who only by moving can balance

Adam took today off work to facilitate me taking him on A Date. (I say "take": he was driving.) The schedule of events was:

• stop off at Wimpole farm to see the baby pigs
  
• ... an unfortunately-timed Skype meeting I couldn't reschedule
  
• lunch in Cambridge
  
• a quick poke around my college, to introduce A to the general concept
  
• the Whipple Museum of the History of Science
  
• a trip to Mackay
  
• dinner
  
• BAT SAFARI

... the day of holiday being necessary not precisely because bat safaris are only happening on Fridays this early in the year, but because at the point at which we were coming up to Cambridge we had Might As Well make a day of it, and I'd been wanting to show A the Whipple, and its opening hours are Monday to Friday, 12.30pm-4.30pm, which are less antisocial than they used to be but still not great, from a tourist perspective.

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Reading. The Audacity of Hope disappeared back off to the library, whoops, but I got through the chapter on Praising The USA's Economic Model In A Fashion Designed To Have Broad Appeal and then started getting on with it better, surprise. I have placed another hold, I will get it back at some point soon-ish, and in the meantime I have been reading An American Marriage, Tayari Jones, one of the books that I was startled by the arrival of last week. Thus far I am quite ???heterosexual men??? about a principal character, but we shall see how it goes. (On my list for this week coming: picking up The Push from the library, where a paperback is waiting for me.)

Film/TV. FINISHED LEVERAGE S4. A has been Much Too Sleepy for managing Orphan Black, alas, but maybe this week? Maybe at some point this week we will start S4.

Food. ( Read more... )

Growth. Two! Passion fruit! Now planted out into intermediate-sized pots! Also two chilli, and maybe a third will go out tonight. Peas went into the ground and are getting taller (!) and growing more leaves (!). No significant progress at the plot; I tried contacting the local tools-for-hire folk to establish whether the soil compactor they had on offer ran off petrol or mains and haven't had a response, so I need to Come To A Decision about whether I'm phoning them, dropping by in person, getting A to phone them, or giving up and going for one of the larger and less local & indie places. Oh, right, and the other thing I did was rotate the compost bin so that it was... facing... down-slope... and the liquid could drain out of the base... and it has promptly heated right up hurrah hurrah.

I should be starting to plant the broad beans and the salads and if I want the peppers to ever happen I should definitely get them started (along with some more tomatoes to go with the tomatoes already -- hopefully -- germinating in the bathroom). Oooh, and the red onion and the leek and the carrot, apparently.

Much of which remains slightly blocked on me getting my act together to actually get the greenhouse up and then sort out the raised beds, of course, but. Plans are afoot; the plot (aha) thickens; etc.

(Today I got distracted by a garden centre and acquired some more pot saucers so as to reduce the amount of soil getting washed onto the decking. I am looking forward to installing them once home.)

Living space. Additional bookshelves sorted out for A's bookcase! Most of his books moved over! On our way down to Wessex for the weekend (more anon) we dropped A Bunch of stuff off at charity shops and tips various, i.e. there is now (hopefully) space for me to finish wrangling bookcases! We have... a long list of More DIY To Be Getting On With. Let's see how evenings this week go, eh.

Tiny adventures. Wildlife Photographer of the Year! Also A had a family thing on this weekend and I ended up accompanying him, so I have now met A Bunch more of his family, mostly been polite if slightly stunned, and now we're in Oxford briefly on our way (ish) home.

Reading. Mostly Predator's Gold, the sequel to Mortal Engines, because I found it for two quid in a charity shop and I wanted to know what happened next. Spoilers beneath the cut. ( Read more... )

TV. Slow progress with Leverage S4, encouraged by a visitcousin who's very into the show. Still pausing several times an episode to go YOU WHAT. THAT ISN'T HOW ANYTHING EVEN. (It's possible I've been spoiled by Matt Damon's Important Space Potatoes, but like, show. SHOW. That is NOT HOW POTATOES.)

Food. I had... two surprisingly faily attempts at sourdough, after a long run of Good Bread. One was in no small part because I started cooking it using the grill rather than the oven because I was Not Terribly With It (...), but both were more of a bread-puddle than they ought to have been. I eventually worked out that I'd made the starter slightly wetter than it had been previously, which meant I needed to decrease the liquid some. Nevertheless our guests this weekend (my parents; a cousin) have consumed three loaves in their entirety, and cousin will make further inroads into the fourth once I've baked it tomorrow morning, so that's all gratifying. For bonus points the cousin is in the process of setting up her own starter so I am getting to do lots of Sourdough Nerdery with her.

Tiny adventures. Yesterday we took a trip to the Giant's Causeway, because it's right there and it would have been silly not to (and also I only waited this long because my mother had put in a special request that we delay it until she could join in). It turns out that despite perfectly well knowing the relevant physics for columnar jointing and therefore what the scales involved are, I'd somehow interpreted "Giant's Causeway" to mean that the jointing itself was on a giant scale i.e. I was expecting diameters of, oooh, at least 75cm or so? Rather than... the thirty-odd we were actually getting. Which, to be fair, is still a good deal larger than my previous in-the-wild encounter: we'd plonked ourselves down in a pile of bracken in a streambed to have lunch, one day during my mapping project, and went "oooh, that's a funny-looking rock..." It turned out, on slightly closer inspection, to be a very small exposure of some really small columns (diameter ~5cm), and I was charmed and delighted. (They were SMOL.) So, yes, this was much more impressive than that, in both scale and definition, and I'm very glad to have seen it, even as I wist after being able to do the proper hike. I hadn't realised about the concave-and-convex ball-joint horizontal fractures as a result of vertical contraction because they're less spectacular so my lecturers just... didn't bother mentioning them? But they were charming, I was charmed, hurrah.

Today we visited HMS Caroline, because my mother is interested in naval history (and my father can be persuaded to be) and it spent nontrivial amounts of time stationed near HMS Essex, which my great-grandfather served on; in the most recent trip to the mouldering ancestral pile some of the things we dug out were A Lot of records pertaining to his time aboard both the Essex and, before that, on the cable-laying ships working the Atlantic. The Caroline is remarkably accessible -- they've installed three lifts, and the ramp to get on board is only unnavigably steep at high tide. I... had a bunch of feelings. me_and's favourite fact was probably that regarding the ships mascots during WWI: two cats and... a rabbit. (I'm not sure I can generate one, because feelings.)

This week coming. Hopefully actually managing to send off a draft of my paper; hopefully actually getting the final data for the final segment of it; hopefully getting to spend a good deal of time at the allotment.

Reading. ( Read more... )

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. ( Read more... )

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.

... because I was most of the way through doing morning balance work while brushing my teeth when I abruptly needed to Not Be Upright, Right Now.

So I e-mailed in! And spent the morning feeling groggy and miserable on the sofa, and sometime in the early afternoon checked my e-mail to discover... that the mass spec was broken today anyway, so I didn't even lose any lab time, and saved at least a 3-hour round trip on public transport.

WHICH MEANS: I should update you all on The DPD Saga before going to bed.

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Most of A's flying 34-hour visit back to London was thus eaten up wrangling DPD, wrangling the resulting wheelchair parts (successfully), and packing, but we did also do a Date Activity we booked lo these many months ago long before we had any idea that Belfast was going to Happen, being specifically Glow Wild at Wakehurst -- an illuminated sculpture/lantern trail in grounds owned by the National Trust but used and managed by Kew. I was telling A fondly, on our way around it, about my year 6 art project that involved making lanterns from willow and paper, so I was delighted by the sign toward the end explaining that over 200 primary school pupils had been involved.

The lanterns were divided into two approximate groups: one set of abstract or geometric solid-colour lanterns strung in trees (some exciting rounded octahedra in various colours; some more like Physalis alkekengi) and FIGURATIVE WILDLIFE. (There was also a grove of moon-and-stars with beautiful architectural willow frameworks silhouetted against their skins, but that appeared to be thematically disjoint from everything else, or perhaps more accurately at least as thematically disjunct as the ten-foot-long floating sky koi, if less disjunct than the ???Weeping Angels???.)

The exciting wildlife started with OWLS and continued largely on a theme of birds (robins! swallows! a heron! a bluetit! a green woodpecker! probably-a-chaffinch!), with BONUS HEDGEHOG AND FOX AND BADGERS. The badgers were wonderful and A Friend and I was delighted by them; A very indulgently took some photos for me, and I provide two here to give you a bit of a sense of being Personally Judged by a Passel of Glowing Badgers.



And with that: A collected the keys for the Belfast Penthouse this morning, established that most of the unopened post dating back over a year was for Game of Thrones cast and crew who really don't care and have long since moved out, and I bid you goodnight.

A few weekends ago I visited the NHM with A. We visited the butterflies, which are always good; I particularly enjoyed that they've moved the banana plants that are always covered in caterpillars to the beginning rather than the end of the route, so you get to move through the life cycle rather more -- the readily-identifiable caterpillars are now before the pupation hut, where we saw an actually only halfway hatched butterfly for the first time, and we also got to see several sizes of Pale Owl caterpillar, all of which have delightfully the same face. We met a couple of new butterflies that we totally failed to identify (black! with red stripy lower wings!) in addition to all the excellent iridescent teal nonsense, and as ever the route is juuuuuuuuust short enough that the "hallucinating that there are somehow impossibly butterflies inside my clothes" doesn't start until I'm right at the very end.

We also took a quick spin around the Life in the Dark exhibition, not expecting great things, but were pleasantly surprised! Particularly compared to the exhibition on colours and the one on venom, this was surprisingly well curated -- though it did still suffer from "items in cases and their descriptions are inexplicably numbered in the opposite direction to that of travel". (Also of note is that there is a central section, otherwise very dark, that features flashing but apparently not strobing lighting; this allows the Ceiling Art Installation to give the effect of bats swirling around above your head and does have warning notices posted, but I didn't spot an alternative route through, though I admittedly wasn't looking terribly hard.)

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Not last weekend but the weekend before we went on a Group Outing to Woburn, where I think I had probably not been since I were wee. It turns out that they have no wifi and basically no phone signal of any kind, which made coordinating two groups Somewhat Trickier Than We'd Expected for a Major Public Attraction. There were lots of things I enjoyed (the buckets halfway up a tree for the giraffes! the people feeding the giraffes from a jeep! the tiny elephant! the giraffe research student, with attendant ranger crossly telling everyone that yes THIS person was parked counter the flow of traffic with their windows open but that didn't mean YOU got to! the giraffe storage sheds with Very Tall Doors! the capybara! the parents very discreetly telling their children to stop watching the enthusiastically-shagging parrots because They Were Busy and Wanted Some Private Time! the agouti, which are Round and Shaped Like A Friend and have Rubbish Little Tails!), but obviously my favourite was the tortoises.

I Learned Some Facts about the Tortoises! At Woburn they've got five or so Aldabra tortoises (I met four but another couple were? hiding?), nine years old and ranging in size from about 15kg (Flo is tiny and runty and nobody's quite sure why but they're fairly certain she wouldn't have survived in the wild) to about 30kg (... everyone else). This means that they are still just about small enough to deadlift (they are an awkward shape, okay) when it's time to go to bed: they sort of wave their legs in the air with a ponderous indignance, but when deposited at the entrance to their (heated) hut (with browsing material inside) they do all go "ah, yes, maybe this is after all a good idea, you are forgiven," and plod solemnly inside to continue munching.

Apparently they're being target-trained against the day they're too heavy to lift, but they're not quiiiiiiiiiite there yet. Target training consists of giving them a treat (accompanied by a clicker) every time they boop their snoot on a proferred stick, and ignoring them if they ignore it, which Flo (the tiniest) in particular is having difficulty with: it was explained to us that after about fifteen minutes in the enclosure, keepers who are new to it always emerge looking slightly spooked and promptly seek advice from a seasoned veteran.

It is always the same advice.

"Why," they ask plaintively, "is she ineffectually FOLLOWING ME EVERYWHERE, it's kind of creepy." "Ah," say the veteran keepers, "did you give her a pat? Well then."

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We woke up in time to get to the Centre Pompidou! We got there about ten minutes after it opened, in fact, and once again swanned past every single possible queue and did not buy tickets. I am not going to get used to this unless I spend a lot more time in France; I am still, at the moment, apologetically wandering up to security at the front of the queue and saying "um, excuse me, where is it that I should be waiting...?" and getting cut off to be waved in halfway through that. It is disconcerting; I am Disconcert.

But! Centre Pompidou! We did a whistle-stop tour of the Musée, with the Collections Contemporaines and the Collections Modernes. I was especially enamoured of the curatorial decision that Respirare l'ombre was accessed via a stark white room containing trees by the same artist: Nel legno, Albero di 7 metri, and one other -- trees right-way-up and upside-down, excavated to their branches and sometimes their twigs, in the forest of their shadows. Sol-Mur is the kind of thing I'd reblog in a heartbeat on tumblr, labelled "hashtag aesthetic". And, while I didn't particularly care for the explanatory caption accompanying Precious Liquids, I did like the installation.

There was also a room full of wire-frame Friends whose name I did not take down because I was a little distracted, and balconies full of excellent swirly metal sculpture, and various other bits and pieces I would like to make the more detailed acquaintance of at some point in the future.

We cleared out of the Musée at 2pm, and were on a bus to the Gare de l'Est a whisker after half past; half-way up the hill between Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est a pain spike started. I curled up in a sofa in the business premier lounge (because, again, being a wheelchair user just... gets you that, for the £29 flat-rate Eurostar tickets for you and a companion) and contrived to have A fetch and carry me drinks and snacks; and eventually onto the train we got; and eventually, eventually, home. Where I have been curled up in a small pile on the sofa basically ever since, watching the birds.

I think this is the first time I have Gone On A Holiday that I substantially conceptualised and orchestrated? It feels very grown up, in a very young sort of fashion, and I think I'm going to keep enjoying that.

... actually starts at KGX, where we rocked up nice and early and had lunch at Dishoom (Indian food, uncomfortable colonialism chic [I stand corrected, see comments], very hip, generally highly recommended for the food incl. by some of our relevant friends), on the grounds that A had not been there, followed by dessert at Ruby Violet, because it was right there, followed by cheerfully jumping all the (utterly miserable) Eurostar queues and inviting ourselves into the business lounge. (Sort of. The person checking me in told us we could use it, so I went and told the doorman that, and he was all "..." and checked with his superior and we were waved in). Whereupon I established (thanks to A) that the developed-as-a-symbol-of-Anglo-French in-collaboration-with-Raymond-Blanc Eurostar-21st-birthday-special gin goes really very well with fizzy rhubarb drink.

Between all of that and the light meal served us on the Eurostar we did not in fact require dinner. Also, we were very tired. Via a slight detour around the sculptures Les Marines and a decorative bench at the Gare de Lyon, we got into the hotel (the chair just about fits into the lift and through the door to the room) and curled up on the bed and watched an episode of Elementary and ate some more of the raspberry-and-treacle tart we picked up cheap in Waitrose the night before and fell asleep and it was great.

Today we achieved breakfast at the boulangerie just over the road (A had not previously met the tiny pistachio-and-raspberry financiers and is a convert), walked from our hotel all the way over to the flea market, poked around there with mild amusement for a little bit, acquired some entirely cromulent pasta-and-pizza for lunch because Hungry, got the bus over to État Libre d'Orange, indulged me in some perfume, and then wandered very slowly back to the hotel again. (We set off around 5:30 and had declared that Dinner And An Early Night would be a good idea. We... finished our bibimbap round the corner from the hotel at 9:30, and got in fairly recently. We were slow in part because A has blistered feet & I have blistered hands, and in part because Pokemon.)

I have been absolutely delighted by the dates in all the paving; the art; the Viaduct Of Art including this preposterous furniture and particularly the Square 38 desk nonsense; the churches various, some of them in the middle of terraces and some of them by themselves, and especially the beautiful clocks designed to match the rose window; the ironwork and doors, everywhere; the duck house in the gardens. I have learned A Thing about Parisian buses, as well, which is that unlike London the route maps have a symbol indicating if a stop is inaccessible (i.e. there isn't space to safely get the ramp out), which is useful, especially as we're intending to mostly do public transport tomorrow, see above re blisters on our motive extremities.

At ÉLdO, I ended up acquiring a small bottle of Tom of Finland (because A went "oooooooh" when I waved the paper strip at him, and obviously I need to expand my collection of woody leathers), plus samples of The Afternoon of the Faun and Putain des Palaces. I also ended up trying on Je Suis Un Homme; amusingly, it starts out smelling like I've spilled orange essence on myself and ends up a slightly odd powdery leather, which I think is mostly the fault of my skin not enjoying patchouli much. This is a Bit Of A Disappointment given how much I love the bergamot in Penhaligon's Endymion, but ah well.

Also smelled: Rien Incense Intense (much smokier; A definitely prefers Rien itself and I think I probably do too); Antiheros, indeed v lavender; Attaquer le Soleil Marquis de Sade, which smelled on the strip exactly like Rien does on me and is therefore gorgeous but of limited interest; Eau de Protection, which was a powdery rose; You Or Someone Like You, a rather aggressive apple made interesting through rose and mint and general cold freshness; and, of course, Sécretions Magnifique, famed for giving rydra_wong nightmares. Disappointingly, on the strip it seemed to me pretty much a slightly odd metallic tang; I didn't quite dare put it actually on my skin to see what it did.

Irritatingly, looking at the full note listing I realise Putain des Palaces contains lily-of-the-valley so I'm almost certainly allergic to it, so once I've tested it I'm likely to be looking to give it away -- shout if interested!

On the upside, despite not having properly done my homework in advance, I think the only thing I'm particularly sad about not having smelled is the cologne -- and given that I've already got four of them (... or is it five?), I think I can manage not adding another to my collection...

When it came to be time for Papa's funeral, Adam very kindly drove me down to Cornwall in a van again, and we loaded the Tramper and the mobility scooter of the Other Wheelchair Saga (which I... need to tell you) into the back, and then he drove us back; since then, the Tramper has been sat on our patio (and, after divers alarums and excursions, plugged in to the exterior socket) and the mobility scooter has been sat in the living room (see above re: saga).

This morning, while we were eating scones, A looked out the window and remarked that the weather was fine... and prompted me to actually go for a walk with him to take it for a test drive.

It was Hard Work in the sense that I had very little lateral support from the seat and as such was doing a lot of core activation -- but we did somewhere over a five-mile round-trip, including a bunch of hills and a bunch of incredibly muddy paths that would have been completely impassable in any of my other chairs and a bunch of just... haring off into the woods because I could. I visited the SQUARE WATER we keep driving past and learned about an entire architectural tradition I'd been oblivious to! I visited the obelisk! I caught a shiny Swablu! I went on [photo] a WALK in the MUD (me with a Tramper off-road mobility scooter, on a muddy path through some woods).

I kept zooming off delightedly because I could. I kept giggling to myself. I kept bouncing gently in place. (I kept dropping my phone, and am going to install a handlebar mount.)

I have investigated ramps to make it easier to get it on and off the patio; I will be talking to my mother about buying it off her rather than selling it on, because really, at the point when this is the face I was pulling solidly for two hours?

I am slowly coming to a conclusion about the NHM, which is that temporary photography exhibitions (WPoY; spaaaaaaaace) are usually excellent, where non-photography exhibitions are of a generally lower standard (to my mind) and much more likely to be disappointing.

I hypothesise that this is a combination of (1) photographs forcing sensible curation in terms of the amount of space given to each item, and (2) photographs speaking, as it were, for themselves, rather than needing explanatory captions.

All of which being said, I was much more pleased with the whales than the venom, but would probably have been grumpy about both if I'd been paying real money (rather than "I'm a member" fake money).

From Venom I learned that slow lorises have poison glands in their elbows, more (though less than I'd have liked) about the creation of antivenoms, and a very little more about the composition and mechanisms of action of venoms (multiple chemicals targetting different systems in a variety of combinations and stages) plus drug development arising from investigation of venoms (there was a really disproportionate focus on dicks in this section). There was also a remarkably large number of #Aesthetic display cases filled only with Atmospheric Labware, a lot of sad animals in jars, and ( spiders ). The most disappointing case, to my mind, was one that displayed all the venemous species in the UK... with an offhand remark that most of them aren't venemous to humans, and absolutely 0 detail on what their venom does target and (what we know about) why we're immune to it. Curation generally disappointing: the "how venom hurts us" section set up to be spoopy and disorienting, which in practice meant it was very dark and everyone was trying to crowd around tiny little displays in tight spaces (at above-my-eye-height, in many instances), with loads of empty space that just didn't have anything to do in it, with a very sudden transition to bright white straightforward-path "but we can also use it in MEDICAL SCIENCE".

Whales I was much keener on, and actually a little excited to go around a second time (with B, having previously been with A in December for a friend's birthday trip). Things learned include: proto-whales had USELESS LITTLE VESTIGIAL FEET and they're the BEST THING; the mechanical role of blubber in efficient swimming; how filter feeding actually works, which had somehow never previously been explained to me in a way that I correctly understood; how we know that toothy and toothless whales diverged from a common ancestor (foetal tooth buds!); what happens to a whale's lungs when it dives, and relatedly some more about how echolocation works anatomically (recycled air! phonic lips! whales don't have any external ears at all!); and some fascinating orca sociology I really wish the exhibition had gone into more detail on, to do with hunting and dietary habits being passed down within family groups, and being identifiable from patterns of tooth wear and indeed the isotopic makeup of teeth. Curation much better: exhibits sensibly spaced out, everything at an accessible-to-a-wide-variety-of-heights level, text much more readable and mostly informative rather than pointlessly dramatic, much more ability to move sensibly around the exhibit and to make decisions about what to skip (or not).


I wish I could work out what the pattern was on which non-photography temporary exhibitions I'll enjoy and which I won't; so far I've appreciated Corals and Whales (and, to be fair, butterflies), and been pretty disappointed by Venom and Colours. I'll report back if I manage to work it out.