The weather is gorgeous and the garden happy, I harvested my first (and maybe only?) courgette. The plant is self-fertilising but there are almost never male and female flowers at the same time, but then again the internet claims the plant should continue producing for a while so fingers crossed. In any case it was a little round thing, rather than long, but tasted good and it’s always satisfying to eat produce from your own garden. Keeping an eye on those tomato plants now. In other news, we watched all of Watchmen during the HBO free streaming. It was pretty …
Looking forward
Bathroom is halfway done, so everything is still a bit of a mess but we can take baths again thank goodness. It should be finished by the middle of the week and you can see how much better it’s going to look. Plus also not being broken, so hooray to that. The garden has been a bit neglected while I haven’t had proper access to it, so I may have to spent some time today and tomorrow making sure everything is happy out there. I might even get to harvest one single courgette! It’s round for some reason, but the …
Home
Tearing down, building up
Work has started on the bathroom, which involves a fair bit of awkwardly trying to maintain social distancing while conversing about the work done/needed. It’s just one guy doing the work for obvious reasons (it’s a small bathroom) and we have exiled ourselves to the upstairs except when he needs to tell us something. He assures us he’s been mostly isolating anyway, as have we, so in spite of not being able to maintain strict distancing due to the limits of the architecture I’m reasonably comfortable so far. The main disadvantages so far are that the poor cats have spent …
Books and bathrooms
It’s the middle of the month, I have two weeks of furlough left probably. I’ve gotten quite a few overdue personal projects done, but I have a bad habit of having so many projects on the go that even if I complete several I don’t maintain much of a sense of accomplishment. It’s tricky. Still, one of them is tidying up the website a bit, cleaning up the menus and links, and updating the art pages. It needed doing anyway, but if I’m planning on entering any virtual art shows, an up to date website seems critical. It’s also nice …
Revolution?
It’s a weird time to post anything personal without feeling navel gazing at best, and honestly there isn’t that much to share in practical terms. I’ve been watching the news and feeling the rollercoaster of emotions that accompanies doing that, but in this moment at least it feels hopeful. I’ve often felt very cynical about American’s relationship with protest and civil disobedience compared to other nations. This feels different, at least from way over here, and there are real radical changes being seriously discussed like defunding the police, along with smaller but long overdue concrete actions like removing monuments honouring …
Virtual congoing
Last weekend was a bank holiday in the UK and Memorial Day in the States. Once upon a time would have that meant Baycon, Fanime, Clockwork Alchemy, and more would all be running at the same time, and I’d be popping between at least two of them and hearing rumours and news from the rest. Obviously that ended once I moved to the UK, but the muscle memory is still there, and I still had the vicarious enjoyment from social media and the occasional text. This year, all of the above have been postponed anyway. But a few cons elsewhere …
Furloughed
After a couple of months of very busy, and then not so busy, I was furloughed last week. The UK furlough scheme runs in three week cycles, so I have at least another two weeks. Most likely they will re-up and I won’t be working until the end of June, but that isn’t guaranteed. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, I have plenty of projects that I’ve ben neglecting, so keeping busy has not been an issue. The garden has gotten some much needed attention, in time to become a useful space during this lovely weather. And my office/studio, which had …
May the Fourth
Star Wars day falls on a Monday, which is when we play our Edge of the Empire weekly role play, so that works out. Besides that we’ve been playing various boardgames from John’s collection. Some Imperial Assault, the app version. Some random small games like Welcome to Dinoworld, which I am abysmally bad at. But mostly Arkham Horror, we’ve played several kinds but this weekend we started the app version, which is not bad at all. Meanwhile I’ve finally gotten back onto the PS4 on a regular basis, sinking my teeth into Horizon Zero Dawn. It’s a very pretty game, …
Food, glorious food.
John and I take turns cooking dinner, just like before lockdown, we were already pretty good at using up our veg box to get a nice variety of dishes. Obviously now we also eat weekday breakfast and lunch at home, usually breakfast is just toast or cereal, lunch we have together but it’s mostly random who makes it, plus lately the weather has been nice enough we can have it outside. We were a bit surprised that our grocery bill has gone up, but of course we’re buying the larger sizes and planning ahead for things that we might need …