fresh_haul | Member Posts

... is a placeholder; apparently getting the bus to a hospital appointment today ate my entire brain, and I need to be up early tomorrow morning for a different medical appointment for a different body part in a different place. (Why am I being sent to get an ultrasound four stops down the Piccadilly line instead of five minutes up the road? A MYSTERY.)

( Read more... )

umadoshi

Work/life overall: Usually before a seasonal crunch starts at Dayjob I think to post something to the effect of "I'm about to be swamped, so while I'll probably/hopefully manage to keep up with reading posts, commenting will probably be mostly nonexistent, etc. etc.", and sometimes I feel a bit silly about it because I'm not as active a commenter as I'd like anyway and sometimes the crunch isn't that bad, and probably most people reading this already know that anyway...but I have some newer mutuals here now and I didn't think to post it, and friends, this crunch is CRUNCHY. Ohboy.

Media intake: LOL. (Okay, I did actually read a couple volumes of manga last night, and I did show ep. 1 of Heated Rivalry to

scruloose last weekend. But I think that's it.)

Weather: We did get lots of snow early in the week, but somehow yet again didn't lose power. No complaints!

Cats: Last week both of the blues had birthdays! Yona turned four on Tuesday and Sinha turned five yesterday. (It would be very convenient to have a pic of the two of them together that'd make a good icon, but the odds of that ever happening are not remotely good. Have an icon of baby!Yona.)

Current Mood: exhausted

kaberett

Got libgourou working ~~(link to follow)~~, with thanks to simont for bringing it to my attention and me_and for making sympathetic and encouraging noises while I stared muzzily at the documentation this evening. Happy to report that I have successfully downloaded Adobe DRMed ebooks from my command line without any Windows install or emulators at all.
I am enjoying A Physical Education so much - SO much - that I have gone out and bought a book it recommends (Starting Strength; very wordy descriptions of which muscles one should be using for what, apparently, i.e. exactly my kind of thing). Acquiring my own copy once I've given the library's back is a definite possibility. It's really interesting in terms of both the pain Project (memoir about embodiment!) and in terms of my own movement-related special interests (e.g. the gulf between my experience of largely self-led Pilates vs the version available via mainstream contemporary classes embedded in diet culture). Lots of content notes but I'm really really liking it. Gratitude to buttonsbeadslace for posting about it ~~(... link to follow...)~~
Stupid Little Walk yielded both very cheap pistachio croissants (MORE BREAKFAST NONSENSE) and a very cheap "cinnamon danish with vanilla fondant icing" I've been vaguely eyeing up but was also very suspicious of. I am glad to have tried it and probably won't get it again, even if it is only 19p.
This evening's tofu was particularly cooperative with being cooked. (Thanks be to evilsusan for the specific combination of courgettes, tofu and garlic that I still make regularly lo these many years later )
I hit refresh on Oxfam Online and discovered that the rotating sale has migrated back around to "30% off 3+ books". Thus now on their way to me I have: the first edition of Explain Pain for an astonishingly reasonable price (I want to do the deeply nerdy thing of a side-by-side comparison with the second edition, and also to revisit its structure while the second edition is on loan to a physio friend...); a book entitled Science of Pilates, which I'd previously eyed up but that time it sold before I got around to it; a book about allotments and cooking; and a probably questionable out-of-print 1980s cookbook...

kaberett

Ridiculous indulgent breakfast situation (though having now looked up Culinary Strata because A asked, I am extremely unconvinced that pistachio croissants with raspberries)... counts.
Therapy session, spent entirely talking about One Thing (with tendrils), has left me feeling distinctly more settled.
Today's primary Make Numbers Go Down project has been working my way through some of the short fiction I've had open in tabs since [mumble]. Highlight thus far is Naomi Kritzer's The Thing About Ghost Stories (cn parental death, dementia).
The other New Thing I started consuming today is A Physical Education, which is extremely and often graphically about diet culture and disordered eating, but which 11% of the way through the audio file I am Very Much Enjoying. Further updates to follow. (The library only has audio, I apparently put a hold on it seven weeks ago though I can't at this point remember where I came across it, and The First Headphones I Have Ever Tolerated remain excellent. Shokz OpenRun Pro.)
The Child liked the replacement mock cherries; spring flowers are excellent (we are firmly heading into daffodils now); Routine Dinner tonight DID work even though the app initially Frightened Me by claiming first available pickup was tomorrow morning.

kaberett

Made it to the plot! Brought home more salad than we actually wanted to eat this evening! Mostly lamb's lettuce but some bonus baby beetroot and spinach leaves :)
Also, the broad beans are starting to emerge (well, the ones that didn't get partly dug up and then abandoned on the surface unmunched, anyway; those have now been reinterred).
In the course of Making An Effort to Close More Tabs I rediscovered Standard Ebooks, and downloaded a bunch of things I'd apparently been interested in for Some Time: Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
I spent some of the evening doing minor crafts with supplies A acquired, to make replacement cherries for a children's board game, using red wooden beans and green cotton string. I am mildly concerned that the Child might disapprove of the string being green rather than red, but We Shall See...
Cleeeeeeeeeen hair.

kaberett

inCompleted White Puzzle!!! We were right about That One Piece being the missing one, and now that I'm not worried about spoilers I have poked the internet and it (mostly in the form of reddit) confirms that Those Are The Missing Bit.
one (1) orchid flower is all the way open!
supermarket had discount fancy croissant, so we are most of the way to prepped for Fancy Breakfast tomorrow morning :)

ursamajor

Watching my soprano section shrink in real time the week of a concert due to the germ soup we're all swimming around in out there: augh. (People. This is why most of your section leaders and certain choir elders have decided to continue singing masked, even if we can't make it policy again for the whole choir for various bureaucratic reasons. Seriously, 3M, where are those black N95s we've been politely requesting for four years now?)

Still, glad to be singing with a group whose music is meeting the moment; check program notes, well worth a read for background. Keeping in mind the timelines for performing classical music are scheduled well over a year in advance. A program replete with music from immigrants, combining disparate musical traditions in the best ways.

*

We almost had snow in the Bay Area again last week - well, okay, the actual 2500' peaks like Mount Diablo and Mount Hamilton got snow and it looked pretty, and of course the much higher Sierras to our east got feet of snow and "no you can't fucking travel today" warnings and avalanche deaths - and now we're missing the first real snow in Boston in years, and it's pretty, but I'm okay with that.

*

I dropped my phone awhile back, and while it was still technically functional, the back had enough spiderwebbing and flaking glass revealing the motherboard structure below that I got it replaced. It has literally taken most of the day since it arrived to get things swapped over. Mostly because this also involved a forced upgrade to Liquid Glass, which I'd been ducking, sigh.

*

A few months ago,

hyounpark and I were getting on the freeway when a billboard flashed "LOCAL BIRRIA BALLS" at us. For, like, half a second, just long enough for H to read the phrase aloud, and go, "Birria *balls*?"
Me: "That's like, bringing up ancient catchphrases in my brain. Remember 'I wanna dip my balls in it'?"
H: "... I don't want to know, do I."
Me: "MTV in the '90s. For what it's worth, they were golf balls."
H: "I suspect birria balls are going to be quite different, but I'm driving so I can't find out right now."
Me: "I'm on it!"
Me, five minutes later: "Well, I can't find a local option for whatever these are, and Google keeps asking me if I'm looking for 'birria bombs.' But apparently a Mexican food truck in Kentucky says they're meatballs made of birria? With Hot Cheetos dust on the outside for crunch? ... and there's a restaurant in West Virginia that agrees with them."
H: "... I mean, that sounds like uber-American stoner kid food mashup culture, but why aren't there more local search results if there's literally a freeway billboard promoting it?"
Me: "Or we can buy them frozen. From an Italian specialty food shop. In Denmark."
H: "Google, you have utterly lost the plot."

We finally saw that particular billboard again (it's one of those electronic billboards with a rotating stash of ads), and this time, it had a URL attached, so we discovered that the local birria balls are literally just flavor packs, you have to provide your own birria in ball form.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: and smiles and knows she's home

kaberett

Reading. Finished The Rose Field (Pullman)!!! I am Making Arrangements for it to Leave My House. ( Read more... )

ANYWAY. I finished it. It Is Done.

Then read the first few pages of Dead Hand Rule (Gladstone; latest in the Craft Wars) before deciding that actually I need to reread at least the end of Wicked Problems in order to remember what's going on...

Writing. Progress continues both glacial and extant.

Listening. My relisten-while-actually-awake of the first chunk of The Hidden Almanac continues, slowly.

Playing. We have finished an Exploders run on Hard in Inkulinati. I am contemplating, given how smoothly that went, whether I want to have a try at Very Hard...

Cooking. It's not quite "this week's breakfast dal, and a loaf of bread", but it does sort of feel like it was. Partly because for reasons we did not get our usual box of veg on Monday last week, which meant that we were scrabbling around using up Shelf Things and the occasional Supermarket Discount Item...

NO WAIT, I also DID make buckwheat pancakes, and inspired by lnr combined Tinned Pear and Stem Ginger with Vanilla Essence and also Ground Cardamom to go in same. V good. Will repeat.

Eating. My mother acquired for us, as A Special Treat, a variety of Baked Goods from The Fancy Bakery In Eddington: my favourite is still the fig-and-?ricotta, but the blueberry-and-?ricotta is also very good, as is the fougasse. A was extremely pleased with the pain aux raisins. AND my mother made some excellent baba ganoush, eaten with said fougasse.

This week also feat. rainbow bagels (which we got to watch some of the manufacturing process for!) as well as misc other foodstuffs from Shalom Hot Beigels.

A has some coffee and butterscotch cake (leftovers from a test bake!) from Flour Arrangements; alas by the time I got my act together to actually collect Excess Test Cake the apple pie and lemon had both all gone...

Exploring. I got to spend a little time in the City of London Cemetery, which is currently ablaze with (among other things) purple crocuses; we also (on our second attempt) managed to go on A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey (with thanks to aldabra for reminding me that it is That Time Of Year still!). Snowdrops excellent. May or may not get around to sharing some photos. (Our first attempt at A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey Abbey wound up mutating into a poke around the back of Churchill and Astronomy to peer at bulbs and other plants misc, which was also very enjoyable even if I did once again fail to take A to see the Barbara Hepworth.)

Growing. ... I bought a bag of snowdrops In The Green at Anglesey, to go into the ground around the cherry tree at the allotment? The lemongrass seedlings haven't all died?

umadoshi

Reading: Last week I finished Stephanie Burgis' Wooing the Witch Queen (fun!) and read Heated Rivalry. I opted to just skip straight to the actual HR novel rather than first reading the Scott/Kip novel, which worked out fine, since I also had that context from the show. I enjoyed it a fair bit, but now I'm in the awkward position of wanting to see the next chunk for Shane and Ilya but no more urgently than after I finished watching season 1 of the show. The choices now are a) read the entire series (presumably doubling back to actually read book 1), b) skip ahead and read The Long Game, or c) hold off entirely and wait for season 2 of the show.

I also read a few more volumes each of Hikaru no Go and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but I'm still in rereading territory with both. (I think I've already read up to vol. 12 of Kurosagi, but for Hikaru, I think the odds are against me really realizing when I've hit new territory until I go to enter a volume in Goodreads and find it's not already on my Read list there.)

Watching:

scruloose and I are caught up on both The Pitt and Frieren, and we finished Midnight Mass last weekend (a very solid, intense ending).

With my crunch time at work starting, it's not an ideal time for us to start a show that's a significant time commitment or that's going to leave me desperate to see a next episode when work is eating most or all of my evenings. It's possible this will result in me just showing

scruloose Heated Rivalry, since it's apparently our key cultural export of the decade and all. *g* Only six episodes and I don't have to worry about being impatient to see what happens next or about being spoiled.

(I still don't feel actively fannish about HR at all, but am enjoying being adjacent to it and seeing all the fannish excitement and meta and such. I have saved many fic recs to my read-later list on A03, but have yet to actually read a single one [and may never, given how slowly I go through fic--there's still a steady stream of Guardian fic I haven't read that also goes on that list].)

Weathering/Working: We have what sounds like a significant nor'easter blizzard arriving at some point tomorrow, with heavy wet snow. Will this be where our luck fails for the season and we lose power for the first time? (I'm completely astonished that it hasn't happened yet. Probably it's not really because the generator and backup power are warding that off, like carrying an umbrella around...)

And of course the spring crunch is set to start tomorrow in the late afternoon, right around when the storm is likely to be in full swing. Will the weather have much impact? (Mainly, I guess, in terms of Those Who Speak all being able to make it there safely; I kinda hope that there's some kind of backup power in their actual building, but I don't know for sure one way or the other.)

rydra_wong

can, to some small degree, be simulated by a blindfolded person trying to push buttons while someone else shouts confused and panicked instructions at them:

Watch on YouTube

(Except that these guys mastered jumping WAY faster than I did.)

It's hilarious and delightful to me to watch people having an experience of Dark Souls which is not wholly unlike mine. In a weird way I feel kind of #represented.

In later vids, they have (like me) discovered the joys of the halberd as adaptive technology for people who are bad at spacing and aiming.

kaberett

Breakfast dal. This experiment continues to work extremely well.
I have definitely reached the point with the Incomplete White Puzzle where it's speeding up significantly on account of enough pieces are in place to significantly reduce the number of possible combinations that need checking. Today's decision was to start filling in from the bottom edge, where I still had a chunk that was just edge and no middles, because I think that up in the top left (interior) corner I've identified The Missing Piece, and will get annoyed if I wind up with non-contiguous gaps...
Today alternating Locate One Puzzle Piece with Do One Useful Job has been nice and smooth and easy. I have got Several things done. Is pleased.
Really really enjoying my ridiculous washi tape collection. Today I self-indulgently Added More Week Dividers, including replacing some pre-existing ones that I was Not Enjoying, Actually.
( Exercise & embodiment. )

kaberett

I have introduced my mother to this, I have introduced the Child's household to this, I am writing it down because clearly It Is Time for me to do so.

( Read more... )

anne

Stray Kids is still my fave, but Ateez's new EP is really, really good. My EXO buddy sent me a box full of CDs, which has been keeping me occupied--they're growing on me, but I'm still not fannish about them. I may or may not be fannish about Ateez...so far not, but their dancing is so good I might break down, idk.

Ever since I got into Stray Kids in Aug/Sept, I've been paralyzed about my bias. I don't have one! I can't pick! They're all so good in their own ways! I couldn't even pick a bias line. But today I realized I do have two bias lines: the hyung line and the dongsaeng line. 🤡

kaberett

Specifically: I find myself in possession of both a superking duvet cover and a deep fitted double sheet that are mostly Genuinely Nice Cotton... and have both got holes worn through them in one specific place.

I have accepted about myself that I am not a person who will tolerate sleeping on patched bedsheets (because Textures). I am loathe to just hand them over to rag recycling. I am scared of trying to sew anything out of them, but might manage it with some encouragement.

I would greatly appreciate people Being Opinionated on this topic.

kaberett

Yesterday afternoon I'd been discussing auditor traps. Yesterday evening we walked out of the supermarket and were confronted by

three signs across a blocked-off road: DIVERSION pointing right, ROAD CLOSED, DIVERSION pointing left

[description in alt text, better to follow]

the_shoshanna

On the BIIIIIIIIIIIIIG screen!

My local fabulous theatre is hosting this event: a showing of episode 6 followed by a panel discussion they describe as

– how the series is changing the game for independent Canadian producers with Heated Rivalry producer Lori Fischburg
– how the music featured in the series has launched emerging artists into the spotlight with CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud
– how modern fandom helped propel its rapid international ascent from beloved underground novels into the TV stratosphere with University of Toronto pop culture professor Angie Fazekas
– its influence on LGBTQ+ athletes and the game itself with sports professor Kyle Rich of Brock University.

and they're doing it on one of the few Sunday mornings this month when I haven't promised to do something at church and I'm going with my local friend who marathoned the whole thing with me on Boxing Day and I am excited!

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

Fresh Haul

vital functions

Weekly proof of life, seasonal-crunch edition

some good things!

some good things.

some good things

some good things make a post

why do you elude me

vital functions

Weekly proof of life: recent media | Spring Crunch Eve

My motor cortex learning to play Dark Souls

some good things

[food] the kale thing

a record of my kpop journey

what does one do with Sad Bedsheets?

particularly timely

I am skipping church and going to the cottage!

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September 2025

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