who only by moving can balance

1. Toddler, upon being informed that we were coming to visit today, apparently grinned about this for TEN WHOLE MINUTES. My heart.
2. This evening's social limb wiggling was outside. I think that's the longest I've spent lying on my back looking at the sky in quite some time and it was lovely, partly for watching the birds go and partly for the was-it-mackerel?-with-occasional-larger-fluffs.
3. Swung by charity shop this afternoon to drop off A Bag Of Stuff. Spotted extremely gay shoes (link has photo, I have not even Tried to actually read the text). Established, via the medium of messaging photos and description, that they were enough too big for A that he didn't wan to try; realised, upon getting home, that the rest of the internet might be interested. Posted photo to FB. Not three minutes later had someone saying YES PLEASE, so back out I went to buy them (and had a lovely chat with the volunteer). (There is also a pair of size 18 Long Tall Sally black linen-viscose mix trousers, with pockets and belt loops, for about £8. If any of you are interested in me acquiring them, only say the word...)
4. Finished last of cake from Tuesday trip via Ottolenghi: Silician lemon & olive oil. I am very excited to have managed to shake the internet until the recipe came out -- I really really enjoyed the way bay contributed to the flavour; I have historically been dubious about making oil-based cakes (in part because historically they Have Not Worked for me) but I am Excited about this one specifically.
5. Frivolous stationery: today I have been enjoying staring at photos of an extremely sold out extremely limited edition Leonardo Momento Zero Grande, and also convincing myself that the Midori metal index tabs are sufficiently likely to Do The Job I Want Them To that I can justify them. (I have convinced myself that book darts are not ideally suited to my main current use case for them, and it is time to Accept This and Try Something Else.)

1. New stationery arrived earlier this week, not for using yet, and I keep getting it out and cooing over it. As celebration of Sorting Out The Paper: a notebook with cover design and endpapers by Yellena James, even though my preferred page layout isn't available, because I like looking at the art just that much (though possibly I should have considered just buying a print and maybe I still will...!). As reward for Sending Off Chapter 5 Rewrites: two Archer & Olive notebooks, recced by celeloriel for purposes of (among other things) self-indulgent (this is a good thing!) watercolour embellishments. (Two: because I couldn't decide on cover design; both North Star and Vintage Bee.) And I am laughing at myself, more than a little, because I knew the paper was 160 gsm and I knew I'd looked at the price points and gone "ah, yeah, sure, why not, I'll go for 192 pages" and I'd even looked at the product weight and thought "huh, that's pretty hefty for a book"... and yet I was somehow still surprised that they do, in fact, as advertised, weigh three quarters of a kilo each.

2. On the topic of fance: fancy shower gel. I have known for Lo These Many Years (good grief, actually genuinely at least a decade) that Fancy Shower Gel that Smells Good makes me much more likely to Shower and much less likely to resent it. Turns out, furthermore, that as I get more financially stable I'm more willing to spend slightly ridiculous amounts of money on "it'll last me several months and make me happy every time I use it" as opposed to topping out at 38p/100ml.

3. I am very pleased both about how much better the most recent batch of meringue came out (I think I was using too little sugar and over-beating the eggs, and have now Learned Some More) and how tasty it is combined with plain yoghurt and also frozen raspberries from last year's harvest.

4. Today's post brought me f i v e h u n d r e d lolly sticks. I am going to label ALL the plants. all of them. (And I have started by working out which chillis have hatched! to which the answer is "some of all of them, give or take me killing off the seedling of the variety I was actually least interested in". I will want to sow more next year, I think, but we will see how this batch goes.)

5. Fiction. I have just finished a Craft Sequence reread, and particularly enjoyed The Ships in Ruin of Angels; I am now in a reread of T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace, because I got two chapters into Palading's Strength before deciding I'd enjoy it more if I remembered who everyone was, or at least stopped getting them quite so confused, and therefore am giggling away to myself at the Grumpy Perfumer, and generally very much appreciating it.

I am on the East Coast Mainline, sat on the left-hand side in the direction of travel, getting to stare down the cliffs onto bays full of dykes (of the igneous rather than queer persuasion), having picked up a new-to-me wheelchair in Edinburgh by dint of a friend's willingness to collect it from West Lothian, and the gorse and red campions are out and the buildings are Old Red Sandstone and this is amazing (I'm in heaven, I'm in heaven, this is the best thing I have ever seen) -- just: yes, yes, thank you.

On Friday evening we sat on a fifth-floor balcony under darkening skies with cheese and bread and fig jam and alcohol. I dangled my legs through the railings and admired the railings across the way. We talked and talked and talked some more. I gave him the selected works of Neruda I'd picked up in the branch of Foyles at St Pancras on my way over; I note with sadness that it shuts at the end of the month. (Still in England, barely outside London, the train passed a field of red double-decker buses that had been put out to pasture.)

On Saturday we ate at an intriguing vegetarian restaurant recommended by a friend (welcome to identify yourself in comments, just wasn't sure whether you'd be okay w/ naming <3) who was very kind about texting back & forth enthusiastically over the course of the morning. The afternoon we spent at the Louvre, where I was very fond of dragons and the cuticles/lines on a Nisus&Euryalis; and there was a tiny gallery of watches about which I was very excited because there was actually a set-up I'd never seen before -- watches with inbuilt sundials + compasses, presumably so that when they wound down/went too badly out you could establish the time in order to correct them! (Really, really excited - I've visited enough horology galleries to be genuinely surprised to come across styles of timepiece I haven't met before.) Said gallery also featured a very nice implementation of the hourglasses-displaying-subdivisions thing -- instead of a rack of 3-4 hourglasses to be turned simultaneously, it was a column of glass blobs that (one infers) emptied sequentially on the quarter hour. AND there was a gallery of scientific instruments and tiny portable armillary spheres, which always make me happy.

In addition there's currently a formal-gardens competition going on -- Notre Dame and a few other associated places seem to have decided on a theme of "The Illusion", by which they mean they've dumped a bunch of 5' tall mirrors in flowerbeds, which is fascinating if slightly creepy.

AND in the EVENING, after a route home via the confusingly-named Luxembourg park that to its credit contained an excellent brass band, we had EIERSCHWAMMERL. I was staggeringly excited to find them at the shop round the corner from P's, because they are very difficult to get hold of in any appropriate form at any appropriate price in the UK, but I got to do all the appropriate things with respect to frying them in butter with garlic and then drowning them in parsley, and lo it was good :-) (At same said stall I was delighted to find that at least in some parts of France the thing I would call Zwetschke is a questche! Not sure which way the etymology goes but will have a go at hunting it down.)

And then TODAY I slept a lot and then feasted well for breakfast (both mornings P popped to the bakery around the corner and returned with a bag of fresh croissant & pain au chocolat while I murbled around still being asleep in bed; it was great) and eventually we left the house; we walked past bookshops & coffee shops & through parks & the Musee d'Armee (nice dome!) & paused to eat fresh bread & fig jam & Selles-sur-Cher, which is my favourite goat cheese and much more readily available in France than in the UK; and ended up at the Musee d'Orsay, where I fell in love with the giant clock faces as architectural features on the top floor and also suddenly got the point of art galleries in front of le jardin de Monet, les iris -- or at least, I suddenly understood why someone might want to just sit and stare at a painting for hours. Additionally: lots of very nice stuff in the Art Nouveau exhibits, and once we got chucked out we hung around on the bank of the Seine to see the Tour de France go past -- P sort of felt he ought to, and so did I, as I'd ignored it in both Cambridge and London and it was right there and due to go by pretty much as the museum was closing...

... and that, having skipped over a fair amount of the intervening raspberry-and-pistachio-ice-cream, was that; I waved at the Centre Pompidou, managed through cunning overscheduling to fail to make it to Etat Libre d'Orange's flagship shop, for which my wallet no doubt thanks me, exclaimed with delight over a very great deal of architecture and a large number of flowerbeds, was delighted to come face-to-face with ponies, swore a lot about how much I hate people, was very glad I'd taken the wheelchair with me, and ate cherries. I continue impressed by how thoroughly pleasant it is to travel by Eurostar with chair - flat rate gets you business lounge & business premier & actually genuinely tasty food on board, so! I was happy and will do the thing again in the future.

Yes. Good weekend. No work, lots of reading of books, good company. Good.

1. Codeine. (Codeine and HF turn out to be less axiomatically lethal in combination than one might have expected.) Basically: I've been having a pain flare since the middle of last week, to the point that I've gone "fuck it" and am taking maintenance codeine in addition to having upped my paracetamol dose. (I try not to do that because my supply of opiates is Limited, but hey. Sometimes the thing is necessary.)

2. Slightly to my surprise, I am actually bang on where I wanted to be with the ridiculous schedule [image|text], give or take the thing last week with a question mark on it, which I am... impressed by, given (1).

3. jjhunter wrote me a poem, and then wrote another poem that might as well be for me with as many of my buttons as it hits.

4. elisem made more shinies! Hel was over, and we SQUEALED WITH DELIGHT; it was brill. I am particularly coveting Night Protocols, The Idea, Rising, Emergent Properties, and How The Message Travels; I genuinely cannot tell if I want Watching Over The Lines (to go with Keeper of the Lines, about which I have written a tiny short prose poem THING that explained my own psychology to me more than I ever expected), because the wirework is glorious but it's not quite my kind of rock (both in terms of colour and in terms of research). And I'd love to love 'Much Ado About Nothing' As Performed By Fish for all sorts of reasons, including that it's my favourite play, but that one is definitely not something that wants to live with me for all it's glorious.

5. Burnt toffee dark chocolate, and unrelatedly blueberries.

6. Sunshine!

7. Talking to strangers on the bus, with the specific aim of helping lost tourists find a place.

8. P, who I am actually managing to catch up with some, which is great.

9. Watering my plants (the strawberries are trying to strawberry!)

10. Hel-who-came-over, who is coming over regularly on Wednesdays at the moment because housemate has gaming, I do better when I have someone to feed, they like being fed, and there is TV I adore showing people that they're wanting to get caught up on. Today: leftovers of yesterday's All The Minestrone (seriously, about five litres) and also courgette fritters, with wholemeal bread + lemon + lettuce.

I am tired and in pain but I am also happy. It is nice.

1. Sunshine.

2. The strawberry plant is starting to have actual fruit on it. Still nowhere near ripe, but nonetheless!

3. Flomping around in vest top and linen trousers.

4. My new wallet. It was a ridiculous extravagance and I felt super-guilty about it, but... it makes me happy every time I look at it, so.

5. Living close enough to friends that if my housemate is out for the evening and I'm not doing brilliantly at food, I can ping someone over IM and ask them to come over for dinner and they will. (I really love that "do me a favour? let me feed you?" is a thing I can ask people.)

6. I am on my first reread of Ancillary Justice because it became perfectly apparent that my brain wasn't going to let me settle into anything else until I did. It is a long time since that last happened.

7. ... apart from the bit where my ereader ended up partway through Famine (by lightgetsin, part of A Deeper Season, the epic Vorkosiverse AU I love to bits) and ~for some reason~ this time round I ended up highlighting huge chunks of it. Ways to fit myself into the world, indeed.

8. My supervisor has replied usefully to the last e-mail I sent her, which means she doesn't hate me forever and I can get on with the things I was trying to get on with with rather less anxiety, thank goodness.

9. People: in addition to spontaneous-friend-tonight, I'm seeing my mum for lunch tomorrow (and possibly visiting London Volcano in company), and randomling is coming over for dinner Friday night; and TOG is staying Friday-Sunday morning. And I then have about three different options for Interesting Things I Can Do With Nice People on Sunday afternoon.

10. Having finished The Middleman, I have persuaded my housemate that A:tLA is a good choice for Next House TV Show. However I am probably going to try to get my act together to make Orphan Black a thing we can do together next season, given how much the entire Internet seems to like it!