shadowspar

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but I did spend this morning sat down with my printouts and my page markers and my highlighters, and I did this evening take some photos of the relevant pages of a book I've loaned to someone else, and the essay (I say, grandiosely) tentatively entitled The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes: against a new dualism is definitely In The Works.

I haven't quite worked out the It is a truth universally acknowledged... opening sentence, and it's probably mostly going to be a series of quotations accompanied by EMPHATIC GESTICULATION in the form of CAPSLOCK, but it's not actually (in its entirety) germane to The Book, so here the indignant yelling can go.

"Ugh," I thought, "why am I feeling weirdly migrainey? My Next Phase Of The Menstrual Cycle is very much not due for like another week? I've been weirdly super regular basically since it reasserted itself post-surgery?"

... TURNS OUT that I had lost track of time a bit and I'm not a solid week early at all, it's a whole two days. This Means Some Things:

1. ... still super regular by my pre-surgical standards,
2. I will not be at the worst stage of my cycle during Significant Travel next week, and LAST BUT VERY MUCH NOT LEAST
3. the migraine is still in fact very clearly associated with hormonal changes even when I'm not expecting them, take THAT Headache Is The Second Most Common Form Of Psychosomatic Pain ~statistics~ (and ongoing anxiety).

... has done so many things and is Going To Bed and will fill in this placeholder Tomorrow.

Reading. ( Descartes, Gouldercourt et al., Clifford )

Forgotten Fruits (Christopher Stocks) got auto-returned to the library for a second time while I was still, like, a third of the way into it. I am going to try to take the DNF with grace this time, but the Completionist Itch is still there...

Writing. Grumpy e-mails to HMPO. Grumpy e-mails to uk.bookshop.org (on the plus side, the book I bought from them now has a shiny wee DRM-free tag! on the downside, I can download it in neither of the browsers I've tried so far.) Mental drafting of context-setting on movement and sleep, which really need to get out of my head and onto the page.

Playing. Inkulinati! We have Completed All Three Journeys. In the second stage we achieved an absolutely bullshit strategy that made things astonishingly easy; the third stage (with SEAL) was much harder work.

Little bit more I Love Hue.

Cooking. Two things of particular note, of which the first was ridiculous parsnip risotto with thyme pesto from The Modern Vegetarian, extremely good, would very happily eat again but I'm more dubious about the prospect of cooking it again, though I will concede it would probably go faster now I know what I'm doing.

Item the second was THE MEDLAR STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING. I am not entirely convinced I can actually detect the, you know, medlar, but it is very tasty.

Elsewise I have two batches of medlar jelly on the go (first batch did not set properly, BAH, I have not made enough jam recently, so I'm going to need to redecant and reboil that before I move on to the spiced) and some ridiculous quince sorbet that needs forcing through the sieve before churning.

And I have still not touched the apples.

Eating. Saturday lunch at Holtwhites Bakery :)

Exploring. Stupid little walk on Sunday revealed unto us, among other things: a pair of cyclamen in a bit of the verge outside our house we don't normally walk past; a discarded fork; a local bush of Purple Metallic Berries; a secret holly hedge.

Growing. SEEDS arrived. Jalapeños (at least at home) turning red.

... Nor shall I say what objects of vision must be agreeable or disagreeable to it; for from what I have already said about the other senses, it is easy to grasp that light that is too strong will injure the eyes and moderate light must refresh them; and that, amongst the colours, green, which consistss in the most moderate action (which by analogy one can speak of as the ratio 1:2), is like the octave among musical consonances, or like bread among the foods that one eats, that is, it is the most universally agreeable.⁴⁰

⁴⁰ What the basis of this remark is is unclear, and although various writers have made suggestions about the relations between colours and sounds, the attempt to quantify green on a par with an octave certainly cannot be sustained. It is worth noting that Descartes will later advice Elizabeth to rid her mind of sad thoughts by reflecting on the greenness of a wood (Descartes to Elizabeth, May/June 1645, AT iv. 220).

(trans. and footnote courtesy of Stephen Gaukroger.)

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