Patron Saint of Falling Over Things

Fire update
- Watch and wait warnings about the Carlisle River fire to the southeast of me
- Evacuation orders ahead of the Budj Bim firefront northwest of me
- I casually use words like 'firefront' now
- Some moron put a smouldering cigarette butt into our pillar box and the postmistress is ropeable

( I screencapped the incident map )

Garden update
The zucchinis are turning yellow and weird, and the problem seems to be low pollination rates. It's not blossom rot, because we put lime down and feed regularly. This site said that hot, dry weather can reduce the amount of pollen transferred:
Why Do My Zucchini Turn Yellow While Growing?

I feel weird about these instructions, okay? I just feel weird about it:
The simplest hand-pollination techniques is to pick a male flower, peel back its petals and rub the structure at its center -- covered with yellow pollen -- into the center of open female flowers. If you're going to take the time to hand pollinate, make sure you're not wasting your time. Pollen is only viable for one day and is at its best when the flowers first open in the morning, so make hand pollinating your first chore of the day.

Nonetheless I diligently made it the first chore of the day. Because I want zucchini bread.

( My hovercraft is full of eels: a Pythonesque tour of my garden )

Link Spam
- via fail_fandomanon:
How you can donate and help the volunteer firefighters in Australia's bushfire crisis

- At the ABC:
Supercell bushfire thunderstorms, tornadoes, fire-whirls and other deadly fires that spin (lilacsigil - do not read this. Or watch the video underneath.)

- via me on facebook, because I was very reassured by the way it helped me understand how co-ordinated and experienced our volunteer firefighters are. They are so great.
Lexton Fire 20/12/19
In this footage, taken from Ararat FCV which was used as a Strike Team Leaders’ vehicle, our strike team and others were tasked with asset protection at the Rainbow Serpent Festival Site.

While this footage looks chaotic, with vehicles circling everywhere, this is process is fairly coordinated. The Strike Team Leaders vehicle circles around to check the assets on the property and to prioritise and delegate tasks to the tankers as required.

- also from facebook, and as a palate cleanser from all that intense fire fighting:
Potaroo and baby eating strawberries

- For people who expressed interest in the Person of Interest Bookclub where we read the big bang fics of 2018 (before the 2020 big bang gets underway fingers crossed), the post is here:
Book Club for January 2020

- Via olivermoss and because it's never not funny to me that this is a Yuletide fandom:
“You’re My Present This Year”: An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad

- At BBC.com, because I love stories about photographs found in thrift stores:
Anonymous Project: A Secret History Hiding in Plain Sight

- via scans_daily and also via the twittersphere's reaction to Cats which was priceless:
THE CAST OF “CATS” AS MEDIEVAL CAT PAINTINGS: A THREAD

- via me googling how-to exercise videos then reading that someone was a kettlebell champion then discovering that this is an actual sport (the article is from 2017 but it was interesting):
Australian athletes weigh in on the emerging Kettlebell sport

- via jaggedwolf, a collection of podcasts premiered in 2019:
All of 2019's Audio Drama/Fiction Podcast Debut Releases

- at My Modern Met:
100+ Museums Turn Their Collections Into Free Downloadable Coloring Books

- via brithistorian:
Royal Derby Hospital: Disposable sterile hijabs introduced

- via fred_mouse:
The world is hooked on Australian coffee culture. This is how it got so good
I had a flattie in Albury the other day that was twice as good as anything I saw in a fortnight in Italy. The entire island of Manhattan has fewer really good places to get a coffee than Canberra.
(This cracked me up. "Maaaate, let's grab a flattie in Canberra!" I just. I just can't.)

- via, ummm, vass I think? Um. Apologies to whomever it was if it wasn't vass:
Geeky license plate earns hacker $12,000 in parking tickets

Good old Bobby Drop Tables.

Nature report:
There's a flock of gang gang cockatoos in town! I've never seen them before but they are very pretty. I can't take my own photo because the flock is always at the bottom of a valley we drive through, and it's not a good place to stop. (It is a good place to drive into the river, though, hence our caution in the car) but I nicked a photo from Wiki:
( Gang gang under here )

We have bower birds in the garden. (This is a different situation to 'kangaroos in the top paddock', aka madness.) I've only seen the females, which are big and green and fond of eating leaves off the bay tree, but a friend has a male in her garden and he's built the most beautiful bower strewn with flower petals and blue plastic.
( Sexy tiems bower under here )

Escitalopram report:
I am less anxious than I was on nothing. I am less... happy? I don't know how to describe it - I think I was rapid cycling a bit before, so I'd have mini-highs and mini-lows. Now I'm level, and it feels a bit flat. But my executive function is a little better, and my motivation seems to be, too. All in all, I'm not suffering, but I'm not having those little peaks of excitation where lots of inspiration comes. Even though those little peaks also came with little troughs of depression, I kind of miss the highs. I'm not talking about the cycling that happens with bipolar conditions - this is tiny, tiny stuff compared to that. I don't want to be appropriating terms - I just can't find a better way to explain it to myself. (And to my therapist, whom I shall be seeing tomorrow.)

Media Report:
The City and the City:
One episode in: this is gorgeous and dreamy and weird (and dripping wet, in the case of Besźel, where the first episode is set.) The story is a police procedural, and the premise is that it's set in and around two cities that occupy the same space, so a kind of dimensional situation, with legal ramifications if you acknowledge the existence of the other city. I haven't read the book, but it has that China Miéville of a beautifully crafted world that you learn about from a very close focus. And the cast is very good: David Morrisey, Lara Pulver. The standout for me is Mandeep Dhillon as Const. Lizbyet Corwi.
( I put a pic under here... )

Counterpart:
Again, I'm one episode in. (My concentration might be a bit borked?) This is basically a Fringe AU, which cracks me up. In Berlin, there's a point where two universes intersect, thanks to Cold War ~science. J. K. Simmons plays two iterations of the same man, one from each universe, in what seems to be an espionage drama. I liked? But I wasn't overwhelmed.

The Good Fight, S1
Loved! Loved where it went, loved how the characters developed, loved that it was basically less gross than The Good Wife was about sex. Loved the cameos from The Good Wife, especially Elsbeth. Loved that there were happy and queer characters that did not get killed. I did not love the tendency towards the corporate voting schemes - who's stabbing who in the back today? How many votes does each person have? This was one of my least favourite things about The Good Wife and one I'm sensitised to because I blew through seven season of TGW in a few weeks, so the takeovers and schemes seemed to be constant. I hope it stops in S2? It hasn't, from the first two episodes I've seen. It's boring storytelling, and the writers can do better.

Fandom report:
There's not very much longer if you're signing up for multifandomdrabble! Sign-ups are here. (Go and request Person of Interest, if you're in that fandom! I want to write you treats!)

poi_fanworks is hosting a Person of Interest Big Bang! The timetable is here, and sign-ups are open until July 18th. Pls sign up! Pls write me long fic.

fandomgiftbox sign-ups are open, too, until the end of June. Here's a link: Sign-up post. (Nobody has requested Person of Interest yet, I'm just saying.)

Holy shit, I've become mono-fannish. That's... an odd feeling for me. It's not like I wouldn't write anything else? I just feel like POI is what I want to write. All the time.

Brainbox update
I'm coming up out of a low, low place, enough that I want to post something. I'm not sure why exactly it happened, or more accurately, there's a number of causes and I'm not sure which one to blame: I stopped amitriptyline and maybe that low dose was doing more than I thought, there was a brief spasm of birthday madness in my family around the date of my lovely sister's birthday (my family does not do birthdays gracefully or well), my therapist went to a seminar so I was a free-range brain for the first six weeks of the year, and my not-lovely sister is getting married which is apparently a family secret that I am not to know but I do because nobody told my father this and he wrote it on the work roster.

Looking back at that list, I'm going to blame my family. (How is keeping a family member's wedding secret from half of us going to even work? I am so confused. Baby sister and I are estranged from her, neither of us have any interest in her wedding, but I don't see how it's functional for my mother to hide the details from me and baby sister. Is she shunning us? Are we meant to feel insulted? What are they going to tell the people who know all of us? What are they going to tell my aunt who is flying in from Canada? I feel like I should make some kind of statement of disavowal or something. IDK, how does estrangement even work? I just want to know what the party line is so I can stick to it and not cause more ruckus.)

Three good things
1. I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which was amazing and made me love spiders. I mean, really, I love them now and think they are lovely. And science is lovely, and evolution is lovely, and science fiction is lovely.

It's a stand-alone novel, and part of the story supposes an evolutionary path for spiders on a terraformed planet. Australopithecine-level civilisation! Alchemist spiders! SPACE-GOING SPIDERS. It's really cleverly thought through, and does a lot with the differences that would arise from spiders: they can walk on ceilings, so spatial geometry of their architecture is very different, their technology develops around the concept of silk, they don't have vocal cords so their language is sign-based. It was awesome, and early on I had to google Adrian Tchaikovsky to find out how he wrote science so well. (Answer: zoology/psychology degree.) Part of the reason I clicked with it so hard, I think, is because I'm the kind of person who hangs onto my physiology textbook long after I'd dropped the subject, because I needed it to figure out stuff like how Vulcan haemoglobin would work. So, if you're that kind of person too, you'll probably like the book. Unless spiders are an absolute nope for you. (Whyyyy? They're so great!)


2. On Tuesday lilacsigil and I had a lovely conversation with her brother and SIL-to be, on speaker phone very early in the morning (they're London-based), while we cuddled in bed with cats. They're getting married in June, and we're not going to be able to make it to the UK for the event, so we called to talk in person instead of chatting, and it was really, really nice.

It was one of those moments in the past few weeks when I've had this weird but pleasant feeling of touching base with planet earth again. The first one was sitting at the kitchen bench while lilacsigil made coffee about a month ago, and I just felt everything slide into position: I was there, she was there, coffee was there, we were safe and well and in our home which is a good place. It was visceral, like I had landed safely. Like I didn't even realise how far I had drifted from myself for weeks until I metaphorically felt my feet touch the ground again. It was very strange to not feel those wheels of almost-panic going. Anyway, early morning to meet London timezone, very cosy, many cats.


3. Monster of the Week started up again! It's a webcomic rewatch of The X-Files which went on hiatus at the end of S4 while the artist had a baby. It's loving and wry, and I'm glad it's back. The Post-Modern Prometheus episode is drawn in colour! Monster of the Week: Season Five, Episode One.

This reminds me that in one of my posts that never got posted, I uploaded a snippet of chat that was X-Files relevant. Also Exorcist relevant, since I was quoting something from FFA about Tomas and Marcus:
( image and transcript under cut, some mention of feral priests )


Clearing out the linkspam folder
- the_good_place! They're having a rewatch of S1. Ooh, there's a banner!
Join us at the_good_place!

- theexorcistfans, which seems to have a rolling writing challenge.

- Write Every Day is at ysilme this month. Everyone is welcome.

- Porn Battle anon meme! pb_anon

- ETA: The Agent Carter fic exchange, ssrconfidential, is running again! Planning post is here: 2018 SSR Confidential.

- The Bright Sessions podcast got optioned for a YA trilogy: Tor Teen Acquires The Bright Sessions Trilogy by Lauren Shippen.

- Keep your lawns short with this nifty guinea pig lawn mower.

- It's from a few Fridays ago, but stiill: Begin Friday With Swinton in a Tux. (I accept that I have a pretty specific women in suits kink.)

- I found this strangely fascinating. From bored panda: 10+ Times People Accidentally Found Their Doppelgängers In Museums

- From Meet Me At Mikes, a list of Australia charities taking crafty donations, like blankets and softies. Crafting for a cause: ace Australian charity crafting campaigns.

- I share this most years, for people who are inundated with zucchini/summer squash. Which is not us, unfortunately. We had a crappy year for squash, with lots of blossom rot. lilacsigil did google research, and possibly the soil is low in calcium, so we're putting lime down tomorrow. Anyway, here's my zucchini recipe collection. If it's tagged 'Imadethis', then I've tried it and found it worthy of making more than once.
My zucchini tag on Pinboard

This was the latest effort (with a gifted zucchini from one of the seedlings I started): Meatballs with Tomato and Zucchini
We used all beef and matched volume of zucchini (it was a massive zucchini - that was only half!), halved the parmesan, and we baked them instead of frying, for 30 minutes at about 160 C. They were fantastic.

Onward, onward towards a better brain.

Something I cooked recently:
- Basil-Walnut Pesto
Because the basil needed a big trim. This is sitting in the fridge in a jar waiting for pasta tomorrow, yay. I am always looking for condiment recipes that I can tailor to my needs (which means making them without garlic or onion) and this worked really well with leek and spring onion tops. It's definitely worth toasting the walnuts. And you need a lot of salt. A lot more than you think. It smells amazing, though.

- Gnocchi, again, this time without egg and with a bit more understanding of the dough. lilacsigil rolled them on the butter pat so they had nice ridges for holding sauce. I actually think I like it better with the egg in it? It fluffed up better with the egg, I thought. But nonetheless it was delicious and plentiful, and there are two bags in the freezer for another time. I do like gnocchi day - the industry of it, standing in a production line making tiny bites of delicious. (This is the recipe I use, though I didn't put an egg in this time: How to Make the Perfect Gnocchi.)

- The Browniest Cookies
The first tray of these turned into completely flat cookie-pancakes. They were tasty, but very flat. So I mixed some rolled oats into the batter, and then they stayed round, though they weren't as moist and gooey as they should have been. I used milk chocolate, so maybe that's a contributing factor?

- Spanakopita Rolls
YUM. These were much less messy, made good use of the rectangle shape of the filo pastry, and were really substantial for a meat-free meal. I subbed leek for onion, and left out the garlic to keep it FODMAP friendly for me. Would make again! Would make and freeze.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake
I love King Arthur recipes, because they have a button that converts US cups to grams. Very handy! (US cups are slightly smaller than Australian ones.) It was a lovely cake, very brownie-like in texture. Is it weird that I'm starting to prefer the taste of chocolate cake with zucchini in it? I don't think I've made a chocolate cake out of zucchini season, actually. I made this in a bundt tin, and it worked well to stop it getting soggy in the middle, considering how much shredded zucchini I sneaked into it.

- Meatballs with Tomato and Zucchini
Here is my brilliant discovery: rolled oats are awesome in meatballs. I put in breadcrumbs, and the mixture wasn't holding the shape I wanted, so, based on the success with the chocolate cookies, I threw in enough rolled oats to get the right consistency. (And subbed leek for onion, left out the garlic, put in bunches and bunches of parsley since it needed a trim.) They tasted great, in terms of flavour and texture. Next time, I think I would like to give the mixture a little time to let the oats swell up and bind. And up the seasoning, since oats soak up salt a lot. But these meatballs were tasty; we ate them on pasta with a veggie tomato sauce.

Wow, I've cooked a lot since the last Recipe Friday. Good. It's a sign I'm feeling better.


Something I have concrete plans to cook soon:
Easter is coming! I have plans for Easter! Roast lamb, because it's lamb season here, yay.

- Orange Rice Cake, which is the closest recipe I've found to my nonna's rice cake. (Without oranges, because she never made hers with orange.) lilacsigil wants me to make a half-sized cake, because the last one spoiled before we ate it all, and I know that makes sense, but I feel like Nonna wouldn't be pleased with that.

Courgette and cheddar soda bread
To use up the last mini-glut of zucchinis from the garden. I love soda bread recipes - they're really quick to make, and the zucchini should stop it going stale quite so quickly.


Something I'm idly planning to cook in the future:
Takeout-style Sesame Noodles with Cucumber
There's a wave of baby cucumbers about to become a glut of cucumbers, and I should be ready to make them into stuff. (Except pickles - I don't really like pickles?) Otherwise, it will be the usual 'make dinner and garnish it with a whole cucumber' situation all over again.

I guess that's why I bookmarked this six months ago when the northern hemisphere was in full cucumber production:
17 Recipes to Make When You're Simply Drowning in Cucumbers
That green gazpacho looks good.


Garden update

Oh, man, what a crappy season for tomatoes. Facebook kept bringing up memories from last year, of trays and trays of tomatoes going into the oven for roasting and freezing, while this year, the fruit was still green. We've had a few - more than a few - but not the overflowing numbers that mean eating them warm from the vine, giving them to your friends, and stowing away a freezer full for winter stews. At least it wasn't just us - everyone in the region had a bad crop this year.

Two zucchini plants were definitely adequate for two people plus a few for friends. It was nice not to have armfuls of marrow the size of babies, and we definitely had enough for regular meals plus some exciting 'how to cleverly use your zucchini' type recipes. I'd like to grow an heirloom type next year, though the Blackjack are really nice.

I wasn't sure if any of my cucumber plants grown from seed would even produce fruit, so I foolishly planted them all, and thus came the 12-cucumber days of late summer. I have exhausted many peoples' politeness in accepting cucumbery gifts. We grew two types from seed, Lebanese (smaller, wrinklier than English cucumbers) and crystal apple (pear shaped and milky white), and when they were not flourishing, we put in two Burpless seedlings from the garden shop. They all fruited, though very late: we didn't get any until March and then it was cucumbers all the way down. Still worth it, because fresh picked cucumber is a whole other thing compared to the kind you get at the grocery store. They're sweet and crisp and a bit peppery, they have texture and flavour and you can just eat them as it, like a giant green banana.

The same deal went with the button squash seedlings - but they didn't fruit as prolifically as the cucumbers, which is good, because there were six of them, and it could have been a zucchini-style apocalypse. They were lovely, though - for dinner, I'd chop them up very fine and stir them into the rice cooker to steam a little.

I've re-seeded the lettuce patch, as it's starting to thin out. There's still enough to supply two or three big salads per week at the moment, but every time I go out, the patch is a little smaller. We're onto our third punnet of snow peas for the year. The basil is bolting, as usual, but I keep lopping the flowers off. The leeks have been thinned (we ate the thinned ones, om nom baby leeks) and the spring onion patch has about a dozen going at the moment. lilacsigil made the amazing discovery that leek ends will regrow just like spring onion ends, so the leeks that we grew from seed are going back in the ground as we pick them, to rejuvenate. It's amazing.

What else? We tried a punnet of pak choi, and it immediately became slug city, so lilacsigil pulled them out. (It was seriously gross.) Research suggests that we need to remove the mulch layer (because the slugs hide out under it during the day) and use a barrier of diatomaceous earth. We couldn't get any DE, but lilacsigil found a special snail gel that delivers a mild electric shock. IDK, it sounds very Star Trek to me, but if it works, I will be very happy.

Look! Two entries in two days. I really think I'm feeling better.

State of the Writing:
I posted a bunch of fics, but have a few more that only need a little bit of work. (Sanctuary wing-fic, this one X-Men/Sanctuary fic I've had hanging around, that Warehouse 13 fic that I thought was finished but actually had [put kiss here] in the body of the text, ffs.)

I'm going to try for a finish-a-thon this Nano. I just totted up my works in progress:
- Post-Winter-Soldier Save Bucky fic now jossed by, I think, four MCU movies, 55K
- Person of Interest 5 Things, with 3/5 of the things done, 15K
- Person of Interest post S5 fixit, 36K
- Person of Interest Sentinel/Guide fic I should never have started but it's so addictive, 5K
- Dracula 2013 Lucy/Mina/Grayson fic 6K
- Original fic, Boarding House of Together They Solve Crime, 50K

That's 167K of unfinished business, holy shit. That's not right. Something has to change here. I think I'm staging an intervention on myself.

Yuletide assignments were super early this year, huh? Mine is great - I'm excited about getting started on that, plus the letter reads like I wrote it. We're obviously very in sync, my recipient and I. For myself, I got my letter in right on the buzzer - Dear Author.

And I have a pinch hit for femslashex that I absolutely need to get cracking on. Now.

State of the Garden:
- celery going strong
- snow peas starting to take off
- weird crinkly spinach in that stage where the more you pick, the more grows
- broccolini is down to one plant, but it still has... brockles?
- bok choy gone (it was a really good winter crop though.)
- seeds for button squash, butternut pumpkin, green zebra tomato, apple cucumber and leek are tiny but strong
- 2 zucchini seedlings are in and planning their strategic advance on the house
- coriander is going
- we put in some beetroot seedlings, mostly because apparently the greens are nice in salad? IDK.

State of the Me:
- I hurt my shoulder and the physiotherapist uttered the dread incantation 'rotator cuff'. It's not too bad, just inflamed, definitely not torn, but I'm being extra careful. I feel like I'm in a bad Victorian novel, always checking that my shoulder blades are down and back.
- The plebiscite on same sex marriage went down in flames, thank goodness, but that and world events in general have left me feeling fairly hopeless about the future. I'm still trying to get over the discovery that I live in a world where #nottheonion is a thing we need when reading news.
- I'm feeling generally flat and uncommunicative but I am trying to push out of it. I have NaNo write-ins I want to attend in Geelong. I've scoped out the locale, it looks nice and fairly accessible. I'm still nervous about it. Socialising is nervewracking, even when I want to do it.
- Pokemon Go is giving me life. Even though fewer people are playing, it takes the edge of my anxiety when I go to a new place, because I can scope out the poke-landscape.

State of the Cats:
( Spring is here and we opened a window )

No Frills Multi-Fandom Friending Meme, thanks to snickfic.

Hello to the new people! I have a sticky post with all the basics and an 'All About Where I Live' post

Hey, Aussie fats - does anyone want to try We Love Colors tights? I bought a pair in fuck-off neon yellow, and fuck-off stop-sign red, and the colours are amazing, but they don't bloody fit me around the thighs. They're fantastic around the calves, and they fit me around the waist, but they don't go comfortably over my thighs. Frustrating! They're so nice and colour-dense, and vivid and so exactly what people tell fat women they shouldn't wear, so I'm really sad. They're size EE. Free to a good home inside Australia - I'll cover the postage.


marvel_bang goes along and along. I really wanted to have old!Peggy take a part in my mystery, and I'm writing her now, but gosh, I worry I'm not going to do okay by her. I know the things I don't want in old!Peggy fic: a cure, Peggy suddenly doing things she's really not physically or mentally capable of, sweet old lady things (because she's never been sweet and I doubt she found it in old age.) It's a matter of working out what I want her to do, what she's plausibly able to do, how she can be awesome, without her sections becoming deus ex machina or overly sickly. It's a very interesting line and I'm glad I have lilacsigil to bounce my draft off as I write it. And I really need to get going on the art, for both of us.

In the garden, there's finally been a bit of spare time to plant the seeds, so yesterday we put tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, cucumber (all heirloom mixes, so who knows what we'll get? So exciting!), mesclun mix, rocket, and basil. They're all in the hothouse which is nice and humid at the moment. Tomatoes need to be ready to go into the beds by Cup Day (which is the first Tuesday in November.) There's tons of bok choy in the beds right now, so I'm making ramen tomorrow to use it up. (There's stock cooking up now while I'm typing this. And I can totally soft-boil eggs now, it's brilliant.)

I finally got 8tracks to work on my laptop and now I can listen to fanmixes again. (I miss megaupload!) I really liked this mix of French rap and pop:
( Player embedded behind here because the art was cute too )
Being able to interact with 8tracks makes me want to re-upload all my old fanmixes that I lost when megaupload went down.


A recipe: Lemon buttermilk donuts. (CN: some diet/'clean eating' talk in the link.) Recipe has quantities in grams as well as cups (important for me, because Australian cups are bigger) and it makes a nice small batch. I had a donut pan that I'd never used but really wanted to, enough that I held onto through the giant kitchen purge before we moved to the new house. I'm glad I tried it because it cooked these little sweeties really perfectly. Definitely going to mess around with that recipe some more in the future.

( This is how ours came out )

I found something to nominate as a microfandom for this year's Yuletide: Find the girls on the negatives. I love the photos - so beautiful, so mysterious - and I think there's lots of potential there for fic. Like, femslash (since it seems possible that each woman photographed the other, right?) Or mermaid femslash - they're going home together at last! Or, really, anything.


Other random things:

- 51 facts you probably didn't know about the Great British Bake-Off. The audition process sounds intense.

- Via conuly, The Disastrous Australian Emu War. I should add that emus don't tweet, they make a thumping drum noise. BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Footy season started, which means I get to sip my coffee and relax a bit at work. I don't like football much, but I'm grateful for slightly slower Saturdays. And coffee. Always grateful for coffee.

ETA: Apparently not football yet? IDK where are the people?

I have been in a bit of a slump, brain-wise, but I'm coming up out of it now. (I'm starting to see a pattern via my tumblr queue - I drop posting down to three per day because it's just too hard to keep that queue topped up, then slowly it fills up again as I have more concentration and energy. When I've got 100 posts in the queue, I up the rate to ten per day. It's an odd but definite pattern.)



Today is officially one year since we put the sticker on the sign for the new house. We've been in for six months. It's a lovely house for summer, as it turns out, and catches cross breezes beautifully. The veggie garden went in late, but we've had oodles of zucchini, peas and basil. Only one tomato, unfortunately. It was delicious but tiny.

Cooking has mostly revolved around zucchini, and the question of how we can get more zucchini into each meal. (Chopped and sauteed with garlic goes well into a toasted cheese sandwich, for example.) The Courgette tag at BBC Good Food has been a wealth of fun. Courgette and Orange cake was the recipe I made the most often, I think, though I make it with an orange glaze because lilacsigil doesn't like cream cheese icing.



Fannishly, I consumed much:

Agent Carter was beautiful and amazing and perfect for me, if not perfect overall. I hope, hope we get a second season. I hope I get a chance to contribute to viewing statistics in some way soon. (I furiously liked things on Facebook, for the little good that does.) I want to write fic. Dottie and Peggy and Angie fic. Le sigh. So many women. Plz come back, writing mojo.

Person of Interest S3 was this amazing blur of femslashy moments, and finally clicking with Reese, and loving all the dystopian AI storylines, and adoring Root in god-mode. And sad about ( Read more... ). I'd love recs for fic that's non-spoilery past the S3 finale, if anyone has any.

I am inspired by many gifs on tumblr to give The 100 a try again. Much femslash, actual queer content, wow.

But I've given Gotham the flick - it got too nasty. And ( spoilers )

The Great British Sewing Bee - I'm almost finished. Just the final to go. It was a great season!

The Comic Relief Bake-Off - there was this one amazing episode, with Joanna Lumley, Jennifer Saunders, Lulu, and Dame Edna Everage. It was like the best episode of AbFab EVER. It was amazing. I love Comic Relief Bake-Off anyway, but this was unusually epic and amazing.

Broadchurch - I have no idea what made me suddenly watch this show - I'm not really fond of that particular style British grim crime drama. I think the small-town angle caught me. And Olivia Colman is ace balls. I'm in the middle of Season 2 right now (so much shirtless James D'Arcy, wow.) ( spoilers ).



So, anyway. This is me. I am here! And feeling better. And hopefully back to fic soon. I have a build-up of fic feelings.

It's so much cooler now. The sky is eerily orange from the fires in the Grampians, but there's nothing close to us at the moment. It's nice to be able to open up the house and get some fresh air into it. Now I'm watching lilacsigil play Lego Marvel Super Heroes. She's driving in New York. We couldn't figure out why everyone was on the wrong side of the road. Hopefully, they will just assume that Tony is wasted. It seems reasonable.


We ventured into the garden for the first time this week, and holy cow, the zucchinis are coming. THE ZUCCHINIS ARE COMING! Fortunately I have been stashing zucchini recipes on Pinboard, so I am ready. The basil is looking awesome. There are tomatoes everywhere but all still green. The pumpkins have gone ballistic in the heat - huge leaves, lots of buds. Watermelons are looking a bit sad; I think they were still a bit small when the heat came, and even though we had plastic over them, they've suffered a bit. The cos lettuce has bolted, but the other lettuces are doing well, and so is the spinach. Peas everywhere! So many peas! And beans! And the eggplant tree is looking alive, at least, even if there are no blossoms. We just can't eggplant here, and it's so sad.


Recipe Friday! Let's make it happen!

Something I've cooked recently:

Braised leg of lamb:

Basically, you get a leg of lamb, preferably with the bone in, stud it with garlic and sprigs of rosemary, and rub it with olive oil and sea salt. Then put it in a cast iron pot. Add a brown onion peeled and cut in two. Chop a head of garlic in half and throw that in, with a bunch of rosemary and thyme. (And maybe some peppercorns, maybe a bayleaf, maybe some brown sugar or honey, but this time we didn't bother because we'd left it too late in the day to be fussy.) Pour white wine over the lot, cover and cook it in the oven at 150C for five hours. Check it occasionally to make sure there's still liquid in the pot. Take the lid off for the last hour. It's done when it can be flaked with a fork.

We did this ahead of the heat, knowing we'd be unlikely to cook this week. The lamb, and some pumpkin rolls from the bakery did us for lunches, and with rice and veggies for dinner on a couple of nights when we were really flaked out from work.


Crispy Roasted Chickpeas:

I was totally inspired by the chickpeas in my Harvest Box last week - all the toasted lentils have been really tasty, and we always have a can of chickpeas to throw in curry, so it seemed like a good option. They were terrible! I don't think it's the fault of the recipe - the spices tasted great, but the chickpeas tasted like ass. I think I'll try soaking my own, maybe? Or a different brand of chickpeas? The problem is that the canned ones always smell really bad to me, and I could totally smell that bad smell, even covered in a billion spices and salt. I need to figure this out, because I love chickpeas, and I want to try hummus again soon.



Something I've got concrete plans to cook soon:

Well, we're going to chargrill the first zucchini tomorrow. The Weber barbecue is working out great! We bought outdoor furniture to go with it - I sit there with my iPad, reading fic and grilling like a boss, while lilacsigil potters in the garden. We chat over the balcony. It's really nice.


mergatrude's Super Easy Butter Cake:

Part of my quest for an easy cake - that recipe I linked last week was actually pretty complex, so I abandoned it. I will have cake that is tender and has a nice rise and doesn't taste like dry paste. I will achieve this. I will be precise. As ducened said, "Cake is your finicky English teacher who marks you off for forgetting the Oxford Comma."



Something I'm idly thinking of cooking in the future

Homemade Vanilla Bean Chai Syrup

This could be nice, right? You basically grab a can of sweetened condensed milk and stir in a whole bunch of spices to make a spiced syrup, then when you want chai, you stir some of the syrup into some black tea. It sounds like a good idea on paper, and I've got everything I need to make it on hand, so I'd like to give it a go.


Panini bread

We've got the sandwich press out, and I'd forgotten how nice it is to just squish good things into bread and toast it. I'm going to make some nice panini-style breads to toast. To follow on with ducened's analogy, unlike cake, bread is your mellowed out art teacher who wants you to get your hands dirty and feel for the right texture.



I've been trying to get this into a post but keep backing out of it: our elderly cat is on the decline. ( Cut for talk of ailing pets )

I had my little sister to stay for a couple of days over New Year, and it was lovely. She is so nice and easy-going and happy, and sometimes I wonder how she came from my family but I don't care because she's awesome. I love her so much. But now she is gone, and all that remains are some haunted cats, a unicorn doona cover, and 'dogs bum looks like jesus' in my google search box. Such good times!



Yuletide reveals! This is me:
Four Times Rolan Spoke For Valdemar, and Once He was Speechless For Himself (1884 words) by st_aurafina
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Talia (Valdemar), Rolan (Valdemar), Talamir (Valdemar), Dirk (Valdemar)
Additional Tags: Soul Bond
Summary:

Rolan is not like other Companions. He Chooses again.

Sparkly pony Christmas! I couldn't say anything in the lead-up to Yuletide, but I had the best time reviewing canon! I read Arrows, Winds, Storms, Vanyel, and then went and read some of the anthologies, and Alberich's books. I hadn't read Alberich's story, and there was a lot in there I needed to know about Talamir and Rolan and Monarch's Own business. And then, because I was on a roll, I re-read the Diana Tregarde novels, which aren't holding up as well in the fail:nostalgia ratio as Valdemar is. I remember loving them so much when I was younger. *sigh*



I'm still on prednisolone for the asthma flare-up I'm in the middle of, and it's such a monster drug. I'm all hyped up and twitchy, and HUNGRY, and my calves are spasming and crampy, and I want to jump down every tourist's throat. (Actually that last one probably doesn't have much to do with the prednisolone. Tourists, man. I hate'em. BE FUCKING POLITE ON YOUR HOLIDAYS, YOU RUDE FUCKING FUCKS. YOU'RE FUCKING GUESTS IN MY FUCKING TOWN OMFG.) The prednisolone has also drastically cleared up my sinuses, to the point where I am rediscovering just how bad we all smell. Ugh. Everyone has this cloud of smell around them, even me, and it's like my personal space has been reduced exponentially. We smell! All of us! It's weird and I don't usually have to spend energy processing that information. Ugh.



In conclusion, we have caterpillars in our tomatoes. This is not a metaphor. They are cabbage loopers and tonight we go at them with chemical weapons, aka detergent.

1. Tonight's X-Files was Hell Money, which I tend to skip in my constant rolling rewatch because it's kind of shitty. But we're keeping up with Monster of the Week which means no skipping. (Last week was Teso Dos Bichos, with the amazing fake kitties.) Anyway, this episode had surprise!Lucy Liu! And surprise!B. D. Wong! So the rewatch was definitely worth it.

2. This week is Freezer Food Week! (Which comes around whenever we've filled up the freezer.) It's a surprise with every meal. Except breakfast.Tonight was lasagna! And this weekend, I'm cooking a giant batch of curried sausages - lovely Nana food, especially when it's cold.

3. I had a really, really good swim on Tuesday, for the first time in five weeks. The Warrnambool pool has been so crowded, but they just opened the outdoor pool for early morning laps, and it seems to have eased the pressure on the mid-morning lap swimmers like me, yay. And they're filling the local outdoor pool now, so hopefully soon we'll be swimming laps closer to home.

4. The green zebra tomato seedlings are ready to go out in the main beds. The cherry tomatoes aren't far behind. I planted some Lebanese cucumbers, but most of them didn't come up, so I shoved in some cantaloupe seeds. And then some things came up but I'm not sure if they're cucumbers or cantaloupes. I guess we'll find out.

5. Crochet!

( Pics of crocheted things, mostly hats )

Sadly, as a result of all this handcraft, I have amped up the tenosynovitis in my right wrist, but I've got a doctor's appointment on Tuesday, and hopefully there will be a cortisone shot. Hopefully. Because I'm sad about rationing my crochet time.