Blog – Peridotlines

Okay Then

Posted: January 1, 2025

This site has been a mess for a hot minute, but I think I’ve finally turned a corner, and now it’s all on my shoulders so hopefully things won’t crash and burn the way they have repeatedly since mid-November.

Do I know what I’m doing? No. Do I have hosting set up for the next year? Yes. Will I post more frequently? Who can say!

It’s sort of a blessing and a curse to go out and do something, return home, and then realize I did nothing whatsoever to document the activity. It’s not like “the blog” needs me to post pictures of our slippery ramble through the state park, but I’d feel better about everything if I at least had a picture to toss up on the page along with whatever minuscule character count I manage. It was a cold afternoon stroll, but pleasant enough that we’ll probably try to do it again with some grippier footwear before the end of the winter. Anyone have recommendations for yaktrax or the like?

We had been hoping to take our snowshoes out, since they’ve lived on the wall in our garage for over a year. Things looked very promising, and then it spent every day between Christmas and now being foggy, and then rainy, and all of that squishy snow turned to icy crusts before it melted into pretty much nothing. There’s still white stuff on the ground, but it’s not the sort of snow that needs anything more than a sturdy pair of boots to navigate. So, our snowshoes languish again. But it’s going to get bitterly cold into next week, so maybe there will be something more winterish on the horizon. Do I need snowshoes to justify being outside? No, I don’t. But, a co-worker summed it up perfectly when she said she wanted the “winter voyager” experience, and there’s nothing that captures that more than tromping through the woods on a pair of snowshoes.

All of the melting has done nothing for my latent urge to hop on a bicycle and tool around town. The things holding me back are that we have two very nice bikes that will not tolerate the salt and moisture, we don’t have anywhere good to clean and dry them in our apartment, and I don’t have a studded tire to make the the trek just a little more secure. I’m still very set on looking into getting a winter bike next year. I know I’ll be out on my own, but two days of full sunshine with practically balmy temperatures would have been glorious to experience on a bike. Luckily, one of the shops in our area sells off their rental fleet every year, so I’m very much preparing to keep an eye out for their sale next fall, so maybe I can make cycling more of a year-round thing.

Stay tuned as I mentally prepare myself to loop the lake in June, because I’m still set on taking part in that nonsense too. Hopefully there will be more pictures of that since I have yet to document much from the seat of a bicycle.

Anyway, Happy New Year everyone. Good luck in 2025, because we’re all going to need it, and each other.

Pikmin Bloom Lifestyle

by Kate

Posted: August 11, 2024

I turned 39 earlier this year.

When my wife hit that point a year ago, she made a comment about wanting to have walked a certain amount of distance before she hit 40. I thought it was a good idea at the time, but didn’t really think of it as any sort of necessary thing for myself in that time frame. I would be supportive (it would be good for the both of us if I participated) but I certainly wasn’t going to go overboard when 40 got closer on my horizon.

Then suddenly that 9 ticked over on my own timeline and it was there… looming over me; the need to “do something” before 40 hit.

I’d like to think I’ve found ways to meet that need since it first arose, but it’s taken some trial and error to get here.

We started being more diligent about morning walks when the temperature was consistently over 40 degrees in the morning. I don’t think a week has gone by where we haven’t walked, especially since this summer has been so pleasant. But, walking can only be so engaging.

We started tracking steps, walked to the grocery store a couple of times, I tried to get back into doing RingFit Adventure (with middling success). Just a mishmash of activities, basically.

Somewhere in the midst of that, I found Pikmin Bloom.

At first, I didn’t bother too much with it. My phone at the time didn’t much enjoy me using such a resource intensive game, but I was at least familiar with Pikmin in a way I never have been with Pokemon.

I was haphazard in my first month, not really caring about the month’s event or trying to make anything happen. Then, at some point, something clicked, and I was all in.

It’s been especially helpful having a couple of large flowers basically to myself in our apartment complex, as well as being in range of a few other locations that have mushrooms (the thing you battle to get more nectar, to then plant more flowers, and get more nectar).

Then I got into collecting the decor, and that’s probably when Ivory started to hear more about me walking around and collecting gifts on expeditions.

It’s taken up a good chunk of my time this summer, but there are only a handful of players in my area. Things picked up a bit during the 2 weeks that Unicon was being hosted, but otherwise I only regularly see one other player in the area I’ve come to think of as my own.

I know I’m pretty isolated here, but it really comes into focus visiting a larger city. When we were at the Hyatt in Minneapolis, the first week of July, we were basically on an uninterrupted carpet of flowers. Here, you can tell exactly where I have walked, every single day.

August’s theme is Ice Cream, so my specialized squad of Pikmin are adorned with scoops and swirls of ice cream and little extra touches. I’m pretty sure the flying pink ones shiver with a brain freeze since the massive scoop of ice cream sits right on top of their heads. It’s cute watching them bop around on my screen with pretty flowers bobbing on their heads.

I’m glad I found this game, since it’s certainly helped me get out of the house just a little bit more, even when I haven’t felt like it. I managed 10,000 steps yesterday thanks to trying to walk around our local park blooming flowers. It’s on odd, meandering sort of thing, but it made taking the walk a little easier, since I seem to need a more immediate intention behind these sorts of things.

I think this is the same reason I get more satisfaction out of riding my bike to do errands than just taking a short trip around the neighborhood for the heck of it. I’m assuming some of this comes down to needing the dopamine reward at the end, because once the novelty of the experience wears off it’s just not the same.

Pikmin Bloom is also slightly responsible for my new bike adventures, since it’s very easy to plant flowers from a bike. I’m enjoying that aspect, a lot.

I’m now 2 posts behind for this month. I’m hoping to do a couple of end-of-day recaps, depending on what we end up doing on our week off. We’ll see, I guess.

Whew!

by Kate

Posted: August 9, 2024

Somehow, I survived the week.

I capped off today by riding my bike on a Target errand and promptly collapsed at home for the night, because that’s just what time is like around here right now.

Before the weekend is over, I have to read 2 books and help get the apartment presentable assuming we might have guests at some point this coming week. This is how the summer goes by in a blur.

In the winter, we hunker down and never do anything. This summer, every weekend has involved running to the farmer’s market or some elaborate kitchen shenanigans, which certainly keeps the days entertaining but it leaves little time for the loafing to whiche I’ve become accustomed.

A few weeks ago, someone at one of my dad’s baseball games was talking about how she would take another COVID summer again. I feel guilty for knowing exactly what she meant. Instead of running around everywhere with a million things to do, we were just at home, and somehow, that was fine. Socially though, that sort of lifestyle just isn’t sustainable. You end up missing too many things, and the disconnect is unpleasant, or at least that’s my opinion on that sort of thing.

For as busy as it makes things, I do enjoy the kitchen shenanigans. Earlier this summer, we canned peaches and made peach ginger sauce. Before that, we got a bunch of strawberries and made jam (it’s more like jam on top, jelly on the bottom). I would make a million more strawberry things, since it’s my favorite fruit. I think the last requirement of the year will be tracking down a loaded crabapple tree and harvesting a bunch of those. I’m really looking forward to having apple jelly again. And loading up a steam juicer with a bunch of fruit is going to make that a cinch.

I was hoping we would be able to can some tomatoes (we have 4 plants on our balcony) but we just lost most of the fruit to blossom rot. So, I’m hoping the next round will be hardier and actually turn red, since they still need the heat, and it’s been very cool this week.

If I end up with enough tomatoes that we have to actually process them in order to use them all, I might have my own parade around the apartment complex to celebrate. (I’m trying to think of something really outlandish to tempt fate into giving me a bountiful tomato harvest… Because that’s how those things work, right?)

Blaugust 2024 Week 2: Writing

by Kate

Posted: August 8, 2024

Here we are, week 2 of Blaugust. I’m still lost in the busyness of daily life, but, I’m trying.

Week 2 is supposed to be about introductions. This place is only a couple of years old, and I’ve only managed a single introduction post in that time, and it wasn’t even for Blaugust.

Here are the basics: I’ve written pretty much as long as I could manage it, whether it was letters, in diaries or journals, or short stories, or social media; I write. Music is also a big part of my life; I wonder how much of that could be chalked up to a childhood diet of Disney Renaissance movies. I love animals, but have only ever lived with cats; we currently have two: Rudy and Kochanski. I’ve knit since I was in college, and picked up crochet in the last year; we make a lot of things out of yarn in our household. That’s pretty bare bones in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully this week I can flesh out some of this stuff and you can get to know me a little more.

The website comes from the second screen name I ever had. Peridot is my favorite color and I figured lines covered… a lot of things. Lines of music, lines of poetry, lines on a page… lots of lines. So, peridotlines has followed me around for almost twenty years now. It used to be a LiveJournal handle, and for a while, it existed on the various LJ clones that came into existence; then Twitter and Instagram. Now, it’s mostly this place and BlueSky. Sometimes, I wonder if I should just switch to a website based around my actual name instead of this other thing, but it’s also been my “name” online for so long that it would feel weird not to keep using it.

The only other thing this screen name has been attached to is fan fiction, which I wrote a not insignificant amount of, up until a few years ago. It feels odd to think back on it now, knowing some of it probably still exists in random corners of the internet besides Archive of Our Own. I’m more than a little relieved that some of my first forays into that particular art have been lost to obsolete technology. Someday, I might come across an ancient floppy disk and there will be no way to extract the fan fiction I had written when I was fully invested in NBC’s Passions forever ago.

While that stuff has been lost to time, I have a stack of journals sitting in a box in our closet haunting me with the cringe of naive adolescence. I’ve tried, quite a few times, to type up those journals so I could get rid of this stack of things that’s just taking up space. I started keeping those when I was 11, and I can usually get through typing up the first few years, but then 13 or 14 hit, and some of it is just raw and real and uncomfortable. I could consider just tossing them, letting them go, but it turns out I put a lot of stock in written word, even if it’s clumsily scrawled cursive documenting our family vacation or the awkwardness of a crush.

I try not to let this place become like those journals, but sometimes it does descend into the deeply personal, especially when it comes to grief and talking about individuals I miss. For some reason, I find it easier to go there with writing than I do the light, airy subjects I see others covering. I wish I could be funny, embrace the silliness at times, but while I can put together words about something sad or dark, every time I try to do something funny, its like I can see the framework of whatever I’ve written, and I can’t see past that, and it’s not good enough.

I’m hoping Blaugust can help me get back on track a little bit with just writing something and getting it posted. I have yet to figure out a good schedule to get something up here reliably though. I thought maybe themed days would work, but if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that if I’m not “feeling” it I don’t want to write about an arbitrary subject I’ve decided to shoehorn into this place. That’s the frustrating part, in the end.

So, this is me and writing. But tomorrow maybe it will be me and music, or me and fiber, or me and cats, or me and my bike. I guess, wait and see.

Wednesday Waffle

by Kate

Posted: August 7, 2024

I have barely survived the first week of Blaugust 2024. Prioritizing this place on the daily feels next to impossible, especially with how little time I’ve spent here in the past few months.

We did manage to make syrup from the juice we made on Sunday. So, I’m hoping we have decent cherry syrup for pancakes, or maybe it will just go on ice cream sundaes, but it at least looks pretty.

We also made a short bike trek yesterday, and I’m finding that method of running errands to be more and more desirable, especially once we both have baskets to carry things around.

It’s gotten weirdly cold, which is going to make riding around even better. Honestly, I’m looking forward to fall a little more than I expected to be, since there’s a chance we might be able to hit part of the trail around the lake and take in some of the colors in the state park. I don’t want to rush to the end of the summer though; I’m enjoying it right now, and all the time I’m able to be outside. I don’t want to figure out other ways to be active, when I’ve only just found something I enjoy doing outside.

All-in-all not my best showing for the first week of Blaugust. I’m hoping I can get my legs under me a little bit more next week. Putting together an intro post sounds good, especially as things have changed in the last year. Plus, next week I’m on vacation, so as long as I don’t lose my brain to “vacation time” I should have a little more to offer here in terms of writing and photos.

What a weird Wednesday this was.

Post-Manic Monday

by Kate

Posted: August 6, 2024

I thought about posting yesterday, and then got sucked into nonsense on top of exhaustion, and completely forgot to write anything, so this morning there will be a recap of yesterday, and at some later time, I guess I’ll be putting up 2 posts in 1 day?

At some point, I need to take actual pictures of my bike, maybe even with me on it. For now, this is what we’ve got.

I managed to ride my bike to and from work yesterday without incident. I only made one bad move in my travels, and those always seem to happen when other cyclists are around. Thankfully, it didn’t lead to anything harmful. Mostly, it just reinforces how much I still have to learn when it comes to actually traveling by bike and not just tooling around on smooth paths with no cars beside me.

Other lessons learned: getting on a step-over style bike (aka a “boy” bike), with a basket containing a computer bag is a lot harder than just getting on the bike, especially while wearing jeans. I’m still just very new to all of this stuff; the getting on the bike, moving forward after coming to a stop, getting OFF the bike; basically me using this bike is still a big old awkward thing. But, I really do enjoy riding it.

I especially enjoy riding it compared with the one I chose to use as a reintroduction to riding bikes.

If I put my new bike next to this old one, I feel like the old one would look spindly, frail, and very light, but when we experimented with hanging this one up, we realized it’s so much heavier than either of our new bikes, and between that weight and the drop bar handles, we decided this one just wasn’t for us. So, now we have to figure out how to ~~get rid of~~ re-home it. I’m not sure who would want a 1970’s department store bike, but hopefully someone else would like a free experience on re-learning to ride a bike before moving on to something better. I’m just hoping it won’t still be in our garage come fall, since space is always at a premium when it comes to apartment living, even with a garage.

It’s much easier to get out and ride now that my wife has a working bike of her own. I had to laugh last night, because she wanted to do a few loops around our apartment complex, and then after hitting every section of the parking lot I heard “Okay, this is boring, let’s go to the trail.” It had looked like it was wet and maybe wouldn’t be fun to ride, but then we took off for the park, and it was just a nice night to be out on a ride. I think today will also be a good riding day, since it’s not going to be very warm, but the sun looks like it will be out most of the day.

I really thought we might be in for a cool and unpleasant summer, but it’s been pretty enjoyable, even if it’s rained a lot at times, and been momentarily humid. We still have some time before the season officially changes, but it’s certainly been a nice summer, especially on a bike.

Juice Sunday

by Kate

Posted: August 4, 2024

We finally used my grandmother’s steam juicer today.

If you’ve never heard of one of these things before, it’s something like this. I will never make crabapple jelly without one of these, because you get the most crystal-clear jelly you will ever see, without having to cook apples and then hang them from cheesecloth to drain for hours; risking cloudy juice in the process.

We bought around 9 pounds of cherries yesterday and ran them through the juicer and are now attempting fruit leather with the remnants of the fruit. The main goal of the juice is to get some cherry syrup, which is the ultimate pancake syrup in my opinion (if it’s chokecherry syrup, it literally cannot be beaten).

I’m glad it’s been relatively cool and not oppressively humid all weekend, considering we steamed fruit for 2 hours and then had more steam pouring out of the oven when we started drying the fruit leather. Hopefully that will last when I have to cook the juice to make syrup and then run the canner on it.

A little over a year ago, I was canning peaches for the first time. I’ve done strawberry jam, and another round of peaches since then. I can’t wait to see what the jelly looks like. My favorite thing is to use the faceted jelly jars, because when the jelly is really clear, the jeweled aspect of the jars really pops. It’s one of those visually satisfying things I wish I could explain better than to say “it just looks pretty.”

It still feels bittersweet doing things like this. There’s the accomplished satisfaction of completing a slightly complex task, followed by the sadness that I’m doing this without the aid of the person who originally taught me. Being this was also the first time I’d used the steam juicer, I feel like there was still some of the lingering smells of my grandmother’s house and kitchen. When I washed it and then started boiling water, there was one last waft of that very specific smell, and then it’s probably gone forever. The power of sense memory is something so strange and wonderful.

We keep being busy, which means I’m still doing Blaugust at the last minute of my days. I think August might continue to be this way. I have a full week of work ahead of me followed by family visiting from out of town the same week we have book club and D&D; and then August will be half over and the end of summer will rear its ugly head. The rapidity at which summertime moves is also mind boggling.

With Monday around the corner and a busy day behind me, I’m still looking forward to whatever the week holds. I’m planning to make my first bike commute, and then… well, I guess we’ll see.

Trying not to be Afraid of Bike Commuting

by Kate

Posted: August 3, 2024

Back in May, I spent $25 on a bike at a garage sale, only to realize I’d forgotten how to ride. Between my rusty skills and the rusty bike, I’m not sure how I managed to find the courage to pedal any further than our apartment garage, but I did eventually figure out how to make the bike carry me around with a modicum of skill.

As an exercise in re-learning how to ride, that $25 was worth it. Of course, between the age and style of the bike, it wasn’t going to work for me in the long term. I ended up going to one of our local bike shops and testing out a couple of bikes before taking home something more upright, with better brakes, and easier shifting.

I’ve spent the past month riding around on this lovely new bike, trying to overcome the hurdle of arriving somewhere slightly overheated, sweaty, and out of breath.

I ride my new bike, slightly terrified wheneven I venture beyond our neighborhood path. Sharing the road with trucks that might not be able to see me scares me to death. And, there’s the fact that I’m still developing the balance to be comfortable looking over my shoulder, or even considering lifting a hand off the bike to signal. But, now that my bike is outfitted to carry me and my things to other destinations, I’m compelled to use it to commute to work.

Depending on the route I take, it will be anywhere from two-and-a-half or three miles. The hardest part, is one street where traffic will likely be the busiest, depending on the time of day I choose to ride. Going out on a Saturday morning, just after 7am, is an entirely different endeavor than at what qualifies for “rush hour” in our area.

I’m glad I didn’t make the decision to just take off at 7:30 on a Monday morning, without making this first (lower stakes) attempt. Some of it went exactly as I expected, but then there are the little things, like finding out the shoulder on the busy street is much bumpier than I realized; in a slightly uncomfortable way. I’m pretty sure taking an alternate (smoother) route might lead to me driving through a few poorly aimed sprinklers, but on a hot day, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing. It also turns out maybe it will be less stressful for me to cross at a busier intersection than somewhere I was expecting fewer cars to be. Getting the bike moving after coming to a stop is still a difficult endeavor, but it is getting a little bit easier with practice.

At some point, I will stop forgetting these posts, and have some photos to share, since I have yet to take pictures of my bike.

My wife also just joined the New Bike Club, so it’s possible there will be cooperative bike adventures for us in the future.

And Here We All Are

by Kate

Posted: August 2, 2024

Did I forget I still need to do a post today and it’s after 7pm? 100% yes.

Life now is busier than it was when I was doing this a year ago. It’s weird to realize there are lots of things taking up my days, and somehow I made the choice to be doing them. After 2020, so much of my time slowed down to pretty much just being at home and maybe going to meet our knitting group once a week. Now?

I’ve been making an effort to be more active while the weather supports it. We somehow had a blessedly cool start to the summer, and I’ve spent so much time outside just enjoying the ability to do that and not freeze, broil, or breathe smoke. And then the last 3 weeks hit and it’s been hot, and then humid, and then smoky, and apparently I’ve built up enough of a habit doing things on the daily, that when I can’t I get a bit antsy and on edge, frustrated that it’s not in the cards for the day.

Our Thursdays have also gotten busier. It used to just be a weekly knitting group, but then we decided to search out a Dungeons & Dragons game and someone was good enough to take us in. We spend a lot of time going over the ins and outs and trying to keep up with a high level campaign every other week now. I’m playing a Lightfoot Halfling Monk, and trying to get used to throwing myself into combat since Niv has the HP and constitution to do that while Kate wants to hang back and be sure they’re making the “right” move.

And we’ve been watching a lot of Dimension 20. We’re just winding up our watch of The Seven, which I think we found even more compelling than the Fantasy High series it spun off from. I’m hoping we can try Never Stop Blowing Up next, since we’re really making use of our Dropout subscription (which has totally been worth it).

It’s been a while since I was just this busy living life. Having fallen out of a journalling or blogging habit, it feels more like I’m trying to wedge this into a packed schedule. But, when I take a step back and look at things, I probably have time. It’s more of a question of motivation than anything else. So, hopefully Blaugust will help me find the motivation, since this place is still important to me.

I’m hoping I can bring some of the busyness here, especially the bike adventures, now that I have a rack and will be able to start doing more errands and using it around town. I’m still thinking it will be carrying me to the office on Monday, so stay tuned to see if I actually have the nerve to “commute” the mile and a half from work to the office. (The scariest part is going to be navigating the roundabout… At least I hope that will be the scariest part)

Happy Friday everyone. Have a fantastic weekend!

Blaugust 2024 is Here!

by Kate

Posted: August 1, 2024

I am no more prepared for this endeavor than I was last year, but, here goes nothing!

At least this time around I knew this was coming. Of course, it’s Thursday, and one of my busier Thursdays at that, so I’m hoping I can get something short and sweet thrown together to mark the occasion, and go on with my day.

For those not in the know, there’s a helpful informational post covering the basics of this whole thing. In the wake of social media really fracturing into a bunch of different factions, I was hoping blogging would see a bit more of a resurgence. I’m not sure I’ve seen that coming true, but Blaugust is still happening, so it’s not like blogging is dead.

I’m hoping to use the BlueSky Feed to keep track of others participating this year. I’m sure things will fall between the cracks, but I got a little overwhelmed looking at the wall of posts in my RSS reader (yeah, those are still a thing) last year.

So, find me over at BlueSky or comment here if you’re doing Blaugust 2024.

I’ve been lost in a bit of a haze when it comes to my life online lately, but I’m hoping to find some other blogs to follow, I’m just not sure what it is I’m looking for. Some of this comes down trying to relive to my old LiveJournal days, but I still appreciate being able to read long form content, and I’d love to look at something besides posts on Reddit.

I’ll be doing an introduction post some time next week, but in short, this place is mostly rambling on the following subjects: cats, LEGO, fiber arts, gaming (rarely), life in northern Minnesota, and (something new) bike adventures.