• The Good Place: Season Four: OH, my god. This is just deeply touching and KIND and so human. I had followed this little team of idiots thru three years of forking bullshirt and it paid off so well. This series has cemented itself as a firm reminder of the value of letting a thing end well. 

• Supernatural rewatching - I had been on a speed run to catch up to the current season (15!) of Supernatural before the series ends, so I had gotten into the habit of sitting down and watching an episode per day for the last... eh, month or two? Now I am actually caught up, I started to re-watch a bit, starting with the season that I started with - season four! I have to say this, the last three seasons of SPN finally feel like they are being written by a team of people who have some interest in exploring the vast chasms of canons, and I adore that. The loose threads are being tied up! The plot holes are being patched! Season 14 and 15 have been in the firm Greatest Hits territory for the show. If that's your jam, it's a good time to catch up or rewatch and see if you still like it. 

• The Untamed, which is slower going for me due to the fact that I don't speak Mandarin. Subtitles take a piece of media out of the 'watchable while super sick' category, usually, but this is still pretty fun and easy to follow when I was a little bit more together. It's delightfully goofy, tho, and if you are feeling lost with the first few episodes, just get to the end of episode two - a lot of show takes place in a prolonged flashback that starts in that episode. Once I made it there, I felt like I started to get a much better sense of the characters and the real dynamic of the show. Commentary on the social elements of the show has also been helpful - Chinese tropes are gonna be different than American ones, and That's Okay. 

Literally, actually, about the gloom - it's cold and drear as balls, kids.

Let's have some Real Life Updates!

Condo Flood Update: 

So, The Upstairses were trying to be frugal and do the insulation removal (and maybe installation?) by themselves to reduce the cost - which is showing me, again, that Ms. Upstairs is a bit of an idiot when it comes to thinking about short term costs for long term benefit. We are getting a Very Reduced Price on this project thru our state's Green Energy Home Improvements process - a price that was further because the whole building is doing the insulation update at the same time.  So, instead of allowing the Trained and Insured Professionals handle this part of their job, they decided to remove the insulation themselves, which caused them to uproot the elderly, dead end pipe that was in their attic, which caused the leak. Their plumber has fixed it and removed the dead end pipe and all looks well. 

So, with the Condo Trustees (aka, the four of us) having met, cordial relations have been restored, we have some things on our respective To Do Lists, and things are presumably fine for the upcoming Insulation Project (This Time With Fucking Professionals, Jeez).

The question remains unaddressed, tho: DID they have the right to be doing construction work in the attic without talking to the rest of the condo trustees (aka, US) first? My reading of the master deed suggest that they really, really did not - the boundaries of each unit's domain end at the upper finishing layer of the ceiling, and the attic seems like it falls under the unenumerated clause of the "Common Spaces and Facilities" clause of the deed - certainly the pipe they hit did, as well as the structures of the roof itself. 

I did not bring this up at the meeting because, why make it contentious if you don't have to? and, now, understanding that they were pulling up insulation that they'd been discussing with the contractor as part of the approved insulation project, I felt like they might have a reasonable case to make that this would have been pre-approved as it were. But I don't feel quite easy about how to address it for next time, and I feel like a legal reading would side with my interpretation of the attic being part of the common spaces. 

This is all made more complicated by the fact that there is an Improvements Clause, that allows each unit to improve spaces that are attached to only their unit "with the approval of 50% of the condo trustees", aka, with just that unit's owners approving it. Initially, this seems to have been written to allow people to enclose their porches, if they want to, but would potentially cause trouble on the issue of their DIY project. Ugh. Thus, I am opting to leave the whole thing alone unless they make another foray into Stupid Home Improvements. 

Little Women:
I had a truly lovely Saturday of lazing about with my Husbeast. We went to see Little Women, which was entirely new to him. I cried, he cried, I crowed about predicting him crying, we sang the praises of Greta Gerwig and had a lovely dinner out afterwards. 

On the film Little Women, I was moved and delighted. It was fasted paced and gorgeous.  I have only vague memories of the book and slightly more structured memories of the 90's adaptation with Winona Rider. I thought Saoirse Ronan was an excellent, focused Jo, who felt Some Kind of Queer to me (Ace? Lesbian? Genderqueer? Unknown and unimportant to pin down!). I think that Gerwig successfully transferred the Great Romance of Jo's life to her writing, and its culmination in her published novel,  and moved away from the idea that Jo's Great Romantic Focus should be Some Dude. Florence Pugh as Amy was deeply felt and wonderful and well rooted. Laurie the Dude was, as always, kind of a consolation prize of a person - if Amy had just won the lottery, I would have felt better for her. All in all, it felt like the very best of Fix-It Fic - rooted in love of the source material, and willing to break the letter of the adaptation to fit the spirit. 

Church Stuff: 
I have accepted a position on the board of my little church, which I have been gently prodded towards several times before. But this was a chaotic good move - it was rooted in a general oozing towards interest in being on the board that has come up over the last few years as the leadership of the board has gotten younger and queerer and better populated with people I know and respect.  So, now I am on the board and will have some voice and voting to do. 

Since it happened rather quickly, I am now playing catch-up with what the board meetings are actually going to be like - apparently dinner and conversation and prayer make up the first hour's business, which makes me vaguely infuriated but I suspect may be crucial in getting anything done. People are bad at handling their feelings - might as well give them space to do it. 

The weirdness of this choice started immediately - my exist from the annual meeting at which I joined the board immediately ended with several people coming up and thanking me and talking to me in a way that I have scrupulously avoided. We'll see how that goes, but it might just be that this is part of the So Now You're Helping Organize A Church. 

Knitting:
I have hit a metaphorical snag in my lace project - one section is Uncharted, with only written instructions, which I irritates me beyond all reason. Every other section of this lace sampler has a chart! They are BAD, but they EXIST. I have been able to find a chart online for this pattern and I will see if I can adapt it to the written instructions, but I am miffed. 

My dishcloth project, aka, excuses to use up my cotton yarn, is producing scrubbies for family now, so it's relaxing and generally not too challenging. 
 

Fannish and Bookish Updates

I have been stuck on Soldier's Heart by Alex51234 as my reading for a while now - the updates are regular and good, so it's not that the author's done anything to me on that front! But I am just finding the headspace the writing puts me in so entrancing that I find it hard to break away from it. I end up reading chapters multiple times, and I'm debating starting the fic over to read it from the top. But I think I should hold out on that for the last couple of chapters, so I get to finish the fic with it fresh in my mind. 

I have also been reading A Private Reason for This by Femme (femmequixotic) which might make it into a rec list one of these days. I'm having trouble finishing it because I keep getting to parts where a character (and they are well done characters!) has a thought about themselves that is a little Too Vulnerable and I feel I have to look away in victorian prudishness at the humanness on display. I don't think of myself as being in Harry Potter fandom, so I'm honestly really enjoying this primarily as a detective story, but some of the elements of a well plotted crime tv series that I love just fall flat for me on the page. I don't read detective novels really at all. 

To be fair, some of the resistance is less a desire to remain in 2019 for any virtue of its own than a fervent wish to not have to get back to working in the office. I functionally took 3 strategic days off and got nearly 3 weeks vacation out of it!

Personal: 
I got to see my sister at her new house and she had a Major Life Event to celebrate with the family and extended relations before Christmas, and then we had a fairly chill Christmas at her house. Me and The Husbeast were in charge of food and catering and early morning walks for my dad's dog. It was delightfully quite and chill. 

Upon arriving home, we had some time to relax and hosted a small New Year's party. 

Most recently, we did a run on Ikea and came back with a wingback chair that I am honestly wild about, and got a sleeper couch for the small bedroom to give incoming guests a proper place to rest. Both are good purchases -  I'm still really pleased with the condo we ended up with and I think the small bedroom for guests is going to be lovely. 

-I honestly just enjoyed the hell out of Knives Out (2019), which I know I mentioned at the time.  It really nailed that conspiratorial element of mysteries, where you-the-audience feel like you're putting the piece of the mystery together at the same time as the detective. In this case, there's an element where A Twist makes you think you've solved the main mystery and sets you off cheering for a character to solve a different puzzle, but you're never left behind - the movie wants you to follow along. It never breaks the rules of a good mystery, and there's a respect for the genre that I really approve of there. 

I have a ficlet idea in my head -SOME SPOILERS HERE-  (Marta/Benoit, slow burn, they stay in touch after the events of the film. He's too old for her, and he knows it - she deserves someone who sees bright and kind thing in her and values it because it mirrors something in them, not like Benoit, who loves the heart of her as someone who has come to see innocence as a rare treasure.  But, sometimes, he needs a medical opinion and he'll let himself call her for advice. Even if there's a doctor closer, even when she's demurs that she's outside her field of expertise - he just wants to hear her voice, sometimes, and if she tells him how things are going with her mom's case, and the lawsuit, and how Meg's doing in school. And then there's the trial, of course, and his testimony is clear and comprehensive and he stays in a hotel on the other side of town, but they have dinner at her home and Marta's mother makes shrimp and they talk until all hours. And eventually Marta decides that the publishing company needs to take on new writers, so she asks Benoit to read some of the manuscripts she receives, and they talk long into the night over the phone and Benoit cups the phone to his ear to listen to her talk about pacing and plot and poison and he can see perfectly how her lips shape the sounds.) that I'm probably never going to write. 

-I finished the first season of The Witcher! Apparently all I need to like Henry Cavill is to visually make him as unlike Superman as possible. (He was, in my opinion, a terrible Superman because he lacks the fundamental earnestness and unflinching compassion of Superman - like Mr. Rogers with laser beams.) I'm not sure I would recommend the Witcher, tho I enjoyed it tremendously - I don't know that the plot holds up if you don't have a background with the games or books. While I think the worldbuilding is actually quite interesting, for a lot of show the screen is too damn close to black and white for it to really have an impact - visually, I mean, it's very monochrome.

I keep meaning to finish The Crown and The Mandalorian. 

I have seen Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. It has cemented my belief that any film JJ Abrams directs has more to do with any other project by JJ Abrams than the source material from which it arose. Overall, I was disappointed.