Don't owe anybody anything!

These are the winners for the 2026 award season of the Rose & Bay Awards in the crowdfunding community:

Art: "Transformation Tarot" by MagicFlower
Fiction: Magpie Monday by dialecticdreamer
Poetry: "Poetry Fishbowl" by Elizabeth Barrette aka ysabetwordsmith
Webcomic: "Alien Romance" by GS Silva aka gs_silva (me!)
Other Project: "The Far Roofs" by Jenna Katerin Moran
Patron: siliconshaman patron of "Poetry Fishbowl" by Elizabeth Barrette aka ysabetwordsmith

I'm going to put this somewhere on the cover of my published graphic novel. It may be a small scale award, but it's still an award!

It looks like I'll be able to hang out the laundry on Monday morning! 20° and sunny. I have an ever-growing pile of laundry next to the washer, hoping for a sunny day so I won't have to use electricity on the dryer. I keep wanting to turn the heat off for the season but it'll be well below freezing this weekend so I can't just yet.

In Shanghai I used to try to see how long a gap I could keep between turning off the heat and turning on the AC. Most years I could make it from mid-March to July. That's harder here, and I can't live without the space heater. I don't love the space heater. In Shanghai we had a portable air filter/HVAC and it was nice until we couldn't replace the filters because they were discontinued and I had to order them from France at 300元 each and that wasn't about to happen.

Everything was cheaper in China except imported goods. And I could get along just fine without imported goods. Chinese goods were sufficient. Though the cost of living there was culture shock after Vietnam.

Now for some gardening! It's really cloudy and forecasts rain but I'll try to dig out some pachysandra while I can. I'd post pictures for you but it's too much effort.

ETA: I pulled out some of the pachysandra and planted some saved seeds in the bare spots. It's the flower I forgot to ID. But I bought it at a native plant project and it's pretty so hopefully it'll come up and then I'll be more meticulous about identifying it.

I can't find the turtlehead seeds. Maybe they're in the shed. I'll deal with it later. My body says "done."

A new major plotline! This one will be a challenge to transcribe. But here goes.

Jon is having lunch with Sarah in the office cafeteria, joking around about math: "...and I said I graduated summa cum laude - I think I can do math in my head!"

Sarah laughs and then asks, "Have you ever thought of getting your Master's in computer science?"

He hasn't, but he doesn't relish the thought of sitting at a desk for the rest of his career. He wants something more active. Maybe teaching.

"Have you ever taught before?" Sarah asks. He hasn't. "You should volunteer at the Y. They'll take anyone."

Jon and Cathy stand on the sidewalk in front of a building with a big YMCA sign above the door. Jon is using crutches. "I have no idea what to say," Jon remarks. He turns away, saying to Cathy, "Forget it. Sorry I dragged you out here for nothing. Let me buy you lunch."

They go to a diner and apparently I have a habit of always drawing Jon on the left side when he's sitting down to eat with anyone. He kind of rambles about how hard it is to approach a stranger and ask for a teaching gig, especially while disabled. "Before, I could waltz in and everyone would hand me whatever I asked for."

"La valse?" Cathy picked up on 'waltz' (which of course is properly pronounced with a German W, or as we think of it, a V). She's surprised to hear Jon talk about the waltz. "You..." she tries, but she's not sure how to conjugate "You used to dance?" in English, so she switches to "Tu dansais?" in French.

***

Another cold and a rainy day. Where on earth is the sun anyway? (It's not on earth. That would be fatal. I like that song but it's logically unsound.)

I could really use some temperatures above 10C, for sanity's sake. I could use a few other things for sanity's sake too, but if I can only get that one, I'll feel several degrees better (also, cold physically hurts, like, a lot, and one thing a chronic pain sufferer never wants is more pain) (and now I'm gratuitously adding parentheticals) (because, why not, it's the end of this post anyhow).

I am on the catio! It rained all night and it's going to rain again soon, and it's pretty cold out here actually. But the garden is coming to life.

The blue jays are screaming at something just out of sight in the woods. Possibly the fox. I heard something large rustling leaves a few minutes ago, but foxes are very good at being silent. So maybe she pounced on some prey in the leaf litter and then went back to stealth.
There are bobcats too. I haven't seen any actually in my neighborhood, but there's no reason for them not to be.
The cardinals with their "wheat wheat wheat" that sounds like a generic bird tweet until you learn to identify it as a cardinal call, and then it forever sounds distinctly cardinal.
The crows but they're not nearby.
The flicker now with its kind of barking noise, and the squeaky toy! Nuthatch! And some other woodpecker, I forgot which one. Time to brush up on my woodpeckers.
The red squirrels are out! One is on my neighbor's patio! They don't usually come this close to the houses but I guess when you're hungry you do what you have to.
A flock of juncos just passed through, bush-hopping. I was about to conjecture that they were gone for the season but not yet.

That's enough for now. The cold finally got to me and there's laundry to be done and boring stuff like taxes. I'm watching the news and somehow it doesn't make me feel like paying taxes...somehow...

ETA: The sun came out and so I was able to clear out a lot of buckthorn and bittersweet. Also talked to my neighbor on the other side and did some planning with him about how to coordinate our gardening efforts.

I taught my mother how to recognize and dig up ajuga. She'll need a lot of reinforcement, but if she takes to this task, she may eradicate the ajuga infestation! She's very, very thorough but she needs to commit to a single task, and while that's not necessarily the best personality type for gardening, we'll make it work.

I saw a turkey buzzard and a smallish hawk, to add to my bird list today.

It's so sunny and beautiful outside! I desperately want to go out and get some vitamin d and rake the side garden. But it's barely above freezing - single degrees C. I'm huddled against the space heater (not literally - that would be a fire hazard) with candles on the countertop (more for ambience) trying to draw more than cry.

(It's hyperbole. I don't cry easily.)

We still have juncos. They're in the hawthorn tree, doing little acrobatic moves to grab the last berries that the robins left behind. Yesterday the crows were around, possibly nesting in the same tall pine tree they did last year. I left them some cat food and it's gone now but I don't hear them today.

Even though my backyard is swampy, I walked through it and checked out the buckthorn patch that I'd started to hack back last fall. There was deer scat in it. I'm glad the deer are finding enough to eat on my property to still make their visits. That's what I'm aiming for by letting the place go native. I was reading about how to stratify turtlehead seeds, and I didn't do exactly as it said, but they've been exposed to the cold all winter, so I guess that means I can go ahead and scatter them now. Which means I need to rip up the pachysandra now. But not right now. I'll try again when it's more comfortable out there.

The storm last night was bad enough to close some roads in my town, but not my road. I only had a couple of fallen branches.

I just saw one of the cardinal couples. Last year I watched them teaching their juvenile offspring the ways of the world - they tend to hang out in the forsythia, and they'll stay there minding their own business as long as I'm minding mine. The mom cardinal especially - she was all over the bird feeder when I had it out, and we could get in and out of the car right next to her and she didn't care one bit. That's so random. I don't know.

It's my kid's birthday next week. He wants to go out tonight though, for Steak Special Tuesday at a local restaurant, so we'll do that. We don't really have a tradition of big birthday celebrations or surprises. Each of us basically states what we want, and the three of us do that, and any wrapped gifts are just incidental. It comes from living abroad for so long. We always survived on a minimum of possessions because we moved so often and wanted to be able to pack all our stuff into 5 suitcases and a couple of tote bags and not have to hire a service to move boxes of stuff. So gift-giving had to be very modest, and mostly focused on experiences.

For instance, one time we took the kid out to see Rogue One, in Phnom Penh. That was fun but weird. (The reason we chose to travel to Phnom Penh to see a single movie is that Vietnam had slapped a PG-13 rating on it, and PG-13 means nobody under 13 is allowed inside the theater under any circumstances, but we're American so of course we're perfectly happy to bring our 8-year-old to watch a Star Wars movie - he's the target audience as far as we're concerned! Phnom Penh is a lovely, crazy city and we generally had a nice time even though it was a short visit.)

Fun fact - my son actually looks like Maurice from Alien Romance. Well, he used to, right up until he was 13 or so. (He had full bangs, though, instead of the middle part that gives Maurice his signature look - ah well, small details.) Then he grew. Now I'll have to invent a taller character to be his lookalike.

***

ETA: It's Poetry Fishbowl! In which ysabetwordsmith writes poems while you watch. Give her a prompt and/or a donation and add to the fun.

Ella is still trying to figure out what costume Maurice's oversized sweater is supposed to be.

Cathy is putting icing on cupcakes when Ella demands she go get dressed. Does Cathy understand her? Probably not immediately, but someone surely escorts her to Ella's bedroom and hands her the bat dress.

Ella, sans bat dress, holds her gigantic witch hat. "I can still wear the hat," she muses. "I just need another outfit to go with it."

She knocks on her bedroom door. "Cathy, almost done? I need to get dressed too!"

Cathy exits, flaunting the fancy, lacy black dress, her arms raised to show off the enormous sleeves. On her head is Maurice's rubber spider mask that Ella hates so much.

Ella facepalms. "Why do you do this to me?" she laments.

Jon, in his wheelchair and still not dressed because he's been doing party setup and he can only do 27 things at a time, remarks, "I dunno, Ella, I think it's pretty hot."

***

I'm still doing it by pencil. The entire Halloween/birthday story arc is done, in pencil. I'll try to switch back to the more legible digital art at some point, but hopefully for now the transcriptions will clear up any visual confusion.

***

Gardening notes: not much today. The backyard swamp turned into an ice skating rink overnight, but not a very safe one because the yellow grass makes it very bumpy. My lettuce seeds are sprouting in the tray on the windowsill. It's a small tray, but a big windowsill, so if I get a bigger tray, maybe I can have year-round lettuce all winter next year.

The potato eyes I planted in the other tray are a loss, but something is sprouting in there. Backyard weeds, most certainly, because some of the soil was dug out of my backyard.

***

By the way, I know a lot of my readers here have works of fiction you're working on, and characters you think about. If an Alien Romance comic ever makes you conjecture what your characters would do in a similar situation, I'd absolutely love to hear about it. I live for that kind of connection.

Or if you know what you would do in a situation! But I already get a few comments along those lines. Those are some of my very favorite comments.