I can’t believe we’re already in February! We both slept in this morning.
I did two loads of laundry, hand-washed dishes, went for several walks with Pip and the dogs, baked chicken for the dog’s meals, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, changed kitty litter, and showered. I made those cheese sausage things for Pip’s supper and had leftover chicken and gravy on bread (hot chicken sandwich?) for mine.
Pip blew out other paths and I actually went on some longer walks today! A .35 and .50mi as well as a .25 instead of all three being .25. Instead of .75 total, I got in over a mile today because of that! I was very pleased with myself because I didn’t think it would be spring before I could mark off the .50 mile walk and over 1.00 mile day on my bingo card, lol!
I had Cinnamon Plum tea again today. I read fanfic (someone wrote ~124,500 words of Heated Rivalry rodeo AU!!!) and watched House Hunters International and Zoo Tampa.
Temps started out at -0.2(F) (it might have been lower earlier, but we didn’t see it) and reached 16.0. There was sun, and while it was good for my mood, it didn’t warm anything up.
Mom Update:
Mom sounded good when I talked to her. She said her energy levels aren’t any better, so I guess it’s all mood. She had a good food day (a variety of foods that all settled well), and my brother and Sister A had visited. She was expecting Sister S, as well. We talked a little longer because she didn’t sound like she was fading, which is good.
Title: Finding Yourself in a New World – Chapter 2: Guilty Pleasures Day/Prompt: Day 2 / Guilty Pleasures Fandom: Warrior Nun (TV) Character/Pairing: Yasmine, Camila, Shannon, Mary, Lilith, Beatrice, Ava Rating/Warning(s): T / None Word Count: 6243 Summary: After her first mission, the team takes Yasmine to a bar and they all bond. Author's Notes: As I said on the first day, this is a continuous story, one chapter covering each day's prompt. The link will go to the second chapter, the first chapter can be accessed from there.
Title: Two callings Fandom: The Last Kingdom Characters: Hild Rating: T Notes/Warnings: Done with Chinese ink and graphite. There's an implied dead body in the frame as a battle takes place in the background. This is also more or less in the same continuity of another halfamoonentry of mine from 2025 :) Summary: Hild's faith is steady but using sword skill, as brutal as its results might be, is a pull she cannot well deny...
Title: Are You A Mirage? (I Hope So) Fandom: Kamen Rider Gotchard + Kamen Rider Girls Remix Pairing/Characters: Lachesis/Nayuta, Rinne Rating: E Word count: 1107 Content Notes: Post-Kamen Rider Eins with Girls Remix, Post-Kamen Rider Gotchard: Graduations, Angst, Ambiguous NTR/Cheating, Contains References To The Gotchard Final Stage and The Upcoming Gotchard Novel, Ambiguous/Open Ending Author's note: Also done for the tokufemslash Femslash February Prompt Meme. Prompt was "Kamen Rider Gotchard: Lachesis/Mikazuki Nayuta + Kudo Rinne - Came back from the dead just to bang your girlfriend in front of you." As said in the notes: the NTR/cheating is ambiguous, so is the ending. It is entirely up to you if this was real, or if one of Glion's followers did this to hurt Rinne. Summary: Rinne and Nayuta were supposed to have a happy reunion, it doesn't end up that way. Also on Ao3, or read below the cut:
Title: Vulcans Don't Feel Guilt (Usually) Fandom: Star Trek: Enterprise Character: T'Pol (Jonathan Archer & Charles "Trip" Tucker are also there) Rating: Teen Word Count: 351 Summary: The Captain was trying one of his getting-to-know you questions on her again
Here are some ideas to get you started: A bag of greasy potato chips, a racy romance novel, a nap in the middle of a workday, or a clandestine affair with a co-worker- some of the things our favorite characters enjoy the most can be viewed as less than healthy or otherwise looked down on by society. Show us a guilty pleasure for one of your favorite characters.
Just go wherever the Muse takes you. If this prompt doesn't speak to you, feel free to share something that does. You can post in a separate entry or as a comment to this post.
Want to get a jump start on tomorrow's theme? Check out the prompt list in the pinned post at the top of the page. Please don't post until that day.
Un’a is proving to be one tough (and smart!) little otter. Despite her rare arm injury that she had when admitted, she shows minimal signs of discomfort and is staying active and curious.
Our veterinary and animal care teams continue to monitor her closely and support her healing with gentle physical therapy (more on this soon!). Luckily for Un’a, floating is a natural part of her day, which helps keep weight off her arm.
An injury like this would have been a serious challenge in the wild, but with a little extra care, she is not letting anything slow her down.
Every mammal, every fish, every vertebrate (creatures that have a spine) has two eyes. It’s been that way for millions and millions of years. But maybe it wasn’t like that forever.
During the Cambrian, when evolution was experimenting all sorts of strategies, early vertebrates may have had four eyes, and they were high-res eyes, too.
Willow: Oh. I keep thinking "Okay, that's the cutest thing ever," and then she does something cuter and completely resets the whole scale.
Tara: Did you see her yawn earlier?
Willow: Yes! I thought I was going to die.
Title: Never go home Fandom: Doctor Who (1963) Character: Victoria Waterfield Prompt: The Innocent Rating/Category: T/Gen Summary: The reality of the situation settles in as Victoria walks into her new room. Her life as she knew it is over.
Never go home The reality of the situation settles in as Victoria walks into her new room. Her life as she knew it is over.
Everything happened so fast that she didn’t even have the time to think until now. Then she reaches her room in that impossible ship, and it’s so completely ordinary, maybe the first thing resembling normalcy that she had since being attacked.
It doesn’t look like her room, but it’s close enough to it, like it could be the room of any girl that she knows, like it could have been her room, and now it is. It’s thoughtful that they gave her a room like this, the only thing around there that feels like it might fit with her home and her life, but it only serves to make more evident the fact that she’ll never come home again, and even if she did, there’s nothing left for her there. Not anymore.
The Daleks took it all from her, and although the Doctor and Jamie have been kind to her, now that she’s alone it’s impossible not to think of how her father is gone and she’ll never see him again, she’ll never see her home again, she’ll never see a single person that she knew before again. She has never even been abroad, and now she’s on a ship running away from monsters, with the strange man that her father entrusted her care to and the brave boy who protected her.
She has never felt so lost, and she’s equal parts excited for the adventure that she has just started and terrified that she’ll encounter monsters like those again. Everything now is just so unknown, and the only thing that she can be sure of is that her life is never going to be the same again.
As the seasons sweep through southwest Virginia, the lush summer landscape transforms, fading into fall and winter.
From October 4 to December 6, 2025, the forests in this animation turn from green to orange to brown before being blanketed by white snow. The animation is composed of images from Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS), a NASA product that combines imagery from the NASA/USGS Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2A, 2B, and 2C satellites.
The animation showcases the Valley and Ridge province of the Appalachian Mountains, named for its characteristic parallel ridges and valleys. When the supercontinent Pangea formed, the region was compressed, one of the factors producing this folded landscape.
The region’s forests, largely deciduous, undergo color change in the fall before shedding their leaves. Certain species change color earlier, while others lose their green pigment later in the season. Because of Virginia’s rich tree diversity—nearly 100 species of deciduous trees are native to the state—the landscape becomes a patchwork of shifting colors.
December 6, 2025
Paige Williams, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability at Virginia Commonwealth University, identified several notable landscape changes captured in the video. Price Mountain, with nearly entirely deciduous forests, appears bright orange in early November and then fades to brown by mid-month.
Northeast of Price Mountain, Blacksburg—home of Virginia Tech—maintains a backdrop of green and gray. Ellet Valley, east of town, stays green until early December, long after surrounding ridgelines fade to brown, due to irrigated agricultural fields, cattle grazing, and golf courses. Evergreens, which retain their foliage year-round, dot the scene with dark green and thrive most on north-facing slopes.
Nearly 80 percent of Virginia’s forests are deciduous or a mix of deciduous and pine trees. Deciduous trees lose their leaves every fall in a process called senescence. As days get shorter and temperatures drop, chlorophyll (which gives leaves their green color) begins to break down, revealing other carotenoid plant pigments, usually yellow and orange hues hidden during the spring and summer. Some trees produce new pigments that turn leaves red. Before the leaves fall, the trees absorb as many of their nutrients as possible, recycling them for future growth.
In early December, a rare early-season snowstorm visited Virginia. Snow covered the landscape, sliding off steeper slopes and collecting in valleys and flatlands. The National Weather Service reported that by the month’s end, Blacksburg had collected a total of 8.6 inches (22 centimeters) of snow—nearly 4 inches more than the 1991–2020 average for December.
Animation by Ross Walter/Landsat Science Office Support, using data from the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) product. Still image by Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Madeleine Gregory/Landsat Science Office Support.
I have ambitions of writing up monthly music roundups. We'll see how long I last, lol.
First, to make sense of my music listening at all (and reading, and movie watching, and...) it's important to know that my brain ties media really closely to the season and the weather, so whatever time of year I first read/watched/heard that thing, that's when I want to do so again. At this point I'm familiar enough with how this works that I can explicitly identify music that will make my brain happy for various scenarios. "Cold and sunny? Time for Endless Summer Vacation again."
Themes of the month 1. Women of hip hop! I returned to my old favorites Glorilla and Doechii (discovered January 2025). I also listened to a TON of music by other artists. I went through several Megan albums, Cardi B's most recent album, and then spread out and explored a bunch of newer artists like Monaleo and KenTheMan.
2. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by Oasis (discovered January 2020). It turns out my fancy earbuds combined with being able to download music in higher quality means I can hear more things. In fact I found out in January why "Fuckin' in the Bushes" has that title. Overall this will never be an absolute favorite, but Gas Panic and Where Did It All Go Wrong are always great, Roll It Over is solid even though it was better live, and I guess I'm warming up to Go Let It Out. Also I don't care if Put Your Money With Your Mouth Is is nonsense fluff, it's a vibe, don't @ me.
3. Love and War by Fleurie, an album apparently designed specifically to make fanvids to, or possibly to use for end credits. (Or even to get sampled by Kendrick Lamar, just to cross some streams.) I first heard it in December and listened to it some more this month. Is "cinematic emo soprano"? Great stuff.
Top artists (by # of streams) 1. Oasis 2. Megan Thee Stallion 3. Glorilla 4. Cardi B
Favorite songs: * girl, get up by Doechii featuring SZA. This one really grew on me: that mellow beat, SZA singing the refrain on the chorus, and of course Doechii doing her thing. "I'll address it on the album." Yesssssssssss, I cannot WAIT.
* S/O to Me by Latto. I'm really conflicted about this one, because I love her flow and the theme of forging her own path, but OTOH the whole verse about how she doesn't like women and specifically doesn't want to hear about "post-partum or menopause" feels pretty gross. A very mixed bag. Still one of the songs I listened to the most this month.
* Accent by Megan Thee Stallion featuring Glorilla. Dark heavy beat with very silly subject matter. Just a fun time.
* Wrong One by Glorilla featuring a bunch of other female rappers. Glorilla and her girl group!! Again, just fun.
New artist to follow: YK Niece, entirely for Goin On and specifically the "way way bigger" line. I love it so much.
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