We're coming to the tail end of this year's snowflake_challenge. Today's prompt warms my librarian heart, because it involves peak librarian skills: searching and finding.



In your own space, post your pictures of your fandom scavenger hunt results.

My results can be found in this Instagram photoset. See the description below for details of which photo fulfills which item.

Look around your current space, whether digital or brick-n-mortar. Post a pic or description of:

1. a fannish item: A photo of some fanart of characters Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen series. The art is by likhainstudio. Likhain also designed my wedding invitations, and I love to be able to say that my invitations were created by a Hugo Award-winning fanartist!

2. something round: An orange studded with cloves, which smells amazing, lasts forever (I have another one of these which was made by my mother in the 1960s, although this one I made myself about ten years ago), and which decorates the living room bookshelf.

3. something that is your favorite colour: Houseplants in the kitchen.

4. the last game you played (video, phone, table top, etc.): I almost never play games of any kind (I basically find every single type of game stressful; they've never been a fun leisure activity for me), so I cheated here and put a picture of my favourite local swimming pool. Swimming is my kind of 'game'.

5. a book you are currently reading: Accidental Gods by Anna Della Subin.

6. album art of the first song that comes up on shuffle: 'Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book', from the Dead Can Dance album Aion.

7. the last movie you watched: The Eternals (a bloated, tedious mess, much as I love Gemma Chan).

8. TV show you're currently watching: The second season of Cheer on Netflix.

9. the homescreen, lockscreen, or desktop wallpaper from your device: I have 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch as my desktop wallpaper, and I think it's basically been my wallpaper — with some brief exceptions — for close to fifteen years. Amusingly, the album art for question 6 is also taken from Bosch's artwork — a weird coincidence.

Let's do this, 2022.

Our tiny Christmas tree is decorated at last, we've got strings of fairy lights up all over the living room, I've just finished some tea, cherry liqueur, and a slice of stollen, and everything feels cozy and cinnamon-scented. I feel as if I'm somehow embodying the season.

It's been a good, if slightly busy weekend, with a real mixture of activities.

On Saturday morning, Matthias and I headed into the market to pick up a few last Christmas presents for his family. It was a bit too crowded for my liking, but we were in and out in about and hour, and stumbled on some cute felt Christmas decorations as well — so we bought a handful to add to the tree. I spent most of Saturday afternoon watching biathlon and scrolling idly around the internet.

Today was busier — I was out at the pool in the morning, swimming my customary kilometre in a rather crowded lane, then back home cooking crepes for breakfast and doing meal prep for lunch and dinner tomorrow. Then, after a stern mental talking-to directed at myself, I sat down and finally put the finishing touches on my Yuletide assignment. It still needs some editing, but it's more or less good to go, which is a huge relief. Annoyingly, the idea for two different treats popped into my brain on my walk back from the swimming pool, but I really don't have time to write them. I've found it hard to accept that my assignment will be my only contribution to the collection this year — I've been participating in Yuletide for seven years now (which I know is nothing compared to some of you!) and have so far never gone without writing at least one treat, and in the past three Yuletides I've written four treats each year in addition to my assignment. But I don't feel it's fair to give someone a treat that got written in fits and starts scratched out in the minimal time I have this week, and so (barring a miraculous amount of free time falling into my lap), the assignment alone it is.

I've spent most of the afternoon doing minor chores, catching up on Dreamwidth comments, and, as mentioned above, achieving Peak Christmas. I'm going to try and squeeze in a bit of yoga before starting on dinner and winding things down. And I'll close out the evening watching the final ever episode of The 100 (of which more in a later post, but suffice it to say that this series offered diminishing returns and got even more batshit as it continued) and the first episode of the second season of Vienna Blood (which at present is my least favourite of three recent TV shows whose premise is that a detective/police officer teams up with a Freudian psychologist in the late 19th/early 20th centuries to solve mysteries).

I still feel I need more stillness in my life right now, but I do at least feel refreshed and relaxed.

Yesterday, Matthias and I returned after a week away on holiday by the seaside. We went to Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, which is an easy trip for us on public transport (2 hours on the train, half an hour on a bus). The two of us don't tend to holiday in the UK — in fact, apart from trips to visit friends elsewhere in the country, and occasional weekends in London, I don't think we have ever used annual leave to stay somewhere within the UK. Last year, of course, we didn't leave the country — but we didn't leave Cambridge, either! All our holidays were at home. We really couldn't face another year like that, and when we were planning when to claim our annual leave, Matthias remarked that he desperately wanted a holiday where we went somewhere, I remarked that I was desperate to see the ocean, and he (who is the booker and planner in our household) investigated a bit and suggested Southwold. It was a really good decision.

( What we did on our holiday )

I'll do another post in the next couple of days about the books I read while on holiday, because they were a great bunch, several chosen on the basis of reviews people in my Dreamwidth circle have posted.