who only by moving can balance

(Sorry in advance about the inevitable linkrot in this one.)

WASHI TAPE: is basically fancy masking tape, i.e. paper tape with a low-tack adhesive that can be easily repositioned... but make it decorative.

There are semi-reasonable uses for washi tape, most of which are (to my mind) "wrapping presents", though it is apparently also very popular in Scrapbooking.

And then there is the whole [gestures] bullet journal... ecosystem.

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I am very amused at how well having set myself up with a set of columns where once a day I write down the number of unread e-mails in each of five accounts and a bonus one for my number of browser tabs... is actually working for getting those numbers to come down. Very slowly, but it is working.

(I was also amused to discover that I am not the only one of us who independently decided to do this. It is lovely to get to Know This Sort Of Thing About Your Lives Again by dint of having declared for myself Amnesty on reading list and just started over with the new Gregorian year. Though this year, as last, I am laughing at myself a little for having picked the time of year when everyone is most talkative to attempt to coax myself back into this as a habit...)

[Cross-posted to bujo, and reproduced here for my own records.]

Several times recently I've ended up explaining how I track symptoms and "habits" in my bullet journal, so have a proper write-up of my current system!

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Reading. The Bullet Journal Method, Ryder Carroll. I would not recommend this book, I don't think. ( Read more... )

This Will Not Happen To You, Marissa Lingen, as linked by... one of you lot.

I also disappeared down a pharmocological rabbit hole for a day or two in there.

Watching. We watched Leverage: Redemption S01E04. ( Read more... )

Listening. So one of the things Ryder Carroll did was quote Anthem (there is a crack in everything/that's how the light gets in) on a section entitled "Imperfection", as the lead-in to an anecdote about a time he screwed up cooking dinner for an ex. I took this extremely personally, and have therefore worked my way through a bunch of the Live In London videos on YouTube -- including, importantly, fucking myself up with Tower of Song ("Now, I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back/they're movin' us tomorrow to the tower down the track/but you'll be hearin' from me, baby, long after I'm gone/I'll be speakin' to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song") -- which, of course, I knew In Advance was going to absolutely wreck me long after he was gone and which, unsurprisingly, does precisely that.

( A parenthetical aside... )

Playing. Okay, so, Solitaire: Grand Harvest annoyed me by letting me build a farm and then taking it away again... but this does not, alas, appear to have put me off it entirely and I am indeed still going.

Also a bit more I Love Hue.

Cooking. Another round of Vanilla Black Cook & Learn, this time Not Mushroom Risotto! Write-up to follow (maybe).

Elsewise of note: potatoes parmentier (freely adapted, including massively increasing the quantity of garlic) with caramelised fennel (from the Ottolenghi cookbook Plenty, see e.g. a classic food blog post on the topic); and lasagna, for the first time in a very long time, which involved using up some dubious vegetable protein Stuff from the cupboard (it was a gift), and the (remarkably edible) basil soy "ricotta" left over from the Vanilla Black adventure, and indeed the rest of the bunch of basil. The fennel seeds in particular (added liberally) were Very Good.

Making & mending. I disc bound my thesis and I am grinning every time I look at it(s exterior ).

Growing. Victory of the day: giving most of the strawberry runners pots with coir in.

Elsewise we have eaten four blueberries and I have just-about managed to keep on top of the watering.

Observing. A NOCTULE.

title as yet to be determined, but perhaps FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION or ONE GRUMPY GEEK or something of that ilk --

-- because, right, turns out I actually am (six months in) getting on with (my... adapted version of) Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal® system (can I make the formatting more sarcastic, do we think?) really pretty well, but, good grief, every time I go "hmm this way I'm doing things isn't quite working..." or "I wonder how else I could be using this...?" or whatever, an internet search turns up 9238437 different blog posts all reproducing the same 42 photos lifted from Instagram in slightly different orders, along with copy that breathlessly talks about how Cute or Decorative or Whatever this specific layout is...

... frequently entirely missing how the functions differ if things, you know, look superficially similar.

And, yes, I am very much enjoying using the entire thing to give myself permission to play around with handwriting and tiny art! But I am also willing to argue that that's function disguised as form, and in any case I still kind of want a resource that actually collects ideas organised by function instead of colour or theme or aesthetic theory of scrapbooking, none of which are bad but also none of which are what I want.

Because the solution to this problem is definitely another dedicated blog.

Further to my previous, I now own:

• a TWSBI Diamond 580ALR in Prussian Blue, with a 1.1 mm stub nib
  
• 80ml of Diamine Eau de Nil
  
• 80ml of Diamine Blue/Black
  
• 60ml of TroubleMaker Starry Night Blue (shown off to gorgeous effect in this r/fountainpens post)
  
• ... and a replacement Pilot Penmanship FP60

I went for the stub nib on the grounds that A already owned a Diamond 580-compatible EF nib, so I had might as well get something as different as possible, on the grounds that I could always swap it out. (A had not realised that the nib units swap out on the Diamonds -- he got his second-hand at a bargain price -- and is Very Pleased at the concept of ceding the EF to me entirely if I stick a B in my next fountain-pen-fandom order, which is... definitely going to happen, sigh).

I have finally, today, got (more-or-less) to grips with the stub nib, and it is now writing reliably. Sorting out handwritings I also like is a work in progress, but I am starting to get some amount of sense of how to do things, e.g. this ink wishlist as a blatant excuse to continue with writing practice:



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So, er, let's see, what is the state of this hobby? "Cheaper than perfume per millilitre" is perhaps damning with faint praise; I am trying to actually think seriously, in the grip of Special Interest NRE, about how much I'm likely to want to use water-based and water-soluble inks (As A Geologist I have historically preferred waterproof inks, but for reasons those aren't generally fountain-pen friendly, because stuff that won't dissolve in water likes clogging up the workings), but for right now I am an extremely happy autistic who is spending hours every day reading fountain pen blogs. I am taking it upon myself to Explain Fountain Pens to A, frequently and with vigour, because his Special Interest was long enough ago now that the scene has in fact moved on some.

And, you know, practical considerations aside, I am having immense fun. There are! so many! shiny blues!

Reading. I desperately needed a comfort re-read this week, so I may have slightly stayed up until 6am one night inhaling A Queen From The North (Erin McRae & Racheline Maltese), which continues to be horribly wrong about an enormous number of things (what! is a geosciences! undergraduate student! doing! in Unspecified lab! in spring term!!!) but also it was pretty much exactly what I wanted, so, hurrah for that.

Writing. ... well. Well. Via shenanigans various: I am Strongly Intending to Finish the redraft of the introduction to chapter 5 tonight, but have been waylaid by figures and also cooking so. Let's see. How crunchy everything gets between now and Tuesday, which is when I want to circulate it around supervisors.

Watching. CXG S02E04. ( Read more... )

Listening. Barenaked Ladies, A Very Virtual Christmas, which I was somewhat dubious about, but nevertheless It Was Nice To See Them.

Playing. Among Us, small quantities PoGo, large quantities Dragons, tiny quantities horn, one (1) Hanabi with A, in which we mysteriously achieved our highest score ever despite having been working at cross-purposes with respect to our conventions for the first half of the game. (It turns out to also be available online! Via an apparently wide variety of interfaces! So have fun with that.)

Cooking. Cauliflower leaf curry! While A made dal and rice to go with. And then, this evening, while I was Definitely Not Procrastinating: 2.5l mulled apple juice; a Large batch of pastry, some of which has promptly been turned into mince pies, and the rest of which is in the fridge to become cheese straws and possibly more mince pies In Future; Teebäckerei (3:3:3:2 flour:icing sugar:ground nuts:butter, plus some grated dark chocolate and ~1 egg per ~100g butter); and tomorrow morning's bread.

Creating. I may slightly (still not procrastinating) have tripped and fallen into the general concept of Bullet Journalling, on the grounds that (1) I like nice notebooks and had just bought myself [shuffles] two Moleskines, one purely on the basis that I liked the cover, which only came with dot grid or ruled and I don't like their ruled, and apparently dot grids are The Done Thing; (2) turns out Ryman were selling the full set of 60 colours of Staedtler triplus fineliners for half-off (i.e. £19.99, as compared with £14.99 for 36 colours...) and I have coveted them for actual years; and (3) the principles are not dissimilar to how I'd been organising todo lists anyway, just, it is probably easier for me to consolidate a bunch of my todo lists In One Place where it's Easier To Look At Them than they currently are.

So far so good: it's been three days and I'm getting rather more physio done (let's see how long that lasts, eh?), and I'm enjoying myself, and also I now have a page for DW Posts I Keep Meaning To Get Around To Writing, and am pretty pleased with its freehanded header (see icon, which might get replaced with one with better colour balance At Some Point).