who only by moving can balance

Reading. kiss him goodbye, Victoria Routledge. On the one hand, my heart breaks for small-me for whom this amount of Mention Of The Gays was a small and secret fire to warm myself by, and also good grief but almost all the characters are still kind of terrible and the derision towards therapy and therapists is exceedingly dull; on the other I cackled with delight when... our main character... moved into a flatshare in West Kensington, i.e. pretty much precisely the location of my first London flatshare, because as I've said these books are intensely nostalgic for me because I read them when I were a wee thing, well before I went to university let alone moved to London, and... well, here we are, nostalgia from all angles. Oh yes, these are my stomping grounds. Hello, North End Road! ... hello, floppy discs and 40wpm typing speeds and mobile phones as a Rare And Unusual Thing that people don't always have (1) on them and (2) on! And: as a bit of flavour, one of the dilettanteish supporting cast... made it through two days of a cookery course at Prue Leith. So that's. Something. (I have found somewhere on the internet willing to send me the author's next two books, which I haven't read, for the princely sum of £4.82. I strongly suspect that in the absence of Nostalgia they really won't work for me, but the worst case scenario here is that I make some mildly inefficient donations to charity, which I can perfectly well live with.)

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie. Launching ever-so-slowly into another comfort reread, for something to do with myself during my workrave microbreaks, and I am enjoying it as much as ever.

Writing. -- OKAY. SO. THE THING IS. I got most of the way through my chapter 5 rewrites! I was genuinely nearly there! And then, this evening, while grudgingly slogging through skim-reading some background for the sake of writing one (1) throwaway context-setting paragraph, I stumbled across an equally throw-away sentence that! explains! everything! Or, well, shifts me from "I know I'm right" to "and I know why", which is a pleasant improvement from my previous position of "... fucked if I know what's going on in physical terms, though". I can't prove it -- I can't go back into lab -- but by goodness can I argue it more compellingly!

... the downside being that it means I probably need to completely restructure the discussion section of my final Science Chapter, and also my supervisor now wants me to hold off on sending her the rewrite I'd been going to get her by tomorrow morning. Until we've had a meeting. To discuss things. When I just want to be done, but, sigh, okay, I have in fact also achieved Explaining!!! Everything!!!!! and spent some time really quite excited about it.

Because. Managing to actually hit a point, in the discussion section of the final science chapter of my thesis, where I read a throwaway sentence included in someone else's 2006 paper for completeness' sake -- and having everything go ker-chunk into place, in a way I am almost certainly the only person on the planet currently in a position to be able to do -- well. Well that's a lovely affirming sense-of-mastery Moment to have had, even as it does make More Work.

Watching. CXG S03E02. Oh good grief. THE CHOREOGRAPHY THAT RESULTS IN REBECCA LEAVING JOSH AT THE ALTAR! The vocation to priesthood actually getting explained to Josh in small words! The reprise of Paula's song, making it unambiguously explicitly clear that Paula's behaviour was also awful! And the beautiful capstone of Josh deciding (and the show letting you kid yourself into believing) that he's done nothing wrong even as Rebecca does start to get a grip on "... wait. fuck." Ohhh that was good.

The Edinburgh Zoo penguin cam, in the background.

Cooking. Jollof rice! And plantain, excavated from the freezer, that was mysteriously in fact still food, and also cauliflower that we'd butchered and then roasted with cumin. And lime juice. This was plausible! I still need to get better at liquid-to-rice ratio, and I also want to work out something more exciting to do with the cauliflower, but Basically Yes.

Subsequent to that I had another go at phở, followed by settling on an approximate order of operations for pad thai, in the interests of using up the bag of beansprouts and also of Thai basil we'd acquired prior to me deciding I didn't feel like the thing we'd first thought of.

Reporting back on Kardemummebullar: freezing them par-baked is definitely a good plan and I will definitely be doing it again, but while dropping the temperature to 160°C for the reheating does help it is increasingly apparent that I should have dropped the temperature for par-baking to 170°C, at which point the innards would presumably all have been properly cooked instead of still a bit doughy. But! Proof of concept!

Eating. The final delivery of our three-month Ruby Violet subscription arrived this week, so in addition to eating up the black sesame (home-made) and the hazelnut brittle (from a previous batch), I have also been monching cheerfully on the British Blackcurrant (always one of my favourites!), the Honey & Honeycomb, and the new-to-me banana-and-toffee. Which I think I like well enough, but would prefer with more evenly distributed toffee and probably also salted caramel sauce, which I do not currently have any of because the previous batch of it finally went off, so perhaps I should make another one in the interests of using up the double cream I'm not otherwise getting around to. Hmm.

Making & mending. I have tried reattaching the mud guard to the bike, and it looks tentatively promising, although I need to tighten up some things and wiggle some other things and generally pump up the tyres, none of which I am willing to do until I've managed to coax myself into sorting out the front brake cable. So that's a job for this week, probably. (I also spent some time poking at the AXA lock on the rear wheel; I couldn't get the broken-off key stub in the lock out using any of the half-hearted approaches I've attempted so far, so for my next trick I need to get around to selecting an appropriate screwdriver, removing the whole thing, and then having another go at said key stub in the comfort of the warm indoors.)

Growing. Chillis continue! Sciarid flies appear to have Done Away With most of the interesting tomatoes, so alas I need to work myself up to getting a second batch of those started (ugh) (and yes they'll be late, but some is better than none). But. Things survive.

Observing. BATS (PLURAL). First bats of the year! We've been keeping an eye out since late March, on the grounds that we first spotted them in early April last year, but in fact the first bat sighting this year was tonight as I was attempting to settle down to start horn practice and, instead, BATS. TWO OF THEM. I am DELIGHTED that we are properly into the season of bat o'clock.

This was sufficiently exciting that even I managed to coax Adam away from his snail to look at (and listen to) them.

... we have also been Observing the Snail. A had brought in the bucket I use to take compost to the allotment, you see, for the purposes of disgorging some more compost into it -- so far so good -- but did not notice that, in the process, he'd knocked a snail off its outards and onto the floor by the dishwasher...

... until he put his great toe through its shell.

Whereupon he flapped sadly a bit and made to put it outside and I gently reminded him that he was allowed to snail hospital, whereupon he lit up and DID, and unlike previous attempts at Snail Rescue this one appears to have not had any major soft tissue damage and is doing a sterling job of reassembling itself, via some minor snail body horror.

Anyway we now have a plastic crate with lots of holes drilled in it, with one yoghurt lid for water and another for food, and a plastic flower pot on its side to be a hide, and -- because the snail has successfully regenerated its membrane and started calcifying it -- now an inch or two of dirt at the bottom to keep it moist and for it to generally roll around in.

After extensive research (and in the first instance Braving The Compost to extricate an egg shell to rinse off to give the snail), A established on Monday (which was I think when all this happened) that there was one (1) non-Amazon place he could find that would sell him a finite (<100) quantity of cuttlebones with next-day delivery, and that's how we ended up with a parcel from Parrot Essentials Dot Co Dot UK.

A has been reading a lot about snail husbandry, and also insisting that I come over to listen to it m o n c h upon the cuttlebone, which is indeed extremely audible. So far it is dubious about beer and banana, but very keen on bean sprouts and broccoli stalk and water chestnut. I am utterly charmed and enjoying myself immensely, and only a little alarmed that garden snails have been recorded as living up to 15 years in captivity...