Extremely quick life update, in bullet point form

[dolorosa_12]

Matthias and I went to London to see Cirque du Soleil's show Ovo. I'm glad we went - I had a wonderful time, and there were a couple of great acts - but overall it was not their best work. I've been watching Cirque shows since I was three years old, so I possibly have overly high standards. It was kind of fun to watch it while sitting near lots of families with small children, because seeing the acts through the children's astonished eyes reminded me of how wonderful it was to see Cirque shows for the very first time.

I've been reading my way through Frances Hardinge's body of work: so far I've read A Face Like Glass, Gullstruck Island, The Lie Tree, A Skinful of Shadows, and Cuckoo Song, and I've been absolutely blown away. They're such intricate, clever books, and so hopeful and healing, all concerned with the dispossessed and powerless, giving them their power back.

Never someone to say no to excessively rules-based stationery, I've gone completely overboard with bullet journalling. I used a bullet journal last year, but in the most basic way (the method outlined in the video on the bullet journal website). This year, I've gone beyond that with complicated habit tracking spreads, a set-up requiring multiple coloured pencils, glue, old origami paper, and a lot of fiddling around. I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it (when I was in high school I had a system of organisation for my exercise books that required different coloured underlining for each day of the week, a complicated way of ruling up every page, and stern opinions as to which kinds of pens I could use for note-taking, so it was probably inevitable that I fell into the post-school iteration in the form of bullet journalling), but I do sometimes dip into the wild world of bullet journal vlogging/blogging and boggle at the excessive, overpriced stationery and the immense amount of work it seems to involve.

I found these two articles about the Salem witch hunt (and also The Crucible, and the modern twisting of the term 'witch hunt') really interesting to read in parallel. The first, by Sarah Monette, is here. The second, by Maria Dahvana Headley, is here, and I came across it via umadoshi.