convenientalias

It's been another homebody weekend, which I don't regret in the slightest. I did go out on Friday night to an event at the tiny local museum, which was a launch of sorts for its latest temporary exhibition. The museum is so small that the temporary exhibitions are housed in a single room about the size of my kitchen; this one was about the history of beer-making, and so the launch event involved talks and tasters from a trio of local breweries. We followed this up with a drink in our favourite cafe/bar, which was heaving with customers — always a good sign on a Friday night.

Other than that, it's been spring cleaning — I cleaned all the external windows and windowsills, including clambering onto the kitchen roof in order to get at our upper floor bedroom windows — classes and swimming at the gym, and batch-cooking. Matthias and I also spent half an hour or so this morning planting wildflower seeds in the front and back garden raised beds, plus beetroot seeds in the vegetable beds. The other seeds that I started off in the growhouse — chives, cucumbers, rocket, salad greens, and spring onions — are coming along nicely, even though it's been cold.

Other good things: Pretty Lethal, the ridiculous black comedy/luridly violent action thriller involving a troupe of American ballet dancers stranded in a Hungarian forest en route to a competition in Budapest, and swept up into a deadly showdown between two rival gangs of goons who want to kill them, one of which is headed up by bitter ex-ballet dancer Uma Thurman (sporting an indeterminate Eastern European accent). The soundtrack is all scores from famous ballets, and all the action scenes involve a sort of intersection of martial arts and ballet. It's as silly as it sounds, and made for a great Saturday night film.

I finished up my Earthsea reread over lunch with The Other Wind, which I think I've only ever read once or twice, but which remains achingly beautiful, like a dragon's half-remembered flight across a sunset sky. I think the peak of the series is probably Tehanu, though, which always renders me awestruck. I have read the Earthsea short story collections at some point, but I don't own copies, so those will have to wait if I want the reread to be fully complete. For now, though, I plan to turn to one of the books from my stack of five from the public library, or possibly Amal El-Mohtar's new short story collection, which I'd preordered and was delivered to me last week.

I hope you've all been having similarly cosy weekends.

I've been ridiculously happy and full of energy all weekend — a side-effect, I assume, of the sunshine, warm spring weather, and abundance of flowers and birds. Whatever the cause, I've made good use of this uncharacteristic energy: throwing myself enthusiastically into my classes at the gym, swimming my laps so quickly that I managed 1km in twenty minutes this morning, and undertaking loads of spring cleaning and garden work. In the past two days, I have dusted all hard surfaces in the house, wet-dusted all the internal doors, swept the floors (this latter is something I do weekly anyway, but the dusting necessitated bringing it forward), swept the outdoor deck, weeded stinging nettles from the lawn, and gathered up all the bark mulch from the vegetable garden that the birds had hurled all over the surrounding patio. Inevitably, half an hour after I cleaned up the mulch, the same birds and returned and thrown it back over the path again. I'm glad that our vegetable garden is alive with worms and bugs that the birds want to eat, I just wish they wouldn't do so with such enthusiasm!

I've bought a bunch of heirloom seeds from this woman, and I had planned to sow them over the weekend as well, but the weather next week is going to be cold and frosty again, so I decided against it.

Yesterday Matthias and I had our first outdoor market food truck lunch of the year in the gorgeous patio beer garden of our favourite cafe/bar, in which every table was taken, with people and dogs of various sizes revelling in the sunshine.

In the evening, we watched Sentimental Value, the Norwegian-language film. It's both a movie about making movies (in well trodden Oscar nominee fashion), and abut dysfunctional family relationships — in this case, between an ageing screenwriter/director and his two adult daughters, who is trying to bring a comeback film to the screen dealing with his own complicated family history and mending the relationships with his daughters — with beautiful, functional Scandinavian architecture as the scenery. I liked it a lot, and particularly appreciated that this version of this type of story was capable of understanding that this kind of neglectful paternal relationship really messes up the children, and that immense talent and driven sense of vocation in the chosen career is no excuse (and in fact makes the hurt even worse, because it's so obvious to the children that their parent prefers being in his workplace setting, and is so immensely valued for what he is and does for all the colleagues and mentees in that setting, in a manner that he never demonstrates in the family). (Touching a raw nerve? The film touched all of them.)

Books this week have been a mixed bag in terms of genre and content, but all equally good. On a whim, I picked up Hostis (Vale Aida), a historically divergent (to put it mildly) take on Hannibal and Scipio which was tremendous fun. If you've read the author's fic about these two figures (including an In Space AU; I think it's fine to link the two identities since the author does so on AO3), you'll know what you're in for. I'm only sorry to see that so much time has passed since Hostis was published, since it ends on a huge cliffhanger, and I wonder if Aida experiencing any difficulties in writing the follow-up.

I then moved on to Three Years on Fire, the third of Andrey Kurkov's diaries about his experiences living through Russia's fullscale invasion of Ukraine. This one covers late 2023 up to early 2025. It's interesting (and sad) to read it so soon after the second volume, as the change in tone and expectation is so extreme — although fairly representative of shifts I've witnessed in Ukrainian society as a whole. There's less optimism, although still incredible resilience, and a sort of weary resignation that things will get worse, but that the only way out is through, and therefore they must keep enduring, as the only other option is to give up, and cease to exist as an independent nation where the chance at a future of democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, and respect for human rights is possible. In spite of this heavier tone, Kurkov is still a forensic observer of the human condition, with a keen eye for little episodes and moments to serve as representative illustrations of life in the 21st century as a civilian in a country at war.

I was a bit at a loss as to what to read next. I'm still waiting on a bunch of library holds to come in, so I elected to start an Earthsea reread, having not returned to this series for a good ten years at least. It's not really the right time of the year for it — they feel like such autumnal books to me, although I guess The Tombs of Atuan has something of a vernal undercurrent, given that it's all about a young woman living buried beneath the earth, and bringing herself from darkness into light, under the open sky. The uncritical sexism of the early books aside, the series remains to me an incredible work of literature: gorgeous language, well-considered, meaty ideas concealed in simplicity, and beautiful, beautiful imagery that is at once uncanny and familiar. It's remarkable to me how good Le Guin is at creating such a strong sense of place for a place that does not exist.

Of course, to me, the strongest pull is all those other oceans, and all those sunsets and sunrises, just beyond the last known shore. My journal's title is 'Beyond Selidor,' after all.

Rather than share each item individually, I'm just going to link to goodbyebird's mostly good news links roundup. There's some fantastic environmental and sociopolitical news there.

I'll add to all this with the news that you can now walk around the entire coastline of England. It's worth reading the article in full, because this undertaking is extremely impressive and future-focused.

Another good news story, via 2022 Ukrainian Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk: the tropical plants in the greenhouse of Kyiv's Hryshko Botanical Garden survived Russia's winter bombardment of energy facilities, thanks to the concerted efforts of staff and ordinary Kyivan citizens.

And I just find this latest batch of artistry from wisdm, in which he styles the celestial bodies of the solar system in high fashion clothing, to be breathtakingly good.

I've basically been immersively living in these two songs for the past week:

The birds are singing, the evening light is beautiful, and my salad greens, herb, and cucumber seeds are sprouting in the growhouse. It's a lovely start to the weekend.

Today's Friday open thread prompt is courtesy of a suggestion from lirazel: what are some types of food that only taste good when handmade/made on a small scale (as opposed to the industrial scale supermarket version)?

My immediate response was 'what type of food doesn't taste vastly better when made on a small scale by hand?' but then I thought a bit more, and realised there were quite a lot of foodstuffs where the difference is non-existent (homemade chips where you chop up a potato and roast it in the oven or deep fry it are no more delicious than the fast-food equivalent), or where the effort involved to make it by hand far exceeds any reward in better flavour (condiments in particular: I'm not going to make my own soy sauce, harissa, dijon mustard, etc, you know?).

However, I'd say that beyond the 'too much effort required' category, in my experience most other types of food are better if they're made on a smaller scale. The biggest one for me is baked goods. There is no bread, cake, pie, biscuit, or pastry on Earth in which the mass-produced supermarket (or otherwise industrial-scale) version tastes better than, or even remotely equally good as, the homemade or expensive artisanal bakery version. (I admit to some significant bias here. I worked part-time from the age of 15-23 — the first years of my working life — in artisanal bakeries/patisseries, the first thing I look up in every place I visit is the most highly recommended bakeries/patisseries, and I'm just in general a massive baked goods snob, which is somewhat hilarious in that I'm a very good cook, and comically, catastrophically bad at baking.)

What are your equivalent foodstuffs, if any?