Consumption
Feb. 10th, 2019 11:31 pmReading. 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.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
