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Prison Break FanfictionI write primarily non-shipper general fiction, and some Lincoln/Michael slash pieces as well. Yes, I know they’re brothers… and no, I normally wouldn’t be writing brothercest. That said, if it’s not your thing then please stick to the General Fiction section.

                  Prison Break Gen Fiction                      Prison Break Slash Fiction

Supernatural FanfictionSupernatural also deals with two brothers, who in this case are bound together in the pursuit of demons and vengeance. An excellent overview of this show and its characters can be found here.

                  Supernatural Gen Fiction                      Supernatural Slash Fiction

Other Fanfiction: Iron Man, Die Hard 4, Chuck, White Collar, Burn Notice, Reaper, and more

Original Fiction and Non-Fiction Stories: Miscellaneous Original Fiction // Real LJ Idol Season 8 // LJ Idol Exhibit A // LJ Idol Exhibit B // LJ Idol Season 9 // LJ Idol Friends And Rivals // LJ Idol Season 10 // LJ Idol Prize Fight // LJ Idol Season 11

I finished the Not-A-Hobbit-House about two weeks ago. It was a lot of fun to build, despite some areas that could have been sturdier (the trees!) and some wrong/ambiguous directions. Only missing one piece, a 2x1 flat white tile. I substituted a light gray one I had left over from the Magic Workshop set from a few years back. If I ever make it to the nearby Minifigures store, I'll buy a replacement.

Here's the inside, with the Frodo, Smeagol, and Gandalf mini-figures that HalfshellHusband bought as anniversary gifts to go with the set (which was a Mother's Day gift from our son):


The interior lighting was a missed opportunity in the directions. It's shown as something you "slip" into the middle roof piece after that gets built, but there's no way to do that. You'd have to include it during the build. Too late now! (That's kind of a shaky area of the set). As a result, it's not bright enough to see that this "Dwarf Cabin" (Hobbit House) mysteriously contains a boombox. \o?

This is the view of the rear when the roof is entirely closed. It has 4 hinged pieces that let you open things up, which is pretty neat!


And a view of the front, with the door partly open so you can see inside a little. I left some parts out of the build, namely the giant orange dog (that is completely out-of-scale with the rest of the house) and the signpost that states "Roantic Home." Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! You have to love the Chinese companies who create these knockoffs. They don't fully understand the culture of the target customers, so misspelling aside, it apparently isn't clear that while you might name your home something like "Bag End," you wouldn't post a sign describing they type of home you intend it to be.


All-in-all, I thought this was a terrific set. And while LEGO makes a set for "The Shire" (at $270), it does not make a Hobbit house. Especially not for $36! :D

Why must your love for The Boy come out your teeth?

Stop trying to bite his calves! Weirdo. :O

After a week of hot temperatures, I was able to bike out in the world again. My downstream trip a week ago revealed horrifying areas of stripped-out pavement about 1.5 miles from my first turnaround point. That part of the bike path needed repaving, but the prep-work left scarred, ancient blacktop behind and 4" high bumps going between pavement shifts. Ow, my wrists!

Fortunately, they repaved in the intervening week! Usually, the prep happens and then months go by without follow-up. :O It was nice to have it fixed, since I need the maximum distance there. It limits how much looping I have to do to 1) avoid tons of other people on weekends and 2) keep to the shade as much as possible on hot days. As a bonus, I rode past what looked like a helmet resting on a log on the way back. That was a turtle, and it's been years since I saw one in that area! My only other key sighting down there (decades ago) was a giant, wide pink mouth that I thought must be the world's largest squirrel. Nope— a river otter! I haven't seen one since.

I also went past (and not over) a King snake a couple of weeks ago. It was a handsome specimen that looked exactly like this. It's the first one I've ever seen, and it had the same distinct diamond patterning. There are tons of other pictures online that show versions with more black than cream or with banding instead of the diamond shape. Not honestly sure how those are all the same creature. \o?

For indoor "sightings", I just finished A Taste For Murder (featuring gorgeous Italian scenery and food, and Warren Brown looking like a gone-to-seed Robert Downey Junior). That was fluffy fun. Then I binged No Offence, which I loved. The cast was great (boy, did Viv grow on me) and it has a fun, ceilidh-worthy theme. Now I'm watching I, Jack Wright. Nikki Amurka-Bird is everywhere, somehow.

For those wondering about In The Grey (our last date night, a couple of weeks ago), that was typical Guy Ritchie. Flashy, trashy fun, though Ritchie's habit of previewing his "cleverness" gets old. Too much Eiza Gonzalez and not enough Henry Cavill. Gonzalez was basically the MacGuffin, pretty but forgettable and not a great actress. I see she was also in I Care A Lot, which we just finished, and I didn't even recognize her, so yeah. \o?

All right, back to the weekend chores!

My son and I went for a walk/hike along the parkway on Memorial Day. 6 miles, which I previously would have considered a short hike when I was walking or running at least once a week. Now? My feet were sore by the end of it. But my plantar fasciitis is definitely better, because after a day of rest, my feet were fine.

We saw a coyote, which might have only been our son's second sighting of one? It would have been the first, but there was a coyote on our front lawn a couple of weeks ago. Not good. :(

Tuesday, I was out there biking again, and at my last turnaround point (a nice shady spot), I saw what looked the the biggest, fattest caterpillar ever shuffling across the pavement! When I got closer, I saw that it was a tiny mole. :O I haven't seen a mole since I was a kid, when we were out digging in the yard for one of my dad's interminable child labor projects. Possibly the summer we made a French drain? Anyway, my brother put the shovel in the ground, and it came out with a large mole on top of the dirt. Ewwwww, but those things are ugly. We put it in an empty Folgers coffee can, and my brother later walked it several blocks up the road to release it into the forest patch that abutted our property.

My husband's wildlife sighting beats mine, though. He was out riding his recumbent trike yesterday, and had to slow because a skunk and her babies were crossing the path. He gave them a wide berth, which I think could have ended badly. I would have waited until they were all the way across and out of sight!

Speaking of skunks, I've decided the odor at the downriver spot where I turn around is skunk and not weed. That's because the mystery construction project beyond the clump of tall bushes there has moved much closer, and you can't smoke weed while working construction. Fortunately, the smell has cleared away from the surrounding areas. Nearby, I biked past one of my favorite smells: the sweet, peppery aroma given off by the buds of wild grapes. No idea why they smell like that this time of year, but it's very consistent!

Do you all have plans for the weekend? We're going out for a belated anniversary dinner tonight, and then tomorrow I need to get my new laptop running. Always a chore...

I only work Monday-Thursday, so this would normally be a 4-day weekend for me. I'd thought we might go somewhere for our anniversary, but that was when I thought Memorial Day was NEXT weekend. So, maybe in June?

I feel like I missed most of yesterday, due to filling out Disability Accommodation forms and routing the needed ones to my doctor. What's happening is that my company is demanding people go into the office to work a minimum of twice a week. But after the pandemic, my division (and probably most) shrank the office space and radically changed the environment. Instead of having individual cubicles (which kept getting smaller over the years), the office now consists of rows of long tables with people packed in side-by-side. Most of the employees are software or hardware engineers, so this is the worst possible environment for getting that kind of work done! And with my ADHD, particularly the problem I have with visual distraction, I will not be able to get any work done there. You can use headphones to combat noise distraction, but without high cubicle walls, there's no way to hide the movement of all the people next to, in front of, and behind you. Plus, I don't think you should have to fight an unreasonable office environment just to try to do your job. :( So, I'm requesting to be exempted from the in-office policy and allowed to just continue working from home. Fingers crossed, because otherwise I'll probably have to retire earlier than I want to. :(

For intentional viewing, I recently finished a couple of TV series on Amazon Prime. The first was the one-season New Blood, where the bromance and humor really made the show. The second was In My Skin, a drama set in Wales that involves a teenager trying to cope with high school, a bipolar mother, and a vicious alcoholic father. It was very good, and it was interesting to see the wiry Rhodri Meilir playing another villain (he's also in the first season of Hidden). Now I'm onto A Taste For Murder (scenic fluff set in Capri) and may be continuing with 35 Diwrnod? That last is a Welsh mystery series where the language is entirely Welsh, but you miss part of the dialogue because notifications like "Beti speaking" obscure parts of it. Some idiot missed the fact that if you can't hear WHO is speaking, it's still more important to know what they're saying. \o?

Now I need to do some work on the photo albums before we go out tonight (dinner and In The Grey).

that I can't reliably tell the difference between skunk stink and marijuana smoke when I'm out biking along the parkway. Now I know why people used to call it "skunk weed"!

I biked out in the world just 2 days last week because of heat and wind, and today might be it for this week? Temperatures will drop to more reasonable levels by Saturday, but that could be due to windstorms again. Ugh. Spring in Sacramento is always like this. :(

In book news, I'm currently reading the last of the Station Eternity series. I really enjoy the characters in it, and I'll be sorry when it's over. I recently finished Night Film, which was good but somehow a lot of work (it took me nearly 2 weeks to read it), and These Summer Storms (which I'm going to call a beefed-up romance novel— not one of my genres). Next on the list is Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?, since my hold on it came due. At some point, I'll get back to the Dungeon-Crawler Carl series, but I was hoping to improve my Goodreads stats a little, since the books in that series take awhile. I'm afraid Night Film just made everything worse!

Hobby-wise, I have begun building the Not-A-Hobbit-House set. The Amazon reviews have some complaints about the bricks imploding, so I'm trying to be careful. I hope the main issue was with the indoor tree (!), which is structurally not very sturdy. :O And there's always the question of whether all of the pieces will actually be included, especially since this is a knock-off set...

Our daughter's Mother's Day present finally arrived, and it was a complete surprise! Also very creative, and true to her snarky sense of humor. It's our family, in LEGO people!



She and our son were on the same wavelength: "Do you know what would be funny?" he said during the individual figure unboxing, and it turned out she had thought of the same thing. The short person with the child-sized legs is ME. Because I'm only 5'6" in a family of 5'10", 6'2", and 6'4" giants. :O

The accessories were well-chosen. Our daughter has a camera, our son has a cat, I have a computer, and my husband has a banana. She apparently was laughing herself sick over picking out that banana, too. :D

We've barely crept out of the weather where I have to bike in the garage due to rain or wind, and now we're into the stage where excess heat gets added to the mix. :( By August, a 90- to 94-degree day will not stop me from going outside, but this time of year? I just can't do it.

I managed to get out yesterday (and hit another snake!), and I got out 3 days last week. The first two days went well, Friday not so much. I got a flat tire, and discovered that I could not change it myself! In fact, I had to get help from two different guys working together just to get tire irons under the beaded tire rim to get the inner tube off and replace it with a new one. /o\

This is bad. Everyone knows that Continental tires run tight, but this is on a whole other level. My current ride is a gravel bike that used to have 32c tires on it. I had the shop put on 28c tires a few months ago, because I don't go off-road at all and I'm using it like a road bike. BUT... I now remember that the reason I stopped using 25c tires and went to 26c on my previous road bike was because I couldn't get the 25s on and off without breaking the tire irons. The wheel rims should be the same circumference for ALL of these bikes--only the width should be different. But I wonder if Continental applies some different kind of logic, and shrinks the tire slightly with the decreased width?

I really like the 28s. I'm able to ride faster on them than the 32s. In fact, I had a ride this past month that averaged 16.9mph, and that's the fastest I've ridden in YEARS. Am I going to have to go back up to a larger tire size now? Or can I buy a wire-beaded 28 from a different vendor and see if that works?

My son and I went to Scandia Fun Center and played a couple of rounds of mini-golf before it got too hot. We were both unpredictable and relatively bad, as usual. He got a hole-in-one and shot a few holes under par, but also got a 7 on a couple of them. I managed par or under on a few, but also got 9 on one of the holes, so he managed to beat me. Putting is my nemesis. :O

We were done outside by about 1pm, and went inside to use the free arcade tokens that came with admission. Then we came home, and I got caught up on a couple of chores. Late afternoon, HalfshellHusband and I watched The Proposal, and then all of us watched Moana and ate takeout Thai food for dinner. Our son was the only one who'd seen Moana before. "Meh" to all of the main character's songs, but The Rock's "You're Welcome" was fun and catchy and I loved the crab's Bowie tribute number, "Shiny". Also, the deranged chicken sidekick was hilarious.

Our daughter called in the evening, and it was nice to talk to her (she lives about 12 hours south of here). Then I opened presents, which included a LEGO-style set titled Dwarf Cabin. It is actually a hobbit house, but you have to love the technically non-copyright-infringing name choice. I hope to start it today!