dark days

[mrissa]

This is the worst vertigo day I've had all year.

Tell me something good, please?

Comments

[msisolak.livejournal.com]

I have a new KitchenAid mixer and there will be apricot pinwheels, butter tarts, and my shortbread nut bars tomorrow.

[vcmw]

A brand new good thing just happened. My persnickety oven, which likes to vary its temperature wildly by 100+ degrees over a cooking cycle, held a steady temp long enough for me to bake three batches of cookies for work tomorrow.
I hope your evening/morning is full of minor odd little triumphs. And cartoons.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine is starting up a Pathfinder game, and I have a delightful concept for a con-artist-type rogue.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

I just made mini-Nutella cupcakes with only three ingredients (the recipe calls for four, but I couldn't find chopped--or whole--hazelnuts for anything at the store), and they turned out fantastic!

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I have a new Kobo ereader (the old one having not been working properly), so now I can set ebooks to the largest font size and read without massive strain and headaches!

[aliseadae]

I might have a story for the Dell Award contest.

Also just went to go see Sherlock Holmes with friends and enjoyed myself.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I spent the evening with the cutest baby in Nashville. He was fascinated by my shoes and tried to gnaw on my leg.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Marionberry cheese torte on triscuit crackers. Was. So. Good.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

The kindergartners are fascinated and baffled by my mismatched shoelaces.

My roommate Kenda bought me the headband I'd been dithering over... and a bunch of iron-on embroidery things that are basically drugs in stitch form. They are strange in strange ways.

I have fabric for curtains, Kenda has her PhD, roommate Angela has an Xbox and Mass Effect, and we all have plans for the basement in the new year. Mancave with knitting.

I finally made the blueberry cake I bought when I moved in in August. It is delicious.

I'm getting my brother happy sushi for Christmas. A friend crochets them-- little sushi rolls with eyes and smiles.

[clarentine]

little sushi rolls with eyes and smiles - that is so cool!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Sundogs followed us across the desert today. (Neither of us had ever seen one before)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Look below you, and at the timestamps. Jinx!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Today Sherwood and I saw a sundog while driving back from Arizona - a snippet of rainbow high in the sky. It was the first one I had ever seen, and the sun shone behind it, making it incandescently bright. She took photos, and we watched for miles and miles until it finally faded away.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

The last weekend has been kind of hard and scary for me, but I have found my cope, and it's deep as a well, and sounding that depth is making me feel very calm now, and very up to the challenge of anything.

I will perhaps ship you some in a jar, if you'd like.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thank you. We reached peak cope sometime last year.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I am planning to move back to California come the spring. Which pleaseth me consid'rably.

[zelda888.livejournal.com]

My friends are beginning to expect me to bring the lussekatter to the holiday gaming brunch. I made fewer rookie mistakes with the dough and kneading this time, although I did learn some... interesting new things about how NOT to load multiple cookie sheets into my oven.

[rosefox]

In another couple of hours I will be able to say that I edited 90,000 words of a rather terrible novel in three days.

As of Wednesday, the days will start getting longer.

I knocked over a thing that Xtina had left on a shelf, and she clearly expected me to yell at her for leaving it there, and instead I apologized and told her it was my fault. (Which it entirely was.)

[dhole.livejournal.com]

I had a horrible hacking cough and low grade fever for the last few days. But today it seems to have downgraded to a sore throat and some congestion.

[pameladean]

David gave me his old laptop and it is SO FAST that I will probably send him email about twelve times saying "fastfastfastfastfast whee!" until me makes me stop.

P.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Wish I had been around earlier to see this! I'm sorry you're feeling bad. WHAT A THING

Today's good thing is that I bought myself a fuzzy green sweater for Christmas and wore it today, and am totally in love, and then when I got home and changed into my pajamas I put it on over them and it's still really soft and awesome.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What kind of green?

[ellarien]

Have you heard about Comet Lovejoy? It caused a fair bit of excitement last week by passing very close to the Sun -- well inside the corona -- and emerging mostly unscathed on the other side, but detached from its tail which stayed hanging out of the corona for several hours before dissipating. Then, before it passed out of the view of the coronagraph on SOHO, the comet grew a new, forked tail, neatly demonstrating that comet tails point away from the Sun, not away from the direction of travel.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

xiphias just posted about Joe Greenstein (http://xiphias.livejournal.com/633295.html). His title is "how cool the world can be" and I can't beat that.

Also, I went to the Salon des Metiers de Arts on my own and bought a bag for A, a big leather bag with straps that mean it can be a backpack or a shoulder bag, and leather butterflies in the leather. I nearly bought her the purse (wallet thingy) to go with it, but decided I was spending enough already. Then a few days later I went to the Salon with Z and A, and A saw this stall and fell on it with cries of "OMG these are so beautiful" and found the matching purse and would have bought it except that Z took it out of her hand before she saw the price and I led her gently away while he bought it for her. Now all I have to do is organize the present opening so that she gets these in the right order.

And I don't know if you've seen this (http://markreads.net/reviews/category/the-hobbit/) but it's somebody who has never read The Hobbit liveblogging his reactions to each chapter, and ooh, the narrative tension!

I lent my pencil with "Veni, vidi, vici" (and Julius Caesar's head in pewter on the top) to E next door for her entrance exam for the school she wanted to go to, and she got in. Her dad, seeing the pencil when she returned it, remarked that of course I had that pencil, obviously I did, it stood to reason.

And I am making afternoon tea for a whole pile of people on Friday, which will feature your cloudberry jam.

[aedifica]

I'm curious: which is the right order for A to receive those presents? I can think of reasons for either order.

I still have the "Senatus populusque Romanus" pencil that my second-semester Latin teacher gave me. I used it for Latin tests all the rest of the way through college. :-)

[applewoman.livejournal.com]

My daughter turned one on Sunday. Her grandparents came over for dinner, and she was SO PLEASED that everyone was there. And there were presents to open, which is a new experience for her. When she couldn't figure out how to unwrap something, she brought it to her daddy for help (which made him so happy!). We played with her new toys for a while, and then we all ate dinner together. After dinner we pressed a candle into a scoop of her favorite ice cream, sang the happy birthday song, and helped her blow out the candle. And then she got to eat the ice cream! It was a great day for her.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I got Pamela's new-to-her computer cleaned up, configured, and data transferred, and everything we tested seemed to work. Much faster than the old one. (Which kept me off my own computer and not keeping up with email much of the weekend.)

It's hard for me to know ...

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

what 'good' is because I laugh at so many things. I must note, for the record, that the solstice is yet two days away.

Several good things, although I hope you don't need them today

[aedifica]

In which I am happy about a number of things, and use lots of parentheses:

I get to visit Dad and Grandma later this week, and THEN I get to visit a Christopher! I am so very, very much looking forward to both parts of the trip.

One of our cats, who had a lump on his leg that the vet said would either go away on its own by the end of the year or else would probably turn out to be cancer (this is the extremely short version of what she actually said), no longer has a lump on his leg. I'm so glad it did go away on its own!

I took my Scheme final yesterday (with a little bit of Python in it too) and I feel very confident about most of it (and even more confident after hearing from some of my classmates what their answers had been, though I was polite and didn't say so. And their answers worked, but mine were, IMHO, better code. Which is an awesome feeling, especially given how scared I was at the beginning of the semester).

Though my family doesn't usually go in for expensive presents, this year I have been (or will soon be) helping to give *four* e-book readers, which are from four different brands because we've picked out the best one we could find for each person we were giving one to, rather than pretending that there's A Single Best E-book Reader that fits everybody. (The four gifts: from Katie and her husband Aaron and me, to Mom; from Katie and Aaron and me, to Dad; from Nate and me, to Nate's mom; from Mom and Aaron and me, to Katie. That last one came about because while we were in the store Katie kept eyeing one of the e-book readers in an ooh-shiny kind of way, so I oh-so-sneakily asked her if she'd like it for a present, then barely-more-sneakily went a couple aisles away to call Mom and Aaron and see if either or both of them would like to go in with me on it. Katie pretended not to know what was going on. :-)

(And as a side note, we didn't even decide this would be the year of e-book readers! Each gift was a different person's idea, and they were thought of independently. And writing that sentence, I felt like I must be writing the intro to a logic puzzle: "Alice, Bob, Cathy, Dave, and Emily each have a plant entered in the local flower show. The one who entered the forsythia does not live in a red house. The one who entered the gardenia lives next door to Dave." etc.)

It's a very nice feeling to think I have found good presents for people I love! And while I haven't for everybody yet, I have for most of them.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

Lost gold earrings I'd gotten for mom on Sunday. Looked everywhere. Got a call this morning from the gym - they found them!!!

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

The collie is HAPPY!

and

The collie is ALWAYS HAPPY!