Flowering Quince

Practically brand new!

A rocky beach with long beach grasses a lots of driftwood.

1.75 miles. Still feeling convalescent but a whole lot better than even a week ago.

I realized very late in the game that Wolves… was a series. And now you tell me there are romances too? I have so much catching up to do.

Food of the gods. There’s a bar near me that most of the year serves vaguely Irish gastropub fusion (it’s good). But for Mardi Gras the chef, who is from NOLA, makes étouffée and it is an Event.

The solstice when we burn the calendars of the bad years and hang up the jul shark to bite misfortune and winter.

Jul shark is coming closer and closer to me doing ill advised things with papier mache.

I’d write you a reference letter!

This is my friend Rebecca—she writes good, and also is very funny and good at texting. Please give her all the money and opportunities that you have. I promise she will give them a good home. Also, remember to hang your jul shark!

Warbling, “last Christmas, I gave you a shark. The very next day, you all ran away…”

I had this mad idea of decorating it for Christmas.

Late stage hydrangea blossoms: teal with purple splotches and brown dried bits.

1.4 very slow miles: first run in nearly a month. It felt like coming home to myself.

I…just spent an absurd amount of time trying to figure out how to get an 11 foot long hammerhead shark model to the west coast, so that I could surprise my housemates with a ceiling shark.

Please note, that they have done nothing that suggests that they want such a thing.

It’s really astonishing that the human race survived the first six-year-olds first critique of the first cave painting. It’s brutality all the way back.

It’s so good. I too need the sequel.

Does immediately getting Last Christmas stuck in one's head count? Asking for…someone else. Definitely.

I listened to Hidden Almanac on a loop during 2020, and it helped.

When (some) animals find a new thing in their environment, they tend to react with caution until they are sure it won’t harm them. The word for it is “neophobia,” your hind brain is just trying to make sure the computer won’t eat you (or your time). Sensible.

My email and text inboxes are full of Democrats begging for money. No more until Schumer is out.

I continue to be bad at convalescing.

Housemate: there’s nothing stopping you from going back to bed.
Me: internalized Calvinism. The worst kind.

Survival and thriving depends on the characters abilities to make peace with their pasts and accept the world as it is, not as they want it to be. It’s a rich text about the continued process of maturation after arriving at adulthood. Wonderful, suspenseful, heartbreaking and funny. Fin/🧵

Elen’s desire to protect her nephew, even as he grows into his own person, and find a path to her own thriving feels urgent and fresh. So many fantasies focus on coming of age, with magic serving as a metaphor for coming to adulthood. Here magic instead reflects a haunted past. 2/🧵

I finished @kateelliottsff.bsky.social’s The Nameless Land, which finishes the Witch Roads Duology. In a high fantasy setting where the story could easily and satisfactorily been a quest to save the world, we instead narrowly focus on a few people swept up in the machinations of princes. 1/🧵

Thank you! I just hit complete order! I would have been sad, if I’d actually failed to finish that.

Welp, I just bought a whole bunch of hang in there and better luck next year stickers, because my people have gone through it this year.

I am so relieved to hear that there will be more adventures in this world. I want to know so much about the world.

A brown tabby cat inspecting the contents of a black mug that features the motto “powered by caffeine” and drawings of black cats being silly.

Dante thinks he might need a look out.

I would accept the halal carts too. Eagerly.

TIL that Dashiell Hammett taught a detective-story writing class at the Communist Party Workers’ School in New York, and I now have a new answer to, “if you could go anywhere in time, where would you go?”

And still a total goofball.

A three month old black kitten that looks younger because she’s so scrawny. She has one eye. The other socket is closed with surgical glue. She’s wearing a blue soft cone and a look of indomitable mischief. She’s on top of the platform bed on the guest room. We don’t know how she got there.

Before. Just because people need to see the tiny, sick, one-eyed kitten that wanted to jump on and off of everything and everyone.

AND SHE THOUGHT IT WAS FUN