The Aviary

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 13:55:17 GMT

Two occurrences from yesterday:

1) So I have this brown skirt that I sewed that I didn't like the color of - I had dyed it myself and the brown came out too light and too orange for my taste. I had decided to overdye it a darker brown and began the process yesterday after dinner. Dyeing takes a while - I was using Rit, and the process is "Make a dye bath, put the item in stirring frequently for up to an hour, rinse out the excess dye, make another bath if you're using color fixitive, put the item in and stir frequently for 20 minutes, rinse again, wash the item in the washing machine, then dry."

I had gotten to the "then dry" part last night before I went to bed. Just before I threw the skirt in the dryer, I looked over it to see how the color looked and was a little dismayed to find several places where it didn't look even and the dye hadn't taken properly. There wasn't anything I could do about it at that point, so I threw it in the dryer and went to bed.

Where I proceeded to alternately worry all night about how I had ruined my skirt, and then try to figure out ways that I hadn't ruined it, or at least not irreparably, and this is how I could fix things. It was not a pleasant night.

And this morning, I pulled the skirt out of the dryer and, lo and behold, the color looks much more even than I remembered, and the few places where the dye didn't take are on inside of the skirt. It looks much better than my catastrophizing brain thought it did.

I don't recommend this worrying-all-night-to-discover-things-are-fine process to anyone, but the relief I'm feeling right now I really pretty great.

2) As I walked to my mailbox yesterday, I passed a dude on the sidewalk carrying a large reusable grocery bag that I couldn't see inside of. I didn't recognize him, but that doesn't mean anything - I am a hermit and am not terribly familiar with many of the people in my neighborhood.

As I passed him, he stopped, looked and me, and said, "Excuse me, I believe these are yours." Whereupon he reached into the grocery bag, pulled out a small but perfect bunch of tiny jewel-like grapes, and handed them to me. Then he walked away.

I have two theories:
a) He has grown the grapes in his garden, now has more grapes than he knows what to do with, and is giving them away to random people.
b) Grape fairy.

If theory b is correct, I'm probably in trouble, because I ate some of the grapes before I thought better of it. They are very tart but very tasty.

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Thu, 22 Aug 2024 02:11:52 GMT

I miss my mom a lot and look forward to her coming home next week, but there are a few advantages to her being away for a while. Chief among these is the fact that my dad does more experimental baking when she's away.

He's trying to perfect his recipe for bolo de caco* right now. Y'all, bolo de caco is so good, even if my dad's not quite happy with the recipe yet.

I hope he has to make it several more times in order to perfect it, honestly.

*Madeiran flatbread made with sweet potatoes. Traditionally served with garlic butter; also makes an excellent sandwich.

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Fri, 16 Aug 2024 16:10:30 GMT

Updates:

- The curse on my aunt's house seems to have lifted, in that nothing else has broken or gone wrong since my last post and most things seem to be improving. Also, my mom apparently had the mildest possible case of covid, which is a huge relief. Things appear very positive on that front. Hooray! (Knock wood for everything in the above paragraph.)

- It is weird to have Mom gone for this long. I love Dad and vice versa, but we basically don't ever spend time one-on-one, so conversation when we're the only people in the room is a little awkward. It's working out okay, but we're both very much looking forward to Mom getting back at the end of the month.

- I cannot wait for summer to be over. It's been relatively cool this week - only in the 70s - and a little cloudier, which has been such a relief. I'm so ready for autumn. The other day, I actually got enthusiastic about knitting, which hasn't happened in months. I bought new yarn and everything.

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Thu, 08 Aug 2024 02:41:16 GMT

( sad post, cw: cancer, feel free to skip )

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Tue, 23 Jul 2024 03:27:40 GMT

Things:

- The temperature dropped today to only the mid 60s, it was grey and rainy, and it is actually cool in my bedroom for the first time in weeks. I'm so happy.

- I am nearly finished sewing my second button-down shirt - I just have to do the sleeves and the hemming. I'm really happy with how the dyeing on this fabric came out as well. Dyeing is always a bit of a dice roll for me, but this one came out a really pretty sort of Eau de Nil color and it's very cool.

- My mood this summer has generally been pretty okay (so far, knock wood) but I have reached the point in July where a bunch of my normal activities feel stale and unprofitable. Reading or watching movies gets harder, as does a lot of my crafty stuff (though sewing seems pretty okay right now). Fortunately, when I hit this point last year, I made myself a handy list of Stuff I Can Do When I Have Summer Brain. One of the categories on it is roll-and-write boardgames, so this weekend I played a lot of Railroad Ink. You guys, Railroad Ink is such a lovely game. It's pleasing to look at, it's soothing to play, it requires just the right amount of thought - I always have a good time playing it. Voyages and Aquamarine from Postmark Games also hit that combination of factors, so I'm going to pull those out next.

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Sun, 14 Jul 2024 15:11:22 GMT

I got out a spinning project last night for the first time in...oof, over a year, and started spinning on it again. (It's hot right now and spinning is a good craft for hot weather, because it doesn't involve a pile of wool or other fabric sitting in my lap.)

I had been a little worried that, with such a long gap, I'd have trouble picking it up again. But it turns out that spinning is like riding a bicycle - my hands know how to do this, even without thinking about it. I'd forgotten just how sensually pleasant spinning is: the feel of the fiber moving through my fingers, the sound of my spindle as it spins. It's very good.

This project is a very large one for me - 24 oz of fiber in total - and I've been working at it on and off for a couple years now. I've got about 6 oz left, which is three full spindles. Maybe this will actually be the year I finish it, and then I can start knitting the sweater I'm making the yarn for.

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Wed, 10 Jul 2024 22:33:46 GMT

Hi, hello, I guess I haven't posted here in several months! Due to a combination of a) being very boring generally and b) inertia. One feels that one has to come up with something interesting when there's been a long gap, and then one feels that nothing is quite interesting enough. But that is silly and I would like to get back to posting, so here I am.

Things:

- I have been on vacation and home alone for the past week (now I am back at work), and have done a lot of sewing. I have completed my first button-down shirt! It is a little wonky in places and the fit is not perfect, but I'm quite pleased with it. Especially since the prospect of making my own button-downs was a huge part of why I started sewing my own clothes in the first place. (Button-downs for made for dudes do not fit me right; button-downs made for ladies almost never button all the way up which I very much want them to do; nearly all of them have breast pockets which I do not want. The only solution is to make my own.) I learned a lot from making this shirt, have already started on a second one, and have fabric for a third.

- I'm doing a concentrated Lovecraft reread for the first time in...maybe 15-20 years? Not everything he wrote - I don't ever need to read "The Horror of Red Hook" again, for example - but the major stuff/my favorites/stuff I somehow haven't read before but sounds interesting. I am reading by theme, not chronologically, and doing some movie pairings as well. Currently, I am in the middle of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and enjoying myself immensely. Also, having it as a project is good, as I often lose any sort of attention span for reading in the summer, but this appears to be holding my focus for now. (Having the house to myself also means I'm free to read aloud if I want to. "The Thing on the Doorstep" is already fun, but it's even moreso if you read it out loud.)

- We have been having a heat wave - I hate it so much. The temperature is finally dropping off somewhat today, which is a major relief. The house is air conditioned, thank goodness, but my bedroom still gets very warm at night and it's interfering with my sleep. But since it's getting cooler now, hopefully I will be able to sleep properly tonight, and also I can do some sewing on the back porch this evening.

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Sat, 02 Mar 2024 17:32:26 GMT

So, a little while ago Joanns was having a really good sale on flannel fabric, and I've been wanting to make myself a flannel dress. I went to the store, but they didn't have a color I wanted, but the sale was also for fabric online, so I just found the color I wanted there and ordered 4 yards of fabric.

I've had variable luck in the past ordering from Joanns online - about 50% of the time, I get an email a few days later telling me that they can't fill my order, are cancelling it, and issuing me a refund. That didn't happen this time, and I got the fabric a few days ago. I left it folded in the package until laundry day (today) so that nothing would happen to it before I could wash it.

This morning, I finally took it out of the package. And discovered that they had, indeed, sent me 4 yards of fabric, but it is in two separate 2-yard pieces. I genuinely do not understand why they would do this - they are a fabric store. Surely they know that this is not what their customers want, right?

I'm going to see if I can still make this work with my pattern but I am making a mental note that it is just not worth ordering from Joanns online.

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Fri, 01 Mar 2024 03:55:31 GMT

When I was little, my Granny made tomato soup cake all the time. I have no idea how I was convinced to eat it - I've had an aversion to tomatoes and all tomato products for as long as I can remember. But I loved her tomato soup cake. It was about the only thing Granny cooked that I did like. She wasn't a great cook, really - her cooking repertoire was a weird mix of half-remembered Portuguese diaspora cooking, Depression food, and weird stuff from the 1950s; the entire time I knew her she was obsessive about making sure everything was low-fat; and she made the worst pie crust I've ever seen in my life. But the tomato soup cake came from the recipe on the Campbell's can and it always turned out well.

Granny died in 2020 (not from covid, but from simple old age). It was her birthday last week - we went to Red Lobster (Granny's favorite restaurant) to celebrate and my mom made a tomato soup cake. I'm eating one of the last slices now. It's still really good.

I miss her.

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Tue, 06 Feb 2024 21:32:46 GMT

So, we got the floors redone in our house a few weeks ago and then, since all the furniture was already out of the way, decided to get some painting done as well. The final part of the prep for all of this was removing everything from our fridge and wheeling it, empty, into the laundry room. The fridge was placed so that you could, if you were careful, just barely squeak past into the laundry room to, y'know, do laundry or get to the garage.

We are extremely fortunate in that we have a smaller second fridge in the garage that we could cram everything into. You can squeeze through the laundry room and carefully carry things in from the garage if you have to, but it is difficult. There has been a lot of instant ramen and similar foods in our life recently.

Final prep for floors et al was done on January 14th. The fridge got put back in the kitchen today.

I've never been so happy about an appliance in my life.

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Mon, 29 Jan 2024 17:42:37 GMT

There was a mixup with work this morning - I had requested the day off and had gotten the request approved, but somehow it disappeared from the schedule website, so my supervisor texted me to tell me I was late and ask if everything was okay. I still had the confirmation email approving my request that I was able to forward to her, so I still have my day off and everything is fine but:

a) Stressful

b) I feel oddly offended about it. Like, how dare you accuse me of not showing up when I'm scheduled to, I have never been even 5 minutes late for work without letting someone know in my life.

I feel like my honor has been impugned.

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Thu, 18 Jan 2024 17:58:51 GMT

So, we're getting the floors redone in our house this week. We decided it would be better to stay in a nearby hotel while the work was being done, rather than stay in our house with torn up floor and no furniture and dust everywhere.

And it's fine? Like, the hotel room is perfectly nice and has a kitchenette so we can (sort of) cook and we're all doing our best to give each other space. But it's also mildly awful - there's all kinds of tiny inconveniences and changes to routine that sound like such stupid things to be upset about if you name them individually, but they all add up to a constant low-level scraping of the nerves. It's a constant simmering of "I feel miserable" that you can't even really complain about, because the causes of that misery are so stupid and the people you live with are a) also miserable and b) the thing that is making you miserable in a way that absolutely isn't their fault and c) being made miserable by you as well.

And now, of course, we find out that the floors will likely not be done on schedule, so we'll have to stay in the hotel for another day. And Mom is proposing that, well, we need to repaint the downstairs as well and all the furniture is already out of the day - why not try to get that done immediately after the floors are finished? We'd stay in the house for that, but it means another week of strangers constantly around, another week of disrupted routine, another week of tiny stupid inconveniences.

I'm going to bury myself in the backyard and become a mushroom.

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Sat, 13 Jan 2024 21:56:23 GMT

Pursuant to the last post:

You guys, I have so many Wretched and Alone games, they all look so cool, and I have played precisely none of them. Because the big deal Thing about Wretched and Alone games is that you need a jenga tower to play - Wretched and Alone games are journaling games about stressful and tenuous situations that could fall apart at any moment and this is represented by the jenga tower.

That is such a cool idea but I do not have a jenga tower. I keep meaning to buy a mini set solely for rpg purposes, but I've never gotten around to it.

I'm gonna have to keep looking at these games with longing and not playing them for now, I guess.

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Sat, 13 Jan 2024 16:18:56 GMT

So I bought the new Solo But Not Alone game bundle the other day, because I am unable to resist sales on solo rpgs. And then, as I was looking through all the cool games I had bought, I decided that a good goal for 2024 is to actually play some of these games. Because I have a huge dumb collection of cool-looking solo rpgs* and then every time I think "I want to start a new game!", I almost inevitably play one of the same three games again.

(Those three games are Starforged, Journey, and 'I don't need rules or a game system, I have a GM emulator'.)

So my goal for this weekend is to actually organize my game collection so I can make a list and then semi-systematically actually play all my games. (Or read through them and decide that I don't actually want to play them, which is also useful.)

*In my defense, most of them I didn't spend money on. There are so many extremely cool things available for free on itch.io, you guys.

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Thu, 04 Jan 2024 18:38:06 GMT

In other rpg news:

At our last All Staff Meeting, one of the little breakout sessions you could sign up for turned out to be a pared-down rules-light D&D one-shot. It was super fun and the guy DMing was great. He mentioned at the end that he'd be interested in an ongoing staff game.

Today, he messaged one of my coworkers who was also at the game, and she let me know that she had been invited and when and where it was happening. And then I was very brave and emailed the DM asking to join.

And! He emailed me back and seemed enthusiastic about me joining! Their next session is this evening, which I won't be able to make, but I'm going to roll up a character tonight and try to join next week.

I'm so excited!

ETA - Ahahaha, I spent the whole evening building a character and I already love him so much. He is a gnomish wizard named Eponymous Raventack, who used to run a magic shop before deciding to go On the Stage as a professional stage magician. (Mostly, he did children's birthday parties.) But then, during a performance, he made his assistant vanish, as per usual, but she never reappeared. So now he is adventuring to find her. He has an enormous top hat and a dramatic cape and a white rat familiar named Clancy. I can't wait to play this goofy dude.

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Thu, 04 Jan 2024 15:10:19 GMT

A cool thing about solo rpgs is that you can accidentally create mysteries for yourself that you have no way of solving beyond continuing to play the game.

( Not everyone wants to know the details of my solo games, I guess )

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Thu, 28 Dec 2023 04:05:56 GMT

My mom gave me a a rigid heddle loom for Christmas (an Ashford 16" SampleIt), because the gods know that I need more textile-based hobbies*. I've spent the evening waxing all the bits to finish them and then assembling the loom.

1) I am so excited to make any number of clumsy, hideous woven objects. And eventually attractive and useful woven objects, but there's going to a long period of hilarious ugly scarves and dishcloths in my immediate future.

2) Building/assembling stuff is so enjoyable. It's honestly a good thing that I don't have a lot of storage space, or I would absolutely have become some sort of model-building hobbyist years ago.

*After weaving, I think the traditional next step is to start looking into raising one's own sheep, but I am planning to stop before I get to that point.

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Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:09:03 GMT

Tuesday is our garbage/recycling day, so everyone in the neighborhood puts their cans out on Monday nights. Except last night it suddenly became incredibly windy around 10 o'clock, which means that around 10:45 I heard someone's recycling bin (impossible to know whose - the wind made determining direction or proximity impossible) topple over and spill bottles and cans into the street to be blown around wildly by the wind.

This is an unfortunate circumstance and I hope it didn't cause whoever's bin it was too much trouble, but it was beautifully musical when it happened.

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Thu, 21 Dec 2023 19:13:45 GMT

So, at the beginning of this year, I decided to knit my sister a sweater as her Christmas present. I bought yarn (that she selected), and found a pattern, and started working on it.

And I hated every minute of it. Getting measurements from her was like pulling teeth, getting her to try things on was even harder, and the actual knitting was either boring or irritating. It was a hateful, hateful sweater, even before the fitting where it turned out I need to rip out several inches and do them again.

So I gave up - I don't want to give someone a sweater I hate because a) knitted gifts should be made with love and b) that sort of thing feels like it would carry a curse to the wearer. She gets on my nerves sometimes, but I don't want to curse her. I talked to her about it, she agreed that she didn't want a cursed sweater, and I promised to make her something else with the yarn (not for Christmas).

I settled on making her a complex lacy wrap/infinity scarf thing - she likes wearing those and I love knitting complicated lace. I rewound the yarn earlier this week and, since today is a holiday and I have the day off, I decided to cast on.

I am going to enjoy this project much more than the last, but it does begin with 368 stitchs of provisional caston, and I am currently regretting many of my choices.

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The Shortest Day

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 16:07:13 GMT

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

- Susan Cooper

It's very foggy where I live today but the sun still came up anyway! Glad Yule, everybody.

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Fri, 01 Dec 2023 20:22:12 GMT

Hands down the weirdest customer service interactions are when a semi-regular patron comes up to the desk and cheerfully exclaims, "You look different! Why do you look different?" when you have changed literally nothing whatsoever about your appearance in over a year.

I don't know, lady! This is just how I look! Maybe you are confusing me with somebody else?

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Sun, 26 Nov 2023 14:40:14 GMT

Hello! I haven't posted here in ages - sorry. But! Yesterday was my birthday and now I am 41, so I felt like I needed to mention it.

My sister and her husband came over yesterday for my birthday and, when they arrived, my sister gave me a hug and said, "I got you kind of a weird present." Which is always an exciting thing to hear. And then, when I opened it, it turned out that she had bought me a mystery collection of animal teeth from etsy. (By 'mystery collection', I mean that she didn't get to pick out the teeth. They are all labeled so I know what they are and can easy catalog them as part of my curiosity collection.) That is certainly a weird present but you guys, I am so delighted by this bag of teeth, I can't even tell you.

I got some other lovely presents as well but I'm probably always going to remember 41 as 'the bag of teeth birthday'.

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Fri, 06 Oct 2023 14:54:47 GMT

It is HPLFF time so I am going to Portland today!

I take the train to Portland and that necessitates first taking a ferry to Seattle. Last year, the ferry I meant to take was cancelled (the ferries have been having persistent staffing issues since 2020), so I had to take the next one and instead of my normal routine of getting to the train station about an hour ahead of time, I got there will literally five minutes to spare and barely got on board before the train left. And now I'm paranoid.

The ferries have been running basically fine lately and there's no real reason to believe that I'll have any trouble today but I still keep checking the ferry app about every five minutes to make sure nothing has changed.

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Wed, 27 Sep 2023 19:18:57 GMT

So, the other day, I checked out a copy of The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral by Robert Westall. The book contained the title novella (which I had read before, but when I was a kid) and another called "Brangwyn Gardens".

The title novella is delightful - a lovely, old-fashioned M R James-style ghost story, with an engaging and vivid voice for its first-personal narrator. Highly recommended.

But the second one was so disappointing that I had to write this post to complain about it. It also starts off as an old-fashioned style of ghost story: the one in which a student has rented a room in a creepy old house which has a creepy landlady and might be haunted. This is generally a type of spooky story I enjoy, so I had high hopes. The story is set in 1955 but the haunting is from WWII - long enough ago that the protagonist was alive during the Blitz, but was a small child. This also works, as the protagonist gets mixed up between his own memories and what may be ghostly occurrences. The atmosphere in general is very well done.

Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that this is one of those "the protagonist falls in love with a ghost" stories. I don't care for those very much - I am perhaps too aroace for the premise to work on me, so the idea of falling in love with someone via reading their diary and smelling the ghost of their perfume and going through their long-abandoned underthings (!) just seems creepy, in an unappealing way. But that's a personal thing - the idea of falling in love with a ghost certainly must work for a lot of people, as it's a fairly common ghost story type.

But then! ( There is an infuriating twist! )

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Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:58:32 GMT

Yesterday, I finished reading a book about horror media which of course meant making a films-to-watch list that I'm very excited about. The problem now is that I have yet to work out a way to get the universe to let me knit and watch horror movies all day (ideally with an interested companion) and still get paid.

It is troublesome.

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