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[personal profile] holmesticemods posting in [community profile] holmestice
Title: In the Thick of Question and Reply
Recipient: BendingTheWillow
Author: REDACTED
Verse: Granada TV Show
Characters/Pairings: Holmes & Watson
Rating: T
Warnings: N/A
Summary: While recovering from an injury, Holmes finds that he might need a bit more help than usual. Watson is glad to assist in any way that he can.

Read on AO3: In the Thick of Question and Reply

Update

Dec. 20th, 2025 08:22 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
I just ate a lovely pickled okra.  So yummy.  Must grow more okra next year...

Yesterday before our work on the Red Barn, Donald and I worked on the road.  It was pelting down rain which is ideal for showing just exactly where to use the shovel.  I got involved with some blackberry vines down by the neighbor's pond and have several nasty scratches which are still making a nuisance of themselves.  We got wet enough that we had to turn around and get dry clothes before going to the barn. Fortunately it isn't cold.  
Yesterday night I got a text that there were cows out in the horse pastures.  Cody said he'd come in the morning. 

Today the Fence Charger project began with running a new ground wire from the outlet on the southeast side of the barn through the 4 tackroom light fixtures and then through the new conduit to the new outlet on the northeast corner.  The outlet works properly, the fence charger got moved to its new location.  We cleaned up and headed home.  I had just sat down in my easy chair when the sense that "something wasn't right" turned into "I know what I forgot!"  While I -had- grounded the outlet to the regular barn grounding system, I had NOT run the 8 feet of wire needed to hook the fence charger to the special fence charger ground.  This is bad because fence chargers burn up if they don't have a ground.  Donald and I jumped in the car and ran back down.  It didn't take long to run that last cable (and for Donald to find the missing hammer).  Once again we cleaned up noting that tack room #1 needed a new light fixture (simple pull chain light).  

Meanwhile, back at the Ranch, Cody was continuing to be puzzled by the actions of the cows.  They have been bunched up pushing on the fences, trying to get out, ever since he put them in Jungle pasture.  These include old cows that have been coming to that pasture for 10+ years and have never caused problems.  Yesterday they were all in.  Today most of them had leaked through the fences into the pastures to the south.  I want to put up a trail cam and see if we can figure out what was scaring them. The older cows have years of living with mountain lions and bears.  They aren't especially afraid of them as neither a black bear or a mountain lion will usually attack a 1,200 # cow.  Calves yes, but there are only two, fairly big calves with the herd and they are fine. Coyotes aren't a threat.  Dogs will run cows but usually they will leave marks on the cows, shredded ears, bitten off tails or bites on the legs. None of that is apparent on these cows.  For now we have let the herd into the House pasture where they are much more content. 

Because the cows moved into the House pasture we closed the gates around the house itself and turned on the electric fence. Mostly this is to keep the cows out of the area directly in front of the house.  When Donald and I returned for the second time I wanted to double check that the fence was on.  It was, but Donald noticed that the fence was "snapping" near one gate post. Snapping indicates a short to ground which is bad. I know this particular problem, it has been an issue in the past. I think the wire that runs under the road was done with the same batch of wire that failed at the Red Barn.  After a rather lame attempt to patch it, we pulled a new wire through the pipe  that runs under the driveway.  Really didn't take long, but it was getting dark and the third flashlight of the day had dying batteries. It was sprinkling on and off.  We turned on the power and then had to replace the last 8 feet of electric fence tape which clearly had broken some of it's tiny wires and was also shorting. The final test of the fence showed it to be good.   By then it was full dark and definitely time to go in.  



 

Exponentile stats

Dec. 20th, 2025 08:05 pm
sonia: Quilted wall-hanging (Default)
[personal profile] sonia
I mentioned Exponentile a while back, and said I hoped I would let it rest. Well, I did get back into it, and played obsessively for a while.

I started playing in DuckDuckGo on my phone which doesn't save visited urls, and closing the tab each time so that I would have to type the url back in to continue playing. I've tapered off quite a bit, but still feel drawn to spend time in a low-stakes world with defined rules sometimes.

My high score is 114,184 and I generally don't get even close to that before the game ends. I think I got over 100,000 one or two other times.

I've had two 2048 tiles on the screen before, but today I got a 4096! I had two 512s, a space, and then two more 512s, and I managed to finagle a 512 to drop into the space. The 4096 glows just like the 2048s.

Is anyone else still playing, or have you moved on to the next fun thing?

This post brought to you by being completely wiped out at 7pm. Maybe all that running around has caught up with me. The concert last night was amazing, and I had a good conversation with a stranger waiting in line for the doors to open in the rain. Inside, I chatted with folks I know from choir or dancing. Feels good to be part of the community that way.

Hmm...

Dec. 20th, 2025 10:17 pm
soc_puppet: A screencap of Namine from "Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories". She is pictured scribbling in her notebook, but an excerpt reads, "And then Axel and Roxas had hot, steamy sex. The End." (Fangirl writer)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
I need to get working on more fics; my AO3 dashboard is currently all Gen, No Pairing, No Archive Warnings Apply works! That's hardly representative of the majority of my writing!

Fic: Future Sight

Dec. 20th, 2025 09:23 pm
soc_puppet: Adorable art of the Pokémon Piplup; its flippers are clutched close to its chin, its eyes are dewy, and it is blushing, while light pink hearts and bubbles float around it. Originally a sticker for Pokémon Go. (Love Piplup)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
Fandom: Pokémon
Summary: Xatu Foresaw the Minior shower in Hoenn three years, six months, and two days prior to its occurrence; something she had not Foreseen was the kindness of the humans working there.
Mirrors: On AO3
Wordcount: ~350
Ships: Xatu & Julian (original male character)
Notes: Sequel to my [community profile] pokepodproject fic "An Eye on the Sky" (Dreamwidth | AO3)
Fic: Future Sight )

It's only eight, right?

Dec. 20th, 2025 10:32 pm
sovay: (Mr Palfrey: a prissy bastard)
[personal profile] sovay
Tonight in the basement of the Harvard Book Store where the part of the HVAC which replaced the original location of mysteries and crime makes enough industrial noise for me to wear earplugs while browsing, I gestured a choice of directions at a T-junction of shelves to a woman laden with bags in both hands who responded in an immediate tone of cheerful accusation, "You're half a man," and then before I could say anything and see which way she reacted, "Half and half. Cream. I'm just kidding," on which she turned around and left the way she came. Happy Saturday before Christmas?

(no subject)

Dec. 20th, 2025 09:49 pm
skygiants: Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender peers through an eyeglass (*peers*)
[personal profile] skygiants
Last time I got the chance to hang out with [personal profile] raven, about a year ago -- there would have been another time recently but, alas!, airline crimes interfered -- I ended up with two books shoved into my hands: Mavis Doriel Hay's Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell.

I was not particularly familiar with Hay's game before this; she falls squarely in the Golden Age but only ever published three novels before focusing all her attention on Rural British Handicrafts. [personal profile] raven is right however that these books are both very fun and worthy of attention for their structure: neither of them have a kind of traditional primary detective figure, and both of them instead focus on a group of people in the murder victim's broader community who sort of collectively solve the crime by bouncing against each other in various directions until the right information comes to light.

In Murder Underground, the unloved landlady of a boarding house is found murdered on the subway, and her Bertie Wooster of a nephew promptly bumbles his way all over the crime scene and makes himself prime suspect number one (Dorothy Sayers, in her review, called this man one of the most feckless, exasperating and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail and I couldn't put it better! god bless!) We spend a good chunk of the book following the Feckless Nephew and another good chunk just hanging out with the people who live in the boarding house, all of whom have Opinions, Mostly Incorrect.

Death on the Cherwell has some returning characters from Murder Underground but mostly focuses on a group of Young Lady Students who have been having an inaugural meeting for their we-hate-and-curse-our-bursar club when they happen to see said bursar floating down the river in a boat, presumably pre-cursed because she's very obviously dead. The police detective on the case has more to do in this one but the charm of the book is all in the Young Lady Students bopping around trying to investigate on their own, annoying various of their friends and relations in the process.

Hay has also written a third book that I've not yet read and I'm curious to see if it leans as much as these two into the ensemble and the way that a whole community can become stakeholders in A Murder Problem. In the meantime, [personal profile] raven has encouraged me to pass these along to another good home if anyone else would like them! ETA and they are CLAIMED

(As always when reading Golden Age mysteries one is inevitably going to run into some classic Golden Age racism, and in this case it would be remiss of me not to mention that Death on the Cherwell has some opinions about Eastern Europe ... ah, those excitable Yugoslavians! A Yugoslavian Young Lady Student MIGHT declare blood feud against one of her admins. Who Could Say. We Just Don't Know.)
sasha_feather: the back of furiosa's head (furiosa: back of head)
[personal profile] sasha_feather
I'm not great at knowing when to quit. I'm stubborn and loyal and I actively try to think the best of people. I try to work out problems or let things blow over. I try to let bygones be bygones, etc. But I've cut people off before when they've reached that line in the sand. This far, and no farther! I sometimes only know the line when I've found it.

With my high school friend Laura, I cut her off when I came out. She had a history of saying racist and homophobic things and I said no more. I wrote her an email and stopped talking to her.

Sadly with my jobs I put up with with too much, but that is a story for another day. Mainly I did not feel safe to just up and quit, which was what I should have done.

With a roommate who had already been stealing money, I finally confronted her, and actually yelled, when I found out she stole medication from me and tried to hide it. Like money is one thing but messing with medication is potentially deadly. I've yelled very few times in my adult life.

With a girlfriend, it was a nasty comment about the teenager she lived with, wishing harm or death or something. I just shut down and stopped investing in the relationship. I broke up with her via text message.

With my brother Nik, the final straw has been laid, the line in the sand is drawn. He lied to my best friend [personal profile] jesse_the_k. I've burned through the worst of my anger and now I'm just calm. I've decided that I'm done.

[community profile] fanmix_monthly

Dec. 21st, 2025 10:17 am
matsushima: (music daydream)
[personal profile] matsushima posting in [site community profile] dw_community_promo
fanmix_monthly: all fandoms, optional prompts

[community profile] fanmix_monthly is a new fanmix community on Dreamwidth!

Posting is now open. Optional prompts will start in January 2026.

The Ornaments, part III

Dec. 20th, 2025 06:48 pm
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
[personal profile] psocoptera
The ornaments my mom sent home with me had more than doubled my total ornaments here, and we already had more here than we could or wanted to hang. So this year, I did a Big Sort, splitting them up between the ones we definitely wanted to hang (now on the tree) and ones we could pack away in long-term storage and not even get out next year. (There also ended up being a third category that we weren't hanging this year but that we weren't quite ready to exile.) Both kids double-checked a couple of times that I absolutely wasn't going to get rid of anything, just keep them safely somewhere where we wouldn't have to dig through them looking for the ones we wanted. So it's not really disadventure, but at least I won't have to deal with them every year.

(I genuinely do not mind keeping all my kids' less-loved ornaments indefinitely, even the Harry Potter ones, or the cheap Olaf who is turning yellow. That's their childhood, who knows where their nostalgia will vest. When we divided things up last year my mom was pretty upset by the idea that I didn't want every single one of *my* childhood ornaments, including ones I couldn't personally remember ever seeing before, or some ugly cheap plastic things I wouldn't mind never seeing again. So there's one whole box of the long-term storage that I will someday accidentally lose in a move someday open, double-check for late-forming nostalgia, and then ask the kids for permission to cull, I guess?)

Two-Week Delay

Dec. 20th, 2025 07:29 pm
amperslashexchange: ampersand and forward slash (Default)
[personal profile] amperslashexchange
The collection opening will be delayed until January 3 at 11:59 PM UTC to give pinch hitters time to work on our remaining pinch hits. I'm opting for a longer delay this time because of the holidays and Yuletide: I'm sorry about the wait, but I think this will be better for timing.

I've updated the due date of the remaining pinch hits (they're now due January 2 at 11:59 PM UTC). Please comment on that post if you're able to take one. (Comments will be screened.)

Daily Happiness

Dec. 20th, 2025 03:34 pm
torachan: onoda sakamichi from yowamushi pedal with a huge smile (onoda smile)
[personal profile] torachan
1. We decided to skip Disneyland today due to the crowd levels, and instead we walked up to a little restaurant down the street from us that we recently saw on a "best breakfast burritos in LA" video. We'd eaten there before, but not for breakfast, so we'd been meaning to check it out. Carla actually went up there herself a couple times recently for breakfast burritos and confirmed they were very good, but this was my first time. It was indeed very good!

2. While I was walking back from the farmers market this morning, I saw some signs by the college across the street from us saying there was a holiday art fair this weekend. I didn't stop to check it out then, but I wanted to take another walk this afternoon, so I popped in to check it out. They had lots of neat stuff, though most of it was not anything I'd have a use for. I did get a couple hand blown glass ornaments, though.



I got the purple one on the bottom row left, and the multicolored one on the top row next to the yellow/orange one. I went without Carla today, but we might go back together tomorrow so she can look around, too.

3. We recently found this new to us variety of apples called Sugar Bee and they are so good! Really good texture and they have such a good sweet apple taste.

4. Gotta love those Gemma profile shots.

Treat for B2BMilde: The Moustache

Dec. 20th, 2025 06:25 pm
holmesticemods: (Default)
[personal profile] holmesticemods posting in [community profile] holmestice
Title: The Moustache
Recipient: B2BMilde
Artist: REDACTED
Verse: Rathbone & Bruce films
Characters/Pairings: Holmes & Watson
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: On a case that calls for disguises...

Read more... )
musesfool: a lit red candle (light in the darkness)
[personal profile] musesfool
So I may have been a little...over ambitious in purchasing eggs and butter and expecting it all to fit into my tiny apartment-size fridge. I did get all of it in there, but there was literally no room to let orange rolls rise overnight so I knocked that off the list. Maybe I will do them for New Year's morning instead.

I also had an unfortunate start to the fig cookies. I made the filling yesterday and I might have put too much cocoa in as I thought it was the bottom of the container so I just dumped it in and well, there was more than I expected in there. *hands* It's fine. Then when I made the dough earlier, it smelled weird. I think maybe the Crisco had gone off? Idk, but I threw out what I'd made and did it again with the newly opened can of Crisco and it smelled correct, so I didn't really get to make cookies this afternoon as planned, but I might make some after dinner, which is how we did it when I was a kid - every night for the 2 weeks before Christmas we were in the kitchen making fig cookies.

I did marinate the pork country ribs last night and they are now in the oven roasting, so that at least is on track.

I also watched Wake Up Dead Man yesterday, and I liked but didn't love it? I'm not sure why? spoilers )

This is a long essay about the movie (spoilers, obvs) that goes much deeper into it: Entirely Too Many Thoughts About Wake Up Dead Man by Leah Schnelbach.

Oh, the timer just went off so I have to take the ribs out of the oven, so I guess I'll just hit post!

***

6-day plan, day 2 )

***

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