stonepicnicking_okapi: 2025 (2025)
stonepicnicking_okapi ([personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi) wrote2025-06-30 07:32 am
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25 in 2025: Mid-year to date

I have ordered some new board games for us to try as a family so that will help. And I'm going to try and overhaul (gradually, one meal at a time) our dinners so that they are healthier. And maybe I'll have a job (*dare I hope*). But I need to be on the lookout for things because I should be at 12 or 13 by now.

1. learn to hem pants
2. go to a new grocery store
3. attend a jhope concert in Brooklyn
4. make an essential oil spray
5. submit an application for a job
6. interview for a job
7. participate in a fic exchange
8. read a manga (Death Note 1)
9. go to Costco
smokingboot: (D Calligraphy)
smokingboot ([personal profile] smokingboot) wrote2025-06-30 07:45 am

Coming In

Yesterday a dark butterfly fluttered into our front room, bimbled around a bit above us, went out again. I made a story in my head: 30th June, date of Mark's death! It has taken him 10 years to return as a butterfly! Alas, my dates were wrong, today is the 30th. So much for my dreaming :-D

Also yesterday, Russ found a bird in our kitchen, confused or something. It flew out unscathed.

Why is everything coming in? I don't mind at all provided the beasties aren't harmed, but I've no idea why our interiors are suddenly so alluring.

Ugh, I am stupid tired. I should go back to bed.

I carried on trying to paint when I got back (God, how long is it going to take us to get over that trip? I feel for R and all that driving. Next time, plane and rental car.) One attempt was so terrible I actually had to snap the canvas in half. Of the four paintings I did on holiday, two are too embarrassing to show anyone and two please me despite their obvious issues. Painting is good for me provided I don't get frustrated at my lack. I feel so at home with writing, there is a kind of guilt at focusing on any other form of self expression, and I do love it, define myself by it almost. But those are very good reasons for working with something free from expectations/demands. So I'll put the two bearables here, in case the canvases get destroyed or I accidentally on purpose dump them in the bin.

This first was nothing more than a moment's feeling, as the wind blew through Saint Emilion, over the houses and through the streets, caught up in my head with the swifts/swallows/house martins flying.




The second was meant to be a snake among fruit and flowers. It became a sea monster because I can't Art. These have a specific meaning in my dream lexicon, based on Irish/Scottish/sea-faring folklore. To see them at all presaged storms and wild weather or by contraries becalming, but to have one see or approach your ship was considered extremely unlucky. This last may be one of the most self-evident pieces of nautical lore ever recorded.




My brother likes it, maybe because at least one of us has a touch of the sea monster about them anyway.

There now, am I awake yet? No, no, not yet.
stonepicnicking_okapi: okapi (Default)
stonepicnicking_okapi ([personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi) wrote2025-06-29 10:10 pm

The State of the Ficcery: June 2025

Word Count: 33,424

Writing: Many things going on:
1. I completed by GYWO pledge for 2025. So year-to-date, word count: 150,040
2. GYWO Yahtzee is over, and I did all but 1 category, so I was #5 (everyone ahead of me did all the categories)
3. I uploaded my beta-ed case fic today. Whew!
4. Started a new BTS soap opera, a Yoonkook Rear Window AU
5. 4 poems
5. Fills for: [community profile] emotion100, [community profile] 100words, [community profile] drabble_zone, [community profile] vocab_drabbles

In July:
1. Keep the soap opera going
2. Still behind on the poems. Catch up on poems.

Reading: A very good reading month. 7 books.

In July:
1. At least 3 squares in the bingo.
2. Finish The Mirror Crack'd [it's annoying me at the moment, which is sad because the plot itself is very clever, but it begins with ol' Aggie's old lady carping and that is giving me indigestion]

Crafting:

5 spreads. 1 card.

In July:
I might do some summer postcards.

I have started a jigsaw puzzle, and I am forcing the boys to get off screen and help me with it after lunch. It is called Around the World in 50 Plants. Finish it by the start of school 25 AUG]

Personal:
1. Surviving the leak
2. Interviewing for a job
3. End of school for the boys

In July:
1. Minor and the boys' father are going to Jacksonville, Florida for 5 days for a track meet. So Minisculus and I will be home alone. It should be interesting.

So many mental and physical health areas I am not doing well in, but I don't want to dwell on them here.

On y va to July!
bleodswean: (Default)
bleodswean ([personal profile] bleodswean) wrote2025-06-29 11:32 am

LJ Idol - Wheel of Chaos - Wk 2 - If It's Any Consolation

If it’s any …
 
It isn’t.
 
I just thought …
 
Don’t. Your thoughts are. Hesitation. Rudimentary. But sincere. I recognize that.
 
Well. For most …
 
Stop. Please. I’m not most.
 
Silence, broken then with. 
 
There is no comfort, no consolation, you see? There is only a letting go. My releasing. Mine. It is a great sluicing of water from off the skin when surfacing out of the depths. A leprosy in which the body sheds its recognizable humanity. Akin to fire, flooding, all the great equalizers of the human spirit is loss. 
 
No pain can be endless.
 
Time lessens, nothing heals. Perhaps the final loss, the dissolution of self. There is that momentary pause in which the soul tells the self rest rest rest now. With those strange urgent shushings the mind exhales and closes an interior eye and the soul sighs and the body relaxes. 
 
Always with the most extreme of analogies.
 
It’s how I process. How I’m formed. The shape of me in this incarnation is allegorical. I admit it. Is it unbearable of me to explain a poetic inclination? 
 
Of course not. 
 
Catch me in one of those expirations then. That numbing prelude to a sleep brought on by the physical and existential exhaustion of the quivering small beast caught in the snare incapable of the final severing of the trapped limb. Perhaps, between respirations I will show gratitude for whatever platitude you long to utter. With such kindness in the dulcet tones of your compassion. 
 
So insulting. But I forgive you.
 
It is no kindness to me. I’m admitting this to you now so that there can be no misunderstanding between us afterwards. In the quiet of acceptance, in the weaking of the bleeding out. You offered me not a ligature, not even a bandage, only the word bandage. Followed by an expectation of a deed done well. Yet, I will nod and listen insomuch as I am able before the next suck breath moment in which I am once again filled with not a gain but a loss. Filled with loss, if you can imagine such a thing. You who have been unlucky to suffer not. Yes, I say unlucky, yes, I call you cursed for your wholeness, your innocence of these mortal woundings, of the soul’s agonies. 
 
And you, I suppose, are blessed by this devastation?
 
Confounded and cast out by the privilege of cataclysmic injury yet I finger the beads and whisper the prayers and allow my eyes to roll back in their sockets from the sheer unknowingness of meaning, the definition of absolutes. Our mother, our father. All these soulful beings arting in their heavens. There is a consecration in catastrophe. 
 
I disagree. You are martyring yourself to this.
 
Martyr? Laughing. This laying on of hands while the blade is hidden in the sleeve, dropped into the palm, the knife snicking out plunging into the heart between the ribs through the lungs a great sucking sound when its pulled back out. Taking life itself with it. The body heartbeating to death through the collapsing arteries.
 
All this because I wanted nothing more than to offer succor.
 
Are you familiar with the consolation prize, my friend? 
 
Certainly, narrowly failing to win.
 
No, finishing last. 
 
Yet recognized! 
 
I don’t want to be recognized for my wounding. Your sympathy is of no value to me. Only to you. So, in an earnest effort to be brotherlike, to recognize that you too will one day bleed, I bite my tongue at refusing your solace. Give it here. In great bucketloads. Pour it out and over me. I’ll hold my breath to keep from drowning in your mollification. It offers some respite, admittedly, to others. 
 
It’s that you can’t bear to be likened to others.
 
smokingboot: (Default)
smokingboot ([personal profile] smokingboot) wrote2025-06-28 08:41 am

The Sunset Lands

When I was a child I would look at the skies and see other countries, realms unknown. It was usually at sunset when the contours of those otherworlds would reveal themselves. Sometimes they would become dragon lands, mapped by rivers of celestial lava, other times I could see the roads and landscapes, seas and mountains. I would catch sight of what seemed like lighthouses on the edges of wild coasts. I have always loved sunsets. But FB reminded me of this, one of the most memorable, which began as some kind of Arrival of the Travellers and ended as a prog-rock album cover.

I can never explain better than this. It's fantastical but real, it's far away but just down the end of the street.









stonepicnicking_okapi: journal (journal)
stonepicnicking_okapi ([personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi) wrote2025-06-27 03:00 pm
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smokingboot: (head off)
smokingboot ([personal profile] smokingboot) wrote2025-06-27 11:56 am

Shingles

No, I don't have it.
No, I have never had it.
No, turns out I have never had chicken pox or any form of zoster.
No, the only connection to potential shingles I have had is the horrid rash I got during/after radiotherapy. It didn't take Sherlock to fathom the connection.
So why did the NHS make me an appointment to have a shingles vaccination? I never agreed to it, don't recall discussing it. Turns out that Shingles is on the rise in the UK and assuming I reach my 70s I will become susceptible, so they just pencilled in a date for Bootpuncture, and texted me on the subject 2 days before, telling me to turn up. Heading the issue off at the pass long before I get there, they say. Very sensible. I cancelled.

I know, I know.

But right now I just can't think of these things. Once my next big C check up is done, maybe I'll be wise.

Or maybe I'll wait til/if it ever turns up, and then flap around in annoyance at myself.