who only by moving can balance

Reading. Finished: Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard. Memoir containing a whole lot of first-person perspective on the last fifty years or so of forest ecology; I found her tendency to short sentence fragments hard going but am v glad to have read this, and learned a bunch about how trees connect to & communicate with each other.

Small progress on EYB indexing for Divine, and reading a tiny bit more of the introductory everything of Medlars.

Writing. I am definitely at the point where I am wailing and gnashing my teeth about how to organise the biology/anatomy section, and grimly wishing to have spent, ooh, the last fifteen years practising anatomical illustration.

Watching. More Farscape. Finished the three-parter in season 2. Extremely A Farscape Episodes.

Playing. We finished getting the achievements for Tukoni: Forest Keeper, and have started a replay of Creaks.

Cooking. ... I sort of feel like there wasn't much of note this week. Is that true? Is that fair? Probably not! This evening definitely included making a batch of the self-saucing passion fruit pudding, which is pleasing.

Eating. VIENNESE PATISSERIE. A brought me: Apfelstreuselkuchen; Apfel-Mohn-Torte; Topfenstrudel; and a pair of things that sadly got extremely squidged but were nonetheless tasty, and were once upon a time a Holländer and a Maronikipferl. Also: the British strawberries continue; more of my mother's excellent beans and tomatoes; APPLES.

Exploring. Took the all-roads-and-minimal-canal-paths cycle route to visit The Child on Tuesday, and slightly to my astonishment it worked and was fine! I apparently did enough getting lost that Garmin thought it was a slightly longer journey than the detour via the reservoirs plus More Canal Path, and who am I to argue.

Making & mending. I have Properly Started patch #2 on Test Trousers #1. This is the largest; I still need to decide what I think I'm doing once I've finished blanket-stitching the edges of the largest hole...

Growing. Kohlrabi are coming up! Squash are squashing! Oca are looking much more cheerful for having had significantly more rain! Trinidad Perfume (heatless yellow habanero) is flowering; the next batch of apples I dehydrate are going to also contain a shelf of ancho chillis, about which I am Excited.

Observing. The bat. :)

That "ugh, but there's so much backstory, I don't want to have to explain it all again to a new therapist" feeling? That feeling. That feeling is a really good indication that going over the backstory again, with a new person as rubber duck, will itself yield new insight.

Will I remember this next time? Probably not! But at least I know it for now.

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.