So my big plan to make gyoza this weekend was almost derailed earlier when I received someone else's grocery order in total, and zero percent of my grocery order. My fridge is now filled with THREE DOZEN EXTRA EGGS I did not order, along with some ground beef, some ridiculously expensive stew beef (which I will have to figure out how to cook so it is not well done, because well-done beef gives me the yucks - marinating and roasting might be the way), an enormous container of Fair Life lactose-free milk, some lovely fruit I would not have ordered yet (not in season, but I will use it) and some KERRY GOLD BUTTER (another thing I would never order because I'm not MADE OF MONEY). But no scallions, cabbage, or ground pork.

So I got on the phone with Stop and Shop and the CSR was very good and got my order re-ordered, and it was just delivered, so it looks like meat gyoza are back on the menu, boys! Though I do not have room to make the chocolate frosted vanilla cupcakes I was planning to make since there's no room in the fridge for anything else right now. I just used up 8 eggs I already had to make a frittata since I need the space (so I have a total of FOUR DOZEN EGGS right now, which would be fantastic if I were boiling and coloring them for Easter, but I am not. or if I needed them to make Swiss meringue frosting, which I also do not).

I'm very glad i didn't do the extra Instacart order from Key Food I thought about last night, because Stop and Shop doesn't have gyoza wrappers and Key Food does, but they look pretty easy to make, so I will spend time tomorrow doing all that. And maybe I will make those egg rollups on Monday for the week so I can use up more eggs. I guess we'll see!

Today's poem is very far removed from *gestures* all of that!

Wilderness
by Lorine Niedecker

You are the man
You are my other country
and I find it hard going

You are the prickly pear
You are the sudden violent storm

the torrent to raise the river
to float the wounded doe

* * *

Quote of the Day:

RE: yesterday's quote, sylvanwitch mentioned that as a tween she worried about the way she was always describing things in her head as they happened, until she realized it meant she was a writer. 8-) That made me think of another of my favorite quotes along the same lines, so I'm reprising this from an old WED post from 2022:

"Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head.
In your head.
Did no one ever tell you this?"

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing. Knopf Doubleday, 2012.


My Check-In:

More work on the Neverending Project — I made a lot of progress yesterday, meaning I jettisoned a bunch of stuff (repetitious & duplicate info). Gone!* Whee!

*Well, you know, I mean, backed up… ;-)


Tally

Day 1: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, the_siobhan, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme

Day 2: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme

Day 3: china_shop


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Well, drat, the things I wanted most to do with Python to Excel files have needed the skimming of another book: Felix Zumstein, Python for Excel, 2nd ed. preview---that is, O'Reilly will release the second edition in June 2026, but its semifinal draft is on Safari already, for community comment.

Stephens's book, in yesterday's post, is published by No Starch and thus also on Safari (to which one local public library subscribes). Its first three chapters ( in case anyone else were pondering Python x Excel--doubtful )

Once upon a time, I used an old copy of Pkzip to peek into a v2 .epub file (they are in fact .zip containers) and devise a plan to crosswalk Adobe InDesign epub-export XML to the XML grammar I needed. It was InDesign CS6, I think. Today I used a copy of 7zip to peek into an .xlsx file, then closed it without skimming the XML bits within. Python on Excel will be fine, thanks, in preference to reminding myself about the XSLT I used to know, because Python can open and close files safely as part of the scripted processing steps.

I made my appointment to return my old modem and router for 2:15 pm today before I decided to take today off, because 2:15 put it right in the middle of my lunch hour. However, having taken the day off, 2:15 became the worst possible time to do it. But it's done! Not without a slight misadventure. I put the address in for a Lyft and doublechecked the confirmation text and was like, okay, 74-10 Austin Street. But when we arrived at 74-10 Austin Street, it was a residential building. And I'm like, I know it's just up the block there and the guy is like, but this is the address you requested. So I get out and start walking and I'm like, I know it's here, I've been here before, where the fuck is it??? So I recheck my phone and the address is...71-40. I would have sworn on a stack of bibles everything said 74-10, but it did not. Brain, why are you like this???

Anyway, the equipment return was quick and smooth, and Shake Shack was 2 doors down, so I had Shake Shack for lunch and it was all good.

Here's today's poem:

Five passages between uncertain territories

1
The wind has got trapped in the chimney;
its plaintive howls crash, slash and rumble
all the way to the backbone and back again.
Walrus angels ride their ancient motorbikes
on the Wall of Death.

2
I burrow deep into heretic soil, lie quietly
close to roots and corms, listen to the sounds
of critters in the field, beasties by the roadside:
their adventure songs of rescue, revelation,
revival and sunrise.

3
Because you travel the undiscovered country,
carrying the black flag, mallet and stake,
I offer you heartware – I stay tuned in all right;
but you know I don't trust you any farther
than to the rim of the map.

4
I lost my little mittens and my hands are cold.
All around, purple pearls and snailshells lie
scattered like random pebbles; I pick them up
gingerly, clovefully. I count them three times,
then once more for luck.

5
Cloaked in furs and feathers I shall sojourn
in abandoned observatories, hurdy-gurdy
power stations, mills by mystic lakesides,
stitching tales of hope and hardship, breaking
every bone in the book.

--Jane Røken

***

Quote of the Day:

"I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing."

— Shirley Jackson


My Check-In:

I'm working on a large-ish nonfiction project with a lot of moving parts, and have been editing & revising it for several weeks; so I did more of that yesterday. I'll do more of it today, too!


Tally

Day 1: badly_knitted, brithistorian, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, goddess47, the_siobhan, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, trobadora, ysilme

Day 2: china_shop


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

I did end up finishing Uzma Jalaluddin's Detective Aunty. It's fine---in particular, it's fair about the social roles in which it places its characters. I liked (and had totally predicted) a particular pairing revealed during a pivotal scene near the story's resolution. Would read another, if it becomes serial.

With similar slowness, I'm now about halfway through the second Thursday Murder Club title. It's also fine, a bit bumpier and more obvious than Aunty.

I think my next read, in parallel, is about to be Tracy Stephens' Python for Excel Users (2025). I might know more Python than Excel, if considering any vintage of either one, and there are other recent books that land more firmly on the Python side of the join---but spreadsheets have been my acquaintance for longer, my tasks with Excel over time have been more varied, and (honestly) I've heard more people complain at length about it.

(First spreadsheet acquaintance: AppleWorks 1.1. heh. When I had to make my father's resumes and cover letters, it was clear pretty quickly that AppleWorks could not help us; my mother brought home a copy of pfs:Write, the only word processing app that the local ComputerLand retail shop had. Soon afterwards, fortunately, my mother gained access to WordPerfect 5.0 (and Lotus 1-2-3) via her bus-ad classes, and I moved the job-app stuff into WP, which unlike pfs:Write could hold its tab stops consistently from screen display to dot-matrix printer output.)

April is National Poetry Month in the US, so as I have done for the last...TWENTY YEARS!!!! I will be posting a poem a day here (and a different poem on tumblr). They will be tagged as "poetry" and "national poetry month 2026," so if you know how to block tags on DW, have at it!

Let's start with old favorite Billy Collins:

Lines Lost Among Trees
by Billy Collins

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place---
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of the syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem---
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

***

Happy April 1st, however you celebrate it!

It's that time again for me to pop unexpectedly to host a month of Write Every Day. 8-)

What is Write Every Day (or as we affectionately type it to save typing) WED?

Once again copied from previous stints as host:

Write Every Day is an informal writing challenge that moves from journal to journal, hosted by different people instead of on a central comm. It's probably a weird way of doing things, but that's how it's set up and — it's worked so far!

I'm hosting it for the first half of this month (sanguinity will take over on the 16th) . Every day I'll make a post where people can check in to comment on what they've written that day, whether a single sentence or thousands of words; or to talk about problems, ask questions, and generally cheer each other on.

There are no sign-ups. Anyone is welcome to join at any time. Just comment and voila! You have joined.

What counts as "writing" is fairly relaxed, and can include working on research, plotting, RPG text, free-writing, and the ever-useful "alibi sentence," which is what it sounds like, a single sentence written primarily to count as writing for that day.

The goal is to write every day, but it's not required. A tally is kept of everyone's daily writing check-in, but it's to help people stay on track. It isn't a race.

The challenge is meant to help each other develop a consistent writing habit, keep procrastination at bay, get through difficult times, overcome writer's block, and to just keep at it.

If you want more information, read zwei_hexen's, (ysilme and sylvanwitch) Welcome to Write Every Day! which goes into the rules (mostly guidelines) in more depth.


Goals & Plans for the Month

If you have any special goals or plans for the month, feel free to share them! My only plan for the month is to write every day. ;-)


Quote of the Day:

"You don't have to write every day to be a writer, you just have to feel guilty every day that you don't."

— Nic Farey, in his SF fanzine This Here.


Onward!

I was going to say this week has been endless and somehow it's still only Tuesday! but that's especially hilarious because I logged off work yesterday at 3 pm to go back to bed, and I'm taking off Thursday and Friday (and Monday), so really I only have tomorrow left of the work week. But subjectively it has felt endless. I do feel better though - still congested and coughing like mad, but no more fever. So you know, marginally better. *wry*

Anyway, I've got a recs update for you:

unfitforsociety has been updated for March 2026 with 13 story recs and 2 vid recs in 5 fandoms:

* 10 Heated Rivalry
* 2 The Pitt
* 1 Batfamily
* 1 Leverage vid and 1 Star Wars vid

*

It's 10 minutes to midnight on 31 March, and I just realised I haven't posted here all month!

Currently I'm writing like a fiend, and also, over at sid_guardian, this year's 520 Day Reverse Exchange is under way. So excited to see everyone's requests coming in!

But to have some actual content here this month, let me very quickly share something I've been meaning to.

Every winter, I want lots and lots of hot drinks, and get tired of having the same drinks all the time. So I try out new recipes, and sometimes I even find something that's really good. (Last autumn, that was the peppermint hot chocolate.)

My latest discovery is a sort of low-cal chai latte sweetened with molasses - it comes out something like Indian Pudding in beverage form.

For two glasses:

1 teabag black tea
1 teabag classic yogi tea
some black pepper
some powdered ginger
1-2 cloves
250ml hot water

Pour hot water over the tea/spices. Let steep overnight in the fridge.

Pour half in each glass, add 120ml almond milk and 15ml sugar-free vanilla syrup each. Heat up in the microwave. (Or in a pot on the stove, that works too.)

Sweeten with a teaspoon of molasses each.

Delicious! :D

In which season 2 comes to an end with a bang and a whimper both.

( Spoilers have just heard there will be a third and final season, which is good )

Even Nyquil couldn't keep my cough at bay all night. At least it's a productive cough? Bah. I feel like I am made entirely of mucus. How is there so much of it??? Plus I woke up with a fever this morning and again when I woke up from my nap just now.

I'm going to eat a bagel, poke around the internet, and then go back to bed and hope I feel better tomorrow. See you on the flip side!

*

Blurgh I think I am coming down with something - my throat is incredibly scratchy and every third breath I need to cough loudly and horribly. It kept me from sleeping very well last night so tonight i think it's going to be Nyquil or bust. Bah.

I keep intending to share these links and forgetting, but at least I can do it while it's still Mika March:

= Mika Zibanejad and the lasting moments of a 1,000-game NHL journey
= A Forgettable Night, A Memorable Career: Mika Zibanejad’s Top Moments

since he's my favorite player now that Kreider is gone. Well, him and Shesterkin. Even though I gave up on this season fairly early (not earlier than JT Miller though!).

*

I finished s4 of For All Mankind with mixed feelings - you can read my review of the season 4 finale here, which goes into details as to why - but not so much that I wasn't curious about s5, which started on Friday.

( Spoilers finally found out what happened to Oleg from The Americans )

I know I owe comment replies and I am going to get to them. The intermittent internet situation this week made me very reluctant as it would drop and I'd lose track of what I was planning to say by the time it came back etc. But! My new modem and router arrived yesterday and early this afternoon, I hooked them up. It worked, though at first I was like, what is happening? Because you do all this waiting for the modem to boot up and activate and then the first thing the router instructions say is "reboot your modem" and I'm like "are you for real? I literally just activated it!" but I did it and plugged everything in and it worked briefly! And then the router started blinking and my phone told me I had no internet and I was like WTF? Because it could 100% be an outside the apartment problem, or it could be a cabling problem because I did not swap out the coaxial cables - why would I do that? They are all nice and tight and the splitter is connected and I have had no issues with my cable box. So I unplugged everything and then plugged it back in and went to the Spectrum website to activate everything and it told me I had nothing ot activate, everything was working! And it has been so far! I will keep the old equipment for a couple of days, just in case, and bring it back to the Spectrum store midweek, probably.

After that adventure, I baked these whipped shortbread cookies (pic). I did not separate into lemon vanilla/orange chocolate. Instead, I used 1 tsp of almond extract in place of the citrus zest, and added chocolate sprinkles once they were piped but before they were refrigerated.

I've mentioned this before, but I am trying to replicate a childhood favorite cookie from an old Italian bakery that closed long before I even moved out of Ozone Park. They were not kept with the fancy butter cookies but with the S-cookies and the biscotti and the anginetti, and they had a much crumblier/drier texture than the typical Italian bakery butter cookies (you know the ones, either dipped in chocolate on one end or sandwiched with apricot or raspberry jam etc.). they were piped round and a slightly darker brown than the butter cookies too. And they were my absolute favorites. I've never found them at another bakery either.

I've tried a few Italian butter cookie recipes but none were quite right (though the one from Dolci was pretty close!), and then last week on thee second or third day of the pecan shortbread, I was like, this is the texture! And almost the taste, but the pecans obviously made the flavor different, though they do have almond extract in them (almond extract is the smell of Italian bakeries to me). So I googled to see if there was a chocolate sprinkle shortbread recipe out there, and found the one I linked above, and they also seemed like they'd be close. So after checking to make sure I wouldn't leave myself out of butter if I made them (I had another pound way in the back of the fridge), I got to baking. I think these also need a little longer in the oven, but we'll see how they taste tomorrow - I think that will be the test. but I think I'm getting close!

*

I made it through this work week unscathed! I logged off last night at 4:45 and took a 2 hour nap where I slept like a rock, got up, watched The Pitt (more on that below) and went to bed and again slept hard. This weekend could not have come at a better time! ;)

In other news, I am sure you have all see this, but in case you haven't: Himesh Patel joins the Ryan Coogler X-Files Reboot. Danielle Deadwyler was already on board. I am seated and ready! Though it will probably be several years before it premieres (if it doesn't get shitcanned the way the Buffy revival did).

My impression - not based on anything except how it's described in that article - is that this is more of a sequel than a reboot? Like a reopening of the X-Files several years later? But I could be wrong. It could be a straight up reboot. I am curious, though, how it will go, especially after we've had Fringe and, more recently, Evil treading similar ground.

As for The Pitt: ( spoilers )

And now I am just going to hit post while I still have an internet connection. The router has been worse today than ever before. I guess it knows its replacement is sitting five feet away, ready to be installed tomorrow.

*