greenstorm (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greenstorm) wrote2025-06-22 11:50 am
greenstorm) wrote2025-06-22 11:50 am
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Solstice day 3
Oh goodness, where even to start. Yesterday I disappeared into the garden. I'm sure I did things but I don't remember what I did, other than in the late evening as the sun was setting I planted saskatoons in front of the spruce hedge. They seem to grow well even under spruce, and even though they were planted into the crevices in a matt of thick roots I have hope that, if I water them, they'll do as well as the other saskatoons I planted there. Once those bushes are well rooted the spruce can eventually come down.
The US bombed Iran yesterday. I was going to say "started a war" but we have a lot of weasel words to avoid that term these days. Someone or other in some gov or other was like "this could be viewed as an act of war" and I just... y'think?
I hda a bit of an online chat with a friend, brushed dogs lots, I'm sure I did other things. I rested as needed but the biometrics on my watch are telling me I'm overdoing it. Still, I made it through a shower and clean hair (I wore sunscreen, which means a full scrubdown every evening or my skin falls off) and... oh, I ran seeper hose irrigation and watered things that way.
We're under a smoke advisory here and the purpleair site (we pretty much have to use private business sites to know air quality unless we're right in a big city, because of course wildfire smoke is primarily in big cities) says that both my town and the town next door have bad air quality. Having said that, it doesn't seem that bad here? I probably should get a monitor, more money to replace yet another function that I consider the gov should do. It just doesn't smell like smoke... though I guess I have been choking a lot more than normal, but that also happens when I overextend myself and my swallow muscles get lazy. Anyhow, it's felt like my place has been in a little oasis of clean air so I've had the windows open and been outside without a mask.
This morning I woke early, turned on the fan to pull cool morning air in, and went back to bed to sleep in and to listen to an agatha christie audiobook. I'm having an experience I haven't had before -- the absolute freedom and joy of having an accessibility device, in this case the audiobook version of my old friends. Honestly even holding up a book takes something out of me, apart from the weird reading thing after my accident AND the weird vision thing. I can read a book I don't even like, or think "I'm not sure I enjoy this" because I don't need to fully minmax every letter in every word. I can lie in bed and read like I used to, comfortably, freely. It's life changing, or maybe life restoring?
I'd been going device-lite during solstice so I missed a text from the tree company; they showed up with chips, I rushed downstairs and put Avallu in, got delightful woodchips, the dogs were exceptionally well-behaved, it was very good. I carried a purring Siri around for awhile out there.
Then I came in and learned my brother's wife had their kid. It might have been yesterday? I hadn't checked that communication channel for a bit. Looks like it's a boy, and there are pictures of my mom and other brother there with the kid (but not my antivax brother in the picture, I've been really worried about that with measles being a big thing now and obviously covid is still around). I need to call Mom and get the details. Between Mom and my sister-in-law's (?that's such a weird thought) huge family with lots of her own sisters and parents and aunties I'm sure they're being well cared-for.
So, big 24 hours, and much better than expected given world events. I now have an abundance of chips to do paths as well as mulch. I need to get my hardy kiwis in the ground because the cats are eating them. I'd like to trellis the tomatoes at some point -- oh yes, I mulched some of them! and plant oaks and graft apples. The first flower clusters on the tomatoes are showing up, 3 weeks after the plants went in the ground more-or-less.
The US bombed Iran yesterday. I was going to say "started a war" but we have a lot of weasel words to avoid that term these days. Someone or other in some gov or other was like "this could be viewed as an act of war" and I just... y'think?
I hda a bit of an online chat with a friend, brushed dogs lots, I'm sure I did other things. I rested as needed but the biometrics on my watch are telling me I'm overdoing it. Still, I made it through a shower and clean hair (I wore sunscreen, which means a full scrubdown every evening or my skin falls off) and... oh, I ran seeper hose irrigation and watered things that way.
We're under a smoke advisory here and the purpleair site (we pretty much have to use private business sites to know air quality unless we're right in a big city, because of course wildfire smoke is primarily in big cities) says that both my town and the town next door have bad air quality. Having said that, it doesn't seem that bad here? I probably should get a monitor, more money to replace yet another function that I consider the gov should do. It just doesn't smell like smoke... though I guess I have been choking a lot more than normal, but that also happens when I overextend myself and my swallow muscles get lazy. Anyhow, it's felt like my place has been in a little oasis of clean air so I've had the windows open and been outside without a mask.
This morning I woke early, turned on the fan to pull cool morning air in, and went back to bed to sleep in and to listen to an agatha christie audiobook. I'm having an experience I haven't had before -- the absolute freedom and joy of having an accessibility device, in this case the audiobook version of my old friends. Honestly even holding up a book takes something out of me, apart from the weird reading thing after my accident AND the weird vision thing. I can read a book I don't even like, or think "I'm not sure I enjoy this" because I don't need to fully minmax every letter in every word. I can lie in bed and read like I used to, comfortably, freely. It's life changing, or maybe life restoring?
I'd been going device-lite during solstice so I missed a text from the tree company; they showed up with chips, I rushed downstairs and put Avallu in, got delightful woodchips, the dogs were exceptionally well-behaved, it was very good. I carried a purring Siri around for awhile out there.
Then I came in and learned my brother's wife had their kid. It might have been yesterday? I hadn't checked that communication channel for a bit. Looks like it's a boy, and there are pictures of my mom and other brother there with the kid (but not my antivax brother in the picture, I've been really worried about that with measles being a big thing now and obviously covid is still around). I need to call Mom and get the details. Between Mom and my sister-in-law's (?that's such a weird thought) huge family with lots of her own sisters and parents and aunties I'm sure they're being well cared-for.
So, big 24 hours, and much better than expected given world events. I now have an abundance of chips to do paths as well as mulch. I need to get my hardy kiwis in the ground because the cats are eating them. I'd like to trellis the tomatoes at some point -- oh yes, I mulched some of them! and plant oaks and graft apples. The first flower clusters on the tomatoes are showing up, 3 weeks after the plants went in the ground more-or-less.
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okay! I have no idea how much you know about torrenting, so i'm just going to describe the whole process step by step.
so first, sign up for a VPN service if you don't already have one. we use Cyberghost on all of our devices, and we love it (and it's $57 for three years, so, very affordable); lots of people like Nord, Proton has a VPN, etc.
Once you have a VPN installed on your computer, turn it on and set your location to someplace different from where you live. Then, download a torrenting app like qBitTorrent (that's the one we use). Once that is working, go to audiobookbay.lu, poke around in the library to find the books you want, and then - this is the tricky bit, to my mind - don't click any of the obvious links, because those are all ads. You do not need to pay for anything in this process (except the original VPN subscription); anything that is telling you to pay is an ad. You need to click the smaller, more subtle "magnet link" in order to download the file to the torrenting app. When the file is fully downloaded, then you can move it around, put it on other devices, listen at will.
they don't have everything, but they do have an awful lot of things. Also with qBitTorrent, i copy files out of the place it downloads them, rather than moving them entirely, so that whenever i am doing this, the files i have downloaded can function as "seeds" for other people also doing this. that helps support the whole file-sharing network.
we also do this with the majority of our TV/movie consumption (terra likes limewire for downloading tv; i am more comfortable with pirate bay. there are a number of reputable sites out there.) this has enabled us to cancel all our streaming service subscriptions except spotify, which has been a great boon to our budget.