Below are the most recent 9 friends' journal entries.

Thursday, November 26th, 2009
elfwreck	10:34p	OD'd on tryptophan The post I wrote last night and didn't send 'cos I'd just posted something else and I always feel ridiculous making two posts in an hour: I like the dressing. Rob makes the best turkey dressing in the world. He makes croutons from sourdough bread & italian dressing, and it's got sausage and ground beef and celery and onions, and chantrelles & crimini mushrooms and cherries and water chestnuts. And Blossom came down from Wolf Creek and made cranberry relish; yaaay! and I made mashed potatoes, and Gail made apples-and-sweet-potatoes with the recipe Rob got from the WitchesWithBrains yahoogroup, and we had brussels sprouts and candied carrots, and pumpkin pie that Rob made yesterday. And turkey. And gravy made from the turkey drippings. Mygods I'm stuffed. It's all really, really yummy food. And we'll have leftovers for daaaaayz. Including enough cranberry relish to make piroshkis tomorrow and maybe to have to take to work next week. And I'm, like, DRUGGED. From the tryptophan. I want to sleep now and wake up... Tuesday. Instead, we have four extra people in our room who are watching the movie "Crowley" while I try to find new fanfic. This entry is crossposted at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/284746.html. You can comment there with OpenID from your LJ or IJ account. Comments so far: (Comment on this)
elfwreck	10:20p	Pagan terminology meta I put together a list of Pagan terms for use by nonpagans, specifically writers, at writing_religion: Pagan terminology for nonpagan writers. It's about 2700 words long. I'd welcome any feedback or questions; part of me thinks it's okay, and part thinks it's about 1/3 done and needs at total rewrite--but if I waited until I thought it was "finished," I'd never get it posted. And there really isn't enough info available *about* Pagans that's not written for people who are joining/members of Pagan religions. And incompleteness is not necessarily wrong, in this case. It's more important to me that nonpagans understand the complexity of the issues than that they learn the details involved. This entry is crossposted at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/284671.html. You can comment there with OpenID from your LJ or IJ account. Comments so far: (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
elfwreck	7:56a	More Hmm. I'm not finding a couple of the blog posts I'd spotted yesterday, that aren't related to the adult privs checklist but were about child agency and the concept that kids, acting like kids, in public, is something the public should just deal with--kids are people, and age-appropriate behavior isn't something that should be kept out of sight of nonparents. Some of these have fascinating comment threads. And by "fascinating," I mean "soaked in privilege and offensive as hell." Related but not necessarily connected posts: Nov 3, Noble Savage: On Child Hate and Feminism "Participating in child-bashing is participating in the oppression of a vulnerable group. … admitting that motherhood went from overrated to undervalued in 40 years flat isn’t something many of us want to acknowledge." Oct 23, Look Left of the Pleiades: People who dance between tables "Having a need for age-specific support should not make anyone any less human." Apr 23, Have A Lovely Time: I'm sorry, does my children's presence offend you? "HOW do you cope when your arrival leads to an immediate and sharp intake of breath from the other customers?" Aug 8, Syracuse.com opinion blog: Discrimination against special needs is unacceptable "They had just as much a right to patronize that restaurant as anyone else. They deserved to be welcomed with respect and kindness. This was not the case." (Does not mention whether younger children without disabilities would be equally accepted.) Adult Privilege Sound-off: Nov 24, Dr. Helen: Your right to bring your screaming child on a plane ends where the rest of our ears begin. "If a kid does not understand how to act in certain settings, teach him or her or don't put them in that setting until they are older. The world will be a better (and quieter) place." Nov 24, Tim Cavanaugh at Reason: No Child's Left Behind "here is (very unscientific) evidence that spanking is poised for a comeback" (With special bonus racism in the comments!) April 8, Guardian: There comes a time when you want to live without children "To buy a property in the village, you have to be 45-plus with no dependent family in tow, and you must sign a contract agreeing not to sell property on to those with children." This entry is crossposted at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/284210.html. You can comment there with OpenID from your LJ or IJ account. Comments so far: (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
elfwreck	11:54p	Adult Privilege Linkspam I may or may not find time to make a coherent post about this anytime soon. This one's important to me; the way we treat children in this country ranges from atrocity to tragedy. But it's late; I have to be up in five and a half hours (because, heh, one of my kids does not mesh well with public school). As a placeholder, have some linkspam: Nov 16 @ Shut Up, Sit Down: Adult Privilege Checklist Reading a post by Elena Perez at California NOW made me think about privilege checklists (like the Male Privilege Checklist and the White Privilege Checklist, for example) and I came to the realisation that, as yet, nobody had written an adult privilege checklist. So with some help from my good friend Jenny, using some of Elena Perez’s ideas from the aforementioned post, I set about writing the Adult Privilege Checklist. Background; older posts: April 13, Mothers For Women's Lib: You’ll never truly be “child free” Oct 22, Raising My Boychick: Dancing between the tables: on the personhood of children Nov 11, California NOW: Feminist Parenting: The Larger Picture Nov 4, Left of the Pleiades: Dear Kate Harding Reactions: naraht: Adult privilege hl: The Opression of Chilhood. In which I try for emotionless and hard analysis (and fail) sqbr: Intersections of youth and other aspects of the kyriarchy Saraspeaking: Mind. Blown. flourish: Adult Privilege This entry is crossposted at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/284122.html. You can comment there with OpenID from your LJ or IJ account. Comments so far: (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
elfwreck	12:19p	Wicca: still not a race. In today's "Activism: Ur Doin It Wrong" department, we have accusations that slurs against pagan rituals are racist. Set aside, for the moment, that said slurs don't actually exist. That... give some insight into the mind of the commenter, but isn't, in fact, relevant. What's relevant is that she thinks Wicca's being insulted, and she's "calling" the supposed insulter on her "racism." (In a community about public transportation. So, um, more than rather severely off-topic all around.) I don't have an icon that's halfway between "facepalm" and "headdesk." (And I don't want one; that would mean I expect to find *more* stuff like this to post about. Which I'd really rather not.) Oh, and the comment threads hit Godwin's law, ablism, classism and childfreekiness. And NEVAR AGAIN TEH BURNING TIEMS! A glory of fucktupitude all around. (I got this from dot_pagan_snark, and it's been on stupid_free, so apologies to people who already know about it. Sharin' the pain, folks; sharin' the pain.) This entry is crossposted at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/283818.html. You can comment there with OpenID from your LJ or IJ account. Comments so far: (3 Comments |Comment on this)
elfwreck	7:52a	She is too fond of books Hi, my name's elf, and I have a reading problem. When most people say "reading problem," they mean "the letters look blurry to me" or "I've been assigned more pages than human eyeballs can absorb this weekend" or "ack, my comprehension of Russian is too low for me to get the right concepts out of this physics paper." It almost never means "I think I've been neglecting other parts of my life for reading." Because reading isn't considered a dangerous addiction. It has no physical side-effects. It doesn't make the mind slow or incompetent. At no point, in the throes of reading, is one incapable of driving or performing surgery, should one's skills go in those directions. (Well, save for the "must put book down" part. However, after that immediate shift in awareness, one's reflexes and attention are both available to whatever tasks might be at hand.) And it's not expensive. Nobody sells off his car and formal clothes to get books. Nobody hocks her wedding jewelry. Books--really good books--are available everywhere at prices ranging from "cheap" to "free." And the internet hasn't made that any less true. Entertaining content, informative & educational content, useful, delightful, important content, is free by the terabyte. And oooh, I want to read it ALL. ( I read a lot. I could read a lot more. ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
elfwreck	10:35p	Five Random Things Hair is on its way to being its proper color again. Just have to sleep on it and rinse it out in the morning. (Brr. We often don't have hot water in the morning; our unit shares a hot water heater with two others.) Windows Vista apparently doesn't come with an unzip program. I can't unlock ZIP or RAR files. (Somewhere in my portable apps collection is a nice unlock-anything program; I've forgotten the name of it and can't be arsed to figure it out right now, since I can unzip the comics tomorrow.) We got Dish network. 250 channels, although I gather that some of those might be music channels, and too many of them are sports. Still, lots more than we've had. I watch DishEarth a lot, which is a satellite feed of the earth, with classical music. I like it, but I miss the snow channel. It's been cold enough recently that both Rob & I wake up with our shoulders tense and knotted in pain. It doesn't go away. I'm taking drugs for pain (erm, Advil; I'm a drug wimp) and it bothers me--I hate taking drugs to alleviate symptoms instead of doing something about the base cause. Phoenix's school counselors suggest we should get her some philosophy to read. (Her reading skills are off the charts, which I find entirely unsurprising. Also, she's prone to getting randomly existential at her teachers, which disconcerts them.) Any suggestions on good philosophy texts for a 14-year-old who loves Pokemon fanfic and the Poltergeist movies? This entry is crossposted at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/283213.html. You can comment there with OpenID from your LJ or IJ account. Comments so far: (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
elfwreck	8:22p	Got my YT assignment One solid match--yaay!! Two more that I'm "aware of" more than "familiar with," but could easily get familiar with enough to write. One I've never heard of. But I'm off and running on the actual match. Have rough outline in mind, know what canon details I need to check, have looked over my victim's recipient's journal to confirm that my normal writing style isn't likely to send said vic recipient into screaming convulsions (of the unhappy variety). This entry is crossposted at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/282384.html. You can comment there with OpenID from your LJ or IJ account. Comments so far: (Comment on this)
elfwreck	6:14p	Yuletide Notes My Dear Yuletide Author letter, mentioning my 4 fandoms: Elfquest, Vorkosigan, Wild Cards, & Sime/Gen My addendum (because I don't know when to quit), offering 33 plotbunnies split across those fandoms. Because I like plotbunnies. Go, bunnies. Go find fics to nest in. Go find happy Yuletidish authors to nibble on. Go forth & multiply; become 75 fics. And GET OUT OF MY HEAD. There's barely room for me in here. (Comment on this)