After having this on my to-do list for an embarrassingly long time, I downloaded and ran Libation, a bit of open-source software to de-DRM your Audible purchases.
The walkthrough is really easy to follow. At first I used the default download settings, and got a file (m4b) that worked fine on my laptop, but my portable music player had some kind of trouble with the encoding. (It did play the file, but it was all crackly and poppy, like an old record.) Then I switched to “just download as an MP3,” and those worked fine.
…I had a lot more Audible purchases than I remember. Mostly “audiobooks I would’ve borrowed from the library if they were available, listened to once, no desire to re-listen.”
But it’s well worth having unlocked copies of the Murderbot books. And the Locked Tomb books. And this one book I don’t even remember reading the first time, so I don’t have to jump through any hoops to play it again and find out if I liked it or not.
On May 8th, I offered to read the first five books people recced - assuming they were available (preferably from the library) - and I'd give a short review [https://bethbethbeth.dreamwidth.org/701769.html].
This is the ninth recced book review.
America (1986), by Jean Baudrillard (recced by Hannah on dreamwidth)
(Note: I read this at least a month ago, but I forgot to post the review!)
America is two entirely different books. If I hadn't felt compelled to complete America (I started it four times before I could move beyond the fifth page), I would have given up the ghost by the end of chapter one. There's no denying that it's beautifully written, poetic, philosophic, deeply thoughtful at times. I have no particular problem with his critique of America - even in what he sees as its "banality." But god, did it feel pretentious and oddly incoherent for the longest time.
It's also weirdly racist. when it most tries to be anything but, and so much of it feels just...wrong. Take his observations of New York City, for example. Yes, much is "fast" about NY - both literally and metaphorically - but of all things, cars aren't the things that are faster (those of you who have experienced an Uber taking 20 minutes to drive from 2nd Avenue to 8th Avenue know what I mean). And eating alone in New York? It isn't incredibly "sad" as Baudrillard suggests... far more often it's a way to feel a moment of pleasurable solitude in a city of so many millions of people.
Some of what I perceive as wrongness in the book could be that Baudrillard is writing about the America of the 80s, yet treating it as if that's all there is of the America of past and future instead of it being a snapshot of time. Or it could be as simple as the translation missing the point at times (although, I suspect that's not the case). But one way or the other, this America seems not just subjective, but far too often like a work of fiction.
There are also an incredible number of similes...sometimes a half dozen per page. :)
Anyway, once America hits the "Utopia Achieved" chapter, it morphs into something both readable and insightful. I'm not sure how that happened. It might possibly have been magic.
I'm not entirely sure it made up for the first 3/5 of the book, however.
Watching. An episode of Farscape: S02E04 Crackers Don't Matter, which I note with mild alarm (given how "..." we were at it) is considered to merit its very own Wikipedia page?!
The Old Guard 2. I... might yet get around to writing up thoughts.
Cooking. An Salad. An improvised but definitely acceptable for its purposes (i.e. providing nutrition for someone who currently has some decidedly inconvenient dietary restrictions) chickpea curry.
Eating. BLACKBERRIES. Still. Also plums. Really enjoying the plums. So many tomatoes.
Also a box of Many Salads from Mel Tropical Kitchen, some mildly disappointing cookies and a Good raspberry pastel de nata, and another cardamom bun from buns from home. Hurrah for spending a day at the BL?
Exploring. Poking around the grounds of a new-to-me hospital, where I came across an Exciting Apple Tree that I totally failed to actually inspect more closely, and about which I am excited primarily because of just having read a book a solid, like, half of which was Reviews Of Heritage Apple Varieties. (I was a little sad that James Grieve got only a very passing mention.)
The BL! And Beckenham, a bit, while picking up a watering can.
Growing. LEMONGRASS HAS A ROOTLET. Having another go at rooting a bunch of supermarket tarragon.
Observing. We found BABY COOTS. At least five of them, possibly six, plus one egg. They are juuust at the stage where they are practising GOING INTO THE WATER and then rapidly deciding Don't Like That and retreating to the Warm.
Friday was the best weather day of this past week, so that was hiking day! Crystal Lakes at Mount Rainier/Tahoma National Park is a place I've been quite a few times over the years. It's always one of the quieter hikes in the park area, so a good one to do in the height of summer tourists when the kids aren't at school.
The wildflower season is largely over now, and it's still too early for the autumn colours, so there's a few weeks where the mountains look less spectacular. Still pretty though!
Koalas have fingerprints; hairy-nose wombats do not.
Skin on fingers and toes wrinkle in water not because cells get saturated but as an autonomic nervous system function, which we have apparently known since at least 1935. An initial 2013 study found that people with wrinkled fingertips could pick up and move more wet marbles in a set time frame than people with dry skin; a 2014 study failed to replicate this, but there's more at the BBC including a 2020 replication. (The 2013 reference at least is buried in the BBC article.)
Holding a hot drink inclines us to view people as "emotionally warmer"; a heavier clipboard inclines us to believe the person whose CV it's displaying takes their work more seriously. Many other related fun facts over here.
The nature of veg box is that Vegetables for which I have no Plan... accumulate. Today's dinner took a bunch of said accumulated veg and made them salad-shaped, and it worked out well enough that I want a record as a reminder for future self that one can just Do This.
In brief: book is the least I've been annoyed by any such book I have yet read, which is fairly impressive going, especially since the copy in the BL's collection is the first edition originally published in 2003 rather than the second edition updated in 2013; more notes possibly to follow (subject to reaching a decision about whether I want to hold out for getting my hands on a copy of the second edition before talking about it in public).
Entertainment: shortly after I finally settled myself down in my nice corner desk against a window with my back to the wall and a whole enclosed-in-glass booth between me and Any Other Readers... my watch buzzed to let me know that I'd just finished a Period Of High Stress. The high stress was, obviously, sitting quietly wedged into a corner on public transport while reading a relaxing book. I did know public transport was exhausting! I have been saying! I'm still kind of impressed at the watch Earnestly Informing Me, In Case I Didn't? Know? and mildly regretting that I'm planning to do the same-ish again tomorrow, and also also I am reassessing A Lot of my wheelchair use in light of this...
Related entertainment: how much my hypervigilance kicked up when I returned from lunch to discover that neatly leaving my notebook and reading-book in a stack on my desk had not had sufficient inhibitory effect, and a Noisy Person had decided to sit diagonally across from me, in my Space, being Noisy. The amount I relaxed when they (temporarily) fucked off is another one for the "yep I can see how not leaving the house for over a year and then staying Hyper Local has added up to me looking much more functional" files...
Bad news first: Welp, adding The House In The Cerulean Sea to the list of “books that get hailed as progressive masterpieces because they tick a bunch of identity boxes and everyone is happy at the end, but they’re not actually, you know, good.”
Our protagonist (Linus) is a social worker who reviews specialty orphanages for kids from magical species. He gets sent to a particularly isolated orphanage, ends up getting personally-attached to the plucky orphans there, falls for the guy who runs the place (Arthur), and (supposedly) learns some Valuable Lessons about prejudice and acceptance along the way. The morals are announced with zero subtlety, the emotional beats are all completely predictable, and systemic social prejudice keeps getting defeated by the heroes making inspirational speeches. A few bits are genuinely charming or clever — but the rest of the book doesn’t live up to them.
An example of what I mean by predictable: Linus shows up at the orphanage, gets the initial tour, and finds out that one of the kids sleeps in Arthur’s room (iirc it was just-slightly separate, some kind of converted walk-in closet). Arthur says “it’s nothing untoward, he just has nightmares, so I comfort him.” Linus instantly accepts this with no follow-up questions. I thought “in the real world, this would be sketchy af, but Arthur is obviously the designated Wholesome Love Interest, so it’s going to be fine.” Sure enough, it never came up again.
The setting is hard to get a grip on. It’s a version of our world — the kids study the Canterbury Tales and listen to Buddy Holly — but you never get any clear details about what country they’re in, or what decade it is. Record shops are still in business; phones are still on cords, and the orphanage doesn’t have phone service at all; but Linus’s office has computers, and the country has same-sex marriage. (Homophobia never comes up as a concern at all, even when they’re specifically facing off against religious bigots.) One of the orphans is supposed to be The Antichrist(TM) — which everyone accepts as a fact, but there’s no detail on who decided this, or how they figured it out, and none of the characters ever put any thought to “how do I feel about the reveal that Christianity is Confirmed True?” (…I’m pretty sure no non-Christian religions are even mentioned. The heroes are all just vaguely secular.)
The “happy ending” is that all the orphans get cross-species adopted. (By Arthur and Linus. Arthur is magic — this is treated as a big surprise by the narrative — [ETA] but not the same species as any of the kids. Linus is human.) There’s not even an effort to reconnect them with their own cultures. There’s almost no worldbuilding about where the rest of their communities are, or how they’re integrated into society in general. Only one kid even knows an adult from her own culture, and it’s another person who lives in isolation near the orphanage.
Look, I’m not out here saying “nobody can write a good fantasy allegory for real-world atrocities.” But, dude. Don’t take something that was part of the atrocity, and paint it as the happy fluffy ending in your allegory! It’s not enough to just read about the facts of history — you do actually have to internalize the lessons from it!
(The fact that residential schools were started by Christian missionaries, with the explicit goal of stealing children from their own cultures and either indoctrinating them or killing them, makes this book’s non-engagement with religion even more dissonant. You would think putting The Antichrist(TM) in a pseudo-residential-school would be a setup for some kind of commentary! Like “the abuses from Christians toward him and his fellow orphans, not to mention toward the gay supportive adults in his life, actively push him toward the Antichristing lifestyle,” or maybe “surprise, he was never really The Antichrist at all, that’s just a fantastical twist on the way the system demonizes non-Christian children.” But no! Nothing comes of this at all.)
I’ve heard that the sequel tries to address/fix some of this. Maybe just the part about “it’s not heartwarming to cut off the marginalized orphans from any kind of connection to their culture.” And, listen, I can believe it — it’s the kind of problem where, after the readers of the first book pointed out the wild oversight, a well-intentioned, progressive-minded author would try to revise/retcon it in the second book. (Can we call this “pulling a Becky Chambers”?)
For the sake of people who liked the series, I hope that’s true. But none of this was gripping or engaging enough that I’m inspired to read on and find out firsthand.
Gonna throw in a re-rec of Cathy Glass’s foster-caring memoirs instead. I kept wishing TJ Klune had taken some inspiration on “how to write realistic, well-rounded displaced children” (not to mention “good caregivers with healthy boundaries”) from stories like hers. The one I thought back on most was The Saddest Girl In The World, which (although you wouldn’t know it from the generic summary) involves a mixed-race foster child, so Cathy writes about grappling with “what specific cultural needs does this kid have, and am I, a white person, understanding them well enough to do right by her?”
—
On to a brighter note: Nettle & Bone was really good!
So much that, when I finished, I immediately went looking for a sequel. No such luck. (It’s by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, so maybe I should just reread Digger now.)
It’s set in a fairy-tale-inspired world, without being a direct remix of any specific story, in a way that makes it comfortable and familiar without being boring or predictable. The main character, Marra, is a third-born princess, who spends a bunch of her life in a convent to keep her “saved” in case she needs to be put in a politically-arranged marriage later. So the bulk of the plot takes place with her in a state of “okay, I’m in my thirties and have learned some specific practical skills (knitting, midwifery, stable-shoveling), but wow, there are a lot of things about General Adulting that a princess/nun doesn’t get experience with.”
(The religion is only vaguely Christian-shaped, in the way the political situation is vaguely medieval-Europe-shaped. Also: as a nun, Marra specifically serves a saint that there aren’t actually any surviving records about, so her convent is openly just winging it about what kinds of devotion The Lady would’ve wanted. It’s fun.)
I like both the magical godmothers we meet. I like the animal sidekicks (there’s an evil chicken, and a skeleton dog). I like the way Marra’s real-world skills help the plot along — not in a way that’s gimmicky or contrived, just grounded and believable. Everybody feels like a real person, having real reactions to things. There are a few surprises towards the end, and they come together in a refreshing “didn’t see that coming, but now that it happened, it makes perfect sense” kind of way.
The book opens mid-magical-adventure, then flashes back to give us Marra’s whole backstory. Good writing choice, because the backstory got a little slow, and if we just started at the beginning I might have given up. As-is, I plodded through to get back to the juicy parts, and I’m glad I did.
Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley - Audiobook with Katie Leung and George Weightman - Interesting vignettes but as a whole story, functionally kind of incomplete. Bradley talked about this book's origin as a piece of fanfic based on AMC's The Terror, which covers a fictionalization of the end of the doomed Franklin Expedition. (Fun Fact: I tried to read the book that the AMC series was based on, but truly hated it! Do not bother!) Bradley wrote pieces for her herself and her friends about how Graham Gore, time traveler scooped from death on the unforgiving arctic ice, would feel about modern UK life - and those bits shine. They feel fun and interesting and cared for. The main character of the novel, an unnamed government official who is strikingly similar to Bradley herself , is also a compelling look at a kind of person who might, in extremis, work at an amoral government agency that scoops people out of time to bolster Britain's fading national security.
The problem is, well, everything else. In a book that started with a thought experiment about how a particular man out of time might react to the modern day world, Bradley has plopped a fairly opaque government apparatus into the story to cover the whys and hows, and added time travel mechanics to make it all fit. But that's a lot of worldbuilding to commit to to just fill in the gaps of the story, and it feels like Bradley kind of just doesn't care too much about it.
Fanfic is all abou asking "What if...?" about a completed work, and I find myself thinking this book would also be great for fanfic - someone one would have fun filling in these gaps!
And Never Been Kissed by thehoyden, Twentysomething - Hockey RPF - I said last time I posted about this, it's a magnificently horny fic. I re-read this as part of my TheHoyden Renaisance where I was just diving back into fics from ten+ years ago , and this merits a re-read. My god, we were all so young and dumb and horny. Wonderful slow burn fic with truly the most desparately horny hockey loving teens I can imagine.
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters - I want to buy Waters a beer. This book tells a humanizing story of so many athletes in the 1930s, about how they were all just living their lives and working their hardest at their sports and then, wham! Fucking Nazis. Every time I thought, wow, I have hated the Nazis so much for so long, I cannot hate them more! Then this book showed me new gleaming heights of hating Nazis - distant beautiful peaks of hating Nazis that I have yet to climb. Because hating Nazis is based in loving that which they threaten, and Waters truly shows you people and a world that is worth loving. It's a wonderful book for showing you that the world is complex and weird and the past I took for granted was never the black and white of photographs. It really drove home just how much Nazis and fascism *took* from the world. I loved this book and burned thru it in about two days.
What I'm Reading Drop of Corruption - Robert Jackson Bennett - The audiobook came and oooh , it's good, so I jumped in. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky - static from last week Deal with the Devil by Kit Roch - static - I need to read it for next Wed.
What I'll Read Next Book Club books planned Lent by Jo Walton The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison Space Opera ? Monsters and Mainframes? The Revolutionary Temper — Robert Darnton - Jo Walton talked about this in her July reading round up and I'm down
The thing about buying new glasses, right, is that I've been feeling avoidant about it in part because I think I was slightly migrainey the day I had the most recent test done and I was already pretty sure that my vision goes... wrong... when migrainey -- most noticeable when moving, but always... there.
Slightly more specifically: it's neither scintillating scotoma nor loss-of-whole-field-of-vision nor any of the other very classic visual auras; instead it's a sense that I'm not managing to track movement properly along the lower edge and especially the lower corners of my field of vision.
... which matches up really well, actually, with the peripheral vision deficiencies that, er, showed up during my last eye test.
I've been noticing the Weirdness on-and-off for quite some time now, and was dithering back and forth about whether it was just confirmation bias in that I was only noticing it when otherwise migrainey -- but then on Monday, while on my way to my GP surgery to pick up some paperwork, it resulted in the railings I was going past (and that I go past regularly!) causing an extremely pronounced and unmistakeable strobing effect. I am very confident that that is not something I would somehow manage to confirmation bias myself out of noticing most of the time, so, hurrah, Definitely A Migraine Symptom (for lo, on Monday I was migrainey) it is.
The thing that is mildly baffling me is that I can't actually find (admittedly on a fairly cursory search) any description of specifically peripheral vision fuckery as a migraine thing! Lots of mentions of tunnel vision, lots of mentions of classic aura, and one case study in which "peripheral vision" is used metaphorically. So, you know, let the record show, &c.
Including the Third Man Phenomenon, where people in life-threatening or highly stressful situations sense another person (of whatever gender) with them. The solo hiker has a companion, or the group of four becomes five, of which most or all report seeing the extra person.
The third man is usually a benevolent presence, giving comfort and hope of survival. Most people don’t get a good look at their extra companion, who seems to be always just ahead or behind them, or in shadow. Still, the presence can seem so real that people attempt to share food with them. Other times the third man is just a voice which dispenses advice and encouragement.
Occasionally, it’s more than that. Examples in the book The Third Man Factor by John Geiger include a solo sailor who believed an unseen companion steered his ship through a storm, a woman in a collapsed building who reported a monk gave her an apple, a solo mountaineer who believed he was roped to someone else and thus descended a peak cautiously enough to save his own life, and another mountaineer who believed someone was helping him carry an injured companion.
A prompt:
The little man who wasn’t there. If the third man is a scientifically explainable brain phenomenon, you could have a plot where people try to induce it on purpose. Maybe a company sells a headband with an electric pulse that brings out a companion for lonely people, or perhaps it’s part of training for soldiers, a way to keep themselves calm in stressful situations. A horror plot could have a person uncertain whether a third man experience is an expected hallucination…or if someone is actually there.
Helpful hint if you're becoming more disabled as you age or as a condition progresses (i.e., if you're new to seeking travel assistance): figure out what sorts of thing are challenges for you in your day to day life, and see how the airports you'll be using can help.
In my case: I have relatively bad arthritis (some weeks worse than others), use a cane, have balance issues and intermittent vertigo.
The two airports I used (O'Hare in Chicago and Sea-Tac in Seattle) are usually both on the lists of reasonably accessible airports (guides, braille elevator signs, etc), and both had free wheelchairs. This would have been great given the extremely long terminal hallways without moving sidewalks, but unfortunately, it was too late by the time I found out.
Knowing about the free wheelchairs would have been especially useful when I was heading home. The TSA lines were wildly long at Sea-Tac and even though I explained my difficulty with standing in lines to SeaTac staff, I was told I had to go to the regular line (note: a roving TSA agent ended up - unprompted (although I probably looked bedraggled :D) - moving me to a faster line, but once you invoke a disability, accommodations should be made as a matter of course.
My return trip from Sea-Tac (after 5 days of hobbling around WorldCon) was also problematic given the inclines between each gate in Terminal D. Why do you have to trudge uphill with teenagers sitting on the side ledges, hanging their legs over the banisters? I shall probably never know.
Plus, there was no seating accessible to me at SeaTac. All the chairs would have been perfectly comfortable for me to sit in, but my cartilage-light knees & my vertigo won't usually allow me to get up facing forward without something to touch for balance in front of me once I'm up. I usually need to turn sideways to get up from a chair (unless it's a relatively tall chair) and touch the back for balance (unless I'm sitting next to a wall), which isn't possible with rows of freestanding chairs that all have armrests and all face each other. In my case, I found a lovely guy at the gate next to my departure gate (my gate personnel weren't there yet) who basically stole a wheelchair (the basic airport wheelchairs are just hard chairs on wheels with movable armrests, i.e., my favorites) and brought me to my departure gate, leaving me to sit in the stolen - and oddly comfortable - chair next to something I could use for balance later for the next hour. This was great, but it took me 25 minutes finding somebody to help)
Note: when I was heading to Seattle, O'Hare's departure gate did have chairs without armrests which made it easy for me to stand up without tipping over onto my face. I don't know whether having some chairs without armrests are part of ADA compliance, but even the lobby for O'Hare's car rental and bus pickup facility had a few of those. Thank you, O'Hare.
On the plus side, there were gender free bathrooms at O'Hare (single user) and at SeaTac (including multi user). I only used the one at SeaTac and the stalls all had full-length doors, which - let's be real - all public restrooms should have. I did overhear a youngish girl - maybe 12? - expressing shock to her slightly older sister about that, but then her parents said "Go in and pee. Our flight's going to be boarding soon." Good work, parents,
The Vampire Haven: At a secret diner in Chicago, humans and vampires create a community. Strictly speaking, it’s not a sex club. But the Haven is the only place vampires can be themselves, without the outside world getting a say. And, well, it turns out most folks find blood sucking erotic. Come get y'all beloved romance and erotica tropes.
While my queer romance novel Forewarning is in the query trenches (I’ve had a few nibbles, which is encouraging), I am working on a new novella series of gay vampire erotic romance: wholesome, romantic smut and also a plot.
If you know me from AO3 (HolyCatsAndRabbits), this is like “what if I put Life of the Party and Tollense together and made it erotica.” This series is in progress (I’m on book 2), and might be self-published: it depends on what happens with Forewarning. I usually don’t talk about works in progress, but I want to build up some hype and also demonstrate that I’m actually writing these and not churning out 7 novellas in 10 minutes with AI. So please bear with me if there are minor changes going forward…
Book 1: Finn and August. A gorgeous, charming vampire looking for his happily-eternally-after falls ridiculously hard for a shy, nerdy human who’s never had a date in his life.
Finn Sullivan is among the most eligible bachelors in Chicago, with movie-star good looks and a reputation as a talented gentle dom. Secretly, he’s also a vampire looking for the love of his life in the shape of a human who wants a very long-term relationship. Finn realizes almost immediately upon meeting introverted, inexperienced August Amesbury that August could be The One. But Finn’s been disappointed in love before—will sweet, shy August only break his heart once more?
August Amesbury can get his head around the idea of actual vampires congregating in a diner to have lots of sex. And while he has no idea what these (very) friendly strangers mean when they say August is a sub in need of a gentle dom, he’s down for figuring that out. What August can’t believe is that Finn Sullivan, the most beautiful person in the world, could actually be interested in awkward, geeky August. But that could be a problem, because August is pretty sure he’s already falling in love.
Plus! A plot! What will August’s awful cousin Logan do when he finds out August has snagged the trophy lover Logan’s been chasing?
Mysteries in the Series: Why are there no vampires over the age of 200? Why can new vampires only be made at midnight on a Friday? Who is attacking humans and turning them into vampires? Why is somebody killing people born on Dec 24 of certain years? And the most important question—why are most of the vampires at the Haven gorgeous queer men who have tons of sex? Well, that one’s obvious, I think.
Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, and I think it's well deserved! This book was fun, well structured, and mastered set up and payoff exceptionally well. I have read Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which was excellent, but not quite as tightly put together, so I would say that Tainted Cup represents both mature skill and growth. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like a good detective story. I read at least part of most nominated works in this category (I missed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay entirely, and did not finish Ministry of Time in a timely fashion to vote) and I was pleased to see Bennett's win.
I want to plug one other nominee - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel is experimental and fascinating - it rewards familiarity with the classics of both the Western canon and the speculative fiction, but it's riffing on them with a light touch. Tchaikovsky is taking serious concepts and looking thru an absurdist lens, taking things to an extra-logical extreme. These robots are both comprehensible and alien. They feel and yet they don't. A running theme is Tchaikovsky telling us that, in any given scenario, the character is a robot and therefore not feeling a particular feeling - but also not feeling any other particular feeling. This apophatic mode of characterization appeals to me so much - showing the reader the emotion while denying the existence of the emotion is a precision weapon for a writer to wield, and Tchaikovsky holds that pen deftly. The main character is even named for his negation - after leaving his role as valet, he is renamed Uncharles: because of course he's not Charles anymore, that is the name of the valetbot in a particular house serving a particular master. And of course he's still Charles: who else would he be?
I think the flaw with Service Model is the ending - as this is an experimental journey thru several literary imaginations, any ending that tried to mesh well with all of them would fail. So the ending becomes quite pragmatic, and attempts to address the ills being done to the characters that we have become attached to over the course of the story. It charms me, because I love when an author trusts that the reader will care what happens to the fictional people of a story once the book is over, but I concede that it is probably not thematically a strong as some of the book's middle. I don't care, but you might.
The Winning Graphic Novel - Star Trek : Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - is simply a masterpiece of Choose Your Own Adventure techniques, where the story itself influences how you interact with the multiple routes thru the book. I highly recommend getting this book in physical form and settling in to just PLAY with it for a few hours. The story is not incredibly long, but there is a beginning, middle, and end that take the Star Trek characters into the scenario and then out the other side; I was compelled to keep trying until I figured out the puzzle. It's woven into the story really well! This was my first experience with Lower Decks and made me actually go and pick up the show, which is a delight.
I have yet to read my way thru the other categories, so I'll hold off on my full opinions there until I am Properly Informed.
In personal life news, I get to do more physical therapy - new body part, old issue. Frustrating to have let things get this bad and liberating that it might be fixable.
Cooking. One more thing from East (kimchi pancakes, mildly disappointing) plus a gooseberry oat crisp I have been meaning to get to since I started picking the pink gooseberries [mumble] ago.
Eating. Ruby Violet (hazelnut + hazelnut brittle, blueberry + lemon curd). buns from home (cardamom, cinnamon, garlic + rosemary focaccia).
My first granadilla, courtesy of a whim in a supermarket!
Allotment apples and tomatoes.
Exploring. Spent a chunk of Monday afternoon poking around the Camley Street Natural Park!
Growing. There are TOMATOES. There are BEANS. I harvested some PEPPERS. I'm still not doing great at, like, efficiency or yield, but hey, I'm eating some things from the plot, which is better than none.
Just, you know, For My Own Reference: a list of the exercises included in Hypermobility Without Tears. I am going to come back through and add links to Pilates and physio explainers for all of these.
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erinptah
