Cybertron Flower

It's been a challengingly busy week (if I owe you comments, I will get to them at some point this weekend, sorry), and my brain is a bit rubbish at coming up with a prompt this time around, so I'm going with the following:

What is the most memorable icebreaker question you've been asked, in any context?

I've been ridiculously happy and full of energy all weekend — a side-effect, I assume, of the sunshine, warm spring weather, and abundance of flowers and birds. Whatever the cause, I've made good use of this uncharacteristic energy: throwing myself enthusiastically into my classes at the gym, swimming my laps so quickly that I managed 1km in twenty minutes this morning, and undertaking loads of spring cleaning and garden work. In the past two days, I have dusted all hard surfaces in the house, wet-dusted all the internal doors, swept the floors (this latter is something I do weekly anyway, but the dusting necessitated bringing it forward), swept the outdoor deck, weeded stinging nettles from the lawn, and gathered up all the bark mulch from the vegetable garden that the birds had hurled all over the surrounding patio. Inevitably, half an hour after I cleaned up the mulch, the same birds and returned and thrown it back over the path again. I'm glad that our vegetable garden is alive with worms and bugs that the birds want to eat, I just wish they wouldn't do so with such enthusiasm!

I've bought a bunch of heirloom seeds from this woman, and I had planned to sow them over the weekend as well, but the weather next week is going to be cold and frosty again, so I decided against it.

Yesterday Matthias and I had our first outdoor market food truck lunch of the year in the gorgeous patio beer garden of our favourite cafe/bar, in which every table was taken, with people and dogs of various sizes revelling in the sunshine.

In the evening, we watched Sentimental Value, the Norwegian-language film. It's both a movie about making movies (in well trodden Oscar nominee fashion), and abut dysfunctional family relationships — in this case, between an ageing screenwriter/director and his two adult daughters, who is trying to bring a comeback film to the screen dealing with his own complicated family history and mending the relationships with his daughters — with beautiful, functional Scandinavian architecture as the scenery. I liked it a lot, and particularly appreciated that this version of this type of story was capable of understanding that this kind of neglectful paternal relationship really messes up the children, and that immense talent and driven sense of vocation in the chosen career is no excuse (and in fact makes the hurt even worse, because it's so obvious to the children that their parent prefers being in his workplace setting, and is so immensely valued for what he is and does for all the colleagues and mentees in that setting, in a manner that he never demonstrates in the family). (Touching a raw nerve? The film touched all of them.)

Books this week have been a mixed bag in terms of genre and content, but all equally good. On a whim, I picked up Hostis (Vale Aida), a historically divergent (to put it mildly) take on Hannibal and Scipio which was tremendous fun. If you've read the author's fic about these two figures (including an In Space AU; I think it's fine to link the two identities since the author does so on AO3), you'll know what you're in for. I'm only sorry to see that so much time has passed since Hostis was published, since it ends on a huge cliffhanger, and I wonder if Aida experiencing any difficulties in writing the follow-up.

I then moved on to Three Years on Fire, the third of Andrey Kurkov's diaries about his experiences living through Russia's fullscale invasion of Ukraine. This one covers late 2023 up to early 2025. It's interesting (and sad) to read it so soon after the second volume, as the change in tone and expectation is so extreme — although fairly representative of shifts I've witnessed in Ukrainian society as a whole. There's less optimism, although still incredible resilience, and a sort of weary resignation that things will get worse, but that the only way out is through, and therefore they must keep enduring, as the only other option is to give up, and cease to exist as an independent nation where the chance at a future of democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, and respect for human rights is possible. In spite of this heavier tone, Kurkov is still a forensic observer of the human condition, with a keen eye for little episodes and moments to serve as representative illustrations of life in the 21st century as a civilian in a country at war.

I was a bit at a loss as to what to read next. I'm still waiting on a bunch of library holds to come in, so I elected to start an Earthsea reread, having not returned to this series for a good ten years at least. It's not really the right time of the year for it — they feel like such autumnal books to me, although I guess The Tombs of Atuan has something of a vernal undercurrent, given that it's all about a young woman living buried beneath the earth, and bringing herself from darkness into light, under the open sky. The uncritical sexism of the early books aside, the series remains to me an incredible work of literature: gorgeous language, well-considered, meaty ideas concealed in simplicity, and beautiful, beautiful imagery that is at once uncanny and familiar. It's remarkable to me how good Le Guin is at creating such a strong sense of place for a place that does not exist.

Of course, to me, the strongest pull is all those other oceans, and all those sunsets and sunrises, just beyond the last known shore. My journal's title is 'Beyond Selidor,' after all.

The birds are singing, the evening light is beautiful, and my salad greens, herb, and cucumber seeds are sprouting in the growhouse. It's a lovely start to the weekend.

Today's Friday open thread prompt is courtesy of a suggestion from lirazel: what are some types of food that only taste good when handmade/made on a small scale (as opposed to the industrial scale supermarket version)?

My immediate response was 'what type of food doesn't taste vastly better when made on a small scale by hand?' but then I thought a bit more, and realised there were quite a lot of foodstuffs where the difference is non-existent (homemade chips where you chop up a potato and roast it in the oven or deep fry it are no more delicious than the fast-food equivalent), or where the effort involved to make it by hand far exceeds any reward in better flavour (condiments in particular: I'm not going to make my own soy sauce, harissa, dijon mustard, etc, you know?).

However, I'd say that beyond the 'too much effort required' category, in my experience most other types of food are better if they're made on a smaller scale. The biggest one for me is baked goods. There is no bread, cake, pie, biscuit, or pastry on Earth in which the mass-produced supermarket (or otherwise industrial-scale) version tastes better than, or even remotely equally good as, the homemade or expensive artisanal bakery version. (I admit to some significant bias here. I worked part-time from the age of 15-23 — the first years of my working life — in artisanal bakeries/patisseries, the first thing I look up in every place I visit is the most highly recommended bakeries/patisseries, and I'm just in general a massive baked goods snob, which is somewhat hilarious in that I'm a very good cook, and comically, catastrophically bad at baking.)

What are your equivalent foodstuffs, if any?

Hot cross buns have reappeared at my favourite bakery in town (the time between them posting about this on their Instagram stories today, and me rushing out to the bakery to buy some was six minutes), everything is all wild garlic, all the time, and I hung my laundry on the washing line outdoors for the first time this year. All, in their way, are my personal markers of spring's return — although it began raining after lunch and I had to rush out into the garden to rescue everything before it had completely finished drying.

Yesterday I was in Cambridge for the afternoon. I went for a massage (the masseuse told me my shoulders and neck were the tensest she'd ever seen in a client), refilled my spice jars at the refill shop, and got my hair cut. My hairdresser, who is prone to belief in conspiracy theories and quackery, didn't even spout any nonsense this time around (apart from recommending black seed oil as a cure for all medical ailments), which was something of a relief.

After the haircut, I met Matthias for dinner at this restaurant, which was fantastic, and of course featured at least one dish involving wild garlic!

( I've read three books this week )

Today has been sleepy and slow: laundry, cups of coffee, hot cross buns, reading in the living room. For most of the morning I was following the sun around the room like a cat, basking. Now, I'm watching the rain on the windows.