Col

1. I will grudgingly concede that the ridiculously overengineered parsnip risotto from The Modern Vegetarian is actually very tasty and it's very obvious that without the THREE DIFFERENT PREPARATIONS OF PARSNIP it would also be significantly less Parsnip. It is not, however, sufficient to convince me to update The Risotto Rule. But, as I say, it's very tasty and we have at least another day (possibly two?) of it, which I am cheerful about as a concept!
2. Blessedly my repeat prescription request had made it to the pharmacy by the time I swung by to pick up A's IOU and a new thing, so I won't need to make any more trips there this week, at any rate.
3. Chillis in the greenhouse that I really need to bring home before I lose the gamble on frost are looking happy still despite a week+ of neglect.
4. Through hunting duvet covers (the one I bought for myself when I first moved out of the Den of Christians and into My Own Flat, in very early 2014, has tragically failed catastrophically) I have been reminded of the existence of incredibly gaudy (watercolours of) tulips, and I'm probably not going to spend slightly silly money on watercolour stripy tulips, but I'm very glad they exist.
5. We are continuing to Really Enjoy playing Inkulinati together, and I now definitely have enough grasp of the mechanics to collaborate on What We Wanna Do Next. One level fits quite neatly into some of the slightly awkward chunks of time in our week; I am looking forward to tomorrow's. <3

Celebrating. Anniversary. <3

Reading. ( Ravindran, Link, Stocks )

I have also: been skimming a variety of pain-related academic publications, and: printed out not one but TWO translations of Treatise on Man for the coming week's work reading.

Playing. Things!

• Gently pootling along in I Love Hue.
• Inkulinati! Delighted by having made it along the High Combat route on the second map page of my journey with... really minimal damage sustained; also very pleased that having worked through most of the Academy and now having made Progress on my Journey I now have enough of an understanding of mechanics that Proper Shared Activity is viable. (... had a Very satisfying Pushing A Helmeted Dog Off Its Level when it had considerately broken down a neutral gate for me.)
• Fluxx! A particularly ridiculous game, that spent a whole bunch of time Draw 1 Play 1 and then suddenly exploded into Draw 3, Play All, Rich Bonus, Poor Bonus, Party Bonus, and Inflation, among others.

Cooking. Um. Three things from [the Roti King cookbook]9https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/466240/roti-king-by-sugen-gopal/9781837832118)! Surprised by how Very Into the beetroot thingy I was, and the pumpkin stew Grew On Me over the several days we spent eating it.

Also a tomato salad from East, which I was meh about -- but hey, that's one more thing crossed off that particular cookbook list!

Eating. This weekend we have had Many Avocadoes (which are a Special Treat), and also A made me blueberry pancakes for breakfast this morning.

OH and a variety of Things To Share from The Artful Duke in Bromley: macaroni cheese not particularly exciting but also very definitely not Cold Sad Soup, and therefore very welcome; sweetcorn "ribs"; three bean chilli nacho Situation; halloumi fries with hot honey. This occasioned the realisation on my part that "hot honey" is upselling for "sweet chilli sauce", which I find very amusing.

And a big pile of tomatoes my mother sent us home with, along with a chunk of Schwarzbrot :)

Exploring. Bromley "zoo"!

Making & mending. ... I got one of A's mildly problematic fountain pens writing earlier today and then promptly made it stop again. Gonna keep poking at the nib. (Tines were misaligned. Fixed that but/and they are now also a bit too splayed for capillary action to work properly; I think this predated my starting to mess around with it...)

Growing. The Mystery Habanero fruit are getting bigger. I am extremely impatient about how much bigger I need to wait for them to get before I can taste one to see how bad an idea eating it neat was.

All the various patio saffron are coming up, but the trough do not seem to have any interest in flowering this year, so I am going to need to Have A Think about what to do to make them happier. Honestly the answer is probably "buy another bag of bulb compost and bury 'em deeper".

( mild anaemia )

The other topic is Physio, and specifically a bunch of the stuff I've been doing courtesy of the (NHS) Lower Limbs Class I've been intermittently going to since the summer; I am finally managing to add Doing This Stuff Once A Week (Not At Class) into my routine, and in addition to just getting better at the exercises themselves I have noticed repeatedly this week that I'm finding getting up from e.g. being sat on the beanbag much easier.

( a little more on exercise )

Published 9^th October: clinical practice recommendations for mixed pain. Apparently This Idea's Time Has Come, at least when it comes to, you know, starting to get shit published in Frontiers In.

(Today's work has included poking at both Pain Toolkit and Live Well With Pain, neither of which say The Thing. And also a third person, but they are a charlatan and I refuse even to link to them.)

Oh, and look, PainScience.com is being extremely relevant to my interests again, this time on the question of whether pain can become a conditioned response.

For reasons this also revealed that the hair stick that went missing after E4, that I was convinced that field had also eaten, to the point that I'd almost resigned myself to just fucking buying another one, had been lurking in (one of) the bag(s) I'd already checked like three times.

And. Upon leaving the carpark. We were greeted by this:

[a municipal garden bed drifted with autumn leaves, behind which a wall, behind which some trees, behind which a house]

Which, when you look a little closer, contains signs:

[zoomed in on the wall. there are two painted signs, A-road style, white on green, pointing left. the top one reads "POLAR BEARS/PENGUINS/GORILLAS". the bottom reads "GIRAFFE/HOUSE".]

( +5 )

Observing. All Souls'. Candle lit; Seelkuchen eaten.

Reading. ( Rucka, Waitrose Cookery School, Stocks, Duncan, Ravindran )

Playing. Merrily pootling along with I Love Hue. Hatched my first dragon with Primal eyes in The Dragons Game.

Cooking. Two variations on a recipe: smitten kitchen's winter squash and spinach pasta bake and the recipe that inspired it, Ottolenghi's pasta and butternut squash cake. On the first day I definitely preferred the smitten kitchen version; on subsequent days I became increasingly convinced by the Ottolenghi. (You see, I had about twice as much of all of the ingredients as I needed, and the spinach definitely needed eating Imminently, and so I thought I'd make them simultaneously so we could do the side-by-side comparison and then freeze some...)

And then this evening I made another round of the wahaca autumn stew with pipián, this time with even wronger chillis but a sensible amount of herbs, and was delighted that it met with my mother's approval.

Eating. SCHWARZBROT with Lizard honey. Curries various courtesy of my father. Salads and lunches various courtesy of my mother. The dark chocolate & raspberry stars that are a Special Seasonal Treat. National Trust lemon drizzle cake. A RASPBERRY.

Exploring. THE NEW SITE FOR ADMIN: THE LRP. And this afternoon we went on an adventure to Anglesey Abbey, where the dahlias were alas gone but we found many many more cyclamen than we knew were there, and several things in the winter garden were at a different stage than I think I'd ever seen them before and were extremely pretty with it.

Creating. Carved a pumpkin for the toddler!

Today has been largely taken up by my first visit to the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP...

... or at least, my first visit in something like twenty years, because it's the old Cottenham racecourse and I absolutely went to one (1) race there in My Misspent Youth. Sudden wave of déjà vu on the final approach to the grandstand, as the perspective shifted to YEP, THIS IS A PLACE I'VE BEEN.

There was Make Tent go Up. There was meeting. There was Make Tent Go Down. There was being given Objects. And there was A BAT that did some beautifully ostentatious swooping against the darkening dusk, and I am delighted.

I supplied knives and fine motor control; the toddler supplied art direction; the toddler's resident adults supplied outlines for me to cut around (and candles, and matches, and in fact all of the cutting of the tiny pumpkin).