A holiday at home
Apr. 13th, 2020 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Matthias and I were supposed to be spending Easter in Germany with his family. That obviously didn't happen, but as my managers in particular are not keen for people to bank all their holiday leave if they'd previously planned to take time off work, we've stuck to our original plan of being on holiday from Friday last week until Wednesday this week. To be honest, a holiday at home seems to have been just what I needed.
The weather was absolutely gorgeous on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It rained last night and has now become freezing cold again, but at least we got three days of being able to enjoy the sunshine (the UK still allows people to go out once a day for exercise, and we also have a small courtyard garden with a table and chairs, so we're lucky enough to be able to take advantage of the good weather).
On Friday I awoke full of energy. Matthias and I went running first thing, and then I spent about an hour and a half over breakfast chatting with my mother and sister via FaceTime. My mother lives in Sydney and my sister lives in Melbourne, but as she, like everyone who can in Australia, is working from home, she got permission to do so from Sydney so that the pair of them wouldn't be living alone during the lockdown. The three of us had an absolutely hilarious time — we never laugh more than when all three of us are talking.
I spent the remainder of the day doing a mixture of housework (cleaning the bathroom and kitchen), yoga (a very intense sequence that focused on core strength), and reading (finishing off Days of the Dead, the next Benjamin January mystery, which was set in 19th-century Mexico and involved family secrets and most of the major political figures of the time, and was, as I find all the books in that series, incredibly restful). I cooked a meal that combines roasted butternut pumpkin (with the skin still on), feta, dates, chickpeas and radishes, with a dressing made of lime juice and harissa.
For some reason, I was completely exhausted on Saturday. Other than going shopping, I only left the house briefly to wander around this incredible nature reserve, which, despite being a minute's walk from my house, I had never discovered despite having lived here for more than seven years. I was so tired that I couldn't focus on my book, I couldn't do yoga, and I couldn't even muster the energy to watch TV. Thankfully we had takeaway for dinner, and I discovered an old documentary on Art Nouveau from 2012, which (although the narrator/commentator was extremely irritating) was soothing enough to watch. It's on iPlayer until Wednesday, if anyone's interested. My greatest achievement on Saturday was to clean all the windows in the house.
My energy was restored on Sunday. Matthias and I began the day with an early walk to and from Grantchester, and I then made us crepes for breakfast. I did a short hatha yoga class which focused on the lower back (I had woken with a lot of pain there), and spent most of the rest of the day reading the book that I couldn't focus on on Saturday: Emily A. Duncan's sequel to last year's Wicked Saints, Ruthless Gods. If you liked the first (which I did), you'll love the second: more political machinations and backstabbing, more epic betrayals, more melodramatic teenagers overwhelmed by weird theology, more pseudo-Slavic mythology.
Given that at the moment my only form of extravagance is cooking, I wanted to make something nice for dinner, and we ended up having duck breast with glass potatoes (the 'Alice Ryan' credited by Annabel Crabb as the inventor of this recipe is my stepmother; Annabel is the person who introduced Alice to my father), sweet potato, broccoli, shallots and red wine gravy. I made the very prudent decision a month or so ago to order a lot of meat from the farm shop which delivers our weekly vegetable box. I froze all the meat, and have been taking it out at intervals to cook — yesterday's duck came from that batch.
The lack of a commute has meant we've had a lot more time for TV, and have used it to catch up on things on Netflix and Prime that have been lingering for ages on our 'to watch' list.
We finally finished the second season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which continued to be silly, trashy, comic book fun. It's hampered a little bit by its desire to force everything into a parody of fundamentalist American Christianity (with a dash of Catholicism), which can lead to some weird contortions of plot and characterisation, but it remains the show which I described at the beginning as let's worship Satan and do social justice!
The recent fourth season of Veronica Mars finally aired in the UK. There was such a gap between its initial airing in the US and it appearing on screens here that I was thoroughly spoiled and a bit irritated at the 'shock twist' that I knew was coming in the final episode. It was as quippy and sharp as ever, it made the same points about class in the US that it's always made very well, it called out Veronica on the same character flaws she's had from the beginning, and it was wonderfully nostalgic to see all the old characters back in Neptune again, and I loved it, with some qualifications. I didn't love what it seemed to be saying: that none of these characters will ever change, that they will repeat the same mistakes constantly, as long as they remain living in Neptune. I know the town has always been its own character in the show, but I think the writers have given it too much power.
Like everyone else on the planet, I also watched the Tiger King documentary, which was at once hair-raisingly horrifying, inexplicably hilarious, and very very sad. It had that particularly American quality of scandal: larger-than life characters who seemed oblivious to the impression they created, huge amounts of money, cults, violence and murder, and narcissists who deliberately preyed on vulnerable people and created an atmosphere of dependence where their word was law. Very compelling TV, but I suspect not particularly ethically made.
The final show that I've finished since I last wrote one of these logs was Unorthodox, a four-part Netflix drama about Esty, a young woman who flees an arranged marriage and what she feels is the stifling ultra-Orthodox community in New York for Berlin. I am not Jewish, so I'm not going to comment on whether the show depicted the community accurately (although it is worth noting that the series is based on a book written by a woman who did exactly what the main character did, and I think most of the showrunners are Jewish, though not necessarily coming from an Orthodox background), but to my mind it did depict Esty's experiences in a way that felt true to her character. It was well acted, I loved that most of it was in Yiddish, and I also appreciated that the marriage Esty was fleeing was not abusive — it was simply the logical conclusion of marrying two people when they were essentially strangers, utterly unworldly, childlike in their ignorance about sex, and coming from a culture which strictly segregates the sexes and then expects a married couple to become instantly comfortable with one another and immediately have lots of babies.
Other than the books I've mentioned earlier in this post, I've reread Robin McKinley's Sunshine (as lovely as ever, with all sorts of little details that I discover on each reread), and read a bit of short fiction: The Deep by Rivers Solomon (a novella which was inspired by a Clipping song about the sea-dwelling descendants of children of pregnant African slaves who drowned when thrown overboard by slave traders; the descendants have become mermaids), and 'St Valentine, St Abigail, St Brigid' by C.L. Polk (a free Tor.com short story about witchcraft, bees, and the heavy cost of magic).
Matthias and I have also watched a couple of films at home: Hustlers (the Jennifer Lopez film based on true events in which a group of strip club dancers drugged wealthy men, brought them to the club, and then fleeced them of all the money on their credit cards; the film does a good job of showing that these women had very limited options and were motivated by a deep fear of the powerlessness that comes with poverty, but I think it's still slightly too sympathetic to them), and the Miss Fisher film (Indiana Jones-esque hijinks, silly and frothy, and probably an unnecessary addition to the franchise, but a nice thing to watch in these unsettling times).
Wow, this post has become ridiculously long: congratulations if you managed to stick with it to this point! I will leave you with a link to some photos I took of all the gorgeous flowers and other growing things in my neighbourhood and backyards.
The weather was absolutely gorgeous on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It rained last night and has now become freezing cold again, but at least we got three days of being able to enjoy the sunshine (the UK still allows people to go out once a day for exercise, and we also have a small courtyard garden with a table and chairs, so we're lucky enough to be able to take advantage of the good weather).
On Friday I awoke full of energy. Matthias and I went running first thing, and then I spent about an hour and a half over breakfast chatting with my mother and sister via FaceTime. My mother lives in Sydney and my sister lives in Melbourne, but as she, like everyone who can in Australia, is working from home, she got permission to do so from Sydney so that the pair of them wouldn't be living alone during the lockdown. The three of us had an absolutely hilarious time — we never laugh more than when all three of us are talking.
I spent the remainder of the day doing a mixture of housework (cleaning the bathroom and kitchen), yoga (a very intense sequence that focused on core strength), and reading (finishing off Days of the Dead, the next Benjamin January mystery, which was set in 19th-century Mexico and involved family secrets and most of the major political figures of the time, and was, as I find all the books in that series, incredibly restful). I cooked a meal that combines roasted butternut pumpkin (with the skin still on), feta, dates, chickpeas and radishes, with a dressing made of lime juice and harissa.
For some reason, I was completely exhausted on Saturday. Other than going shopping, I only left the house briefly to wander around this incredible nature reserve, which, despite being a minute's walk from my house, I had never discovered despite having lived here for more than seven years. I was so tired that I couldn't focus on my book, I couldn't do yoga, and I couldn't even muster the energy to watch TV. Thankfully we had takeaway for dinner, and I discovered an old documentary on Art Nouveau from 2012, which (although the narrator/commentator was extremely irritating) was soothing enough to watch. It's on iPlayer until Wednesday, if anyone's interested. My greatest achievement on Saturday was to clean all the windows in the house.
My energy was restored on Sunday. Matthias and I began the day with an early walk to and from Grantchester, and I then made us crepes for breakfast. I did a short hatha yoga class which focused on the lower back (I had woken with a lot of pain there), and spent most of the rest of the day reading the book that I couldn't focus on on Saturday: Emily A. Duncan's sequel to last year's Wicked Saints, Ruthless Gods. If you liked the first (which I did), you'll love the second: more political machinations and backstabbing, more epic betrayals, more melodramatic teenagers overwhelmed by weird theology, more pseudo-Slavic mythology.
Given that at the moment my only form of extravagance is cooking, I wanted to make something nice for dinner, and we ended up having duck breast with glass potatoes (the 'Alice Ryan' credited by Annabel Crabb as the inventor of this recipe is my stepmother; Annabel is the person who introduced Alice to my father), sweet potato, broccoli, shallots and red wine gravy. I made the very prudent decision a month or so ago to order a lot of meat from the farm shop which delivers our weekly vegetable box. I froze all the meat, and have been taking it out at intervals to cook — yesterday's duck came from that batch.
The lack of a commute has meant we've had a lot more time for TV, and have used it to catch up on things on Netflix and Prime that have been lingering for ages on our 'to watch' list.
We finally finished the second season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which continued to be silly, trashy, comic book fun. It's hampered a little bit by its desire to force everything into a parody of fundamentalist American Christianity (with a dash of Catholicism), which can lead to some weird contortions of plot and characterisation, but it remains the show which I described at the beginning as let's worship Satan and do social justice!
The recent fourth season of Veronica Mars finally aired in the UK. There was such a gap between its initial airing in the US and it appearing on screens here that I was thoroughly spoiled and a bit irritated at the 'shock twist' that I knew was coming in the final episode. It was as quippy and sharp as ever, it made the same points about class in the US that it's always made very well, it called out Veronica on the same character flaws she's had from the beginning, and it was wonderfully nostalgic to see all the old characters back in Neptune again, and I loved it, with some qualifications. I didn't love what it seemed to be saying: that none of these characters will ever change, that they will repeat the same mistakes constantly, as long as they remain living in Neptune. I know the town has always been its own character in the show, but I think the writers have given it too much power.
Like everyone else on the planet, I also watched the Tiger King documentary, which was at once hair-raisingly horrifying, inexplicably hilarious, and very very sad. It had that particularly American quality of scandal: larger-than life characters who seemed oblivious to the impression they created, huge amounts of money, cults, violence and murder, and narcissists who deliberately preyed on vulnerable people and created an atmosphere of dependence where their word was law. Very compelling TV, but I suspect not particularly ethically made.
The final show that I've finished since I last wrote one of these logs was Unorthodox, a four-part Netflix drama about Esty, a young woman who flees an arranged marriage and what she feels is the stifling ultra-Orthodox community in New York for Berlin. I am not Jewish, so I'm not going to comment on whether the show depicted the community accurately (although it is worth noting that the series is based on a book written by a woman who did exactly what the main character did, and I think most of the showrunners are Jewish, though not necessarily coming from an Orthodox background), but to my mind it did depict Esty's experiences in a way that felt true to her character. It was well acted, I loved that most of it was in Yiddish, and I also appreciated that the marriage Esty was fleeing was not abusive — it was simply the logical conclusion of marrying two people when they were essentially strangers, utterly unworldly, childlike in their ignorance about sex, and coming from a culture which strictly segregates the sexes and then expects a married couple to become instantly comfortable with one another and immediately have lots of babies.
Other than the books I've mentioned earlier in this post, I've reread Robin McKinley's Sunshine (as lovely as ever, with all sorts of little details that I discover on each reread), and read a bit of short fiction: The Deep by Rivers Solomon (a novella which was inspired by a Clipping song about the sea-dwelling descendants of children of pregnant African slaves who drowned when thrown overboard by slave traders; the descendants have become mermaids), and 'St Valentine, St Abigail, St Brigid' by C.L. Polk (a free Tor.com short story about witchcraft, bees, and the heavy cost of magic).
Matthias and I have also watched a couple of films at home: Hustlers (the Jennifer Lopez film based on true events in which a group of strip club dancers drugged wealthy men, brought them to the club, and then fleeced them of all the money on their credit cards; the film does a good job of showing that these women had very limited options and were motivated by a deep fear of the powerlessness that comes with poverty, but I think it's still slightly too sympathetic to them), and the Miss Fisher film (Indiana Jones-esque hijinks, silly and frothy, and probably an unnecessary addition to the franchise, but a nice thing to watch in these unsettling times).
Wow, this post has become ridiculously long: congratulations if you managed to stick with it to this point! I will leave you with a link to some photos I took of all the gorgeous flowers and other growing things in my neighbourhood and backyards.