ten good things make a post

[kaberett]

1. A combination of Terrible Bus Journeys and Piccadilly Line Strikes meant that I ended up in Ikea on Wednesday afternoon, where I made a friend, because, um, I don't believe anyone who has ever met me expects me to meet a small round white glowy hedgehog and not bring it home to cuddle.
   
2. We have been very much enjoying the cherry tomatoes off the plants I bought from a charity shop with zero identification; when they're full-sized but haven't started ripening up yet they do this fantastic two-tone thing with dark green tops and light green bottoms and a sort of striped or streaky fade between the two. They're great (and also pretty tasty); I've tentatively identified them as maybe being Gardener's Delight, but I've also saved a bunch of seeds from them so we get to have more next year regardless.
   
3. I have spent a lot of the last few days curled up in the evenings with the Guilt Knitting and fic or advice columns or the Watergate Documentary (thanks to rydra_wong, who was sufficiently enthusiastic that I subdued my intense suspicion of unfamiliar audiovisual media and watched the full four hours), and it has been very pleasant and soothing and I am making great progress.
   
4. First actually-all-my-fault food from the allotment as part of last night's dinner (and today's lunch, and today's dinner)!!! The pak choi I planted out directly into one bed (and then mulched, and then mulched some more) recovered from the slugs after the second mulching and are now sufficiently productive that I can start pulling bits off them without endangering their life. All the other allotment-food we've eaten has been pre-existing stuff that I wasn't Directly Responsible For All Stages Of, so I am proper delighted about this.
   
5. I finally have confirmation from my wheelchair dealership about pricing and part numbers various, and to my very great relief they're happy for me to fit the parts myself rather than needing to slog down to Farnborough to see them, so with any luck by this time next month I will have two fewer wheelchairs in the house (well -- net one fewer, because one of mine is currently on loan to the person whose chair I currently have here waiting for me to finish tuning it up, but hush).
   
6. I stumbled upon some of the small Leiths How To cookbooks in a shop last week, skimmed all of them, learned a lot, promptly acquired one of them that had an ex-library copy going cheap on eBay (which turned out to be from the Dublin public library system, ha), and very tentatively managed a slightly more convincing (in some respects) sourdough than I have previously, in a way I sort of feel I understand. I am looking into getting myself an oval banneton, and am feeling a lot more confident about maybe meeting this year's culinary goal of "maybe??? learn to make a convincing sourdough???" So I'm excited about that!
   
7. Other allotment news about which I am excited: the fennel (even the ones I rudely transplanted and did not expect to survive, but which I couldn't quite bear to just thin out and dump directly in the compost) are looking increasingly like a recognisable vegetable! My three rows of spinach have come up and are starting to produce recognisable spinach leaves in addition to their seedling leaves!
   
8. Orchestra has started up again and I'm doing much less badly than I expected for not reaaaaaaally having played much in about six months. My tone isn't great but I've mostly actually got enough stamina to play for a rehearsal? I can roughly remember where the notes are? I have yet to manage to take the horn out of its case between rehearsals to practice at home, but I have Secret Plans And Clever Tricks aimed at making that more manageable (to do with having rearranged space inside the house).
   
9. I keep remembering the Elementary season 6 finale and having More Feelings. People who love each other.
   
10. Cough-suppressant drugs I can safely take, which are enabling me to get to sleep at all, are Really Good and I am Very Grateful.
    

Comments

[alexseanchai]

♥!

[vass]

Congrats on all of this, but especially the garden.

[ghoti]

hedgelight!

[davidgillon]

Yay food, and yay wheelchair stuff!

Also yay breathing and sleeping without coughing!

[swingandswirl]

OMG that hedgehog is The Cutest I want five.

[sfred]

Congratulations on making there be food!

[judiff]

Hedgelight looks really cool - are they good to cuddle or like is that a bit awkward and they are best to be more hand-off friends with?

Yay! For cooking and Cook Books and wheelchair-sorting

[rydra_wong]

thanks to rydra_wong, who was sufficiently enthusiastic that I subdued my intense suspicion of unfamiliar audiovisual media and watched the full four hours

*nodnod* New audiovisual media input is difficult and not always something my brain is prepared to digest! So I am glad that this seems to have been enjoyable enough gor you to be worth the effort.

[kaberett]

plamp plamp plamp

[kaberett]

it is SUCH a friend

[kaberett]

<3

[kaberett]

ISN'T IT GOOD.

[kaberett]

they are good to cuddle! they're ?silicone, so they're soft and smooth and slightly squishy and I very much enjoy leaning back and sitting with it sat on my chest poking its nose toward me. They are also exactly the right shape to hold the round good back of in my cupped hands.

[kaberett]

<3 (I am aware of your "please fan at me about this!!!" comment, and I intend to, just Brain -- but tl;dr A was sat behind me while I watched the fourth and fifth episodes, not having seen the first three, so I kept pausing to explain "and THIS is the point we're at right now in the reenactment with the potential firing of the Deputy Attorney General" and he was increasingly "......... fuck me this is an impressive reenactment". I also got to explain about Buttercup's comments about Hoping There Aren't 'Tapes', which he hadn't quite put together, and about Dean being told about the existence of same...)

[rydra_wong]

Obviously I totally understand about how Brain, so no pressure/stress. Only if you have the spoons and feel like it at some point.

so I kept pausing to explain "and THIS is the point we're at right now in the reenactment with the potential firing of the Deputy Attorney General" and he was increasingly "......... fuck me this is an impressive reenactment".

SERIOUSLY. The commitment to detail!

I don't know why they've decided to run with it, given that it didn't work out so well for Nixon, but it's got to the point where serious Nixon historians are going "... yeah, this is kind of freaky."

(e.g. https://twitter.com/MikeKoncewicz/status/1039114605702860800 )

I mean, I'm going to be picky and keep pointing out that the Vice President has to resign before you fire the Deputy Attorney General, so they need to get on that, stat (has anyone checked Pence's office for large envelopes of cash lately?).

But otherwise, their commitment can't be faulted.

P.S.

[rydra_wong]

and about Dean being told about the existence of same...

On which note: https://www.axios.com/john-dean-watergate-trump-tweets-mueller-investigation-35129f85-0622-44df-9657-cd369bc0b617.html

Dean describes himself as "actually honored" to be called a "RAT" by Trump.

[tree_and_leaf]

Congratulations!

(IKEA are very good at the cute, aren't they?)

[ironed_orchid]

Meds that allow you to stop coughing long enough sleep are some of my favourite meds.

The hedgie is lovely.

Your vege garden sounds fantastic.

[hydrangea]

Thanks for posting about unfamiliar audiovisual media! I thought it was only me that had huge issues with that. :)

[silveradept]

Ten good things, indeed!

The Watergate documentary sounds like something that should be "required" viewing for people who want a horror story once they start making the connections.

[vass]

very plamp

[rydra_wong]

Nooooo, me too. Too much new input to process! Too much requiring of emotions and stuff in real time! Text is much more controllable and manageable; I can process text at my own pace, whereas audiovisual stuff occurs at its pace.

[rydra_wong]

The Watergate documentary sounds like something that should be "required" viewing for people who want a horror story once they start making the connections.

But with a happy ending! And it's also a "how-to" guide to all the things that need to fall into place to bring down a criminal presidency, and a epic ensemble drama in which many many people rise to the occasion (sometimes in unexpected ways) to make that happen.

So that's why I am a fan.

[rmc28]

I am very glad for the good things :-)

[kaberett]

yessss. I also have an octopus for hanging my socks up to dry on.

Re: P.S.

[kaberett]

:D

[fyreharper]

Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissss.

[judiff]

Cool :)

There's like plans to build an Ikea near Brighton but it's like controversial cos of parking and congestion and stuff. But i really want to be able to go and look at the cool/cute things...

[rydra_wong]

On the other hand, once I have got through it the first time, it then becomes Familiar Audiovisual Media and can be enjoyable and even soothing. But it takes a significant chunk of mental energy to ingest initially.

[kaberett]

YUP.

[kaberett]

It is super super super not just you, audiovisual processing being High Effort is well-documented, and it's worse when you've got problems with either of those! Which is super common with things like, uh, autism. So. REALLY not the only one. :-)

I can go to a cinema if it's... basically My Activity For The Day. It's better if it's part of a franchise I'm already familiar with. Similarly e.g. watching a new episode of Elementary is much less effort than watching an episode of a new-to-me show.

[hydrangea]

This is why I really enjoy your blog! It teaches me so much about things I do/have problems with that I don't know about myself! It's like the first time I met my poly partners - she's used to explaining him to others because of his ADD and instead me and him just clicked. For the first time, I met a person that I could actually understand! And that could understand me!

It's ridiculously important to know that there are others out there, I guess.

(I'm undergoing a neuropsychiatric evaluation to see if I'm on the autistic spectrum right now. It will be interesting to see what it comes up with.)

[hydrangea]

Huh. I do tend to enjoy the same movies because they are soothing. There's this rather bad Lifetime movie that I put on in the background when my anxiety levels go up - it's better than meds.

[kaberett]

YUP. For me it's Ten Things I Hate About You.

[silveradept]

That's true. Watergate does end well for the country.

I will see about checking out the documentary.

[rydra_wong]

I wrote an extended ramble about why I think this particular documentary is so awesome here.

[kaberett]

Please do! I will thus feel that I have paid my dues to rydra_wong such that it's okay if I can't scrape together the brain to do a detailed squee about it to them. ;)

(ALSO it looks like you two don't know each other, but I think you'd be respectively interested, so please consider this an introduction!)

[cesy]

Much yay

[tree_and_leaf]

I have the octopus - known, imaginatively, as Socktopus - too! It's great.

[brainwane]

Seconding this. :-)

Re: P.S.

[rydra_wong]

I am endlessly entertained by the mental lurch my brain still does between John Dean as A Person In History and John Dean being on Twitter.

I mean, rationally I know that the younger Watergate players are now in their 70s and 80s so of course some of them are still around, and of course plenty of older people use Twitter! It's not that! (And Dean is very tech-savvy, and I have picked up various good links from his reTweets.)

It's just this ... gap or something that that my brain has to do an awkward little hop over, between Significant Figure In Important Historical Episode From Olden Times and "is on the internet shouting insults at Trump like the rest of us (albeit with certain unusual areas of expertise)".