vital functions
Sep. 27th, 2020 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettReading. The Things I Would Tell You, edited by Sabrina Mahfouz: an anthology of writing by British Muslim women, including poetry and plays and memoir and reported interviews and stories. On the one hand I found this difficult in much the way I usually find anthologies hard going (my speculation is that this has to do with executive function and task-switching), and on the other I was utterly absorbed by the play in a way I didn't expect at all, and plenty enjoyed lots of the rest of it.
Brit(ish), Afua Hirsch. This arrived from the library today! And I have actually started reading it, instead of getting sucked entirely into the pit of "okay but can I make the library send books to my ereader instead of my phone, because that... would be nice."
Writing. Current chapter has been dithering back and forth between just over and just under 7k words, as I edit and restructure and consolidate; currently it's on the just-under side of things, but. It's progressing.
Watching. As previously related, a bunch of YouTube videos about master putter-togetherers of handmade scissors up in Sheffield.
CXG S01E11. I keep being surprised and impressed by this show, like, they are not being in the slightest lazy with their structural elements and framing device and that: this episode, the title song appears in spoken word as a conversation catching another character up -- and it was only as that was playing out that we actually registered that we hadn't had the usual sequence up at the start of the episode. And then! The part where it's still doing such a good job of pitching the emotional/emotive Fantasy Of How It Could Go Right tipping into the utterly inevitable crash.
This ep I really properly viscerally felt the way that people might actually watch this and, so far, be laughing at Rebecca (rather than with her) -- primarily because oh boy is that audience about to get hit with NO, ACTUALLY, THIS REALLY FUCKS PEOPLE UP AND IS A DIRECT RESULT OF TRAUMA, ACTUALLY. I both kind of love it a lot and have made absolutely the right call in limiting myself to one per week.
Listening. TMA 180. It was lovely to hear Martin and Jon actually interacting with each other in a way that made it seem like they like each other, still, in spite of everything; I found the statement very... compelling...; my heart breaks for Jon being happy and excited and relieved; and also, WHAT THE FUCK, is this going to be Matryoshka Apocalypses All The Way Down, are the weird invisible bits The Web (Via Salesa) Arranged For The Eye's Ritual To Even Work And Therefore The Web Has Its Own Pocket Dominions, where does the rabbit hole end, "it was all the web all along" seems remarkably pat and narratively unsatisfying and there's still twenty episodes to go so I cannot imagine this is actually the endgame, but also, w h a t, does this mean that other people who died in explosions didn't actually???
Playing. Alas, the official cooperative Untitled Goose Game requires two sets of controllers, so we've not started that yet (wings crossed for more DLC to come, though).
I've got quite sucked in to playing a bunch of easy sudoku, about which I can mostly say that there are worse self-soothing strategies.
PoGo: I have been really enjoying the ridiculous number of Lapras provided by the current event.
Horn: have been managing longer practices this week, and really enjoying the pay-off.
Cooking. Oh I have had some really satisfying cooking this week. As mentioned, A asked nicely for quiche; I'm not at all sure how I achieved this but it really was a particularly good one. Allotment onion and celery cooked slowly together, on top of which a little rosemarry, on top of which cheese, on top of which egg mix, on top of which sliced Feo di Rio Gordo tomato. The general fleshiness of the tomato was wonderful in this context. Genuinely the best cheese-and-tomato quiche I have ever made, I think, and is a significant nudge toward doing it again with these specific tomatoes. Very satisfactory, and the more so when eaten with (variously) Cosse Violette beans (still delicious), Double Red sweetcorn (still both tasty and pretty), cherry tomatoes roasted with thyme, and floury potatoes boiled and served with parsley and butter (which always taste, to me, of Home).
Given that I was making pastry I made a full pat of butter's worth, and used the other half-to-two-thirds to make a double-crust fruit pie, with cooking apples that had been languishing in the fridge and jostaberries I grew myself and then froze. I don't normally put sugar in pie fillings, but did for this, and it was the right call. The quiche is finished; we'll have a final helping of the pie tomorrow night.
We also made -- collaboratively -- another round of the summer squash pasta bake, and lo, it is still Excellent.
Breads: mostly-white with dark rye and caraway, topped with pumpkin and sunflower seeds; I think a 60% wholemeal date-and-walnut earlier in the week; and tonight's loaf is 80:20 white:spelt with poppy seeds.
Making & mending. Hmm. I've been investigating replacing the battery (and possibly the rear camera) in my current handset, because the PoGo has finally taken its toll; I'm not convinced I want to give it a go, but also it looks like parts are under a tenner so I... might. (For the cost of getting someone else to do a battery replacement I can buy a replacement second-hand phone, so.)
Growing. Harvest: another 1.5kg of tomatoes, for 21.5kg total so far. The first (small!) handful of autumn raspberries. Ongoing patty-pan squash, sweetcorn, Cosse Violette beans, cucumber. Bonus: tiny purple sweet peppers, and another few Sugar Magnolia pea pods to dry for seed storage for next year. (I want to grow a lot more of these next year than we did this.)
Bonus poor photo of tonight's TREASURE (500g tomatoes, a good handful of dark purple beans, four small purple peppers, two ears of ridiculous bicolour white-and-red sweetcorn, two patty-pan squash):
Pests & diseases: the milk spray has worked and the various squash are Perking Up acceptably. Thus far I have kept the blight from making a proper wretched mess of the potatoes.
Infrastructure: I did (to my own surprise) manage to prop up the beans rather better, with a structure that survived the past several days of winds and heavy rain. A is making great strides towards Sorting Out My Second Water Butt, which I am grateful for also.
Elsewise: chillis/peppers/luffa/lovage continuing to plod along to themselves. The transplanted root veg (because I couldn't bear to thin them) mostly seem to be actually putting themselves together, rather to my astonishment. We're going to need to harvest and eat the beetroot imminently. The transplanted supermarket basil does seem to be perking up and getting settled in, to my delight. I continue to coax the strawberry runners also.
Observing. A has made it easier to observe the bats! From the warm and the inside. And now our sofa chitters at us (if we remember to turn it on).
I've also been enjoying the Very Shouty Parakeets, but have still not got my act together to actually make a recording of the ?woodpecker, which is definitely Hanging Around.
Brit(ish), Afua Hirsch. This arrived from the library today! And I have actually started reading it, instead of getting sucked entirely into the pit of "okay but can I make the library send books to my ereader instead of my phone, because that... would be nice."
Writing. Current chapter has been dithering back and forth between just over and just under 7k words, as I edit and restructure and consolidate; currently it's on the just-under side of things, but. It's progressing.
Watching. As previously related, a bunch of YouTube videos about master putter-togetherers of handmade scissors up in Sheffield.
CXG S01E11. I keep being surprised and impressed by this show, like, they are not being in the slightest lazy with their structural elements and framing device and that: this episode, the title song appears in spoken word as a conversation catching another character up -- and it was only as that was playing out that we actually registered that we hadn't had the usual sequence up at the start of the episode. And then! The part where it's still doing such a good job of pitching the emotional/emotive Fantasy Of How It Could Go Right tipping into the utterly inevitable crash.
This ep I really properly viscerally felt the way that people might actually watch this and, so far, be laughing at Rebecca (rather than with her) -- primarily because oh boy is that audience about to get hit with NO, ACTUALLY, THIS REALLY FUCKS PEOPLE UP AND IS A DIRECT RESULT OF TRAUMA, ACTUALLY. I both kind of love it a lot and have made absolutely the right call in limiting myself to one per week.
Listening. TMA 180. It was lovely to hear Martin and Jon actually interacting with each other in a way that made it seem like they like each other, still, in spite of everything; I found the statement very... compelling...; my heart breaks for Jon being happy and excited and relieved; and also, WHAT THE FUCK, is this going to be Matryoshka Apocalypses All The Way Down, are the weird invisible bits The Web (Via Salesa) Arranged For The Eye's Ritual To Even Work And Therefore The Web Has Its Own Pocket Dominions, where does the rabbit hole end, "it was all the web all along" seems remarkably pat and narratively unsatisfying and there's still twenty episodes to go so I cannot imagine this is actually the endgame, but also, w h a t, does this mean that other people who died in explosions didn't actually???
Playing. Alas, the official cooperative Untitled Goose Game requires two sets of controllers, so we've not started that yet (wings crossed for more DLC to come, though).
I've got quite sucked in to playing a bunch of easy sudoku, about which I can mostly say that there are worse self-soothing strategies.
PoGo: I have been really enjoying the ridiculous number of Lapras provided by the current event.
Horn: have been managing longer practices this week, and really enjoying the pay-off.
Cooking. Oh I have had some really satisfying cooking this week. As mentioned, A asked nicely for quiche; I'm not at all sure how I achieved this but it really was a particularly good one. Allotment onion and celery cooked slowly together, on top of which a little rosemarry, on top of which cheese, on top of which egg mix, on top of which sliced Feo di Rio Gordo tomato. The general fleshiness of the tomato was wonderful in this context. Genuinely the best cheese-and-tomato quiche I have ever made, I think, and is a significant nudge toward doing it again with these specific tomatoes. Very satisfactory, and the more so when eaten with (variously) Cosse Violette beans (still delicious), Double Red sweetcorn (still both tasty and pretty), cherry tomatoes roasted with thyme, and floury potatoes boiled and served with parsley and butter (which always taste, to me, of Home).
Given that I was making pastry I made a full pat of butter's worth, and used the other half-to-two-thirds to make a double-crust fruit pie, with cooking apples that had been languishing in the fridge and jostaberries I grew myself and then froze. I don't normally put sugar in pie fillings, but did for this, and it was the right call. The quiche is finished; we'll have a final helping of the pie tomorrow night.
We also made -- collaboratively -- another round of the summer squash pasta bake, and lo, it is still Excellent.
Breads: mostly-white with dark rye and caraway, topped with pumpkin and sunflower seeds; I think a 60% wholemeal date-and-walnut earlier in the week; and tonight's loaf is 80:20 white:spelt with poppy seeds.
Making & mending. Hmm. I've been investigating replacing the battery (and possibly the rear camera) in my current handset, because the PoGo has finally taken its toll; I'm not convinced I want to give it a go, but also it looks like parts are under a tenner so I... might. (For the cost of getting someone else to do a battery replacement I can buy a replacement second-hand phone, so.)
Growing. Harvest: another 1.5kg of tomatoes, for 21.5kg total so far. The first (small!) handful of autumn raspberries. Ongoing patty-pan squash, sweetcorn, Cosse Violette beans, cucumber. Bonus: tiny purple sweet peppers, and another few Sugar Magnolia pea pods to dry for seed storage for next year. (I want to grow a lot more of these next year than we did this.)
Bonus poor photo of tonight's TREASURE (500g tomatoes, a good handful of dark purple beans, four small purple peppers, two ears of ridiculous bicolour white-and-red sweetcorn, two patty-pan squash):
Pests & diseases: the milk spray has worked and the various squash are Perking Up acceptably. Thus far I have kept the blight from making a proper wretched mess of the potatoes.
Infrastructure: I did (to my own surprise) manage to prop up the beans rather better, with a structure that survived the past several days of winds and heavy rain. A is making great strides towards Sorting Out My Second Water Butt, which I am grateful for also.
Elsewise: chillis/peppers/luffa/lovage continuing to plod along to themselves. The transplanted root veg (because I couldn't bear to thin them) mostly seem to be actually putting themselves together, rather to my astonishment. We're going to need to harvest and eat the beetroot imminently. The transplanted supermarket basil does seem to be perking up and getting settled in, to my delight. I continue to coax the strawberry runners also.
Observing. A has made it easier to observe the bats! From the warm and the inside. And now our sofa chitters at us (if we remember to turn it on).
I've also been enjoying the Very Shouty Parakeets, but have still not got my act together to actually make a recording of the ?woodpecker, which is definitely Hanging Around.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-28 04:10 am (UTC)The purple capiscums and corn look so pretty!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-28 08:16 am (UTC)It turns out we're also significantly better at eating corn-on-the-cob when it's been picked when we're going to eat it than when we buy it in the supermarket speculatively....
(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-28 06:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-28 08:18 am (UTC)(A's favourite colour is purple, and also he's scared of plants, so in an effort to entice him into Gardening As A Hobby and also making him smile, as many things as I can grow in purple are being grown in purple. With the exception of the beetroot, which is yellow. >_>)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-28 07:32 pm (UTC)*rolls eyes*
(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-28 07:45 pm (UTC)(Regular beetroot isn’t purple anyway, so it might as well be yellow ;) and I love how cheery those ones are!)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-30 10:10 am (UTC)Also purple sweet potatoes go an amazing BRIGHT purple-blue when cooked.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-14 09:26 pm (UTC)THESE FACTS ARE GOOD TO KNOW. Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-21 01:49 pm (UTC)And I recently found out that if you use these together to make vegetable pancakes, the result is PRETTY DAMN PURPLE.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-28 08:54 am (UTC)