Sidra

I have often referred to the Middle of Nowhere, Norfolk. There's a lot of it, hereabouts.

I now know exactly where that is. I drove along Nowhere Lane today. There is a property there called The Middle of Nowhere. https://www.staythemiddleofnowhere.co.uk/about You can stay there, if you like.

*

I went to Nowhere Lane in order to visit the Bug Parc, and to meet up with nopseud and her family. We had a very agreeable visit, chat interspersed with bugs large and small. The big, leaf-sized katydids were particularly impressive, there were giant (gigantic!) snails, a butterfly house that felt like walking into soup, which probably explains why one of the butterflies spent quite a while trying to drink from me, there were millipedes, beetles, all sorts. Cockroaches do look quite a lot like Priuses. And there were two wonderfully twined ropes with ants marching along them in both directions—carrying large pieces of leaf to the giant pot, and coming back to the plants for more leaf pieces.

*

Very enjoyable evening at chorus, practising Christmas songs while our regular MD is away.

Hostess Donettes claim to be "America's #1 Mini-donut" but I don't remember there being a nationwide referendum. Just another example of the rampant corruption going on right before our very eyes.

You know, I have composed so many DW posts in my head, and totally failed to follow through by posting here. I actually fell off DW for a few hours as I didn't manage to renew in a timely fashion. But I am still here!

Things are very busy at the moment. Beast and I spent a week travelling south and west, first to see my sister in Devon, then to Convention in Bournemouth, then to Oxford to see my bro, then home. My cat was greatly relieved to have the Imposter Humans gone—our housesitters. Ungrateful cat.

The visit south comes with a Public Service Warning: if you drive an electric car, it may have 'acoustic foam' in the tyres, and this foam may come loose and make you feel as though the car will shake itself into oblivion, or the axles will come off, or something. We had a very long day, is all I will say about it!

But Devon is very pretty, sister's house is lovely, and we visited a honey farm which was a lovely way to spend a reasonably sunny afternoon.

Convention had its moments, including my chorus winning the award for best in division—which we had sorta anticipated, being as how we were the only ones in the division. But our score was disappointing, as it went down quite a lot. I was honestly expecting an improvement. Oh well.

I was trying to think how long it is since I've seen my brother, and it might well be ten years, absurd as he really doesn't live that far away, but somehow... Well, he is in fine form, and even cooked lunch for us on Monday.

And now I'm back and looking to the next thing, which is my BIL's birthday event (this coming weekend), which will involve me cooking a mighty meal for about a dozen people, and us also doing a walking tour of the city. I hope the rain lets up for that, though I am glad it has been raining a bit. There are beans and peas growing in the garden. And kale! And cauliflowers! And courgettes! So far, anyway. I'm sure they were glad of the sprinkle.

You guyssssss I felt a profound sense of satisfaction for completing the Three Weeks challenge and very much enjoyed my long weekend after an exasperating work week only to discover I had one post left! Oh noes!

Fortunately, runpunkrun and mific gave me something to post about! They did an awesome mcshep collab while I was away and what a treat! So awesome to have terrific art and podfic and story as one. Like the fandom days of old *sobs in old-timey*

It was a marvelous distraction from my usual hobby of staring in blank horror at the news. Speaking of which...

I beg everyone to please contact your senators about the Big PoS Bill! For too many reasons, but also because I just found out it includes sneaky provisions that completely undermine the judiciary, including *retroactively* making previous rulings and court orders unenforceable! Such as, oh, orders to return US Citizens and illegally deported immigrants from overseas gulags. The administration is angry at the lower courts for ruling against them, so they are trying to use Congress to render the judiciary impotent. See Section 70302 of One Big Beautiful Bill Act 119th Congress (2025-2026). Not to mention, of course, the bill raises taxes on the poorest, adds trillions to the deficit, drops the tax on gun silencers (what?), chops SNAP, medicare, and medicaid, and lines the pockets of the already wealthy with more and more tax cuts. I want to puke.

If you live the US, please CONTACT YOUR SENATORS and tell them you are so very against this Big Ugly Bill for more reasons than can be counted. Tell them to kill it or they will smell your vengeance come midterms.

Thanks, my friends.

Today I had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast, my first in a long time, and I realized I slice up my banana the exact same way my pops did: diagonal cuts so the slices fall off the knife instead of sticking to it. I don't remember deciding to adopt his method. But there you go.

How do you slice your banana? Are there other tricks you picked up from parents or friends unconsciously?

So what is absolutely stunning to me but shouldn't be, is we have regressed! Regressed but it's packaged as progress, and I went along with it every step of the way like a little lamb. But no more! I'm tired of this commercialism crappy, and when I say this is absolutely the last iteration of laundry detergent I will buy, I mean it!

It's not my fault, I swear, I went from mom buying the detergent at home, to college, where I followed in her footsteps. She swore by Tide, possibly on the advice of one of her new American friends.

First this Tide:


A white powder with cleaning surfactants, sodium carbonate and sodium silicate to soften the water, also possibly bleach and enzymes to break down food stains, and suds reducers and brighteners and fragrances and such.

Then came the innovative! Liquid in jugs! Wow! Just an excuse to charge more, I think. What was wrong with the powder? Oh, because then you could more successfully rub it in your stains beforehand I guess. I dunno. But jugs meant no more cardboard, just plastic, plastic, plastic:



Then, of course, they came out with pods of the liquid. But the pods were even more ridiculous, because some of them came in plastic jugs as well! And! And, it turns out the pods don't melt entirely: they introduce microplastics into the water system as well as the plastic containers getting tossed in the landfill. Oh, joy. (I skipped the pod step. Maybe because some people were reported to have eaten them. I feared becoming a tide zombie.)

So people tried to solve the pod problem by coming up with sheets! And we were so eager to embrace strips/sheets because they came in cardboard sleeves (I am an eco-warrior!) and weighed absolutely nothing on the walk down to the laundry room, we didn't discover until later that the strips themselves were bonded together with microplastics. (*They often contain polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), a plastic-based polymer, which some manufacturers claim is biodegradable, but its biodegradability is questionable and not well-studied.) Oh, woe!

So, Self, does anyone make, I dunno, powdered detergent that comes in a box? Why, yes! Wouldn't you know. So many different ones. I found one called Meliora that's low-sudsing and unscented and literally takes a tablespoon to clean a giant double-load of clothes and my clothes smell *fantastic*. One tablespoon. Jeez, I mean. It comes in a cardboard tin that you can refill from a cardboard box and I will never, ever step away from powdered plain old surfactant again.

My long laundry journey is done.

(And wouldn't you know it, and this just kills me, but Tide still makes):

omg you guys. you guys.

so this is runpunkrun 's fault, because she posted about Staged, so naturally I wanted to watch it. I've been wanting to for a while but imdb wasn't helpful bec they said for the longest that I had to subscribe to britbox which, I wish.

Anyway, Punk recommended https://Kanopy.com, a service where you use your local library card to log in and stream stuff. I did not know this was an option. What a wonder.

Of course, when I tried, they gave me guff about my library card, which I haven't used in ages because I can no longer read paper. So I called my library. And in times when corporate America is experiencing record high profits and is STILL scaling back on weekend/off-hours support, the San Francisco Public Library picked up at 2pm on a Sunday to answer my call.

And of course the librarian was the absolute sweetest and fixed a number of problems with my account and wished me luck with Kanopy and told me to call back if I ran into any problems.

Librarians, I swear: proof that humanity is of the good.

Anyway, I'm sure all of you knew all of this already, but it certainly bears repeating. And I've watched exactly 2 minutes of David Tennant and Michael Sheen being gloriously ridiculous together on screen and my Sunday is SET.

Thank you, SFPL and Punk!

💖💖💖


"I could be Welsh."

*laughs* "We'd never have you."

"You'd love to have me. You'd beg to have me."

You guys you guyyyyyyys look what popped up on my notifs! the wait is finally over!!!



I'm 15 minutes in and I'm just....

( tiny spoiler )

Just seen first two episodes of Murderbot. It is not a perfect representation of the books in my head, but it seems reasonable within the constraints of a TV adaptation. I love it and will now go and re-read the book.

princessofgeeks has a more detailed post with spoilers.