vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. Ahhhh I have been managing to read this week, and even I have been making further inroads into the stack of physical books I mostly picked up in charity shops, have spent [mumble] years not reading, do not actually have shelf space for especially if they're just going to sit around unread.

Not actually a charity shop acquisition: The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells. This one was a spare copy belonging to a friend (sing out if you'd like!) that made its way to me; I was a bit dubious because Not Murderbot, but while it's definitely by a much younger writer and is adjacent to rather than actually My Id, partway through it became apparent that I was in fact inhaling it and therefore I had a quick poke at the library to see if they had the sequels in ebook. Answer: yes! And even better -- they were all immediately available! Hurrah, I thought, put my auxiliary internet device back down, and resumed reading.

You can see where this is going, I assume: between when I checked this and the point at which I finished the first book, somebody checked out the second one. I have been shaking my fists at the sky not least because THEY ARE PROBABLY GOING TO BE GOING THROUGH ALL OF THEM IMMEDIATELY AHEAD OF ME :| and I feel honour-bound to NOT proactively check out book #3 until my hold on book #2 actually comes up, but also! I want to keep reading! and that is why I have read the first two chapters of The Serpent Sea, which were available from the library as a sample.

Religion for Atheists, by Alain de Botton, was very definitely a book I picked up while the charity shop halfway down the hill was doing an "as many books as you can fit in a carrier bag for a fiver" thing. I am frequently annoyed by the way capital-A Atheists wilfully ignore the sociological functions of religion completely independent of whether you Believe In Whatever Metaphysical Or Theological Theory, so was vaguely hopeful that this highly-rated book would be an interesting exploration of the topic! ... and I emphatically gave up on page 27 (out of around 270) because it was just so lazy and ahistorical and poorly researched. Did Not Finish. Back in the charity shop pile.

Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell, I acquired at the same time as the de Botton on account of having osmosed the existence of Rowell from, like, The Internet. Only a few pages in, but so far I am keeping reading!

AND FINALLY: I have returned to yánasenesse! I stopped keeping up around the end of last year because it had got into Oh No Everything Is Starting To Go Horribly Wrong :( and I have not been feeling up to putting myself through that particular emotional wringer. But! Migraine medication! SO NOW I AM UP-TO-DATE. And have cried Several times, so, y'know. :-p

Watching. The Addams Family (1991). A much-needed palate cleanser. A remarked that the 2019 film feels like the Leverage reboot, in that the superficial trappings are there but the characters feel like caricatures of themselves drawn without much understanding.

Cooking. I have been feeling deeply uninspired cooking-wise, but I did wind up doing an apparently Ottolenghi-derived broad-bean-and-tomato thing that I was underwhelmed by. Probably I was in part underwhelmed because the specific beans we were eating weren't very exciting, and partly because we had it with pasta, but even so.

I did also make a Ribiselkuchen, which as mentioned turned out Very Well and Extremely Pleasing.

Making & mending. I sketched out roughly want I want a custom... notebook belt pouch...? for Admin: the LRP to look like, and have passed the details on to the crew member who made one or Adam. (I want mine to look an awful lot like Adam's! But there are some tweaks.) I am not expecting it to be ready for E3, which is Definitely At Least Six Weeks Away (spoilers: no it isn't), but I am Hopeful that it will make it easier to e.g. Take My Meds and Not Lose My Pens in much the same way that having the water bottle Attached To My Belt works better.

We have also made up something like 500 meal ticket booklets, having bounced a bunch of ideas about how to Improve them around, so we'll see how that goes.

Growing. I have had OVER A KILO of raspberries this week despite my Gloomy Prognostications (which possibly didn't ever make it into electrons, or at least not electrons around here?) about having failed at watering at a Crucial Moment such that I was not expecting to get much fruit off the summer canes. And one possibly-a-loganberry, having once again excavated it from the surrounding Thicket and discovered, rather to my surprise, that it's still alive and still fruiting!

Also a kilo of jostas. Also I harvested and processed all the redcurrants -- really not very many this year (these I did mess up the watering on) but enough for two Ribiselkuchen, one this week and the rest in the freezer for A Future Occasion.

And artichokes! I have finally got the hang of prepping them such that you can in fact scoop the chokes out before bringing them to the table! And my soup peas are setting pods, and my various beans are identifiably beans if not yet flowering, and many of the tomatoes now have actual tomatoes on. The Queensland Blue are abruptly Enthusiastic, which I am delighted by; one of the two courgettes looks like it might not recover from the gastropods but the other is making flowers happen and the Pattison Blanc is tolerably well established at this point. I have been weeding. The aubergines have responded to being potted up by flowering. The pineapple physalis continues delicious beyond my wildest dreams. The peppers are considering fruiting.

Everything is Extremely Go, basically!

Observing. Of greatest note: a flock of parakeets seems to have moved in! We've seen them flying past en masse making a tremendous racket at around the same time on several evenings, now, and gosh but they are pretty.