kaberett | the best people I know are looking out for me <3 // ten good things (Reply)

I have various ganache and praline bits-and-pieces left over from last time I made chocolates; I ran out of dark chocolate for making my ludicrously overengineered hot chocolate with; I have therefore, for the past week or two, been using up ganache. This has several notable benefits, including "I simultaneously free up tupperware and flat surfaces". Also it is tasty, and I'm currently working my way through a hazelnut praline and a litre of hazelnut milk; it is excellent comfort-food for Alexen.
I am currently working my way slowly through 750ml of strawberry-and-banana smoothie; this evening the online shop will be bringing me a small lake of apple-peach-and-pear juice, which is not as nice as the apple-and-pear juice I used to be able to get that has been discontinued but is nonetheless acceptable as Food.
I have got all of the necessary ingredients for making tiramisu, and indeed last night brewed some (decaf!) coffee to make it with.
I am still chewing over last week's Elementary, and redemption arcs and chosen family and boundaries and necessities and narrative imperative in tension with multiple kinds of emotional satisfaction, and the things I find myself wanting -- superficially -- from the story, given points-of-view, and the odd and bittersweet relief at instead getting what I need. The murder plots make no sense, but then they mostly didn't ever; I am still very much here for the characters.
My new CEA card arrived in the post yesterday, which means I will stop feeling faintly guilty about "wasting money" every time I go to the cinema. This is a Good Thing, given how much I'm looking forward to Hidden Figures.
I'm having a really tough time writing an abstract this week, for a variety of reasons, but in the face of that I got a draft in more than 18 hours before the deadline that I was actually reasonably happy with, via the iterative-improvement approach to writing. It needs substantially rewriting, but I've demonstrated that my techniques work, and I've got reasonable confidence that the substatial rewriting wasn't in fact me wildly misinterpreting what was going on.
I said no to someone, and it was fine. (And indeed several other someones, which was less fine but which left me feeling better than I would've if I'd stayed silent.) I told someone I'd screwed something up, face-to-face and more-or-less straight away rather than stewing for six hours over sending an e-mail, and it was fine. Both were really difficult, and I did them.
I appear, via UCH, to have found a sustainable set of strength-building exercises to do that are resulting in measurable improvements. I'm dealing with a lot of complicated Feelings about this pretty well.
Some stripy tulips were much reduced in the supermarket last week; they've been sat in a glass jar on the dining table slowly drying out and turning interesting shapes ever since, and they make me feel soothed and safe and at home.
I am forever gently amused by the thing where, when A is around, we sleep under a single lightweight duvet and are frequently too warm. When he's away, I end up nesting in a pile of that duvet, my three-season much-larger covered-in-dinosaurs duvet, a weighted blanket, and a big soft non-allergenic stripy blue blanket -- and I end up comfortably warm, and with a lot of weight on me, and it's very nice to have occasionally.