mhalachai | Reading

Sometime during lockdown in the last four years, my arches fell. They had never been particularly high, but they felt fine in Birkies and so on. But now I am doing foot exercises to get them to show up at all, and if I don't it is really painful to walk any distance.

This cuts into my abiity to regain stamina and general fitness.

The exercises are starting to help significantly, so now all I need is a day or two without a major rainstorm or enough after a rainstorm that I won't be getting wet just by walking around near trees and bushes.

A friend told me that it takes at least 6 months to get one's energy back after COVID. Well, I was diagnosed Jan. 20 and it went for a couple of weeks actively and a few more overall. It took more time to be rid of the bad taste from the Pax than I expected. So I'm still within six months of it. I keep telling myself this.

The other thing that interferes with my health at the moment is variable tinitis, as in it comes and goes, and when it's there I have to find a soundscape in my CALM app that has that tone in it, so that the app's sounds distract me from the one inside my brain. Usually it works, but last night the inner sound had apparently retuned itself (autotune is the plague) and did not match anything on Calm except a wind in the trees, so I wasn't able to sleep, since the 'wind in pines' just didn't work. There is a downside to having perfect pitch and noticing when the inner-produced noises change.

settiai

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: sleepy

settiai

We've lost another one. Goodbye, Hot Lips. 🙁

I really need to add a M*A*S*H rewatch to my ever-growing list. I started one last year, but then work exploded and I just... never got back to it. Maybe I can do that when and if I finish the Babylon 5 rewatch.

Current Mood: sad

princessofgeeks

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beatrice_otter

I just realized that I haven't looked at Dreamwidth in I have no idea how long. At least a week, probably. I wasn't especially busy; I did take a few days with my family for Memorial Day weekend mini-vacation (which we have done every year since before I was born), but judging by how far I've gone back in my reading list and haven't started seeing posts I recognize, I had stopped well before that.

Normally, checking DW is part of my daily routine. My flist isn't hugely active, so there's no need to check more than once a day, but it's the only place that I can reliably check in with several long-term friends, and of course a lot of exchanges are mostly run through DW and it makes it easier to keep up with what's planned and what's in progress. I missed the signups for Fandom 5k, and none of the pinch hits are things I'd want to write, which is a shame, because I prefer the longer exchanges. Ah, well, I guess that means I will have more time for shorter-minimum thematic exchanges instead.

If you posted something important and I missed it ... sorry! Feel free to let me know in the comments!

lycomingst

The “put up a new fence” boys are here and have just about finished the job. Looks good. And I discovered my neighbor has a cherry tree. I am envious. I am out in the yard every day for about an hour or two. But the weeds and bushes are on a at least eight hour day and they’re racing ahead of me.

I took my first bath here last night. As opposed to the shower. I wanted to pumice stone my feet which are very hard skinned on the heels. The tub isn’t big but then I am not tall. I enjoyed it.

The Park has told me that I am on the list to have the very large, very dead tree in my backyard removed, at their expense. Later this summer. That will leave another stump but my plan involves having whatever I can afford ground down, in the future.

settiai

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Current Mood: drained

settiai

"I'm exhausted from not getting enough sleep, and my spoons are gone after the hell that was work today," I said yesterday evening after getting home from work.

"I have so many things that I need to get done this evening, but I don't have the energy right now," I said. "Plus my head's really starting to hurt."

"You know what?" I asked myself. "A short nap will be the perfect solution."

Spoiler: it was not the perfect solution for accomplishing things yesterday evening. Why not? Because instead of it being a short nap, it turned into a full night's sleep.

Oops?

Seriously, I didn't even turn out the lights. I curled up on top of the comforter on the bed. I wasn't even under the sheets. And I still slept for hours.

Luckily, I woke up for something like twenty minutes a little before midnight. That gave me time to take care of a couple of things that I really had to do, and then I was able to at least turn out the lights and such. But, yeah. That wasn't exactly what my plan was for yesterday. It's certainly what happened, though.

Current Mood: frustrated

sage

( books (Shaw, a different Shaw, Spinney, Ames, Barkataki, Palmer) )

yarning
ahahaha, etsy. So, out of the blue, I sold 3 things Monday, 2 of which I didn't have in stock and had to make, and guess who hadn't crocheted at all in 3 weeks? And hardly at all for nearly 3 months? Also, I hadn't sold anything through Etsy except patterns in months, or promoted my shop on social media, or even uploaded the few things I've finished lately to my shop. Stupid shoulder, stupid slump. But now I've caught up, I need to jump back into it. And also get the sold items in the mail.

dirt
omg the thrips saga is ongoing. The whole extensive bathroom-greenhouse is at risk, and I've sprayed almost everything in there down with Captain Jack's Dead Bug Brew, whether it's edible or not. Also unfortunate, there are fungus gnats in my terrarium, so along with a Buddha statue, there are 2 yellow sticky trap flags. They really set the tone. Um, not. Also, but fortunately, the snail is 100% NOT a leaf-eater, so I'm hoping it lives on detritus and not something important, like roots. Will have to do more research now that it's large enough to possibly identify.

( healthcrap )

food
I made mujadara for the first time in at least a year, and it turned out so well. I'm glad I used both giant sweet onions, because they were just enough. Also made sunflower arugula pesto. Zucchini noodles are weirdly satisfying, even if they aren't near filling enough. Still having trouble getting anywhere near thirty different plants a week in my diet, and also getting enough protein.

#resist
June 1: Pride LGBTQ Protest
June 3 to 9: Target Boycott
June 14: Flag Day & No King's Day (Trump's Birthday) Protest
June 19: Juneteenth Protest
June 27: Stonewall Anniversary Protest
June 24 to 30: McDonald’s Boycott
July 4: Independence Day Boycott and Protest

a list of resources:
50501, Tesla Takedown, Build The Resistance, The General Strike, Indivisible, Rise & Resist, Move On, The People's Union USA, all but the last taken from 50501's latest Substack post. Plus, on DW:

thisfinecrew and

communityactionusa.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333

marthawells

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/david-dastmalchian-murderbot-dexter-resurrection-interview/

"Now I feel much more comfortable advocating for [what I need]. To give you an example, on the set of Murderbot, going to my directors and writers, the showrunners, Chris and Paul [Weitz], and saying, ‘I'm really sorry, but on Wednesday at 2pm - I know I'm on the schedule that day, but is there any way I could be in my trailer for 45 minutes to have a therapy session?' and them being so supportive and loving and saying, ‘Of course, we will get you a Wi-Fi booster,’ because we were out in the middle of nowhere.

twistedchick

Short takes -- three brief considerations of life in America now. COVID shots, travel advisories and Hegseth.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: depressed

snickfic

- Saw some pap photos of most of the returning members of Oasis, got all excited, spent a bunch of time on the forum catching up with convos and speculation, reading linked articles, etc. Two months from today I will see them live! Ahhhhhhh!

- Tried American Psycho because Todd in the Shadows talks about it a lot and because I knew the director was a woman. Unfortunately these were not enough for me to care about satire of 80s capitalism. I DNFed about halfway through. Christian Bale was very good, though.

- I am rereading SA Harian's novel Briardark so I have some hope of understanding the sequel. The character writing is not that great, but the scary weird parts are SO scary and weird that it's worth it. It's also nice being able to reread knowing the biggest spoiler, and being able to interpret things in that light. Still, I'm excited to get to new material.

- Made a tiny bit of progress on an old Oasis WIP. Zero additional progress on H/C Ex. I have 1100 words, but now I need to write the rest of the story. I've got six days to do it in...

settiai

Welp. I didn't accomplish quite as much as I'd hoped this weekend, but hiding in the hotel for most of it definitely seems to have helped increase my spoons. Now if my head would just stop hurting, I'd be all set to go back to work in the morning.

I spent most of the weekend catching up on sleep and reading/writing fanfiction, although I did manage to watch a few new-to-me movies here and there which was a nice plus. My plans to play video games fell through, mostly due to my concentration being shot my first few days off. There was definitely a part of me that wanted to play, but I couldn't drum up the energy to actually open a game and start playing, so I just... didn't.

Still, sleeping and reading with some movie watching isn't bad. I'll take what I can get.

My legs are sadly still a bit of a mess from my fall on Friday. The left one is just bruised and a little scraped, but my right ankle and knee both continue to have swelling in addition to similar scrapes and bruises as the left leg. Add in the psoriasis on both of them, and they both look pretty horrifying at the moment. While I'm limping some, I can still walk, so I'm counting that as a win.

Current Mood: sore

luninosity

Guess we’re all official now, so I can announce this! We are doing a charity auction sort of thing – limited quantities available! – from May 31 to June 1! R. Cooper and Geneva Vand are marvelous humans and I am happy to be involved!

My little contribution will have six things – a couple of flash fics, a poem, a preview of the first 7k of the next Magician-related novel (it’s a Jer/Talis sequel!), a bonus story for Sam and Leo from Character Bleed, and…well, it’s a story you will never ever see anywhere else, which is seventeen years old now, from back when I wanted to write Humorous Fantasy (I was reading a lot of Terry Pratchett and Peter David), and I should probably warn you in advance about the terrible jokes*….but, hey, it’s in a good cause! Enjoy my embarrassment!

*among other lines, there’s the truly dreadful song pun, for which I might owe John Cougar Mellencamp an apology…

More details soon – keep an eye out!

Current Mood: excited

beatrice_otter

I just read a fic where a character in the Regency period is reflecting on how she'd never imagined she'd be able to have a full-time nursemaid.

Me: Girl, you are and have always been wealthy and you live in an age where labor is CHEAP.

And by "cheap" I mean "so cheap that servants had servants." (Upper level servants in large houses would often have lower-level servants assigned to them as a perk of the job.) So cheap that the gap between "people who were servants" and "people who had servants" was very narrow, and often crossed over the course of a person's lifetime. It was fairly common for working class/poor girls to work as maids for a few years saving up money before they got married, and if they married a reasonably prosperous farmer they would probably be able to afford to hire a maid themselves in good years. (Not "maid" as in "a personal servant to wait on you hand and food," this is "maid" as in "someone to do the nastier/harder bits of cooking and cleaning.")

By 1795, the price of wages for a day laborer was pegged to the price of bread. A gallon loaf weighed 8lbs 11oz, and was theoretically enough to feed a person for a week. Laborers were supposed to make at least three times the cost of a gallon loaf per week, so that if a gallon loaf cost 1 shilling they should be paid at least 3 shillings per week. That is peanuts. For comparison: A pair of wool stockings in the Regency era cost about 2 shillings 6 pence. In other words, a day laborer was paid only a little more per week than the cost of a good pair of socks. Silk stockings--the kind you would wear to a ball--were 12 shillings, or four times the weekly wages of a day laborer.

Combine this with how labor-intensive even the most basic tasks were, and it meant that anybody who could afford servants had them, and anybody above the poverty line could afford them.

Over the course of the 19th Century, the cost of wages relative to the cost of other things rose dramatically, so people had fewer servants and fewer people could afford to have servants. And still, Agatha Christie remembered that when she was young "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car." She did not grow up wealthy, she grew up middle class. Even in 1900, your average middle-class person in England could not imagine being too poor to afford servants.

This changed radically over the course of the 20th Century; now a middle class person might have a cleaner who comes in once a week, but they definitely will not be able to afford a full-time servant. You have to be wealthy to afford that. So we assume that servants are a mark of huge wealth even in historical periods, when they just ... weren't. This is not helped by the fact that novels set in period times (whether written then or later) rarely mention the servants, so you can read, say, an Austen novel and not have any clue what sort of servants they have. But unless you have researched the issue, it's best to assume they have more servants than you think they had.

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: gloomy

settiai

It's not a surprise, since he's had significantly health issues for quite a while, but it's still so sad to hear the news. The word has lost one of the greats.

I've loved so many of PAD's books and comics over the years. MadroX and X-Factor (v3) will forever be one of my favorite Marvel runs of all time. I read his Centauri Prime Trilogy so many times, not to mention "Soul Mates" is one of my favorite Babylon 5 episodes.

There was a period of several years where I was utterly obsessed with his Star Trek: New Frontier series. Imzadi will forever be one of the most influential Star Trek books that baby!me ever read.

He's played such a huge role in my life over the decades. He'll very much be missed.

Current Mood: sad

luninosity

It's a book release day!! "In Perfect Time" is out now - and 45% off if you buy it directly from JMS Books this weekend, for the Memorial Day sale!

It's about 12k words, it's MM contemporary (but fairytale-esque, deliberately so), and it's got...

~a *very* loose modern-day Cinderella retelling
~some of my favorite dialogue I've written

~baking as stress relief

~a truly terrible fancy party

~a gorgeous stranger, lonely on a balcony

~a one-night stand (might be the best thing that’s ever happened to either of them)

This was an interesting one to write - I've had little pieces and moments and scraps of it done for years, but it hadn't really come together...and then I started thinking about it again...and for some reason I thought, oh, well, but it's a Cinderella retelling, isn't it, not exactly, but the story beats are there...and then it clicked.

So there are scenes in here that I've had done in draft form for literal years, and also new pieces, and lots of layers, like a cake Kyle might bake - I think it came out fairly delicious, so I hope you enjoy it!

Pick up a copy at JMS Books here (remember, on sale!) or at Amazon here, or all the usual book-buying places!

In Perfect Time

Current Mood: accomplished

twistedchick

What stories do you see being told around you in the actions of the federal government these days?

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mhalachai

June 2025

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Page generated Jun. 6th, 2025 11:49 am

Three dollars and some change

mhalachai was here

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Historical Fiction Pet Peeves: Servants

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