Who dares
Apr. 13th, 2026 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
viridian5My federal and state tax forms were e-filed and accepted this weekend. I'm so glad that's over.
I sent e-mails to three different taxslayer e-mail addresses trying to get help with a problem, only for all of them to try to toss me somewhere else. The third one at least suggested something, even as they said they weren't allowed to. They didn't tell me how to do it, but they made a suggestion. I figured it out after playing around with various things for thirty minutes.
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For some reason, Queen's A Kind of Magic, their Highlander soundtrack, came to my mind, so I borrowed it from the library. Of course, "Princes of the Universe" is here, but you probably know that one so what I put here is "Who Wants to Live Forever," which is about the movie's love story and can make me teary-eyed. It has churchy organs, some orchestral sections, and Freddie Mercury really feeling the lyrics.
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Regular Car Reviews thoroughly roasts the Cybertruck, with some of the comments/insults making me literally LOL. Also funny to me was that when I looked at the roads they're riding on, my immediate thought was "This is Pennsylvania all right."
I sent e-mails to three different taxslayer e-mail addresses trying to get help with a problem, only for all of them to try to toss me somewhere else. The third one at least suggested something, even as they said they weren't allowed to. They didn't tell me how to do it, but they made a suggestion. I figured it out after playing around with various things for thirty minutes.
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For some reason, Queen's A Kind of Magic, their Highlander soundtrack, came to my mind, so I borrowed it from the library. Of course, "Princes of the Universe" is here, but you probably know that one so what I put here is "Who Wants to Live Forever," which is about the movie's love story and can make me teary-eyed. It has churchy organs, some orchestral sections, and Freddie Mercury really feeling the lyrics.
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Regular Car Reviews thoroughly roasts the Cybertruck, with some of the comments/insults making me literally LOL. Also funny to me was that when I looked at the roads they're riding on, my immediate thought was "This is Pennsylvania all right."
The case of the missing notifications
Apr. 11th, 2026 11:58 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
denise posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceI keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.
Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)
We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.
current stitching, and
Apr. 11th, 2026 09:33 amthistleingreyMy mother has requested a color and "something small," not a pattern or style. She means shallow and narrow, not a triangle that covers one's back, but also not a scarflike rectangle. We got as far as "Tie the shawl loosely around your neck, or have dangling ends?" and then she told me to decide. And she'd like it not to be warm, instead "more decorative."
If my current hands can deal---somewhat better off than my 2022 hands, and somewhat worse, in different ways---then the yarn may become Lorkowska's Scarflette. If not, it may become Salt Water and Sea Stars (not quite narrow enough, unless I edit it) or a reverse-engineered hack of Hitchhiker (boring).
The yarn is a bit lighter in weight than the first two links call for, so it'll make a slightly smaller finished object. I did this accidentally to good effect with the shawl that I named Rough Weather. Holst Coast, for my mother's not-warm narrow shawl, is as close as I've gone so far to the yarn weight of the gift shawl that my hands and eyes had to quit. Coast is a wool/cotton blend in light fingering, a bit stiffer than pure wool before it's washed; I used it last year for the starting "bookmark" of a sleeveless top, the section across the back shoulders, which paused so that I could practice adapting shoulder and neckline (on the more workaday sleeveless top that I ended up re-knitting several times). The gift shawl used Exquisite Lace from West Yorkshire Spinners, a laceweight wool/silk blend, recently discontinued.
I think the gift shawl was hobbled by more than my damaged hands and eyes. ( Read more... )
If my current hands can deal---somewhat better off than my 2022 hands, and somewhat worse, in different ways---then the yarn may become Lorkowska's Scarflette. If not, it may become Salt Water and Sea Stars (not quite narrow enough, unless I edit it) or a reverse-engineered hack of Hitchhiker (boring).
The yarn is a bit lighter in weight than the first two links call for, so it'll make a slightly smaller finished object. I did this accidentally to good effect with the shawl that I named Rough Weather. Holst Coast, for my mother's not-warm narrow shawl, is as close as I've gone so far to the yarn weight of the gift shawl that my hands and eyes had to quit. Coast is a wool/cotton blend in light fingering, a bit stiffer than pure wool before it's washed; I used it last year for the starting "bookmark" of a sleeveless top, the section across the back shoulders, which paused so that I could practice adapting shoulder and neckline (on the more workaday sleeveless top that I ended up re-knitting several times). The gift shawl used Exquisite Lace from West Yorkshire Spinners, a laceweight wool/silk blend, recently discontinued.
I think the gift shawl was hobbled by more than my damaged hands and eyes. ( Read more... )
Meanwhile, in RL...
Apr. 10th, 2026 12:37 amviridian5I'm trying to self-file my taxes and I've hit a segment I don't think they had last year that's stopped me dead. I can't get it to make sense as to what information from where they want me to enter. I think I don't have to do the lump sum payment section because I didn't get one but I'm not sure, so I'll be traveling to a RL site to try to get some free help since the person who answered my call for help through taxslayer.com wasn't very helpful for me. I don't know if it's their fault, my fault, or both our faults, but....
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I uploaded these photos to include on a comment to someone, but since I put them up I figured I'd share them with you guys.
I was born in 1973, and looking at old photos of my childhood shows that I was dressed in... some things. In the ones below, my parents seem to have been aiming for a "literal embodiment of the 1970s" vibe. ( photos )
(I do get such a big smile at the last photo though.)
Continuing the "very 70s" thing, I remember my childhood clothes in that decade being either very girly or rather butch, which went along with how my toys were dolls, plushes, trucks, cars, and action figures. Also in my childhood wardrobe were some clothes my mother made for me off Simplicity patterns: I remember in particular a dark blue jumpsuit that had several patches sewn to the knees since even then I fell a lot and a Holly Hobbie sundress and a Raggedy Ann one.
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I uploaded these photos to include on a comment to someone, but since I put them up I figured I'd share them with you guys.
I was born in 1973, and looking at old photos of my childhood shows that I was dressed in... some things. In the ones below, my parents seem to have been aiming for a "literal embodiment of the 1970s" vibe. ( photos )
(I do get such a big smile at the last photo though.)
Continuing the "very 70s" thing, I remember my childhood clothes in that decade being either very girly or rather butch, which went along with how my toys were dolls, plushes, trucks, cars, and action figures. Also in my childhood wardrobe were some clothes my mother made for me off Simplicity patterns: I remember in particular a dark blue jumpsuit that had several patches sewn to the knees since even then I fell a lot and a Holly Hobbie sundress and a Raggedy Ann one.
recent not quite reading
Apr. 8th, 2026 04:39 pmthistleingreyCarobeth Laird, Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of my life with John Peabody Harrington (1975)
Skimmed, partial---amidst the readings for one of my classes, I was reminded that an undergrad prof had mentioned Laird years ago. The prof said that Laird's book made Harrington sound both brilliant and "like ... not just a piece of work, but a pile of work."
I'd say that from Laird's text, it seems that Harrington was firmly neurodivergent, unable to connect with Laird, apt to project his mother ineffectually onto her (without understanding that he was doing so or that his repeated errors were painful for Laird), and lucky in benefiting as a white man from the work others did for him and around him. Yes, also quite bright, but the inability alongside it to balance schedule disruption and the undertaking of basic self-care, including regular meals, is awfully familiar from at least one person I've dated previously. He didn't "have to" learn it because others sort of handled it, until they didn't.
Laird downplays her own brilliance in the text, though it's clear that she knew herself. She managed to secure a divorce from Harrington in an era when her father could appear in court on her behalf.
The long-ago undergrad prof was a person with a teenaged child, at the time, and had recently divorced a husband who was a piece of work. Harrington's work was amazing, she said, though a lot of "Harrington's work" is only attributed to him---often by him, unfairly. She had been working on Harrington's work, including his letters, and--- The classroom full of students interested in Celtic studies blinked at her, she realized she'd hared off on a tangent, and we went back to how the late Romans wrote about, or misattributed stuff about, continental Celts. What Harrington worked principally on, and what the undergrad prof doubled in, was indigenous languages, mostly in California.
Skimmed, partial---amidst the readings for one of my classes, I was reminded that an undergrad prof had mentioned Laird years ago. The prof said that Laird's book made Harrington sound both brilliant and "like ... not just a piece of work, but a pile of work."
I'd say that from Laird's text, it seems that Harrington was firmly neurodivergent, unable to connect with Laird, apt to project his mother ineffectually onto her (without understanding that he was doing so or that his repeated errors were painful for Laird), and lucky in benefiting as a white man from the work others did for him and around him. Yes, also quite bright, but the inability alongside it to balance schedule disruption and the undertaking of basic self-care, including regular meals, is awfully familiar from at least one person I've dated previously. He didn't "have to" learn it because others sort of handled it, until they didn't.
Laird downplays her own brilliance in the text, though it's clear that she knew herself. She managed to secure a divorce from Harrington in an era when her father could appear in court on her behalf.
The long-ago undergrad prof was a person with a teenaged child, at the time, and had recently divorced a husband who was a piece of work. Harrington's work was amazing, she said, though a lot of "Harrington's work" is only attributed to him---often by him, unfairly. She had been working on Harrington's work, including his letters, and--- The classroom full of students interested in Celtic studies blinked at her, she realized she'd hared off on a tangent, and we went back to how the late Romans wrote about, or misattributed stuff about, continental Celts. What Harrington worked principally on, and what the undergrad prof doubled in, was indigenous languages, mostly in California.
Mysteries
Apr. 3rd, 2026 10:23 pmviridian5
This image of mine was put into Flickr Explore, explaining why it has so many more hits, faves, and comments on it than my usual. I still have no idea how Flickr decides that. The funny thing is that I have a very practical reason for shooting this monument this way: her nose has taken some damage over the years, and this angle disguises it.
I have some more recent St. John Cemetery photos up at my Flickr.
But here's a mystery: ( photos )
What happened here? What could have been rubbing at this door like this?
