beetiger

There's a big meme going around -- a whole bunch of you have done it -- that starts out with "Ten things I want to say to ten people", which people are doing anonymously. And I hate it.

I don't hate that you're doing it, and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to do, but it activates the part of my brain that just needs to know more, that just wants to pick at things until I get more details, wants to know if you're talking to me, talking to my friends and loved ones, wants to follow those trails in my own brain until the weirdnesses of my brain chemistry and my internal landscape turn them into things they almost certainly aren't. Or I'm sure you aren't talking to me, even though I thought I might have been bigger in your mental landscape, and I feel invisible and lost.

It's one of the parts of myself of which I'm probably the least proud. But I think I'm getting better at recognizing how much of it is internal and not projecting it too much on anyone else.

I'll ask you this -- if you are in fact talking to/about me, point me there. We don't have to talk more about whatever it is, and I promise not to push. And if you are talking to/about someone I care about, and you think I'd like to know, and it feels safe to you, you can tell me that too.

OK, as of December 31, I am officially closing the Little Pagans clothing store. I will probably put some of the more popular designs on Zazzle or something at some point, but I'm done printing shirts myself.

Therefore:

All currently printed shirts selling grab-bag style, $6 each. Tell me the size you need, I'll give you something I have. $6 shipping for any amount. Paypal to sales@littlepagans.com with your requests.

Send your friends.

Sizes: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 2T, 4T, 6T, Youth 6-8, 8-10, 10-12, Adult S, M, L, XL, 2 XL.

Also, if anyone screenprints and wants blank American Apparel shirts at wholesale cost, drop me a note.

My son projectmothra has agreed to do NaBloPoMo in November, when some of you guys are writing novels. He's going to do an LJ post every day in November, with an incentive of a trip to Ninja Nww York if he succeeds in doing it.

If you don't have him friended, and your LJ is generally kidsafe, go on over and friend him, and give him feedback on the posts. He did this a few years ago, and I have faith it will be much more interesting this time if he puts his mind to it.

Maybe I'll join him and post here every day in November myself. I've mostly been keeping online interactions to chat and short attention span Twitter updates, but it would probably be good for me to put more thoughts to keyboard again.

I have this little black dress. I mean, I have actually a whole bunch of black dresses, but there's one I wear constantly. It's made of (I think) jersey cotton, it's got a scoop neck and 3/4 inch sleeves. It doesn't wrinkle and it pretty much stuffs in my purse if I need to change for a party. It goes with corsets. It goes with pretty much every piece of jewelry I own. It goes hiking. It goes to fetish clubs. It's wearable when I didn't really want to get out of bed and dressed. I can sleep in it if I have to.

I wear this dress about once a week, and have for...years, I suppose. I don't remember when I got it, but it was probably in college sometime. With striped socks, it's pretty much an identity piece. I've said I would wear it until it falls apart.

Well, it's falling apart, or at least getting holes in inconvenient places to fix. And I'm kinda devastated, considering it's a piece of cloth. I haven't found another one like it.

Is there someone here that sews, can make patterns, and would be willing to try to duplicate this very simple dress? I can send you pictures. I can even send you the dress if you promise to send it back intact. I'm happy to pay a reasonable rate for the amount of work it would take to get it right, even if that's more than a dress like this would probably cost.

Feel free to pass this on to anyone you know that you think might help. This would be an easy project for the right person, I think.

My bees seem to be mostly avoiding doing much with the honey supers, and the last few days way too many of them were hanging about outside the hive for my liking, so I went in today and replaced a frame of capped honey from the edge of the deep box with a frame of drawn but empty comb in the center. Hopefully if my queen was getting honeybound and running out of places to lay, this will help. There are a few frames with worker brood on them, so I'm not overly worried, but still. Anyway, that means I ended up with a frame of capped honey (on plastic foundation) in the kitchen, and now I have honey. Now mind you, I don't really have any equipment for collecting honey, so I've got a frame dripping over a tupperware box and a bunch of mashed up comb dripping through a strainer.

It's very pale and sweet and a little floral -- clover, maybe, and I've got about 4 cups of it, very barely strained. I'll throw the emptied sticky frame in the yard tomorrow --rumor has it the bees should scavenge that up.

And I seem to have gotten at least a bit of my bee Zen going, and/or have finally found a successful style of coverage for bee raiding. No stings.

I'm very happy. And sugar crashing. I hope the bees go work the supers soon, but if this is all the honey I get this summer, I'll still be happy.

My friends read_alicia, asoundguy, and a bunch of other cool folks have just launched a new podcast audio drama, The Mask of Inanna. I've been involved with editing the scripts since the early draft stages, and they are wonderful. I've just gone and listened to the first episode, and it's better than it sounded in my head.

Anyone who is interested in old-time radio drama, complex interpersonal drama, mystery, or just plain old Stuff That's Good, do go check this out.

WEBSITE: http://www.themaskofinanna.com/
DIRECT DOWNLOAD: http://themaskofinanna.com/download/PMRP-MaskOfInanna-Ep1.01_Pilot.mp3
TWITTER FEED: twitter.com/maskofinanna
PODCAST FEED: http://www.themaskofinanna.com/?feed=podcast

bard_bloom and projectmothra and lediva and I were at Morphicon this weekend, with the Blooms being GoH. I haven't been at a regional con in a loooong time, and even though I really don't know most of the local community, they were really quite lovely to us and in general ran a fun little con.

They're incredibly generous to their top sponsors (hypertrophes), feeding them dinners and ice cream and putting them up on banners and offering them piles of stuff from the GoH (they gave each of them two of our books and a tarot reading from us). And we discovered an alternate use for the Crowdsource Tarot -- adding "in bed" to the end of the divination meanings, like one does with fortune cookies.

We sold a modest amount of books and bee jewelry and Tarot decks, but that was fine with me since I didn't really feel like I was there as a vendor, so it was more just a way to be guesting at people.

projectmothra had a great time, being on relatively low supervision. He found lots of people to play Flux and other games with him, sold homemade lipbalm to make money which he then immediately spent in the dealer's room or artists alley (where everyone gave him discounts), and generally got doted on all weekend.

The smallness of the con meant some stuff was sparsely attended. I tried to do a freak parenting session, but failed, since there were only two families there with young kids, us and one other who decided to watch cartoons in that slot. The Iron Author session was fun but only got two contestants.

lediva and I did a polyamory panel which was well attended, and went off well despite the usual mix of people's level of knowledge, interests, and concerns. It was the one part of the con where I distinctly felt a little bit older than the attendees -- lots of people still learning how to negotiate their relationships and their sexuality in ways in which I feel pretty settled about.

The staff also let me strip and get in the jacuzzi in the Presidential Suite they were using for panels once it was afterhours. They get piles of brownie points just for that.

Many thanks to Jewel, Savant, Foxx, SonicBlu, and all of the folks who took such good care of us!

Began working Census this week, which will be turning my schedule a bit higgeldy-piggeldy but will get me out of the house and walking in this beautiful weather, give me an excuse to learn a little bit more about the layout of my neighborhood, and bring in a bit of extra cash which really never hurts. Between that, working on my mother's estate, and singing a concert this weekend, open time's been pretty scarce.

Bees appear to be flying, though not building as ambitiously as I might have hoped at this point. Still optimistic about getting honey this year.

I've also been crazy tired all this week. I'm not sure if it's because I've gotten unused to working all day or if something else is going on, but I'm finding myself pretty exhausted by early evening every day.

Not as prepped for Morphicon as I'd like, but getting pretty psyched about it anyway. If you live anywhere near Ohio, I hope you'll consider coming and seeing us, as we don't get that direction all that often.

Thank you all for being around. It's nice to have you to check in with.

Most of you probably know that my husband, bard_bloom has been writing a slice of life diary of a World Tree Zi Ri since 2002, originally housed at sythyry and now at zir own WordPress blog.

For those who have been reading online, but like to have books they can hold in their hands, or for anyone who wants to read the piece as a novel (i.e. forwards, without comments or OOC stuff, and with typos corrected and hanging plotlines cleaned up), there is now a print version available, with beautiful cover art by djinni. 626 pages of DOOM! for only $25. That's only four cents for a whole page of doom!

In any case, if you are interested, you can get yourself a copy at this link.

The beehive is not really in the state I wanted it, but it is good enough that if I got a call tomorrow saying my bees were here, I'd have somewhere to put them. So that call could come anytime now, please :) Also, I do have enough materials to get a first level started on a second hive, so if a swarm wants to move in to this one before I get that call, that would be just fine with me, Universe.

Really in a one step at a time, one foot in front of the other place right now. Monday, I attended a medically required C-section, over 8 weeks early, for a client I didn't expect to serve until June. It wouldn't have been my top choice to be back in the hospital quite so soon after dealing with my mother in the ICU, but life is what it is, and the baby is doing well in the NICU.

This week is full of things to do -- taxes, book reviews, dealing with family and the beginnings of estate stuff -- and low on mental and emotional energy. But I'm doing what I can, and trying to be gentle on myself.