Consumption
Jan. 27th, 2019 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettReading. Happiness, Aminatta Forna, finished earlier today. I... really did not get on with it: the prose style involved lots of half-disconnected sentences strung together with commas in a way that I found very heavy going; I utterly failed to suspend my disbelief about both the description of an academic conference and the ecologist who thinks that, compared to coyotes, dogs are Evolutionary Toddlers; I was underwhelmed by the two dead women providing character development for a dude (this is a slightly crude summary but also I'm not wrong); and I struggled with the idea of "resilience" being presented as a Revolutionary New Concept In Psychology in... 2014. It's not that I disagree with the partially-underlying idea that the suffering and damage "caused" by a traumatic incident actually have a lot to do with community responses to the individual survivor; I just... am really not the right audience to have this presented as revelatory. The mildly baffling thing (to me, at least) is that Forna does, actually, have a bunch of up-close-and-personal experience with trauma, and has clearly spent some time thinking about it, and this is a highly-praised result of all of that that just... really didn't work for me, in terms of either style or content. I'd be interested to know if any of you think I should nonetheless try her other work.
Next up: Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama, because I enjoyed Becoming a lot and therefore Right Fine Okay Let's Get Around To These (i.e. I speculatively put a hold on the ebooks from my library, and they... showed up faster than I expected, so now I get to inhale them whoops.
TV. We finished Orphan Black S3; A reappeared shortly thereafter in the living room holding out S4 to me. I gently pointed out that there were only 20 episodes left; we are therefore getting started with Leverage S4, which began with Elliot being wrapped up in snow gear and we think makes even less sense and involves even more incompetence.
Food. Visited Jumon, which I'd wandered past the other week; it reckons it's fusion-y pan-Asian vegetarian food. The laksa was not what I expected it to be but was nonetheless very nice; the chips-with-kimchi were Somewhat Baffling but also I ate most of them; and there was a fried cauliflower starter that was Great. Lots of leftovers, which A & I have eaten for some weird lunch-dinner hybrid today, hurrah hurrah, and probably we Will Go Back (he was working late on Friday so didn't join us). ALSO: The Collective Dairy's passionfruit yoghurt = my new fave, as mentioned.
Trips. We stopped off at Belfast zoo on our way to drop offcesy and alexwlchan at the airport! We got snowed on while watching the penguins be fed. (I hadn't previously realised that Rockhoppers and Fiordland penguins also have yellow eyebrows; I thought it was just Macaronis but nooooooooope.) My other favourite New To Me Aminal: the Gidgee Skink, which is a sort of slightly flattened spiky sausage that droops itself inelegantly over surfaces and cannot move itself to movement even when crickets are literally walking all over it. They're great and I love them, almost as much as I loved the tiny tortoise that was very determinedly failing to eat a pear. Also feat.: small goats (that were efficiently stripping needles off all the local seasonally-recycled-pine-trees), Tamsworth pigs (v eager to be scritched by fingers, which are better than walls, in that they are flexible and repositionable and have pointy bits), miniature donkeys, a BARN OWL that was an OWL and therefore a LIE, some Norfolk Grey chickens.
Next up: Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama, because I enjoyed Becoming a lot and therefore Right Fine Okay Let's Get Around To These (i.e. I speculatively put a hold on the ebooks from my library, and they... showed up faster than I expected, so now I get to inhale them whoops.
TV. We finished Orphan Black S3; A reappeared shortly thereafter in the living room holding out S4 to me. I gently pointed out that there were only 20 episodes left; we are therefore getting started with Leverage S4, which began with Elliot being wrapped up in snow gear and we think makes even less sense and involves even more incompetence.
Food. Visited Jumon, which I'd wandered past the other week; it reckons it's fusion-y pan-Asian vegetarian food. The laksa was not what I expected it to be but was nonetheless very nice; the chips-with-kimchi were Somewhat Baffling but also I ate most of them; and there was a fried cauliflower starter that was Great. Lots of leftovers, which A & I have eaten for some weird lunch-dinner hybrid today, hurrah hurrah, and probably we Will Go Back (he was working late on Friday so didn't join us). ALSO: The Collective Dairy's passionfruit yoghurt = my new fave, as mentioned.
Trips. We stopped off at Belfast zoo on our way to drop off
cesy and alexwlchan at the airport! We got snowed on while watching the penguins be fed. (I hadn't previously realised that Rockhoppers and Fiordland penguins also have yellow eyebrows; I thought it was just Macaronis but nooooooooope.) My other favourite New To Me Aminal: the Gidgee Skink, which is a sort of slightly flattened spiky sausage that droops itself inelegantly over surfaces and cannot move itself to movement even when crickets are literally walking all over it. They're great and I love them, almost as much as I loved the tiny tortoise that was very determinedly failing to eat a pear. Also feat.: small goats (that were efficiently stripping needles off all the local seasonally-recycled-pine-trees), Tamsworth pigs (v eager to be scritched by fingers, which are better than walls, in that they are flexible and repositionable and have pointy bits), miniature donkeys, a BARN OWL that was an OWL and therefore a LIE, some Norfolk Grey chickens.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 08:33 pm (UTC)Could you tell me more about the chips-with-kimchi? We make a lot of our own kimchi at home and are always looking for new ways of serving it.
(we had oven-baked celery root with...clarified butter?? idek about these food terms, mashed potatoes and parcil today. very very yummy)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-30 06:26 pm (UTC)Hurrah for celeriac, it is great :D
Kimchi: it was just... here are some chips, with a tea egg, and some kimchi. And some slightly fancy ketchup, but it was really just "let's use the kimchi as the red sauce for the chips"...!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 08:41 pm (UTC)OMG that sounds wonderful. Also, from the link, self-defense through inflation:
When threatened this lizard will take cover in a hollow log, under bark or between rocks. If harassed further it will inhale air, making its body swell up - this increased size, combined with the spiky keeled scales, makes it difficult for a predator to dislodge the lizard from its hiding place.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 09:35 pm (UTC)YES. AREN'T THEY AMAZING. they're weird flat little sausages that INFLATE when THREATENED and I LOVE THEM.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 08:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 09:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 09:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 09:35 pm (UTC)<333
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 10:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 10:25 pm (UTC)I think this was honey-and-sesame-glazed???
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-27 10:31 pm (UTC)I can also imagine cilantro and lime to be quite excellent.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-28 12:28 am (UTC)Q: Why are “books” behind a cut tag? Is it length, specific content, something about the medium? (I totally see why “food” gets a cut tag; books less so.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-28 09:05 am (UTC)Honestly mostly because I'm still playing around with the format of the post -- the last couple I cut everything; this time I basically decided to try not cutting single paragraphs that weren't about My Grumpy Opinions. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-28 10:47 am (UTC)I am curious. They are quite magnificent.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-28 11:16 am (UTC)Because they are 80% floof and 30% aggression by volume and I love them!
Specifically, a couple of years ago now (give or take), A was driving me down to Cornwall and we stopped off at the Cornwall Services... where the local screech owl sanctuary had a stand to try to drum up business.
Where you could, very gently, stroke an owl.
Adam had not realised that owls are 80% floof by volume and was very surprised when he reached out to stroke it and his hand just... kept... going...
(toucans, similarly, are A Lie; images of their skeletons are Explanatory.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-30 01:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-28 03:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-30 01:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-30 11:46 am (UTC)INDEED
(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-30 02:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-30 02:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-01-30 10:02 am (UTC)AREN'T THEY GOOD THEY DID A PUFF UP