newredshoes: Domo-kun doing victory arms! (domo-kun | victory arms!)
my love, I am the speed of sound ([personal profile] newredshoes) wrote2025-07-14 09:35 am

I'm back to save the universe!

I AM 41.

I AM EMPLOYED.

I HAVE A NEW BIKE.

For real!!

So much has happened!! Things are very good right now! Kpop Demon Hunters holds up well the second time you watch it! Gingko defended me/picked a fight with three asshole dogs behind a fence and is very proud of herself and her battle scars! I am publishing a story either this week or early next week that will make absolutely everybody mad, so I need to figure out how to protect myself on social media! I was finally able to BUY NEW BRAS and I hope they fit???

But yeah... yeah! Birthday last week was really excellent! I have a full-time job now, and it started last week! I have been sleeping so much since that started, just because I think I've been holding a decade's worth of stress about where my next paycheck is coming from and now I just... get to stay. (It is journalism and it is public media, so no, the guarantees are not 100%, but it's an amazing group of people who absolutely adore me and I'm on the softball team and I tested out my biking commute yesterday and it is less than half the time it takes on public transit! Imagine getting more than 15 years of workplace trauma healed with one gig that appreciates you and fights for you!)

I'm just very excited about things now. I'm watching a lot of decent/fun TV (mostly cdramas; League of Noblemen, A Dream Within a Dream, The First Night with the Duke, The Blood of Youth). I finally deep-cleaned and organized my kitchen so that I'm able to cook again, which I did this weekend, hurrah! My DnD party is confronting our Final Boss, and my beautiful dumbass tiefling monk took down the first of the three dragons we'll be fighting. Summer in Chicago is very, very good! I am eager af to make art and write fiction and play music again! Do all these exclamation points sound deranged? I'm just. Very happy right now, and I will ride it out as far as I can! ✶
splash_of_blue: I'm a girl from the Rift City (Default)
Bethan ([personal profile] splash_of_blue) wrote in [community profile] ways_back_room2025-07-14 11:34 am
Entry tags:

Monday DE: ...as my man Cole Porter said

Mrf. Mondays.

(Sorry I missed last week btw!)

Apropos of nothing, for no reason whatsoever... what does your character cope better with - excess heat or excess cold?
chanter1944: a bright blue sky and fluffy clouds (Wisconsin summer: boundless friendly sky)
Chanter ([personal profile] chanter1944) wrote2025-07-12 10:01 pm

land stewardship FTW

New birds added to the life list while camping at Lake Kegonsa: Osprey, courtesy the nest built on a doubtless purpose-created platform along a local trail. So, so, cool. :D Also least flycatcher, which was a total random chance surprise. :)

Warm fuzzy of the day in a different category entirely, though, was getting love from a rescue puppydog while on the way back to the apartment with a bag of groceries. The groceries were set safely down before the (possible pitty/lab mix, there were characteristics of both for sure, shorter fur and slightly perked ears, but also fluffy double coat and super happy otter tail) got pet. According to her people, I made her day. My reaction was, she made mine! :)

Random post is random.
bjornwilde: (Default)
bjornwilde ([personal profile] bjornwilde) wrote in [community profile] ways_back_room2025-07-10 07:18 am
Entry tags:

Thursday DE

HOw does your character(s) deal with folks being angry with them? Is there a difference between when the anger is perceived as warranted or when it is not?
thebattycakes: (phantom spaceman)
thebattycakes ([personal profile] thebattycakes) wrote in [community profile] ways_back_room2025-07-09 11:06 am
Entry tags:

Wednesday DE: tell all

Hello Milliways, Wednesday has rolled around once again.

Today's DE:

What is the title of your pup's Netflix documentary?
silveraspen: an aspen clone with golden leaves under a cloudy sky (silveraspen: an aspen clone under a clou)
scientific integrity and blah blah blah ([personal profile] silveraspen) wrote2025-07-09 11:54 am
Entry tags:

weary of considerations

(N.B. - Sometimes you encounter a poem by random chance and it speaks to you.)

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

--Robert Frost

(Poetry Foundation dot org.
bjornwilde: (Default)
bjornwilde ([personal profile] bjornwilde) wrote in [community profile] ways_back_room2025-07-08 07:47 am
Entry tags:

Tuesday DE

How is your pup with persistent pain?

I'm thinking level 5 or below, just the annoying level rather than the stop what you are doing now level.
silveraspen: blue rose with wheel of time quote caption (wot: a spoonful of hope)
scientific integrity and blah blah blah ([personal profile] silveraspen) wrote2025-07-04 01:12 pm

thoughts in a changing world

I went back and checked, and it's been five years since I wrote here with anything approaching regularity. I guess the pandemic did more of a number on my creative voice than I realized.

So there's that. Anyway.

Today is July the 4th. The current administration in the U.S.A. is not something to celebrate. Yesterday the deadly budget bill passed the House (again), having somehow become worse than before in its little trip through the Senate.

(Oh, wait. I know how. We all do, really.)

These are dark times and I'm pretty sure they're going to get worse before they get better. That said, I'm not giving up. I may not be able to change the world as a whole, but I can make a difference for people around me, or at least I can try. Or keep trying, actually; there's that, too.

(My team's been hit hard by what's going on at the NIH. I'm doing the best I can to keep everyone employed. It's something.)

For today, I'm going to take a little time for myself to do personal things rather than work things, and then J. and I are going to grill burgers on the terrace and drag toys around for the cat and enjoy the evening.

For the occasion, I'm wearing a T-shirt from Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour, which we saw last Friday in Gelsenkirchen (and which was absolutely amazing in many ways).

It seems appropriate.
bjornwilde: (Default)
bjornwilde ([personal profile] bjornwilde) wrote in [community profile] ways_back_room2025-07-03 09:37 am
Entry tags:

Thursday DE

Taliesin the bard once said/sang, “I have been a word in a book.”

If the book is your character’s cannon, what word would your character be?
thebattycakes: (some beach)
thebattycakes ([personal profile] thebattycakes) wrote in [community profile] ways_back_room2025-07-02 09:49 am
Entry tags:

Wednesday DE: blended debate

Hello Milliways, it's hot, have a popsicle.

Today's DE:

Another versus question - smoothies, shakes or slushes?