Welcome to your feet again

I just got back from the first curling game (and post-game beer) of the second half of the season for my Wednesday night Open League, and I have to do some dishes and go to bed very soon, but I must sneak in a little entry for today's snowflake_challenge challenge #4 before I go.

Alas for the curling, my team lost. I made some shots, but overall I didn't play very well. Hopefully soon I'll get all the bad shots out of my body, and in the meantime, I'll dine on the sick shot I made to win our game for my Rookie League team last Sunday. Possibly I'm going to have to go to open practice ice one of these Saturdays, though!

Anyway, snowflake_challenge. Challenge #4 is: Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

My last page, before I got to the challenge entry on my reading page, was the Greater Victoria Public Library page, where I was checking my position on the hold list for Heated Rivalry. I'm up to #2. Fingers crossed for this weekend! For most of you, my local library will not be your local library, and I'm sure I hardly need to say this for this crowd, but I do recommend your local library!

My other recommendations, perhaps at the "something a bit more eccentric" end of things, are some curling go-tos. For curling scores from all the events (ALL THE EVENTS) and rankings for all the teams with word curling rankings (ALL THE TEAMS), there's Curlingzone. Are their news reports up to date? No! Is their website user-friendly? Also no! But are the scores for, again, ALL THE EVENTS and rankings for again, ALL THE TEAMS there? OH HELL YES!

Also, for pro curling, there's the Grand Slam of Curling website, bringing you media and live and on-demand streaming from the Grand Slam of Curling pro curling tour, and the soon-to-be pro curling Rock League!

Happy 2026! Is it as wild to you as it is to me that we're this far into the twenty-first century? 2026! I hope it's kind to all of us!

My New Year's Day is off to a slow start so far. I closed out 2025 yesterday by dealing with travel shenanigans. I spent Christmas day here in Victoria, but flew back to Vernon on Boxing Day. I was scheduled to fly back to Victoria via Vancouver yesterday morning at 9:00 am. I woke up at 5:45 am in preparation for leaving for the airport in Kelowna, 40 minutes away, by 6:30 am, and that was when I discovered that my 9:00 am flight to Vancouver had been cancelled at 2:00 am, and that I had been automatically rebooked on a flight to Vancouver leaving two hours earlier than my originally-scheduled departure, at 7:00 am. Thanks, Westjet! I was able to re-rebook myself on a different set of flights back to Victoria, via Calgary, leaving Kelowna at 3:00 pm, and had a nice extra morning of visiting with my parents. My flights went smoothly when they happened, if you can call flying to Alberta to get to Vancouver Island from the Okanagan smoothly, and I was able to reclaim my bag, find (and scrape the frost off of) my car, pay for parking, and escape the airport with no issues.

Then I got home and discovered that while I was gone, Cormac and Liz cleaned my kitchen and bathroom, washed all the dishes I didn't have time to wash before I left for Vernon, and most dramatically, cleaned out my fridge! When I've referred to my fridge as my shame cave over the past few years I have not been joking, and a few weeks before Christmas I actually had a dream that I was evicted from an apartment (not this one, it was part of a whole living in France again scenario) because my fridge was too disgusting. I'm torn between delight that my fridge is now clean and abject horror that Cormac and Liz have witnessed the totality of how gross it was. Cormac says that it wasn't as bad as he was expecting giving how I talked about it, but I extremely beg to differ. On the strength of all my feelings about that, I didn't stay up until midnight to see the New Year, but went to bed around 11:00 pm.

Anyway, I'm a functioning adult, I swear!

I still owe my compendious 2025 meme post, which my original plan was to complete yesterday afternoon once I was back in Victoria. Lol! I plan to work on it this afternoon, among other things. The point of this post, however, is mainly to be my response to snowflake_challenge challenge #1. Hi! I'm monksandbones, again, a competent adult! You can find more about me in my dreamwidth profile, but the short version is that I grow reforestation seedlings as my day job, and outside of work (which there is less of than I'd like, often), I knit, I'm a curler (playing in two curling leagues at the moment), I lurk in fandom, I try to squeeze in a little volunteering and climate activism where I can, and I do my best to be a cool aunt to my three niblings.

I've never managed full participation in snowflake_challenge, and I'm sure I won't be able to do all the challenges this year either, but I'm aiming to participate where I can. For almost the first time since I started online journalling on livejournal in 2003, my posting collapsed in 2025. Part of that was that for the first time I really felt like it was silly to be posting about the mundane details of my life and expecting people to read it, and part was being too busy and tired to fight that feeling and post anyway. But I hate not having posted about anything that was going on!

I want to post more regularly again in 2026, and my goal is to let snowflake_challenge help with that. I'm less reliable in commenting and responding to comments than I'd like to be, but I'm always open to them and I'm happy to meet new people! Please come and talk to me about Tolkien fandom, hockey (I'm up to #6 on the library hold list for Heated Rivalry, which is, in addition, sold out at all the bookstores I've tried, and I'm dyyyyyyyyyying because the wait is killing me), PWHL hockey in particular (go Goldeneyes!), tree- and reforestation-related topics, knitting, mundane life details, delightful child/nibling shenanigans, and curling! Especially curling! There must be other curlers and curling fans out there on dreamwidth, and if there aren't, I'm prepared to make some!

I'm always reading my reading list, even if I'm not posting or commenting, and again, I'm hoping to improve on that this year. If you're reading this, welcome (sorry about the fridge discussion), and I hope 2026 and the 2026 snowflake_challenge bring us all the level of journal activity we want!

I'm pleased to report that all the tree samples I shipped last Monday and Tuesday arrived where they were going by Thursday, and likewise that, with the assistance of NC forklifting them out of the depths (and heights) of lane 81 of our cold storage facility, I gathered the samples for another late-arriving customer request. They could have had those samples hand-selected from across the whole crop if they'd put their request in before we lifted the trees, but no, they chose the way of pain (for us), and samples selected from only three boxes, all on the same pallet, per seedlot (for them).

Anyway! I saw a very good new-to-me birb (a golden-crowned kinglet) in the ginko tree outside the growing office on Thursday, and I've had a modestly productive weekend so far. In that spirit, in the 30 minutes I have before I have to get changed and ready for my curling game, it's time for some select catching up with snowflake_challenge!

( Challenge #3: A fannish opinion that has changed over time )
( Challenge #4: Goals )

Well, I was hoping to get through a few more challenges, but not only did those two take more than the 30 minutes before curling, they've also taken me to almost bedtime. More tomorrow, maybe? I have to do some grocery shopping on my way home, but I did take the time after curling to get gas at the gas station across the street, so I won't have to do that on my way home. I'm already appreciating that, and I'm not even my tomorrow self yet! But anyway, perhaps if I get a good sleep, I'll have it in me to post again tomorrow evening?

Pursuant to the policy I'm attempting to implement of directly messaging people who I think would be interested in my comments when I feel the urge to tweet them, I have also messaged this to my sister, but: I went to practice ice earlier this afternoon to work on my slide and my draw weight, and I think I have sort of identified the latest thing that has been going wrong with my out-turn throws. ( TLDR: issues with my out-turn slide )

As I said to Morgayne, do I know how to correct this? Lol, no! But surely identifying the problem is the first step!

Now, of course, my legs are tired from practicing, which means I'm likely to have a terrible game in a couple of hours, but when you can't make it to Thursday practice ice because you have a job, what can you do? Also, the older man from the new 2:30 pm Rookie League who I was sharing a practice sheet with (whose name I immediately forgot) had one of the models of curling shoes I've been considering. They looked great in person, and I've now added them to my cart on the Olson Curling website, and I might do it! With a neon yellow gripper, of course, because of who I've turned into as a person.

~

Anyway, you're not here for curling (unless you are, in which case, I love you, let's talk curling). You're probably also not here for elf hell, but elf hell is what you're getting. I know the snowflake_challenge technically ended last Wednesday, but I really wanted to do challenge #13, the make a rec list challenge. I've read a lot of Silmarillion fic in the past year, so much that it's taken past the end of the month to organize my brain enough to recommend any of it. This is only a taste of all the fic out there that I love, but for an extra level of elf hell, these are all recommendations for WIPs, active and abandoned both.

( Join me in elf hell with six Silmarillion WIP recs )

Victoria's coldest temperatures in 55 years have, ironically, frozen the pipes of the curling rink's ice-making machinery, and my curling league is cancelled tonight. I'm consoling myself by having a modestly productive day, something that I can't usually manage when I know I have curling later. Among the productivity: catching up on snowflake_challenge, which I didn't mean to fall this far behind on!

( Challenge #2: Goals for the Coming Year )

( Challenge #3: Fandom Wishlist )

( Challenge #4: Icebreaker Challenge )

It's now time to go and further take advantage of not being at curling right now to make supper and meal-prep my lunches for the week, so that will have to be all for now. More tomorrow, maybe? Or next weekend?

I haven't done much today, and need to go to bed soon so I can get up and do a lot more tomorrow. Unfortunately, I probably will have the time to do it, because Clara has come down with a cough and runny nose, and the plans for her birthday party are on hold for now. That doesn't make so much difference to me, because I'm in Victoria all the time and can be there for a rescheduled party, but I'm sad she won't get to celebrate as planned with my parents and Marek and Zöe. Liz and Cormac say that if she's feeling better we might be able to reschedule for Sunday afternoon, but if not, they'll miss out. And poor Clara, being sick for her birthday! I hope she isn't too disappointed–but she's turning three, and probably now understands things enough to be disappointed.

Anyway, bedtime.

I have to be at curling in just about exactly four hours, and I still have a lot to do this afternoon, but I've just made a massive mug of chai, and one item on my to-do list is catching up on a few more challenges for snowflake_challenge before I run out of January.

I responded to challenge #1: update your fandom information by introducing my COVID book pile in this entry. I'm pleased to say that since then, my baby nephew has arrived and is doing well, and not quite so pleased to say that despite my resolve, my COVID book pile has only grown. I've acquired my own copies of seven volumes of Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, and so far, I've only reread five of them, for a net addition of two to the pile. I've also had a tiny avalanche of library holds come in, which currently gives me a four-book Omicron library book pile.

I responded to challenges #2: set some goals, #4: make a fandom wish list, and #5: talk about an idea you wish you had time/energy/talent to implement in this round-up post.

Here are a few more:

Challenge #10: In your own space, rec a fanwork (fic, art, vid, playlist, anything!) you did not create.

You know how, see above, I've reread five Gamache mysteries in the past month? And if you read my fandom wish list post, you'll know that I want the dark internet to show me the secret Gamache fanfiction. Well, the internet has provided, just a little. I went to check the Gamache tag on AO3 (it exists) and discovered that it's now up to FOUR works, from the previous three. And the new work is a complete delight!

It's a missing scene from The Brutal Telling, in which Gamache's daughter Annie calls to talk through a problem with Gamache, who isn't available, and talks to his sidekick Jean Guy Beauvoir instead. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene in the book, reported after the fact in a conversation between Gamache and Beauvoir, but it takes on greater significance as the series goes on. This fic absolutely nails what the conversation between Annie and Jean Guy must have been–just a gem and a perfect example of the "missing scene" genre. If you've read the Gamache series, or even if you're Gamache-curious (see also my "québecois detective problem" tag for more of my thoughts/Jean Guy Beauvoir feels), I strongly recommend it!

Looking for wisdom in the dark (2898 words) by disjointed_scribblings
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache - Louise Penny
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jean-Guy Beauvoir/Annie Gamache
Characters: Annie Gamache, David, Jean-Guy Beauvoir
Additional Tags: Bickering, Tenderness, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Missing Scene, Enemies to Lovers, Sort Of, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, the slowly dawning realization that you have made a huge mistake
Summary:

The problem with being married to the nicest man in the world is that sometimes he just doesn't understand.

The problem with talking to the most infuriating man in the world is that sometimes he understands too well.

// a certain phone call in The Brutal Telling

~

( Challenge #13: share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone. )

~

Challenge #15: create your own challenge.

monksandbones clean out your fridge vacuum your apartment actually write the fic challenge!

No, but I've actually set quite a few goals for this year. I also see that a lot of people are resolving and challenging themselves to be more active on dreamwidth, which is excellent! I always enjoy reading people's posts, but I'm already pretty active as far as posting to my own journal, and I have an active post-every-day goal. I think I've been pretty chatty so far in 2022!

My challenge for myself, and for anyone else that wants to take it, has to do with helping communities, rather than individual journals, stay more active. I challenge myself and any other takers to select one or more communities, and commit to posting at least once a month, and, as opportunities present themselves, commenting at least once a week.

The first community I'm choosing to support this year is cookbook_challenge, which was a lot of fun last year. It's a community dedicated to encouraging members to cook recipes they've been meaning to try, or have had in their possession for a while. People have cooked some really interesting things! And I've tried a few myself, which is good, because at the moment I need all the cooking motivation I can scrape together. Participation is down this year, perhaps because there has not yet been a new 2022 challenge sign-up post, but I hope I can help keep it going for another year.

The second community I'm planning to support is get_knitted, a daily crafts check-in community. The comments are active on a daily basis, with a core group of regulars and some occasional commenters, like me. It's not realistic for me to comment every day, but I hope to comment once a week or so, and to contribute questions and discussion topics as they occur to me.

What about you? What dreamwidth communities would you consider committing to support this year?

No word so far on Liz's summons to the hospital, and my summons to Cormac and Liz's to look after Clara, so while I continue to wait for baby, I might as well put together my introduction for snowflake_challenge. I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to participate, because I'm not really in any particular fandom at the moment, but I like how much posting and energy the challenge creates on dreamwidth, and I'm hoping to post more this year anyway, so here goes. There also may be a few of you out there following me who don't have access, so if this is you, hi! I mostly post under access-lock, and if you'd like in on that, please let me know!

Anyway, by way of introduction, here is my COVID book pile, a TBR mountain of books I have acquired since March, 2020 (a few of which technically go back to Christmas 2019):



( Titles and details )

The books fall into several, instructive categories relevant to my interests:

Plants, Trees, Forestry, History of Forestry, Environmentalism

Relevant to my work and political interests! My politics, although I'm not happy that environmentalism falls under the realm of politics, are green. Quite green, at this point. Not so green that I'm going to quit society, quit my forestry-adjacent job, or blow up a pipeline myself, but...

In re: trees, I work at a commercial reforestation nursery, which on one level, because of the way forestry industry regulations are structured in BC, is enabling unsustainable logging practices (I accept that it's a teensy bit debatable how unsustainable, but definitely not as sustainable as the government likes to claim), but on other levels, is, in fact, growing 12–15 million new conifer seedlings every year. I do a lot of irrigation management, quality control, and data management to make sure the smol trees are healthy and prepared to survive being planted all over BC and in Washington and Oregon!

Medieval History

It's coming up to five years since I decided to quit academia, a few months after I moved back to BC at the end of a two-year post-PhD visiting assistant professor position in the department where I did my PhD. My life has gone in very different directions, and my interests have developed accordingly, but I'm still fascinated by medieval history, and I still nurture a tiny hope of one day being able to continue my research a little, on the side. (Not this year, though. What I'm doing on the side this year is the second half of an online horticulture diploma for professional advancement at work.)

Indigenous Issues/History/Literature

This is topic I'm working hard to educate myself on. #LandBack!

Mystery novels

There's only one representative on my pile currently, mostly because these are the books least likely to linger on mount TBR. But a lot of my current fannish feelings are dedicated to two mystery series in particular: Jean-François Parot's Enquêtes de Nicolas Le Floch, commissaire au Châtelet and Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. If I could find fanfiction for either series I would be all over it, and my problem of being between fandoms at the moment would be solved!

I've actually written fragments of a Nicolas Le Floch post-series, mid-French Revolution story, but I feel very little optimism that I'll ever finish it.

Historical fiction

One day I'd maybe like to write some myself, if I ever write anything, so I feel like I should read it too.

Knitting

marinarusalka wrote an anthropomorphic yarn knitting fic (which I highly recommend, by the way) for Yuletide this year. Does that make knitting officially a fandom? Knitting is my main hobby other than reading, and I tend to alternate knitting and reading phases.

The most recent volume of Alastair Campbell's diaries

My most recent, and still semi-active fandom (that actually has a fandom, as opposed to the Nicolas Le Floch and Gamache mysteries) is The Thick of It, and back in February 2020, I signed the abridged version of Alastair Campbell's diaries, The Blair Years, out of the library for fic research purposes. I have only very, very lightly dabbled in writing the fic in question, a Malcolm-Tucker-and-Nicola-Murray-have-a-brief-and-disastrous-affair-between-series-three-and-four thing, and will probably never really do it, but since then, I have read the entirety of the first seven unabridged volumes of AC's diaries. I'm kind-of, sort-of saving this one because I don't want to be done them all.

That One About the History of Transportation in British Columbia

I just have a lot of feelings about the Coquihalla, okay?

I feel like I must be singlehandedly spiders georg-level warping netflix's statistics with my repeated viewings of "Fireplace for Your Home: Birchwood Edition," but I regret nothing. The happy little fire in my TV, crackling away, somehow feels like nice company on these dark late-fall evenings in 2020 (and as I've possibly mentioned here before, winter nights in BC, even in more-or-less downtown Victoria, are somehow still always darker than I expect them to be, after the ten years I spent in Boston)!

I'm on my second time through the film tonight, as I knit and type this and read the internet. It's also ferociously windy outside, which makes the fire seem even nicer! I've spent most of the day reading and knitting and doing some minor weekend chores - dishes and laundry, and walking to the wool store in Trounce Alley to get some more wool for my family of socks project. The one baddish moment of the day happened in the wool store, when one of the (masked) customers wanted to debate masks with the couple who own the store and who don't require customers to wear masks. I mean, they should require masks, and also wear them themselves, because their store isn't really big enough for social distancing, but I wouldn't pick an angry debate with them over it. I just wear my mask when I go in, and try to keep my distance, and I'm trying to gather all my sock supplies and support small businesses now, while cases are still low on the Island.

Anyway, I'm getting to the point on my latest sock where I'm going to have to hazard a guess at how big Marek's feet are, ideally without having to ask Zöe for his shoe size and risk giving the game away. I know how big all my closest female relatives' feet are compared to mine, but I'm a little ??? for my male relatives. Obviously I should have spent more time in the past discussing shoes with them like I have with my mom, Morgayne, Liz, and Zöe! And I mean, I guess I've never discussed shoes with Clara, but she did show an early affinity for shoes, and also I'm sure I can find excuses to look at her pudgy little baby feet enough to know how big to make her socks.

Today's posting failures started with spending the morning freaking out about my tires (a mission out to my car with a ruler suggested that the bottom of the hubcap of the damaged front-left tire was maybe 2mm closer to the ground than on the intact right-front tire, and yet). I was in a significant lather by the time Laurie and I finally managed a phone call, for the first time in four months, and I fear I spent a lot of it continuing to be an anxious mess while talking to her.

After I got off the phone, however, I had some lunch and tea, and sat down and did some Nicolas Le Floch rereading, first on my couch and then on a chair on my deck, and that calmed me down. I didn't make it out to do anything, but I did do a bunch of dishes, and my laundry. I also mostly scrubbed out my bathtub, which I can now admit that I hadn't cleaned in at least a year. It was pretty gross! There are still some spots that need more scrubbing, and tomorrow morning I have to attend to the tiles, but progress!

Between scrubbing and running downstairs to deal with my laundry, I also managed to get in a bit of a writing groove and write a small section of my fic, which is why I'm once again posting at 10:30 pm. I actually stopped writing around 10:00 pm, but then I fell into a small research rabbit-hole of trying (again) to find some details about what happened to the Carmelite priory of Saint-Dénis during the French Revolution. Everything is about one of the art gallery that's there now, Madame Louise the daughter of Louis XV who was its prioress until she died in 1787 (TWO YEARS TOO EARLY TO BE USEFUL FOR MY CURRENT PURPOSES), or the Carmelites of Compiègne, who got themselves executed at the end of the Great Terror in 1784. Not what I want! I mean, yesterday I read a glorious, hot-off-the-presses, defended-this-spring-during-COVID, 450-page dissertation on nuns during the French Revolution, which gave me a general idea of what happened to the priory, and to Nicolas Le Floch's mom who was a nun there, but still!

Anyway, I now have two more days of long weekend/holidays to dedicate to this fic, plus all my other chores and projects, so I'd better get to bed the better to be able to take advantage of them. I'm pretty sure I slept terribly last night, which I'm sure didn't help with my freaking out this morning.