[fic] As You Wish
Holy crap, I actually wrote something! This is a Wonder Woman/Princess Bride fusion, on account of Robin Wright playing major roles in both films.

Hot off the presses and unedited, since I need to go to bed now:


As You Wish
by K. Stonham
released June 9th, 2017

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Teeth and Cake!
Jazzy now has three teeth, having just cut his upper left incisor.

And today I tried making an icebox cake for the first time. Basically just alternating layers of whipped cream, graham crackers, and sliced strawberries, chilled in the fridge for a few hours. I was slightly dubious. We were all slightly dubious. It rocked, the moisture in the whipped cream transforming the graham crackers into a perfect cake-like texture. Definitely a keeper recipe! I've seen a variant with layers of pudding replacing some of the shipped cream. I may have to try that next time....

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Catching Up + 50 in '17 #8-9
Hot weather arrived and with it, flea season. Yech. The cat has been Advantaged and I'm working my way through washing the everything-that-can-be-washed and vacuuming the everything-that-can-be-vacuumed. And squashing every flea I can catch. :/

I've also been working on quilts in a dual-purpose sense. Firstly, going through my vast collection of Works-In-Progress/UnFinished Objects (WIPs/UFOs) and getting some of them done (I'm aiming for one a month) and simultaneously targeting those which will neatly become Christmas presents. For further details, see my quilting blog.

Jazzy is now crawling forward and pulling himself to a stand so I'm having to go through the house with an eye to re-babyproofing it. Squiddle continues to be a bit of a threenager and had a wonderful meltdown at a Chinese restaurant the other day over wanting soup. Which we were ordering for him at the time! Fortunately the waitress also had a three-year-old and went and put in the order for the soup first and then came back to take the rest of our order. (And it was really good soup, too.)

And I've been working my way through rereading Marie Bostwick's Cobbled Court and Too Much, Texas books. So, quick book review time!

Title: Yarn Harlot: the secret life of a knitter
Author: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Length: 219 pages

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Title: From Here to Home
Author: Marie Bostwick
Length: 351 pages

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Mother's Day 2017
We didn't do much around here for Mother's Day this year. We did send cards and a gift card to my little sister, as she's now a mother, which I think she wasn't expecting. And my mother continues to be out of the country until Wednesday, so I told her on the phone this morning that we're delaying Mother's Day for her until next Sunday.

And for me, well, Jazzy had an unhappy night the night before, where no matter how deeply asleep I thought he was, I was not allowed to put him back into his crib. So eventually I gave up and he spent most of the night in Mummy and Daddy's bed. Where he wet himself thoroughly. So part of yesterday was changing the sheets, washing the comforter, and including the next size up of disposable/overnight diapers on the shopping list.

On the other hand, I got up an hour and a half before my boys and Wonderful Husband, and spent the time sewing. In fact, I managed to put together another quilt top yesterday, and am hoping today I can put a backing together to go with it. I have it earmarked for a Christmas present.

Plus I cleaned out some science experiments from the fridge and made some double chocolate banana bread and chicken pot pie for dinner. Win!

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A toddler's bed is his castle
Squiddle is finally down for a nap. In his new castle bed! Which is very spiff:



It got assembled a week ago. And last Friday the convertible bed got converted back to a crib. So now the boys are sleeping in the same room. Well, the first two nights Jazzy woke with screaming fits around 2am and had to come back into Mummy and Daddy's room. But the last three nights, bar me getting up 3-4 times a night, they've both slept in the same room. Hallelujah...

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First DW post!
First post at Dreamwidth! Not much going on, but a few amusing things to share. Squiddle, ever more articulate, told me the other day that "The moon is a planet made of cheese." And Wonderful Husband came up with the idea that the little mermaid wasn't really walking on knives and glass, just no one had told her not to walk on the Legos.

Current Mood: awake

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Going to feel this tomorrow...
I went out with the weed-whacker this afternoon and decimated most of the paths in the kitchen garden. (The last path has lot of weeds that go to fiber when whacked, so those need to be pulled by hand.) Then I cleared one of the remaining three (long) beds of weeds, and got about a quarter done on the next.

I know I have two soaker garden hoses that need mending/splices, but if I have any ability to move tomorrow, I'd like to get a working hose on the cleared bed and plant it. I grew corn in one half of it last year, so I'd like to do beans there this year to replenish the soil, and maybe shift completed trellis #2 there and put either melons or summer squash on it to grow upward....

Maybe this evening I'll sew?

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Que Sera Sera
Ah well. No Comic-con for us this year. Once again Wonderful Husband got let into the sales room only after all badges were sold out.

So, (a) doubly glad we got to attend Wondercon, and (b) we are vowed to do something fabulous that weekend anyway.

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Wondercon 2017
So this weekend was Wondercon! And in some ways it's a good thing I didn't end up needing to fly up to help my sister after all, because Wonderful Husband is sick. Cough, stopped-up nose, etc... no fever. But he ends up extremely run down each day, which is not a good state to be in while taking care of a very active little boy in the form of Squiddle.

But we did the con, taking two separate cars on Saturday (he left about an hour and a half before I did) and going together on Sunday. One nice thing about being local to the con (we live ~5 miles from the convention center) is knowing where to park. The signs were directing convention center parking to Anaheim Stadium, to be bused in! We parked at the GardenWalk instead and walked over.

I took four books and got them signed by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. We bought a couple new variants on Ticket To Ride (Rails and Sails, and a card game), Amy Mebberson's Disney Princesses books, a pair of Stupid Fox books for Squiddle (and a Furret sticker he really really wanted), some Pokeball hackysacks for juggling, and a HTTYD shirt for me. We didn't attend the Masquerade, but there was some wonderful hall cosplay going on. I only attended one panel (the Mercedes Lackey/Larry Dixon panel), but overall I left the con feeling inspired both for writing and for sewing. And also, yesterday Wonderful Husband was extremely patient and minded both boys while I donated blood. It's been years since I've done so, and I feel good about getting back into the habit.

Now to wait until this Saturday and see if we can get tickets to Comic-Con. We tried for the prereg sale, and Wonderful Husband got in the sale area at the last minute... only to be told that there were no tickets left for sale. Which was not well done of the ticket sales mechanism.

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The Almost Emergency Trip
I got another of this year's new blueberry bushes into a pot. Only one left! I mix the potting soil with a cup or so of cottonseed meal to acidify it. So far so good. And having more bushes around, albeit in the small from-the-nursery pots, during flowering time definitely made an upward tick to the amount of blueberries per bush we'll be getting this year.

This afternoon was spent in something of a more hectic mode, though. My sister has been readmitted to the hospital for a mastitis abcess and infection. She wasn't going to be able to keep Niecelet with her, and there's no one else to take care of things. So the social workers at the hospital were going to arrange for me to fly up. A good chunk of the afternoon was spent back-and-forthing on this with her and Wonderful Husband. Jazzy was to go with me; Squiddle was to stay with Wonderful Husband. About an hour before the last possible time I would have been able to leave to catch the flight, a different doctor came in with a different verdict. Sister's getting admitted overnight, probably will be released tomorrow, and a friend of hers can room in and be the responsible adult so far as Niecelet is concerned.

So, I can go to Wondercon this weekend after all.

But at least now I know how quickly I can tidy up necessary crap around the house and pack for a trip.

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Squiddle Report
I'm taking care of things at my parents' place while they're out of town. Today that included deadheading the rosebushes I planted out front years and years ago. This was actually done in self-interest, as I'm cutting myself a bouquet of roses for my dining room table every week. Today also included weeding their vegetable and herb beds, during which chore Rey, one of their cats, tried desperately to get under my hands to elicit gentle caresses. I summoned the Squiddle to help. His exact phrasing was "Rey, you naughty kitty. Come out of there!"

My baby, all grown up and talking in complete comprehensible sentences. (Sometimes.) It wasn't that long ago that he was at "Wei, wheh ah yu?" when talking to her....

Of course, I was slightly less pleased by his opining that a snail was yucky. I mean, sure I don't want them in among my vegetables, but I'm even less sanguine about him disliking them because of... reasons. Whatever they are. I suspect Peppa Pig may be to blame for this one.

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Captive Things, Kinda?
I am... mostly okay now. The first couple days were the worst. But I have more deadlines I'm running up against, and little boys to take care of, and a husband who makes sure I'm as okay as I can be at any given point.

When running errands after Mommy-Baby Yoga yesterday, I took said little boys to the pet store. Squiddle always wants to look at the hamsters first. But he's not getting one until he's probably at least eight! What we were there for was to get some ghost shrimp to add to the fish tank. I got six, for a grand price of $.39 each. (Woo, really breaking the bank.) One has died; the others seem to be doing fine. And since we got back from our holiday I've only seen one African Dwarf Frog. (Though I haven't located a corpse for the other.) Still, a replacement each for the shrimp and the frog, and one more set of fish, and I think the tank's good.

(And a few more live plants. Always more live plants)

Unrelatedly, Wonderful Husband has been playing Pokemon Go for months. It's also a wonderful distraction for Squiddle at, say, restaurants. I finally gave in and downloaded it onto my phone while we were up in Washington....

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R.I.P. Paris
Up at five a.m. I think I got a couple hours of sleep between two and four? We just got back from a week visiting my sister and niecelet up in Washington, and came in the door to find the cats' water bowl bone dry and Paris collapsed in the hallway and weakly meowing. We spoon-fed some water and wet cat food into her, then I ended up taking her to the emergency clinic. She was severely dehydrated and in critical condition - her core temperature was five degrees below normal. She weighed only seven pounds. I knew she was light, but I hadn't known she weighed so little. She was at least fifteen years old and the vet made it clear to me that even with hospitalization, her chances weren't great. I had to make the hard call to put her down. I've spent hours crying and I don't know how to explain this to Squiddle when he wakes up and asks where she is.

I should have left more water - though what I left was more than my parents' two cats go through in a week when my parents are out of town. Or I should have tried harder to get one of my cousins to check in on the cats. I think Paris just had so little in the way of reserves that everything collapsed. Sushi, who is by comparison quite sturdy, was just able to shrug it off.

I swear that I felt her weight on me while I was lying in bed earlier. Maybe it was her coming by to let me know it was okay, that she's okay. Stranger things have happened. Ask me sometime about my late grandfather showing up in my and my mother's dreams.

I will miss Paris dreadfully. She was the cat who would tolerate Squiddle and Jazzy touching her, only hissing when the former got too rambunctious. She was very vocal, so much so that had she not already been named when we got her, "Cricket" would have been a good name. She had a stutter-meow that let me know when she was bird-watching, and a deep "mur-OW" that told me when she'd found a lizard in the house. She loved sunbathing in the kitchen garden, and slept on the same spot on the back of the sofa.

It's never hard letting go of a pet, and it's one of those things that makes the ephemerality of the universe seem so cruel. But how much poorer would we be without them in our lives?

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50 in 2017: #2-7
Pressed for time and stressed out of my mind. I may do summary/reviews later, but for now, here's what I've read in the last couple months.

Title: Spiderlight
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Length: 291 pages

Title: Every Heart A Doorway
Author: Seanan McGuire
Length: 169 pages

Title: Rilla of Ingleside
Author: L.M. Montgomery
Length: 277 pages

Title: Searching for Dragons
Author: Patricia C. Wrede
Length: 242 pages

Title: Talking to Dragons
Author: Patricia C. Wrede
Length: 255 pages

Title: The Runaway Quilt
Author: Jennifer Chiaverini
Length: 329 pages

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Sleeping Baby
Have a baby draped on me, sleeping. Haven't had this experience as much with Jazzy as I did with Squiddle since, y'know, I now have a toddler to run after too. Just going to lean back, close my eyes, and enjoy my baby.

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Keeping Up With Hobbywork, Mostly
Still doing the shuffle of recovery. I (mostly) feel fine, but I sound like the living dead. Last night was fortunately better, as I had a guild meeting. Where I was voted and sworn in as Secretary for the next year. On top of running the Block of the Month and a Nine-Patch Exchange and sometimes helping out with Quilts For Kids. As one of my friends in the guild observed, "if you want to get something done, ask a busy person." Well, I expect it'll be good for me.

I'm also pondering which quilts I might want to enter in the quilt show in a couple months. Of the ones I've made and still have, there are five that spring to mind as maybes: the black/orange crane quilt, Wonderful Husband's flag quilt (the show's theme is "As American As..."), Squiddle's dinosaur quilt, Squiddle's sunflower quilt, and I need to pull out and get quilted the top from the round robin last year, since the show would like all those exhibited together if possible.

I'm four books behind in my blogging for the year, and currently working on my fifth, Rilla of Ingleside. I read maybe the first half of Montgomery's Anne Shirley books when I was younger, but I never got to this one, and I think it's a good thing, because I don't think I'd've liked it then. Now, it's interesting and I'm liking watching Rilla mature. Though the baby she's taking care of keeps taking me aback when she mentions things like him being exactly on track, weighing nine pounds at four months of age. Um. My babies were almost ten pounds when they were born. ^_^;; And they don't even hold the family record! I don't think I've ever held a baby that small.

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Fish; Frogs; Seeds
Urgh. Only one out of the four of us slept well last night, and he's the one who has his own room. Nonetheless, stuff got done today including, yes, the purchase of two African dwarf frogs for the fishtank. Plus another bundle of plants for it - this time telanthera cardinalis. I'm figuring every couple of weeks I'll add a new species and a new plant to go with it, pulling out the plastic plants as I go. Of course, I'm only planning to add like two more species: some ghost shrimp, and probably some rasboras.

One thing that I wish I could find online is a tank stocking calculator. Something that says if you have this size of tank, how many fish you can you fit in it. With inputs for things like "I want X number of Y type of fish" where it will calculate their size requirements for you and do pop-up warnings if a type of fish will try to eat one of the others you've selected.

Also today I did get some more seeds planted. Sugar Pie pumpkins, Charentais melons, Minnesota Midget cantaloupes, Sugar Baby watermelons, rainbow chard, and jalepenos. Counting the popcorn seedlings this afternoon, it looks like I got somewhere around a 75% germination rate, which is not great, but also not terrible for a year-old packet. And that's why I planted the entire packet! Anyway, now I'm at the point where I need to fill more seed starter packs with soil. And research vegetative cloning of my surviving tomato plants....

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Flu & Other Fun Things
Not much going on at chez Stonham since we've all fallen under the flu crud to varying degrees. Wonderful Husband took today as a sick day. And even Jazzy has a snotty nose and a nice chesty cough going! But none of it is worth a doctor's visit - fortunately Squiddle's fever broke Monday morning, otherwise we would've hauled him in for poking and prodding. And he was miserable enough as it was.

Unfortunately, however, the fact that we're all sick has meant no playgroups and classes for Squiddle this week! So he's been bouncing off the walls at times, which has drained me down further. Today, though, I'm hoping constitutes a turning point.

This afternoon, while both the boys were napping and Wonderful Husband was vidgaming, I did another session of "tame the kitchen garden." The dead bay tree was put in the brown bin for yard waste, as were the ginormous kale plants. The bin is FULL. No more yardwork until Tuesday, I guess. Though I need to examine the bottom of the pot the bay tree was in, since it died of drowning - the pot clearly needs more drainage holes before I use it again.

The hundred-and-seven popcorn plants just started peeping their heads up today, and the peas/spinach/radishes/beets/lettuce/carrots/whatnots in the one bed I've planted are all neatly sprouting. As are the onion sets at my parents' place that I thought wouldn't sprout, so goes to show what I know! Tomorrow we're due for more rain, which makes me happy, but... I'd kind of like a dry week so the back lawn and kitchen garden paths could get mowed. Ah well. Grass is always greener and all that.

I also did a 10% water change on the fish tank this afternoon and will probably add in a few more critters tomorrow. Likely either a couple African Dwarf Frogs or half a dozen ghost shrimp, depending on which one excites Squiddle more when we're at the store....

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Babies Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy
Well, the Squiddle is sick, with what's probably the flu. We're keeping him dosed with kiddie acetaminophen and ibuprofen, and if he's still feverish and coughing and congested and miserable tomorrow, we'll get a same-day appointment for him with our pediatrician.

Jazzy, meanwhile, has probably got a milder version of the same thing - runny nose, but no fever or coughing. He's also, at four months, outgrown the six-month sizes of clothing, so today I'm digging out the nine-month bin....

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Groundhog Day Miscellanea
I planted 107 popcorn seeds (one whole packetful) on Tuesday. Will be interested to see how many come up. Meantime, in the garden bed I planted with fifty bajillion seeds a week or so ago, the radishes and mizuna are popping their heads up and I think I saw the first sprouts in the spinach and snow peas areas. (Also in that bed: mesclun, lettuce, cucumbers, two types of beets, leeks, carrots, arugula, and parsnips. Plus the potatoes and calendulas that had self-seeded from last year. I may have drawn myself a map so I remembered what's where.)

We bought a betta to add to the tank, so that's up to six fish now and everybody seems happy thus far. I'm going to wait a week or two before adding anything more. I'm thinking maybe some mollies or guppies would be pretty, but I want to do some research first.

I got an out-of-the-blue call today that pretty much summed up to "Hi, you don't know me, but I was given a bag of quilting fabrics and I don't really do that, so would you like them?" Seems someone (I suspect one of my guildmates) had given Shirley my phone number. And I love the fabrics she gave me - they're quite varied and I think I'll find them useful.

Also today, my sister, after two weeks in the hospital, has finally been released to go home. Hooray! This extended postpartum stay involved an abcess the size of a tennis ball. *grimace* Nobody was really happy about that. And she's still on antibiotics. But she and niecelet finally got released. And apparently the frozen breast milk I shipped up has come in handy, so at least that was good.

And, last but definitely not least, Wonderful Husband and I have now been married thirteen years. ^_^ Still my lover and my best friend, even if we don't get to date or dance as much as we used to. ^_^

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