I had a slight mental health wobble earlier this week, before making the rather obvious connection between my furiously miserable mood, and the fact that I had spent some time on Twitter. If I could just find a way to maintain the friendships and connections that I've made there, with people I don't speak to on any other platforms, I would leave that hellsite in a flash. I need to remember that whenever the UK government is being particularly horrible about immigrants, I need to steer clear of Twitter, otherwise it feels like standing in the middle of a public square and letting people take turns to punch and spit in my face.
Monday is a public holiday in the UK, although my library doesn't close. However, as I worked the previous May public holiday a couple of weeks ago, it's my turn to take the day off. Matthias and I elected to take today (Friday) off and make it a four-day weekend. Obviously we can't go anywhere (the travelling highlight of the long weekend is likely to be the trip we made this morning to buy difficult-to-obtain groceries from the street on the other side of town where the Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Italian etc grocery stores are all located), but we've got a courtyard garden, it's very sunny, and I keep breaking away from writing this post to dance to Matthias's 100+ hour female vocal trance playlist which he's playing through the cheap external speakers.
In terms of reading I haven't had the brainspace to deal with anything more demanding than a reread of KJ Charles's
Charm of Magpies trilogy, which at least was cozy and kind-hearted. I also signed up for a programme with the publisher Hodderscape which gives (UK-resident) participants one free ebook per month. My selection this month is
Honeycomb, a book of short stories by Joanne Harris, all inspired by fairytales. We'll see how this goes — other than
Chocolat, which I read years ago when I was a teenager, I can't say I've ever been hugely impressed with any of Harris's books. Given this one is free, I'm happy enough to give it a try. If anyone is interested in this programme let me know and I'll try to send on the details.
My plans for the remainder of the long weekend are to write fanfic (a month ago, one of my goals was to write at least 1000 words of fic in the next four-week period, and then I ended up writing ... 15,000 words — which I get is a miniscule amount for a lot of people, but given I only ever write fic in response to exchange prompts, this is a staggering amount for me), try to finally finish watching
Jane the Virgin (I've had nine episodes to go for over a year, and I really need to sit down and just watch them), cook a bit, and transfer some of the plants I've got in pots on the kitchen windowsill into the garden. We should have been travelling down to Devon to visit our friends who live there, but given that's no longer possible, my holiday plans seem like a good substitute.
Today's post title is, of course, brought to you by that rallying cry of introverted Gen Y Australian homebodies everywhere:
I hope you are having delightful weekends.