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Dear Diary

A 3686-post collection

SNAFU

My plans have, once again, gang aft agley. The bronze pins are too thick for some of my seed beads, so unless I want to slow down and find the wide-bore ones, I'm going to have to make my own from the wire I have. Turns out the holes are too small for any kind of pin.

Good news: I don't have to go trawling for findings again.
Bad news: A majority of my time, today, is going to be spent on hand-making pins from my beading wire.

I think I'll use my supply of gold, first. Then move on to the black and the silver.

When I run out of those green seed beads, I'm going to be looking for a better supply.

But, waste not want not. I've had plenty enough delays, and now all my impediments are with other people. I can get on with things! And I'm going to bloody well get on with those things, and badger my other people to get the fuck on with it.

The sooner all means of production are in my hands, the better off I will be.

About the only person I can rely on for this thing is, currently, myself. I have to bark everyone else into doing anything that I can't. Pain. In. The arse.

I also need to arrange a day for editing KFZ so I can finally go trawling for agents.

I need to go look after myself. I forgot to eat again.

So close...

I really want to be able to start making earrings on Monday. I have a plausible workspace set up. I just need to sort all my beads, findings, and whatnot before tomorrow.

If I can put in a minimum of two hours' work a day on designs, then that means stock in abundance. I know that if I put in too many hours at jewellery, my body pays for it.

I'm in the last stretch of bead sorting. Which means that I've

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Beloved bought me Factorio!

So you know where the rest of my weekend is going. Lol.

But first, my usual nonse and a call to MeMum. Because family is important and all that.

And in the unlikely event that I get bored with Factorio (more likely to be waiting for my machines to accomplish a thing) I have beads to sort. Small beads. Which means that I finally busted out my Aldi's magnifying lamp. Huzzah.

Good stuff: No assembly required.

Bad stuff: I need the right

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Intense, repetative, and thankless

All efforts to translate Adapting into Markup by automated means have failed abominably. Which means that I am left with copy-pasting text and then editing in the italics.

And when I've had enough of doing that, I go to my unsorted beads and frelling sort some of those shits out.

The lovely spouted bowl MeMum found for me is not that great with small, faceted beads. Those little shits tend to clump, so pouring large volumes of them into wee baggies is

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Knuckle down, buckle down...

I'm doing my first edit on Adapting today. I might even convince myself to transfer the entire text into Markup, so that Beloved will have an easier time making it dance for me. The more work I do beforehand, the less time it takes for Beloved to have it ready for any beta readers.

I'm thinking of sending out a new appeal. I can rely on MeMum and a single Friendo, and if I am lucky and can get Beloved to get

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Beads, glorious beads!

I've got loads of the fuckers, and I'm planning to get some more. Turns out the local post office has a jewellery stand with some interesting pieces I could definitely use. Alas, I have to wait for next payday.

So if I am still going there to collect parcels, I might grab me some nice looking beads to fluff out my already huge collection of interesting shiny things.

MeMum managed to secure a good two kilos or so from her own sources.

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::Zombie Chewbacca noises::

Woke up at roughly 1:30 AM. Spotty, intermittent sleep until 5AM when my braid decided that, yes, going into slumber was a great idea.

And then, half an hour later, Rabbit started saying 'good morning' to everyone. 5:30 Am, after a rough night like that one, is the time that I least appreciate Steam Powered Giraffe. But I get over it quickly enough.

My gaseous plans to fetch batteries or shop around for cabochons on the cheap are currently shelved.

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Miss Chaos is 11 today!

Eleven years ago, my life was made infinitely more interesting by the arrival of a slightly strange little girl.

Yesterday, she got as much purple and sparkle as we could mutually supply. Sometimes in the same thing.

And she also got to run around like a mad thing at Calamvale district park for a majority of the day. Good news - I can do moderately stable braid crowns by doing additive braids all the way around and then weaving the ends through

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Party time!

I've done my math on the matter and I reckon we should take off for our party at the park long about 9. That gives us enough time to get there, fetch MeMum, and do any other setting up before everyone else gets there.

It's just immediate family. We had no time to invite friends. And it's probably for the best because Chaos gets overstimulated just thinking about parties. Having a host of folks, food, and presents there might make her vibrate

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It's raining findings!

There's a definite difference between buying in person and buying online. And it could be solved with ONE solution.

An adult human hand.

Not everyone understands centimetres. Not everyone expects centimetres to pop up on a findings site where your average measurement is in millimetres.

So I've wound up with nonse like this:

[Shown here, a "feather" finding that overflows my palm]

[Shown here, a "leaf" finding as long as my pinkie finger]

The human hand is a universal indicator of scale.

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Busy Times

The weather is changing and I can literally feel it. The usual low pressure system warning has clung to my head in a band formation. Meaning that I ache across both eye sockets, my teeth, and the nape of my neck.

The chill turn of the weather doesn't help, either.

Something else has come by my mailbox, but I have to go and collect it locally. Which implies that it was too big to jam into the mailbox. Which, in turn, has

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My calendar is full

Driving to and from Tullagawupwup. 3AM wake-up against my will. A dire need for coffee and a dire need for air.

And one of my nineteen parcels arrived, but it wasn't any of the ones that I can confirm as being in Sydney.

Evidently, Aus!Customs has no qualms about a quarter cup's worth of glass shrapnel seed beads. I kid, of course. I'm not going through all this shit just so some forensics mook can dig it out of the scenery.

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Secondary skills

In the words of Odo when Quark questioned his interest in funerary rituals, "Everybody needs a hobby." It didn't come in to the Hevun's Child trilogy, because almost everyone I was writing about literally did not have the time to kick back, relax, and faff around.

I glimpsed at it in The Amity Incident but by and large, the entire human colony were a bunch of nerd whose primary focus was their better future. The luxury of messing about with things to

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A Winner is...

The 7-loop connector bars (250 of them!) from Milky Way 888. They were one of the last to get going, and I had to extend the allowance time lest my order get cancelled. And yet, they are the first ones to arrive in my hot little hands.

A moment of silence for the ziplock baggie that tried valiantly, but could not contain the mighty force of two hundred and fifty brass findings during the rigorous journey between there an here. It did

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Signs of progress?

Yes, I'd love some. I looked up the status of my nineteen parcels for EGDB, and nothing has yet shifted. I've also discovered that Auspost is absolute shit at tracking things from China.

I can't wait for the day that I'm big enough that I won't have to worry about this shit.

Chaos keeps complaining about being forced into a Dutch Braid rather than a French Braid. All her arguments are currently illogical so I guess I'd better actually show her why

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