Definitely! San Francisco is just such a liberal bubble, and enough of the people I know in San Diego are vote-for-their-own-interests-only types who do live in 49 and more than likely voted for that criminal, that my perspective is a little skewed. But politics aside, I’m excited!

WELL I have great news for you: CA49 is part northern SD county, part southern Orange County. The North County SD portion of the district voted for Applegate over Issa, and Hillary won easily here, too. We are rapidly increasing in our progressivism here. It was the rich assholes in Orange County that just barely…

VEX is a huge national program. The state competitions qualify your team for Worlds which are now held in KY (they outgrew Anaheim). A week ago I had the pleasure of judging the STEM research projects for middle schoolers in Southern California. There were many moments of unintended hilarity but all of the kids were…

Coming out at weird angles and backing up in the wrong part of the bag (I can’t seem to scrunch a ziplock bag into the right cone shape. I’m constantly having to scrape batter back toward the tip). I’ve never tried making a piping bag out of parchment, I’ll have to give it a go next time I run out of piping bags!

God, yes. And I still cry every time I read it, even though I know what’s coming.

I now make a lemon mascarpone cream to go with pound cake. It is a literal (LITERAL) dream come true.

The Phantom Tollbooth! Admittedly for younger kids than YA, but I loved it. I also read a lot of mysteries and Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe were what I graduated to after Nancy Drew. On the scifi front, I read a lot of Asimov and Bradbury.

It took me three tries but I think I finally managed to make a perfect batch of macarons this week! I’m super proud of myself. My first batch was good but sloppy because I tried to DIY a piping bag out of a ziplock baggie, which didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. The cookies were tasty but too uneven in shape…

WRONG

Only place you can’t put tinfoil.

I’d tell you what I’d be moving up from the store brand mustard.

But a few biological struggles like menstruation (and endometriosis), birth, and the oppression that comes with them are still exclusively the struggles of cis women, and its important not to minimize those.

Not to mention, you know, travel visas.

Don’t get sick! You won’t have healthcare!

Speaking of OSR, at the point when free software will be able to  actually read the stories written in my crappy long hand, the software will be writing fiction on its own.

Egh they’re the fucking worst. “Select all images that have a lake” and then you sit there wondering if its a lake or a really fuckin wide river or maybe some other body of water that doesnt classify as lake because no matter what fuckin combination of images you selected it’s still somehow wrong.

Maybe they WERE robots.

Saddest animated movie of all time has to be grave of the fireflies. I’m actually tearing up just thinking about it (not hyperbole, my eyes are literally glassy right now)

I was exactly the same, but probably decades before you. Excelled at math until I hit calculus, which reduced me to tears. Several semesters of sheer hell in college. But I vowed if I had daughters I would never let them see any math anxiety from me. Luckily they got the calculus gene from my husband and both excelled…

Everything should be accompanied by peppery arugula !