Figured I should mention I'm alive. I'm not by any big fault lines; we only get small jiggles. Everyone I know is okay. I'm not watching the news.

Our hospital has canceled any non emergency procedures in order to accept earthquake victims from the other hospitals. It will be a while before my neighbor gets her hip surgery.

I've made the second room in the ghost game! Scavenged bits of wood, plastic, etc. Yogurt tubs are the very devil to glue to things. School glue pops right off, superglue barely holds, and I'm about to give up and pull out the hot glue, but I'm worried it will melt the plastic. Maybe if I owned mod podge or something? I am new to the gluing things to things life.

It's very relaxing to play with paper bits. I'm fond of dollhouse stuff to begin with, and also puzzle games and murder mysteries, so this is the sweet spot of the venn diagram. That's two rooms done, and now I am at liberty to work on the next one. My fingertips are mostly normal, just a little pinker and shinier than they were before the Jam Incident.

I should make some birthday presents, though... I hate to lose momentum, but duty calls.

Picked up my hexagon quilt again.

I have been chatting with a couple friends as one of them plays a video game in the background. Sometimes we game together, if the lag isn't so bad (three time zones), and we play occasional rpgs. The modern Friday night poker, I guess. I'm going to pull out my Escape Room in a Box kit once we are done with the latest game, which I have successfully played online before via taking photos of the pieces. Anyway, it's nice to have some English paper piecing to keep my hands busy as we talk, and I'm very close to the end of the quilt. It's the blue and orange one, if anyone remembers it. Hand sewing can be done sitting on a couch or bed, and doesn't require my sewing chair. I finished most of the quilt while watching Columbo.

I'm back in the trenches, looking for recipes. My father has expressed his preference for a variety of dishes, instead of the same pot of beans all week. Annoying, but I see his point. I'm scrounging through the cookbooks we own, and the internet at large, for the good stuff. You get into some strange places that way, like the Christian Mom With Five Kids part of the internet. Boy, do those people love cheese and packets of premixed herbs. It's interesting to have windows into such different lives, you know? I take time off from serious recipe hunting to read my comic relief cookbooks, which I have collected plenty of. Some of the jello stuff from the 60s is charmingly alien. Wouldn't look out of place in Star Trek. There's one where you peel a cantaloupe, hollow it out, fill it with fruit and jello, and then frost the outside with cream cheese. My friends have been rating the jello dishes on a scale of how likely they were to cause a divorce, and that one got a Henry VIII.

I managed the treasure hunt for my dad in the nick of time - the last day my twin and the kiddo were there, and the moment the hunt was over they had to go home and pack for the flight. The kiddo and I had a lot of last minute fun doing the setup - burying a mint tin in the patch of pine trees, drawing letters on the bottom of soda cans, making a soda tab necklace, blowing up jellyfish balloons, swimming to the patch of sea grass and dropping a bottle tied to a weight, hiding walnuts among the gnomes. All in giggly top secret spy fashion, of course. She ran around with my dad as he solved the clues, I have a lot of great photos of them. She shot me sly conspiratorial looks every time he solved a puzzle.

God, I am exhausted. I have been working hard for what, a week? Coming up with the puzzles, crafting them in secret, and then staying up late to do a last minute drawstring bag because I didn't have a proper prize. Then I had to gallop up and down stairs, dig a hole in hard ground with a pickaxe, stand on chairs to hang balloons, carry lead weights around, and go back and forth over the terrain planting clues as quickly as possible without being noticed. And then do it a second time with my dad, taking photos and giving gentle nudges. At one point, he needed his reading glasses, which had been swept into the sea and lost a lens. That wasn't part of the puzzle, but we had to fix it anyway. The hunt ran about an hour and twenty, judging from the time stamps on my photos. I didn't get any shots of the setup, because I was in a hurry, but that also probably took over an hour, and I was soaked with sweat by the time it was ready.

He had a wonderful time. The kiddo did too.

I've taken a lot of notes for next time.

Crafting came down to the wire!

Things that got made: tiny pirates for each kid, with personalized eyes and hair and pants color. Tiny tricorns with deluxe chicken feathers, antique lace, and a jingle bell color coded to the pants to prevent fights. Tiny rapier made of bamboo skewer, leather basket guard, color coded wooden bead pommel, and thread wrapped hilt. Tiny drawstring bag with color coded beads on the strings. Tiny roll of treasure map paper. Larger drawstring bags containing pirate loot. Tiny functional leather belt made with an old cufflink as the buckle.

Things that did not get made: pirate vests and sashes, mermaids, etc. Maybe next time.

There was also candy, of course. Wow, chocolate melts fast. Next time, less meltable candy. The marshmallows were a hit, maybe some cookies, lollipops, those chalky candy necklaces. The hard shelled skittles and m&ms held up well. Need to do research.

Set up the clues, summoned all the kids to the water. One of them was so excited she fell down the stairs. She's fine, just a graze, and it did not dim her enthusiasm. They worked together well, despite having two different languages between the three of them. They swarmed from clue to clue, climbing, digging, cracking walnuts, assembling puzzles, rummaging through flowers. They did so well! They all got a chance to shine, and they were careful not to leave each other behind, even through mishaps like losing a shoe or needing a bandaid.

They were so happy about the treasure at the end. They adored the little pirate dolls, and there were no squabbles about the candy or the colorful bead necklaces. The old coins were a huge hit. I caught the kiddo arranging her treasure on her bed the other day, and my cousin told me the other two played with the pirates on the flight home, showed them off to their grandma, and played pirate dress-up and made necklaces with the old coins and some seashells.

Wish I had been able to do something like that for the older kids, but I didn't think of it in time. Ah well, there's always a next time. It was an exhausting week of work, I stayed up until midnight the night before sewing, and stole as many hours as I could the next day adding last minute stuff like the tiny bags.

I am now planning a grownup treasure hunt for my dad. The only sticking point is the treasure at the end - would he want a pirate doll and some candy? I can make it happen.

Half the cousins left, we only have the smaller, shyer ones who don't really speak English. My twin and her kid are coming soon, and there's gonna be a little overlap with the little cousins, and they are even in the same age range! I'm excited to see the kiddo, it's been years.

I am planning a group activity for the kids - a treasure hunt. I've got a nice bottle with a cork, I am making aged (coffee stained) paper scrolls where I can draw pictures of various landmarks in my grandparents' house (they don't speak the same language, so riddles are out) and they can run all around collecting clues until they come to a pirate chest full of treasure. I have a cool chest, and I'm going to make drawstring bags for each of them, with old coins, gemstones, candy, and hopefully a pirate doll. The rest of the family is welcome to put stuff in the chest.

I'm modifying my keyhole doll pattern to have boot flaps and a puffy shirt. The kids like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which means a long vest, sash, belt, beads and findings, and bandanna. Not hard to do, but keyhole dolls are very small. I will do my test piece today, and if it doesn't work out I will size up. Yes I have plans for swords.

I'm excited.

Having a good time with the Dracula Daily emails. They're a great combination of weird and melodramatic. It has inspired me to pick up Quincey Morris, Vampire again - I love that dumb soup vampire.

Snail has also unearthed Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in İstanbul), a Turkish movie from the 50s. It was free on archive.org, like the Hollywood monster movies I've been watching. Fascinating movie! Honestly a lot closer to the book than the Bela Lugosi version. The castle sequence was great, the addition of the butler was a great choice for exposition and dramatic tension. I also liked the shift away from wafers n holy water to all garlic all the time - the garlic clove necklaces, brandishing heads of garlic like crucifixes, the concern over how to cook eggplants without garlic.

The Mina character, Güzin, got an unexpected amount of screen time. She has a career as a dancer, she drives her own car, she has her own constellation of connections in the movie. Mina herself was not half as independent as Güzin, and didn't get to spent nearly as much time talking to other women. I also genuinely wouldn't have expected Mina to be portrayed as the sexiest character in the movie, but I didn't see Renfield coming in the Hollywood movie either. Surely people would either go for Dracula the seductive villain or Van Helsing the Gary Stu? Bram Stoker definitely feels like Van Helsing deserves some love and kisses.

3.9 earthquake last night. That's not a dangerous one, don't worry. The place I live is prone to little shakes, but not big ones. Not on a fault line, something something sediment, whatever.

The house shuddered. It waited thirty seconds, and shuddered again. It comes up through the walls, moving the whole house as one piece. Everything was fine, not even a painting fell off the wall.

When I was a kid, we lived somewhere different. There was a big earthquake that collapsed buildings and killed people in a nearby city. It happened in the middle of the night, and my parents woke up, grabbed us, and we spent the rest of the night outside. We camped in the yard for a while after that, I forget how long. That was all that happened, our house was fine afterwards, we were fine.

I'm still a little unsettled by yesterday's nothingburger earthquake.

I don't think it's unusual to dislike natural disasters. We have had earthquakes, hurricanes, and forest fires (in different locations and intermittently, I did not grow up in some kind of hell zone). I am currently living in a no hurricane zone, but I'm still suspicious of certain kinds of winds or clouds. (A light but unceasing wind, a sky where the clouds are all on their way somewhere and then you run out of clouds.) We have a big risk of forest fire here. The fires got too close for comfort last year. So really, I should just worry about the fires, instead of the earthquakes or the wind, both of which aren't a real concern here.

There have been earthquakes here before, while I was visiting, while I've been living in this house. I don't know why yesterday is still bothering me.

Gardening today. I mostly try to avoid gardening tasks, because my mother is in something of a frenzy, buying plants, sprouting seeds, shoveling various substances over the garden, making off with kitchen scraps to plant them, and then there's the picking, pruning, watering, weeding, and so on. It is a never ending series of tasks that expand to fill the day, and my mother wanders in for meals starving and exhausted, yet unable to account for the missing time. And we don't even have any fairy rings to blame for it.

Anyway, we have a truly alarming number of citrus trees. I have been trying my best to tackle the lemons, researching recipes that use up a respectable amount of lemon juice or zest - I will not be piddling around with a whole cake that uses a mere teaspoon of zest, you understand. The situation is far too grave. And we can't even foist any off on the neighbors, because everyone in this neighborhood seems to be growing their own citrus. So, here is what works: my mother has some sort of pickled lemon thing, which she seems pleased with, says it will be useful in dishes. She is also doing some kind of lemon salt, which has consumed a satisfying amount of zest. Any time I misjudge how much zest a recipe needs, I throw the remainder at her salt. So far so good. But there were more lemons.

So, lemon curd! İ love the stuff, so I tried my hand at making it. Accidentally cooked the egg white and had to strain it out, but it was still tasty. But two cups is not a reasonable amount of lemon curd for one person to consume. Made a yellow cake recipe from scratch, swapped out half the milk for lemon zest. Turned out okay! Dense buttery cake, slight zing of lemon, convinced my parents to heap lemon curd and whipped cream on top. It went well, but the recipe made two solid cake rounds, and it was a struggle for the three of us to consume them both, as they just got denser with time. Still, made a good dent in the lemon curd.

Lemon pudding cake turned out better than expected. I'm not sure if I did it wrong, but it went into the oven looking like a half digested cloud. I have a pact with my parents that we will eat whatever crawls out of the oven, so we awaited the results nervously. But apparently it managed to separate into a layer of perfectly nice cake on top of some perfectly nice pudding. What a magic trick!

Next, lemonade. Found a recipe for it, you make sugar syrup with zest, then add lemon juice. You store it in the fridge, and spoon it into a glass, add water, and it's lemonade! I had to double the amount of lemon juice involved, it was extremely sweet and not very lemony. I am going to make myself a Fancy Restaurant Lemonade with strawberry slices and a whole mint sprig. Very exciting.

Pie recipes are good at absorbing an alarming amount of fruit. I had to decide between Ohio Shaker Lemon Pie, which seems to be made of whole sliced lemons, and Lemon Meringue Pie, which is basically lemon curd with meringue on top. I make beze on the regular, and I figured I shouldn't let the lemon curd incident scare me, so I went with lemon meringue. Well, it wasn't terrible. I will use finer sugar next time, a less buttery crust, and I will fine tune the sequencing so it isn't as much of a scramble to get all three parts together at the right time. I did use the meringue recipe without cornstarch, so it's not going to keep well, but unfortunately three people can't eat an entire pie in one sitting, so we will see whether it has turned back into slime overnight.

My mother said her teeth hurt from all the sweet lemon stuff, and the rest of the lemons have vanished. My mother is discussing using lemon in cleaning products next.

Anyway, in the absence of lemons to cook, I have been conscripted into garden tasks again. Harvesting mallow seeds for replanting, deadheading the daisies, and picking oranges. And now, I must begin searching for orange recipes.

Oof, I just checked out a public discord server for artists, and it's all teenagers drawing furries and anime. And you know, whatever, good for them, but that is extremely not my scene. Where do I find artist friends?

Do I have to join a fandom again to make connections? I guess I am technically in the middle of making fanart for goofy choose your own adventure novels from the 80s, but just like making Hobbit quilts and reading cheesy 90s fantasy novels and scouring magazines from the 50s for Roman detective stories, it's not in particularly high demand as a social activity. I don't mean to sound like a hipster or a snob, I have honestly been trying to expand my interests, I read new stuff frequently. I have been looking for fandom stuff since leaving my last (tiny, obscure) fandom, but whenever something clicks, it's something weird nobody else has heard of. Do I have to start watching TV shows? Can I find a gaming group in my time zone? I miss the excitement and energy, and all the people eager to talk about mutual interests.

I guess once my latest obsession cools off, I can head back into urban fantasy or superheroes or something. I have a Dresden Files fic I can dust off and publish, I have a bunch of goofy superhero designs I can do something with, I'm getting better at art. I leave goodreads reviews for the books I like and search for people who have things in common, I left a nice comment on the one (1) fic on Ao3 for the cheesy fantasy book, and a friend of mine has now read the book and loves it, we have been having a great time discussing it.

It's just a very lonely plague.