kaberett | vital functions (Reply)

Reading. Mindfulness for Health, Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman. Shortly after last week's post on this topic I reached the stage where they blithely reproduce the story of the Two Wolves with Cherokee people as flavour, followed a little while later by merrily recounting the nice superficial story of the Roseto effect. This did at least function as a salutary reminder of the lure of confirmation bias, both on the part of the authors and on my own, given that I do actually think that mindfulness approaches have contributed significantly to improving my experience of chronic pain. But that doesn't mean I can actually trust that any of the studies they cite in support of mindfulness-based interventions actually say what they claim they say in any way that stands up to more than cursory scrutiny. (I consequently moved on to shaking down the internet for actual systematic reviews on the efficacy of mindfulness in various contexts, and the answer seems to be broadly "low-quality evidence, possibly some benefit", but settling down to do that reading properly is a future problem.)

The Age of Seeds, Fiona McMillan-Webster. I am enjoying no-note-taking-required Plant Facts.

Lots of Murderbot: Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Home. That last one especially caused me some Unexpected Emotions (In Bagging Area). I continue feeling Vindicated about That's Not What Murderbot Looks Like, though (visible non-organic parts! all over the body! THE ENTIRE FEET.)

The Welsh Cake Cookbook, Gilli Davies and Huw Jones. Tiny ten-recipe book indexed for EatYourBooks. (Of those ten recipes, eight are vegetarian; of those eight, I've made two and there's only one -- the cranberry & white chocolate -- that I'm sufficiently unconvinced by that I'm intending to skip it. Next up is lavender + honey, which we are dubious about, but not dubious enough to prevent making it; the actual blocker there is getting my act together to source One Teaspoon Of Crushed Lavender Flowers, dried vs fresh unspecified.)

Cookie Love, Jean Hwang Carrant: tiny 33-recipe book indexed for EatYourBooks. ~~This is one of the ones I got for like £1.99 from Oxfam for the express purpose of indexing and then giving back to a charity shop so as to increase the number of free slots on my bookshelf by one.~~ (Having said which I am enjoying EYB enough overall that I'm probably happy to continue paying them the really-not-that-much per year for the premium subscription for the time being regardless! But, you know, contingency planning.)

And, technically, a tiny bit (like, the introductory material plus one and a half paragraphs) of Nerve and Muscle (3^rd ed), R.D. Keynes and D.J. Aidley, before I got sufficiently spooked by not being able to get my head around what "ganglia" look like when actually embodied (never mind getting around to looking up "interneurons") that I retreated to making the internet spit out the PDFs that make up the Cambridge Textbook of Neuroscience for Psychiatrists, which hilariously looked to be a bit more my speed from the preview snippet. (In this instance, by "making the internet spit out" I mean "actually getting my Cambridge alum account set up and then painstakingly downloading all the PDFs at a rate of one per chapter section, which I still need to actually merge into a single document".)

... all of which adds up to more pain-related reading than I felt like I'd managed this week, huh, I thought I had tripped and fallen entirely into Murderbot and EatYourBooks indexing but apparently not!

Writing. A response to the EHRC consultation, which was... several thousand words. A very, very brief response to the Pathways to Work green paper consultation ("I am too disabled to manage doing this properly. These charities are speaking for me. Please fucking listen to them.")

Watching. The first half of Fantasia, with the toddler, with my hand held through all the scary bits to reassure me, apart from the bit that was SO scary that we had to get up and distract ourselves until it was over. Which had absolutely not been flagged as one of the scary bits, and which was the deep-sea-origins-of-life section.

(I had not watched the film since primary school, I don't think? And between then and now I have played a bunch of orchestral music, for most of that time on the violin but latterly as a French horn. It turns out that when I'm not distracted by playing a completely different part, I have incredibly intense sense-memories of several of the pizzicato sections early on...)

Another Murderbot episode. (I continue Indignant.)

Another Farscape episode, this one Taking the Stone (S02E03), which I think was firmly back to early season one levels of incoherence.

Tragically we have not managed The Old Guard 2, because I have had too much migraine and there have been SO many things Happening, but... maybe this week???

Cooking. Several new things! Four from East, leaving me at 41/120 recipes still to make (two of which are "probably won't happen" for reasons of "grapefruit" and "matcha"); of those this week's meal plan includes two (aubergine larb with sticky rice; Vietnamese coconut pancakes). I appreciated the reminder that fried new potatoes are tasty, and A is notably into the chargrilled summer vegetable salad, though I was not a fan of the faff and think I prefer smitten kitchen's charred corn succotash.

Approximately zero faff was salt lassi, and A is now aware that this Special Treat is available; low faff was a cherry clafoutis with fruit from the plot, which I overcooked a bit but, hey, I do in fact like caramelised crunchy bits.

Eating. FIRST BATCH OF DESSERT GOOSEBERRIES ARE RIPE. A tiny handful of Sugar Magnolia sugarsnap peas. Misc jostaberries. RASPBERRIES. And also supermarket strawberries, because we have hit the stage of the summer where they're down to £5 per kilo :)

Growing. I have been doing small bits of harvest and failing to get support structures in for the beans and tomatoes. The outdoor tomatoes have tomatoes on. The squash are coming along; I put more squash seeds in, on the grounds that they're super late but might still do anything; I have not managed to kill all of the chillis; the pepper has flowers.

Harvested lots of dried peas for sowing next year. Am attempting to develop Plans that might actually let me have a full bed of broad beans and a full bed of peas in the interests of getting Reasonable Quantities of them. ~~If the council doesn't tell me I'm not allowed the abandoned plot next door--~~

I could get so much done if I could coax myself out there for even an hour a day but the agoraphobia is saying No, annoyingly. Gonna try to get A to chase me out more this week.