Happy birthday to me!

I am about half an hour into being 45. Celebratory beverage:



Birthday plans have been somewhat downscaled due to the possibility of pouring rain where I was going to go (Denali Park) but I still plan to get out of town and obtain lunch somewhere and hike around a bit.

Meanwhile, please appreciate my absolutely ridiculous 45th-birthday present to myself:



He comes with a tiny little codebook for controlling the Winter Soldier! He is currently hanging out with my Defenders (they are nervous) and my Nakia (Zemo is v. nervous).

I actually preordered this back in May, and it came much earlier than it was supposed to. Falcon & Winter Soldier has turned out to be my New Big Thing, apparently! Who knew! There's a pretty nice show!Bucky action figure as well, but I haven't found a Sam I like yet; I want one in civilian clothes, not the costume.

Things which I would like for birthday presents, if you want to leave me one:

• Birthday wishes are always nice!
• Prompts for Falcon & Winter Soldier ficlets, with the caveat that there is a VERY STRONG chance they might never be written. Any characters are welcome; however, I strongly suspect terrible things happening to Zemo (or presence of Zemo, generally) would greatly increase their chances of being written.
• Prompts for Iron Fist (always in style, ditto re: caveat about possibly never being written).
• Pretty pictures, recs, fic snippets, etc, for any fandom you know I'm into.
• Suggestions for ways I might combine my h/c bingo card with Falcon & Winter Soldier characters.
• Just generally talking about the show! Or Zemo. Meta prompts welcome!
• Suggestions for interesting photo ops for my new tiny!Zemo.

Birthday and a fic rec!

I have had a lovely birthday! Thank you so much for your birthday wishes and other beautiful things, which I will respond to as soon as I can!

We had perfect weather, sunny and breezy with mixed clouds and sun, not too hot or cold. We drove to Nenana, an old riverboat town (now mostly without the riverboats) a little over an hour's drive south of here, which we've never actually explored. It turns out there's very little to explore, but the old houses are interesting to look at, and we looked at a fish wheel (from a respectful distance, as it's private property and someone's livelihood), got excellent sandwiches from a cafe and ate them sitting on the Subaru's tailgate by the river.

Then we came home, I ate birthday brownies and wrote on my romance novel and then we walked to the nearby beaver pond in the dusk and heard beavers calling to each other. I didn't even know beavers make vocalizations; this is the first time I've ever heard them. It was an adult calling to a baby, and we thought at first it might be a duck (we couldn't see clearly through the brush, and weren't sure the beaver was what was making that noise) - until we saw the baby (so tiny! so round! so SMOL) clamber over a mudbar and swim to catch up. Here is a Youtube recording of what beavers sound like. The "wah, wah!" sound is just what we heard.

And you need to read the glorious Falcon & Winter Soldier birthday gift fic that sovay wrote for me!

Longing, Rusted, Seventeen (Falcon & Winter Soldier, 1900 words, Bucky & Sam & Sarah + Zemo's unseen presence)
If he kept his combat face on, Bucky could make himself believe it looked like nothing much, lying on the cream-scrubbed deck of the Paul & Darlene in the salt-clean morning sun: a red book with a black star, about the size of the composition books of his school days, far too many wars ago.

It is lovely - the vivid setting, the characters, the complex relationships these people have with each other, and the book with 70 years' weight of personal history and trauma in it. I loved every bit of it.