Sunday, June 1st, 2025 12:57 pm
Welcome to June's monthly theme post. This month we're thinking of the smaller areas within a larger space with the theme 'nooks & crannies' - interpret this how you will but a few examples could be little used drawers, shelves you haven't checked through for a while, the space beside a cupboard/chair or behind a seating arrangement.

Basically anywhere that might not get looked at very often will fit the bill for this month - it may be that all the space needs is a clean to be free of dust, or it might actually be an easily forgotten space that we use as a temporary measure for storing things we plan to deal with later - if you are anything like me, they'll be things I've soon forgotten about.

So we'll tackle a different room each week and try to check up on the forgotten spaces or the forgotten clutter. We'll start this week with the bedroom. Here's hoping that unexpectedly most of the spaces will just need a bit of a clean!

Just in case I miss a week or am late posting, here's the monthly plan:

Week 1: Bedroom
Week 2: Kitchen
Week 3: Lounge/Living Room
Week 4: Your choice but could be bathroom/spare room/study/cupboard in the hallway/garage/loft or attic space or even a garden shed! Or if you feel like you're making good progress and would rather revisit one of the earlier rooms that works too.

Have a good month - I'll post as often as I can - tell us how you get on.
Saturday, May 31st, 2025 09:06 pm
Well, the main thing is we’re staying at our current house for the foreseeable future, which is good since we still have quite a bit to clean up before we could ever move. I’m not 100% sure about the Buick, though.

So as far as the garage is concerned, the only thing I’ve gotten rid of is a pitchfork. I know I’ve donated something else from there, but I can’t remember it anymore. I should go through our toolbox before July 21st when Ridwell will collect hand tools. 🧰 Unsure if I’m going to have to wait until it’s cooler to possibly clean out the playhouse. The deck for it is rotting.

I’m contemplating whether I should go through my CD collection. I rarely play them anymore because I don’t have a player near my nightstand or one with a remote like I did decades ago. I could also take the holder over to where the Giving Tree is. I’ll probably try hunting down vinyl versions of most of my CDs, though.
Saturday, May 31st, 2025 06:45 pm
What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?

Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

What do you just want to talk about?

What have you been watching or reading?

Chores and other not-fun things count!

Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky
Saturday, May 31st, 2025 11:21 am
Big BIG doings this month! My decluttering motivation went into overdrive, mostly due to home renovation and shortened timeline for moving.

My bedroom is empty except for my bed, the (empty) hope chest my sister and brother-in-law hand made for me when I was in my teens, and a bureau that was originally part of my parents’ bedroom set. My closet (i.e., wardrobe) has been downsized and neatly organized.

The guest bedroom contains only a bed, an empty chest of drawers (also part of my parents’ bedroom set), a computer desk & chair. The closet is completely empty.

The smallest bedroom was used as a home office/library but now is completely empty, as is the closet in that room. I am using it now as a staging area for packing boxes as I gear up for the future move.

The upstairs, which includes a large family/rec room, a full bathroom, a large bedroom, 3 walk-in closets plus some floored attic space – IS COMPLETELY EMPTY! That space is currently being renovated to make the house more saleable.

• Finished rehoming ALL of my fanzines, nearly 200 in total
• Decluttered a bunch of other fandom treasures and memorabilia – three big boxes
• Gave away my son’s old children’s books, all his art supplies, games and puzzles to neighbors with young children (my son didn’t want any of it) – two boxes worth
• Gave away the last of my jewelry to a niece
• Donated slightly more than 400 books to my local library
• Donated old purses and wallets, kept two purses and one wallet
• Donated/rehomed small decorative household items – four boxes
• Flattened and took a lot of old cardboard boxes to the recycle bin
• Took a nonfunctional old printer to the electronic recycle bin
• Small closet purge – donated four knit tops and two sweaters
• Donated one set of bedroom drapes with matching tiebacks

This was a huge, busy and very successful decluttering month, but there is still more to do, absurd as it seems.

This is such a kind and encouraging community and I am grateful to have a place like this to report on what is – and will continue to be – a physically difficult and emotionally challenging project. And I do hope that my progress might serve as a beacon of hope to everyone who struggles with clutter and downsizing, to see that through baby steps, it totally is possible to reduce your excess possessions down to whatever level is comfortable to you.
Thursday, May 29th, 2025 07:13 pm
Cdramas: I finished watching Blossom | 九重紫 (34 episodes) starring Meng Ziyi and Li Yunrui. It's a historical romance with a fantasy element at the beginning.
I loved it! (Spoilers!) It's a "do over" fantasy where the main character, Dou Zhao, is magically sent back in time and gets the chance to avoid the pitfalls that led to her disastrous marriage and ill fate the first time. This time around she crosses paths with Song Mo, a young general who's drawn to her. There's a good political plot revolving around Song Mo and his complicated family, but the main plot is about how Dou Zhao, aware of how and why her life turned out so horribly the first time, doesn't back down from changing her life this time.

I loved Meng Ziyi and Li Yunrui in this and thought they had great chemistry together. The relationship between Dou Zhao and Song Mo was nicely developed, and when they get together it didn't lose interest for me. They're both strong and supportive of each other, which I loved to see. Dou Zhao also has great female friendships.

The families in this show rank among the most horrible Cdrama families I've ever seen! (Which is saying something.) But what I absolutely loved is that we see the reasons why everyone is the way they are, and some of the reasons are quite poignant. Not all the antagonists get fully fleshed-out backstories, but they all get at least some indication of their motivations, which I really appreciated. I was amazed how I came to see Dou Zhao's scheming stepmother (played by Alina Zhang) as a tragic character after loathing her so much.

Another thing I loved was the dramatic do-over version of Dou Zhao's awful husband and his affair with Dou Zhao's half-sister. That was handled so well and ended up so painfully tragic!

The series has a happy ending for the leads! ♥

The actor Xia Zhiguang was in it as a major side character, so I've started watching The Spirealm, where he's one of the leads. I'm only on episode 4 but I'm finding it interesting so far.

After Blossom, I watched The Story of Pearl Girl | 珠帘玉幕 (40 episodes) starring Zhao Lusi and Liu Yuning. Another historical romance, this one about the rise of Duanwu, a pearl diver, who meets Yan Zijing, a mysterious trader.
I really liked this a lot. A great cast in a high quality production, gorgeous costumes, and an interesting story that grabbed me from the start. (Spoilers!) I want to say I loved it, but unfortunately there are two halves to this drama, and the second half was just not as strong as the first half, although the story as a whole was still interesting. There are some pacing problems in the second half (as well as some disconcerting editing jumps, where things seem to happen out of order), but for me the main problem with the second half is that the focus moves away from Duanwu and Yan Zijing and we seem to spend a lot more time with the villains. Also, unlike Blossom, not all of the antagonists feel well-rounded or sufficiently motivated.

But on the other hand! I loved Duanwu and her growth and strength as she goes from mere survival to pursuing her ambitions. I especially loved how she learns to treat others with kindness, and how that is contrasted against Yan Zijing's obsessive drive for revenge that underlies everything he does. I liked their relationship, and I loved that the set-up for a love triangle where Yan Zijing and Zhang Jinran (played by Tang Xiaotian) compete for Duanwu never really goes anywhere and Zhang Jinran remains a friend to them both. Zhao Lusi is so good in this and I was really impressed with Liu Yuning. (Plus he looks great in the costumes and braided wig. *g*)

There are some great side characters, too. I especially loved Kang Ju, Yan Zijing's right-hand man and confidante. But I have to say, Cui Shijiu (played by Xie Keyin), nearly stole the show with her ruthless determination (and crossdressing swagger). I enjoy stories where two strong, competent women go from enemies to frenemies to wary friends. The drama delivered on that point, but I wasn't crazy about how in the second half both Cui Shijiu and Duanwu seemed more passive and in peril.

I didn't find the ending very sad despite the tragic, doomed romance. Yan Zijing's fate is set up from the moment we meet him and I never really believed it would play out differently. I liked that Duanwu knew and just wanted as much time as they could have together. The very end, where we find out Duanwu went on to become successful for the next 40 years, felt oddly tacked-on but was a nice conclusion to what should've been a story that stayed focused on the female lead and women's empowerment against the odds.

Speaking of Liu Yuning, I'm currently watching The Truth 3 with him, Bai Yu, Zhang Linhe, Dilraba, Jin Jing, and Zhou Keyu. The show is kind of like celebrities doing RPG to solve murder mysteries in escape rooms. It's fun! Loving the costumes this season. ♥ Hope this BlueSky link to Bai Yu's pirate look works. :D

The other Cdrama I finished recently is Love in Pavilion | 淮水竹亭 (36 episodes) starring Zhang Yunlong and Liu Shishi. This is the second series in the "Fox Spirit Matchmaker" xianxia romance trilogy, and I didn't watch the first one but I don't think that would've changed my feelings about this one.
I ended up skimming a lot and only watching it because one of my beloved farmboys, Zhao Yibo, had a supporting role and was surprisingly good in it, I thought. (Spoilers) I started off very frustrated by this drama and ended up losing interest. I tried to find the leads compelling, tried not to be bored by all the effects-heavy swooshing fights, tried to follow the plot through its complex detours and mostly one-dimensional villains. That was a lot of effort and unfortunately I couldn't sustain it. I thought the pacing was slow and the production which was apparently quite expensive didn't look it.

On the plus side, some of the embedded mini-arc stories were interesting (though, to be fair, they were part of why I felt the pacing was so bad). And I own my bias in this, but Zhao Yibo as Li Quzhou brought a welcome liveliness and spark. And his character didn't die! (Though what we see of the end of his story isn't happy, either.) Content warning for ableism in Li Quzhou's storyline.

It ends tragically, which unfortunately I wasn't particularly moved by because I'd lost interest by then. Just not my cup of tea.

Speaking of the farmboys, I found Chen Shaoxi's movie The Midsummer's Voice | 倒仓 on YouTube. I thought it was a well-made coming-of-age story about three friends in a school for traditional opera singers. Shaoxi plays the male lead's friend and though he doesn't get to sing he has a good role. It was interesting and enjoyable.

More speaking of the farmboys: Wang Yang returned as a guest in season 3 and it was wonderful. He seems like a big fan (he wowed them by knowing all of their birth years) and they think he's the bee's knees and cat's pajamas and I was so happy for everyone. ♥___♥ The episode is on YouTube: part 1 and part 2.

I finished reading Golden Terrace, translated by E Danglars.
I enjoyed it so much! (Spoilers) Arranged marriage, yay! I loved the reveals of the characters' feelings for each other, their competence, and the political plot. If anyone ever did a poll for "Cnovel BL couple most likely to switch" I think my vote would go to Yan Xiaohan/Fu Shen, lol.

And in non-Chinese media, I watched Andor season 2.
SO GOOD! (Spoilers!) I rewatched the first season before starting season 2, and season 1 is nearly perfect in my opinion, so I was pretty wary about season 2. But I thought season 2 was almost as good as season 1, and it kept the same feel throughout. Great storytelling and sustained tension. And the cast is so, so good. ♥ Diego Luna.

I wasn't surprised by Brasso's death but it was still a gut punch. *sob* I didn't hate the ending with Bix. I just kept thinking how awful for her, because we know Cassian's never coming back. *sob* (And who knows what happens to the planet she's on...) The whole episode about Kleya and Luthien! And "Who are you?" Wow.

I really appreciated how the force was mentioned and its context. It was a great way of including that part of Star Wars lore but in a way that didn't jerk me out of the very specific worldbuilding of Andor. In the same way, I appreciated seeing the backstory of how K2SO joins Cassian.

I'm so glad season 2 didn't disappoint. I KNOW I will be rewatching it soon.


Chinese language stuff )

There's probably other stuff I'm forgetting. Ah, well.
Thursday, May 29th, 2025 10:41 am
I got to see an Osprey sitting on its nest!

brown and white raptor sits on a nest at the top of a wooden pole

When I came back later to show my partner, we talked to another birder who said this nesting platform has been there for a long time but in past years Ospreys have only stayed for a short time and not fledged any young. This year they've stayed much longer than usual so hopes are high for a baby! The other adult was perched in a tree nearby.

Ospreys eat only fish. (The platform is above a river.) It's interesting that small birds seem to realize they're no threat, and completely ignore them. While we were there, we saw a flock of blackbirds furiously mob and chase away a Cooper's Hawk while the Ospreys calmly looked on.
Wednesday, May 28th, 2025 01:57 pm
Metal From Heaven by August Clarke
I recommend to everyone [personal profile] skygiants' review for a perspective from someone who enjoyed this book more than me. I respected it, but I can't say I liked it. However, it is clear to me that many people would like this very much! A violently purple, ambitious fantasy story about lesbians who hate each other and the workers' revolution (sort of).

I felt like it careened out of its own control around the 2/3 mark (which is also where one can audibly start hearing the Evangelion theme song). However, if you like swirly-marbled psychedelic books with 90s anime antecedents where every character can be described as The [attractiveness adjective] [morality adjective] Lesbian, evil blue tangerines, and other people's trip diaries, this is for you. It's very very different, ambitious, and fresh, which one likes to reward, so I hope it gets lots of attention, even if it wasn't totally for me.


But Not Too Bold, by Hache Pueyo
This was… basically okay. "Lady Mary and Mr. Fox" but lesbian horror-spiders. I appreciated how the Folklore Flavor details were specific in a way that I find sadly uncommon in this species of contemporary "monster" "romance" fantasy. It is stuck halfway between the broad strokes of a fairytale and the demands of a lengthier novella trying to have a mystery plot, and the romance is really just armature.


The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, by Sarah Brooks
This is a blown egg of a book. There's a shell of cool things, like trans-continental trains, eco-horror gaslamp-style, a quasi-Rusalki in ambiguous love with the orphaned Chinese train-foundling, and alt-history, but the shell is all there is. Bombastic but substanceless.


Hopefully in the next few months I will read some new-to-me F/F which I can wholeheartedly love.
Wednesday, May 28th, 2025 02:43 pm


For more details about our trip to this desert (in Russian), see here: https://pilottttt.dreamwidth.org/445028.html
Tuesday, May 27th, 2025 05:52 am
Taken last year, this is pictorial tax for my previous post; this little guy was one of a family headquartered in a vacant lot along one of my habitual shopping routes.





Note the ropes cordoning the space off, as well as the designated perch set up for the owls. In the upper background, across the path, is another staked-off owl nesting site; unusually for birds of prey, Burrowing Owls are social animals who sometimes form communities of multiple families.

(If I’ve slipped into Earnest School Essay Mode, it’s because this is stuff I myself am very much newly learning.)
Monday, May 26th, 2025 12:54 pm
Lizards have been somewhat fewer in the apartment complex than last year, and the other night I learned a possible reason: a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) couple have set up housekeeping on the back lawn next door! (No pictorial tax as yet: their nest, less than five feet from the curb, overlooks a back alley heavily travelled by garbage, service, and delivery vehicles as well as human pedestrians—meaning that they’re probably experiencing botherance enough without amateur paparazzi. (1)

Burrowing Owls are regarded as local mascots and rigorously protected here; standard procedure upon discovering an inhabited burrow is to erect a little designated perch for the owls and cordon it off, crime-scene style, halting any human construction until the young have left the nest.

(1) Rule of thumb is that if the owls are reacting to your presence, you’re too close; the risk of attracting gawkers is one reason that doxxing Burrowing Owls nesting on private property is frowned upon around here. Schools, museums, and other such facilities, however, will encourage on-site nesting, observable by remote cam.

I’m finding varying accounts of how capable they are of digging their own burrows, but certainly the owls prefer the convenience of found housing when they can get it, not only taking over burrows constructed by other animals but occupying such human artifacts as PVC pipes; it’s quite possible to build artificial burrows to attract them.
Sunday, May 25th, 2025 11:12 am
I'm surprisingly annoyed that Mozilla is killing Pocket, given that my personal use case for it is "that's where I throw unread links that I realistically know I'll almost certainly never actually dig up again, thus satisfying the itch of 'but I need to know where it is in case I suddenly have a desperate need to read it'". I've backed up my Pocket data and will presumably never look at it again, but what will I use as bottomless pit now?

Reading: I finished The Incandescent, which was a great read and also a wildly different book from Some Desperate Glory, so hats off to Emily Tesh's range! Now I'm a couple of chapters into Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice.

I'm also still working my way through Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

Watching: [personal profile] scruloose and I are caught up on Murderbot and (until tonight) The Last of Us, and have finished The Pitt, which was, as advertised, fantastic. (Medical shows are so very not my genre that I don't have anything to compare it to; I think the only other one I've seen is Scrubs, manymany years ago.)

I duly read through the trivia section and whatnot on IMDb and saw when season 2 is apparently going to be set, and I think that's more months into the future that the newbie!doctors' ER rotation will last? (Have I successfully absorbed the terms for the various levels of doctors in an ER? No. >.<) That's a bit of an upsetting prospect, since Mel is my favorite (and [personal profile] scruloose's, and probably unsurprising for either of us). But I haven't read much else about the show at this point.

EXCEPT! I did remember that Sarah Kurchak [standard disclaimer: friend] wrote an article about Mel for Time last month, so I've read and can recommend that: "The Pitt’s Dr. Mel King Is a Small but Meaningful Step Forward for Neurodivergence Onscreen".

So now we have one episode left of TLoU, and odds are good we'll shift back to Kingdom for season 2, but Kingdom's seasons are very short, so we'll be back on the "what to watch now?" train relatively soon.

(Wheel of Time fans, I'm so sorry about the show's cancellation. :( On a personal level, I guess it pretty much guarantees that we're not going to go back and resume season 3 from where we drifted off after the first couple of episodes.)
Sunday, May 25th, 2025 04:44 am
The end of May is fast approaching and so this week we can either move on to cleaning curtains/blinds or the windows themselves or if that's not a good option for you, feel free to re-visit an earlier week this month if you'd like to make further progress there.
Saturday, May 24th, 2025 02:31 pm
What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?

Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

What do you just want to talk about?

What have you been watching or reading?

Chores and other not-fun things count!

Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky
Saturday, May 24th, 2025 05:09 pm
I accidentally walked up on this lovely heron at the lake today (US Midwest, small man-made lake that just happens to be close enough for me to walk to), and he was obliging enough to stand still until I had a chance to get out the camera! I see a lot of birds out there every year (right now we also have ducklings, a small geese population, and a lot of red-winged blackbirds), but this is the closest I've ever gotten to one of the herons, and I thought this community might like to see him.

a gray and black heron taking flight from a lake

Fairly sure it's a great blue heron, though I'm not a bird-identifying expert.
Saturday, May 24th, 2025 04:00 pm
I found this article about making a Mosquito Bucket of Doom

1) Fill a bucket with water and put it outside.

2) Add a handful of grass to make carbon dioxide which will attract more mosquitoes.

3) There are two options to kill the resulting larvae.

-- Dump the bucket weekly and refresh the trap with new water and grass.

-- Add a mosquito dunk, which lasts about a month.  Replace whenever it sinks or dissolves.


Also, make sure there are no other pockets of still water to attract mosquitoes elsewhere in your yard.  Every bit that you can find and remove is one less mosquito nest. 
Saturday, May 24th, 2025 11:03 am
For those who have go-to versions of common things like, say, meatloaf or brownies or curried chickpeas, how many recipes do you try before settling on one? Is there a point when you say "THIS. THIS is my [x]", or do you sometimes try new versions even when you have one you love? (Possibly this is a "once you've actually cooked a lot, you can look at a recipe and have a fairly good idea of what the different seasonings might add up to"?)

(I didn't help enough with any of the meals under the cuts to tag this post with YKYC, alas.)

meatloaf! (well, meatloaves) )

belated notes on a batch of black beans a month ago )
Friday, May 23rd, 2025 08:53 pm
This week I finished The Dawnhounds, the first book of the The Endsong series by Sascha Stronach.

This book has been compared to Gideon the Ninth, which I think does it a disservice, because while there are enjoyable things about it, if you go into it expecting The Locked Tomb, I think you're going to be disappointed. They are not on the same level.

Protagonist Yat's homeland—the port city of Hainak—is implied to have been colonized and fought a revolution to escape that, but while some of the changes have been welcome—the embrace of "biotech," freedom of determination—her home is in the throes of sliding from one abusive regime to another. They have thrown off the yoke of colonization, but as Yat comes to slowly realize over the course of the novel, what they replaced it with isn't much better.

Yat is in a prime position to realize this. A former street rat turned cop who joined the police in hopes of making a positive change for people like herself, she's been slowly worn down over the years into someone who simply closes her eyes to the worse abuses by the government and partakes herself in the lesser offenses. The kick-off for the story isn't any of that though—it's that Yat is demoted after her coworkers learn she's patronized a queer bar. She's blundering through the fallout of that—continuing to patronize that same bar, and using drugs to cope—when the fantasy plot hits her in the head.

Unfortunately, here is where the novel began to lose me. I think the comparisons with The Locked Tomb arise from the way The Dawnhounds throws the reader into the plot with the promise of revealing more information later. Except that where TLT is a masterclass in subterfuge and gradual reveals that make perfect sense in retrospect, and in some cases reframed entire characters and story arcs, The Dawnhounds just...never really reveals the information.

Read more... )
Tuesday, May 20th, 2025 07:19 pm

How goes the decluttering? Have you shifted anything out of the house? Found something to sort through? Had thoughts on things you can let go of?

Comments open to locals, lurkers, drive by sticky beaks, and anyone I've forgotten to mention.

Monday, May 19th, 2025 12:12 pm


I've only seen one here twice before, once in the months after I moved in, and again a few years ago. Unfortunately just as this time, I had been on my way to the grocery, and I assumed I'd have time to take photos when I came home. Which I didn't because it was gone. Read more... )