mf

And were too afraid to ask (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala & Sabé
Characters: Padmé Amidala, Sabé (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Drabble, Sex Education
Summary:

Padmé skipped health class and did double diplomacy instead.

*

Come as you are (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Drabble, Yuri, Theology
Summary:

Who the Mother loves; who the Bastard loves.

*



Belated discovery (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Cyteen Series - C. J. Cherryh
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Catlin AC-7892 II/Ariane Emory II
Characters: Ariane Emory II, Catlin AC-7892 I
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

For the prompt, "What took you so long?"

*

Pasta e amore (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: due South
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elaine Besbriss/Francesca Vecchio
Characters: Francesca Vecchio, Elaine Besbriss
Additional Tags: Drabble, Disney References
Summary:

"Aw, c'mon." Frannie holds out a forkful of capellini to Elaine. "We can make it work."

*

Palimpsest of self (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Michael Burnham/Mirror Philippa Georgiou
Characters: Michael Burnham, Mirror Philippa Georgiou
Additional Tags: Drabble, Yuri
Summary:

Michael and Philippa compare scars.

*

Tea, tea, and tea (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Tales of the City Series - Armistead Maupin
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Anna Madrigal & Mary Ann Singleton
Characters: Mary Ann Singleton, Anna Madrigal (Tales of the City)
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

Mary Ann has tea with the landlady.

*

Her favorite curse (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan & Alys Vorpatril
Characters: Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Alys Vorpatril
Additional Tags: Drabble, Sex Education
Summary:

Cordelia wants to go shopping for a different body part this time.

*

Lie down with actresses (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hornblower (TV), Slings & Arrows
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kitty Cobham/Ellen Fanshaw
Characters: Ellen Fanshaw, Kitty Cobham
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

Ellen takes a trip.

*

A union in partition (100 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slings & Arrows
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Anna Conroy/Maria
Characters: Anna Conroy, Maria (Slings & Arrows)
Additional Tags: Drabble, Morning After
Summary:

Anna wakes up.

Ending the month with good news: I've got a new gig. It's full-time and starts on a week where I'll have Friday off, so it'll be an easy adjustment and a decent way to test out if I'm cut for it long-term. Or even medium-term, into the next couple of weeks until the usual receptionist gets back.

I'll be doing scheduling, some emails, some phone calls. Front desk work on the Upper East Side. It'll be easy to get there, and it'll be done indoors and sitting down. I don't think it's going to be all that relaxing and I'm going to have to go back to doing workouts at night in my apartment instead of at the gym for the duration. But it's just for a little while, to see if it's a good fit.

Every time I think, "I need a peer group," I need to remind myself about the various corners of fandom. Escapade is very much made up of my peer group in a not insignificant number of ways, and spending a good chunk of the weekend in such a group's company was a balm. Soothing, comforting. We're of different ages and backgrounds, and we're peers with one another in a way I don't much get in other places.

I even got some practical suggestions for the ongoing job hunt. It always remains to be seen how helpful they are, and the point stands that they're practical, with specific tasks and methods. Another thing to remember: look to one's peers for help. Not for everything, but for many things.

Reading. ( Scalzi, Wells, Gordon + Ziv, Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster )

I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!

Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.

More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.

Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.

Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!

Cooking. Bread? Bread.

Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)

Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.

I received what I'm going to take as a fine compliment today: someone I'd met all of four hours earlier said I sounded like I wrote professionally for magazines and other publications, simply from how I talked.

I've decided it's up there with multiple people - completely independently, several years apart, none of them knowing each other - telling me I speak in real life the way I talk online.

There has been A Great Squawking audible through the open windows for much of the last week. Yesterday A got to witness the source and then this morning so did I.

You see. There is a slightly scruffy, slightly scrawny magpie, which we wouldn't even necessarily have clocked as a juvenile if we'd seen it by itself? But we didn't. What we saw was it being attended by two actually filled-out adult magpies... up to and including it sitting back on its haunches and raising its mouth to the sky and continuing to yell until food was placed in it.

We have also got to watch it hop around in important little circles, intermittently pecking disconsolately at the ground, because apparently this is how the grown-ups make food appear!!! and it has not yet quite managed to work out why It's Not Working for baby, who is a Good Brave Baby who is doing All The Right Things and yet??? no food?????

And now that we have matched the yelling up with the culprit, I am grinning every time I can hear it, not just when it's visible. :)

I ran across this Tumblr post about being entitled to financial compensation for having a visceral reaction to hearing "Carry On My Wayward Son" in public, and I made a silly addition, as one does.

Then something stirred in my deep memory and I remembered I'd made the joke I'd just made before.

Here, this is from my gdocs. It's the first two-and-a-bit pages of a story I wrote in 2012. I have no idea what the plot was going to be.

Title: PTSD Reaction to Sarah McLachlan (abandoned WIP)
Fandom: due South
Pairing: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Rating: Teen and up
Summary: It took Ray two weeks on the trail to feel like if Fraser got abducted by aliens, he wouldn't necessarily die within the next ten minutes.
Notes: This is my experiment with writing a post-Call of the Wild story and I chickened out right when the plot kicks in, but the RayK voice makes me happy.

( It took Ray two weeks on the trail to feel like if Fraser got abducted by aliens, he wouldn't necessarily die within the next ten minutes. It wasn't the best feeling he'd ever had in his life, that dependence on somebody else for stuff like what to eat and how to pee without freezing off the family jewels, but he got used to it, worked through it, and got to thinking about how Fraser'd been depending on him and Vecchio for years for Chicago survival stuff. That thought took the edge off of the sheer unadulterated what the fuck of the Arctic. )

1. Went on an Adventure to post a lost item back to someone (hopefully in time for the next thing they want it for...), and was rewarded with DUCKLINGS.
2. Not too warm to achieve fallback dinner of I Don't Know, Bake A Potato, with the result that we finished the lurking salad leaves and also stuck some of the cook-from-frozen pasteis de nata into the oven once potatoes were done.
3. Ridiculous organic greengrocer had an option on sending us rainbow chard this week, which means I might actually manage to cook one whole new recipe this month (!), which was otherwise... not looking likely. (I have been comprehensively failing to sow any, but there we go.)
4. Went fossicking in sofa to try to at least rationalise my horrid piles. Found one (1) of the two (2) fancy watch chargers I own, and not the one I was expecting to turn up (because I thought I'd probably mislaid it in a field), which hopefully means that given a leeeetle bit more fossicking I might even find the second.
5. Really enjoying playing with pens for the purposes of making notes on the pain reading. (Today has been Mindfulness for Health, with detours to read up more on the gate control and [neuromatrix] theories of pain; I was surprised that Model First Proposed In The 1960s is still apparently more-or-less the best we've got for "how the fuck does psychology and emotional affect and other sensory input actually affect how pain is experienced?")

You Can't Keep Me From Singing by Gordon MacDonald, Jr., a filk of How Can I Keep From Singing.

Reproduced here so if Mudcat keeps being impossible to search, I can find it again:
( Whenever I begin to sing there's rising agitation )

Please let us talk to Kris, Deltarune. It's all I want.

It's very weird to write a fic in which one of the central characters is the player of the game! Obviously it's not possible to write a representation that reflects every player, so how do you approach it?

I've ended up writing someone who's not quite me, but who played the game in a similar way and holds similar attitudes towards it. Hopefully it'll ring reasonably true for other players, or at least not outright ring false. (With the possible exception of the part where I push my 'Kris has an unrequited crush on Noelle' agenda, because I could not resist.)


Title: Communication
Fandom: Deltarune
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2,000
Summary: Kris has a conversation with the soul.
Warnings: Alludes to events and revelations from chapter four of Deltarune.


( Communication )

The thing that's getting to me about my part time gig - more than pretty much anything else - is that I keep having to defer to my client's doctor's appointments and other such obligations. I know how hard it is to get an appointment with a specialist in a reasonable timetable, and adding in factors like her having to schedule a car because she can't use the stairs to get to the subway, it becomes exponentially more difficult to arrange, let alone attend.

It's not the deferring so much as knowing if we met at least twice a week, we could build some momentum on tackling the decades of accumulated legal paperwork and really get going.

If you have had long-term pain, of any kind, for any reason, a component of your pain is neuroplastic. Neurons that fire together wire together: you've had lots of practice at being in pain. This comes down, fundamentally, to how we learn.

Which means that while neuroplastic pain management approaches may very well not solve all of your problems, they'll treat a component of them, and that's worth having -- in exactly the same way that we don't want to e.g. give up painkillers that "take the edge off" but don't solve the whole problem.

(None of this is actually novel except insofar as most education about chronic pain blithely asserts that "most" healing has completed within 3-6 months, so pain persisting beyond that timescale Is Neuroplastic unless you've got cancer we suppose. So in the context of My Project, the framing of "this is an approximately unavoidable complication of your underlying condition that requires active management in its own right" strikes me as important.)

Yesterday was largely a smoothly running operation. Once things got set up, it was easy to tell people to feed the ballot into the scanner until the machine caught it and to wait a moment for the confirmation screen, and being told to wait a moment as part of the general instructions helped people do so. There was a moment someone didn't wait, didn't see he'd marked his ballot badly enough it couldn't be read, and he was thankfully barely out the door for us to get him and tell him to fill out another one.

There was another moment someone used a red privacy sheet instead of a black one, which had us worried for a moment before we found out the only major difference in the sheets is the color and any ballot inside them's good to be accepted. A few affidavit ballots got spat out, and so did some with extra marks. Sometimes a ballot needed to be fed in from the other end to get accepted by the machine, and it never mattered which side faced up.

Setting up the machine was easy, except for the part where someone needed to come and troubleshoot one of them, leaving us to open about 15 minutes behind schedule. It didn't cause a backlog or an issue, and all in all, we serviced just over 1300 people - about the same as the election last November. There were more babies and animals this time, and about the same number of children, but beyond that, the adults of all ages blurred together after a while so I can't speak to the represented demographics. Just that a little over 1300 ballots were processed by all the machines, with people showing up early and still coming in at 8:59PM.

Closing the machine was trickier because while all the steps were direct and granular, there were still moments I wanted to double check a part of the process with someone, and with everyone working on something, nobody could say "I'll be with you in two minutes, hold tight until then," which didn't help. But we got it done, and while we were out a little later than in November, with the sunlight having lasted longer and the day itself being much less stressful, it evened out.

One amusing moment came when someone tried to juggle a paper takeout bag, an iced coffee in a plastic cup, and a ballot, and I told him to put the coffee down onto the floor. Which he did. Something in how I told him to do so had one of the other poll workers laughing throughout the day.

Another amusing moment came in the last fifteen minutes of the day. Someone wanted them to work faster and I said we could glare. They looked away and said sure, and when they looked back, they jumped and cried out - because when they'd looked away, I'd pulled out a hard stare to demonstrate the kind of glaring I was talking about. I broke into laughter and they did, too, but man, what a moment to have.

One other poll worker was reading the Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, which had us talking about systems of power, whether power corrupts or reveals, good research methods, and hypothetical Caro-level biographies we'd like to read. One person said Sacajawea and the LBJ reader said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I told him I'd want to read one on Tom Cruise, which, given it's a theoretical Caro-level biography, would talk about things like the history of cults and the rise and fall of various aspects of the American film industry to give full context the way Caro's LBJ books talks about the daily life of pre-electricity rural Texas and his Robert Moses book talks about the geology of Long Island to help the readers understand where those men were really coming from.

We also speculated on whether someone would get a 51% plurality and secure a spot directly from the ballot box. We chatted about market tonics and sourdough starters and the terroir of wheat. On occasion, one of the voters was upset about the concept of ranked choice voting, and sometimes they voted for one candidate instead of ranking anything and at least one person cast a blank ballot as a political statement. After twelve hours, I stopped saying people could take pens and stickers and simply told them to take pens and stickers. I ate lunch and dinner in a nearby park and otherwise spent most of the unpleasantly hot day in an air-conditioned building.

Overall, while parts of it could've gone better, I had a good enough time I think I'll probably be back in another few months.