who only by moving can balance

Reading. Prophet, Helen MacDonald & Sin Blaché. DELIGHTED SCREECHING. I have rydra's various discussion posts open in tabs to delve through as and when my brain will let me.

I attempted to start Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone, second in the Craft Wars) but got a couple of pages in before deciding I really did need to refresh my memory of Dead Country. So I've opened that in calibre on desktop, established I want to start skimming at around chapter 25, and then got distracted just a little way in on account of...

Creating ... some ridiculous pixel art. I've made another couple of tweaks since yesterday's post, and have now sent the whole thing with extended commentary off to simont, who is making problems of his very own with it :)

As I mentioned in passing I wound up making a bunch more by way of Creative Interpretations than I'd anticipated going in -- partly down to variation between reference images (never mind photo quality) and partly because actually some of the details of the original design were Just Bad Actually (at least once you've spent that long staring at the thing).

I was not expecting the kind of magic way things acquired depth and dimension between one round of being zoomed all the way out and the next. Overall, A Delightful Experience that I have no intention of repeating.

Cooking. A bunch of recipes from East, as part of project Cook (Almost) Everything In This Book: sunken ginger plum and spelt cake (unveganised; used wholemeal spelt instead of white because it was what we had in, with consequent grittiness; I'm still not a fan of Quite That Dominant a dried ginger flavour but A was def a fan); sweet chilli cashews (... I was surprised by how much I liked these and did indeed drink two G&Ts as accompaniment before we managed to finish them, as recommended by the text); spring onion and ginger noodles (no); blackened sweetcorn with miso butter (... definitely too salty given miso alone); tandoori broccoli (meh).

Eating. Cartmel's sticky toffee pudding! An excellent treat, as ever.

Making & mending. I have been knitting! I've been working on my Firstfall mittens, with copious use of lifelines; before I got wholly sucked in to Pixel Art I wound up knitting to the end of the ball of yarn with the pattern as written so I could decide how dubious I was about the sizing. I am definitely dubious about the sizing, and this afternoon frogged back to my last lifeline; I'm now experimenting with a variant hand flap design (though not short rows because that sounds difficult). I might yet wind up Redoing From Start again (the cuff as written goes well over halfway to my elbow, which is much longer than I need or particularly want, especially given that I'm finding myself playing yarn chicken at the other end!). And hey, if I do redo from start I'll benefit from having got at least slightly back into practice with tension management...

(I have also got A to select a yarn for their pair. I am not allowed to order it until I've cast on mitten #2 for myself, I have decided...)

Growing. Lemongrass continues to bravely struggle on! I really need to inventory seeds and decide what I'm ordering for the season (in particular I want to double check whether I've successfully saved seed from a couple of favourite tomato varieties). Sciarid fly nematodes arrived while I was head-down in pixel art so have gone to sit in the fridge and will get applied... probably tomorrow, at this point. (I am so bored of them continuing to show up.)

I continue enormously grateful for people helping me Actually Go To The Plot.