So you’re going shopping because you’re concerned that you may be forcibly cloistered or you may self-cloister for two weeks. Continue reading
Archive | March 2020
Work From Home Blog: Day 1
Technically BEFORE Day one; I’m still sitting in the armchair doing Pre-Morning Things.
👩💻
Day One of Telecommuting (long-term, rather than, say, when I worked from home Friday because my co-worker made me sick again)
Clothes.
Last night I found myself regarding the closet, wondering what I was going to wear to work.
Then I realized: my pjs.
(I always find this a funny way to put this, since what I wear to bed is a pair of armwarmers and that in the winter).
My bum-around the house flannel pants and favorite cami, in this case (I need to do laundry), the green flannels with the tear in the upper leg from where I sit cross-legged and the faded camo cami (It was on clearance!) that sort of matches.
Working from home is a little weird 😉
Sure, some Zoom meetings I’m still going to have to put on a cardigan and brush my hair for, but for the most part, as long as you contribute, people don’t ask questions about why you don’t have the camera on.
Especially when the school is so focused on a) getting all the professors ready to teach their classes via Zoom (zoom is like skype, only… not?) in a few weeks and b) working on getting people less equipped to telecommute and less urgent about it than I am.
(I needed someone to tell me it was okay and someone to set up Remote Desktop in case I needed it).
Personally, I’ve never been one of the people who needs specific clothes for a productivity ritual. Tea, yes. Not clothes.
What about you? If you’re starting a work from home, how are you handling the clothing issue?
The Bellamy, Chapter 10
“What were you looking for, again?”
Veronika could tell when the subject was being changed. She took it before she annoyed Two any further.
“Microfiche of an article on Hammondsport, it’s supposed to be from, let’s see, from The Bellamy Gazette, really? From 1879 – June 14th, the morning edition. Ah.” She cleared her throat. “Sorry. I’m Veronika Bellamy.” She offered her hand.
Two shook it firmly. “Hi, Veronika. I’m Two, of course. The Gazette microfiche are this way. They don’t do two editions a day anymore, just one a week and that’s mostly online, just about 300 copies to really dedicated subscribers, but back in the day, you could get a lot of interesting stuff from the Gazette. I love reading the really old articles when I’ve got some free time.”
“That sounds amazing. You like it up here, then?” Continue reading
Pi Day Story: the Pissers
I am taking prompts on the theme of “Begins with Pi-” (preferably a phrase rather than a word).
Content warning, this one is definitely inspired by current events.
Also, I have the typing version of a sore throat – my right ring finger is sad – so pls. forgive any typos.
Purchase Negotiation 37 – Don’t Let Her Get Hurt
First: Purchased: Negotiation
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Don’t let her get hurt. That meant Leander had to get her out of the line of fire. Five of them. One of him.
He ducked his head, took a second like he was really considering it, and pushed all the force he had into making a sort of dimple in the brick wall just big enough to hold Sylviane.
He’d been talking fast, but it was still not fast enough. One of the goons grabbed his shoulder.
He shoved backwards at the same time he grabbed the gun, twisting it away. He shoved that goon hard into the next one and kicked out towards the third.
Then it was target, hit, repeat, target, hit, repeat. The guns went away, the goons went into the wall, he kicked one and punched another and didn’t even pause before he hit the girl, grabbed one last gun before it could aim Sylviane’s way – Continue reading
Saving the Cult (if not the World), Chapter Eleven
“-Might have noticed how you didn’t fall to your doom.”
Ethan was the best at being menacing; Jackson was the best at being logically charming, and somewhere in between the two of them, Dylan smiled at people and they seemed to agree with him.
There were five of them Jackson had noticed, and they were starting with the three that might need the most convincing, as far as he was convinced – one of those had been almost all the way to Lina when the shield caught him, so he might have thought that he’d have been fine, discounting the huge crowd of people that were also clawing towards him.
They’d let Dylan have him, Jackson convince the one who seemed to know nearly as much about the Organization as he did, and then aimed Ethan at a creepy woman who declared that she owed nothing to anyone, ever.
Lina – watched. Truth be told, she took mental notes, too. She had some idea how to handle people, from school, from bullies, from watching her parents, but watching the three of them work was a completely different matter. If all three of them weren’t so sure that they didn’t have magical powers, she’d have – given what she knew now – suspected some sort of magical charm going on with all of them. They just headed in to what they were doing and came out the other end with a smile and the response they wanted. Continue reading
Aunt Family Help (Mostly Kelkyag) Requested
Hi
I’ve started to write the story of Beryl going through Aunt Mary’s journals.
Which means I really need to be able to place Aunt Mary on the timeline.
Preference is earlier but American so obv. not TOO early; I also need to know or name the Aunt that came before her.
1789 is the earliest I can go and be in the timeline that the Rochester NY area was settled IRL.
Malina and the Border Banners, Chapter 4 (A Story for B)
Began here.
Chapter 2 here
There was a tower in a castle in the sands on the edge of the border Malina had never seen before, certainly not like this.
There was a room at the top of the tower, a room high up in an intact tower in a half-ruined castle.
There was a throne in the room, a cat on the throne, a sand-cat, who had not signed the Last Treaties.
And in the middle of the room was Malina.
There was only one chair, something Malina’s feet were protesting loudly. She considered the floor. She considered the cat.
She considered the windows – the glass was wavy and speckled, so that she couldn’t see through them – the piles of documents, the map in sand. Continue reading
Under the Bridge
Warning: Dark. Discussion of death and dying, although mostly a bit sideways.
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They lived, if you wanted to call it that, down by the river, the Trade Street Bridge providing the roof and a back wall to their residence , the steps of the Riverside Inn down to the water providing another wall. Their floor was the gravel and slate of the river-shore and the river was their front porch, their food provider, the road they took out of there where they needed to and the barricade that kept most others away.
There were generally four or five of them there; on the coldest nights, there were fewer, and on the full moons, sometimes as many as twenty. The one with the long, long hair (black as a raven’s wing) and the one with the piercings (eighteen of them), they were always there.
Under the bridge, there weren’t names and there was rarely talking, but the one with the long, long hair, others called Godiva; the one with the piercings, some of them called Nails, because the nose-piercing was a nail.
When nobody else was there, they existed wordlessly. They’d collect the interesting debris the river provided and sort it out – Gloves could use this and Hammer could use that; Blue might want that photo but Clacker would definitely want that sock. They fished and smoked the results, muddy bottom-feeding fish that were far better once you’d gotten them full of some stolen mustard – and they might not steal, but someone did. They bribed the gendarmes which could be bribed and scared off or hid from the other ones. Continue reading
The Bellamy, Chapter 9
Veronika found herself pressed against the wall in the Much Smaller Elevator, just enough room to press an antique button for the fourth floor. She pressed it and took the three minutes the elevator took to climb a single story – maybe she should’ve tried the stairs again – studying the Very Small Elevator.
The paneling was old and, in few places, dinged deeply, but the trim was still in good shape and the little bits of brasswork, including two brass sconces which made the space even smaller, was bright and beautiful. The floor looked like marble, and the ceiling, which was surprisingly high for the tiny size of the elevator, was arched and embossed in a pattern that looked like fleur-des-lis.
There were numbers one through ten and B, G, S, and U on the button pad, far more than the Bellamy appeared to have – although she thought perhaps S was sub-basement, that didn’t tell her what U was.
At least there was nothing, as far as she could tell, moving on its own (other than as, say, an elevator was supposed to) or otherwise particularly strange about the elevator, other than that the lifts in this place appeared to believe that there were more floors than the architecture believed in.
She pushed her cart out as soon as the door dinged anyway – a minute was too long in such a cramped space – and looked around. To the left, she was in what seemed to be a non-public area, stacked with boxes, each of them labelled with what she thought was a name, a number, and something that in theory would have been a date Continue reading