imaginary_girls

Reading. Finished: Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard. Memoir containing a whole lot of first-person perspective on the last fifty years or so of forest ecology; I found her tendency to short sentence fragments hard going but am v glad to have read this, and learned a bunch about how trees connect to & communicate with each other.

Small progress on EYB indexing for Divine, and reading a tiny bit more of the introductory everything of Medlars.

Writing. I am definitely at the point where I am wailing and gnashing my teeth about how to organise the biology/anatomy section, and grimly wishing to have spent, ooh, the last fifteen years practising anatomical illustration.

Watching. More Farscape. Finished the three-parter in season 2. Extremely A Farscape Episodes.

Playing. We finished getting the achievements for Tukoni: Forest Keeper, and have started a replay of Creaks.

Cooking. ... I sort of feel like there wasn't much of note this week. Is that true? Is that fair? Probably not! This evening definitely included making a batch of the self-saucing passion fruit pudding, which is pleasing.

Eating. VIENNESE PATISSERIE. A brought me: Apfelstreuselkuchen; Apfel-Mohn-Torte; Topfenstrudel; and a pair of things that sadly got extremely squidged but were nonetheless tasty, and were once upon a time a Holländer and a Maronikipferl. Also: the British strawberries continue; more of my mother's excellent beans and tomatoes; APPLES.

Exploring. Took the all-roads-and-minimal-canal-paths cycle route to visit The Child on Tuesday, and slightly to my astonishment it worked and was fine! I apparently did enough getting lost that Garmin thought it was a slightly longer journey than the detour via the reservoirs plus More Canal Path, and who am I to argue.

Making & mending. I have Properly Started patch #2 on Test Trousers #1. This is the largest; I still need to decide what I think I'm doing once I've finished blanket-stitching the edges of the largest hole...

Growing. Kohlrabi are coming up! Squash are squashing! Oca are looking much more cheerful for having had significantly more rain! Trinidad Perfume (heatless yellow habanero) is flowering; the next batch of apples I dehydrate are going to also contain a shelf of ancho chillis, about which I am Excited.

Observing. The bat. :)

On Sunday I went up to Cambridge; on Monday I came back down to London, with a little shy of 30kg of apples, triaged into "needs using pretty much immediately" and "probably shelf-stable for at least a few days". This morning and early afternoon, to my own minor astonishment, I actually processed a bunch of the needs-used-immediately(ish), further triaged by urgency, into the dehydrator! Which is continuing to run overnight, and therefore everything smells of warm apple, and I am very pleased about it.

I am not entirely sure where the executive function came from but I'm very relieved it chose to show up, given how much of the last batch of apple harvest I wound up sadly composting.

Prompted by A's adventures elsewhere I took another look at the bezel colours Framework offers for my laptop, to confirm that they still do not inspire me. In this I was correct. (Un?)fortunately, however, I also came across files for printing your own, along with a report from someone who printed the earlier version of the files. Might I be going to get a teal edge to my laptop screen? Maybe! Might A's bezel be changing from OEM orange to sparkly purple? Also maybe!

Cycle ride home from gym (and subsequent dinner, because I could give people money to make the problem of feeding me go away) featured a very dramatic sunset, of which have an amateurish photo (that alas could not cope with showing both the orange-pink end of the spectrum and the section of the sky down to the lower right that was doing the thing of being green):

I thought it was probably still too early in the evening for the bat, but I was wrong! So I followed up gawking at the sunset with gawking at a bat.

I have just bought my first Railcard since the start of the pandemic. It probably won't be live in time to use it for tomorrow's intended travel, but at least next time I decide I want to buy train tickets it will Already Be Sorted.

I have grudgingly succumbed to the lure of "synthetic fibres might survive a little longer than natural when it comes to, you know, cycling" and am now in possession of several second-hand Sturdy By Design lower-limb coverings. I have yet to actually get the selfie of how hilariously well the favourite shorts coordinate with the gym decor, which I had not clocked at all until I showed up wearing them; today was the leggings' first outing; I am recording this in no small part to make it easier to work out whether they are actually more robust to Indignities. I am enjoying being All The Rainbows All The Time, helped along by the part where I'm not actually willing to subject that fabric to my bike keys, so they now live on my Pride lanyard for gym-going purposes...

1. Release yesterday: Modified HIV drug reverses vision loss and paralysis in multiple sclerosis model (Yeramothu et al. 2026)

2. And from last week: Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds (Jokhai, Dundes et al. 2026)