I have, over the past twenty-four hours or so, been pulling cards from my various tarot and oracle decks (by which I mean "all three of them"), and the set I got from The Golden Wheel was particularly striking:

(The Eight of Wands, The World, and The Fool. The sky seems continuous across all three cards; the Eight of Wands faces right, and The Fool faces left, both leaping toward The World, mirror images of one another.)

Over the last few days I have been reading lots of Dreamwidth; I'm now caught up to the 19^th of December, which is as up-to-date as I think I've been since April.

I have also had a toasted sandwich lunch on a park bench with A, under a clear blue sky; quietly played several games; and, eventually, made a start on setting up next year's notebook.

Thank you for sharing your lives with me. <3

1. The paragraph from one of the pain books about Soup continues excellent for dramatic readings. I appear to have not quoted it here? I shall have to remedy that in the morning.
2. My Shit Beard Hairs (I think I'm up to... 10ish of them, fairly reliably?) are increasingly white, which makes them increasingly hard to remove in targeted fashion (which I care about solely because the sensory experience of Isolated Hairs is Bad, Actually). I am amused by all of this.
3. I am nearly up to halfway through December in my DW catch-up. Will I manage to be actually up to date by the end of the calendar year? PROBABLY NOT, because I am about to hit Year In Review season, when for some reason you all get very talkative!
4. Absolutely have not set up my notebook for next year yet, and indeed am several days behind on physio log (augh). Executive Function Is Hard, Actually. This is the other factor that is likely to derail getting caught up on DW tomorrow...
5. Successfully offloaded some leftovers at a Boardgames And (Fake) Leftovers gathering (with air purifier, and carrageenan nose spray). Tragically, left behind the tea strainer that we'd been using to fix the problem of Cork In The Port...

Reading. Me, a few days ago:

... I picked up the bad and naughty book I'm not supposed to read after 8pm because it's too annoying It was annoying

So that's how The Story of Pain (Joanna Bourke) is going. ( Read more... )

I have also made a tiny bit more progress on Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), read one and a half magazines sent to me by Organisations Various that I feel bad recycling unread but which have a tendency to Accumulate in that state, and some of a Libby sample of Cloistered (Catherine Coldstream) based on one of you mentioning it mid-November, which I have just about got up to on my reading page. Also, I am up to mid-November on my reading page.

Added to the queue are Vespertine (Margaret Rogerson; courtesy of someone mentioning it a while back, probably skygiants, and my library Acquiring A New Copy), The Long Journey of English (Peter Trudgill; a present from my mother, in her capacity as a linguist), and Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes (Rob Wilkins; a loan from my father). For the sake of my spreadsheet of books (with the increasingly inaccurate filename books-2011.ods) I am probably going to be trying to finish rather than start things for the rest of the calendar year (not the Bourke) but we'll see how that goes.

Listening. ... an episode of Elementary that a relative was watching...

Playing. Scrabble! Monument Valley 3. Inkulinati (having another go at beating my head against a run at Master difficulty).

Cooking. Another batch of the quince and squash stew. Two days' worth of minestrone (with bulgur wheat because we are apparently out of tiny pasta, but not that), which worked well as Some Lunches. I think little else of note.

Eating. So much of my mother's cooking various, including a few last tomatoes from her greenhouse (!!!). Also my father's mince pies.

Exploring. Several stonks around Cambridge, including visits to some little free libraries and to various likely locations for snowdrops (mainly the grounds of Churchill, up at the chapel end, where they do indeed exist). Brief trip to Anglesey Abbey, which also has snowdrops coming out and one very enthusiastic daffodil; winter garden remains lovely.

Growing. The pineapple leafs are taller than the (remaining, trimmed) originals, as of... two weeks ago? Ten days? But I think I hadn't yet mentioned and it's still making me smile.

There is one (1) curry leaf cutting that is Not Yet Dead.

I am now noticing that it is in fact Fairly Consistent that I can Do More in terms of Pilates if I'm doing it at a rate of Two Full Sessions A Week rather than three. I am Somewhat Dismayed at now needing to go "okay, this clearly means I'm not fully recovering doing what I'm currently doing at a rate of every other day-ish, which means I will derive more benefit if I do less of the activity"; I am trying to cheer myself up by persuading myself that what it Actually Means that I get to play with a greater variety of Colouring Things In on The Sticker Chart.

I am amused that I am about as Oh No This Is Terrible about Officially Reducing My Mat Time as I am about getting onto the mat. Brains. Brains!

My mother has today loaned me some knee-high compression socks in a fun design and... the amount of presyncope I've been getting on standing up from squatting is approximately None, despite feeling while squatting like It's Gonna Be A Bad One When I Stand Up. So I'm probably going to be buying myself more of them as my mother's present to me for this winterval.

Obviously I was delighted when I got to page 7 and found the rainbow...