kaberett | vital functions

Reading. La Grotta Ices, Kitty Travers. I have almost 1k words of ~~review~~ Opinions typed up but they are currently not in any coherent order. Let's see if I manage to finish the write-up any time this year, eh?

One More Croissant for the Road, Felicity Cloake. Despite all the descriptions of Endless Meat I am continuing to very much enjoy this for all that my progress continues plodding!

Writing. Some progress on aforementioned ice cream recipe book review.

Playing. Scrabble! Two games with my mother, both of which I lost, but we had a lot of fun engaging in some collaborative cheating in the last two goes (one necessarily retroactive) of the first game, enabling me to get out with GLOAtING. (The previous turn I'd played BEG; if I'd kept the G I'd still have got the last letters out of the bag, but the entertaining exit strategy would have been actually possible.)

Cooking. Sous chef on a lentil moussaka (will probably add to rotation) and Several Vegetable Stir-Fry. Elsewise have used up the last of the Shipton Mill spelt-and-fig-and-pumpkin flour, and will be buying a half-kilo bag of diastatic malt off them Forthwith. Batch of brownies made with a middling-cocoa-solids-percentage milk rather than 70+% dark, to suit A's tastes, and it is not the thing I want out of brownies but A is happy and this is good.

Exploring. Went for a stonk with my mother.

Making & mending. ... I got the sewing machine out? Next trick is to actually apply it to things. And I bought a replacement battery for my previous phone, and only once it arrived realised thaaaaaat I had in fact bought a battery for a similar but not actually identical model. So that's being picked up by Royal Mail as a return tomorrow morning, and the correct thing from the same seller should hopefully arrive shortly thereafter, at which point actually finishing up the repair job ought to be fairly straightforward but who knows whether all the components work/I've replaced the actual problems/etc etc etc. Fingers crossed!

Oh, and as we had the laminator out anyway for One Million potions for Admin: the LRP, we got our collective act together (I provided executive function and searched the web for clip art; A actually did the graphic design; I wrangled the guillotine; A wrangled the laminator; I wrangled the hole punch...) to make (1) a set of cards I can leave out by vegetable peelings etc if e.g. A is not available as I'm generating them, so he can choose what he wants as sneet (... snail treets) and consign the leftovers to either the stock bag in the freezer or the compost as appropriate without having a flap about what to do with which bits, and (2) a set of tags for Our Current Specialist Recycling Set-Up, which consists of a children's clothes rail in the pantry on which are S-hooks off which are hung carrier bags in various sizes to take various complicated materials/packaging/etc. They were labelled with treasury tags, which were small and fiddly; they are now labelled with much larger tags that fit onto the end of the S-hook and help keep both of the carrier bag handles attached appropriately. We've had them out for all of six hours at this point, maybe, but they are already definitely an improvement.

OH. AND. I think I mentioned last week that I had reattached 1.5 autovent openers to their appropriate windows in my greenhouse? And A did the remaining 0.5?

... well. I arrived at the allotment on Thursday to discover. That the one I'd attached all by myself. SURE HAD OPENED A WINDOW ALRIGHT.

... specifically it had "opened" the pane below the neatly framed one it was supposed to lift up by dint of pinging it neatly out onto the grass. The glass did not break, thank goodness, and after spending several minutes going ??????????? it finally dawned on me that what had happened was that one end had detached itself and thus the other, as the wax expanded in the heat, had put steadily increasing pressure on the fixed pane that wasn't supposed to go anywhere. (I recognise that this explanation is almost certainly hideously unclear even to people familiar with standard greenhouses; I will contemplate uploading and describing the photos I took Later. Probably as a lower priority than the ice cream review.)

It had one job! It did it superlatively! It is a Very Brave Autovent! ... and I reattached it to the thing I wanted it to open and so far it hasn't done the same thing again. Yet.

Growing. Broad beans continue growing Big And Strong! All the Ribes have flowers! Peas are hatching! Some tomatoes (the Marmande, which prefer cooler weather) are in the ground (at the allotment) and tubs (at home)! The cherry tree is also Producing Flowers! I sowed some celery!

I continue to do bits of weeding and bits of infrastructure; A joined me yesterday afternoon and set himself up to do admin at the garden table while I pottered. It was lovely.

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From:

shanaqui

(I recognise that this explanation is almost certainly hideously unclear even to people familiar with standard greenhouses; I will contemplate uploading and describing the photos I took Later. Probably as a lower priority than the ice cream review.)

I think I follow, actually! It sounds like a clever system, when it works.