vital functions
Apr. 12th, 2020 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettReading. The Story of My Life, Helen Keller. Very little progress: I've mostly been neck-deep in rereading literature for a response-to-reviewers and that's been taking most of my words brain (as well as the rest of my brain, sigh).
Watching. Planet Earth: great plains. Grasslands: a little rain, but not enough for An Forests.
Outer Mongolia: gazelles! Probably 2 million of them: communal calving! Almost all of them reproduce within a span of about ten days, and also oh DEAR they make NOISES. "There's only one thing to hide behind: grass. And it's not Very Effective."
Oooh, Eagles nesting directly on the ground!
... okay I almost don't believe this footage of thunderstorm + lightning + fire, are the diaries going to tell me it's really real as opposed to like... Dramatic? Because goodness but it is dramatic!
Nice timelapse photography of grass regrowing, though. Heyyyyy wee little flowery bits, that's nice :D POP.
... m a n y birb. Red-billed quelia? Savannahs of Africa. "Most numerous birds on Earth" WELL LOOKING AT THIS FOOTAGE I BELIEVE IT. "Some flcoks are so vast they can take five hours to pass overhead." [we don't have subtitles this time because the remote isn't playing nice, ALAS.] ... the footage now just looks like static on an old CRT monitor tbh. Okay, apparently the birbs eat the grass seeds (because grass grows quickly enough to do the thing!) and then antelope come to eat leaves & stems.
oh hat is a WONDERFUL aerial of wildebeest, with the leading edge of animals clearly leaving the ground a very different colour where they've eaten the green bits.
But Grass Is Not Confiend To The TRopics!!! yep we're now talking more about what a heckin weed grass is. Hello Arctic grasses! Moooooore timelapse (like I will grant I am actually impressed by the panning-forward timelapse.)
Important Arctic Tundra full of meanders, good.
Snow geese!!! Overwinter in New Mexico, then FIVE MILLION of them fly up to the Arctic tundra for spring, making a GREAT HONKING. (3000 mile, 3-month migration!) -- oh no they Pair For Life and fight over nesting sites as soon as they land. THERE IS A GREAT HONKING. A GREAT! HONKING! IT IS A LOVELY DAY IN THE ARCTIC TUNDRA AND YOU ARE A QUARRELSOME GOOSE.
Short intense summer = vigorous grass growth, plus relatively few predators, so ground nesting works pretty well... even though you do need to sit on the ground incubating your eggs for three weeks.
Local predators: hello again the Arctic foxes. Can't do a sneak and gets Rapidly Mobbed By Geese... and nevertheless Steals An Egg, to stash for later.
Okay the Arctic wolves (a bit further south... where they get bigger) are Much Prettier, gosh, aren't you elegant. Prey is both seasonal and Hard To Find. Because there's a lot of land, and caribou can travel 30 miles a day, and generallly just... low population densities are A Thing. Oh no they have SUCH good noses I want to touch their noses. NOSES. ohhhhhh that's some fun timelapse of the front of the herd moving forward as a wave moves ahead to graze, then pauses and gets overtaken by those behind. WHAT fun herd dynamics. (Oh no bab caribou)
... Another Honkening??? ah yes same geese, high summer, BABY CHICKS DO A PLAPPETY LITTLE YELL. ONE MEEEEEELLION GOSLINGS. SUCH PEEPING. THEY ARE SO EGG-SHAPED. (Oh no fox :(. goodbye cosling. :( but okay I am enjoying watching the cubs narm on each other.)
TAKES GOSLINGS FOR WALK YES GOOD HELLO SHIT TINY DINOSAURS. oh NO the little fluffballs FLOAT in the water that is only up to like... the ankles of the parents.
If we go even further south, summers are longer & grasslands flourish etc etc etc. OH that's a nice aerial shot of mountains YES good. North American praires: bISON. Bison populations are at least recovering, though, uh, nowhere near their heyday, Thanks Colonisers.
Alright, the bison are gonna do A Sex Thing. I mean. Initially A Foreplay Thing i.e. "fight each other" but there we go.
aaaah!!!!! more important timelapse Flowering Grass, this is SO good, it all goes SPROING. ohhhh the sound effects uman is having a LOT of fun with making the stigma etc go TING
Southern hemisphere also do the thing did u no. South African veldt being particularly highlighted for FLOWEM. -- HELLO AN BIRB. OSTRICH?? BIRB???
"Not all temperate plains! are so rich and colourful! in the summer!!!" Midsummer on the Tibetan plateau: It Quite Cold. Highest of all grazing herds: wild yak! T rarely above freezing, & obv we're at like 5000m altitude, and of course it's Very Dry because the Himalayas are right there, having a rain shadow. And nevertheless, Grass Persisted.
As Long As There IS Grass There Are Grazers, they say, showing us some footage of wild ass competing for territories. "It's a... frisky... business," says David, followed by Mythologising The Unfathomable BEhaviour Of Female Asses, did we HAVE to.
Most numerous grazer in Tibet: PIKA. Adam is very pleased with them. ... aND BIRBS MOVE INTO THEIR BURROWS IF THEY'RE ABANDONED. BURROW FULL OF BIRB. BIRB QUEUE BIRB QUEUE BIRB QUEUE. Groundpeckers & snow finches, which provide early warning system for Predators... birds of prey and also the Tibetan Fox, which David describes as bizarre. And, okay, that is a slightly weird gait, I will grant. "But why? the Square Head?" says David: and gives no answer.
In India, with Tropical Rain and Lots Of Sun, grass Reaches Its Full Potential. Elephant grass, says David, is The Tallest In THe World, AS ELEPHANTS EMERGE FROM IT. HELLO BABY ELEPHANTS. BABLEFANT.
oh my goodness who the fuck are you birb. "the lesser florican": bounces like hecking HOW far off the ground!!! to be seen over the top of the grass!!! that elephants are buried in!!! genuinely like what SIX FEET over the tol grass??
pygmy hogs: RABBIT-SIZED PIG. Collects grass for BUILD a NEST... for SMOL??? NEST FOR SMOL!!!! t i n y !!! pib!!!
but Mostly There Is Also A Dry Season, And Then Foraging (back to Africa): plains becoming dustbowls. Elemphants have to drink almost daily, which is... Difficult. ... and they are sharing the watering hole with lions because there is InadequateWater and Everyone Is A Thirsty. Aha, and the elephants are mostly Scarier than lions during the daytime but not, it transpires, At Night. Elephants aren't much better at night vision than us, unlike An Cat.
.. oh no kitty. "Lions don't usually hunt elephants, but desperate times require desperate measures." And, yep, people keep arriving late because it's cooler and less unpleasant to travel in...
Oooh, now we go to the African savannahs that turn into giant heckin lakes during the rainy season, which I'm pretty sure we've seen some of this footage earlier in the season, heh. Moral of the story appears to be: Grass, It Is Really Tough, Did You Know.
Ayup, here we are, permanent residents the baboons: which have to adapt between dustbowl & flood & ice, i.e. hello tiny baby swimming baboons that look Underwhelmed by their life choices. (oh NO they boop quietly to themselves and THERE IS A BAB HOLDING ON TO UNDERSIDE OF PARENT WITH ITS LITTLE FEETS.)
AWRIGHT DIARIES. WHAT HAVE THE DIARIES TO SAY. "We had zero fun filming lions hunting elephants, because it all happened in the sodding dark." Preparations include enormous hecking IR rigs strapped to the front of jeeps. "To stand any chance of filming hunting behaviour, the crew first had to find the lions." Ooooh, one of the biggest prides in Africa! That's exciting. (They had told us it was 30 lionesses.) So they pretty much just... folllowed the lions around as much as they could, but obviously there weren't exactly roads so they had a certain amount of having to do on-the-road repairs... in the dark... in lion country.
"In the heat of the day, the lions were sleeping in the most comfortable place - a remote tourist lodge." Lots of shade, the grass is kept watered, the swimming pool can be drunk from... and the tourists all got locked in their lodges, ahahahaha. >_>
"The African night is rarely silent. Before one beast stops, another one starts," says David, as part of the camera crew turns an IR light on a napping colleague, snoring very loudly, while they're waiting for the lions to DO ANYTHING.
Challenge the next: elephants can't see very well at night, and when they're frightened they charge, and this is Not Healthy For The Jeeps, oh dear. (Nobody was hurt apart from that one elephant, apparently.) "Very rare behaviour, didn't think we'd get the footage, but now we're here it doesn't feel like a privilege, it just feels like a bit of an ordeal."
Listening. The Magnus Archives, where we are ALL UP TO DATE. I have thoughts. I should start Making A Post yes yes. (Instead of just yelling atrecessional, which I have been doing... a fair bit of.)
Cooking. A tiramisu, to which alas I added too much alcohol too early in the proceedings so it is... distinctly lacking in even so much structural integrity as one might ordinarily expect a tiramisu to have.
A big vat of chilli.
And adventures in Ethiopian food! So much. So much. On Friday we made niter kibbeh. Injera batter got started on... Thursday night, I think, which was actually a little too early given that I dumped it all straight into a bowl that had just had some sourdough come out of it, i.e. it didn't really need to hunt its own yeast culture. On Saturday: berbere.
And then today we made misir wot (at the same link as the berbere recipe); kik wot; shiro wot using R&R Teff's mitten shiro; fasolia (1, 2); and tikil gomen (1, 2).
We made so much food. So much. The injera were... well, the first batch were not usable as eating implements, but the second batch pretty much were; I'd decided to Live Dangerously and tried for 100% teff flour for my first attempt, and then ended up fiddling around a lot with cooking times and temperatures to get anything that even vaguely worked. I've got another bowl of batter going, this time with a little wheat flour just to see how it goes; hopefully I will also get the ferment time closer to right, because starting it on I-think-Thursday-night with some pre-existing yeasts around had it puffing up beautifully yesterday and then a little flat and sulky today, and a little too sour for Adam's tastes. Fingers crossed. I'll report back.
(The niter kibbeh recipe made two small jars, one of which we used up entirely today making A Million food; we'll just have to either spread the second jar on toast -- the onion-garlic-spices we strained out goes really nicely on bread, good grief -- or do Another Huge Batch Of Curries. WOE.)
Eating. A lunch about which I am feeling very positive: two tinned artichokes (i.e. the end of a tin I'd used for pasta earlier in the week), sliced in half and then done in the griddle pan, on toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic, drizzled with olive oil, and with some thin slices of fake vegetarian Parmesan. It was so good. I am trying to work out how many more tinned artichokes I want to buy between now and the plot artichokes coming up ripe. (I'm going to have another go at eating them this year, and see if I can catch them at a less stabby juncture.)
And. Well. The obvious. (SO GOOD. Not as good as Kokeb, but... definitely better than anything else I'm getting within striking distance of Enfield under the current circumstances.)
Creating. Iiiiii dyed Adam's hair, and having had the trad "oh no it's all terrible I don't understand how to colours YOUR HAIR WILL BE BROWN" flap last night, it's... actually worked out pretty well! And I have a slightly better understanding of the fundamental physics of the thing I'm struggling with in terms of (1) attempting to maintain a rainbow gradient while (2) not bleaching All The Hair, Every Time.
Making & mending. See Growing! Yes, the entire point of this section is me being excited.
Growing. Ohhhh lots of exciting things are Happening. As of Friday night, on my way to bed, there was One Hatching Pea; as of Saturday morning, there were nine visible wee sproots. The leeks and squash aren't doing much yet, as is to be expected, but the holy basil is continuing a bit excitable and as of Sunday morning the purple sprouting broccoli is beginning to come tentatively up (imagine me squeaking!). My blueberry arrived, and I've potted the poor rootbound thing up; I've potted up and staked most-but-not-all of the tomatoes (and successfully separated out some more where two germinated per module, \o/); I've also potted up the largest of the chillis, and am experimenting with gradually hardening off the peppers collectively before they actually end up too big for the Warm Plant Box, with tentative success -- today, Sunday, they had the warm plant box lid off all day and barely shrivelled up and died at all, though the question of how precisely to reacclimatise them to, um, the greenhouse, is... something I shall have to think about further. The celeriac are busily growing more Tiny Leaves. The fig's enjoying having been unwrapped and is spreading its leaves out enthusiastically; the strawberries are appreciating having been moved into slightly more direct sun; and the lemon's still not dead.
At the allotment, the major project this week has been Putting Together The Fruit Cage For Realsies This Time, with lots of help from A. Most of the roof is covered -- I need to go back over with the third roll of aviary mesh to fill in a couple of gaps -- and similarly about half of the sides are sorted out. I am properly pleased with myself for having managed to buy The Correct Thing on my first attempt each go, and also grateful to A for loan of tools (specifically, a good chunky wire cutter/plier combo) in addition to the physical labour. (The skeleton's aluminium poles and heavy-duty metal joints; the "glazing" is 1" mesh aviary wire, joined together with netting clips, and attached to the frame with open pipe clips.)
The cherry's in enthusiastic blossom -- it was just starting on Wednesday, and was riotous by Friday. The autovents on the greenhouse are all working well. The bin's chugging along merrily. The garlic and shallots and the two surviving broad beans are growing industriously, and the Ribes (which I've been weeding) are putting out leaves and flowers all over the shop.
In the foreground is a road and a lot of greenery. In the background is a cherry tree in blossom illuminated by late-afternoon sun, a greenhouse with its windows open, and a fruit cage that is partially covered with chicken wire.
Observing. Peacock butterflies at the allotment on Wednesday! They're my favourite: on one occasion when I was fairly small, Papa sat us all down on the sofa, with a projection screen up against the living room window overlooking the valley, and a slide projector sat on top of the piano, showing us a selection of his photos of the local flora and fauna. I remember very little other than a vague sense of being Polite and also Bored until the peacock butterfly image whereupon I was utterly captivated. So having a couple of them bimbling about the place at the allotment made me feel very happy and settled and at home.
And also, of course, WE SAW THE FIRST BAT OF THE YEAR.
(There was a cowslip in the lawn until the gardeners mowed it.)
Playing. PoGo: I got the FLAT FISH, and a will-be-perfect-once-it's-purified shadow Growlithe, and some lucky trades from A.
Horn: some extremely satisfying progress: I actually managed clean (if not smooth) octave slurs over three octaves Multiple Times, and everything else in the standard legato warm-up exercise is getting better (more accurate; improved tone; faster; etc) as well. Which means it's time to start flailing around at staccato properly, probably, sigh, but I do at least know it'll feel really good to start making visible progress on it.
Watching. Planet Earth: great plains. Grasslands: a little rain, but not enough for An Forests.
Outer Mongolia: gazelles! Probably 2 million of them: communal calving! Almost all of them reproduce within a span of about ten days, and also oh DEAR they make NOISES. "There's only one thing to hide behind: grass. And it's not Very Effective."
Oooh, Eagles nesting directly on the ground!
... okay I almost don't believe this footage of thunderstorm + lightning + fire, are the diaries going to tell me it's really real as opposed to like... Dramatic? Because goodness but it is dramatic!
Nice timelapse photography of grass regrowing, though. Heyyyyy wee little flowery bits, that's nice :D POP.
... m a n y birb. Red-billed quelia? Savannahs of Africa. "Most numerous birds on Earth" WELL LOOKING AT THIS FOOTAGE I BELIEVE IT. "Some flcoks are so vast they can take five hours to pass overhead." [we don't have subtitles this time because the remote isn't playing nice, ALAS.] ... the footage now just looks like static on an old CRT monitor tbh. Okay, apparently the birbs eat the grass seeds (because grass grows quickly enough to do the thing!) and then antelope come to eat leaves & stems.
oh hat is a WONDERFUL aerial of wildebeest, with the leading edge of animals clearly leaving the ground a very different colour where they've eaten the green bits.
But Grass Is Not Confiend To The TRopics!!! yep we're now talking more about what a heckin weed grass is. Hello Arctic grasses! Moooooore timelapse (like I will grant I am actually impressed by the panning-forward timelapse.)
Important Arctic Tundra full of meanders, good.
Snow geese!!! Overwinter in New Mexico, then FIVE MILLION of them fly up to the Arctic tundra for spring, making a GREAT HONKING. (3000 mile, 3-month migration!) -- oh no they Pair For Life and fight over nesting sites as soon as they land. THERE IS A GREAT HONKING. A GREAT! HONKING! IT IS A LOVELY DAY IN THE ARCTIC TUNDRA AND YOU ARE A QUARRELSOME GOOSE.
Short intense summer = vigorous grass growth, plus relatively few predators, so ground nesting works pretty well... even though you do need to sit on the ground incubating your eggs for three weeks.
Local predators: hello again the Arctic foxes. Can't do a sneak and gets Rapidly Mobbed By Geese... and nevertheless Steals An Egg, to stash for later.
Okay the Arctic wolves (a bit further south... where they get bigger) are Much Prettier, gosh, aren't you elegant. Prey is both seasonal and Hard To Find. Because there's a lot of land, and caribou can travel 30 miles a day, and generallly just... low population densities are A Thing. Oh no they have SUCH good noses I want to touch their noses. NOSES. ohhhhhh that's some fun timelapse of the front of the herd moving forward as a wave moves ahead to graze, then pauses and gets overtaken by those behind. WHAT fun herd dynamics. (Oh no bab caribou)
... Another Honkening??? ah yes same geese, high summer, BABY CHICKS DO A PLAPPETY LITTLE YELL. ONE MEEEEEELLION GOSLINGS. SUCH PEEPING. THEY ARE SO EGG-SHAPED. (Oh no fox :(. goodbye cosling. :( but okay I am enjoying watching the cubs narm on each other.)
TAKES GOSLINGS FOR WALK YES GOOD HELLO SHIT TINY DINOSAURS. oh NO the little fluffballs FLOAT in the water that is only up to like... the ankles of the parents.
If we go even further south, summers are longer & grasslands flourish etc etc etc. OH that's a nice aerial shot of mountains YES good. North American praires: bISON. Bison populations are at least recovering, though, uh, nowhere near their heyday, Thanks Colonisers.
Alright, the bison are gonna do A Sex Thing. I mean. Initially A Foreplay Thing i.e. "fight each other" but there we go.
aaaah!!!!! more important timelapse Flowering Grass, this is SO good, it all goes SPROING. ohhhh the sound effects uman is having a LOT of fun with making the stigma etc go TING
Southern hemisphere also do the thing did u no. South African veldt being particularly highlighted for FLOWEM. -- HELLO AN BIRB. OSTRICH?? BIRB???
"Not all temperate plains! are so rich and colourful! in the summer!!!" Midsummer on the Tibetan plateau: It Quite Cold. Highest of all grazing herds: wild yak! T rarely above freezing, & obv we're at like 5000m altitude, and of course it's Very Dry because the Himalayas are right there, having a rain shadow. And nevertheless, Grass Persisted.
As Long As There IS Grass There Are Grazers, they say, showing us some footage of wild ass competing for territories. "It's a... frisky... business," says David, followed by Mythologising The Unfathomable BEhaviour Of Female Asses, did we HAVE to.
Most numerous grazer in Tibet: PIKA. Adam is very pleased with them. ... aND BIRBS MOVE INTO THEIR BURROWS IF THEY'RE ABANDONED. BURROW FULL OF BIRB. BIRB QUEUE BIRB QUEUE BIRB QUEUE. Groundpeckers & snow finches, which provide early warning system for Predators... birds of prey and also the Tibetan Fox, which David describes as bizarre. And, okay, that is a slightly weird gait, I will grant. "But why? the Square Head?" says David: and gives no answer.
In India, with Tropical Rain and Lots Of Sun, grass Reaches Its Full Potential. Elephant grass, says David, is The Tallest In THe World, AS ELEPHANTS EMERGE FROM IT. HELLO BABY ELEPHANTS. BABLEFANT.
oh my goodness who the fuck are you birb. "the lesser florican": bounces like hecking HOW far off the ground!!! to be seen over the top of the grass!!! that elephants are buried in!!! genuinely like what SIX FEET over the tol grass??
pygmy hogs: RABBIT-SIZED PIG. Collects grass for BUILD a NEST... for SMOL??? NEST FOR SMOL!!!! t i n y !!! pib!!!
but Mostly There Is Also A Dry Season, And Then Foraging (back to Africa): plains becoming dustbowls. Elemphants have to drink almost daily, which is... Difficult. ... and they are sharing the watering hole with lions because there is InadequateWater and Everyone Is A Thirsty. Aha, and the elephants are mostly Scarier than lions during the daytime but not, it transpires, At Night. Elephants aren't much better at night vision than us, unlike An Cat.
.. oh no kitty. "Lions don't usually hunt elephants, but desperate times require desperate measures." And, yep, people keep arriving late because it's cooler and less unpleasant to travel in...
Oooh, now we go to the African savannahs that turn into giant heckin lakes during the rainy season, which I'm pretty sure we've seen some of this footage earlier in the season, heh. Moral of the story appears to be: Grass, It Is Really Tough, Did You Know.
Ayup, here we are, permanent residents the baboons: which have to adapt between dustbowl & flood & ice, i.e. hello tiny baby swimming baboons that look Underwhelmed by their life choices. (oh NO they boop quietly to themselves and THERE IS A BAB HOLDING ON TO UNDERSIDE OF PARENT WITH ITS LITTLE FEETS.)
AWRIGHT DIARIES. WHAT HAVE THE DIARIES TO SAY. "We had zero fun filming lions hunting elephants, because it all happened in the sodding dark." Preparations include enormous hecking IR rigs strapped to the front of jeeps. "To stand any chance of filming hunting behaviour, the crew first had to find the lions." Ooooh, one of the biggest prides in Africa! That's exciting. (They had told us it was 30 lionesses.) So they pretty much just... folllowed the lions around as much as they could, but obviously there weren't exactly roads so they had a certain amount of having to do on-the-road repairs... in the dark... in lion country.
"In the heat of the day, the lions were sleeping in the most comfortable place - a remote tourist lodge." Lots of shade, the grass is kept watered, the swimming pool can be drunk from... and the tourists all got locked in their lodges, ahahahaha. >_>
"The African night is rarely silent. Before one beast stops, another one starts," says David, as part of the camera crew turns an IR light on a napping colleague, snoring very loudly, while they're waiting for the lions to DO ANYTHING.
Challenge the next: elephants can't see very well at night, and when they're frightened they charge, and this is Not Healthy For The Jeeps, oh dear. (Nobody was hurt apart from that one elephant, apparently.) "Very rare behaviour, didn't think we'd get the footage, but now we're here it doesn't feel like a privilege, it just feels like a bit of an ordeal."
Listening. The Magnus Archives, where we are ALL UP TO DATE. I have thoughts. I should start Making A Post yes yes. (Instead of just yelling at
recessional, which I have been doing... a fair bit of.)Cooking. A tiramisu, to which alas I added too much alcohol too early in the proceedings so it is... distinctly lacking in even so much structural integrity as one might ordinarily expect a tiramisu to have.
A big vat of chilli.
And adventures in Ethiopian food! So much. So much. On Friday we made niter kibbeh. Injera batter got started on... Thursday night, I think, which was actually a little too early given that I dumped it all straight into a bowl that had just had some sourdough come out of it, i.e. it didn't really need to hunt its own yeast culture. On Saturday: berbere.
And then today we made misir wot (at the same link as the berbere recipe); kik wot; shiro wot using R&R Teff's mitten shiro; fasolia (1, 2); and tikil gomen (1, 2).
We made so much food. So much. The injera were... well, the first batch were not usable as eating implements, but the second batch pretty much were; I'd decided to Live Dangerously and tried for 100% teff flour for my first attempt, and then ended up fiddling around a lot with cooking times and temperatures to get anything that even vaguely worked. I've got another bowl of batter going, this time with a little wheat flour just to see how it goes; hopefully I will also get the ferment time closer to right, because starting it on I-think-Thursday-night with some pre-existing yeasts around had it puffing up beautifully yesterday and then a little flat and sulky today, and a little too sour for Adam's tastes. Fingers crossed. I'll report back.
(The niter kibbeh recipe made two small jars, one of which we used up entirely today making A Million food; we'll just have to either spread the second jar on toast -- the onion-garlic-spices we strained out goes really nicely on bread, good grief -- or do Another Huge Batch Of Curries. WOE.)
Eating. A lunch about which I am feeling very positive: two tinned artichokes (i.e. the end of a tin I'd used for pasta earlier in the week), sliced in half and then done in the griddle pan, on toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic, drizzled with olive oil, and with some thin slices of fake vegetarian Parmesan. It was so good. I am trying to work out how many more tinned artichokes I want to buy between now and the plot artichokes coming up ripe. (I'm going to have another go at eating them this year, and see if I can catch them at a less stabby juncture.)
And. Well. The obvious. (SO GOOD. Not as good as Kokeb, but... definitely better than anything else I'm getting within striking distance of Enfield under the current circumstances.)
Creating. Iiiiii dyed Adam's hair, and having had the trad "oh no it's all terrible I don't understand how to colours YOUR HAIR WILL BE BROWN" flap last night, it's... actually worked out pretty well! And I have a slightly better understanding of the fundamental physics of the thing I'm struggling with in terms of (1) attempting to maintain a rainbow gradient while (2) not bleaching All The Hair, Every Time.
Making & mending. See Growing! Yes, the entire point of this section is me being excited.
Growing. Ohhhh lots of exciting things are Happening. As of Friday night, on my way to bed, there was One Hatching Pea; as of Saturday morning, there were nine visible wee sproots. The leeks and squash aren't doing much yet, as is to be expected, but the holy basil is continuing a bit excitable and as of Sunday morning the purple sprouting broccoli is beginning to come tentatively up (imagine me squeaking!). My blueberry arrived, and I've potted the poor rootbound thing up; I've potted up and staked most-but-not-all of the tomatoes (and successfully separated out some more where two germinated per module, \o/); I've also potted up the largest of the chillis, and am experimenting with gradually hardening off the peppers collectively before they actually end up too big for the Warm Plant Box, with tentative success -- today, Sunday, they had the warm plant box lid off all day and barely shrivelled up and died at all, though the question of how precisely to reacclimatise them to, um, the greenhouse, is... something I shall have to think about further. The celeriac are busily growing more Tiny Leaves. The fig's enjoying having been unwrapped and is spreading its leaves out enthusiastically; the strawberries are appreciating having been moved into slightly more direct sun; and the lemon's still not dead.
At the allotment, the major project this week has been Putting Together The Fruit Cage For Realsies This Time, with lots of help from A. Most of the roof is covered -- I need to go back over with the third roll of aviary mesh to fill in a couple of gaps -- and similarly about half of the sides are sorted out. I am properly pleased with myself for having managed to buy The Correct Thing on my first attempt each go, and also grateful to A for loan of tools (specifically, a good chunky wire cutter/plier combo) in addition to the physical labour. (The skeleton's aluminium poles and heavy-duty metal joints; the "glazing" is 1" mesh aviary wire, joined together with netting clips, and attached to the frame with open pipe clips.)
The cherry's in enthusiastic blossom -- it was just starting on Wednesday, and was riotous by Friday. The autovents on the greenhouse are all working well. The bin's chugging along merrily. The garlic and shallots and the two surviving broad beans are growing industriously, and the Ribes (which I've been weeding) are putting out leaves and flowers all over the shop.
In the foreground is a road and a lot of greenery. In the background is a cherry tree in blossom illuminated by late-afternoon sun, a greenhouse with its windows open, and a fruit cage that is partially covered with chicken wire.
Observing. Peacock butterflies at the allotment on Wednesday! They're my favourite: on one occasion when I was fairly small, Papa sat us all down on the sofa, with a projection screen up against the living room window overlooking the valley, and a slide projector sat on top of the piano, showing us a selection of his photos of the local flora and fauna. I remember very little other than a vague sense of being Polite and also Bored until the peacock butterfly image whereupon I was utterly captivated. So having a couple of them bimbling about the place at the allotment made me feel very happy and settled and at home.
And also, of course, WE SAW THE FIRST BAT OF THE YEAR.
(There was a cowslip in the lawn until the gardeners mowed it.)
Playing. PoGo: I got the FLAT FISH, and a will-be-perfect-once-it's-purified shadow Growlithe, and some lucky trades from A.
Horn: some extremely satisfying progress: I actually managed clean (if not smooth) octave slurs over three octaves Multiple Times, and everything else in the standard legato warm-up exercise is getting better (more accurate; improved tone; faster; etc) as well. Which means it's time to start flailing around at staccato properly, probably, sigh, but I do at least know it'll feel really good to start making visible progress on it.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-04-12 09:34 pm (UTC)STOP PRESS
Date: 2020-04-12 10:29 pm (UTC)* squash sprout: Pattison Blanc
Re: STOP PRESS
Date: 2020-04-13 07:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-04-12 10:46 pm (UTC)/die of lol
(no subject)
Date: 2020-04-12 11:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-04-13 12:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-04-14 06:34 am (UTC)I'm not saying where it is on a (semi) public blog: let's just say that it was a magical experience.