Hit me with your best shot

We got our flu shots on Tuesday. While we normally get them every year anyway, the word on the street is that this year's flu is a particularly nasty one. I've also got reports from others who have got this shot that its hit them harder than usual, so I braced myself for the worst - especially since I had a dental appointment the next morning.

It was fine. I felt a bit off, with the beginnings of a headache later in the evening, but by the next morning I was fine. atara got hit a bit harder by it, though. I wonder if it's due to the difference in our ages, and the robustness of our immune responses.

In bagel news...


I braved the rain yesterday to pick up some chicken thighs for dinner, and while I was at the butcher shop, I decided to pick up some black forest ham and bagels too. The latter were listed as "water bagels" - a vegan alternative to their usual egg bagels. We're not vegan, but I was curious to try them and see how they stood up against their regular ones. Oddly, they seemed to be just like their regular bagels, but with garlic, onion and poppy seeds. We suspect they were just put in the wrong bag since the ingredients list on the back did not list any of the bonus ingredients like onions and garlic.

Not cool.

Neither atara nor I have an onion/garlic/dairy/egg allergy, but this is an accident waiting to happen. I mean, they were delicious, but not what I thought I was buying.

As you might also be able to tell in this shot, I brought in some of my herbs from the garden and set up an indoor herb garden. My goal is to have fresh herbs all through the winter. Right now I have parsley, chives, thyme and rosemary. Sometime in the next while I'm going to get some basil seeds and start one or two of those as well. I am hoping that the basement is warm enough to keep them happy through the winter - there is a radiator nearby, so I think they may be okay. Time will tell, I guess.

Still writing

It's been some time since I posted a story here, but I'm still writing these days. My last couple of efforts have been in the Bolt fandom again, but I've got a couple of Transformers stories in the pipeline as well - including a remake of a popular fable set in the Transformers universe.

I've settled on Archive Of Our Own (AO3) as my repository of choice for my writing these days. I'll link to them here going forward, but I am not sure if I will be copying and pasting them over going forward. It's a lot of work to fix up the formatting.

My most recent efforts are a two-parter in a fandom for which I vowed I would only ever write one story. Maybe two.

Summary:

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Penny's mom inherits a cabin from somebody who is ostensibly a relative. Then nothing happens. This is one of those character-driven stories where there's lots of talking and hurt and comfort and stuff.

Edit: One of my beta readers has told me that my summary might not draw in a reader. Try this:

Imagine if the movie "Bolt" had been the product of some experimental mid-century Swedish director, with lots of essentially static, stark black and white moments with a split-screen of two actors' faces against a Stygian background, one facing right and the other facing the viewer. Their pallid visages betray no emotion as they stoically talk over each other, voicing their feelings of emptiness and ennui in the face of a meaningless existence. They end by saying, "I am alone, even when we are together" in unison.

Now imagine if this story is nothing like that, other than lots of dialogue and character interaction. And a hamster and a dog and a cat.

The Cabin In The Woods - Plonq - Bolt (2008) [Archive of Our Own]

Summary:

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Bolt finally manages to get both of his fuzzy friends up to the family cabin in the mountains, but his obsession over keeping Penny safe from mundane chores leads to conflict and misadventure. For those wondering about the title, I decided not to post Part 2 because it was just a lot of driving, and various characters whining, "are we there yet?"

This is functionally the sequel to The Cabin In The Woods, but I wrote this story so that it would stand on its own if you missed the prequel. (But the other one is a fun story too, so I recommend it! ;)

The Cabin In The Woods - Part 3 - Plonq - Bolt (2008) [Archive of Our Own]