Like a Can Opener in a Worm Factory

but we managed to spend some of this evening taking a look through a chunk of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year gallery on the NHM's website. Favourite so far: this very resigned chameleon. My second favourite so far is probably this sexy mushroom.

My other achievements have included "digging out my slippers", "reading two and a bit magazines from charities I support", and "getting some bread ready to be baked" (though I think I've neglected it enough it's going to be a bit of a puddle, alas).

I have still not perfected whey protein hot chocolate but I think today's effort constitutes a cautious step toward Adequacy. My fancy organic frou-frou vanilla milkshakes have been very pleasant during the summer but given that I have this thermal protein shaker and given that gym routine is "finish indoors, hasten outside, REMOVE MASK, prop myself up by the bike stands Consuming Protein" I would definitely like the option of Warm Protein during colder weather. (Today's failure was at least a standard failure of making hot chocolate full stop, instead of the unique horror that is getting whey powder too hot, but it didn't achieve better than "lukewarm". So. More experiments tomorrow, maybe.)

1. Today in gym: for my second warm-up set, still Romanian deadlifts because the plates I had on the bar weren't big enough for full ROM (well. ignoring the hypermobility. WHICH for these purposes I AM), my hamstrings deigned to join the party. Did not manage to replicate this sensation of Actual Hamstring Activation at higher weights, but... proof of concept! (It's only been, what, six months...?)
2. next apple crumb cake recipe: baked. Alas timings such that we are not having it for pudding because it's bedtime, but Deb does say it's better if you leave it to sit and think about things overnight, so...
3. Yesterday I managed to acquire more flour, and also feed the breadpet. This evening there is bread sat in the fridge to be baked tomorrow.
4. Yesterday I made three days' worth of enchiladas. Today dinner was approximately 0 work. Thank you Past Alex.
5. Gently pootling along with hobbies: have managed to pick the current cookbook indexing back up, and have pretty much convinced myself that the current mending project won't be sufficient for Polite Company but will be plenty adequate for e.g. gardening and being in a field, which was fundamentally The Goal. Sufficient to motivate me to actually finish the final patch? WATCH THIS SPACE.

Reading. Reread Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) because I was having a specific craving for specifically that.

Started (?) True North, Gavin Francis, whose Adventures in Human Being I greatly enjoyed a few years ago.

Watching. We have had another episode of Farscape. It was... another episode of Farscape.

I was sort of in the room for approximately the first half of WALL-E on Saturday, but I was really not paying attention to it...

Also!!! The 2026 Small World in Motion gallery!!! LARVAL JELLYFISH in WATER DROPLETS. SEA SLUG that POOTLE. Highly recommended.

Playing. At home: we have completed our Creaks replay including Getting All The Damn Pictures.

Away: I have now played Betrayal at Baldur's Gate™ and Betrayal at House on the Hill, in that order, both for the first time. There was... some slapstick. This was also my first exposure (other than osmosis) to Baldur's Gate...

Cooking. Apfelstreuselkuchen! We have almost finished it, which means it's almost time for the next recipe variant. I thiiink that's the only exciting thing I've cooked this week.

Exploring. Brief walk along a section of the River Roding. :)

Making & mending. SECOND TEST PATCH OF TROUSERS COMPLETE. Need to get my shears back out, cut down said patch to a more reasonable size, and sew down its edges; will then be down to one (1) remaining patch before establishing whether I have Achieved Wearability.

Also made a pompom for the Child, who burst his balloon and was thus in need of something soft enough that he could throw it indoors...

Observing. Cormorant! Along aforementioned River Roding.

Remember the premature giraffe calf?

Yeah, so, she's now three months old, and robust enough that yesterday she got to join the rest of the herd at the wildlife park where she's a resident (video on FB, sorry).

I have managed, today, to settle down with my notebook and my pens and substantially catch up with some of the things I want to record, and it's been lovely, actually. When, this evening, one of said pens disappeared under the sofa; A kindly did some grim rummaging to help me retrieve it (it was initially very much within my reach but in attempting to get hold of it I instead pinged it very much out of my reach...)

On Wednesday last week, A brought me home some Apfelstreuselkuchen from Vienna, and a cold; a week later I still have no cold, and ate about two thirds of the Apfelstreuselkuchen while A wasn't looking, which turned out to be an error in that they turn out to actually really like the stuff. So, given I'd brought home somewhere over 25kg of apples, I promised to make some; this evening's attempt isn't qui-i-ite right but is still extremely tasty and went very well with my fancy hot chocolate. Next we'll be trying the smitten kitchen version.

Today at the gym I Picked Up A Thing at a number of sets & reps that I have successfully managed in the past but failed last week, and it wasn't easy but it did go. I am feeling cheerful about being able to nudge it up on Sunday (and maybe match my personal best?).

Brain is permitting me to reread a book I have previously enjoyed, after a long enough gap that most of the details and several of the protagonists are surprising to me.

It's only been... okay, I don't want to think how long.

We are preparing to take the beta update page and the beta inbox out of beta with the next code release. We don't have an exact date yet, but this is your last chance to tell us about problems!

To enable the beta versions: go to Beta Features and enable the "new Create Entries" beta test for the new update page and the "New Inbox Page" for the, well, new inbox page.

If this is your first time using the beta update page: nearly everything on it can be adjusted, moved, or removed to some degree. The upper right side of the update form has a " ⚙️ Rearrange Panels" link.

Not every panel is enabled by default! If you don't see something you're used to finding, look in the disabled panels. While in Rearrange mode, you can enable or disable panels, drag them to whatever position you want, and generally customize it to your heart's content.

Once we push the button and switch to the new update and inbox pages for everyone, we cannot keep the old ones available. We are so close to finishing the decade-long "get rid of the undocumented custom templating language from 1996 that no one else uses" modernization project that's been sapping our collective will to live that we can taste it, and we can't convert the old update page and the updated inbox page is the converted version. This is your last chance to alert us of problems. If you let us know after the switch goes live, we'll still fix it, but we can't guarantee how fast. Prevent future problems and test drive them now!

Reading. Finished: Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard. Memoir containing a whole lot of first-person perspective on the last fifty years or so of forest ecology; I found her tendency to short sentence fragments hard going but am v glad to have read this, and learned a bunch about how trees connect to & communicate with each other.

Small progress on EYB indexing for Divine, and reading a tiny bit more of the introductory everything of Medlars.

Writing. I am definitely at the point where I am wailing and gnashing my teeth about how to organise the biology/anatomy section, and grimly wishing to have spent, ooh, the last fifteen years practising anatomical illustration.

Watching. More Farscape. Finished the three-parter in season 2. Extremely A Farscape Episodes.

Playing. We finished getting the achievements for Tukoni: Forest Keeper, and have started a replay of Creaks.

Cooking. ... I sort of feel like there wasn't much of note this week. Is that true? Is that fair? Probably not! This evening definitely included making a batch of the self-saucing passion fruit pudding, which is pleasing.

Eating. VIENNESE PATISSERIE. A brought me: Apfelstreuselkuchen; Apfel-Mohn-Torte; Topfenstrudel; and a pair of things that sadly got extremely squidged but were nonetheless tasty, and were once upon a time a Holländer and a Maronikipferl. Also: the British strawberries continue; more of my mother's excellent beans and tomatoes; APPLES.

Exploring. Took the all-roads-and-minimal-canal-paths cycle route to visit The Child on Tuesday, and slightly to my astonishment it worked and was fine! I apparently did enough getting lost that Garmin thought it was a slightly longer journey than the detour via the reservoirs plus More Canal Path, and who am I to argue.

Making & mending. I have Properly Started patch #2 on Test Trousers #1. This is the largest; I still need to decide what I think I'm doing once I've finished blanket-stitching the edges of the largest hole...

Growing. Kohlrabi are coming up! Squash are squashing! Oca are looking much more cheerful for having had significantly more rain! Trinidad Perfume (heatless yellow habanero) is flowering; the next batch of apples I dehydrate are going to also contain a shelf of ancho chillis, about which I am Excited.

Observing. The bat. :)

1. Yesterday I made the quinoa salad thing for lunch. This meant that for lunch today there was... quinoa salad thing! And I didn't even have to do any work.
2. Cake (Topfenstrudel) for breakfast; cake (Apfel-Mohn-Torte) for pudding. Thus are the Viennese pastries finished. (A turned out to be a bit sad that I had eaten most of the Apfelstreuselkuchen, so given that I still have the better part of 20kg of apples in bags on the patio, that's one of my baking jobs for tomorrow...)
3. A looked sufficiently as though they had cleared the upper respiratory grot that we are sleeping in the same bed again. Better. (Cross your fingers for me that I did not make the call they were probably non-infectious again too soon...)
4. A few days of bracing has calmed the ankle right back down: for today's Stupid Little Walk I wore the hiking boots and stuck the brace in my pocket, and did not wind up feeling the need to stop and put it on. Hurrah for Management Strategies That Work and also Listening To My Body.
5. Supermarket, not unrelatedly, yielded cut-price British strawberries that on the one hand were still very expensive and on the other are very tasty.
6. I am hitting the point of having a pretty solid stash of dried poblanos, and the heatless habanero is abruptly COVERED IN FLOWERS again and I am somewhat hopeful that if I bring it inside they might actually usefully fruit...

Hi all,

I had to push some code live today to fix something, and that brought with it a couple of new things like if you have two-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) enabled, you got automatically logged out and it is now required to log in. If you don't, you can set it up if you want (you don't have to.)

This also means that if you have 2FA enabled, you will not be able to use 3P clients using your username and password anymore. You should be able to use API keys in most cases, but there's some nuance to that (and tbh, I just am not precisely sure what clients anybody even uses.)

Please do comment if you're seeing anything weird, as per usual, and we'll work on it. Thank you!

That "ugh, but there's so much backstory, I don't want to have to explain it all again to a new therapist" feeling? That feeling. That feeling is a really good indication that going over the backstory again, with a new person as rubber duck, will itself yield new insight.

Will I remember this next time? Probably not! But at least I know it for now.