Hello, friends and enemies. Sometimes I sit down to write my blog and I find myself wondering if I did anything at all in the last 14 days. Clearly I have; the business of being alive alone takes up a lot of my time, but I think the hot weather has had me just lounging around for the most part. I’m have been reading, studying my languages, and things of that nature, but some weeks, there’s just not a lot to say about it all! That said, please enjoy this short post.
Books and Other Words
The Feywild Job is ostensibly a Dungeons and Dragons novel, and I don’t totally know what that means except it seemed to have some bearing on the setting and the characters have fanciful last names related to their abilities like “Charmhand” or “Redsong.” That said, I have loved everything I’ve read from C.L. Polk (see Witchmark and The Midnight Bargain) and I do love books about magical gay people, so I figured this would probably worth reading even without having much interest in D&D. In this story, the protagonist Saeldian Charmhand is a con artist who gets drawn into a heist job with the ex-boyfriend they haven’t spoken to in a decade, Kell Redsong. Saelidan has spent years perfecting their illusion magic, granted to them by a fairy patron, who they encounter in the second part of the heist when they have to go into the fairylands. I am not going to try to describe this book because every word I put down sounds wackier than the last but I did love it and it was very sweet and fun to read. I recommend it!
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- The end of the working writer via Is It Supposed to Look Like That? This article gut punched me with this observation: “Sometimes, I think we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence.” My job is to care about words and my hobbies also involve caring about words, but unfortunately, many people don’t care very much and just having some text, even if it is, to my eyes, bad, is fine. That’s a part of why LLMs are getting so much traction.
- Air Force Engineer Accused of Cutting Down 13 Police Cameras Says They’re Unconstitutional via Military.com. Good for him.
- I can’t imagine this being exciting news for any of my readers, but I was very excited about this. My Icelandic teacher Robert showed me Morgunstund.net, which has an Icelandic copycat of NYT’s Connections game (here: Tengingar) and another word-based guessing game. I love a word game so this is going to be fun and educational for me.
Moving It
I am very proud to report that my bar hang is improving. I held on for about five to ten seconds on a lighter band. I’ve been doing one hang on the medium band and then one on the light band for the last week or so. Being able to hang independently from the bar is finally starting to feel possible instead of just something I’m going to be working on forever.
Here are the recent stickers. Four workouts in a week is seeming like the limit, but I am trying to convince myself to at least do a little stationary bike time on a fifth day. However, this may not be possible for me until the summer is over.
Kitchen Witchery
At my last trip to the farmers market, I bought a bunch of corn, green beans, and a merely reasonable (instead of excessive) quantity amount of squash. I had some potatoes to use too so I made a shepherd’s pie but with beans, since I had some in the freezer. I mixed the beans with some frozen corn, peas, and carrots, and a bit of green beans, then mixed that with seasonings and a packet of brown gravy. Et voila. We had corn and asparagus pasta with ricotta, which is a summer favorite, along with some chicken for which I used the marinade from this kebab recipe (but obviously did not make kebabs) and it was quite good. I made everyone’s favorite corn soup from Decolonize Your Diet. The only change I make to this recipe is to blend the whole thing because I have learned that I do not enjoy chunks of a lot of types of vegetables.
As far as treats are concerned, I made the carrot cake muffin from 100 Morning Treats, but I have never met a muffin recipe that I didn’t want to tamper with so I added cinnamon bits. I skipped the frosting the recipe calls for (I love frosting but I didn’t want frosted muffins aka … cake?) and added a little streusel instead. I also made this zucchini cake which was very easy and successful. Cake is such a great way to eat more vegetables.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
