmly explained how to make ridiculously amazing furniture and carpentry projects with a soothing Eastern Massachusetts accent.

checkmate atheists

Ed Markey tears into Seth Moulton: "Massachusetts deserves better than a senator who scapegoats trans kids." The crowd goes fucking wild.

The urge to wear flannel and drive my Suburu up to Vermont with Dana and become lesbian woodworkers together. (It's not a strong urge, but it's there. I'm girly, but I contain multitudes...plus, we both grew up in farms.)

Time to read out the names better than AI ever could.

The Casio W-217H is better than the Casio F-91W and the Casio WS-1600H is better than the Casio AE-1200 and I'm sick of pretending otherwise just to placate Casio fanboys on the internet who have all fallen under some weird groupthink. The emperor has no clothes!

"Visit me today because I want to see you before you go back to the UK. I want to buy you a new dress, and then you can buy me cannabis." —My Mother this morning via text

You actually can get IRN BRU in New England because Foxon Park soda brand has an "Iron Brew" soda flavour.

Today I learned that women are changing their names on Doordash to male-coded names because male delivery drivers sometimes wait for them to come outside to grab their food (i.e., they want to ogle women). One of the few benefits of being called Mathonwy is that this has never happened to me.

My dirty secret is that I kind of like some of that post-grunge hard rock from the 90s that people are calling "divorced dad rock" now. I even kind of like Creed! Not all of it, mind you, but those kinds of bands made some bangers in the 90s!

I split my time between the US and UK, so here goes for each: Massachusetts — I drink Dunkin Donuts all the time, but I don't worship it as a religion the way folks do around here (or so says the stereotype, at least). I think it's fast food coffee, and that's exactly what you get. Fine, not great.

My landlord just told me he's voting for the Massachusetts rent control measure and all the ads we're seeing are nonsense scaremongering made by wealthy slumlords. I know we're not supposed to like landlords, but my landlord is really cool!

These are the knights I have hired to defend my queendom.

Every friend group needs an Irish person, a Scottish person, and a Welsh person. The Irish person is the comic relief, the Scottish person is the great banterer and insulter, the Welsh person is like the petulant/depressed Eeyore of the group that balances things out.

I got no less than three remarks about how we must care for our students because we use people to read names instead of AI. Has the bar become so low?

Well, I can say with all honesty that Catholic Tayto wins. Better flavour, better texture (more crispiness). I'll give Protestant Tayto this: the crisps are a bit thicker, and I like that, but the texture seems to suffer because of it, not in spite of it.

Martin Tuber vs Popetato

I like how the secret is in the flavour. Good place for it

Today we discover which is best: Protestant Tayto or Catholic Tayto.

Come to my booth so I can pronounce your name correctly when I read it at graduation!

I'm flattered, Spongebob, but I'm a married woman.

Padme doesn't understand that the reason why British houses are cool in winter and warm in summer is the same reason (poor insulation).

My queendom is not of this world! Nor the next! That's my mother's queendom. I'm not queen of anything. But I'm, like, kind of a big deal in some circles. Mostly orchardists. One of them calls me "Apple Girl".