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Re-Tired

I do not normally drive Gretchen's minivan, but -- of course! -- it came with us to OVFF. And when I went out to fetch lunch on Sunday, I looked at the tread on the front tires and said "That is some sad looking tread."

Today, the van went to Sam's Club and got a new set of four tires installed. There was likely some more life left in the rear tires, but it seemed better to replace the set. And since Sam's Club (in theory, at least -- we'll see what happens in practice) offers free tire rotations for tires that are bought and installed there, I will be taking it over there on a regular schedule for those rotations.

Since the van will be going to GAFilk with me in January if everything goes according to plan, I am *highly* in favor of tires with good tread. :)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Taylor Swift, mad woman

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A-Z fic meme, as seen all over my friends list

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count. (Using whichever fic I feel like when there are options. God. I feel like I could have just done crossovers...)

A And Sinister, X-Files/Greek myth (just trust me) It's perilous to bargain with dark women at crossroads.
B Bad News on the Doorstep, Highlander/Marvel Hopefully, they're going to get along. Maybe like a bar afire.
C Cherries In Winter, Victor/Victoria In the winter of 1935, soon to be 1936, Andre Cassell's club has a new opening act.
D Double Vision, Marvel (various canon) Steve Rogers learned his guilt-trip glare from his mother. It can have interesting effects.
E Exemptions and Indulgences, Highlander/Discworld I AM AFRAID YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION.
F Fire In The Hole, Highlander/X-Files/Buffy Possibly the weirdest part of Mulder's night so far -- and it said a lot about the whole thing -- lay in the wolf being the one that tried to get out of his way to let him shoot the basilisk again.
G A Game of Cat and Cat, Highlander/Blood Ties Two acquaintances from the court of Henry VIII, five hundred years later: who's playing with whom?
H Hot Pursuit, due South/Highlander Law enforcement officers can't resist hot pursuit. 800 year old FBI agents are no exception to this rule, especially when it's a Mountie in a speeding carriage chasing a wolf through Chicago.
I The Innocent Sleep, Highlander New Year's Eve at Joe's bar. Written for Amireal's International Nap Day challenge.
J Joe Dawson, BAMF, Highlander/Stargate SG-1 https://archiveofourown.org/works/763847
K Kindred Spirits, Highlander/Leverage Rebeca learned about cons from one of the best.
L Life Cycles, Marvel Sometimes 'daddy's girl' isn't a description so much as a warning label.
M Mismatched Pieces, Marvel/Highlander (Opportunities 'verse) Very few targets survive the Winter Soldier.
N Not To Plan, X-Files/Stargate SG-1 The second stupid thing the goons did was throw Mitchell in the same cell with Krycek.
O Open(ing) Doors, Leverage Game and negotiation theory suggests that opening up and vulnerability can in fact lead to the best mutual outcomes. Grifters use their own apparent vulnerabilities to achieve their aims. Mix well, stir, and add an angry Eliot Spencer, who grifts quite well for a ~~hitter~~ retrieval specialist.
P Parched, Highlander Blood cleans off a blade so easily, really. Some days it's dry and difficult work. Other days it's as easy as running that blade through a man. This morning, though -- this morning was easy, both the killing and the aftermath.
Q Quiet Breaks, Numb3rs Ian hasn't talked to either Eppes brother since they hunted down a black box together. He's been a little busy with this.
R Respite, Buffy/X-Files Two heroes sorely in need of a vacation run into each other. They also run into tea, cocoa, conversations about vampires, and really good pancakes.
S The Scent of Salt and Wood, Rivers of London/Forever Kissing a perfect stranger in an alley is unusual behavior for both of them.
T Time Upon A Once, Amber Chronicles/Wizard of Oz/Fairy tales A thorny tale of 1 missing prince, 2 princesses, 2 cats, 3 witches, and a silver bird. Some overlap possible among categories; partridge in a pear tree not included. Drinking while reading not recommended.
U Unanswered Riddles, Riddlemaster of Hed She woke in the night knowing that her doom had missed her by an hour at most... and that it was still waiting for her. So Lyra got up, and packed, and went to meet it.
V Vintage Appreciation, Forever Knight/Southern Vampire books (Charlaine Harris) Two vampires discussing rare vintages.
W White Horses and Tails, Nero Wolfe/Highlander Saul Panzer never forgets a face, or where and when he saw it. Connor MacLeod has lived, and done business in, New York City for two centuries, off and on. In combination, that can lead to a problem.
Y You See Two Geek Geniuses and Several Computers, Leverage/Warehouse 13 They were in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

X & Z don't have titles. I shall have to fix this. 24/26, and 291 works. Nice!
(If any links go to the wrong fic, let me know and I'll fix it.)

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Lonesome Star

I was on the way back from dropping K off at Ball State and was looking for ways to stay awake while driving. Although I had already written a song for this year's OVFF songwriting contest (Theme: Steer by the stars), I thought about what I might have written if I didn't already have a useful pair of songs to add a third part to with "Four Stars", which I posted several weeks ago. And I got the chorus for this together and sang it over and over again until I got to a gas station where I could write it down. :)

When I was done, I decided I liked this song better, so I entered it in the songwriting contest. And although it didn't place, it was fun to get up there and sing it and see people tapping along to it and singing along with the choruses.

And if nothing else, it is another exemplar for Brenda to use as she looks at *her* Bill, who seems to have more of a problem coming up with romantic songs. :)

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Back From OVFF

We got back from OVFF at about 1 AM last night, which is causing me to strongly contemplate the wisdom of staying over for the Sunday Dead Dog. But that wasn't really an option once the kids were in school. This will not be true next year.

But this was *this* year and Gretchen and I both had a great time. Gretchen didn't do any singing, because her knees were bothering her greatly, but she had a lot of good conversations as did I. And although I didn't manage to spend a lot of time in the open filking because of schedules and dealer table, I *did* get to sing six different songs from the stage, three with Amy accompanying me, and two by the greatly missed Tom Smith during the Pegasus Concert. That makes a pretty good weekend of singing all by itself. :)

We also sold a goodly number of copies of the new "Amy & Me" album and a good number of "Liftoff to Landing" as well, which bulked up the sales considerably over last year. This is also a good thing. :)

But it was good to see friends. And new people! I am in favor of new people, because they make the whole affair more interesting.

We are still catching up on sleep, so I think I will head in that direction now.

Current Mood: exhausted

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Spook Me fic postings!

Two stories so far this year (I'm trying to finish the third):

No Rest For The Licked (3678 words) by Gryphonrhi
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel (Comics)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Tony Stark, JARVIS the AI (Marvel), Hulk (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Spook Me Multi-Fandom Halloween Ficathon
Summary:

"Eight foot frogs in Central Park? J, the sun's not even up."

"The people reporting it sounded awake and sober, I'm sorry to say. Sir will make pickup in six."

Steve was in a warm bed, pleasantly tired from the night before, and he'd been promised a very good breakfast. "This job," he sighed and went to get changed. Maybe there'd be a coffee cart open when it was over.

Operation Shock and Claw (2610 words) by Gryphonrhi
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: DCU
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Scarecrow, Tim Drake (DCU)
Additional Tags: Spook Me Multi-Fandom Halloween Ficathon
Summary:

Fear gas is an ongoing experiment, not yet perfected.

Hope you enjoy!

Database maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

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Woof!

The dogs have been liberated from their kennels and will get breakfast in a moment. Then I need to take Calvin off to be boarded for the weekend, as he is too much for Julie to handle. By the time all of that is done, Gretchen should be back and we should be ready to hit the road for OVFF.

If I can manage to finish packing...

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Prep Work

The week before OVFF is really not the time to have meetings downtown on Tuesday and Wednesday. But that's the way that the schedule worked out, so...

To add to the general entertainment, Julie had a root canal today. Calvin had his last lesson of puppy school and has graduated. More training is likely in order, but it's progress.

And the new CDs are tucked into inventory and the van is packed, save for our luggage.

I should really feel better about this, but it's being a bit of a treadmill. It will be better when we hit the road. :)

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They Say It's Your Birthday

Today was the second day of meetings in the Loop. Everything went well and when we were done, I lit out for the train home, because today is Gretchen's birthday.

After some brief negotiations, it turned out that what Gretchen really wanted for dinner included the deep fried mushrooms from Mr. Beef and Pizza, so I went out and grabbed dinner for us there. (I had already picked up Julie's dinner from Subway.) Then I went to Omega and bought cheesecake slices for the assembly.

Everyone is quite full. And happy.

That's a good result for a birthday. :)

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Fabulously Tired

Day one of my two days of Loop meetings is over and I am fabulously tired. This is because I not only had to get up annoyingly early to catch a train, but I slept badly for a variety of reasons.

But the meetings went well, so that makes it worthwhile.

I will keep telling myself that when I have to get up early again tomorrow.

Thursday, I am going to sleep.

And then Friday I am going to get up early so we can get to OVFF on time.

Whee!

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General Chaos

Sam and Bonnie came by for lunch today and to meet the new puppy. Then we went out to grab lunch and get them a spare house key that they can use while helping Julie out over the weekend during OVFF. I got new keys cut and gave one to Sam. When I got home, I looked to my left and found the missing spare key. Oh, well. More keys are still a good idea.

Gretchen urgently needs to renew her driver's license, but when she went online to try to grab an appointment at 6:30 AM, the system crashed out from under her. This may or may not have had something to do with the AWS outage today. I am getting up early tomorrow and will try to make the appointment for her, because I would like her to have her driver's license for OVFF.

And I have to get up early anyway, because I am off for two days of client meetings in the Loop. This will be my first time doing this since before COVID, so I am reacquainting myself with the current versions of the train schedule and paying for parking.

And then I will walk from Ogilvie Station to a building that I've never been to before.

This is perhaps a bit more chaos than I needed leading up to OVFF. :)

AWS outage

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

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Hazardous Pudding

One of the problems with K going to college is that I keep forgetting that there is no one at home who is dedicated to consuming leftover Texas Roadhouse rolls that I bring home from lunch. Now, I *have* discovered that they make an excellent vehicle for peanut butter and strawberry jam sliders, but there is only a limited number of those that fit into my diet.

Saturday, I discovered that I had managed to accumulate *nine* rolls of recent vintage. The only thing to do was to make bread pudding.

I turned up a useful recipe for cinnamon raisin bread pudding that started with stale cinnamon raisin bread. These stale rolls would make a nice substitute with sufficient cinnamon and raisins in the mix, both things that we had available. So I whomped up the recipe which (given the number of rolls involved) required four cups of milk and eight eggs among other ingredients.

The bread pudding is quite good. There is, however, *way* too much of it.

I did not bring my leftover rolls home from Texas Roadhouse today.

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litterachewer

Diwali - and Narnia

A lot going on, etc, etc. My mother's first Diwali party in the new house went marvellously well. My in-laws were here for it; lots of family friends; plus three of my friends, brown and married-into-brown. Food, patake, tikka and diya, a little bit of aarti and sweets. I got a Diwali cake from Lola's because I was so shocked and delighted that you can get commercially made Diwali cakes now, and it turned to be delicious; a kind of mango coconut confection with rose petals and pista barfi stuck to the top. So I got dressed up, everyone came, and it's so utterly fucking lovely to see A. and L. casually happy and comfortable as part of a brown family. I never get tired of it. My dad not being here made us realise that no one at the party knew how to tie a kalawa. It's supposed to be a priestly skill, and my dad came from a very traditional Brahmin family. (This was the first time I'd realised this, since his death: because I'm a Brahmin Hindu by solely patrilineal descent, I was the only one in the room. Me. The priestly skills of the Bronze Age pandits. Me.) The thing is, if my dad tied a kalawa, it never, ever, ever came off - he was a surgeon tying surgeon's knots, so the thread just stays with you until it drops off. The threads got tied anyway, without him and even though I know nothing. We're gonna have to abolish the caste system, it turns out.

Diwali isn't till tomorrow, actually! But I'm so pleased about it all.

I'm having a bit of an existential time, otherwise. Writing has been bad, it's making me feel genuinely sick and sad, and I've been worrying a lot about my Wednesdays. If I don't write on them, and I don't work on them, what do I do? Related: cluster is why I don't work in the mornings, but if cluster isn't hitting me every day, then what am I doing with my time? And that, inexorably, has been turning into - well, what am I doing with my life? I'm having trouble with that. My therapist, who is helpful sometimes, gave me advice, and then started laughing at herself for just... giving me advice, against all tenets of the therapeutic relationship. It was good advice, I think. It was - do nothing. Stop trying to get a grip on your life. Fill each Wednesday with whatever you feel like doing that day.

I'm trying it. We'll see what happens. So far it seems to have been reading a lot of children's literature, Joan Aiken, CS Lewis, Judy Blume - and I was actually going to divide this part about the books from the rest of the post, but it strikes me that "Hindu adult reads books intended for Christian children" is a pretty good segue. ( the rest of this is about me rereading Narnia )

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One Step at a Time

I'm prepping things to get ready for OVFF. I don't expect any major problems, but it's good to keep knocking off tasks, especially because work wants me down in the Loop next Tuesday and Wednesday.

One of the things that I did was to buy a new watch. My Seiko Kinetic was over 20 years old and the battery died months ago. I have missed having a watch. You'd think it would be easy enough to get that battery replaced, but it's a unique design for that watch and the entire watch has to be disassembled to get at it, because it was originally a capacitor that went many years between failures. Then Seiko "improved it" by switching to a lithium rechargeable battery. But since you don't know how long the battery has been sitting on the shelf, you don't know how long it's going to last. The second-to-last replacement lasted a year, which is ludicrous. The current replacement lasted maybe three years. And Seiko has abandoned the whole line.

So I have a new watch now. It is a Citizen Eco-Drive that looks very much like my old watch. The only problem is that I need to get a link put in the band to make it just a bit looser. The nearest watch shop that can do this repair is closed on Monday.

Did I mention that Tuesday and Wednesday I am supposed to be in the Loop?

But it's nice having a watch again. :)

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Practice, Practice, Practice

If I have counted on my fingers correctly -- this was a challenge, because I needed two hands -- I am scheduled to sing six songs at OVFF next weekend, assuming that I manage to get my entry for the songwriting contest in on time. This is more songs than I manage to sing in open circles some years.

Time to go practice! :)

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The Play That Goes Wrong

"The Play That Goes Wrong" was the fall play over at Maine West and Julie and I went to see it today on Opening Night since the puppy training lesson was postponed. It was an absolute stitch.

Y'all should go see it if you're around here. Shows on Friday and Saturday night remain. :)