26 august 2025
I've been having such a great time puttering around town. Some wonderful late night chatting with a few other townies, (Nebula, owl, and dozens), about everything from mountain ranges, weather, climate change, what people were studying, indie TTRPG systems and solo journalling games- plus, plenty of wrangling around CSS/HTML in a way that made me really happy and proud of myself.
I wouldn't really consider myself someone who is primarily a coder, but there's something deeply satisfying about being able to take a floaty concept in your brain and turn it into reality: even if you know the underpinning is quite simple, it always makes me excited and happy when I figure out how to do something new: like re-sizing status.cafe RSS feeds to make them fit adorably into the tiny box on my Neocities site, or figuring out a workaround with an 'invisible' sidebar to 'float' the feed beside my main content, (tables resize a bit funky, but I'm thrilled that everything works great on my laptop, and is functional, if not the ideal viewing experience on mobile.) Very proud of cobbling it all together from scratch.
Recently also got a haircut- just a bit of a trim for split ends and smoothing it all out, since the academic term is right around the corner, and I'm pretty pleased with how that came out. Some last minute shopping for essentials, and it looks like I'll be driving down right on Labour Day, which is annoying in terms of my schedule for unpacking and such, but still leaves me with a day to unload the essentials and also find my classes, set up my school ID and transit pass, all that good stuff.
I've been waking up with the sun, lately. It's pretty nice, waking up bathed in warm, radiant sunlight- not too hot yet, because the fierce heat hasn't settled in, (and August is losing its bite, as the weather turns autumnal- soon, I'll have an excuse to break out my green beanie, which is a brand new addon, I'm considering adding a handmade patch onto it of some sort), which suits me just fine- I adore cold, snowy weather. One of the things I'm most looking forward to in the winter term is taking a seat on a bench on campus, late at night- when the air is inky blue, and the warm orange glow of the streetlights bounces off the heaps of crystalline snow, and everything just has an inner glow, the world muffled and silent from the blanketing snow as thick, fluffy Hallmark snowflakes swoosh by in soft eddies and curls of wind. Gorgeous. One of my favourite experiences of downtown- alongside the way the neon streetsigns and car lights reflect on grey, wet pavement: how there isn't a true, deep darkness out on the main streets: the lights are always on, and the city always feels alive. Plus, it's a fun excuse to use my Hello Kitty umbrella, which is brand new, pink, and adorable.
Quite proud of myself for all the tinkering around with coding I've done as of late. Had fun suggesting some indie TTRPG games to other townies- Butterfly Court, Of Moon and Leaf, Tangled Blessings: all such fun games, and a good time with newcomers and experienced hands alike.
Coming to the end of my summer journal. I've been thinking about copying down some of my favourite poems from my webshrine into the front of it, as a way to break it in for the term with something special, and to be able to carry around a little piece of soothing comfort in the form of my favourite poems in the front. Sounds rather romantic. If you don't romanticize your life, who will?