who only by moving can balance

There are onions caramelising in the Instant Pot. There is bread needing put to bed in the fridge overnight, for baking tomorrow. I have had supper of, yes, panettone and milk. It has been, on the whole, a good day for me. I hope you are doing well. <3

• I am up to In Sea-Salt Tears in my great big October Daye readthrough. I am having many more feelings about Simon Torquill than I had ever expected to. (Somehow??? I find myself??? with a Simon Torquill ship?????? which I imagine the rest of the fandom got to a VERY long time ago, but maybe that means you will appreciate my bafflement)
• Not unrelatedly, I have books 1 and 3-10 in somewhat battered paperback. (I am... fairly sure book 2 went home with a houseguest one house move ago, alas.) I think that now I have the lot in ebook format I am ready to let these go on to their next home, so if you are in the UK and interested let me know and we can work out how to get 'em to you.
• ( Medical. )
• A reminded me that I paid for the damn private health insurance, and then nudged me through the self-referral process, so tomorrow morning I have a video appointment with a physio so they can go "... yeah we want to see you in person, thanks" about the plantar fasciitis flare that's been a Problem since the beginning of August. (I have also, today, learned the word metatarsalgia. Helpfully, treatment is pretty much identical to NHS recommendations for plantar fasciitis. Less helpfully, several of the recommendations make things worse; of the remainder, the ones I can do haven't helped, and then there's the ones I can't do or at least am intensely reluctant to, including "icing my feet" and "taking lots of painkillers".)
• We had a surprise smart meter installation yesterday. I am sincerely hoping that my brain will Settle The Fuck Down about being able to See Numbers Go Up given a bit more exposure and a bit less NEW SHINY THING in a context of photosensitivity.
• One for the fountain pen nerds: you know, I am now at the point of actively deliberately seeking out and reading Conid Kingsize reviews and I still can't muster anything more than a "I'm glad you're happy" about them, which I am mildly disconcerted by (as well as, obviously, relieved to not be pining over it).

• made it to the allotment. (the day before yesterday, I decided that the Tramper battery and my bike tyres both were too flat to be of use, having made it as far as the main road. yesterday I took the mains lead out to the garage and plugged the Tramper in to the mains to charge, and brought the bike up to the patio for further ministrations. today I took the Tramper to the allotment and fed the bin and inspected my plants various and put some cardboard out over one of the beds as proto-mulch. maybe tomorrow I will dump woodchip over the top.)
  
• remembered to wear warm gloves for the expedition!
  
• first batch of apples: dried! apparently I can fit about half a large carrier bag's worth of apples into the dehydrator if I slice them at actually 1/8" max, whereupon they take less than 6 hours to dry. I think tomorrow's batch is going to get sliced somewhat less thinly, and also, I need to somehow avoid just... consuming them all instead of moving them through to storage.
  
• labelled all but one of the various apple preserves and started moving them through into the pantry.
  
• dragged myself very slowly through an entire book-sequence of Pilates, with lots of pauses between exercises, but I did do all of them (with modification as appropriate).
  
• aaaand semi-surprise phone call from GP survived and medication various now on order :)

• I have been... less entirely non-functional today than I expected. I am not sure whether this is to do with taking one (1) triptan, leaving it two hours, going "well this has made fuck-all difference", and taking The Illicit Codeine, or... what, but I need to go back over my notes and check the extent to which "middle day is less bad" is a pattern and which of those sets of decisions about medication it correlates with. (And for that matter see if tomorrow is worse again.)
  
• I have also been experimenting with prochlorperazine, an anti-emetic, and I think it's been helping a little with the nausea? But my ability to self-monitor mid-migraine still isn't great.
  
• behold the handout for the walking tour of sundials in the centre of Cambridge, which I had cause to link elsewhere and am still inordinately fond of.
  
• NEW DINOSAUR doing a thing that we have not previously identified any animal doing in terms of defensive features
  
• Today's post brought, among other things, a 20cm wooden scoop, which I have now established is vastly preferable to the ladles for Decanting Flour from the 25kg sacks. Currently it is drying after being wiped off with a damp sponge, and tomorrow's jobs include lightly oiling it to make it a little happier.
  
• I am v v grateful for all the comments, even while I'm not managing to actually reply to them in anything remotely resembling a timely fashion. (I still have the post about wearable fitness tracker Things open to respond to, for example, but... brains! Apparently.)

1. We have had some spectacular sunsets several days running -- all sharply delineated beautifully illuminated brightly coloured fringes and trails of cloud.
   
2. I am grinning pretty much every time I look at the hardcopy of the thesis. Giving myself a Nice Tangible Object was definitely a good call.
   
3. I first became aware of flowering teas long after I stopped drinking caffeine. I realised, earlier today, that this is a thing I can have -- like, if I'm going to be having regular migraines I am absolutely going to gleefully grab hold of every single possible positive associated experience.
   
4. On which topic I have also spent a very pleasant chunk of the day looking at tea bowls, and am going to let the research sit and percolate while I decide which I actually want. (The question is essentially "what kind of blue glaze?" -- naturally.)
   
5. Treasure of the day: Papa's army uniform cap, GviR ROYAL ENGINEERS metal crest and all, buried in the last two suitcases of camera gear which I have finally got around to cataloguing today (give or take the two camera cases I have not yet managed to get into, but I'm pretty sure one of them's empty and I've definitely dealt with The Majority Of The Stuff at this point.

• I put an entirely-green tomato (it came off in me hand) in the fruit bowl with the bananas and it's actually ripening: it's been there about a week, this morning I was at "hmm, is that turning yellow?", and it is now unambiguously turning red. I am very excited about this!
  
• I spent a bunch of this morning sorting out my accounts; I'd not been doing great at keeping up with them since about... April... but a quarterly statement arrived last week and, well, I'm now up to date, so that's one background stressor down.
  
• I have come to the possibly dubious conclusion that in addition to tracking (in my giant nearly decade-old spreadsheet) what I've read when, and author demographics, and brief notes, and so on, I should also track when I bought things (or who I borrowed them from, etc), and thus elapsed time between acquisition and consumption. This in turn means I'm... actually going to set myself up with a list of Things I Haven't Read Yet But Own And Want To, in addition to the "recs received" list, because that's the easiest way to track acquisition date with my current set-up, and long story short I think I might be procrastinating.
  
• I have picked up a reread, however, which is. A doorstop of a hardback. That I want to keep Nice. And it turns out there are in fact many reasons that I mostly don't read hardcopy full stop let alone hardbacks, still, and also that the ebook is currently £4.99, so I think I'll keep going for the first chapter or two and probably then grudgingly admit defeat that discretion is the better part of valour and that I really like this book.
  
• Two days ago, Freecycle went "hey, do you want an exercise bike?" "Hmm," thinks I, "well Adam will probably say we don't have space for it and even if he doesn't it'll probably be gone by the time either of us reply," but I sent him the link and heard nothing back and made mild enquiries later that evening about his thoughts on the topic and, uh, yesterday evening (1) we picked up an exercise bike and (2) A spent a bunch of time Doing Some Tidying to make space for it. It is... very much designed for a 6' tall man, and it is a bare-bones model with minimal scope for adjustment, but I did a slightly incautious three minutes and my knee isn't screaming, so, let's see how it's feeling tomorrow, eh?