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Another of my tumblr people found me here! Hi again [personal profile] earlgraytay !

The last few days I've been hit with an overwhelming urge to work on optimizing the organization of my living space and to dust ALL THE THINGS while I'm at it (to be fair, I have kind of been neglecting the dusting). So far I've got my mini wall altar... dusted, taken apart and the pieces shuffled to temporary holding spots so that the shelf is clear for a new setup, my Working Altar taken down and set back up for Yule season (including the addition of my new charcoal incense burner and the tin of the Yule incense blend I'm in the process of tweaking, as well as my preliminary version of a smoke-cleansing blend), dusted a bunch of wall arts, redid the decorative array on top of my bookshelf which is also where my anchor for my room wards lives and trimmed the dead leaves off my houseplants, cleared off the second shelf and started putting stuff on it that goes better there than where it used to be. Before I can finish it I need to make a run to storage and retrieve the rest of my DVD's that I packed away when I moved though, I'll probably do that tonight. Next up will either be working my way down the bookshelf or redoing my headboard-shelf arrangement, which is currently more a jumble of stuff I just kinda put down rather than intentionally decided to keep there than it is an "arrangement".

For the first time I have a living space where not only am I *allowed* to keep some of My Stuff in the common areas besides food & cookin' gear in the kitchen, but there's open shelf space I can use in the living room without having to buy new furniture. I'm debating which of my books would be better suited there than in my bedroom. The cookbooks at least are going downstairs, they'll be closer to the kitchen that way, probably at least a solid chunk of my fiction books, maybe some of my witchy reference books that aren't obviously witchy from the titles? IDK. I'm thinking stuff I regularly reference for witchcraft should stay in the area I mostly do that in, and also anything that's obviously A Witch Book and would freak out the mormon neighbors if they stopped by probably shouldn't go in the living room where they'd be easy to encounter at a casual perusal of the bookshelf titles, which... kinda sucks but is just how shit be, not everyone's educated enough to know that witchcraft isn't necessarily devil worship (and that most actual satanists seem to be reasonably chill people anyway)... but if someone's gonna get weird about my Neil Gaiman collection or a sorta hipsterish book on making cocktail bitters they're probably not someone we want in the house at all. Of course, final decisions will also depend on how many books end up fitting on the currently-empty shelf.
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 I got myself a loose-incense burning setup the other day, so that I can test some of the blends I want to make. Ran my first attempt today -- just, using the charcoal, seeing how a few things smell individually when burned so I can guess at how they'd smell in combination, and how much of each thing I might want to use to get the effects I'm after. 

I have sort of vague plans to make an incense blend for each of the equinoxes, solstices and cross-quarters, ideally with exclusively ingredients that I can grow or forage myself in my area. It's at least an aspirational idea, I might end up bowing to the need for more variety and incorporating other stuff than just what's naturally available here, but I've at least got a pretty solid baseline concept for a Samhain blend already, and might be able to concoct a good Yule blend in time for actual Yule, if I primarily go with evergreens.

The charcoal tablets sure do leave a large quantity of ash behind, which will maaaybe make certain of my magical powders and other recipes that use general ash as a key ingredient easier to make in quantity, anyway. Saving up ash from incense cones and sticks takes a while to get enough. 

Also finally got the issue with my paypal sorted out so I could send money for a Pillowfort code. Because I really, REALLY want an actual tumblr-like thing to use that isn't run by complete idiots (which doesn't mean I'm planning on ditching DW as soon as I get on Pillowfort, just... really do want a few options). 
lenyberry: photo of me in profile (Default)

 Goddamn it, I really am gonna miss tumblr. Specifically, the way it facilitated communication between just... any and everyone. Sure, that had its downsides with shitty people throwing fits about any and everything, but. Well. 

Someone just reblogged a thing I'd commented on about my stupid painkiller sensitivity, with info about how some people have extra copies of an enzyme-coding gene and that enzyme does stuff with metabolizing painkillers such that, if you have extra, you can easily OD by accident because stuff converts faster and hits you harder. 

I obviously haven't confirmed for sure yet that that's what's up with me, but if it is? This random tumblr person who somehow stumbled across my bitchin' about how the side effects I get from opiates just aren't worth the pain relief when my general sensitivity also means that there's very few pains that a high dose of tylenol won't fix for me anyway... might have given me info that could literally save my life from an accidental medical overdose one day. 

And yeah, this time it's really personally relevant sorta shit, not generally-interesting stuff, but even when it's "just" a biochemist dropping facts about why one should not use malachite as a dildo and tying the whole explanation into how Flint's water system got so fucked (seriously, if you're bored and haven't seen it yet, google "don't fuck the malachite")... Well, this is the kind of thing that tumblr really shone at. Letting conversations occur across such a wide and diverse userbase that it's near impossible, for any post that gets any kind of reach, to not be seen by someone who has personal and specialized knowledge of the weird specific thing that the post's talking about and can Explain A Thing. 

lenyberry: photo of me in profile (Default)
I tried to get a good night's sleep. I really, really tried. I failed, but damn it, I sure gave it a good effort! I shut off screens with an hour before bed and did relaxy wind-down activities. I drank a nighttime sleep tea blend. I even put on binaural beats for Restful Sleep Cycles.

...and then at 2am my guts decided to throw an ENORMOUS shit-fit for reasons undetermined.

ExpandSkip this bit if you don't want TMI about Digestive Disturbances )

Nutshell version of the cut: meatsuit's glitchin' and I dunno why or how to make it stop, and it is Annoying.

And I did not get the good sleep I desperately needed and made every reasonable effort to attain. Am now even MORE tired than I was yesterday.

At least I have tomorrow and Monday off from work. This week has sucked so much between work-schedule madness and Tumblr Exodus stuff and just. All my routines have been thrown completely off-kilter, so maybe it's just stress making my guts act up. Doesn't seem to be anything actually medically disastrous at least.
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 Yesterday's work shift might have set a bar-wide record for deadest shift ever. I'm... really glad it was my short day for the week (weird shift lengths to avoid ending up with overtime)... I came in at 2, because my boss had to leave then, she worked the early chunk of the shift herself. She had no sales. I sold a grand total of 2 beers in the next four hours before nightshift came in. 

Today's been much more normal so far. Which of course means I have less time to re-adapt myself to this interface and do Tumblr Migration stuff like trying to get some of my posts that I wanna save moved over here... this whole thing happened at a pretty inconvenient time for me. Ugh. 

I'd really like to find some good communities over here, since so many of my tumblr people have either been deleted, gone quiet, or are mostly just taking potshots at tumblr staff now, and my dash has gone both much slower and much less fun (though, honestly, the potshots are pretty entertaining). 

Gonna have to figure out what I'm gonna do about image hosting though, since I'm not just gonna be able to endlessly upload directly. I used to keep a private album on FB to upload stuff and then link it into my posts back on LJ, might have to pick that habit up again.

lenyberry: photo of me in profile (Default)

 Oh man. Just found the "current mood of service" thing. Apparently the latest Big Mood on DW is "bitchy" ahahaha! 

I can't possibly guess what that might be about. It can't have anything to do with Nipplegate/The Great Tumblr Purge/Tumblrpocalypse. Can't possibly. 

Old LJ-functionality memories are starting to come back. I'm sorta vaguely remembering how it all went... wonder if I've still got my icon collection somewhere on one of those old salvaged hard drives, that could be a blast from the past to go looking for. I forget if I just pulled stuff off that I needed and put it here on my new lappy or if I actually wiped 'em to be used for general extra file storage... if they got wiped, it's even odds I didn't pull those icons off first, but if they're not wiped I bet it's all still there (if I can find it. Never been real good at file-system organization, or any kind of organization for that matter). 

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Bought some new jewelry on black friday sales when that was going on, because why go out and stress about shopping for other people when I could instead stay home and online shop for myself with my birthday money? Hah. Joke's on the rest of y'all, I get my Yule shopping well underway long before Samhain even arrives. TBH it's just sort of a rolling thing with me. Spot something perfect to gift to a friend, buy it if it's a decent deal, keep an eye out & wait for it to go on sale otherwise, stash these things away with notes attached about who they're for if it's not actually immediately obvious just by looking at what it is, dig something out of the stash next time I need a gift for that person... 

Anyway. Bought new jewelry. Got one of my two orders the other day, and it was missing one thing. Probably my second favorite out of the whole order... well, customer service was very good about it when I brought up the problem, but they were out of stock and so couldn't send a new one. Refunded me, but dang it! I really liked that barbell. Cute little stormcloud... *sigh* Well, here's hoping it'll end up back in stock and I can go buy one again with my refund money. Not gonna bitch too hard, because I've ordered from the same site a lot and this is the first time I've ever had any problem whatsoever, and I get it, black friday shipping is probably hectic AF, particularly for a smaller business. Plus they were really great about getting back to me quickly and working out a solution. But it's making me a bit sad, I was really looking forward to wearing that one.

At least I DID get the one that's pretty much a tiny Starfleet crest except with Galaxy Color in the circle bit. That's the Top Fave. And the rest is good too, some new daith rings so I'll finally have options other than "silver horseshoe barbell" and "black with inset sparklies", since I've realized I just don't much like wearing bent barbells in there after all. They're neither as aesthetically nice as rings nor as comfortable... too bad I made the mistake of buying several sets before I figured that out. 

Well anyway. It's probably time to go to bed. Gotta work again tomorrow, this fun fun week of full time and doing weird stuff with my shifts to avoid actually going overtime... because while More Money wouldn't suck, full-time hours make me crazy real fast already and also overtime pay ain't all that great when you mostly work for tips, and my boss also very much prefers to not deal with overtime so we're in agreement on "how about not". Normally I'm part-time but a coworker had to go to the hospital a few days ago and while she's gonna be fine, she's not allowed to come back to work until next Monday by doctor's orders, so shifts had to get covered on pretty short notice. And since I'm the only one without kids or a second job... guess who gets most of 'em!  Yep. It's me. 
lenyberry: photo of me in profile (Default)

 Well, I guess it's poetic if I went to tumblr after LJ shat itself, and now that tumblr's shitting itself I'm heading to the newer (and hopefully better) LJ-copycat, retaining the same username the entire way (I thought about changing it. I thought about making it a true fresh start, but.. I am a creature of habit). 

Well, to be entirely honest, I'm not sure yet where exactly I'll end up. I don't think mastodon is right for me. Too twitter-y. I can't get a pillowfort code yet because my paypal is having Issues of unknown origin and size. I liked tumblr better than LJ but I've seen enough by now to know that when shit goes down like tumblr, shit like tumblr goes down. At least eventually. Or it just... continues existing, but in a much crappier incarnation that's too boring to bother with, once all the fun people have gone elsewhere. 

Fun times, fun times. Did I mention how much I hate change? Well, I really heckin' hate it. Learning new interfaces and reconstructing a friends-list is an enormous pain in the female-presenting nipple. If nothing else, at least this interface is... familiar. Distantly so, at this point, but nonetheless, I do remember the old LJ days. I might have to brush up on my html again but I can manage this. 

In more personal news, my running theme of being the living Stan Lee Cameo continues. This time it's of the "delivery for Tony Stank" variety -- I find myself in possession of information that is Someone Else's Business about Other People's Drama, and the only person who can possibly give it to them. Awkward and uncomfortable though this position may be. And since it's somewhat personal shit, I can't just throw the knowledge to the wind and hope it finds its proper home. 

The life of an extra is interesting, at least. If sometimes in the Chinese-curse sorta way. At least I'm not bored?

 

[NOTE: posts showing as earlier than this one are reposts from tumblr; backdated to keep things tidy]

lenyberry: a bumblebee on a stalk of mint flowers (bee)
We all love our correspondence lists! But what do you do when you want to work with ingredients not on the usual lists? Or when you want to fine-tune your understanding beyond the basics given in a book? You can always use your intuition of course, but that can mislead if you aren’t good at discerning intuitive impressions from random leaps of thought, and can leave gaps, and sometimes it's just too easy to doubt yourself. There are other methods as well; one such is pendulum dowsing which I want to talk about today. This is a bit different from standard pendulum technique, but shouldn’t be too hard to pick up once you’ve got the hang of that.

You will need: a pendulum, a bit of the substance you want to learn about the possible uses of, and a list of purposes you want to see if it would be useful for. 

Hold your pendulum over the substance (if using a pendulum with a chamber, put your substance inside it) and go down your list of possible correspondences, asking if each in turn is a good use for that substance. 

Take notes of how the pendulum responds for each. A ‘yes’ answer means that the substance is magically useful for that intention, and the strength of the answer indicates if it’s particularly good or only functional and perhaps not ideal if you can get something better. The pendulum won’t respond if there’s no association and will simply hang still. A ‘no’ response indicates that the substance is actively contrary to that intention and should not be used in any spells for that purpose even if its other associations may be desirable, though it may be useful for spells for an opposite intention, in baneful spells to strip a good thing from a target, or to counter that association in another ingredient in a spell for another purpose – for instance, if one wished to do a friendship spell using yellow roses, but wanted to be sure it would not manifest any romantic feelings, one might include an ingredient that’s contrary to romance but not to friendship, so that only the friendship aspect of the yellow roses will be effective. A 'maybe' response indicates that there might be issues in specific cases under the umbrella of the broad correspondence asked about -- for instance if I asked "would this be good for love spells" and got a maybe, it might tell me that it would depend on the specific kind of love spell I want to do, and that I should ask more specific questions such as "would this be good for self-love" "would this be good for romantic love" "would this create strong compulsions in a love spell that might be undesirable" etc. to clarify where it would and wouldn't be an appropriate spell component. 

lenyberry: a bumblebee on a stalk of mint flowers (bee)

(repost from my tumblr; backdated)


Dream Bitters

  • 5 parts mugwort tincture
  • 4 parts rose tincture
  • 3 parts lavender tincture
  • 2 parts cacao tincture
  • 1 part lemonbalm tincture

Blend & store in a dark glass eyedropper bottle. To induce vivid dreaming, add a dropper-full to a small cup of water and drink it right before going to bed. If you wish you can take it straight, but I find it’s much more pleasant an experience when diluted.

For flavoring cocktails, I'd recommend this one to enhance pungent tones in a gin-based beverage, or to balance sweet flavors without blunting sharp notes.

This can of course also be mixed with juice or soda or tea, as you prefer.

Thoughts

Jan. 5th, 2018 01:23 pm
lenyberry: a bumblebee on a stalk of mint flowers (bee)
Concept: a mind-control spell meant to be performed on oneself.

Imagine the possibilities. The ability to keep a mental illness under control by conscious will – to literally decide to be happy and thus defeat a depression spiral (yes, the general retort to the depressed about “have you tried not being depressed” is obnoxious. But what if you could make it actually that easy for yourself). Being able to fall asleep when you want to regardless of insomnia or jetlag or a mis-judged intake of caffeine too late in the day, or stay awake when you want to without requiring stimulants to function. If the control extends to the autonomous nervous system, cure your hiccups with a thought and never shoot juice out your nose from an ill-timed laugh or cough again.

And no one can argue that it’s immoral to mind-control yourself.

I haven’t much of an idea how this would actually work, but it’s a concept with some potential if it can be pulled off, at the very least.
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(this is quite stream-of-consciousness, so I apologize if it skips around confusingly)

A supermoon is a full moon that falls at a time when the moon is at a closer point in its orbit to earth. The moon’s orbit is elliptical, so there’s a point at which it’s the closest it gets, and another at which it’s the farthest it gets.

The technical terms are perigee (the closest point) and apogee (the farthest point).

Incidentally, the opposite of a supermoon is called a micromoon – a full moon falling near the apogee rather than the perigee. A micromoon appears smaller and dimmer than usual.

The moon keeps this orbital pattern even when it doesn’t line up with full moons, of course. The full lunar orbit takes approximately 27.5 days from perigee to perigee, while the lunar phase cycle runs approximately 29.5 days.

Any moon phase falling at or close to the perigee is enhanced in effect and appears larger & brighter, while phases falling toward the apogee are diminished in effect and appear smaller & dimmer. It’s mostly talked about with regards to supermoons because those are the most dramatic, but a new moon or waxing crescent or last quarter moon falling at the perigee is similarly enhanced.

The moon’s speed of travel also increases at its perigee and slows at its apogee (this is true of all elliptical orbits). Times when the moon is at perigee and travelling faster are good for quick results, while times when the moon is at apogee are better for anything you want to last for a long time.

You can use timeanddate.com for tracking perigee and apogee: https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/moon/lunar-perigee-apogee.html
(also a good site for other timing tracking like moon phase, sunrise/sunset, moonrise/moonset, upcoming eclipses, etc)
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This is a spread I came up with some years ago. I’ve found it very useful for myself, and figured it might be worth sharing.

1-4: The foundation – why the current situation is able to exist (these should be read as a sentence, in combination)
5: The catalyst – what sparked the development of the situation
6: The obstacle – what stands in the way of progress
7 & 8: Supporting pillars – where does help to overcome the obstacle come from and/or what helps the situation progress in spite of it
9 & 10: The choice – two options that are available to you
11: Capstone – what’s most likely to develop if you take the easy choice or the one that’s most natural for you
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