What I'm Doing Wednesday
May. 14th, 2025 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sageBuddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom by Rick Hanson, Richard Mendius, Daniel J. Siegel. 2009, I think. Really not as sciency as I was hoping for. :(
Chakras, the Vagus Nerve, and Your Soul: Journeying to Wellness Through Subtle Energy and Your Nervous System by C.J. Llewelyn, M.Ed, LPC. I was expecting something bordering on the woo-woo, based on the title. But it's actually a therapist's book on treating clients with trauma in a somatic-informed way. Which is very cool and relevant to my interests! (The last 20% kind of went into soul-stuff, but the rest was very rooted in science.)
The Neuroscience of Yoga and Meditation by Brittany Fair, Bruce Hogarth (Illustrator). This is so cool. All the nitty-gritty science of what yoga and meditation do to the brain. Recommended.
currently reading: The Hidden Story of the Mahabharata: With Inner Meanings from Paramhansa Yogananda by Nayaswami Gyandev. I've read parts of the Mahabharata, inc all of the Bhagavad-Gita, but never the whole thing and never with annotations. So far, it's a deeply satisfying read.
( dirt )
( healthcrap, Pilates, yoga, yoga nidra )
#resist
May 20 to 26: Walmart Boycott 2
June 1: Pride LGBTQ Protest
June 3 to 9: Target Boycott
June 14: Flag Day & No King's Day (Trump's Birthday) Protest
June 19: Juneteenth Protest
June 27: Stonewall Anniversary Protest
June 24 to 30: McDonald’s Boycott
July 4: Independence Day Boycott
I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333
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May. 12th, 2025 07:02 pmlycomingstBut it’s raining. Cloudbursts come and go. I’m not used to rain after April. The dogwood tree has lost all its flowers. Now it’s all green leaves all the time. Petals on the ground. When I moved in last autumn there were brown leaves ankle deep. The tree always has something to say.
90% of the weekend was great ...
May. 12th, 2025 09:36 pmrmc28I managed to kick my cold enough to play the ice hockey tournament Saturday and Sunday afternoons. One of my teammates gave me a lift from Cambridge rink to Romford each day. It's an easy drive and we get on well, and the tournament itself was great fun. Exhausting, but fun and definitely great for developing and improving play. The other four teams playing were pretty friendly and we made some connections and enthusiasm for playing more games against each other as individual teams.
Unfortunately my ride home got injured in the last few seconds of the last game of the tournament on Sunday evening, a "needs A&E and good drugs" level injury. So I went with him to the local A&E on the grounds they'd probably want a responsible non-drugged adult to get him home, and it'd only be a few hours, right? Ahahaha, it was 16 hours before we got out and it was not a good experience.
Also neither of us had showered between "playing lots of ice hockey" and "showing up at A&E", so very sorry to anyone who had to sit too near either of us.
I got a very minimal amount of work done today on my phone from the hospital, but went to bed for a few hours as soon as I finally got home and feel more human now. I will have to figure out whether I take leave for today or make up the effort elsewhere in the week. But that is a problem for tomorrow; tonight I'm hoping to reset my sleep schedule by going to bed on time.
things I update
May. 11th, 2025 09:30 pmsnickficOngoing horror watch (and reading) list. A giant post of all the horror I consume, sorted into Loved It, Like Some of It, Disliked It, DNFed. I use this list all the time when looking for recs for people. I put an * for stuff that has explicitly queer themes or major characters.
(Obviously some of these are judgment calls, like is Mindy Meeks-Martin in Scream 5 significant enough to get an asterisk? I decided not.)
The Epic Mpreg Recs List. I made the main list six years ago, sorted lovingly into my own idiosyncratic categories, but I do occasionally add new stuff at the bottom.
horror movies: The Shining, Until Dawn, Clown in a Cornfield
May. 10th, 2025 10:21 pmsnickficThe kid actor was good, and after all the shit I'd vaguely osmosed about Wendy Torrance (or just about the actress), I was extremely impressed with how effectively she protected herself and her kid, even when she was scared out of her mind.
Honestly I mainly watched this so I could finally watch Doctor Sleep. Mission accomplished, I guess. I also want to reread the novel now.
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Until Dawn (2025). On a road trip to find closure over a friend who went missing, a group of five twenty-somethings stumble into a house that traps them and kills them over and over.
This movie tried to do too many things and half-assed most of them. The characters got at most half a personality characteristic each. The monsters were boring. The plot/explanation got increasingly convoluted, with more and more stuff stuck onto it. The main sets around the house all felt weirdly artificial. There were a handful of great horror reveals (the bulletin board, the guest book), but the movie didn't really know how to capitalize on them.
I did like ( spoilers )
There were some okay kills, if that's your thing. There's one particular kill that I was not expecting at all, and the movie made a lot of hay out of it. It's like they found One Cool Trick and kept hitting that button, for better or for worse.
In conclusion: big meh.
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Clown in a Cornfield (2025). In a tiny midwestern town, sometimes a clown murders one or more people in a cornfield. Enter Quinn, a high schooler who's just moved to town with her father while they both grieve her mother's death.
This was completely delightful. The novel this was adapted from was written by a high school teacher, and I think that really shows in the affection for the teen characters. The fraught father/daughter relationship is good too, though! I also really enjoyed the romance, which I thought was very sweet.
There's also themes! A late stage reveal that made me think of a completely different movie that I will not spoil you for! Lots of fun kills!
This is far and away my favorite of these three movies, but it's hard to articulate why except that it's a lot of fun and the characters feel like real people with real relationships, which is saying something in a movie about a killer clown. The clown gets the marquee, but the characters make the movie. If this sounds like your jam at all, I highly recommend you check it out.
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May. 10th, 2025 06:55 pmlycomingstShe wants to replace our shared fence which is in sad shape. She did tell me that the Park will pay for removal of the dead tree in my backyard. If I don’t have to pay for that, I could afford a new fence.
I made escape from the Park on Friday as they seem to have finished the road work. Much better than traveling over the gravel and stones. We’re smooooth. I hit three stores and got more garden stuff. When I used to have more disposable income I gave more to charities and somehow signed up for the Arbor Day organization. And they send me plants if I give them money. So I have three butterfly bushes in pots; let’s see if they grow. I didn’t want them in the ground because they can be a bugger to get rid of. I think the Arbor Day org. Is cute.
A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a Mr. Lincoln rose. Which, I’m happy to say, is putting out leaves. This rose is very fragrant, as roses should be.
I heard my first Miley Cyrus song. I was surprised by her voice and I liked it.
Poem: "The Horrors"
May. 10th, 2025 11:46 amjjhunterit just showed up one day and made itself domestic
it wants to be where we are all the time
have to shove The Horrors out of the way
to get at the coffee in the morning
'I didn't sleep last night because of The Horrors', you say
and I know you mean it was yelling at your door late into the night
it likes to sit on our phones and stare at us
unblinking
it wants a share of everything we eat
Using a spray bottle to get The Horrors off the table sometimes works
Sometimes we get a break for a while
Though that often means it's been making its own fun
elsewhere in the house
Knowing we have The Horrors in the house makes me want to clean everything
but it feels like a Sisyphean task
how did our home become part of its litterbox?
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my bad habits lead to you
May. 9th, 2025 10:37 pmrmc28Goodness having a cold is dull. I spent most of yesterday resting/asleep, felt able to work today, but did it from home and definitely favoured the easier tasks from the todo list. I skipped indoor cricket this afternoon, and TriBase scrimmage tonight, in favour of continuing the recovery curve enough to play an ice hockey tournament this weekend.
I have successfully wrangled a car pool for the Kodiaks B to go to Gosport next weekend, which includes me driving a hired 9-seater, whee. Car pooling has been wrangled, mostly not by me, to get Warbirds to Romford tomorrow and Sunday. (The women's team and the mostly-men's team living up to stereotypes about planning, not for the first time.) The weekend after Gosport is playoffs in Sheffield, where we see if Kodiaks A can win promotion to the next division, and as a bonus I can meet up with my mother-in-law.
A couple of weeks before my Czech holiday I started taking all the morning school runs while Tony took the afternoons, after a long period where it was mostly the other way around. It is suiting me much more than I had expected, and has also led to me going to the office a lot more. Essentially, once I've cycled to school, it's as easy to go to the office as to go home, and usually I'll go to the office. Partly because my role and personality make "useful spontaneous in-person conversations" more likely to happen. Partly because once I'm on site, it's easier to take advantage of the university's Active Staff programme. I'm generally only working from home now when not-quite-well (as today) or if my schedule is All Online Meetings All The Time. The downside of the office is I have no privacy at the hotdesks and need to use a pod for meetings. I quite like the pods, but not for hours on end.
Active Staff is a recent initiative of the University Sports Service. Through it, I can get two exercise classes a week for free (mostly yoga, pilates and similar) and additional ones at the Sports Centre on a PAYG basis. While the most popular classes often book out really fast, people seem pretty good about cancelling if they can't make it, so a space often pops up the night before or morning of. I can also join the indoor cricket and table tennis "Give It A Go" sessions which are shared with students, which is how I've ended up playing cricket again for the first time since I was a teenager. It's not helping my workload problem but it's not making it worse, and it is bringing me a fair bit of joy, so I'll call it a win.
Events of note: since the Czech holiday
May. 8th, 2025 06:39 pmrmc28Thu 24 Apr: tried out a Learn to Play session at Alexandra Palace. It's a great session, the coach is good, but it's very late at night - so late it's not actually possible to get home by public transport afterward. My friend P drove us (now she has an ULEZ-compliant car) but we got home at 2am and my alarm goes off at 7am and I was really struggling on Friday. In theory I would like to go again, but in practice I haven't felt up to it since.
Sat 26 Apr: away game for Kodiaks B in Oxford. Our first away game of the season, our first game with none of our league players, and my first game as Captain. We lost 7-17 but it was honestly a good-tempered and positive atmosphere and some fantastic learning and effort displayed. Our goalie was playing her first full game ever (having played ten minutes in our previous game), and you could see her improving almost minute by minute.
Sun 27 Apr: social visit to beckyc and S, then a lift with one of the Kodiaks A players and her dad from Huntingdon to Peterborough to watch the league team beat Peterborough 15-2 and secure the top spot in WNIHL 2S. Then a lift back with a different player to Cambridge in time for bed Sunday evening.
Thu 1 May: outdoor cricket game, my first this century (hehe). An internal game to warm up for the summer, as West Cambridge has enough people for two teams. I enjoyed fielding, got over my nerves enough to (badly) bowl a single over, and ended up in bat for rather longer than expected. Mostly due to my batting partner, but I at least managed not to do anything catastrophic when I was facing the ball.
Fri 2 May: summer scrimmages with TriBase are back, so I went along; it's the first time I've played with this team since September, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I've improved since then. (Don't get me wrong, I'm still not really up to their standard, but the gap has closed a lot and I'm keeping up a lot better.)
Sat 3 May: last Kodiaks A home game of the season, this time for the league Cup, which they also won. I have finally built a confident enough team for the off-ice work that I could stay entirely on front-of-house during the game, freeing up our steady ticket sales volunteer to watch a whole game. I missed quite a bit of it due to talking to people (shocking I know).
Sun 4 May: trip to London for a hockey friend's birthday, but with bonus addition of brunch beforehand at Dishoom with my baby sibling. The bottomless house chai is still my favourite. The birthday celebration was outdoors in a park, and the weather got steadily chillier as the afternoon went on. I managed to leave my sunhat behind in my friend's flat (this is the hat I bought in San Sebastián last summer after losing the previous sunhat somewhere on a hill, itself a replacement for one I left on a train earlier that summer), but it will make its way back to me eventually, I'm sure.
Mon 5 May: over to see naath in Bury St Edmunds, where I got caught in the traditional Bank Holiday rain on the way to get lunch from M&S. You know you're not in Cambridge any more when there are dozens of car parking spaces on the high street but no cycle racks.
This afternoon I should have been playing cricket again with West Cambridge after work, but I started going down with a cold yesterday afternoon and have spent most of the time since in bed feeling sorry for myself. I am really hoping to be recovered by Saturday as I have an ice hockey tournament to play with Warbirds on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I also have a bunch of things I want to do tomorrow, but I guess I'll just have to see how I'm doing in the morning. (We have covid tests still, they've all come back negative, but even "just a cold" is a miserable experience, ugh, so I'm attempting to avoid sharing it with the household or indeed anyone else.)
Events of note: holiday
May. 8th, 2025 05:19 pmrmc28Oops, it's been about three weeks since my last update of substance: I was in Czechia with C, and anticipating the last five games of Women's Worlds. I think literally none of those last five games went the way I wanted, but I'm very glad to have watched them and been part of the highest attendance ever for the Women's Worlds tournament. (Breaking audience records for women's sports! yet again!).
Sunday night, after the gold medal game, we hung out with some new friends in a bar. Afterwards, very slowly saying goodbye in the main square (I'm on a groupchat now, yay), we saw pretty much the entire Finnish team walk past dressed to the nines and wearing their bronze medals. I went to bed far too late given the time we had to get up in the morning, but no regrets.
Monday (Easter Monday), we left České Budějovice on a train at 8am, changed at Linz, had nearly four hours stopover in Frankfurt (boat tour, discovered the Too Good To Go app works there and thus picked up some delicious curry for dinner) and arrived in Paris at 11pm, checking into a hotel a very short walk from Gare de l'Est.
Tuesday we walked up and down the steps of the Eiffel Tower (to the second floor, they don't let you walk up the really high bit), took a boat tour with a really mediocre audio guide, had the most delicious lunch in a very cramped restaurant on the Île de la Cité, got fancy ice cream from the Île Saint Louis and walked from the Seine right back to our hotel for the luggage, onward to Gare du Nord and the Eurostar and home.
Wednesday morning I was back at work, the children were both back at school, and Wednesday evening I was back at hockey practice. And since then my life has reverted to the usual whirl of work, family, ice hockey, with a new summer addition of cricket with the West Cambridge team. (Obviously one sport with a concussion risk was insufficient.)
České Budějovice seems like a world away now, nearly three weeks ago: I am very glad I went, I am very glad to have had C's company on the trip, and I'm very grateful to Tony for keeping the lights on and taking care of N at home so we could go. I could write several long posts just about the tournament to be honest but the short version: it was really good ice hockey, it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting and slightly crazy. Czechia treated it like a serious tournament and the fans showed up in response. I very much want to go to future Women's Worlds, if I can afford to.
I miss that little city and the beautiful, very walkable, historic centre. Like but not like Cambridge in a lot of ways. The hostel worked well for us, the weather was lovely almost every day of our stay, and we got the budget about right. Six months of Duolingo Czech was very far from sufficient, but I could at least manage please and thank you and simple food & drink orders. I still want to do better, and I'm going to Prague for a hockey camp in June, so I'll keep persevering I guess.