belated vital functions

Jun. 16th, 2026 09:57 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Tiiiny bit more of Much Ado About Mothing.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac on the way to the field! Mord and Drom are On A Road Trip...

Cooking. First batch of experimental copycat Dr Karg's protein thins: didn't roll out thin enough, possibly wanna experiment with bumping the vital wheat gluten down, and also I think the (majority of the) chopped pumpkin seeds probably want to go on in some kind of final rolling step. Hurrah for progress!

Eating. The crêpe place on the field had STRAWBERRIES i could get them to add STRAWBERRIES to my lemon-and-sugar crêpe!!!

Breakfast mush worked... acceptably with the little pots of instant porridge from Crew Welfare, though I definitely preferred starting with plain and adding things to starting with even the dried-strawb-and-rasp option.

I remembered I could ask the pizza place to put pineapple on my veg pizza.

Observing. BATS on site!!!

yes good event

Jun. 14th, 2026 11:59 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

The DRAINAGE (ie Thursday rain that would have rendered the previous site wretched all weekend was mildly inconvenient on Thursday and then became Fine Actually). The friend we brought along had a really good time with sledgehammers. Social overtures. Once we'd made it through Thursday, things ran... smoothly? Gigglefests with multiple groups of people. Yes Good.

Media Roundup: Pre-Trip Reading

Jun. 14th, 2026 02:09 pm
forestofglory: Cup of tea on a pile of books (books)
[personal profile] forestofglory
I’m leaving for a short trip soon and I thought it would be nice if I could finish up some of the massive pile of library books I have sitting around before then, seeing as I don’t want to take them with me. I didn't read as much of the pile as I hoped but I did make some progress!

Many of these are nominees for this year's Eisner Awards, since I looked at those and put in holds for the ones that seemed interesting recently.

Vern, Custodian of the Universe by Tyrell Waiters—Graphic novel about Vern, who having lost his job moves home to Florida where it turns out his grandma has gotten him a job at a weird tech company. This was fun and zanny. There’s multiverse travel and kinda trippy art to go with it. The story is a bit didactic but I really liked the message so that worked for me.

This Place Kills Me by Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux—This a murder mystery set at an all girls school in the 80s. (It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice it wasn’t contemporary) Our main character is a recent transfer student who doesn’t fit in. I really liked this, the characters were compelling, the mystery was interesting, and the ending felt just right
Content notes are spoilerish Homophobia, underage sex, death of a teen


Globetrotters: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's World Tour by Julian Voloj and Julie Rocheleau—This graphic novel is inspired by real historical events – that I knew basically nothing about before reading this! All I knew was that Nellie Bly was a pioneering woman journalist. The subtitle makes it sound like Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland were traveling together but actually they were racing to see who could get around the world the fastest! I was totally riveted!
Content note: period typical sexism and racism

Detective Beans: Adventures in Cat Town by Li Chen—The second Detective Beans book, about Beans the adorable detective kitten. This one is a collection of shorter stories, my favorite was the last one with the bear and the moon!

Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young—This is hard to talk about. It's a graphic novel about a group of friends who are looking for one of their friends who is missing, possibly dead. (They are all teens) its kinda creepy, but also kind of heartwarming? Anyways I enjoyed it a lot!

ARB Roundtable

Jun. 11th, 2026 04:35 pm
forestofglory: A hand writing in Elvish (Writing)
[personal profile] forestofglory
I'm took part in a roundtable on "Positivity, Negativity or the Secret Third Thing (Criticism)" which is now up at Ancillary Review of Books!

vital functions

Jun. 7th, 2026 11:19 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Finished Dead Hand Rule, Max Gladstone. Am disgruntled. Might soothe the disgruntlement by rereading the Sequence of adoration past.

Also finished Fight Right, as previously mentioned; I am sort of interested by the range of disagreements I have with them and also by some of the things they omitted (they make no suggestion of exchanging Tokens Of Good Faith when brain is too Bad to talk usefully???); I am kind of sad for them and specifically for Julie that they... are much less good at this than they think they are, based on their reports of their own fights. (Two key examples: including Julie saying "I'm always [negative]" during Model Apologies with zero indication that this is not good practice on multiple axes; the whole lengthy story in which neither of them seem to notice that what she actually wanted was for him to say Hey, You Did A Hard Thing You Struggle With, Good Job and instead got him assuming out loud that she had in fact done the polar opposite of the hard thing and proceeding with the conversation on that basis.)

Casting around for Maybe I Want Some More Non-Fiction, my "maybe read this one day" queue in the library app has yielded: Much Ado About Mothing, James Lowen, which is obviously relevant to several of my interests though I'm prepared to be disappointed by the lack of any meaningful incorporation of My Favourite Shakespeare. I am in chapter three and having a good time.

Listening. Today was Laminate All The Things day, so we have listened to another chunk of Hidden Almanac! Mord's hellebores.

Cooking. Broad bean kuku with the ALLOTMENT SAFFRON. Experimental Kaiserschmarrn with blueberries instead of raisins, and pear and rhubarb compote. Another round of the potato and kale and bean thing.

It turns out that the tiny 2.5kg weights A has for their dumbbells do really well for squishing tofu in a hurry, which would be a more useful fact if A were not considering getting rid of that set of dumbbells given that I have the fancy ones...

(Weights nerds: the 1" spinlock things that are endless faff.)

Eating. SAFFRON from the ALLOTMENT.

Exploring.

Creating.

Making & mending.

Growing. I made it to the plot. I spent very little time there but I made it; cherry tree looking EXTREMELY unhappy about not having been watered but soft fruit all looking promising; should def harvest some broad beans (or maybe just have An Million to do a whole bed full next year).

At home: some TLC to the smaller orchid, which is looking very sad (having successfully sent up a flower spike most of which never opened, sob) because I am having a time trying to get watering it right without moving it into its own saucer that I don't reaaaaaaally have space for on that windowsill. (Am I contemplating going back to the charity shop and Acquiring the pointy teardrop open terrarium situation I saw there yesterday? Yes I am.)

Observing. Baby birds! The teenage foxes continue to yell SO MUCH. Many excellent plants in passing. Gosh it's nice being outside at the moment when it's not, you know, absolutely bucketing it down.

some good things

Jun. 6th, 2026 11:46 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

We engaged in what is now our Brunch Date tradition, in that we visited the fancy bakery and then we bimbled around the aqueduct looking at baby birds while slowly consuming our spoils.

Baby birds the first were at coot nest #1; we spotted the mallard sitting merrily on top of it to start with, and then I went HOLD ON THAT'S A TINY FLUFFY DUCKLING. ... THREE DUCKLINGS. The coots (a) are not shy about chasing ducks off and (b) tend to move gradually down the not-exactly-a-river with successive clutches, so we are not too concerned about them.

There were also: another clutch of (rather larger) ducklings, with no supervising adult; some extremely teenage coots; some extremely baby coots going WHEEK WHEEK WHEEK at the tops of their tiny lungs; yet another coot nest containing one (1) adult, two (2) teenagers, and three (3) tiny fluffy cheeplets, the teenagers being actually in the nest and variously sitting on top of and preening the cheeplets. The Egyptian goslings meanwhile are very nearly all the way grown up, but continue to spend most of their time clustered together.

I am not entirely sure why I had decided baby season was probably over, but I think we can definitively say that It Is Not!

some good things

Jun. 4th, 2026 11:41 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. was invited to read A Bedtime Story :)
  2. fresh new bedlinen
  3. Eating More Food has in fact fixed the muscle soreness, again
  4. successfully achieved a favour for a person (via venturing into the Warhammer shop halfway down the hill)
  5. after the torrential rain, the sunset

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Cambridge University

April 2010

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