One piece at a time

I never thought I'd end up becoming the kind of person who gets a rush from decluttering the house, and yet here we are. On Friday, in a fit of frustration, I started going through the house and courtyard and collecting items we haven't used for years, and are unlikely ever to use, and within 48 hours pretty much all of them are gone, or on the way out:

I wheeled Matthias's unused bike, which he acquired secondhand, and which has been sitting, with flat tyres, slowly gathering rust in our garden since about 2013, to the cycle sales/rental place in the park nearby. The owner was happy to take it — he said he'd sell whatever parts were salvagable, and recycle the rest.

I advertised the three university gowns we have (and which are technically the 'wrong' gowns now that we both have PhDs, and have done for years) on postgraduate and undergraduate student Facebook groups for my old department. So far one has been collected, and another has been claimed and will be collected tomorrow. Fingers crossed for the third!

We had two broken plastic garden chairs in our garden which have been sitting there for months. They're too big to fit in the bin, and can't be repaired. On Friday, I suddenly had the brilliant idea to saw them in half. This was the work of a few minutes, and now they're all in the bin.

I got rid of our old plastic garden table (a secondhand gift from a neighbour) on Freecycle yesterday.

Someone else from Freecycle is coming to collect our old vacuum cleaner any minute.

I've found a company that will collect and recycle electronic items for free, and am going to call them tomorrow to take Matthias's two old laptops and another pile of old cables, disused DVD players etc.

I thought this would be a whole lot harder...

It's been a wet, miserable weekend, so mostly I've just been at home, reading. I've read two books.

The first was Jordan Ifueko's Raybearer. This is the first in a new YA series. I'm just going to point you all to schneefink's spoiler-heavy review, because it pretty much says everything I would have said about the book. The one thing I would add is that I figured out most of the plot twists, including the various ways Tarisai managed to wriggle out of fulfilling her ... I want to say geas, except that the book is inspired by West African mythology and geasa are from Irish folklore. I wouldn't say that's a weakness of the book — it's more because I've read a lot of stories that are about unbreakable supernatural vows/obligations, and the ways characters find a way around them.

The second book was The Queen of Nothing, the final book in Holly Black's Folk of the Air YA trilogy. I'd been waiting until this one came down in price for a while, and the wait definitely paid off. I'm not going to pretend these books are groundbreaking YA fiction, but because Holly Black and I most definitely share an id, I always feel like her books have been written as if to my exact specifications. This trilogy does a really, really good job of exploring the implications of the folkloric understanding of fairies: namely, that they are incapable of telling lies. All sorts of things follow on from this: a culture of beings who cannot lie will of course develop expert skills in omission, half-truths, and circumlocution, and they will also find human beings, who can lie, to be absolutely terrifying. Any humans who get caught up in otherworldly fairy politics will, of course, find the fairies absolutely terrifying. I love the series so much, and I hope people write it for Yuletide.

Last night Matthias and I were at a bit of a loss, and so we decided to make some use of our languishing Disney+ subscription, and rewatched Black Panther. It's still not my favourite Marvel film, but I think it's definitely the best quality one, in terms of the screenwriting, cast, design, score, and overall storytelling. Watching it now, after the death of Chadwick Boseman was certainly a bittersweet experience, and I'm quite worried about what plans Marvel has afoot regarding sequels — I think recasting the role would be a very bad idea, but I also think more films about the other characters in this corner of the franchise would be very welcome. Something centring on the women might be good.

Other than that, I've been mostly doing yoga, and braving the rain to collect a free Chelsea bun in celebration of Fitzbillies' (a Cambridge cafe/bakery that's something of an institution) 100th birthday. (And speaking of Instagram, I've had a couple of people add me over there who I suspect are fandom types who know me from Dreamwidth. If that's you, and I haven't added you back, it's because your username doesn't match the one I know from Dreamwidth/Twitter etc -- so let me know who you are, and I'll add you back!)

All in all, a good weekend, if only because I've studiously avoided focusing on anything occurring outside the pages, or the four walls of my own house.