who only by moving can balance

1. Good grief I am tired. I would really really like the fatigue to ease up a little, please, any time now would be great.
2. Was Conveyed to check on the saffron. I haven't obviously missed any flowers (not that it would necessarily be obvious...) and I think there are another couple of clumps coming up.
3. 'nother page of handwriting practice today. I suddenly understand why they're called "copybooks". Also, if I actually keep practising then I am going to Indulge Myself to the tune of attempting to find a copybook that isn't predominantly composed of Eighteenth-Century Moralisms. Like! It's a C18 copybook! It's not surprising that it also does duty as Improving Literature? But I think I would prefer a slightly different flavour of Improving Literature, actually.
4. Aaaand today we started on the first big vat of soup of the season: pumpkin and carrot and leek and onion and celery.

One of my minor victories today: not panic-buying a cylinder of CO₂. We had an empty SodaStream canister that we definitely weren't going to refill from our larger CO₂ canister, and not just because our larger CO₂ canister needs refilling, which means we need to take a trip to Whipsnade Zoo, which means we need a car. Obviously.

So today's Outdoors Adventure (neatly avoiding rain!) involved picking up some drugs for me and also for A from the pharmacy; taking a photograph of a gate for THE GATE APPRECIATION SOCIETY on Facebook (A+ wholesome content, highly recommend if you're on FB anyway); and dropping said empty canister off for recycling at one of the places that sells SodaStream canisters and therefore participates in their recycling scheme. The way the recycling scheme works is that you get £10 off your next canister if you're handing an empty one in; the very cheerful and helpful and friendly assistant asked very kindly if I definitely didn't want a replacement...?

I am easily flustered and therefore found myself saying, approximately, oh, go on then, and indeed had got all of the cash out of my wallet, at which point Friendly Assistant said "oh! if you're paying by cash we'll need to use the other till--" and gestured me up to queue at the other till, which was otherwise occupied.

Which gave me long enough to recover some semblance of rational thought, recall that we already have An Abundance of cylinders at home, and that it would be vastly cheaper (and arguably more sound on various axes etc etc etc) to, if I were actually that desperate for Angry Water, just buy a 2l bottle of sparkling mineral water from a supermarket (£1.75 for a 4-pack) than to buy a Whole New Cylinder (£12.99 with bottle-return rebate), to add to our Pile Of Cylinders, which we would then need to return, whereupon the life cycle would repeat itself.

So I said "oh, no, sorry, I'm being silly, I'd just like to return the old one for recycling, please!" and fled.

Other things achieved: acquired intro Pilates book that I thought looked plausible acquired for A; found a shirt that we wound up going back to get for A also (because I have been venturing briefly into charity shops, masked, primarily to drop things off but while I'm In There...); some more getting to grips with our new schedule for meal-planning (after a fashion, at least); retrieved Large Glass Jars from the garage and decanted various seeds from the One Remaining Awkward Food Shelf into them from their loose bags; brought bike in to deal with the fact that the rear brake is being a problem again (and upended it, though did not actually get as far as Wrangling The Brake); had an Entire Moment over the Irish for "brain" being "in-head"; continued delighted with our other kitchen-rearrangement, such that it is now Much Easier for me to get the Instant Pot (and indeed the rice cooker) out and indeed put away again, so there's a very happy proto-loaf of mostly-wholemeal raisin-and-walnut that's been put to bed in the fridge for breakfast tomorrow. And now! it is also time to put my me to bed. Goodnight!

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

[Content note: breathing problems. Not plague!]

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They sent me an e-mail about a virtual gift, you see -- not that I've logged in since The ToS Changes...

I have also now had my COVID-19 booster, as of lunchtime. I think I am going to take another dose of paracetamol before I attempt sleep...

A couple of weeks ago now, A dropped me off at the allotment, on his way into town to pick up meds from the pharmacy.

On his way back up the hill, he paused to send me some photographs, captioned "What sort of tree is this? I don't think I've ever seen seed pods quite like these..."

"Oh!" sez I, "Those are cob nuts! We can eat them if you like."

By the time I replied (my hands having been full of snail) he'd already wandered on without them, and so on that day no cobnuts were consumed, at least by us.

Today, however! Today, on our way back from a Terrible Date Activity (i.e. ongoing active participation in the ZOE study), A took us on a detour via the tree in question. In fairly short order, we filled a carrier bag nuts in their wee hats, and then continued on to the allotment, where I separated the nuts from said hats in order to feed the hats directly to the compost bin.

(Trees for Life asserts that "The English name for the tree and its nut is derived from the Anglo-Saxon haesel knut, haesel meaning cap or hat, thus referring to the cap of leaves on the nut on the tree." -- but I have not actually tried terribly hard to track that down, yet, because it is past my bedtime.)

This evening, after a lot of faffing around with a mortar and pestle, we eventually had them -- all half-a-small-bowl of them -- for dinner (with Cosse Violette beans from the allotment, and a cheese-and-onion quiche with allotment-onions, and boiled wee potatoes and half a large carrot each, and thyme and -- for me -- parsley).

Personally I am very much of the opinion that they are Not, in and of themselves, Worth The Faff -- but I was and indeed am definitely enthusiastic about encouraging A in Foraging Behaviours.

However, having demonstrated that these oddly tentacular seed pods are food, I am glad to report that he, too, considers them Not Worth The Faff. I am nonetheless delighted that we've now conducted this experiment, however, and am immensely looking forward to the day when I can drag A into Waitrose during cobnut season and show him just how much they charge by weight for fancy hazelnuts still with their horrible little hats on...

Reading. We've had a little more of 20020! We are parcelling it out carefully so we can savour the last few chapters. simont explained variations in the outfield in baseball fields to me last week, which has further improved my enjoyment of this amazing multimedia fiction.

Writing. The chunk of ch4 I was incredibly stuck on is now written to the level of informal sentences. Unfortunately, I then went on to trying to work on the next bit and promptly tripped up on something else unexpected, so that's gonna take me a while too. Current gameplan: e-mail supervisors with what I have tomorrow morning, along with questions about what's bothering me and details of my other progress, namely "typesetting chapter 3" and "so do we wanna put this paper up on a preprint server or what". Which is at least evidence of some work even if I ended up shifting around what was scheduled. :|

Playing. ( Read more... )

Cooking. A Disappointing quiche. Two rounds of quesadilla, where I really need to get my act together to start the black beans 24 hours in advance because they are much improved by resting, and also we finished the last of last year's squash. And bread! We just finished the last pair of 25kg sacks of flour, and are going, tomorrow, to need to break into the new pair. (50kg of flour lasts us about 6 months, so I am buying about that much about that frequently and otherwise not having to think about it and it's glorious.)

Growing. I continue small quantities of plant-maintenance at home. My first Big Packet Of Seeds arrived earlier in the week. I am going, damn it, to get this chapter redraft done and then I am going to spend some time with plants. :|