rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


A historical children's novel by a Ukrainian-Canadian author, based on Ukrainian teenagers and children forced into slavery during WWII. After watching her neighbors and finally her family getting dragged off by the Nazis, Lida, a Christian Ukrainian girl, is kidnapped along with her younger sister. They're immediately separated and Lida is sent to a horrendous work camp. She's skilled at sewing, which keeps her useful and so alive for a while. But then the Nazis need bombs more than uniforms...

This book is an impressive feat of walking the line between being honest and straightforward about how terrible conditions are while not being too overwhelming for children to read. Lida and the other girls endure and try to support each other. Lida gives a Jewish girl her crucifix necklace to help hide her identity, and an older girl advises Lida to lie about her age so she isn't killed immediately for being too young to work. The German seamstress Lida works with (an employee, not a prisoner) is occasionally casually kind to her, but also gets a gift of looted clothing from a probably murdered French woman, and gets Lida to meticulously remove the woman's stitched-in initials and re-sew them with her own. A Hungarian political prisoner, who gets better soup than the Ukrainians, advises Lida to say she's Polish, as that will improve her her food. Later, Lida muses, It seemed that just as there were different soups, there were different ways of being killed, depending on your nationality.

Read more... )

The book is interesting as a depiction of an aspect of WWII that isn't written about much, a compelling read, and a moving story about some people trying to keep hope and caring - and rebellion - alive when others are being as bad as humans can get. It's part of a trio of books involving overlapping characters, but stands completely on its own.

The afterword says that Skrypuch based the book on her interviews with a survivor.
petra: CGI Obi-Wan Kenobi with his face smudged with dirt, wearing beige, visible from the chest up. A Clone Trooper is visible over one shoulder. (Obi-Wan - Clones ftw)
[personal profile] petra
Dance in the oldest boots I own (5106 words) by Petra
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Hondo Ohnaka
Characters: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Hondo Ohnaka, Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Winter Soldier AU, Inspired by Fanart, Not a Superhero AU
Summary:

Hondo finds Obi-Wan frozen in carbonite and decides that he is worth more than the bounty on his head.

Obi-Wan is discomfited to learn what has been happening in the galaxy since he's been out of commission, but not nearly as discomfited as he is by finding out what his erstwhile padawan has been doing.

Two chapters of a Winter Soldier AU.

jjhunter: silhouetted woman by winding black road; blank ink tinted with green-blue background (silhouetted JJ by winding road)
[personal profile] jjhunter
Marianne Kuzujanakis: Book Review: “Take Joy” by Jane Yolen
it is so important to understand that writing is a way of thinking and existing, and not just an act of doing

Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty
It’s easy to pass judgment on ourselves and each other for what we’re “already doing” or failing to do. But as an organizer, I’m concerned with what might motivate or allow people to act differently.

Sasha Chapin @ Sasha's Newsletter: How to like everything more: on the skill of enjoyment
In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other. This is not how enjoyment is taught—the only tip people typically receive re enjoyment is to “be mindful.” I think this is a suggestion to adopt what meditators call “one-pointed focus,” a form of concentrated, narrowed attention on a small portion of conscious experience. It’s a mediocre suggestion for a couple of reasons. First, this is hard to do well, even for seasoned meditators. Second, it is far from the only enjoyment-producing mental motion.

Liz Neeley @ Liminal: Week 19: What now & what’s next in science and higher ed
Everything is terrible, but I brought you some plums.
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Funnily enough, the thing that gets me to actually read a MXTX novel is to assess getting it as a birthday present for someone who would give me no info on their current reading tastes and said they were willing to get anything, so based on some of their previous tastes, I considered a MXTX book and figured TGCF would be the most likely book of interest. So out from the library I got the first volume out to read it and assess it.

And it's funny and it's good, so I keep reading to see if the volume ends on a cliffhanger or not, and then I get to the Banyue arc. And I had been told the Banyue arc was racist but I was so not prepared for how racist it is. Right off the bat, it's "hello, nice to meet you, I'm a racist caricature" and then it *keeps getting worse*. So I plan to get the other volumes out from the library and read them myself, because this is enjoyable, but I'm unsure of the birthday present situation. I may go with something else.

schneefink: River walking among trees, from "Safe" (Default)
[personal profile] schneefink
One of my favorite things about not having plans and not having to study is that I can do things spontaneously, like meet up with friends to go shopping and have food and then go for a walk to see some sheep and goats that I had no idea were there so my biologist friend could delightedly poke at the dung to find beetles.
One of my favorite things about staying at my friends' house for a few days is that I don't have "I should do chores/clean/tidy" run in the back of my head at all times. I still found things to procrastinate on - an exchange letter, leaving fic comments etc - but overall it was very relaxed. I'm getting better at Beat Saber.

Books I read recently:
The Burning Kingdoms trilogy by Tasha Suri: The Jasmine Throne, the Oleander Sword, the Lotus Empire. This series has been on my to-read list for a while and I finally got around to reading it. I enjoyed it a lot! I enjoyed the Indian-inspired setting and the complicated politics of it with many different groups, and I liked the development of the main characters both separately and together. Spoilers )

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett: I enjoyed this much less than the first book in the series, sadly. At one point I complained to LB, who's actually worked at a university, that I thought the portrayal of academia was unrealistic, and he said that it's not that unrealistic provided the character in question is a bit of an asshole. Spoilers )

The Firm by John Grisham: The first non-SFF book I read since April 2022, according to Goodreads, wow okay. And the first non-SFF novel since February 2022. I decided to read it because the lecturer of one of my business law classes mentioned it, and I didn't give up early even though the writing is clunky. In the first half I really liked the slowly growing sense of creeping dread from the dangers the reader sees but the main character doesn't. Spoilers: that was the best part ) I don't regret that I read it but only because now I know.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins: I started with this one instead of "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" because I got this one first from the library, but in hindsight I wonder if that was a mistake. It worked on its own but I strongly suspect I missed many connections. Conversely, it's been many years since I read the original trilogy but there were almost too many connections and similarities for my taste, it seemed a bit repetitive. To be fair there's only so many ways the Hunger Games can differ. Spoilers )

(no subject)

May. 30th, 2025 11:23 pm
skygiants: Rue from Princess Tutu dancing with a raven (belle et la bete)
[personal profile] skygiants
The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )

MCYTblr AUfest letter

May. 30th, 2025 10:49 pm
schneefink: Hotguy and Cuteguy thumbsup (Hermitcraft Hotguy and Cuteguy)
[personal profile] schneefink
Placeholder
(I didn't manage to finish this in time for the event to start, sorry, but all the likes/dislikes and even most of the prompts are in my sign-up, I was just hoping to expand on them a bit. Definitely this week though.)
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


In a magical version of the medieval Middle East, a middle-aged single mom, who was once the notorious pirate Amina al-Sirafi, is dragged out of retirement for one final job.

This book is a complete and utter delight from start to finish. It has all the pirate tropes you could possibly want - sea battles! sea monsters! quests for magical objects! loyal crews! tossed overboard! marooned! - and sly twists on others. It's got great characters. It's got hilarious dialogue and character interactions. The world is wonderfully detailed and varied, full of plausible historical details and with a lovely faux-historical feel. There are stories within stories. It's all marvelous.

As a child, I had a book called Muslim Saints and Mystics, which was a translation of parts of the Tazkirat al-Awliyā, a collection of stories about Muslim saints written around 1200. It was funny and magical, and some of the stories-within-stories in Amina al-Sirafi have a similar feel. The novel neatly toes the line between dialogue that feels fairly contemporary and a plausibly historical mindset. Amina is horny as hell, but a serious Muslim who believes in not having sex before marriage; as a result, she's had five husbands. There's a major trans character, in addition to several gay characters; Amina has come across people before who prefer to live as the other sex, and takes it in stride without resorting to Tumblr-esque labels or attitudes.

I loved every moment of this book, and was delighted that though it has a reasonable ending, it is the start of a trilogy. It's the first book I've read by Chakraborty, and I'm excited to read her City of Brass series.

Read more... )

spring in Dairyland

May. 29th, 2025 08:57 pm
chanter1944: a lilac tree in bloom (Wisconsin spring: lilac season)
[personal profile] chanter1944
A few small but significant warm fuzzies from my corner of the isthmus, because why not?

My winter thyme (insert temporality jokes here, I already have) is happy, as is the pineapple sage. The [vehement swearing redacted] squirrels are still digging in my daylily pot, but the daylily doesn't seem to be too bothered. And both my spinach and dill are growing so well they need harvesting; the dill's getting long, and the spinach is flourishing in all directions. :)

We may, and I'm not certain I can be sure without a visual ID, have a northern mockingbird in the area! I didn't think we got them this far west, but I was absolutely hearing snippets of multiple other birds' songs in succession - cardinal, robin, house finch - from exactly the same location, none of them duplicated in full. Next time I hear whoever that is, I'll call AIRA and see if they can pin down a visual. I wish them luck searching through the local trees. :P

Blooming lilacs are a joy all their own. Sniff sniff sniffity sniiiiiff. :D

And speaking of sniffing. On my usual lunch break walk, I met a passerby going in the other direction, clearly accompanied by at least one puppydog. I melted, asked if I could say hi, and got an affirmative, but a warning that both (!) dogs were bouncy friendlies with a tendency to jump for joy. I took a guess, said they sounded like retrievers, and yep! Two goldens, neither very old. One was just a year, which is absolutely still a puppy when you're a retriever, and particularly when you're a golden goofball. I said as much to said teenage floof, while snuggling him and getting licked in the face. Awww. They were both super sweet, which... well, retrievers. <3 My day was brightened, which is also not unexpected when retrievers are around.

(no subject)

May. 29th, 2025 07:59 pm
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


The absolute greatest thing about having medical trauma and having to get medical tests done is when you tell the person doing the test that you have medical trauma and please X, Y, and Z, and they then proceed to ignore it and give you more medical trauma.

And you never know! Until you get there and do it! If the person is going to have great bedside manner and everything will be wonderful, or it isn't, and you just have to roll the fucking dice.

jesse_the_k: portable shortwave radio (radio)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k

The Met Office’s Shipping Forecast Key announces weather conditions in 31 areas around the UK. For internet users, real-time info is now available for each area via a handy-drop down

But it's the radio broadcast which has soothed me on many an anxious evening. Here’s five hours worth: https://youtu.be/CxHa5KaMBcM

They use a highly structured, compact format limited to 370 words:

  • Time and Date of the active forecast being read
  • List Gale Warnings current around the British Isles
  • General Synopsis
  • Area Forecasts, within each
    • Location
    • Wind direction
    • Wind speed according to Beaufort scale
    • Precipitation
    • Visibility
  • Inshore Waters Forecast

The Beaufort Scale provides vivid descriptions of different wind patterns, as befits a tool standardized before radio or photography. For example,

Wind force 5, also known as "Fresh Breeze," is 29-38 km/h or 19-24 miles per hour or 17-21 knots. You can recognize this force when Small trees in leaf begin to sway; crested wavelets form on inland waters. Moderate waves, many white horses. Probable wave height of 2.0 meters, 2.5 meters max, with a "sea state" of 4.

The newsreaders develop a very soothing rhythm—so consistent that many people have created "better sleeping through weather awareness" content on YouTube.

For radio nerds like me, nothing finer than this 30 minute deep dive: The Shipping Forecast: A Beginner’s Guide

Unlucky

May. 29th, 2025 04:39 pm
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
A hundred years from now, chroma key colors are going to be considered unlucky to wear in a set of professions like newscasting, and nobody is going to quite realize why.

Unplanned hiatus

May. 29th, 2025 10:51 am
beatrice_otter: Me in red--face not shown (Default)
[personal profile] beatrice_otter
I just realized that I haven't looked at Dreamwidth in I have no idea how long. At least a week, probably. I wasn't especially busy; I did take a few days with my family for Memorial Day weekend mini-vacation (which we have done every year since before I was born), but judging by how far I've gone back in my reading list and haven't started seeing posts I recognize, I had stopped well before that.

Normally, checking DW is part of my daily routine. My flist isn't hugely active, so there's no need to check more than once a day, but it's the only place that I can reliably check in with several long-term friends, and of course a lot of exchanges are mostly run through DW and it makes it easier to keep up with what's planned and what's in progress. I missed the signups for Fandom 5k, and none of the pinch hits are things I'd want to write, which is a shame, because I prefer the longer exchanges. Ah, well, I guess that means I will have more time for shorter-minimum thematic exchanges instead.

If you posted something important and I missed it ... sorry! Feel free to let me know in the comments!

Food and games

May. 29th, 2025 08:08 pm
schneefink: Gail from Phoenotopia: Awakening next to flowers in a cave (PHOA Gail in Mul cave)
[personal profile] schneefink
I cooked! Literally. (It took a surprising amount of effort not to address a non-existent "chat" here xD) There's a completely arbitrary (and very silly) distinction in my brain about what counts as "proper" cooking, and most of what I prepare for myself doesn't or barely counts. But today I made a pasta-tomato-ham casserole, which undoubtedly is proper cooking, and it was very good.
I really wanted to properly cook something because I'm currently house-sitting and the house has a very well stocked kitchen - I'm envious of their spice selection - but it turns out that not having my own tools, like working scales, and knowing where everything is is a disadvantage and it about evens out. (Most of these spices I don't even know what to do with tbh.)

I've also played quite a bit of Beat Saber already. Got a some expert level completions, but only managed normal for other songs. It's nice to play outside, too.

I've barely seen the skunk I'm house-sitting for, he's still in his winter phase apparently and eats little and mostly sleeps all day, and the one time he saw me he ran away. Nothing to worry about, according to his owners; he's getting old for a skunk, too. Beforehand I was mildly apprehensive about him demanding lots of attention, now I'm more worried that I wouldn't even notice if something was wrong.

Last weekend I played Islets, an indie metroidvania by the same solo dev who made Crypt Custodian. I only meant to try it out on Saturday and ended up playing for six hours, and then I finished the next day with 95% completion. It was a lot of fun! Importantly, movement feels good, and the exploration is fun. I played on easy because there were some bullet hell bosses and I don't like those, but on easy it was fine.

The Big Four

May. 29th, 2025 11:53 pm
meteordust: (Default)
[personal profile] meteordust
French Open: Rafael Nadal honoured at Roland-Garros as Federer, Djokovic and Murray return

"You gave me some hard times on court but I really enjoyed a lot pushing myself to the limit every single day to compete with all of you," Nadal said.

"At the end, tennis is just a game. Sometimes we feel it's a little bit more but I think we understand it's really only a game.

"So that means [everything] for me that all of you are here. That's a great message to the world that we can be good friends even if we had the best rivalries. Thank you very, very much for everything during all these years."


An era that seemed like it would last forever. At least the memories will.

wednesday reads and things

May. 28th, 2025 05:05 pm
isis: Isis statue (statue)
[personal profile] isis
What I've recently finished reading:

A Drop of Corruption, the sequel to The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. I liked it a lot (Din and Ana are great characters!), and I thought it was easier to follow than the first book, in the sense that I figured out the major twists and culprits before they happened (which is not a criticism, it means the appropriate breadcrumbs were dropped). The worldbuilding continues to be very weird and cool. Definitely one of the best Sherlock Holmes fanfics I've read! :-)

What I'm reading now:

I've gone back to the Shardlake series by C. J. Sansom and am now on the fifth book, Heartstone.

What I'm watching now:

Still Andor. The other night I dreamed we were giving a party, except our house was basically Mon Mothma's house on Chandrila and the party was like the wedding episode. And then I went into the bathroom to change clothes and I noticed that my husband had left the tap dripping water so the cats could drink it, just like in real life :-) And then I woke up.

What I'm playing now:

Still Mass Effect: Andromeda, heading toward the endgame. It's still fun! Except for having to kill another Architect, which is basically the thresher maw of the Andromeda galaxy, and I still hate both of those enemies!
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija


Sciona, the first woman ever admitted to the University of Magic, takes on Thomil, a janitor from a discriminated-against culture, as her lab assistant, and they both learn dark secrets about their world.

Thomil is introduced when his clan makes a desperate run across deadly ground to get to the safety of a city surrounded by a magical shield. The shield protects against bitter cold and the deadly Blight, which randomly zaps and dissolves people, but the area around the city is particularly Blight-infested. Only Thomil and his baby niece survive. When they arrive, they find that the city natives hate their race and has consigned them all as a permanent underclass.

Ten years later, Sciona, a well-to-do young woman in the city, is preparing for her magic exam to try to get into the sexist magic university, which no woman has ever passed. Though she does pass, all the male mages but her mentor hate her and hassle her. The only other person who's even remotely nice to her is Thomil, the janitor, who is assigned as her lab assistant as a cruel joke. But though Sciona is racist and classist, and Thomil is mildly sexist in an oblivious way, they find that they kind of get along...

Wang has an engaging, easy-read style for the most part, the intros to the two main characters are quite compelling, and despite the heavy-handed axes of privilege themes, Thomil and Sciona have a nice dynamic.

I said "for the most part." The exception is the magic system, which I think is basically computer programming via magic typewriters (spellographs). The wizards program a spell to access a specific area of the magical Otherrealm (which they can't see or sense in any way, so they're just plotting points on a grid) to grab magical energy or matter from it. But we get MUCH more detailed and lengthy descriptions of it, from long explanations to actual spells:

CONDITION 1: DEVICE is 15 Vendric feet higher than its position at the time of activation.

ACTION 1: FIRE will siphon from POWER an amount of energy no lower than 4.35 and no higher than 4.55 on the Leonic scale.

ACTION 2: FIRE will siphon within the distance of DEVICE no higher than 3 Vendric inches.

If and only if CONDITION 1 is met, ACTION 1 and ACTION 2 will go into effect.


The first half is Sciona and Thomil working on various spells, interspersed with very heavy-handed commentary on colonialism, sexism, and how Sciona totally gets feminism when it applies to her personally but is oblivious to all other isms. Sciona is an awful, self-centered person and Thomil is mostly perfect. Almost exactly halfway through, there is a shocking reveal. At least, it shocked many readers. It did not shock me.

Read more... )

Despite what the plot description sounds like, Sciona and Thomil do not have a romance beyond occasional sexy feelings. It's a magical dystopia/dark academia, I think similar to Babel (which I could not get very far into) but less anvillicious in that it does not have literal footnotes saying stuff like "This is a racist comment and racism is bad." (In the bookshop, I have Blood Over Bright Haven tagged "If you like Babel you will like this.") Sadly for M. L. Wang, this comparative subtlety got them some reviews on Goodreads accusing them of condoning Sciona being a bad person and endorsing her beliefs.

I did not care for this book but I can see how it would work for many readers, especially if they're shocked by the twist at the halfway mark.

5 Things Always Make a Post!

May. 27th, 2025 04:01 pm
oracne: turtle (Default)
[personal profile] oracne
1. I participated in Science! This involved an MRI of my right calf while at rest and before, during, and after doing a minute of movement. I got paid, and used part of it to finally buy the Shape Note song book a college friend (from choir) worked on. The next step is to try and make at least a few of the monthly sings in my neighborhood this summer, while I'm off from regular choir.

Read more... )

Recaf

May. 27th, 2025 01:09 pm
azurelunatic: "beautiful addiction", electron microscope photo of caffeine (caffeine)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
We know about Decaf, where by some process, caffeine is removed from coffee or whatever.

I present: Recaf. Where maybe decaf isn't doing it today so you add in a bit of caffeine powder or something.

(I have a flask of decaf on me today, and then we stopped for breakfast and got Coke, and I said "recaf" and had to make the definition.)

Things

May. 28th, 2025 12:48 am
vass: a man in a bat suit says "I am a model of mental health!" (Bats)
[personal profile] vass
(One day early or thirteen days late, depending how you count.)

Books
Finished reading Freya Marske's A Restless Truth. Despite how long it took me to read it, it was a good fantasy romance novel. If it weren't the middle novel in a trilogy with m/m couples for books one and three, I'd be reccing this one to nearly every f/f romance reader I know, actually. As it is, well, that recommendation stands if either you read m/m too or don't mind reading book two of a trilogy as a standalone when it really would work better as book two.

It's not a heist novel, but it pushed some of the same anxiety buttons for me that heist plots do, which is probably at least part of why it took me so long.

A thing I'd like to note: a lot of times when I read f/f romance by an author who mostly writes m/f or m/m, the f/f doesn't ring very convincing to me (same problem with m/f romance authors writing m/m.) This was Freya Marske's second published novel, so I don't know what she "usually" writes, but this did ring convincing. I believed that Violet was bi, and I believed in Maude's lesbian awakening, and I believed in their attraction to each other.

My paper copy of Cameron Reed's The Fortunate Fall arrived in the mail. I read it back in uni (borrowed from the Rowden White Library in the early 2000s) but hadn't owned it until now.

About midway through Jazz Money's how to make a basket, a 2021 book of poems in which Wiradjuri words grow up through the cracks of the English.

Started reading KJ Charles' Death in the Spires. (Waiting for the "in spires" pun to drop.)

Not books but literary analysis: I read Andrea Long Chu's 2022 article Hanya's Boys, on Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. I haven't read the novel itself, and don't think I want to. And I think Chu is very incisive and good at what she does. But also: wow, mean. Maybe the meanest literary review I've read in I don't know how long. Came away feeling defensive on Yanagihara's behalf as someone who has ever read even one whump fanfic.

Fandom
Prophet: [personal profile] rydra_wong posted her post-canon 'a word you've never understood'. I don't know that I can recommend it to people who haven't read Prophet (I can recommend they read Prophet and then read Rydra's fic) but if you have read the book and liked it and are someone who reads fanfic then I unreservedly recommend this fic. I've been looking forward to this one since Rydra started writing it (under extremely stressful writing conditions) and I'm so happy she did.

Comics
I cackled out loud (very loudly) at the (nsfw-ish) recent Dumbing of Age strip titled 'Fingering'. And then went "aww" in a sad way at the next page. Joyce and Dorothy are both going through some things, and afaik poor Joe has no idea.

Making
Made another linocut, this one a bookmark-shaped print of stacks of books. It came out nicely: I'm pleased. I like the idea of bookmark-shaped lino printing: it's a manageable size for a project, and produces objects I can use, or that I can give as gifts without worrying about giving clutter.

Tech
Felt the urge to spend some days spending more time changing my laptop's window manager configurations than talking to people. You know how it is. And it does look better than it did before, although somehow I changed the lockscreen without realising I'd done so, which was a bit of a shock when I locked the screen for the first time after that.

It was after I wrote that post (Tuesday last week, I think?) that my laptop's wifi card started disconnecting randomly while I was using it and needing the external wifi/radio switch[*] jiggled to reconnect it. Then it stopped reconnecting and I had a crash course in Linux kernel drivers for WWAN, WLAN, and Bluetooth, what rfkill does, the difference between soft-blocked and hard-blocked wifi, etc.

cut for length )

Games
More Slay the Spire: still no infinity deck, but I got the 'Ooh, Donut' achievement for killing Donu with a Feed card. So that was satisfying.

Garden
I bought a little (less than one square metre) pop-up greenhouse tent thing, set it up outside, and planted the basil cutting there. A few days later I woke up and found that it was gone. Tent and all.

I have no idea what could cause that. Did I not put the stakes in deep enough? Did some basil-loving animal come into my back yard? ???

Weather
It's finally cold. Cold enough, in fact, that last week I purchased an electric foot warmer for those "oops, my toes are all corpse white" times. I'll keep looking for a less e-wasteful solution, but I'd like to still have toes by the time I come up with it.

Miscellaneous
Last week I had to get a routine blood test. I noticed that there was a case under the exam bed across the room from the chair I was in. I couldn't tell what instrument it was, it was a bit too broad and flat for a trumpet. Banjo, maybe? Ukulele? "Aha," I thought: "an opportunity to make small talk as the humans do!"

When it was my turn in the conversation to provide a line, I asked "What instrument do you play?"
"I actually don't play an instrument," the phlebotomist said. "It's funny that you thought I did..." and then followed my gaze to the case. "Oh! That's not an instrument. A patient gave me that. She was cleaning out and thought I might like it. It's actually an arm. A rubber one, for practising giving injections. She thought I could give it to the company, but they have their own training materials. I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Fancy dress, maybe?"
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