hannah

Something strange is happening with my main MP3 player, beyond bad data on a small number of MP3 files from the giant hard drive recovery - that part doesn't bother me because I can replace everything from my main computer, the original CDs, or other digital downloads. The strange thing is sometimes it'll play half a song and then skip to the next one, even if the file itself is perfectly normal. It's a fairly old player as MP3 players go, so maybe that's where the strangeness is coming from. If that's the case, I can accept it. Not that I'll like it. Just that I'll accept it.

Other than that, and work being fairly slow and frustrating in ways that had nothing to do with each other, a few really nice things happened today. I finally ate at Lupe's East LA Kitchen, which was exactly like a tiny spot of California tucked away in New York City - the second such one I've found - whose California vibes were made even stranger and stronger when the staccato sunshowers finally ended, leaving the air clean and cool, exactly like it should be. My brothers and I ate by an open window, and I leaned my elbow out and drank a pineapple mojito and felt all right for a little while.

I also stumbled over a pair of houses up the street from Lupe's that, amazingly, had backyards. Old houses, National Registrar of Historic Places old, from the early 1800s, both with open space behind them visible from the adjacent driveway-alleyway. Left to their own devices, the grass was taken by weeds and the trees loom over the house. In one, foundations of something are still visible, the erected structure long since gone; in the other, an empty freestanding wooden trellis and a dry, tiered fountain. Basically, if Ganesh walked out of one of the houses into the backyards, I wouldn't have been surprised. (He only lives a few blocks north on Crosby, after all.) Even more amazingly, they had fireflies. Fireflies, tucked away in a little forgotten spot that shouldn't be there but is just right as it is.

After dinner my brothers and I went looking for the Ghostbusters firehouse, and on the way found Manhattan's smallest museum, similarly tucked away. It was closed, so all we could do was peer through the glass.

Because I had time in between work and dinner, I wandered a bit, which included a detour through Washington Square Park, where someone gave me a little bit of birdseed that I used to attract pigeons over and entice them to sit in my outstretched hands to eat. Then I stood still so they'd stay, and more would come. And maybe it's that I volunteer with birds and they sense that, or maybe it's because I've fed them before and they recognize me, or maybe I was nonthreatening enough that more did come. Lots more. My arms are still a little scratched up. They landed and sat up and down my arms, and a few even walked over my shoulders or my chest to get from one side of me to the other. And they were so nice, and warm, and didn't think I was anything to be afraid of, and I think it was nine or ten, all told, at the height of the madness.

Rain like today's in New York City doesn't happen where I grew up. It's not something I've really been able to get used to - rain at this time of year, warm summer rains, rain that stops and starts and stops and starts instead of happening or not. There's no season for rain. It just comes when it comes, even if I can see the sun shining on a building just a block away from me. Even if I can see the sun shining in the sky. It doesn't swallow the world, just breezes on through it. And during the in between moments, before it finally left, when it was a brief moment of light mist instead of genuine precipitation, the combination of the shimmer in the air and sky caught the light to soften it, just a little bit, just enough to let you know there's always something new to see.

If it all goes well, I've now achieved redundancy with my computer files. Everything I want to keep safe is now backed up on an external hard drive that will largely live alone on my desk unconnected to my main computer. Because of this particular arrangement, I've named this hard drive The Hinterlands. Let's hope everything stays as pristine as the name implies.

I'll see if I can turn it into a monthly routine - pay the credit card bill, back up the last month's worth of important data.

I also managed to solve another irksome issue, deleting a couple of troublesome files that defied the usual methods, by following some simple directions that still made me feel like I'd just solved an eight-part math equation.

Also, I held a giant fancy pigeon today, and had birds land on my head. So on and offline, it's been a good day all around.

Just about packed for the con tomorrow; what's not yet set aside is recorded on a checklist and waiting to be collected. The MP3 player gets loaded up last.

Today at work I learned all over again just how different I am from my coworkers: they never looked inside some of the filing cabinets in the office when they got there. They've been working there much longer than I have, and today was the first day those cabinets got a proper investigation and a full cleaning. They were stuffed with all sorts of office detritus: loose envelopes with office letterhead, computer cables, takeout leftovers like salt packets and napkins, delivery menus, pens, block of staples, post-it notes, lost clothes, medical records that can't yet be thrown out because of federal regulations, shower gel, candy, perfume samples, rubber bands, paper clips...stuff, mostly. Lots of stuff. That I would've cleaned out in days of arrival if I'd been able to, because I would've gone looking to see what's around and figured out what to do with it all. Like, for example, throwing away old delivery menus.

I recognize a fair amount of inertia behind a closed cabinet door in an office where things are always busy. I also wonder why they never raided those cabinets for pens, when pens are a valuable commodity in basically any office environment.

Next week, I'm taking the clothes back with me, washing them, and then dropping them off at an appropriate fabric recycling program. I figure it's the best option available.

Today I experimented with cake variations and wandered into a neo-pagan street fair. The cake came out as a success and I bought some jewelry I'd wanted for a while. First, eliminating the crumb topping, doubling the batter, and baking it in a larger pan. Second, a hamsa of reasonable heft and weight that I haven't yet been able to find at most other open-air street markets I've managed to wander into. I don't know if I'll wear it, but I like having it.

I might have to go again next year, if they get the same jewelry vendors. The hamsa vendor had some pretty amusing fandom-based charm bracelets. I know I basically inoculated myself in terms of fandom jewelery possession with this single purchase, so I doubt I'd wear them, but it'd still might be fun to have them. Or deliberately buy them to give them away.

Yesterday was made of petty disappointments, and today about made up for it. Yesterday things were delivered that were technically correct but improperly aligned to what I'd wanted, nothing was as productive as I hoped, all those tiny things adding up to a day that wasn't wrong or bad in any big way, just lots of little ones.

But today I ran errands, fed pigeons at two different parks, looked at buildings and murals and got rained on and met a friend for dinner at Schiller's Liquor Bar before it closes next month. We talked about work, AIs, music and mattress shopping and non-tourist vacation spots, and the fine points of personal taste and what makes different alcohols good to drink. No personal work done - no classwork or writing - but filing myself up to give it a go tomorrow.

Tonight I'm baking and watching TV. Tomorrow night I do laundry, and Monday night I cook. And Tuesday night, I begin proper research and editing to see to the end of the little bracketed notes - looking up suitable surnames, checking possible neighborhoods and the associated urban geography, stuff that would've bogged me down during the composition phase and the first major editorial pass. But now, it's time to gear up and get ready, because soon, very soon, it'll be as finished as I can reasonably get it myself. Well, to be fair, myself and the people I've flailed at in chat conversations. So, basically petra. Thanks, petra!

Hard cider will most likely be greatly enjoyed throughout the process.

Also, because I'm wearing one right now, I want to go on record saying that new t-shirt smell beats out new car smell. It's just better in every possible way.

My family's going to Denmark in a couple of months. For the first time, I'm included in the group. So I'll be going to Denmark in the first weekend of September.

It'd be easy to extend the trip for a few days, fly back to the US from Paris or London, see people I've never hugged or only met face-to-face once before. Or fly back to somewhere else! See someone in Canada, maybe, or Iowa or California, get a chance to...

But I don't think I could manage. I've got classes, for one, and dropping a full semester of them would push completion even further away and I don't want to be stuck in it longer than I need to be. My job's flexible enough I can take a good chunk of time off if I let them know months ahead of time and still be able to return without much disruption to my place there. So there's both of those things. One or the other could maybe be pushed aside for a little while. But not both.

It used to be I had all the possible time on my hands, but nobody to see and no way to visit them. Now I have people to see and the capacity to travel, but no time to see them. Seems fitting to my life, really.

I met a friend for coffee after work today. That's it, that's the big Solstice news. It's something new to me, and it turns out that even though it cut into my evening writing time, I really liked it, and I'll have to try it again sometime. Just not soon, given the aforementioned writing time. But definitely before August.

After I don't know how many years, my basil plant's crumbled up and died. It was a slow process over a couple of weeks, a gradual withering, but today I knew it was over. So I salvaged what was left of it - most of the leaves, some of the stems - and I'll be using it in my morning eggs for a while.

I say "I don't know how many years" because I can't remember when I got it. At least three years ago, possibly four or five. Another bunch of herbs from the farmers' market I put in water to make last a little longer that put out roots into the jar and had me buying a pot and dirt to put it in. I guess it'd reached the limits of what I could do. Nothing left but to aerate the soil, give it some time to rest, and see about trying again soon. It's always nice to have some green around.

The vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel don't have a culture. They've got traditions and customs, like not going out on Halloween, transmitted information and oral histories, like the Whirlwind's notoriety and the near-mythic Slayer, and the occasional prophecy or cult of personality, but no culture. No society as such. It reminds me a bit of childlore and other parts of children's culture, where it's only tangentially connected to the surrounding civilization. They're so bereft of anything - any connections whatsoever - that the moment someone says "I'm going this way" they've got people following them.

Usually vampire society is shown as something that's existed for thousands of years with all sorts of small details, elaborate hierarchies and aristocracies, and established protocols and rituals, like what to do if you make a new vampire. Sometimes it's completely absent and vampires are non- social solitary predators. Every so often, it's shown as something in flux and ongoing development, but I've never seen anything with vampires creating a society of their own.

It'd take an immense shift in the entire dimensional paradigm to get vampires to talk to each other long enough and consistently enough to make something which could be accurately called a culture.

And it was when I was discussing the parallels between Spike and Konstantin Bothari - two monstrous people that devote themselves to becoming heroes and take meaning in their lives from being a beloved woman's dog - that I realized the Vorkosigan Saga had the ideal framework I could hang these thoughts on.

As ever, would that I had world enough and time; instead, at a friend's request, a write-up it is.

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Vampires are monotheists. They refer to their god in euphemism, by her title, because her current name isn't known and her old names aren't to be spoken aloud. (  They call her Slayer, as she was in life. )

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It took throwing up the walls to bring every slithering and creeping thing out of the shadows and into the open for everyone to learn about them. Something suitably terrific and terrifying to push the magic and the dark creatures out into the world's eye forever. Something to get vampires to speak to each other. The realization that where you once had a huge, lush forest, you've got a botanical garden. Beautiful, but not wild. Never wild again.( Never wild again. )

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Spike met Taura when she was in her early 20s, on shore leave from the Dendarii. (  She was out with her friends, enjoying the night, and when Spike didn't hesitate at all when he saw her across the room, just came up and started talking. )