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Local Amenities

The Sky Over Cooper Mountain Nature Park
iPhone 13 mini photo

Until a heat wave hits here on Friday, we’re having a week of very nice weather in the Willamette Valley, with highs in the 70s and low 80s °F. On Sunday, the high temperature was 75°F. I had to run an errand in Tigard on Hwy 99W and decided to take the long way home. I hadn’t been on SW Bull Mountain Rd. in a very long time, so I decided to take it from 99W to SW Roy Rogers Rd. Then I took Roy Rogers Rd / SW 175th to SW Kemmer Rd and Cooper Mountain Nature Park. On a sunny and temperate day, the park is a nice place to look out over the Tualatin River Valley. Very pretty. I don’t come here often enough, even though the park is not far from my house.

I considered visiting Jenkins Estate, which is nearby, but I didn’t have enough time. I made a mental note to make a separate trip to Jenkins Estate before the summer ends.

Current Mood: excited

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American Meadows Order

My fall order from American Meadows has arrived. :D Now I just need the weather to break so I can actually get out to plant things. If you're still shopping, this nursery has some stock of fall bulbs left and some of those are on sale.

Dangerous Mood Bearded Iris (lavender standards with near-black falls)

Montmartre Bearded Iris (purple with yellow edges)

Ziggy Reblooming Bearded Iris (yellow standards with burgundy-and-yellow streaked falls)

First day back at work

Didn't really want to get up this morning, did it anyway. Had a good morning phone call with Keldor as he drove to work, then took my elsparkcyckel to the busstop.

As expected, the 1.5 hour bus ride wasn't long enough to empty ny inbox from all the vacation mail, though I did manage to delete a fair bit.

I tried stopping by hörcentralen on the way to work, as my left hearing aid hasn't seemed to be producing sound at full power. However, they had a note on the door saying reduced drop-in hours right now due to someone being out on sick leave. I checked their normal open hours, and they don't open till 09:00 anyway, so I will need to try again another day.

Had both fika and lunch breaks with Phil. He says they have lots of red currants if I want to come pick some. I said I would love to, later in the week, as I have blueberries drying and black currants in the fridge.

This evening I took the dry blueberries out of the dehydrators, and consolidated the ones that are still moist onto two trays. Then I washed the black currants, and decided that it was too late to tey to dry them, so hust bagged them and put them in the freezer.

Driving home

Reached the Bessešjohka rest area just before midnight, we crawled into bed in the back of the van, and got a few hours sleep. I woke at 05:10 with an ache in hips, so I used the toilet and drove two hours, while Keldor slept in the passenger seat. Then he took over driving at the Lappeasuando rest area and I got a 40 minutes nap, till we came to the Stenbro rest area, where I did 15 minutes yoga under the bridge.

Then we drove on towards David's house, stopping for a sign in the Kalix area that said "blueberries". So I bought a 5 liter wooden box of blueberries gor 450 kr, which is a lot, but I don't have time to pick them, my day is already packed full.

David was home when we arrived, so I was able to get a hug and use the loo before heading down to pick black currants. Keldor lay down on the bed in the van to rest while I picked. After about a 40 minutes I was closing in on 3/4 of a bucket of berries, happily sticking to the bushes in the shade. Then he came down, talking on the phone with his dad, and grabbed me and dragged me over to bushes in the sun which had more, larger, berries. I wimpered a little, because sun, and we filled the rest of the bucket in about 15 minutes, and continued driving.

We dropped off a little gift (a glass testube thingie with a coiled base that we found in the second han store in Norway) for Louise in her mailbox on our way out of town (she had a doctor appointment), and picked up one she left for us (a bag of pretty rocks).

When we passed through Skellefteå we stopped to pick up my new passport. Luckily, the station is very near the highway, so very little extra time needed.

Then home and unload the car. I got all of the kitchen stuff put away and washed the dirty clothes we'd brought home while Keldor dealt with getting the basement stuff put away and mowing the front yard. That leaves the clean costumes and accessories to deal with later.

While driving we saw:

1 deer crossing the road up ahead, while I drove

2 reindeer, one of which majestic and white, with a huge rack of antlers

last day at Lofotr

We started the day with loading the car eith everything save food and clothes to change in to after the after work shower.

Then we went to work and packed up the smithy, took down the tents we had been using, loaded everything onto pallets for Drift to take away tomorrow, and our personal gear into out car.

Then we spent the last couple of hours of the shift up at the longhouse, where I made a small nålbinded bag.

Then back to the house, shower, load the food into the ice chest and into the car, clean the room, and hit the road at 18:00.

We drove just till midnight, and got some sleep at a rest area.

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fitness fellowship 2025

Fitness Fellowship 2025: Check-in 33 (a day late)

Here we are past the midway point of August. I go back to work next week (meetings, student orientations, etc.) and I'm having a little trouble wrapping my brain around it. For 50 of my 54 years, the rhythms of my life have been dictated by the academic calendar, but every year I grow older, the harder it is for me to readjust to having less time for myself.

If you have a similar challenge in your life, a cyclical thing that dictates to you the way you spend your time, do you also experience feelings of stress when an expected change comes around?

As always, there's no need to answer my navel-gazing questions, but please do share how your fitness journey went for you this past week.

( My Week )

I'm sending you all the good vibes I can spare that you have lots of success this coming week!

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planes trains and automobiles

Home from Phoenix, Home from the Airport

Phoenix travelog #4
Back home · Mon, 18 Aug 2025, 8pm

Our flight home from Phoenix on Monday left 45 minutes late due to numerous aircraft swaps. Partly to make up for it our route home from the airport was swift. That was a mood lifter because waits at the destination airport always seem 10x longer than they actually take, whether it's for checked luggage to arrive on the conveyor or for a hailed driver to appear. Well, we drove & parked out own car, so there was no waiting. There was barely even any walking....

Sometimes parking at the airport is the most convenient AND cheapest! (Aug 2025)

Sometimes parking at the airport is the most convenient AND cheapest! (Aug 2025)

As we came down the escalator from the gate area to baggage claim we could see our car parked outside. We were in the second row!

Partly this primo location is from choosing to drive & park in this particular lot. The cost has increased over the past few years but it's still a tad cheaper than a roundtrip Uber/Lyft ride from home. (Plus there's the schedule certainty of not wondering how long it will take for the driver to come or how many times a driver cancels & has to be reassigned.) When I parked here two weeks ago it was a 5 minute walk each way to/from the terminal. The reason we're parked so close today is because we're using Hawk's disability placard.

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Well there's a change

1) Even though I saw it months ago now, I never really wrote up thoughts about Andor S2. I think it's hard to compare the two seasons because S1 has a lot of setup and a pretty wide canvas whereas S2 sticks with the characters we already knew but also jumps forward in time repeatedly, leaving various things unexplained. ( Read more... )

2) Another bundle of Death in Paradise seasons and yet another new inspector. I was glad to see it though for various reasons. ( Read more... )

3) Nothing like changing my email service to make it obvious how PR mailing lists work. I have maintained my Yahoo mail because after 25 years there was an awful lot tied to it that I will never remember to change. However very little comes to it now other than marketing emails for a variety of accounts I have. In fact, in one case my brokerage was still sending my statements to that address instead of the new one. ( Read more... )

4) Nobody on TV ever has their blinds closed or curtains that can't be seen through. This stands out a lot in mysteries because there are inevitably lurkers and peepers and passersby. But there are so many shows with houses made of windows and clear doors etc. ( Read more... )

5) Have that many people even ever had anchovies? Other than being an increasingly rare topping for pizza, I have to wonder how else people even encounter it. But this survey puts it at the top of the list for Americans' disliked foods. ( Read more... )

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lgbt,
social

Queer Kiki

Last week, our usual Twitch / Discord club stream was rescheduled due to a music festival, so cosmolinguist had an unexpected free Thursday. There's a queer meetup in Manchester every Thursday, so we took the opportunity to head along - the venue has outdoor seating and it was a lovely evening.

We had a good time. There were people there I knew from other queer events across Manchester, including trans gym, but also lots of new people. I had arranged to meet a friend from Discord, recently arrived in Manchester from the States, and they were lovely. We drank beer and cocktails, chatted away, and didn't get home until after midnight. It was a very fluffy evening, and really made me feel like part of a community.

Current Mood: busy

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Birdfeeding

Today is partly cloudy and sweltering. It rained a little last night.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/19/25 -- I put out water for the birds. I've seen a male cardinal.

.

Current Mood: busy

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Birdfeeding

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Harry Potter: A Convenient Arrangement by CatsAreCool (Rachel500) (TrekCat)

Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairings: Hermione/Harry
Characters: Hermione, Harry, Hermione's father and mother, Harry's mother, other canon characters
Rating: Teen
Length: 31,500 words
Creator Links: CatsAreCool / Rachel500 / TrekCat
Theme: Marriage of convenience, AU: Fork in the road, Working together

Summary: Lady Hermione Granger needs to get married in order to secure her inheritance and everybody agrees that the best candidate to help her is the Earl of Gryffindor, Defeater of the Dark Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter.
There's just one problem: they're not friends and Hermione may have once told him, thanks to some meddling Weasleys, that she'd never get involved with him.

Reccer's Notes: Excellent story. AU - Hermione never cared much for Harry, but when she's required to marry, he's the logical choice. I love how they discuss it like adults, reach a mutual agreement, and then find themselves gradually falling for each other. And all of this adult attraction goodness is nicely interwoven with an intriguing mystery. It's a well-told story with a thoroughly satisfying ending.

Content Notes: Canon-typical violence including attempted murder via spells, mention of old-fashioned patriarchal approaches to women including conc.ept of ownership and arranged marriages, use of love potions. Mildly anti-Dumbledore, anti-Ron and Ginny Weasley

Fanwork Links: A Convenient Arrangement by TrekCat at AO3

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Vids and Craft Workshops

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Sunflower Auction 2025

The

sunflower_auction is open for 2025. You can find my offer here! I'm offering cover art or moodboard for any fandom. Bidding is open until September 15.

The Big Idea: Michelle Knudsen

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/19/the-big-idea-michelle-knudsen/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56899

Escapism through reading fantasy is something we’re all familiar with, but is it always the best idea to ignore the rest of the world and to some extent, yourself? Author Michelle Knudsen explores this idea in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Into the Wild Magic. Come along to see how Knudsen weaves a message of morals throughout the magic.

MICHELLE KNUDSEN:

I never really know what a novel is about when I start writing it. I usually begin with a scene, a couple of characters, and the vague knowledge that something magical or horrible or supernatural will happen. Sometimes I write the scene and it goes into the metaphorical trunk. Other times, I feel that tingle of yes that makes me want to keep going. In this case, I wrote a scene between two girls in a schoolyard. I didn’t know anything about them or what their story would be, but I knew I wanted to know more.

Those two girls turned out to be Bevvy and Cat. Bevvy is lonely and bullied and longs to escape into her fantasy books. New girl Cat, we soon discover, has the ability to open portals into another world. She avoids using her power, for Reasons, but is soon forced to open one of her portals, dragging Bevvy through with her. The story has all the exciting things I love to put in my novels: magic, monsters, adventures, battles, strange creatures, complicated people, dangerous situations. It’s about the girls, their various secrets and fears, and their attempts to get back home. But underneath all of that, it’s about connection: about what it means to have a friend, and to be a friend, and how to find connection when it seems forever out of reach.

Like (I assume) many speculative fiction writers, I lived in fantasy and science fiction as a kid to escape the realities of middle school and high school life. I wasn’t Bevvy; I was lucky to have some really good friends, but I definitely also had times where I felt very alone, like there was some reason I wasn’t able to connect with others, like there was maybe something wrong with me. It was fantasy and science fiction that got me through. Not just because of the fantastic or futuristic elements (although yes, those too!), but also because of the characters who existed in those incredible worlds and the larger-than-life struggles that brought out their truest (and often best) selves.

I still believe that a lot of what I learned about being a good person came from the books I read back then. They were fun and full of adventure and magic and robots and spaceships but also they were stories of people facing danger to help or save those they loved. They contained characters who showed up for each other in extraordinary ways, who loved each other despite none of them being anything close to perfect. They brought me hope that there were lots of ways to connect with other people in the world.

I write stories for all ages, and in my picture books as well as my novels, I find myself returning to themes of friendship and unconditional love and finding a place where you belong. Sometimes that place can be a person. Or a lion. Or a group of bunnies you thought you had nothing in common with but then you all bond at the monster truck show and you realize with unexpected joy that you now have a tiny, fuzzy friend-family for life.

Part of the secret is always finding those who get you, who see you for who you are. But the other part is being able to see yourself, to accept that you are worth the love and friendship of other people (or lions, or bunnies).

Bevvy starts this story wishing for a friend: just one. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to tell you that she finds one, but more than that, she learns to be friends with herself. The magical world she encounters is way scarier in person than in books, and she has to navigate her new relationship with dodgy, difficult Cat while running for her life, facing danger, and getting swept up in a magical war. Even more frightening, she must make some hard moral choices that could mean losing the friendship she so desperately wants.

Bevvy has to figure out who she really is and attempt to arrive at the place I hope all of us can eventually get to of deciding we are worthy of love and affection. And that we deserve to surround ourselves with others who feel the same way.

Into the Wild Magic invites middle-grade readers to escape into a fantasy-world adventure, but I hope it also helps some of them think about the kind of person—and friend—they really want to be. (And also that they love the dragons and the tree magic and the kitten and the dog and the giant moths and everything else!)

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Facebook|Newsletter

Read an excerpt.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/19/the-big-idea-michelle-knudsen/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56899

Carbamorphine And More

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/carbamorphine-and-more

I wrote here years ago about how many natural product scaffolds had not been modified with single-atom-replacements (nitrogen or oxygen for carbon, for example), largely because of synthetic chemistry barriers. And a few years later I noted that there are some people out there making some of these compounds, starting out with natural products and dinking their structures around on the hypothesis that there might be more active compounds there than you would get from chance. That idea is borne out by the sorts of activities seen in the mirror-image enantiomers of active natural products as well, and it’s occurred to many people over the years.

So I was glad to see this recent paper on a single-point-change in the morphine skeleton. The authors take that ether oxygen atom in the middle of the structure and just change it to a CH2 methylene group, and they mention that “very few synthesis campaigns have been undertaken to vary the core atoms” of this molecule. This was believed to have a strong chance of changing the binding at the mu-opiod receptor, and so it did! The resulting “carbamorphine” was not horribly difficult to prepare, but neither was it easy: 15 steps from a commercial indanone starting material, and 3% overall yield (which works out to 79% average per step, which is certainly respectable). Several of these steps had to be rejiggered from the original plan, as is damn near inevitable in any new chemical synthesis of any reasonable length. It’s as good or better than the known methods of making morphine from scratch, for example, not that anyone does such a thing when the opium poppy is growing right over there. But no plant makes carbamorphine - until now, nothing that we know of has ever produced carbamorphine.

Its activity is suggestive. As very much contrasted to morphine itself, both enantiomers of this new compound are active at the mu-opioid receptor, although to be sure they seem to have different binding poses when modeled. And this activity seems to de-emphasize the respiratory depression activity of morphine (which is common to opiod analgesics in general) compared to those analgesic effects. In addition, it shows lower “conditioned place preference”, which is considered an animal model of addiction (or at least of strong liking!) Like many such behavioral assays, that one is tricky to run in such a way that other factors don’t interfere, but this result is certainly an interesting starting point.

So overall this work suggests that it may be possible to change the classic morphine scaffold in ways that preserve pain-relieving activity while lessening some of the known harmful side effects. That’s definitely worth more research, and I hope this leads to more weirdo synthetic variants. What happens if you put a chiral methyl group (or a methoxy) at that new carbon? Or a gem-dimethyl? Or what if you have a CF2 instead of a methylene there? These will all take some work to realize, but it would be really interesting to see what can be accomplished in this part of the molecule. Let’s make some.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/carbamorphine-and-more

Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius #21

Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius #21: An Entertainment in Londinium by Kaja Foglio and Phil Foglio

Spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes

( Read more... )

Current Mood: nice

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life: moontime

🌙

Moontime began around noon today. Cramps were significantly less than last time, so the ayurvedic medicine I've been taking (a combination of ashokarishta and lodhrasava) is doing its thing. Last month I was obsessing over Nushu period panties. I've been pimping the Nushu Hiphugger to anyone and everyone when the topic of periods comes up, and someone I recced it to has become as much of a fan as I am:

I replied with my original post saying I'm the one who recced it, and this was her response (she @/ed me and I redacted my full name although you'll know it if you know my debut novel/have been around my blog long enough lol)

I'm not being dramatic when I say my life has changed. I could never wear a period product for four to six hours in one go without overflowing, before. My life has changed so much that I went out with Bella (who is here briefly) for brunch. We had congee and pancakes! And after we came back to my house to spend the day coworking. I even dropped her back home, despite that taking a couple of hours. I used to never be able to go out on my period.