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Whenever I see a post about how wonderful and amazing wool is as a fabric, I just want to cry, because I'm so so SO very allergic. Like touching the stuff for even a short time causes hives, and being around it for too long causes me to have respiratory problems but it's so beautiful and useful and I wish it wasn't aiming to kill me specifically, but I'm apparently its nemesis and in the battle we're fighting, I'm losing.

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sometimes i think about how eliot spencer in any other font would be such an annoying character. like he's the gruff, ex-military, man pain guy who gets all the girls. and then they said no! he's a thoughtful and kind man who children love and who has an absolutely mind-obliterating insane amount of ptsd. and he's got long hair, jewelry, and probably some sort of pronouns situation. and he's almost certainly in a sort of queerplatonic throuple with an adhd genius and the most autistic woman(?) alive. what a character

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When I was early on in my transition I got in a Lyft, and the driver was this big country guy. I was a little nervous so I just sat quietly in the back.

After a moment he changed the music on his phone to what sounded like a Hatsune Miku song. Curiosity got the better of me, so I finally spoke up and said “is this Hatsune Miku?”

And he said “Yep. You looked uncomfortable, and I know Transgender women like Hatsune Miku, so I thought it might help.”

I think about that interaction a lot.

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fun thing about herding and/or generally neurotic breeds: they are really good at following rules you have instituted, but they will also make their own Dog Rules they will follow stringently whether or not you like it

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When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

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Bat vase by Richard Freiwald

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last time my mom visited I was talking to her about parenting and how I appreciated a lot of the choices she and my father had made about raising me and my brother and she agreed that just listening to the child and taking them seriously was the One Weird Trick to cutting out like 60% of conflicts between parents and children. and she said one time I was about three or four years old and we were all going to the grocery store, and at the threshold of the store I just had a meltdown. i was overwhelmed, I was crying, I was just at the end of my rope like kids get sometimes. and instead of dragging me through the store my mom and dad stopped what we were doing and just asked me what the problem was. and I was able to say I didn't want to be there, I couldn't do it, I wanted to go home. and she says she and my father just looked at each other and back at me and said "okay" and we all went home that day instead of forcing the grocery store trip. and I had so few public meltdowns as a kid despite being pretty autistic because, I think, I knew that if I ever really needed to leave, my parents would understand and back me up. and that was the case throughout my childhood. which paradoxically (one might think) resulted in me having fewer incidents of being overwhelmed in the first place, which then made me better able to handle increasing amounts of stress and so on. it also taught me that expressing feelings and communicating them to my caretakers wasn't going to be punished or ignored or called weird, so unlike many other autistic kids who get judged or rebuked for expressing sensitivity or opposition, I didn't need to constantly blockade everyone and internalize everything all the time.

it's a pretty simple concept whether your kids are autistic or not, but most parents don't seem to get it. their parents taught them to just force everything and let the child deal with it alone so they just repeat the cycle even though they know how it feels.

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I was trying to find out if Kermit was eligible to be pope and I found a blog that says he's the perfect example of a catholic priest

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Are Pinky and the Brain still trying to take over the world? Because at this point, I'm willing to hear the Brain's platform.

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The Good Place 4x13 - “Whenever You’re Ready” deleted scene

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Succulent cactus cupcakes

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Can you imagine Pirate King Elizabeth killing people on the high seas and her final words to them are ‘Say hello to my husband’

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I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

*electric guitar riff*

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

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Numbers Tag Game!

I was tagged by @hekate1308 for this one 😊👋

Rules: give us the links to your fic with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the least words (feel free to interpret however you would like; if not on AO3, can be on Tumblr or FFNET!).

Most Hits and 2nd Most Kudos: Beating Like A Hammer, Mass Effect, F!Shepard/Garrus, Rated M, ~16K words

Third Most Comments: Kissing, Accidentally. Good Omens, Crowley/Aziraphale (plus footnotes), Rated G, ~2K words

Fourth Most Bookmarks: Domesticity, Mass Effect, F!Shepard/Garrus, Rated T, ~3600 words

Fifth Most Words: Callous, X-Men, Rogue/Wolverine, Rated T, ~26K words

Least Words: So I've written dozens of 100 word drabbles o in my life, like EXACTLY 100 words. But for ease of this meme, I'll go with the one that is listed last on my Ao3 page for word count: A Night Under the Stars, Doctor Who, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, Rated G, 100 words.

Tagging @missroserose, @mrv3000, @threewhiskeylunch and anyone else that wants to do it!