Boiling water without burning it

Reading. ( Brosh, McMorland Hunter & Hughes, Melzack & Wall )

Dreamwidth! Down to two and a half months behind.

Writing. So many e-mails about objects. So many.

Watching. Farscape S02E06, Picture if You Will. The discussion about which of the Highly Specific Fetish Big Bads it was who was resurrecting in this particular context was entertaining in terms of highlighting the, you know, motifs. Of the work.

Playing. We have just managed some Fluxx. <3

Cooking. Batch of puff pastry for the sake of making two (of the three) things in East that call for it (because I could not quite bring myself to buy pre-made). Pleased with how the puff came out; mildly dubious about both the tomato, pistachio + saffron tart and the banana tarte tatin, but on the level of "I am unlikely to make these again", not "I regret making them".

Eating. On Tuesday we hit the point of Make The Internet Bring Us Pizza. The Pizza was very welcome.

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to say goodbye to Ruby Violet, i.e. we had cake for breakfast, along with hot chocolate. The flavours were all ones I was familiar with but I'm still pleased to have had them. (It is not impossible I will decide I want to make another trip by myself, though, especially given that they currently have the malted milk on...)

As mentioned we then also availed ourselves of an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean Veggie Combo and a piece of Japanese Curry Bread, both of which I am pleased to have experienced.

Exploring. St Pancras Waterpoint! Brief turn through Camley Street Natural Park.

Growing. Spinach that I thought was unlikely to still be viable turns out to in fact still be Extremely Viable! Spinach is go! And the lambs' lettuce has self-seeded nicely (so in fact I also had some of that plus some allotment rocket accompanying the tomato tart). Tomatoes continue to produce tomatoes. Peppers various looked very happy last time I went to see them so now I want to overwinter them all. At home, the pineapple continues to grow and the lemongrass isn't obviously dead yet (and I'm doing something right with at least the larger of the two orchids...)

Observing. BAT, extremely obliging with the aerobatics. Good sunsets. Cyclamen various. Moon.

Ruby Violet, my favourite source of ice cream, are continuing as a business (I feel like that bit is important to say first) but will alas be closing their King's Cross parlour for the last time at 5 p.m. Sunday next, the 5^th of October. They're apparently still intending to have their ice cream van at Granary Square during the summer, and to have a variety of "pop-up shops" around London, but... gosh I have a lot of feelings about the amount of post-therapy ice cream I have eaten at the lovely big wooden table indoors and on the benches and grass outside.

So today we went to say goodbye (and I managed to drag a university friend into joining us, as they're also independently fond), in the form of Dessert For Breakfast: apple crumble + the hazelnut & hazelnut brittle ice cream for me; sticky toffee pudding and coffee mocha ripple for A. Hot chocolate for both of us. (I'm very glad we had the Afternoon Tea Experience in 2023 for Animals Week; by the time I thought to try booking a farewell repeat it'd gone from the online shop.)

We followed this up with some slightly more savoury food from around the entire Coal Drops Yard situation (one veggie combo from an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean stall, mostly for me; one Japanese curry bread mostly for A); fifteen minutes or thereabouts poking around St Pancras Waterpoint, an old water tower that was having a serendipitous open day; and a quick poke around the Camley Street Natural Park, which A had not previously met.

I'm very glad we did it.

I cannot tell if it's that I'm asleep, or that I'm Not A Biologist, or just that this paragraph (from The Challenge of Pain, Melzack & Wall) is actually very, but I am... struggling to persuade it to resolve into meaning:

Embryological and anatomical studies of fish, amphibians, and reptiles reveal that, even in the lowest vertebrates, reflexes are created by internuncial cells that link the sensory input to the motor output. During embryological development in these species, behaviour becomes increasingly a function of earlier sensory inputs as a result of the memory traces they have etched into the neural connections. Behaviour, then, is not merely the expression of a response to a stimulus, but a dynamic process comprising multiple interacting factors. Coghill (1929) was the first to propound this principle, based on his brilliant neuroembryological-behavioural studies of salamanders, which has been substantially confirmed by later investigators. Given this fundamental principle -- that organisms are not passive receivers manipulated by environmental inputs but act dynamically on those inputs so that behaviour becomes variable, unique and creative -- the remainder of evolution becomes comprehensible as a gradual development of mechanisms that make each new species increasingly independent of the push-and-pull of environmental circumstances.

Other than (but also, actually, in addition to) being sufficiently puzzled by this that I should definitely Go To Bed: I have caught up (mostly) on the PD e-mail. I completed one EYB indexing project and have been happily rolling around in making a start on the next. I made pastry, and used it as a prompt to unfuck the kitchen some, and then made progress on project Cook All The Things (From This One Book). I went on a Stupid Little Walk for my Stupid Mental Health. I am very very tired, and it has been a good day.

1. Today's post brought THREE of my (latest batch of) books from Oxfam, of which two were non-work-related: Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), which recessional mentioned when it was first published and which I am only just now managing to get to, and Chihuly at Kew, the exhibition book for the 2019 installation. I am having so many feelings about getting to flip through professional photography of all this art again. I'm so so pleased.
2. I mentioned these books to simont, who promptly went "hold on, isn't that the one that has a good Wikipedia article?" Turns out it very much is.
3. To my delight, despite the fact that I'd not been to the plot in something like two and a half weeks (between ten days away and the post-event collapse seguing immediately into A Cold that A brought home for us) all of the peppers various in the greenhouse were looking perfectly happy with themselves. HURRAH for Svaemskog terracotta watering bits + 2l drinks bottles. This is actually the happiest the chillis have been all year, given my... erratic... ability to leave the house; I am looking forward enthusiastically to the fruits of Expanding The System Further next year.
4. The ancient spinach seed is coming up! In vast quantities! That I was expecting to be dead and thus sowed all of across half a bed! There is going to be SO much spinach and even I will get to turn some of it into seeds for saving purposes, probably, and much of the rest of which I will go "oh right, I have discovered I like adding fresh spinach to the sad emergency noodle pots" about.
5. Brought home A Pannier Full Of Food, about which I am feeling very good given the Neglect. I am looking forward to turning a suitable array of tomatoes into part of the ongoing cooking project (at which point I will have some leftover puff pastry, so will also do the banana tarte tatin).

(I have not today achieved my Assigned Reading, by which I mean "30 pages of The Challenge of Pain, with notes", because instead I finished reading the last five pages of yesterday's thirty pages and still need to go back and Make My Notes on, like, twenty of those pages. I am learning so much neuroanatomy good grief. But there is bread, and there is yoghurt, and there is drying laundry, and I went to the plot, and I have started digging myself back out from under my pile of PD e-mails, and there was an excellent sunset.)