ten good things

[kaberett]

1. Yesterday got much, much better.

2. Wahaca's churros come with an espresso cup of melted 85% chocolate and it is great.

3. I ended up with some time to kill at Liverpool Street Station yesterday so have a smol bottle of blue shower gel from the Lush. I think I am glad I only bought a small -- I turn out to prefer the way it smells in the bottle than on skin when mixed with water -- but nonetheless I have a smol and blue and this helped some.

4. A & I are improving at coping with each other when very tired (executive function degrades in both of us in ways that are primed for a vicious cycle; I think we're getting better at how early we catch it and how much sorting out it takes), which is nice in and of itself, but the actual point that I am working my way round to here is that I am super grateful to him for coping with me so gracefully last night when I hit the point of having really needed to be asleep three hours ago. I was buffering quite poorly and was very fretful and anxious and not really managing to cope even with one thing at once, and basically I am just enormously grateful to anyone willing to coax me through that particular state.

5. Relatedly, I ended up in floods of furious tears at the end of BSL last night and did Impromptu Military History at everyone, which A helped me redirect into explaining that I cry that much about lifeboats and tiny space robots as well, so we dispersed on an explanation of how Curiosity sings happy birthday to itself rather than on my impotent outraged grief about the specific bit of mil hist, which: probably for the best.

6. Bagels! Favourite bagel shop is about halfway between BSL venue and the station for heading home. I lurked in the bus shelter hissing miserably at the rain while A bravely disappeared into the dark dank night to retrieve Bagels.

7. To my amusement, the bus shelter contained an ad for a new Calvin Klein perfume, ck2. Based on The Book's scathing review of ckin2u, I expect I won't like this much either -- but (which I didn't even register at first), two of the four featured couples (the idea being that it's somehow a unique selling point that it's a gender-neutral perfume, rather than that... being the default) were queer. So that was nice.

8. The petition is 10% of the way there. It's slowed down a lot -- I need to Social Meeja it some more -- but I am pretty confident this is a thing I can do.

9. I am periodically remembering the fact that at the beginning of the weekend I found a 2001 Graun food article revealing that Nigel Slater has apparently never picked blackberries in his life:

Urban cooks like me have no tree standing bent and laden in their back garden, let alone one whose fruit they can cook with. Blackberries come from the greengrocers, incarcerated in unromantic plastic punnets emblazoned with a sell-by date. It is not the same as the fruit you pop in your pocket while walking the dog, but we must make the best of what we have.

10. There is new your blue-eyed boys-related short-fic, and I am going to finish writing the thing I'm working on and then curl up to read it, yes yes. Excellent.

Comments

[sfred]

Hurray for good things.

[tree_and_leaf]

I went brambling a lot, but the results never appeared in pies, not did I wish they would (Personally, I don't like the seeds: the jelly Mum made was much more satisfactory).

[alexseanchai]

yay good things!

[redbird]

I have no idea who Nigel Slater is, but I have lived in three cities in my life, and picked blackberries in two of them. Not "gone out to the countryside to pick berries," but picked berries in those cities. Granted, blackberries and therefore picking them are a lot commoner in the Seattle area, where many people consider them a weed, than in New York City, but city landscapes are more varied than he seems to realize, or to have looked at. (It's easy not to glance at a particular brownstone in midtown Manhattan and see the grapevine.)

The places where I could have easily gathered enough blackberries for cooking with, the people I was visiting weren't especially interested: but if I had been primarily picking berries, rather than primarily clearing a path in the back garden, there would have been more than enough for jam or pie.

[kaberett]

He's a UK celebrity chef/food journalist bod; and, well, yes, the other point being is that he lives (and lived, at the time!) in bloody London, where there's brambles along quite a lot of the above-ground tube lines and above-ground stations never mind in every bloody bit of public park!

[birke]

I'd be wary of eating fruit growing wild in cities -- unless the city controls its soil's heavy-metal content better than Portland.

[mair_in_grenderich]

after picking buckets of blackberries from the abandoned allotments behind us every year as a child, I can never bring myself to pay for the things, even though I haven't actually managed to go picking properly for years.

[vass]

1. Good.

4. I'm glad you have each other.

5. Do you read Questionable Content? (parenthetical about how I can certainly understand some of the various reasons one might want not to.) I do sporadically, and I always used to find the droids extremely annoying -- which is not how I normally feel about droids! -- but I really love one of the recent droid characters, Bubbles. She's a veteran combat droid, big and strong and intimidating, and she knows she scares people and hates it and isolates herself because of that, and the new mechanic at her workplace is [one of the strip's main characters] prickly, defensive, recently-sober Faye, and they're striking up an extremely wary friendship, and... *flail*

8. *cheers you on*

[sylvaine]

*squints with great surprise and amusement at #9*

[fyreharper]

But why would one put blackberries into one's *pockets*? That seems sure to lead to squashed berries and stained clothing... Proper receptacle for berries is *mouth* :p