We got a new used pickup truck. Tom is so happy. I am missing the chip that makes people want new cars-- I am 51 and I’m only on my 3rd car. I drive them until they fall to bits. All cars look the same to me. I pity the detective who ever needs me to identify a car. But I take pleasure in Tom’s joy.
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Cars are tools. Tools are meh.
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I like used vehicles, especially well-loved vehicles. You can almost feel the owner’s personality indelibly imprinted onto it in a thousand little ways. My favorite are unorthodox repairs. I once owned a little hatchback Pontiac T-1000 that I bought from an old lady for $300 and a few hours of lawncare and weeding. It had translucent red cellotape over the rear driver’s side brake light as the glass was missing. There was a small hole in the front passenger side floor that you could see the road sliding by through, and the switch that controlled the headlights had been fixed using a standard home lightswitch with OFF and ON written to each side in sharpie directlt on the light switch wall plate screwed into the dash. The driver’s seat was covered in a layer of duct tape and I was never able to identify the smell. Drove it for 4 years and sold it for $1000. Great car.
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I’ll admit my wife and I did love our little 1982 Volvo 242 we bought in 1995 and drove into the ground until it died in 2003. It came with us on our honeymoon roadtrip around the eastern US, visiting all of the drive-in movie theaters, diners, Elvis memorabilia, and Largest X in the World attractions that we could find. We glued plastic aliens and dinosaurs and etc all over the dashboard, listening to Southern Culture on the Skids, Ben Folds Five, and The Squirrel Nut Zippers. We were grad students! This was our idea of luxury!
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I forgot how much I like using my laptop in bed (something I normally only do in the summertime,) but it makes me feel like some sort of sickly boywaif princeking scrawling missives in bed and being a bit silly. So comfortable with all of the blankets…
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I love how the orange kitty has such round little ears and a teeny tiny head. Super cute! They even have little soft swirling patterns like dappled sunlight all over, and that cute little ‘M’ marking tabbies have that’s perfect for forehead smewches.
Very fluffy kitty in the middle, and an adorable little meowmeow who looks like what I think squirrels do a bit, with that dappled darker fur pattern. Staring off at very impurrtant sights, I presume.
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That’s Kiisu, our kitten. He can fetch.
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Ah, that explains why he looks like such a cute little baby compared to the other kitties! Sounds like Kiisu is a very talented young man.
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Re-listening to the audiobook of Blindsight by Peter Watts, the one narrated by T Ryder Smith.
Reading is a bit difficult off-meds, but Smith’s performance really adds a lot.
I love this book, though probably not for the same reasons as most of the fandom. It was the first book where I actually related to the characters and cared about them. It’s a book with a lot of tiny details to mull over and appreciate. It’s a horror story, if you take a moment to really consider it all. It’s a barely-comprehensible game of chess, and it’s really fun to analyze all the moves.
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It’s winter in northern Michigan on the eastern edge of Lake Michigan and it isn’t completely overcast today. That counts as a win.
(The sun! It does exist!) 
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Texas usually just hogs all the sun. If you want sun, come here. Day after day of blazing sun. Ninety days of over 100 degree weather last year. It’ s the opposite here-- we’ve had a cool and overcast week, and everybody goes outside to enjoy it before the sun really starts flexing its muscle and makes it a hellscape for 6 months. This is about when I start dreaming about a summer house on the Maine coast and looking at real estate porn every day.
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Turns out I did pass my Business Information Systems exam after all.
When they put out the list last week and it said I had failed I was pretty devastated. This was the last exam I had to take besides by Bachelor’s thesis before I’m done. (There would have been an opportunity to retake the exam two weeks from now, but after that I’d have to wait a year.)
But I went to the post exam review yesterday and… well, apparently there was some sort of mixup somewhere and I had actually passed. Just barely, but I passed. It’s not graded beyond pass/fail so I don’t care. That’s about an anvil’s worth of weight taken off each of my shoulders.
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Congratss!! 
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This whole post solstice thing is driving me crazy- I don’t know what to do with all these hours of daylight! I keep expecting it to be pitch dark by three PM! Always surprising to still see blue skies overhead.
I found an old estate sale ring I had bought and promptly lost- it’s sterling, the little gem’s cut in a solitaire style- the setting is so like, tall? That it kind of makes it look like the gem is floating, rather than sitting in the band, which is interesting. It doesn’t fit properly on my hand anymore, though it does on the middle finger, which I found a bit funny. Also found some cute pearl and Y2K styled bracelets I had forgotten about. One has a My Melody charm on it!
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I found myself on a bit of a rabbit hole for a moment- flipping through old SpringThing threads, and reading over how nervously excited I was to participate in last year’s kind of made me smile, seeing how nice people like Rovarsson were to a little scaredycat. He’s always been very kind, especially in DMs, and I’m happy to still be kicking around the forums and sharing a space with such lovely meowmeows.
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My in-law’s package for my birthday arrived! Lots of sweets and treats (and a 1000 piece puzzle!).
One pack of candy decided during the trip that it wanted a life of its own, showering the inside of the parcel with sour sugar 
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Ever since I showed my son the Muppet thread, he’s been singing
—phenomena—toodootododoo—
(yes, I’m sticking with “phenomena”)
This has me and my girlfriend alternating between toenail-tearing irritation and fits of uncontrollable bellyshaking laughter.
Especially when he does his little dance with it.
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I discovered where the stairs go today on my quest for a quiet space to record some audio for a class assignment- the little spots by the elevators and dressing room storage area with the plug and the ominous stairs leading to nowhere below? It turns out if you hop up the stairs, it does not go to where I expected (some lockers by the professor’s offices.) Instead, it drops you off at street level where the medical centre is. I don’t know how, but somehow the geography lines up, which means you can cut across a huge chunk of campus (hopping from building to building) in about a quarter of the time it would normally take to navigate that far.
It also turns out that the bridge I’ve been too nervous to cross until now actually drops you off into the odd building exit I was always curious about near the office building I like to hang out. Inside of the building is mostly stuff I’m not interested in, though there were a few open air tables to hang out on.
Also, if you take the stairs up from the area of lockers near the medical area, but not the ones by the far side- you can actually drop yourself off directly in front of the gyms area and all of the little offices up there, and from there, there’s a bridge section that broils you alive like a little plant with all the glass and sun, which in turn leads to the fashion area, where you can drop into the library building from another bridge. I didn’t realize the medical stairs could take you over there! I also found a little bag of candy that said: ‘help yourself to White Rabbit candy’ and being the foolishly intrepid adventurer I am, took three, since the bag was full. Any more would have felt too greedy- I’m taking one home for a meowmeow in the household to share, one for now, and one to have later.
Taking the forbidden stairs from the quiet spot where the leak was a few weeks ago actually drops you off into the food service corridor, as well as where they service the elevators and other loud humming sounds. Going down leads to a whole warren of forbidden doors with closed access for service staff. However, if you continue upwards, it takes you to where I had a physics lab once, and lots of art students are- which joins up onto the professors offices area, and has tons of open seating that’s a bit echoey but quiet enough to get work done. From there you can drop into the library building from the northern stairs, which is a good thing to keep in mind if I want to do some more quiet work on campus…
I also scored an empty classroom in a building hardly anyone goes to, (mostly engineers and the odd humanities course) to record my stuff in and work on some assignments this evening, which was really lovely- a plug, a chair and desk, and peace and quiet from there not being much but some association lounges and one large theatre off to the side. Nice!
All of that rambling around and I’ve solved some mini mysteries, got some candy, and work done. Lovely.
Ignore the nick on my pinky finger nail: I scraped some of the polish while running away when I suddenly heard someone burst out into singing (sounded a bit like a siren echoing all syllable-y in the stairwell) from grabbing the railing. I also did snag an audio recording of the singing, but I’m not sure how to upload that… It was pretty spooky, since travelling up and down the stairs didn’t reveal a person- so perhaps the sound was carried in from a nearby dressing room…? But I didn’t see anymeowdy. Ah, well.
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