I meant to post last night but I could barely keep my eyes open so I went to bed early (and missed a super rare Mets comeback in Atlanta!) and slept for 10 glorious hours! I felt great at work today, and got some stuff done, and made some suggestions about the September board meeting agenda that I am sure the CEO and the Chair will not like, but they wanted to get radical and also not overrun the meeting time by 45 minutes again, and I offered a good way to do it to my boss. We'll see if anyone bites.

I am off tomorrow for the dentist - it should just be a cleaning (though I am braced to hear I need yet another crown) but I am always so tired when it's over. And my team meeting on Tuesday got cancelled so I am tempted to take next Tuesday off since I'm already off Wednesday (my birthday), Thursday, and Friday of next week. My boss was like, sure! but I'm still thinking about it.

I thought I had something else to post about but I can't remember... oh right, I finally watched Project Hail Mary the other night. I enjoyed it but it was too long. And there was not enough Eva Stratt, who was the best thing in the movie.

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Had a couple of baking fails this weekend, so I guess it's granola bars for breakfast this week! Oh well. Eventually I will bake those myself too, but for now, store-bought is fine. *g* Luckily, this hoisin garlic chicken (NYTimes gift link) turned out well. I added soy sauce in place of salt, and also a sprinkling of Chinese five-spice powder instead of red pepper flakes, and it was delicious. And I have leftovers enough for a couple more meals. I also made bacon this morning, so it'll be another week of chicken bacon ranch wraps for lunch. Uh, not the hoisin chicken, though. Perdue short cuts roasted chicken strips.

And I had the first plums of the summer this weekend and they were so good. Plums! I love them so much! Cherries have also been good, but are much more expensive. And I figured out a use for the leftover seltzer for when Friend L was here - it's a good vehicle for the electrolyte powder I otherwise don't end up using, and this weekend it came in handy.

In other news, this morning, my cleaning service texted me asking if they could come tomorrow. I responded promptly saying, no, but I was available on these other dates. They have not responded. So now I'm like, are they coming tomorrow? Do I have to be ready? Because I am not ready and that is why I said no. Ugh. So now I will scramble to get ready and they won't come. Bah.

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I finally caught up on the last 3 episodes of this season of Abbott Elementary and ( spoilers )

Also, my internet and cable went out for several hours this afternoon, I'm guessing because of the heat? but I was able to use my phone as a hotspot, so it didn't deter me for long. *wry* I took today off because originally I was supposed to be dog-sitting at my sister's before plans changed, and I decided to keep the 4-day weekend. I'm glad I did. I like my job and I mostly like my coworkers, but I am so tired of people asking me for things. Hopefully, I can get a bit of a respite and a reset.

I hope you are all staying cool if you're in the heatwave. <3

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Tall Ships!!! So beautiful!!!

Wednesday reading, also beautiful!

What I've just finished
Six of Crows: A Darker Shore: Letters from Ketterdam by Leigh Bardugo. I don't know why the title is longer than the short story but I loved it! It's an epistolary story, using an investigation of the mysterious captain of The Wraith (tall ships!!!) as the framework, and letters between Kaz and Inej make up many of the documents the investigators are using. Ugh, I love them so much! ( spoilers )

I really hope this isn't the only time Bardugo chooses to revisit the Dregs and Ketterdam, because I would pay full hardcover price for a full-length, getting the band back together heist novel.

What I'm reading now
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. I'm enjoying it but I only have a very vague recollection of what happened in the main trilogy, so some of it is probably going over my head. And I also realized I haven't read Translation State so hopefully that is not to relevant to this one. I do enjoy how Leckie plays with POV though.

What I'm reading next
As always, who can say?

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June recs update:

unfitforsociety has been updated for June 2026 with 10 recs in 3 fandoms:

* 8 Heated Rivalry
* 1 Dungeon Crawler Carl and 1 The Locked Tomb

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So I did finish season 5 of The Bear last night - instead of the episodes being shambolic and overly long, they were mostly a tight 22 minutes (there were 3 I think that were longer, out of 8) and ( spoilers )

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In other news, my sister and brother-in-law took Baby Miss L and her parents to Disney World this week, and I've already gotten adorable photos of them with Winnie the Pooh! Hopefully there will be many more where that came from. *g*

Also, I forgot it was a short work week and made myself a big tray of chicken cutlet parm for lunch/dinner. Oh well, it will still be delicious.

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I slept in this morning, but I am still so tired. Luckily it's a short work week and I have a 4-day weekend next week for the 4th.

I got a late start, but I did make blueberry corn muffins and they turned out well, but I think maybe I just prefer to have blueberry or corn muffins? Idk, but I still have corn meal so maybe I'll just make corn muffins next weekend.

I also have cherries which I am excited to eat - there is so much fresh fruit now and all of it was on sale this week, so I had to choose, because I can't eat all of it before it goes bad. And last night, I set up the first coffee granita of the season, and had some earlier and it was so good.

Now I've started watching season 5 of The Bear and will probably try to finish it this weekend so I don't get too spoiled. I also watched that one-off episode Gary but did not enjoy it much. Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach have great chemistry, but ( spoilers ) It had some good needle-drops, though. Anyway, hopefully they stick the landing. I'll guess we'll see!

After that, I have so many other things to watch, so I will probably just end up rewatching something I'm already familiar with so I don't have to make a choice. *wry*

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Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.

We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.

You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.

So the board meeting went well, even if it blew past the scheduled time by 45 minutes. My boss and I are already brainstorming strategies to contain the questions and digressions by the new chair (who has ALWAYS run on and made meetings longer than scheduled, but had been better about it lately, until now). The senior staff were not happy about it though, and none of the board members who repeatedly agitated for an in-person meeting attended in person, but I can't control that. I can only massage the agenda to ensure that digressions don't put us over by more than 10 minutes.

It was also the CEO's birthday, so while I offered to make cupcakes, one of the other executives brought a Dominican cake filled with guava paste and soaked in rum (and so sweet I could only eat two bites) and champagne. It was a big round cake and I was telling my co-workers about how my dad would always insist on cutting a circle in the middle of a round cake so it could be sliced more easily and consistently, and we were always like, just slice the cake already! but the co-worker who brought the cake was like, "And he was correct!" and she cut a circle in the cake before starting to cut slices. My dad would have been so pleased to be vindicated, considering all the mocking he got for it.

In other news, I just learned that there is a sequel to Practical Magic coming out in the fall and I am like, !!!! about it. They removed the curse in the first movie! But somehow the curse has returned I guess they didn't, because 1. Aidan Quinn isn't in it and 2. that is the plot - Sally's daughters are now experiencing the curse's effects. At least it still has Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing, and Dianne Wiest in it, plus Lee Pace! Also, nothing about the brother from the books (I was so annoyed that the prequel book was so much about the brother when the whole point of interest in the movies is the the pairs of sisters). I probably won't see it in theaters but I will definitely watch it when it comes to streaming.

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