Disobey Gravity

Before even more time passes, I want to tell you all that last weekend it was our Jinksy!bear (and Claudia!kitten)'s thirteenth birthday. I'm managing not to let my brain actually crunch the numbers to figure out exactly when in the coming year he'll (please, God) cross the line of "has now lived half of his life without her".

He's unmistakably showing his age, although he doesn't yet seem old. I can never shake the fact that when I was a kid, thirteen would have seemed OLD for a cat; it always seemed to be such a marvel when a cat lived well into their teens. (One of my childhood cats, Jenny, lived until after scruloose and I moved home from Toronto! She made it to nineteen, which is still a fairly impressive age now.)

I will forever wish we'd had the chance to see what kind of little old lady cat Claud would have been, and forever be grateful for how long we've had Jinksy. He continues to be just ridiculously sweet. We are so lucky to have him and the blues.

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Today wasn't scruloose's first market visit of the year, but it was mine. They went to pick up a meat order at one of the year-around main ones last week, and that errand meant that we didn't go to the little in-walking-distance market when it had its first day of the season last Saturday. But today we made it out, and since there wasn't much of a crowd--presumably due to the steady, if not heavy, rain passing through this morning--there were still plenty of strawberries available when we got there. (I wasn't surprised that things were quiet with the weather, and obviously financial pressures are hitting so many people brutally hard, but it was still quieter than I expected, esp. given that it was the first of the strawberries.)

First market haul of the year: strawberries (two quarts), salad greens, a sweet potato, eggs, a small dense sourdough loaf, kimchi, and kimbap (the sort that look exactly like onigiri--triangular and fully wrapped in nori, rather than rolled).

Reading: On the fiction front, over the last couple of weeks I read:

--Remember You Will Die (Eden Robins), which is SF told entirely through news and obits and correspondence and does some very neat things. It didn't give me any particular feelings, but I enjoyed it.

--The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty), which is pretty much a delight from start to finish.

--The Book of Love (Kelly Link) unfolds in all kinds of interesting ways and had a lot of...emotional momentum?...for me, although I didn't come away with deep feelings about or attachment to any of the characters.

--The Everlasting (Alix E. Harrow), which I finished a few days ago and have seen several people discussing since (probably because it's up for a Hugo). I liked it more than some of you did, but didn't love it.

I haven't started another novel(la) since. After talking to Kas (who's most of the way through the series-so-far) last weekend, I went ahead and put the second Dungeon Crawler Carl on hold, and somehow my brain seems to think that's what I'm going to read next, which is awkward given that I don't expect it to arrive in the super near future.

On the nonfiction front, I read a bit more of Braiding Sweetgrass, flipped through some gardening books, and started rereading Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace in hard copy (I read it in ebook almost exactly a year ago). I really like the feel and the spirit of this, and it's packed full of information that flows in a way that makes it hard for me to actually retain a lot of said information. I picked up the hard copy from Book Outlet in hopes that having a physical book would give me better odds of actually being able to usefully refer to bit of it.

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Watching: Some more of both Justice in the Dark and Witch Hat Atelier.

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Growing: Yesterday we acquired and planted five tomato seedlings (and a few other seedlings that still need planting). More on that in another post later, hopefully.

The tab situation doesn't bear thinking about. I have so many tabs open with posts I want to reply to. I don't know how good my odds are of getting through them, friends. :/

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Our Monday morning dental appointments were scheduled to start at 9 AM. At about 7:57, we got a call canceling them because the hygienist was out sick; someone from the front desk made the successful effort to call us before the office opened in hopes of catching us before we made the drive, which we appreciated. (Shame about the four-hour carshare booking we still had to pay for. Ah, well.) So that's unfortunate, but I'm glad the hygienist did call out rather than sharing air with patients. I've rebooked us for next month, and here's hoping local covid levels will still be low then.

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Suddenly we're having weather that actually feels like early summer, at least during the day. Still not entirely confident that there won't be frosts at all, but nonetheless, Friday we're hoping to venture out and buy tomato seedlings and more soil to plant them in. We still have a heap of fabric plant pots of a few sizes (which we need to shake out and inspect in case something has somehow gone horribly wrong with them during their several years of disuse, and replace if need be, but here's hoping not) and several tomato ladders to put to use.

(That "hoping to venture out" uncertainty is primarily because we're both taking the day off, but gambling and not booking a carshare in advance so that we don't have to commit to a departure time or try to guess how long we'll be out. Hopefully on a weekday we'll be able to get a flex car--that is, a first-come-first-served car that you can just park anywhere in ~the zone~ [which doesn't include our place, but comes fairly close, so there are quite often cars parked right along its border] when you're done with it, leaving it up for grabs--without too much trouble.)

A random garden-adjacent thing that keeps annoying me even though there's nothing to be done about it: given last year's drought situation, I keep having the thought of buying some sort of rain barrel. But the roof of the townhouse row is flat and all of the rainwater channels down into the drains through the building, so there's no spout or anything where the water can actually be caught. Alas. So I wish the notion would stop popping into my head as if it's something we've never considered.