Beejournal

Reading. ( Allie Brosh, Jeannie Di Bon, Helena Attlee, Louis MacNeice, friends misc. )

... and several of the magazines that have been sat around causing Guilt and a sense of Obligation, subsequent to which I have happily recycled them. Favourite fact from the three so far: Garden Organic/the Heritage Seed Library are trialling using tuning forks to pollinate their tomato crops! ( Facebook | Instagram )

Bonus: sifting through a pile of notebooks etc to try to work out who the hell they belong to, mostly salvaged from the pile that was due to go out to event-freecycle on the basis that SURELY I could do something useful with them if, you know, I sat down with them at a time that wasn't in a field under Significant time pressure while Very tired. And I could! One and a half remain unidentified (I say "half" because We're Working On It).

Writing. A lot of lost property e-mails.

Cooking. One new recipe from East: paneer, spinach and tomato salad, accompanied by the herbed naan from the Leiths How to Cook Bread book (this is probably on my To Cook Through list). I was into this!

Also vaghareli makai ("spiced Indian corn") by way of David Lebovitz, and a slightly underwhelming lemony fennel and broccoli pasta (significantly improved by the addition of pine nuts).

Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Blackberries. Local plums are starting to be ripe!

Exploring. Poked around the green belt a bit to see how the plums were doing! And I think that's most of it?

A very brief poke around the entrance to the Pimp Hall Nature Reserve following a successful drop-off of Objects to the adjacent Household Waste Recycling Centre; tragically the signs on the gates claimed that they'd be locked at 4 p.m., which we had not quite anticipated, and we only reached them at 3.58. Next time, perhaps!

Creating. Hmm. Does sitting around knolling for the purposes of the big lost property post count? I think it probably does; certainly while the photos still aren't good (am I contemplating a lightbox and a tripod of some kind of this specific terrible hobby? to my slight horror, I kind of am...) the arrangements are getting much easier to parse visually, I discovered upon going back through a bunch of them, which I am pleased about.

Growing. Found a surprise pocketful of dried Sugar Magnolia pods, so I am definitely in the black when it comes to number of seeds for next year, which is a pleasant surprise!

I did not, until a few hours ago, know that diesel was named after Rudolf Diesel, "... who invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel".

(Some cheerful things, in brief: turns out shimmer inks really do work better when you thoroughly scrub the feed of your fountain pen clean at least occasionally; I am excited about tomorrow's bread; I was Greatly Honoured by the Toddler in a truly toddleresque fashion the details of which I shall not go into; I have finally got my act together to order a copy of the Roti King cookbook; glorious comfort reread of a thing I'd totally forgotten was even available for comfort reread, and for bonus points there are new bits!!!)

For Redactle reasons, yesterday I wound up working my way through Wikipedia's List of oldest continuously inhabited cities.

This turned out not to be helpful for Terrible Game Purposes, but it did mean that I came across a city in Anatolia, Turkey, "founded by the Phrygians in at least 1000 BC[E], although it has been estimated to be older than 4,000 years old".

The name of this city? Eskişehir.

"Eski" is the Turkish (and possibly Turkic?) word for "old" (antonym of "new" -- antonym of "young" is a different word). "Şehir" means "city".

We are so good at this.

Today was Lower Limb Class #2, as ongoing follow-up for the most recent ankle reinjury. (On which status is: still a biiiit weaker when I'm pushing to limits, but not really noticeable in day-to-day life, e.g. I'm no longer regularly wincing when I jar it getting off a bike; definitely still feeling the work up the outside of my right leg when doing e.g. isometric holds on double heel raises.)

I am very amused by how "???!!!" the physios got when I tried to faint from things that "shouldn't" have been significant cardio and indeed aren't by my standards for cardio but crucially involved a lot of moving around and position changes while upright: sit-to-stand, lunges, crab-walking with knees bent. Apparently I have carefully selected for exercise done while seated or prone for really solid reasons, i.e. that would be the orthostatic hypotension. Which I apparently hadn't told the physios about as its own thing. ...whoops.

( notes )

1. Sense Has Prevailed. (There has been an ongoing a Fabric Of The Building thing -- we live in a block with 12 other flats, every owner has a share of the freehold -- and today we had an actual meeting where we Voted and Agreed Next Steps. Via an hour or so of frequently-infuriating back and forth.)
2. Which we celebrated by stopping at a pub on the way home and making them bring us dinner (and raspberry lemonade for me, and a beer for A) to our outside table in the sunshine, rather than slogging up the hill to bake a potato.
3. Have made substantial progress on wrangling the post-event lost property paperwork. I have sent so many e-mails.
4. Continuing to read one chapter at a time of Hyperbole and a Half with A. <3
5. Many many exuberant and ridiculous flowers on the walk home.
6. Lots of effusive praise for various bits of Admin: the LRP-related work (including some v high praise indeed for the current GOD management team, which includes yrs truly).
7. Own bed and good sleep.
8. Apricots. (Left over from grocery order over two weeks ago, but stored in the fridge and still Very Apricot, about which I am delighted).
9. Helpful response means I am now unstuck on finishing up my current EYB indexing project. (... which is just as well because another stack of books may have just arrived...)
10. Really enjoying the handful of combat trousers I got Oxfam to send me. POCKETS.

... this being the style I have already sacrificed one of to The Endless Woodchip. Attempt at loss the first occurred while putting up tent; attempt at loss the second occurred late on Saturday night, when I was rushing from A to B to provide a roll-mat to a player and lost a fight with the bunting we use to discourage people from walking into the tent in places we don't want them to.

It was dark. Nonetheless I spent several whole minutes searching before giving up and resolving to try again in daylight. Consequently I got up good and early to start hunting before the team started carting all of the Objects back out of the storage ISO (all of the in-character valuables get locked away overnight while the tent's unstaffed...) and... discovered it really wasn't going to need much hunting after all.

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Tragically the brass hair stick I pulled out of "freecycle" before letting the players at the aged-out lost objects... wound up getting dropped in a known fairly well-defined location, and vanishing utterly into the ether, despite a good five people having a hunt for it. Ah well; maybe it'll show up next time, and maybe it won't, and either way I am likely to have future opportunities to Acquire More Hair Adornment.