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Blue Monday
Jan. 18th, 2016 06:44 pmAccording not to actual actuaries but to marketing idiots, to whom of course we pay no heed, today is the most depressing day of the year.
Nope, no heed at all.
Nevertheless, it is true that I have been somewhat downcast this last week or so. As witness, no post in eleven days. Truth to tell, I have also been sick, or sick-ish; the one thing may play upon the other, who can say? But the fever broke last night, if fevers do still break in this day and age, if they ever did; and so today I have run four loads of laundry from beginning to end, and walked to the hardware store and back without buying anything, and edited Chapter Nine of the Crater School project and started Chapter Ten (funiculi funicula), and and and.
One of the nice things about last week was the being able to think "Oh bloody hell, I'm really depressed, I'm going to write the next Crater School chapters to cheer myself up," and being absolutely right about that. It's nice to have something that's undeniably work that I find uncomplicatedly happy to work on. (Also, of course, I have been lying on the sofa reading the Chalet School, because that is Research as well as What I Do When I Am Sick: and I do have to say that Joey Goes to the Oberland is the most extraordinarily empty novel I have ever read. From the time she falls into a packing-crate at the start, to the time she falls off a ladder at the finish, pretty much absolutely bloody nothing happens: and this is comparative, in a series of which it has been rightly said - by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shewhomust inter alia - that nothing ever happens anyway. This is just the unexciting travel journal of Joey and her eight kids and their hangers-on moving from Wales to Switzerland, in a comfortably middle-class kind of 1950s way. It didn't need to be like that, and I have to confess that this book disappoints me. I'd rather read the Crater School, frankly. Funiculi Funicula!)
In other newses, I wish they had invented Smellernet, because this thing happened where I overtoasted some almonds in the oven and they were totally too dark to serve atop the brussels sprouts as planned, but not exactly quite burned; so I eyed them askance for a couple of days, then tossed them into my grindy-machine and grinded them. And now I have this dark toasted almond flour which smells just amazing, and I can only share with you in pictures:
Also, bread: I am loving this thing of having dough slowly souring in the fridge, ready to bake at any time through the week. Today's loaf was eight days on; it may have lost a little lift, but oh, it makes up for that in yum. And holes. It has excellent holes.
Also I made a kind of Hoppin' John I was happy with, four years on from learning that one should. Heirloom rice and peas, people, and everything cooked separately, and I should've taken a photo of the plate. Also the chicken roasted with tangerines and carrots and basil, which baked down into a kind of succotash beneath. The fooding has been good hereabouts, regardless of the world and gloom and such.
And now I must get on with work and dinner and so forth. We are eating leftovers - but "leftovers" in this case means the beans from the Hoppin' John mixed with the beef from Saturday's pot roast and made into a chilli, with the rice and collard greens surviving from that same Hoppin' John fried up together, and sprouts and mushrooms and and and...
And Chapter Ten, funiculi, funicula.
[EtA: never brag upon the internets about how you're feeling better. You will obviously and immediately die. Shouldn't I have learned this by now? I feel dreadful...]
Nope, no heed at all.
Nevertheless, it is true that I have been somewhat downcast this last week or so. As witness, no post in eleven days. Truth to tell, I have also been sick, or sick-ish; the one thing may play upon the other, who can say? But the fever broke last night, if fevers do still break in this day and age, if they ever did; and so today I have run four loads of laundry from beginning to end, and walked to the hardware store and back without buying anything, and edited Chapter Nine of the Crater School project and started Chapter Ten (funiculi funicula), and and and.
One of the nice things about last week was the being able to think "Oh bloody hell, I'm really depressed, I'm going to write the next Crater School chapters to cheer myself up," and being absolutely right about that. It's nice to have something that's undeniably work that I find uncomplicatedly happy to work on. (Also, of course, I have been lying on the sofa reading the Chalet School, because that is Research as well as What I Do When I Am Sick: and I do have to say that Joey Goes to the Oberland is the most extraordinarily empty novel I have ever read. From the time she falls into a packing-crate at the start, to the time she falls off a ladder at the finish, pretty much absolutely bloody nothing happens: and this is comparative, in a series of which it has been rightly said - by
shewhomust inter alia - that nothing ever happens anyway. This is just the unexciting travel journal of Joey and her eight kids and their hangers-on moving from Wales to Switzerland, in a comfortably middle-class kind of 1950s way. It didn't need to be like that, and I have to confess that this book disappoints me. I'd rather read the Crater School, frankly. Funiculi Funicula!)In other newses, I wish they had invented Smellernet, because this thing happened where I overtoasted some almonds in the oven and they were totally too dark to serve atop the brussels sprouts as planned, but not exactly quite burned; so I eyed them askance for a couple of days, then tossed them into my grindy-machine and grinded them. And now I have this dark toasted almond flour which smells just amazing, and I can only share with you in pictures:
Also, bread: I am loving this thing of having dough slowly souring in the fridge, ready to bake at any time through the week. Today's loaf was eight days on; it may have lost a little lift, but oh, it makes up for that in yum. And holes. It has excellent holes.
Also I made a kind of Hoppin' John I was happy with, four years on from learning that one should. Heirloom rice and peas, people, and everything cooked separately, and I should've taken a photo of the plate. Also the chicken roasted with tangerines and carrots and basil, which baked down into a kind of succotash beneath. The fooding has been good hereabouts, regardless of the world and gloom and such.
And now I must get on with work and dinner and so forth. We are eating leftovers - but "leftovers" in this case means the beans from the Hoppin' John mixed with the beef from Saturday's pot roast and made into a chilli, with the rice and collard greens surviving from that same Hoppin' John fried up together, and sprouts and mushrooms and and and...
And Chapter Ten, funiculi, funicula.
[EtA: never brag upon the internets about how you're feeling better. You will obviously and immediately die. Shouldn't I have learned this by now? I feel dreadful...]