Boromir by electracution (SFW)

Nov. 29th, 2025 10:01 pm
mific: (dragon's eye)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fanart_recs
Fandom: Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Boromir
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: traditional art (pastels)
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: electracution on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: A lovely pastel drawing of Boromir. I love the use of minimal colours, and the few very effective white highlights. Aced the likeness, too.
Link: Boromir

External Hard Drive Rabbit Hole

Nov. 25th, 2025 06:53 pm
amalthia: (CareBears2)
[personal profile] amalthia
Last month I had 4 external hard drives and my husband convinced me to buy a new hard drive to replace my two oldest drives. So I did what most people do and I went to Amazon and bought a Seagate Expansion 22TB hard drive. It arrived in the retail box on my front porch, which was kind of weird, and I'm glad I was home because it required zero effort to figure out what was delivered.

My concern then became is this a safe way to transport external hard drives? So I started down the internet research rabbit hole to figure out if this was a safe way to transport these types of drives and how to verify that the hard drive wasn't physically damaged in transport.

cut for the rest of the post )
cimorene: cartoon woman with short bobbed hair wearing bubble-top retrofuturistic space suit in front of purple starscape (intrepid)
[personal profile] cimorene
Last week I spent all five days out of the house, 9 am to 3 pm, at a course designed to help job seekers. I was hoping for this to be more immediately helpful to me than it was; the last one I went to had time blocks for comparing positives and negatives to decide what kind of places to apply, compiling a list, and creating separate cover letters and CVs, all with counselor feedback; but it lasted longer. These are all things that I know how to do but which are much easier to do with external structure because of executive dysfunction! Read more... ) I did not learn much last week, though I did get a few tips about modifying my CV. I found the week surprisingly nice, though - way too draining (I didn't have the energy to do anything else all week), but it was pretty comfortable. I liked the other people and would have been happy to keep seeing them.

After one week where I was too exhausted to do anything, after having been in the habit of near-daily sweeping and vacuuming of the kitchen/dining Sipuli enclosure where I spend the day and Wax sleeps at night, there were a staggering amount of dust bunnies today. I spent a long time sweeping and vacuumed a bit (until the vacuum needed charging). Then I took the rinsed recycling from the draining cupboard where it drips dry, because it was starting to leap out whenever you opened the cabinet door, and I also washed the counters and the sink. That was extremely fun and exciting for Sipuli. She got the zoomies and zipped around sniffing things and warbling at me and playing for a couple of hours. (She is back inside the duvet tent against the radiator now, though.)

A week ago we also finally gave up on the triplets telling us what kind of sweaters they would like (these are their 18th birthday present from last summer: Sweater of Your Choice. I tried spamming them with pictures and suggestions for months. Ciara picked a mariniere and a color combination, but the others didn't even make a peep). We also could not get a response on 'When can we come to your house and measure your teenagers' or 'Could you measure the length and width of a sweatshirt from each of them' from Wax's brother, so we finally just asked for generic size class (M for all three) and then decided to guess. Wax and I picked the patterns and the colors for the two remaining sweaters. She is working on Ciara's sweater and I have started one of the others, and already managed to knit too many hours in a row (in spite of not even having made it down from the neck opening to the underarms yet) so my right shoulder was feeling stiff. So now I'm trying to knit for shorter blocks of time and do other things in between, to avoid hurting myself so badly that I have to stop knitting entirely again.

Due to the aforementioned exhaustion we've only gone out for me to practice driving our car once so far, and I was disconcerted that it was pitch black and I couldn't see the inside of the car. Everything's different, including the gear shift! Driving in daylight in this season will require a little more work though, since the sun is up from about 8-16:30. Wax is working too late this week.
mific: (dragon's eye)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fanart_recs
Fandom: Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Legolas, and Gimli
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: traditional art, pencil drawing
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: Turner Mohan on DA
Why this piece is awesome: This is a companion to my last, more upbeat post of the friends sailing to the Grey Havens, done in a quirky, somewhat medieval style. In contrast, this is beautiful traditional art, and heartrending. Gimli is very old, and even Legolas shows his years as he helps Gimli aboard. An extraordinary piece.
Link: An attributed repost on tumblr: Legolas and Gimli Depart. Read the note on the tumblr post - it's wonderful. And here on the artist's DA.

amalthia: (Thumper GRRRR)
[personal profile] amalthia
Here is the lowdown, this year for Thanksgiving I traveled from Alaska to Texas. That part went well.

The part that annoys me is my mom just told me one of my aunts and uncles plan to attend Thanksgiving and they plan to watch football in the living room. My mom's house has an open floor plan so the dinning area, the kitchen, and living room are all in the same space. They are planning on at least 12 people attending this party.

The biggest problem beyond my own irritation at that level of rudeness is that I can't hear well when there are too many competing noises and I've noticed over the years I don't do well with crowds or too much noise.

I'm like why the fuck are you even visiting people if you plan to watch TV? They could stay home and do that, or show up for an hour two, then leave to go home and watch TV. There is no visiting and catching up if someone's attention is focused on a TV show. Also why does "football" get a pass on family holidays in terms of what is played on TV but not other shows?

I was sort of looking forward to catching up with aunts, uncles, and cousins, but not sure that's going to happen. It's hard enough talking when there are a lot of people around and there is just conversation happening, but add in TV noise and it's just unbearable. I'll probably eat and bail. Too much noise stresses me out. I already told mom when I get overwhelmed I'm leaving the party to go hide out away from the noise.

Which is what I did a lot of when I was growing up, parties with large groups of people make me miserable. Small gatherings are fine but I think after 10 people it's just too much.
cimorene: The words "EGG AND SPOON RACE" in bright turquoise hand-drawn letters (egg and spoon race)
[personal profile] cimorene
In Non-functional public health appointments, part 2, we heard that when I called on the one day (out of 2 weeks) when you can book appointments with an MD, the appointments were all filled well before the end of the day and they told me to call back in 2 weeks as early as possible.

So that was Monday, and I called at 8:05 (5 minutes after opening) and put my message in their automatic callback queue. I didn't get called until after 11:00 and I could hear the receptionist's voice trembling with stress as she tried to gently and politely apologize because "It was so good that you called at eight, but unfortunately all the doctor slots were already full again!"

She asked again how soon I will run out of meds, and since I will not run out in the next two weeks, she told me to try calling back at eight am again on December first.

!!!!!!!

"Really really sorry, it's so unfortunate."

"Well, it's not your fault, I know," I said.

"Even so... yeah."

So. Two weeks. If I call at 8 on the dot, maybe I'll be early enough in the queue... or maybe I can't get an appointment until I'm about to run out and they therefore have to promote me to the 'urgent' (or semi-urgent) queue.

Wow... I'm so mad about this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Remember that this was actually my third call because the first time I didn't call on the Appointment Day at all and had to be redirected (but unfortunately, even though she said they might fill up, I didn't realize it was like, CALL WITHIN FIVE MINUTES).

The sun was not up at 7:00

Nov. 17th, 2025 08:31 am
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (Default)
[personal profile] cimorene
I'm up early to call for a doctor's appointment at eight before a "job hunting course" at nine. The latter is something I've seen twice before and am expecting a fair amount of wasted time this week, but they do provide an individual coach to give advice and talk through options and that should help me, not only because of my executive dysfunction, but also because I'm genuinely torn about what to do next.

I don't know how much of the day I have to wait for a call back from the health center, though, so I will have to leave to take the call at some point.
mific: (dragon's eye)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] fanart_recs
Fandom: Tolkien: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Legolas and Gimli
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: traditional art - aquarelle watercolours
Artist on DW/LJ: n/a
Artist Website/Gallery: cosynopsis on tumblr
Why this piece is awesome: I'll be reccing two very different versions of this scene, of Legolas and Gimli on their last trip together, sailing to the Grey Havens - Gimli was the only dwarf to go to the Grey Havens. This version is bright and upbeat, and I like the quirky style and details. Also I'm pretty sure Gimli has spectacles here, which is cute.
Link: last entry of the red book