Dwarf Planet in Purple

The Dreamwidth people had some sort of "code push" over the weekend, so I thought I'd check to make sure everything still works around here. Apparently it does.

Anyhow. Yesterday I was thinking, "Hm, there was one Pennsic when I didn't bring my tent, but I can't remember why." So I went through my DW entries with "pennsic" tags. Turns out that was in 2017 and the only way I could register was as someone's "ghost," so I ended up in a borrowed mundane tent with a slightly smaller footprint than my own. Obviously the experience did not kill me. In fact, I had a blast, because that was the year that Wyn and Yaakov were elevated to Laurel.

Looking up past Pennsics and remembering the issues I had with the 1993 Honda Accord also reminded me that I'm glad I didn't have that vehicle for an extended period of time.

The packing is getting ramped up. So many things got put into different locations during the move. I just extracted a bunch of mundane necklaces and other doodads I don't want to bring to Pennsic from my "treasure box," a wooden box with a hinged mirror folded into the lid. I bought it years ago at a Pennsic shop called Tancred's Tangled Woods. I'm pretty sure the shop owner passed away before the next Pennsic took place, sadly.

And speaking of death, a friend whom I never met in person, but knew through LJ at first and later through Facebook, passed away a few days ago due to complications from heart surgery last month. He was at https://davidkevin.livejournal.com/ but hadn't updated that blog since the 50th anniversary of Star Trek's premiere in 2016, and I don't think he ever joined DW. His beloved wife Nila died of cancer several years ago, and one of his two grown sons kept everyone up to date on his condition via FB. Ad astra, David.

EDITED TO ADD: Tributes to David here (item #9 in the July 27 entry) and here.

Anniversaries...

My parents were married 74 years ago today.
Tom Cruise turns 60 today.
It's been six years since I danced in Sokiu Svente 2016 -- the Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival. (Today was the next Sokiu Svente, delayed two years because of the pandemic.)

And today makes 19 years since joining LiveJournal (which eventually led me to switch over to Dreamwidth).

How times have changed.

Stupid LJ, effectively owned by the Russian government, has decided for whatever reason to ban crossposting from DW. Not DW's fault, apparently. I'm sure you can read about it elsewhere on DW.

I've made my Jan. 25 entry public and I will write a separate entry over at LJ so that friends there can catch up on what I've been posting. Guess I'll be doing a lot more cutting and pasting in the future. *sigh*

In other news, I had a quiet weekend at home, between an online "visioning" session at church and lots of online classes from the University of Atlantia. The visioning session is part of the congregation's effort to set some new goals and put ourselves on a more sustainable trajectory for the future. I'll write more about that some other evening.

Some days are more productive than others. Yesterday I made progress on my next feature article, watched a session of the Toastmasters International virtual convention (the one that was supposed to be in Paris), and attended my friend's Zoom-based Zumba class (yay for exercise in a pandemic). Today I went to the store to pick up a few things, but then I learned that an SCA acquaintance on the West Coast had passed away from cancer. We weren't close, but still, it's sad. I ended up taking a nap.

Tomorrow I hope to be more productive. I am scheduled to interview a scientist for my feature article, so I had better be more productive.

I temporarily forgot my new LJ password, but I think I remembered it now. If you missed the last couple of entries that didn't get crossposted, hop on over to http://luscious-purple.dreamwidth.org.

Also, I dug out an oldie-but-goodie LJ icon to bring over to this site. So many of my old LJ icons (inactive, so invisible to anyone but me) are even more outdated than my DW icons. But I found one that still applies.

Over and out.

To see if I can crosspost to LJ. I haven't been trying lately.

1. Lately, my LJ layout seems to be completely broken on the Chrome browser, but it looks normal on Firefox. Has anyone else (or, anyone else who still does LJ/DW, that is) experienced this problem?

2. After a year and a half, I finally updated my "Lady Patricia of Trakai" blog. Check it out.

3. Today I spent some time working on my class for next week's Known World Dance and Music Symposium. Teaching a class on a subject on which there is exactly *one* extant English-language book will be ... interesting.

4. Today has also been the 40th anniversary of my high school graduation. I think the boy toy is officially tired of the subject. :-)

5. Little by little, I'm going through my files on both my computer's hard drive and my external hard drive to weed out duplicates. Especially on the external hard drive ... I've found five or six copies of some of the files on the external drive, thanks to various backup efforts. I had been really close to running out of room on both drives. Now I'm a little less close.

http://luscious-purple.livejournal.com/1247108.html

I guess the service is now old enough to vote????

I still can't crosspost to LJ because I still haven't accepted the new, evil TOS. I suppose I'll have to, eventually. But I have so much else to do this week.

I started my LJ in July 2003 and began this DW blog in March 2010. My crossposting between the two platforms was a bit spotty at first, and occasionally I posted to only one or the other because I was focusing whatever I was saying on someone who was on just one site. Since March 2010, though, I suspect that 99 percent of the content is crossposted.

If I start importing my LJ to DW, will the previously crossposted posts made after March 2010 be duplicated in DW, so that I have two copies of every post from 2010 on? How does the importing function handle entries that might be slightly different from DW to LJ? Would it be better to simply start a new DW account -- "luscious_archive," let's say -- and import the whole LJ shebang into it, and leave it as a record of my LJ activity?

I never did get lj_book to work at all. I'd like to back up my LJ as PDF copies of each entry on my external hard drive, but dang, that is one repetitive, lengthy, boring chore. And I don't have time for that chore. I have a feature article due early next week and a job interview on Thursday afternoon (at a place where I've already been turned down for three jobs over the last few years, but oh well), and I have very little money and I desperately need the cash from the writing job, and yeah, stress stress stress. Plus, I need to do some budget stuff for church, and oh, yeah, the congregation's search for a new settled minister is going to take just a bit longer because none of the candidates we wanted actually wanted us. *sigh*

Plus, I hear that DW's import function is swamped because of the latest LJ crisis. So, yeah, I'm not going to deal with it this week.

I think I've caught up with everybody from the friending meme, so it's about time that I started explaining myself to my new friends (and this may be a refresher course for longtime friends as well).

I'm Patty, Pat, or Patricia (not Trish). Born and raised in Massachusetts, I still identify with that state, even though I have lived in Maryland for 23 years now. I am simultaneously an only child and the youngest of at least five -- my mother had a whole string of miscarriages before I came along. When I was growing up, I thought *everyone* waited 11 years after their wedding to become parents. Ha ha ha. So, yeah, my parents were "old" parents. In fact, today would have been my mother's 96th birthday.

So, yeah, I've been "on my own" since my mother died when I was 37. My father died shortly before my 23rd birthday. At least he got to see me graduate from college ... the first time around.

I have bachelor's degrees in both journalism and physics (different universities, different decades) and a master's degree in astronomy. Didn't get to my doctorate; the master's degree is worth about as much as a postage stamp in the job market. I did a lot of writing for trade magazines you've never heard of. For the past five years I've been freelancing, which means that I still write for some of those obscure publications, but for far less money. Sometimes I get really depressed and wonder why the hell I bothered to be the first in my family to go to college.

Anyhow, as you may have noticed from looking at my tags, I've been in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) almost as long as I've been on LJ. (See this for an explanation if you're unfamiliar.) Sometimes I wish I had joined the SCA much earlier in my life -- who knows what my life might look like by now -- but one can't turn the clock back. I just might as well make the best of whatever life I've got left.

Some other dramatis personae in this journal:

* Julia -- my beautiful gray and white cat. She came to live with me on July 14, 2009. (Don't worry, I love dogs too, I just don't have one in my life at the moment.)

* The boy toy -- this guy who has been living here in my condo (without a job) for some years now. I tend not to call him my boyfriend. More like the Doctor Who companion. I have no plans to marry him. People think I should throw him out, but I worry that I will be incapacitated with loneliness.

* Tall Dancer -- An unattached male SCAdian who lives 650 miles away. He was invited to our barony to teach some dances back in January and I ended up getting a wicked bad crush on him. Various things happened online. I guess we're just friends now. I have been unable to convince him to go to War of the Wings, a fairly large SCA event that is roughly equidistant from the two of us. But I'm going there anyway.

* R. -- A platonic male friend of mine for 30-plus years. Lives in northern Virginia. Politically conservative, so I try not to bring up the subject of politics. Huge LOTR fan. He has many, um, quirks, but he is part of a small group of friends who helped pull me out of a dark place when I was in my 20s, thus earning my lifelong thanks.

* T.H. -- A friend who has invited me to her house for Thanksgiving for many, many years. I mean, when I first started going, her nephew was in middle school, and he's now in his mid-20s. By now I know her entire family.

* Maugorn and Patches, CZ and Alex/Phoenix -- people I know both in real life and in LJ.

Other people to be explained when necessary.

Another fairly recent introductory post.

I think that's it for now. Feel free to ask questions.

Supposedly there is a meme now going around on LJ:



Hey, I'm all for the few remaining LJ users (well, "few" comparatively speaking) finding each other.

The first time I tried to comment on the original post, it got marked as "spam," probably because I included a link to the SCA. I took it out and then the comment posted. Anyway, here are my answers the way I originally wrote them.

Intro
1.) Name (What you want to be called): Patty or Patricia (either is fine)
2.) Timezone: U.S. Eastern
3.) Languages: English
4.) Hobbies: The Society for Creative Anachronism is my great hobby, interest and passion. It's the overarching framework for a lot of my other activities. That said, I'd list my current hobbies as reading, fiber arts (especially knitting), English country dancing, and playing music (percussion and recorder) for English country dancing.
5.) Interests: Lithuanian history, heraldry, astronomy, history of science.
5 1/2.) Fandoms: I lean more to Star Trek than Star Wars. Also: Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter, and a whole lotta bands and TV series that don't exist anymore.
6.) Passions: Progressive politics, Unitarian Universalism
7.) Guilty pleasure music/song/band: Various '80s and alternative stuff
8.) Level of activity on LJ: (i.e., frequent updater, lurker, just a commenter, etc.) I post about 9 to 15 times a month, depending on mood.
9.) DNW: far-right conservatives, tea partiers, homophobic racists and sexists
10.) Words to live by: If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

Body
1.) Do you have faith in the next generation? Why? My friends' kids are awesome. I hope certain people in the older generation don't ruin our world before they inherit it.
2.) What makes you laugh? The humor posts on the "Single Dad Laughing" blog
3.) What exotic pet would you like to have? I don't think people should have exotic pets.
4.) What is the next planned event you're looking to in your life? A professional conference in October
5.) What was your favorite food when you were a child? Potato pancakes and sour cream
6.) What is your favorite time of day/day of the week/month of the year? Early evening/no preference/September
7.) What do you want to be when you grow up? Employed
8.) What is something you learned in the last week? Power-boat racing used to be a popular sport on the Chesapeake Bay.
9.) If you could be any fictional character, who would you choose? Hermione Granger
10.) Who/what is your spirit animal? Don't really have one.

Conclusion
post a gif, image, video, or words to give a more personal touch
I find it inspiring that Weird Al Yankovic is having the best year of his career at age 55! I find this song of his hilarious because I am such a grammar nerd: