Reading

Entry tags:

due South: Hungry Like the Wolf, by Wagnetic

Fandom: due South
Characters/Pairings: Diefenbaker
Rating: Gen
Length: n/a (artwork)
Content Notes: may induce donut cravings!
Creator Links: Wagnetic on AO3
Theme: Food and cooking, Happy endings, Crafts, Textiles

Summary: A bag featuring Dief and the imminent demise of some donuts.

Reccer's Notes:
I will never stop reccing this! An excellently crafted bag with a felt appliqué of Dief about to enjoy a stack of donuts. It's so good, and a perfect likeness of Dief with a "donuts incoming" gleam in his eye!

Fanwork Links: Hungry Like the Wolf

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Multifandom: Eat, Drink, and Make Merry Exchange

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Overlooked Again

1) Some interesting posts at Henry Jenkins blog about the Peabody Awards process and disruption in the entertainment industry. "So, Peabody meets 3 times face-to-face. And it is an award that is decided across genres and platforms: television, radio, podcasting, and interactive, which is games and VR, etc. And across genre: entertainment, news, documentary, etc. But in particular, it's decided by a unanimous vote of a board of 18...who represent lots of different facets. There's critics, which include academics and TV critics, media executives, writers, and showrunners. ..which is different from a campaign for 26,000 voting members, in which you have no control of what they've watched and what they've not watched...Aziz Ansari was famous for coming to our show and saying, “You know, this is pretty cool. It's like you watch all of our shit, and you just decided it was good, and we didn't have to go to a bunch of weird-ass parties and stuff"

Two other factors: "It's not just celebrating entertainment. It's trying to talk about the ways that popular culture and entertainment can deeply shape who we are and want to be as a people, as empathetic citizens in the world" and "also...is it a story that matters? So, sometimes the craft can be brilliant, but it may not be a story that matters." ( Read more... )

2) A few more notes about Silent Witness as I move into S26. S23 seemed a really unusual season, enough so that I wondered about its production dates. ( Read more... )

3) Watched a documentary on the BeeGees which, like a lot of documentaries, goes very light on the time after their popularity peaked. (That was one thing the Billy Joel and Bon Jovi ones avoided). ( Read more... )

4) A Spy Among Friends was well written and interesting to watch but I kept constantly thinking about the 2003 Cambridge Spies which I saw last year and suspect it's much closer to the truth. ( Read more... )

5) Just a few comments about the Emmys, mostly in how unsurprising it was that Stephen Colbert finally won an Emmy for Best Show more because voters were jolted into a show of support. Yet John Oliver won yet again, twice. (Particular irony given the broadcast was on CBS).

Otherwise can't say it was entertaining and I wish a lot of stuff not involved in handing out awards had been cut. The tribute to Gilmore Girls seemed to really exemplify "too little, too late" since it and so many shows from the WB had been overlooked through sheer snobbery decades ago, when the attention would have done more good.

Poll #33627 Kudos Footer-540

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Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 1

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Entry tags:

wed 2025

Write Every Day September 2025 - Day 16

Quote of the Day:

I was thirteen when I really realized I wanted to write. One of the magical things that happened to me was I discovered my mother’s old typewriter in the garage, and I hauled it out and got all the dirt and dust out of it and found out it still worked. It seemed like such magic to me, that you could type stuff; it looked so neat and clean.

— Luis Alberto Urrea

Interview in Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia (Anthology, 2010)

Today's Writing:

801 words on something very silly I'm writing about reading SF Fanzines of the 1930s-40s. It will probably be shorter when I'm done…

Tally

( Days 1-14 )

Day 15:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

trobadora,

yasaman,

ysilme

Day 16:

china_shop

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Entry tags:

wales

More on the pluses and minuses, and some more pluses

We can hear the surf crashing just outside our window!

So, yeah, we got to Aberystwyth with no problem on a scenic three-hour bus ride. I have no idea how drivers manage big vehicles on these roads, and the secret is, sometimes they don't; at one point one lane of the (theoretically) two-lane road (one lane in each direction, that is) (well, two-thirds of a lane in each direction) anyway one lane was closed, and the driver couldn't turn the bus into the other lane, avoiding parked cars and cars waiting to come the other way, until he got out and moved one of the "lane closed" signs a couple of feet back. And there were plenty of times when the roadside hedge was audibly brushing the bus windows as we went by, and a couple of times when we came around a corner to find ourselves abruptly almost nose to nose with an oncoming car, which usually had to back up to let the bus complete the turn. Disconcerting to those of us used to wide North American roads with generous sidewalks or breakdown lanes; utterly unremarkable to the locals.

Aberystwyth is the big city compared to where we've been! According to Wikipedia, the twin towns of Fishguard and Goodwick, that we just came from, have a population of about 5400; Aberystwyth has maybe 18,000 depending on where you look? (And whether you're counting the university students, who won't arrive until just as we leave.) We went from the bus station first to the tourist info, where we picked up some flyers on coastal walks and such; then we staggered into the extremely strong wind coming off the ocean to our hotel, which was half a block from the shore.

Well. What we expected to be our hotel. It turned out to be a "self-check-in" place, meaning unstaffed; you walk in the unlocked door and the front desk has no human, just some folders with people's names on them, and you find yours and in it are your room key, hotel info, etc. You know you're in a low-crime area when! But there was no folder for us.

I poked my head further into the hotel and found a couple of guests in the lounge, who showed me the rather tucked-away button on the desk that might summon a staffer. It did not. So I phoned the number on the hotel's business card, a stack of which were also on the desk, and the guy who answered said a) he had no record of ever receiving our reservation through Booking.com, and b) the hotel was full, no vacancies. He was apologetic about it (while also anxious to assure me that he wasn't holding my money; Booking.com was), but there was flat-out nothing he could do.

I've never had that happen before! (Not that I use B.c that often, I always prefer to book direct, but sometimes either a hotel has completely outsourced its booking to third parties like B.c or B.c just has better rates and cancellation policies.) I had multiple confirmations from B.c, but apparently they were all auto-sent without the hotel's involvement.

So that was stressful! Geoff and I camped out in the hotel's wee lobby for a bit. I had my printout of B.c's confirmation in one hand, their website open on my ipad in my lap, and with my other hand I was phoning B.c customer support. Fortunately I did connect quickly with a human, who put me on hold briefly to call the hotel himself and confirm that they couldn't house me (I presume to ensure that I wasn't just trying to scam an upgrade) and then told me that B.c would cancel that booking and email me some possible alternatives, and I could book one of them and B.c would pick up any extra cost above what the original place would have cost.

He said the email might take 30-45 minutes to arrive, but in fact it took only a few minutes -- which I expected to be the case, since it's all automated; it's not like there was someone hand-curating my options, although the agent's spiel made it sound like there was. I picked the one with the best B.c reviews that was close by and on the shoreline, hastily booked it, and off we went into the wind again!

The new hotel is actually in a slightly better location and has an actually staffed front desk (by incredibly cheerful and friendly young women), and we're on the second floor ("first" to Brits) with a bay window looking directly out at the beach and the waves rolling in. (Today they're rolling. Yesterday they were crashing. Either way it's a lovely sound to fall asleep to.) There's also a small table and two chairs in the bay, to sit in and watch the ocean, but frankly Geoff has dumped his stuff all over them (my stuff is dumped all over the floor on the other side of the bed) and we like to just sit in bed, from which we have almost as good a view. And the bathroom is large, and has plenty of flat space on which to put toiletries etc., and also has a tub. Yay!

The only difficulty now is that I am absolutely morally certain that the agent told me on the phone that if I chose one of the options B.c sent me, they'd pick up the whole price difference; but the email actually says that they'll pick up up to £51 and change. The actual price difference is £105. I'm prepared to fight them on this (the phone call "may have been recorded for training and verification purposes," after all), but if we lose, well, worse things happen at sea.

Once we'd successfully checked in to the new place, we went out to stretch our legs and look around the center of town a bit. And we started by going back to an outdoor-gear store we'd walked past on our way to the tourist info, that was having a going-out-of-business sale!

I'd realized a few days before that the coating that lined my rain pants was disintegrating; they were shedding a fine white grit. And they had eventually soaked through, in that storm we were in. Durable water repellency doesn't endure forever. Also, my everyday backpack is a basic Jansport school bag; it's fine for its intended use, and I like that it's big enough to serve as weekend luggage (I'd say it's thirty liters) while still small enough to fit under an airplane seat, but when I load it up with rain pants, rain jacket, one or two midlayers, one or two water bottles, lunch, emergency first aid supplies, and so on for a serious day's hiking, I really regret its lack of a waist belt. Also I only have a cheap third-party rain cover for it, which you may remember proved totally inadequate against a real rainstorm. (I sure remember.) And, the other day, I noticed a thinning at its bottom where the material was beginning to think about wearing through; not immediately, but that's not something I want to run risks with. And I don't have a rain cover for my big (seventy-liter) hiking pack at all.

So we stopped into the store and I scored heavily discounted replacements for all of the above! Including a thirty-liter daypack with not only a proper waist belt and ventilated back panel but -- what I didn't realize until I got it back to the hotel and was exploring all its pocketses in detail -- its own integrated rain cover! Win.

After that we just wandered around a bit, and spent a good amount of time clambering around the ruins of the coastal castle, which was fun and dramatic and also very windy omg. We eyeballed a bunch of restaurants, but nothing screamed out "eat here" to us.

So we went back and had dinner in the hotel restaurant, because we were not up for researching a place; I had done enough frantic internet juggling for one day.

me at dinner last night: I think I'll have a big glass of wine.

Geoff: You should. You deserve it.

me: I had a very stressful five minutes!

(He did loyally remind me that in fact it was longer than that.)

Entry tags:

admin: poll: theme

Round 179 Theme Poll

Poll #33623 round 179 theme poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 76

Pick the next theme of fancake:

Mystery & Suspense
27 (35.5%)

Platonic Relationships
23 (30.3%)

Uncommon Settings
26 (34.2%)

Entry tags:

[Charity Auction] Marvel Trumps Hate Creator Registrations are Open!

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Current Mood: charmed

Entry tags:

Stargate Atlantis: A Supermarket in California

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairings/Characters: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Rating: Mature
Length: 7,571 words
Creator Links: whateverrrrwhatever on AO3
Theme: Food & Cooking

Summary: John decides that California doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

It's an AU where John Sheppard inherits a supermarket right next to Cal and meets Rodney McKay, physics professor. They kiss. That's it, that's the fic.

Reccer's Notes: This is an *almost* complete AU, shot through with wonderful location details, wherein John is a veteran who spent time in Antarctica and Rodney is a professor at Berkeley. In a series of snapshots, John inherits a run-down local market, decides he likes the neighborhood, and sets about making a place for himself. Then one day, an "unnecessarily dramatic" (as described in the tags) Rodney walks through the door.

This was one of the first SGA AUs I read and it stayed with me. I truly enjoyed following John as he problem solved; first the store, then Rodney. (Spoiler: the solution is snacks.)

Fanwork Links: Story on AO3

Entry tags:

wed 2025

Write Every Day September 2025 - Day 15

Sorry this is so late! Got caught up in chores & stuff. I'm behind on replies to comments, too. 8-(

Quote of the Day:

"I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods."

--Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1988)

Today's Writing:

I wrote about 650 words, working through something…

Tally

( Days 1-13 )

Day 14:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

goddess47,

luzula,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Entry tags:

Ladies' Bingo 2025-2026 (Round 13)

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Entry tags:

wales

pluses and minuses

+: Christine brought us to the bus station to catch the bus to Aberystwyth in good time, and the ride went smoothly

-: When we arrived in Aberystwyth, the hotel we had a multiply confirmed reservation at had never heard of us

+: We managed to hastily book what is probably a nicer hotel in just as good a location

???: Booking.com said on the phone that they'd cover the difference in price, but I'll believe it when I see it

+: The new hotel has a full bathtub

-: I have discovered, over the course of this trip, that some of my gear is on its last legs

+: We walked past an outdoor gear store having a going-out-of-business sale, and now I have new ~~toys~~ gear!

Updates to “No Fandom” Additional Tags, September 2025

Posted by Lute

https://www.transformativeworks.org/updates-to-no-fandom-additional-tags-september-2025/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=268037

AO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don’t belong to any particular fandom (also known as “No Fandom” tags). This post will provide an overview of some of these upcoming changes.

In this round of updates, we continued a method which streamlines creation of new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a regular basis, so check back on AO3 News for periodic “No Fandom” tag announcements.

None of these updates change the tags users have added to works. If a user-created tag is considered to have the same meaning as a new canonical, it will be made a synonym of one of these newly created canonical tags, and works with that user-created tag will appear when the canonical tag is selected.

In short, these changes only affect which tags appear in AO3’s auto-complete and filters. You can and should continue to tag your works however you prefer.

New Canonicals

The following concepts have been made new canonical tags:

In Conclusion

While all these new tags have already been made canonical, we are still working on implementing changes and connecting relevant tags, so it’ll be some time before these updates are complete. We thank you in advance for your patience!

While we won’t be announcing every change we make to No Fandom canonical tags, you can expect similar updates in the future on the tags we believe will most affect users. If you’re interested in the changes we’ll be making, you can continue to check AO3 News or follow us on Bluesky @wranglers.archiveofourown.org or Tumblr @ao3org for future announcements.

You can also read previous updates on “No Fandom” tags as well as other wrangling updates, linked below:

Got Questions?

For more information about AO3’s tag system, check out our Tags FAQ.

In addition to providing technical help, AO3 Support also handles requests related to how tags are sorted and connected. If you have questions about specific tags, which were first used over a month ago and are unrelated to any of the new canonical tags listed above, please contact Support instead of leaving a comment on this post.

Lastly, as mentioned above, we’re still working on connecting relevant user-created tags to these new canonicals. If you have questions about specific tags which should be connected to these new canonicals, please refrain from contacting Support about them until at least two months from now.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/updates-to-no-fandom-additional-tags-september-2025/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=268037

Entry tags:

Two Murderbot fic rec posts

Two rec posts at my DW featuring recs from my recent Murderbot fic reading:

1. Murderbot bookverse short gen [9 fics featuring a variety of characters]

2. Murderbot longer iddy h/c & plotty fic [9 longer fics, mostly Murderbot & Gurathin]

Entry tags:

Multifandom Exchange: AspecEx - Sign-Ups are Opened! Nominations Close Soon!

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Entry tags:

wed 2025

Write Every Day September 2025 - Day 14

Quote of the Day:

(Another quote by William Trevor — I don't know where this one came from…)

"I get melancholy if I don’t write. I need the company of people who don’t exist."

— William Trevor

Today's Writing:

I managed a little over 430 words, written before I fell asleep! \o/

Tally

( Days 1-12 )

Day 13:

badly_knitted,

brithistorian,

carenejeans,

china_shop,

cornerofmadness,

sanguinity,

sylvanwitch,

the_siobhan,

ysilme

Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!

Entry tags:

tv: sense8

New Vid: Voice in My Throat (Sense8)

Title: Voice in My Throat
Fandom: Sense8
Music: "Voice in My Throat" by Pearl & The Beard
Summary:

I walk down the road and I'm alone again but | All these years I've travelled down a lonely pathway
You will be the voice in my throat | You have been the voice in my throat

Notes: Made for

colls for

fandomtrumpshate

AO3 | DW | Tumblr

Entry tags:

wales

Unexpected fun!

by which I mean work! Fun work!

Before we left on this trip, we'd booked a sea kayaking tour for today; with only two full days here, the idea was to spend one of them hiking along the tops of the coastal cliffs, and the other admiring them from below. Also we go lake kayaking at home, which we enjoy a lot though it is of course orders of magnitude more gentle than sea kayaking! We booked a similar sea kayaking tour in New Zealand years ago and really loved it.

But it was a lot warmer in New Zealand. And we weren't quite so tired. ~~and we were a lot younger~~ After the day we hiked through sideways hail, we both agreed that we'd just as soon give it a miss. But of course we were well past the company's free cancellation deadline. But fortunately (??) the forecast for today was for heavy rain and high winds. The kayaking company wrote to us a few days ago saying that the outlook was bad, and would we be willing to switch our booking to Saturday (yesterday)? No, we said, so sorry, we can't do that; and crossed our fingers. And indeed, on late Friday evening they cancelled Sunday's trip and said they'd refund us. (I haven't actually checked, but I assume the refund has gone through, or will on Monday.)

So we were off the hook! As I said in an earlier post, we laid in food (and beer) yesterday for tonight's dinner, so we wouldn't have to go out. And Geoff had the brilliant idea of asking Mike and Christine if they'd be willing to show us around the farm a bit today, maybe we could offer unskilled help with whatever they were doing? So we asked, if it wouldn't be intrusive (I mean, it's their home, and Mike's son is visiting), could we participate in their work today? And they were pretty surprised, I think, but said sure!

This morning I made a big breakfast for us with three of the six eggs, two of the four sausages, all the cherry tomatoes that hadn't gone off, three of the five huge mushrooms, and half a red onion that we'd also bought the day before, because for Geoff it's just not an omelet (well, a scramble) without onion. It was delicious.

They said they'd likely be at work in the barn behind the house around ten, and we'd be welcome to come by; but when we started over there a few minutes past the hour, Christine saw us passing their door and nipped out to say they hadn't started yet. So we suggested they just come by whenever they were ready for us, and went back to lounge about a while longer. Finally Mike came by and said he was on his way to the barn to split logs, and if we really wanted to come help, we'd be welcome.

It was ferociously windy and gusting rain, sometimes quite heavily. (Definitely not a kayaking day!) (At least, it was ferociously windy to us, but Mike said that 50kph winds are nothing, around here. Eep.) We put on rain gear, but to my private relief we ended up actually working inside the barn. (Mostly.) Mike was sitting at a powered log-splitter (somewhat like this https://www.homedepot.com/p/YARDMAX-6-5-Ton-15-Amp-Horizontal-Electric-Log-Splitter-YS0650/323678117), with huge tarpaulin bags of cut logs behind him, and it was our job to keep handing him logs to split, keep another bag positioned for him to toss the split ones into, and haul away the bags of split ones when they reached max haulable weight, piling them against a wall of the barn to be moved further (and sorted into shorter ones that would fit in their own home's wood stove and longer ones that would fit in the rental's) sometime later. Geoff also went out into the rain a couple of times to bring in wheelbarrows-full of more logs. Meanwhile Mike's son Aneurin was dealing with their apple harvest; they have I don't know how many apple trees, but I can see through our own window some trees absolutely flush with apples, and the strong wind meant lots of windfalls; so they had to be picked up and brought in and sorted into best quality/not so great quality/use right away, and the first two categories at least had to be put away, each variety separately in its own part of their apple storage cabinet. (Mike called it the apple store, meaning storage of apples; it looked like a tall enclosed cabinet with shelves, and I'd try to find a picture of the kind of thing I mean except that I know you understand that searching for "apple store" will not turn up anything relevant.)

Anyway, it was fun! We borrowed work gloves so our hands were protected, and I was careful of my back, and in about two hours we'd helped him split, at a very very rough guess, maybe fifty cubic feet of wood? We filled seven tarp bags to the limit of the weight that Geoff and I could haul to the side. I know that Mike couldn't have worked so fast alone, and we freed up Aneurin to deal with the apples; Christine was inside their house cooking and also directing Aneurin whenever he had a question about the apples that Mike couldn't answer. Certainly he and Christine seemed genuinely pleased to have us helping; Mike said a couple of times that we should come back, and we'd find the Cwtsh (our rental space) heated by wood we'd helped split!

Once all the wood was split, he invited us into their house for tea! Christine welcomed us in and made impressed sounds when Mike told her we'd filled seven bags of split logs. The kitchen, which was the room we walked right into, is a wonderful space. She said that when they bought the house about twenty-five years ago, she initially didn't like it at all; it had been redone badly and uglily in the seventies (a drop ceiling instead of that gorgeous medieval vault! Terrible colors!), and they tore all that out and restored it to what it had been, except of course with all mod cons. Her oven and hob are tucked into the huge stone arch that was the original fireplace, and the ironwork chain and hook that were originally over the fire, to suspend the cooking pot from, are now hanging decoratively from the rafters. She has floor-to-ceiling shelves on one wall that are largely filled with enameled cast iron pots and pans; I expressed my admiration!

Mike took us further into the house to a small solarium, filled with plants; he successfully grows pineapples there, as well as a cinnamon plant, frangipani, limes and lemons, and more that I can't remember. (Imagine being in a Welsh market and seeing pineapple for sale labeled "locally grown"!) We oohed and aaahed, and then came back out to have tea with the two of them and Aneurin, although Aneurin looked at his phone and excused himself once he'd finished his cup. We chatted about what Geoff and I do for work, and Christine told us about working in professional storytelling and also writing a book of local folktales (https://www.amazon.com/Pembrokeshire-Folk-Tales-United-Kingdom/dp/0752465651 -- there's a copy of it in the Cwtsh but I hadn't realized it was by her!), and also about falling in love with the property despite its hideous 1970s tat when they learned that it has its own spring-fed water supply. We talked briefly about the awfulness of climate change. (I forgot to say that earlier, one of the times she'd come by our place for some reason, I'd said something that made clear I was originally American, "but these days I don't admit it," and she shudderingly concurred, and added that they have a swear jar in the house, and every time That Man's name is mentioned, the offender has to put a pound in.)

They invited us to stay for lunch; but we demurred. I at least didn't want to overstay our welcome even though they pressed us a bit, and I didn't want them to feel pressured to socialize at the expense of getting necessary work done (there's a lot more to do; Mike described a lot of work that's going to be done in and to the barn, in preparation for which a lot of space has to be cleared in it), and I was a little socialized out, to be honest, and wanted to have a chance to relax and also catch up on blogging! Also we really have overbought food -- we still have bags of nuts and dried fruit for hiking that we haven't even opened yet -- and while I'd always rather have too much food than too little (especially on long hikes; imagine if that sideways-hail hike had been even longer and worse, and if we hadn't had plenty of calories available if we'd needed them), we really didn't want to spoil our appetites for dinner, when our wee fridge is bursting with the food we laid in yesterday.

So we said many thank-yous on both sides, and Geoff and I came back to our space. Mike commented that the rain would probably stop in good time for us to have a dry, if windy, evening walk, but we've just been sitting around contentedly on our devices (and Geoff had his usual-when-he-can afternoon nap). Tomorrow Christine will give us a lift down to the bus station, where we'll catch a 10:48 bus to Aberystwyth; the timing apparently works well with an appointment she has, which is great.

It's been a fabulous visit, and I'm sorry it's so short. The location has its inconveniences (and cooking for ourselves? on vacation? what?) but overall this is a great place to stay, the sort of thing AirB&B originally marketed itself as (they are listed on AirB&B, but we booked directly, which I think they much preferred). We've loved both the space and the chance to spend time with them!

Now Geoff is busy figuring out how to work the oven, to heat up our pies and chips, and I'm finally catching up to now here!

Entry tags:

wales

some pictures

Geoff is the primary photographer of our trips, just as I'm the primary logisticker. But I have taken a few photos that I thought folks might like to see.

And if you don't, that's what cut tags are for!

This was the view from our first hotel room, in Bishop's Castle:

A view across Bishop's Castle and the hills beyond

This is a pretty representative image of what the easier parts of our hikes have looked like. (On the harder parts I haven't been getting my phone out except to navigate with!)

Some rolling countryside near Kington, Herefordshire

This was the cheese I bought for a picnic lunch in Hay-on-Wye. How could I resist?

This was the path we walked along the River Wye:

and this is what it looked like when we got out into the meadow and had lunch:

A moderately wide, placid river between wooded shores

This was just part of the breakfast spread awaiting us in our Fishguard B&B:

(Yes, a few of the tomatoes had unfortunately gone a bit moldy by the time we got to them. But the others were delicious.)

and this is the ladder up to our sleeping loft!

(meanwhile at home)

Our long-delayed front porch and mudroom project finally began construction while we've been away, and within a couple of days they notified us that they'd found dry rot and more asbestos. This house, I swear.

As God is my witness, I will have a mudroom this winter!

Entry tags:

wales

Yesterday (the "today" of yesterday's post) was great!

A beautiful hike in unexpectedly beautiful weather

The morning dawned cloudy with intermittent bursts of rain. For some reason all we wanted for breakfast (aside from coffee with that delicious local milk) was toasted laverbread with butter and jam! The bread is crumbly and hard to slice, so we sometimes ended up with more chunks then slices, and there's something in it that makes my tongue tingle, but it tastes good and it's exceedingly Welsh and I so rarely have butter and jam, it's just not usually my thing, so it was a big treat. But all that beautiful sausage and bacon and the eggs (two of their hens lay blue eggs! Four of our six eggs are blue!) went unloved.

Mike came by to say hi and check in, and showed us radar on his phone suggesting that the rainburst that had just passed would actually be the last one; the official BBC forecast was for (possibly thundery) showers off and on all day, but the radar showed nice clear skies coming in from the west. (He said that he often finds the Irish forecast more useful than the British one, since that's where the weather's coming from.) So we set off walking around noon. We asked him and Christine, who also stopped by on her way to tend to the chickens, what the best way to get from here to the coast path would be, and they gave us directions northward on the road, past a cemetery and a small named settlement/farmhouse and a church that was attacked by about 1400 French soldiers in the last ever invasion of the British Isles, in 1797. The soldiers mostly absconded and/or got drunk, one local woman is reputed to have rounded up eight of them while armed only with a pitchfork, the invasion fell apart, and a peace treaty was signed on the site of the pub we had dinner at last night. One of the local attractions that we will not make time to see is a tapestry depicting the battle, modeled after the Bayeaux Tapestry.

Anyway, after the church Mike's directions degenerated into "I don't know, find a path, follow your instincts!" Which was reasonable, considering that the coast path we were aiming for runs, you know, along the coast, and we could see the water from the churchyard, so when we found a path marked as a public footpath leaving the road and heading toward it, we took it, and indeed it shortly intersected the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. (Wales has a marked and maintained footpath/hiking trail running the entire length of its coast, which is amazing.)

The B&B is north-northwest of the town, and we went north to reach the coast path, so our plan was to turn right and follow it east and south again, back to the town's harbor, and thence home. And Mike was right; the weather was absolutely beautiful, sunny with clouds but never even a threat of rain, and although it was sometimes briefly quite windy, it was always blowing onshore from the water. Which was a good thing, because a good chunk of this part of the path runs along high rocky cliffs over the ocean. Signs on some of the gates leading from farmers' fields warn, "CLIFFS KILL. Stay on the path," and indeed, as I think Buffy once said, "Fall down there, be dead a long time." I never felt genuinely in danger, the footing was generally good although sometimes a steep scramble up or down and we each have a good hiking pole, but I did once make the mistake of imagining what falling would feel like, and I kind of freaked myself out. I was glad when the path moved away from the cliff edge again. And we never admired scenery while walking; we always stopped first and then looked around. I would definitely not want to do that walk in stormy weather.

The path wound up and around, edged with gorse and other brush, and giving us some great views of waves hitting the cliffs, and places where the cliff had calved into the sea. As well as fields on the inland side, of course, but we didn't actually see any livestock in them. (Though at times there was certainly a lot of manure.) We saw the big ferry making its way from Fishguard Harbor toward Ireland. We stopped now and then to eat handfuls of trail mix and drink water and watch seagulls soaring far below us.

And at one point, when we'd been walking for maybe three hours in all, we were startled by a call from behind us of "Track!" and four trail runners overtook us! We're in boots, with poles and a pack and layers (including rain gear just in case, because hello), slogging along the hilly and precipitous terrain (happily! But slogging!), and they come cheerfully loping past us in Lycra shorts and t-shirts! We got out of their way, everybody said hello as they went by, and as the last guy passed me I said, "well, we're impressed!" and he called back something cheerful-sounding in Welsh. It definitely put our sense of trekking accomplishment in perspective!

Eventually we hit the outskirts of town, and descended on roads to the harbor. At the point where we left the coast path (and the coastal national park) a sign noted that, to control plant growth and encourage biodiversity, the area was being grazed by ponies! but unfortunately we didn't see any.

We didn't want to keep asking Mike for rides into and out of town, but we also didn't want to climb the steep hill back to the B&B late in the evening (extremely narrow road with no pedestrian walkway, after dark; also we just, you know, didn't want to climb the steep hill back to the B&B). So we hit a fish and chip shop on the harbor and got two huge pieces of fresh-fried cod, and also a large order of chips to share. I was the one who said "let's split a large," and holy shit a regular would have done; that order of chips would feed four. We sat in the sun on a concrete ramp leading down to the water (not the most comfy, but the benches in the actual waterside park area were exposed to the very strong wind) and managed to finish our fish and put at least a visible dent in the chips. Somewhat to my surprise, we were not harassed by seagulls! One or two landed fifteen or so feet away and eyed us consideringly, but never actually tried for our food. Very polite. So that was our early dinner, and we wouldn't need to go out later in the evening.

We also picked up some pies (one beef and onion, one chicken and mushroom, one Cornish pasty) and a couple of beers to bring back for the next day's dinner (tonight's), because today's weather was predicted to be abominable and we didn't want to have to go out.

We walked out on a long mole/breakwater into the harbor, just to see the water and the land from a different angle. I was amused that, although it was completely wide and firm and level and there was a wide flat path along it with lots of other people strolling out (and two teenage boys fishing off the far end), a sign at its foot warned that the breakwater was not designed or intended for pedestrian access, walk at your own risk; like, they disavow this completely easy and innocent stroll, but the cliff trail is public access?

There is a town bus that sometimes stops a hundred meters from the B&B (and that last hundred meters is virtually level; the bus covers all the steep climb), but trying to figure out exactly where we could catch it and which of its runs went to where we'd want and not somewhere else had defeated me in the pre-trip research. And if you think that sounds silly, here is a map of the bus route (the long thin thing sticking out is the breakwater we walked out on):

A map of a bus route that looks like a demented spiderweb

But Google Maps' transit info feature came to my aid, informing me that we could catch one going where we wanted in about half an hour. And waiting for the bus was a much more attractive idea than struggling on the road up the hill; we'd been out for almost five hours, and we were full and tired. So we hiked uphill a couple of blocks to what Google indicated was the right corner, and settled in to wait.

After a while a man came out of the pub across the street and called out to us that we'd be waiting quite a while, and we assured him that we knew that. He was waiting for the same bus in the opposite direction; it was going to arrive from the southwest, pick him up and bring him northeast, then reverse direction back to us, pick us up, and bring us west and north. It was very reassuring to have him confirm that it was coming! He also told us the fare: 95p each. I was confident that we'd be able to tap a credit card, since all the buses do that, but I asked him, just in case, and he said he wasn't sure, and actually came across the street to give us two pounds! So nice of him! But I knew I had two pound coins in my bag, and was digging them out. And when the bus arrived for him, he called out to us, before boarding, that he would tell the driver that we were waiting to be picked up on her return.

So he did, and we were, and we enjoyed the feeling of the bus laboring its way up the hill instead of us doing it. Then there were hot showers and a nice quiet evening, with cups of tea. It is very quiet here at night so far out of town (and, I mean, behind two-foot-thick walls).

That was yesterday, and I will post this before starting to try to write up today!