Benton Fraser: secret werewolf?

Discuss.

oh look, the list is marginally shorter.

outside
- get seeds in (morning glories (on the old fence), second batch of sunflowers, bells of ireland)
- weed raised bed
- redd up & mulch back garden beds
- put hosta between compost bin & fence
- build up earth by fence
- weed and mulch front beds and around new mailbox
- buy stone for paths (60 linear feet of path, maybe 45 linear feet of stone)
- buy new trash can

inside
- get correct paint for stairs
- paint stairs
- put up shelf & new shower head in basement bathroom
- rearrange dining room furniture
- put old furniture upstairs
- scrape bedroom ceiling

So today I'm at the midwife's office (I go to the Midwife Center for my womancare), and she's trying to feel my liver and kidney. She frowns and says "Relax your stomach muscles." "I am," I say. She looks at me and says "OK, *tense* your stomach muscles." I do, and she says "Jesus Christ, you're strong."

...yeah.

I get the sense that the outpouring[1] of WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING in Laura Hale/partly_bouncy's direction is coming as a surprise to some people.[2]

Part of that is the fault of a lot of the people who have had history with her, but for lots of good reasons -- most of them involving not wanting to attract LH's negative attention -- kept fairly quiet.

This means she was able to do things and hurt people who otherwise might have been warned.

And yes, I'm to blame as much for that as anyone else who knew what she was.

So what is she?

She is one of only two or three malicious, worthless sacks of skin that I've met in fandom. Given how many people I've met over the past n years, we're not doing too badly, percentagewise.

Given how much pain those two or three skinsacks have caused, though, I'm sometimes surprised so many of the good folks stay around. And part of the reason they do stay around, are able to stay around, have the heart to stay around, is that eventually, the skinsacks cross too many lines, and everyone else closes ranks but good.

We should do it more quickly when it's necessary, but I know it's hard. We don't want to believe that there are skinsacks among us; many of us want to believe that we're all coming from a place of love, even when we fall down and screw up and hurt people.

The skinsacks want to hurt you. And me. And everyone else.

Kick them to the door. Hard. Tell people about them. Document what they do. Don't let them participate in your community, your mailing list, your journal. Yes -- even if they haven't done anything problematic in your space yet. Because they will. They will use fear and intimidation[3]; they will use sockpuppets; they will use lies. They will push good people until the good people are the ones who step over the lines, in rage and frustration, and then play innocent.

The two most worthless skinsacks I have ever encountered, personally, in fandom -- just so you all know -- are these two:

1. Laura Hale/partly_bouncy (and other names)
2. Honisoit/EvilSmurf/Tritorella (and other names. Puppeteer, and a fairly clever one[4]).

There are others. Some, like Victoria Bitter, are well documented. Others are not. Document them. Tell people. These bloodsucking parasites rely on the good people keeping their mouths shut.

Make your blood poison to them.

eta: oh, wtf.

eta2: Yes, I was incorrect (in the comments) about Tritorella being the person who made threats to mamadeb on CritEdge. However, I believe her to be a puppeteer and flamemonger and general poison within fannish communities. I also *believe*, though I am willing to be corrected, that under the name Honi Soit/Evilsmurf she outed a DS slash writer to her employer; I was not very active in DS fandom at the time that went down.</s> As I also mentioned, she asked me not to contact her, under threat of legal action. She has commented on this post, but I will not respond to her here or elsewhere (when I know who she is).

eta3: Revision of above statement: Honi Soit/Evilsmurf/Tritorella did out a DS fan to her employer. My uncertainty was not whether this incident happened, but whether I correctly recalled who had done it. I did.

---

1. My .02, Sometimes a brain can come in quite handy, about the outing, Calling out Michaela Ecks/Laura Hale/Purplepopple/Partly_Bouncy, In the department of "It's about damn time", Should have known..., Laura Hale: Sole proprietor of a unique marketing opportunity.
2. I will note that none of the people who appear to be surprised seem to have a history with FCA-L, which I think was my first exposure to LH and her lunacy. (Back in the day, FCA-L was a list with some fine quality crazy, some of it even provided by yours truly.)
3. "Fear is the original sin," wrote John Foster. "Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading." -- L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
4. My "favorite" bit of interaction with this one was when she told me not to contact her again or she'd have the law on me for harassment. I haven't contacted her since, at least, not knowingly -- since she's a puppeteer, I might have done so unawares. She, on the other hand, has contacted me more than once -- to no response, I might add. Though I did tell my employers about her in case she decided to out me (something she has a history of doing). I didn't have to tell them about my fannish hobbies; they already knew.

Congratulations to tmaher and urso!

Much love & kisses to you.

I had my physical the other day, and mentioned my "finger migraines" to the doctor.

Result: diagnosis of Raynaud's. The usual treatments are "keep affected areas warm" and calcium channel blockers, but CCBs are a poor choice for me since I have low blood pressure. (Unless, you know, I really WANT to faint all the time.)

So my plan is to keep my hands warm. I have a pair of handwarmers at my desk at work, but I think I need to knit several pairs of fingerless gloves to stash in various handbags, around my house, in the car, etc.

Since it turns out that I dislike knitting socks, I think I know what I'll be using all my sock yarn for....

I wanted to finish either the cardigan or the lightweight summer sweater I'm working on before taking back up my Clapotis, but I think at least one pair of gloves is going to need to take precedence over everything else.

eta: O hai! I am clever. I had a too-pretty-to-frog, too-hateful-to-finish sock around; before finishing the first sock of Hedera, I'd decided that I hated sock knitting. But! So pretty! I didn't want to frog!

Instead, I ripped it back to before the heel and am reknitting the top section as a pair of fingertip-less gloves. I like knitting handwarmers, and I need handwarmers, so I think the second one of the pair will come along swimmingly.

For the thumb, I am using an afterthought thumb, and for the fingers I am using the Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns as a guide.

I keep not writing that long post about Can We Talk About Race, mostly because it involves using my brain.

Anyway. What I've read since:

• Little,Big by John Crowley, which was in bits very good and in bits quite bad.


• Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard. This bit of history is more speculative than most histories that I'm used to, because it's based largely on an oral history given to one of the authors by an elderly African-American quiltmaker, Ozella McDaniels. McDaniels reported a "quilt code", in which quilts were used to lay out preparations and directions for slaves escaping to the North. Tobin and Dobard argue that quilts are connected to African memory boards, and they have to speculate about a lot of things that are lost to history because they weren't written down and no one still alive remembers them. An interesting read, especially if you're into American (USan) history.


• Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports by Michael Sokolove. This book got a lot of people on edge with the title -- is this guy against women's sports? -- but he's very strongly pro-women's sports. What he's anti is accepting the sky-high rates of ACL tears in women's soccer, which he believes are caused by failures of adequate cross-training, overconcentration in a single sport from a young age, and overexposure (too many games/practices per unit time). What he suggest be done to protect girls is not to stop them playing, but to involve parents in asking for ACL injury prevention programs, get coaches to work on ACL injury prevention (very few do), and to revise the youth sports culture in the US.


• The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz. I've been talking this one up all over livejournal since I read it; it's both a social history of the American family and a cogent argument that if you base your national family policy on a nostalgic ideal that is not only difficult to attain, but impossible to sustain, you will mostly screw everyone over*; instead, you should base your national family policy on reality. (The problem, of course, is that some people in charge want to screw almost everyone over.)
  
  * except for rich white married heterosexual couples

The above list is pretty typical for me: lots of nonfiction, one fiction book that took me ages to slog through (I started reading Little,Big in 2007). I used to love fiction. I know the switch happened sometime while I was at university, but I don't really know why.

Now reading: The Ghost Map and Bonk (both nonfiction). I have two fiction books on deck: Acacia and Victory of Eagles; I'll start one or the other when I finish Bonk.

I am kind of fascinated and annoyed by an article that I read at CNN.com this morning, which now I cannot find. It was listed on the front page....

Anyway, the thing that annoyed me about it was that it was about women working vs. women staying home, and it quoted people on both sides of the issue -- but all the people on the "women staying home" side of the issue were, like, researchers and running online forums for stay-at-home moms and it was citing studies and so on, and all the people on the side of working women were...working women. As if there aren't studies to support THAT side, either (there are), or serious criticisms of the studies on the other side (there are), or as if the underlying ideal of the stay-at-home mother doesn't have problems (it does).

The really hilarious thing was that the article mentioned that working mothers perceive that there is a media bias against them. Jeepers, what would give them THAT impression? Maybe articles like yours, where you put all the experts and scientific studies on the other side? The uncontested assertions that working mothers spend only "a couple hours" with their kids?

For the record, I don't think either choice is bad. I do think unbalanced media representation makes the lives of working mothers a hell of a lot harder, and that CNN needs to shut the hell up.

(Unrelated: I'm on the top floor of a building. Why are there loud thumping noises coming from the ceiling?)

Last night: accidentally rocked out until 1:15am.
This morning: overslept but eventually made it to the Strip, where we purchased about 30 lbs of pork butt, a huge salmon filet, and sundry other items. Then we got beer in Lawrenceville & hied us home.
This afternoon: Finished installing the new mailbox.
Tonight: grilling salmon and starting the pork smoking (nlanza is going to smoke it overnight in his birthday present).
Soon: a nice cold Lagunitas Kronik Censored.

Tomorrow: shopping with basingstoke? Rollerblading with Lindz? Eating pulled pork until I explode? WHO CAN TELL. EXCITEMENT ABOUNDS TO BE SURE.

Please enter into evidence:

"I wonder if Helms was ever in a three-way with J. Edgar."

"And, y'know, come to think of it, Barry Goldwater was such an angry, lonely man. In need of someone... to hold close..."

tmaher , do you kiss your husband with that mouth?

I stopped posting to-do lists, and, well, that kind of meant I stopped...doing anything.

So here we go.

outside
- get seeds in (morning glories (other side of arch, on the new fence, on the old fence), second batch of sunflowers, bells of ireland)
- weed raised bed (half done!)
- redd up & mulch back garden beds
- put hosta between compost bin & fence
- build up earth by fence
- put in new mailbox
- buy vegetable plants (peppers, tomatoes)
- put in new salvia
- lay gravel for trashcan area (could do with another bag or two, but what I have is done)
- buy stone for paths (60 linear feet of path, maybe 45 linear feet of stone)

inside
- get correct paint for stairs
- paint stairs
- put up shelf & new shower head in basement bathroom
- clean off dining room table
- rearrange dining room furniture
- put old furniture upstairs
- scrape bedroom ceiling

I neglected the cardigan I'm working on for a while -- I worked on it on a plane in March, then didn't touch it again until another plane ride in June. Spent a chunk of that plane ride working out a bunch of modifications, which I'm going to have to type up because the pattern is now barely decipherable under all my scribbling.

Did wind some yarn today. I saved some money by buying the yarn (Artfiber's Phyz) in skeins instead of on a cone, but take it from me: it's not worth saving the money. This yarn tangles like a sumbitch.

Soon, I will be at the peplum of the cardigan, and after the peplum there's only the sleeves and the button band left to go. My current plan is to knit the sleeves down to the edging on both sides, and then see how much yarn I have left -- I might want to go with an alternate color for the sleeve edgings and button band.

I have an old dying upright vacuum (it was a 21st birthday present, and I'm, er, no longer in my 20s), and a 20% coupon for Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

Any suggestions for a good upright? I like vacs with long cords and good on-vac tool storage with easy switching between the hose tools and the regular format. Lightweight enough to make stairs not a punishment is a bonus, too.

Do I want a Dyson? A Hoover? Which one? How good are those combo carpet-steamer/vacs?

2001: I got an lj in June 2001, but didn't start updating it regularly until October of that year. Oddly enough, I actually have a post from 3 July 2001.

2002: nlanza criticized my taste in television, and mamadeb and I talked about Simon Illyan, and I re-read some Spock/Uhura and watched some Sentinel -- thus nlanza's tv criticism!

2003: we'd closed on our house the week before, so we were in prepping-it-for-movein-mode. It's a little hard to believe it's been that long...but it sure does explain why some of those rooms need to be repainted.

2004: I didn't post on 3 July, because we were visiting firimari and virginiadavis, and their at-the-time new baby. I can't believe she's 4 now, jeepers!

2005: I also didn't post on 3 July. 2 July I was plant-shopping, and then 5 July I posted about 070705 and asked about crossdressing otherkin furries.

2006: Apparently I like to plant shop in July.

2007: We'd spent some time getting our backyard set up, and then had folks over, and then I was sick, and I remember basingstoke got a speeding ticket that day I didn't go out with her because I was sick. Shame on us; we still need to buy a shed and level the ground for the hammock.

Last time I looked at Donors Choose, there weren't any Pittsburgh-area schools with submitted proposals. That's changed now, so I made a Pittsburgh-area challenge.



I forgot to add the project I fully funded to the challenge until after I funded it -- it's the "fully funded" one at the bottom of the challenge page. But! I will pledge an extra $500 to a Pittsburgh-area Donors Choose project, to be donated out of my next paycheck (end of July), if this challenge gets fulfilled by July 31.

I think it's ridiculous that schools need this kind of thing, but I am fortunate enough to be able to help. If you are, too...please do.

I tried to get a variety of schools in there, but only a few schools/districts in the area are using Donors Choose. If you work for a school district or know teachers in districts that aren't using Donors Choose, let them know about it!

(x-posted to pittsburgh)

I feel bad. We've been doing house-and-garden stuff all day, and as I was outside weeding I found what I thought was a dead mouse. I went to pick it up on a shovel to toss the body down the cliff, and turns out it is alive, but badly injured.

I can't get a good angle on the poor thing to kill it, so it is still there.

I'm taking a break from gardening now. If I can't ease its passing at least I don't have to be out there terrifying it as it dies.

My car is in the shop, again. I biked to work this morning, expecting to bike home in the late afternoon to pick it up and run my non-bikeable errands.

It won't be ready until tomorrow (thanks, car). So I called up my sister J. and asked if I could borrow Mom's car, then biked over there from work.

I used to do the bike from Mom's to my current workplace a few times a week, back when I was 17/18 and lived there in the summertime while working...er...at my current workplace. I remembered it as being no problemo. Let me compare and contrast today's rides:

	To my house	To my mom's house
Distance	~3 3/4 mi	~4 1/8 mi
Hills	None to speak of	O HAI
Major Roads	~25%	~75%
MPH/Flow of Traffic on Highest-Speed Road	25/35	35/50

I have to say -- I now remember why I shifted 100% to the bus after a few summers!

Get dog ready for a walk.

Then make her wait until the humans are ready for the walk.

Both temporarily there, and temporarily better, I believe. I'm in San Francisco til Saturday. I didn't fly out with nlanza because of an Important Meeting at work -- and there's important meetings and then there's Important Meetings, and I'm glad I stayed because my coworker K. thanked me so profusely afterwards for being there; I think it meant a lot to her.

So yesterday, my flight from Pittsburgh leaves a little bit late, but not too bad. I wrote a nice presentation on my shiny new Air, though I discovered that only SOME of my license keys and so on transferred in the machine-cloning operation, so I'm going to need to dig out all my media when I get him. I should really start storing that stuff in Yojimbo-or-something.

I get to Las Vegas pretty much on time. Off I hop and go to look at the TVs to see where my connecting flight is. The first thing I see is that it's delayed 1.5 hours, which would mean leaving Vegas at 11:35 their time and getting into SFO at a point when I would be comatose.

The second thing I see is that the previous flight to SFO is delayed 2.5 hours, which means it leaves in 15 minutes. Off I scoot and get my butt on that flight instead.

I pretty much figured that my bag wasn't going to make it, so I called ahead and nlanza went and bought me undies, socks, and a shirt to wear today at Macy's. I ended up getting out of SFO at around the time I was originally scheduled to arrive there, and was in the hotel asleep by the time my original plane finally made it in. Walked to Blue Bottle for coffee, had an empanada for breakfast, accidentally sort of stimulated the economy (which I had promised I wouldn't do but then nlanza kept pointing out all the great shopping and in my soul I am a covetous little goblin), ran an errand for a friend.

My feet, which did not appreciate wearing shoes for 20 hours straight yesterday, are not pleased with me. No matter how comfy the shoe, feet will only take so much.

My luggage showed up sometime this morning, so I'm back at the hotel and going to unpack in a few. Tonight, going out with tmaher and urso, hoorah!

Create your own family sticker graphic at pYzam.com

I know yinz who have pets in your stickers are lying, because you have not put the pets in-between the humans. Like Tovy and Bella would let me get near nlanza if they could help it. (Bella is stretched out between our feet right now.)

eta: mistergone FTW.