Check-in post for day 6!

Day 1: sylvanwitch, trobadora, luzula, badly_knitted, china_shop, the_siobhan, brithistorian, sanguinity, cornerofmadness, carenejeans, ysilme, goddess47, shadaras,

Day 2: sylvanwitch, trobadora, luzula, badly_knitted, china_shop, the_siobhan, brithistorian, sanguinity, cornerofmadness, carenejeans, ysilme, goddess47, shadaras,

Day 3: sylvanwitch, trobadora, luzula, badly_knitted, china_shop, the_siobhan, brithistorian, sanguinity, cornerofmadness, carenejeans, ysilme, goddess47,

Day 4: sylvanwitch, trobadora, luzula, badly_knitted, china_shop, sanguinity, cornerofmadness, carenejeans, ysilme, goddess47,

Day 5: sylvanwitch, trobadora, luzula, badly_knitted, china_shop, brithistorian, sanguinity, goddess47, ashelterofpages,

Day 6: china_shop,

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Title: Blueberry Harvest
Author:kat_lair
Fandom: Lord of the Rings (all media)
Characters: Frodo & Sam
Tags: Ficlet, Domestic Fluff, Comfort Food
Rating: G
Word count: 434

Summary: Happiness is shared blueberries.

Author notes: Comfort hobbits and comfort food for sheenianni for  fandomtrees. This is unbetaed so if you spot a typo/mistake, you should absolutely tell me about it.

Blueberry Harvest on AO3

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[This got quite long! The Japanese Wikipedia page goes into unbelievable detail.]

Nikaido Tokuyo was born in 1880 in a mountain village in Miyagi. She finished her schooling at fifteen and became an elementary school teacher’s aide in the same year, like many rural girls; her students enjoyed their bouncy young teacher. Deciding to get formal education credentials, she applied first to the Miyagi Normal School, which no longer had a women’s department, and then to the Fukushima Normal School, which told her she had to be a resident of Fukushima; nothing daunted, she got herself adopted (on paper) by the editor of a Fukushima newspaper, started school, and graduated in 1899. At the Normal School she found the old-fashioned gym classes boring, but did well in them as a student teacher, allowed to wear her “sports” outfit (tight sleeves and a hakama) on a daily basis.

Teaching once again, she encountered Naganuma Chieko, the older sister of one of her students; they became lifelong friends. In 1900 she took leave and entered the Women’s Higher Normal School in Tokyo, where she studied pedagogy with Yasui Tetsu as well as gym and poetry. She graduated in 1904 and went to teach at the Ishikawa Girls’ Higher School, where—having expected to teach Japanese—she found herself assigned to gym classes; resentful at first, she found they improved her own health as well as her students’, and began taking gymnastics lessons with Frances Kate Morgan, a local Canadian missionary. Eventually she progressed to coaching local elementary school teachers in gymnastics instruction. A gymnastics demonstration at which students danced the quadrille, with a live band sponsored by the prefectural governor (whose daughter was among the students) was so popular that local high school boys, unable to get tickets, climbed over the fence and caused a minor riot.

Tokuyo was transferred to Kochi in 1907; there she became famous for reading Shakespeare to her students while they rested in the shade between exercises. In 1911 she took up a position at the Women’s Higher Normal School, where she briefly worked with Inokuchi Akuri; the following year, the Ministry of Education sent her to England to study gymnastics. There, under Martina Bergman-Österberg, she was able to study systematically in comparison to the bits-and-pieces, mix-and-match approach she had followed so far (her instructors were surprised at how little she knew about standard gymnastics).

After her return to Japan in 1915, she taught dance, gymnastics, games, and sports (including cricket, the fruit of her study in England) at the Higher Normal School as well as Tokyo Women’s University, publishing several books as well. After some clashes with her colleagues, she resolved to set up her own school. In 1919 she formed the Association of Women Gymnastics Teachers; in 1922 she founded the Nikaido Gymnastics School to research women’s physical education and train women teachers; it was her stance that women should educate women. In addition to Tokuyo herself, instructors included various military doctors and athletes as well as her little brothers, who showed up to teach Japanese, while her mother Kin—once a tough farm girl who hated sewing—ran the dormitory. In 1925, stimulated by the matriculation of the Olympic runner Hitomi Kinue, Tokuyo decided that her school needed to train athletes as well as teachers. The school was approved as the Japan Women’s Vocational School of Physical Education in 1926.

In her later years Tokuyo became increasingly nationalist as Japan slid toward wartime status; she had a perpetual adoration for the military. She died in 1941 at the age of sixty. (In 1943, a newspaper printed her thoughts on the establishment of a women’s physical education exam; the text actually came from her brother, but she was considered better news regardless of the fact that she had already been dead for two years.) Among her students were the dance teacher Tokura Haru, who was instrumental in keeping the school solvent, and the politician Yamashita Harue; Tokuyo’s school remains in existence as the Japan Women’s College of Physical Education. She was said to have had the powerful voice of an opera singer, or rather of the gym teacher she was; she also had a repertoire of insults to rival Captain Haddock, including “jelly on horseback!” “rotten washcloth!” “misshapen rock candy!” and so on.

Sources
https://www.jwcpe.ac.jp/college_info/idea/founder/ (Japanese) Includes a picture of Tokuyo with her students in uniform

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

why do things always feel so difficult

Today's theme is London.

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On uhhh almost Friday :D

Reading

• I read Gakuen Heaven by You Higuri. I've really enjoying some other You Higuri stuff and I feel like this is kind of a yaoi manga classic, but I only found it ok. I'm sure I would have liked it more if I'd read it as a teen lol
• I started reading Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks by Juliet Eilperin. I haven't gotten far yet, but I'm intrigued so far. I do love sharks!
• I started listening to Jump the Shark: When Good Things Go Bad by Jon Hein. And DNF'd it at 40%. I thought this would be much more interesting than it was. Part of what made it meh was that I just have not seen much if any of most of the shows he was talking about, but also I just found his opinions questionable. Like sorry not sorry, anyone who talks about TOS Kirk being just a huge playboy is sus in my book.
• Ficwise, I've been alternating between JunDylan and VegasPete. Currently I'm reading a long BDSM club VegasPete fic called Don’t You Care About the Casualties by AnaliseGrey, which is pretty good but they're both a little well adjusted for my tastes.

Watching

• The roommate and I finished Dangerous Romance. I liked it a lot! PerthChimon were very cute, but I'm glad that mostly just made me excited to see Chimon with his new partner and not too sad about them no longer being together. Also so intrigued by how PepperPapang could have been...
• The roommate and I started watching Boys in Love. Very cute and sweet! A little too much on the good communication front, which feels a bit weird to say, but I'm loving all the new pairs we're getting to see on this.
• The roommate, best friend, and I watched the last episode of Goddess Bless You From Death. Great ending! I love that they wrapped up the spooky stuff and spent the back half of the episode letting PoohPavel be cute together lol
• The roommate, best friend, and I watched the latest episode of Cat for Cash. Still very cute. I'm enjoying the shenanigans.
• The roommate, best friend, and I watched the latest episode of Melody of Secrets. I didn't think it could get wilder and weirder, but it really did! That is both positive and negative because wow, this show sure is something.
• The roommate, best friend, and I watched the last episode of Burnout Syndrome. Things really did go to shit, and I wasn't sure they'd resolve happily, but they did! Overall good, could have used more of Thor though.
• The roommate, best friend, and I watched the latest episode of Dare You to Death. I think it's starting to hit its stride more, so I'm enjoying that. Also, some AouBoom, yay!
• The roommate, best friend, and I watched the first episode of My Romance Scammer. What a great first episode, like wow! I love that they are speedrunning the get togethers to presumably bring lots of drama very soon lol Looking forward to more.
• The roommate, best friend, and I watched the first episode of Duang with You. Also very good first episode! TeeteePor are so cute. I do feel like this episode covered most of what was in the trailer, so I'm intrigued to see what's going to happen.

Listening

• Been doing a lot of listening to my Thai music playlist while I work. I think it really does help me work faster listening to music rather than watching youtube...

Writing

• Nothing.

Learning

• The roommate and I (who met in college Japanese class!) have decided that we want to brush up our Japanese (which makes it sound like I had much skill back then... I did not lmao), so we are studying back through our textbook. I went through the first chapter, and hey, I am remembering some things!
• I did the third lesson of Pimsleur's Thai. I think I am mostly liking this style! But there are some words that are very hard for me to tell if I'm hearing/saying them correctly. Especially because I'm coming to realize that I kind of literally spell out words in my head when I hear them, so without ever seeing the words spelled, it's a bit frustrating.

Curti is way too cute!

An interesting pose haha. I love his super fluffy tail! He probably needs a bigger cat tree :P

People donate the coolest things at work, like this super cool maritime compass!

The top..

Inside! SO cool!! I definitely had to buy that haha. It's like Christmas every day at the bookstore :P

Tomorrow at work is another First Friday 50% off sale..hopefully it'll be busy, since people have been discovering us again!

( feb 2-5 )

Yesterday I learned the company's DEI group is reading When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill (amazon link). I thought: not real dragons, surely, but I clicked through to find out. There were dragons on the cover so I read the sample and determined that there are in fact dragons in the book.

I was able to borrow the book from our local library at lunch, and I finished reading it this evening. Not only are there dragons, but there's a world very much like ours that's dealing with the dragons. The story ends well and I enjoyed it.

This was the page I bookmarked, when the librarian learns the narrator has a banned book about dragons:

"You should definitely keep this [book]. They're quite rare. Chock-full of absolutely incorrect information too, as it turns out. [The author] will be the first one to say so. The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know. It requires an incredible amount of humility to be willing to be wrong nearly all the time. But we have to be willing to be wrong, and proven wrong, in order to increase knowledge overall. It is a thankless, and essential, job. Thank goodness."

I also appreciated this comment in Kelly Barnhill's acknowledgments:

"The work of storytelling requires a person to remain in a state of brutal vulnerability and punishing empathy. We feel everything. It tears us apart. We could not do this work without people in our lives to love us unceasingly, and to put us back together."

A brain, because that was the only organ sticker I had. But that was probably the bit of least concern while I was in the hospital.

This was a terrible week!

Goals for the week:

• Nothing! I was in the hospital Sunday - Thursday!
• I guess I did technically try to get all my leave stuff sorted out, though I did not succeed
• I guess I could also put "manage to get discharged and go the fuck home" on the list, haha

Tracked habits:

• Work - .5/7 - I worked a half day on Sunday before I went to the ER
• Household Maintenance - 4/7
• Physical Activity - 0/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
• Non-fiction Writing - 1/7 - over 1000 words
• Meta Work - 0/7
• Personal Writing - 4/7, though three of those were very short phone updates from the hospital
• Other Creative Things - 0/7
• Reading - 1/7 - I finished reading What Feasts at Night
• Attention to Media - 6/7 - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I watched various nonsense that I couldn't focus on while in the hospital; Friday had some stuff in the background on youtube but still didn't focus on anything; Saturday we watched a lot of news coverage after Alex Pretti was murdered.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 5/7

Total words written: 3367 words written about my time in the hospital

Hi everyone! Still here, still super busy, but I saw an item in the news today that I had to jump on and share with you: The most humorous (potential) Olympic doping scandal ever!

The event: Ski jumping.

The rule: In order to prevent ski jumpers from going full flying squirrel with their suits, they undergo a 3D body scan, which determines the dimensions (and hence the surface area) of their suit.

The allegation: It has been alleged that some ski jumpers are having their penises injected with hyaluronic acid to make them bigger and thus net them extra cloth in the crotch of their suits. It's not a lot, but given the tight margins of victory in some Olympic competitions, it could make a difference.

The ruling: WADA (the World Anti-Doping Agency) has said they have no definitive evidence that this has ever been done, and in fact they aren't even sure that this would fall under the definition of doping, but they do say they'll be looking into it.

Meanwhile, I'll be over here laughing.

Here we are, the final week of Part 1!

This week's Minimum, Medium, and Maximum moods are: Relaxed, Silly, Uncomfortable

These three moods help diversify your mood theme; if you want maximum different images with the fewest possible graphics, these are good to include.

But what do you think about the moods themselves? Relaxed and Uncomfortable are almost polar opposites here! Hopefully, once you figure out the one, the other will come easily. Silly is always kinda fun, IMO, but if you're working with a serious character, you might have a bit of trouble with it. Do you put them in clown makeup, or a funny hat? Or maybe there's a scene where their drama is being crashed by a much more unserious character that you can draw from? Let's talk about it!

I was despairing of the 73% of American Republicans who are on team GO ICE in a poll NPR just published asking whether ICE has gone too far -- and the 7% of Democrats and 29% percent of Independents who are with them.

hannah talked me down by pointing out that, as discussed in the linked conversation, 27% of Illinois voted for Alan Keyes over Barack Obama, which was patently bananas.

I remember a certain male role model in my life talking up Alan Keyes. This does not increase my faith in his understanding of politics, or indeed his inhabiting of the same planet I do.

i have a hard time moving on from things. everything feels so deep and things stick with me for a long time.

i’ve left my mark on everything i’ve ever wanted by ruining it all with deep purple bruises. i grab on too hard until my hands ache and i realize i need to let go. somehow, the aches stay with me, and i don’t forget no matter how hard i want to.

This simple diet shift cut 330 calories a day without smaller meals

People who switch to a fully unprocessed diet don’t just eat differently—they eat smarter. Research from the University of Bristol shows that when people avoid ultra-processed foods, they naturally pile their plates with fruits and vegetables, eating over 50% more food by weight while still consuming hundreds fewer calories each day. This happens because whole foods trigger a kind of built-in “nutritional intelligence,” nudging people toward nutrient-rich, lower-calorie options.

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I knew Prue Leith left GBBO, but I just learned that Nigella Lawson is replacing her for this year's show! I am intrigued! (Note: I still haven't watched the most recent series - I usually save it for my summer vacation.)

I am also considering if I want to try to bake something new this weekend, or just more orange cranberry scones, so my giant bag of cranberries in the freezer slowly gets smaller. I do have plans to try a new pasta recipe and maybe some panko-crusted pork chops, but I hadn't really thought about a baking project. I will have to think on it now.

In work news, some of the stuff I was concerned about yesterday got done, finally, so I feel so much better. I still have to write my stupid review of Assistant J though. I've been putting it off but I can't put it off any longer. Ugh. Such a stupid process.

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