schneefink

I went to a Christmas market last week and saw a beautiful black leather journal with a blue marbled turtle on the cover, and I stared at it for a while but then I told myself that I have some empty journals at home that I never use and I have no idea what I would use it for so really why should I buy it. And then I got home and was still thinking about it, so I went back the next day and bought it. Still no idea what I will use it for but I will call it my experimental journal! I'll just try things out and see what sticks. It's so pretty and feels good to hold that I'm confident I'll at least want to use it sometimes.

(I also bought a colorful thick wool jacket, I might have paid too much for it but it is very cheerful and cozy and brings me joy.)

Soo, current question:


Tips for what to use it for also appreciated. (Yes I am procrastinating on wrapping presents etc. - in that sense the Hermitcraft s9 world download/public server had bad timing...)

The past two days I was sick in a "proud of myself for briefly getting out of bed to have some liquid and a little bit to eat" kind of way. Today I'm feeling better, I actually managed to take a shower and make it to the doctor (though now that I think about it I've barely eaten anything, I should really fix that.) I got the confirmation that I have COVID, for the first time that I'm aware of. Not fun. At least today I'm well enough to watch things again. I should also drink tea but somehow I'm not in the mood, I've mostly been drinking orange juice, surely that counts as well because vitamins.

Timing-wise at least it could have been worse, I made it to Vienna Comic-Con the weekend before (I will post about that eventually surely) and hopefully won't miss cat D&D early next week, but I will miss a theater play and a crafting evening. Uugh, being sick sucks.

I dreamed that I wrote a Star Wars fic for ficinabox and found out that Star Wars is on my recip's DNW list and that felt terrible because I stressed about my main FIAB fic for many weeks, only to wake up and eventually remember that I didn't write Star Wars fic at all. No idea where that came from.

My brain is mush.

- I went running again today, go me. I wanted to go when it was not entirely dark out yet but was distracted by a Team Canada stream (no VODs for those, boo), but I went after and temperature-wise that was better anyway.

- The weekend before last weekend, as my mom's birthday present we went canoeing on the Danube, which was great. It started raining and we parked our canoes beneath large trees in a cut-off river branch and had our snack break there, and afterwards it cleared up and was sunny, very nice.

- I got complimented on my hat twice yesterday, that was nice. I got this hat when I visited the nearby palace Schloss Hof with my parents early this summer and forgot my sunglasses, and now I prefer wearing the hat to sunglasses because it is both easier than switching glasses all the time and also I am sensitive to bright light even with sunglasses on.

- I barely visited the excellent ice cream shop around the corner all summer and now I went three times in the past week. Have to take advantage as long as the weather lasts.

- There are so many shows I want to watch but I have no streaming services atm and I am too lazy to figure something out tbh (usually I leave that to DD when she is home) but fortunately I have more than enough MCYT videos and streams to watch.

I saw so many beautiful shooting stars yesterday, it was amazing. Eight of us - my cat game group, another friend of a friend, LB, and I - in two cars drove about half an hour outside of Vienna to a nice solitary spot in an empty field to avoid the worst of the light pollution, we had picnic blankets and actual blankets and snacks, and we had a great time. Occasionally we played some music and sang along. We got lucky and there were barely any clouds. Most of the shooting stars were smaller ones, but we also saw a couple of very big and bright ones streaking across half the sky.
(I didn't remember to wish on all of them, but I did make a couple of wishes.)

The plan for next year is to stay at one friend's aunt's summer house for the weekend, the sky should look even better from there. I'll miss that because of Worldcon but there's always the years after that.

I finally did something I'd been procrastinating on for a while for no reason: I let my clothes with bad sweat stains soak in vinegar water overnight before putting them in the laundry machine. Preliminary results show a slightly over 50% rate of success, sadly not including one of the dresses I was most hoping to wear again so maybe I'll try something else eventually, idk. Still, at least I tried.
I did also buy two nice new summer tops last week, but sadly couldn't find the things I was actually looking for, a bikini and sandals. I'm this close to lowering my standards but still hoping that there have to be things I like in my size somewhere… Shopping is only fun when I don't actually need anything.

Yesterday was MCC 32! I watched Red Rabbits live and had a great time.
( GTWScar on the Red Rabbits )

I'm still low on batteries, despite the recent vacation days though that helped, and therefore haven't been posting or commenting much, but here are some of the things I've done in the past few weeks:

- I went to see the D&D movie for the second time, this time with my TTRPG group, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time. We watched it in German because on that day it wasn't available in English anymore but fortunately German synchronizations are generally excellent, there were only a few instances where the translation seemed slightly awkward.

- It has been a while (too long) since we managed to find a date for a cat TTRPG session and then last time I had to cancel because I had no voice, but the time before that when two people were on vacation we instead played the boardgame "Flamecraft" (in the fancy deluxe edition with shiny metal coins etc.) where you play in a town full of both humans and dragons and it is possibly the cutest game I have ever played. I enjoyed the game and afterwards I looked at all the cards we hadn't used to admire the art. (And the puns.)

- I watched "Across the Spider-Verse" and I enjoyed it. Haven't finished writing up my notes, maybe later. (Looking at my many post drafts: yeah that is a definite maybe.)

- I went to see a theater play for the first time in years: "Noises Off," a comedy about plays, at the Burgtheater. I wouldn't have gone if I hadn't gotten gift tickets for my birthday months ago but I'm glad I did. I'd already seen it once but that was about fifteen years ago so I remembered little except that it was very funny, and it was. I went with two friends and, after the third friend cancelled, with my mom, which was nice, and she was especially happy because she is always very excited to meet my friends. My mom and I are going to see another play this week and I look forward to it.

- It is finally warm enough to swim in the river near my parents' place again, that was nice.

- For the first time in several years (because I usually forget) I went to the Pride parade, it was great. My friend F had great body paint on and she offered that next year she'll paint me too, that'll be fun.

- We had a company outing to Bratislava via boat, that was nice, even though it was very hot. I last visited Bratislava about a dozen years ago, even though it's so close. My favorite find was this statue of Hans Christian Andersen with a snail.

- I finally have a summer hair cut! Definitely not too soon.

- the GM of my cat TTRPG group had his 30th birthday party and some others of our group organized an actual quest for him, that was so much fun. He got to pick two guests as his party members (one of them was me) and then a mysterious figure in a bar told him he had to go on a quest to save ice dragon babies. Along the way a "mage" as well as three "gnomes" in a blanket trench coat demanded that he solve logic puzzles (we failed at two out of three) and at the end he had to destroy a piñata of a dragon raised by an evil necromancer, while wearing a dragon onesie for stealth reasons.

- D and I recently talked about computer games and he invited me over to try out playing on his PS5 since I haven't played anything on a console since… ever, I think? At least a very long time. It's definitely a different feeling than playing on my laptop. I played a few hours of "Horizon Forbidden West," the first main quest, and had a great time. It's a gorgeous game, definitely requires a big screen. The monsters look very cool too, and there were enough of them that I very much appreciated the red grass and the sneak attack ability. It took me a while to get used to the controls, I usually only play 2D games so I had to get used to using one stick for movement and the other for perspective, but eventually I improved.

I've not been doing very well recently, and after I yesterday finally thought things were slowly moving in the right direction today was an exceptionally frustrating day at work. On the way home I bought myself frozen pizzas and that made me feel a little better. And then because some kids had made a mistake during their order I got a free ice cream cup from the excellent ice cream shop around the corner and that felt a bit like the universe telling me that I'll be okay and things will get better, that was nice.

Tomorrow is the three year anniversary of the first COVID lockdown in Austria, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it this past week. Three years! Friday March 13th 2020 was the day the upcoming lockdown was announced, we all sat down at the office to talk about it and then everyone went grocery and toilet paper shopping during lunch break (except me because DD had already done that the day before, on a tip from my mom.) And then on Monday the lockdown started. It was weird and it sucked. And then it ended, and then we had more lockdowns, and then there were finally vaccines, and now it's been three years and sometimes everything feels almost "normal" again and sometimes it feels like we're all just pretending for the sake of being able to deal with the constant risk (that is lower now but still there) and anxiety about this and so many other things.

I signed up for hurtcomfortex - my first non-Yuletide exchange in over three years, I'm a bit nervous but mostly excited. I found out that there's an automatic app for any exchange now and I've been having fun browsing it here and already coming up with ideas. I still like the idea of writing a letter though so I still wrote one, even though as of now it's pretty much exactly the same information as in my sign-up, I'm planning to come back and expand on it a bit later.

I'm on vacation this week!
( whining about pain )

I went running today, even though it was very cold and it took twenty minutes for my hands to stop freezing because I forgot gloves, and I almost fell twice because even though I took a different route than normal some places were still icy. But I still went, not for very long but it counts. The only reasons why I didn't hate every minute were because a) the feeling of spite and accomplishment, and b) the sun. When I'm out in full sunshine for the first time in a while I always feel very plant-like.

On Friday after work I went to LB's apartment to finally watch Prince of Egypt, which we'd been talking about for a while now. "Deliver Us" is such a good song&scene, goosebumps.
Today he came to our place for dinner and to watch Glass Onion. It was fun, and I was glad that I managed to avoid spoilers enough to still be surprised a few times. It was the first movie I saw that was set during COVID times and I really liked how that was shown especially in the beginning. Some of my favorite parts were

spoilers

everyone arriving with different kinds of masks, Blanc immediately solving the planned murder mystery, and his long speech at the end in which during the speech which was only meant to stall he realizes what was actually going on and is mad about it because of the stupidity. I also liked him emphasizing that he is not Batman and at the end saying he could only uncover the truth but not deliver consequences - but then he did encourage Helen to ensure consequences on her own. (Sadly I could not forget the likely future that Helen will almost definitely go to jail for it.)

Afterwards we got LB to watch the Potato Wars series xD He's had to put up with me talking about Minecraft for months now so it was high time to show him what got me into it. First I told him that the first one isn't that long and then he enjoyed it enough that he didn't complain at all when the playlist continued, success.

It was fun, we should do movie evenings like that more often. Unfortunately LB soon won't be here for a few months, we'll have to pick it up again afterwards.