kaberett | Entries tagged with mush

I HAVE LEGITIMATELY SOURCED A COPY OF THE (I'll stop shouting now) pattern for the Firstfall mitts! About which I am delighted, not least because it means I've got something fiddly to do in hospital/etc -- working out genypher's short row faff seems to me vastly more approachable than trying to reconstruct the whole damn pattern!

Other delights today have included "delivery of a pair of ridiculously fancy leggings" and "Glow Wild 2024" (photos of which to follow), but -- I woke up to the e-mail notification and have been buzzing happily ever since. (And occasionally forgetting why I'm buzzing -- but buzzing nonetheless!)

On our most recent trip to Cornwall A made a bunch of recordings of The Waves and The Wind and (occasionally) The Birds for me. I am starting to listen through them to establish that they do not contain Unpleasant Surprises, for the purpose of having Soothing Noise to listen to in hospital.

I have thereby discovered that I can play said recordings using the bone-conduction headphones and have a completely normal conversation simultaneously, because the sounds slot so well into the Ah Yes Home bit of my hindbrain that instead of being Extra Processing (Bad) it just winds up being reassuring.

I am delighted by this proof of concept.

I mentioned, recentlyish, being both good and brave.

I have been wondering, on and off, over the about -- well, "brav" is the German for "good" (in the sense of well-behaved), so... cognate???

I was initially plerplexed by poking at etymonline and wiktionary, both of which specify

From Middle French brave, borrowed from Italian bravo, itself of uncertain origin...

... but NOPE that's also where we get brav from!

Bonus: etymonline also encouraged me to look up Old English "modig" ("(now "moody")"), in some startlement, because that sure does look like "mutig" i.e. the German for "brave"! ... yep, they're cognate too. I am charmed by the semantic drift!

Me, earlier today: Hey, Adam, is there a reason you didn't flatten the [smallish] carton before putting it in the recycling? Adam: ... yes. I forgot. :( Me: Okay, cool!

... and there the conversation ends. If it were the case that he didn't realise that collapsing the boxes was better, or he was labouring under the erroneous belief that Not breaking them down was Better, we could productively continue the discussion ~~so that I could convince him that My Way Is Better~~. But it's not that: it's that Brains Gonna Brain. There is no disagreement here and in this instance no change that could be implemented where the benefits outweigh the costs, so -- information exchange complete, conclusion reached, and on we go.

I only really noticed the contrast between this shape of conversation and Assumed Heteronormative Scripts earlier today, when the cardboard question came up.

( Read more... )

But mostly: I am just amused (and a little bit proud) that we have managed to get to a place where the answer to this sort of question being "no, there is no good-in-the-sense-of-positively-motivating reason" leads not to Increasing Resentment but instead to acceptance. Well done us.

We are continuing to greatly enjoy Ori and the Will of the Wisps, give or take the bit where the game has twice now just... dropped... a couple of hours of saved play out of existence, and also the bit where it is alarmingly easy to look up and realise it's 90 minutes past lights-out time, never mind bed time.

The thing that actually prompted us to bump it up the list was being told about the adorable creature chorus announcing "So brave! So soggy!" As a household (... me. this one's me.) we were already prone to pronouncing I Have Been Very Brave (or the car has been very brave, or a snail has been very brave, etc) and are consequently Delighting in the call-and-response structure (adjectives so far that are not "soggy" have included "muddy" and "sticky"...)

But I think my second favourite so far is definitely enthusiasm makes everything an adventure (even if you can't jump very high!); third place goes to "Bad water! Sad water!"

We are playing through at what is apparently a very leisurely pace, even without the evaporating saves, judging by the Steam discussions. I am completely okay with this, and at this point it seems pretty likely that we'll go back and play the first one next...

Today has been for Errands, including the errand of Getting A Full CO₂ Canister, which requires driving most of the way to Whipsnade Zoo on a weekday.

So we did that (via returning a library book, and dropping things off at a charity shop, and buying vitamins, and stopping at the pharmacy, and visiting the tip where I maybe slightly acquired another cookbook) and then, obviously, visited The Zoo.

Highlights included:

BABY ELEPHANT. POKING HER LITTLE NOSE OUT BETWEEN THE BARS TO PICK UP THE HAY THE BIG ELEPHANTS HAD DROPPED ON THE FLOOR.
also she yelled. ... at the forklift.
also we watched a Big Elephant roll a log ponderously across the enclosure so they could put their feets on it so as to reach the suspended haynet with their face
baby langur!!!
Saw The Pygmy Hippo
saw the CHEETAHS who are not normally quite that obliging
goldfinches
PENGUINS WITH EGGS
flamingoes doing a BIZARRE vibratey thing with their faces
babirusa, which have ridiculous fancy tusks
Visayan warty pigs gruntling away to themselves

... and then we came home and played more Filament. Good day.

This morning I found myself, for reasons, handing A's hot drink back to him while he was getting set up for work. I was mildly baffled that it was tea, not coffee, and remarked upon this.

:(, said the Adam, approximately, and explained to me that he had been meaning to get more from the refill shop, and then he hadn't managed to make it to the refill shop, and by the time he'd realised he'd mismanaged his stock control he was going to be able to go back to the refill shop before an online order could make it to him anyway, and...

I, obviously, stared at him. As realisation dawned.

Adam, says I. Did you... forget. That coffee. Can be found. In supermarkets. Supermarkets like the ones we've made several visits to in the last week.

... oh, said the Adam, who had indeed forgotten that coffee also comes from supermarkets.

(He was very good-natured about my helpless laughter.)

This evening's date activity was "go on a stupid little walk for our stupid mental health" with a secondary quest of Fruit.

We achieved: probably around a kilo of blackberries? I need to weigh them still; a visit to the plum trees, which need another week or so; and a quick check on the quince, which is Definitely A Quince and has Many Fruit.

In the course of all of this I wound up explaining to Adam that There Are (Roughly) Two Kinds Of Blackberries growing wild hereabouts (with various closely-related crossbreeds): the big fat juicy ones that really do want to be about ready to drop off the canes before they're at Optimum Flavour, and the smaller chewier tougher ones with a more complex flavour. The allotment mostly has the former; the fields out around the back mostly have the latter, so A had to do lots of taste-testing to recalibrate How Ripe Was Acceptably Ripe For Harvest. And then, in an idle attempt to establish whether "bramble jelly" versus "blackberry jelly" is regionalism for the same thing or meaningfully drawing some kind of distinction between wild and cultivated, I learned... that blackberry genetics are More Of A Mess Than That. To the point that they're just an aggregate species. Microspecies! They're all microspecies! I am delighted!

A month or several ago, while we were wandering around talking about something or other, A somewhat sheepishly said that he thought Animal Experiences were a Really Good Present Idea but he was concerned it was Cheating in some fashion to get me animal experiences for my birthdays because I'd Thought Of It First.

While I am absolutely a fan of saying "look at this ridiculous(ly expensive) fountain pen! wanna buy it for me?" and indeed "hey, want to buy us afternoon tea at Ruby Violet?" I am also very much on board with Surprise Animals, and that is why this time last week we were settling down to sleep in a tiny two-person cabin overlooking the Chilterns having thoroughly worn ourselves out with Keeper for a Day at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo.

a photo wood-panelled bedroom featuring a photo of lions, a vase of flowers, and some pillows

[ID: one wall of a light-coloured wooden cabin, with a print on canvas of a photograph of two lions. to the lower left, pillows in white pillowcases are visible. to the right is a chest of drawers, on top of which there are a cube-shaped box of tissues and a clear glass vase containing red and yellow roses, and purple and red-and-yellow tulips.]

This had entailed getting up early enough to Be At Whipsnade for 08³⁰, which was made all the more painful by making a surprise late-night wheelchair delivery the previous evening, but nevertheless we had an excellent time of it.

( Keeper for a Day, in detail )

... and then it was time to fetch the car from the main car park and head up to the lodges for the Zoo Sleepover.

( Lookout Lodge, in bullet points, to be expanded upon at a time that is not bedtime. )

A couple of months ago I wound up seeing a tumblr post about The Burrito Method of getting a duvet into its cover[1], and promptly went !!! because I got myself a superking when I moved to London (a grown-up duvet for my first double bed!) and have Loathed changing its cover ever since.

The first time I experimented with it, I did it solo. The second time, I asked A if he would like to Share An Experience.

So we laid out the duvet cover, and we laid out the duvet, and we rolled it up, and I said "and now you invert the corners!" and wound up staring at my hands in confusion while I tried to remember exactly how the magic works. It was at this point that A started Voicing His Doubts about how this could Possibly Work.

Hold-on-give-me-a-moment I muttered, or something like that, and did the corner trick. A was still going "this geometry doesn't work. this doesn't work? this cannot work." as I started unrolling again.

A stunned silence Developed. Briefly. And Then Came The Denouncements Of This Witchcraft, followed by some more silence and a thousand-yard stare while he tried and failed to work out what in the name of fuck had just happened, geometrically speaking, and long story short-ish I'm not saying he's safeworded non-Euclidean etc but also...

[1] ugh okay edited to be a link from further down the reblog chain that does work, as opposed to the one that doesn't grump grump :-p

Which, as it turns out, we first did seven years ago.

In early 2016 I was not having a... brilliant time of it. I was taking an interruption from the PhD because my antidepressants had, fairly catastrophically, stopped working; I was having a lot of housing/housemate stress; and I was consequently spending a lot of time at A's -- indeed, friends helped me move all of my stuff from one side of London to t'other, to move in with him, the last weekend in February.

One of the ways I deal with "stress" and "not wanting to eat" is tackling Learning A Culinary Technical Skill.¹ The previous summer, I'd gone up to the Edinburgh Fringe with the same friends who spent the weekend moving me, and discovered the bounties of the crème brûlée van.

So I decided to learn to make custard, for the purposes of crème brûlée! And A very gamely ate a lot of slightly dubious experiments until I'd worked out how to achieve exactly the result I was after, most of which we brûléed with his soldering iron.

Adam's soldering iron, I should at this point clarify, is -- crucially -- gas powered and has removable tips. This means that you can remove the tip and use it as a flame torch, without getting anything that's actually touched actual solder on your food, which would not constitute Best Practice. We thought we'd only do it a few times, as proof of concept, and then if I didn't lose interest in making crème brûlée I'd get a proper culinary blowtorch! ... it worked sufficiently well that we didn't bother, and for the last mumble years the soldering iron body has lived in one of the utensil pots rather than in the tool box with the rest of its accessories and accoutrements.

This will not work if instead of flammable gas your soldering iron runs off, e.g., electricity. It is, additionally and furthermore, a bad idea to stick the metal tip of any kind of soldering iron into anything you are intending to eat! But if you have a soldering iron with more-or-less the same characteristics as A's, I can confirm that this approach works entirely adequately!

So there you go. That's the story. :)

1. If I am sufficiently sad and sufficiently uninspired by the entire concept of food I will accidentally end up making quiche and twice-cooked chips and salad from, variously, the flour and the whole potatoes on up, and usually by the time I've wrangled all of the moving parts and tasted things as I go along I wind up no longer feeling repulsed by food and actually willing to ingest it so that the effort doesn't go to waste.

In January 2021, I said

Lessons for next time (probably not until 2023, given that the last time I made any was 2018)...

I insisted to

lemon_badgeress, in specific, that I definitely was not going to make any marmalade in 2022.

In February 2022, I remarked that

I insisted last year that I wasn't going to be making any marmalade this year

... while, of course, making marmalade, using a portion of the 5kg of blood oranges we had accidentally delivered.

It's okay, I said, to

lemon_badgeress. I definitely won't make any marmalade next year--

(You see, of course, where this is going.)

Earlier this week, during his usual call with his mum, she asked A slightly wistfully if she should send us some more blood oranges. (We took her some of the blood orange marmalade I made from the previous lot and she discovered that she does, actually, under some circumstances, to her very great surprise, like the stuff.)

Today, while finalising a grocery order, A asked me -- with the page open in front of him -- if I'd like any blood oranges.

I do not like anything larger than a clementine unless it's been juiced[1], and he knows this. (During undergrad, when I was living with C and sharing groceries etc, knowing what "oranges" meant on our shared shopping list required remembering which of us had put them there, because she only likes big ones.)

Obviously, therefore, I said no. No I did not want them. No they were not relevant to my interests. Thank you! but no.

... and then, perhaps foolishly, I relented, and added "... but if what you mean is that you'd like to get some, and have me turn them into marmalade, as a Special Treat for you and your mother..."

And so, inevitably, this year I find that I will once again be making marmalade.

[1] ... or made into marmalade...

( Read more... )

Tonight A & I are sleeping in different places for the first time since, I think, the end of November 2019. (He is in the back of the car in a field in the Midlands, doing some Extremely Outdoors And Generally Masked prep for First LARP in... exactly the same length of time, in fact, and I am at home in bed.)

I woke up without a migraine, this morning, and on the whole that's much better than the alternatives. I have had a day of quiet pottering: I retroactively filled out the hospital's preferred migraine diary for February (on the basis of my personal notes), I organised meal planning and an online shop, I Did My Exercise, I did some half-decent horn practice, I read some book, I continued catching up on my reading page (I'm almost to the end of January!), I messed about with fountain pens and notebooks and starting to actually write up my personal planting calendar, and I had an excellent dinner of pasta with roasted cherry tomatoes and peppers and red onions and garlic and parsley and basil from the plants around the house and also tiny mozzarella balls (which A did not abscond with; I had meant to prompt him re same).

And now I think I am falling asleep, so: goodnight, Dreamwidth. <3

Reading. Her Body & Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado. Finished & returned to the library! Excellent prose; I found the stories uncomforting & disorienting and am still chewing on them.

Listening. FTHC, Frank Turner's latest. I'm very glad he's doing generally better. I think most of the album is not for me, but some of it definitely is, and I will try to sort out which tracks are which by listening to it when I am not in a moving vehicle.

Orphan Black: The Next Chapter, another episode thereof. This is still an audiobook squashed uncomfortably into the format of a podcast, and I still don't quite believe the Characterisation and the Manufactured Drama, but I remain very fond of all of the characters and happy to have them as background noise.

Cooking. ( Amaretti, rice pudding, confit tandoori chickpeas )

Growing. Passion fruit has three true leaves! Yacon is... sprouting?! And the greenhouse blew down and I did initial triage and clean-up (and got some broad beans in the ground) and then I had a migraine.

Observing. ( mush )

Approximately all I have managed today, aside from Having A Migraine, is throwing a bunch of vegetables as needed used into the Instant Pot this morning before I passed back out. The noise of chopping was not good, but soup for lunch was. (This is frankly Very Good Going for Having A Migraine.)

Meanwhile, A heroically handled all of the interaction with the human I'd booked to come and Fix The Tramper, so it's had a service and is now WORKING AGAIN (its batteries had finally died), which means I have more ways to get to the allotment again, which is Very Definitely A Good Thing.

Also he picked up a three-piece coal set from freecycle for the benefit of my mother, and while he was out acquired More Dubious Bibimbap and also red bean mochi for dinner. I am well looked after. <3

Today started, auspiciously, with me getting Adam to hold my hand through a bunch of detailed troubleshooting of the four-way block that's command-stripped to the wall just above my bedside table for the purposes of plugging in my bedside lamp, my phone/watch charger, hair clippers, etc. I'd checked that everything plugged into it still worked in different sockets, and then moved the actual four-way block through to the living room to test it with a different electron source (all four sockets!) and was perplexed to find that Everything Was Fine. I'd been gearing up to get the multimeter out and check the fuse in the plug and so on and so forth, but it was all... mysteriously fine?

So I took it back to the bedroom, plugged it back in, and experienced The Dawning Realisation that the great big clonk my phone made falling down the back of it last night?

Had bounced off the switch rendering the whole damn assembly turned off at the wall.

Anyway, this evening I have a migraine, but in the meantime (with more of A's supervision) I used some power tools and reseasoned some cast iron and oiled and sharpened a variety of gardening blades, and I'm less miserable than I might be, so on balance it has been a satisfactory day.

Duolingo listening exercise, Tuesday night, as transcribed by me: "Zwei plus drei gleich vier" ("two plus three equals four"). It's not uncommon for auditory processing to fuck with my ability to distinguish sounds, but usually I'm managing to carry out basic sense-checking of what I think I've heard, and reinterpret on the fly as necessary.

Fast forward to this evening. Migraine has (touch wood) cleared up, but I'm still wearing sunglasses indoors and generally being Careful. I can talk in coherent sentences again! I can have a whole entire thought from beginning to end on the first attempt! But A is still, not unreasonably, operating on the basis that my general level of functioning is as per exhibit A above. We sit down to dinner; I pick up the cutlery he's brought round, to distribute it; I stall in confusion.

-- backing up briefly: we have three (and a half) different sets of cutlery. One (and a half) belongs to me, being the cutlery my mother took to university with her, which I then took off in my turn. (... they fork you up...?) Two belong to Adam. We agree on the second-best cutlery -- we both think the set with squared off ends to the handles is Acceptable. However, he thinks my inherited floral cutlery is An Abomination Unto Nuggan, and I feel similarly about his round-bottomed IKEA cutlery (with the grudging caveat that I will use the forks for making bread, because they conveniently weigh more-or-less-exactly 50g).

So I have in my hands four items of cutlery, consisting of two items from the abominable IKEA set and two of the acceptable square-bottomed set.

I am staring in bewilderment at the contents of my hands.

Adam, as described, is still assuming that I am operating with significant cognitive impairments.

Somewhat defensively, he protests that I think that particular square-bottomed knife and fork make a matching pair, even if he doesn't. (The detail is, I think, something to do with him owning one solitary knife from a subtly different set, which he can't bring himself to get rid of because It's A Perfectly Functional Knife...) While doing so, he removes from my hand -- by the pointy ends -- the two round-bottomed IKEA utensils.

There is a moment of silence before he realises that I am still staring at cutlery, but it's the cutlery he's holding not the cutlery I'm holding.

He shifts his grip to the handles. He shifts his gaze to the tines. Of the forks. The forks plural.

And slowly -- beautifully -- comprehension finally dawns.

A couple of weeks ago, A took me into central London. We packed everything still in my desk at work into a couple of bags, and then we went to the zoo.

I have now got around to taking... most... of the Stuff out of said bags, and once again am wailing and gnashing my teeth about Needing More Shelf Space even after I dumped a good kilo or two of paper in the recycling. One of the things I did manage to tidy away, though (for some value of "tidy") is my molymod set. I tucked it under the monitor stand on my half of the desk in the study and wandered off...

... and a little while later wandered back to find that A had at some point, presumably in some meeting or other, Helped Himself To It and started building molecules.

Which is to say: I considered inviting him to play with it but decided that he'd probably get to it regardless so didn't bother making it explicit, and now I get to explain organic chemistry to him. Like: why do the nitrogens have options for four bonds? So, obviously, I've now talked him through the Bohr model (which was revision) and dot and cross diagrams (which weren't) and what orbitals as in electron probability densities look like and Why The Periodic Table Is Like That (feat. printing one out and cutting it up) and, briefly, at the end of this evening's infodumping, Why Graphite Is Electrically Conductive.

I am having great fun. And I am only slightly considering finally shelling out for the molymod orbitals kit...

As I have previously mentioned, and as the joke goes, There Are Two Kinds Of Autistics...

... and in this specific instance, I'm "leave things out on the side until it's empty enough that I can work up the executive function to put them away neatly" to A's "shove everything into the cupboard until it becomes completely untenable and then haul it all out to reorganise", where the more chaotic the cupboard is the less able I am to put things away and the more things are out on the side the more desperately he'll shove them into cupboards anywhere they fit.

Negotiating this incompatibility is... a work in progress. :-p

But! We recently had another go-round with "how is it possible to distinguish between things I've left out because I have a specific near-future purpose in mind for them, versus those I've left out because Nope?" and I abruptly realised that a trivial and straightforward solution that I can implement with precisely 0 problem is "have a dedicated pad of kitchen post-its, plus a dedicated kitchen pen, preferably attached to the fridge".

Because! You see! It is absolutely ingrained that one of the last things you do on your way out of lab is you look around and you see what you've left out in communal areas (as opposed to your dedicated storage space) and you label the shit out of it...

... usually using a post-it.

Thus we have a system that costs me approximately nothing and makes Adam's life much more pleasant, and I am gently amused at transferable skills producing easy wins.

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

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

GREAT EXCITEMENT

an good thing

very good and VERY brave (or, etymological redundancy)

conversational snippets & scripts

enthusiasm! makes everything an adventure!

zooooooo

oh no

blackberries!

further adventures with fauna: Whipsnade Keeper for a Day

non-euclidean geometry in the bedroom

... I forgot that you wouldn't all know about the soldering iron crème brûlée

[food] ... I do this to myself.

ten good things

[plague diaries] milestones

vital functions

some good things make a post

[diarish]

[migraine] anecdotes on a theme of cognitive impairment

adventures in chemistry!

transferable... something, anyway

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April 2025

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