Who is the man in the mirror?
Apr. 24th, 2026 10:39 am
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Thanks, David and bunny Daisy! David says that “Daisy [is] in the first patch of clover.”
Despite the rather disparaging title of this post, I've been very pleasantly impressed by the windows people. They did the whole upstairs on Wednesday, not even needing to put ladders up. They just put the outside parts of the window through the gap and pulled it into the socket from the inside.
Then they did all the windows downstairs, and the front door, yesterday. And today they're just finishing off with the patio window/door that leads into the garden and forms the whole wall along the back of the sitting room. This is apparently much more complicated than any of the previous things so it requires a day of its own - certainly they're hard at work on it and have been since 7.55. (It's now 9.43)
I am so pleased with the new front door! The old one was a bit ratty even when we moved in. The blue paint was flaking off and the wood of the doorstep had begun to fall apart - there was a chunk missing. It was also very plain and let the drafts through, and generally we ignored it.
This one however is a nice green colour. It has stained glass, and a knocker in the shape of a bee. It feels sturdier and fits way more snugly in its socket. When the sun shines through the door panels, onto the floor of the hall, it's very beautiful.
The workmen did attempt to force one of our internal doors with a crowbar. (It's a sliding door and it is finicky - there's a knack to it and they didn't have the knack, so they attempted to force it and broke the lock.) But they have fixed that now.
How easy it is for an experienced person to get through a door with a crowbar! A slightly worrying thought.
Well, I think I will get out of the chaos by cycling into town to get groceries and go to the gym. I don't really want to do either of those things, but there's no peace to be had here, so why not?

Discipline, Pham - I've been in a prose reading rut lately and checked out a few recently published books for some light reading. Discipline is a novel about Christine, a former painter, who writes a novel heavily inspired about her romantic and sexual relationship with her male mentor. She abandoned painting after her experiences at her MFA and "disappears" into her persona as a writer. While on tour for her novel, the mentor contacts her and invites her to his cabin in Maine. She goes, seeking—revenge? Closure? Affirmation? All of the above?
Naturally, this made me think of Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist Journey, an autobiographical künstlerroman manga by Akiko Higashimura, a prolific shoujo manga artist most famous in the anglosphere for Princess Jellyfish. Higashimura details her childhood ambition to be a manga artist and her relationship with Hidaka, the man who ran an art school/cram school in her hometown. The mentor-mentee relationship is totally different here, along with the perspective, tone, and genre; on the other hand, it's hard to think of another work that's similarly preoccupied with painting, talent, fine arts, and not becoming the artist you thought you'd be despite your mentor's expectations. Putting these two works together really made me think about some of my dissatisfaction with contemporary novels from an aesthetic perspective…
Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".