Boys of Summer was playing over the intercom at No Frills and it was just an oddly moving experience. I'd been thinking about what, exactly, that I learned in high school that was still immediately useful me this year. And it was mostly things from that hiking trip that I hated at the time but built a lot of character. Bring two litres of water per person on a day trip, how to poop in the woods, how to dress for the outdoors. All things that will come in handy in April. 

Anyway, the great bathroom reno is nearly done, minus final cleanup and mirror installation. I might have Krogoth start a co-op game of Baldurs Gate 3 with me later, but I'm running out of excuses to avoid my WIP. 

But the sooner I address my WIP, the sooner I can get to the Babylon noir detective fic in the same fandom that I've been thinking about... 

They're real simple: 
- wrap up my D&D 5e game (this has gotten very out of hand, if I can finish up around summer that'd be nice) 
- Keep drawing with the inks I bought myself for Christmas
- recommence writing my WIP, which I stopped when I started playing Baldur's Gate 3, preferably before I: 
- Successfully go on the road trip I've planned to fulfill a 20-year dream; I've bought a guide book and mapped out everything and all but the midjourney 40-minute flight is booked!! Unfortunately I borked the timing so I will miss the eclipse... but there's still Iceland in 2026 :) 
- Successfully see Death Cab (already got the tickets and only overpaid a little bit!) 

I finally got around to watching the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven, i.e. Orlando Bloom being mildly cool but being effortlessly outshone by the rest of the cast. It's not his fault - how's a depressed blacksmith supposed to stand toe-to-toe with Saladin, Sibylla, Liam Neeson, and Baldwin the Leper King? 

- I walked home from my meatspace RPG group on Friday night, getting back after midnight. I get why some women don't like to do it, but I guess I've always had a high tolerance for potentially getting axe-murdered on a side street. There's an unlit shortcut that crosses the train tracks and goes up a big hill behind the plaza. Climbing it in the dead of night felt like a minor spiritual experience. 
- I had McD's today. Condiments gotta be ordered separately and they don't have individual self-serve dispensers anymore. But as I was putting stale pepper on my ketchup - I realised, I didn't think of that combination myself. My parents didn't give it to me. Where did it come from?
- How do people grow up without keeping an eye on all the publicly available info on themselves?? But there I can't figure out how to delete my pinterest account because I haven't got a clue what the old password to my burner email was... 
- I went to a concert last Saturday. It was fantastic, I will definitely keep an eye out for other acts coming to Toronto. 

I have tickets - more accurately, one ticket - to see Delain and Visions of Atlantis. I debated getting one for Xandria/Battle Beast/Kamelot but that one is on a Tuesday. I know I'd enjoy it but .... it's on a Tuesday. 

Also, all booked up to go to the east coast in October. Finally! 

We went from "window shopping is fun but we're not going to move," no mortgage approved, nothing, just having attended some open houses to look at neighbours' closets and stuff... to "holy shit" and accepted offer in 31 and a half hours. Why doesn't this train have brakes???

Utter insanity. We had the mortgage-paid-off celebration dinner only a few weeks ago and just installed a bunch of wall shelves...



Monday - 11:56 AM "Hey, look at this place, ha ha, isn't that literally the place that we thought would be funny to buy if its owner died or something..."
Rest of day: unable to nap on the bus due to thinking about it
Evening: call parents to ask for ticket off the crazy train, they don't give it to us. Call Justin's old real estate agent. Start moving moonies around.
Later at night: Can't sleep, reading Red Seas Under Red Skies until 3AM

Tuesday: 4PM - tour the other place,
5PM - make offer. Start signing forms. cancel d&d game due to stomachache
5:30PM - moonies finishes getting moved around
7:40PM - agent calls back, offer accepted

"You are beyond mad," said Locke after several moments of silent, furious thought. "Full-on barking madness is a state of rational bliss to which you may not aspire. Men living in gutters and drinking their own piss would shun your company. You are a prancing lunatic."

I was cleaning my desk today, but yesterday I did a quick reading. It didn't make sense to me until I moved the junk box back to the bedroom and came back to see a bunch of discord messages, re: the DM having not enough time and needed to tie up loose plot ends asap. So looking at this with the benefit of retrospect:

Past: 2 of cups reversed

Present: 8 of coins - skill development, getting gud
Future: moon, reversed - fear of the unknown
Influences: 10 of coins - mastery, achievement, stability, certainty, having it all and knowing it too
Outcome: the tower, lol


I don't even want to do a full analysis, but I'll leave the following notes for my future self:
- It's interesting that the Present/Future card is 8P and the moon, while Influences/Outcome is what could be considered a clearer, amped-up version of the first pair. Where the first pair merely precipitated a falling house of cards, the second reflects a collapsing castle, as if just to underline the meaning of the first three cards drawn.
- It wasn't a complete surprise when I drew the tower, even though I wasn't sure what I was reading for. Again, that might be the first three cards. What can be devastating is less so when you already knew it was coming months in advance (the moon)

Forkin did a site visit on March Break, when tourism as at a low, when one of the station entrances is fully closed, when we're getting about half the ridership that the model says we should be getting, just absolutely FML 

Past: eight of blades reversed. "I'm sad"  // freedom
Present: three of blades reversed. one more time for the homes at the back: "I'M SAD" // rebirth
Future: star reversed. "I'm thinking about being sad some more" 
Influences: eight of cups reversed. So this is one of the cards where I think the Divine Tarot does it better. I mostly read with the Darkness of Light tarot because I like the tactility of the art and the spooky atmosphere, but the Divine Tarot shows the eight of cups as Moses going off into the desert. Eight of cups reversed is Moses NOT going into the desert, being too afraid of the heat and lack of water and making excuses about his sheep. 
Outcome: queen of coins. It's nice not to finish off the reading with a card of abject misery but I don't see what this is supposed to represent or how it's relevant, like, I'm going to be sad, but I'm going to make money off it? 

Also I dreamed about a thing two people in my life have in common, except that it's WEIRD because one is DEAD and the other one is like, ???. I followed them through the transit system and lost them, like how Morgan loses track of Ree-ree's tribe in the chasm in Empire of Grass. Then I was unfortunately in university again and needed to take a course so I signed up for a mythology bird course. 
 

I went for a walk last night around midnight, when it was snowing, because I was promised thundersnow. 

It's an incredibly liberating feeling to wander around the neighbourhood at night, with no cars or people out, and just fall into snowbanks wherever I want to. To just lie back in a huge open field and stare at the snow coming down, and to scream into the sky and know that nobody heard you because of the wind. And also a very powerful feeling, to be armoured up in jackets and snowpants and boots, and just not feel the cold. I was out for about two hours, and only went back inside because the effects of my booster shot were beginning to catch up with me. 

I didn't see any thundersnow, though. 

Today I ate ten cocktail bocconcinis with salt, olive oil, and peach-infused white vinegar. They were delicious, and also 50% easier to snack on than, say, cheese ON the cracker. As opposed to just a piece of cheese, barely dressed, unabashedly pale in the night. 

They are too easy to eat. I wish I'd never discovered the cocktail bocconcinis at the grocery store. 

Oh, I also tried out the sakura tube watercolours. They're thirty years old, so I'm surprised that they hadn't dried out, but I hear it's easy to revitalize them if they do. There wasn't any need this time, but I still can't read the instructions at the back because they're in Japanese. 

First of all, the texture. When pan-fried from frozen according to the package instructions the perogy wrapper gets... puffy. Very sturdy. No give. Like deep fried bread, or tiny pizza pockets. I've had other pan-fried perogies, and dumplings, and none of the wrappers have ever ended up like that before. 

Secondly, the filling. The flavour was nominally bacon and potato, but it had a hard time staying inside its fried dough pouches. Also I'm not convinced there was bacon in there. The filling tasted like they had once LOOKED at a closed bag of crumbled bacon bits, demurely, from the opposite side of the fridge, not making eye contact.