winterfirelight

Well... I guess I kind of fell off the posting wagon again at the end of January. I enjoyed the Snowflake Challenges that I got to, but ultimately life took over and I just haven't had the time. I've been making a concerted effort in February to cut back on some of the things I do so I can feel like I have any amount of breathing room again, with varying success. 

Enough success I had a bit of time to do some herb stuff again! So that's nice. It's garden planning season, and I got a number of new exciting things at a seed swap, so one of these days I need to sit down and plot out what's actually getting planted this year. I'm hopeful that some of the things I planted last year have overwintered successfully, but I won't know until it's warmer. I think the valerian will be fine, but the elecampane I'm worried about. It never seemed to like where I put it, so if it's survived, I may try to transplant it elsewhere to see if I can find what it prefers. The angelica is still there and arguably doing better than it did all last year - maybe it's just needed time to settle in. We'll see! 

A neighbor gave me some hops that I put in the ground a month or two ago, and I'm just starting to see it come up through the mulch. It's got a small little trellis for now, but if it does well, maybe next year we'll put in something bigger and prettier there. I'd love to get some passionflower somewhere too, and that's a climber as well. 

I'm thinking of replacing the old garden bed by the street with a few taller corrugated steels beds. The old one has been there since before we moved in and is slowly rotting away, and being practically at sidewalk-level where dogs pee all the time, I don't love the idea of harvesting from it as-is. It'll never be the best place to grow edibles, but I think if we elevated it by a couple of feet and had steel instead of wood, that would make it more reasonable. With a few pots instead of one big bed,  we could grow some of the things that like to take over without risking the rest of the garden. Oregano, lemon balm, maybe motherwort? Feverfew loves it over there, so I should probably reserve it some room, though it tends to wander and may not cooperate well with being given a designated spot. 

I keep thinking about what else I can make with the harvest I still have left from years prior. Herbs only stay good for so long, and the poor calendula in the jar is more yellow than orange at this point, so I fear it's past its prime already. Alas. This coming season I'll make oils and tinctures from it early in the season, and then save the later harvests for tea so the dried flowers last longer into the winter. Live and learn. I did finally get around to making some fresh vinegar shrub with the elderberry I got at the farmer's market last fall and froze. I'm really hoping to get some elderberry plants of my own one of these years, but I'm still debating on the best place to put it. They can get sizeable, I understand. We got the backyard clear of brambles last year, but it's still not really set up for gardening beyond that. 

In non-garden news, Discord is going the way of age verification, which means I will no longer be there. Which honestly really sucks. My most active online communities have been there, and folks seem to be struggling to figure out where to go. An herbalism server I'm in has been going round and round on different options, and though I've floated Dreamwidth a number of times when folks have expressed a desire for old-school blogging formats like LiveJournal, I don't seem to have gotten any bites on it. Baffling. It's exactly what people are saying they want, but tell them that it actually exists and they really, truly could have the platform of their dreams, and it's crickets. Oh well.

...incidentally, is anyone interested in an herbalism community here on Dreamwidth? Maybe it's an "if you build it, they will come" situation. I'm far from the most qualified person to run something like that, but seeing as I'm about to have a significant amount of my regular internet time freed up without Discord, maybe I could manage to sustain it even with my history as a chronic lurker.

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!

lebateleur shared some incredible resources on digital privacy in their response to this challenge, and I feel compelled to continue sharing with all internet denizens who will listen the good news of reclaiming control of your data.

Get started with the Cyber Cleanse Guide! So far my personal favorite recommendation in this absolute treasure trove is keeping your payment information secure using privacy.com.

Later in the guide is a section about cutting down on tracking through your phone by switching to a more private operating system, rather than the oh-so-ubiquitous iOS or Android. I personally am a big fan of Graphene OS, but there are other options out there (Sailfish being another that is new-to-me and that I will certainly be looking further into).

And if you want to go an extra step and get your computer off of running Windows or Mac, you can always try Linux! Linux Mint is often recommended for those just getting started with making the switch, but KDE Plasma is also an excellent option I've seen.


Снежнике-Вызов
Вызов 4:

Рекомендуйте содержание вашей последней страницы: любой веб-сайт, который вам нравится, будь то фанфики, искусство, социальные сети или что-то более эксцентричное!

В своем ответе на этот вызов lebateleur поделилась некоторыми замечательными ресурсами по цифровой конфиденциальности, и я чувствую себя обязанным продолжать делиться хорошими новостями о восстановлении контроля над вашими данными со всеми пользователями Интернета, которые хотят это услышать.

Начните с Cyber Cleanse Guide (и прошу прощения за то, что не перевела весь сайт)! До сих пор моя личная любимая рекомендация в этом сокровище - обеспечить безопасность вашей платежной информации с помощью privacy.com.

В гиде также есть раздел о том, как уменьшить отслеживание через телефон, перейдя на более конфиденциальную операционную систему вместо повсеместно распространенных iOS или Android. Мне лично нравится Graphene OS, но есть и другие варианты (Sailfish еще один, который для меня новый и который я обязательно рассмотрю более подробно).

А если вы хотите пойти еще дальше и отказаться от использования Windows или Mac на своем компьютере, вы всегда можете попробовать Linux! Linux Mint часто рекомендуют тем, кто только начинает переход на Linux, но KDE Plasma тоже является отличным вариантом, как я заметил.

Made it outside for some good time in the garden this morning. Today I tackled the raspberry bush that's been slowly taking over underneath the apple tree. It hasn't been pruned in at least five years, and goodness, did it ever need it. I cleared out most of the dead canes, plus a bunch of weeds, plus the stump of some kind of dead bush that seems to have been buried there for ages. My hope is to pare down the remaining canes into an amount more manageable, and getting them tied up on a trellis so that next year they're easier to tend. They've been encroaching on another mess of weeds and bushes and grass on the other side of the apple tree, and I'm debating if I pull everything else and let the raspberries spread into that section in a more controlled way, or if I clear that whole area and plant something else there instead. What else would grow well under a tree with some berries?

One of my arnica plants went to seed, so I went ahead and planted a few in the ground, and saved the rest to plant next spring. I'm curious to see if the direct sowing method works this time - I've rarely had luck with that in the past. I'd love to have a more substantial arnica patch, since it's such a useful salve to have on hand. If it ever manages to be as prolific as my calendula, I'd be over the moon, but I'm sure it'll need more time to get established.

The battle against the brambles continues out back. But we finally got rid of all the rotten wood pallet furniture the previous owners left behind, so the space has opened up considerably. That's been a goal for several years, one of those things we never seemed to manage to get around to, so I'm pretty thrilled it's taken care of. Now I'm mulling over what kind/shape of raised bed will work best there, and what we might plant in it. The general thought is to grow mostly herbs out front, and veggies out back, but we'd have to sort out what veggies we would actually use. The risk is relatively high that we would plant a bunch of things, and then realize they don't fit easily into our usual cooking and food habits. I'm not the chef in the house, and generally prefer not to have to think about what to eat, so my opinion is less important than others in that regard.

We're still seeing hot days here and there, but the summer is slowly giving up the fight, so I'm hoping for more opportunity to work on things outside without baking to death in the sun. I've probably missed the window of opportunity for harvesting a couple of things, but since this was the first year for most of the plants I added to the garden in the spring, they're mostly still getting established and won't be ready for harvest until next season (at least) anyway. Very excited to see how next year goes, now that everything's had a chance to settle in. 

Wow, suddenly it's August somehow. That seems unreasonable. It was just June, like, yesterday.

The Sunshine Revival challenge finished up. I had a blast with it, even though I fell off the wagon for the last half from being out of town, and then having many things to do to catch up from being out of town. It was a fun event though, and I've kept all those goals I made at the start of July in mind throughout the month.

Here's a progress update on said goals!

• Learning more html to use on Dreamwidth!: Success! This wasn't a particularly measurable goal, but I picked up a few things. There's still more I'd like to do with this, but I figure I'll continue to learn as I have opportunity to use html.


• Completing an online course for the CompTIA A+ exam that I don't intend to take yet but would like to learn the material for regardless: Well... this one started off well enough, and then I decided I didn't like the particular course I was doing and went off to find a new one. And then I decided to buy a textbook that goes along with it since I learn a lot better through reading than through watching videos, and then I had to wait for the textbook to arrive, and now July is over and I feel like I've only just gotten started. I'm enjoying the learning though! I do need to be careful here because the material is making want to built my own computer, which is a project I do not need nor have time for right now.


• Gifting someone IRL an herbal gift of some kind - don't care who or what, I'm just running out of space and need to make room!: I made my mom a little salve while we were together! Calendula, mullein, and lavender, I think, but honestly I've already forgotten what all I put in it.


• Giving my cat more attention, apparently, as he tries to sit on my arm while I type. As if he doesn't get enough attention by screaming to be held all day long. I love this obnoxious little man :3: Much success. Easiest one on the list. The kitty wasn't about to let me leave this goal unfulfilled, even if I wanted to.


• Starting on the next section of my longfic! Bonus stretch goal is finishing that section, but that's a longshot, especially with everything else going on. My overarching goal is to finish the entire work before the end of the year.: Success! I got four chapters into the section, and plan on getting more writing done today. I continue to be very excited about where this work is going. Not sure if finishing by the end of the year is going to be feasible at the current pace, but we'll see.


• Not sitting and staring uselessly at my work computer when I have nothing to do and instead using that time for something actually productive even if it's not work (the hardest on this list, tbh): also not the most measurable, but I did manage to spend some work hours with nothing to do reading the textbook I got and taking care of life admin. So definitely some success! We'll see if I can maintain it.

I really enjoyed being more active on DW at the start of the month because of this challenge, and I'm definitely looking forward to doing more like this in the future. It does seem like a great way to get to meet folks and learn about what other people are interested in or up to! At some point I may go back and finish up some of the prompts that I missed, but for now, I've still got my incomplete goals to keep working on. Allons-y!

Challenge #2

Tunnel of Love
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.
Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like

I'm coming in a little late on this one, but catching up now. This is a hard question! Not because there's nothing I'm sentimental about, but because there's so much. It's genuinely hard to decide what to talk about.

Here's what I ended up with...

I love writing. More specifically, I love writing between and among the lines of what already exists. These days that's largely fanfiction, but if I were to write an original novel (I'd like to someday) it would almost definitely end up being historical fiction and/or magical realism and/or magical realism-adjacent. Something where I can take the real world and spin it up into something different. It's just so interesting to dig into what's real or canon, and then find the spaces in between to fill them up with something that isn't real but maybe could be, in a way that blurs the lines until you're not sure which was the real part to begin with. Bringing the fantastical down a notch by elevating the mundane to something extraordinary.

Part of my interest in this is that there's just so much to learn in the world. In my current longfic project that is based on DC Comics canon in the mid-'90s, I've got a character who is a first-generation Hmong American and another who is Vietnamese but living in the US. I initially started reading about refugee experiences to help inform my writing, but at this point I've ended up spending the better part of three or four years working my way through a variety of migrant and refugee literature purely for its own sake. Almost none of what I'm writing is actually about this topic - it's a superhero story about grief and belonging and family ties, not the human cost of forced displacement. But I've become a better, more informed, more empathetic person as a result of this exploration, not to mention a better writer, and I'm grateful to all of the authors who have contributed their stories and wisdom to this corner of the pool of human literature.

Which... maybe that doesn't quite seem related to magical realism and writing between lines or any of that, but to me, it's all connected. You can only write between lines if you know where the lines are and what they're made of, and you can only know that by learning about the world as it exists, and you can only learn that by listening to others, and you can only listen to others by witnessing their reality in whatever way we can manage with art and writing and stories and everything else we as humans create.

Is that a poem? Maybe that's a poem.

Challenge #1

Journaling Prompt: Light up your journal with activity this month. Talk about your goals for July or for the second half of 2025.
Creative Prompt: Shine a light on your own creativity. Create anything you want (an image, an icon, a story, a poem, or a craft) and share it with your community.

The first goal of July is learning more html to use on Dreamwidth!

...starting with this li'l collapsible, and continuing with bullet points. This is fun! Other goals for July include:

• Completing an online course for the CompTIA A+ exam that I don't intend to take yet but would like to learn the material for regardless


• Gifting someone IRL an herbal gift of some kind - don't care who or what, I'm just running out of space and need to make room!


• Giving my cat more attention, apparently, as he tries to sit on my arm while I type this. As if he doesn't get enough attention by screaming to be held all day long. I love this obnoxious little man <3


• Starting on the next section of my longfic! Bonus stretch goal is finishing that section, but that's a longshot, especially with everything else going on. My overarching goal is to finish the entire work before the end of the year.


• Not sitting and staring uselessly at my work computer when I have nothing to do and instead using that time for something actually productive even if it's not work (the hardest on this list, tbh)

I am tempted by the creative prompt too, but I think I'll let it lie for today. Inspiration may strike later in the month, and I'll plan to tackle it at that point.

I'm officially on vacation! I've made exactly zero plans for the time I've got off. Most likely I'll end up spending a good amount of time getting the garden and yard in order. 

This morning I went out and harvested more calendula (always more calendula, we're swimming in it). There was a yarrow ready for harvest too, so I brought that in, and another batch of mint. I'm hoping to start tackling the mint patch this week to get it out of the yard and into a nice big pot somewhere, so I can still have a good harvest of it without it taking everything over completely. 

I also finished processing the dried rosemary that was hanging, so now we've got a nice big jar of that for cooking. Sometimes it really feels like we don't have quite enough drying space. I'm sure that will only become more true over time, as the plants in the new garden space get bigger. I won't be able to harvest most of them for another year or two, probably. 

Everything is in bloom, everywhere. I keep seeing new kinds of flowers around the neighborhood that I can't identify. There's a lovely little blue thing on top of a fluffy stalk of some kind that I've been really enjoying seeing around, and a lot of towers of bell-shaped flowers that I think may be foxglove? Outside of my narrow lane of certain herbs, I'm not all that well-versed in identification.

Regardless, I'm enjoying it. I'm not the biggest summer fan, enjoying neither heat nor sun, but I like that the plants are liking it, at least. 

Wow, what a week! Totally I finally get to have some time off of work, which is nice. I need a break.

Yesterday I finally got around to planting the angelica, wild ginger, and stinging nettle I picked up at the plant sale a couple of weeks ago. I still have to figure out where to put the wasabi. The nettle I ended up just putting in a small pot as a temporary measure, since it was looking rough, and I'll have to figure out it's more permanent situation later. I'll need to keep it from spreading, and also keep it out of the way from where people usually walk, but I'm excited to have it (assuming it survives!). It makes for good tea, and if I grow enough, I could use it for greens too.

This morning I harvested a ton of the mint growing in the backyard. I'm not sure where it came from, but it's clearly escaped containment somewhere. I'll need to pull it all out at some point, probably sooner rather than later, but I might as well get some nice tea out of it in the meantime. That's all hanging to dry in the window now, which always makes the kitchen feel a particular kind of homey.

We've got a couple of IKEA bookshelves to build, so I may spend a chunk of the day on that. Somehow there is never enough storage space, but we're slowly making headway on clearing out the clutter and getting things organized. Last weekend we managed to get a whole load of things over to the Goodwill, which was nice to have out of the way.
 

I've been spending a little less time in the garden lately. Mostly because everything seems to be doing alright on it's own. I've got some new borage coming up, and have kept on harvesting what I can harvest. The new parsley is struggling to adjust, but everything else is doing well. There's another plant sale this weekend that I'm hoping to make it to, and we'll see what's available there. It's supposed to be all edible plants, which is very much my jam.

I've kept up writing this week. I'm almost done with the piece I started from the dream I had, and... ooof. It's gone a much darker direction than I had planned. Only the first couple sections came from the dream, and the rest is just following that trajectory through to an end, and it is. Not a happy end. I'm not entirely sure what to do with that, to be honest. I'm used to writing angst and addressing some pretty uncomfortable themes, but even my usual beta reader read what I've got so far and went "o.o you'd better put some trigger warnings on this, holy hell that is sinister". So that's... something. I'll have to sit with it for awhile, I think, before I go posting it anywhere. There's all kinds of dark stuff on Ao3, so it's not that it's especially out there in the scheme of things. I'm just going to have to think through best tagging practices and author's notes for it so the people who want to see it will, and the people who would rather not don't have to.
 

In other news, my boss very casually let drop the other day that she's actual, literal, real-life besties with a rather famous comic writer who I shall not name. Like, take-trips-to-see-each-other-and-text-all-the-time level of besties, not just casual acquaintances. So now I've accidentally come out to my boss as a Big Ol' Nerd, which she was floored by because it has never come up before (why would it?) and I tend to keep my personal and professional lives rather sharply divided. Her response to that is that she might try to invite her famous comic writer friend to a work event we're having later this year (!!!!!!!!) which is equal parts awesome and terrifying. If that ends up happening, I'm going to have to put some real work into getting over being starstruck so I can act like a normal person. I'd hate to make it weird, but also, what a cool opportunity that would be!

It's been raining, which is good for the garden. More of the elecampane and valerian are putting out new leaves as they get settled in the ground, which is nice to see since they were looking so sad for a little while there. Everything else seems to be doing okay so far too, though I'm very curious to see how the arnica does in this climate.

I've not spent a ton of time out there, thanks to the rain, but that's bought me some time for continuing to work with GIMP and play around with icons. I've got a quite a few now! Not all of them are to the standard I might like, but given I started with zero experience, I think I can be proud of myself for it regardless. Dusting off some of those old art skills that I never fully developed.

I've not been keeping up with blogging here as regularly as I had hoped for Three Weeks, but then, there's a lot going on. Now that I've got icons sorted, I may start posting up the last fic I haven't uploaded yet. I'm debating how I want to approach it on DW. On Ao3, I post a chapter a week on a consistent schedule, but that means there's lots of chapters I've written that won't see the light of day for a long time. DW feels like a more intimate venue, which I like, so I'm tempted to post all of it that I've got so far and add the last arc's chapters as I write them. Or at least, to maintain the consistency, get it caught up to the chapters available on Ao3 and then have it run a week or two ahead as a way to lure some Ao3 denizens over to this excellent little website.

Things to consider.