Got Trapped Under A Weir Current While Canoeing And Almost Drowned (and Did Dislocate My Shoulder And

got trapped under a weir current while canoeing and almost drowned (and did dislocate my shoulder and knee), took two minutes of me being dragged back underwater before someone could get close enough to me to pull me out

then caught COVID two days later and got an awful secondary chest infection lmao

I still plan to canoe that stretch of river again

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five things I'm loving at the moment!

1) nice tea! I'm living in Spain this year and the tea situation here is dire frankly

went home over Christmas and had good loose leaf tea (my partner and I drank a lot of a vanilla tea blend that was delightful) but frankly also a cup of decent earl grey is wonderful

2) cats! here are some photos of mine and my partners I took while back in the uk

3) good food - I love cooking and I find it relaxing. My faves are risotto and lots of Indian veggie curries

4) online communities for things people are passionate about! Fandom is wonderful and full of incredibly supportive people especially as I've been easing back into writing, but also online communities for people with same weird disability as me which has helped me learn how to handle it better

5) lego flowers!!! the combination between lego (wonderful, delightful, extremely calming) and flowers (beautiful) is great especially with the lack of pollen. I have both the flower bouquets combined in my room and they look so good, even if they do desperately need a dust rn

Interstellar Overdrive

A Tess x Joel bodyguard/boss AU set in the 1970s whew

His fingertips brushed through the curtain of hair hanging to her waist. Dressing like a goddamn hippie with motivations that were resolutely square. A capitalist muckety-muck playing dress-ups with the beautiful people. Tess had some goddamn nerve and he wanted every last piece of her, Duke’s warnings be damned.

Because Duke was right – he’d never met anyone like her before. And maybe by getting a little closer he could unravel the enigma, because he’d meant what he’d told Duke – one woman was, essentially, the same as another. There were a finite number of parts people could play. And she was just playing one of them, concealing it a little better than most.

Tess whispered again in his ear: “You answer to me, now.”

Chapter One now on AO3! HNY!

I speak English (fluently) and Spanish (well enough I'm living in Spain and all my classes are in Spanish and it's fine)!

The weird thing with studying abroad though is by the standards of other Erasmus students I'm weird. One of my friends here speaks four languages extremely well (Italian, English, German, and Spanish) and that's not even unusual it's wild.

I'm desperate to learn more though, at school I took one year where I had Spanish, french, Latin, and classical Greek and it was wonderful

how many languages do you speak?

(i’m counting languages where you took one class for a semester if you retained any of it congrats you are a little multilingual)

(reblog for bigger sample size!)

One of my personal nitpicks for historical fantasy is a lack of servants, staff, subordinates, and... idk... subjects? Like, their absence is not... a total dealbreaker for me, depending on the situations the characters are in and whether or not I can just assume that other people are there in the background... but so many of the protagonists in historical fantasy stuff are higher-ranking (very often royalty), and/or have busy jobs, and/or have enormous houses that would necessitate having at least part-time staff.

Like, girl, you should have a maid! WHERE is your chaperone?! WHO is driving this carriage?! Where are your footmen? Are you trying to imply that a WEALTHY DUCHESS is taking a CAB?! You know that you probably have tenants, right? Where is your steward?! Where is your lawyer? Your accountant?! (Like, yeah, you're not going to have your lawyer living in your house, but you HAVE one, right???)

Or, man, you're supposed to be a military commander and you don't even have a single secretary?! Where is your SQUIRE?! (In the spirit of historical fiction, I am jumping wildly across time periods with every sentence here.) Man, I know you aren't looking after your own boots. Where are your GUARDS?! Who set up this tent for you?! Who is looking after your horse?! Who is making and carrying the incredibly valuable maps people are recklessly stabbing daggers into?!

SOMEONE has to be scrubbing these floors and delivering the mail and cooking the meals, and they're probably all DIFFERENT people! My dentist has at least three different receptionists and we can't even get ONE for our court wizard here? A sorcerer's apprentice to take notes? Sherlock Holmes can get away with just having a housekeeper and taking taxis, sure, but your character is supposed to be a KING?! Why is he answering his own front door? He's going to get assassinated.

Like, yes, I understand that a lot of servants in certain places at certain times were supposed to make their labor invisible, but there have always been servants who still had to interact directly with the masters of the house?! Yeah, there are potentially really messy ethics here, class divisions are bullshit, but I don't think ignoring the reality that humans have ALWAYS been doing work for other humans (even if it's just having a collective cooking pot for the group and the cook not necessarily being subservient to anyone) is better than just including some servants and employees? Because a complete absence of them, especially where logically for the worldbuilding there MUST be servants, often makes me think that your main characters just don't care enough to notice the "lower class" people or know their names.

Also, even Frodo Baggins had a gardener and Samwise Gamgee might be the best damn character in the story?! Sam saved the world?! Servants are PEOPLE. Servants are often the funniest and most interesting characters, tbh, with the most to say about a society and its workings, and also the joke of some romantic scene being carefully orchestrated by a stage crew of servants frantically diving into bushes to stay out of sight never gets old to me. Team work makes the dream work!

I don't want to gatekeep historical fiction, especially not historical fantasy, because the worlds don't necessarily have to conform to our own and may have magic and characters are often in very unique circumstances, but... sometimes I pick up a story and it's like... "Author, please tell me that you know there is a difference between a butler and a valet?!"

y'all are gonna break me this is perfection

but like I do regret we didn't get to see more of Tess and Joel as smugglers in Boston - Joel is fairly openly dealing to FEDRA and Tess seems entirely unthreatened by Robert who seems very powerful. These two survived long past everyone else because they were *good* at what they did

do you ever think about how joel and tess were together long enough to see each other start going grey