Celebrating. Two birthdays! Both, conveniently, in Cambridge.

Reading. The Age of Seeds, Fiona McMillan-Webster (finished). Cannot articulate why this turned into a bit of a slog (kept running off to look other things up? suspicion about the materials science fluency? difficulty engaging with The Climate Situation for leisure purposes? lots of other things going on?) but I did finish it and I have learned things. Sort of. I at least now have more of a vague outline about how seed dormancy works (on multiple levels) than I did previously, even if I did spend a lot of the explanation going "okay but what does that MEAN???"

Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh. Two chapters left!

I also continue to take steps towards getting my head around neuroanatomy; today I have been particularly annoyed by (1) the terminology of "ganglion", and apparent variation in whether it is used strictly to refer to the peripheral nervous system, and also (2) Nerve and Muscle cheerily providing an incomprehensible-to-me introduction to the concept of action vs resting potentials, and the difficulties inherent in measuring them. This is possibly going to be another case of "read three pages, then go and do a lot more reading elsewhere to fill in". Have also been poking at a couple of wikibooks on neuroanatomy.

Listening. Bats! More than seeing, really.

Cooking. Birthday cake! "No, really, don't use pre-ground hazelnut meal, your mother prefers a more Rustic texture" now firmly established.

Eating. FIGS. SO MANY FIGS. MY MOTHER'S FIG TREE IS RIDICULOUS. We have brought about a kilo home? I think we have genuinely brought about a kilo home and that's after the quantity I've eaten in the past 36 hours.

(Schwarzbrot + Yarg + fig: yes excellent thank you.)

Exploring. Small adventures around Darwin Green and various other Cambridge back streets. Tragically the known black mulberry tree is not quite ready for Significant harvest yet, and also there was someone sitting (and smoking) on the bench once needs to climb upon to reach the majority of the branches that overhang the public highway.

Growing. Greenhouse chillis potted up before vanishing to a field: not dead! Sugar Magnolia: continuing to produce more pods! Tomatoes: still not ripe!

Observing. Many bats. Good dragonfly. Lots of red admiral butterflies on the buddleia. A SQUIRREL in a WALNUT TREE the existence of which I had not previously been cognisant: the pitter-patter of little bits of walnut fruit was somewhat perplexing until the involvement of Horrid Little Hands and Horrid Little Teeth dawned upon me, whereupon I was absolutely delighted to get to watch this creature in Action.

Reading. ( Wells, Lister, Tufte, Brosh, McMillan-Webster )

... I also technically started reading a little bit of Descartes, and more around Descartes, for the pain project -- but really not very much as yet.

Playing. A round of Hanabi with A & houseguest! We were playing with very different House Norms which led to some hilarious miscommunication, but A Good Time Was Had.

A good time was also had following the toddler around a playground, including some time On A Swing where we worked out How Legs Do. :)

Cooking. Several Questionable loaves of bread (mostly "too much liquid, ergo puddle"). Three more recipes from East, none of which were particularly interesting to us. (Piccalilli spiced rice; Sodha's variant on egg fried rice; a tempeh-and-pak-choi Situation.)

And Ribiselkuchen! I have been very very happily eating Appropriately Seasonal Ribiselkuchen.

Eating. A made us waffles for breakfast this morning. I had them with SLICED STRAWBERRIES and SLICED APRICOT and MAPLE SYRUP and also LEMON JUICE and VANILLA SUGAR and I was very happy about all of this.

Making & mending. It is Event Prep Week. There are so many potions.

Growing. ... I got some more supports in for my beans? I have just about managed to break even on the sugar snap peas this year (should NOT have eaten the handful I did...) and might yet manage to do a little better than that, with luck.

Squash starting to produce female flowers (yes I was late starting them). More soft fruit (which desperately needs processing; I will be sad if I wind up needing to just compost the jostaberries that have been sat in the fridge for ...a while, now). Many many tomatoes, none of which were actually ripe yet last time I actually made it to the plot...

Observing. Peacock butterfly at the plot! Tawny owl (audio only)! Bats (ditto)! The Teenage Magpie Persists!

Also a variety of awkward teenage waterfowl in Barking Park, along with a squirrel who was most unimpressed when our attempts to feed it mostly involved accidentally handing it an empty half-peanut-shell. It made it very clear (well before any of us had independently noticed The Issue) that it understood we were willing to feed it but that we were doing a terrible job at this and Should Try Harder. I was delighted.

Reading. ( Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster, Wells, Davies + Jones, Hwang Carrant, Keynes + Aidley )

... all of which adds up to more pain-related reading than I felt like I'd managed this week, huh, I thought I had tripped and fallen entirely into Murderbot and EatYourBooks indexing but apparently not!

Writing. A response to the EHRC consultation, which was... several thousand words. A very, very brief response to the Pathways to Work green paper consultation ("I am too disabled to manage doing this properly. These charities are speaking for me. Please fucking listen to them.")

Watching. The first half of Fantasia, with the toddler, with my hand held through all the scary bits to reassure me, apart from the bit that was SO scary that we had to get up and distract ourselves until it was over. Which had absolutely not been flagged as one of the scary bits, and which was the deep-sea-origins-of-life section.

(I had not watched the film since primary school, I don't think? And between then and now I have played a bunch of orchestral music, for most of that time on the violin but latterly as a French horn. It turns out that when I'm not distracted by playing a completely different part, I have incredibly intense sense-memories of several of the pizzicato sections early on...)

Another Murderbot episode. (I continue Indignant.)

Another Farscape episode, this one Taking the Stone (S02E03), which I think was firmly back to early season one levels of incoherence.

Tragically we have not managed The Old Guard 2, because I have had too much migraine and there have been SO many things Happening, but... maybe this week???

Cooking. Several new things! Four from East, leaving me at 41/120 recipes still to make (two of which are "probably won't happen" for reasons of "grapefruit" and "matcha"); of those this week's meal plan includes two (aubergine larb with sticky rice; Vietnamese coconut pancakes). I appreciated the reminder that fried new potatoes are tasty, and A is notably into the chargrilled summer vegetable salad, though I was not a fan of the faff and think I prefer smitten kitchen's charred corn succotash.

Approximately zero faff was salt lassi, and A is now aware that this Special Treat is available; low faff was a cherry clafoutis with fruit from the plot, which I overcooked a bit but, hey, I do in fact like caramelised crunchy bits.

Eating. FIRST BATCH OF DESSERT GOOSEBERRIES ARE RIPE. A tiny handful of Sugar Magnolia sugarsnap peas. Misc jostaberries. RASPBERRIES. And also supermarket strawberries, because we have hit the stage of the summer where they're down to £5 per kilo :)

Growing. I have been doing small bits of harvest and failing to get support structures in for the beans and tomatoes. The outdoor tomatoes have tomatoes on. The squash are coming along; I put more squash seeds in, on the grounds that they're super late but might still do anything; I have not managed to kill all of the chillis; the pepper has flowers.

Harvested lots of dried peas for sowing next year. Am attempting to develop Plans that might actually let me have a full bed of broad beans and a full bed of peas in the interests of getting Reasonable Quantities of them. If the council doesn't tell me I'm not allowed the abandoned plot next door--

I could get so much done if I could coax myself out there for even an hour a day but the agoraphobia is saying No, annoyingly. Gonna try to get A to chase me out more this week.

... is a placeholder because I am doing so badly at routines in general and bedtime routines in particular, still, augh.

Reading. Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. Not entirely sold on the way anecdotes were strung together, and definitely dubious about the broader social history, but a pleasantly undemanding diversion in a week where I really needed that and for bonus points it finally explained The Thing About Blackwing Pencils to me.

( Stationery nerding. )

Watching. One more episode of Farscape (S02E02 Vitas Mortis), while bleaching A.

Cooking. Mostly Pasta With Things. (Things have included "kohlrabi and misc other greens from the allotment" and "psuedo puttanesca".)

Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Have also nibbled, from the allotment: peas! broad beans! aforementioned kohlrabi! cherries! the first raspberries! redcurrants! jostaberries!

Exploring. ... bits of a field? OH and I bimbled down to the post office and, en route, checked how the local quince tree is doing. (FRUITING.)

Creating. Painted A colours!

Growing. Iiii just about made it to the allotment to water things on, like, Tuesday, but I have otherwise been... struggling.

... the ginger at home continues to go zoom, though! And I really really need to pot it on, eesh.

Observing. BAT.

Reading. Finished: a comfort reread of your blue-eyed boys, which fit the bill excellently. Have only restrained myself from launching straight into (even if I could) make a deal with god (and for that matter the other two series) on the grounds that I need to reread Prophet (Helen MacDonald, Sin Blaché) so that I can properly appreciate rydra_wong's a word you've never understood.

You see, I read the first two paragraphs, had a lot of feelings, and promptly decided the way to Maximise Feelings would be to do the reread I didn't set off on immediately after first finishing it.

Thus far I am going "my goodness, I forgot a lot of the detail here". ( Spoilers... )

I have also listened to a little bit more of Furiously Happy (Jenny Lawson). There are definitely aspects I don't love (like, as someone who is taking an antipsychotic for non-psychosis reasons, and someone who can at this point go entire years plural without any significant episodes of even very mild psychosis, the way antipsychotics are discussed makes me... a bit twitchy), and I'm annoyed by how much more disruptive needing to reread sentences is in audio than in text (and how much more frequently I'm needing to do it), but also it turns out rather to my own surprise to be a thing I can listen to when I'm not doing anything else with my brain, provided I don't mind not really retaining any of it for longer than about five minutes.

Eating. I have been fed a slightly ludicrous amount of (more-or-less responsibly harvested) wild asparagus this week, which has been A Delight.

A Variety of other things, courtesy of having someone else doing meal prep all week. Still suspicious of Nutritional Yeast, mind.

FIRST STRAWBERRIES from the plot.

Growing. Swung by the plot this evening (courtesy of significant support from A) and in addition to STRAWBERRIES: ( Read more... )

Celebrating. My 35^th birthday! With a picnic at the allotment (and the allotment fox, and a slow worm, and THE WOODPECKERS); and birthday cake courtesy of my mother. :)

Reading. Finished The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke, and enjoyed myself so doing!

Then What An Owl Knows, Jennifer Ackerman, showed back up from the library. I am making better progress this time and continue to enjoy Owl Facts.

I have made 0 progress on any of the books on pain, and The Silence Factory (Bridget Collins) has jumped to the top of my read-next list courtesy of getting to the front of the holds queue much sooner than I'd expected to...

Writing. PIP submission got to Good Enough by very early Friday morning. That has been most of my make-words-go brain this week, shockingly.

Playing. I Love Hue: I am Infuriatingly Stuck, presumably at more or less the point I got Infuriatingly Stuck last time. I am more-or-less at the point where I am going to just restart the level and hope I get luckier on my second attempt, but that is never a particularly satisfactory!

Cooking. Choy sum with oyster mushroom sauce, garlic, and peanuts: didn't really get the point of the peanutty topping; unlikely to bother with again. White miso ramen with asparagus and tofu: I was extremely dubious about this based on reading the recipe, and somewhat to my surprise wound up actually really liking the broth; not a high priority for eating in-season asparagus in future, though. Bay, rye and hazelnut cake with poached rhubarb: Y E S, especially using the poaching syrup as a drizzle!

Eating. A made me Saturday brunch waffles, and conveniently we had leftover picnic strawberries and some cream that needed using up, so I got fancy strawberries-and-Chantilly-cream waffles as a Birthday Treat :)

Also had a cream tea at Wimpole early on Sunday afternoon, and curry from a restaurant in Cottenham following Terrible Further Sunday Afternoon Adventures. Some of my mother's bread; birthday cake courtesy of my mother also; also also lentil moussaka ditto :)

Exploring. Visited Home Farm at Wimpole Hall, where we scritched piglets and observed a variety of rare breed hens, rare breed ducks, chicks and ducklings ditto, The Horses, The Rabbits, The Bogat Goats incl. Baby Goats, and we waved to the donkeys, in addition to being very pleased about the various swift-ish things and sparrows making their way in and out of the barns.

Also spent an afternoon sat at the junction of the A10 and Landbeach Road, for terrible hobby purposes, and relatedly a little bit of time poking around the even-more-immediate vicinity of the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP, aaand also drove past the house we are not even remotely going to buy just to sort of wist at it.

Making & mending. Sawed some wood! All of the bits for railway sleeper raised bed #1 are now in position and I've filled it; but on reflection I deemed the 180mm screws Too Short so am awaiting delivery of some 300mm for Final Assembly. (Whereupon I get to decide to do it all again for bed #2...)

Growing. First broad beans will be ready for harvest any day now (and in fact if we wanted to eat some immature pods I could have the first handful already). Peas are starting to flower! Strawberries are extremely Set Fruit and might even start ripening at some point soonish!

I am extremely excited about how happy the raspberries are looking.

Have sown all of my remaining elderly quinoa seed, which I am not expecting to do much of anything, and will be pleasantly surprised if it does; having one final go at getting any viable plants out of the pineapple physalis seeds I bought at the beginning of the season; have been Donated some Moneymaker tomatoes and a basil plant from my mother; really really need to get the cucumbers started, but Not Quite Yet.

Have started putting squash various outside. Need to finish prepping beds for them to actually go into.

Oh! And the tomatoes are also going out! Annoyingly I lost track of which were Orange Banana and which were Blue Fire so I'm not entirely sure I'm going to actually manage planting up a rainbow of the things, but -- fingers crossed, eh?

Observing. IN ADDITION TO the excellent allotment wildlife and the Creatures at Home Farm, we enjoyed various plantings around Wimpole (including the incredibly striking Very Tall Straight-Stemmed Ferns), and while Doing A Traffic Survey At The A10/Landbeach Road Junction saw also: lambs! corvids harassing a red kite! more swift-y things! goldfinches??? wild rabbits, to A's delight. Some geese, honking merrily away to themselves.

It has been a particularly good week for Creatures. :)

Reading. Finished The Way Out, Alan Gordon "with" Alon Ziv. I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS AND THEY'RE MOSTLY GRUMPY. Longer thoughts to follow, maybe even sometime within the foreseeable future, but to get the positives out of the way first: the foreword (I think? rather than the introduction? book's on the sofa and I'm not, I'll double-check for the proper write-up) does at least say that they don't yet know which illnesses and people this will actually work for, and is appropriately guarded about actual scope; I'm going to find some of the referenced literature useful, notwithstanding that a frankly shocking amount of it is over 20 years old; it's not exactly that the actual described approach is incorrect.

BUT GOOD GRIEF. ( Read more... )

Most of the way through: Coast, Rachel Allen, Recipes from Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way. Eventually got to the top of the library's hold queue on this one having stumbled across it via some combination of browsing the Oxfam food section and Eat Your Books; was utterly baffled at the presence of avocado. Having now read most of it the avocado makes slightly more sense (she's building recipes around specific Irish-origin ingredients, but not restricting what else she brings in) but also this is a travelogue composed mainly of the phrase "one of the country's [superlative] X" (I exaggerate only slightly) and at least as far as things I've read recently go for my money (i.e. council tax) Felicity Cloake provides a much better example of the genre.

Halfway through, continuing to enjoy and half-remember snippets of: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Playing. I Love Hue: neaaaaaaaarly done with The Alchemy.

Cooking. Underwhelmed by ricotta and rosemary bread pudding, which is somewhat unfair of me given how egregiously I deviated from the actual written ingredients, but hey, A likes it.

This evening I have technically done another Meera Sodha recipe, but it requires sitting overnight and I'm not going to eat it anyway so I have very little to report on that front.

Several rounds of Pasta With Green And Also Lemon.

Eating. Such treats as Frozen Thai Green Curry, post-field CAKE, three-cornered leek, MINT, and the occasional nibble of leafs.

Exploring. The chunk of National Cycle Route 1 that runs alongside the local Tall Water! Hurrah for towpaths and locks and so on and so forth. Excellent clematis. Many other excellent things too, but clematis in particular.

Growing. Radishes coming up! Redcurrant looking extremely promising! Raspberries ditto! PEAS abruptly trying quite hard to be Luxuriant; strawberries setting fruit; not all of the tiny beetroot I planted out have died; tentatively excited about chillis; cherry tree also COVERED in small green fruit swelling from the ruins of the blossom.

So much grass. So much bindweed. I'm letting the dandelions flower and then attempting to deadhead before they actually set seed, with mixed success.

... three loofa hatched, which is more than I was expecting! Alas my Sibley seedlings are Not Doing Well so I might have another go at those. Really REALLY want to get the shed Erected before the greenhouse gets any more full. Aaaaaaaaand it's time for bed.

Reading. I continue to make slow progress with both What An Owl Knows (Jennifer Ackerman) and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke).

Writing. Grumpy e-mails to Labour, mostly? Grumpy e-mails to Labour. Oh, and separately to the DWP courtesy of My UC Journal.

Playing. I have tripped and fallen back into 2048. I do not know why I have tripped and fallen thus. There are other things I would rather be doing. Brain whyyy.

I Love Hue current status: just started The Alchemy/Knowledge/12.

Cooking. Two new-to-us recipes from East: caramelised fennel and carrot salad with mung beans and herbs, of which I am a fan but about which A is a bit meh; and Amritsari pomegranate chickpeas, with the decaf English Breakfast I bought the other week, which I also quite liked but A was mildly dubious of.

Today has featured a different Welsh cake recipe, from one of the charity-shop books I acquired for the purposes of the special interest in EYB indexing. This one includes honey and ground mixed spice; I am decidedly disconcerted by how much they taste like Wrong Texture Mince Pies when cool.

Eating. ... yeah it's been A Migrainey Week, and has consequently contained two rounds of Wagamama. TRAGICALLY I decided on the first of these to branch out and try Not My Usual. Not My Usual turned out to contain The Dread Mayonnaise (I had been lulled into a false sense of security by the number of things called "slaw" I had recently encountered that did not contain mayo). It was mostly salvageable...

Exploring. ADVENTURES in VAN HIRE for the purposes of moving SHED. This involved heading out to Hatfield, because the one fifteen minutes up the road was already Thoroughly Booked. We got to observe MORE FLOWERS and lo they were good.

... I think that's it? I think that's it. (A also went on another adventure to acquire roof box and appropriate rack, but I stayed at home for that one.)

Making & mending. I have not, technically, actually resumed A's pair of gloves, BUT I have now got the information from A I need in order to do so! So that's a progress.

... there has also been. Event prep. So much event prep. The meal ticket booklets for crew are all done; the potions are all sliced and folded ready for laminating (except for the one that needed someone to actually finish writing what it did); ... progress?

Growing. SO MANY SQUASH. Not all of the ones I sowed, but... a lot... have come up.

Somewhat irritated that somebody found my Bravest Dwarf Pea, which had actually managed to find and attach itself to the pea sticks, and severed the stem a little below said attachment. :|

Main infrastructural progress this week was getting all the railway sleepers and shed bits up to the plot (with significant and indispensable help from A). I've not done anything with them yet but they are there, I have plans, necessary hardware is en route, etc.

What else what else? First of the beans are in the ground. I was feeling decidedly surly about my redcurrant but this turns out to have been premature and unfair -- since last weekend it's unfurled a little more and is looking much more promising in terms of potential harvest. The raspberries also seem to be very much enjoying the mulch + semi-regular watering, which is pleasing.

Observing. I totally forgot to mention in last week's section on this topic that on the ride back from Anglesey Abbey we observed Many Cowslips, including at least one that was red!

Tulips continue fantastic. Irises are getting into the swing of things at this point. The bindweed is definitely waking up...

Reading. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke: reread, for the first time in... a while, status ongoing. I am enjoying the mix of things I had entirely forgotten and things I half-remember and being totally unable to tease out what's actually foreshadowing from what's memory, real or invented.

I am currently less than a month behind on Dreamwidth.

I have also been dipping in and out of various cookbooks & Joy Larkcom's Grow your own vegetables, but nothing thorough enough to make it into the spreadsheet!

Writing. An e-mail to my MP? Quite possibly the most writing I have done this week is an extremely resentful e-mail to my MP.

Oh! and I actually submitted my second indexed cookbook to EYB. Now I get to wait impatiently while it's proofread, and then I can ask for book #3...

Playing. Finished a jigsaw! ... which is missing a piece. We bought it second-hand; did it arrive this way? Or did I manage to knock it off the table and then feed it to the robot vacuum without noticing...?

Regardless: absolute nonsense. It was a bit of a slog to start with but turned into Lots Of Fun, so I suppose I'm keeping this one as well.

Cooking. ... so I am doing the thing where I am making Lots Of New Recipes and it is honestly quite tiring and I should probably attempt to do slightly fewer New Things? But this week featured:

• sweetheart cabbage okonomiyaki from East; not this recipe but same basic idea. I actually gave up on attempting to cook this last week because I was so convinced I was going to dislike it (or at least the sauces she advises to go with), but... actually it was a very tasty and very quick cabbage fritter and it is Getting Added To The Rotation. (I have a Sous Chef tab open with okonomi sauce...)
• an Ottolenghi rice pudding with roasted rhubarb and tarragon: I think I prefer our usual, but I have also been sneaking bits of the roasted rhubarb out of the fridge entirely by themselves, which I had not anticipated...
• one-tin Korean style aubergines with spring onions and sesame rice: entirely adequate as a way to eat a pile of vegetables (and, to be fair to it, better on day two, and genuinely very straightforward), but not particularly memorable.
• Ottolenghi olive oil courgettes with eggs and potatoes: I am unsure how much of my absolute delight with this was simply that I've not eaten enough fried potatoes recently, but it was very pleasant. Might well reappear should I actually manage to grow three different kinds of courgette this year.

Eating. Two rounds Solero Exotic Fruit, because it was sunny and pleasant and A wished company in eating Take Away Ice Cream, and I was more into the concept of these than into the concept of Cornettos (of which I was very fond in childhood, but which I'm afraid will turn out to Not Be What I Want any more, and I would on the whole prefer to err on the side of preserving the memory). Two rounds of pizza (one at the allotment). Wagamama, because I had a flap about not getting to eat it in The Usual Fortnightly Dinner Slot (replaced by a Social Pizza, not at the allotment).

Ottolenghi dark chocolate, pistachio, and raspberry brittle: annoyingly I think I significantly prefer the salted caramel & hazelnut brittle.

The last piece of Ottolenghi cake -- "cooked fruit tart" i.e. pear frangipane -- with a slightly ridiculous quantity of Chantilly cream (because I was whipping cream anyway for the rice pudding...)

Exploring. Whipsnade Zoo! Lots of fantastic sleepy animals and a new-to-me goose.

Barking Park, with new duck food dispenser.

Making & mending. ... honestly it was mostly A? but there is Tiny Progress toward fixing the book chair (which will if absolutely nothing else be extremely helpful for cookbook indexing...)

Growing. SO MANY THINGS. To my surprise several things I'd given up on (having sown them direct) are sprouting, and are not promptly being obliterated by gastropods. I've moved garlic chives and shallots from modules into the allium bed, and sown the rest of my leek seeds (which might actually do something, which I'm very excited about). Buoyed by this unexpected success, I have direct-sown a whole lot more peas.

The jostaberry is now in full flower; the cherry is still thinking about it but not quite there yet.

Infrastructure-wise, reorganising the footprint of the fruit cage to make it easier to actually close went surprisingly well. Both oak saplings from the bed I want to grow tomatoes in this year have been Removed, one entirely by me (and unlikely to survive) and one mostly by Adam (about which I am more hopeful). Do I wish to donate them to The New Site for Admin: the LRP? Yes of course I do. And the capillary matting I am using in the greenhouse seems fingers crossed to be more-or-less doing the job I want it to.

Basils continue happily. I might have two germinated aubergine after all? Ditto pineapple physalis? I have also sown the rest of the calabrese seeds in my possession (highly unlikely to germinate, but at least no longer taking up space in my seed box); the pak choi I'm hoping to generate seed from this year are sorta progressing (though I have discovered just how badly they don't like being transplanted, so am sowing the remainder in newspaper pots).

... lots and LOTS of plants. And also some Freecycle railway sleepers, though I need to arrange to go back to the house they exist at with a pry bar and a saw, to cut the longer ones up enough they'll actually fit in the car...

Observing. COOTS. BABY COOTS. SO MANY BABY COOTS.

Zoo animals! Birds Of Barking Park! The allotment foxes are getting much more comfortable with me!

And, also at the allotment, my first peacock butterfly of the year :)

Reading. ... I have skimmed several more cookbooks?

Writing. OH HEY I HAVE ACTUALLY DONE SOME OF THIS. I now have an introduction to The Book that is (i) longer and (ii) better; I've also expanded several other notes and had a !!! moment about the comorbidity of autism with chronic pain disorders + commonly-observed reduced sensory habituation in autistics. (I'd already got "habituation" in the notes for expansion, but I was thinking of it in terms of the example of having three bowls of water, one hot one cold one tepid, and what the tepid bowl feels like to hands that have spent time in the two "extremes".)

Also at least one grumpy e-mail to Labour. This is not the right week to ask me to donate money to help fund The Change Britain Voted For, it really really is not, good grief.

Watching. We have finished Farscape S1! We attempted to start S2 today but got about ten minutes in before technology just... stopped cooperating.

It is also Migraine World Summit week. I'm really listening more than watching (insofar as I am watching, it's for the captions); I did not even manage day #2 before messing up time zones. I have not yet managed to e-mail in my "sell me a full-access pass for cheap, please" evidence, but I did at least manage to watch day #3, and it did actually contain some useful-to-me bits.

Listening. Waves. Including at 2 a.m. today, when I was Awoken By Pain and trying to soothe myself while waiting for the codeine (et al) to kick in.

Cooking. One-step no-churn coffee ice cream, using CO₂-decaffeinated instant (essentially Nigella, by way of Meera Sodha); delightfully, this does seem to be adequately decaffeinated for my purposes, and I am now plotting CAKE, and the ice cream itself (while not wholly well-behaved) goes very well with frozen berries, to my mind. Also from the desserts chapter: a coconut banana bread, which I consider strictly inferior to our normal, but hey! Tried a new thing!

The other two things are both cases of "okay, well, the principle is sound but I think I probably want to explore less simplified-for-ease-of-preparation versions": bunny chow, in this instance spiced-cabbage-and-chickpeas served in hollowed-out bread rolls, and sweet potato and aubergine massaman curry.

Exploring. Two particularly notable stupid little walks! On one of which we managed to go by the horse field at around dinner time, so they were poking their heads over the fence and willing to be scritched at least long enough to determine whether we secretly had dinner; and on the other we were Going To The Pharmacy, and taking the back route allowed us to discover a COOT NEST with an adult Firmly In Residence, and Patience was REWARDED with a VIEW OF THE EGGS (seven!!!). Think this was the pair we spent a lot of time watching further down the river last year -- one of them in particular has a very distinctive Threat Display sort of Angry Popping Squeak on quite a hair trigger.

And we also visited Barking park! Birds (of particular note) observed included: heron; tufted ducks; greylag geese; Egyptian geese; a moorhen making a really questionable nest; a duck I could not quite confidently identify also firmly sitting on a nest. AND there were Many Excellent Daffodils, and Lots Of Violets. (Locally tulips are starting to come out!)

Making & mending. Tunnel for peas is In Situ and has (or had, earlier in the week) A Pea installed! (I have not made it back to check on it...)

About halfway through A's first glove? I think that's about right.

Growing. Some Trinidad Perfume are hatching and also my second attempt at getting Feo di Rio Gordo going has also worked (emphatically). More beetroot coming up too; also the shallot and garlic chives and SO MANY basil. From this we learn: no really coconut coir is a better idea than general-purpose compost for getting things started; wrapping trays in plastic bags really does work and I really should do more of it; It's Never Too Late. Lots of the next round of pricking out now needs to happen. Fungus gnats treated with extreme prejudice; fingers crossed it sticks.

Observing. ... I think I managed to mostly cover this above.