elizabethmccoy | Network

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Most Wanted Man"

pegkerr

My cousin Jill's Year of Adventure suggestion for me was to take a couple of hours volunteering together to plant some trees with Great River Greening. So, we signed up for a shift, and last Saturday on a beautiful sunny day, the two of us, along with her partner Jack, met in a park in Brooklyn Center.

The volunteer coordinators had the process down to a well-rehearsed presentation, and we three ended up planting three trees in all in the two-hour time slot. The first two were straightforward enough, and third, a Catalpa, had evidently been in the pot too long. The tap root had pushed through the hole in the bottom and grown large enough to embed itself into the plastic. It took a twenty minutes struggle to get it out of the pot.

It was hot by the time we finished up, and I'd exerted myself enough during the struggle with the stubborn tree to be glad to drink down the water I'd brought and sit in the shade a bit. But we enjoyed ourselves, and there are now three new trees in a park in Brooklyn Center, thanks to our efforts. Afterward, we drove to Jack and Jill's house for lunch, where I admired their extensive gardens and patio under the beautiful spreading oak tree.

A day well spent in the outdoors.

Image description: Lower center: head and shoulders of two women and a man, wearing hats, smiling at the camera. Center: The same three people are planting a tree. Overlaid over the tree are the words "Great River Greening."

Tree Planting

22 Tree Planting

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: pleased

stonepicnicking_okapi

This one in my planner.

sholio

The recent "only one bed" meme (which I still haven't finished, as per usual) led to only-one-bed thoughts and this missing scene for B5 5x16.

One Safe Harbor (also on Ao3 - G'Kar/Londo, 2300 words, explicit)
Missing scene on the flight from Babylon 5 to Centauri Prime in 5x16. Two people in a very small sleeping space. Also, some feelings are had.

( One Safe Harbor - 2300 wds )

sovay

As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.

Current Music: Sam Fender, "Tyrants"

kaylarudbek

https://theimpactproject.org/the-impact-map/

sholio

I watched the first 15 minutes of "In the Beginning" back in May, and finally watched the rest last night. I enjoyed it, despite not being that interested in the 10-years-earlier part of the timeline (or the Minbari, for the most part). Annoyingly, the audio/video was a little out of sync for most of it, and I'm not sure why.

( Spoilers for a 25-year-old TV movie )

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

1. Have you ever been to summer camp?

2. Have you ever made a s'more?

3. Have you ever slept under the stars (no tent/tarp)?

4. Have you ever had a member of the opposite sex sleep over at your house?

5. What type of bed do you have (queen, twin, bunk, etc.)?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

stonepicnicking_okapi

from Leaves of Grass

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the
ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

minoanmiss posting in

agonyaunt

Twists and revelations!

( Read more... )

stonepicnicking_okapi

Thank you for the outstanding impression you made during your interview. We are so glad to have a great new team member.

I have to fill out a lot of paperwork and go through orientation but I (most likely) have a job!!!

OMG!

minoanmiss posting in

agonyaunt

A Reder Writes: ( Read more... )

sholio

This was written for one of last year's prompt fests - Whumptober, I think - and never posted. At the time, I was really struggling to get words out, feeing pretty insecure about the words I did write, and I could tell this needed editing and didn't feel up to dealing with it. Also, it was too long to just post as a snippet of fic like most of the others. I sat on it for a while with the idea that it might be possible to clean it up and use it in an exchange, but it didn't fit anything I was writing for, and I finally got around to editing and posting it.

Old Words (1978 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Biggles Series - W. E. Johns
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Characters: Erich von Stalhein, James "Biggles" Bigglesworth
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Friendship, Developing Relationship, Secret Messages
Summary: Some time after Buries a Hatchet/Looks Back, Biggles and Erich find an old message in an abandoned dead drop.

Also posted under the cut.

( Old Words - 2000 wds )

mildred_of_midgard

From my utter lack of running updates, you can draw the correct conclusion about my knee.

It's fluctuating between better and worse, but not letting me run. I've been consistently sleeping on my right side, so my left knee has greatly reduced its popping and pain, and I haven't had to brace. But it's continued hurting in a different place, more front and center, just over the bottom of the patella.

I managed a run last Thursday--only one hill rep, because my cardio is trash again. Then Friday I was running again, but I was getting a stabbing pain on the top of my knee with every step.

I eventually figured out it was a tight quadriceps from weeks of compensating for a bad knee. So I kept running--tight muscles are the least alarming pain, for they respond to stretching. Then I did something monumentally stupid: I realized if I bent my knee more, the quad hurt less, so I bent my knee more.

One wrong step, and my knee went from painless to erupting in pain. I was stranded a mile from home, so I had to hobble and limp--and I couldn't even take my normal route home, because it goes up a hill. So I detoured down to Main Street, where the route was flat, and I ended up hobbling a mile and a half (in a way that obviously aggravated my quads, too).

My knee did get slightly better, in the sense that it didn't hurt if I walked on it around the house.

Then on Saturday I was continuing my decluttering project, and I don't know what I did, but I think maybe it was kneeling to get the DVDs and DVD player out from the bottom of the television console.

About a minute after I got up, my knee was hurting in a way that no amount of compensating could make go away.

I lay down and iced it, and it *still* hurt with every step an hour later.

So I didn't do any walking all weekend, except around the house. Monday I managed a walk to the grocery store, but no running. Yesterday I managed a 3-hour hike, with uphills and downhills and rock scrambling, and my knee mostly held up! Except that sometimes it protested the downhill slightly, and a couple of times, something moved in a non-painful but alarming "this isn't supposed to move like that" way. Fortunately, it didn't do that very strongly until the end of the walk, when I was literally standing across the street from my driveway. So I hobbled across the street and up the parking lot, and then it got better. I think it was triggered by something in changing my stride from trail walking to flat asphalt walking.

I walked to the grocery store and back today, and it was fine, but as I got home, the side of my knee started doing the weird thing again. So I decided not to do the housework I had planned, which involved kneeling.

Maybe at some point, I'll be permitted to run again. Hopefully while I can still do one cemetery loop, and not where I was a couple months ago, where my cardio was *so* bad I couldn't even do one.

Consider me disgruntled but determined.

sovay

Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls

spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

( Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "A Library Used to Be (Black Hole and Its Concentrated Edges)"

kaylarudbek

https://open.substack.com/pub/longmemo/p/leopards-eat-floridas-face?r=2a18wh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

stonepicnicking_okapi

I haven't don't one of these since April, but I've come across some new-to-me words.

Wednesday's word is...

...banjax.

1. ruin, incapacitate, or break.

I found this new-to-me word in the Inspector Rebus I just finished (Saints of the Shadow Bible).

"...Reckons we banjaxed the Saunders case to keep a good snitch on the street."

I would also like to add this saying (also new-to-me) from the same which is very Rebus.

Fair exchange is no robbery

That is definitely going to be the title of my next hard-boiled detective fic. It's great.

stonepicnicking_okapi

This bingo card was created by

kingstoken. More about the challenge here: https://kingstoken.dreamwidth.org/109837.html

LBGTQ+: Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Derby. An interesting life. This is a long work, however, and at times was a slog just because of the length. 500+ pages.

Multiple POV: The Guest List by Lucy Foley. Of course, you can't think of a Multiple POV book when you want to, so I googled it and got this, and my library had it on audiobook. It's a modern And then there were none with everyone coming to a wedding on an island. No one is likeable. Really, they're all sort of awful. And it wasn't clever. And public school boys bullying someone to death is too cliche for me. But it held my attention enough to finish it. 10+hours. Ensemble narrator cast.

Anthology/Collection: The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón. An excellent collection of poetry by the US Poet Laureate. I listened to audio verison in her own voice, which I recommend. I included some of my favorites in an April post: https://stonepicnicking-okapi.dreamwidth.org/598098.html

Friendship: Seafire by Natalie C. Parker. This was my 'blind date' book I got at the library in February. It was a YA fantasy book of a kind of Mad Max world on the water. The main characters are young women who are captain and crew of a ship which is renegade/rogue, fighting against the warlord who controls the area. It was good. The world building was interesting. I'm not going to read the next in the series but I enjoyed it. Friendship is definitely a main theme. [I am also trying to do as many squares as I can of

garonne's 2025 Book Bingo here: https://garonne.dreamwidth.org/58219.html so I think this qualifies as G-B-3: Set at sea.]

Movie/TV-tie in: Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. This was the first book on the 'Reading List for 4th graders' sent Minisculus' teacher, and I decided to make a Mother-Son book club. It's a sweet little book about a girl in Florida. They made a movie out of it. Winn-Dixie for unfamiliar is a grocery store chain and the girl names the stray dog (like Annie and Sandy) after the grocery store she finds it in. Minisculus, of course, reads manga and Percy Jackson. But he needs more torture in his life :) [also for G-I-1: children's book]

azurelunatic

Cat: "Me-ow!"
Me: "Me-ow! You-ow! We all ow!"

sartorias

I was taking to a felow customer when I stopped for sandwiches while strolling around downtown Albany last night, and when I commented on the deepeness of the verdure around me--I can't get enough of it--he said that it's been a very wet season here.

I took a walk along the Hudson, stopping at a little side canal, or whatever they are called, when I saw a bridge and inviting shadows (the sun was overly warm and the hair humid and kind of dirty). I snapped this shot:

If it works right, and you embiggen, look just above the top branch of the fallen tree. I'd spotted a pair of geeze swimming toward it, and thought they'd make a splendid shot framed by the two branches. But they never emerged from behind the top one, some twenty feet below me and upstream. I could see the ripples from them paddling, but no sign of the geese.

When I looked closer, I just spotted a black and white goose head peeking at me from beyond that branch. They were clearly waiting for the monster to lurk somewhere else.

And now I'm on my way northwards toward Montreal, which I should reach this evening.

Profile (About Me)

elizabethmccoy

July 2019

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Page Summary

sovay - Finally, time to write the book on you
pegkerr - 2025 52 Card Project: Week 22: Tree Planting
stonepicnicking_okapi - Collage Journaling: Jupiter & Saturn
sholio - Babylon 5 fanfic: One Safe Harbor
sovay - On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running
kaylarudbek - Mapping
sholio - Babylon 5: In the Beginning (the rest of it)
anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 6 June 2025
stonepicnicking_okapi - Poet's Corner: Miracles by Walt Whitman
minoanmiss in agonyaunt - Ask a Manager: Job Candidate Got into A Fight With My Wife
stonepicnicking_okapi - GREAT NEWS
minoanmiss in agonyaunt - Ask a Manager: My Boss's Parenting Choices Are Driving Me Nuts
sholio - Biggles fic: Old Words
mildred_of_midgard - Knees
sovay - I know it made your head spin, what we did with money
kaylarudbek - Link of interest
stonepicnicking_okapi - Word: Banjax
stonepicnicking_okapi - Book Bingo: June 2025
azurelunatic - Things said to cats
sartorias - Northwards

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Style: Wisteria for Nouveau Oleanders by branchandroot
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Page generated Jun. 7th, 2025 04:27 am

Elizabeth McCoy

Network

Finally, time to write the book on you

2025 52 Card Project: Week 22: Tree Planting

Collage Journaling: Jupiter & Saturn

Babylon 5 fanfic: One Safe Harbor

On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running

Mapping

Babylon 5: In the Beginning (the rest of it)

The Friday Five for 6 June 2025

Poet's Corner: Miracles by Walt Whitman

Ask a Manager: Job Candidate Got into A Fight With My Wife

GREAT NEWS

Ask a Manager: My Boss's Parenting Choices Are Driving Me Nuts

Biggles fic: Old Words

Knees

I know it made your head spin, what we did with money

Link of interest

Word: Banjax

Book Bingo: June 2025

Things said to cats

Northwards

Profile (About Me)

July 2019

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