quietlymagical

The week's update is happening a day late because... I took a while at the hardware store yesterday, walked home super slowly, and then the bug and I spent all evening playing Chants of Senaar together, with the impulsive young cat alternating slowly between laps. And that is just the kind (and level) of debauchery I can get behind, in this current season of my life.

So, the week.

I read my first real manga that needed to be read from back to front: Uzumaki. Very fun (the big bad is... a spiral?) and good body horror. It took me an embarrassingly long time to see "maki" (as in sushi) hidden inside of "uzumaki" (spiral).

Too many of my friends lost jobs; one quit to escape a shitshow, two more went out together when a local company decided their software didn't need no stinking frontend, and a fourth just got the axe from one half of a husband-and-wife team after the other half had hired her. I feel some kind of survivor's guilt, even though I don't have a tech job anymore either and I'm glad I'm not trying to get one. The whole sector seems to be on fire.

Random good news #1: the bug's kidney stone is out and gone!

Random good news #2: the squirrel has a new puppy! I took the bug to visit her. She seems to have the makings of a sweet doggo, but of course a new puppy is still mayhem; the squirrel family is short on sleep.

Flora: of the five types of plant I put in last week, one of them curled up and died without comment. The others are alive. And the two that I chose most carefully, based on shade requirements, actually seem to be firm and perky after a week in the ground. Nothing exciting like new leaves growing, but they seem at least curious to see what's happening here.

Crossword nerdery:I've been getting more and more into the NYT crosswords. Last Thursday the puzzle constructor put out a call for collaborators, so I emailed (with some nervousness), and he wrote back to me and now we're brainstorming theme ideas together.

I went on two lovely long walks with people, the better one being with apfelsingail to have the best breakfast sandwich of my 2025 along with a tour of the USS Constitution. If any of y'all are anywhere close to Lechmere / Galleria area, go here and try the breakfast pita and thank me later. I've been walking a lot; enough to make my feet feel the burn most days.

The squirrel says I haven't really found the balance between Doing All the Things and Doing None of the Things, and that seems both fair and accurate. I've made some decidedly odd choices, like spending a few hours this week hollowing out a tree stump to make a planter; I think I'm only sticking with it because it's so nice to sit outside listening to a good audiobook and doing something manual. And sometimes I do too much and then crash out early. But... so what, exactly?

sorcyress

It's extra help in the library time!

After the first half of the year, I got rather into the habit of expecting 0-1 students, usually on the low end of that range. But then I've had a few weeks in a row of the pre-calc teachers sending me students to make up tests and things, or do body doubling, and suddenly this week I have _three kids_ hanging out with me. Two are doing tests (one mine, one a pre-calc kid) and the third is finishing up work with me semi-helpfully remembering how limits work.

(I have not yet cynically said "I suppose you can see how often this gets used in the real world" but it's coming)

We're very much at the end of the year, and things are pretty self-paced, which means sometimes in class I can even grade a test or two. Which is good, because the major work task I have right now is, uh, grade all the tests. And everything else that is outstanding. And shake my head and sigh at the students who are obviously using AI, badly. (I miss when they were using photomath badly, at least that wasn't --as I saw someone describe genAI today-- "smarmy").

I had a fourth student arrive! I briefly had FOUR STUDENTS at once which is an absolute record for library help! This was another one of my kiddos even, and I was able to help him grasp the trig stuff he managed to miss entirely, and then throw the test at him to finish up. It will be much more successful than the two days he spent staring at it in a panic because he didn't know any trig.

***

In my real life, I have begun playing Stardew Valley (edit: no spoilers please), and decided it is the Bee's Knees. This shocks basically no one who has ever met me. Am I able to moderate my playing? I will be! But, uh, not quite yet. I need to calm down about it a little bit, or get _really_ strict about playing a day at a time and pausing in between each day to go accomplish real life tasks. (To be clear, I started it on Saturday, and finished the first day of fall yesterday, so we are moving along real nice. But also I did like eighteen hours in two days so UH.)

I'm also doing my reading (I have two days before my check-out pops for Drop of Corruption and I'm only about two thirds done), and getting ready for LCFD weekend quite soon (where hopefully I will not have an infinite amount of grading to do, although I am apparently going direct from work to my ride's house to camp. So I'm packing whatever I haven't already graded! (note to self: This means you'll be packing the work laptop, and shouldn't need to also bring your personal one).

Tonight is the high school graduation, and I've kinda just decided to go direct from school to there. This might be annoying in terms of baggage, but I think it will ultimately be fine. Worst case scenario, someone steals my work bag and I am very sad oh no.

The hardest part about Stardew Valley is that right now it feels _happy_ in a way that means I should probably talk to my therapist. Because Saturday was not otherwise particularly happy, and Sunday was better but also not exactly joyful and HM. What exactly am I looking for here? Control? Simple well definied tasks? An extremely imposed bedtime that I can't avoid no matter what? A morning routine that can always be the same followed by a variety of pleasant ways to spend the afternoon and evening?

(Sunday was good because I was helping LB move, and community is good. It's nice to get to pretend to be butch sometimes, and there was a lot of walking back and forth between old and new houses in pleasant weather. But it was also a lot of social-with-people-I-don't-know which can be fun or can be hard, and LB being extremely efficient which was actually great but then meant everything was done in like...three hours including the eating lunch at the end part. And back into my own head we go!)

***

The real answer is I'm looking for "not being burnt out" and video games can feel like that, kinda sorta sometimes. It is unfortunate that the only real cure for burnout is "rest, prolonged" and I don't get access to that until mid-July. And then I need to figure out the rest of my plans, like when I'm going to Maryland and the like. Sigh.

okay, I think I have figured that out, and also I think I'll be in town for about two weeks, assuming the timing works for my mom. Which means I should definitely _actually see people_ in MD, and also like, I dunno, go to a bells practice? Note to self, send some emails closer to. But as always, it's primarily a chance to hang out with my Cool Mom.

And then I'll have queer Scottish on the 7th, and then two full weeks of very little planned¹, and then into the school year! Huzzah!

***

We keep going. Tonight there might be ice cream. I do like that part.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: I uh. god willing and the creek don't rise, it's very little planned, but that little is a _lot_.

sorcyress

It's not Wednesday, which means it's a day of the week eligible for Wednesday Books. (I don't know why I'm so contrary about this, and I know occasionally I've messed up anyways). It's been a while, let's catch up!

Finished Reading Recently

We left off with me just barely having started Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters. I got through it, but am continuing to feel Pretty Weird about the fact that I don't love the Witches stories nearly as much as I love the Guard stories. I did like all the Scottish-play references, because I am a theatre nerd (even if I'm not that kind of theatre nerd).

I then did a very necessary and very burnt-out reread of all seven Murderbot (by Martha Wells) books in rapid succession. They continue to be Real Fucking Good, and I continue to enjoy having

verdantry to samebrain at and send random screencaps or whatever when I need. Three is still my absolute favourite golden retriever puppy of a character, but I had an unexpectedly positive reaction to 2.0 this time around. The seventh book is still the hardest to read, due to [redacted] but I still love the ending so goddamn much and all the hope for the future it seems to provide. Man these books are good for me.

After I finished Murderbot, I returned to the Disc with the next guards book: Jingo! This uh. This is a book about colonialism and racism and war and UH. Like. UHHHH.

Look, all of Pratchett's stuff has this horrible timeless quality to it --I say horrible, because it's less like "applicable to humans everywhere" and more like "goddamnit, we _still_ have to protest this shit?". And reading a book which is very blatantly drawing some parallels between us, the upstanding white British folk with our stiff upper lips and sensible demeanor, and them, the brown-skinned desert-living barbarians with their foreign ways and horrible traditions......yeeeeah, we still have to protest this shit?

It is nice as hell to watch Vimes annoyedly realize he's being racist and have to figure out how to be Less So. It's _amazing_ to watch him wield his privilege like a weapon, as extensively as humanly possible. The only reason to have power is to help those who don't have it, and Vimes gets that.

I was unexpectedly okay with the haha-very-funny joke of Nobby-the-horrible-gremlin being put into a dress and getting in touch with his feminine side. Like. I mean, there were some parts of it that were transphobe-adjacent, but most of the humour was very solidly on "Nobby Nobbs is a horrible gremlin" and not "men wearing dresses is inherently funny". And honestly, even with the first part, it felt pretty okay to watch him be like "no, it was genuinely good for me to explore my gender by doing some of this"

I've done at least one babysitting of The Local Toddler, so we read a small handful of books --not nearly as many as last time, because we spent most of the day outside at the playgrounds instead. But we got through a few:

Hooray, a pinata! by Elisa Kleven felt _ridiculously_ familiar to me as the kind of neurospice who builds connections with toys and plushies and fictional objects. Very sweet little story!

Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall I have maybe read before? Not sure. It's a trans allegory and it doesn't try to be subtle about it. Reading parts of it really hurts because dannnnngg yeah, it is hard when other people see you in a way that just isn't true.

The Doorbell Rang by Pat Hutchins was entirely forgettable. There's counting. There's a nice cast of multi-racial inoffensive children. There are cookies. Great literature, it is not, but it won't hurt anyone.

Bootsie Barker Bites by Barbara Bottner I read after the toddler was in bed, just finding it on the floor and giving it a shot. And it was _delightful_! It includes a child being belived by their parents about something they find uncomfortable! It includes the triumph of brains over brawn! It includes girl children who are horrible little gremlin bullies! (I mean, obviously we don't like bullies, but dang, it's weirdly refreshing to see visions of bullying that look familiar to my childhood and ALSO let girls be rough and physical and scary sometimes!). It was a fun read and I didn't predict the twist and was pleased when I got to it!

Last thing I've finished reading recently was the entire archive of the webcomic Subnormality. If you've been around the internet for a while, it's the one with too many words and the immortal human-eating Sphinx as a regular character. I'd read batches of it before, but not in ages and ages, and it was nice to see how all the threads warp and weft. It's absolutely pretentious as shit, but still made me cry at least a couple times, and wrapped me up in a general hope for humanity --even when it's being cynical as fuck, it never seems to stop hoping. (The lead singer of the Generals is my favourite character, by far).

Oh, and I don't think I ever properly mentioned it, but I had been reading The Pushcart War aloud to Austin, and did finally finish it. And then quite soon after, observed one of my favourite students holding her own very beloved copy and we had a mutual squee.....and then I learned that apparently subsequent editions have changed the dates of the book to place it "in the future" which makes absolutely zero goddamn sense given that _nothing else is changed_. So her copy, published in like 2014 or so, sets the pushcart war as beginning in 2026 but does not otherwise _remotely_ reimagine a world that is different from the one in my much older copy, which sets the tale in the 1980s.

Currently Reading

I have been a mess with library check-outs and holds and stuff. I have two physical books I really need to return to the library, like, months ago because I'm probably not going to read them at this point, and I have two digital books that I need to re-hold because I didn't manage to get to them when they were checked out to me. Arg!

What I am actually currently reading though is A Drop of Corruption, which is Robert Jackson Bennett's sequel to his excellent The Tainted Cup which I read last year. I'm through the first part and definitely having as much joy about the worldbuilding and any moment Ana is on screen. Din is...going through it, and I hope he works himself out okay. I like that I've observed at least one of the Clues that was later confirmed, although I wasn't nearly smart enough to answer the first mystery that was presented. Anyways, I have like five days before that ebook evaporates, but I think I'm on track. Finding excuses to walk places and read as I do seems to be really helpful for how my brain handles books.

A couple weeks ago, I needed something to read as I walked to (actual in-person!) therapy, so I broke out my Gutenberg ebook of Dracula, and read up to the current day. I think my hope is to actually go ahead and read the whole thing _not_ as a daily, since I haven't managed that either of the previous two years I've been subscribed. But I haven't read anything since, so I'm behind either way. I did get far enough to get to the part where Jonathan is looking out the window and being all "that sure is my host climbing around on the outside of the castle like a big lizard". Delightful!

What I'm Reading Next

More Discworld, probably. I'm currently at a slight loss for specific cravings, although Tho read Scholomance on my recommendation, so maybe I grab that again. I could for reals try Fire Logic (third time's the charm?) or try to get and finish How To Be Perfec.

I should have some free time in mid-to-late August and I'd love to spend some of that doing like...a thorough read-through of the stuff on my bookshelves I've never gotten to. I also had something push the "Transmet?" button in the back of my brain and like ugh, we all know Warren Ellis is a creep and the books have some serious problems, but also I think I was rereading the entire series more often than once a year during the first Tr*mp administation and I'm probably due for more of that.

Yaybooks!

~Sor
MOOP!

sorcyress

Returning to the real world has been rough.

I think part of it is that I didn't sleep well --the whole previous week, I managed to actually get out of bed on the first alarm without hitting snooze multiple times. Today....I did not manage that. Part of the problem is waking up and it being _cold_ and part is just being tired and cranky. But I definitely spent _way_ longer in bed than I should've today.

I did make it to work, and then it took over half an hour to get my 40 copies finished, which like...fucking hell, I wish I worked for a school that had sufficient materials, etc. For all that I'm part of my union's bargaining team, this is really not something that has made it onto the list, because it's just...stupid. It's stupid that we don't have sufficient copiers in my fucking building. At least the one in my wing was even actually working today, just slow as fuck, and being behind literally one other person fucked it all up.

But it was mostly okay, just...braindead. I am burnt out and tired and really want to go back to camp and be at Pinewoods again. I do not want to be in school anymore. The children are tired and I am also tired. I liked the parts where I could do simple mindless physical labour instead of abundant emotional and mental labour.

I'm also just real tired about being _busy_ all the time. I know where my break comes --right after Scottish Sessions-- and there's a _long_ way to go before then. A lot of said way is quite good! But there's a lot of it. Union meetings, dance meetings, eventually preparing my ESCape classes.

Stuff costs energy, especially when the background radiation is _real_ bad right now. I hope I can find the energy I need to do the stuff I want, and I hope you can too.

~Sor

MOOP!

sorcyress

Sunday of work weekend was fine (and complicated and stressful because Mice) but mostly uneventful and my brain went a little sideways for some parts of it, which was not the best. I think maybe the most satisfying part of Sunday --and a little bit of today-- was developing new skills and practicing at them some, and getting reasonably good at them.

The new skill from yesterday was sewing, and specifically doing a very fine whip stitch with almost hidden stitches to get the edge on for a quilt (basting? Is that what it was?) I was taught by Kimberly-(Lucretia's-Mom) who is entirely lovely and was calm, good at teaching, and a lovely conversationalist. I will probably never love sewing, but it's good to remember that it and I can be friends, and it's very good to have chances to learn skills with it sometimes.

The new skill from today was Ditch Digging! Elliot was in charge of doing some path-shaping to get water to travel the correct directions (off the path) and a little bit of berm shaping and the like. My first ditch was, uh, a little too extreme, but I took his good feedback and by the end of it, I think I had a pretty good sense of how to make the path go the ways I wanted it to.

In the afternoon, I did a little bit of other helpful things, and then suddenly was gifted with the truly wonderful present of a working Hobart. Well okay then, I *will* wash the last few dozen loads of dishes, since I don't have to then drag them through the sanitizer as well! Critically, this meant all the flatware, which was going to be _miserable_ to have to drop in the sanitizer and then retrieve. I also now know exactly how many trays are at camp (both the Good Kind and the shitty kind.) The margin is...a _lot_ closer than I would've expected, honestly.

It was _so pleasant_ to spend the last three hours of my work weekend in the kitchen, by myself, just me and the music cranked and the hobart humming along and round after round of dishes. Isaac even brought me some soap so that I wouldn't have to run to Dingle every time I needed to wash my hands between dirty side and clean side. It is good to learn new skills and get better at them! It is also real fucking good to just do skills that I am already competent at and feel like I have good agency for.

It was also really nice to feel like I could make Actually Useful And Sensible Decisions about how to run things through. My only concession to Amanda being the Head Of Kitchen was to send a text being all "I'm doing the rest of them and you can't stop me", I didn't need to ask her for advice because I could think through all the things that needed to happen and just...do them!

Like, there's this thing I do where I be Extremely Confident which dovetails in interesting ways with that thing I do where I be Extremely Nosy About How Everything Everywhere Works. I worry that people might not be standing up to me enough about their own expertise sometimes --like, it is cute for Seramay to defer to me on cabin opening things, he has _way_ more experience doing so than I do! But also, I do have a fair chunk of experience and I tend to be competent in general, so yeah, it's not unreasonable to be all "okay Kat, go get the clotheslines up in the Bamps and the hill, have fun".

Anyways, it felt nice to be helpful (Amanda sent me a very nice text at the end when I was finished) and it was very nice that I got to do a _lot_ of dishwashing which is my absolute favourite job at camp 5ever. I don't mind opening cabins, and digging/carrying/general grounds nonsense is fine. But this particular work weekend I got to send...gods...Okay so like, there were 16 flats of just trays to go through the Hobart and that wasn't even half of what I did today. I probably pushed well over 200 flats through on Saturday? 300 maybe? I wish I had counted, because it was _wonderful_.

*and* I got to fill four fire bins, which is close to half the ones at camp, and is my other favourite job. I loved _so much_ two years ago when I got to do the camp safety audit and I briefly knew where literally every fire extinguisher was at camp. I also love running through and checking the AEDs, although I noted that they weren't up yet for this year.

So yeah, this was a very satisfying work weekend where I did a lot of things I liked, and made some good connections because of it. (I was working with this summer's dishwasher on Saturday and gave her plenty of random advice; this year's potwasher is totally new to camp and I think I left a good impression. And the head cook for the weekend is charming and I think I have successfully charmed them in return).

I really don't want to go back to the real world. LCFD in a couple weeks, which is good, but man, there is a _lot_ of grading between here and there.

~Sor
MOOP!

flexagon

A friend was discussing some bullshit he's dealing with at work (in those terms), and I realized my life is quite low-bullshit at the moment. I guess I expected this, but it's gratifying. The most likely source of bullshit in my life is now probably... me. Me who is definitely going to use every moment of tomorrow in the best possible way, mmhmmm. Me whose hips are definitely going to go forward over my hands, next time I do a straddle jump. Me.

So anyway, the week:

Flora: Went with motyl in the pouring rain to buy native plants on Thursday. The rain persisted and the plants sat by the side of my house getting soaked for a while, but now they are all in the ground, and labeled too! I bought a wide, shallow pot at Pemberton to set on the pipe/drain I found under the dirt, so that we can cover it while not totally losing it again, and one more random (non-native) plant to go in that -- at the plant store I found myself surprised that living things can be so cheap, and then I realized that living things are almost the only self-assembling products out there. So maybe the low prices do make sense.

Fauna: speaking of life in my yard, I had a bit of a Boys Don't Cry moment while feeding my favorite squirrel Wispy. Wispy was eating a nut, sat up while directly facing me, and... Wispy, I don't think you're a girl after all. At least, no squirrel doctor would have said so at your birth. So I've been engaged since then in a slightly creepy quest for firm photographic evidence, but in the meantime I think Wispy is never going to give birth to a litter of adorable black squirrels (sniffle). I will have to wish him well in the mating games if I am to see such babies.

Finished reading, and writing reviews for, The Poppy War and Abundance and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Two of those were audiobooks! Gardening and house projects both help a lot with getting the hours in. As for Abundance: now I am mildly inspired about infrastructure, know more about what "supply-side" economic discussion is about. I also learned that Ronald Reagan shut down a bunch of solar energy programs that had been started in the 1970s (the 70s, ffs!), and we'd probably be way further along now if that hadn't happened. Sigh.

House projects included painting over some chips in the bedroom walls, priming/painting over some knots in the stairwell along with cleaning the stairs and baseboards, taking off even more nasty plastic/tape/adhesive from windows, and installing a new bathroom fan with a lot of care for extra noise & rattles. Now it's quieter and doesn't let weird flakes of gunk fall through from the attic.

One drawing lesson on drawing organic forms. I was supposed to find something mostly based on cylinders, spheres etc but imperfect, and settled on mushrooms, which turn out to be quite fun to draw.

A private lesson with Tiny Coach on Thursday and a group one on Friday just kept blowing my mind.

I didn't know that one can (and maybe should) do the standard upper-back stretch on the wall with... relaxed traps, just leading from the chest. It's hard to be aware enough to get this right, but it feels great when it works.
And I didn't know that one can hypothetically get a good backbendy stretch sitting in a straddle, with pelvis tilted anterior and arms overhead (holding a weight). My body barely goes there, it's so confused, and its confusion is interesting to me because I have all the pieces.

She did a very painful massage thing to my right leg that made a knot deflate almost instantly. After she did it I was able to briefly touch my right elbow to toe for the first time in years, though with a calf twinge.

Overall, I've been having a lovely time of it. My human squirrel has been gone for a long weekend away, but I've been happy and engaged around my home. The bug has a birthday tomorrow and I'm looking forward to celebrating with him, plus there'll be acro practice and a chance to do more house things. But if I want to get there it's time to stop writing, wash the dishes (with the next audiobook) and settle down (with the next paper book).

sorcyress

I am at Pinewoods!

It feels nice to write that for this, the first time in 2025. I am at Pinewoods and I am sitting somewhere quiet and alone and I am about to take my covid test.

(Where that place is? Somewhere with enough wifi to make my computer go. What are you, a cop? If you wanna find all the places at camp that have wifi, you are welcome to, but I'm not gonna make it easy for you because I am a Jerk, tm.)

Anyways, it's just me, my covid test, and a chance to write my words and this is a pattern I got into in 2022 and have never really wanted to leave: the quiet joy of enforced time _by myself_ where I can write my words in the middle of the day instead of trying to do so very _very_ late at night.

I am at Pinewoods for the first time of the year, and I am quite happy, even though it's a different set of people than I mostly know and even though the weather is very damp and kinda grey. But the place is still good. I have chased some dragonflies to try and paparazzi them, I have had good mealtime conversations with people I know and like.

And I have done work, because this is a work weekend! And because I am very good at what I do¹, I got assigned dishes, as in, "wash all of them". Or nearly all of them, we are skipping the camper dishes which don't want to have to be spread out to dry in the same way everything else does because jegus what a pain.

So I did two shifts today with Brenda, who is going to be the Dishwasher for the summer, and it's her Very First Year doing so! She's been a camper dish-helper before (I remember working with her and being pleased) and so it's gonna be a good move up. I think she has a great attitude for it, and got the hang of a lot of things very quickly.

I interspersed actual work things with various ideas and advice as I thought of them, some of which were like "this is technically potwasher advice". And I ran...golly I can't even begin to approximate how many loads through the (only sorta working) Hobart. The Hobart wasn't sanitizing, so part of her clean-side duties² was to run everything from clean-side over to the potwashing sinks, all three of which had been turned into sanitation sinks, and to constantly drop stuff into the solution, and then run it all around the kitchen and stack it...virtually _everywhere_.

It was a lot of fun and we got _so much_ done. Maybe six total hours work? And I got to listen to my music in the first half and her music in the second and that all felt great too.

Of course, having done such an impressive job today, there's hardly any dishes left for tomorrow, so I'll probably be back to normal work weekend tasks, opening cabins and the like. Which is honestly fine, I quite like doing so! Lots of dusting, and wiping things down, and SWEEPING, and if you're lucky, getting to do a windows run.

I'm not sure what the plan for the rest of the night is. I am feeling a little people'd out, which means I don't necessarily want to be SUPER SOCIAL for the entire evening. Maybe I will read a book in a corner, maybe I will draw more pictures (yesterday I drew a dog, link is to Bluesky)

Maybe I will go for a nice stroll between now and dinnertime (which is over an hour, jegus, so late!) because if there's anywhere in the world I enjoy just prowling around by myself, it's camp. Bring my camera, look for bugs, visit Kitty Alone, see the new bathrooms, check in on El Nino, there's lots and lots of good things to do at camp!

Another day and a half of this, and I'm very happy for it. I hope wherever you are, you are also happy!

~Sor

MOOP!

1: I am using this (very common Kat-phrase) as a double meaning right now. Because first I am literally quite good at washing dishes, and second, I am good at working my way into the hearts of The People In Charge in order to get to do the things *I* most want to do. I mean, it helps that the things I want to do are often things that other people don't, but dang, I get away with a lot of special privileges just by being very open about my wants, and wanting weird stuff.

2: Of course I was working dirty side, I nearly always work dirty side, my absolute single favourite job in all of camp is dirty-side at the window as a camper helper. See footnote 1.