The Door Is Open Wide

Me, after last post: I'll make a post with my vids when I have a little more time! :)
My house: *floods*
Me: :(

...okay it wasn't quite that dramatic. Only almost. Including waking to insistent beeping at 3:30am to find no lights working, the fridge (which was the insistently beeping thing) blinking a warning that it was losing electricity, and a plant light flickering like a haunted thing.

Now, we have had to check the fuses before, but not in the middle of a freezing night with a foot of snow outside. (The electrical main is on the outside of the house.) So that was an experience! But we did find a main fuse had flipped off, so flipped it back on.

And then, just as I was settling in for my half day at work (I am also on sick leave 50% because of a very bad... seven months) I got a text from my husband with pictures of our basement flooded with sewer water, and our heating pump freaking out.

Oh, and it was his birthday.

Hahah. Ha.

We've been homeowners for three years, and this was the biggest "fuck fuck what do we do agh fuck" moment so far! Fortunately our home insurance company knew who to call to start un-flooding the basement, and it is literally just a little storage room with its own door, not a furnished basement or even connected to the upstairs in any way. (We had some bad smell in the bathroom above it, but nothing that spread further after I covered the drain and put a plate of vinegar out.) So we didn't lose anything important!

We did start freaking out a bit about the heating pump, for obvious reasons of a heating system being something you don't want breaking in the middle of winter, but our electrician literally sold us the house, and he was able to come around within a few hours of getting my call.

So by 2pm, our basement was scrubbed clean and was being dried by an industrial fan, and all of the secret fuses we had not remembered existed had been replaced/switched back on. Heat worked! Electricity worked! Just the way we and the kitties like it.

The root cause for all of this was a randomly blocked sewer pipe that we had to pay to have unclogged by a vacuum truck, but discovering an emergency during office hours is great for getting a good rate on that sort of thing!

Now to research whether or not it's worth getting some kind of check valve or something installed in that particular basement floor drain.

...and at some point I will also have the time and energy to post the vids I made. But for now, that's what's happening over here! Hope everyone else is having a much less exciting week.

Dear Festividder,

I am so thrilled that we've matched on something, and know I will love whatever you want to make! I just adore the art form of vidding, and all the different ways people use existing sources to create something new.

( Cut for length - but for anyone NOT participating in Festivids, this post contains the rare actual rec from me, for 7 TV shows, 1 movie, 1 book and 1 manga/anime! )

We have a cat tree with three baskets at different level. Both cats love the middle one best. And even though it's a little on the small size, they usually squeeze in there together. Sometimes they fight about it and one of them has to scuttle off. (It's usually Meenie deciding to fight, and Nora deciding to leave.)

This afternoon I stood up in the sofa to look down into the basket, and... Meenie, how are you even configured?!

It's November! Which means it's been over a year since we realized that, no, it's wouldn't be alarmist to say that Twitter is fucked. (It was indeed not alarmist.) I'm trying to motivate myself to get more Dreamwidth time in, and the new posting page is promising. Being able to do this on mobile would be great! Being able to write more longform stuff would be great, if I ever found myself with enough words to warrant the format... this is why microblogging is easier for me. I just. Don't feel I have much to say these days.

Elsewhere, here's where I am at:

Twitter
First locked, then soon after deactivated my account. I have until early December to reactivate it if I want to keep my username, which I might do? But I honestly can't use the site anymore.

Bluesky
I feel right at home on this microblogging site, which most of my Twitter friends have made the leap to. Unfortunately it doesn't have any way to lock either your account or your posts, which is keeping several people I know from joining, and there's no Direct Message option. But for now I'm the most active there. I'm at naye, where I post random stuff including my photography.

Mastodon
Honestly my favorite of the "Twitter alternatives", even though it's way older than just the mass exodus to get away from Elon Musk. It's got per-post privacy settings! You can hang out locally on a server and talk to others on other servers and no single person or company can buy the whole thing! I try to post and interact daily, and it's always so gratifying to see my photography get lots of appreciation there. (Hashtags work on Mastodon, unlike on Bluesky, so lots of people can find things if you post them in the relevant tags.) I'm naye[Bad username or site: wandering @ shop] - a server set up to be like a coffee shop for the SFF community, which I am only part of as an occasional reader, but it still feels like a very nice server to be on, and I'd be happy to share invites!

Tumblr
I've been on Tumblr since 2012, and while I've gone long periods mostly just leaving it alone, I'm really enjoying using it for scrolling through pretty things. It's also where I'm posting my sporadic One Piece reread reactions, because it's easy to mix text and images there, and sometimes other people like the posts too! Otherwise I don't interact much over there.

Cohost
I totally dig Cohost as a service. It's so easy to use for everything from posting pictures to embedding posts from elsewhere. It's like the Pokémon final evolution of Dreamwidth and Tumblr! Alas, very few of my pocket friends have made it over there, so for now I just sit around hoping it'll somehow get more popular with users. You can find me naye.

July 15,2023
Lofoten, Norway
Camera: Canon PowerShot SX50

Struggling with the platform exhaustion I mentioned a few posts ago. Don't have much to say. Things aren't bad! Have a pic.



The Road, Lofoten (Norway)
July 18, 2023
Camera: Canon SX50

Trying to keep up with friends in half a dozen places, and deciding where to post what just isn't sustainable for me. The past couple of days I've ended up hardly talking to my pocket friends at all, and that doesn't feel right either. But when there are so many places... And many friends are in more than one place with me and I don't want to spam people but...!

Don't know what to do about this but you can find me in the places through Linktree.

Alt: The silhouette of a photographer holding a camera in profile against the low midnight sun. The landscape - low islands and glimpses of the sea - is bathed in orange light.

July 15, 2023 23:28
Outside Eggum, Lofoten (Norway)
Camera: Samsung Galaxy S10

I finished Martha Wells' Witch King and loved it SO MUCH I feel bereft now that it's over. Fabulous writing, and some of the best found family I've read in ages! I adore everyone and wish I had another thousand chapters of them and their fascinating world. (And more plot, because I'm so hooked!)

I am so bad at reviews, but here's what I wrote on Storygraph:

Characters to love and a world to explore

I absolutely loved this! The world is fascinating, and the characters are multifaceted. Reading, I wanted to know more about everything, and I was rewarded by so much cool stuff about the characters, their relationships and their past.

Fortunately other people write better reviews, including vashti-lives, who has a great one here (my reblog bc finding posts on Tumblr is a nightmare now).