sapote

sapote @ 2010-02-23T17:32:00

2010-02-23T22:32:55Z

I want to tell anyone else with big narrow feet that Clark's made a ballet flat that comes in narrow!. It's already sold out in my size from Zappos (in 24 hours) so I bought it from Shoebuy.

I don't think anyone else on my friendslist is in their shipping area and has feet like bananas, but heck. The day that there's a flat shoe made in my size that's neither basket-weave nor made exclusively for seniors with poor circulation, glad though I am that their needs are being met, is a day I shout from the rooftops. Even though I'm pretty sure it won't fit me in the end, because (::single tear::) they never do.

Let's plant the whole thing by alliteration.

2009-12-22T16:10:13Z

Now that it's freezing hard every night and there's no risk of actually having to do garden work, I am of course seized with the frantic urge to plan elaborate, unmanageable garden plots that I will 1) probably fail to plant 2) definitely fail to tend. I blame these seed catalogs I'm getting, which seem to know full well that I am not tempted by useful things like tomatoes and cabbage (blah) but am entirely transported by the idea of planting sassafras and woad. Yes, I'll take a shiitake log and some saffron bulbs, please! How hard can those possibly be to grow?

Maybe if I can just get out of the S section I'll recover my senses. My poor boyfriend tried to talk to me about practical things this morning and got nothing but a screen full of "spinach sassafras saffron and salsify" over and over. Try to say that out loud. That is fun.

I want to send this poor man nice cards.

2009-12-10T16:33:59Z

I get the impression that not everyone who reads my livejournal/dwidth agrees on the abortion-access thing, and of the people that agree, it's not everyone's pet issue. But it's an issue near and dear to my heart, and I'm writing ( this doctor and his staff a nice postcard )

Okay, I'm determined.

2009-12-03T15:21:19Z

I will send cards even if they are postcards and they get sent in February. (Things are about to hit the level of CRAZY here, so seriously, expect a postcard of a tobacco barn with a HAPPY SOMETIME IN THE SPRING! written on the back. Or something. But still! I will try!)

All comments screened, leave me your addresss. Also, is there something peculiarly Southern/American you've been wanting? Poor-quality chocolate? (Snobby foodie chocolate?) Microwave grits? A picture of a tree growing out of a car? Bluegrass music? Triscuits? Do tell me, for if it is small I will send it to you. Otherwise, expect a random selection that may not make much sense.

... I am really good at promoting my holiday plans.

My daily dose of casual-gamer chagrin.

2009-11-17T17:47:10Z

There were two people waiting outside the Gamestop this morning when it opened. One was a young man waiting to buy Assassin's Creed, and one was me.

Clerk to Assassin's Creed Dude: Oh man, you should have been at the launch party at midnight, this is pretty much the best thing to happen all year. ::carries on::

Clerk to me: Sims 3 expansion pack? I think we have one in a box somewhere around here. ::wanders off for a while::

Sometimes I wish I played real video games. Wtf-ever, though, I'm counting the hours until I can go home and take my sims on tiny twee vacations.

I am watching the Big Bang Theory!

2009-11-13T14:43:54Z

Note that I am only through 2x23.

I'm not watching in a particularly fannish way (I found all the fic, mind, but that's just what I do) but since this lj/dw has pretty much devolved down to what's at the forefront of my brain during any given moment, who wants to hear what I think about the oh-silly-nerds sitcom? ( Trust me, I can't not blah blah blah about feminism for any show I watch, I just usually do it in IM instead of here. )

( Now I will talk about other things! )

Yes, this is a massive wall of typing for a fairly silly and lightweight show (look, do you know how excited I am that someone in tv-land has seen Babylon 5? We're one Farscape reference away from true love here) but I am using writing this entry to put off driving across the state in the rain. Which I need to do now. Have a nice Friday, everyone.

I guess it is veteran's day.

2009-11-11T21:39:55Z

( NPR ... brought it. (Upsetting) )

I know how to cook?

2009-10-26T14:45:35Z

I bought I Know How to Cook (the first English edition of Je Sais Cuisiner) on sale on Friday, and so far I have made three, count them, three recipes, which I think is as many as I've made out of Sundays at Moosewood in six years of owning it. It helps that there are about eighty recipes that are essentially just eggs. ( Cut for long rambling review of my new cookbook - no pictures. )

This concludes my ramble about my new cookbook. For now. I am so excited about this thing that I actually called my boyfriend and read him a list of all the different sorts of teas made by the French over the phone. This is something which he endured with good grace, which means I will let him have half of those cheesy eggs next time.

Sims sims sims

2009-10-04T19:48:56Z

It's kind of twisted and indicative that of all the things involved in the new Sims expansion pack (yes, I know, already) I am mostly excited about 1) more modest clothing - though still no hijab, all I want is a sim in a styling headscarf, is that too much to ask? and 2) growing grapes.

Yes, the ability to construct fantastic Indiana Jones-style puzzles for your digital people means nothing to me, but I will gladly drop $40 to have baggy shirts and a greater selection of grape varieties. As a gamer, I lack a certain oomph.

Also, may I choose this moment to say that the new pay-as-you-go downloadable content scheme kind of sucks? There's a lot of really attractive official content in the EA store, but if you look in the background of the screenshots for the expansion pack what you see all over is the same damn base-game folding screen and row of sunflower pots over and over. I know that the expansion pack Adds Powerful New Gameplay Options and so forth, but the reason the Sims is my game is because I like arranging digital furniture, and I'm ... not expecting World Adventures to have much at all. Sigh. Ahem it is, then.

... Anyone study vikings?

2009-08-18T16:17:43Z

I am picking poor phnelt's history-major brain, and I don't think she even watches True Blood. I know there are medievalists who try to keep us from embarrassing ourselves when we write historical fiction, but is there anybody who's well versed in things Viking? So far I'm reading a lot of SCA websites, and I'm not sure if I'm getting it right.

True Blood s2e09 NOW WITH SCREENCAPS (crappy, will try to improve quality).

2009-08-18T03:38:20Z

( Major spoilers are danced around unsuccessfully and then spoiled; mood of pictures is: bummer, mood of commentary is: incongruently pleased. )

I AM TOTALLY SULLYING THEIR POIGNANT LOVE WITH CAPSLOCKS BUT OH TEE PEEEEE

True Blood s2e09

2009-08-18T02:47:10Z

HOMG MY PEACHES, WHERE IS THE FIC, WHERE IS THE MOTHERFLIPPING FIC. ( Spoilers? )

Joe Arpaio worries me.

2009-07-28T13:38:31Z

I wish the New Yorker article had full digital text, but here's an NYTimes editorial that leaves out the parts where if you criticize him, according to the New Yorker, he will 1) arrest you for disorderly conduct 2) stage a midnight raid on your home and 3) if you know anything about conditions in his jails, you know that being arrested by him is actually taking a chance on either dying of dehydration or being beaten to death by his goons before you go to trial.

I've been following the Honduran situation as closely as possible from here, and my contact-to-contacts-on-the-ground is talking about sending a delegation of "observers", i.e. Americans to stand there in case something happens so it will make the US newspapers. But I have to say that the way things are going down in Honduras so far is very 21st-century (negotiations and dispersed police brutality of the confused sort), while what's happening in freaking Arizona really starts to look like Olancho in the 70s.

Yes, everyone cares about my incisive political blogging. I will post about Draco Malfoy later, I promise.

At times like this I really wish my family hadn't found my stupid livejournal

2009-07-25T14:59:42Z

Because I want to go on about how I'm reading one of those stories where Our Heroes do the dance of unexpressed attraction for hundreds and hundreds of pages and I can tell the writer's a tasteful creature and is going to resolve this not with the ten-page romance-novel-style heaving-busoms treatment it deserves but with a pg-13 makeout followed by a fade to black.

HOW YOU TEASE ME, AUTHORS. Argh.

On the continuing travails of trying to like music.

2009-07-22T15:45:42Z

It's not like I'm getting any vidding done these days anyway, but the whole "Pandora will help me build musical tastes in case I need vid songs!" thing is, so far, backfiring, and there seems to be one central reason:

For a song to be effective for fanvidding, I feel like it has to have at least some drama and musical variation, and it helps if the lyrics talk about feelings. It turns out that I like songs that are monotonous and talk about zero feelings if possible. I will accept some abstract metaphors about boats if necessary.

On the other hand, I've finally been able to own up to my love for overintellectual 90s electronic music. Oh yes, Hybrid Sound System. Entertain me more with your pretty and somewhat emotionally vapid progressive breaks. Because whatever "progressive breaks" means, Pandora tells me I enjoy it.

So I finally saw Half-Blood Prince

2009-07-19T19:10:11Z

( Oh my god I fucking loved it people )

Dear Hipsters

2009-07-15T17:51:00Z

What is with the banana bangs and mullets? I am from Appalachia. Salon ladies kept trying to give me banana bangs and mullets well through 2002. It is not far gone enough to be retro; please stop.

Also, rattails on boys just makes me feel like I'm back at middle school in tobacco country in 1997. I'm just saying I would have chosen to retrocycle through the thirties, forties, and fifties another couple of times before everyone I saw at the coffeeshops made me feel faintly thirteen again.

Two great Spanish fluency-building sites

2009-07-08T21:58:11Z

1) Leerescuchando.net seems to be, essentially, volunteer-read podfic of public domain stories in Spanish. I am so, so happy, as Spanish-language audiobooks of everything except The Secret are painfully hard to get here. I spent all yesterday listening to The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist. I mean, I still don't know who did it, but I learned some verb tenses! (Registration required, in Spanish, but so far they have sent me zero email, which is good). Stories are available streaming or to download. Warning for autoplay on their front page.

2) It just now occurred to me to listen to BBC Latinoamerica podcasts (again, download or streaming, no registration required) and that is how I learned that today we, if you can trust science reporting, now live in the Huxleyverse. (Stem cells are "maternal cells" in Spanish! Fascinating!). This also makes me happy because I like to listen to the BBC Theme whenever I'm sad, and this way I hear it three times in fifteen minutes! Seriously, so happy-making, I have no idea why..

::sigh::

2009-06-28T14:19:36Z

I am so exhausted by this thing. I am pretty sure we are all really exhausted by this thing.

If anyone else needs to know, I usually warn for a whole bevy of things, mostly because to me "warnings" is pretty much a self-important name for "tags".

Why am I so obsessed with Quiverfull, why, why

2009-06-25T17:47:50Z

( People having bazillions of babies can be kind of upsetting in its implications? )

( I think a lot of my obsession with Quiverfull is how much it Venn-diagram-overlaps with my own subcultural obsessions. )

I know no one reads me for my incisive blogging (and I feel like most of my flist is busy / in a non-shared fandom right now anyway) but it is my latest nonstop obsession, and that's what journaling services are for?

sapote @ 2009-06-08T18:26:00

2009-06-08T22:52:55Z

I gots the Sims 3! ( And I'm going to tell you all about it! )

This from the girl who has self-policed out nearly every mention of the ~~only thing between me and couchdeath~~ Wii fit because I didn't want anyone to feel peer pressure to get one of those ~~expensive balancy cutepanels of fun~~ things. And yet apparently I feel it's appropriate to laud EA Games. Sigh.

Who wants to hear about my wacky dream? Internet, I choose you!

2009-05-22T11:54:17Z

I dreamed last night that Barack Obama and I had been best friends since kindergarten and told each other everything and sometimes hugged, but not <i>like that</i>, why did people keep claiming we liked each other like that? Because I thought Michelle was the best thing that ever happened to him! Jeez, head of the house finance committee, get a life and stop spreading gossip!

The whole dream basically recast the election as a high school AU. But I remember being all sad at the end because he got elected President and had to go live his dreams, and I had to go be the US ambassador to Mauritania.

Dreamwidthwards migrated

2009-05-11T22:41:08Z

I've imported both this and my old real-life journal, which is access-locked. This is germane because I also trimmed my "access granted" list down to people I've interacted with regularly on my old real-life filter. I almost never use the friendslock on livejournal for anything fannish, and if I ever were to, I think I'd create a sapote_fic journal or something. As always if you miss my grocery lists and so forth and aren't an axe murderer, please let me know that you'd like to be back on that filter.

I am not migrating all the way right now, and am certainly not planning to disable comments on my livejournal. I don't even do most of my reading here yet. I really like the Dreamwidth project, but am now experiencing nerves at the thought of picking up and moving too fast. Consider this dipping my toe in the migration pool. If that metaphor makes any sense at all. But do let me know if I'm missing anything terrific over here, please!

This is awesome. Hello, awesome.

2009-04-06T18:41:28Z

OMG OMG OMG OMFG OMFGOAPS.