leboyfriend was a talented singer and voice actor. evannichols put together this clip, originally recorded in 2008, of leboyfriend playing a Sumerian god for the Ask Dr Eldritch podcast.



I remember the night we recorded that; there was a lot of goofing around and laughter. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

( COVID19, deathCollapse ) This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

( COVID19, expected deathCollapse ) This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Kitty doing what she does best: exactly what she wants.

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Yesterday, @tgarnsl floated the idea that our kitty is actually Napoleon Bonaparte.

Proposition: Kitty is Napoleon

Evidence:

• does what she wants
  
• starts fights
  
• doesn’t listen when she’s told it’s time to stop fighting
  
• still wrangles treats out of people
  
• would probably escape captivity to stir up trouble
  
• needs attention

@grrlpup added this further evidence:

• short!

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gakked from sara

( 20 questions about what life looks like nowCollapse )

Additional questions, courtesy of china_shop:

1a. Are you in a vulnerable category?

No.

19a. Have you run out of anything else?

Eh, anxiety brain likes to yell about how we're nearly out of every blessed random thing that comes to its attention, but the truth is, no, we're not out of anything yet, nor are we in particular danger of running out of anything. (Cross-stitch fabric! it screeches at me, when I have done EXACTLY ONE cross-stitch project in my life, AND I still have scraps from that last project that I could use if I wanted, AND I have enough fiber-crafts supplies in this house to choke a whale if I tried.)

21. Has anything major happened in your life during the rāhui/lockdown?

Nothing, blessedly. If we could just keep having a nice quiet lockdown, that would be swell. *knocks wood*

22. What are you grateful for?

Having employment, and not just for the obvious reasons. If you asked me a month ago if my job would ever be one of the best things about my day, I would have laughed in your face. But during the workday I'm thinking about utterly mundane work things, and anxiety brain doesn't have the idle bandwidth to twiddle at me about crap, it's great.

I'm also grateful to be spending this time with my favourite person, and that none of our parents are in care homes.

23. Is there anything you'll miss about lockdown life?

Not having a commute. Being able to wander into the next room whenever work is stupid or boring, and drop a kiss on the top of grrlpup's head. Working in my jammies with my cat sprawled across my chest (even if I do spend a good deal of time begging her to be less pointy)... Basically, working from home is great, and I am not looking forward to going back to the office again. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Sunday afternoon grrlpup wanted to take the car for a short spin, just to make sure it would start...

Narrator: It did not start.

It's a Prius with a push-button start, not a proper ignition, and pushing the button is mostly just booting-up the computer (rather than anything so crude as starting a physical engine). But the dash-display lights didn't come on, and something in the engine compartment started whining weakly like a deflating balloon. Nothing we did could get it to stop making the deflating-noise, either. Well, fuck. Upside: it's not like we needed to go anywhere anytime soon. We called our next-door-neighbor who's a mechanic, and when he didn't pick up, we called AAA.

I have never seen AAA come so quickly -- I'm guessing there were no other jobs in the queue, and our mechanic was delayed by nothing but travel time. He gave us a jump, he had a look at the battery (original to the car, so maybe getting on toward time to replace it, maybe not), quoted us a fee to replace it (we choked from sticker shock, but I guess everything in this car is going to give us sticker shock), and went on his way.

Whereupon we went for a spin on the interstates in the name of bringing the battery back up to charge.

I have never seen the freeways so empty in this town, excepting at three in the morning, maybe. The over-roadway reader boards that give time-to-arrive estimates all said "STAY HOME, SAVE LIVES" (which is the name of our local stay-at-home order), and the downtown skyscrapers were eerily dark. Lots of storefronts were dark, too -- I never realized I'd never seen the bar on the corner dark at night, until I drove by and it was.

Anyway, we did the big interstate loop instead of the little interstate loop, because we needed the engine to run a certain number of minutes and we were making that good of time on the freeways.

Then we stopped off at the Burgerville drive-through for dinner -- there was a line there, to our surprise, but I guess all takeaway traffic, such as it is, is going through the drive-through right now -- and then we came home. I'm glad I got to see what the city looked like during the shut-down, I guess, but boy, creepy.

So that's our PSA for the week: if you have a car and haven't fired its ignition lately, you might want to do that. This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Hah! I found my seam ripper!

Actually, we think it's grrlpup's seam ripper? But it saves us from having to ask the 10yo boy next door if we can borrow his, so I don't care.

(The 10yo next door would be thrilled to loan me his, I'm sure.) This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

@acdholmesfest revealed today! Way back in January, @capt_facepalm saw that reveals were scheduled for April Fools, and so asked permission to be assigned to herself, as a prank on all the guessers. She succeeded.

My own contribution:

The Taste of Truth, for @colebaltblue
ACD Sherlock Holmes x The Lie Tree (Frances Hardinge)
Holmes/Watson, past Mary Morstan/John Watson
Reichenbach, Magical Realism, Lie Tree AU, Angst with a Happy Ending
25,500 words

Two and a half years after Reichenbach, John Watson discovers the magical tree that caused Holmes to fake his death.

( In which Sanguinity loses her damned mindCollapse )

( Notes about the story properCollapse )

So. That's what I spent February doing: feverishly writing a story, and mumbling vaguely whenever anyone asked what I'd been up to lately. (One day over lunch my coworkers asked what I was writing, and I answered "A novel," not wanting to split hairs about novel/novella. They all thought I was kidding around, and eventually decided that I was actually pulling a Harriet the Spy on them: obviously I was writing down scathing commentary on all their doings. But they never tried to steal my notebook from me to find out, so I left them to their conspiracy theories and wrote the next 200 words of my novella. BECAUSE DAMNIT I HAD 24K WORDS TO WRITE.)

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Today is my friend evannichols's book release day:



He's a dork and I love him.

(His book can be bought here. I'm going to post my Today's Zombie Danger sign on my office door, should I ever go back to my office again.)

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I had a birthday last week! Most of my birthday cards/emails were about the virus, which was kind of annoying and frustrating, but most things nowadays seem to be about the virus, so that's to be expected, I guess. grrlpup got me a work cardigan (in case I ever go back to work again), and also the book that is currently sitting on the hold shelf at the library for me, unable to be picked up.

(The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which some tumblr friends were enthusiastic about. I'm only seventy-odd pages in, but I'm enjoying it.)

Things are mostly fine here. We're both still employed, both working from home, both going on several walks a day to vent anxiety and/or prevent the stir crazies. Sometimes we do yardwork instead. grrlpup spent last weekend going through our pantry, cleaning and reorganizing, and filled a shopping bag of expired food, which we're currently working our way through. (If something smells off, we toss it, but food expiration dates are mostly about flavour and very infrequently about safety.) The other night she made lime shrimp dragon noodles from two of the expired ramen packets, and it was very tasty.

...and it really feels like there isn't much to report. I'm exceedingly grateful that I like my house and my wife so much. I miss petting the neighborhood dogs.

In fact that's one thing I'm very much looking forward to, when this is all over: being able to ask random strangers again, "Can I pet your dog?" This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Earlier today, @grrlpup asked me if I'd record myself reading Daniel Pinkwater's Devil in the Drain -- someone on Twitter needed it, and Mr Pinkwater said he was down with someone recording it for them, and @grrlpup had a copy on her shelf.

I thought it sounded like a fine way to squander an evening.


Devil in the Drain by Daniel Pinkwater, read by @sanguinity

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I got my gift for ACD Holmesfest this morning -- it's a podfic of "So Keen a Sympathy", my very first ACD story, which features Mary Morstan/Kate Whitney, Mary Morstan/John Watson, and John Watson/Sherlock Holmes. (It was also one of my very first forays into romance, too: I remember I almost died of embarassment while writing the hair-brushing scene!)

The podficcer did a lovely job. I put it on my headphones and went for a walk, and it was such a pleasure to hear what they did with the story. My words on the page always seems a poor substitute for the story in my head, but getting to hear someone else's take on it... The story the podficcer told is so much realer than my words on the page ever were, and the story they told was very much the story I meant to tell.

(And it's so interesting to hear all the interpretive choices they made! Because a podfic is very much an adaptation, and there are a slew of artistic choices that a podficcer makes -- how do they choose to give a moment its due weight? And which moments do they think are worthy of that treatment?)

I am very pleased.

Anyway, @acdholmesfest has been posting a work or two a day, and will continue to do so for another week or so. If you're looking for some excellent ACD Canon stories, art, and podfic, do check it out.

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Telecommuting worked for exactly ten minutes, after which I got booted off; I haven't been able to get to even the login page since. Teleconferencing phone lines are also down. I presume the system was never designed to have [unknown but presumably significant percentage] of the agency telecommuting in all at the same time. Team lead is trying to get hold of our boss, but of course our boss is in emergency meetings until who-knows-when.

In the meanwhile, I have been instructed to entertain myself with cat videos until we get word about what they want us to do.

---

I was wondering yesterday whether going to therapy tonight would be a good idea or a bad idea, but yesterday the therapist wrote to say she's cancelling all appointments until she can figure out tele-services. So that's one decision out of my hands. The college down the street where I have alumni privileges has also closed their campus, so there's another one.

This means that all the places I go routinely -- my job, my library, my therapist, my college campus -- are now closed. My one routine destination that is still open is the grocery store. And, I suppose, the public park at the end of the street.

Last night I was feeling a little freaked-out about how everything has turned on its ear nearly overnight, but as I keep reminding myself: this is all preventative.

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@fansathome -- a place for people to share recommendations, fandoms, works, and ways to keep busy while at home!

Also, @acdholmesfest began posting today! Art and fic for ACD Holmes, with a new work posted every day for the next... eighteen days? Or so. I have a work in the collection; guess it if you can!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comments. You may comment there (using OpenID) or here.

Dear Author,

Thank you for writing something for me for unsent_letters_exchange!

The main thing here is to have fun and write the story of your heart -- I'm leaving you a fair amount of latitude to do that. I like characters to be accorded a fair amount of narrative respect (no bashing side-characters, please!), and I subscribe to the belief that historical queer people were pretty resourceful at snatching some happiness for themselves. (I.e., if Hornblower is a miserable git, it's because of his brain chemistry and war trauma, not because historical homophobia prevented queer people from being happy.) If you're writing shipfic, I prefer consensual and reasonably healthy relationships (although Hornblower canon is such a mess I'll cut you a fair amount of slack on the 'healthy' front). Please know that I'm just as happy receiving gen fic, if that's what you'd rather write.


Hornblower - C.S. Forester

( Hornblower - C.S. ForesterCollapse )


Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

( Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan DoyleCollapse )


Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century

( Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd CenturyCollapse )


Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993) aka 1994 Baker Street

( Sherlock Holmes ReturnsCollapse )


Original Work

( Original WorkCollapse )


And I think that's it! If you have questions about my tastes or want to run ideas past someone, grrlpup is a good bet, but please don't feel that's necessary. Go have fun, tell the story you want to tell, and I look forward to reading it!

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I just watched the sunrise from my office window.

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Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, by Michael Helmquist

Marie Equi was been rocking my world lately: she was a Portland lesbian, doctor, abortionist, suffragist, labor activist, and pacifist, who made all kinds of radical trouble at the beginning of the 20th Century.

I first heard about her on a local women's history tour, in which they told the story of her horsewhipping a man in the Dalles in the 1890s: at the tender age of 21, before she was a doctor, Equi was homesteading in the Dalles with her girlfriend Bessie Holcomb. Bessie was a schoolteacher, and the school superintendent — a local minister and scoundrel who was notorious for running real-estate swindles on people back east — stiffed Bessie a year's wages. So Equi went into town, horsewhip in hand, to call the man out. He fled out the back door, but the very eager crowd helped Equi intercept him and the man got his horsewhipping. Afterwards, the triumphant Equi raffled off the horsewhip to successfully pay her court costs and replace Bessie's lost salary.

Which is a wonderful and colorful story, yes? It's the least of what this woman did.

She became a medical doctor, at a time when it was still fairly rare for women to do that, and joined in the emergency relief after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was the only woman among the medicos that went down (iirc, the people organizing the relief efforts didn't want her there, but she bulled her way onto the train anyhow), and she ended up organizing the obstetrics ward, and saved the lives of many mothers and babies who would have died without her. She also got involved with the labor movement, traveling throughout Oregon and Washington on a moment's notice to provide emergency medical care to strikers in the aftermath of police violence. She was quite vocal about local strikes, and would try to foil the arrests of labor speakers -- she once made national news for attacking police with an allegedly poisoned hat pin while demanding the release of a pregnant Native woman (identified in the Oregonian articles as Mrs. O'Connor) who had just been arrested. Equi was a fiery speaker in her own right, and did lots of fundraising for strike and bail funds. Once, in her efforts to evade arrest and finish her damn speech, she borrowed linesman's spurs and climbed a telephone pole to give her speech just above the policemen's reach. (The police tried to conscript the fire department to get her down, but the firefighters were union men, and refused to touch her.) Equi got arrested several times over for labor activism, and likewise was arrested with Margaret Sanger for distributing birth control pamphlets. (She apparently had a love affair with Sanger, too, judging from Equi's letters!) However, she never got arrested for providing abortion services to poor women, which was another injustice she was vocal about -- rich women could de facto get abortion on demand, but not poor women.


(1916 arrest ledger bearing the names of Dr. Marie Equi and Margaret Sanger)

Meanwhile, Equi was in and out of the papers for her relationship with Harriet Speckart, a local heiress who was in the middle of an inheritance fight with her family. Speckart's family asserted that Equi's "influence" over Harriet was a major reason that Harriet shouldn't inherit the family money, and that court case dragged on until 1922, before Harriet finally prevailed. During that long court battle, Equi adopted a daughter — an adoption approved by the courts, despite Equi being an unmarried woman and a known lesbian! — and she and Harriet raised the girl together, Harriet taking informal custody of the girl after she and Equi stopped living together some years later. (Harriet doesn't seem to have been comfortable with Equi's radicalism — at one point Harriet negotiated Equi's release from jail if Equi agreed to leave the state quietly. Unfortunately, no one told Equi about the deal until they were at Union Station. Equi refused to get on the train and marched straight back to jail.)

Predictably, Equi was in the bad books of lumber interests and the FBI, and she vigorously fought back. And not just on her own behalf — there's a story about an activist for Irish independence coming to Equi for help when she was in Portland: federal agents had taken the two hotel rooms that flanked hers and were bugging her room. Equi went to the woman's hotel room, fired shots through the walls into the federal agents' rooms, ripped out the dictaphone, threw it through the transom of one of the feds' rooms, and called in anonymous tips that the agents were consorting with prostitutes in the hotel. Then Equi took the activist home to stay with her instead.

Equi was an outspoken pacifist during WWI, believing the war was imperialist and capitalist and fought on the backs of the poor. Unfortunately, a number of wartime Acts of Congress made it illegal to speak out against the war, and Equi was targeted in a sting operation and charged with sedition. The prosecution actively harassed her and her legal team, planting an undercover operative to get close to Equi and learn her defense strategies. Equi's legal team was able to delay the trial until after the end of the war, but that didn't save her: she still ended up doing time in San Quentin for sedition.

Things weren't the same after that: Equi's health had been damaged by her year in prison, and the Wobblies by that point were on the defensive, fighting for their lives, all their efforts going into fighting anti-syndicalism court cases. After the government crackdown on the socialists, the only radical game in town anymore was the communists, and Equi didn't hold with the communists. So Equi raised her daughter — Speckart had died, so Equi had custody again — raised legal funds for Wobblies, spoke on prison reform, gave shelter to other former activists, and provided down-low abortion services to poor women.

When she died in 1952, she had outlived basically everyone who remembered her sedition trial or her firebrand decades, and all her personal papers were thrown out; the private papers we still have mostly come from the Hoover administration of the FBI, who intercepted and copied all her correspondence for years. While Equi's and Speckart's respective obituaries spoke of them as single women, their daughter knew better: Harriet and Marie are interred together at the Portland Mausoleum, just down the way from me; I'm going to make time to go visit their niches soon.

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For reasons known only to her, Kitty has rejected her heated cat bed. She always forgets about it over the course of the summer and we have to retrain her to it -- put it on the couch between us, where she's sure to find it, then gradually move it off the couch and across the floor to its usual spot in front of the window. We did that this fall, and she was using it for about a month, but now she's rejected it, and no amount of "Remember this? you like it!" prompting from us is having an effect on her. We've laundered it again -- we always launder it at the beginning of the season anyway -- just in case that was putting her off for some reason, but no. Should we spritz it with catnip? I'm at a loss.

This is what she's taken to doing instead:



(This picture is from a couple of mornings ago, but she is in fact doing exactly this as I type.)

I don't object in principle to her sitting on my chest -- or at least, not once she makes herself short enough to see over -- but it does make it hard to drink my coffee. And she gets very interested in my cross-stitch (if I happen to be doing cross-stitch), with predictably unfortunate results. Not to mention the usual problem of I'm too fidgety to be a good cat-lap, and then she gets all pointy in an effort to ride my fidgetiness out, and I get fidgetier because ow, and she gets pointier, and then it ends in tears for everyone.

But not so many tears on her part that she doesn't come right back again.

(Okay, now I've pushed her off elsewhere, because my back was starting to kink.)

---

In other news, over the weekend we went on an alumni field trip to the local waste transfer station, as well as the paint-recycling facility. grrlpup has a write-up-plus-photos. I don't have much to add except that the people in our tour group had obviously zero exposure to industrial facilities -- they were horrified by the manual-labor aspects of paint recycling, and wanted to know how it was possible to find people to staff it. grrlpup and I both did manufacturing production work through our twenties -- I for the whole of my twenties -- and I had been coolly evaluating it against some of the assembly line work I had done. It was annoyingly alienating to hear my alumni group having the vapours about HOW do you ever FIND people willing to do THAT?? Do they get BREAKS? Yes, I get it, the dirtiest you've ever gotten at work is changing the printer toner, nice to know. I've been going to a lot more alumni events this summer and fall (because job-hunting, because tapping your network), but between the classism about industrial work and the purity environmentalism in the van, I was reminded of why I don't emotionally connect with the alumni network very much.

---

NaNo is how I first got into writing, but I've since learned that I'm happier and more consistent writing at a somewhat slower pace than NaNo demands. (My top sustainable speed is about half the NaNo pace.) However, most of my local friends are people I met through NaNo, and several of them are doing a modified NaNo this year, and so I found myself at a write-in yesterday, keeping them company and working on my own projects.

(Kitty is back, angling for chest-space again.
Me: "Ow, pointy! Please don't be pointy. You have to be short. Short. Shorter than that. I can't see over you, short. Okay, that's good." [kiss on her back]
Kitty: [purrs])

...and I don't know where I was going with that, as I've been thoroughly distracted by Kitty. But maybe this would be a good place to plug the Write Every Day community? It roves from one journal to the next, month to month (currently being hosted by silveradept, here's this month's intro post), and you basically comment on the days you write saying that you wrote. The minimum unit of writing is one sentence (also known as an "alibi sentence"), and revision and other writerly activities count, too. It can be a useful way of making sure you make some time for your WIPs every day, with a lot less of the write-or-die pressure of NaNo. I've been doing it since July (with a break in October, because omg, this October!) and I've probably gotten a little bit more written than I might have done without it.

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For starfishstar and other fans of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels:

As My Wimsey Takes Me is a new fortnightly podcast about the Lord Peter Wimsey novels. They're doing the novels chronologically; they've just finished Whose Body? and they'll air the first ep for Clouds of Witness (through Chapter 8) on November 4.

I just listened to the two Whose Body? eps last night, and really enjoyed the range of topics covered, the additional background information for the novel, and the style of the hosts. (I particularly appreciated that the eps were tight and well-planned, while still being conversational!) They're conscientious about not prematurely spoiling the whodunnits, but they do bring up later books in their discussions, particularly when there's a theme or thread that's introduced in the current novel and developed further later. The hosts are obviously fans of the stories, but they're also forthright about things that deserve criticism, such as Sayers' anti-Semitism. I could have followed the podcast without re-reading, but I'm glad I'm reading along: one of the topics for Whose Body? was Sayers' literary style (for example, how and when she chooses to change point-of-view, including her deployment of the two second-person passages), and that discussion was richer for having those details fresh in my mind.

My only real frustration was that it's a podcast, and I couldn't actually join in the nattering. But that's what Dreamwidth is for, I suppose. ;-)

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