In Her Stars

Pennsylvania wife, Quaker, writer, artist, baker, homemaker, cat mom, crone. Curating artifacts of peace, beauty and gratitude in the everyday. Fair warning, I'm not everyone's cup of tea.

[inherstars]

I accidentally grew some cucumbers.

I MEANT to plant a butternut squash, realizing only after it was in the ground that the tag said cucumber. I actually hate cucumbers.

But M. likes them, so I just kept tending and training it alongside the pumpkins.

I saw plenty of little nubbins and flowers, but nothing that really looked like a cucumber.

I was out in the garden just now, watering everything before we go away, and saw what looked like a half-grown cucumber poking out from the leaves. So I thought, hm! I wonder if there are any others.

And there were these four sumbitches. M. was so surprised and delighted.

Apparently, they're pickling cucumbers! I hate cucumbers but I will put a hurting on a pickle.

So! Last minute trip to the market for some spices I didn't already have, and I'm currently prepping two batches of refrigerator pickles, which should be ready to eat by the time we get back from our trip.

The chocolate-cherry pie was amazeballs, by the way. 10/10, would smash into my face again.

[inherstars]

Yes. Yes, good.

Filling bubbled up over the crust a good bit, but don't care, will eat. I may just increase the pie crust recipe by a bit to make sure there's always an ample crimped edge.

Smells amazing. Will be set in time to have a small piece after dinner!

[inherstars]

Chocolate-cherry pie. In the oven, currently. Fingers crossed it turns out nicely.

We were in the store the other day and I saw some sweet black cherries, and I was like, "I'm going to make a cherry pie!"

Which is a thing I always say, dismissing how much of a fucking pain in the ass it is to actually make the pie.

Oh, the crust is easy. I even found a nice vegan roll-out crust that I've been making in lieu of my old "press-in" version. The topping comes together quickly, but the pitting. OH THE PITTING.

I have a handy-dandy cherry pitter, which is still an annoyance to use, because the cherry juice gets everywhere (but it was a good excuse to wear one of my aprons), and also it's only about 99% effective at removing all the pits. The recipe calls for the pitted cherries to be halved, as well, so it was a good opportunity to go back and check for potential dental emergencies.

I found seven pits. Fuckers.

It's not heavily chocolate, there's about 3 tbsp of cocoa powder in the topping. It's just now getting to the point where I can smell it baking, and oh my God it smells so good.

M. is going to come down from his office soon, and look longingly through the oven door, and be like, "Why do you do this to me. You know that smell carries." Ha ha.

[inherstars]

I lured M into a morning putter with me, and was very excited to find two caterpillars on the dill! I love dill, but I really only planted it to keep the squash bugs off the adjacent pumpkins (GREAT success so far, by the way! This time last year they were absolutely covered with them.)

One is much bigger than the other, and Seek tells me they're black swallowtail cats.

Absolutely chuffed to have them as visitors. I almost flew into, "Must protect them at all costs" mode, a la the duck that made her nest in our garden box, but then remembered that nature's gonna nature, and decided to just leave them be.

So cool, though. I am going to be checking on them every five minutes.

[inherstars]

Paused while cleaning to rearrange this little corner of the living room. I found the old metal tool box at thrift the other day for $4, and the ivy and sunflowers were all repurposed from other arrangements. The thing in the back is a candle holder made by an 86 year old local craftsman (I need to put something under it to make it sit taller, because it has some beautiful inlay. We're not really candle-burners, so I have to think if there's something else that can go on it.

The various tins were all thrifted over time. The box is an old sewing machine accessory box that I painted--it unrolls, it's really neat. The words on it (that are continued inside) are from the song we walked down the aisle to. The binoculars were my grandfather's.

We found the "HISTORIC SITE" sign at the same store as the tool box. It doesn't say anything flattering about the state of our house, but I thought it was funny anyway.

I did paint the ribcage on the wall, though! It's also on an old, thrifted cutting board.

I really do have to get back to cleaning, so that sign doesn't become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[inherstars]

I've been needing a little craft project I can work on at night, when we're watching TV (or while M braids my hair and I zone out) that isn't just mindlessly scrolling on my phone.

I have crocheted exactly one blanket, using the one fancy stitch I know, but I fall afoul of crochet and knitting due to my complete inability to properly count stitches. I used a baby shell, which worked, because it needed a very precise number of stitches, and it was pretty hard to fuck up. But now I've done that, and I'm not inclined to do it again (and I've also accumulated many crocheted blankets from thrift stores that are way nicer than I have the patience to make.

See also: 7 cats + skeins of yarn is a study in frustration.

I could sketch, but it doesn't really work very well when seated on the floor, and I need to feel like sketching something. Even if I have a painting to work on, there's no way I can drag all the painting supplies into the living room.

I also just sold my sewing machine, having come to the firm conclusion that I was never going to have the time or inclination to learn how to make my own clothes. That was right up there with I think I'll become an animator.

Anyway, long story short, I recently bought a stack of 300 pieces of very precisely cut 4" x 4" cotton squares, in all different patterns. I'd intended to use them in something else, but then I'm like, "All the cutting work is done for me. How hard could it be to make myself a quilt?"

Needle and thread still isn't ideal, where cats are concerned, but it would be a nice, cozy cold-weather project. I could make a lap quilt to get a feel for the stitchwork, and even as inexperienced as I am, I'm fairly sure I can hack something of this scale.

The squares are arranged by color, in three repeating gradients, so I might as well just follow the gradients. 15 squares x 20 squares will make a nice lap quilt, and shouldn't be too overwhelming. I'll worry about finessing it once the top is together.

[airanfadh]

the absolute joy of inefficiency-maxing (or: why i am writing this on a nintendo DS)we spent the last five years optimizing every single second of our miserable little lives. "habit stack your skincare with your taxes!" "use AI to draft your break-up texts!" i am sick of it. my soul has been dehydrated by the moisture-wicking fabric of corporate productivity culture. the newest, most elite trend of 2026 is inefficiency-maxing. we are bringing friction back, baby.the bots can write the code. they can optimize the spreadsheets. let them. i will be over here, manually grinding coffee beans with a flat rock because the sensory feedback makes me feel like a medieval wizard who just discovered physics. here is how you join the movement:walking to the grocery store to buy exactly one loose lemon, carrying it home in your bare hands like a precious dragon egg.refusing to use GPS. if you get lost on the way to the dentist, you simply start a new life in the woods.sending physical letters written in calligraphy that take 4 business weeks to arrive, just to say "lol".reject the hyper-optimized prison. embrace the beautiful, stupid struggle of doing things the hard way.

[inherstars]

Got word back from the vet that Happy's ultrasound came back clear. He's back to eating well, but he's developed a problematic love for junk dry food. Ugh.

Greta continues to be hit or miss with her meals. :(

Pym successfully had her dental, we're still waiting for her imagery results. She's barely touching her food. This cat is hellbent on starving herself to death. We may need to look into serving her primarily those high-calorie kitten pouches for the rest of her life.

So it's quiet again, for now. Jim has another doctor's appointment tomorrow, and then I'll hopefully get on a pot of chili and some cornbread. I managed to make a dozen of M's bagels for the next two weeks, and some more chickpea salad.

There's a Little House on the Prairie reboot on Netflix! I only know a bit about the original series, but I watched two episodes after finishing my chores, and now I'm hooked.

M. won't be home until after 10... I think I can sneak in one more episode...

[inherstars]

I'm sitting here and trying to figure out why the whole, "ACTUALLY, slow living is problematic..." thing got under my skin so much.

My mother has spent her whole entire life believing (consciously or otherwise) that she deserved better. That the better thing was right around the corner, and she deserved it, and once she got it she would be happy.

She desreved a nice house, and the daughter she always wanted, and to get away from her second-generation-immigrant "dirty dago" roots, and to have the nice house and the nice things and the quiet, burning envy of others.

And at many points in her life, she had all the things that she wanted. She got a daughter (me, for whom she could not hide her disappointment and annoyance), a nice house and nice things (we moved around a lot, but before the divorce we lived in relatively nice middle-class houses or apartments), and she even moved far, far away from her "dirty dago" roots, and got to be derisive of everything that meant.

But she married the wrong man, and it eventually fell apart, and she had to come home to everything she hated. And then she married another wrong man, and between the drugs and alcohol she rightly fucked up everything for everyone.

And now she's living in a trailer park with an ailing husband 20 years her senior, no friends, no family, and a daughter who only talks to her because she absolutely must. Nobody envies her. Most people probably would pity her.

But it wasn't always this way, and it didn't have to be. It still doesn't have to be. She could make friends with any of the women who live in the park--her immediate neighbors and otherwise--or start going to the senior center nearby, take up a hobby, join a book club... literally anything at all.

She could give up the drugs, but she won't.

Over and over and over again, she was offered, in cradling hands, a DIY kit for simple happiness. A cozy home that's easy to maintain, ample help, a grocery delivery service, offers to meet up for coffee or go out shopping or do little day trips. It was never enough.

The nagging, permeating feeling of deserving more and better has always, and will always, fuck it up for her.

She doesn't want to make friends with the ladies nearby, because she looks down on them. She doesn't want to go to the senior center, because those people are old and poor. She could take up a fulfilling solitary hobby, but she won't even do that. She'll be 74 this year, and she's the very definition of Waiting for My Real Life to Begin.

It's still not too late, but it's already too late. Her entire identity is inextricably tied up in being unhappy and incomplete.

And I think that's why I'm so rankled by the "Slow Living is Problematic" bullshit.

The whole concept is to take stock of what you have, and to treasure it. It requires nothing but time and mindfulness. Not even a LOT of time. We're not talking meandering, hours-long strolls through bee-loud meadows in your long flowing white cottagecore dress with a hand-woven basket of wildflowers hung on your arm.

It's enjoying the way the light shines through the steam coming off your coffee cup. That one bird with the funny song, always singing when your alarm goes off. The determined but pretty weeds growing alongside the grocery store parking lot. The softness of the lamplight in your bedroom when you're getting ready to turn in. A corner of your living room that you made look cozy and inviting.

Don't make it something it isn't in order to backfill your own personal prejudices, or your need to find offense and correction in every single thing. It is literally about finding joy in the simple and the mundane, and remembering that there is goodness and peace in even the small moments.

If you spend so much of your time looking for misery, I promise you will find it, and it will always find you. The point of living through hard times is getting to one day enjoy the ability to breathe.

When you get to that day, you shouldn't feel guilty for it. You shouldn't have made being miserable so much your personal identity that you don't know how to be something else, and so you always go looking for a new thing to feel bad about.

Just fucking enjoy living in whatever small way you can. That's literally it.

[inherstars]

If I'm allowed an Old Woman Yells at Cloud moment, I am tired of paying $13 for a stick of deodorant in a cardboard tube, and to still reek like a bag of onions.

I'm over here trying to be as green and eco-conscious as possible, gritting my teeth and buying this bullshit deodorant in a cardboard tube so I'm not leaving more and more plastic behind as my legacy, and the shit does. not. work.

I caught a whiff of myself in the store today and was horrified.

Grocery Outlet occasionally has a glut of different brands that were overstocked elsewhere, and those are only about $3-$6 per tube, and I buy them out whenever they have them. But either they don't work, or they fall out of the tube the first time you use them. Or both, as I'm discovering.

Why does not smelling like ass have to go hand in hand with plastic trash? We put a man on the fucking moon.

[inherstars]

Tumblr has this permeating idea that there are a long list of things you shouldn't enjoy fully--or you should feel bad about enjoying them--because repressed / under-represented / underserved / queer / neurodivergent people can't enjoy them.

Which is bullshit. It's in the exact same family as "thoughts and prayers." It's putting forth an idea and an emotion that requires absolutely no involvement or effort from you, and only serves to make other people feel a certain way (in this case, shitty), without actually doing anything useful.

A post crossed my dash about the idea of "slow living" belongs to the privileged, because people working multiple jobs and who have no time to themselves (for any of various reasons) can't slow down and enjoy things.

Who and what does it serve to go out of your way to make sure someone out there feels shitty about that? It certainly does nothing to help the people who are struggling. But I guess you get to feel like you did something to better the world by pointing it out?

A better suggestion is for the people who have the time, and have the resources, to use some of their own bounty to help those who don't have those things.

Offer to make some freezer meals. To drive the kids where they need to go, or help pay for them to go to a day camp. Offer to do their shopping alongside your own. Buy them a gift card so they can order out a night or two, and don't have to worry about cooking. In our town, you can even pay towards someone's utility bill. Help them find resources. Ask them in what ways they're struggling, that they feel comfortable sharing, and fucking do something about it, so they DO have a moment to breathe.

You can even do some of these things anonymously--a gift card in their mailbox or email inbox-- so they don't have to feel like a charity case, or that they need to reveal things about themselves and their situations that they may not be comfortable doing.

Anyone who posts or reblogs one of these vile, "You should feel shitty about this thing that bring you a modicum of joy in this dystopian hellscape we're all suffering through," is right up there with the, "thoughts and prayers" Facebook crowd.

You are literally part of the problem, and you're doing nothing at all to help fix it.

[inherstars]

We had nine healthy cats.

I suppose technically we still do have nine healthy cats. Three of them are currently in a state of Schroedinger's Health, as tests and imaging have been done, and we're just waiting for answers.

Technically, one of them is just a foster.

Technically, one is a feral.

I have no excuse for the other seven, frankly.

Happy was a bit under the weather last week, and stopped eating, so we brought him in with Greta (she was due for her annuals.) They discovered that he'd lost two pounds since his last visit in October (he was both overweight, and very fluffy, so it wasn't immediately apparent to us.) The weight loss was a little surprising (we were trying to get him to lose), but the vet also noticed he'd lost some muscle in his back end, which is a sign of something more troubling.

His appetite is more than restored, thankfully. They did a round of bloodwork, and he was in yesterday for more, fasting bloodwork, and an ultrasound. We're still waiting for word back on any of it. The concern is that he may have lymphoma. He's only 4 years old.

Today Pym went in for a dental cleaning, and I elected to have a proBNP test in advance of it. The vet discovered that her levels were above normal, and she needed an echocardiogram. That seems to have come back within range to safely complete her dental, but now we're waiting on results of the imaging, to see if she may need medication to treat heart disease. She's only about a year older than Happy.

Generally I laud "converted" feral kittens as being pretty hale, overall. As kittens they're usually incredibly sickly and parasite-ridden, but once restored to health they're vigorous and resilient. Unfortunately, our particular crop of converted feral kittens also came from notoriously inbred stock, so they seem to have that working against them.

Greta is also now on methimazole for hyperthyroidism, and will go back in a month to see how she's doing. I suspect she'll do fine on it, although we may need to get her on Solensia in the next year or so. I'd hoped she could hold out until after Maggie passed, so we weren't dropping $200 a month on arthritis medication, but if it needs to be done, it needs to be done, and Greta is lately enjoying a whole new lease on life. Her comfort and happiness is worth every penny. The vet hasn't recommended it yet.

Maggie also keeps trucking along at nineteen, giving the middle finger to everyone she meets along the way. Good for her.

Goose seems to have taken a shine to Scarlet, as well. I'm not entirely sure if it's her he likes so much, or just the nice big cushion in her room, but sometimes he just hangs out on the floor, or in the little canvas hut, with her nearby.

He loves those big girls, I tell you what.

[inherstars]

Went out to check on the garden, and the bumblebees are absolutely loving the pumpkin blossoms.

Look at this little dude, just lost in the sauce.

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Being married to me is probably pretty trying.

[inherstars]

I keep meaning to sit down and update, and then immediately getting distracted with other things.

Been an eventful few weeks. I probably won't be able to get as much cleaning done this week, owing to the weather (some very much needed rain), and some uptick in work. I got a bit behind on my "daily bread", so I've got two sandwich loaves proofing right now, and later this week I'll try to knock out M's bagels.

I found a great use for that last smidgen of silken tofu that doesn't go into the bagels: blend it with canned chickpeas and seasoning into a mock tuna salad. It's been amazing in sandwiches and on crackers.

We had a fairly sedate Independence Day, not being particularly vocal patriots at the moment. I made pasta salad (first time making it, and had to do a lot of alteration--the recipe I found online was so bland), and black raspberry shoofly pie with a scratch crust for dessert. Was a bit worried about the pie, but it baked up beautifully. Next time I'd make just a bit more streusel for the top.

The morning after, M. made us "red, white and blue" pancakes with garden raspberries, blueberries and white chocolate chips <3

We skipped Meeting this week, and instead drove out to Hamburg just to get out of the house for a bit (the heat kept us mostly homebound this week.) We did get a few nice things done around the house, though, including finishing the closet in my office (and moving all the art supplies into it--the center of the room is finally empty!), and putting up some textured cling film on the bedroom windows, so we can get sunlight in without having to worry about privacy.

I finished The Happening, which took longer than expected, despite it being a very short book (with very large print.) I was looking for good non-fiction book about the event (M. and I were actually coming home from Lancaster the morning it happened. We'd just gotten word that the offer was accepted on our first house) but this was not it.

The book was not good. For one, the author's last name is Yoder, and that should give you a pretty good idea of what his opinions of the Amish are (which is not to diminish the absolute horror and tragedy of the event itself, but there is a very heavy-handed Amish bias throughout the telling of the story.) It's basically a fictionalized, elementary-school-level retelling of the story.

Next up is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which seems like it's going to be a horribly depressing read. Why do I keep buying these books?

M and I are tying up some loose ends in preparation for a new adventure, as well. I don't want to say too much more about it than that--he and I are already having hilarious anxiety dreams about it--but hopefully I'll have more to share by the end of the month.

Writing night at the coffee shop, tonight. Still not sure if I'm super excited about it, but I think it will be good for me.

[inherstars]

If hell is a real place...

There is definitely a 24/7 stream of Pioneer Woman episodes playing on a constant loop.

"I'm going to put these tomatoes in the salad... or should I say... on the salad. Ha ha . You'll understand what I mean in a minute."

AN ACTUAL THING SHE JUST SAID. Like there's an audience of white women out there putting their hands over their mouths and whispering, "On the salad? On the salad? Tomatoes? What could she possibly mean? I'm confounded. And riveted. I'm riveted and confounded. I must know more."

How is it possible for one human being to be this vapid? And it's rehearsed vapidness. Like, she worked on this. She probably has an entire staff of paid professionals capable of just writing lines for her, and yet somehow everything that comes out of her mouth is still the worst thing I've ever heard.

[inherstars]

It was his joy, love...

My favorite way to come up with story ideas is from songs. For a long time I really didn't listen to any new music, but over the past few months? Year? I found a new Pandora playlist (because I'm old), and it's introduced me to a slew of new songs that I've gotten to download and enjoy.

One of them gave me a good story idea, or at least the beginning part of it. I still haven't figured out what the long-term conflict is, but I'm enjoying trying to work it out. This has led to a lot more "randomly and concerningly staring into space" probably, but such is my lot.

I really need to finish the other story first, before I go deep-diving into this one. Or maybe I'll take a break from it and come back to it, like I did the story about the dragon and the maiden.

I guess there's a certain freedom in deciding, "I'm just going to do whatever the fuck I want," and not necessarily writing for a purpose.