My seasonal world

This has been a pretty standard weekend: exercise, Saturday lunchtime in the market, a little bit of wandering with Matthias, Saturday film night, some reading, some cooking, some pottering about in the garden. I feel stretched but relaxed, which is exactly what I wanted.

Due to all the travel (and being sick), my exercise regime has been very irregular for the past couple of months, and for various reasons, yesterday was my first time doing my two hours of Saturday fitness classes for about six weeks. It was tough going, but I made it through, though my muscles are very angry at me today. After struggling my way through the classes, I met Matthias at the market, and we did the week's grocery shopping (mainly vegetables, of which there are many, and all are splendid), collected library books, and ate woodfired pizza from a food truck in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar, which was filled with excitable dogs. I also impulse-bought a secondhand Le Creuset lidded skillet in extremely good condition, for half price, which was an unexpected bonus.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon lying around on the couch, alternating between reading and watching cooking videos on Youtube, apart from half an hour doing stretchy yoga in an attempt to stave off the inevitable muscle soreness. Then I cooked a lazy dinner (vegetable frittata — other than chopping the vegetables for roasting, you just stick things in the oven and leave them alone), and we settled in for our selected Saturday night film: Mountainhead, a direct-to-TV satire about a quartet of terrible American tech billionaires holing up in a mountain retreat to get away from the fallout from a disastrous rollout of new features on one billionaire's social media platform, and plot and scheme about the future. This is possibly too on the nose for US politics reasons (two characters are really obvious fictionalised versions of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; the others feel more like amalgams of various horrible tech elites), and it's not exactly subtle, but if you want to spend an hour and a half watching the antics of a quartet of terrible, oblivious, and pathetic people, this will serve you very well. The dialogue is absolutely word perfect.

Sunday dawned sunny and bright, and I headed off to the pool to swim my laps through liquid sunshine (again difficult, as my swimming routine has been as erratic as my fitness class attendance), and then walk home, where I passed a house in which three different cats were all lying contentedly in various patches of sunlight, looking thoroughly pleased with their life choices. The morning was mostly eaten up with cooking crepes and doing household chores, but Matthias and I did venture out briefly after lunch to get gelato (a good life choice on our part). I've been spending the afternoon doing yoga and catching up on Dreamwidth, and in a bit I'll get started on dinner, which will be a stuffed capsicum recipe from the Ottolenghi/Tamimi Jerusalem cookbook, using some of the giant tomatoes from our garden.

This week's reading has had a bit more genre variety than normal, which made me happy.

( Books behind the cut )

And that's pretty much it, although earlier in the week, Matthias and I also met up with friends from our former department, who now live in Germany and have a ten-month-old baby. It was a hot night, and we sat out under the trees in a lovely Cambridge beer garden, catching up and delighting in the antics of their very cute baby. I hadn't seen them since their wedding, which now feels like an age ago.

I'll close out this post with the news that one of my friends from undergrad, who is now a children's book author, won the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year. (Hers isn't the book that gets discussed in depth in the article, but I was struggling to find any publication other than paywalled material that focused on hers.) On top of winning the juried vote, her book also won the shadow award voted on by a panel of children, which is fantastic, and very well deserved.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, this summer left me completely physically and mentally exhausted, and regularly posting to Dreamwidth has been one of the things that suffered. This exhaustion is mostly due to good things (my sister and mum visiting, lots of fun travel) or things that are a temporarily unpleasant symptom of otherwise good things (needing to work in the office full time while new colleagues hired in the wake of my promotion are trained up, after which point I'll go back to working two days from home), so it's a good problem to have had, but still left me very tired for weeks on end. As you can presumably tell, my mum — the last of the family visitors — went home to Australia earlier this week, and (after I spent two days home sick recovering from illness) things have restored their previous quotidian equilibrium.

This weekend I elected to skip any lap swimming or classes at the gym to ensure I was fully recovered, and took the time to fully reset the house. So far, I have:

-Dusted all hard surfaces
-Cleaned both bathrooms
-Vacuumed all carpeted floors
-Wet dusted all hard surfaces in the kitchen
-Swept and mopped all hard floors
-Done two loads of laundry
-Swept the front patio and the back deck
-Swept the area around the vegetable beds and restored all the mulch (which resident blackbirds hurl all over the ground when digging for insects and worms) to the garden
-Watered all the houseplants by sticking them in a bathtub of water overnight

I've also done all the grocery shopping, cooked a bunch of stuff, picked loads of tomatoes from the garden, and started making apple cider vinegar from some of the windfall apples. We've eaten extremely well this weekend, and tonight's dinner — which is marinating in a mixture of garlic, shallots, lemongrass and fish sauce in the fridge — should be equally delicious. The house is clean and airy, and I feel relaxed in a way that I haven't done so for weeks — I need my surroundings to be like this, and a sense of enough hours in the day to get all this done, or I just feel grindingly stressed.

Last night Matthias and I resumed our Saturday film nights with the Antony Mackie Captain America film, which was about the level of cinema that our brains could cope with. We have a Disney+ subscription and I've reached the point that I'm not prepared to pay to see any Marvel films at the cinema again (and I've hit my limit completely with the TV series), and I have to say that this latest offering practically confirmed the validity of my choices. It's been a long time since I've been excited about any Marvel offering, and my response is just complete exhaustion; this film felt plodding, cynical and tired — almost like a roll call in which every actor sauntered in in order to get their name ticked off another contractually obliged appearance. There was never any sense of risk or danger — since we know most characters are due to appear in a plethora of sequels — and no one seemed particularly pleased to be there. There were a few emotionally affecting moments around the storyline relating to Isaiah Bradley, but beyond that, the cash cow was milked, and more pieces were moved into place for the next film or TV show in the production line.

As for reading, it's been a lot better. On the basis of a not exactly recommendation (but rather a description that made it clear the book would be extremely Relevant To My Interests) from dhampyresa, I picked up Cruel Is the Light (Sophie Clark). Indeed, it was everything I'd hoped: tropey enemies-to-lovers in an alternative version of the Vatican in which exorcists are at perpetual war with demons, ostensibly adult characters behaving in a very YA-ish way, and Surprising Plot Twists unlikely to surprise anyone. In other words, I can't really recommend it either, unless you like the specific things I like and have a high tolerance threshold for this sort of thing. It's frothy nonsense, but it's my kind of nonsense.

I've also just finished reading The Bewitching (Silvia Moreno Garcia), a gothic fantasy novel with three intertwined timeframes and perspectives: a Mexican postgraduate student at a liberal arts college in 1998 writing her thesis on the horror short stories of a female American author, the student's grandmother on a Mexican farm in 1908, and the horror author's time at the same liberal arts college in 1938. The book draws both on Mexican folklore and the broad corpus of New England gothic literature, and each strand focuses on its respective young woman character experiencing the slow, creeping horror of a targeted, supernatural campaign of haunting, their defenses slowly being eroded and the psychological torment ratcheting up the closer each woman gets to uncovering the identity of their tormentor(s) and finding the means to overcome them. The book is adeptly written, with lots of affection for the tropes of the genre, all of which were fairly recognisable to me by osmosis, despite the fact that the only author in this canon that I've read is Edgar Allan Poe. I imagine if you've also read Jackson, King, and cosmic horror like Lovecraft, even more would be familiar. Moreno Garcia is hit and miss for me, but this latest book definitely worked well for me.

It's now mid-afternoon, and I've finally felt that I've caught up with everything I wanted to get done this weekend (including the four Dreamwidth posts I wanted to make), so I will finish things up here. I'll leave you with a link (via vriddy to a post by sunsalute on fanworks exchanges — all the logistics and unspoken rules and potential for friction participants might not understand, but be too afraid to ask about. I know most people reading this are fairly old exchange (and Dreamwidth) hands, but it's the sort of thing that could be useful to point the perplexed towards, and I'm glad someone made the effort to write all this up. For something that's meant to be a fun hobby, exchanges can definitely cause their share of drama!

My mum and I were in Copenhagen for a week, and arrived back in the UK this time last Saturday. It was a glorious holiday; Mum and I are very compatible travel companions, in that we like the same activities (swimming, walking, eating, and art galleries) in roughly the same balance. Copenhagen was a good (if expensive) venue for all these things, with the added bonus of being extremely walkable and with a straightforward, well served public transport system. We were staying in Vesterbro, about midway between the central railway station and the hipsterish foodie meatpacking district, which worked perfectly for us — I'd recommend this as the ideal location to anyone else thinking of visiting.

I didn't keep a paper journal during this trip (I brought it, and then ... just didn't put pen to paper for a week). This summer has completely burnt me out, and I've found myself lacking in mental energy for long stretches of time, even during holidays. Therefore, rather than being a transcription (like my Shetland write-up), I'm just going to group everything under headings and talk a bit about what we did — assume the activities were spread roughly evenly over a week.

( New seas, new skies, new baked goods )

Until I visit my family in Australia in a few months' time, that's it in terms of holidays and travel for the year, and I feel extremely fortunate to have had the chance to visit Copenhagen, and have such an excellent time. If you have access to Instagram, most of the recent posts at my ronnidolorosa are photos from the trip, pretty much echoing what I've written here.