who only by moving can balance

1. consumèd the last of my birthday cake <3
2. supermarket supplied More Cut Price Pistachio Croissants for More Indulgent Luxury Breakfast
3. A is very very good in particular (I went Quite Wrong on Wednesday night; tonight we debriefed and achieved many communication and I think none blame)
4. the weather is a bit cooler and it was extremely pleasant to be outside for Evening Constitutional
5. brain appears to be allowing me to read a tiny bit of fiction, which is a nice change!!!

Reading. I managed a bit more of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish before it got autoreturned to the library; I do not regret the outdoor activities I was doing instead of finishing it up but I am also mildly disgruntled that it's likely to be around another month before I get it back from the library. (Yes, it has won me over from my initial grumbles about Intro To Phylogeny.)

I have managed to reread approximately, generously, a chapter and a half of Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone), which I still want to complete before I have another go at Dead Hand Rule, because I absolutely do not have adequate recollection of how WP finished. And yet: my brain it goes eeeeeeeeeenh.

Watching. Apparently it has been a week in which I was willing to do audiovisual processing, and not just on my special interest?

In NOT my special interest news (see also Exploring), I appreciated this very short documentary on the piece of artwork at the centre of the Kerdroya labyrinth.

On Friday I hit the point of going "okay, this is ridiculous, what the hell is going on that I am managing to move that much weight in what is nominally a barbell row", tried to get the internet to tell me how I should expect row vs bench weights to look, and found a Renaissance Periodization video on 11 Barbell Row Mistakes (content note: masturbation jokes in questionable taste). RP are a source that Casey Johnston trusts, and I trust Casey Johnston sufficient to take that rec (though, to be clear, not on all things), so I watched it! And I now think I know some things I'm doing suboptimally and for that matter some things Johnston recommends doing suboptimally or unclearly! So obviously I am impatient to wave a stick around and see how it feels, and I am next scheduled to do this with barbell rows on... Wednesday.

I have three other videos from that sequence open in tabs.

Listening. Tragically we did NOT listen to a bunch of Hidden Almanac on the way down to Cornwall and then back up again, because it would not have been to my mum's taste and we did not wish to ensadden her on the journey.

Playing. Have replayed Tukoni: Prologue on my own machine for the purposes of getting the Steam achievements (incidental to wishlisting the full game as and when it gets released). Also a couple of rounds of Scrabble.

Cooking. Uh. Let's see. There was... quiche? There was a quiche, and also cheese straws. A questionable stirfry that did broadly achieve the goal of delivering protein.

Eating. ASPARAGUS incl purple. Birthday cake. A sampler of commercially available Greek and Greek-style yoghurts. The LENTIL MOUSSAKA of my mother (second portion). Bean burgers also of my mother. ALPINE STRAWBERRIES from the garden!

Exploring. Helston Sports Centre and associated environs (involving BUSES).

Kerdroya!!! We wanted somewhere to stop and eat our Gear Farm pasties on our way back upcountry, due to divers alarums and excursions we wound up on Bodmin Moor at lunchtime (i.e. well behind schedule), so we sat on some grass and watched cows wade in and out of the lake and then while A was eating their Cornetto we went to see how long a walk it was to this labyrinth. WE ARE IN LOVE WITH THIS LABYRINTH. In addition to showcasing the various kinds of rock found around Cornwall and their accompanying styles of hedging we also got to see an excellent variety of foxgloves (white to very deep pink), a thing my mother called "whispering grass" that is not Stipa tenuissima that I am not going to finish looking up properly right now (short, seed heads bow over, fascinating sort of inverted-teardrop-shaped white-to-pink scaled situation?), scarlet pimpernels cascading down the vertical faces, ...

Growing. The at-home plants have not all died while I was away, despite the nightmares about the lemongrass! Indeed the poblano has NEW FRUIT on it!!!

Meanwhile, in Cornwall I Actually Did Some Weeding.

Observing. Goldfinches! Stonechats! Cormorants! Choughs!!! Barn swallows! Cows In Water; many calves and lambs; so so many Excellent Flowers.

The waves.

Goodness it's been an excellent week for spending time quietly outdoors.

1. Saw the goldfinch(es) again on my way home from gym + shop.
2. Birthday cake continues to exist :)
3. For five glorious minutes I was one of only two people in the gym (and the other one was very quiet, so it's just as well that other people showed up as I was starting to deadlift, really).
4. Vanity: ( Read more... )
   .
5. There are lots and lots of wildflower verges on my various perambulations and I cannot emphasise enough how much I am enjoying having ready access to both the hedges covered in sea pinks and patches of long grass mingled with poppies and (multiple colours of!) cornflowers and Margeriten.

Celebrating. My 36^th birthday! In low-key but very pleasant fashion.

Reading. I have made Some progress on Your Inner Fish (Neil Shubin), but alas not enough to actually finish it before the loan autoreturned to the library (and there is a queue, so I have put it back on hold, sigh). I had got up to the teeth. Leaving aside some towering indignation on behalf of zoos and aquaria everywhere (not everything in these settings is Bilaterian! not all Bilaterians have a head and two eyes!!! this is a terrible introduction to phylogeny!!!!!) I am having a good time with this one. In brief: palaeontologist specialising in fossil fish unexpectedly ends up in charge of medical students' first-year human anatomy course, and has Opinions.

Watching. Richie's Brooklyn Gym, a ten-minute documentary short about the gym Casey Johnston joined when she first started lifting weights.

Playing. Working on a puzzle that I am enjoying way more than I expected to, which is a delight.

Cooking. A quiche, this evening, with spelt flour, which I overdid a bit but oh well; and, yesterday, The Familial Celebratory Cake. :)

Eating. PURPLE ASPARAGUS. Raspberries. My mother's moussaka. Birthday cake. Bonus cake from Gweek Village Stores. A Gear Farm pasty.

Growing. The lemongrass has survived being potted up! And the poblano is flowering enthusiastically. :)

Observing. A nuthatch, we are pretty sure, at the Cornish Seal Sanctuary! In addition to the puffins and The Regulars Various, we did get to meet Hot Cross Bun, who is not quite ready for release yet but is getting very close to it. We got to see seal behaviour we had never previously observed (Attie, up in a rehab pool to keep Banana(rama) company while she stabilises on her anti-seizure meds, apparently really likes sunbathing belly-up with only her head underwater; and two of the residents were PORPOISING enthusiastically!!!). Sea pinks; Wundklee; CHOUGHS.

( Today we were not the first responders to an incident. )

Today I discovered, at approximately 6 p.m., that The Gym is only open until 5 p.m. on Saturdays. We had had a fairly lazy day at home and I had been putting off My Own Gym until after I had talked A through their (second!) Liftoff Phase One workout; I spent the approach going "... this car park is suspiciously empty, I don't think it can possibly be just that the school isn't on today..." and, yep, closed already.

( Read more... )

One: bread/avocado/scramble breakfast exactly as good as I had been looking forward to, with bonus realisation that we currently have some plum jam open so I got to finish with the rye-caraway-poppy (still mostly white wheat but those were the flavours) + butter + plum jam and this, too, was magnificent. (Bonus food excellence: ASPARAGUS that is now in season; some brownie bar + strawberries.)

Two: gym!!! I made the decision that the traffic was awful enough that buses would be a bad idea so I got bonus admiration of some excellent front gardens I have been otherwise oblivious to, and also observed More Coot Eggs.

Three: Murderbot is apparently managing to occupy a sweet spot in terms of complexity and degree of emotional engagement that means I'm actually managing to read the new one. (Bookshop.org very much does NOT have the ebook in the UK store so I even don't feel bad that I forgot it existed until after I'd given Kobo money.)

Four: post-therapy treat was Completing The Speedrun Achievement for the arcane library game, thereby sorting me out with All achievements, so I am now probably ready to contentedly move on.

Five: spent a chunk of the evening removing labels from the Child's clothing, and it is very very nice to know that his life will be materially improved as a result.

The other highlight of the day was my ongoing experiments on myself with respect to movement, which I had intended to witter about, but (1) it got late and (2) when I came to actually look up "neuromuscular/movement patterning" as terms for That Thing about The Process Of Learning Physical Skills I could... only find a bunch of people selling movement coaching services. Working out what the academic terminology for this is: now on my infinite todo list.

(tl;dr I made a back muscle very unhappy a few years ago now; ever since it has been prone to Twinges but not actual dysfunction, which I've been interpreting as Nerves Primed To Go AAAAH; managed to push it past twinge into persistent unhappiness on Saturday, and have spent the past few days playing around with how it responds to various kinds of movement in terms of better/worse/about the same...)

Reading. I am up to AUGUST 2025 in my She's A Beast back-catalogue catch-up. Will I be able to read Anything Else At All Soon? Maybe?

Among several library holds that have now turned up (... ulp) I have technically started Run Towards the Danger (Sarah Polley), another memoir about embodiment, which I... suspect was recced via SAB one way or another. By "technically" I mean "I am a couple of pages into the preface, and trying to decide whether the formatting fuckery is worth sticking through".

Writing. So. many. e-mails. about. objects. and I have barely even Started the damn Object E-mails good grief.

Progress on Book also continues (look at me not using qualifiers!). Currently I am slightly going in circles about (1) how much background I need to give on why I think "biopsychosocial" can be a useful frame at least to the extent of providing structure for the first big chunk of the book, (2) what you've got to be very careful you're doing if you want that to be the case, and (3) whether I need to engage in depth with the goddamn philosophy of it all in re e.g. "it's not a model if it doesn't have predictive power" (which I am extremely inclined to sidestep by just......... calling it a frame).

Playing. ... we have tripped and fallen and are playing Librarian: Tidy up the arcane library. Initially we were co-playing with A doing most of the driving and me going LOOK THERE'S A PATTERN-- but then it became apparent that my ideal mode of gameplay (keyboard rather than controller, Manually Shelve Each Book Individually) is not compatible with A's (controller rather than keyboard, Use All The Magic). So I got a second copy. And have been playing through it merrily and slowly. To my amusement it turns out that my specific bullshit here............ gets you the rarest of the Steam achievements. (I am about 2/3 of the way through shelving, and things are speeding up substantially in more or less the same way as they do with jigsaw puzzles. This has eaten my brain and I really really need to do Other Things that are Not This but gosh it gets quiet in here when Allow The Brain To Just Focus. Will I do any further rounds of it? Unclear.)

Cooking. Continue to appreciate braised chickpeas in all their forms (still v keen on Adding A Tin Of Artichokes to the party).

Eating. Had my second hundoburger, which I had deferred until after E1, for the purposes of having an additional day where I didn't need to think about food. Also: STRAWBERRIES; bakery brunch (feat. both the bread pudding and the cardamom bun); ... almost certainly other things but the brain it says no.

Exploring. Bakery brunch featured a detour to visit a red horse chestnut I'd spotted from the bus on my way back from yesterday's hospital appointment, and also pointing out to A the pink bits on some of the flowers on the standard horse chestnuts on the way there.

Technically Finchley Memorial hospital, but mostly I got on a bus I was familiar with and played sudoku to keep myself vaguely calm, and then I managed to NOT panic and get onto a bus going in entirely the wrong direction by dint of it pulling out of the stop sufficiently far ahead of me there was no way I was gonna catch up with it, and then got the unfamiliar bus in the correct direction and... spent significantly more of that panicking quietly. There was definitely A Point at which, it having become apparent that the bus was On Diversion and Not Following Its Usual Route and None Of The Normal Stops Were Happening, I equally quietly Gave Up and decided this was simply going to be yet another hospital service I got discharged from for being disabled, BUT in fact that service TERMINATED at the hospital (and was the only one serving it!!!) so it did get there in the end. I would still prefer to not do that journey again please and thank you, even though I did per the above spot a convenient local red horse chestnut on the return leg, and for that matter several dramatic wisteria hidden from road level but NOT from upper-deck-of-bus level.

Growing. A took me to the allotment this afternoon! The josta is setting quite a lot of fruit and the cherry is even managing some despite my utter failure to water them! I put some marigold seeds in the ground in between rows of broad beans though this is clearly futile because the red ants are already Very Definitely farming on them; the oca in the bottom half of that bed are starting to come up despite the utter lack of watering, as above; none of the seedlings at home died while we were away; ... I did some weeding?

Observing. BABY BIRDS incl. cootlets going WHEEK WHEEK WHEEK all the way up and down the river; the Egyptian goslings are now at the stage of mostly having vaguely competent adult plumage coming in but still managing to turn into balls of ungainly fluff when they sit down; a second batch of coot eggs is being Definitively Incubated. We did not see the duckle again but we did see a very small starling. It was a very pleasant brunch down by the aqueduct.

Today has been. the first time in A While that I have spent mostly horizontal and mostly asleep on account of migraine, despite drugs. I am Not A Fan.

( Read more... )