How the flowers bloom, how the branches rustle

[dolorosa_12]

This long weekend was exactly the reset I needed after all the tiring travel, so although it wasn't deliberately timed, I appreciated it.

Saturday was filled with bucketing rains, and I trudged resolutely through the deluge to my fitness classes at the gym — which were incredibly challenging after such a long break (this summer has been very disruptive to routines), but worth doing. I trudged through more rain to collect groceries from the market, where most of the traders had given up, or never shown up to begin with. Some British friends of Matthias's family had just returned after visiting his family in Germany, and dropped by to deliver a bunch of stuff that had been sitting at his sister's place for several years, waiting for someone with a car to drive it back to the UK. It was mainly books, but also some vases, a decanter, and decorative flower pots, for which I was pleased to be able to find homes in various parts of the house. The family friends stayed for a cup of tea, while the rain continued to lash at the windows.

It was the perfect weather to snuggle up inside and watch a film after dinner: Civil War, which has a ludicrous premise, and fails as a war movie in the political and logistical sense (both of which you have to handwave and ignore), but works very well as a road movie, and as a movie about journalism.

The remaining two days of the long weekend had much clearer weather, which made starting both Sunday and Monday with a 1km swim in the pool even more enjoyable than usual. We've made the most of the warmth — yesterday we picked up food truck food from the market and ate lunch in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar in town, today I've been doing odds and ends in the garden, and both days we've done loads of laundry — the backlog from our time away. We've been eating a lot of fresh tomatoes and zucchini from the garden, and generally making the most of this last gasp of summer.

The remainder of the afternoon will be spent on various pastimes: I'll read a bit more of my book (a reread of The Palace of Impossible Dreams, the third in an epic fantasy series by Jennifer Fallon that I remembered perhaps more fondly than it deserved from when I first encountered it in the 2000s; now I keep being slapped in the face by a variety of unfortunate authorial implications and am questioning my past judgement), do some yoga, and wander back into town with Matthias for a late afternoon gelato.

All in all, not a bad weekend, although I could really do with one more day off!

Comments

[rekishi]

💖

[dolorosa_12]

<3

[mific]

I enjoyed Civil War as well. For the journalism and road movie aspects, as you said.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, it was really good at those (albeit with somewhat stereotypical characters), and I appreciated it a lot on that level. It was also incredibly good at creating an intensely tense atmosphere, which built and was sustained through the whole film.

[merit]

There's a few books from the 2000s I've read over the years where I am like ?? did I read a different version of this book?

I hope you enjoy the gelato!

[dolorosa_12]

Some 2000s epic fantasy really still holds up (Kate Elliott springs to mind), but some of it really makes me recoil, or at least be somewhat appalled at what I felt was innovative, feminist, etc.

The gelato, on the other hand, was delicious!

[chestnut_pod]

The 2000s were an especially strange time for fantasy, weren't they? Or maybe they just fall into the trap of being recent enough that you can't file away their flaws under "the past is a different country," but too distant to gel with our current tastes, standards, etc.

[dolorosa_12]

There's some stuff that really still holds up well — Kate Elliott's doorstopper series from that period, for example — but a lot of it falls into exactly the trap you describe. I'm having a particularly disorienting time revisiting the wildly popular Australian epic fantasy series by women (in Australia, this was a particularly female dominated genre, with a lot of successful women authors) of my youth, which at the time were perceived as, if not feminist, at least ~empowering and filled with Strong Female Characters™. And, with the distance of hindsight, they're really, really not (and have some appallingly misogynistic, homophobic, orientalist, and otherwise unfortunate implications as well).