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Entry tags:

"really and truly, it's just you and more you." (notes from the universe)

Happy October!

Recently I learned:
1) Tinnitus can sound like music.
2) Enzyme cleaners are great at unclogging pipes.
3) Less authentic mooncakes may be more delicious.
4) Some very dramatic plants think 50F is a killing frost.

Also, you can explain to your dog that you will always provide her with more food, you can show her all the food you have which is more than any three dogs could possibly need, and she will still ask for 100 dreambones so she can hide 50 of them for the hard times, and you will find them in places you never knew she'd been, usually still clean-ish and not gross but NOT ALWAYS.

On the plus side, when you ignore the lose bolt in her dog stroller too long and it falls out, never to be seen again, the internet can actually teach you enough about nuts and bolts that you can order a correctly sized replacement online, without having to interact with a single human being while still benefiting from humanity's collective wisdom and ingenuity.

I was cleaning yesterday: not the light garden, which I cleaned last week because plants were knocking on the door at the end of September this year, but all around the light garden because sometimes I worry that my laissez-faire attitude toward cleaning will result in a dust dragon, which sounds so much cooler than what I imagine I will find when I pick up all the blankets lying on the floor. (Dreambones, mostly.) There were no dragons, and the dreambones have been thrown away.

My point is, why do I worry so much? ("It's people like you who survive disasters," someone once told me. But waiting to survive a disaster doesn't seem like the most fulfilling use of my life on Earth.)

I have a Chinese journal now; it's mostly private because I'm using it for

inkingitout this year, but I'm also using it publicly for all the other challenges I've mentioned, and when I'm not tending the plants for hours I collect pictures from my or other local gardens, along with occasional fic recs or notes on the Untamed.

Welcome to follow or not as you wish: this isn't an advertisement, just a PSA given that some of us are in the same communities, and I'm not a big talker but I get that there's no reason to expect

xinger ("star") and

starandrea are the same person. They are.

In conclusion:
5) Last year's dahlias were yellow; why are they all red now?
6) A single vine can grow so many different kinds of gourds.
7) Glow in the dark bracelets light up night corn mazes.
8) Pledge of the Peony ftw.

SW Rarepairs 2025

Likes: Found family, families of choice, team as family, slice of life, cuddling, friendship, and crossovers.

Dislikes: mentor/student pairings, non-con, char bashing.

Yuletide noms are getting approved!

(Yeah, I'm overly excited for no reason.)

Of the fandoms I nominated this year:

* Assemble with Care doesn't have any fic on the archive/isn't wrangled, so unsurprisingly it might take a bit for the mods to double check the character names. ETA: Approved 10/2 with all 4 characters!

* Cozy Grove is approved! I'm not surprised, because it's the easiest of my bunch to check (I'm essentially requesting the same characters as last year and it's a tiny tiny fandom).

* Fantasy Life is a canonical tag, but of the 3 characters I nominated, only Taylor (under Shushu | Taylor) is canonical; Chic and Madam Purl have never been tagged, and the last character is worldbuilding. 10/2: approved!

* Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time does not have a canonical tag. I would not be surprised if both games were put under Fantasy Life by the tag wranglers in the end - and I'm not actually overly bothered by that. Also, one of my noms is a one-shot NPC quest giver with limited dialogue (Monsieur Cobra) who just got introduced recently so he might take a sec. (The others are Chemmel, his assistant Mira, and Worldbuilding, all of which are easy to find.) ETA 10/1: Approved, all characters (including the cobra) - a bit amusing that the fandom with the harder to find character got approved before its older predecessor with easy to google information, but that's how the random approval screen cookie crumbles, I guess.

* My Time at Sandrock: This is getting very close to the limit (900+ works complete in English over 1000 words; 1400+ all together), so it's definitely going to be over the limit next year. So even though I went with two characters with canonicals (Heidi and Trudy), this one might take a bit of time to get approved. ETA: Just after I hit "post" I rechecked and this is approved!

Interestingly, they set up the Fantasy Life characters as (Fantasy Life Video Game) and the Fantasy Life i characters as (Girl Who Steals Time) - I'm figuring out if I should raise this up because it took me a second to recognize my own noms.

Entry tags:

plants

"older but no more the wise, we've learned the art of compromise" (suzy bogguss)

In times like these it feels important to be visible when spoons and safety allow, so I just wanted to say: you are loved, and we're here for you. You're in this world to be exactly who you are.

In the immortal words of a fellow teacher explaining the plan for getting three different field trip groups along multiple walking routes to the same destination at the same time (cartoon maps and faux football play diagrams were involved), when responding to the following question:

"What do we do if it rains?"
"...If it rains, we go out and we fight. We fight and we fight and we win."

Relatedly, in the way that all things are, I'm enjoying

communal_creators right now. I joined, as with

battleshipex, because Marci did. And as with

battleshipex, it has done great things for my creative output and self-expression. (Along with drabble community

chenqing_100, a serene place that inspires me to contemplate the drabble-esque qualities of classical Chinese.)

Autumn arrives as well, and with it, the soft opening of my indoor light garden. Every single one of my high intensity lights from Gardeners' Supply is going strong, but none of my low-intensity lights from Amazon has lasted more than two seasons. On a quest, then, to find new gentle lights for my less sun-hungry plants, I tried the Gardeners' Supply light guide (illustrated) and laughed at the following multiple choice question:

"What kind of gardener are you?"
1) Tabletop: "I just want to keep my African violets happy."
2) Floor Plant Fanatic: "I've got a few monster-sized Monsteras and fiddle-leaf figs to tend to."
3) Plant Parenting Pro: "I'm growing light-loving houseplants of all sizes, including an orchid, several succulents, and a sago palm."

Option 3 may not quite cover it, but that's as high as the scale goes and I embrace it.