◆ PARALLAX

New page, new month, same crew. If you are awake at this hour and you should not be, pull up a chair. Rules of the night shift are the rules they have always been: no cases, no feds, no doom -- that is what the other 6,000 threads are for. In here we talk about what we are reading, what we are cooking, what is keeping us up, and whose cat is on whose keyboard. I will start: third coffee, raining sideways, halfway through a novel I am not enjoying but cannot abandon. Your turn. Anyone.

Pulled a card for the thread because Nia dared me with her eyebrows from across the Atlantic: Three of Cups, which is the friends-and-cups card, which is on the nose enough that I am suspicious of my own deck. Also, and with love, tarot is a structured randomiser exploiting my own pattern-matching, AND the card is correct, AND both of those are true at 3am and only at 3am. I do not expect the daytime people to understand the night-shift metaphysics. They have not earned it.

since the wood-knocks lot will not let anyone draw the thing without a forty-post argument, I drew it here instead where it is safe. this is my official reconstruction based on SquatchFieldNotes' description and zero of his actual evidence. it is canon now. you cannot stop me. it took ninety minutes and the fill tool betrayed me twice.

Worked Japan last night on FIVE WATTS and a wire in an apple tree -- Kenji if you are lurking the night shift, that 7MHz signal at silly-o'clock might have been me saying hello badly in CW. Meanwhile the allotment is a disgrace, the leeks have bolted, and a fox has opinions about my brassicas. I can talk to the other side of the planet on the power of a nightlight and I cannot keep a fox out of a cabbage patch. There is a lesson in that and I refuse to learn it.

cat update, with photographic evidence as demanded by the desk-photo faction. he has claimed the keyboard, the warm spot by the monitor, and what remains of my evening. I have been allotted the corner of the desk and whatever gratitude he chooses to release. this is the natural order and I will not be writing to anyone about it.

Quiet one from me tonight. Lost a patient on the last shift, an old one, no family in, and I held the hand because somebody should. Not posting it for sympathy, posting it because this thread is the only place I say the true thing before I drive home and say the fine thing to everyone else. Going to read Nia's bad novel recommendation badly and sleep till noon. Thanks for being awake, all of you. It helps more than the cases ever will.

For Nurse, and for anyone else white-knuckling a long night: here is the no-knead loaf, posted in the WRONG thread, completely unrepentant. 500g strong flour, 350g water, 7g salt, 3g yeast, mix into a shaggy mess, leave it overnight to do its slow quiet thing while you do yours, bake screaming hot in a covered pot. You cannot rush it and you cannot fail it, which at 4am is the only kind of project worth starting. Photo of tonight's, which is ugly and perfect, like all of us.

mod hat OFF, just a tired woman at the end of a long one: can we get back on -- no. no, we cannot. we are pages deep and it has been cats and then a loaf of bread, and I have read every single word and I would not change one of them. carry on. I will be asleep. wake nobody.