umadoshi: (stop destroying our planet (bisty_icons))
[personal profile] umadoshi
The entire province is in a drought now, after a generally dry season that was already extremely dry in a lot of areas, and last I heard there was no rain in the forecast. Yesterday official word came out asking people to try to conserve water and telling everyone to stay the hell out of the woods. (Apparently there's a substantial fine, although my understanding is that no such fine has ever been successfully enforced, so that's...great.) So now is the time of hoping the farmers and crops come through as well as possible, and that wildfire season passes us by.
umadoshi: (books 01)
[personal profile] umadoshi
We didn't decide before going to bed last night whether we'd get up and head straight for the market (not helped by going to bed at different times), and before getting up we halfheartedly opted against it so as not to be rushing around. (This was influenced by knowing that [personal profile] scruloose won't be at work next week and will almost certainly have to grab a car and go acquire odds and ends for the household project, which means swinging by local-produce places will be easier than usual.) Naturally, now I'm having regrets. But hopefully sometime this week I'll get my hands on my first peaches of the season.

Reading: [personal profile] scruloose and I are soooo close to done with the audiobook of All Systems Red (which is good, since it's due tomorrow). We listened to chunks of it over supper for the last couple of nights, but their regular Friday-night video chat meant we had a cutoff time last night, so we still have about half an hour left. (Potentially dangerous, this realization that we can maybe listen to audiobooks while eating if the meal isn't "TVable", as I say.) We have Artificial Condition checked out now, too; I remembered to snag it before the month ended (since Hoopla seems to only allow five loans a month? Or does that depend on its deal with specific library systems?).

As for fiction in print, I finished E.K. Johnston's Sky on Fire, which is not set nearly as far after Aetherbound as I initially thought, but also smoothly wove in reminders to key my memory of how that book played out, so all was well. I really enjoyed this. ^_^

Then I read The Butcher of the Forest, which was my first Premee Mohamed work. As with most novellas, it didn't sink its hooks into me, but I liked it and get the feeling I may do well with her novels.

And now I'm reading my first Victoria Goddard book, The Hands of the Emperor, which is a TOME (I think the print edition is 900 pages) but a pretty quick read; I think I'm approaching halfway through? Really enjoying this, too.

On the non-fiction side, I'm leafing through The Afrominimalist's Guide to Living with Less (Christine Platt), which I picked up on a whim at some point. Not very far into it yet, I don't think. (Really what I should do is figure out which decluttering book I read years ago that resonated with me and reread that in hopes of having the same feeling from it and maybe actually taking action this time. It's genuinely awkward that [personal profile] scruloose and I both tend to hang onto things too much but for completely different reasons. ^^;)

Watching: I think we're three episodes into The Summer Hikaru Died now? (I think episode 5 comes out today?) Creepy and weird. I'm not sure I'm bonding, but I'm interested.
umadoshi: (Zhu Yilong 06)
[personal profile] umadoshi
I'm not at all clear on how it's August. Time, what is, etc. But word has it that Canada's getting Z1L's Dongji Rescue this month, so that's something to look forward to--assuming we get local showtimes. (I'm haunting the Cineplex site.) Having gotten to see both Lost in the Stars and Land of Broken Hearts in theatres makes me optimistic about this one being my third in-theatre experience since covid arrived.

(We won't dwell on not having gotten Long-ge's Only the River Flows, which I still haven't seen. >.< It seemed like that one mainly/only got film fest sorts of releases. In theory it's had an official English-subbed DVD release, but Amazon has three different listings, all from third-party sources, and I'm not at all sure which, if any, is the legit one.)

[personal profile] scruloose is taking a bit of vacation time to try to get a long-delayed household project done. The clowder won't enjoy the upheaval, and neither will I, but it needs doing (and I was the one who was like, "Hey, were you still thinking of taking time off for that this year?", so I have no one to blame but myself).

And now a three-day weekend. I don't know if I'll be able to get my next rewrite fully polished and turned in, but at least I'm going into the weekend with a draft of it, so I should be able to read and maybe start in on the next rewrite.
umadoshi: (tomatoes 02)
[personal profile] umadoshi
Yesterday we ran All The Errands! We made ten or so stops, all told, which is a pretty good outcome; there were two places on my list that we ultimately opted against, because it was really quite a lot (and one of the two is a stop [personal profile] scruloose can make pretty easily when coming home from work).

The critical thing, of course, is that I did indeed get the lemon ice cream. I'd initially decided to go all in and get the lemon sundae, which IIRC also involved lemon curd sauce (I'm pretty sure that was the phrasing, and I don't really know why "curd sauce") and some sort of crunchy lemony thing, but one or both of those toppings was out of stock, so the sundae wasn't on offer.

The ice cream itself was tasty and I'm glad to have gotten it, but I didn't fall in love. (Just as well, really, since it was a temporary thing. I'm not good at ephemeral joys.) The flavor wasn't terribly intense, I think? But it was a delicious thing on a hot day.

The absolutely ridiculous thing I bought was this Hallowe'en figure from Michael's, which I saw go by on Bluesky a few days ago and for which I felt an immediate mighty need. It's very small and very inexpensive and is genuinely cute in person. It's presumably meant to be a Sphynx cat, but still looks enough like Sinha that I feel gleeful just looking at it. It may have to be a bit of year-round decor. other things that came home )

and lo, we have a tomato plant! And...a rodent in the garden? o_o )
umadoshi: (lemon slice (oraclegreen))
[personal profile] umadoshi
Reading: I finished both of the non-fiction titles I was reading in last week's roundup. I'd somehow thought Burn It Down would shine a spotlight more strongly on more specific shows than it did, but it was an interesting read nonetheless, if mostly grimly unsurprising.

[personal profile] scruloose and I are now maybe two-thirds through the All Systems Red audiobook.

Other than that, I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar, which went on sale in ebook right after I heard it mentioned by a couple of different people. (It may still be on sale! Worth checking!) It was a really good read that surprised me quite a few times via some great redirects. The main downside is that it's very recent and is the first of a...trilogy, I think? Hope I'll be able to remember what happened in this book, because it was a LOT. (Also, I assume this was a deliberate style choice, but it's rather a cascade of comma splices.)

I've just barely started Sky on Fire, E.K. Johnston's second book of the summer. In the leadup to its release I repeatedly forgot and was reminded that it's a sequel to Aetherbound, which I read when it came out in 2021. In this case my memory is a bit fuzzy on what came before, but this book is set a fair bit later and (I think) recapped the major plot outcomes from Aetherbound, so here's hoping I do okay! ^_^ (A definite downside to ebooks--if I had a hard copy I could pretty easily flip through it, but I find that a huge pain with ebooks, and between that and how infrequently I reread anything, sequels can be tricky for me. >.<)

Watching: Minimal. [personal profile] scruloose and I watched episode 1 of the The Summer Hikaru Died anime, which is only a few episodes along so far. I know almost nothing about the manga (and don't know how long [this season of?] the anime is expected to be or how faithful it is so far), but ep. 1 seemed like a good start.

Cooking/Baking: Berries continue to be gloriously available, and I hear the first early peaches have been glimpsed in at least one of the local-produce stores. (It's so lovely to have several of those!) We once again made it to the corner market and came home with raspberries, blueberries, and cherries; strawberries are still around, and I enjoy them, but I don't love them the way I love raspberries and I find them harder than blueberries to eat quickly enough.

Mid-week we made Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Summer Sheet Cake to use up a whole heap of strawberries and froze most of the cake (*ritual but intensely heartfelt grumble about needing to eke it out in the name of sugar intake etc.*); the slices we took out to thaw this afternoon are the first previously-frozen ones, so we'll see how it does with this treatment.

Planning: It's been a good chunk of time since the last time we both took the day off to run errands on a weekday, so we're planning to do that in a couple of days. Apparently the day we've chosen is going to be a scorcher (which is a bit awkward since, while we've booked a car for the erranding, AC in vehicles usually nauseates me pretty badly but will be necessary so we don't completely melt. Here's hoping proactive gravol does the trick). (Could we do it another day? Well...yes. But the core inspiration for doing it at all is that there's a local ice creamery that does weekly feature flavors and has legendary lineups, and I've never actually had their ice cream and this week's flavor is lemon. Hopefully going midday on a weekday will mean the line isn't too horrendous when we go on lemon's final day in rotation.)

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