Dawn

@dawnbuggy

Avid consumer of fish-related content. (Not a consumer of fish.) Social & environmental justice, gardening, cooking, and trying to make my car live forever. I respect your pronouns but consider mine irrelevant.

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Dawn@dawnbuggy· 3d

Tortie sub-thread? This is Mabel, one of my cats-in-law.

A tortoiseshell cat with a little light patch on her chin sits and regards the photographer from inside a plain cardboard box almost tall enough to close over her head. Her head is tilted to one side in a way that could be interpreted as disappointment in what she sees.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· 3d

HAPPY INVERTEFEST! I dug a bunch of thistles out of my yard this evening, disturbing an encouraging array of grasshoppers, crickets, etc. Husband carefully offloaded bugs as stems went into the yard waste bin. Then he called me over, and omg! Sis was bigger than my finger! I could see her breathing!

A beautifully camouflaged praying mantis stares straight at the camera, perched among the thorns of a thistle stalk in a blue yard waste bin. We gave her a ride out of the bin on a stick after taking the picture.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· 24d

“It’s so hard to get kids to eat vegetables,” they say. Meanwhile, I take my 11 month old out to the garden and let him hold the produce on our way back inside… 🌱

A small eggplant with dark purple skin that looks black in the warm light, sitting on a wooden table. There are several small bite marks in the end, revealing pale green-white flesh.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· 27d

Here’s my haul! Goodies from @fowllanguagecomics.bsky.social @effinbirds.com @adhdinos.bsky.social @sarahseeandersen.bsky.social @beetlemoses.bsky.social @danaatnip-art.bsky.social and @jimbenton.bsky.social Thank you all for being there! (I was the one carrying around the baby in the crab outfit 🦀)

A collection of books, cards, and stickers laid out on a chair. The books are Fowl Language: Welcome To Parenthood, Fowl Language: The Struggle Is Real, Effin’ Birds: A Field Guide to Identification, ADHDinos: The Land Before Time Management, The Flyer from Beetle Moses, and Fangs by Sarah Anderson.
(The chair is upholstered in off-white damask and the finish on the wooden arms is very worn.)

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Jul 30

Ok so traffic lights have faces, right? The vertical ones. Red ones look worried, yellow is disgusted/confused, green is smiling. I came to this conclusion when I was a little kid and never wondered if anyone agreed, til it came up in conversation with my husband. He thinks I’m nuts. Do you see it?

Three traffic lights hanging (unrealistically close together) from a pole. The body of each light is black, with a white border. The left one is red, middle yellow, right green. Background is a blue sky with wispy clouds and there are slight shadows suggesting nearly overhead sunshine.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Jul 9

It took a few years to get here, but this is the kind of thing my mom does now and it’s one of the many reasons she’s the greatest.

Gray text message bubble that says “Call when convenient, please. no hurry”

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Jun 3

Don’t even think about it, jerks 😡 We stayed out past the start of mosquito time to put up a temporary fence around the plants I managed to get into the ground. I hope it’s tall enough to deter them for one night.🌱

Photo taken from close to ground level in the middle of a rectangle of bare, tilled dirt in a large yard edged with trees and a partial cyclone fence. Past the edge of the plot, two deer stand in the short grass, regarding the photographer with placid expressions that nevertheless convey the attitude of circling vultures.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Jun 1

Progress and final pics from what my dystopian cake project morphed into: full vaporwave design, dark future embodied just in intensely processed ingredients: boxed cake mix, kool-aid powder, extra food coloring, jello. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out after little planning and no trial run. 🍽️

A 13x9” sheet cake in a nonstick pan sits on a white enamel stove top. The bulk of the cake is a medium ocean-y blue, but a large portion of the middle has been cut out and replaced with a nearly round section containing alternating chunks of bright yellow and orange cake, evoking a wavering sunset just starting to dip below the horizon. Said horizon is highlighted by a line of pink sparkling sugar and two palm trees, rendered in dusted cocoa powder, are silhouetted against the sun.
Around the cake pan are a few accessories to the project: a bag of powdered sugaro, the multi-compartment container of several colors of decorative sugar, and the canister of cocoa powder.

The same cake, except the blue background has been covered by a layer of pink jello (not pictured: watermelon flavor) which emphasizes the summer vibe and the stylized 80s aesthetic that inspired the design. The jello is cut out so the sunset colors appear clearly.
Faintly visible are grid lines cut into the jello, with the intent of adding perspective as they’re arranged to converge in the imaginary distance.
The pan is covered in plastic cling film, somewhat obscuring the effect.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· May 23

Happens to the best of us.

Joke explanation first, then image description.
This is a screencap from the end credits to Star Control II, a space exploration video game from 1992. (Actually, technically, this is probably from The Ur-Quan Masters HD, an open source fan project that’s worth looking into if you want to actually play the game.) The credits feature “bloopers” and out-of-character conversations with the aliens you encountered in the game. This screen is the Kohr-Ah, a powerful and scary enemy in the game, tripping over a threatening line. The text says “You WILL be annigilated… I mean annihigated.. damn!”

Image: a squirmy, tentacled creature, sort of a cross between a caterpillar and an octopus, black with red markings, hangs over a pit lined with vague skeletons. Its many eyes focus on you, the viewer, and its foremost tentacles frame its face. In the background is a row of windows looking out on the dark of space studded with purple stars. The dialog is two lines of white text across the top of the image. In the lower left corner is an inset box depicting another creature, a toad-brain thing with yellow eyes. It does not look happy to be there.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· May 18

A hardcover book titled Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections. Text along bottom says “See inside 18 amazing buildings and machines.” The illustration taking up most of the cover is a drawing of an ocean liner, sliced into sections to illustrate the ship’s various decks, rooms, systems, and occupants. Even one of the exhaust stacks is cut away.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Apr 22

I married one and have had this picture of him favorited for three years.

A gravel road curves through a clearing, disappearing into woods in the distance. On the road are a smallish (maybe eight inches nose to tail), smooth, dark colored turtle, approaching the safety of the shoulder, and a man leaning over and reaching his hands down to persuade the turtle to keep moving. The man is wearing jeans and a gray t-shirt and his face below shoulder-length hair is obscured by a turtle emoji.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Mar 21

The fan display section of a big box hardware store. A dozen lighted ceiling fans are mounted over an aisle lined with more fans in boxes. On the green carpet is a shopping cart containing a baby in a blanket-draped car seat. The baby’s face is obscured by the starstruck emoji.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Feb 21

When the typo is more accurate than the intended copy 😬

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Jan 20

Having run out of slow songs to sing my kid who was determined to stay awake long past his usual bedtime, I thought of the song of Eärendil that my dad read to me many times during my own childhood. With no lights on, I pulled my LotR box set off the bookshelf and opened to exactly the right page.

Low light, slightly unfocused photo of a yellowed paperback copy of The Fellowship of the Ring open to pages of verses in italic print. Two fingertips hold the book open at the very bottom of the frame and behind the book is a brown and white bedspread.
Text on the pages is too much to type out; it starts with the line
“Eärendil was a mariner”
and ends with the line
“and melodies they taught to him”.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Jan 11

Leaving my lunch break on Friday I had to stop and watch the sky out the office window for a while. The clouds were speeding by - the video is real time - and the camera barely caught it, but the dark cloud directly overhead spent a few minutes dumping huge raindrops before it too hurried away.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Dec 25

My dad’s cousin, grandma to twins who are in middle school now, sent us a board book about Twerking Santa 😐

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Dec 3

Obligatory. I’m sorry. i.kym-cdn.com/photos/image...

Comic of Goofy giving his son Max the “birds and the bees” talk. Operative line: “Your dad doesn’t just have sex, Maxie. Your dad *fucks.*”

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Nov 30

I asked my ex for her grandfather’s spätzle recipe so I could make it this year, and she sent me the note file I remember her scrawling on her phone 15 years ago. One instruction had been modified, initially it said “water til wet” and caused trouble when we tried following it. I nailed it this time

A recipe hand written with a touch screen stylus on a digital notepad:
Spätzle
700mL flour [look, none of us owned a kitchen scale at the time]
4 eggs
water til moist
salt to taste
-
Cook: Boil water
slice strips of dough into water w/spatula
when float, remove w/slotted spoon

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Nov 26

The potato salad log, coleslaw mold, beef in aspic, and honey mustard ring in this photo beg to differ 😛 (You’re right, for the most part, I just love exceptions and will take went opportunity to show off the spread from my midcentury food crimes dinner party a few years back.)

A wood dining table covered in dishes of food, mostly molded into unnatural shapes. There’s a huge cheese ball made to look like a pineapple, two ring-shaped gelatin molds, two log-shaped gelatin molds, among others. Red glass plates and blue quilted placemats complete the setting.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Nov 25

Potentially familiar image of a somewhat extra round cat looking up at the camera, mouth open as if vocalizing or just in expectation. Text around the cat reads:
“DAD dad DAD dad DAD dad DAD
I need ham”

The word “fancy” has been added with punctuation the correct term for which I’m not going to bother to look up, but it indicates the bottom line should read “I need fancy ham”.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Nov 13

I got curious about the very long building in the second photo. No mention in the wiki article, so I followed the source for the pic itself. Occidental Chemical Company does have a Clearwater, KS address, but it seems to be a different site entirely. Now I’m worried about that green river, though 😳

Screenshot. Google Maps satellite view, having looked up Occidental Chemical Corporation in Clearwater, KS. The marker points to a nondescript road leading to a rectangular building and a couple of big storage tanks surrounded by fields and woods. Running through the patch of woods is what looks like a creek, but it’s bright, opaque green.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Nov 12

😭

Screenshot from an aurora tracking app. The blue dot indicating my location is very close to the green “pretty definite aurora activity” zone and also directly underneath a wide band of thick clouds.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Oct 30

I learned two things today: 1) I desperately need to wash my front windows 2) T/N/R is going to be more expensive than I thought, because that really looks like three kittens and not the two I’d seen with their mom before.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Oct 18

A friend just sent me this, taken as they were driving by today.

The same cactus sign as in the original post, taken from a car on the other side of the road. The Hilltop part is still there but the word Steakhouse has been replaced with small rectangular signs for eight or nine other businesses. The separate sign at the bottom is also now another business, not the (owner? chef? whoever Frank Giuffrida was)’s name.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Oct 17

Finally had one more section of carpet installed to cover up the last of the lead-painted floors in my house. This was a remnant and both the owner of the carpet place and the rug binder came out to measure and make sure there would be enough - they had ~6 sq ft to spare. Love how it turned out!

A wooden staircase rises to a landing just above camera height. The center is covered by a runner of thick medium-dark blue carpet with a light cream colored scroll pattern. A big window mostly out of frame on the right, with plants on the sill, provides most of the light. On the far wall above the stairs is a support bracket for the hand rail we haven’t reinstalled yet.

The same carpet covers the floor of a small hallway at the top of the stairs. In this light it’s easier to make out the secondary scroll pattern in a lower contrast gray shade. From the photographer’s position partway down the stairs, two bedrooms are visible with their doors open. The walls are somewhat bubbly white-painted wallpaper and wide wooden trim borders the floor and doors.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Aug 30

I read this thread earlier today and said “oh wow, I should make sure my Detroit based prenatal group knows about this!” Tonight, walking into the hospital to get something checked: “Ok, good, they’re way ahead of me as they should be.”

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Aug 24

Post something from your camera roll that comes up when you search yellow car.

A grocery store shelf containing jars of squash blossoms packed in liquid. The label reads:
El Gallito
Flor de Calabaza
Pumpkin Flower
The price tag on the jar in focus reads $4.69.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Aug 19

I haven’t eaten a single leaf of the kale I planted this year. It’s all for this guy.

Mostly washed-out picture of an aquarium with water-spotted front glass. Blurry shapes of brightly colored fish, aerator bubbles, and an assortment of real and plastic plants fill the background. In the foreground along the top, an albino bristlenose plecostomus has sandwiched itself between two kale leaves that are suspended from the top cover. It’s attached upside down to the top one.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Aug 19

Antique oven problems 😅 🍽️🍜

The speckled enamel interior of an oven containing an uncooked pizza. About three quarters of the pizza (width-wise, at least, which is the important dimension here) occupies nearly all of the top rack. The remaining section sits on the second rack beneath it.
If it matters to anyone, the visible toppings are banana pepper rings and torn-up bits of fresh mozzarella.

Dawn@dawnbuggy· Aug 8

Wait I missed this the first time around. Your neighbor and my husband should talk…