tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-04:284344Ruth Sadelle AldersonDisagreeing with fandom since 1999.Ruth Sadelle Alderson2021-03-09T01:01:36Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-04:284344:543623Miscellany (March 2021)2021-03-09T01:01:36Z2021-03-09T01:01:36Zpublic0Hello Dreamwidth friends. I was very excited to write that post about Bridgerton last week because it was the first thing I'd written in a very long time, so I thought I would write a miscellaneous recent things entry as a way to practice writing something, anything.<br /><br />I am now the only unvaccinated member of my family! I am very much looking forward to it being my turn for the vaccine. I would like to hug my family again. (Or anyone really; the closest I've come to touching another human being in the last year was getting a flu shot.) My family has been having Zoom lunches every other week for most of the last year, and we're all ready to transition to close, in-person meals. We did have one distanced outside lunch, but outside is hard here - most of the year it's too hot, too cold, or so full of allergens I can't breathe. On the upside to this whole pandemic thing, I had the easiest allergy year I can remember last spring and it was really nice to stay inside in the air conditioning all day all summer.<br /><br />I have baked a lot over the last year. I have always said I would bake even more than I did if I had someone else to wash the dishes for me, and it turns out that not feeling like I have to give up some of a limited amount of free time to wash dishes is a second best. I've decided that at this point, I am very much an experienced baker, and I can trust my instincts about recipes. I've had the experience more than once now where I've read a recipe, followed it exactly despite my doubts about the proportions, and then found that the final result would have been better if I'd followed my instinct about how to adjust it. I did, however, realize that I needed to start taking notes about recipe variations because I won't actually remember what I did from time to time. They also need to be useful notes; there's a bread recipe that has water amounts in two different places that might be different things I tried or amounts that need to be combined, and my cobbler recipe has the word "less!" with an arrow pointing at the sugar but no notes about how much less.<br /><br />Also in pandemic-related news, I got very sick of dealing with my hair so I bought clippers and <a href="https://twitter.com/rsadelle/status/1364350575228293122">cut it all off</a>. I'm not sure exactly how much I like it as a look, but I'm <em>so relieved</em> to have it off my neck and out of my way. I keep joking that it's basically lesbian haircut #17, and I was highly amused that while there were some straight people who left positive comments on my Facebook post about it, most of the early comments were from other queer people. I also had a very interesting sense when I first did it of feeling very intensely queer (in a "not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you" sense), probably because this is the most visibly queer my look has ever been.<br /><br />Speaking of queer people, I have now read all of Cat Sebastian's Regency romances. The Regency Impostors series was fine. I loved The Turners and the Seducing the Sedgwicks series! I actually want to go back and reread <i>A Gentleman Never Keeps Score</i> even though I read it within the last month. I got all of them through libraries (if your library system has access to books on Hoopla, they have a lot of hers), so if you like Regency romances about queer people, I recommend her stuff. I will also take any and all recommendations for other good similarly historical romance novels about queer people.<br /><br />In terms of fic reading, I am very much between fandoms, and so I've spent a significant portion of the pandemic reading MCU fic, because it's one of those fandoms where I know just enough for it to make sense but don't care about that much. Somehow the pairing I have decided is the one I want to read a lot of fic about is Clint/Bucky. Bonus points to anything with (a) falling in love/competing/flirting while shooting, (b) therapy for one or both of them, and/or (c) d/s-y dynamics. If you have favorite Clint/Bucky or other MCU fic, I would take recs.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=rsadelle&ditemid=543623" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments