Well, I got some nice shoes?

Apr. 11th, 2026 03:18 pm
missdiane: (Default)
[personal profile] missdiane
We headed into Brooklyn close to noon on Thursday (Lyft to train station, NJ Transit to NY Penn Station, subway to Brooklyn then walking several blocks to the hotel). We tried to stop for lunch at a chain called Sweetgreen but the pin on their map is in the completely wrong location so we crossed the street and tried to get something at the revamped fancy train hall but the food court had no place for us to sit so we gave up and ended up chilling for a few moments at a Zaro's bakery in old Penn Station before hopping the subway to Brooklyn. I had a small but tasty tuna salad sandwich (noting the food for future reference).

When we got to the hotel, since we were dragging suitcases and hadn't done the ol' city crawl in a long time, we were pretty tired and so we got into each of our rooms and crashed for a while. We tried to get adjoining rooms but that didn't happen. We were at least on the same floor and I did have a walk-in shower in my room. A few hours later we decided to walk several blocks to a modern Mexican restaurant that sounded good. The food was super tasty - I ordered a horchata, a lobster taco that's served cold and is a little spicy with some fresh onion and a bowl of pozole which I've always wanted to try that soup. Emily also ordered some fresh pico and chips to share.

I finished my fancy taco (it wasn't any bigger than any regular taco) but had just a few chips and pico and barely made a dent in the pozole and didn't finish my drink. I chalked it up to the Mounjaro finally making me full quickly. I was bummed that I had to waste the rest of the soup since it wouldn't have traveled well but at least we know that this place, while a little expensive, gives filling servings. It wasn't just the size of the meal...I screwed up, I screwed up BIG. While I do need to contact my doctor to graduate to the next dose up, it's still effective enough at slowing digestion and I had been avoiding things like broccoli, brussels sprouts and...ONION...since starting the drug. The tuna salad had raw onion, the taco had raw onion, the pico had raw onion. Oh hell.

And naturally the Tums I meant to bring didn't make it into my toiletry bag or my purse. I had to spend $4 for two Tums at the front desk and it still barely made a dent into the stomach woes. I didn't sleep much or well that night. The next morning I thought that it was down to a dull roar and had a little of the free breakfast (oatmeal with fixings since they had an awesome oatmeal bar and a side of a little scrambled egg for the protein), but through the day, I just kept getting waves of feeling hellish. We went into the city since I wanted to go to a shoe place I saw online to try on some flats. I liked the fit of them - they even have quarter sizes which I didn't know was even a thing! After doing a little more wandering in Manhattan, we were both tired and took the subway and the several block tromp back to the hotel in early afternoon. Since neither one of us were up for doing a sit down meal that night, we had stopped at a bougie grocery in Brooklyn on the walk back to get some things to eat at the hotel before the concert.

I had to spend another $4 for some more Tums since I was still in a good amount of gastro distress. I managed to keep things down, barely and laid down for a few hours to get things under control. I did eat the very simple sandwich I got at the grocery before we went for our several block walk to the concert venue.

It was a good enough concert, well kind of, but we ended up leaving early because we couldn't take how ungodly LOUD it was. Like rattling your seat loud even when he was doing what were ballads. Emily was getting a headache and that thumping didn't help my stomach any so we were only there and hour and a half.

I stopped at a Walgreens outside of the Barclays center and got extra Tums and water. It helped. Unfortunately someone was having a party at 1am in the breakfast area that Emily's room overhangs so she had to call the front desk to complain about the noise. We were both sore as hell the next morning so instead of dragging ourselves the several blocks, I called for a Lyft to take us to the subway. Thankfully we didn't have the energy to do more exploring in Manhattan since during the time we were hanging out in Penn Station for an hour waiting for the next NJ Transit train, some guy with a machete went on a rampage at Grand Central. Yikes.

It wasn't a terrible time but hopefully the next trip we go on has less misadventures. Hey, I did get over 12K steps in on Friday alone.

current stitching, and

Apr. 11th, 2026 09:33 am
thistleingrey: (Default)
[personal profile] thistleingrey
My mother has requested a color and "something small," not a pattern or style. She means shallow and narrow, not a triangle that covers one's back, but also not a scarflike rectangle. We got as far as "Tie the shawl loosely around your neck, or have dangling ends?" and then she told me to decide. And she'd like it not to be warm, instead "more decorative."

If my current hands can deal---somewhat better off than my 2022 hands, and somewhat worse, in different ways---then the yarn may become Lorkowska's Scarflette. If not, it may become Salt Water and Sea Stars (not quite narrow enough, unless I edit it) or a reverse-engineered hack of Hitchhiker (boring).

The yarn is a bit lighter in weight than the first two links call for, so it'll make a slightly smaller finished object. I did this accidentally to good effect with the shawl that I named Rough Weather. Holst Coast, for my mother's not-warm narrow shawl, is as close as I've gone so far to the yarn weight of the gift shawl that my hands and eyes had to quit. Coast is a wool/cotton blend in light fingering, a bit stiffer than pure wool before it's washed; I used it last year for the starting "bookmark" of a sleeveless top, the section across the back shoulders, which paused so that I could practice adapting shoulder and neckline (on the more workaday sleeveless top that I ended up re-knitting several times). The gift shawl used Exquisite Lace from West Yorkshire Spinners, a laceweight wool/silk blend, recently discontinued.

I think the gift shawl was hobbled by more than my damaged hands and eyes. Read more... )
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila
After breakfast, we got on the bus to the museum at San Sabba, the rice factory that served as a concentration camp in WWII. As expected, it was quite harrowing, especially walking into the middle square where the Nazis had torched the crematorium before fleeing. The hole where the chimney had been ripped out has a small plaque and flower vase in front of it. I am not at all superstitious. However, the feeling you get walking in from the entrance is one of tremendously bad juju. The dank cells with the wooden doors and too-small bunks may be the only physical remains of the instruments of torment, but the walls are permeated with it. We did not take any photos. We read through all the exhibition materials in the museum. Keiki insisted we leave a donation to ensure all is preserved so no one forgets.

Our bus ride back to town was quiet, and at the end of the journey we walked to a gelateria. Everyone practiced ordering in Italian. We must have done reasonably well as the server smiled at us a great deal and our single scoop cones wobbled under the weight of gelato piled in.

Much of the rest of the day was spent walking, punctuated by stops for refreshments and a bit of shopping. We visited the Cattedrale di San Giusto Martire (photos in a separate post), and we watched the sunset from the harbour’s edge.

20260409_150038

Random garden with large wisteria vines in full flower.

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The drive leading up to the castle.

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WWI monument.

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Aperol, crisps and beer. Very acceptable.

20260409_193900

Triestian sunset.

Halfway through "What We Are Seeking"

Apr. 11th, 2026 04:00 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
and oh god it's so good, that unique polished authorial confidence of The Fortunate Fall is so back, and like The Fortunate Fall it's a book that's somehow slipped out of time, not exactly in sync with the present moment in sf/f but maybe both older and newer, and it's very quiet and calm except for that bit in a recent chapter which actually made me make an involuntary noise of shock and alarm out loud, and I have no idea where it's going and I hope she sticks the landing but right now the vibes are Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand and The Left Hand of Darkness, and what with those being two of my favourite novels ever, I'm having a very good time.
firecat: red panda, winking (Default)
[personal profile] firecat
This is an ~30-minute episode of a Vox podcast called “Today Explained.” There is a transcript.

”How fan fiction went mainstream: The community that underpins Heated Rivalry, explained” by Danielle Hewitt and Noel King

It’s a pretty good intro to fanfic and how it’s become something publishers and creators of TV/movies pay attention to. They interview Francesca Kappa, a co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, which created AO3.

Things I learned and some bits I liked:
  • AO3 was created in part to prevent commodification of fanfiction and the social connections it facilitates.
  • “one of the projects that I worked on in the early days of the OTW organization for transformative works was that we were being contacted by women in their 70s and 80s who were like having to move in with their kids or going into nursing homes and they had like 3,000 fan fiction zines.”
  • It was claimed that AO3 is “much bigger than Wikipedia.” I’m not sure what metrics they’re using to come up with that.
  • [AO3 is] “structurally unenshittifiable” because “we don’t have customers and we’re not a business.”
  • (Discussing copyright) “it would have been terrible if Shakespeare had to, like, negotiate with Netflix for the right to Hamlet and then didn't get it. Like, that's the world we live in, right? We're like, Netflix owns Hamlet, it has a five-year option, Shakespeare really has a great idea for it, but like, no, I'm really sorry because JJ. Abrams is going to do Hamlet.”
    (I need to know which circle of Hell shows JJ Abrams’s Hamlet on repeat, because I really want to avoid it.)

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