All my friends have been doing this meme, so it's made me want to fill it out too :) Unsurprisingly, my answers to several of the questions are the same as Rachel's :)

( 100-question memeCollapse )

Apologies for being terrible at the livejournals! Rachel is begging me to post these XD And I'm not sorry that she is!

We had the MASSIVE AWESOME FINALE of our Shadowrun game this weekend, and it was incredible. See Rachel's journal for a recap. My character, Mika, is a pop star/part-time thief whose millionaire foster father decided that his next business venture would be to use Mika's music and giant fanbase to summon an ancient horror. Mika had to kill him with an orbital satellite death ray that she hacked with her brain. Fun times! (She's going to need therapy.)

I drew Rachel's character Lindir and his soon-to-no-longer-be-ex-boyfriend, Gil. Gil (an NPC) patiently put up with all of us lunatics invading his bar every few days and using it as our home base. He left Lindir at the altar when he found out that Lindir had been KIDNAPPED AND GIVEN A CYBER LEG. (This is what happens when you use the Big Book of Backgrounds to create characters XD You roll dice and consult tables for random events in your character's history. As you can see, there are some weird ones.) But because Jason is an awesome GM, we learned in the course of the game that Gil has cyber-limb baggage because of his little sister having run off to become part cyborg.

Lindir is FABULOUS.


Gil is skeptical. As he should be, considering who hangs out in his bar.


Another thing Gil is: sorry.

I'm happy to finally unveil something that's been months in the making: Rachel and I have started a blog together!

Arboreal Rainbow

This summer, while we were spending a quiet week dogsitting for our friend Bethany's adorable puppies, Rachel and I decided that we wanted a place to chronicle our story and preserve the some of the precious bits of our lives together. We came up with the blog name Arboreal Rainbow as a meeting of the symbols we both love best: trees for me and rainbows for Rachel. It evokes the image of rainbows living in the treetops.

We only have a few posts so far, but we plan to add all sorts of things, from knitting adventures to tea reviews to the story of how we met. I hope you'll take a look! <3

This spring, as we drove home from the Fairie Festival, Rachel and I talked about how we could make our lives more like how we felt when we were there. We decided that we wanted to rearrange some of the rooms in our house; one of these plans was to make the guest room on the first floor into my library/office and move the guest room upstairs. Rachel has her studio, and before this, we'd said that the Temple Room upstairs was my space, but I never completely got comfortable there. As lovely as it is, it it's a hassle to keep temperate because it's stifling in the summer and unheated in the winter.

We wrote up how we'd do it, complete with graph-paper models of both rooms and a step-by-step moving plans. Last week, we set the plan in motion.

( Pictures galore!Collapse )

Rachel and I went on a whale watch yesterday -- Rachel's first ever and my second, though the first was long enough ago that I don't remember much about it. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

This morning, though, I was going about my business, getting ready for work as normal, when I got suddenly very sick. I'll spare you the gruesome details, but I think it was due to dehydration (it was pretty hot yesterday, even though I tried to drink a lot of water on the boat). So I stayed home and slept until noon. I feel worlds better now but exhausted, so I'm writing up our adventure.

I don't have very many pictures because I was too entranced, too captivated by the whales to try looking at them through a viewfinder. But I do have one or two :)

The whale watch was out of Rye, NH and was organized by Granite State Whale Watch. Rye is one of the prettiest towns in New Hampshire: it's located on our teeny tiny inch of coastline and is home to Odiorne Point State Park, the Seacoast Science Center, rolling dunes, bird-filled estuaries, really nice beaches, and about a hundred eye-popping mansions. The sun was out bright as we drove down the shore road past all of these and made our way to Rye Harbor.



We got there about a half hour before the ship was going to depart, so we got a pretty good seat on the starboard side near the bow. It was HOT waiting for the ship to leave; there was a bit of a breeze but it didn't do much against the sweltering sun. Once we started moving out, though, the wind picked up and it was utterly perfect.

Rachel bought me a hat at the ticket counter, and I was very glad I had it!



I was pretty much exploding with excitement, and as soon as we started moving, Rachel was too <3



We chugged out past the harbor walls and caught a glimpse of some harbor seals on the port side of the ship. As we passed the Isles of Shoals, the captain told us a bit about the islands (although I could scarcely hear him over the sounds of the engine).

It was such a gorgeous day, with the sun blazing above and the horizon swathed in haze, creating a pale shimmering curtain against the blue sky. I always expect the energy of the ocean to be this deep, heavy, mysterious thing, imposing and powerful, and that's how it is with your legs in it on the beach... but out there on the water with the wind and sun and the sparkle of the waves, it just felt free. Light and floaty and untethered.

The first whale we sighted was a fin whale, the second largest creature to ever live on earth. They're the most commonly sighted whale near Jeffery's Ledge, the bountiful feeding area we were exploring. This one was identified as Dingle, a whale they see pretty often. It was so, so huge. Its black back with its small curved fin kept sliding up out of the water and in again as it sent plumes of breath up. The ship turned to keep it in our vision, so we watched it long enough to recognize the extra-arched back that signaled a deep dive. It came up again for several more breaths every five or ten minutes.

After we spent some time with this whale (and a couple of minke whales that we could just see in the distance), we moved along to explore some more.

The next thing we came upon was a surprise: a basking shark. We could see its dorsal fin puttering along (the naturalist narrating the whale watch said that they normally can only see basking sharks on calm days because their fins aren't visible in choppy water). It didn't notice us for a while and so it swam quite close to the boat, and we could see its huge, grey bulk just beneath the surface. Basking sharks are the second largest shark in the world (and they only eat plankton!). It was pretty amazing because the fin whale hadn't gotten close enough to really see any of it except the parts that came out of the water.

Next we encountered another fin whale, Crow. This one came closer and closer, finally close enough that we could see the swoop of paler grey coloring just behind its blowhole. The whale's skin shone a gunmetal color in the sunlight. Then, as we all watched spellbound, it sunk under and resurfaced again right next to the ship. Its fin breaking the surface was incredible to behold. It lifted its head slightly out of the water -- something neither it nor the other fin whale had done -- and the naturalist pointed out its white lower jaw. Fin whales are asymmetrically colored and only the right side of their lower jaw is white. It was so beautiful, so amazing, that it took my breath away. I think it raised its head to get a look at the ship, because it was so close by.

The next whales we saw were both humpbacks <3 And I got a couple of pictures of the first one! This is Patches, a humpback that Granite State Whale Watch sees frequently but hadn't encountered yet this season, so they were really happy to see him.

Here's Patches' back as he started curving for a deep dive.



And here's his beautiful tail!


We got to watch him dive over and over, displaying the unique pattern on his fluke as he went down. When he was at the surface, we could see the most remarkable thing -- his white pectoral fins shone an incandescent green underneath the water. The next one we saw was called Quill, and gave us an equally impressive show. Humpbacks are so lovely -- I would love to see one a little closer <3

Eventually our time was up and we had to turn back. But on the way back, just past the Isles of Shoals, we saw a bunch of harbor porpoises! They were splashing around, feeding, and a flock of gannets were gathered around them. Once or twice we saw their dark silvery backs arch above the water.

Back in Rye Harbor, we talked to the naturalist and some of the interns and adopted a humpback whale, Owl (for Athena).



It was such an experience, full of wonder and amazement. Whales are such beautiful, otherworldly creatures. I want to go on another soon <3

I'm starting to work with tarot again, and I think it's time for my less-used decks to move on to other owners. Is anyone interested? All prices have shipping included.

Llewellyn Tarot - $15
This beautiful tarot is sumptuously illustrated with watercolor paintings of figures from Welsh mythology, including Rhiannon, Bran the Blessed, Myrddin, and Ceridwen. See the Amazon listing here. The price includes a full book, The Llewellyn Companion, that explains the cards and associated mythology.

The condition is like new. The cards aren't even out of order -- I don't think I ever used it. There is no box, though, just the sparkly bag shown below.





Winged Spirit Tarot - $15
This was my first tarot deck, and as such it's gently used (no frayed edges or anything). The illustrations are flowing and starkly outlined, reminiscent of stained glass, and the figures are lithe and dancer-like. Here's the Amazon listing. It comes with the box and a little booklet describing the cards and their meanings.



If you're interested, shoot me an e-mail at elabymoon (at) gmail.com or leave me a comment here :) I'm flexible on the prices too. If you're not interested but you have a few minutes, I would love a signal boost!

<3

For the past few weeks, a Baltimore oriole has been visiting me.

The first time I met him, he was chirping his little birdy head off outside a coworker’s window. Sitting about twenty feet away, I wondered what the sound was, but I was engrossed in work and couldn’t see where it was coming from. My coworker leaned out of her cubicle and hissed, “Katie! Katie! There’s this gold bird outside!”

The windows of our office building are reflective on the outside so that people can’t see in. (We must have privacy as we type away on top-secret insurance documents, I suppose!) Because of this, birds are always mistaking our windows for a twin tree to the ones outside and attempting to land in the reflection. Usually they just skitter along the glass; once in a while, they get a little more forceful.

This particular coworker sits near a big evergreen tree that presses up against the window, and when I answered her summons, I saw a bright orange and black oriole sitting in a branch, inches away from us. Because they can’t see us, birds tend to land on the sill or on close branches and allow us to get a really good look at them.

This one was utterly stunning. His black back was shiny, and the feathers on his breast melted deep yellow to the most vibrant orange. He had bright eyes and a smooth, charcoal-gray beak that he opened to sing for us a melody that would become familiar over the next several days.

I got to know that song very well. Every time I heard a clear “chirp chirp-a CHIRP chirp... chirp!” I’d look around for the oriole, and there he’d be: either sitting in the tree outside my window, jumping about in the bushes right below the stone sill, or perched on the sill itself, his little face peering up at the glass and wondering, as my coworker put it, “Why won’t that handsome bird in there play with me?”

I haven’t seen him for a week. I think perhaps he’s moved on. But it was such a blessing to see him here, up close, in all his dappled night-and-day glory <3

A few weekends ago, we celebrated my dad's birthday at my parents' camp in Roxbury, Maine. It's a beautiful camp -- it's a very small house that someone used to live in all year round, so it has all the amenities like heat and running water :3 And more bathrooms that our house has! XD It's such a cozy, comfy place, and the area is BEAUTIFUL. We drove to a state park one day and I took a whole bunch of pictures.

( Trilliums! :DCollapse )

Sunday I woke up with a sort of “nothing sounds fun to me today” feeling, until Rachel remembered that she wanted to go buy some plants for our offices, and I perked up immediately. She convinced me to leave the house without showering first (always a hard sell) and we ended up running ALL OVER THE WORLD and having many adventures.

First, we went to breakfast at the Wooden Spoon, a little local place that serves platter-sized pancakes, only takes cash, and always has a line out the door. Pancakes, waffles, and the restaurant’s signature grilled cinnamon roll were ruled out because of my decision not to eat eggs, and I instead had a large serving of home fries and their homemade toast. So delicious! We spent breakfast talking about Majora’s Mask and our current troubles at Snowhead Temple.

After breakfast, we stopped at Salmon Falls Stoneware, a local pottery studio that makes really amazing high-quality stuff. I won a gift certificate a few weeks ago at the movies (just by spinning a wheel!) for an oil lamp, and we decided to pick it up. The store and studio are mingled: the front shop has the “best” pottery stacked on shelf after shelf, and a door leads to a labyrinth of rooms of less expensive “seconds” (perfectly sound but the designs are sometimes a little blurred) that merge with shelves of unglazed, drying pottery. It’s so much fun to wander through.

We chose an oil lamp (number 531) in “Mountain Berry” and got a bottle of lamp oil with the gift certificate. We also picked out a coffee mug (number 311) in Blue Green Vine and a beautiful little dish that’s not listed on their website. It’s about four inches across and has scalloped edges and a raised image of a teapot in the middle. It also has a beautiful crackled glaze of blue-green glass around the teapot. We’re going to use it as a tea bag/tea ball holder <3

Then we moved on to the main event! Wentworth Greenhouse :3 It was such a glorious soul-balm to be there among the plants, in the warm, moist air. It seemed like there was no one there when we arrived (it was probably around eleven by then and they were open since eight) but ten or fifteen minutes later, the place suddenly FILLED with people. The greenhouse is mostly a gardening supply store but it also has a large display area, teaches classes, and hosts (or used to host?) the local winter farmer’s market, so it’s a big place. The display area has some of the most lovely exhibits. My favorites are a huge urn overflowing with succulents, some vertical wall-gardens with moss and teeny blobby plants, and an entire bed made from live flowers complete with a leafy patchwork quilt and branches for a canopy. They also have finches <3

Rachel and I wandered among the houseplants for a while and I dithered over choices until we found someone to advise us. Since my office is climate-controlled and I sit right near a window, I had a lot of options. I had pretty much decided on one of the string-of-pearls plants (a succulent) when the guy who was helping us showed us over to the ferns.

FERNS. My heart delights in ferns. He said they were easy to care for, so I looked through them and one delicate, bushy beauty with tiny lobed leaves caught my eye. I picked her up and she was perfect. I felt the kind of love one usually feels toward a small furry animal. We explored a bit more (and I chose a string-of-pearls as well) and we found someone to help us pick out the right size pots. We told her we’d be keeping them in our offices, and when she saw my fern, she said, “Oh, maidenhair ferns are probably the hardest ferns to take care of... I’m not trying to be negative, but are you sure that’s the best choice?” I felt like somebody wanted to take my kitten away. Imagine, if you will, a kind gardener looking concerned and a little chibi Katie hugging a plant and screaming “MINE! MY BABY!”

In fact, what I said was that I wanted to try, so she told me all about how to take care of it. I think I have a good chance of keeping it alive from what she said about placement and watering. It’s so beautiful <3

The gardener repotted our plants for us (for free!) and gave us all sorts of encouraging advice about how to take care of them. It was wonderful. I was so, so elated when we left. We decided to deliver our plants to our offices right then so we wouldn’t have to mess around with them in the cold Monday morning. It was a really good idea – we helped each other carry our pots in, and after we dropped them off at my office, we went to Street for a late lunch (a nifty restaurant in Portsmouth that serves street food from all over the world). We shared a vegan bibimbap and some amazingly good curry fries :3

I’m going to talk about food and my dietary choices :D I’ve learned that food is something that touches people on an extremely personal level, so please know that my decisions, my likes and dislikes, are what’s best for me and only me – I would never want anyone to feel belittled or as if I think they should change their own choices because of what I do. Just sayin’ <3

( DecisionsCollapse )

We had a pretty busy weekend for one where we didn’t have anything planned!

On Friday, our gaming group got together for L5R – always a fun time :3 There were satisfactorily arranged marriages, drug trafficking, a giant freaking oni who very nearly walloped us (but was vanquished thanks to Kyo-san’s two well-placed knife-to-the-nuts thrusts and Kirito-san’s awesome Matsu badassery, set aflame with divine fire by Satomi-san!), and a plan to reinstate the Hare Clan! Hahaha we’re an ambitious bunch XD

We got up on Saturday morning and immediately set to shoveling off the porch roof, which is flattish and was covered by a 3-4 foot snow drift. Heavy snow/freezing rain was forecasted for Saturday night, so all the local radio channels and so forth were telling everyone to clean off their roofs. There have been a lot of collapses lately. We climbed out the temple room window and shoveled and pushed snow off the edges, carefully keeping close to the house wall. It was done in about 40 minutes, much to our relief!

After that we flopped about in exhaustion and played Majora’s Mask until the afternoon, when we ventured out for lunch/dinner at Popover in Epping. I also discovered that I somehow own only one pair of jeans (where did the others GO? O_o) so we went shopping and I got a nice pair for $10 at Marshall’s. It’s getting hard to find the style of jeans I like (i.e. somewhat baggy) since even the supposed “straight leg” jeans at Dress Barn were skin-tight. I also got some dress pants at Dress Barn and they’re very lovely and comfortable, but I discovered today that they have no pockets >_<

We got groceries after lunch and drove home as the snow started. It kept up into the night but didn’t amount to a lot (haha, in comparison to the snow we’ve gotten lately! It was about 5 inches or so).

On Sunday it was WARM WTF (around 40) and the sky was blue and it was GLORIOUS. When we were out at Target in the morning, we saw an entire flock of cedar waxwings in one of the trees – I’ve never seen so many at once before. They’re my favorite birds and they’re so pretty; they remind me of spring and herald good things. I counted 24 in one tiny tree, scarfing down berries, and there was another tree full of them too.

We’ve been watching Flea Market Flip on Netflix and we fell in love with a dresser that one of the teams had decoupaged with old love letters, and we have a beautiful dark wooden desk that we picked up off the side of the road last summer…

So off we went to antique stores to look for letters :3 We didn’t have a ton of luck, but we did find one nice letter dated May, 1890 from a pastor’s wife to a friend describing how her family was settling into their new parsonage after moving. There was a really cute part about how her husband had just gotten a new cart and all she could see when he took off in it was a cloud of dust and pedestrians staring after him “in wonder” XD



We also found some really beautiful postcards with photographs of pretty ladies (actresses, I assume) and flowers. The messages on the postcards are all in French!



The other letters we found weren’t very long so don’t suit our purpose perfectly, but they were cheap so we bought them anyway. I think they were being sold for the stamps on the envelopes (we saw a TON of empty envelopes at the antique stores for stamp collectors). We also got some Easter post cards and a few pretty Valentines. One of the Valentines is from one man (or boy, perhaps) to another <3





I also discovered an interest in Wedgwood pottery. I went to the Wedgwood museum/factory in England when I was there in 2001, and I thought they were pretty then, but I’m especially drawn to the classical imagery now. Most of the jasperware pieces are covered in beautiful classical ladies with flowing hair and dresses, with little winged babies and trees and things. They’re so beautiful and smooth and cameo-ish, like the figures are emerging from within the porcelain. We saw some green and purple pieces (along with the more popular pale blue) that were really stunning. I didn’t buy any, but they ranged from under $10 to over $100 at different antique shops, so there’s a good variety of prices. I want to learn more about the different designs and maybe find a couple that I really love. I don’t have a collector’s instinct but I long to have something to search for when I go antiquing. Letters are definitely going to become something we always look for :)

We didn’t end up finding enough letters to cover the surfaces on the desk that we wanted to decoupage, but we’ve decided not to decoupage it anyway. Instead, we’re going to lay out the letters and post cards and put a slab of clear acrylic over it (like glass). That way, we can swap out letters and things when we find new ones :3

Today has been a perfect Valentine's Day <3

We slept in this morning and I was so excited to give Rachel her gift that I made her put on her glasses and stay in bed and I ran and got it XD I wrote her a poem and inked it on this beautiful brown scrapbook paper with a faded castle in the background, and then I glued it on a border of scrapbook paper covered in faded brown and red embroidered roses. I was rather proud of myself. She loved it <3

Our plan had been to visit Shalimar India for dinner in Portsmouth, but since it was supposed to snow today into tomorrow (TWO MORE FEET WTF) we went for lunch instead. It's our favorite Indian restaurant. We always get the vegetarian dinner for two, which includes the best vegetable soup in the universe, two samosas, two entrees (Rachel had Shalimar Baji and I had Chanaa Masala), rice, raita, naan, and rice pudding with chai for desert. I always bring half home and end up STILL stuffed XD While we ate, we set down in writing our GRAND PLOT for our BJD characters' timeline and the multiple AUs we have going XD We need a freaking flow chart to catalogue everyone's reincarnations/parallel timelines/whatever. We have, let me see -- a Roman incarnation, an Anglo-Saxon incarnation, Council of the Chosen (the circa-2000 vampire-werewolf-paranormal RP monstrosity that started it all, which Rachel and I took part in during college), a secret agent AU (BECAUSE WE SAW KINGSMEN LAST NIGHT AND HOLY CRAP IT WAS MIND-BLOWING), the Pacific Rim AU, Taylan and Dante's recent reboot where they live during an apocalyptic vampire/werewolf war, a post-apocalyptic the-Earth-reclaims-itself world where Aster is from after the end of the vampire/werewolf war, a post-post-apocalyptic scary technology-overrun world where Poppy is from and ultimately where she goes back to become, uh, deified, and finally the mermaid incarnation which takes place AFTER Poppy's final reset of the planet.

HAHAHA BEST VALENTINE'S DAY LUNCH EVER XD

After that, we stopped at Home Goods because Rachel wanted a pretty wooden tray like willow_cabin has to arrange her crystals in, and we ended up getting a couple of really cool things :3 We did find a wooden tray, and we also found two dishes for our altars: Rachel's is silvery-iridescent and kind of shaped like a pyrite sun, and mine looks like greeny-metallic lotus petals. We also got two incredibly awesome teapots: they're both white porcelain, and the body of one is in a basket-weave pattern with a handle like two reeds twined together with a tiny bird on the lid, and the other is shaped like a conch shell. I've never seen a teapot like it. Rachel also got a little sugar dish with a bluebird handle on the lid that she plans to FILL WITH GLITTER. I kid you not. We also got two heart-shaped taper candles that are, as I type, flickering on our dresser-top altars.

We got home just as it started to snow, and I suggested that we swap out some of our less-loved teapots for the new ones. We went through the tea things and set a few items aside for the donation box, and then this led to a whole living-room-wide decluttering. We rearranged three high shelves (one actual shelf and two tops of hutches) and one bookcase. Our collection of lesbian Willow Tree figures got a nice clean space (yeah, I'm sure they're meant to be sisters, but they're ALL LESBIANS IN OUR HOUSE - we have these ones: wifeys, totes girlfriends, not just for sisters, LOL SHE'S MY WIFE NOT MY MOM, and yeah, married).

After a good few hours getting rid of stuff and reorganizing, we took ourselves upstairs and played Fantasy Life all evening :) It's snowing outside and we have nowhere to go tomorrow; it's shaping up to be a great weekend.

Happy Imbolc, my beloved friends <3 We got home from Florida and our joy-filled, relaxing visit to sugarmaplelife this morning around 1:00 a.m., with no flight problems whatsoever on our return trip, and today it's blizzarding again. I need to sit today and reflect on all of the wonderful experiences I had this weekend, but I wanted to share with you a letter I received in my e-mail from my city's mayor. I've always generally approved of him for his politics but I didn't know a lot about him personally, and this letter is at the same time beautiful, inspiring, and touches me as a pagan. What he writes about is very appropriate for Imbolc. I was very impressed when I read it, and it's kind of amazing (and new) to feel an affinity with a political figure like this. He was also New Hampshire's first openly gay mayor, which is just extra wonderful to me <3

The Mayor's Corner

In Memory of City Councilor
Marcel Hebert, Ward 3

Winter can be unforgiving for most of us. The lack of warmth, sunlight and forced hibernation begins to take its toll as storms continue to batter us, and temperatures remain low. However, there is a deeper natural meaning hidden in the darkness of winter if one is only willing to look. Winter is nature's way of forcing us to slow down, recharge our energy, re-evaluate our goals and prepare for the coming rebirth of spring.

It reminds us as we look out our windows or observe through our travels throughout New England, that despite being surrounded by death, warmth and rebirth of life will occur. It is with nature's message that we can be inspired to celebrate life and its brief magical moments, to endure all of its joy, pain and sorrow and yet be thankful for the time we were able to walk with friends and family.

The Somersworth City Council Family, City Manager and I, are saddened by the loss of our colleague, Councilor Marcel Hebert. While the emptiness Marcel leaves behind cannot be replaced, we are blessed by the memories of his humor, wit and dedication to the home we all call Somersworth. It was impossible for anyone who had a conversation with Marcel to not walk away with a smile on their face. It is these memories which will continue the legacy of Councilor Marcel Hebert.

The Tao Te Ching, a classic Chinese text written between the 4th and 6th century BCE, is a base of spiritual guidance, celebration of life and daily wisdom. One of the writings of the Tao speaks of morning. "Greet the dawn. This is your miracle to witness. That is the ultimate beauty. That is sacredness. That is your gift from heaven. That is your omen of prophecy. That is knowledge that life is not futile. That is enlightenment. That is your meaning in life. That is your directive. That is your comfort. That is the solemnity of duty. That is inspiration for compassion. That is the light of the ultimate".

With each and every sunrise, let us not only celebrate the blessing of our life, but the lives of each person who have walked with us on our journey. Let the warmth of the morning remind us of the joys they brought us, and of their dedication and sacrifices. With the promise of a new day, let us rededicate ourselves to living life to the fullest and becoming the keeper for our fellow brethren.

Sincerely,
Mayor Dana Hilliard

I had a really nice, low-key Christmas. We invited my parents over to our house on Christmas Eve and ate delicious appetizers and desserts. We popped Christmas crackers, played with the little toys inside, looked at nineteenth-century photographs of Kittery Point (where my parents and I grew up, not to mention both sides of my family going wayyyy back), and giggled over a Victorian young woman’s health and hygiene guide I borrowed from Rachel’s library.

On Christmas morning, Rachel and I drove over to my parents’ house with three boxes stuffed full of gifts. We ate bagels for breakfast, opened the stockings (a Rachel tradition! My family always opened stockings last, but we converted when Rachel joined us :3), and spent the next several hours opening presents. We open them one at a time so everybody can watch <3 I was very blessed with goodies this year! Here’s a run-down of my favorites:

- Additional RAM for my laptop. It makes SUCH a difference! My laptop only had 2 MB before, and just opening/closing Text Pad was a nightmare. Heaven help me if I wanted to open more than five tabs in Chrome. Now I have 8 MB and things work so much faster. I can actually load multiple .gifs now without Chrome asking me if I want to kill the page!

- Rachel got me a set of Lord of the Rings sampler teas from Adagio <3 <3 <3 IT IS SO COOL. Teas include White Tea of Kings, Elevenses, Wizard’s Grey, Second Breakfast, Barrels of Tea (the only one I’ve tried so far – DELICIOUS), and Enchanted Tea.

- My parents got both of Rachel and me Fantasy Life, a 3DS game that we absolutely adore. It’s a mixture of questing, crafting, and monster-slaying where you’re able to choose a Life (like a profession – I’m a cook right now) and improve at it until you’re a master. You can switch Lives as often as you want so you can experience all of them, and your progress in previous Lives remains the same. The plot is charming and the dialogue is hilarious. I have yet to become frustrated with any aspect of the game, which is really remarkable. I love it <3

- I got two books on Neolithic tombs and monuments, one that explores the spirituality associated with them and one big coffee-table book full of lush photos. I can’t wait to immerse myself in both of them.

- Aster got some really badass new clothes, which you can see on my Flickr. She also got a gorgeous pink/purple galaxy-patterned sweatshirt which I haven’t taken pictures of yet.

- I got a DVD of AKB48’s documentary, To Be Continued, which follows their career throughout 2011. It’s swoonworthy. They’re all so freaking cute. It had a lot of interviews and discussed how they’re encouraged to put their personality into their performance (when most of them assumed they’d have to conform to a specific “idol” image). I don’t know how much of it is fabricated for the fans, but they seem to really care about each other and consider themselves a family.

- Rachel got me several scarves from Mexicali Blues on sale, and they’re soft and happy <3 I’m wrapped in one right now! I also got some flannel-lined khaki pants (man, should’ve worn those today ¬_¬), a sweater, and some socks at the L.L. Bean’s outlet. Yay for discount Bean’s clothes!

- We took advantage of the Fable Tribe closing sale to get a bunch of gorgeous Glamourkins <3 <3 <3

We had snacks for lunch, as usual (chips and dip, devilled eggs, crackers and cheese, and nuts), and lasagna for dinner with my mother’s apple pie afterwards – she makes the best apple pie known to man.

This year, I took the week after Christmas off, for the first time (when we weren’t traveling to Colorado) since I graduated from college. It was PHENOMENAL XD We spent whole days playing Fantasy Life; we visited bead shops and stocked up on varied and nutritious bird food for the finches; we moved a table my dad had fixed up for us from my parents’ basement and set up a new doll photography area; we went to the movies TWICE IN ONE DAY (something I’ve never done before XD Made possible by a movie gift card I won at work and my manager’s holiday Chipotle gift card); we cleaned and rearranged and flopped around doing nothing. I had to go back to work on Friday, but I was one of three people in the office so it didn’t feel like a “real” work day. I haven’t had such a relaxing holiday in a long time :)

I haven't posted anything in my art tumblr for years, but I was struck with the need to do Tolkien fanart and there seems to be a really nice, thriving Silmarillion fandom over there. So I drew a picture of Thranduil. If you like, have a look!

We saw The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies on Tuesday! And as I’m suffering somewhat from post-series withdrawal, I wanted to blather on a bit about it.

I can’t believe it’s over ;_; SILMARILLION MOVIE, ANYONE? RIGHT? RIGHT?
T_T

On the whole, I really enjoyed the Hobbit movies a great deal. They were lighter in tone than the LotR movies (but not as light as the book) and they felt like they kept in the spirit of the other films. In the interest of organization, I think I’ll break this up a bit XD

( Spoilers, natch. And you know how long-winded Tolkien makes me.Collapse )

Happy Solstice and Yule! I wish love and warmth and happiness to all of my friends as the days start to lengthen again and midwinter takes hold <3

Rachel and I had a really nice weekend. On Saturday, we visited some friends in Boston and had a really, really happy and fun time. Our friends down there are such awesome, kind people <3 We drove home in the evening to host a Call of Cthulhu gaming session (Cthultide! :D) and the campaign was predictably insanity-inducing. My character died horribly – run over while trying to get into the escape vehicle, then put out of my misery by my friends-turned-brainedwashed-cult-followers – but there was so much hilarity that I didn’t mind in the least. My character was lots of fun to play: she was a published paranormal nonfiction author who’d had some really creepy shit happen to her, and she was also a technophobe, so I had all sorts of fun pretending not to know how to work the digital camera the GM brought (complete with local photographs as clues!). She also had inherited her grandmother’s pendulum and I used it mostly to my advantage, although for the first hour or two I don’t think I ever rolled under a sixty no matter which dice I used XD

The next morning, we slept until 11:30 (!!! That’s what happens when you’re up until half past two gaming with a tableful of awesome friends and load of delicious desserts :3) and then we ventured out to Trader Joe’s to pick up food for Christmas Eve, which we’re hosting at our house. We were happily surprised to find the mall area much less jam-packed than we expected, but we got our couple of groceries and beat a hasty retreat nonetheless.

When we got home, Rachel worked on sewing projects for Christmas presents and I started making our Solstice feast. Our original plan was potato soup, which we changed to corn chowder thickened with Rachel’s famous Best Mashed Potatoes Ever. I started by washing and peeling the potatoes.



( More photos, dinner, and our ritualCollapse )

I have the day off tomorrow! :D And that is a wonderful thing, because today I helped finish the biggest case at work that I've ever taken part in. It came down to LITERALLY THE LAST MINUTE. I am a noodle-person now. I surely have fewer brain cells than when I woke up this morning.

Tomorrow, I plan on wrapping presents, doing yoga, having lunch with Rachel on campus, and going to oil painting in the evening. My painting teacher is putting on a student art show in January, and I'm going to be in it! I have one painting to put in so far; I hope to finish another, but I'm behind on it because it was too snowy (and I was too peopled-out) to go last week.

I'm very excited for Yule/the Solstice on Sunday. Rachel and I are planning to make a Solstice feast for dinner and then we'll have a ritual with candles and bells.

I think we have all our gifts bought, or at least the materials to make them. The gifts we'll be sending to friends through the mail may be a little late this year ^^;;

The other night, when we were getting the trash and recycling together to put out, Rachel ran and got me and insisted that I come outside with her. I didn't have any socks on but I put my bare feet in my fleecy Bean boots and bundled into a coat and followed her outside. It was cold and the sky was extremely clear, and Rachel showed me how one particularly bright star on the horizon was twinkling, flickering, and visibly changing colors from white to red to blue like a Christmas light. The stars were so bright that we could see the Milky Way. Rachel showed me Orion's bow, which I honestly had never realized was visible before. The stars were so brilliant and flickery, like you could see what they were made of. As I was looking up at them, I saw a shooting star <3

Comings and Goings

Rachel’s parents are visiting us right now, which is really nice <3 Her mum has been out a couple of times this year to handle Gramma stuff, but we haven’t seen her dad for a year and a half, so it’s wonderful to get to spend time with him. He’s currently up north visiting his family and Rachel’s mum is staying with us to visit Gramma, who’s been in the hospital. The poor old lady is just getting more and more confused. She knows who people are (in general) and is fairly calm most of the time, but she’s never quite sure what’s going on or what’s been happening to her at any given moment.

Last night, Rachel’s mum taught us how to make stitched bead stars. It was SO much fun and so easy, and I love how mine came out:



I want to make a million more!

Prehistoric Monuments

Lately I’ve been having a surge of interest in stone-age monuments like Newgrange and Stonehenge. I’ve always felt a connection/fascination with barrows and passage-tombs (I blame Tolkien for terrifying me with them and Brian Froud for telling me faeries live in them). When I was younger, I had a very vivid dream about being inside one. It seems like the less available information there is about a time period, the more I’m interested in it – my favorite part of Anglo-Saxon England takes place before Christianity arrived to help people write things down, and now I’m very interested in prehistoric Britain. I’m especially interested in the monuments that include stone-carvings (like Newgrange has) and ones that were erected to align with the solstices. Learning about the daily lives and religion of the people who built and used these places excites me. I’ve asked for a couple of books for Christmas :3

Rachel’s brother and sister-in-law currently live in England, and we want so desperately to visit them – both to get to see them (which we hardly ever do) and to sightsee. My dream vacation would be a folklore/history/pagan-themed tour of the U.K. It would include visits to so many Neolithic and Anglo-Saxon sites, and probably a great many locals giving me the side-eye for my epic amounts of squee. Newgrange has a lottery where you can be chosen to enter the barrow (!!!!!!!!!!!!) on the winter solstice, when the rising sun illuminates the passage and falls on the spiral-carved stone at the end. SO. AWESOME.

Reading

Because it’s winter and this time of year always gets me in the mood for some Tolkien, I’ve been reading Unfinished Tales, a compilation with notes of some of Tolkien’s unfinished bits of lore. It’s fascinating because it gives little details about the characters and shows how Tolkien’s conception of them changed over the years. I have the vapors for Galadriel, so it’s especially exciting that there’s so much content about her. My favorite bit of knowledge is this:

So, Fëanor, right? Elf of extremely bad judgment who made the Silmarils, shiniest of the shiny gems, and was so possessive of them that he got a large portion of Elves booted out of Valinor and subsequently triggered generations of tragedy and warfare? In those gems, Fëanor captured the light of both of the Trees (the pre-Sun-and-Moon gold and silver trees that lit the world) and he was inspired to create them because Galadriel’s hair was the color of the light of both Trees mixed together. He begged her three times for a lock of hair, just a single strand – but Galadriel told him to get bent because he and his lust for personal glory creeped her out.

AND SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS LATER, SHE GIVES NOT ONE STRAND OF HAIR, BUT THREE… TO A DWARF.

I can just see her graciously handing her gift over to Gimli as the Fellowship depart Lothlorien, and Gimli walking off with little hearts popping over his head while Galadriel turns toward the Halls of Mandos to righteously give Fëanor the finger. As Rachel said when I regaled her with this story: “Wow, long game.” XD

I love that lady.

My birthday was Tuesday, and I’ve had a really wonderful birthday week <3 Rachel gave me one of my presents earlier in November, because I was sad and she wanted to cheer me up. It was an exquisite acorn necklace, made out of a real acorn cap with a droplet of amber-colored glass as the acorn itself. Inside the glass, there’s a beautiful metal oak leaf that’s silver on one side and orange on the other. It’s so lovely, and I cherish it <3

My mum’s birthday was the Friday before (November 14th) so we took her to Dobra Tea in Portland on Sunday for our joint birthdays. They moved to a new location, and while it feels a bit smaller, it’s lighter and more airy because it’s right on the street instead of inside another building with no external windows like it was before. The tea, as always, was perfect. I can’t remember the name of mine, but it was from an island in China with a thousand-year-old tea tradition and a statue of Guan Yin that looks out to sea. I also had warm pitas and goat cheese. Rachel had a spicy Middle Eastern tea with honey and almond milk, with rice Casablanca (rice mixed with fruit, nuts, spices, and honey), and my mum had rose tea and a couscous dish with olives and feta cheese. We perused Mexicali Blues in the Old Port and then headed to Whole Foods (the closest one to us), where we bought some sweets and some things for dinner.

For my birthday, my parents got me some cute tree ornaments and a Blu-ray of the Miku concert I went to in Los Angeles in 2011 (gosh, that long ago!). It’s the Western release so it had English subtitles for the songs, which was beyond wonderful. Along with a really skillful, close-up recording of the concert (*swoons*) it also had a “Making of Mikunopolis” short that had snapshots of Miku doing touristy things in California. ADORABLE. My parents also got me a new pair of black and red plaid pants for Aster <3 She's borrowing Taylan's shirt here.



On my birthday, Rachel woke me up by plomping my gift bag down on the bed beside me and going “Happy birthday, daahling!” like Norma Desmond XD I was still half asleep so I just took one of the wrapped presents out and hugged it and laid back down. But I eventually woke up enough to open them :3 She got me the most wonderful present: recent reprints of Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books, where the original watercolors were scanned using cutting-edge technology to show every bit of detail. Unlike one of the more recent collections of the Flower Fairies poems, which doesn’t reproduce every illustration exactly like the original, the books she got me include all the illustrations in their whole, unedited forms. They’re breathtaking – a perfect combination of botanical drawings and fairy artwork. I’ve started to read the poems to Rachel in bed before we go to sleep, because poetry deserves to be read aloud <3 Rachel also sneakily bought me a beautiful amethyst bracelet with a tree charm at Mexicali Blues when I wasn’t looking XD

It was so nice to get so many Facebook wishes on my birthday. My coworkers brought me whoopee pies and a Barnes and Noble gift card, and after work Rachel and I had dinner at the Olive Garden with my parents as another joint birthday celebration. My parents had another present for me: a delicate necklace with a silver Moon Stick pendant (Sailor Moon’s first weapon/purification item). There are tiny clear gems in the pendant, and it’s the perfect size – identifiable but not gaudy. I love it so much!

On Wednesday, we saw _melisande_, and she gave me a gift card to Michaels so I can buy more oil painting supplies <3 I’ve been feeling a little trepidation about the coming winter and how it’ll effect my mood, and this all was a lovely bright spot in the cold November <3

I started taking an oil painting class in September, and this past Thursday, I signed my first painting! It was thrilling -- everyone clapped for me <3 I enjoy painting with oils so much. I learned to oil paint when I was in elementary school, taking a class in my slightly-crazy painting teacher's breezeway, with the wood stove blazing at all times of the year and unfamiliar junk food piled in bowls. I loved it then, but I don't remember anything I learned, so I found a freestyle painting class about 45 minutes away from our house when I wanted to start again. This class is wonderful, because the students paint whatever they want at their own pace and the teacher walks around the room giving guidance and advice. You come when you can and pay for each session rather than for a series of classes. Mary, my teacher, is a fantastic painter and a very friendly, kind person. The other students are all older than me and are very welcoming. Every night I go is a refreshing, relaxing experience.

I based my first painting on a bunch of different landscape photos I found around the internet. I snapped some cell phone pictures of it every time I made progress, and after I finished, I put them all together to post here!

( Long, loooong images under the cutCollapse )

You may remember back in the spring of 2013 how I posted about discovering that a forest I walked through at work had been bulldozed. A happy consequence of this was that because I was forced to find a new walking route, I found another path through the woods that led to a glorious meadow and pond. For a year and a half, I've walked there almost every day when the weather would allow for it. I've watched it move through the seasons and I know it's a place of magic.

On Friday, after a week of rain, I was going stir crazy at work. I went out for a walk in spite of the chill and drizzle.

And I found yellow POSTED signs at the gate and all over the trees lining the path to the meadow.

They state, in no uncertain terms, that trespassing for any reason is strictly forbidden. I called Rachel and cried and she comforted me and on her suggestion I e-mailed the local development authority (who had posted the signs) to ask if walking there, leaving no litter and disturbing none of the plants and animals, could possibly be allowed. I thought it was a nature preserve. I haven't heard back -- I probably won't -- but I'm not giving up my meadow without even inquiring.

Luckily, unlike my other forest that was torn down, I have many pictures of this forest path and the meadow. It's a breathtaking place.

( Photos under the cut.Collapse )

Rachel and my seventh wedding anniversary was October 6, and this past weekend, we took a little vacation to Boston to celebrate <3 Most years, we go to Rhinebeck to the sheep and wool festival on this weekend in October, but this year we didn't manage to plan early enough and when we tried to book a hotel room, they were ALL sold out T_T It all turned out for the best, though, because we had the most wonderful weekend in Boston.

It didn't start out all that smooth XD Our plan had been to park our car at the train station in Dover on Friday, have my parents drive us to an end of the T line, and take the subway in to our hotel. We'd then take the train home on Sunday and our car would be at the station. However, when my parents were waiting to pick us up at the station lot, we discovered that we would have to pay $0.25 per hour all weekend to park there. It's never cost to park there before. I had forgotten my camera, so we had our parents meet us at our house to drive us down. My mother graciously agreed to pick us up from the train on Sunday <3

We arrived in Boston around 11:30. Even though we couldn't check into our hotel until 3:00, they had a luggage storage service, so we went there to drop off our suitcase - and they let us check in early! It was wonderful to be able to settle into the room before going off our adventure. The hotel was a "boutique hotel" (I'm still not sure what that means) and it was very beautiful and fancy. Everything was nautically themed because it was right near the harbor (very close to the New England Aquarium).

( Cut for such an awful lot of photosCollapse )

One of the reasons I embraced paganism is that I wanted to feel more in touch with the seasons and the turning of the year. When I was little, I imagined the year to be like a circle or clock: Christmas was at 12:00, Easter at 3:00, the Fourth of July at 6:00, and Halloween at 9:00. I was somewhat off, but that’s pretty close to the pagan wheel of the year. As I grew older, I became more and more irked by the calendar definitions of the changeover from season to season. I mean, anybody who’s lived in New England can tell you that it starts to feel like winter WAY before December 21st. I wanted to celebrate the seasons by how they felt, by the changes in the weather and the earth, which is what the seasons actually are. As I learned more about paganism, I looked to the pagan calendar - the solstices and equinoxes and cross-quarter days - to remedy what I felt was erroneous in our secular calendar.

At first, this simply meant shifting the “wheel” in my head, as if I’d taken a circular 12-month calendar and superimposed a translucent circle with quarters for each season on top of it -- with just a 1/8th counterclockwise shift, the first day of winter now lined up with Samhain, the first day of spring with Imbolc, the first of summer with Beltane, and the first of fall with Lughnassa. This fell into place nicely with the old words for Yule and Litha: midwinter and midsummer. In my mind, the 21st of December felt a lot more like the middle of winter than the first day of it, and it made sense that winter would span the lead-up to the longest night of the year and the weeks after, when the sun was starting to return.

This adjustment made the seasons and dates line up a little better and soothed my literal-minded need to categorize things. However, it wasn’t perfect. In New England, it sure doesn’t start feeling like fall at the end of August, nor does the beginning of February feel like the start of spring. Both fall and spring are shorter and the changes in them more rapid than winter and summer are (much to my regret).

This year, I’ve felt particularly attuned to the change of the seasons. It’s not really anything I’ve done differently… I’ve tried to notice every year, but this year I feel like I had more cause or more opportunity to watch the wheel turn. In the spring when I was sick, being outside was one of the only things that made me feel better. At work, there’s a pond behind my office and a swath of long grasses and reeds between the parking lot and the water. I’ve been going out there almost every day, just to stand and breathe in the air and soak up the sun. It’s amazing what you see when you watch something grow over several seasons. I saw the cattails turn from green pencils to brown sausages and then bubble with fluff, wooly seed motes that floated in the air around me on my walk at lunch today. I saw dark purple spears appear at the tips of the long grasses and then bloom like fireworks into burgundy tufts, which have now mellowed to silver-gold. I saw purple crown-vetch replaced by Queen Anne’s lace replaced by asters. I saw butterflies give way to wasps and bumblebees who then made room for dragonflies.

It strikes me now that trying to delineate the seasons, trying to make the dates line up with the changes I see, is just as silly as trying to cram anything else into a neat, easily describable box. The number on the calendar is meaningless, because the shift between seasons is gradual and awe-inspiring and just as much its own “season” as any other. In fact, the time “between” seasons is always my favorite, because I love to watch the changes: to taste that first scent of crisp, dry grass on the air that signals autumn, to see the monarch butterflies appear.

Happy Mabon <3

Tonight we got our Graze boxes in the mail, and we were discussing the contents and whether to keep one with Brazil nuts in (neither of us are big on Brazil nuts).

Rachel: I'll take it. I'll just pick the Brazil nuts out.
Katie: On the bright side, it has pecans. *pronounces it PEE-cans*
R: Do you mean pecans? *pronounces it pick-CAHNS*
K: No, I mean pecans!
R: Is this like that apricot thing? *pronounces it AY-pricot*
K: It's APP-ricot.
R: You're wrong and you know you're wrong so you should feel wrong.
K: *aghast*
R: I… I'm sorry. But you're still wrong.
K: You're just a FOREIGNER.
R: I was BORN here!
K: But you didn't grow up here! Nobody from here says "pee-CAHN" or "AY-pricot".
R: Okay yeah but YOUR FAMILY COME ON. Don't be setting linguistic norms by your weird-ass family!
K: ...You have a point.

So last week, Sailor Moon Crystal wasn't on even though it was two weeks since the last episode, and there was SO MUCH SADNESS LET ME TELL YOU, but this week it was on and that makes up for it!

No spoilers, but I just have to say, for the record: NO WONKY FACES OR DUBIOUS ANIMATION FOR THE PAST TWO WHOLE EPISODES. \o/ The animators were just getting their sea legs. And after this latest one, I'm floating on a cloud of happiness <3

So I've been avidly keeping up with Sailor Moon Crystal, devouring each new episode when it airs, but SOMEHOW I TOTALLY MISSED THIS.

It's the official music video for Momoiro Clover's "MOON PRIDE", the Sailor Moon Crystal theme song. It's fully animated and extremely high-quality (much higher than most of the episodes). I kept seeing all of these gorgeous gifs and wondering where they came from... well, this is it.


*watches it about a skillion times*

Last weekend, Rachel and I went to one of my favorite places in the world: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Rachel’s library has a membership so we can reserve passes to go down there whenever they’re available. Rachel got up early to put the egg strata we’d made the day before in the oven, so it came out hot and smelling delicious when I woke up. She made it using a small loaf of bread we’d bought at the previous weekend’s farmers market and topped it with veggie sausage patties. I usually have to wait a few hours before I want to eat breakfast, but I snarfed this down right after getting up – it was that good <3

We drove down to Boston using a new route, because the last several times we’d gone, the GPS and Rachel’s phone had taken us different circuitous routes every time. This time, we used a freaking map XD And it worked out perfectly. I think it might’ve taken us a bit longer, but the route was simpler and didn’t require that we go all the way downtown first to get to the T station on the north edge of the city. We also went to a different T stop than usual, as recommended by one of Rachel’s coworkers :) It meant we didn’t have to change lines at all and we just had to walk a little ways to get to the museum. We left our house at 9:00 and were through admission by 11:30.

( Explore the museum!Collapse )

I've long had a love affair with poetry. From the moment my mother read me The Hobbit, I was awestruck by the way meter and rhyme can twine together to create this lyrical, evocative thing, like the lovechild of music and prose. For years, I held onto the notion (snob that I was, and still sadly have the capacity to be) that poetry could only be that which has both meter and rhyme. In high school, I was enamored with Edgar Allen Poe, particularly his most musical and metrically perfect poems like "Ulalume" and "Bridal Ballad". In college, I took numerous courses on the Romantics, treasuring especially the storytelling poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads. I came to recognize that poems that didn't rhyme were sometimes even more complexly meaningful than ones that simply sounded beautiful. However, I rejected my professors' assertion – and still do – that a poem that portrays complex ideas necessarily has more value than a simpler poem constructed for the purpose of pleasing the ears.

A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended a poet named Amy Lowell. Lowell was a nature-reverent woman who loved women, writing in the early 20th century. I borrowed a book of her poetry from the library and started to page through it. There was no meter, no rhymes.

And I fell head-over-heels.

I look back with embarrassment on my former belief – if only privately proclaimed – that the only poetry worth reading was that perfectly constructed, metrical rhyming sort. Poetry doesn't need these things to be beautiful, to be valuable, to be a worthwhile pursuit either in reading or writing it. The flexibility of poetry seems uniquely freeing to me: in writing prose stories, I still believe that there are certain elements that must be executed with skill in order for the writing to be high-quality. With poetry, though, anything goes. Even the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalization, which I would never purposefully violate in prose writing, can be stretched or completely ignored when writing poetry. As someone who is frequently paralyzed by self-imposed standards of quality when writing prose, poetry is a delectable escape.

Because of my depression, I had written practically nothing since winter. In May, after the Fairie Festival, I came home and the world was blooming. There was so much beauty, now more easily visible to me with the help of medication and therapy. I had been deeply longing for quite some time for a way to express my adoration and appreciation of nature, but writing stories felt exhausting and pressured, and my attempts at botanical drawing fell short of my standards. As much as I've loved reading poetry, I've very rarely written any, and my prior attempts at perfect meter and rhyme were too constricting for sustained enjoyment.

One day in May I took my notebook and I went out into our yard. I sat down beneath our maple tree, in the grass amongst the clover and phlox and bluets, and I wrote a poem. And then another. They had no meter and no rhyme, just the natural flow with which the words slipped onto the page. Without the goal of writing a certain number of words or setting up a coherent story, and without the confines of meter and rhyme, I could focus on choosing one perfect word after another. Refining the final draft, tweaking each sentence so that it reflects precisely what I mean, has always been my favorite part of writing. When I write poetry, I can do that from the start.

My notebook is slowly filling up with poems. I don't feel pressure to excel when I write them, just the desire to reflect what inspires me. It occurs to me that this is what art is all about, but for so long that's gotten lost in my expectations and yearnings and "I should"s. Predictably, it's helped me write prose again, too. Rachel and I are writing together in the carefree way we used to when we were in college. It's blissful.

It's been forever since I put up a bunch of pictures, but I've been taking them all the while :) I find that I like taking pictures better than I like looking actually through them and uploading them XD Rachel and I have been doing all sorts of happy things together this summer: taking walks in the elegant old Victorian cemetery down the street, going to the beach, seeing fireworks up close and personal at our neighbor's Fourth of July party... and today, we did a little redecorating and rearranging in our bedroom to give it more of a cozy, witchy, magic-cabin-in-the-woods feel.

Lots of pictures ahead!

( Violets, gazebos, waves, and exploding starsCollapse )

I don't think I've EVER been as excited for the premier of a TV show as I was about Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Crystal. Sailor Moon was a huge, huge influence on me as a teenager, second only to Utena, and I still covet my ancient fansubbed tapes. Friendship, love, bravery, acceptance – its merits go on and on. The new series, which doesn't remake the old anime but is rather adapted directly from the manga, aired this Saturday, July 5, at 6 a.m. I watched it Saturday night, palpitating with joy.

Spoilers under the cut :3

( Ima yo, Sailor Moon!Collapse )

I'm not sure if I've squeed here about The Secret of Kells before, but it's one of my favorite animated movies of all time. It's one of the most beautifully imagined and realized things I've ever had the pleasure of setting eyes on. It's about a boy, Brendan, living in a monastery in medieval Ireland, and a faerie girl, Aisling, and how they use the power of the written word to survive a dark, violent time. If you haven't seen it, I highly, highly recommend it. And if you have seen it...

OMG OMG OMG LOOK WHAT THE SAME STUDIO IS RELEASING THIS YEAR :O



It's called Song of the Sea *vibrates with anticipation*

I haven't posted about my new doll, Aster! She's a LUTS Delf Arwen, and she's 58 cm tall -- the biggest addition to our dolly family. I had no idea how big she would really be! She came so quickly (only a month after ordering her!) that I didn't have time to buy or make her any clothes. I did have a wig for her, and I made her a sweater and some pants soon after she arrived, but they're far from the style I envision for her. Hopefully the new wig and clothes that are coming in the mail now will suit her better :3 Even though her temporary clothes aren't perfect, she still looks cute in them and she's just incredibly gorgeous all on her own.

We attended a doll meet in Boston the other weekend and had SO much fun. Everyone was so friendly and it was really nice to talk to other dolly people (and other Vocaloid fans! :D) The next day, Rachel and I decided to do some doll maintenance. I hot-glue sueded Aster's neck joint so her head would pose better, but her other joints were already pretty perfect, and I was afraid adding a layer of hot glue to them would throw off her balance. I started trying out some positions to see if she needed sueding anywhere… and it just seemed natural to put her in all of the poses I've been doing in yoga lately :3

( Nude, bald doll in creative positions aheadCollapse )

I love the internet. I love it to what is sometimes an obsessive degree. I depend on it to distract me. But lately, instead of finding it relaxing, I feel like it dusts me with a vague melancholy, like snow, that grows heavier with accumulation.

I'm going to try an experiment - one week with no internet. No e-mail, LJ, or Tumblr. I'm going to see how it effects my mood, and hopefully the result will be a better way to manage my self-care.

Love you all <3 If you have my cell number, please feel free to call or text. I love to hear from all of you; it's the obsessive refreshing-for-distraction that I'm trying to get away from, not my wonderful online friends <3

I've been taking a lot of walks, since the weather has turned pleasant, and I often take my camera. I thought I'd share some of the pictures I've taken as kind of a "here's what I've been up to lately" :)

( Photos under the cut.Collapse )

I finished my fourth reading of Lady of the Forest <3 I love it. The thing I noticed the most this time was that in my memories, it never had such a coherent story. I remembered the first series of events very clearly, and then the rest of the novel was sort of a blur of dim castles and political machinations and a rather brief sword fight. I'd always thought the parts I remembered took up the first couple of chapters, but in actuality, they span the first three-quarters of the book. All 700 pages takes place over just a handful of days, and events lead from one to another in a very meticulously planned sequence - nothing like the jumble that I vaguely recalled.

The thing that surprised me the most was that it's at least 500 pages before anybody gets to outlawin'. In the back of the book, the author describes how she intends the book to be more of a prequel, explaining how the characters were able to move through the social classes into the positions legend has put them in, which makes sense. It's unfortunate, though, because my favorite things about the Robin Hood legend are the ensemble-cast-outlaw-camaraderie-banter and the gadding about the forest.

Still, the book as a whole is really delightful and incredibly well done. Although Robin bored me at the beginning, he loosens up considerably. Marian is a constant delight - strong, beautiful, believable. The supporting cast is brilliant. The Sheriff of Nottingham is probably the most complex character in the whole thing, and I do appreciate a complex villain :3

( Spoilers under the cut - more specific things I liked and didn't like.Collapse )

I bought the sequel on Sunday and I'm really looking forward to reading it, since it'll likely have more of what you'd normally expect from a Robin Hood story: robbing the rich to feed the poor :3

(We also watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves the other day - but how much I adore that terrible movie is another post XD)

My gastroenterologist is pleased with my improvement, and advised me to keep up what I'm doing for the next six months *headdesk* So much for my assumption that I'd get to add foods back in after a month of the elimination diet. I'll keep avoiding wheat, soy, eggs, and nuts until September. I honestly haven't been feeling as deprived as I would've expected, though. It's hard to find wheat-free baked goods that are also egg-free, but we've found some, and we're prepared to get creative.

Yesterday, there were leftover hotdog buns at a party Rachel's library threw, and she brought them home with the suggestion that we go and feed the ducks today. The idea filled me with delight. Of course, we didn't know WHERE we would find any ducks XD We tried two tidal rivers before we finally gave up and decided to go feed the seagulls instead, but as we drove toward York beach, I thought of one more place to try... When I was a kid, my mom and my grandmother used to take me to this duck pond in York. We'd stop at the Cumberland Farms and buy a loaf of Wonder bread first. One time, as I was standing right up at the fence, an overzealous goose bit my sneaker. Geese are pretty terrifying when you're a toddler. I had no clue if we'd be able to find the place - I hadn't been there in 20 years, if not more. But I knew it was kind of... that way *gestures vaguely to the left of the main road* so we took a random road that looked to lead in the right direction, and THERE IT WAS. I was so impressed with myself that I yelled something to the effect of "FUCK YES!!!!" and startled Rachel XD

The pond was frozen over except for a little open area that was teeming with ducks. The geese were still there (presumably descendants), and today, I hand-fed them pieces of hotdog roll without the slightest danger to my footwear. They were still overzealous. The ducks were mostly Mallards with one or two American Black Ducks mixed in, and even an American Black Duck x Mallard hybrid. Pretty cool!

After that, we drove down to the beach for a picnic, because it was 40 degrees, holy crap. We ate on the Nubble (the local lighthouse) and bird-watched there, too. We saw Buffleheads, Surf Scoters, White-Winged Scoters, Great Cormorants (magnificent!), and - MUCH SQUEALING - Harlequin Ducks! I'd never seen any before, and they're SO pretty.

Rachel and I talked during lunch about how birds for her are like knitting for me - we love them because our wife loves them, and we love to go on outings related to them, even if they're not "our" personal hobby. I'm so lucky <3

The other day when I was feeling sick, Rachel insisted that we watch Robin Hood - the Disney one with the foxes <3 <3 <3 It's really the first Disney movie I can remember watching, and it's always been one of my favorites. It kicked off a bit of a resurgence in my Robin Hood obsession, which is nearly as old as my Lord of the Rings obsession.

It started with the Disney movie when I was very wee, and then the Kevin Costner movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, solidified it. I would've been nine when it came out, and from then on, every one of my daydreams involved archery and tree-houses in Sherwood forest. Around the same time, my mother was reading a book by Jennifer Roberson called Lady of the Forest and, in spite of the fact that it's 761 pages long, I decided I had to read it too. It's classified as a romance novel, but it's really more like 40% romance and 60% political intrigue. The important part is that it became my Robin Hood headcanon for quite a numerous span of years, and even though re-reading it is a pretty big undertaking, I do so every so often.

Aside from the fact that I just adore this book in general, one of the most enjoyable things about it is that every time I read it, I notice something I never noticed before.

When I read it the first time, I was probably somewhere around the age of 10, give or take a few years. The things that stuck out to me were surface-level details about the characters: Marian was very dark of hair and blue of eyes, and Robin was pale pale pale, white-blond. Will Scarlett's wife had been killed by Normans - I reacted with loathing to any mention of Normans for years afterwards. Somebody broke Alan-a-dale's lute. Little John was a giant; Much was a boy they called "simple". The frightening things stuck with me too: Robin's violent flashbacks to the battle of Acre; Marian's scary dream about some unfamiliar monster called a bean sidhe. (Years later, a Brian Froud book supplied the pronunciation - "ban shee" - and my brain exploded.)

The second time I read it (when I was a teenager) well, good heavens - it appears I completely missed the sex the first time around. Even the dreaded bean sidhe nightmare comes right after sex, which my unready brain skipped blithely over. This time, I certainly noticed, and I paid more attention to political plot, which I understood enough of to find incredibly long-winded.

The third time I read it, I was in college. Again, I noticed that the political plot was given as much weight, if not more so, than the romance, but I liked it better this time. I found Robin and his stoic-controlled-angstfulness considerably more tedious than before. But the real revelation this time was about Robin's relationship with Richard the Lionheart, who he followed on crusade. The first time, I completely missed the numerous blatant references to Richard's romantic inclinations toward menfolk. The second time, I noticed them, but what I didn't catch until the third time was that Richard had been interested in Robin, and Robin hadn't been able to return his feelings - and Robin was tormented by this failure to accommodate his sovereign. This reading was, as I dubbed it, the "I couldn't shag my king" reading.

I'm only 120 pages into my fourth reading, and already I'm more interested in Marian and how the women of the story navigate their positions than before. I'm hoping for another massive revelation like "I couldn't shag my king"; we'll see :)

The results from my lactose test are back, and it turns out I'm not lactose intolerant! I was pretty happy to hear that (although I still have no answers about what IS wrong with me). Being able to eat dairy again has made it significantly easier to get protein into my diet.

Last night, Rachel and I went to the live Welcome to Night Vale show in Boston. It was AMAZING. I haven't been to a large fan event like this since Anime Expo in 2011, and this was of a different flavor because anime cons tend to be 90% people under the age of 25. The WTNV show had people of all ages, which was pretty cool. We were at the Berklee Performance Arts Center at the Berklee School of Music, and the theatre was gorgeous. When we arrived there yesterday afternoon, we were peering around, wondering if we were in the right area, looking for our parking garage… and then we realized that ALMOST EVERY person walking down the sidewalk was carrying an instrument, and we knew we were in the right place XD

The show was fantastic - thrilling performances, awesome music, so much thought and care put into the content - and it was such an incredible experience to see and hear something live that had, before, really only existed for me on the internet. The internet used to be such an island, a little secret-club enclave, and these days culture is changing so the internet bleeds into "the real world" faster and faster. I really like that change. Random strangers can come up to you and say "Hey, I bet I don't even have to ask what you're doing here today!" when they see your Night Vale t-shirt, three or four hours before the show. It makes shared experiences so much easier, and allows us to have the in-person feeling of community about something we really love rather than something that's only mildly interesting but conveniently close to where we live.

What better time to write an LJ post than when you're sitting at the gastroenterologist's office, having a lactose intolerance test that entails nothing more than drinking a glass of citrusy liquid and breathing into a bag every couple of hours? We were instructed to bring something to do. There are three other people in the room with me and it's DEAD SILENT.

I've been watching a couple of different anime series lately on Crunchyroll. The unfortunate thing about the evolution of my tastes is that I kind of don't want to watch any anime unless it's got queer characters and they're treated with seriousness and respect, and, uh... yeah. As you can imagine, that narrows things down considerably. The two things that I've been watching are Hourou Musuko (Wandering Son) and Sakura Trick.

Hourou Musuko is by far the higher quality of the two. I can honestly say that it's unique in terms of the anime I've ever heard of - Hourou Musuko is about a trans* girl and a trans* boy who have just entered middle school and are navigating their developing understanding of themselves. This is a purely serious show, and the characters gender identities and sexualities are treated with seriousness and respect and without exploitation, voyeurism, or comic relief. Trans* issues like the difficulty of deciding which bathroom to use and finding chest binders are touched upon if not discussed thoroughly. I honestly never thought I'd see an anime that treated trans* people like actual people who face real difficulty and oppression rather than just a silly side character played for laughs. There's even an adult trans* woman character who is an excellent role model for the younger characters - she's portrayed as just a regular woman with a regular job and a stable, loving relationship. I'm kind of blown away at how well-done this show is (and the animation is gorgeous as well). I don't know how it will end, and I fiercely hope that it's not disappointing, but so far there's been a good balance of showing the difficulties of being trans* while not making the characters out to be tragic and hopelessly doomed to unhappiness.

Sakura Trick is kind of at the other end of the spectrum, but it's also unique in some ways. It's a simple slice-of-life anime comedy with no plot to speak of. It's yuri, and that's pretty much all it is - a half hour of cute schoolgirls kissing. And kissing again. And holding hands, and then kissing some more. What's different about Sakura Trick is that the girls do kiss all the time. There's no teasing about "are they or aren't they?" like so many other yuri shows. There's less skirt-peeking pervyness. There's just girls kissing over and over in every possible situation you can think of. They don't do the "But we're both girls!" thing, either. The two main characters, Haruka and Yuu, just accept that they love each other and like to cuddle and kiss, and the only trepidation or embarrassment they have is worry that they're going to get caught kissing at school (because you should only be studying at school, not because they'll get in trouble for being gay). There's an eye-rolling amount of fanservice (boobie jiggling! Random shots of their thighs!) but it's ignorable. Every episode is complete fluff, but it's really nice to have some fluff aimed at people like me once in a while.

I ended up staying home sick from work on Valentine's Day, and Rachel stayed home with me to take care of me <3 I'm so incredibly lucky to have her. Once I was feeling better, we had a very relaxing day, sleep-filled and movie-filled. And we exchanged our Valentine's Day gifts <3 <3 <3

This year, we both made most of our gifts for each other, and we holed up in separate rooms several times over the past weeks to get things done in secret. We made supply trips alone (we hardly ever run errands alone so that was totally bizarre, in a fun way XD). This is what Rachel made for me. <3



(There were three boxes of Girl Scout Cookies, but the other two are now open and in the freezer XD All to be saved until after our diet experimentation month.)

I've been having trouble sleeping lately, and so Rachel made me a decoupaged bottle covered with tissue paper hearts and filled with little heart-shaped pillows that she'd filled with organic lavender. She actually gave this to me earlier this week so I could use it, and I have one of the pillows inside my pillowcase now. It smells divine.



The biggest and most wonderful surprise of my gift was this set of Glamourkin-inspired pendants that Rachel made for me. I almost exploded from joy when I saw them. I knew she was making something for me with Mod Podge in the studio all of those days, but I had no idea what <3



Each one of them is so perfect. They all mean something special to us or reference something I love: clockwise, there's the Maid Marian one, the Anglo-Saxon poetry one, the writing one, the forest-spirit one, the Anthy one, the sleep-and-portals one, and the one that alludes to the depth of our love, the ocean, and our favorite Project Unicorn story, "Pearls Enough". I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw these <3 <3 <3 I am blessed beyond all measure to call this wonderful woman my wife.

Today, she took me on a Secret Valentine's Day Date. She wouldn't tell me where we were going, just to dress up and that we had reservations at 1:00. We drove through town and into Dover, at which point I was very confused because we'd gone past pretty much all of the establishments IN Dover but we hadn't taken the faster route past the town to any other towns. Then Rachel pulled the car into the Silver Fountain Inn, a beautiful Victorian bed-and-breakfast that we'd passed multiple times and often talked about staying at for a silly one-town-over vacation. It turns out that the Silver Fountain Inn has just started serving afternoon tea <3

It was delicious. We were the only ones in the dining room, and we could sit at any table we liked, so we sat at one of the larger ones with lots of elbow room. The plates were golden and all the teacups and saucers and pots matched. Soothing music played in the background as we drank Subtle Strawberry white tea and ate tropical scones with clotted cream and lemon curd. We were able to get a two-tiered tea sandwich tray (less expensive than the three-tiered one at the other tea house we normally go to, which is also more than an hour away). They made me sandwiches of egg salad and strawberry cream cheese and cucumber with butter to substitute the chicken salad they usually served. We're starting my restricted diet tomorrow so it was extra wonderful to have this today <3 And the house was so beautiful, with curving staircases and hand-painted canvas wall-coverings instead of wallpaper. It was an incredible find and the perfect Valentine's Day date <3 <3 <3

I've been having some stomach trouble over the last several months and the gastroenterologist I'm seeing has asked me to start avoiding dairy, eggs, wheat, soy, and nuts for a month. I know lots of people with varying food habits and choices and restrictions, so I wanted to ask you all for suggestions about anything in these categories that you like to eat.

Since I already don't eat meat, with this dietary change, I'll be eating vegan, wheat-free, soy-free, and nut-free. I'm particularly interested in sources of protein, snacks, and breakfast (I feel like lunch and dinner might be easier).

My wonderful mother has been looking up recipes online for me, but I also wanted to ask all of you, because I know what fabulous cooks some of you are and I'd love to hear any ideas that you have. <3

Thank you! I'm looking forward to seeing if this makes me feel better. I figure it can only make me healthier!

P.S. We watched the "new" Starsky and Hutch movie last night (with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) and I wasn't expecting to like it, but it was really good XD They OBVIOUSLY did their research, apart from the weird personality-switch they inflicted on the boys. I expect they did that because this was their "first meeting" story rather than the "known you for years" era of the show. I was impressed by the homages: we swore that they used the same sets and on-location scenes that were in the show, and there were shots that were straight-up recreations of shots from the openings and stuff. And of course they kept pointing out how much they TOUCH each other XD The cameos were worth the price of the DVD, too. AND THEY HAD THE SWEATER. The horrendous, amazing sweater that Starsky wears in the earlier episodes. I love that sweater.

Last Wednesday, Rachel and Bethany and I went to an event at our town's public library - Paranormal 911. It was a presentation by a paranormal investigation team, a woman (an EMT) and a man (a firefighter) who investigate hauntings with the goal of helping people be comfortable in their homes rather than getting "results" that prove the existence of ghosts. It was a really cool event: the woman was very science-oriented and relied primarily on hard data to draw her conclusions, whereas the man was a Reiki master and described himself as a "sensitive" who drew more on psychic impressions and his understanding of energy. Very Scully and Mulder ^_^ I could have listened to their stories all night. They've investigated a lot of local sites and the woman was an expert and enthusiast in gravestone imagery and death/burial/mourning traditions, so they had a lot of really interesting things to tell us.

We've had a lot of foggy days lately, because it'll snow a lot and then the temperatures will rise and the snow will breathe all of this mist into the air. When we got home from the presentation that night, the full moon was wreathed in an almost rainbow-colored halo. I thought I'd test out my camera's night settings :) And the monopod Rachel got me for Christmas, which is indispensable for taking clear photos at night!



( More under the cut.Collapse )

My favoritest of Etsy shops, The Fable Tribe, just updated today with a series of Doctor Who-themed pendants and blessing bowls. I am SO EXCITED, because not only do I love Doctor Who, but Jenn and Sarah have translated the most inspirational and heart-filling of Doctor Who's themes and messages into poetry on their pendants. I seriously can't imagine any fan creation better.

If you love Doctor Who, check them out! But they're bound to go fast :) There are also pages of wonderful Glamourkins from previous updates, and I took the opportunity of having saved up some money to get some of the older ones I've had my eye on :3

We've had a wonderful Solstice and Christmas season. It seemed to come upon us so fast, but we got organized quickly and I really feel like the gifts we gave and received were meaningful and a good use of our funds. Because I just got my new camera, a lot of the gifts I received were photography-related gear :3 And so I took TONS of pictures.

( Tons of pictures of ornaments, people, and presents.Collapse )

Today I got out of the shower to find my wife seated on the kitchen floor, hacking apart our memory-foam mattress with a giant knife.

She looked up at me and said, "What? You were in the shower! I was bored!"

I asked her kindly, the next time she's bored, to play with the kitties instead of hacking our furniture to pieces XD

You just never know what sights you'll see in this house.

(For the record, the memory-foam mattress is the one from our old full bed, which we rolled up and stored after we got a queen-sized one. Months ago we discussed cutting it up and making floor-cushions out of it. Months ago.)

For my birthday this year (I'm 31, omfg) I asked for donations toward a good camera :3 And using the gifts I got and after saving up a little, I just welcomed home my own Olympus SP-810US! <3 <3 <3 After I bought it, I discovered I'd gotten the same camera as _melisande_ XD I had grilled her about cameras when I was trying to figure out what one to buy, but I didn't remember what model she had - and since I know she did a ton of research before buying hers (and I did as well), I'm pretty confident in my choice!

I've been experimenting with it ever since it arrived in the mail, and today Rachel dropped me off at the cemetery down the street while she did grocery shopping so I could take some pictures of snow-covered gravestones.

( See how I've been experimenting with my camera!Collapse )

Rachel posted recently about our outing on Saturday when we took the dolls out to photograph them in the woods, and I wanted to share a couple more pictures of my girl, Elaine. I took like seven skillion pictures of her so I could be sure I'd have a couple that came out well XD I'm saving up for a new camera, and I can't wait until I get it and we can have two cameras! Then we won't have to keep swapping the camera back and forth.

Also, I need to get poor Elaine some seasonably appropriate clothing XD All she's got are little sun-dresses and short pants (partly because Momocolor's 29cm dolls are slightly taller than most in their size category so the majority of pants are short on them...) She had one sweater that doesn't look too see-through unless you inspect it closely, and she borrowed pants from Lavinia and a hat from the General Knitted Dolly Things Repository. Her only shoes don't fit if she wears socks, so I kept thinking the whole time we were out that she must be freezing to death. This from the girl who, all through high school, changed her American Girl dolls' clothing from light to heavy in the fall and back again in the spring even when she didn't otherwise play with them.

( Pictures under the cut!Collapse )

I know it's normal for peoples likes and dislikes to change over time. For example, I used to hate mushrooms. Now, I rather like 'em! I can't say I'd eat a whole plateful no matter how they were cooked, but I'd even purposefully put them into recipes now. I never really liked tea either, and now I'm absolutely bonkers for it. Along the same lines, I used to be really (really really) into anime, and now I'm only passingly into anime. I'll look at pictures if they come across my Tumblr dash, and I'll watch shows if they're recommended to me or if I know I'll like them, but it's not an all-consuming passion by any stretch of the imagination.

In spite of the fact that I know changes in interests are normal, I'm used to there being things that I've always liked and always will like - things like french fries and Tolkien. But I'm starting to realize, over the last couple of years and especially lately, that there's one thing that I used to adore and now not only am I not really into it, it even sometimes depresses me. And I liked this thing so much that the great majority of my media consumption (and therefore my entertainment, relaxation, and creative pursuits) revolved around it.

This thing is slash.

You understand, if you've been reading my journal for any length of time - particularly during the Holmes Era - that this was a fairly devastating thing to realize. How can I dislike slash? As I so often point out (when people would tell me that they "usually hate slash" but love my fanart), as a lesbian, my life essentially is slash - meaning a same-gender love relationship features heavily into it. But lately, the more potentially slashy pairings I come across in modern media, the more it depresses me.

I ran across the term "queerbaiting" recently. It's used in reference to those shows, movies, books, etc. that tease audiences with the potential of a romantic same-gender relationship but never actualize that relationship. Anime and manga are, and have always been, terribly notorious for this, but it's becoming more prominent in Western media as it becomes more acceptable to acknowledge the existence of same-gender relationships.

This concept pretty well encompasses my current feelings toward slash (when the term refers to potential relationships in fiction, not anybody else's fannish tendencies, which of course I heartily support one's freedom to have). It doesn't bother me so much in fiction that's historical, fantasy, or sci-fi, but I'm finding any contemporary media with slash potential to be more and more depressing. I think this is because in a contemporary story, there's every possibility (from a social and personal-identity-development standpoint) that the characters could be in a romantic relationship but the creators refuse to commit, out of fear of audience rejection or just plain manipulation. And I find that watching such things and picking up on the clues that used to delight me now only makes me sad and frustrated.

This comes with all sorts of complications. For example, I very much believe that two fictional people of the same gender should be able to have a close relationship without it being romantic. It's important to show that that kind of relationship exists in reality too. And I'm sure I could find exceptions to this where the slashiness doesn't give me feelings of despair. But the fact remains that lately, watching shows with extremely high slash potential and no real hope of actualization upsets me. And the fact that it upsets me... upsets me >_< I never used to care whether my favorite OTP had a chance in hell of ever happening in canon. I mean, it was always kind of a given that they didn't. I guess what's changed is that in our world now, the complete absence of established same-gender relationships in media is not a given. And I don't want it to ever be a given again.

I'm sorry to let go of this piece of my fannish history. It's not like I think I'll never get starry-eyed over two same-gender characters in a TV show or movie again, but things have shifted, and while I accept that this is how I feel now, I miss the time when it didn't bother me.