Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

I'm working on a Niebling pattern for a half-circle shawl, with lace-weight yarn and size 4 needles. Not loving it. I bought the yarn at the Adirondack Fiber Fest last year and it's pretty, but there's just so much color in it that there's basically no pooling, and I don't think the lace pattern I'm spending ages on is going to be visible among the tumult. Annoying!

The socks I've been knitting in meetings are more than 75% done. One or two more meetings and I'll be on the toe. Because I was knitting, the manager of fiber arts and foodways interpretation asked me to be part of a sheep-to-shawl thing they're doing - I found a kind of slipper pattern in an 1866 Peterson's that I think will work well with the heavier yarn they've spun, and is actually the sort of thing I've been intending to make so that I have something to wear while doing photography. (You take off your shoes so as not to leave footprints on the backdrop paper, and after a while my feet really start to ache.)

I was going to do the photography for the next bay on Saturday, but we're getting a premium-quality used mannequin from the Costume Institute, so it makes no sense to do any more photography until we get it. (All I did was email the collections staffer I know about their mannequin distribution program and as soon as she forwarded me to the colleague in charge of it, the form was offered. I'm over the moon.) I also will need to make some head caps for the thing with different era hairstyles, as she has a face and so baldness will stand out rather than looking like she's just a mannequin, if you know what I mean. A SMALL PRICE TO PAY. It's perfect timing because I was told to pick out pieces to be used for new banners, and I was dreading using the awkward form I've been taking pictures with for something we'll be spending a lot of money on.

Have opened up a little bit at work about how much better this place is and they don't really get it, which is probably partly because I underplay shit but also because they don't get the difference between mild incompetence and active malice. Like I went to a meeting for our annual fundraiser that pleased me and afterward was trying to explain what the one I'm used to was like, and was getting, "That sounds like us ..." in response. No, it doesn't! I'm trying to tell you that their planning committee was largely invested in self-aggrandizing and making the fancy guests feel special without actually getting a significant amount of money from them! They refused to let me have a chair in a corner so I could sit down occasionally while doing my "job" over the five hour event and made fun of the request behind my back! Our people are actually doing event planning and we all need to pitch in because there's simply too much work for facilities and development to do alone! Having to set tables is not a big deal! There's a lot of grumbling here in general and I get it but at the same time there's a part of me that's like, oh you guys really don't know. The grumbles are so petty. I was being hunted for sport for seven years.

Okay, I think I might have found my new home? It's the same vintage as my current house, with all the same woodwork and then some, plus pocket doors with leaded glass panes, greater square footage, and a functional(?) laundry chute with little doors in the walls! It's reasonably priced but there's always the possibility of being outbid; I'm heartened by the fact that my dad called up a list of recent sales and most of the time they go for the price that was given, and when it's more it's usually like $20k more, not 50+. I also suspect that most buyers would see the historical nature of the house as a negative rather than a selling point.

Feeling happy and curatorial this week, I restarted Wedding Wednesday and Footwear Friday on Bsky/Tumblr (and will get back to Miniature Monday as well): they've always been opportunities to practice clear but elegant label-writing, nd now I need that more than I have in several years.

I'm also psyched to eventually meet up with the Western NY Costuming Community after so many years of just not being near any groups. They're having a literary-themed picnic in early June and that will be mere weeks after I move out there, so I CANNOT try to make something, but at the same time I am so itching to do it. No!!! By now I don't think I have anything historical that fits ... Well, actually, I have a ca. 1908 blouse I made for everyday wear (except it looks way too frumpy as modern dress), and surely I could put together a walking skirt and be like "this is for The Secret Garden". And just be without a corset because the blouse is loose enough for it not to be too horrendously obvious.

Also having my usual "moving to a new place, is this when I finally get started with the SCA?" feelings. Thescorre has a lot going on.

Pot roast in the oven, lentils started on the stove for meal prep ... can relax again.

In another two-week-wait! I had to drive to Syracuse on Tuesday for the IUI, and it was not so bad getting there but terrible coming home, particularly after I charged the car for ~45 mins. Couldn't get anything for lunch because everywhere in and around Syracuse was closed due to the storm. I'm hoping that the "this will make a great 'where you came from' story someday" factor is on my side.

About a week ago, I started writing a new Regency romance, and it's going SO well. I partly attribute this to all of the practice (something like 450k words on AO3 over the past four years, plus several personal projects), but partly to the amount of deconstruction I've done on KJ Charles just this year. The former's made it so I can write more smoothly and the latter's helped me figure out how to plot well enough to not end up going "uhhh my outline says 'they get to know each other better' for this chapter" which then contributes to more smooth writing. I've given myself a minimum of 500 words a day and hitting it isn't really a problem? I've only just hit chapter three, so maybe I'm still in the easy-to-write-because-it's-new zone, but it feels different. Well, I guess Grand & Glorious and Arrow Collar Man were similar, it's just that the last original thing I started was a different Regency story that got stuck due to poor plotting (pre-KJ Charles) and also I had some fandom obligations at the end of the year that I didn't really want to write, so I haven't had the feeling of a story just WORKING for months.

So I had my London trip, which was excellent, and I patterned at the Met and the PMA, and I finished writing the manuscript and digitizing the patterns and submitted them! (Still working on getting all the photos.) Been killing myself over the last four days or so to get it all in - I did the Met/PMA patterns after I got back home, but then I had to go through and make sure that they were all consistent in terms of markings and labels, which made me realize that a couple of the older ones weren't digitized at all ... So it was a lot of work in a short time, during which I was also getting started with the Anything Goes costumes and making hanging sleeves for quilts (at home, because it's easier to sew and iron there).

Now while I still need to get all of my photos together, I just have Anything Goes to focus on, plus fiction writing, which is done at my own pace and so doesn't bring up the same stress. (Although I'm doing something called Novella Spring Garden right now which involves a goal of 330 words a day.)

More to say, but later!

So I made una torta salata the other night (sans crust because I couldn't be bothered) and it was freaking delicious, but it also gave me a touch of food poisoning. I'm blaming the mushrooms, which I'd bought at the farmer's market more than a week in advance, or the provalone, which I'd bought more than a week earlier(?) and used half of previously ... I just don't think it was the potatoes. Still, I recommend the recipe and will be making it again.

Home from work today, attempting to clean the house before Dad comes to stay while I'm in DC. It's not going to be as clean as his house is, but I've made a whole list of things to do in Habitica and am slowly working my way through them.

As it's getting cold again, I'm back to working on the Shapely Vest, which has been languishing in UFO hell. I think once I hit the underside of the back armscye it will start zipping along - 10" of 1.5'-wide 1x1 ribbing is just really really boring. Anyway, I'm making myself finish this before I start the pi shawl I just bought yarn for. I'm going to bring it with me to DC and hopefully get a lot done on the train ride there and/or back.

A BlueSky friend just had a short story published in Sword and Sorcery Magazine, A Hoard of Infinite Meanings! It's really good. About a frustrated translator on a centuries-old project, the situation similar to what would have happened with Egyptian without the Rosetta Stone.

I started watching this show, Kaos, which is a show retelling Orpheus and Eurydice/general Greek myths/the Iliad and Odyssey. I picked it up because it stars Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, which struck me as bizarre and interesting, but it's actually brilliant. Well, I mean, the show is brilliant. (Goldblum might also be brilliant! Did he just force an eyebrow twitch?!)

There's a lot of fiction based on Greek myths, where the gods are real and the hero has to interact with them and all that. They never feel quite right to me - a lot of the time the conflicts between the gods are treated as very serious wars, and the gods themselves are pretty serious individuals. Or else they're Just Dudes. You either get the sense of their power, or you get the humanity. In Kaos, you get the sense of these very human foibles and weaknesses but also the power, both in terms of what they can magically do (Hera makes Zeus' lover's pregnancy fully develop in seconds and pop out a kid, then she turns the woman into a bee to add to her hives) and their aesthetic similarity to the ultra-rich.

It's also set in a modern fantasy world, rather than either here'n'now or ancient Greece; it reminds me of Kings in that way, if you remember that show? This is a highly believable and recognizable world where people worship the Greek pantheon with tongue-cutting-out and human sacrifice.

(Now I want something that goes in the other direction and acknowledges that the modern conception of Greek religion as a unified set of myths and a belief in The Pantheon is anachronistic in order to complete the spectrum.)

My bone tatting shuttle broke. 😔 I assumed it was all carved out of one piece of bone, but I think it must be two pieces glued together - and being in my pocket was not good for the glue. I tried to superglue it back together and it popped off again, so I've ordered a couple of metal ones and a horn one and hopefully they'll be better.

I'm thinking about going to the DAR Museum's Terror in the Seams and Making Meaning Memory events at Halloween - is anyone else? I know a lot of you are reasonably close to that area! (Although I'm not sure how many of you are still active here ...)

Damn it, I missed the signups for rule63exchange! BY ONE DAY! 😭 I'll have to look through the signups and write some treats.

Aughhhhhhh so sick. On Monday night I had a tickle in my throat that I thought was acid reflux, but it was clear when I woke up on Tuesday that it was a pre-cold sore throat. Worked on Tuesday but stayed home on Wednesday as it was turning into the cold. Should have/would have stayed home today as well, but there were things that had to be done at work and nobody else to do them, so I braved the drive in on Dayquil (NOT FUN but I did not crash). Now that I've done what needed to be done, I'm taking it easier.

I wrote a short one-shot, The Rest of the Night, while I was out sick. It's a missing scene from the end of The Shabti, an excellent horror-ish novel set in the 1930s about a reformed con artist/fake medium dealing with an Egyptian ghost brought to his attention by a professor. It's a sweet love story and not very horror, hence "-ish" - there's creepy ghost stuff but it feels more SF/F to me. A standalone book but potentially could have sequels if Lorenz chose to write them: it's open to more ghosts turning up.

Been feeling like writing some Regency lately, so now working on a Peneloise fic - when I was watching the scene where Penelope came home after the ball post-scheme-with-Colin reveal in Whistledown, I was hoping Eloise would be the one who came to talk to her rather than Colin, in order to apologize and make up. She wasn't, so I'm writing it and making it romantic. Because I can.