Me: *flings open door to my bedroom* Hello, kitties! The feline phobic guest is gone! I am here to liberate you from bondage!

Cats: *look up at me from their positions on my bed and huge old comfy couch, respectively, with expressions that suggest that I am not only off my rocker, there has never been a rocker in the picture*

Me: Or you could continue sleeping. The point is, the choice is now yours.

Cats: *roll eyes, return to napping*

My youngest brother's friends know my younger brother, the middle brother, by name. This despite the fact that he is never around/awake when they are here.

I? Am forever in the house when they are here. Sometimes I feed them. At times I've read them the riot act. I've met their parents and introduced myself, and generally acted as the household's third responsible adult.

None of them have ever bothered to use my name. I doubt they have learned it. I am always "your sister".

Title: As Dragons Go
Author: tiamatschild
Rating: G
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Character/s: Ran Fan, Ling, ensemble
Disclaimer: Not mine!
Warnings: None.
Summary: Alchemy, under the table diplomacy, and espionage - all the usual, but with dragons.
Notes: Spoilers through Chapter 90 of the manga. No, I have no particular excuse.

( As Dragons Go )

We have this firebellied toad. It lives in a five gallon tank with a waterfall for a filter and pump that I got Mom for her birthday before last. He has all kinds of different levels of water - shallow water, very shallow water, somewhat deeper water, a little bit of water deep enough to keep a small bait goldfish, which Mom plans on putting in there eventually, and dry land with moss on it, all constructed out of iridescent pebbles and smooth, water tumbled rocks from the stream that I boiled to sterilize their surfaces. Some of these rocks are gorgeous agates, including one that sits mostly out of the water and blazes red and black. Lots of them are just chunks of the local limestone, a rather attractive white-ish tan.

The toad, like all firebellied toads, is brown and black speckled on top, to resemble a bit of rock in the water. The thing it seems to enjoy best in the world is to take advantage of this by hiding in the water partially under bits of its silk spider plant. With the outline disrupted this way - poof! No toad!

It's a little nervewracking, but we have the cage locked down with cage clips actually meant to keep snakes in their tanks, so at least we know the little bugger can't have really got out. He's in there somewhere. Lurking.

I locked myself out of my friends' house while taking their Molly-dog for her walk this morning. I am still not quite clear on how I managed this, but however it happened there I was, barefoot, in a short skirt, with no phone, no key, and a door that most emphatically would not open.

So I went and checked the back. Maybe I'd forgot and left it open. No such luck. So I tried the front windows. Nothing doing. So I walked backward across the lawn and -

Aha! I had left a window open. On the second story. I looked doubtfully at the big wooden post holding up the overhang. I am not that good at shimmying up things, and it was square, not round. I couldn't see how to do it.

By this time the dog had made herself sick nibbling on the grass, and I dithered for a few more minutes back and forth back and forth, until I went over and asked the next door neighbor, who has met me before, and knows I sit, for help. She lent me her stepladder, but it wasn't long enough, so she took Molly and me over across the street with her to her friend's house. After some brief period of confusion, her friend appeared and lent me her stepladder which was several feet taller than the first one. Up I went, in my short, flared skirt (I mean, it is several inches above my knee and it is seriously flared and has a tendency to Marilyn Monroe on me) and my bright orange underwear with butterflies on, trying not to think too hard about this. After a brief moment of steeling myself, I half hopped up onto the roof, made my way up the slope to the window, and slipped in.

I knocked a photo frame off the desk in front of the window and onto the carpet, but it didn't break, no further harm was done, I ran downstairs, unlocked the door, thanked my saviors profusely, and gave Molly her breakfast.

Exhausted from all the excitement, Molly spent the rest of the day sleeping under my feet.

Chapter 97 of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga is out, and the raw's up, and that means the translation should be up sometime next week.

So excited so excited so excited.

( Cut for spoilers for past chapters. )

1) Harriet Jacobs. Which. Admittedly if there were a biopic about her coming out I would probably be terrified of it and antsy and not want to go see it in theaters because oh my god I would need to be able to stop the tape and walk away and come back to get through it, but she just blows me away, and and and it could be awesome!

2) Rebecca Harding Davis. I can think of so many ways to structure her story, and it could be really cool to do a biopic about a literary woman working in the midst of taking care of her family and promoting her husband's career - so long as no one went with the old and inaccurate line about her work declining and her becoming a discredited and uninteresting frustrated writer, which is not true. (Yes, I admit it, I can just see so many ways this could go wrong.) She was a prolific and powerful writer, and had a wide range. And I think that her major thematic touchstone, ability neglected or suppressed, could be an iiiiinteresting center to the movie.

3) Lucy Parsons. I get all excited and start making eeping noises at the very idea. It could be so incredibly fantastic.

4) Hild of Whitby. Okay, so the information on Hild is scanty. But we do know that she was an energetic administrator, involved in the community beyond her convent walls, theologically influential, and very highly regarded by everyone who knew her. I think her life could make a good story, especially if it used the Synod of Whitby as a framework, and flashed back and forward to tell her life.

5) Florence Li Tim-Oi. She was a really interesting person, the first woman ordained by the Anglican communion. I think centering a movie around her ordination by the Bishop of Hong Kong and her subsequent life under the Japanese occupation - with some sort of epilogue after she resigns her license at war's end, covering the reconfirmation of her status as a priest in the 1970s - could be really really cool.

What about you? :D

Okay, so, I am not entirely sanguine about Sink the Bismarck, but when we're away from the irritating plotline about the Director of Operations' repression (UGH stop narratively pressuring the cute young warrant officer to heal his heartbreak ugh ugh ugh), and when I can ignore the fact that you can tell that the Germans are Germans because they all speak in English with German accents, despite the fact that sometimes the film actually uses German (and Hindi and Arabic, and Japanese - radio station montage scenes) the various sailors and civilian contractors caught up in the battle are fun.

There's this pair of sailors on watch in the middle of the night in the North Sea, freezing thier buns off and complaining about it and one of them says, "Foot thick armour plate, that's what the Bismarck's got."

"Who said?"

"Gunnery officer, that's who. Said for all the good our guns would do, we might as well be throwing crumpets at her."

"...I wish someone'd throw crumpets at me."

It is super cute.

This movie has the WORST Winston Churchill impression I have ever heard. He sounds like he's holding marbles in his mouth.

It also has adorable girl crazy teenage sailors!

And some actually very nice model work. I think it's model work. Is this model work? I'll have to look it up at some point.

The ending was appropriately somber and not triumphalist in an icky way (I consider eliding or ignoring all that death and there is a lot of death in this film to be icky), while still acknowledging that obviously all the surviving British vessels are quite glad to Not Be Dead and I actually like the last line of the film: "I worry about us, lad," says one seaman to another, speaking of one of the operations staff, "He's got three bars on his coat and he don't know what time of day it is!

The dog bit me, and when I shouted, the younger of my two younger brothers told me to calm down.

And then I told him off and he kept telling me to calm down, the patronizing self righteous little hypocrite, like he hadn't been louder than me ten minutes earlier over his game with his friends!

Of course, now his friends all think I'm an insane hysterical bitch, but they're a pack of misogynistic little bastards in training and I hate them all and I hate that everyone is always telling me "Calm down!" over everything. "Calm down, just calm down," like I had a goddamn gun instead of a soprano voice and a political analysis!

Tired. So tired.

Also. Sometimes you just have to laugh, y'know? Mom and I spent half the day buying the ingredients for and making eight loaves of meatloaf because thirty pounds worth of the stuff hadn't been signed up for. Guess how much meatloaf we had left over at the end of the night?

Yes, you are correct. Sixteen loaves.

(I was not feeling particularly inclined to join in the pious comments about it being like the loaves and fishes, no. Pretty much with the not so much on that one.)

...

.....How can you misread the sections of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga with Mrs. Bradley so badly that you think her marriage to King Bradley is a marriage of convenience?

She's incredibly goopy about him! She gazes adoringly at him! She wanders off onto tangents about their courtship on a regular basis, and always has to put a hand to her cheek to hide her blush! She waits up to all hours so she can take tea with him before they go to bed, even though his working hours are unpredictable and long and they've been together decades! How does this add up to an asexual, unromantic arrangement of state on her part?

I just. Reading comprehension fail.

Which is a tiny laptop. It is not the tiniest of laptops, being ten inches instead of seven or eight, but still it is a tiny laptop.

I'm not quite used to the keyboard yet, but it's not too odd, I think I will get used to it soon.

Also, I have been watching the first anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist. To be honest, thus far I like the manga better (yes, yes, I'm on episode five, I know, give it more time) but yay! Hughes! Hughes on the phone gooping about his family. Hughes the dashing action hero! Hughes, oh, Hughes, you doll.

Although I gotta say, Roy only wishes he were this cool. Seriously, anime!Roy is like Roy's fantasies of how smooth and mysterious and suave he is. Which, in the manga, he isn't. At all. Remotely.

I mean, he's seriously awesome, no doubt, but he's a giant dork when he's not embarrassingly earnest. Smooth he is not. At all. His flirting strategy boils down to 'be as endearingly eager and dorky and sweet as possible'. Which, because he is an adorable, huggable button, works really well for him! But is not exactly suave, is my point.

(Also, anime!Ed's squishy marshmellow center is slightly more obvious than manga!Ed's. Although manga!Ed does not hide his marshmellow center at all well. Dogs notice instantly.)

Comment "WORDS" to this entry and I will comment back (probably next week) with five words I associate with you. Then you post this in your journal elaborating.

The words given to me by holyschist were:

sea cows

I am fascinated by the whole sirenian order. Slow moving aquatic herbivores! That is pretty awesome!

The first mention I ever ran into of Steller’s sea cows was in Kipling. The White Seal, “I met my mates in the morning and oh, but I am old.” It took me four or five read throughs to figure out what these creatures he was describing were and then for a while there I thought he’d made the beasties up, because they were plausible enough, but I’d never run into a discussion of them anywhere else. So it took me a while to realize that no, they were real, but extinct and never well studied. Cold water sirenians, which is unusual enough to seem almost contradictory, even though it clearly isn’t.

Arthurian

I think the real reason I like Arthurian legend so much is that it is a multiplicity of texts. There is no one single version of the stories clustered around Arthur, and I like that. It’s like comics fandom! If comics fandom had had centuries to acquire all kinds of crazy stuff.

Also, the horrible, horrible, horrible Victorian poetry is impossible to pass up. For example, this classic bit from Robert Buchanan’s “Camlan”.

His fainting head they pillowed
That lady's lap upon;
"Now row ye, sisters, row ye
With speed for Avalon!"

Sometimes inversion is bad, folks.

sewing

I’m not that great at sewing. I’d describe myself as “reasonably competent” really, and I have massive trouble with bias tape. Massive trouble. But the actual work is soothing and what I produce is wearable and looks good on me, even though I may have had to rip out certain sections three or more times because there were problems I didn’t catch until I’d finished a seam, or I managed to sew a wrong side to a right side. You’d be amazed how often I do that. And then I make muffled snarling noises and go get the seam ripper. But it’s fun! I enjoy it! And honestly, it can be a pain in the butt for me to find ready to wear clothing that fits me and suits my sense of fashion. I’m tall, and if I want a skirt that actually is full length, it’s just infinitely less painful to do it myself. Same thing with trousers. And of course, I like cotton for summer, because blergh, synthetics in eighty percent humidity when it’s ninety five F in the shade? No thanks! But for reasons unknown to me, ready to wear dresses are almost exclusively synthetic. So, for that matter, are women’s blouses.

And store bought aprons are ridiculously expensive, almost uniformly. (Unless you’re going vintage and have found a good seller.)

So. Much. Easier to sew. Even with the wrong side to right side mishaps and the trials of bias tape. And it’s fun! Even with the wrong side to right side mishaps and the trials of bias tape.

fanfiction

Fanfiction is fun! I love writing character backstory and small missing scenes and speculation for what happens next (though I don’t do that often). And world exploration, in fandoms with strong and interesting worldbuilding, and I like playing with genre, though I haven’t finished most of the document style work I’ve started. It is fun! Yes. It makes a nice hobby. There is external validation involved.

garden

I love gardens so much. I like to wander around in other people’s almost as much as I enjoy working on my own. I wish mine were established and mature, but I know that’s not going to happen for a long while yet. I have to keep working on it. With the soil as unimproved and badly abused during the process of construction as the soil in my yard is, that involves a lot of heavy lifting and digging, which I like to do. I like tiring myself out physically with something that will lead somewhere good, and I like getting earth on my hands, and like hauling water, and I like taking care of living things. It’s a good thing. I like it.

Title: Aspire After That Sweet Clime
Author: tiamatschild
Rating: G
Fandom: Arthurian Legend
Character/s: Galahad, Peredur
Disclaimer: They’re everyone’s!
Warnings: None.
Summary: A crown didn’t suit Galahad.
Notes: A present for rainbowjehan. Takes the sequence of events in the Vulgate where Galahad winds up unwillingly crowned king of a small port city.

( Aspire After That Sweet Clime )

Because, um. Wow. That is. That is a kind of a giant morass of ablist langauge there.

Granted, you could argue that it's not as bad as the book ostensibly on depression that was actually an argument that people with depression aren't really depressed, they're just sinful, but that's a pretty high bar, and. Uh. I put that one down too.

Zowie.

Pete Seeger, Pat Sky, and the Pennywhistlers performing "No Sir, No" on "Rainbow Quest".

The best part is that they rapidly run out of verses they know, so Sky substitutes some from another song, and then they still have more time on the clock, so Seeger starts to make stuff up. I've been there!

I cleaned, quartered, and seeded the first harvest off of Dad's pepper plant so that I could freeze it.

It took three hours and six rounds of through hand scrubbing for my skin to stop tingling.

Near the end of The War Games

Me: So, do you think the War Chief was the Master?
Baby Brother: Couldn't be. The Master'd never let other people do the hypnotizing.