Atalanta Pendragonne

Clicky!

Also, I meant to say re: the utilities that you are all the best and I absolutely love you :)

(Still need to call National Grid and still don't wanna.)

Jenn's plan to self-set-up her own balanced billing + a random screwup with autopay that she didn't realize until we were in the hole + having to help a friend get out of an abusive relationship = omg.

I'm pretty sure that they legally can't actually shut us off until May 15th, and once we get the tax refund we can pay the entire past due bills... but there's no promise we will get that refund by that date, and I would be surprised if we do. I don't want to go a week without lights and hot water, or a fridge and stove.

I'm reasonably certain that if we pay even half the past due now, we can talk them into waiting for that refund. The entire total is something like $6k... I'm a little scared to look again, honestly. I just sorta glanced at the bills in horror.

I've got paypal and venmo, which is posted here, or if you can't see that and can and want to help out you can PM me. We can absolutely pay back (or forward!) as soon as that refund comes in. I know how much the refund is, it will cover these bills.

(I've also been sitting on posting this for a few days, so I better get it out before I chicken out again!)

I believe it is a brown thrasher. Google says they're not frequent feeder birds, but they like mealworms and I put out dried mealworms, so that'd do it.

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Some information here at Bluesky

If anybody has more links, please share!

(It was every bit as ridiculous as I thought it would be.)

And that led me to this thread and the corresponding subthread where he really just gets into it with me, for no fucking reason, on the subject of "no mass produced book series marketed towards children would depict homosexuality in 1997-2007. No publisher would take it on".

This is a factually untrue statement, and I have the booklists to prove it. I'm not saying these books were necessarily available to every kid who might reasonably have wanted to read them, but to say they didn't exist at all? I bought some of them from Scholastic book forms! Bruce Coville? He's a big name! The Skull of Truth came out in 1997! Norma Klein? She's a big name! People absolutely heard of her who read realistic YA fiction. Francesca Lia Block? I never read her, but I had heard about her, I knew people who read her books, I knew her books touched on homosexuality. But here he is, arguing with me about it! Why are we arguing about something so absurd?

At least I figured out why this is bugging me, and if I get another reply I will tell him. When he claims that these books did not exist, that no mainstream publisher would have printed any of them, that no mainstream bookseller would have stocked them in the children's or teens sections, he's buying into the bullshit queerphobic narrative that before X date, everything was hunky-dory and those people either a. didn't exist or b. were happily closeted.

In the a version of this narrative, things were better then, and it is all this publicity that makes people think they're LGBTQ. In the b version, things are immeasurably better now and all those LGBTQ people should just stfu already and be grateful. And key to either version is erasing the proof that it's just not true*.

And part of that proof is juvenile fiction published by mainstream publishers in the dark days of the 20th century that involve LGBTQ themes.

FFS, it's like another flavor of "Women didn't write sci-fi until yesterday" and yes we did. Don't fucking devalue their very real difficulties in getting published and staying published by saying they didn't exist at all.

(And if you're about to tell me that I grew up in a socially progressive part of the country, I know! But according to his claims, so did he, with a liberal family and a bookseller uncle to boot. If he never heard of a single YA book with LGBTQ themes at that age, I imagine that must be because he didn't ask anybody or look very hard. I didn't ask anybody or look very hard either, and I still bumped into them just, like, on the shelves! Neither of us was growing up in a Fundiegelical hellhole, so.)

Note: I would've asked him if he'd ever heard of Heather Has Two Mommies, but that turns out to have been printed by an indie publisher after all. I never woulda thunkit after all the press it got!

* It is measurably better now in some aspects. The important thing is that the past does not just get uniformly more queerphobic the further back you go, and in a way that maps perfectly onto modern bigotry.

"Said gave".

As in "He said gave consent for the procedure" or "My professor said gave me an F".

A search for this was productive, if mildly frustrating - there's a lot of other reasons for those words to appear next to each other, but it definitely does seem to appear in the sense I saw more often than you'd expect for a speaker error.

You can see some examples at the following places:

Also, it does not matter if they said gave consent in the past for the same action. Consent is about the here-and-now.

An attorney (or firm) can be relieved of the duties owed to previously clients is said give consent (in writing) to do so. (This one is so odd I'm not sure it isn't an error.)

Nebraska's Matt Rhule said gave an update on the status of Dylan Raiola....

My instructor said gave me an F

Dr. David Persse said gave an update on what wastewater showed



Of course, there's always the possibility that these are all just disfluencies, but it doesn't seem likely...?

So, at the end of the book, did they just decide to leave some other random world in the hands of a murderous adolescent? I guess they figured it was officially Not Their Problem, but all the same, that's some interesting decision making there! I mean, they did tell her that her lackeys were only pretending to carry out her orders, but all the same, it's hardly better.

Of course, these are the same grown men who decided to shove a magical spycam in said adolescent girl's bedroom mirror and then watch it themselves. However evil she is, that's still super skeevy. You can't tell me that was the best way to monitor her. It's the only thing in the book that can make me feel bad for Gwendolyn. Not very bad, but she does have the makings of a legitimate grievance here. A single legitimate grievance, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

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I can't find our 2023 tax returns. I was sure we filed, but... where is the documentary evidence? Did I file them and forget to email around everybody so we'd all have a copy? And if so, where is my copy?

I'm still 95% sure we filed but... how do I find out if we filed? Do I have to call the IRS? Ugh, that's gonna be a fun way to spend the weekend before tax day!