I'm putting this at the top of my journal so folks can find things easily. First all the trip journals. They're all family friendly, especially the pictures.

2009 Trip Journals -- First Entries:

• Biloxi rebuilding -- Pictures
• Glennwood Spings train trip -- Pictures
• Four Corners and Mesa Verde
• East Coast Trip -- Pictures
• The Vedauwoo Seed Collection Project -- Pictures
• Seattle

For my fiction, I put everything that's PG or higher under an Adult Concept lock and everything that's R and worse under Explicit Adult lock, as the Adult Concept is supposed to work for 13 and up and Explicit keeps out folks under 18. Ratings are by the listing.

Uhm... and, yeah, I don't friend very often because I really suck at keeping up with my flist... so it's not you if I don't pick up on an add.

( The complete list of fanfic and original fiction and fanart for my fiction (wow). )

I don't know how many of your are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Usagi Yojimbo fans... I imagine a great deal of the Horde, like me, read many of them when they first came out.

If you loved 'em... go read this.. It's a gift fic by zangetsugirl that I especially like. It's entirely within their genre. Just great story, no warnings if you know the originals, a mild spoiler warning for info about a major char death if you haven't read the old series.

On Saturday, the boys and I went and got two loads of mulch from the City Tree Limb place, and we covered up all the formal roses with them. They already had an insulating blanket of snow on 'em, but the extra mulch didn't hurt. I ache today, all over; but the weather turned really cold, and we've had teens all day and are already in the single digits tonight. Even our highs aren't supposed to get above freezing until Thursday, so we're kind of hunkered in for the week.

I'm still amazed that the roses ripped good chunks out of my old down gardening parka. They are mean plants. *laughs*

( Final price on the tree, church, and painting. No pictures... )

Thanks to rmd for pointing out this gem of a modern steampunk house. NOW I'd know what to do with a Santa Cruz Victorian...

I have to remember that when people ask me to do things like stand for two and a half hours and talk with a constant stream of people. I am great one on one with just about anyone, but give me a constant stream of them and I run out of energy really, really fast. I'm now pretty exhausted...

They roped me in to help with the Home Tour part of the whole fund raising thing, to make sure people going through had tickets and the ones that wanted to buy stuff could do so. The same folks got my tree... I was flattered to find out that they'd valued the tree at $100. Not bad for some folded paper and silver string... and I was pretty happy to see that it was bid up to $55 when I left.

( A good day, all in all, and trying to make writing fun again. )

What more could one want?

It snowed two or three inches last night. Enough to make things a little slick, but not enough to stop anything or keep anyone from doing what they wanted to do. It was all just a little slower.

Since it was Late Start Day (first Wednesday of every month), I thawed some beignet dough and made them for breakfast for us. Jet loves that, as do we, though the powder sugar clouds do go everywhere. Rather than starting two and a half hours late, though, he had a Green Club meeting an hour before school started. It's a club where the kids figure out how to do things to help the environment for the school and with the help of the school staff. They've run a recycle shoes campaign, worked with them on a Zero Waste Lunch week, and have other things they've planned.

It's pretty cool.

So we dropped him off for his Club meeting and then wandered off on a little food adventure.

( Read more... )

The trip was really good: busy, warm, and wonderful. We stuffed the SD trip full of great food, beaches, the Zoo, mounting paintings, and seeing my family again. Since we'd gotten our ticket so late, we came home again on Friday and had the whole weekend to make our own turkey (yum, leftovers!), pumpkin pie, and stuffing with gravy, and then John's birthday was Sunday. We celebrated that with a three mile walk around a lake, and going to dinner where he wanted and my "chocolate thingy"s for dessert.

I like that Jet decided that the recipe for my chocolate thingy's should remain a family secret and that he was going to make them for his kids some day. *grins*

( More details and pictures for those with the time for them. )

I dunno why, but my parents' dsl isn't talking to my laptop, so I'm connection limited in a big way using my Dad's old Mac. *laugh* Facebook actually *crashed* the machine it's that old.

I hope everyone who is celebrating it has a Great Thanksgiving! We're very much enjoying the 70+ degrees, the beach (castle building and boogie boarding), and the great Chinese food. Mom and Dad taught John, Jet and I how to mount my ink paintings, so they're looking very nice now.

It was a fun project to all do together... and I'm even getting to do part of the Thanksgiving Feast tonight! I'm very thankful to be with family and in such a lovely part of the world.

We're off again, this time to my parents' house in San Diego for Thanksgiving. It's been a while since my parents got to see Jet, and we needed to make the trip.

Been packing, poking at more origami ornaments, not writing as much as I wanted, but I knew that from the start of the month. That's okay. The tree folks really liked the tree I made for them. I'm kind of glad I didn't sign up for Nanowrimo, though part of it was due to the Flu hitting so hard. It'll be good to spend some time in the sunshine and hope that my cough finally goes away.

But I am getting going on the next chapter of Twin Souls, so I'm pretty happy there, and I've really been enjoying writing Winter War.

And I thought I'd offer my thanks to all of you folks on my flist. Thanks for being around and commenting and for just being cool folks to read stuff from and to talk to. Thanks a lot to all my old friends whom I've known forever, and who really know me. Thanks to the tech folk that have dropped by. Thanks to the religious folks that offer commentary, debate, and sympathy. I've really enjoyed this last year and really enjoyed interacting with the parts of the fan community that I've had the pleasure to talk with and talk things over with. I've really had a fun time. It's also been really fun getting involved in the Word War community of writers as well. Not that I'm stopping! *laughs*

I just wanted to offer my thanks to all the folks that have just made livejournal a lot of fun for me, and one of the best places for thoughtful, encouraging, supportive and fun commentary. It's been really rewarding and I think I've improved on my writing a lot in the last year. So Thank You!

Title: Isane: Present
Story: Winter War -- and AU co-authored by incandescens, sophiap, and I. It's a dark AU where the Gotei 13 lost the winter war but they find themselves one last chance. "Nothing is sacred and no one is safe."
Characters: Kotetsu Isane, Shiba Kuukaku, and Shirogane Mihane
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 for language
Word Count: 4414
Summery: Isane is challenged by both Shiba-sama and Shirogane to find her strength in the midst of the ruins that will be Ukitake's new base.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to both incandescens and sophiap for both the lovely and fun plotting as well as their great concrit and help in getting this good and solid. I'm putting this up now before I leave on a Thanksgiving trip.

Previous Chapters:
13. Karakura: Waiting
14. Iba: Hurry Up and Wait
Complete Index


( Kotetsu Isane hurried through the underground chambers of Shiba Kuukaku's latest work of explosive art. )

sophiap has posted the next chapter of Winter War. It's called "Iba: Hurry Up And Wait".

The rest of the Winter War Au can be found here. It's a Dark AU that sophiap, incandescens, and I are co-authoring.

Sometimes I just don't know how to say, "No."

About a month ago, the ladies that were suddenly taking over the church's Home Tour asked me to Decorate a 3' tall Christmas Tree for their silent auction. The money from the Tour and all the proceeds go to about a dozen different local charities. The OUR Center being a big benefactor, but there are also women's groups, children's support, and a bunch of other missions that we help out with.

Jet was on another origami kick, and he unwittingly dragged me along with him, and I decided to do the whole tree in origami ornaments, and do a knitted scarf in red as the skirting underneath. I think the tree's due tomorrow, and I'm still knitting, but the other bits can be seen in a little flickr album here. A few highlights were the umpteen piece dodecahedron, a couple of traditional Japanese chrysanthemum constructs with various types of stoppers, and some frogs and fishes for luck along with a few dozen traditional cranes in various types of paper.

Part of the insanity is that this morning John found out that our wireless hub had broken down completely. It was dead. We have a "only replace dead things" sort of policy right now for most of our big expenditures, and we only upgrade when we replace. The price on the N protocol wireless is now very, very good, so he simply replaced the hub. The upstairs computer is hardwired to our Internet connection. My replacement machine has the new protocol built in, and we only had to buy a plug in dongle for the laptop, so we're all good now, and the upload and download speeds are now phenomenal. I'm... amazed.

for stark_black in thanks for her service....

( Read more... )

Last summer, I got a new phone from Verizon and it died in the first two weeks. The support folks were pretty nice about getting me a new phone and getting me what I needed to ship the broken phone back to them. So I did that, and the lady at the shipping office said, "Make SURE you keep the UPS shipping slip to make sure you have a record of sending it to them."

I'm now thanking and blessing her for saying that. I filed it away in our celphone records folder, thinking I'd never see it again.

( Yes, I did see the #$@*&! thing again. )

To all the veterans of all the services and all the wars...

Thank you for what you've done and for what you've sacrificed.

... and finally writing a little again, but mostly just staying alive, lately. It's been kind of cool.

Yesterday the chiropractor tried to straighten me out after all the coughing. My massage therapist was just shocked at how knotted up I was last Tuesday, so she recommended me getting worked on, as he could help with the immune system as well as the muscles that were just messed up by lying, sitting, and coughing all week. The funny thing was that for the middle of my back he got me all positioned like a pretzel and then bounced on me, and nothing moved. He said that my muscles had locked up so tight from the coughing he couldn't do anything there. So we worked on both ends, neck and hips, and got some movement there. I'm going back next week.

( Cut for a bunch of pictures and text. )

... with coughing optional. *laughs*

Here.

Don't feel like being short today. *laughs* So I'm just putting it all behind a cut for folks' flists...

( Meanderings about childhood memories in Taiwan, recovery, really enjoying the last of After School Nightmare, and really liking US-made Dramacon manga, published by Tokyopop. )

... it was 72 degrees yesterday.

Who would have thought there was a foot of snow less than a week ago?

( Cut for today's picture. )