Adventures du jour!
My friend Jamie’s dog Jasper died yesterday, a dog whose presence runs through the hearts of everyone who met him and got seduced into throwing just ooooone more ball. My heart hurts for her and Mike, and Rosie (their other dog) too. Jasper was the kind of dog who reminded people how to be people.
Talking about anything else feels wrong, but I’m gonna. Just – taking it a bit slower and sadder today. Please send Jamie your love if you know her.
Yesterday’s writing went pretty well; putting Goth Girl in charge of the scene was a good idea, and the bad guys’ stupidity came out pretty clearly at the end of the scene, escalated tension, etc. But eventually my brain got tired of working out the implications of what the bad guys were doing and I just flooped. I went to bed after trying to watch the same video like three times and remembering nothing.
I screwed around on Midjourney a bunch yesterday when I was stuck and tried to build sketches for another story about clones and AI, and decided it needed some fae as well. I’m definitely at the midpoint of the current story, because the Shiny New Idea has shown up. “You don’t need to finish what you’re working on…you can just work on meeeeeee…” I’m not sure whether I want to post those or not. They turned out really well, but I don’t want to invest more time/attention on Shiny New Ideas at this point. But this does seem like a good one.
Yesterday I started making the parts of the French onion ramen. I roasted the pork neck bones I was using and tossed in all the peels and ends from the onions, plus some more veggies in the fridge that were starting to turn. I forgot to blanch the bones either before or after roasting, but this turned out to be fine. I didn’t get a bunch of scum on the broth. (It’s also not very clear, but I’m not going for that, because ramen.) The onions have been slowly caramelized into a puddle of brownish, gelatinous jewels. The pork belly has been cured (rather longer than before, oops) and is in the oven. The broth is making a last run at melting down the tendons and making the broth even more sumptuous. I *am* going to have to try using the Instant Pot next time, though, because curious minds want to know: is the broth comparable? Instant Pot soup bones become satisfyingly squashable, may be the real reason I’m curious.–How hard would it be to reduce a corpse using an Instant Pot, I gotta wonder. The idea has cozy mystery written all over it.
At any rate, the house smells the kind of delicious that says I’ll probably be making this again. Roasting pork bones = amazing aftersmells.
Yoga this morning, the hip was in spasming in pain again. I did the new things and they worked well; I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface on what the warrior poses are about, though, and it’s going to take some time before I really get it. Today I worked on making sure I stayed as “released” from tension as possible while moving through the easier poses, and I couldn’t do it. Tree pose was mostly easy, but Warrior (which I mostly took for granted) was kicking my ass. I had to touch down a couple of times.
On the walk, my hips were locking up and I had a fierce headache. My feet headed me toward the big park I like, where I took a bunch of photos of trees, trying to catch mythological tree nymphs for Jamie. At one point, I was going to walk by my favorite cement house (okay, there’s only one), when my hips gave a particularly vehement cramp and I stopped and went, “fiiiiine” and took the picture, at which point they let go again. I usually try not to take pictures of the same things over and over again, but it was comforting today. There were fine beads of dew all over everything. One particularly reddish bush looked like it was covered in frost and I had to literally touch a leaf before I could believe it wasn’t.
At about the halfway point, my hips locked up again, like, “You don’t get to go back until you work this out.” So I stopped. There was a thought I didn’t want to think waiting for me. I’m not sure how to explain how that worked (and it’s too raw to talk about). I had the thought; it’s good that I had it; it was still difficult to let it pass through. After that, my hips still hurt. I took three steps, stopped, said, “My dear troublesome hips, I am fond of you. You have every right to be angry with me for not listening. The heart is having troubles today. Please help support it. I can’t do this without you.” And they unlocked and haven’t hurt again since, and are in fact feeling about as smug as a cat sitting with its front legs curled up under it, looking inscrutable. I’ll take it.