who only by moving can balance

Today, my mother posted me a package containing some onion sets and some seed Charlotte potatoes and -- probably -- some other bits and bobs.

Today, I put together a package for my mother containing caraway seeds, and poppy seeds, and sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds, and a wee tub of sourdough starter. (It needs taking to a parcel post box; that trip is probably going to be combined with picking up my latest prescription from the pharmacy and is almost certainly not going to be made by me.)

Back in the 70s and 80s, my Großmutti was living in Cornwall and her mother, Grausi, was living, still, in Austria. At that point it wasn't really possible to get, in the UK or at least that part of it, poppy seed or vanilla sugar or any of a number of other small comforts that make your connections and your continuities feel a bit less tenuous.

Which is how it came to pass that Grausi would post, across the Iron Curtain, packages containing anonymous (but highly scented) white powder, and poppy seeds that probably weren't a drug precursor, and--

-- and here I am, posting my mother food, and having her post food to me.

I have (at least since I started the PhD, and probably longer) derived particular joy from looking at the publication dates of academic papers I am reading, and thinking about where I was and what I was doing at the approximate time that research was being performed. I have a particular soft spot for the work done while I was in primary school, for no particular reason other than sentiment, but in general it's just very soothing to watch this continuous chain of human endeavour directed toward Understanding Shit Better in a way that -- from my particular perspective -- funnels down to me. (Anthrophic principle, innit.)

earlier in the day: a multi-collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer

currently: my grandmother's darning mushroom; needle & threads; A Laptop Computer

Diarish: various putterings about, today, with vague gestures toward housework and doing a lot more science (not, of course, that I am anywhere close to done yet, or at least not as close to done as I'd like to be given that it's very definitely my bedtime). The rest of the fennel seed heads are spread out on some ancestral linen on the floor of the study to dry; I used my grandmother's secateurs to chop some dead sunflowers down to a vaguely transportable size; I fed my mother some Potitze, and we played Scrabble with a set liberated from the mouldering ancestral pile; my parents took us out to dinner and I might finally have got the Turkish for "leaf" (yaprak) into active vocab by dint of finally recognising it as a constituent part of a menu item. We talked, over dinner, about the amount of time Papa Hase spent in Turkey; both he and Mama spoke Turkish. Threads of continuity.

I have been missing my grandmother a lot, the last week or so, as I've been working through a bag of plums from the allotment. We've had cobbler and crumble (and indeed at the moment I've got a bag of apples from my mother's garden stewing on the hob, to go into jars tomorrow), but apparently I associate "baked plum desserts" with Mama, and consequently I've been wisting after plums halved, stones left in for flavour, across the bottom of a rectangular Pyrex dish, with some lemon juice and spices, and a single layer of pastry over the top.

I've just also been too tired and worn thin to make the pastry.

I find myself trapped in something of an exhaustion spiral. I'm resenting how much I need to sleep, and how little it means I get done, so I'm arranging my days around not napping, which gives me more time but less energy such that I'm not really actually getting much more done (well, except for the things that want to sit and wait for a while once they've started), so then I stay up "late" to Just Do One More Thing because I can't face 8 o'clock bedtimes and the insomnia would probably interfere anyway, and then I'm too tired to do much, so...

... I did at least take a nap this afternoon, for an hour or so, and I am at least spotting what's going on; in a spirit of accountability, I note here that I am not going to go into work tomorrow: I'm going to stay at home, and sleep, and maybe go rummage around in some plants, and read a novel, and try to rest.

The link, such as it is, is that my mother has been remarking with some degree of envy or intimidation about the number of Fo-ish -- Mama-ish -- things I do: the bread the gardening the marmalade the cakes. On the one hand, I'm bleakly aware that I'm not doing half so much of it as I'd like, or indeed as Mama did, and it's still more, really, than I can manage; on the other, I am trying to remind myself that Mama also routinely took siestas in her latter years.

Round and round we go. I'm being somewhat difficult to live with at the moment. Here's hoping that the sleep helps.

Thank you to everyone over here who linked me to the Never Again Means Now fundraiser, aiming to cover legal fees for people involved in direct action against the US' concentration camps; I wanted to let you know that I've put the link up on FB, I appear to have been the first person in my extended social sphere to have done so, and it is getting a lot of traction and onward sharing.

I had been feeling utterly hopeless and powerless, and being able to put money towards this is helping. Thank you.

(I wish I had the cope to write a round-up of what this is and why it's important and why I think it's a useful way to spend money on the problem, but I'm afraid I'm one week post-Decapeptyl and I just can't.)

Reading. ( Read more... )

TV. Leverage Leverage Leverage. Aaaaaaaalmost to the end of this season, at which point we will switch back over to Orphan Black for a season.

Music. A concert! EChO's spring offering, as an audient rather than a player, as mentioned yesterday. Our Patron's latest, Mozart's second horn concerto, Beethoven pastoral.

Living space. Garage storage has arrived! Which was very helpful, because the bubble wrap et cet it was delivered in proved extremely useful for Transporting Greenhouse Bits. We haven't yet started filling it up but we are making progress on sorting the next box of charity shop stuff. Finalising bookcases is currently blocked on sorting out (i) where the new Internet comes into the house (which means I need to speak to a neighbour), and (ii) some bonus shelves for something that looks for all the world like an IKEA Billy bookcase but is 24cm deep and 68cm wide instead of... anything even remotely standard for the Billy system.

Growth. SO MUCH HATCHING (peep peep peep peep). Both kinds of pea (in an egg box in the bathroom) are determinedly Wearing Hats; several of the chillis are now coming up with visible leaves and all, and stems that are starting to be purple; comfrey continues enthusiastic in spite of today's actual literal snow; Passiflora edulis is not doing anything detectable, but then I wouldn't expect it to be. Infrastructurally, I've acquired scaffold boards and The Greenhouse (including water butt, gutter connection kit, and some staging). The compost bin is slowly heating up again (and I've got some more food for it to eat tomorrow); I've ordered some legs to arrive later this week, and at some point will get A to drive me over to B&Q to buy some concrete to anchor the legs with. (And dither over paving slabs. And whether to use cheap flower pots or cheap pipe to contain the concrete. And and and...) But: Adam's away next weekend, which means I can just spend the entire thing rolling around in the mud, which in turn means that hopefully I'll at least take steps toward getting it up then or thenabouts.

Cooking. First batch of bread since getting home (which reminds me, I need to get the tiny god out of the fridge so that I can cook with it again tomorrow). Spinach for ravioli outards prepared; butternut squash-roast garlic-ricotta-pine nut innards likewise prepared. Fingers crossed for scraping together the brain & cope to make a big batch tomorrow.

Language. I am... not getting on terribly well with the FutureLearn Irish 101 course so far; I find "here's a bunch of set phrases and we're not going to give you the grammatical background to understand how they're being constructed for an indeterminate time" stressful, so I've stalled partway through the first week. This is frustrating but, eh, maybe I will manage to scrape together brain and cope.

Board games. ( Read more... )

Pokemon Go. New-to-me species this week: Dialga (BLUE SPIKEY BIOLUMINESCENT DRAGON FRIEND, current legendary raid boss), Mantyke (oh NO it has a SMILEY FACE on its back), Happiny (I... am not sure about this baby Chansey). I caught my first wild Shieldon (having previously hatched one), along with A's first one full stop. I also hatched a shiny Budew and caught a shiny Mankey. (Hopes for a shiny Machop or Makuhita before the end of the current event are... dwindling.)

and the days at last grow longer.

here's hoping for a symbolic, as well as a literal, crawling out of the dark for the northern hemisphere.