nor so wide as a church door

I am just feeling all kinds of rambly today, and I haven't posted in a bit, so this is just going to be a kind of random collection of things that have been happening and thoughts I have been having.

So.

To start with: sometimes, I hate plants. I don't think whatever I have is poison ivy, but it's poison something, because there are welts and bumps and LOTS OF ITCHING. After a few days of the welts and the bumps, but not very much itching, I woke up early this morning with the new and thrilling urge to chew my own arm off, if only it would stop the itching. I slathered it with anti-itch gel, and have been periodically coating it with calamine lotion in the hours since; so far, it's working decently well, if not perfectly, and some of the worse bump-welts have diminished. (I would like to make a joke here about how they will soon be sailing to the West, except it seems so wrong to compare my favorite summertime curse to Galadriel.)

However, weeding recently has not been all bad. The cat who was the antagonist in that chipmunk drama a while ago has forgiven me for thwarting her plans for chipmunk murder, and warmed up to me; she came climbing up the slope to visit me on Friday, and graciously allowed me to pet her into a near-coma. A small, silvery, extremely soft-looking creature whom I have since tentatively identified as a mole came bumbling along to within arm's reach - part of the reason I have identified it so is because it appeared to be totally unable to see us, but as soon as I had the cat properly secured and got a hand free to bump the plants near it, it ran like hell.

Or, okay, it was (most likely) a mole, it trundled like hell.

In a similar vein (that vein being nature! yays!), after basically dipping my arm in calamine this morning, I took a walk with my sister and my dad, up the road to the top of the hill and then over and down. The whole thing took about an hour. And my god, it was absolutely beautiful out; it has been horrid and rainy and damp all week, and then today, it was sunny and very breezy and the sky was fantastically blue. I spent a good portion of the walk staring up at the patterns the leaves made against the sky, and against each other, in lovely sunlit shades of green that varied depending on the amount of overlap. Gorgeous.

There have also been fannish pursuits, though, as per usual, none that are going to end up anywhere where anybody but my sister can see them. Cliché bingo has taken my soul and run with it, despite the fact that I did not actually sign up for a card. I took the masterlist of clichés and have started typing out fics - not whole ones, just paragraphs, moments of things that could become fics if I filled in the spaces. So far I have a set for Hellboy (mostly Hellboy/Myers) and a set for Harry Dresden (more on the gen side, I don't ship anybody in those books super hard), and I keep coming up with more things I want to do.

( A little bibbling about that. )

Also, I kind of want to try a batch for Harry Potter. But I should save the energies of the HP sector of my brain for the massive AU, and the accompanying Irrelevant Shipfic.

I haven't fiddled with my conlang in a while; maybe I'll work on that this afternoon.

So Saturday was awesome. I walked stilts for so long that I actually kind of hurt my left foot a little bit; I think I made the foot-strap a little too tight, because the side of my foot, the place where the strap crossed around, was all weird and achy. I was anxious about the kids - and people in general, really, as I am good with neither - but it was like I was possessed, or something. People asked me questions, and I answered them! In a kind and friendly manner! \o/ I'm always particularly afraid of what to do when a kid says something I can't understand, or something kind of silly - like, one of them seemed to be having serious trouble grasping the entire structure of the stilts, and kept asking me what the wood was for - but it actually wasn't half bad.

Turns out that being on stilts brings the same set of questions to everybody's mind: how tall are you, how do you get up there, how did you learn, and is it hard. Plus, I have never had so many people try out the "How's the weather up there?" thing on me in my life.

The rest of the weekend was rather unremarkable in comparison. I find myself weirdly enjoying grocery shopping; there was a phase in between when I got to ride on the cart and now when I thought it was the most boring thing in the world, but that seems to be coming to an end.

Today was more weeding - no particularly good stories, sadly, although I do think I managed to make friends with both of Mary's cats - and also a marathon of The Closer. ( I kind of love The Closer. ) I'm actually typing this during spare moments of the season premiere, which, so far? Awesome.

I used my memories to collect a couple recent posts - specifically, cereta's post on men and rape, and a reaction to it. Reading it and the comments to it has been painfully illuminating; I'd call it a valuable experience for me, except that makes it sound like I'm okay with the pain some of the commenters have gone through because it taught ~*~me~*~ something, which, hell no.

Sometimes, how my day goes is almost wholly determined by what SciFi is running in the morning. Trufax.

Today was Special Unit 2 Day. I have a kind of embarrassing amount of affection for SU2; it's not genius or anything, but it's cheesy fun, with a partner dynamic that I really adore. Nick is flirty and a smartass, but possessed of Issues; Kate is practical and also a smartass, and possessed of lots of weapons training. They're friends and partners first - that is the relationship that predominates over any kind of extended romantic tension, at least in all of the eps I've seen. Plus, they're both smoking hot. That doesn't hurt. :D Some things tend to be overplayed, and it can be pretty anvilicious - not to mention deeply scientifically inaccurate - but it's still pretty fun to watch.

So that was what I spent my morning on, pretty much. And then I went to work in the afternoon. It was pretty satisfying, all told; there were a lot of pricker bushes to pull up, and one of the things I like most about weeding is winning a good, long tug-of-war with a really impressive root system, so. I do need to take better gloves with me when I go tomorrow, because the ones I had were not quite as thorn-proof as I might have liked. But otherwise, I'm happy. And it was really nice only having to work for three hours.

And now, to write. I'm trying to work a little on some part of the HP AU every day. With any luck, I will manage to post at least part of it before I die of old age.