vital functions
Jun. 28th, 2020 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettReading. A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies, Alix E. Harrow. I squinted at this a bit -- it seemed quite drama-of-the-white-saviour, I think? -- but I also enjoyed it.
Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells. Yep, I am continuing to inhale these. Pretty sure I liked this more than Artificial Condition. I am a bit dubious about the extent to tactical analysis on splitting the party doesn't seem to involve concern about possible flanking manouevers in convoluted interconnected terrains, and I'm also still a bit hmm about the tech security of the future, but several of my questions from the last round-up were answered and that's been Nice.
How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi. I'm up to chapter 3 of 18, and so far finding it somewhat mixed: on the one hand I frequently admire how carefully constructed and pitched it is, and on the other I am pretty regularly stopping and rereading paragraphs multiple times and completely failing to parse them. (To the extent that I've currently got a referenced source up on Gutenburg to see if that helps any, f'rex.) I think this might be a function of autistic "but I want to know what all the words mean"? I'm definitely struggling some with technical terminology used without explicit definition, and so far I'm finding that if I keep reading more explanation tends to show up, but it's... my instinct is to try to make sure I've understood and internalised each paragraph before moving on, and that doesn't seem to be serving me terribly well here.
I also participated in the readthrough of two episodes of firefly, and gosh revisiting that script was... something.
Watching. Attack the Block (2011). Oh my goodness this is so good. I... I have a lot of feelings about how good it is and they're mostly inarticulate flail, but -- everyone is allowed to be so human, so complex and nuanced and blinkered and petty and brave, and there are no easy answers, and I. I love it. I love it a lot.
Listening. The Magnus Archives. I've been having a lot of opinions on the Internet about the most recent pair of episodes (172 and 173): at rydra's, at JJ's, and of course in this journal.
I'm really not used to being confident or opinionated enough in my analysis to speculate like this, or even really to join in these conversations rather than lurking quietly in the margins, so I'm finding this an interesting experience.
(We've hit episode 49 on the relisten.)
Cooking. Oh my goodness dinner this evening was so good.
... no, back up. Okay. Earlier in the week, we made the tofu thing (with holy basil I grew from seed -- I am very excited about it being big enough to harvest) plus a whole lot of rice. And then the next day we ate the second half of the tofu thing with egg fried rice, and still had some rice left over, so on the third day we made more egg fried rice plus sea-spicy aubergine, and on the fourth day we needed to make more rice to eat with the second half of the sea-spicy aubergine and made too much again...
... so today we did the last of the rice (egg fried rice, again) plus -- so I'd harvested another handful of peas from the allotment, right? They're purple sugar-snaps, the first batch was a bit starchy so I let the second batch swell up a bit more, and oh my goodness they were so good. Stir-fried with garlic (also from the allotment) and ginger, dressed with mirin, with sesame oil in the rice. I am definitely doing that again.
And! Tonight, at A's request, we (collaboratively!) turned most of the remaining cherry harvest into smitten kitchen's sweet cherry pie (which Adam is slicing up as I type this). Vanilla sugar for the crust, and A didn't want to eat around the pits and we don't have almond essence in so he topped it off with Disaronno.
Eating. The first blueberry (furtively, without telling A; sorry, love).
Extremely dubiously, a small slice of the cherry pie, which I seem to think is food.
Waffles two mornings running because A made a batch of batter on Friday night. <3
Making & mending. Finished cataloguing the photography gear from the mouldering ancestral pile and circulated it via my mother; progressed cataloguing the Kenwood shite.
We picked up a bunch of pallets (in a socially-distanced fashion!) from people on Freegle, over the past couple of weeks, and I have started sawing them up and turning them into proto-bed-edging.
Growing. We are... definitely moving into harvest season: this week I'm on (I think) my third tray of redcurrants being frozen, plus half a tub of raspberries, plus some of my neighbour's whitecurrants, plus I'm working through the ripe jostaberries with an eye to turning at least some of them into jostaberry-and-soured-cream ice cream, because a mash-up of my favourites from Ruby Violet and G&D's sounds like an excellent plan to me.
We've also been eating a fair few shallots and a non-trivial amount of garlic, plus we're on the second round of sugar snap peas harvested, as discussed above.
Coming up on ready to harvest: the first of the lettuce; the lemons (! -- some of which are turning yellow even).
Tomatoes continue setting fruit, as do the chillis; excitingly, the first bell pepper has set, too. (The first of the tomatoes are possibly beginning to ever-so-slowly turn a colour that isn't Entirely green.) The various beans and maize are making progress, ditto the self-seeded fennel (I do want to actually get some started properly but I need to decide where); the various squash (excepting the Pattison Blanc) keep producing flowers.
I spent a chunk of this evening planting out the purple sprouting broccoli that'd got big enough to chance it; we'll see how many of them survive. (I might try firming the soil around the rest of them down more tomorrow, by which point the ants will have calmed back down...)
At home: the wind today blew the quinoa tray over twice before I got my act together to move it somewhere more stable, but on the upside I haven't immediately obviously lost any plants. There are a lot more of the carrots and parsnips (last year's seed I didn't get to) coming up than I'd expected, which is probably on balance a good thing though I'm panicking a bit about readying a home for them (they're in newspaper pots so root disturbance shouldn't be too much of an issue). Beetroot and root parsley likewise doing well. There's been significant attrition on the salads so I need to resow the ones that have done particularly poorly, but I'm enjoying them as have progressed. Marigolds doing well; one (1) calabrese showing its face so far, after all the direct-sown ones got slugged.
That about it? I think that's about it.
Observing. Back-garden fox! Bat! A pigeon actually managing to get laid (very noisily, while we had the back door open, alas, but I was still kind of impressed).
Playing. Weirdly enough, slightly more reliable horn practice this week has resulted in an immediate obvious improvement, which is nice.
PoGo: 98% Shelmet (what EVEN; hatched); will-be-98%-once-purified Growlithe.
Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells. Yep, I am continuing to inhale these. Pretty sure I liked this more than Artificial Condition. I am a bit dubious about the extent to tactical analysis on splitting the party doesn't seem to involve concern about possible flanking manouevers in convoluted interconnected terrains, and I'm also still a bit hmm about the tech security of the future, but several of my questions from the last round-up were answered and that's been Nice.
How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi. I'm up to chapter 3 of 18, and so far finding it somewhat mixed: on the one hand I frequently admire how carefully constructed and pitched it is, and on the other I am pretty regularly stopping and rereading paragraphs multiple times and completely failing to parse them. (To the extent that I've currently got a referenced source up on Gutenburg to see if that helps any, f'rex.) I think this might be a function of autistic "but I want to know what all the words mean"? I'm definitely struggling some with technical terminology used without explicit definition, and so far I'm finding that if I keep reading more explanation tends to show up, but it's... my instinct is to try to make sure I've understood and internalised each paragraph before moving on, and that doesn't seem to be serving me terribly well here.
I also participated in the readthrough of two episodes of firefly, and gosh revisiting that script was... something.
Watching. Attack the Block (2011). Oh my goodness this is so good. I... I have a lot of feelings about how good it is and they're mostly inarticulate flail, but -- everyone is allowed to be so human, so complex and nuanced and blinkered and petty and brave, and there are no easy answers, and I. I love it. I love it a lot.
Listening. The Magnus Archives. I've been having a lot of opinions on the Internet about the most recent pair of episodes (172 and 173): at rydra's, at JJ's, and of course in this journal.
I'm really not used to being confident or opinionated enough in my analysis to speculate like this, or even really to join in these conversations rather than lurking quietly in the margins, so I'm finding this an interesting experience.
(We've hit episode 49 on the relisten.)
Cooking. Oh my goodness dinner this evening was so good.
... no, back up. Okay. Earlier in the week, we made the tofu thing (with holy basil I grew from seed -- I am very excited about it being big enough to harvest) plus a whole lot of rice. And then the next day we ate the second half of the tofu thing with egg fried rice, and still had some rice left over, so on the third day we made more egg fried rice plus sea-spicy aubergine, and on the fourth day we needed to make more rice to eat with the second half of the sea-spicy aubergine and made too much again...
... so today we did the last of the rice (egg fried rice, again) plus -- so I'd harvested another handful of peas from the allotment, right? They're purple sugar-snaps, the first batch was a bit starchy so I let the second batch swell up a bit more, and oh my goodness they were so good. Stir-fried with garlic (also from the allotment) and ginger, dressed with mirin, with sesame oil in the rice. I am definitely doing that again.
And! Tonight, at A's request, we (collaboratively!) turned most of the remaining cherry harvest into smitten kitchen's sweet cherry pie (which Adam is slicing up as I type this). Vanilla sugar for the crust, and A didn't want to eat around the pits and we don't have almond essence in so he topped it off with Disaronno.
Eating. The first blueberry (furtively, without telling A; sorry, love).
Extremely dubiously, a small slice of the cherry pie, which I seem to think is food.
Waffles two mornings running because A made a batch of batter on Friday night. <3
Making & mending. Finished cataloguing the photography gear from the mouldering ancestral pile and circulated it via my mother; progressed cataloguing the Kenwood shite.
We picked up a bunch of pallets (in a socially-distanced fashion!) from people on Freegle, over the past couple of weeks, and I have started sawing them up and turning them into proto-bed-edging.
Growing. We are... definitely moving into harvest season: this week I'm on (I think) my third tray of redcurrants being frozen, plus half a tub of raspberries, plus some of my neighbour's whitecurrants, plus I'm working through the ripe jostaberries with an eye to turning at least some of them into jostaberry-and-soured-cream ice cream, because a mash-up of my favourites from Ruby Violet and G&D's sounds like an excellent plan to me.
We've also been eating a fair few shallots and a non-trivial amount of garlic, plus we're on the second round of sugar snap peas harvested, as discussed above.
Coming up on ready to harvest: the first of the lettuce; the lemons (! -- some of which are turning yellow even).
Tomatoes continue setting fruit, as do the chillis; excitingly, the first bell pepper has set, too. (The first of the tomatoes are possibly beginning to ever-so-slowly turn a colour that isn't Entirely green.) The various beans and maize are making progress, ditto the self-seeded fennel (I do want to actually get some started properly but I need to decide where); the various squash (excepting the Pattison Blanc) keep producing flowers.
I spent a chunk of this evening planting out the purple sprouting broccoli that'd got big enough to chance it; we'll see how many of them survive. (I might try firming the soil around the rest of them down more tomorrow, by which point the ants will have calmed back down...)
At home: the wind today blew the quinoa tray over twice before I got my act together to move it somewhere more stable, but on the upside I haven't immediately obviously lost any plants. There are a lot more of the carrots and parsnips (last year's seed I didn't get to) coming up than I'd expected, which is probably on balance a good thing though I'm panicking a bit about readying a home for them (they're in newspaper pots so root disturbance shouldn't be too much of an issue). Beetroot and root parsley likewise doing well. There's been significant attrition on the salads so I need to resow the ones that have done particularly poorly, but I'm enjoying them as have progressed. Marigolds doing well; one (1) calabrese showing its face so far, after all the direct-sown ones got slugged.
That about it? I think that's about it.
Observing. Back-garden fox! Bat! A pigeon actually managing to get laid (very noisily, while we had the back door open, alas, but I was still kind of impressed).
Playing. Weirdly enough, slightly more reliable horn practice this week has resulted in an immediate obvious improvement, which is nice.
PoGo: 98% Shelmet (what EVEN; hatched); will-be-98%-once-purified Growlithe.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-28 11:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 12:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 01:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 06:16 am (UTC)Your current gardening and cooking sounds amazing.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 12:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 12:55 pm (UTC)Ooh! I really liked this when I saw it a while back! ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 01:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 04:27 pm (UTC)Your garden sounds amazing.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-29 06:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-02 09:13 am (UTC)Weirdly enough, slightly more reliable horn practice this week has resulted in an immediate obvious improvement, which is nice.
A gift from the lockdown, from working from home with time and space to exercise during the day: practicing the Bokken and Jo Katas every day has made an immediate and obvious improvement in those exercises, and in my balance and movement in general.
Who knew?
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-06 02:59 pm (UTC)Disaronno in the cherry pie sounds like SO MUCH but in a great way lmao.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-25 06:37 pm (UTC)I was so (VERY PLEASANTLY) surprised to see you at Firefly! I didn't have it in my brain that you were An Fan, but hey ho.
AND YE THE SCRIPT.
I think my days of still liking Whedon met a middle a long time ago, so now.... I'm ready to let him go.
He took up such a big part of my hobby/ fandom identity, but now I can use the space for something else. Liek She-Ra or whatever. Honestly didn't think it would age badly, but there you go.
Does Disaronno in cherry pie make it taste like Bakewell Tart Pie (/ Dr Pepper pie)?