Entry tags:
- cemeteries,
- home,
- memes,
- rl
Post, comma, things make a
I'm back in San Francisco and had a relaxing day cooking, reading fic, and sort of leering in the direction of the mostly-completed filing I left behind last week. It's funny, it was really good to be home for the last few days, and now it's even better to be back home again. (Multiple homes HOW DO YOU WORK.) Curling up and reading in my traditional spot in the stairwell at my parents' house was incredibly comfortable. But then again, so is being back in my own space.
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Today's cooking: pasta with pesto for lunch, vegetable soup for dinner, and the inauguration of my waffle iron's future in cooking things it is not rated for, in the form of waffled oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. This poor waffle iron did NOT know what it was getting into when it came home with me, for I am filled with all the evil plans that waffleizer.com infected me with last summer. (Tomorrow when
oliviacirce gets here, I imagine she will make lots of Connor/Geoffrey jokes and then find a way to combine waffles with celery salt in order to achieve the Smallville fluff POWER COMBO. [References: Conflicts of Interest, Omiai])
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Yesterday, I went adventuring to Fort Bragg to meet
meloukhia. I can't even say how exciting it was to confirm that there in fact queer geeky awesome people in relatively close range to home. I am still a bit confused about the fact that we apparently spent four hours together, because it doesn't seem like it was anywhere close to that long. The weather, which started and ended the day violently, cleared up for a few hours in the afternoon, allowing us to poke around the cemetery downtown without getting soaked.
The thing I love the most about cemeteries is the stories they tell. You can wonder through a small plot of land and find out a lot about a community. You find out which families have enough wealth and hubris to build themselves monuments, you find disasters that took down large groups of people. The variety of languages represented on tombstones tells you about histories of people who traveled a long way to live and die in one place. Family plots tell you a lot about the relationships between their denizens, and children's graves even more so.
The thing I found the most fascinating at Rose Memorial was the clusters of markers from people who couldn't afford tombstones. The wooden and corrugated metal and sometimes paper markers are a striking memorial families who cared enough to leave a marker but didn't have the resources to make one that would last in the soggy coastal climate. They drew a fascinating contrast with some of the really garish modern graves, emblazoned with laser-etched representations of hobbies and interests.

Hopefully the next time
meloukhia is down in the Bay Area, there will be Colmafest 2011--I haven't been to Colma since my great grandparents were interred, and there is some excellent grave-viewing to be had there.
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1. Reply to this post and I will pick 5 of your icons.
2. Make a post and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts, creating a never ending cycle of icon squee.
meganbmoore asked about:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5. 
1. This icon is SECRETLY about Herman Melville. There was a pin with this text for sale in the gift shop at Arrowhead (Melville's house in Pittsville, MA, where he lived for the slashy-with-Hawthorne years.) I assumed at the time that it was a quotation from Moby Dick, but it is apparently independent, and just made the people at Arrowhead THINK of Ahab, I assume. I resisted buying the pin by telling myself I'd turn it into an icon, and so I did. In fact, I turned it into TWO icons, but the alternate version has only ever been used in the LJ Community We Will Not Name.

These days I use it for any situation where I have an excessive amount of glee, not just things I want to hunt down like a WHALE THAT IS DEFYING ME.
2. This is the closest thing I will ever have to an O'Brien/Bashir icon because I hate that ship like burning. Canonical bromance has never given me so much frustration. Anyway, the two of them spend a lot of time being totally awkward together, and it is particularly adorable when they have traveled back in time to a TOS episode and Bashir is concerned that he might be about to become his own grandfather. I got it from
iconsbycurtana
3. Screw the trolls who made Homestuck into a trendy fandom. Rose Lalonde will kick your ass, and she will do it with her knitting needles. And then she will knit a lavender cozy for your corpse, because she ispassive-aggressive polite that way.
4. So, I am the child of a public school teacher. What this means, among other things, is I spent large swaths of my vacation time finding ways to entertain myself on empty campuses. Every summer I read through all the core novels for the grade I was about to enter. And then there were the educational computer games. As a matter of fact, while I am not at all versed in computer games that people choose to purchase for themselves, I do know quite a lot about educational computer games released on the Mac in the mid-90s. I played not only Oregon Trail but it's spawn Amazon Trail and Yukon Trail, not only Sim City but Sim Tower and even Sim Farm. I factored quadratics for fun in order to save space ships, and navigated mazes that could only be unlocked with geometry trivia.
But, in my opinion, the queen of 90s educational computer games is MythWeb's Wrath of the Gods, which teaches about Greek mythology by asking you, a bastard son of Zeus who was raised by centaurs, to repeat every great quest from Greek mythology. I stole the Golden Fleece, outwitted Chiron and a cyclops, seduced Ariadne like an asshole, wandered in and out of Hades like it was going out of style, and mastered the art of bull-leaping, all with a dorky grin and an uncanny tendency to walk in straight lines and turn at sharp 90-degree angles in the center of every intersection. Or, rather, the guy in this icon did. His name is Our Hero. Protip: never allow me to start quoting dialog from this game to you, because I will.not.stop.
5. This is from an episode in season 2 or 3 of Smallville where everyone but Clark gets screwed up by wackyKryptonite meteor rock sex pollen. Chloe has a brief moment in the sun as an evil lesbian. It is very exciting, look at that evil lesbian smolder. I have no idea what else happens in this episode or how it gets resolved.
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I don't suppose you read Lackadaisy? If so, did you see the Christmas mini-comic from this week? Mordecai! My heart!
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Today's cooking: pasta with pesto for lunch, vegetable soup for dinner, and the inauguration of my waffle iron's future in cooking things it is not rated for, in the form of waffled oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. This poor waffle iron did NOT know what it was getting into when it came home with me, for I am filled with all the evil plans that waffleizer.com infected me with last summer. (Tomorrow when
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
----
Yesterday, I went adventuring to Fort Bragg to meet
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The thing I love the most about cemeteries is the stories they tell. You can wonder through a small plot of land and find out a lot about a community. You find out which families have enough wealth and hubris to build themselves monuments, you find disasters that took down large groups of people. The variety of languages represented on tombstones tells you about histories of people who traveled a long way to live and die in one place. Family plots tell you a lot about the relationships between their denizens, and children's graves even more so.
The thing I found the most fascinating at Rose Memorial was the clusters of markers from people who couldn't afford tombstones. The wooden and corrugated metal and sometimes paper markers are a striking memorial families who cared enough to leave a marker but didn't have the resources to make one that would last in the soggy coastal climate. They drew a fascinating contrast with some of the really garish modern graves, emblazoned with laser-etched representations of hobbies and interests.

Hopefully the next time
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
---
1. Reply to this post and I will pick 5 of your icons.
2. Make a post and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts, creating a never ending cycle of icon squee.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
1.
1. This icon is SECRETLY about Herman Melville. There was a pin with this text for sale in the gift shop at Arrowhead (Melville's house in Pittsville, MA, where he lived for the slashy-with-Hawthorne years.) I assumed at the time that it was a quotation from Moby Dick, but it is apparently independent, and just made the people at Arrowhead THINK of Ahab, I assume. I resisted buying the pin by telling myself I'd turn it into an icon, and so I did. In fact, I turned it into TWO icons, but the alternate version has only ever been used in the LJ Community We Will Not Name.
These days I use it for any situation where I have an excessive amount of glee, not just things I want to hunt down like a WHALE THAT IS DEFYING ME.
2. This is the closest thing I will ever have to an O'Brien/Bashir icon because I hate that ship like burning. Canonical bromance has never given me so much frustration. Anyway, the two of them spend a lot of time being totally awkward together, and it is particularly adorable when they have traveled back in time to a TOS episode and Bashir is concerned that he might be about to become his own grandfather. I got it from
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
3. Screw the trolls who made Homestuck into a trendy fandom. Rose Lalonde will kick your ass, and she will do it with her knitting needles. And then she will knit a lavender cozy for your corpse, because she is
4. So, I am the child of a public school teacher. What this means, among other things, is I spent large swaths of my vacation time finding ways to entertain myself on empty campuses. Every summer I read through all the core novels for the grade I was about to enter. And then there were the educational computer games. As a matter of fact, while I am not at all versed in computer games that people choose to purchase for themselves, I do know quite a lot about educational computer games released on the Mac in the mid-90s. I played not only Oregon Trail but it's spawn Amazon Trail and Yukon Trail, not only Sim City but Sim Tower and even Sim Farm. I factored quadratics for fun in order to save space ships, and navigated mazes that could only be unlocked with geometry trivia.
But, in my opinion, the queen of 90s educational computer games is MythWeb's Wrath of the Gods, which teaches about Greek mythology by asking you, a bastard son of Zeus who was raised by centaurs, to repeat every great quest from Greek mythology. I stole the Golden Fleece, outwitted Chiron and a cyclops, seduced Ariadne like an asshole, wandered in and out of Hades like it was going out of style, and mastered the art of bull-leaping, all with a dorky grin and an uncanny tendency to walk in straight lines and turn at sharp 90-degree angles in the center of every intersection. Or, rather, the guy in this icon did. His name is Our Hero. Protip: never allow me to start quoting dialog from this game to you, because I will.not.stop.
5. This is from an episode in season 2 or 3 of Smallville where everyone but Clark gets screwed up by wacky
-----
I don't suppose you read Lackadaisy? If so, did you see the Christmas mini-comic from this week? Mordecai! My heart!