vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. Starter Villain, John Scalzi. Starter Villain, John Scalzi. I did have to consciously and deliberately suspend disbelief a few times as per, but it was also an extremely quick and easy read and extremely welcome fluff. There are unionised dolphins. Very much A Scalzi Caper.

All Systems Red, Martha Wells. Part comfort reread, part Indignation At TV Show. Mildly embarrassed by how much I'd fallen for Murderbot's self-mythologisation despite knowing how much it self-mythologises. Extremely contemplating moving on to the next one.

The Way Out, Alan Gordon with Alon Ziv. Quick reread for note-taking purposes. Notes successfully taken. Zebra demographics successfully researched. Book itself annotated in pencil by sections I was most indignant about (e.g. bro, I think you might find that clients often think they're failing you/the method/themselves if they wind up with a 90% but not a 100% reduction in pain because........... of the amount of time you spend talking about how The Method will cause All Of Your Pain to Dissolve and Dissipate and Melt Away. just MAYBE.)

Mindfulness for Health, Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman (in progress). Reading for note-taking purposes, having previously worked through the programme presented in Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Mark Williams and Danny Penman). I acquired this some time ago for personal interest reasons and then bristled hard at both of the authors experiencing chronic pain by way of Having Had A Serious Accident, rather than by way of chronic illness, but actually this turns out to have been somewhat unfair to Burch, who unlike e.g. Alan Gordon above is in ongoing pain and doesn't actually say (or at least doesn't say consistently) that her one weird trick is going to magically fix everything and does explicitly frame things in terms of living well with ongoing pain. There's also a good thorough quantitative and implementable explanation of how to set up a pacing programme for yourself, at least assuming that your fatigue is secondary to chronic pain rather than being the whole shitshow that is post-exertional malaise. (And let the record show that I am resentfully finding the reminder to do a bunch of this stuff useful.)

The Age of Seeds, Fiona McMillan-Webster (in progress). Chosen this morning from my "maybe read this at some point?" tag in Libby; currently very excited about 2000 year old seeds that were successfully germinated. (The geopolitical situation surrounding the successful germination of those seeds in particular is... not great, in that it's the Judean date palm, so this is your warning to be braced for Current Events if you do decide to pick this up.)

I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!

Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.

More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.

Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.

Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!

Cooking. Bread? Bread.

Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)

Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.

Comments

[lunabee34]

Those pens are really beautiful; I've never used one, just admired from afar.

[cesy]

I am glad to hear your opinion of Murderbot TV is similar to mine.