Like a Can Opener in a Worm Factory

Reading. ( Regula Ysewijn, McKinley Valentine, David J. Linden, Ann Leckie )

Skimmed several more pain-related papers.

... and I am also making some actual progress on catching up with my reading page! By which I mean "... I'm almost a whole entire week into May." I make no promises about how far I'm going to actually get.

Watching. 'nother episode of Farscape: S02E05 The Way We Weren't. Will concede that this made me go "... okay, yeah, I see why I needed to watch everything that went before, and damn it I am Having Some Feelings".

I have now sat or indeed wiggled my way through through Squish The Fish (Cosmic Kids' "baby yoga") in its entirety, it being a great favourite of The Toddler. I continue to have fascinating conversations about things that are easy for toddlers versus for grown-ups with the resident physiotherapist.

Cooking. A sweetcorn, tomato and runner bean curry, unearthed via Eat Your Books when I realised I had somewhat unintentionally got the nice organic veg box people to bring us runner beans (of which I am generally suspicious because of the texture of the pod).

Two loaves of actually vaguely competent bread (turns out scraping together the executive function to make the timing work... works better).

For breakfast this morning: the next recipe from the Welsh cakes book, being blackberry and apple splits (thereby using up some of the stewed apple in the freezer!). Could stand to have significantly less sugar than the recipe suggested and frozen blackberries very much want to make something that could only generously be called a purée rather than a soup, and definitely benefitted from being left to stand and cool before any attempt is made at the actual splitting, but A is very happy so I am content :)

Eating. Pizza Express takeaway to go with the Farscape on Tuesday evening when we were very, very tired.

Lunch in the café at Forty Hall this afternoon, featuring orange-and-lavender loaf cake!

Blackberries and onions and tomatoes and my mother's fig jam. Many very good food. Very pleased yes.

Exploring. Forty Hall! We went on an ADVENTURE this afternoon to get LUNCH there, which was slightly complicated by the part where ( breathing, everything is fine )

such that I spent a significant amount of time on the way both there and back again going "nope, need to stop" and spending a while lying on the grass staring up at the blue sky and the wispy white clouds through the various oak trees we passed. I have thoughts about this specific medical experience that I might write up elsewhen, BUT we WENT ON AN ADVENTURE and explored the farm shop and had lunch/afternoon tea in the café and walked around the walled garden and went home VIA THE (outskirts of the) BEAVER ENCLOSURE (thank you all, looking up that link means I have just discovered that TOURS NOW EXIST as of last month!!!) (more context: first beavers reintroduced to London after something like 400 years, back in 2022). Very very pleased to have managed this.

Creating. Hmm. I haven't been creating, as such, but I have definitely been consulting with A about some 3d prints to make sorting the in-game currency easier at Admin: the LRP!

Growing. Everything is tomatoes. I have not managed to get overwintering onions going; maybe tomorrow?

Rooted lemongrass potted up; let's see how long it takes me to kill it this time.

Observing. Alas no beavers, but lots of excellent birds, including two excursions (one solo, one partnered) to visit the cootlings :) The one that hatched last (by a considerable margin) is very definitely still no more than about half the size of its elder siblings!

1. Went out to get mozzarella to have with lunch. Realised halfway down the hill that we could go all the way down the hill and watch the latest batch of cootlings. DID SO while eating raspberries. Excellent.
2. Lunch also included home-made Tomatoes and Basils and Bread, and also separately a small baguette with fig jam courtesy of my mother and brie courtesy of Somerset via The Supermarket. V pleasing.
3. Excellent chapter of book has introduced me to all kinds of things including pain asymbolia.
4. I have DONE SOME ADMIN: THE LRP PAPERWORK. There is paperwork that is DONE and consequently in the RECYCLING. I have sent SO MANY E-MAILS. I am getting some really lovely responses! And soon there will be FEWER THINGS.
5. Playing with pens! Continuing to really enjoy playing with pens.

1. BREAD. I have coaxed myself back into giving it vaguely sensible timings, and shockingly it works better when I don't leave it to get sad and lonely.
2. I slightly tripped and bought myself a writing slope last week? ... I am somehow surprised that it's being useful, specifically for when I'm being a horrible laptop + paperwork goblin on the sofa.
3. SPEAKING OF WHICH, I am going through a bunch of tragically overdue paperwork for Admin: the LRP purposes (the person it is overdue to is... me) and found the answer to a mystery. (I am somewhat baffled that I apparently got the answer to this mystery at the second event this year and yet had completely forgotten that I'd managed anything of the kind until Just Now, two weeks before E4; I think I'm probably just going to chalk this up as another piece of evidence that my brain just... wasn't... working very well at all in June.)
4. TOMATOES. Actually this is related to the Good Bread -- I had an excellent bread-and-butter-and-tomatoes-and-parsley lunch, which was delightful. The Purple Ukraine are so good and I like them so much.
5. Today I have managed non-zero tidying, and the flat is marginally better and more usable for it. Mostly sorting out some of my gardening horrors on the patio; partly Wrangling The Dishwasher and some of the washing up; partly the aforementioned overdue paperwork, a consequence of which is putting a bunch of paper IN THE RECYCLING. Is good.

1. A coaxed me out of the house for lunch; they'd been intending to spend the day in the office, but Shenanigans ensued such that they needed to pick something up from home and also the office canteen had run out of the veggie option, and by this time the triptan was more-or-less working. So we had zapiekanka at the market in the sunshine, and lo, it was good.
2. I apparently somehow managed to duck into the BHF charity shop right before it started raining heavily, and upon reemerging from poking at homeware and books at the back was startled to find that it was no longer raining heavily, but that everything was suddenly and inexplicably (at least briefly at least to me, in my migraine-addled state) damp.
3. I have finally picked up Lake of Souls (Ann Leckie), which I absolutely pre-ordered and absolutely was very excited about but am only now getting to, and I am having A LOT OF FEELINGS. SO many feelings.
4. A brought me ice cream from the freezer. Raspberry ripple, which I was inexplicably in the mood for, and the hazelnut + hazelnut brittle.
5. ... and in fact I am going to go and be in a sleepy pile. Yes. That can be thing number five.

Subtitle 50 irresistibly nostalgic sweet treats and comforting classics... featuring "Trinity burnt cream":

Also known as crème brûlée, old recipes for versions of this pudding are found in various parts of Britain and Europe. Its association with Trinity College, Cambridge goes back to at least the nineteenth century.

Despite my documented interest in crème brûlée and, you know, having grown up in Cambridge, I had somehow never come across this before?! And yet it's inexplicably clearly attested on Wikipedia. Nominally this means I should probably be indexing the "Ethnicity" of the dish as "English" as well as "French" but, frankly, je refuse, and even Trinity have the grace to say:

The story that crème brûlée itself was invented at the College almost certainly has no basis in fact.

It's not even like the National Trust is making a point of having all the recipes in this book be of British origin! Clearly-identified non-British culinary sources include Italy, Latvia, and Russia! (... the Welsh- and Scottish-origin puddings have headnotes mysteriously quiet on said origins, though.) AND YET. Crème brûlée! Trinity! Really.

-- no wait that's a lie, I also investigated an apple tree. (Unremarkable eating apples.)

But! Tomatoes!

Pictured varieties: Purple Ukraine, Blue Fire, misc green stripey, Orange Banana, Moneymaker. Buried so you can't see it is a Feo di Rio Gordo. I did not get the whole rainbow I was aiming for this year (alas the Yellow Pearshaped all failed, as did the Known green stripey), but I'm nonetheless pleased!

Reading. ( Raymond Blanc, Ceri Olofson, David S. Butler + G. Lorimer Moseley, David J. Linden )

Watching. An episode of Farscape: S02E04 Crackers Don't Matter, which I note with mild alarm (given how "..." we were at it) is considered to merit its very own Wikipedia page?!

The Old Guard 2. I... might yet get around to writing up thoughts.

Cooking. An Salad. An improvised but definitely acceptable for its purposes (i.e. providing nutrition for someone who currently has some decidedly inconvenient dietary restrictions) chickpea curry.

Eating. BLACKBERRIES. Still. Also plums. Really enjoying the plums. So many tomatoes.

Also a box of Many Salads from Mel Tropical Kitchen, some mildly disappointing cookies and a Good raspberry pastel de nata, and another cardamom bun from buns from home. Hurrah for spending a day at the BL?

Exploring. Poking around the grounds of a new-to-me hospital, where I came across an Exciting Apple Tree that I totally failed to actually inspect more closely, and about which I am excited primarily because of just having read a book a solid, like, half of which was Reviews Of Heritage Apple Varieties. (I was a little sad that James Grieve got only a very passing mention.)

The BL! And Beckenham, a bit, while picking up a watering can.

Growing. LEMONGRASS HAS A ROOTLET. Having another go at rooting a bunch of supermarket tarragon.

Observing. We found BABY COOTS. At least five of them, possibly six, plus one egg. They are juuust at the stage where they are practising GOING INTO THE WATER and then rapidly deciding Don't Like That and retreating to the Warm.

Koalas have fingerprints; hairy-nose wombats do not.

Skin on fingers and toes wrinkle in water not because cells get saturated but as an autonomic nervous system function, which we have apparently known since at least 1935. An initial 2013 study found that people with wrinkled fingertips could pick up and move more wet marbles in a set time frame than people with dry skin; a 2014 study failed to replicate this, but there's more at the BBC including a 2020 replication. (The 2013 reference at least is buried in the BBC article.)

Holding a hot drink inclines us to view people as "emotionally warmer"; a heavier clipboard inclines us to believe the person whose CV it's displaying takes their work more seriously. Many other related fun facts over here.

(Book of the moment: Touch, David J. Linden.)

The nature of veg box is that Vegetables for which I have no Plan... accumulate. Today's dinner took a bunch of said accumulated veg and made them salad-shaped, and it worked out well enough that I want a record as a reminder for future self that one can just Do This.

( Read more... )

In brief: book is the least I've been annoyed by any such book I have yet read, which is fairly impressive going, especially since the copy in the BL's collection is the first edition originally published in 2003 rather than the second edition updated in 2013; more notes possibly to follow (subject to reaching a decision about whether I want to hold out for getting my hands on a copy of the second edition before talking about it in public).

Entertainment: shortly after I finally settled myself down in my nice corner desk against a window with my back to the wall and a whole enclosed-in-glass booth between me and Any Other Readers... my watch buzzed to let me know that I'd just finished a Period Of High Stress. The high stress was, obviously, sitting quietly wedged into a corner on public transport while reading a relaxing book. I did know public transport was exhausting! I have been saying! I'm still kind of impressed at the watch Earnestly Informing Me, In Case I Didn't? Know? and mildly regretting that I'm planning to do the same-ish again tomorrow, and also also I am reassessing A Lot of my wheelchair use in light of this...

Related entertainment: how much my hypervigilance kicked up when I returned from lunch to discover that neatly leaving my notebook and reading-book in a stack on my desk had not had sufficient inhibitory effect, and a Noisy Person had decided to sit diagonally across from me, in my Space, being Noisy. The amount I relaxed when they (temporarily) fucked off is another one for the "yep I can see how not leaving the house for over a year and then staying Hyper Local has added up to me looking much more functional" files...

The thing about buying new glasses, right, is that I've been feeling avoidant about it in part because I think I was slightly migrainey the day I had the most recent test done and I was already pretty sure that my vision goes... wrong... when migrainey -- most noticeable when moving, but always... there.

Slightly more specifically: it's neither scintillating scotoma nor loss-of-whole-field-of-vision nor any of the other very classic visual auras; instead it's a sense that I'm not managing to track movement properly along the lower edge and especially the lower corners of my field of vision.

... which matches up really well, actually, with the peripheral vision deficiencies that, er, showed up during my last eye test.

I've been noticing the Weirdness on-and-off for quite some time now, and was dithering back and forth about whether it was just confirmation bias in that I was only noticing it when otherwise migrainey -- but then on Monday, while on my way to my GP surgery to pick up some paperwork, it resulted in the railings I was going past (and that I go past regularly!) causing an extremely pronounced and unmistakeable strobing effect. I am very confident that that is not something I would somehow manage to confirmation bias myself out of noticing most of the time, so, hurrah, Definitely A Migraine Symptom (for lo, on Monday I was migrainey) it is.

The thing that is mildly baffling me is that I can't actually find (admittedly on a fairly cursory search) any description of specifically peripheral vision fuckery as a migraine thing! Lots of mentions of tunnel vision, lots of mentions of classic aura, and one case study in which "peripheral vision" is used metaphorically. So, you know, let the record show, &c.

Ordered, at least, to pick up next week.

Indulgence is a writing slope off eBay with a lucky dip of writing utensils, one of which I am very cheerful about...