We have been having a very cold and rainy spring, so maybe it's for the better that I didn't have the chance to plant eggplants this year because of the timing of our move. A local organization had a sale of native plants recently - including some flowers I would love to have at our new place - but we're probably not moving for a month or so yet, so it's a bit early to be getting anything to put in the garden! Will definitely be keeping an eye out for next year.

My local skating club had our spring show. A decent number of people from my group lessons participated, including my coach!, and my nerves were more under control this time. Still there - I had to remind myself to really dig that toe pick in because I was struggling with my waltz jump in the warmup - but not too bad. I did have to improv a little at the end yet again because I finished early! My coach thinks said it's mostly because I was doing things more smoothly than even my last practice run-through, though, so I didn't have some of those little hesitations that add up. We're having a show for the people in the group lessons at the end of August, so I'll probably keep the program for one more go and then think about doing something new for the next winter show.

Z was out of town that day, and we also had a group lesson in the morning, so I just stayed at the rink between and had a snack. My desktop keyboard is bluetooth and relatively light despite being full-sized, and while I felt a little weird about pulling it out of my backpack, I got a decent amount written on my phone with it during the wait :)

Been keeping busy! My boss and I have been grinding away at a paper revision for our big project of the last few years. I spent a week and a half being very frustrated with the code to fine-tune one of our models in response to a reviewer comment... and it made no significant difference in the results in the end. Ah, well, it turns out like that sometimes. Also I learned that even our most technical person barely knows how to Git, so I now feel less bad that I can hardly muddle through anything more complicated than a basic commit.

In March, I went to skating Worlds with my mom and had a blast (at least with the skating - the organization was bad enough that I never want to go back to TD Garden again, and any events run by SKOB are on thin ice), will try to write up my impressions properly at some point. In terms of my personal skating, it turns out that I do need to get new boots AGAIN because I was right about being fit poorly, sigh, and probably at least semi-customs like I kept asking the fitter about. I've been putting off getting the process started because it's a lot of money, and at this point, it's hard not to worry that they are still not going to fit properly. But in better news, I just passed the Canasta Tango dance test and have signed up for my club's spring show. Several other people from my group lessons are going to be there, too, so we can cheer each other on :)

Z and I began house hunting because our lease is up soon and our landlord is putting where we live now up for sale, and we thought it would be nicer to have a place of our own if we could find one (and renting can start to feel like throwing money into a hole). After an intense few weeks of looking, we have found a place. It's close to where we live now! I can probably walk to the local library branch! The view from the front is amazing! We even got it under asking price when a few other places we looked at got bids way above the price and also way out of our budget! ...because we agreed to take on the expensive septic repairs in exchange for paying less. There's always something. We just had the inspection, and while it is a little depressing and nerve-wracking to hear all the things wrong with a house you're trying to buy given how much they cost, our inspector was very nice about explaining a lot of things for us.

During the trip to/from Boston and all the rides to houses (since Z was driving), I made it through a couple of library books. The first was the second book in Jonathon Stroud's latest series, The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, which I quite enjoyed even though it's been ages since I read the first, and the other was Prairie Fires, an extremely detailed biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's very good if you are the kind of person who wants to read an extremely detailed biography of her, although at a certain point it becomes a biography of her daughter as well, and eventually I started to wish that the author would shut up about her because the hateboner was a lot. I also think that Lane sounds like a horrible person, but around the fifth time you're going after someone for her shitty writing practices or being terrible with money in a biography about her mother, I think you should maybe consider whether the comments need to be there. But there was a lot of information there; I liked the parts that gave greater context to her life, starting before she was born with the Dakota peoples and the families of her parents, and as a writer, I also found the discussion of how various events were treated differently in different manuscripts and drafts to be interesting.

And on the computer, I've gotten as far as Gongaga in FF7R - really lovely area, and I like how the music isn't the stereotypical 'jungle' music - but put that on pause because Oblivion Remaster came out of nowhere for the rest of this year's game budget 😅 Once I figured out the performance issues in the outdoor areas by getting the mod that force-disables the raytracing out there, it runs fine and looks beautiful. The autumnal area between Bruma and Chorrol in particular is gorgeous, especially when it's foggy and the sun is setting. I definitely have some things I would change further (let the women wear pants and men skirts, you cowards) but I appreciate the tweaks to the mini-game UIs and things like the Altmer being more golden-skinned rather than weirdly pink.

Might get one of the mods that evens out the level scaling, but I'm still pretty low-level and haven't felt the need yet. And judging by some of the comments on my Morrowind WIP, I think the release is making people think of the other TES games as well :) Need to keep hacking away at that... I expected that a small fandom wouldn't have a lot of people reading, but there's more enthusiasm for this ship than I had been hoping for! I'm hoping I can stick the landing on it since it's a slowburn fic, and I know those can sometimes get kind of frustrating if the burn stops going anywhere.

Today's prompt snowflake_challenge was 'a rec countdown':
"You pick 5 categories of Recs
You pick which category gets 5 recs.
Which one gets four, three… and so on."

I chose to do:
5 - skating performances from this quad
4 - rhythmic gymnastics routines from this quad
3 - vintage skating performances
2 - rhythmic group performances
1 - ballet clip to mix things up a little

( Cut for lots of video embeds )

I received an email from the city that was much more exciting than the usual: they're reopening the city rink soon! It's been closed almost since I moved here, and I didn't know that they were still working on renovating it. It's still not a walk down the block for me, but it will be much easier for me to get to, and they already have a schedule up with skating hours every day. Looking forward to trying it out!

Apparently I haven't done this for a couple of years, but here's a year-end fic writing meme.
( Cut for length of the fic meme )

I went home for the end of the year. Z came with me for the first few days, but he left the day after Christmas and has been sending many, many pictures and videos of our cat. Our place is undergoing renovations by our landlord, so they've been cuddled up in the basement, and our kitty has many blankets to laze around in.

I've been babysitting some Very Important Code for work, but other than that, I took off all this week, and it's been nice to not do much of anything harder than cleaning up after dinner. Z had been on a big organizing binge before we had to move half our furniture for the renovations, so he also had a good break. We enjoyed a relaxing Christmas especially - my favorite moment was when Z opened the last card, which said something like 'Oh my! This gift wouldn't fit under the tree! A special delivery is incoming' and then I wheeled the box in on my parents' handcart because the box was a little too bulky to keep in the room. The look on his face was amazing :D Z also did a great job of picking out the Christmas mead for my mom, which we've been having at dinner.

On our drive down, I read most of a novella I had an ARC for (it was good) and I've also gotten through Captive Prince, which was a breezy read and certainly iddy in a lot of ways. My holds for the next two just came in this morning, so I'm looking forward to reading more of the story. I did wish it had been give a better edit to excise the repetition and the telling us that this is a deadly decadent court with schemey schemers, and maybe rework the action scenes, as I found them hard to follow. Still need to finish Frankenstein as well.

Overall, while I haven't read quite as many books this year - part of it was everything that happened over the summer, and part of it is that I'm spending more reading time in Japanese, where I'm much slower - I did a better at picking books that I really enjoyed this year compared to last year.

Z and I brought our Switch with us, and I've picked up Fire Emblem: Three Hopes again and am working on the Golden Wildfire route. Just needed a bit to remember all the game mechanics and controls! My dad likes watching me play it and seeing the very OTT battle scenes. And I've posted the first chapter of my Morrowind WIP; it's a little nerve-wracking to finally start posting it after keeping it to myself for so long, but I'm also glad to have part of it out there for people to read.

The OTW board got around to replying to a message I sent in July 2023. It was about as helpful as most of their replies to questions were at the last board meeting, i.e. they told me nothing. Do not recommend bothering. When I was filing that away, I also noticed that no action has been taken on any tickets I've sent in about AO3 works this year, dating back to January. They're not high priority items but also shouldn't be huge time sinks to deal with, so I'm a little concerned.

Anyway, in more fun things:
AMBER GLENN GPF CHAMP. 💜 I cannot wait to see her in Boston. My mom, who is far less into FS than I am, must have seen the video somewhere, because she texted me the same thing last night.

The Morrowind fic is still at the 'denial' stage of the slow burn. I sure did learn some things reading up on toxic plants and volcanic minerals for the last chapter and have also sure done some squinting at the blurry 2002 clothing textures. Half tempted to try to make a hi-res texture replacer of my own for them, because the AI upscaled ones sometimes get weird results from things like folds or laces.

I DNF In the Shelter of the Pines, the 18th-century Japanese biography of a politician. I think I have a high tolerance for historical rich people antics, but by the time I was maybe a third of the way through, I just could not continue to read about everyone endlessly fawning over this guy. Gobs of silk and delicacies and swords and books were exchanged at this shogun's visit and another priest was impressed by his Buddhist learning and hey look, time to exchange nauseatingly expensive gifts again! I have instead started reading Frankenstein, which I never happened to read, and to be honest, I almost DNF that as well. Then I got to the part where we head another level deep into the embedded narrative and hear from Frankenstein's creation, which has so far been the most interesting part for me.

I have a post half-written about my recent trip to visit my workplace in person and how it was much nicer than I expected, even if I came back just in time for Big Conference Deadlines and everyone I've collaborated with in the past year suddenly asking me for more data/figures/whatever to finish their submission on time.

But today I just feel exhausted. Kind of beats the near-panic attack I was at for most of last night. Trying to keep myself busy and making myself eat.

We've already seen the effects of the rightward shift at the organization where I work. I'm not on the front lines of it, but I've been in the video calls where the people who are were almost begging to be allowed to violate the law to keep serving our populations properly. I can't imagine how much worse it's going to get for both of them.

This weekend was somewhat more exciting than the last - Z and I got our fall vaccines (and joint aches to go with it, blegh), and I went to a community CPR class and bruised my hand practicing on the dummy. I didn't realize just how hard you need to shove! Definitely left an impression on me in case I need to attempt it on a real person one day. Also went to the OTW board meeting, which I'm not sure was worth it. Should I bother re-re-submitting the now kind of outdated question I put through their contact us form over a year ago, which was a question the previous board had already completely dodged answering when I asked it in a board meeting, especially when based on last night, they seem likely to tell me to send it to a committee instead? 🫠

I've been replaying Morrowind a lot lately, to the point where I'm half thinking of making a sideblog for it to reblog fanart and post all the 'look at the pretty sky and layered mountains!' screenshots I'm taking. It is both quite charming and also sometimes very much programmed and written in 2002. Still working on my mod configuration for combat that is actually fun more of the time, but there are some pretty good quest mods that I've enjoyed!

I was a little surprised at how much headspace it took over once I started playing in earnest - see how I suddenly wrote ten fics for it this summer - and we'll see if that lasts. Some of it is nostalgia, since Morrowind was my first Elder Scrolls back in the day, though I also loved Oblivion and Skyrim when they came out (which makes the fandom a bit annoying! I rapidly learned that clicking on a reddit thread has, like, a 30% chance that someone will start sneering about how DUMBED DOWN Skyrim is even if nobody mentioned the game) and would like to try playing Daggerfall Unity sometime. Of course, I have appreciation for different parts of the game now than I was a kid, and I think the fandom itself has also changed, because I read so much Morrowind fic on ff.net back in the day and certainly didn't see much picking up of the subtext around Dagoth Ur and Nerevar/the Nerevarine.

The amount of lore is fun, but I've found it also makes fic-writing a bit slow-going - it reminds me of when I was first getting YOI and would always end up with like 15 tabs of So You Want to Watch Figure Skating because I didn't know anything. But now it's 15 tabs of UESP articles and also their sources, since it is a good fan wiki but still a fan wiki. Like sometimes you see a line about how, say, Dunmer are accepting of polygamy, and the source is an esoteric in-universe religious document about how a god supposedly married three people together to found a religious warrior faction, which may or may not say anything about whether it was generally accepted and just not portrayed because of when the game came out.

I've been experimenting with a new personal wiki program to try and keep track of the things I need to keep looking up and stuff like that for longer fic. If it goes well, I think I'll switch my original works worldbuilding over to it, since the program I was using hasn't been updated in a long time and isn't the smoothest for editing. I'm also experimenting with trying to make the LanguageTool offline version more useful, because I would like a grammar checker that isn't relying on 'AI', which seems to be most of the other options. Adding an English ngrams package is supposed to help, but I haven't tried running it on much yet.

I went to visit my parents for my birthday. My present was, unexpected, a board game (Botany, which Z and I have played and enjoyed). We went for several walks while I was there, since the weather was so nice, and I helped them eat some of the delicious fruits and veggies from their CSA box. They also sent me back with some Filipino snacks and other nostalgic food gifts for Z.

I brought them a few of my eggplants, which they rated as 'okay, for an eggplant', but a few days after I came back, I did a more thorough search through my garden patch for fruit, and, well:

Z and I have almost entirely made it through that. I thought maybe twelve plants would be a bit too much even for me, but we're managing! I really like this variety and am going to try to save seeds for next year.

And last weekend, I went down to the city for new skates, finally. I spent over two hours trying on skates, and though I did buy some (and new blades... my wallet was not happy that day), I am wondering if I shouldn't have gotten semi-customs after all. The fitter kept telling me that it's normal for the heels to lift when you put your weight on the toepicks and focused instead on whether they lifted when I bent my knees, and I am still not convinced; if my heels lift when I do that, then they feel wrong when I so much as point my toe in them during forward stroking, and I just don't believe that everyone's heels move around when they jump. Once I've worn them a few more hours, I am going to get them punched out up front and see if I can get the heels pinched in any, and I'm still trying different ways to lace them to try and lock my heels in for real. They are definitely better than my old skates, but given how much money and effort goes into these things, it's disappointing to feel like the fitter isn't taking your biggest issue as seriously as you.

(The figure skate color gender binary is also very real, so they wouldn't let me try on skates with the "wrong" color because they kept said it would be a worse fit in the heels. I bought skate tape and am still thinking of how I want to decorate them once they've been punched out. So far, I'm leaning towards mostly covering them but cutting out some little star shapes from the tape to show through.)