the deep moans round with many voices

Last bit of internet housekeeping (for now...).

And then I wrote a Yuletide treat for sholio, because I liked the prompt. :)

Desdemona's Holiday (1301 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Adelis Arisaydia, Nikys Khatai, Alixtra (Chalion)
Additional Tags: Family

Summary: Adelis returns to Vilnoc for a family visit (carefully wrapped up in diplomatic pretexts), only to discover that Penric and Desdemona have once again found themselves in a tricky situation.

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sholio asked for a story in which, through some form of handwavium, Adelis and Desdemona get a chance to speak without Penric acting as intermediary. I found a canonically plausible method. :D

This is really chapter 1 of a somewhat longer story, but deadlines being what they are, I posted a complete scene and I am going to try REALLY HARD to get the rest written this year. (I have made a start on the next scene! ...It's from Desdemona's point of view, which is fun, but it also unexpectedly required me to do a bunch of urban planning and that promptly bogged me down, alas.)

Tangentially, I am very pleased with the name I came up with for Tanar and Adelis's child, because it's exactly the kind of careful political flattery you get at imperial courts. :)

Hi, and thank you in advance for writing a story for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene, I'll be thrilled just to get a fic in one of the fandoms I asked for. *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

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( General Information )

Okay. On to specific fandoms!

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( The Darkangel Trilogy )

( Nine Worlds Series – Victoria Goddard )

( Saga of the Skolian Empire )

And that is that. Thank you again, and happy writing!

Yesterday I failed to buy groceries or buy some additional underthings, but DID successfully A) do laundry, B) order a refill of my Celexa prescription, and C) reschedule my dentist appointment and request a refill of my prescription toothpaste. Which is not nothing!

Anyway, today work was kind of blargh -- I always spend Wednesdays feeling like I am playing catchup to myself, because Mondays I work in the Collegetown office and Tuesdays are my day off. So I caught up on key returns/move-outs, and I caught up on email, and I took care of various minor tasks that had been hanging for a while, and I did a preliminary run at a new Task that Ms. Random Numbers requested I handle, and I started catching up on application responses.

Then I closed the office about 15 minutes early because I needed to get to church for our annual congregational meeting. That's where we approve the budget, elect people to the Board of Trustees and the Nominating Committee, and vote on any other business that needs the approval of the congregation at large -- which, in this case, was the adoption of the 8th principle.

See, Unitarian Universalism currently has 7 principles (rather than any creed or dogma), but there has recently been a movement to add an 8th principle to specifically address racism and other types of discrimination/oppression. It's a grassroots movement at the moment, with individual congregations voting on whether to adopt it, and whether to recommend that the UUA adopt it. I believe the UUA is currently slated to vote on whether we as a denomination should adopt the 8th principle in our 2023 General Assembly.

Anyway, that ate the bulk of the meeting because we had a number of people get up to speak for and against (mostly for!). I had initially been surprised by the 8th principle thing when I heard about it a year or so ago, because I felt it was implicitly covered by the existing 7 principles, but you know, when there's rain coming in through the roof, you don't say, "It's okay; the roof is so well-constructed that it should already have tiles over that spot!" You patch the roof. And also even if racism doesn't personally hit me where I live (I have that privilege, as a white woman), it hits a lot of other people where they live and I hope that I am the kind of person who doesn't need to be personally devastated by a problem to think it should be fixed. Which is more or less what I said during my 3-minutes to address the congregation.

...

Anyway, we adopted the 8th principle by a healthy margin.

I have to fix up the minutes a little bit tomorrow or Friday, so they'll be in good shape for next year's meeting. And I know if I don't do that SOON, I will forget entirely because that is exactly what happened with the 2021 annual meeting minutes. *headdesk*

A small, everyday example of white privilege:

On Sunday afternoon, as I was driving home from Arby's, a cop pulled me over. He was a generic white man, probably somewhere between 30 and 50 years old. He asked for my license and registration, which I provided, and then asked if I knew why he'd stopped me.

I said no, because I had absolutely no idea.

He said I'd been holding my phone, and did I know that talking on a handheld device while driving was illegal?

I said yes, I knew that, but I hadn't been making a phone call. I was just turning my audiobook back on. I then picked up my phone from the cupholder, swiped it open, and showed him that the active app was, indeed, Audible, with an audiobook cued up in the middle of a chapter.

Hmm, he said. And what audiobook was I listening to?

Herodotus's Histories, I said, as he looked at the phone in my hand. It was, of course, displaying Herodotus's Histories.

Hmm, he said again, and went back to his patrol car to do something with my license and registration.

When he came back, he returned my documents and told me to be more careful about my audiobooks. I should turn them on before I start driving, and not adjust anything while on the road.

I said I would be more careful, and should I expect a ticket?

He said no, he was letting me off with a warning. This time.

And then I drove home, carefully.

...

The thing is, I was not afraid at any point in that interaction. Worried about a potential ticket, sure! Riding a small adrenaline buzz because cop car lights are calculated to rouse that response, you bet! But not afraid. And I did get off with only a warning. (Probably because the cop didn't think his chances of winning the case were very high if I chose to contest a ticket, and he suspected I would contest it.)

I am 100% certain that my lack of fear is because I'm white, and about 90% sure the mostly-harmless way that the interaction played out is because I am not just white, but a white woman who does an excellent hapless gazelle impression when that seems like the most useful persona to display.

And that is white privilege.

Not because we should all be afraid of cops, nor because being afraid of cops is wrong. But because nobody should NEED to be afraid of cops, and at the moment, a vast percentage of people in America do, in fact, have completely valid reasons to be scared of the police. :(

This past week at the rental office has been A Lot, about 90% of which is the result of my own actions.

To summarize, I sent out notices to current tenants who had placed their apartments on hold to notify them that the hold period was ending. I then also sent notices to everyone who hadn't responded at all to our "hey, what are your housing plans?" emails in the fall to say that as a courtesy we'd been contacting them directly if someone was interested in their apartments, but because the hold period was ending, after [date x] we'd just assume their apartments were available... so did they maybe want to renew?

We have consequently been inundated by renewal requests. Which is a good problem to have! It's just a lot of work, both to pull them all together and send them out, and to keep track of what's been done and what still needs doing.

Today I sent non-renewal notices to everyone who didn't respond to this set of emails, which duly prodded at least one more person into saying, "Oh hey, actually I do want to renew!" I need to set a calendar reminder for sending the legally required 90-day notices later this month (so as to catch the late May/early June leases), and then the 30-day notices later on.

I mean, we are still more than happy to renew most of these tenants! We just can't assume they will renew if they don't respond to our attempts to contact them, you know?

...

We are also having a disruptive tenant issue in one property and it looks like the situation is getting worse. Multiple other tenants have complained and various authorities and advocates have been contacted. Ideally we can figure out and resolve whatever is going on with [name redacted], who has previously been a great tenant and generally a chill person, but their current behavior is super not okay and is creating an unsafe and upsetting environment for their neighbors. :(

( some thoughts on tenants and landlords )

But people are always going to be people, and given that truth, there will always be situations where one person makes a building unlivable for their neighbors. And there's no way to resolve that without making someone upset. :(

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And now I think I shall go to bed early, because I will need to get up early tomorrow morning to dig myself and my car out of the 6-12 inches of snow predicted to fall by the end of this storm. Ugh. This storm has already made me miss yet another attempt to give blood (tonight's appointment was cancelled on account of ice and snow), and honestly, I am so done with winter.