galadhir

Oh, the sword is a representation of how as an adult you have to keep all the business of your life up, like spinning plates or balancing a sword on your head. And that's why you have such a hard time reconnecting with friends who you've fallen out of contact with!

It represents all the burdens and responsibilities of your life, under which you have to learn to dance with grace and smoothness.

Cool! This will not have any effect at all on what the dance looks like, but I do like to keep my story coherent ;)

So my Thursday class has ended for the summer holiday break, and due to the teacher's various commitments, it will not be starting again until November(!)

She told us that she wants to start again with a little showcase, in which each of us presents our own dance to an audience, in the hopes of attracting a few more people to join the class.

We are to choose our own music and choreograph our own dance from start to finish, and practice it enough so we can dance in front of an audience in the run up to Christmas.

This is probably not such a big deal for the rest of the class, who have been dancing for years and years. But I only started, from a basis of never having done it ever before, in September 2023, and given the huge gaps between terms I think I can only have done about 30 sessions.

Still, you've got to learn at some point, and what better way to learn than doing it, so time for me to write baby's first choreography, I guess.

I'm actually really excited at the thought, though who knows if I can keep that motivation up all the way to November.

I know that I want to do a sword dance. Which is another ridiculous choice given that I've only ever taken one single sword dance class. But hey - worst comes to the worst, I can just stick the sword on my head and do a basic belly dance while balancing it. The sword part doesn't have to be fancy.

So far, I've chosen my music, which has to be a good start!

Now I just have to think of some combinations to fit it, and work on my balance.

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

I was very wrong about it not being a long slump! My last post was in February. I'm not even going to rashly claim to be back anyway, but I am still alive.

What have we done since February? Well, we moved the boat from a marina in Northampton to a marina in Shardlow near Nottingham, because Son's partner lives in Nottingham and he wanted to be closer to them.

That was another several months long business, including a several week wait on a two week mooring while the Canal and River Trust cleared a landslide, a blocked sink, the bilge pump going kaput because the stern gland needs repacking, and the solar panels unplugging themselves leading to all the batteries being drained.

However, we are now much more aware that this sort of thing is just part of the normal day to day existence of boat life. Indeed, Son is being a bit more nonchalant about the bilge pump than I would prefer. Husband has got Shingles, though, and I am no electrician, so getting there to fix it may take a while.

I have been writing a lot of fanfiction, being ill, belly dancing when I wasn't ill, and on Saturday danced at my first hafla.

Apart from all that, it has been rainy and wintery since February and we've done nothing really except for being ill and cold. Now morris dance season is on us in earnest and my knees won't take it any more, and DH has had shingles for about three weeks with no signs of getting better yet, so we're both in desperate need of enrichment.

Hope everyone else has been okay while I was out!

Well, the good news is that it wasn't a very long slump, but the bad news is that this is how long it's taken me to fall off the writing wagon and to no longer be working on my novel. I'm still writing, but I'm back on fanfic, doing a time-travel fix-it fic for Jin Guangyao.

[Guanyin's Gift](https://archiveofourown.org/works/53696275)
With Jin Guangyao the main difficulty is to find a time in which he has any good choices available to him at all. So I had to go very far back *and* allow him to keep his adult memories and skillset.

I'm now belly dancing twice a week, which is lots of fun and has given me a new lease of life. But I continued to be frustrated that you could not get a nice coin belt of the right size for a plus size person, so I've started making them.



This is great for me, because I now have multiple belts that fit me and are interesting and unique. And I would like to make them available to other fat dancers who are presumably all also facing the same problem. But I can't make them as cheaply as the scarves that straight-sized people can buy on the internet for £3.99. £3.99 would not cover even the least amount of braid that goes on one of these, let alone the material.

I can't imagine selling them for less than £15 just to pay for the material and trimmings, and then who's going to pay for that?

On boat news, Son is coming to the end of his mooring in Northampton and is thinking of moving the boat up to Nottingham, where he has a small community of friends. So I imagine we'll be spending at least some time in late spring on the boat - getting him up the 12 locks of the staircase onto the Northampton arm of the canals, if nothing else. Expect more breakdowns, panicking and repairs to follow :)

I'm afraid I didn't know any of the fandoms or characters you mentioned, but as you said to cast the net wide, I went to your interests list on your profile to see if there was anything I did recognize. Not only were there dragons but Pern dragons specifically, so I'm afraid I've made some Pern dragon icons.

They say 'be careful what you wish for' and I should have known better than to make a goal to learn to hope. How do you learn to hope? You get put in many situations where you have to practice hope...

Friday, I was peacefully going through my morning routine when DH texts the family group chat to ask if Son is okay, what with the flood warning.

• Son is like 'oh heck! I'm not actually at the boat. Would I lose the boat in a flood? Should I buy enough food to survive if I'm marooned on the boat and go and be on it?'
• I'm like, 'no, you shouldn't! You should stay somewhere where you'll be safe.'
• DH is like, 'maybe you should! If you were on the boat, you could lengthen the ropes if the floating pontoon reached the top of its range, and at least it wouldn't risk tipping sideways and filling with water and sinking.'
• Son and I are like 'Yeah, but what if it's swept out of the marina onto the river and Son ends up unable to find anywhere to moor up and can't sleep because he has to be on the tiller or the boat sinks with him on it? We don't fancy that!'
• And I'm like 'well, I suppose you do also have an anchor. You could drop the anchor to keep you in the marina until it subsided again.'

So eventually it was decided that Son would go back to the boat on Friday night. The flood warning said the water would be at the highest on Saturday, and should go down after that, and we decided to hope that the floating pontoons would take the high water in their stride.*

That was an intensive day of active hope, but it did indeed turn out that (so far) the pontoons are coping.

DH and I went over there today to add clips to the solar panel boxes to prevent the solar panels from being blown off again, and Son was like 'Ugh, this door lock is getting stiff.' But we got the solar panels latched down, and the final window covered in window film, and came home.

Then at 10pm when we're sitting watching TV at home, Son texts to say 'I've just arrived back from work and I'm locked out. I can't get this door lock open at all.'

Further panic - we're nearly two hours drive away and we don't have a replacement door lock. Now what?

DH orders a new door lock from Screwfix. Then Son texts back to say 'I bought some WD-40 and sprayed it and now I'm in!'

So now we're going back tomorrow to put a new door lock on.

I know I had the temerity to think there would be less boat work this year, but that was before I remembered that there was still this list of things to do:

• Take the wall panels off the inside (possibly one room at a time)
• See how terribly rusty it is behind them, and sand the rust back to bare metal
• Paint the inside hull with rust resistant paint
• Add insulation
• Put the panels back on.
• Disassemble the current bed and underbed storage, and somehow get it - and the mattress - out of the cabin. Son prefers his sofa-bed in the warm sitting room by the stove, and the bed is taking up so much room. He could use that room as an office if it was gone.
• Cut inspection hole in the floor, so the bilges can be pumped out with a hand pump.
• Do something to stop the front window wooden surround from rotting
• Get the hull re-blacked below the gunwales
• Somehow plug the holes in the doors/hatch arrangement which currently allow rain into the engine room
• Get an engineer out to fix the engine idle rate and check the engine mountings
• Put a better hatch/door lock on.

It will be years before this is all done!

*Son's friend also has a boat, moored in a marina closer to London, and they received an evacuation warning. So that confirms my initial thought that the correct thing to do - if your boat is in the way of an oncoming flood - is to leave it and go somewhere safer. Next time we will know :)

Challenge #1

Update your fandom information. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I actually did this a couple of days ago when I updated my DW profile. Nothing really new there since last year.

Went to visit Son at his boat yesterday. Fortunately this is not quite the adventure it used to be, now he's in a permanent mooring. Long may that last! But he had unplugged the shore power when he was at ours for the holidays (because rain tends to get in the socket and trip the breaker), and his fridge/freezer had defrosted, indicating that the solar power panels were not working. So we went along for DH to see if he could fix those.

Son had been keeping his rotary washing line on the roof, but there had been high winds while he was away and it was now missing. So the first thing we did was go fishing in the marina with a magnet on a string. Yep, there was the missing washing line, lying invisible in the mud. We got the boat hook around one of the arms and pulled it out, and after a quick wash to get the mud off it was as good as new.

I had hoped to make a start on painting the bow decoration - traditionally sun, crescent moon and diamonds - but it was raining, so that was out.

(An example of the kind of narrowboat bow design we're thinking of. Not Son's boat, unfortunately!)

Instead Son and I applied temporary plastic-film double glazing to all but a couple of windows. (We left a couple untouched for ventilation, since the boat is heated by a woodstove and carbon-monoxide is a concern.)

It's important that the solar panels are delivering charge to the batteries, because Son's mooring is for 11 months a year. For four weeks of the year he has to be out of the marina, and at that point he needs the solar panels to keep the batteries charged so the engine will turn on and he can have lights/charge his phone. So we were keeping an attentive ear out for DH's success in that department.

Fortunately, it turned out that the problem was just a blown fuse which had automatically turned the solar panel box off. Once the fuse was replaced and the switch flicked, DH declared it fixed. Then DH installed a light in the engine room, which had heretofore been a bit of a black hole, and we called it a day and walked into Northampton for KFC.

Not quite the Herculean and heroic efforts of previous excursions, but it is nice to make small (hopefully incremental) improvements and leave the place more functional.

Pretty much failed to finish Snowflake Challenge 2023, but we'll see how 2024 goes :)