Beyond Selidor

The big news this weekend is that Matthias got his second dose of vaccine (AstraZeneca). He had really bad side effects the first time around, but this time it's just made him a little bit tired. It's a huge relief to know that he's well on the way to being as protected as he's ever going to be from Covid. I've still got a little time to wait, although I watch eligibility inch down to my age group week by week. If things with the over-forties go as quickly as they have been with older age groups, I may be eligible to book my first dose by the end of this week, but I suspect it may be in two weeks' time.

We've been doing a lot of stuff outdoors, one way or another. Yesterday we assembled our garden furniture, so we now have a table and chairs on the deck — just in time for warmer weather. I'm looking forward to eating meals out there, as well as doing some of my work from home outdoors, as I did last year in the courtyard at our old place.

This morning, I attacked the weeds which have been sprouting up everywhere, then planted a bunch of seeds in the outdoor container garden, and in pots indoors on the windowsills. If things go well, I should have a bunch of radish, bean, and rocket seedlings appearing in a week or so.

I've been watching a bunch of TV as well. We finished off Shadow and Bone last night, and my original opinion of the series remains: a competently done adaptation of silly source material. I remain irritated that the Six of Crows characters got shoehorned into Alina's story in a way that decreases everyone's screentime, and hope we get more seasons that spread the characters' stories out a bit better. While show!Mal is an improvement on book!Mal, I still dislike the character and Mal/Alina as a pairing. The cast were all delightful, from Ben Barnes scenery-chewing to surprise appearances from half of the four leads from The Musketeers, and I very much enjoy all of them on social media, in a way that I rarely get involved with actors or behind-the-scenes stuff in general.

The BBC is re-airing the first season of The Killing (the Scandi-noir that launched a thousand copycats), which I've never actually seen (when it originally aired in the UK, I was living in Germany as an exchange student in Heidelberg). So far it's been a fun game of 'spot the Borgen actor', and there are three characters who feel plausible to me as the killer, but as we've only watched two episodes I'm probably wrong on all counts.

I'm not sure what the rest of Sunday will entail — Matthias is resting, and I'm out of books to read. The weekend will be closed out with the final episode of Line of Duty — about which I've developed a theory as to the identity of the elusive 'fourth man' which I've not seen anyone else mention in the wild. My theory seems horrifyingly plausible (and cynical enough to match the general tone of the show and its showrunner), but we'll see what unfolds tonight. I'm rarely right about these things, though!

Here's a quick little meme, originally from the New York Times (although I got it from aphrodite_mine).

( Seven questions about things that kept me going during the pandemic )

Feel free to steal this if you'd like.

I've spent the morning watching the ABC's coverage of the Western Australian state election. (I'm not from WA, but my family are all either political journalists, political staffers, or just rabid Australian politics watchers, so obsessively watching Australian political coverage is kind of mandatory for me).

There are landslides ... and then there are landslides. (To decode this for non-Australians, the Liberal Party in Australia is the conservative right-wing party in Australia, the ALP is the Australian Labor Party, our centre-left party, and the NAT in the screenshot refers to the National Party, the conservative party that only stands in rural seats, and always contests elections as the junior partner in a coalition with the Liberals. So for the National Party to win more seats than the Liberals is basically unheard of.)

A few links that have caught my eye over the past few days:

Data visualisation of a survey done by Fansplaining about whether people in fandom prefer to read fic for fandoms with which they're familiar, or on the basis of tropes in fandoms that they haven't read/watched/etc. I found this really interesting, because it was basically a fifty-fifty split, with further data for each set of reading preferences. I fall solely in the 'only read fic for fandoms with which I am deeply familiar' (I don't even like reading fic for ongoing canons).

( Cut for discussion of the pandemic )

Like many Australians who grew up in Canberra, holidays 'down the South Coast' of New South Wales were a huge part of my childhood, and the old bridge in Batemans Bay was an icon of those landscapes. Now that old bridge is being replaced, and the operators (whose job is to lift the bridge two times a day to allow ferries to pass through) are out of a job (although my impression is that they were on the verge of retirement). This is a delightful interview with one of those operators about his experiences.

It was warm, it was sunny, the farmers market in the centre of town was flooded with far too many people, but I can't bring myself to get too worked up about it because I just feel so relaxed and happy. We flung open the curtains, and filled the house with flowers.

I come bearing a few links.

The more observant among you may have noticed that I no longer live in Cambridge. This is (sadly) a product of the ridiculous housing market in this part of the world. When Matthias and I decided we wanted to buy a house, we basically had the option of either living on the very outskirts of Cambridge in what would probably be a house needing a lot of work, and have to spend hours every day commuting by (slow, unreliable) bus into work, or moving to one of the surrounding villages on the trainline and buying a much nicer house that would not need to be gutted and renovated from the ground up. Add to that the fact that both of our workplaces are basically not going to return us to full-time work in the office even after the pandemic is over, and the decision was obvious. We moved to Ely, which is fifteen minutes away from Cambridge on the train. While I miss some things about living in Cambridge, it was definitely the right decision.

All that by way of preamble to say that the house was finally in a presentable enough state for me to do a photo tour. I've posted three batches of photos over on Instagram at ronnidolorosa. Batch one, batch two, batch three.

Also via Instagram, a link to a wonderful photo essay (in a rather pretentious travel magazine) about the gorgeous ocean baths of Sydney. I miss the sea — and specifically the Sydney sea — so much!

Via a convoluted sequence of links in Dreamwidth, I stumbled upon this Tumblr post, which argues something I've long been struggling to articulate — my frustration and discomfort with anti-intellectualism on the left. It comes from a different place to the right-wing equivalent, but it's just as misinformed and damaging. It being a Tumblr post, I find it a touch on the polemical side, but it summarises a lot of things I've long felt, and gave me a satisfying jolt of recognition.

I also particularly enjoyed Amal El-Mohtar's newsletter this week, not least because the ritual she describes (Friday evening walks, take-away, and WandaVision) closely resembles my own Saturday evening pandemic ritual (take-away, and films), and because she is so overwhelmed with love for WandaVision, like me.

Edited to add the link to the first trailer for the Grishaverse Netflix show! In terms of the original books I only really love the Six of Crows duology (the ending of the original trilogy makes me incredibly angry, and the new series mainly focuses on characters in whom I'm not hugely interested), but the trailer is reminding me of all my intense Darklina feelings (because of course I've never met a heroine/villain ship I didn't like), and I'm very much looking forward to the series!



I hope your Saturdays have been filled with light, both physical and metaphorical.

I'm not having a good week, or really a good month.

( Cut for a lot of emotions )

If you live in the UK, you'll share my contempt for our current government. I didn't think I could despise them any more, but this pack of incompetents never cease to find new depths to plumb.

( COVID-19 stuff )

Today is my birthday. As you can imagine, it's been a rather subdued affair — but given I'm not one for big group parties anyway, I haven't felt like I missed out on anything. Matthias and I went out for a sun-drenched walk to Grantchester (photoset here). I'm planning a nice dinner with wine and cocktails. And I'm going to spend the evening reading seasonally appropriate books: rereads of Iona Datt Sharma and Katherine Fabian's novella Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night (see my review of this book from last year; the story is basically a celebration of family in all its forms, a restoration of love and light and compassion to illuminate and banish the darkness), and Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy. I think we could all do with stories that are about hope in the dark, kindness warming the icy heart of winter, and the fire that can be a candle flame.

My heart will not give up, my heart will not give out, my heart will not give in.

I woke up this morning feeling a rumbling sense of anxiety, and the feeling didn't really dissipate for the entire day.

( Cut for COVID talk )

In slightly better news, I opened my work inbox yesterday to discover that the students had nominated me for a teaching award. These are entirely student-nominated, and the text they'd written in support of my nomination was so nice! It was a really lovely piece of news with which to start the week, and it felt fabulous to see my work recognised in this way.

I'll close this post out with some music — an absolutely beautiful live performance by Four Tet, in the Sydney Opera House, which was just about the only thing that made a dent in my anxiety today. Music, as always, is one of the few things that quietens my noisy mind, and soothes the sea inside.

We have a scattering of local shops around the corner, and I generally try to do as much grocery shopping as possible in them, usually on a Saturday morning. Given that these shops are all quite small and narrow, they have had strict limits on numbers allowed inside during the pandemic — either two people or one person at a time. What this means, of course, is queues of masked shoppers outside waiting to be allowed in.

Outside the French bakery, I fell to talking to the young guy standing in front, whose ears pricked up at my accent when he recognised a fellow Australian. He was from Sydney, married to a British woman, and had been here for five years. (Whenever I meet a Sydneysider I always tell them I'm from Canberra, because they always want to ask what school you went to if they think you come from Sydney.) Within about a minute the talk had inevitably turned to visas, dealing with the Home Office, and paths to citizenship. It's been four years since I became a citizen, and three years since I had to stop worrying about it on a personal level when Matthias became a citizen, but the whole experience is still so clear in my mind — that sense of having to marshall vast armies of paper and documents to prove the things that others took for granted, that feeling of anxiety that never really left, the need to put your life on hold until the next piece of paper, the next reprieve, and yet mentally counting down the years until you'd have to do it all again. Almost all the time when I meet a fellow migrant, talk turns to visas before too long. If you're not a migrant, and don't have migrants in your family, it's sometimes hard to get a sense of how much this whole business just completely dominates our lives!

Fretful visa talk aside, it was quite nice to chat to another Australian.

The other shop was different. This shop is simultaneously a post office and newsagent, and a convenience store and fancy deli, as well as being one of the few places in town that sells kosher food. It's where you'd go if you want groceries that can't be found in the rather limited tiny Co Op supermarket. Since the pandemic started, they've had a limit on two customers at a time in the store, although because of the way it's laid out, you can't always see how many other people are already inside. This morning, when I arrived, I stuck my head in the door and could see about eight or ten students clustered inside, making no attempt to disance, all queueing up to pay for their respective shopping. I felt awful for the shopkeepers. Because they were each paying for individual items, those who had been served then left the shop and stood in a cluster right next to the door, removing their masks and chatting, and there was no way for me to move away from them as it would have meant I'd lose my spot in the queue. (They were also talking loudly about students in their halls who'd been having unauthorised illicit parties in the shared kitchens, which did nothing to lessen my stress!) I'd been feeling worried enough in the press of crowds in the centre of town, but I'd completely forgotten that in our rather suburban area there is also a scattering of university accommodation — which means students in the local shops. I think I'm going to have to switch to doing my local shopping during the week, in the middle of the day or something.

On its own, such an experience is perhaps insignificant. What worries me is that versions of what I witnessed outside the shop will have been repeated in various ways all around town, and puncture the fragile relative safety we'd managed to maintain for the past seven months.

This is a post about COVID — in terms of the state of the world in general, rather than concrete specifics. I'll still cut, in case you want to avoid this sort of thing.

( Keep the streets empty for me )

I realise I owe a lot of people comments, and I will get back to you all soon. I am drained to the point of exhaustion.

Thankfully, I now have a five-day weekend: as soon as I realised that travel would not be possible this northern summer, I elected to take all my annual leave in little segments. I am going to have a three- or four-day (or in this case five-day) weekend every week now for the rest of July and August. I've just found out that although my library is going to partially physically reopen in mid-August, I will continue to work from home past that date. The university's policy remains that everyone who can do the bulk of their work from home must continue to do so, which suits me fine.

It's been a bit of a fragmented, strange day. I know I whinge a lot about Twitter, but sometimes it can be nice. I spent most of today chatting with likhain and aliettedb about books, which was a happy diversion in an otherwise stressful day. (As an aside, Aliette's latest novella is an utter delight. It reads like fanfic in the best possible way: a m/m couple — one of whom likes to deal with problems with diplomacy, the other of whom likes to leap immediately to violence and stabbing — solve a murder mystery. I love it a lot.)

It's been raining all week, which has made my tomatoes grow furiously, revived my dying bean plants, and caused my chili plant to grow multiple flowers. I am very pleased at this. Have a photoset of all the flowers I saw when walking around earlier today.

I am down to my last batch of stationery. If anyone wants a recipe letter, you know what to do.