Miscellany (March 2021)
Mar. 8th, 2021 04:59 pmHello 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.
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.
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.
Also in pandemic-related news, I got very sick of dealing with my hair so I bought clippers and cut it all off. I'm not sure exactly how much I like it as a look, but I'm so relieved 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.
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 A Gentleman Never Keeps Score 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.
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.
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.
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.
Also in pandemic-related news, I got very sick of dealing with my hair so I bought clippers and cut it all off. I'm not sure exactly how much I like it as a look, but I'm so relieved 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.
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 A Gentleman Never Keeps Score 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.
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.
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