Stuff and Moonshine

The world continues to be lousy, but at least winter is drawing to an end.

On a self-centred level, I’m happy to finally have a paying gig for a bit. The assignment is officially for about two months, but the agency said it might get extended, and the temp I’m replacing has been there since last August and is leaving now only because she got a permanent offer from a different company closer to her home in Oakville (and in trucking logistics, which is her chosen specialty). She told me it’s a pleasant work environment and the staff are all pretty nice; adding “and I’m a real bitch, so I don’t say that about just anybody.” My first week seemed to bear this out. Also the employee kitchen has good snacks (keeping it stocked is one of my duties): fresh fruit, granola bars, yogurt cups, instant oatmeal packets—so I won’t have to pack or buy myself any breakfasts as long as I’m working there.

Posted more Meadowville and Gentleman of the Shade.

Watched the first couple of episodes of Bookish, starring Mark Gatiss as Gabriel Book, who runs Book’s Books and solves mysteries on the side in 1947 London, along with his wife Trottie (Polly Walker) and assorted other characters.

Meadowville, Chapter 5

Apparently one of the possible Eurovision entries for 2026 is this band made up of firefighters? Idk if they’ve been definitely selected yet as Sweden’s entry.

An Australian talking about spiders in the most soothing and lyrical voice imaginable.

A 19th-c Portuguese estate with a lot of dramatic Masonic imagery.


Angine de Poitrine. Not sure how to describe this band. Sort of like Daft Punk but acoustic and polka-dotted?

Just posted another short chapter of Gentleman of the Shade.

First spray treatment for the bugs appears to have gone ok. Wrestled the cats into carriers and camped out in the building lobby for a few hours. Beatrice (the semi-feral) gave me a small scratch on the face, voided her bowels, and bellowed with rage and fear, but she and Nana were both pretty quiet in the lobby (there’s a gas fireplace, and we think they liked the warmth) and both appear to have now forgiven us (Beatrice came over for scritches a couple of minutes ago) although now I think I hear them growling and hissing at each other.

Tomorrow morning have to clear out the front closet/laundry room so someone can come clean out the ducts.

Finally posted a new (short) chapter! https://archiveofourown.org/works/55953232/chapters/202134506

So, I’ve avoided posting about this, but just before xmas eve we discovered a bedbug infestation. It could be worse, I suppose—it’s pretty much localized to the bedroom, we threw out the bedspreads and a lot of stuff, and washed everything else, and have been camping out on the folding couch in the living room while we try to prep for the fumigators to come.

This has so far involved throwing out all the boxes that house Andrew’s comics collection—the comic books themselves seem to be ok, but the corrugated-cardboard boxes were definitely providing the ideal hideout for the disgusting critters. I bought thirty plastic bins and we’ve been transferring the comics and many of the books. Andrew’s been keeping it together better than I could have hoped, at least.

In order for pesticide spraying to happen, we need to 1. get as many of the shelves as possible away from the walls, and 2. to get the cats out of the apartment for 4-6 hours. This will be the hard part—Nana can be wrangled into a carrier, but in the five years since we brought her home, we’ve never been able to capture and hold Beatrice.

I guess, living in an apartment, it was only a matter of time. Meanwhile, of course, the wider world continues to be even worse.

In slightly better news, last week I read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. An SF novel about large intelligent spiders might seem an odd choice of comfort reading under the circumstances, but I’ve a feeling that in addition to watching a lot of David Attenborough nature films, Tchaikovsky has seen a lot of classic Doctor Who. His spiders are easy to root for, and his desperate human colonists fleeing a doomed Earth are somehow not quite as bad as real-life politics. I’ve also fond of Holsten Mason, the tragi-comic Classicist who, due to only getting woken out of cryogenic suspension when the crisis du jour specifically requires an expert on Old Galactic Empire dialects, is experiencing the whole multi-millenial epic as “a rough few weeks” during which most of the other crew outage him by decades.

I think my own writing is coming back after a rest following my Yuletide fic—I at least managed to make a bunch of notes today for Gentleman of the Shade, which for some reason has decided it needs another flashback, this one set in a 1970s supper club.

This evening’s migraine is being held at bay by rizatriptan, but it included, for the first time in my life, one of those zigzag rainbow auras I read about. Weird.