sebastienne

1. Clean, hot, on-demand running water.
2. I do not thus far feel particularly inspired by any of the recipes in Mary Woodin's The Painted Garden Cookbook, but I am very much enjoying leafing through the watercolours.
3. Bread came out of the oven not terribly long ago and will be breakfast tomorrow; I'm looking forward to it (probably with spiced medlar jelly, yes yes).
4. Continuity Gripes notwithstanding, I have this evening been extremely glad to have several October Daye short stories I'd not yet got to.
5. The pen I was using to take notes on The Challenge of Pain was running out of ink juuust enough that I was having to have repeated attempts at the odd letter, but not enough that it stopped writing before I was done making said notes. Great Satisfaction Achieved (and I'm hopeful that the thorough bath it has just had will mean it starts behaving better...)
6. Various greenhouse peppers continue to pep. The purple jalapeños are thus far mysteriously very much green, the thing that I think is a poblano (there was a mishap with labels) is setting fruit, and I've got no idea what exactly the short very bushy thing is but that too is now covered in flowers so with a little bit of luck I might even find out soon.
7. The second sowing of kohlrabi I'd entirely given up on... appears to be coming up after all???
8. A is a Very Good A Indeed and has finished unpacking the car following the event back in the first half of September. Before we wind up driving it across London again. And has cleared a bunch of the pile of Misc to take out to store in the garage.
9. Fancy moisturiser.
10. Warm Bed. yes. good. off I go.

Reading. ( Brosh, McMorland Hunter & Hughes, Melzack & Wall )

Dreamwidth! Down to two and a half months behind.

Writing. So many e-mails about objects. So many.

Watching. Farscape S02E06, Picture if You Will. The discussion about which of the Highly Specific Fetish Big Bads it was who was resurrecting in this particular context was entertaining in terms of highlighting the, you know, motifs. Of the work.

Playing. We have just managed some Fluxx. <3

Cooking. Batch of puff pastry for the sake of making two (of the three) things in East that call for it (because I could not quite bring myself to buy pre-made). Pleased with how the puff came out; mildly dubious about both the tomato, pistachio + saffron tart and the banana tarte tatin, but on the level of "I am unlikely to make these again", not "I regret making them".

Eating. On Tuesday we hit the point of Make The Internet Bring Us Pizza. The Pizza was very welcome.

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to say goodbye to Ruby Violet, i.e. we had cake for breakfast, along with hot chocolate. The flavours were all ones I was familiar with but I'm still pleased to have had them. (It is not impossible I will decide I want to make another trip by myself, though, especially given that they currently have the malted milk on...)

As mentioned we then also availed ourselves of an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean Veggie Combo and a piece of Japanese Curry Bread, both of which I am pleased to have experienced.

Exploring. St Pancras Waterpoint! Brief turn through Camley Street Natural Park.

Growing. Spinach that I thought was unlikely to still be viable turns out to in fact still be Extremely Viable! Spinach is go! And the lambs' lettuce has self-seeded nicely (so in fact I also had some of that plus some allotment rocket accompanying the tomato tart). Tomatoes continue to produce tomatoes. Peppers various looked very happy last time I went to see them so now I want to overwinter them all. At home, the pineapple continues to grow and the lemongrass isn't obviously dead yet (and I'm doing something right with at least the larger of the two orchids...)

Observing. BAT, extremely obliging with the aerobatics. Good sunsets. Cyclamen various. Moon.

I cannot tell if it's that I'm asleep, or that I'm Not A Biologist, or just that this paragraph (from The Challenge of Pain, Melzack & Wall) is actually very, but I am... struggling to persuade it to resolve into meaning:

Embryological and anatomical studies of fish, amphibians, and reptiles reveal that, even in the lowest vertebrates, reflexes are created by internuncial cells that link the sensory input to the motor output. During embryological development in these species, behaviour becomes increasingly a function of earlier sensory inputs as a result of the memory traces they have etched into the neural connections. Behaviour, then, is not merely the expression of a response to a stimulus, but a dynamic process comprising multiple interacting factors. Coghill (1929) was the first to propound this principle, based on his brilliant neuroembryological-behavioural studies of salamanders, which has been substantially confirmed by later investigators. Given this fundamental principle -- that organisms are not passive receivers manipulated by environmental inputs but act dynamically on those inputs so that behaviour becomes variable, unique and creative -- the remainder of evolution becomes comprehensible as a gradual development of mechanisms that make each new species increasingly independent of the push-and-pull of environmental circumstances.

Other than (but also, actually, in addition to) being sufficiently puzzled by this that I should definitely Go To Bed: I have caught up (mostly) on the PD e-mail. I completed one EYB indexing project and have been happily rolling around in making a start on the next. I made pastry, and used it as a prompt to unfuck the kitchen some, and then made progress on project Cook All The Things (From This One Book). I went on a Stupid Little Walk for my Stupid Mental Health. I am very very tired, and it has been a good day.

1. Today's post brought THREE of my (latest batch of) books from Oxfam, of which two were non-work-related: Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), which recessional mentioned when it was first published and which I am only just now managing to get to, and Chihuly at Kew, the exhibition book for the 2019 installation. I am having so many feelings about getting to flip through professional photography of all this art again. I'm so so pleased.
2. I mentioned these books to simont, who promptly went "hold on, isn't that the one that has a good Wikipedia article?" Turns out it very much is.
3. To my delight, despite the fact that I'd not been to the plot in something like two and a half weeks (between ten days away and the post-event collapse seguing immediately into A Cold that A brought home for us) all of the peppers various in the greenhouse were looking perfectly happy with themselves. HURRAH for Svaemskog terracotta watering bits + 2l drinks bottles. This is actually the happiest the chillis have been all year, given my... erratic... ability to leave the house; I am looking forward enthusiastically to the fruits of Expanding The System Further next year.
4. The ancient spinach seed is coming up! In vast quantities! That I was expecting to be dead and thus sowed all of across half a bed! There is going to be SO much spinach and even I will get to turn some of it into seeds for saving purposes, probably, and much of the rest of which I will go "oh right, I have discovered I like adding fresh spinach to the sad emergency noodle pots" about.
5. Brought home A Pannier Full Of Food, about which I am feeling very good given the Neglect. I am looking forward to turning a suitable array of tomatoes into part of the ongoing cooking project (at which point I will have some leftover puff pastry, so will also do the banana tarte tatin).

(I have not today achieved my Assigned Reading, by which I mean "30 pages of The Challenge of Pain, with notes", because instead I finished reading the last five pages of yesterday's thirty pages and still need to go back and Make My Notes on, like, twenty of those pages. I am learning so much neuroanatomy good grief. But there is bread, and there is yoghurt, and there is drying laundry, and I went to the plot, and I have started digging myself back out from under my pile of PD e-mails, and there was an excellent sunset.)

[... sorry about the template, I hit return in the title field and IT POSTED. details to appear shortly. :-p]

Reading. ( Ann Leckie, Monty Lyman, Ronald Melzack & Patrick D. Wall )

Writing. ... I have actually put some more notes into The Document.

So many lost property e-mails. (And at some point I'm going to need to start replying to them, too.)

Watching. On YouTube: True Facts: Bats, The Science Of The Hunt. NSFW. Definitely... An Experience.

Cooking. ... yeah no I managed to make veg spag bol on Friday but otherwise we've mostly just been feeling faintly sorry for ourselves. Okay, no, that's not quite true, I did also achieve baked potato on Wednesday.

Eating. Misc takeaway from The Field (leftover Sunday night curry for dinner on Tuesday; leftover vegetable fried rice + Szechuan tofu for breakfast on same...). I remain mildly resentful that the Wagamama menu still does not contain any of My Favourites.

Growing. The second attempt at pineapple has NEW LEAVES. The second attempt at lemongrass is maybe Going? And other than that I have no idea because I have spectacularly failed to make it to the plot this week.

Observing. BATS. A variety of excellent dahlias and passion flowers on a Trip To Town (post office, pharmacy).

A little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...

... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!

(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)