persimmonfrost | Reading

A good while ago I traveled to Oregon from CA for the Labor Day weekend. I took some kayak lessons. It seemed to me that the weather changed over the four days. Autumn came. Living here now I find that to be true. It’s overcast most days, there are sprinkles of rain with more coming up. Just like that, it’s Fall. The leaves are turning and soon we’ll be ankle deep in crinkley crunchy dry stuff.

I went to Trader Joe’s this week. I didn’t get all pumpkined out, though there’s that opportunity. Pumpkin is the only squash I’ll eat but only if there’s lots of sugar and cinnamon added. I did buy some maple almonds and they were good. I have to remind myself that TJ runs must be done first thing in the morning, else I feel the press of TOO MANY PEOPLE. Why must they stare at all the cheeses for such a lengthy time? Don’t they know the kind of cheese they like? Cheddar? Blue? Something to shred for pasta? Eventually I just cut and run.

I’m winding down the garden. It’s not been a great success. The zinnias were great though. They’re on the roster for repeat. I’m saving money to have somebody really help me next year. There are some godawful, ugly bushes out there.

I also attended the monthly meeting at the Mobile Park clubhouse for the first time. I’m not good with strangers but a nice man did engage me in conversation. I learned that contrary to what I thought, we don’t have a swimming pool. Upkeep was too expensive and they turned it into a patio that gets more use. I did get the card that opens the back gate, which I was hoping to score. If I go again I will try to get info on good garden people.

twistedchick

I'm having a much harder time coming up with nominations than in past years. Part of the problem is that I've mostly been reading nonfiction, and that I catch up with shows years after they first start up. I didn't expect Phineas & Ferb to have more than 4000 stories in AO3, and the number for Elementary (tv) is almost equally high. Forget writing Strange New Worlds.

So that leaves me with one TV series with not that many stories -- Dark Winds -- and one of the old Georgette Heyer novels that I haven't written about yet.

I always try to choose things that are easily available, more or less. *stares at bookshelves that need weeding.*

And none of the nonfiction I read is likely to have enough of a fandom. Or any, actually.

At least I have a few more days to come up with something...

twistedchick

At this link are Charlie Warzel's Atlantic story about Epstein's birthday book, and also links to the birthday book, the non-prosecution agreement, his will, and what appears to be an address register. You can read all of it for yourself if you want. Note that the address register was scanned sideways. All the documents are PDFs.

twistedchick

At some point within the last 400+ years your ancestors came to North America, and then (for many of you) to America. What do you know of their journey?

twistedchick

Is it possible for FB to choose specific accounts and slooooooooooow them down? If so, I'm a target. My FB constantly reloads, eats posts, and runs slower than when I used a 300-baud modem, back in the 90s.

sigh

... back to working on my list of nominations for Yuletide.

lycomingst

I have insomnia, but if I fall asleep I’m like the dead. Last night in the small hours, the cat decided to make his opinions known in a very loud voice and in great length, great length. The yowls worked their way into my dreams and then they woke me. Before sunrise.

I have a Discover card that I use about once a year just so they don’t cancel me. I went to the website to see when it was due and realized that I have changed my computer and my phone # since I was last on the site. They can’t send a confirming text to the phone to assure them that it’s my computer, since it’s the old number. This might devolve into the dreaded phone call to them.

I bought Sony ear buds to listen to Pandora on the phone when I’m in the backyard. They worked once, and now they won’t connect to the phone. I feel as though I need a degree in something (electronics? physics? astral projection?) to understand the problem.

So that’s my life.

twistedchick

I sent copies of my exchanges with my former aunt to my cousin Susan, the only one on that side of the family whom I'm in contact with. She told me in response that she nearly snorted her coffee when reading them. She hasn't gotten along with that aunt for decades, and manages to avoid dealing with her by being the youngest of her sibs (the aunt likes the two older ones.)

She and I are now the Two Black Sheep of the family, which makes me happy.

twistedchick

I seem to live between odd dichotomies these days.

It's hard to go to sleep, in part because of lack of noise. I have just enough tinitis that when I can't hear the traffic it's hard to sleep; think of permanent mosquito in your ear. I found a technique in FB reels for tapping hard on the bone behind the ear that gets rid of the worst of it, but it doesn't always work. So I use an app called Calm, which has 'soundscapes' including things like six different kinds of rainfall, waterfalls, forests of various kinds and white, pink and brown noises, find whatever works for me that night and leave it on all night. That helps. Or I could stay awake till nearly 4, when the noise from the Capital Beltway a quarter mile south of me cranks up to its general daily roar.

A friend suggested that I get a night light for the bathroom in the shape of a capybara, or in her words, 'an imperturbable capybara'. So I did get it, and have it set to the lowest level of light, but I am not yet used to any light there. Normally I have my Kindle nearby, and when I need to get to the bathroom I flip the cover open and use it as a night light. Last night, the capybara was sitting imperturbably on my toothbrush holder, but its light shone out on a wall that I'm not used to having lit, so I had to remind myself that I had a friendly and non-aggressive critter there shining the light (I need reminders when I'm almost asleep but my body discerns something different.)

That meant that I slept on my left side last night, with my face away from the lit wall. Which, for most other people, would not be a problem, but I have all my life had a slightly curved spine, leaning to the left. (During the 2000s, I was doing deepwater running twice a week and the supported floating combined with gravity straightened my spine out, but I have not done it in several years now bcC (because Covid) and it is leaning a little. When I sleep on that side it leans more. As a remedy my husband put up a bar in one of the doorways that I can reach up and grab and dangle myself from, and my own weight straightens my back out painlessly. A side effect of the bar is that my grip strength has increased a bit, so I could do better at pulling out vines yesterday.

Much more of this balancing and I may start thinking of Philippe Petit balancing on the rope between the Two Towers, long ago.

twistedchick

What's behind the cruelty of this government? A lot of unhappy people whose lives have been cruel to them, who are feeding their addictions to stifle their pain? Sure looks that way.

twistedchick

This is the most complete resource I could find for dealing with it. Take care of yourself. None of you are replaceable, and I lost 40+ friends and relatives in the last five years already.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

crafty_packrat

Two brown-eyed susan (Rudbeckia triloba) plants, 7 lbs of yellow peaches, donut peaches, mixed plums, magness pears, figs, hardy kiwi fruit, goat mozzarella, a baguette, dark chocolate walnut cookies, anaheim peppers, and roma tomatoes.

I got compliments on my shirt (Velvet Night button-down from MorningWitch) and my packbasket.

denise posting in

dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

twistedchick

Some years back, I was asked to spin the shed fur from a very fluffy dog so the owner could knit a coat out of it. There was definitely enough -- but the bags of fur she left me had not been washed. I carded them into rolags (outdoors) and gave them back to her, and asked her to find someone else to do it.

But in the process of doing that, I looked online and discovered that it was illegal, in the state I was living in, to sell any object or garment made from fur that could be construed as pet fur.

Why? Because nobody wanted to start having to deal with trapping pets and killing them for their fur. Never mind that it was shed fur and combed off a still-living pet. It was still illegal. I don't remember what the penalties were.

There are already enough dognappers stealing pets from hunting-type breeds to sell as 'trained hunting dogs.' One of my cousins lost a dog that way for a month, until he turned up in a neighboring town after running all the way back from the Adirondacks to Rochester, well over 100 miles. I still don't know how he survived.

So, a suggestion: check the laws in your state about this, if you plan to card and spin and knit something that isn't for yourself from Bowser's or Fifi's fur.

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Tracy Rowan

August 2013

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News of the World

Reading

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Oh Yuletide

don't say I never gave you anything...

New Substack post

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And then there's this

Life is being only moderately odd today

New Substack post --the unhappy bones are showing

COVID is back

Code deploy happening shortly

Farmer's Market -- 31 August 2025 (Walnut Day, 14th of Fruitful, Year 233)

Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts

a cautionary note

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August 2013

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