such things wow

• I WAS CORRECT: putting one of the bowls of bird feed on the garage roof, with an identical bowl of bird feed on the picnic table, did in fact mean that the birds Got The Idea. Food is being consumed. I startled a pigeon when I got out of bed around lunchtime.
  
• I would be very grateful for advice on how to go about acquiring a replacement silicone lid for a bamboo travel mug, because I am utterly incapable of working out a search term that doesn't just... return a million and one results for complete sets of travel mugs, where the issue is specifically that I have lost a lid, gah.
  
• I am having a happy flail about food? I made ice cream using not-the-ice-cream-maker-I-first-thought-of and it did A Texture and I have leftover apricot jam to eat for breakfast for the next week or so, hurrah. Next step: go through the recipe book and stick a post-it note on all the things I want to try making.
  
• I have spent a bunch of time over the past few days going back over paper diaries back to ~2010, in order to establish how much time I've spent in Cornwall over the last decade, and goodness there was a lot of stuff in there I'd completely forgotten happening but am pleased to have a record of. (I am particularly amused that I apparently made specific note of having met A in person, complete with his full name and everything; this was at a point at which I was nooooot writing down much actual emotional state in my diaries because reasons, so I can only speculate about why I felt it was sufficiently momentous to Record, but there we go. Amusement.)
  
• Dishwashers are amazing and I love them. (I've been unpacking some of the boxes brought back from the mouldering ancestral pile, some of which contain cookware, and there was no way I was dealing with any of that without giving it a very thorough clean first -- and, well, just being able to stick it all through a dishwasher at 75°C and Not Think About It Any More and have it come out clean? is pretty magic. I have soufflé dishes.) Bonus points: A explained to me the other week why in fact it is that US housing doesn't come with in-unit washing machines and dishwashers until you get as far as Properly Fancy housing, which is apparently... because of the electricity set-up. Which makes entire sense and had not occurred to me, but also Good Grief I am glad I live somewhere with 240V mains. (And also a bit perplexed, because the dishwashers at Caltech seemed to work fine, but who knows.)