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dolorosa_12) wrote2021-02-21 05:18 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2021-02-21 05:18 pm
Entry tags:
The light gets in
This has been a pretty good weekend, all things considered.
The light returned — and that was definitely the biggest contributor to the general sense of happiness in our house, I suspect. It was warm enough to go outside without a coat, the sun shone pretty much all day, it's still light and clear at 5.30pm, and there are flowers blooming on the quince trees in our back garden. The first of the bulbs planted by the former owners have begun to flower. Spring is definitely in the air.
Matthias and I reacted to this tangible changing of the seasons by buying a lot of seeds: zucchini, cauliflower, parsnips, peas, tomatoes, butternut pumpkin, multicoloured beetroot, etc. Next weekend, weather permitting, we will tackle the vegetable patches (which are getting a bit overgrown with weeds), and hopefully everything will be ready to go for March.
We managed to do a video chat with four of our friends (two couples) yesterday evening via Facebook — and when we actually looked at our group chat logs, we realised the last time we'd done something similar was in August! No wonder I'd been feeling isolated! One of the couples lives in Vienna, and the other in Ely like us, but of course since we only moved to Ely in December, we haven't been able to meet up in person — so they might as well have been in Vienna too! They did tell us the amusing news that the only two instances they spotted of people obviously breaking lockdown rules were a) a gang of teenagers smoking from a single joint in a bus stop and b) a bunch of middle-aged men shiftily doing hare coursing out by the river. Both strike me as pretty par for the course in East Anglia.
Today I've mainly been cooking, although I've also managed to get pretty stuck into a new book: Winter's Orbit, by Everina Maxwell. I knew that this was originally serialised on AO3 as tropey original fiction a few years ago, and then pulled to publish, but I never read the original so I can't compare it with the published version. In terms of the latter, it was exactly what I've come to expect from this kind of pulled-to-publish m/m sff romance: an arranged marriage, slow burn romance, very heavy on the character and relationship studies, and light on the supporting framework (intergalactic politics, handwavy science fictional elements, secondary characters who are basically there either to hinder or support the main couple's relationship). To be clear, I like this kind of thing when I'm in the mood for it (which I definitely am at the moment),although what I really want is this kind of story and character dynamics, but with f/f or m/f couples, to be honest.
I feel as if this post isn't meandering so much as lurching wildly from topic to topic, so I might as well lean into that, and leave you with two unrelated links.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen this, but I had an absolutely epic baking disaster while attempting an extremely simple recipe yesterday, and I invite you all to laugh at me in my incompetence in this Twitter thread.
Finally, if you're like me, and vaguely aware of gossip and shenanigans going on in fandom at large, not just in your own active fandoms, you may be aware of an absolutely infamous fic whose wall of tags is notorious and somewhat inescapable. AO3 have kind of wrung their hands and said there's nothing they can do ... and so fandom has taken to mocking the offending fic to hilarious effect. I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
The light returned — and that was definitely the biggest contributor to the general sense of happiness in our house, I suspect. It was warm enough to go outside without a coat, the sun shone pretty much all day, it's still light and clear at 5.30pm, and there are flowers blooming on the quince trees in our back garden. The first of the bulbs planted by the former owners have begun to flower. Spring is definitely in the air.
Matthias and I reacted to this tangible changing of the seasons by buying a lot of seeds: zucchini, cauliflower, parsnips, peas, tomatoes, butternut pumpkin, multicoloured beetroot, etc. Next weekend, weather permitting, we will tackle the vegetable patches (which are getting a bit overgrown with weeds), and hopefully everything will be ready to go for March.
We managed to do a video chat with four of our friends (two couples) yesterday evening via Facebook — and when we actually looked at our group chat logs, we realised the last time we'd done something similar was in August! No wonder I'd been feeling isolated! One of the couples lives in Vienna, and the other in Ely like us, but of course since we only moved to Ely in December, we haven't been able to meet up in person — so they might as well have been in Vienna too! They did tell us the amusing news that the only two instances they spotted of people obviously breaking lockdown rules were a) a gang of teenagers smoking from a single joint in a bus stop and b) a bunch of middle-aged men shiftily doing hare coursing out by the river. Both strike me as pretty par for the course in East Anglia.
Today I've mainly been cooking, although I've also managed to get pretty stuck into a new book: Winter's Orbit, by Everina Maxwell. I knew that this was originally serialised on AO3 as tropey original fiction a few years ago, and then pulled to publish, but I never read the original so I can't compare it with the published version. In terms of the latter, it was exactly what I've come to expect from this kind of pulled-to-publish m/m sff romance: an arranged marriage, slow burn romance, very heavy on the character and relationship studies, and light on the supporting framework (intergalactic politics, handwavy science fictional elements, secondary characters who are basically there either to hinder or support the main couple's relationship). To be clear, I like this kind of thing when I'm in the mood for it (which I definitely am at the moment),
I feel as if this post isn't meandering so much as lurching wildly from topic to topic, so I might as well lean into that, and leave you with two unrelated links.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen this, but I had an absolutely epic baking disaster while attempting an extremely simple recipe yesterday, and I invite you all to laugh at me in my incompetence in this Twitter thread.
Finally, if you're like me, and vaguely aware of gossip and shenanigans going on in fandom at large, not just in your own active fandoms, you may be aware of an absolutely infamous fic whose wall of tags is notorious and somewhat inescapable. AO3 have kind of wrung their hands and said there's nothing they can do ... and so fandom has taken to mocking the offending fic to hilarious effect. I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.