Patron Saint of Falling Over Things

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.

Self-care Links:
From runpunkrun: Three LGBT romance novels from Riptide Publishing
Because everyone deserves comfort reads.

From lilysea: How To Get Through This: Tips From A Lifelong Depressive
(Lots of self-care and self-checks in here, cw for talking about depression)

From SBS:
Living with mental health issues? There's an app for that
Advice on evaluating apps for anxiety or depression to determine if they're good mental health and wellbeing tools. I haven't tried the apps it suggests but I'm planning to check them out.


And onto recipes! (I haven't done this in a while!)

Something I cooked recently:
Dorie Greenspan's Custardy Apple Squares
Aaaah, so good! It's very sliceable, and would probably freeze well. The custard isn't a runny kind of custard, it's more like a glue holding all the apple slices together.

I peeled and cored the apples then sliced them on the mandolin, and completely did not slice off a digit. (I am very frightened of the mandolin.) We cooked it in a glass dish rather than a cake tin, and it worked fine.

A+++ would bake again. (Have, in fact, baked again. A double recipe.)

Jaffa cakes ala Bake-off
For me, it was too many bits and pieces, and I'm not fussy enough a baker to bother. But I do know a British expat who suffers from a lack of Jaffa cakes in Australia and loved the recipe. They tasted okay? But not so great that I'm craving them again.

C+ Would not bother again - too fiddly for something I don't have a nostalgic connection to.


Something I have concrete plans to cook soon:
Jam and Coconut Slice
This is a lunch box classic for our house. It's basically coconut fluff over raspberry jam on a biscuit base, and it's tasty and reliable.


Something I'm idly planning to cook in the future:
Monkey Face Biscuits *content warning: creepy puppet*

I'm transcribing this because the recipe at the site is baked by a scary puppet and I can't look at it. I have made these biscuits and the recipe works really well but that puppet is a big nope.

( Monkey Face Biscuits )

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 )

Ugh, I think I have a virus. I'm running a temperature and I have a scratchy throat. I am Friday-night drunk and cranky and happy is haaaaaaard.

*works hard* Um, um, um.


1. Paranormal Activity 4 is on, and it's surprisingly not handheld. Spooooky times.


2. I pulled a muscle in my groin working out. (I think my groin might be my Achilles' heel!) But it got better through the day, and I think I'll be able to work out tomorow.


3. Yesterday on ABC FM, Emma Ayres referred to Tchaikovsky as "Tchaik". G'day, Tchaik, mate! Bonza symphony.


4. We have planted cos lettuce and peas in the garden. The peas are in little biodomes made from Sprite bottles.


5. lilacsigil made me a hold-all for my crochet paraphenalia:

( She's also making cushions out of the groovy orange and beige fabric )


Links:

- femslash_kink, has opened prompts for filling on the 2013 kinkmeme. The masterlist is here. SO. MANY. PROMPTS.


- Flourless chocolate and hazelnut cake. But I'm probably going to make lemon and blueberry bread this weekend because I have a bunch of lemons and limes to use up.


- Birds like this guy is why we need to keep our garbage safely inside the wheelie bins, and not have any poking out over the top.


- BABY RHINO!


Okay, I'm going to bed now. Today wasn't awful, and tomorrow will be better.

1. Unexpectedly sunny weather, which was unexpectedly pleasant, especially because work wasn't too busy. At this time of year, Saturdays alternate between frantic and dead, depending on whether the football game is home or away. I did have to make an ointment, though. I hate compounding, and am delighted by the proliferation of compounding pharmacies so I don't have to, but this one was so basic I was too embarrassed to refer the patient on. But I got it all done, and with minimal suffering, despite the utter grossness of lanolin. Ugh, and it's so hard in winter. Like mashing cold butter, only so much stinkier.

2. I've ordered seeds so I can start this year's tomatoes. I got green zebras, because I was depressed about global warming, and then I thought "Well, if it's going to get warmer and warmer, I'll grow tomatoes that need warmer weather, damn it." Green zebras are tasty, if we can get them to ripen. And if I've now jinxed myself into a cold, wet summer? See what I did there? Ha!

The other variety I ordered was called "Camp Joy Cherry" which sounds absurdly rude for no actual reason. I get my seeds from Forget Me Not Heritage Seeds, and they've never let me down.

3. I haven't said much about the casting for the new Doctor, but I'm pretty happy with Peter Capaldi. Like most people, I'd love a woman, I'd love a POC, but I'm happy postponing that hope for a new showrunner. When I heard what Moffat said about the Queen, I thought he was calling for a succession, and entertained a vague daydream where he gets put in the Tower for treason.

4. I've made the bread for lunch tomorrow. That means I can sleep in a bit more, since I don't have to get up and get it going in time. This also means the loaves will have cooled properly before we slice into them, unlike when I grab them hot from the oven. I can never wait - I hack into them when they're far too hot, and they collapse. (It's Honey Sunflower bread again. It makes the nicest toast.

5. Cool things in fandom:

xf_is_love is running the X-Files Love Month: ...a month-long multimedia celebration of X-Files where each participant claims a date and then posts some new X-Files related fanworks (which can be fic, graphics, icons, vids, essays, a memoir of your days in the X-Files fandom, or pretty much anything as long as it's new and original) on that day. You can do as little or as much as you want - the day is yours!

Sign-ups are here, and there are still days free.

havocthecat has a great post on femslash: What do I want from femslash? I'm in it for the characterization.

thekimonogallery for beautiful vintage kimono, and other picspams of Japanese culture.

1. It's raining like the dickens out here. Sideways rain. Sheets of water on the road. Bluster and wuthering and thunder and hail. All the cracks in the lawn are gone, where it had shrunk away from the curb has all filled in again. I look forward to a month or two of mud, and farmers finally complaining that the rain had better stop.

2. I'm limping because my knee injury flared up this morning, to the point of needing maximum OTC painkillers, and not being able to walk without a limp. Not sure why - weather? Overdoing it with the personal trainer? But I'm looking after it in a much better way than when I originally injured it - I have a tendency to freeze up and protect the part that hurts, which leads to more tension and stiffness and pain. This time, I'm icing it, and keeping moving even if I'm awkward and clumsy, and I'm stretching. Stretching is honestly the best thing I learned from the original injury. It's so important for me!

3. We made bread for lunch tomorrow, an awesome recipe that has become a favourite: Honey Sunflower Bread. Thanks, vass, for putting me onto this blog - so many good recipes there.

4. It's going to be a king tide at our house this weekend. Our cycles aren't in sync, so it doesn't happen very often, but when it does, we cook lots of meat! We're slow cooking a leg of lamb this weekend, which we will then fall upon like savages and devour.

5. Speaking of carnivores, our Hannibal rewatch reached the second last episodes tonight. Ack, so tense. So nearly there, and then I can talk about it with lilacsigil who is seeing it for the first time. *clutches self*

- As predicted, I did wake up cranky and weepy and stressed after the past few days. I am proud to have seen it coming, and for not beating up on myself for things like leaving my bed unmade and not really doing much today. Must remember to tell my therapist. I like to tell her when coping strategies are working.

- I left my bed unmade until I felt like making it just before lunch, so it was in full sunlight when I pulled all the blankets off. Baggins leapt up and was ridiculously adorable in the sunbeams, so I lolled around with him and had epic, epic cuddles. I have been fully kneaded by giant paws.

- my mum is being super weird and making oblique references to the dinner with lilacsigil's family without actually saying anything outright. My auntie was visiting them today, so she must have said something. Mum's the one that had freakouts whenever I tentatively mentioned lilacsigil's family. I wonder where she thinks lilacsigil came from? Under a cabbage? Anyway, I'm listing this as a good thing because I'm not feeling in any danger from it, I guess. She can't do anything or have any effect on me without directly saying what she wants to know. So she can play her weird mind games and chase her tail around and around, but the basic fact is that I had a good time and I was glad my auntie did, too.

- I baked ANZAC slice for the third time, and got the baking time just right for my oven. If you're trying it yourself, you'll want to underpitch the baking time - take it out just before you think it's done. If it's solid but very squishy, it will set with a lovely chewy texture. And I remembered to put some sea salt in the recipe this time - it really makes a difference. Or at least, it does in my mind!

- I am making this hat - Waving to Granny Hat - only in wild rainbow colours like my tea cosy. I'm up to the even rounds now, and it's turning up at the edges just like in the picture. I love it when that happens!

- Back to work tomorrow. I must be a grown-up, since I'm listing that as a positive thing.

I pulled a muscle in my groin doing sidekicks in the pool yesterday. Today I am walking like a penguin.


I've started using Spotify. Not sure how to make best use of it, though, especially finding friends. Should I let it have access to my Facebook? Do I want my family knowing what music I'm listening to? Do I want to know what music they're listening to? One of my brothers-in-law and the only one I know for sure uses Spotify, is a big Daft Punk fan, and I'm not, particularly, so I'm undecided on the matter.

Anyone here on Spotify? Can I, like, add you or whatever? If I can figure out how to do that. So far, I've just been throwing random artists I like at it and seeing what it spits out, which is working okay, but I'm sure I should be doing more or something.


Book signal boost:

Death By Silver by Amy Griswold and Melissa Scott, aka amygriswold and mescott.

This book is heaps, heaps, heaps of fun! Murder mystery set in Victorian-era London, with magic as an everyday kind of thing. Queer representation, public school beatings, and magic teapots. Harry Potter meets original flavour!Sherlock Holmes. Go buy it! This book needs a fandom of more than me. (There are ebooks coming soon, or so I believe.)



ETA: It's also available at Book Depository with free international shipping.



Recipes cannibalised from other recipes so I can cook it properly next time, part two:
Beef and Kidney Bean Stew

( Despite the titillating mention of cannibalism, there are no actual kidneys in this recipe )