vital functions
Mar. 17th, 2019 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettFilm/TV. The Dawn Wall! Free Solo! On the whole I found The Dawn Wall much more enjoyable and am seriously contemplating a near-future rewatch. This also means that I am grudgingly allowing as I do like documentaries, then, fiiiine, which maybe means I want to start making a list of things to watch that A Won't Want To for while he's away. (The to-watch fictional-TV list includes Sens8 and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and maaaybe The Good Place, once we've finished Orphan Black and Leverage, but A is actually interested in most of those so I'd rather watch with him for the first time in the interests of optimising for audiovisual processing.)
Reading. Still finding The Audacity of Hope a bit of a miserable slog, but I am also nearing on the end of the chapter on Opportunity, which mi-i-ight mean I'm about to get back onto topics I care about more than a deliberately centrist and anodyne appeal to the American Dream. (I'm being slightly unfair, but there we have it.) I've also been working steadily throughrydra_wong's linkspam on Free Solo, along with digging through various comments over thereabouts for links to More Discussions About The Dawn Wall. I have also put a library hold on The Push, Tommy Caldwell's memoir, because actually I was sufficiently into that film to read an entire sodding book by a cis straight white guy. (AFAIK; there is precisely 0 indication in anything I've seen so far that he's in any sense An Queer, though I suppose it's not implausible that if he were he wouldn't notice.)
Growth. TWO PASSION FRUIT EMERGE. They have a LEAF PAIR and EVERYTHING; I am simultaneously excited and nervous for them, and really astonishingly dithery about what constitutes Sufficiently Large To Handle for the purposes of transplanting. (I am experiencing A Concern about whether they will be shocked and dismayed by being moved into ambient room temp etc from their Warm Box.) Still four chillies, two of which are stubbornly refusing to shed their seed-case hats; peas are now in the ground (I built them a climbing frame out of bamboo I pulled out of a skip; it's now survived both Storm Gareth and Storm Helen so I'm feeling pretty confident about it); and I put some tomato seed in an egg box yesterday to incubate.
At the plot I have been sinking the bits and pieces I acquired to act as anchor points, rearranging top soil in the hope of getting a sufficiently level patch that the greenhouse won't sulk upon being put up, and coming to the mildly resentful conclusion that I probably do want to do day-hire of a vibrating plate soil compactor. I have also been feeding and stirring the compost bin, doing some incredibly desultory weeding (though the pizza-box + manure + woodchip mulch mostly seems to have kept them down while I was in Belfast, hurrah), and cooing with delight at my Ribes various, which I appear to have managed to prune just before they collectively burst into riotous bud.
ADDITIONALLY AND FURTHERMORE I worked my tiny charity-shop magic to (i) acquire some friends a long cosy ace-flag cardigan that they can fight each other over and (ii) find a glass plant pot to move the orchid into, because it wanted potting up and apparently their roots like light, or something. (My mother is fond of orchids; I don't... really do them? But there was a reduced live one at the supermarket six months ago or thereabouts, and while I don't by-and-large like having cut flowers bought for me I do like being bought flowers, so I looked adorable at a slightly baffled A until he bought said cut-price bargain orchid for me. It's lived on the windowsill above the sink ever since.)
Cooking. Two items of particular interest this week: I'm (hopefully! assuming it doesn't all go wrong!) going to be making ravioli with spinach-what-I-grew once I've finished writing this post; and I had A Craving for the kind of Brown Mushy Vegetable Soup With Bits In you get from supermarkets but without a million times less salt, so I... made... some? I MADE SOME, hurrah. Veg stock (there's a bag in the freezer that we dump all the stock-worthy veg peelings into; periodically I boil them all up in my Big Steamer, strain the stock out, and deposit the bits in the compost), leek/onion/celeriac/potato/carrot/lovage/bay leaf boiled up then blended (including accidentally the bay leaf, whoops), final addition of small cubed potato/carrot/celeriac + frozen peas + a tin of sweetcorn for Flavour Cronch. There was... a lot of it. Slightly uncharacteristically I actually managed to put it in the fridge in good time, and have therefore been eating it all weekend while A was away with minimal disaster. (My worst failure mode when it comes to food waste is cooking a big batch of something tasty perfectly competently, and then just utterly failing to have the executive function to get it into the fridge/freezer until well past It Is Too Late. It is a problem and I/we are working on it.)
Living space. We have a new internet connection! Via a new master socket! (We previously had a master socket for Virgin but not for BT; we have just moved to Andrews & Arnold in part because they're xkcd/806 compliant and A was thoroughly sick of Virgin Media's thoroughly aggravating tech support. This in turn means that I am making progress on rearranging bookshelves and the living room more generally, and hopefully fairly shortly the hallway (though we'll need to put a shelf up to finalise that). There is still A Pile in the living room but we might be making progress toward Getting Rid Of It For Realsies, maybe.
Movement. Upped my weights at the gym hurrah hurrah. Also managing a very slowly titrated return to doing some of my balance work with my eyes shut (at most one rep of my sets of three per leg, with a finger lightly touching something for balance, because pushing too fast on this and wrenching my knee would be the opposite of helpful.)
Language. I... whoops, I have done 0 on FutureLearn this week, but I have... kept Duolingo up? I have kept Duolingo up and I continue to Learn Things or at least Revise Them.
Pokémon Go. Wild-caught shiny Psyduck sodding finally (when I was racing from the allotment down to the middle of Enfield in order to do a legendary raid). Small blue sparkleduck yes excellent.
Reading. Still finding The Audacity of Hope a bit of a miserable slog, but I am also nearing on the end of the chapter on Opportunity, which mi-i-ight mean I'm about to get back onto topics I care about more than a deliberately centrist and anodyne appeal to the American Dream. (I'm being slightly unfair, but there we have it.) I've also been working steadily through
rydra_wong's linkspam on Free Solo, along with digging through various comments over thereabouts for links to More Discussions About The Dawn Wall. I have also put a library hold on The Push, Tommy Caldwell's memoir, because actually I was sufficiently into that film to read an entire sodding book by a cis straight white guy. (AFAIK; there is precisely 0 indication in anything I've seen so far that he's in any sense An Queer, though I suppose it's not implausible that if he were he wouldn't notice.)Growth. TWO PASSION FRUIT EMERGE. They have a LEAF PAIR and EVERYTHING; I am simultaneously excited and nervous for them, and really astonishingly dithery about what constitutes Sufficiently Large To Handle for the purposes of transplanting. (I am experiencing A Concern about whether they will be shocked and dismayed by being moved into ambient room temp etc from their Warm Box.) Still four chillies, two of which are stubbornly refusing to shed their seed-case hats; peas are now in the ground (I built them a climbing frame out of bamboo I pulled out of a skip; it's now survived both Storm Gareth and Storm Helen so I'm feeling pretty confident about it); and I put some tomato seed in an egg box yesterday to incubate.
At the plot I have been sinking the bits and pieces I acquired to act as anchor points, rearranging top soil in the hope of getting a sufficiently level patch that the greenhouse won't sulk upon being put up, and coming to the mildly resentful conclusion that I probably do want to do day-hire of a vibrating plate soil compactor. I have also been feeding and stirring the compost bin, doing some incredibly desultory weeding (though the pizza-box + manure + woodchip mulch mostly seems to have kept them down while I was in Belfast, hurrah), and cooing with delight at my Ribes various, which I appear to have managed to prune just before they collectively burst into riotous bud.
ADDITIONALLY AND FURTHERMORE I worked my tiny charity-shop magic to (i) acquire some friends a long cosy ace-flag cardigan that they can fight each other over and (ii) find a glass plant pot to move the orchid into, because it wanted potting up and apparently their roots like light, or something. (My mother is fond of orchids; I don't... really do them? But there was a reduced live one at the supermarket six months ago or thereabouts, and while I don't by-and-large like having cut flowers bought for me I do like being bought flowers, so I looked adorable at a slightly baffled A until he bought said cut-price bargain orchid for me. It's lived on the windowsill above the sink ever since.)
Cooking. Two items of particular interest this week: I'm (hopefully! assuming it doesn't all go wrong!) going to be making ravioli with spinach-what-I-grew once I've finished writing this post; and I had A Craving for the kind of Brown Mushy Vegetable Soup With Bits In you get from supermarkets but without a million times less salt, so I... made... some? I MADE SOME, hurrah. Veg stock (there's a bag in the freezer that we dump all the stock-worthy veg peelings into; periodically I boil them all up in my Big Steamer, strain the stock out, and deposit the bits in the compost), leek/onion/celeriac/potato/carrot/lovage/bay leaf boiled up then blended (including accidentally the bay leaf, whoops), final addition of small cubed potato/carrot/celeriac + frozen peas + a tin of sweetcorn for Flavour Cronch. There was... a lot of it. Slightly uncharacteristically I actually managed to put it in the fridge in good time, and have therefore been eating it all weekend while A was away with minimal disaster. (My worst failure mode when it comes to food waste is cooking a big batch of something tasty perfectly competently, and then just utterly failing to have the executive function to get it into the fridge/freezer until well past It Is Too Late. It is a problem and I/we are working on it.)
Living space. We have a new internet connection! Via a new master socket! (We previously had a master socket for Virgin but not for BT; we have just moved to Andrews & Arnold in part because they're xkcd/806 compliant and A was thoroughly sick of Virgin Media's thoroughly aggravating tech support. This in turn means that I am making progress on rearranging bookshelves and the living room more generally, and hopefully fairly shortly the hallway (though we'll need to put a shelf up to finalise that). There is still A Pile in the living room but we might be making progress toward Getting Rid Of It For Realsies, maybe.
Movement. Upped my weights at the gym hurrah hurrah. Also managing a very slowly titrated return to doing some of my balance work with my eyes shut (at most one rep of my sets of three per leg, with a finger lightly touching something for balance, because pushing too fast on this and wrenching my knee would be the opposite of helpful.)
Language. I... whoops, I have done 0 on FutureLearn this week, but I have... kept Duolingo up? I have kept Duolingo up and I continue to Learn Things or at least Revise Them.
Pokémon Go. Wild-caught shiny Psyduck sodding finally (when I was racing from the allotment down to the middle of Enfield in order to do a legendary raid). Small blue sparkleduck yes excellent.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 05:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 09:49 pm (UTC)A caught a shiny Ponyta, which is Blue. I am deeply envious and still tapping Even More Desperately Than Usual on every single fire pony I see. >:(
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 06:19 pm (UTC)You've found the various threads at
AFAIK; there is precisely 0 indication in anything I've seen so far that he's in any sense An Queer, though I suppose it's not implausible that if he were he wouldn't notice.)
*snerks*
At least he's a bundle of specific learning disabilities, so not NT!
And I liked his book; it's impressively and uncomfortably honest (he's willing to talk about a lot of messy and difficult feelings), and complements the film in an interesting way.
Book in progress:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BsoscNvhj2-/
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 09:51 pm (UTC)I am Looking Forward to the book, but going to try to make myself finish slogging through this politics first. (It's frustrating not least because I really loved the previous one of Obama's; I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that election manifesto is a different genre to memoir, but I'm grumpy nonetheless.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 07:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 09:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 08:00 pm (UTC)Plants :D
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-17 09:49 pm (UTC)(It hits me right in the I-don't-deserve-nice-things feels and... takes some time to recover from. It's v tedious and I'd like to avoid it more. The workarounds mostly include me attempting to remember to say "please put this all in the fridge" to A, who finds that step much easier than I do... provided he doesn't have to realise it needs doing.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-18 12:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-18 08:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-19 01:04 pm (UTC)Same hat. If you come up with a protocol that might work for other people, please do share.
I'm just impressed you manage to compost and to make stock.
they're xkcd/806 compliant
OOH. And hey, I understood that reference. But mainly, OOH.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-19 01:58 pm (UTC)Unfortunately I suspect my protocol is unlikely to be generalisable, in that it prooooobably is going to end up with me saying to A "the [food] needs put in boxes": I find cooking easy, he finds getting boxes out of the cupboard and putting food into them easy. I in turn am pretty good at Tetris (whether that's into the car or the freezer or whatever, so it's likely that I am going to be attempting to Leverage Complementary Autism on this one in a way that... requires a complementary autistic.
I'm still a bit frustrated/anxious about that as a Potential Protocol, though, so will probably be attempting to talk to my therapist about it (when next we manage a session) & definitely have a DW post percolating on the topic. (I am trying to Reduce The Amount Of Stuff In The Freezer, which will also help, and should probably reorganise the boxes cupboards again, but urgh.)
OOH. And hey, I understood that reference. But mainly, OOH.
yep. :D after the six-week period Virgin Media spent promising us very earnestly that the problem would definitely be solved within 48 hours, yes they know they said that last time but it really will be THIS time, no they can't tell us what the problem is, A has... Readjusted Priorities And What He's Willing To Pay For some.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-19 03:49 pm (UTC)Congratulations on your teeny passionfruits! I have no idea when they should be transplanted, but I have had good luck with tiny tiny stonefruit trees by leaving their little greenhouse hats on until I stopped running the heater, at least.
...Have I told you the saga of the accidental avocado?
Your charity-shop magic sounds like a most excellent superpower.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-21 09:13 am (UTC)The accidental avocado is not one I've heard from you but I am Familiar With The Principle and therefore preemptively amused and delighted.
The passion fruit I've transplanted out of the warm box seems to be doing fine; almost time to move the second one, I think...
it is an excellent tiny magic!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-21 02:51 pm (UTC)I have promptly named it Coolada for its pineapple-y color and stuffed it in as many gyms as I can. *L*
Hah! I'll spare you the full details, then, but the end result was Star going, "what did you PLANT" and me going "...bzuh?" And then research to determine that it was, in fact, the sprouted avocado pit I'd felt bad for, stuffed into an occupied pot, and forgotten about.
Go go go, passion fruit!
*consisting, at this point of a small banana that has never bloomed, a giant cutleaf pothos, some green-and-white striped thing that gets into all my potted plants eventually, and the avocado. I've started referring to it as a forest in a box.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-21 02:56 pm (UTC)yesssssss plants.