who only by moving can balance

Reading. For EYB indexing purposes: I have finished Hotel Chocolat: A New Way of Cooking with Chocolate (absolutely do not). I have started Divine: heavenly chocolate recipes with a heart (Linda Collister; not particularly interested in the recipes here either thus far but good GRIEF at least it's actually centering the growers' co-op!!!) and also Medlars: Growing & Cooking (Jane Steward; I had been holding out hope that it would be better than the other book in the series I've indexed, Cherries & Mulberries, but alas while it's differently bad it's still bad: I think I'm at least three loops deep into "we don't have evidence for this so we can't say it happened ... and now I'm going to tell you more about the speculation ... that we have no evidence for ..." and I am definitely getting dizzy about it).

I have also got to the top of the holds queue for Finding the Mother Tree (Suzanne Simard), which recessional pointed me at when I had my rant about The Genius of Trees. I am about three pages in and feeling pretty good about it so far.

I also read the first few pages of Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, after having the third book in her memoir trilogy advertised to me By The Internet, and I think have decided to not read further though I am experiencing mild temptation for reasons I cannot articulate.

Watching. I painted Adam. We watched a Farscape episode. It was very a Farscape episode.

Listening. absolutely earwormed with ein ganzer Sommer.

Creating. Painted A!

Growing. Garlic chives are flowering. :) Squash continue to squash; even I managed to treat the powdery mildew today before going off on a Trains Adventure.

Observing. BAT. Very obligingly came out to swoop around while I was admiring the sunset yesterday!

1. I have FINISHED indexing (in the EatYourBooks sense) a cookbook I was threatening to stall on.
2. Indexing sure is getting me to actually properly read a lot of cookbooks about which I had vague curiosity! I am glad to be doing the reading and also, perversely, glad to discover that the majority of them are of limited interest to me for any purpose other than reading approximately once. (Alas that indexing takes reading at least twice...)
3. The magic that is international video calls.
4. A few weeks ago I bought some freeze-dried raspberry powder to see what I thought of adding it to protein shakes; I'm indifferent to that but really enjoying having a tablespoon or so of the stuff in my breakfast mush.
5. Sourdough bread and its willingness to just keep on being food long after it was baked and without any especial care being taken of it.

This morning I accompanied A to St Pancras to wave them off to NixCon, via getting brunch just over from the Eurostar, and paused for my own purposes at buns from home in KGX to get myself treats.

Unfortunately, this evening I went "... it really has been a while since my last dose of the anti-CGRP migraine preventative, hasn't it", checked the calendar, and realised it was due last Tuesday. ( Read more... )

... is the part where the Site Of Worst Pain has been alternating between hips + wrists on the one (as it were) hand, and ankles + shoulders on the other.

I have also reestablished that I really, really shouldn't plan to do Any Things At All the day after a vaccination, good grief.

Got home from event on Monday evening. Spent most of Tuesday asleep. Spent most of Wednesday asleep. Diligently did not Do Exercise on either of those two days. Did not spend today mostly asleep but did spend a bunch of it so absolutely Flattened that the Internal Wailing about why do I even botherrrrrr was... loud.

Turned out! it was a migraine! and I do with my thinking brain know that I would be more tired and sore if I had in fact not spent those two days mostly asleep (and today mostly horizontal). It is also a really useful reminder of how easy it is, still, to tip me over into Absolutely Not, Everything Too Hard, No More Walking. But! Also!

(Following application of prochlorperazine I did actually manage to lie on my back and wiggle my limbs some. The outdoors was nice; I am regretting not having put the catnip on, however...)

Reading. There was An Event, and unsurprisingly I did not alas finish Proto before it went back to the library. There is a Significant queue for it, and it's £4.99 in ebook, so I am contemplating simply buying a copy of my own so I can have the maps that begin each chapter up on the laptop and the actual words on my ereader...

Playing. ... Color Bus Trip continues.

Admin: the LRP.

Cooking. Very little, on account of Being In A Field.

Eating. Realised! I could get the crêpe place! to make me a savoury crêpe I wanted to eat! and promptly had two of them within twelve hours (plus the sweet one I originally went for with dinner).

What were my other highlights. Hmm. The Quaker Protein Porridge pots were remarkably acceptable, to the point that I was a bit sad when they ran out (having had Oats Without Sugar I was feeling surly about going back to the Added Sugar). Blackberries out of the hedgerows (not my favourite flavour thereof). Yuley's has changed the pizza bases they're using and I think I prefer the new ones?

Making & mending. Restrung a bracelet for a friend/team member! After my first several failed attempts to tie a knot with Stretch Magic I did a lot more pre-stretching, and now they seem to be holding! (And there's two of them, and two lengths of the cord holding the beads, so hopefully if catastrophic failure ensues it will do so slowly enough that none of the beads vanish...)

I have Gathered, inter alia:

• a 2kg bag of cobnuts (still VERY MUCH in their husks so usable weight is going to be... less), destined for some combination of sage & cobnut salted caramel (to go with medlar sticky toffee pudding)/blackberry and cobnut jam/an Ottolenghi courgette and cobnut salad (made with allotment squash but not alas my own basil)
• cream, to make said caramel
• not quite as much flour as I wanted (1.5kg each of wholemeal and white bread flour; 1kg spelt) because the shop was inexplicably out of 1.5kg bags of flour
• some ... fascinating ... discounted-because-no-one-had-bought-them Quorn Protein Snacks, which we turn out to not actually hate

I have also: strained the yoghurt (slightly more than I intended but nobody is exactly going to object); converted the resultant whey into two proto-loaves of bread (one wholemeal fig & pumpkin seed & spelt, one mostly-white poppy & caraway) to be baked tomorrow morning while our energy supplier will pay us to wiggle electrons; Had Therapy; spent time with The Child. Sleep now? Sleep now.

Celebrating. RAIN. MULTIPLE PROPER DAYS OF IT.

Reading. I have given up on Weathering (Ruth Allen), in that I had struggled through only a little of the first post-introduction chapter when it autoreturned to the library a second time, and by this point I'd taken several screenshots to send to people for yelling purposes. ("To put therapy in a replicable, familiar, closed box of a closed room, in a clinical environment, is to say an individual thing got broken and now must be shut away to get fixed ... Therapy has no echo in nature when you see it behind closed walls, sealed in to medicalised or clinical environments, disconnected from the messy edges of the encroaching world"!!! THE COCOON METAPHOR IS STARING YOU IN THE FACE.) It has had its second chance; I think alas it is not for me.

HOWEVER. I am back on my EatYourBooks indexing bullshit! And have thus read Jams with a Twist (Kylee Newton, National Trust), which I will be keeping, at least for now; and I am most of the way through Notes from the Jam Cupboard (Mary Tregellas), which I will ALSO be keeping, because in addition to the fine Brythonic surname she............. has a Mitteleuropäische family history of the form "her mother moved to Devon from Czechslovakia, For Love", followed by spending a fair bit of time in Austria as an adult, and I am finding her very soothing company. Not quite finished this one (I have yet to actually read the final chapter on breads), but aaaaalmost! Almost. I swear the next book will be one I am going to actually give back to the charity shop--

And meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I have also made a start (thank you the library) on Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Laura Spinney). I have thus far greatly enjoyed the introduction and a good chunk of the first chapter (on Proto-Indo-European's own parent language); there are many excellent Language Facts and also many excellent facts that are not directly about language; I am Having A Good Time and Do Recommend.

Listening. We've wrangled a whole pile of potions for the upcoming last event of the year! We have therefore also listened to a bunch more Hidden Almanac! We're just edging into summer 2017. Georgina is being Threatened but has not yet Arrived...

Playing. More Color Bus Trip, and also Tukoni: Forest Keepers!!! Or at least our first run through; there are 9 Steam Achievements we have not yet Achieved so we will be doing at least one more in the relatively near future, and it is just as soothing and delightful as the prologue and does a really good job of incorporating but largely not repeating the material from the prologue. V v v happy about this.

Cooking. The veg box brought us multicoloured beetroot, so, a variant on the caramelised onion and butternut squash tart, with rings of sliced beetroot in Colours Various and also rosemary in the custard. Since I was making pastry I made a double batch and turned the other half into approximately apricot-pistachio squares, with some figs in addition to apricots; this time I did double the frangipane, or rather all of its ingredients except the sugar, and this was very satisfactory. Will attempt to remember to do again in future. (Hi, future Alex who is looking for notes on this topic!)

I have also made Fig Soup, by which I mean Approximately Fig Jam But I'm Working Myself Up To Boiling It Up Some More. Alas I do not think half sugar to the weight of fig is sufficient for my textural purposes so plausibly I will just... empty everything back into the pan and add... another kilo of sugar. (And then I desperately need to repeat the process with the rest of the figs...)

Eating. FIGS. Strawberries. More of my mother's beans. A has been making akuri. Generally it is a season of abundance and feasting that I am greatly enjoying.

Making & mending. Iiiiii need to actually tie off the ends for patch #1 and move on to patch #2.

Growing. DID I MENTION THE RAIN.

I have furthermore sown some kohlrabi and some fennel. We Shall See.

( Read more... )