kaberett | Entries tagged with ten good things

I am continuing to really enjoy all of the changes testosterone is making to my body. ( Read more... )
Bog mummy continues the best hairstyle I have yet tried for Getting Labwork Done with minimal sensory argh, and I can just about get it brushed & back up again in the time it takes to get from Oakwood to Finsbury Park (where I change from the Piccadilly to the Victoria, because it's very slightly faster and, more importantly, it means I only have to deal with one lift at Green Park.)
I spent a bunch of today thoroughly settling in with Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), during the sitting-and-waiting parts of lab, and I continue astonished by how immediate and vivid and real all of her writing feels.
Paper continues trundling along; need to make a few more tweaks following feedback from primary supervisor, and then we'll be circulating around (potential) co-authors early next week to solicit feedback/comment/etc. (If they have substantive contributions they're welcome on board; if they mostly just want a bit of a discussion in passing they will get gratefully acknowledged.) I'm feeling pretty good about the shape of the science there.
I have been really enjoying your collective enthusiasm for the What Do I Even Do All Day post. <3
We've had a run of excellent sunsets: good illuminated clouds yesterday, and then today the sky was completely clear and the colour gradient to the west was stunning.
I've taken to carrying a small pot of rosebuds with me, in addition to the travel mug, so that I can have a Fancy Warm Drink when out & about should the mood take me, which is how I came to spend some of my afternoon drinking rose tea and wrangling references while on campus. It is exceedingly pleasant.
A changed the bedlinen, night before last, and I have been very much enjoying - and am now very much anticipating - curling up and savouring it, with bonus points for I Didn't Have To Make It Happen.
Past!Alex made me lots of treats: dinner was a slice of toast with peanut butter, from this morning's bread, plus the end of the butternut squash risotto I made earlier in the week, plus a scoop of the apricot-and-soured-cream ice cream. Thank you, past me. <3
Dinner with wonderful ex-housemate C last night, post-lab, at Sagar, where I did not get the paper dosa but did nevertheless eat dosa; heading to Kew with her tomorrow to spend some more time looking at Chihuly.

teenage coots running angrily and incompetently across a thick layer of underwater vegetation, cheeping furiously; it was not always apparent whether their heads ended up beneath water because they were >intentionally looking for food or simply because they faceplanted and then tried to make it look deliberate
still don't own a rocking chair, because impulse-buying a trad wooden rocking chair with no cushions when (1) I don't know where I'd put it and (2) it might hurt me isn't actually a good idea, so, three cheers for believing in sufficiency
we do, however, now have a low coffee table that might make playing games while sat on the floor/beanbag/whatever slightly more pleasant, because since we were looking at furniture and it was Right There
Tunbridge Wells is a place we're about to drive past, which still delights me because of Mortal Engines
I am in the process of arranging a Cousin Social (or rather, my cousins have very kindly Arranged One With Me), and I am utterly charmed by their sheer enthusiasm for the Kardemummebullar aaaaaand maybe I make a double batch this time given the extent to which I am Keen on the Prospect of Breakfast Bullar which just... did not happen last time
cut-price cheese-and-onion focaccia in an supermarket
it is super great going to charity shops with other people where I get to Find Them Things without actually acquiring more stuff myself
I'm feeling quite buoyant and excited about science - data from last week are good and useful and support my sample selection; I'm beginning to have ideas about What's Going On; I've got a meeting scheduled with my supervisor on Thursday that I'm expecting to be happy and productive and positive (which is a really big deal; that I'm looking forward to Talking Science as opposed to preemptively panicking over being found wanting is definitely A Thing)
I got to spend a lot of today in a warm sunny room with an open sash window onto a gently sloped roof leaning over which was an apple tree with the fruit coming ripe
I just got to watch a CONE DISPENSING LORRY on some incipient roadworks on the M25 and fairly soon I will get to Go To Sleep in My Own Bed and it will be Good.

Watercolour pencils, because I really enjoyed messing around with them at a friend's the other weekend and I have the Succulent Dragons colouring book and actually I enjoy colouring in even if I'm still scared to actually sketch things of my own to colour and I'm... allowed to do things I enjoy badly. (Also I dithered over What Exactly To Buy to A & now I am apparently getting a present, so that's a warm squishy feeling.)
Two kinda fancy paintbrushes acquired from a charity shop, at half price.
I have utterly failed to locate (in town or online) any Suitable Large Planters for MY NEW FIG TREE, but I have enjoyed looking and will probably get A to take me to a gardening centre.
Lots of thinking about shears. Need to check my neighbour's Box Of Tricks because if they have some I probably oughtn't to buy them, but Investigation nonetheless, leading to a clearer idea of what I want. (The difficulty is that so far as possible I'd prefer to avoid plastics, but pure wood-and-metal-and-enamel-I-guess tools aren't super easy to find.)
I think I might have identified the plumbing bits I need to make the water butt slightly more robust.
Apparently the bit of furniture I want (that I saw in a charity shop and that had vanished by the time I checked it was okay with A, grump grump) is a valet stand or butler stand. Now at least I can keep poking the internet for more.
There is a semi-plausible definitely-ridiculously-located sun lounger on the eBays that I might attempt to go for, in that the single biggest improvement to my quality of life at the allotment would be "somewhere to lie down that is guaranteed to contain neither thistles nor ants".
I am tentatively fairly sure that I can in fact afford to Just Buy a fruit cage, rather than scrounging around for bits and pieces to DIY it, which abruptly frees up a lot of cognitive function, hurrah.
I have been doing a pretty good job of accepting support over the past few days, which gives me a framework to keep thinking about vulnerability and connection in.
Over the course of the evening I have made both vegetable stock and bread, which is extremely satisfying even if the bread is Kind Of A Shape. Settled and grounded and yes.

Right yes okay goodnight.

The local co-op does in fact sell my favourite yoghurt, so I have been getting to eat that (+ cut-price raspberries) for breakfast.
We successfully hooked my laptop up to a TV for the purposes of My Talk On Debugging Relationships. (The slides do exist but they're very much "supporting the talk" so I will attempt to write them up properly for you all at... some point once I am back.)
... said talk was remarkably well-attended and a lot of people seemed to be getting a useful out of it, which, that is very cheering. There was also lots of excellent feedback and suggestions & I feel very lucky.
Attended a session on disability in LARP, and actually contributed a couple of useful things, I think, from the disability perspective, for all that my knowledge of LARP is entirely second-hand osmosed.
Sat on a beanbag and was intermittently sarcastic at A during his session on Being First Responders, during which the people present felt they Learned A Lot and also I made a suggestion that A hadn't considered in response to one of his scenarios, so, \o/
Had a craving; made brownies. Brownies mostly inhaled. (I had mine with strawberries and raspberries, because there are both and we need eating.)
Leftovers from yesterday's takeaway for dinner, because we had ordered Plenty Enough when it became apparent that it wasn't going to be trivial to use the kitchen.
There is a weirdly high concentration of geologists, which means I am getting to nerd A LOT and my talk about rocks isn't even til tomorrow lunchtime.
There are GOATS. I had not previously mentioned the GOATS. There are THREE OF THEM, with elegant little horns, and one of them is the excellent colour scheme where it's mostly brown with a very dark dorsal stripe and excellent stockings.
I am enjoying the current book! I have been spending a lot of time curled up on a sofa Reading Books Sleepily and rather enjoying it.

Bonus: brought two walking sticks. Spent a bunch of today doing more walking without aids than I really should have done (entirely around the building, natch), but did then have access to both of them when I hit the point of No More Walking. And: played Dominion! With some people I hadn't played games with before! Without giving the in-advance spiel! It helped that I knew the game, obviously, but Even So, that is Definite Progress.

Oven still isn't getting all the way up to temperature but the new seal has improved matters significantly, and my new griddle iron is serving v well as a Basis for Bread, having now handled both soda bread and a loaf of sourdough Acceptably.
Flying ants are, it turns out, actually quite pretty if... you are existing immediately adjacent to the nest they're all trying to get away from.
I spent a whole bunch of this afternoon sat on the grass in a friend's back garden, messing about with watercolour pencils that I didn't actually have to try, and thinking about shame and failure and vulnerability and drawing and my desire to have the courage to Make (More) Bad Art, and what I can do to foster and facilitate that.
I have successfully dropped off birthday presents for my mother (having left my Cambridge keys in London, whoops, but it was only a flying visit), having Even wrapped them (courtesy of said crafternoon). These consisted of (1) a Peter Igelhoff CD (with another to come, because it hadn't alas arrived by the time we set off this morning) and (2) some (second-hand, aged) geological maps of areas relevant to her interests, which I acquired as a result of a completely incidental detour into the BGS shop at the NHM. (Alas they'd sold out of linen-backed maps of The Town Of Her Actual Birth, but I still did pretty well.)
The new car... has a frankly completely ridiculous sunroof... that extends all the way over the passenger seats. It! Is ridiculous! And also it is SKY and I am very fond of it.
There is an excellent crescent moon.
A very kindly took me into South Ken this morning, before we headed up for our flying visit to Cambs, such that I didn't have to get up ludicrously early for the ridiculous solo round-trip; I successfully did (well, progressed) science, and was brought COOKIES by A & B, who had gone on a wander while I disappeared into my basement lair.
I have plans for More Science next week, and am looking forward to it, because for all the many difficulties I really do enjoy being in lab.
I am finding my current book enormously engaging, like, "it's an ebook I have from the library so I've got out an actual notebook to scribble down my thoughts about it because I can't usefully annotate it directly and I want to remember things, also maybe I'm going to buy a copy once I've established how much it pisses me off" levels of engaging. Thoughts aren't coalescing yet, but I've got lots of points to jump off.
Even and especially when fraught or difficult or hard topics come up, A & I have built & are building really robust patterns of kindness with and trust in each other, and I am very grateful for this.

I bought myself flowers! Because I do this, occasionally: mostly stripy tulips, but on this occasion as I was wandering around looking at other reduced bits, an enormous bouquet of sunflowers and white roses got further reduced from £5.79 or thereabouts (from an original £15) to £1.79 and I pounced, and now it is in a vase on the dining table and making me happy.
Both supervisors have now signed off on my second data chapter, to the tune of "Yeah, look at it again when you're finalising the writing up but this is currently in better shape than a lot of chapters we've examined, well done you". There was even some good-natured joshing about my proclivity for semicolons.
Paperwork has been filed with a partner institution requesting the samples I'm aiming to work on for my final portion of the project. I was pointed at the existing publication on the samples; I decided how I wanted to shortlist them and why; those are pretty much exactly what we've requested, in the end. (We dropped a couple, but haven't added anything, which feels pretty good.) And I advocated for a reasonable work pattern that my supervisor was a little dubious about, so, y'know, let's see how much lab time I can cram in between now and December.
I have also actually done a sterling job of talking myself down from some PhD-related rejection hypersensitivity, to the tune of being able to offer myself plausible alternate explanations essentially immediately and mostly actually hold onto them (with a few wobbles) over the course of a Somewhat Stressful Day (lots of it eustress, but, as M points out in my head, That's Still Stress).
Testosterone. ( Read more... )
I am -- finally! -- starting to settle into and enjoy the current short story collection, not least because it turns out they're doing the thing of being less standalones and more interlinked and slightly overlapping; main characters at one life stage in one story show up as background characters at quite another time of life in another, which is letting the bit of my hindbrain that finds short stories (and especially short story collections) Difficult relax a bit.
Being back in the old labs is (we have two clean lab suites) is Interesting but, I think, on balance good: on the one hand everything's rather older such that e.g. there's a slightly alarming amount of rust in some places, and there are fewer mod cons, and I've got a rather less convenient arrangement of cupboards to store my miscellania in, but on the other everything is a sort of creamy beige instead of SCREAMING WHITE and as a result it... hurts much less to exist in, as a space, and that's a relief. (I mean, I knew I was keeping most of the lights in the new labs off, given the option, and I knew I was finding it a Difficult environment, but I think I'd managed to lose track of quite how difficult, because they "ought" to be easier to work in, see also: mod cons.)
Other mental health work paying off: no noticeable spike in separation anxiety this evening, and a whole lot of buffer to be kind to myself with if it had, in spite of the Everything.
All of the ice cream mix has now been churned, which shifts fridge space to freezer space and also means there is now apricot ice cream both with and without raspberry ripple (and I really must get to the allotment for long enough to pick a pile more raspberries and turn them into cake/lemonade/etc).
Quiet evening largely curled up on the sofa and gently socialising via the magic of the internet, yes good.

I made it to the gym, by myself, and didn't run away again when people needed to move cars such that I could actually use the step-free route (admittedly that was because staff spotted me and cheerfully told me they'd get on that before I had the chance to). WITNESS MY BRAVERY.
I was much delayed in getting out to the gym by... A Cat. There was, you see, A Sad Yelling from the communal hallway. ( Read more... )
And to my utter astonishment, I haven't actually had a massive allergic reaction everywhere, so: hurrah for better living through chemistry.
Post-gym, I wandered around the various shops a little, in the process winning a kilo of strawberries for £2.90. (I was very good and did not in fact buy multiple kilos of strawberries.)
Jumping earlier in time through the day again: a few days ago I moved the jostaberry "sorbet" (that was actually more like granita) from last year's attempt to the fridge from the freezer, and the ice cream maker bowl into the freezer, and so this morning I rechurned the sorbet mix and lo, it is smooth and tasty and Good and now we will Eat It slightly faster, probably. (Also it's taking up much less freezer room, via the magic of having been moved into a much smaller container. Smaller crystals = more efficient packing = smaller volume, hurrah.)
Some time ago now, I made a toasted seed mix to serve with houmous; this evening I finished it off, as part of dinner, and lo, it was good.
I keep being sad that I fundamentally don't like any of Maggie Stiefvater's other stuff half as much as I love The Scorpio Races, give or take a soft spot for the teenage werewolves, but it's now been long enough since all of the Raven Boys books thus far were released that they were available for instant borrowing in electronic format from my library, from the comfort of aforementioned sofa, so I've spent the past couple of days inhaling those for the first time as A Break from the various bits of difficult life admin I've been doing.
In respect of which: I am not where I wanted to be with the PhD work but I'm managing to talk myself down from Actual Terror about that; I have a reasonable plan of action, I'm going to do it, It Will Actually Be Fine.
A has now seen The Bat also. As I type this it is approximately bat o'clock, so I am Hopeful that if I keep half an eye out the window while I'm wrangling the dishwasher I will be lucky.
Concert on Saturday. I am feeling reasonably buoyant about it; I'm at the stage where I'm mostly managing to play the notes, and I'm hopeful that if I manage to keep the practice up over the summer I'll be able to focus a bit harder on musicality next term.

Last year, in the lead-up to my birthday, I spotted a relatively cheap three-tier cake stand in the window of one of the local charity shops. I got it, because I was planning Afternoon Tea for my birthday, and have been enjoying it sat on top of the dresser since; this weekend just gone I got it down again and piled it up with madeleines (baby's first!) and scones, for a Jupiter Ascending watch party hosted with miscellaneous cousins various. It is a tiny extravagant frivolity and it makes me very happy (as does feeding people Afternoon Tea, it turns out, so I should be aiming to do that more often).
And then on the Monday we took the Leftover Afternoon Tea down to Kew, to visit the Chihuly and Interview the recently-acquired Young Man of one of said cousins. We picnicked on the grass just inside the Victoria Gate, in view of Sapphire Star, and it turns out that in addition to Woobly Glass I am, also, very fond of Providing Picnics, so I shall aim to do more of that, as well.
Progress at the allotment, various: yesterday, after sending my work for the week over to my supervisor, I had dinner and headed out and stayed til dusk. I weeded the allium and the Ribes, I fed the bin, I removed a token carpet square. Today, after my supervisor meeting to discuss said etc, I gathered up the bricks from the ex-cat-stairs and took myself down to the plot and sorted out the water butt, which involved (i) building it a wee platform of said bricks and (ii) actually giving it a thorough scrubbing. I did not feed the bin because it was still full, but I did admire the Ribes in slightly more light than I had by the time I left yesterday; and I made more progress on The Carpet (!); and I picked some spinach to put in dinner. (It's mostly going to flower, now, but the more of it I cook with the less guilty I'll feel when I rip the rest of it up to get The Sodding Carpet out.)
This morning I picked up My First Tube Of Tostran. In the process I had a cheering interaction with My Default GP at the current place, and then while waiting for the prescription to be filled I was approached by someone using a walker and Asked For Wheelchair Advice (on behalf of their spouse rather than themself) and got to be Kind And Helpful.
On my (slow and meandering) way home, I found (1) a cast-iron plausibly-suitable-for-injera pan, and did a bunch of research on where and how to buy teff in the UK, and (ii) spotted in a charity shop window a Kenwood mixer bowl, so promptly crossed the road and purchased it immediately, because I Am Become My Grandfather.

I have handled so. many. support. requests. So many. (So many.)
alexwlchan has written A Bunch of bugfixes and I am v proud!
momijizukamori has tentatively Fixed a problem that was making the support board Very Unhappy and I am approximately 95% pathetic gratitude by volume.
I am increasingly convinced that the way to make scones Work is to tip out the bit that has actually stuck together, mix More Liquid into the remaining, and only then try combining the lot of them. (The previous batch I took this approach to did work; today's batch was... less successful, because I forgot to and didn't.)
A is a sweetheart and got me a Larger Bucket for proving my bread in. That I... should probably actually use, whoops.
Today I have arranged loaning one acquaintance a car battery charger, and acting as a friend's proxy for the EU elections. Hurrah for communities and interconnectedness.
Tomorrow I will (among other activities) be seeing my mother, at which point I will be picking up A Wide Variety Of Artefacts from the Mouldering Ancestral Pile (that she ended up driving back up-country for me after the most recent round of house clearance, because there was no way I could carry even a significant minority of it back on public transport). I am not sure A is quite emotionally prepared for this reality, but there we go; I look forward to providing you all with an inventory.
Two more things from the knife skills course: we were taught how to make garlic paste, which I utterly failed to understand in the moment but which Adam has subsequently patiently explained to me at home and Now I Can Do It; we also had explained to us A Trick for Mangos, being that if you roll them gently from side to side they always end up resting in the same place -- with the seed parallel to the horizontal. I am excited by all these things.
I skipped out on therapy on Thursday by dint of my therapist having forgotten the session and me not reminding them (in the way I ordinarily would) because I Didn't Want To; rather to my surprise I received an e-mail later that evening, in which they pointed out that they didn't have me down for a session and inquired as to how I was doing. I've just e-mailed back to request an appointment net week, and even -- having written up my notes from the previous session -- I'm cautiously looking forward to it.
Lots else to look forward to next week, as well: a trip to Kew, a birthday dinner, some time at the plot. Maybe planting my tomatoes on, even. I'm currently feeling relatively relaxed and relatively optimistic and relatively cheerful; long may it continue. (And if it doesn't then, well, that too shall pass.)

I am home. In my house. With my plants. (To my mild astonishment I actually Managed the public transport All The Way Back with only intermittent panic, and I only dropped things about twice, and only once in a way that was actually a problem.)
For bonus points, having dragged myself out of bed and through packing to get the 9.07 bus... and having then been expecting to hang around Redruth interminably until the 12.28 train... I actually arrived in time to get the 10.27! Which was beyond my wildest dreams in terms of getting home at a reasonable hour!
... it was a ten-car train, not a twelve-car. Which meant there were no standard-class wheelchair spaces. Which meant I was in first class. Which meant I got plied with free orange juice and sandwiches and cake, and felt mildly guilty, but only mildly.
NEW ROLLING STOCK I'd not been on the long-distance new(ish) GWR trains before, and they have a fascinating two-stage ramp system. And, much as I might grumble about it in practice, when we got to Plymouth I was moved to the rear set of first class carriages because the accessible loo in the front pair wasn't working -- and this is institutionally A Good to have happened unprompted and unrequested even though I did not, in fact, want to use the loo on the train.
A valiantly fed the breadpet while I was away. It became happy! It... became Very Happy. It... escaped its container by quite some way. (It is now being turned into two loaves, one of which I will be palming off on the allotment seed swap social tomorrow afternoon if I can bring myself to leave the house again.)
Having got some bread started upon my return home (lares & penates, honouring thereof, etc) I Left the House again and poked around supermarkets various, where I acquired the ingredients for burritos (having decided I wanted to Make Some and that The Instant Pot Makes Refried Beans Meaningfully Possible) along with Several Small Treats, and only got rained on a little (which is good for my plants so I'm not even complaining that much).
And then there was a the-new-regional-legendary raid on, so I did my first one... ... and it's 100% of all possible stats and I caught it on my second ball (of twelve) so it... wasn't even hugely stressful??? And that's... This Month's Legendary... Done...?! Hurrah.
Curled up on sofa with A finished Leverage ate some misery pizza (beans will take tiiiiiiiiiiime) did some talkings.
Items brought back from the mouldering ancestral pile this trip (for me): a pair of Felco Model 7s (in need of some tuning up); a bonus pair of ratchet anvil secateurs; my favourite of the walking sticks Papa owned, that I'd been keeping down there (he mostly used crook-handled sticks, which don't work well for me); a proper workbench clamp; my grandmother's collection of seeds, including the Ancestral Lovage (which turns out to be from Suttons but I'm not actually complaining); and a venerable train timetable for a friend.
I have discovered that it is in fact currently possible to buy my preferred form-factor of wok... provided I don't mind getting it shipped from Germany. Which is still better than "none of the shops I have looked in at any point over the past decade have in any sense contained the thing I want", so: tiny celebration, and at some stage I will work out if I actually want to buy one.

My lemon tree is getting delivered at some point in the next three days and I am Extremely Excited! (I also... need to finish the greenhouse, whoops. Perhaps tomorrow evening's greenhousery will be mostly cleaning glass and FINALISING THE BASE.)
Some of the other plotholders have cordless drills they can lend me, which will make Dealing With the raised beds much easier and less expensive (... subject to me getting the greenhouse up so the existing ones can stop being used as a prop for the glass...)
I spent a chunk of this afternoon sat in Ruby Violet with excellent hot chocolate, waiting for barrelofrain to show up so we can have ice cream. I was seriously conflicted about which set of things to get because there's At Least Four that I Want, but happily BoR having had A Day meant that I had plenty of time to dither. (I ended up with the pear sorbet and the marzipan & orange blossom ice cream.)
Via a small pile of anxiety I successfully navigated the BL and used one of the reading rooms for the first time ever. Quiet! Plugs! A desk! Yes good. (I also got to look at a couple of the exhibitions currently on; I skimmed The New Londoner, observed that the third floor has Some Furniture for me to look at more in future, and made a mental note that I want to drag A to spend fifteen minutes looking around Imaginary Cities next time we're in town.)
I have made Some Progress on The PhD Work and am slowly building up momentum again. (It's the thing where If I Manage Some Every Day I stay engaged and have ideas and can think of things to do next; if I let it slide I... really struggle to pick it back up.)
I have introduced my godmother's eldest and my largest smallcousin and they are talking enthusiastically to each other in a group chat I've set up with the three of us, which is thoroughly pleasant to check in with periodically.
We've had some of A's family visiting tonight; we're now at 3/4 parents having seen The Flat, and we successfully Went Out For Dinner including Everybody's Favourite Waiter, me successfully judging how hungry I was, and Managing A Social without immediately crawling under the bed.
The walk back from the restaurant featured an excellent crescent moon glowing orange through an approximation of fog.
I am greatly enjoying my current book, because it's filling in gaps and giving me more detail in re The Dawn Wall, and it's very... communicative of personality in a way I'm mostly charmed by.
This morning's bread worked particularly well, and I am very much enjoying continuing to experiment and learn and improve (both understanding and skill).

Movement. ( Read more... )
I got a phone call from a Dublin number while I was at the gym. ???, I thought. And lo, it was the passport office, wanting to confirm my card details so they could take a payment. (This does not mean I'm getting the passport any time soon; it just means they're processing it, which means that in the next phone call we'll get to discuss a. my name and b. my godmother's phone number, I expect.)
A's lavender -- that we got for 50p from a stall by the side of the road on our trip to the south coast to pick up chiasmata's wheelchair, and which has spent the winter resolutely grey and miserable and dormant -- is sprouting with enthusiasm from its base, and getting visibly larger day by day. (This is going to be one of the plants that lives on the back porch at home, at least until it gets big enough to layer, at which point I might move a baby plant over to the allotment for the sake of pollinators.)
w8rose had more reduced thyme! so I have another bucket of thyme that I HOPEFULLY won't kill off instantly, which gets to go live... on the porch. (Also there were reduced tiny carrots and cavolo nero, so dinner tonight was sausage + mash + veg, and reduced yarg, so belated lunch was cheese + ajvar + Ryvita + cucumber.)
I have allllllmost finished moving the furniture around. (It's not perfect but then it wouldn't be with the constraints we're working with; it is nonetheless an improvement, I think, and I'm appreciating having A Book Corner.)
On Monday I collected some rhubarb from the allotment; we have spent the week consuming pear-and-apple-and-rhubarb crumble.
Bread bread bread. A continues to set the oven to be hot when we actually wake up, which is making fresh sourdough for breakfast a much less time-consuming and sleep-disrupting process, hurrah. (Still working on the timings of feeding the tiny god for optimum rise. Unfortunately, this means lots of experimental bread. It Is A Trial, etc.)
I have more-or-less decided where I want to stick the comfrey on the plot. At least one of them can go under the cherry tree, and I will probably attempt to distribute the other two in the Awkward Corner.
rydra_wong has pointed me at some footage of Beth Rodden being amazing, and I have the firm intention of curling up with it tomorrow afternoon in the post-meeting adrenaline crash (if I don't just disappear off to roll around in the mud, which is also a possibility).
A is great and has spent the evening wrangling soldering irons and heatshrink in service of streamlining my life; we have sorted a batch of towels for disposal; more bits have been put on freecycle/freegle; I have Progressed Some Of The Mending (by which I mean "I have taken the memory-foam travel pillow out of its wrapper in order to facilitate sewing repairs to the disintegrating wrapper, also lol whoops the pillow... has a massive tear? never mind", but this is a significant executive function step); make house a home, etc etc etc.

not braining content notes for this but There Are Some

( Read more... )

Stubborn positivity:

A came home via the big supermarket the other evening, bearing gifts: specifically, cut-price nonsense geometric chocolates in a variety of flavours. I had in fact been eyeing that very box up every time I went past and feeling like I couldn't possibly justify getting it, so it was a Very Nice Surprise.
Movement: my knee is still coping with increased resistance + cardio at gym, and I'm starting to feel like I'm getting meaningful exercise out of it, as well as increased stability/physio work.
Kew is putting on a massive bullshit sculpture trail this summer, which I found out yesterday, and I am really looking forward to it. I am intending to make at least one evening-opening visit, along with hopefully multiple daytime visits. (Specifically, it's bullshit abstract glass sculpture by the dude responsible for the V&A chandelier, which I'm enormously fond of.)
I have used up all the ravioli filling... and still have an eighth of the dough left, so that's going to get turned into another batch of tagiatelle, I think. (Dinner was ravioli. It was good.)
M posted new fic and I spent Some Time rolling around in it and asking yet more questions.
A is making great strides towards (i) sorting the Piles such that we can meaningfully get rid of them and (ii) putting things on Freegle (after Freecycle didn't bite). Order is emerging from chaos and it is doing my brain a good.
I managed to leave the house today while it was actually still light -- down to the end of the road for a Pokémon raid (hiiii Shinx). AND on the way back from the gym we got a NEW SPECIES, which, yes hurrah good there had never previously been one of those spawned that I could actually get to.
w8rose does a raspberry-and-passion-fruit cheesecake, it's currently cut price, and it's exactly what I wanted.
I do in fact have a bunch of useful How To Humaning-related expertise, and I am in fact managing to help people make their lives better using it, and they are in fact learning principles and frameworks from me such that they can work more of this shit out for themselves independently, and I am pretty fuckin' proud of them.
I am, very shortly, going to go curl up in a bed that doesn't actively hurt me, underneath an anger blanket, with a hot water Adam, and I am going to sleep.

The dishwasher may be broken but we did, in fact, blitz the washing up. All of it. In about twenty minutes. So now the kitchen is livable again, at least temporarily, while we wait for the electrician to show their face again, hurrah. (The dishwasher is A Saga. tl;dr the first time it blew the 15A fuse in the consumer unit we assumed the fuse had merely reached the end of its natural life. The second time it did it, we summoned an electrician, who pulled apart the plug and went "I think that's your problem, mate", which seemed reasonable enough. The third time, there was an audible pop from the dishwasher but the 13A fuse in the plug was fine and the 15A fuse in the consumer unit had gone again... and so did the fuse in the circuit for the washing machine, immediately, when A swapped it in to try to finish the cycle. So then we spent a bit of time Not doing the washing-up, and summoning an electrician, and so on, and now hopefully said electrician will reappear tomorrow.)
I am 3.5k words into structuring and fleshing out a benefits appeal for a friend. It Is Gonna Be Okay. I am Somewhat Tired but, also, this is a thing I can do and do well, and it's important work, and it feels like a concrete contribution to both the friendship and, like, Society As A Whole, so that's a thing.
A picked up burritos on his way home, so that (a) I didn't have to think about food and (b) we didn't generate any more washing up.
Turns out I enjoy Barack Obama's writing, too, not that I am particularly surprised by this at this point. I'm finding it absorbing and soothing. (I'm not managing to focus on it much, but I am managing a bit, and that's currently something of a relief.)
I'm not sure what the source of the bells that chime the hours is -- whether it's one of the churches, or the Albert Memorial Clock -- but the tolling of the bell across the water soothes & situates me.
Slightly to my own surprise, I am actually, in the middle of all this, managing to generate ideas and sort-of string together scribbled and highlighted sentences in the current PhD paper, some of them involving ideas.
On which topic, I am in fact in Belfast this week. There was some degree of uncertainty: I might have been pulling a couple of long days on the mass spec, but as it turns out the machine is having a strop, which means that instead I am At Home and looking out across the river and in company.
I am very much enjoying the ongoing uptick in activity around these parts, long may it continue; I'm perpetually low on generating-interactive-words (between the current paper and the benefits-wrangling for myself & others) but it's lovely to get to brush against your collective individual lives from my sofa in the corner, and it's lovely to receive comments, and thank you all.
Yesterday, at the penguin enclosure, I put a Piplup on the adjacent gym, to keep the shiny Psyduck (also blue) that was already there company. It's still happily sitting there being a tiny blue penguin Pokemon, and I am smiling every time I think about it.
We definitely didn't steal a red panda and absolutely have compelling alibis (animal went missing; was recovered safely).

Waking up to (mostly) clear streets, against a backdrop of snow on the hills.
I have in the fridge my first ever tub of The Collective Dairy's passionfruit yoghurt. It... is my new favourite? It is very much my new favourite. (I was forever into the limited-edition raspberry trifle which is, alas, no more; the plum and honey is also Good; but I think passionfruit is My New Fave.)
The ritual of sourdough continues soothing.
Today I finally had a proper poke around the Professional Caterers' Shop in the centre of Belfast and successfully didn't buy anything, though honestly this was mostly because they only sell cheesecloth in 10m rolls and I thought A would be... Unimpressed... if he came home to find one.
To my minor astonishment, I have actually managed to string words together today in the context of the PhD! More words than I have managed for the past week! It is a relief, and also things continue slotting into place.
A & I have been having a bunch of Conversations that on the one hand have been hard work, in terms of leaky feelings and vulnerability, and on the other feel immensely productive and positive and affirming.
Nice clothes today: the mostly-cotton definitely-peacock-blue V-neck sweater and the black-blue-purple-white striped herringbone shirt, both from a charity shop (and specifically the BHF). They're both new-to-me enough that I'm Wearing Them A Lot and being delighted.
I have been playing... a lot... of Dominion Online, mostly against the bot but sometimes against friends, and (1) enjoying it (!) and (2) getting to try out a bunch of ridiculous okay-but-what-if-I-don't-buy-any-money decks (to go with the okay-but-what-if-I-do-endless-gardening ones).
Problematic Aunt got me cheese for the new year, from the Snowdonia Cheese Company; the Little Black Bomber is always a win, but I hadn't had their vintage Red Leicester before and it is good.
I am struggling somewhat with uncertainty around illness, but: I'm being kind to myself, and letting myself rest, and doing a bunch of self-soothing and self-care around No, Really, Love, You're Ill. I've got so much better at this specific skillset, and it's such a relief.

there is now 4G signal downstairs at the mouldering ancestral pile. Four bars of it! This is astonishing; for a long long time you could just about get half a bar of signal for making phone calls in a couple of spots in the attic if the weather was fine. So that's instantly added to the property value without us even having to do anything...
abstracted from the m.a.p.: an icing-spreading implement, a hopefully-competent bread knife, an ice-cream scoop, a tiny fork, and two butter curlers. (One of them is steel-handled and larger and probably more usable; the other is smaller and wood-handled and very emphatically from West Germany.)
after a quick triage (and unloading the Phormium tenax from the car, I now no longer have three clumps of P. tenax cluttering the place up, the car is Very Muddy but it's a hire car so that is FINE) we pottered off to Roskilly's for lunch and a little grockleism, via Goonhilly and an introduction to Arthur, because A had not been before. Apparently they're moving the Jersey herd onto a New Zealand-style once-a-day milking regime (rather than the standard British twice-a-day option) so we didn't get to see the milking (AND health-and-safety means you're no longer allowed on the dairy floor to cuddle the calves, boo) but we went up to the gallery anyway and showed A all the explanatory signs and pointed out the high-tech milking stations to him. (The once-a-day milking is from around 10 to around 11:30, so given that I'm intending to commandeer A for another visit to the Hepworth museum and sculpture garden at St Ive's, we might have another go at saying hi to the cows on our way out one day.) We DID, however, meet quails (smol round angry borbs!), and Long Ducks, and a guinea fowl, and some turkeys, and A Lot of chickens, and some very enthusiastic goats, and a Tamworth pig (which A bought food for -- 50p -- and then fed delightedly).
In the course of my afternoon it became rapidly apparent that the Pile in the cellar, which I'd assumed was mostly empty cardboard boxes and disintegrating plastic bags and the leads cut off expired toasters... was, once upon a time, Papa's work area, such that underneath a thin veneer of soggy cardboard boxes and disintegrating plastic bags (and expired medication) is, in fact, an incomprehensible jumble of rusty pipe wrenches and even rustier tins of paint and brand-new still-in-packaging tools misc. from Coopers of Stortford (a curse upon their house). The thing is, it also contained Grandpa B's Billy Hooks (these are apparently A Thing) -- and at the back of the second cutlery drawer (do not, gentle reader, be fooled into believing that there are only two cutlery drawers) we also found some miscellaneous silver napkin rings and more importantly Grandpa B's service napkin ring (with his WWI ships and deployment dates engraved on it), and Papa's equivalent (off the Royal Engineers). The other thing is that we have house clearance people coming next week and we... really can't! just let them do their thing! without losing stuff like that! so we have to sort it ourselves anyway first.

... it is An Adventure.

Today in doctors: I have bronchitis (I am forever amused that so many illnesses are just called [Greek for body part]+[Greek for "it's a bit cross"]) and an antibiotic prescription and stern instructions to spend some time steaming myself. Apparently I am to expect coughing for two weeks after the end of the antibiotic course, just Less Bad Than This. On the upside this has provided some helpful-for-my-brain calibration on "what's bad enough to bother a GP about" in this specific domain, so hopefully less time it'll involve less angst.

Today in cookbooks:

the copy of The Fat Duck Cookbook that I had espied in the window of a closed charity shop yesterday was... still there. So I popped in to make its acquaintance, having already told myself very firmly that it was probably going to be twenty quid and I wasn't to get it if it was more than a fiver and anyway it was probably offputtingly mostly meat... so I sat there leafing through it, increasingly absorbed, and finally grudgingly checked the price. Which was £6. So I got it, obviously.
while browsing the library shelves for more of the Leiths books, I came across an actual copy of smitten kitchen every day, found a sticky-toffee-pudding waffle recipe, and decided I needed to bring it home for A to poke at (his current favourite waffle recipe -- have I talked about the waffle iron here? -- is a lightly tweaked version of smitten kitchen's essential raised waffles, adapted to work better and more consistently with our set-up, and writing it up For The Old Blog is on my todo list), and then to my mild outrage found... a recipe... for porridge... I'm actually plausibly willing to eat, neatly solving at least some of my breakfast problems (provided I use non-calcium-fortified milk): caramelised pear baked oatmeal.
... and also The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, which looks like a fascinating memoir of a year (two years?) of study at Le Cordon Bleu, so I intend to nestle into that good at proper.
finally in Today In Cookbooks, I continue getting on very well indeed with the Leiths How To books; I think this attempt at sourdough is going to be my best yet, possibly to the point that I get to tick "get competent at sourdough" off my culinary skill acquisition list for the year ("learn how to make neat pastry" is also tentatively in the running for getting ticked off, again thanks to Leiths). I will find out tomorrow.

This week in allotment: compost bin had cooled down a fair old way again due to running out of food while I was in the Peak District, but I gave it a big feed onnnn Saturday, and temperature was rising again by Sunday evening. (I'm about to have another big feed for it, because I'm using up the last of the frozen veg stock in tonight's stew and therefore boiling up a new batch from the scraps bag, which will then go to become More Vegetables.) The squash is recovering well from the powdery mildew; the damage is increasingly less miserable. I only have one large fruit ripening up, though, so I'm not convinced I'm going to get a whole heap of them this year even if I do let them just keep going in the unseasonable weather. The spinach, however! Is doing magnificently! So our future contains A Lot of spinach.

This week in HOUSE: A has indulged me A Great Deal on the topic of DIY, including an IKEA trip to acquire (1) a blackout blind and (2) a curtain rail. The idea is to make the living room both more lightproof (for when we have guests staying) and warmer (because A has pre-existing Big Velvet Curtains that will cover the French window nicely, in addition to the current slightly flimsy blind); he put up the blind last night while (heteronormativity!) I was making pasta sauce (using tomatoes from the patio and courgettes from the allotment...).

1. A. very gently and patiently telling me to pick a film, and when given précis of Ponyo and Kiki's Delivery Service picked the latter. So I watched it again, having forgotten most of it, and was charmed again.

2. A. made dinner, in which we continue using tomatoes and herbs from the patio, and I find it soothing.

3. I took a break halfway through the film when a friend arrived to spend the weekend holed up in the second bedroom having a thesis-submission-related essay crisis, during which I made plum-and-apple cobbler and also made substantial progress on putting together the wheelchair I'm to deliver next week. (I have now met a Quickie Xenon and its baffling folding mechanism, being very used to the Kuschall Champion that is my main chair.)

4. While I did have a panic about having Cocked Up relating to all the various wheelchair-related parts that were required, I've got some bonus kit out of it and I asked for appropriate help & support in Sorting It Out. (Actual Sorting It Out to follow, but sketch plans exist.)

5. Neither of my computers has gone bafflingly wrong in several days, and as a bonus I "fixed" the issues I was having with playing mp3s in Firefox by... "upgrading" (slightly dubiously, via the magic of being extremely selective about the unstable repository for Debian) to ESR 60.1, having established that Tree Style Tab now exists for this brave new world. I am genuinely mildly surprised at how much I don't hate it. (I would like there to be more and better ways to get rid of visual clutter, but at least some of it has an API in development honest guv, and as for the rest I can just about remember how CSS works and I can definitely copy and paste other people's code.)

6. I have just had an excellent giggle with H over Captain Awkward imitating life; we both read the first two sentences of one of today's short question and went "IS THIS US"

1. I've been complaining a fair old bit, over the past few months, that I've been feeling very resistant to writing up therapy notes but I couldn't tell whyyyyyyy and it didn't make any seeeeeeeeeense. It turns out that, as ever, brains are sneaky little buggers, particularly in self-defence, and the reason I was so reluctant to engage with therapy notes is in fact exactly the reason I go to therapy. Which is: I want to have a responsible adult around to spot me while I do a bunch of emotional heavy lifting, and as it happens part of why I find writing up therapy notes so useful is that it makes more stuff cohere, i.e., it's more emotional heavy lifting. Only I try to do it all in one chunk without a spotter. And over the past few months, when the reluctance has really set in, I've by-and-large been stable enough that I've actually been digging into long-term change, which is much more intimidiating than short-term fire-fighting when it comes to looking at it solo. Well done, that brain, but it's okay, I promise, we got this.

( They get less ambivalently positive! )

On Friday night I got back from Cornwall, for the second time in a fortnight. Treasures found include a leaflet from the opening of Goonhilly Downs, a brief diary kept by Papa in the latter half of 1940, typewritten letters both grumpy and endaring, and lots of photographs of varying vintages of relatives various including my great-grandmother and -- of particular interest to me -- Mama icing the Nikolaus biscuits she made us every year, and a family holiday with people standing on the bit of mountain that is the reason I'm a geologist. Horrors included the new mouse nest in the piano, the headline "Don't invite vermin into your home" adjacent another different nest, the receipt from 1964 (WHY, Papa), and guidance on completing your tax return from the early seventies to the mid-nineties inclusive.

I brought back patient letters about European voltage harmonisation for A to read, along with Kerrier District Council guidance pursuant to the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) and an ancient newspaper clipping about a brood of 27 ducklings.

Last night I ran a pile of coppers through vinegar before feeding them to my whale; this morning I spent some time placidly experimenting with picking rusted keyless padlocks while A put waffles in front of me. This afternoon I have been scrubbing down the top of the picnic bench, having acquired the necessary materials to generally spruce it up slightly earlier on, and I've repotted my ridiculous little jade plant into a better soil mix (and confirmed the presence of rootlets in the process). The wild garlic and sage I brought up from Cornwall last weekend are doing well in their tub; the rosemary is incredibly cheerful about the run of dry weather; the parsley is starting to think about flowering.

I'm doing okay.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

some good things make a post

some good things make a post

today in idle poking around

ten good things

ten good things

ten good things

ten good things

some things that happy

bulletin

ten good things {thought I'd something more to say}

ten good things

there are a lot of reasons to be very tired so let's have some good things

juggling

ten good things

ten good things

Today's adventures

Misc.

some good things make a post

some things make a post

{I bought my soul back from the devil and now I'm keeping it all for myself}

Profile

May 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags