bironic

(1)

How many of you are of an age and region to remember the BookIt! program, where kids get stickers for reading books and then trade them in for a Pizza Hut pizza? disgruntled_owl has organized a fall reading challenge for our local fan group that serves as BookIt! for grownups, and I am inordinately enthused about it. Need to do a books catch-up post.

(2)

Change of season—theoretically; summer hasn't let go yet—means replenishing fall work wardrobe and sprucing up the apartment. Clothes shopping is hard, but five hours' work yesterday yielded a pair of plaid pants, a tunic sweater with side grommets and a corduroy dress that I really like, and everything was on sale.

I also picked up a trio of fairy tale-inspired prints at a local art fair and hung them in the bedroom.


(The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast, done in geometric mosaics of construction paper. Click for bigger.)

It's funny because it turns out the artist is the same one who made a paper-doll Edgar Allan Poe pattern and various cute horror figure prints that caught my eye when I lived in D.C. The styles differ so much, I didn't make the connection.

(3)

I got a haircut and I think I don't like it. :/

(4)

Trying to decide whether to participate in trickortreatex or yuletide_admin for the first time or to sit out official signups, look at people's requests to see if anything sparks an idea, and concentrate on my own WsIP otherwise. I'm thinking no on Trick or Treat and maybe on Yuletide. Just in case on the latter, I nominated the fandoms I'd want to request stories for and/or that I feel most capable of writing. Three is not much when you don't expect to know most of the sources other people nominate.

Either way, the "Original Works" prompts for trickortreatex are a lot of fun to peruse. They're listed under "Other Media" here. (I copy-pasted into a Word doc and added line breaks to make them readable.) Some faves:

- Actor Cast As A Vampire Who Is Actually A Vampire
- Businessman Who's Obviously A Poorly-Disguised Tentacle Monster
- Demon Who Has Accidentally Locked Himself Out Of Hell And Just Wants To Go Home
- Ghost of a Dried Up River
- Ghost of Highly Intelligent Octopus that Escaped From Its Tank
- Giant Robot Who Just Wants to Know Love
- Haunted Yarn From An Evil Sheep
- A Reader's Digest Condensed Book that Slowly Devours the Reader's Soul
- Reanimated Egyptian Mummy With A BA In Film Studies From USC

(5)

Wait, I thought of a fifth thing. I booked a flight to see my longtime friend A. in Tucson, AZ in November. She moved there five years ago and it took this long to visit, whoops. Recommendations welcome if you know the area. So far: Sonoran Desert Museum, Saguaro National Park, drive up Mt. Lemmon, a Mexican restaurant her family likes.

Which reminds me: This week marks five years since I moved back to Boston! It seems simultaneously like less and more. 2013 was the summer jetpack_monkey made the Starships! remix. Kink Bingo was still running. This is the longest I have stayed at a single job or school. While there are annoyances and stressful periods, I don't at the moment have plans to look around. I miss my D.C. friends (and my NY friends before that) but am glad for my Boston ones.