Midsummer garden
Jan. 21st, 2026 07:56 pmI'm still marinating in Heated Rivalry everything and it's helped with creating in other fandoms - an SGA and a due South secret Santa fic in late Dec and several SGA ones more recently for another exchange (will be unanoned soon). Gave myself for-real goddamn eyestrain from too much screen time reading and scrolling tumblr - inflamed, watering eyes, blurred vision, the whole nine yards. I'm being marginally more sensible about breaking up screen time with other activities now and that's resolved it, thank goodness. Too wet to garden, but. Anyway, garden pics follow, and here's hoping you're all doing okay! (Click through for large size)
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Jan. 19th, 2026 09:55 pmSo. The planner.
I got a new planner. It’s good. The layout is right, the paper feels right, my brain went oh, yes, this will work. I’ve got a whole bunch of new planner stickers. I am, objectively, very close to planner peace. I even have more sticker orders arriving this week, because apparently hope is my dominant personality trait.
And the thing is — most of what I use fits fine.
I mostly plan with icon stickers. Script stickers. Little visual cues. Those are perfect. No issues. They sit exactly where they’re meant to. They behave. They understand the assignment.
But this week I had some big things going on. Capital-B Big. The kind of things where I wanted to block out space and make it very clear, at a glance, that Shit Was Going On Here.
So I used some flags and half boxes and quarter boxes from older kits.
And those are all just ever so slightly too wide.
Not unusably so. Just enough. Enough that my eye keeps snagging on them. Enough that I now know — with horrible clarity — that most sticker kits are designed for 1.5" columns, and my planner columns are 1.25".
Which means that the one time I don’t usually plan this way — the one time I actually need big, obvious visual space — is the time everything feels wrong.
And suddenly it feels like I’ve picked the wrong planner. Like I’ve broken some arbitrary but Very Important Planner Rule that everyone else somehow knows. Like I am Doing Planning Incorrectly™, despite the fact that this system works for me 90% of the time.
Never mind that icon and script planning is how I actually function. Never mind that I don’t usually need big boxes. Never mind that stickers are meant to be tools, not tests I can fail.
My brain has latched onto this tiny mismatch and decided it is Evidence.
I know this is not actually about stickers.
It’s about wanting space to acknowledge that things are hard. Wanting a system that can hold big days as well as small ones. Wanting one area of my life to feel contained and legible when the rest of it isn’t.
Tonight that has manifested as 0.25 inches of wrongness and the feeling that I’ve somehow messed up something that was meant to help me.
I’m aware this is absurd. I’m also aware that feelings don’t care about that.
Shows: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms ep 1, The Pitt eps 1&2, Landman s2
Jan. 19th, 2026 09:54 pmMy main gripe was the shitting scene, to which my reaction was you've gotta be shitting me! Dunc has a projectile shit from a standing position (slightly bent forward), like one of his horses but with way more rearward velocity. Was it supposed to be "gritty reality"? Because no one shits standing up like that ffs, and if they did it'd for sure go all over their legs. Presumably there's nothing wrong with his legs so why the fuck not squat like a normal, limber young person? Stupid nonsense, which I can only assume was supposed to be humorous. I was not amused.
The Pitt - I'm not liking it quite as much as season 1 so far but that's probably me finding anything not HR a bit lacklustre. Very happy Dana the charge nurse is back and in fighting form, and am enjoying all the usual suspects. One major plot point is that Dr Robbie's about to go on sabbatical and is being replaced by a new female consultant with whom there's a lot of friction as they do things very differently. She's a fan of generative AI for note-writing, for example. I can see they wanted the drama of the clash, but did they have to make her uptight, rulebound, female and with a Muslim name? Sigh. I really hope the drama's not going to play out in as stereotypical a way as it's currently threatening to, but the writing was good last time, so they get the benefit of the doubt.
Landman season 2 is on Prime, and is excellent as always. Superb writing, great acting and characters. It's about a Texas oil industry guy who is 2IC to the company CEO, and who does all the hands-on practical management and troubleshooting, including dealing with the local drug runners, wells blowing, and workers getting injured etc. His wife and daughter at first glance seem complete rich dumb blonde stereotypes, but underneath that facade both are interesting and funny, and cunning in the ways of their people (mostly at manipulating men). I enjoy it.
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Jan. 18th, 2026 01:57 pmI quit my job.
There isn't a shiny next thing lined up, no dramatic leap to a new role, no tidy narrative arc where I immediately land on my feet. Just... an ending, and the quiet (and slightly terrifying) space that comes after it.
A lot of this comes down to the airport and the ongoing issues there that have been grinding me down for a long time. Throw in the recent sale and murmurings of 're-organisation (but apparently our jobs are safe... uh-huh, not my first rodeo, my dude). Add in my disabilities - the ones that don't get better if you just push harder, the ones that flare when the world decides to be loud and unpredictable and physically demanding - and something finally clicked into place this week.
Full-time, on-site work is no longer sustainable for me.
That's not an easy thing to admit. I've circled around it for ages, tried to negotiate with myself, told myself I could just adjust one more thing, power through one more rough patch. But the reality is that the cost keeps getting higher, and I'm the one paying it with my health.
Li and I talked it through properly - not in a panicked way, but in that calm, practical, loving way that says okay, let's actually look at what life needs to look like now. And we've landed on a plan that feels... doable. Not perfect, not magically fixed, but realistic.
I'm going to start looking for either:
- full-time remote work, or
- part-time work that gets me out of the house without breaking me in the process.
Right now, I'm trying to sit in the in-between without spiralling too far ahead. Rest a little. Breathe. Let my nervous system unclench. Trust that making a choice in favour of my health isn't failure, even if it doesn't look like success the way it used to.
If nothing else, this week has been a reminder that I don't have to keep proving I can survive things that are actively harming me. I'm allowed to build a life that fits the body and brain I actually have.
More soon, probably. But for now: this is where I am.
it ends where it began
Jan. 17th, 2026 09:14 pmThe Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. LOVED THIS <3 The prose was so good and there was so much yearning and devotion and tragedy and it had time travel/time loop and academia and fighting fascism and personally I love second person so the first/second person POV was very enjoyable and it had swap POV of the (mostly) same events and secret code and dragons!? I could go on. I feel like this was written with me in mind.




