kafj | Reading

There was less of it usable than if it hadn't been sitting in my living room for a fortnight, but there is one dehydrator load of apples drying, and one saucepan of Apfelmus cooling, and... I think the latter is probably going to get frozen (at least in the first instance) because I am not at all convinced I have water-bathing a couple of jars in me right now. That might be a December problem.

But. The pulp leftover from the medlar jelly is frozen in Future Sticky Toffee Pudding-sized portions. The quince sorbet is in the freezer in its tub. And the apples are As Above. I am very very glad to have got that all dealt with, but alas have no other thoughts to contribute. <3

kaberett

( Read more... )

kaberett

but I did spend this morning sat down with my printouts and my page markers and my highlighters, and I did this evening take some photos of the relevant pages of a book I've loaned to someone else, and the essay (I say, grandiosely) tentatively entitled The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes: against a new dualism is definitely In The Works.

I haven't quite worked out the It is a truth universally acknowledged... opening sentence, and it's probably mostly going to be a series of quotations accompanied by EMPHATIC GESTICULATION in the form of CAPSLOCK, but it's not actually (in its entirety) germane to The Book, so here the indignant yelling can go.

kaberett

At the weekend we made a mildly unusual detour to a fancy local bakery; one of the things they had on the shelves about which I went "oooh" was fig, hazelnut & anise bread. So that flavour combination (plus some spelt) was went into the oven this morning!

The way bread normally works around here is that I make it, via the Ritual Question of Do You Have Any Breadferences (Bread Preferences). To facilitate this call and response, A List of our Usual Options, doubtless to be added to. Suggestions welcome. :)

( Read more... )

davidgillon

4AM-ish I wasn't asleep, and heard something which I couldn't work out if it was an aircraft or thunder.

So I popped open the bedroom window to see if it was any clearer that way, just caught the very end of it, and still couldn't tell.

I stood listening for a while, as it's rarely that quiet, and I could hear a freight train going past in the cutting down the hill - you can only really hear the trains at that time of night as otherwise they're drowned out by the traffic noise.

And then, for about 10 seconds, I heard the distinctive clip-clop, clip-clop of horse's hooves. WTF?

If you hear hoofbeats, suspect auditory illusions?

I have no idea what it actually was, but it sounded like hoofbeats. At 4AM.

Current Mood: Confuzzled
Current Location: In the still of the night

cahn

Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth (and five sequels); Gina -- The Girl Who Broke the World (and two sequels)

Outstanding! (As Hilo would say.) I do not know how with two children I have hitherto been unaware of the Hilo graphic novels, but indeed I did not know about them at all until a friend who was cleaning out her older kids' book collection offered them to A., and then I forgot about them until A. told me I needed to read them.

I don't know, y'all, these are graphic novels aimed towards the Dog Man demographic, I guess 8-year-old kids or so? they are definitely written on an 8-year-old level (complete with the old "let's erase everyone's memory" trick used a couple of times)... and somehow they were also a shot straight at my id. Maybe it's that I was getting over a cold when I read them and so my mental state was that of an 8-year-old. Or that the author was apparently influenced by Calvin and Hobbes and that went into some deep places in my brain. But I plowed through all 6 of the first set of books, and 3 of the next set, without being very aware that I was not absolutely the target audience. And indeed, what it shares so poignantly with C&H is that sense of deep joy. Hilo's very being just emanates joy. He has other kinds of emotions, too, but joy is the one that just radiates from the page.

But also all the characters are The Best and I have a lot of feelings about them! DJ and his large family that is so busy that they don't sit down to eat, but always have room for a few more, why not? Lisa, my fave, the little sister who starts getting suspicious about all the suspicious things going on that the other family members are too busy to pay attention to! Gina who wants to do STEM-y things and not do cheerleading, and her cheerleading-crazy family! Hilo and the ones who make up Hilo's backstory! Polly, who shows up in the second book and basically steals every scene!

The other thing about these books is that they are so wildly inventive. I read book one and thought, wow, that was good, but there's no way the author can pull that off for more than one book. Nope, he pulls it off for the five more in the series. It reminded me a little of how in The Good Place, I thought I knew what was coming in the second season, and then everything I thought was going to happen in the entire season happened in one episode. Loved these books madly, loved all the crazy hijinks madly, loved the deep compassion for all the characters madly.

The Gina books slow down a bit; they are still wildly inventive and with the same awesome characters, but by the nature of the series they have to be a tiny bit more serious, and so the set doesn't have quite the same exuberance that made me love the first six Hilo books so very much (which also do get more serious as they go along, but since it's all part of the same arc it's a little more gradual). But they are still great.

Spoilers

IZZY. Izzy was absolutely my favorite, no one will be surprised to hear. ALL THE PIECES FIT. I legit cried over her.

It's interesting -- some books I have a lot to say about, and I don't have very much to say about these; they're not the kind of books that I feel the need to chew over. (And, I mean. They're written for 8-year-olds.) They're just so joyous that I loved them very much.

HAZZAH!

silveradept

Good day. Let's begin with 144 hours of DDR to make a record.

Early hominids appear to have not only used tools, but passed that knowledge down through the generations. Which will evolve the understanding of the earliest ancestors of the human species, as science is wont to do.

If you haven't received a flu vaccine for this year, it might be a good idea to do so, even if the protection might not be ideal because of a new mutation showing up after the formulation had been decided.

The complete history of the nation must be preserved, and that means a lot of places are trying to keep and digitize the collections of Black newspapers and broadsheets they have in their collections.

Also, Dick Cheney is no longer able to create a more terrible world, having died at 84 years of age. If his name is invoked from here on out, it should be as a warning not to do what he did.

( There's more inside, about people who have made cruelty the point and disclaim any responsibility of care for what they've created. )

Last out for tonight, an eyesore with a bad caricature and Randian-libertarian messaging is now providing a better message, since the land and the billboard were bought by the local Native nation.

And research now suggests that humans do instinctively work to help each other, rather than passively watch others be hurt, especially in emergency situations.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness

kaberett

"Ugh," I thought, "why am I feeling weirdly migrainey? My Next Phase Of The Menstrual Cycle is very much not due for like another week? I've been weirdly super regular basically since it reasserted itself post-surgery?"

... TURNS OUT that I had lost track of time a bit and I'm not a solid week early at all, it's a whole two days. This Means Some Things:

... still super regular by my pre-surgical standards,
I will not be at the worst stage of my cycle during Significant Travel next week, and LAST BUT VERY MUCH NOT LEAST
the migraine is still in fact very clearly associated with hormonal changes even when I'm not expecting them, take THAT Headache Is The Second Most Common Form Of Psychosomatic Pain ~statistics~ (and ongoing anxiety).

hunningham

Trying to do dail(ish) journal entry - I know it's good for me but at a loss to explain exactly how or why it helps. Self-reflection? Vaguely social? Looking at what's happening in my life as opposed to in my head? IDK

I know that if I try and write about the big things I freeze up. So instead of "my father is dying" we have "today we et potatoes" And I can't do a "what I did today" journal - I just bore myself. So instead it's just what I'm thinking about right now this minute. 3 random things.

Yesterday was a good day. I got some exercise, I managed a journal entry, I ignored the greenparty WhatsApp, and I coloured my hair for the first time in about 3 months (I use henna and it really needs to be redone every 2-4 weeks).

And - above all - I am sleeping better. This does mean decamping to the sofa at about midnight with an eiderdown and a pillow, but it is working. If I'm sleeping okay I have superpowers, and I can do anything.

And the first thing I have to do today is order a lightweight single duvet. For my sofa escapades, I am using an old feather eiderdown which Mrs. Next-Door gave us some time last century. I think she bought it shortly after WW2. It has been stuffed into an old duvet cover to stop it leaking feathers, and it's very warm but it smells funky. Not exactly wet sheep, maybe elderly hens?

hunningham

Cat has had blood tests for kidney disease and for thyroid. And all clear, cat is in good health, just thin and a very fussy eater. I'm so glad. It's not just my little cat, but I'm looking after very elderly father-in-law right now and we're making decisions about his future and his care, and I really don't want to manage end-of-life care and decisions about euthanasia for my cat at the same time. Distressing for everyone.

Cat & father-in-law are getting on well. They share the sofa, have naps and listen to radio 3 together. My father-in-law has told me that one of the big regrets of his life is not getting a cat when his wife died. I am very surprised by this, because he is so not a cat person.

James-the-robot-vacuum-cleaner now has googly eyes. This has not endeared him to the cat. I think the robot is cat's equivalent of a dalek. It's approximately the same size as cat, makes very threatening unpleasant noises, will slowly pursue cat with obviously hostile intention. Have discussed this important matter with family & decided that big googly eyes would not have improved the daleks. Wise design decision on part of the BBC.

kaberett

~~... has done so many things and is Going To Bed and will fill in this placeholder Tomorrow.~~

Reading. ( Descartes, Gouldercourt et al., Clifford )

Forgotten Fruits (Christopher Stocks) got auto-returned to the library for a second time while I was still, like, a third of the way into it. I am going to try to take the DNF with grace this time, but the Completionist Itch is still there...

Writing. Grumpy e-mails to HMPO. Grumpy e-mails to uk.bookshop.org (on the plus side, the book I bought from them now has a shiny wee DRM-free tag! on the downside, I can download it in neither of the browsers I've tried so far.) Mental drafting of context-setting on movement and sleep, which really need to get out of my head and onto the page.

Playing. Inkulinati! We have Completed All Three Journeys. In the second stage we achieved an absolutely bullshit strategy that made things astonishingly easy; the third stage (with SEAL) was much harder work.

Little bit more I Love Hue.

Cooking. Two things of particular note, of which the first was ridiculous parsnip risotto with thyme pesto from The Modern Vegetarian, extremely good, would very happily eat again but I'm more dubious about the prospect of cooking it again, though I will concede it would probably go faster now I know what I'm doing.

Item the second was THE MEDLAR STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING. I am not entirely convinced I can actually detect the, you know, medlar, but it is very tasty.

Elsewise I have two batches of medlar jelly on the go (first batch did not set properly, BAH, I have not made enough jam recently, so I'm going to need to redecant and reboil that before I move on to the spiced) and some ridiculous quince sorbet that needs forcing through the sieve before churning.

And I have still not touched the apples.

Eating. Saturday lunch at Holtwhites Bakery :)

Exploring. Stupid little walk on Sunday revealed unto us, among other things: a pair of cyclamen in a bit of the verge outside our house we don't normally walk past; a discarded fork; a local bush of Purple Metallic Berries; a secret holly hedge.

Growing. SEEDS arrived. Jalapeños (at least at home) turning red.

umadoshi

Reading: Recently finished: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Schwab, V.E.), Confidence (Frumkin, Rafael), and Hemlock & Silver (Kingfisher, T.).

Currently reading: Still working through Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (Lamott, Anne) and most of the way through Metal from Heaven (Clarke, August).

scruloose and I have passed the halfway mark on listening to Network Effect, and haven't watched anything since that's occupying our "watch/listen to something together" time.

Weathering: Well, the weather sure has noticed it's November! This is not the first gray wet day we've had, and while yesterday kindly didn't rain on us when we went out erranding, it was down near the freezing mark (and had gone below overnight).

Eating:

scruloose and I have a delicious go-to Indian place, but both it and our fallback spot too universally have onions in everything for them to be good choices for Ginny, so periodically when she and Kas are over we gamble on an Indian spot that none of us have tried. ( butter chicken sadness )

kaberett

Irritatingly, the medlar jelly recipe I used last time I made the stuff, over at the RHS, is no longer extant (web.archive.org link!). Herewith my own readily findable copy of the thing, plus my notes on what I'm actually doing this time around.

(For amusement: I apparently first found the medlar sticky toffee pudding recipe in 2023...)

( Recipe as written )

( Notes )

kaberett

... Nor shall I say what objects of vision must be agreeable or disagreeable to it; for from what I have already said about the other senses, it is easy to grasp that light that is too strong will injure the eyes and moderate light must refresh them; and that, amongst the colours, green, which consistss in the most moderate action (which by analogy one can speak of as the ratio 1:2), is like the octave among musical consonances, or like bread among the foods that one eats, that is, it is the most universally agreeable.⁴⁰

⁴⁰ What the basis of this remark is is unclear, and although various writers have made suggestions about the relations between colours and sounds, the attempt to quantify green on a par with an octave certainly cannot be sustained. It is worth noting that Descartes will later advice Elizabeth to rid her mind of sad thoughts by reflecting on the greenness of a wood (Descartes to Elizabeth, May/June 1645, AT iv. 220).

(trans. and footnote courtesy of Stephen Gaukroger.)

davidgillon

The House of Lords have been taking evidence on the Assisted Suicide Bill.

Disabled folk to Parliament: The possibility of being compelled into assisted suicide scares us

Pro-assisted suicide mob to Parliament: a few disabled people coerced into assisted suicide is still worth it.

Honestly couldn't make it up

Current Mood: Grrrrr!

davidgillon

After three days in a row of not getting to sleep until after the sun was up (and then being woken mid-morning), I've basically spent the entire day asleep, apart from answering several phone calls from my sister and then almost immediately falling asleep again*.

I answered those sitting cross-legged on the bed, and I fell asleep in that position and then slept that way for several hours. My hips are NOT happy with me.

* I was particularly impressed that I picked up the thread of a dream I'd been having before one call afterwards. Strange dream for me, unusually non-action movie style.

Current Mood: Ow!
Current Location: Not cross-legged, much

hunningham

We had some problems with moths recently. There were rooming freely in the attic and chewed up a llama skin rug I had from my father, reducing it to a leather rag and a sad pile of fluff. I am impressed with their destructive abilities, but I do not want to encourage.

My moth identification skills are weak, but I think these are carpet moths rather than clothes moths. The interwebs say that the best way to combat is to hover every single day. That's hoover the entire house and under all the furniture. This is not going to happen. It really isn't.

So we now own a little robot vacuum cleaner. He's called James and he lives under the sofa. My father-in-law is deeply interested & fascinated, and the cat is completely appalled. I am going to buy some googly eyes.

kaberett

[cn time-restricted eating.]

( Read more... )

kaberett

( Read more... )

kaberett

I will grudgingly concede that the ridiculously overengineered parsnip risotto from The Modern Vegetarian is actually very tasty and it's very obvious that without the THREE DIFFERENT PREPARATIONS OF PARSNIP it would also be significantly less Parsnip. It is not, however, sufficient to convince me to update The Risotto Rule. But, as I say, it's very tasty and we have at least another day (possibly two?) of it, which I am cheerful about as a concept!
Blessedly my repeat prescription request had made it to the pharmacy by the time I swung by to pick up A's IOU and a new thing, so I won't need to make any more trips there ~~this week, at any rate~~.
Chillis in the greenhouse that I really need to bring home before I lose the gamble on frost are looking happy still despite a week+ of neglect.
Through hunting duvet covers (the one I bought for myself when I first moved out of the Den of Christians and into My Own Flat, in very early 2014, has tragically failed catastrophically) I have been reminded of the existence of incredibly gaudy (watercolours of) tulips, and I'm probably not going to spend slightly silly money on watercolour stripy tulips, but I'm very glad they exist.
We are continuing to Really Enjoy playing Inkulinati together, and I now definitely have enough grasp of the mechanics to collaborate on What We Wanna Do Next. One level fits quite neatly into some of the slightly awkward chunks of time in our week; I am looking forward to tomorrow's. <3

Profile

Kathleen Jowitt

April 2015

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Page Summary

kaberett - I have processed the fruit
kaberett - some good things!
kaberett - this post is not Descartes apologia
kaberett - [food] breadferences
davidgillon - Well that was weird
cahn - Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth (Winick)
silveradept - Only a little bit behind - Early November 02025
kaberett - [embodiment] ... ha
hunningham - Journal is good for me, like eating kale
hunningham - 3 Cat Things
kaberett - vital functions
umadoshi - Weekly(ish) proof of life: reading (no notes), weather, and butter chicken sadness
kaberett - [food] medlar jelly recipe
kaberett - [pain] today in Descartes: green is the best colour because it is most like an octave
davidgillon - Department of Couldn't Make It Up
davidgillon - Well, that was sub-optimal
hunningham - Moth and rust doth corrupt
kaberett - [embodiment] still a terrible hobby
kaberett - some good things make a post
kaberett - some things make a post

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Nov. 23rd, 2025 07:05 am