an IRL-oriented life
I'm pretty chronically online by most standards, but I also feel more oriented than ever to my physical world. I also like seeing what other people's real lives are like, which I think is why Jenn's blog is so wonderful to me. I'm nosy and I want to know what the flavor of other peoples' lives are like.
Here's what I've been up to, some of which has been on Mastodon or 32-bit Cafe. A blog post feels like a sturdier container than posts floating elsewhere, and maybe one day it will interest me if not anyone else.
I moved to Baltimore recently, which was on purpose because I love this city, but I hadn't been to the aquarium since 2010 or so. My spouse and I celebrated our second anniversary (I originally wrote birthday! which also feels correct) with Ekiben garlic chili tofu noodles and fish. Admission is half-off on Friday evenings, or $25, and definitely worth the crowds. I saw a woman my age, visiting or recently moved here from another country, lose her mind in the most wonderful way over horseshoe crabs. She couldn't believe they were real, and was the most excited touch tank participant among a sea of toddlers. It made the interpreter's night, and mine too - I've been throwing back at sea from the beach since I could walk and kind of took them for granted.
I've been wanting medaka, or Japanese ricefish, since I went down this youtube rabbithole. I saw someone selling them on r/aquaswap and I met her in a gas station parking lot. I asked her if she bred them herself and she was really proud. Again, people being excited for things is my fuel these days.
Some are too small to put with the goldfish, so this is a very temporary solution until I get a bigger bowl to keep them in, maybe this weekend. They are one of the only fish who do well in bowls, and then I can grow plants with them without the goldfish eating them. The bowl is tucked into the goldfish pond for winter and in the spring a bigger bowl will be outside.
They are hard to photograph, but orange, white, and shimmery type called shukogyoku. I will be documenting this set-up's progress on this tank journal post on the ThePlantedTank.net's forum - if you're new to medaka, check out another user's response to my post for the type of planted medaka bowl I hope to have by spring.
I painted my studio! This color (I picked the middle swatch) looks heinous on my older iPhone camera but really lovely in real life, I promise! I am downgrading my letterpress business to a project, as I drop art sales from a necessary part of my financial picture. It's freeing but weird during what would have been hectic ordering/packing/art show season. And then Florida - I went to my old home for the holiday for the first time since I moved here in April. We drove there and back, because I truly hate airlines and we couldn't buy plane tickets with the shut downs and flight cuts at our home airport.
Our family time was small and sweet. Morale is understandably low for a college town taken over by anti-intellectual politicians. But people are carrying on - a friend bought a big wooden Victorian surrounded by palms and pines. An old coworker invited me way down her sandy dirt road to a late-night old time music circle. We sang and played and slapped our knees by a fire and felt better. I mostly knee-slapped. My coworker picked up mandolin at forty, and she's really, really good now.
I rescued my own huge staghorn ferns that I couldn't bring on the first trip up. It's in rough shape - severely dehydrated and recovering from frost - but unfortunately I have left it in this shape before and I know it will recover. But first, she's my drunk girl crying in the shower (I guess this is how I will water her in the winter up here!?)
I'll park her in my studio window - my green studio! - and eventually she will look like this. And when she goes outside I will feed her a banana peel once a month - all Floridians swear by this with our big hanging outdoor staghorns.
Links:
- My Year of Raves - a really beautiful tribute to queer identity, dance, hope, and midlife
- See a beautiful in-depth tour of an elaborate Dutch dollhouse narrated, inexplicably, by Helena Bonham Carter (via DivergentRays!)
Thanks for reading! fern_enjoyer at tutamail.com or my site's cbox are good ways to get in touch (or you can comment on this post on Mastodon)