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vital functions
Aug. 16th, 2020 10:42 pmReading. I have spent most of this week in the Thesis Swamp but I have also managed some Reading For Pleasure. ( Erin Morgenstern, T. Kingfisher )
Watching. S01E03 & E04 of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I have now managed to burn some bread by going "oh, I'll put it on at the beginning of the episode, I'll be fine getting up two-thirds of the way in to get it back out", and have learned my lesson, namely: because it's fiction, and because -- I think -- there's the buffer of the incredibly self-aware musical interludes, I am utterly absorbed by this incredibly sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of someone who is making absolutely terrible choices. She's being awful! She's treating people awfully! And yet somehow, still: sympathetic. Definitely enjoying this a lot.
On Sunday afternoon we rewatched Knives Out (2019) with my cousins various (remotely!). It's still perfect. I still adore it. I picked up so many more details. We remain absolutely delighted with the whole thing.
Playing. Okay, I am massively enjoying the remote raiding feature Pokémon Go has introduced. I am super into getting to raid with people on whole other continents. (I'm also experiencing expected ongoing frustration with PoGo's shitty stability and propensity to fall over in a heap on basically 0 warning, but.) Caught this week: a shiny Sableye (thank you Tuesday), a 100% IV Elgyem (wild!) (which turns out to evolve into an eldritch horror), a shiny Deoxys (remote raaaaaid), and (new species!) a remarkably good Cottonee (which has a STAR ON IT). I am pleased.
Horn: I have managed to get the set of exercises I'm doing reliably down to ~25 minutes if I'm paying attention! I might have another stab at incorporating the staccato exercises (as well as the legato ones that are my current regular routine), but also maybe that can wait until The PhD Is Done, given that it's not like I'll be resuming playing with my amateur orchestra in September.
Cooking. A second batch of blackberry jelly attempted, but it needs... further attention. This time I managed to get 6 jars out of 2kg of fruit, in no small part through rather more enthusiastic squeezing of the jelly bag, but I didn't add the lemon until after I'd strained the pulp. On the one hand this might have made it easier to get more juice out, and on the other I'm pretty certain it's why the jam didn't set (grumble), so having jarred it all up neatly I... need to decant it back into the pan and boil it up again, sigh.
Yesterday morning we made scones; once again I got A to add the buttermilk to the flour mixture; once again I ended up pacing nervously back and forth behind him, thinking he'd been mixing for an awfully long time and surely this was overdoing it; once again I squashed my urge to Say Anything; once again the scones came out perfectly. I do not understand his magic but I am duly impressed.
Another handful of purple sugarsnap peas with garlic and ginger and mirin; the courgette-and-tofu thing, with allotment-courgette and allotment-holy-basil-flowers, all of which I am very pro.
Little else of note, though we have been eating lots of salads made with allotment-tomatoes and allotment-cucumbers and allotment-shallot!
Eating. Tonkotsu cold noodle salad, because we went to Hackney on Tuesday evening to collect an eBay lot of a whole bunch more terracotta pots (I'm sorry, I'm just... like this) and I really wanted japchae but couldn't trivially find anywhere that was selling them, so, noodle salad from Tonkotsu eaten in the car (with the air conditioning) (on a day that hit 35) (and a house that made it up to about 28°C) (so really escaping into the car with the air conditioning was the most comfortable we'd been in actual days).
Prodigious quantities of tomatoes.
Growing. This week I mostly managed to keep watering things (with a lot of help and support from A) and occasionally managed weeding and definitely managed a whole lot of harvesting blackberries. And tomatoes.
I've not made it over to the plot since the storms started, but shall head up tomorrow, whereupon I'll find out how cross with me the various greenhouse plants are. Goal: pot up some of the peppers, now I've got more appropriate containers for them!
Observing. In addition to the common-or-garden bat, we detected an ALLOTMENT BAT (and also saw it, at least briefly). This one was, possibly, a mezzo-soprano? The bat detector emitted the lowest-pitched noises when it was tuned to 50KHz, where thealtocommon pipistrelle characteristically calls at a range centred on 45KHz and the soprano characteristically calls at a range centred on 55KHz.
On our way out to the allotment on the evening A brought the bat detector, we were also delighted -- it had been raining some -- by the number of snails that had climbed up to the top of the hedge at the bottom of the lawn and were perched on the leaves waving their eye-stalks about.
And there's been some impressive sheet lightning, both with and without rain!
Watching. S01E03 & E04 of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I have now managed to burn some bread by going "oh, I'll put it on at the beginning of the episode, I'll be fine getting up two-thirds of the way in to get it back out", and have learned my lesson, namely: because it's fiction, and because -- I think -- there's the buffer of the incredibly self-aware musical interludes, I am utterly absorbed by this incredibly sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of someone who is making absolutely terrible choices. She's being awful! She's treating people awfully! And yet somehow, still: sympathetic. Definitely enjoying this a lot.
On Sunday afternoon we rewatched Knives Out (2019) with my cousins various (remotely!). It's still perfect. I still adore it. I picked up so many more details. We remain absolutely delighted with the whole thing.
Playing. Okay, I am massively enjoying the remote raiding feature Pokémon Go has introduced. I am super into getting to raid with people on whole other continents. (I'm also experiencing expected ongoing frustration with PoGo's shitty stability and propensity to fall over in a heap on basically 0 warning, but.) Caught this week: a shiny Sableye (thank you Tuesday), a 100% IV Elgyem (wild!) (which turns out to evolve into an eldritch horror), a shiny Deoxys (remote raaaaaid), and (new species!) a remarkably good Cottonee (which has a STAR ON IT). I am pleased.
Horn: I have managed to get the set of exercises I'm doing reliably down to ~25 minutes if I'm paying attention! I might have another stab at incorporating the staccato exercises (as well as the legato ones that are my current regular routine), but also maybe that can wait until The PhD Is Done, given that it's not like I'll be resuming playing with my amateur orchestra in September.
Cooking. A second batch of blackberry jelly attempted, but it needs... further attention. This time I managed to get 6 jars out of 2kg of fruit, in no small part through rather more enthusiastic squeezing of the jelly bag, but I didn't add the lemon until after I'd strained the pulp. On the one hand this might have made it easier to get more juice out, and on the other I'm pretty certain it's why the jam didn't set (grumble), so having jarred it all up neatly I... need to decant it back into the pan and boil it up again, sigh.
Yesterday morning we made scones; once again I got A to add the buttermilk to the flour mixture; once again I ended up pacing nervously back and forth behind him, thinking he'd been mixing for an awfully long time and surely this was overdoing it; once again I squashed my urge to Say Anything; once again the scones came out perfectly. I do not understand his magic but I am duly impressed.
Another handful of purple sugarsnap peas with garlic and ginger and mirin; the courgette-and-tofu thing, with allotment-courgette and allotment-holy-basil-flowers, all of which I am very pro.
Little else of note, though we have been eating lots of salads made with allotment-tomatoes and allotment-cucumbers and allotment-shallot!
Eating. Tonkotsu cold noodle salad, because we went to Hackney on Tuesday evening to collect an eBay lot of a whole bunch more terracotta pots (I'm sorry, I'm just... like this) and I really wanted japchae but couldn't trivially find anywhere that was selling them, so, noodle salad from Tonkotsu eaten in the car (with the air conditioning) (on a day that hit 35) (and a house that made it up to about 28°C) (so really escaping into the car with the air conditioning was the most comfortable we'd been in actual days).
Prodigious quantities of tomatoes.
Growing. This week I mostly managed to keep watering things (with a lot of help and support from A) and occasionally managed weeding and definitely managed a whole lot of harvesting blackberries. And tomatoes.
I've not made it over to the plot since the storms started, but shall head up tomorrow, whereupon I'll find out how cross with me the various greenhouse plants are. Goal: pot up some of the peppers, now I've got more appropriate containers for them!
Observing. In addition to the common-or-garden bat, we detected an ALLOTMENT BAT (and also saw it, at least briefly). This one was, possibly, a mezzo-soprano? The bat detector emitted the lowest-pitched noises when it was tuned to 50KHz, where the
On our way out to the allotment on the evening A brought the bat detector, we were also delighted -- it had been raining some -- by the number of snails that had climbed up to the top of the hedge at the bottom of the lawn and were perched on the leaves waving their eye-stalks about.
And there's been some impressive sheet lightning, both with and without rain!