Word: Halyard

Jul. 2nd, 2025 12:23 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: letters (letters)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Wednesday's word is...

...halyard [hal-yerd]

noun

1. any of various lines or tackles for hoisting a spar, sail, flag, etc., into position for use.

---

I found this in Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary

First Mr. Fridley fastened the U.S. flag on the halyard (that's a new word in my vocabulary) and then fastened the California flag below it.

halyard

Views & News

Jul. 1st, 2025 06:45 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: ChopSuey (chopsuey)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
1. The big news...Orientation is Thursday...I have a job! Orientation is PAID. I haven't been paid for work since 2015. This is a big deal! I know I will cycle through anxiety and fear but it's incredible that it's even happening!

Not much else to compete with that. We took the kids to Costco for the first time on Monday, and they were impressed. I am trying to get my cleaning done and my soap opera update written because at the end of orientation I will meet with a scheduler and I have no idea what that will be like.

Apparently the delay was my last employer (the nursing home) not having employment records going back that far so they couldn't verify my employment. So I had to dig up decade old tax forms and scan them and send them in to prove I did work at some point.

I bought 2 EXIT games to play with the fam. We'll see how that goes.

More Ryu and Ryua camping

Sunshine Revival #1

Jul. 1st, 2025 01:54 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: beach (beach)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Sunshine-Revival-Carnival-1.png

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.


Here is my monthly planner spread in my Hobonichi techo for July. July's theme color is GOLD.

25 in 2025: Mid-year to date

Jun. 30th, 2025 07:32 am
stonepicnicking_okapi: 2025 (2025)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
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

Coming In

Jun. 30th, 2025 07:45 am
smokingboot: (D Calligraphy)
[personal profile] smokingboot
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.

The State of the Ficcery: June 2025

Jun. 29th, 2025 10:10 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: okapi (Default)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
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)
[personal profile] bleodswean
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.
 

The Sunset Lands

Jun. 28th, 2025 08:41 am
smokingboot: (Default)
[personal profile] smokingboot
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.









Shingles

Jun. 27th, 2025 11:56 am
smokingboot: (head off)
[personal profile] smokingboot
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.

My poem: stupid motel fridge by okapi

Jun. 26th, 2025 11:24 am
stonepicnicking_okapi: otherwords (otherwords)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
stupid motel fridge by okapi

I hear it. Doubt. Wait. Know. My refuge
Is anything but. It has found me.
The monster I have been running from
Is right here. In the room. With me. Now.
I listen. I hone in, creeping nearer,
Like one of those dull, topless slasher girls
Ineffably drawn to her doom.
The door resists at first, then rips
Like silver duct tape torn from the mouth
Of a hostage. Confirmed, justified,
fear and dread. T/here. Water where water should not be.
Falling. In drops. In wet rhythm.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

I can’t find a plug to yank.
I won’t invite a stranger
Into this. I know better. The dial
Clicks to clacks. Coolest. Off. Wait. Watch. Count.
Like Kabir’s moon and sun.
Then I am rolling terry cloth
To mop up the flood suspended on glass
And deaden the sound. Dead.en.sound.
I go back to bed. I get up
Again. Check. Go back. Listen
For noise I’ve made sure I won’t hear
Like the last girl standing before the credits roll.

Snow White and the Poop Cruise

Jun. 26th, 2025 07:40 am
smokingboot: (losing plot)
[personal profile] smokingboot
My niece was up looking after the cats, and being a Disney fan, introduced me to the latest Snow White.

Hmm.

This bombed hard, mostly blamed on Rachel Zegler being a charmless sneery little goon in interviews. For sure Disney needed to have a chat about her working as ambassador for the film; when a trailer gets a million downvotes something's obviously gone wrong. But the fact is she's the best thing about Snow White. Despite some piranha-like chin waggling a la Keira Knightley, she's talented, pretty, can sing, dance, and play a saccharine part without being the spirit of cloy. The real trouble is that it's an excruciatingly bad screenplay with an overstretched plot, dull score, and uncanny valley issues through the roof. These latter don't just cover the nightmare dwarves (I don't care what Peter Dinklage says, Tyrion Lannister roles don't turn up every day and real actors with dwarfism could have used this opportunity/cash) but the whole CGI overload. It works in some places, like the interior of the cottage and the pipe organ, but often it's just an acid trip without the fun. Gal Gadot's not terrible, she's just got this terrible script. She does what's required of her, and it's not enough because nothing could be; nothing was ever going to save this badly conceived, badly executed project.

Speaking of badly conceived, badly executed projects, the cruise of the Carnival Triumph in 2013 has become infamous, but we knew no details. Now we do. In horrified awe we watched Poop Cruise on Netflix directly after Snow White, which made perfect poetic sense at the time and still does. This documentary is horrible but very funny. I never was a fan of cruises. Now it'll take bribery to get me on one.

But as entertainment goes, Poop Cruise kicks Snow White to the kerb.

Never Mind

Jun. 26th, 2025 07:16 am
smokingboot: (head off)
[personal profile] smokingboot
Seriously tempted to drink the entire pot of coffee. One cup down, two more to go.

Big barney with Mother last night. She wants to invest in something she can't even name or describe, gave me a bogus address for it, and when I flat out said 'don't do it,' got angry with me.

I am not patient enough.

But I am wary of her being fleeced as so many pensioners have been. Got Bro to talk to her, and he reassured me that her understanding of banking security, firewalls etc is so honed as to be professional - paranoia has some benefits clearly - but he will check out the address and see what he can find. If he has flattered her enough, she may wait before opening a new bank account dedicated to this 'investment'. My personal feeling is to remember what she said many years ago re schizophrenia; that the voices never tell sufferers to do nice things like buy some flowers or go for a walk in the sunshine. The instructions/suggestions are always stick-a-fork-in-the-wall-socket type stuff, inimical, destructive, sometimes even dangerous.

I will leave her be for a few days. She got very unpleasant last night. She told me I had been short with her recently - I haven't, I've done nothing but send her pleasant prattle. She is probably referring to earlier in the year when she went through a phase of phoning me up and not being able to hear me, or me phoning her and her not being able to hear me. Bro thinks she faked that whole thing. She certainly couldn't explain it beyond the phantom 'hooligan' in the city who mucks around with her phone, and after anywhere between 5 and 13 calls in a row where it seemed she couldn't or wouldn't operate a basic phone properly, yes I got a bit frustrated.

Decision; Just peace and quiet today, me, the husband, the cats, the coffee. Bro said he could deal with it, so I will trust him. The whole situation might be less intense if he did his share of regular communication with her as he has promised to do so often. Never mind.

Book Bingo: June 2025 (#2)

Jun. 25th, 2025 10:37 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: books (books)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
My thought is 3 books make a post.

This bingo card was created by [personal profile] kingstoken. More about the challenge here: https://kingstoken.dreamwidth.org/109837.html




Recommended: The Seamstress [also titled The Time In Between] by María Dueñas is one that [personal profile] smallhobbit recommended as one of her favourites. It is the story of a young Spanish girl with a talent for dressmaking. Her loves, betrayals, breakdowns, and triumphs set against the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II. She flees to Morocco and there is a lot about life there. She ends up being a spy. Very engaging, compelling. It's long. 600+ pages but I definitely got sucked in. [I am also trying to do as many squares as I can of [personal profile] garonne's 2025 Book Bingo here: https://garonne.dreamwidth.org/58219.html so I think this qualifies as G-G-1: Not set in UK/US/France/Germany.]

YA/Children's: Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. This was on the list of books for 4th graders and Minisculus and I read it. It was about a young boy living in a poor rural American setting who wants to be a fast runner. He also loves to draw but hides his enthusiasm due to stigma. He makes friends with the new girl over the summer, and they invent a make-believe land in a secret hideout near their homes. Very tragic ending.

Sci-fi/Fantasy: Death Note vol. 1. by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. This is a Japanese manga (which Minisculus much prefers to the reading list!). I wasn't sure if it fit this category but simple wikipedia calls it a 'supernatural thriller fantasy manga. It is the story of a Japanese high schooler who comes into possession of a mystical notebook and he finds he has the power to kill anybody whose name he enters in it. I enjoyed it even though reading right to left and back to front was a bit awkward. I wouldn't mind knowing what happens next but I don't think I'll seek another one out. [G-N-1: Book from a genre I typically avoid]

Word: Camphoric

Jun. 25th, 2025 10:30 pm
stonepicnicking_okapi: letters (letters)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Wednesday's word is...

...camphoric.

1. pertaining to or derived from camphor.

That's not helpful because I don't know that I know and/or remember what camphor is like. This was one of my prompts in my last Yahtzee roll. I was mainly interested in how it's used. And I discovered it is mainly perfume descriptions:

As soon as I sprayed it on I felt the presence of the original, in the heavy, bitter almond opening standing in for that famous camphoric tuberose-anise-incense blast.

Facing Down the Beast: Dior Hypnotic Poison, Marina Geigert, 2009

Narcissus is here, but it's the earthy, almost camphoric kind, not the sweeter type.

Perfume-Smellin' Things Perfume Blog, 2010
stonepicnicking_okapi: butterflycard (butterflycard)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Title: Clearing the air
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt: camphoric
Summary: A riddle turns into a case.

Read more... )
stonepicnicking_okapi: butterflycard (butterflycard)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
Title: Too many clocks, not enough time
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt:
Summary: A death at a nursing home leaves Sally with more questions than answers.

Read more... )

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