Reading

365 Questions 2025

29. What are you uncertain about? How the next month or two are going to play out.

30. What do you think about when you lie awake in bed? It depends on whether or not I'm feeling worried or stressed about something; if I am, that's usually what I think about. Sometimes I think about the past, about good or bad times with other people. I'd say there's a huge range of subjects which might play across my mind when I'm lying awake in bed.

31. What’s something most people don’t know about you? That I grew up on a farm with no electricity or running water until I was about 12, and that I started school a year late because there was no school bus to get me to the school in the town 16 miles/25 km away when I should have started.

Entry tags:

connecticut august 2025

(no subject)

This morning has disappeared in a flash; I'm not sure why, because yesterday morning seemed to drag. I guess the main reason is I went for a walk after breakfast and was gone for more than an hour. It was such a perfect morning for outdoor exercise that I just had to go. (Clear and sunny but only in the mid 50s/mid teens, and with a slight breeze.) The girls were all otherwise occupied so nobody clamoured to go with me.

They have now gone to their other grandmother's for a barbecue lunch; one of their uncles is also there but I don't know whether any other relatives will be present. My daughter is spending the day working, because when her husband takes the girls out it's a perfect opportunity for her. Eden asked me if I'd take them to the school playground when they get home, which I will be happy to do.

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In a study, wearing rose scent for ONE MONTH increased growth in the brain's gray matter!

Well, this is kinda interesting! It's hard to say at the moment what the significance of it is, though. This is what I love about medicine: they discover one thing, only for it to prove how little we know about the body. "Hey! We know how to stimulate growth of gray matter! But we don't know why or if it's good for anything...." But hey, it's science, and science builds upon science, so it's all good.

From the article: "Researchers from Kyoto University and the University of Tsukuba in Japan asked 28 women to wear a specific rose scent oil on their clothing for a month, with another 22 volunteers enlisted as controls who put on plain water instead. (and that's not entirely accurate: 29 women wore the scent, but one was unable to do the post-MRI)

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans showed boosts in the gray matter volume of the rose scent participants.

While an increase in brain volume doesn't necessarily translate into more thinking power, the findings could have implications for neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia."

There was no change in the areas of the brain where smell or emotions were processed, which is interesting. But "significantly more gray matter in the posterior cingulate cortex or PCC (linked to memory and association)."

They don't know why this change is happening. One thought put forth is that the rose scent is acting as an irritant, which is interesting. I'm hoping they do longer term studies to see if it actually affects dementia-related illnesses! Of course, I'd also like to see this study replicated using men. It's the same problem of most medical studies using only men because they don't want to have to bother with accommodating women's hormonal variances, it's just so yucky and unpredictable! Then they proclaim that everything applies equally to all women, and they just don't.

The scent-wearing group were 29 participants aged 41–69 years, the control group 22 participants aged 41–65 years.

https://www.sciencealert.com/smelling-this-one-specific-scent-can-boost-the-brains-gray-matter

The full paper is currently available at
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361923024000297?via%3Dihub

If it becomes restricted, I downloaded the PDF and would be happy to supply it.

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puzzles

Puzzle: Hitchcock

This is Murder Mystery Party's Alfred Hitchcock 1000 pieces. It comes with a little booklet and a scenario. The tricky party is there isn't a picture from which to do the puzzle so you are flying without a map. The key to any puzzle (but especially this type) is to carve out enough time (and have enough good light) to let your eyes adjust and figure out what they are looking at. So we have The Birds, Psycho, and one I've not seen, Frenzy referenced here. So the story is there is a murdered psychiatrist, this is the crime scene photo, 3 suspects, 3 interviews, who did it?

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Hey, think the time is right for a palace revolution

I woke up in the early hours of this morning from an intense bad dream. But when I described it to D this morning as "my usual 2025 nightmare...my friends and I fighting in the streets," he made a perfectly understandable but inaccurate assumption: "what, like a fight club?"

No, I said, not fighting each other. Fighting nazis.

But being very silly about which of our friends we could best in physical fights ("well P's out, she has a broken leg" "...do we have to fight each other?"), while snuggling in bed on the one morning a week I don't have to get up as soon as I'm awake, did a great job of dispelling the visceral misery the dream left me with.

Saved from angst by silliness, this feels like the story of my life these days heh.

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books,
reading

What I have been reading, July/August edition

Books I read late July and August.

New books

At School With The Stanhopes by Gwendoline Courtney. If you follow my journal, you will sooner or later hear me talk about Stepmother by the same author. It’s one of my constant comfort reads, and has been since I was 10. But not until I was an adult did I realize that Courtney wrote a number of books in the 1940s and 50s, all geared towards teenage girls. Most of them have been out of print for decades, and being in Sweden has made it a bit of a hassle to buy them used. But now girls Gone by seems to republishing them, and I read II earlier this year. At School With The Stanhopes is about 16 year old Rosalind, whose guardian dies, forcing her to move in with her much older brother, whom she hardly knows. Neither of them are pleased with it, but I lifes becomes much less gloomy when her favorite teacher opens a school just down the lane. Especially as Miss Stanhope has a bevy of friendly younger sisters. It’s mostly a school story, but also about Rosalind and her brother building a relationship, and I enjoyed it enormously. I do wish I had been able to read this book in my early teens, though, because I can tell I would have loved it even more had I read it back then.

Furstinnan (The Princess) by Eva Mattson. A biography of the 16th century Swedish queen Catherine Jagiellon. Sweden is pretty bad at noting women in history, and this is the first biography of a very interesting woman. Katarina Jagellonica, to use her Swedish name, was a Polish princess who rather surprisingly married Johan Vasa, the younger brother of the Swedish king at a time when the Vasa dynasty was seen as an upstart royal family. She was highly educated and educated, and it’s clear after reading this book that she had a lasting impact in how late 16th century Sweden was shaped.

The Art of French Pastry by Jacqut Pfeiffer. I read a lot of cookbooks, but mostly just bits here and there, so never mention them in these posts. But this book was really interesting as it isn’t just recipes, but a thorough explanation of why a recipe looks the way it does, and also how it’s supposed to behave throughout.

The Adventure of the Demonic Ox by Lois McMaster Bujold. The latest installment in the Penric and Desdemona series. It’s a series of fantasy novellas about a young man who accidently gets infested by a demon, something which makes him a sorcerer. As he doesn’t know how one is supposed to behave during those circumstances, he names the demon Desdemona, and they embark on a much more equal relationship. Bujold is one of my favourite authors, and the Penric and Desdemona novellas are bite-sized pieces of delight that together form a bigger whole. With that said this was probably one of the more lightweight installments in the series.

Re-reads

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fannie Flagg. The first book has been a comfort read of mine since the early 90s, and I like the movie too. A couple of years ago it got a sequel. If Fried Green Tomatoes paints the past in very nostalgic shades, The Wonder Boy feels like a fanfic, if one can say that an author can write that to their own work. Everyone is happy at the end of it, and if the bad guy in the first novel was a genuinely awful person, the villains in the latter are reduced to a man with murderous intent towards a cat, and an awful mother-in-law. But sometimes one is in the mood for a book where everything will be just fine. And then some.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I have always thought of this as a gothic novel for children. I mean, an orphaned heroine moving into an isolated mansion where she hears strange cries in the night, and there is a garden no one has been in for 10 years, and no one knows how to get into. I still remember how thrilled I was when I first read it as a kid. And I still love the description of the secret garden.

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tv: the middleman

Media signal boosts

Two wildly different media signal boosts:

--The Murderbot & More Humble Bundle is available for almost two more weeks! (I already have all but one ebook in there, so I'm not pouncing personally, but it's a great collection!)

--Via a couple of people, Javier Grillo-Marxuach recently shared on Bluesky that The Middleman is now streaming on Archive.org. (This is probably my definitive answer to the classic "what canceled show would you revive if you could?" question, although at this point it's not really "revive" so much as "magically keep from being canceled in the first place so it could've just carried on". This show deserved so much more--or at the bare minimum, to have had its season 1 finale actually filmed, while in this timeline 12/13 episodes were filmed. Like. Come ON, studios.)

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Murder by Other Means by John Scalzi

Murder by Other Means by John Scalzi

3/5. A novella in a series about a world where people who are murdered come back to life 999 times out of 1,000, except natural deaths still stick. I was hiding from my library book (shut up, it happens) and let Audible give this to me for free.

I read the second novella first by accident, and had a decent time. It’s one of those stories that I’m never going to really love because it is built around thinking through the implications of a single premise and how that would change society, but there’s no attempt to actually explain anything, and that’s probably for the best because there is no explanation that would be interesting or satisfying. The implications are mildly interesting, though – how do you murder someone under these constraints, for one? So, entertaining enough, but meh.

Then I realized I read the second one first and tried to read the first one and no, please, stop. The tortured infodumping is just so bad, I cannot. Apparently ‘second in a series, we assume you already know how this works’ is the degree of explanation I want for this sort of shallow construct.

Also, Zachary Quinto narrates these (Audible Originals, they do that sort of thing) and he’s . . . aggressively okay at it. Aggressively okay is kind of the whole vibe.

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books,
scotland_25

No, I wrote Spartacus!

We had not seen J. since we parted at Pitmedden, so there was plenty of catching up to do when she called in this afternoon.

On her way south, she had visited the Grassic Gibbon Centre for tea and a scone. Inevitably, she had also bought some books. "Did you know," she said, "that he wrote Spartacus?"

I thought Howard Fast wrote Spartacus, and said so.

Eventually we got this sorted out. The film Spartacus was indeed written by Howard Fast, but Grassic Gibbon's version was published twenty years earlier (under his real name, James Leslie Mitchell). The National Library of Scotland's 'Curator's Choice' makes sense of this (and offers a link to the text).

You learn something every day.

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Haunted Toilet — Best Craigslist Post This Decade

Free Toilet – Haunted. Slightly Used. You’ve Been Warned.

Posted 7-Aug-2025 from the north side of Madison

In a dark room, a standard toilet seems to glow white

( click for pic )

Do you have guts of steel, a strong back, and a questionable sense of judgment? Then boy, do I have the throne for you.

As Paul Harvey intoned, the rest of the story…

I’m giving away a toilet. Not just any toilet. A porcelain enigma, a mystical butt-bucket, a vessel forged in the deepest depths of a cursed Home Depot clearance aisle.

It flushes with the fury of Poseidon’s trident and occasionally emits sounds that suggest it’s trying to communicate in Morse code. It once screamed. Not like the pipes—like a person.

The backstory? This toilet was installed in my guest bathroom, affectionately known as “The Chamber of Screams.” Three guests used it. Two of them have since moved to Canada without explanation, and the third refuses to make eye contact with me at barbecues.

What you need to know:

Flushes. Sometimes violently.

Bowl glows faintly during thunderstorms.

Came with a bidet. Now it just hisses and sprays randomly like a venomous snake.

Every full moon, the tank fills with glitter. Unclear why.

One Yelp review from a plumber simply said “no.”

I just want it out of my house. You must pick it up yourself and sign a waiver that I am not responsible if it follows you home.

NO SCAMMERS. NO WITCHES. NO EXORCISTS (already tried). Serious inquiries only.

If you’re brave enough to sit upon the throne and live to tell the tale, contact me ASAP.

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the state of the ficcery

The State of the Ficcery: August 2025

Word Count for August: 20,692

Writing:

I missed two weeks updating my soap opera, and that makes me very disappointed in myself. I didn't do hardly any comm fills. In fact, I un-susbscribed from a couple of comms simply because I was feeling guilty about not participating. So writing isn't going so well. I really need to sit down and map out the rest of the story plot-wise (soap opera).

Poetry: Even worse for poetry. I completely abandoned my project to use Jo Bell's prompt book 52 and write a poem a week. I managed 29 poems but as the missed weeks piled up, I began to feel so bad and just had to cut bait. Sadness. I do have any idea for posting other people's poems on Thursday which I am going to try this Thursday.

Reading: I finished the book bingo. 6 books this month. I am currently reading: Miles Davis' autobiography, The Clocks by Agatha Christie (which I haven't opened), and Inspector Rebus #21.

Crafting: 6 collages. I have a new project which will be taking up my time and will be presented later in the autumn. 1 jigsaw which I will post about shortly today.

Fitness: No movement on the scale :( But I am committed to a long run on the weekend and two treadmill sessions at the YMCA during the week. Minor thinks I should shoot for a 40 minute 5k (our annual Thanksgiving Turkey Trot). Considering I'm at 48 minutes right now that seems unrealistic. Yesterday I got up at 530 and went to the lake in the dark to run. It was nice. Nobody was there. I got to see the sun rise and 2 herons, 2 rabbits, deer, and a beaver.

Maybe someone Out There knows of a good book, Youtube channel, etc. on how to cut out processed foods from one's diet. I understand that's what I need to do but I am sort of stuck in the few dishes I know how to cook that my family will actually eat and they are all super-processed. I don't know how to make the transition to less processed foods without domestic revolt (and myself included to a degree. I am very used to frozen lasagna and hot dogs, too.) I need something easy. And none of the books I've read so far or Youtube channels I've browsed so far present any kind of foods that is actually easy. It just isn't. It's not easy. Or food my family will actually eat. I hate cooking. I really do. I feel very stuck in an eating pattern that is not good, but I can't see a way out.

Personal: Survived the first week of school for the boys. Gosh I have to get up very early to get everyone's lunch and breakfast made. And I took the new car for a real test drive yesterday morning to the grocery store. It's fine.

I have been depressed this week, but so what? Life goes on.

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movies

Two movies, unrelated

This morning I watched Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
then this afternoon I watched Wicked.

Aquaman was very underwater whoosh booms, but I thoroughly disagree with the theme thing where they were all
family is important, forgive your brother, you can rely on family!
I mean personally I feel that when someone has done a bit of murder and has attempted to kill you, you are allowed to leave him in prison. Not torture prison, that was not okay, but a general prison shaped future seems reasonable.
I am also not a fan of the thing where characters 'earn' their freedom by killing the right people this time. That seems of the bad also.
So I cannot say I liked this movie.
It did do the whoosh booms a lot with interesting visuals though. Points for effort.
... rereading this I realise I might be having problems with the genre conventions of both superhero and royalty movies. someone else might be better able to review it for what it was actually doing then.

Wicked didn't work for me. I do not usually watch musicals and I think I am not good at it. Like, Defying Gravity made me have many feelings, but basically all the rest of the movie my feeling was
why is this a singing
silly singing people.
... this is not a flaw of the movie musical, obviously.
So all I can conclude is I haven't got the hang of watching musicals
which is not actually surprising given how often I give up on sound and just watch with the subtitles on.

But I tried two new to me things so the day is not wasted.

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Rare Male Slash Exchange reveals (and Yuletide)

raremaleslashex works have revealed! I have received a lovely Kidnapped fic which I think lives up to its excellent summary :D

A Careful Touch (2995 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kidnapped | David Balfour Series - Robert Louis Stevenson
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: David Balfour/Alan Breck Stewart
Characters: David Balfour, Alan Breck Stewart
Additional Tags: Fishing, Fencing, Play Fighting, Intimacy, First Kiss
Summary:

David and Alan at the Heugh of Corrynakiegh (k-i-s-s-i-n-g).

The author tells me they've shipped Alan/Davie for a long time but never written it before (indeed, I don't think any of the other fandom regulars were signed up), so I am curious to find out who they are!

And it's an exciting day for exchanges generally, with the Yuletide schedule just posted. The change in deadline/reveals timing is slightly disorienting—this will be my eighth Yuletide, reveals have been at 9am on the 25th for as long as I've been doing the exchange and I'd developed a nice little routine around them—but I think it'll work. Now I have to think what fandoms I might nominate—anyone else got any ideas...?

On Silver Shores by VT Hoang

On Silver Shores by VT Hoang was absolutely amazing! Detective Carver and analyst Jian investigate rebel werewolves together.

Here's to 5 more books on my to-read list, as the 6 novels of this exceptional urban fantasy saga were released within 6 months! The writing style is beautiful, the worldbuilding is complex and the characters are giving me intense feels.

The author is a Vietnamese trans man. Carver is a Black male half-siren. To be specific, all sirens are biologically female, Carver got his Y chromosome from his human father and is biologically intersex. He also has Severance Syndrome (a supernatural disability). Jian is Sino-Vietnamese and suffers from PTSD. There's major m/m, minor f/m/nb and a sapphic character.

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Moon of the Crusted Snow

Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice, 2018 sf novel. The power and phones go out in a small Ojibwe Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario; they slowly realize there is a more widespread (national? global?) breakdown happening, although they (and we) never find out much about it. I found this most interesting in its low-key "how might these people react and adapt to this" parts and less interesting when it got bogged down in the inevitable white man antagonist trying to take over/take advantage. I mean, that definitely is how that would go down and it's fair for Rice to say so but I didn't really feel like we needed an antagonist beyond the situation. I have heard the idea before that for indigenous/First Nations people the apocalypse already happened (in 1492/1620/local year of colonization); Rice states that explicitly, in a conversation between the protagonist and the wise elder, that their world has ended repeatedly and they've survived, so this apocalypse is just another one. Possibly this book is one of the places that originated or popularized that idea? Anyways it felt like an important work of the postapocalyptic genre, and I'm definitely curious to read the sequel and see where Rice takes it.

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In which there are 52 times Our Heroine improves her habitat, week 35

- Current reading quote:
I was trying to maintain conversation as he rattled mugs and spoons, but I was incredibly distracted by a taxidermied wallaby staring blankly at me across the room. Eventually, unable to continue without acknowledging it, I said, 'Andy, there's a stuffed wallaby in your kitchen.'
Andy looked up from the kettle to the wallaby and laughed, 'He doesn't say very much,' he offered, before returning to the tea. No further explanation was forthcoming.

- Some people can't be helped, the map reading edition:
I offered to help direct a couple of all-day walkers, who were lost despite standing next to a literal signpost for their next destination. I showed them where they were on their map and explained verbally where they were going next. We were walking the same path for a short distance so I even walked along with them and pointed to each landmark on their map as we passed. I explained I would be taking an earlier footpath to the right that would cut out a small corner of their route and suggested they accompany me instead of walking slightly further and through a farmyard, but they declined. I repeated yet again that they should turn right through the farmyard and showed them on their map. I could hear them arguing when they reached the farmyard and I waited to see if they turned right and walked across the field below me but, no, they inevitably turned left away from the farmyard and 180 degrees opposite to their intended destination which was still some miles away over another ridge. One can only hope that when they reached the next inhabited road somebody with a sense of direction offered to drive them back to their car because I'm honestly not sure they were going to make it any other way.
[/possibly they have the opposite of whatever migrating birds have and Persistent Directional Wrongness is a disability but I feel it's more likely they were subjects of an Ancient Curse]

- Pleasing occurrences:
25: Serendipitous reading.
26: Had positive conversations with two neighbours met individually in town.
26: Found a very new book I wanted was unexpectedly on the shelves in a local library.
26: Decided to start a new reading challenge, an a-z type, which is my third set for this year as I'd completed the first and second by April.
27: Spotted new invertebrates in my garden.
28: Was treated to a vanilla soya milkshake and had a delightful flashback to the last time I ate vanilla ice cream which was in St Ives in Cornwall.
29: Had a very pleasant walk. Saw a new-to-me invertebrate in the meadow behind my house.
30: Productive day full of small satisfactions. :-)

( Minor habitat improvements )

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Signal Boosting: smallweb and Communal Creators!

LOOK AT THIS BANNER, ISN'T IT ADORBS?

Join us at

smallweb for Small Web September!

smallweb is a community for folks building personal, small websites. I'll be taking part in Small Web September to spruce up my Final Fantasy Fan Script Fan Site. The goal is to complete porting over the stuff I've previously posted here, at the very least. If I can, I'd like to get FFXI: Chains of Promathia documented as well. And I really should go back to my FFXIV script, too; it's been over a year since I touched it and I'm still mid-Shadowbringers.

communal_creators is a community for creative types, and will be starting its next round in mid September. ANY creativity counts! I am definitely going to double-dip and count working on the website, but I also hope to get some fiber arts done. We'll a supportive and chill community, so come join us if you need some cheering on for your creative projects!

Current Mood: happy

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comfort corner

Bonus Comfort Corner

The carpet is thick, soft and cream coloured, while the walls are a yellow bronze colour. In the corner along one wall there is a large sofa, able to seat 4 or 5 people comfortably. Along the other corner wall there is a smaller sofa for 2 or 3 people. In the middle of the furniture, there is a low, round coffee table, perfect for colouring at or for other craft activities.

There is a scratching post and a cat tree for climbing, which are both along the wall opposite the couch. A few fluffy beds have also been put out, in varying sizes, in case any one prefers the floor. There is also a large sturdy perch and a marked off area that says "Landing Pad" in case any winged friends want to visit.

There is now a blue chaise chair in the nook as well, which has been placed near the couch and is good for both sitting and spreading out lengthwise. There are also two armchairs; one an oversized, deep gray leather chair, the other a square fabric armchair in deep blue with light purple swirls on it.

There are two baskets off to the side. One contains fuzzy blankets, a variety of fuzzy and textured pillows, and a collection of stuffed animals while the other contains a variety of art supplies, ranging from colouring pages and blank paper to crayons and coloured pencils, and more besides.

The last comfort corner of August (and summer)! Outside, there is an inflatable pool set up for floating around and a sprinkler for running through. There is fruit salad, a mixed greens salad, hot dogs, hamburgers, roasted potatoes, corn on the cob, coconut macaroons, chocolate cake, red drink, iced tea, and lemonade. Come have some fun!

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Book reaction: It Was Her House First (Cherie Priest)

I just finished reading Cherie Priest's It Was Her House First. It's a really good book and I highly recommend it. It's a haunted house book set in the Seattle area, centered around the ghost of a silent film era actress and her house, now badly in need of restoration. It's got an interesting twist that I've never seen before in a haunted house story, but I can't really say anything else without spoiling it. I hope you give it a shot, and I hope you enjoy it.

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Weekly proof of life: reading, A1C, and weather

Reading:

scruloose and I finished listening to Rogue Protocol! Here's hoping future installments listened to via Hoopla don't have the weird audio glitches that this one did. I think we're probably going to go with chronological order rather than publication order, and if so, I think that gives us two more novellas before the novel. I suspect I'll lean toward not having an audiobook on the go during the fall crunch at Dayjob, but hopefully we can get at least one novella in before that starts up.

I finished These Burning Stars (Bethany Jacobs) and found it more engrossing than I'd expected at first, but I don't feel a need to rush out and read the second book. (Given how this book was constructed, my guess is that the second will be a fairly different experience? But I don't actually know that.) I also read Stephen Graham Jones' Mongrels, which I liked; there are some things I'm still a bit fuzzy on in terms of the backstory/worldbuilding, but it feels likely that that was a deliberate choice.

Current fiction: The Future of Another Timeline, which I think is my first Annalee Newitz book.

Non-fiction: I've been doing some more cookbook reading, and I'm still reading Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, and I've now also got Goblin Mode: How to Get Cozy, Embrace Imperfection, and Thrive in the Muck (McKayla Coyle) on the go. Given that my non-fiction intake is generally quite low, this is...well, a whole lot. I'm not getting the feeling that I'll actually take much away from Goblin Mode, but it's kinda fun, so I'm pressing on with it.

Meat-puppetry: I got my first A1C test since April, and got a 5.8 result. (After a 5.9 in April and a 5.8 in December.)

I don't know what was different about how the test was administered (it was even the same person who did my last one, I'm 99% sure), but that was a couple of days ago and my fingertip still hurts a bit (it's improving steadily, so I don't think anything is wrong-wrong) and was very faintly bruised. O_o Dunno what's up with that, but hopefully it increases the odds that next time I'll remember to ask them to use the side of a finger, not the pad. I need that!

Weathering: The province overall is still too dry. Our region got a very respectable rainfall early last week (? It's a bit of a blur), but the area with a major wildfire got almost nothing from that weather system. What we got was nowhere near enough to properly refill the water reservoirs, and Halifax Water reports that they've noticed very little change in water consumption since they started asked residents to voluntarily conserve water (I've seen multiple people mention seeing their neighbors out watering their fucking lawns), so it's possible mandatory restrictions will be rolled out. (Unless something's changed drastically overnight; I haven't checked Bluesky yet today, which is where I get nearly all of my local info.) People are allowed in the woods again in this area, though.

>.< Naturally, it appears that golf courses are officially exempt from the "STOP WATERING YOUR GRASS" requests.