Reading. I confess I have tripped and fallen into a special interest and am therefore currently primarily working my way through the archives of She's A Beast. BUT.
- This was all kicked off by A Physical Education: *, Casey Johnston, *inhaled; more comprehensive notes on this topic currently part way through being typed up.
- I am also about half way through (reading!) LIFTOFF: Couch to Barbell, also Casey Johnston, and am having fun starting to play with moving my body in ways.
- Continuing the theme of Moving Bodies In Ways and What Even Are Muscles, I have also started Science of Pilates (Tracy Ward).
- I also continue to work my way through What Is Queer Food?, John Birdsall, and am nearly done. Probably more thoughts on this at some point in the upcoming week.
Writing. Words continue to, very slowly, go up.
Listening. More Hidden Almanac. Very close to being caught up to the point I've theoretically listened to with A (some of which I wound up being asleep during)...
Playing. Inkulinati Exploders run on Master difficulty continues. We have now broken a quill (DEMONS :|) but we do continue to progress...
Another round (well, most of one) of The Little Orchard, this time with The Child deciding that we SHOULD turn the Bothersome Crows back over and put them back...
Cooking. New recipe! Meera Sodha's leek & chard martabak. Unlikely to make again but not sorry to have made.
Exploring. Adventures this week have included:
- Wood Green Mall, which contains PRIDE STAIRS, and the Community Diagnostic Centre, which contains GIANT WATERFOWL MURAL
- the walk between Wood Green underground station and Wood Green Mall, feat. ACORN BOLLARDS
- went for a bit of a Cross Walk one evening earlier this week (brain said AAAAAAH) and discovered along the way a fantastic white-with-pink-stripes camellia
- generally Going Out To Run Errands is currently accompanied by Many Flowers and that is nice, actually
Observing. flowersss.
Wait, did someone say sensible thing? How about instead I take that course (along with another one in Patristic Greek) as a standalone module - that's only 39 credits (compared to a standard of 30) this semester. What could possibly go wrong? My plan had been to start all the modules until a decision was made, and then drop at least one of the optional ones if I wasn't allowed to switch with the compulsory one. The fatal flaw in that plan is that I am now having Way Too Much Fun to do that. I will keep the option of dropping one or the other in reserve if I feel like I'm burning out. The workload is a lot, and I am slightly behind compared to where my timetable says I should be, but if life holds off on curveballs then I think I should be able to get caught up in the next week.
The Midrash course in particular is really really good. We had a couple of introductory lectures on generally background, one from an academic and theoretical perspective, and one in which we looked at what what midrash says about itself. After that we got stuck in to actually doing the reading and interpreting. We're studying the Petikot (a series of introductory comments) of Lam Rabbah, an exegesis of Lamentations. It's a completely different approach to that taken in traditional Christian Biblical Studies, somehow both more open to individual and non-literal interpretations and also more demanding of a rigorous justification based on the precise details of the words of scripture.
It's quite a small group - four students, and two professors - Rabbi Dr David Meyer, who is leading us, and Pierre van Hecke, my erstwhile teacher of Ugaritic and Hebrew, who is engaging more like a fifth student. It's really delightful, having spent a fair amount of time over the last 18 months learning to read Hebrew, to be actually putting that learning into practice. My command of the language is probably the weakest in the group, but I'm just about managing to keep up, and at least some of my hermeneutical suggestions in class have been meeting with positive responses, which is encouraging.
About twenty metres up the road is a front garden that is, at this time of year, full of ridiculous daffodils. It is an Annual Delight. I took this photo yesterday, and then I dragged A out to visit it at lunchtime today, in glorious weather. It has been a good day.
This evening I am having A Headache. It's an annoying headache; it's definitely a distracting headache; but it's "just" A Headache. No other symptoms that I'm noticing.
... except that it's Exactly The Right Time For A Migraine, and yesterday I had a bunch of migraine prodrome symptoms. (Being Too Warm. Wanting to close my eyes a lot. Nausea. Overwhelming despair.)
I find myself Wondering whether my regular menstrual migraines actually started on 1st January 2021, or if that's just the point at which symptoms tipped over into very obviously photosensitive migraine. At that point I was on continuous acute pain relief, and it is slowly dawning on me that An Annoying Headache with no other symptoms distinguishable from background noise (anxiety, depression, thesis-related stress, ...) is the kind of thing I'd have just merrily ignored, and for that matter that I'd still be ignoring if I weren't now Keeping A Headache Diary...
... is a placeholder; apparently getting the bus to a hospital appointment today ate my entire brain, and I need to be up early tomorrow morning for a different medical appointment for a different body part in a different place. (Why am I being sent to get an ultrasound four stops down the Piccadilly line instead of five minutes up the road? A MYSTERY.)
Reading. Progress on my pile of tabs, mostly in the form of short stories! ( Read more... )
And finally Library Books In Progress:
- What Is Queer Food? (James Birdsall): gradually plodding along; I'm enjoying learning about how many of the people involved in various culinary anecdotes with which I was previously familiar in outline... were queer, but so far (a little over halfway through) the attempts to construct a narrative or category of Queer(ed) Food feel quite contrived to me. Possibly this is because I have yet to come across an instance of Academic Queering of Whatever that, like, speaks to me, you know.
- A Physical Education, Casey Johnston (in audio?!). ADORING THIS. Probably gonna buy myself a copy. Fuller notes to (possibly) follow (look, I've written some of them up at this point--). (Actually finished at the time I am filling this post in, though it wasn't at the point at which initial post was made, so I am absolutely holding out a bit on writing up...)
Writing. I continue to eke out words. :|
Watching. One (1) episode of Farscape (S2E08), while bleaching A. It sure was a Farscape episode.
Listening. More Hidden Almanac! And also (see Reading) A Physical Education, Casey Johnston.
Playing. ... we are tentatively trying an Inkulati run with Exploders at max difficulty. It's... working? I'm suspicious about how well it's working (so far) (and I am also annoyed that I couldn't make my beloved foxes work this well).
Eating. Enjoyed discovering Kiernan's Coffee at Wimpole; particularly appreciated the cinnamon bun but the multi-inch stack of whipped cream on top of my hot chocolate was also extremely welcome (albeit messy). That was not my only ridiculous pile of whipped cream of the day; I also got Birthday Cake later on in the afternoon...
Exploring. Had a good poke around Wimpole on Saturday. Enjoyed the Walled Garden feat. nonsense petticoat daffodils out in force, and also bimbling round Home Farm, where there were sleepy Shires and tiny (squeaky) piglets.
- Got libgourou working
(link to follow), with thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
simont for bringing it to my attention and me_and for making sympathetic and encouraging noises while I stared muzzily at the documentation this evening. Happy to report that I have successfully downloaded Adobe DRMed ebooks from my command line without any Windows install or emulators at all. - I am enjoying A Physical Education so much - SO much - that I have gone out and bought a book it recommends (Starting Strength; very wordy descriptions of which muscles one should be using for what, apparently, i.e. exactly my kind of thing). Acquiring my own copy once I've given the library's back is a definite possibility. It's really interesting in terms of both the pain Project (memoir about embodiment!) and in terms of my own movement-related special interests (e.g. the gulf between my experience of largely self-led Pilates vs the version available via mainstream contemporary classes embedded in diet culture). Lots of content notes but I'm really really liking it. Gratitude to buttonsbeadslace for posting about it
(... link to follow...) - Stupid Little Walk yielded both very cheap pistachio croissants (MORE BREAKFAST NONSENSE) and a very cheap "cinnamon danish with vanilla fondant icing" I've been vaguely eyeing up but was also very suspicious of. I am glad to have tried it and probably won't get it again, even if it is only 19p.
- This evening's tofu was particularly cooperative with being cooked. (Thanks be to evilsusan for the specific combination of courgettes, tofu and garlic that I still make regularly lo these many years later )
- I hit refresh on Oxfam Online and discovered that the rotating sale has migrated back around to "30% off 3+ books". Thus now on their way to me I have: the first edition of Explain Pain for an astonishingly reasonable price (I want to do the deeply nerdy thing of a side-by-side comparison with the second edition, and also to revisit its structure while the second edition is on loan to a physio friend...); a book entitled Science of Pilates, which I'd previously eyed up but that time it sold before I got around to it; a book about allotments and cooking; and a probably questionable out-of-print 1980s cookbook...
- Ridiculous indulgent breakfast situation (though having now looked up Culinary Strata because A asked, I am extremely unconvinced that pistachio croissants with raspberries)... counts.
- Therapy session, spent entirely talking about One Thing (with tendrils), has left me feeling distinctly more settled.
- Today's primary Make Numbers Go Down project has been working my way through some of the short fiction I've had open in tabs since [mumble]. Highlight thus far is Naomi Kritzer's The Thing About Ghost Stories (cn parental death, dementia).
- The other New Thing I started consuming today is A Physical Education, which is extremely and often graphically about diet culture and disordered eating, but which 11% of the way through the audio file I am Very Much Enjoying. Further updates to follow. (The library only has audio, I apparently put a hold on it seven weeks ago though I can't at this point remember where I came across it, and The First Headphones I Have Ever Tolerated remain excellent. Shokz OpenRun Pro.)
- The Child liked the replacement mock cherries; spring flowers are excellent (we are firmly heading into daffodils now); Routine Dinner tonight DID work even though the app initially Frightened Me by claiming first available pickup was tomorrow morning.
- Made it to the plot! Brought home more salad than we actually wanted to eat this evening! Mostly lamb's lettuce but some bonus baby beetroot and spinach leaves :)
- Also, the broad beans are starting to emerge (well, the ones that didn't get partly dug up and then abandoned on the surface unmunched, anyway; those have now been reinterred).
- In the course of Making An Effort to Close More Tabs I rediscovered Standard Ebooks, and downloaded a bunch of things I'd apparently been interested in for Some Time: Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
- I spent some of the evening doing minor crafts with supplies A acquired, to make replacement cherries for a children's board game, using red wooden beans and green cotton string. I am mildly concerned that the Child might disapprove of the string being green rather than red, but We Shall See...
- Cleeeeeeeeeen hair.
- inCompleted White Puzzle!!! We were right about That One Piece being the missing one, and now that I'm not worried about spoilers I have poked the internet and it (mostly in the form of reddit) confirms that Those Are The Missing Bit.
- one (1) orchid flower is all the way open!
- supermarket had discount fancy croissant, so we are most of the way to prepped for Fancy Breakfast tomorrow morning :)
Or is that just like a being on the Tube thing? And in most of real life adult-looking-people with Stuffys are still going to get disapproved of?
Like I just want it to be OK and like safe to be an adult-bodied person with a Bunny ….. I kind of think that adults who think they are too old for stuffys are missing out for not like a good reason but it doesn’t bother me if anyone has a stuffy or not in public and I don’t get why it seems to bother Bully-type-people what we do? But we do like need to know if that kind of judgment is still going to make problems for us (and our Bunnys) or not…
Do you all have opionions (like about what you think most outside people will think - if you think adult-bodied-people-shouldn’t-have-stuffys then you prolly shouldn’t be reading my DW!)
(A long time ago
oilrig was like frustrated about something and said like rhetorically “why can’t you grown up?” - we asked him how he achieved growing up and he said he didn’t know - “it just happened” … so we pointed out that meant it couldn’t be our fault that it didn’t “just happen” for us. Which he had to agree was just logical and so he stopped saying things like that. But Bully-type-people don’t like work like just-noticing-difference-type-people and don’t care about logic)