Reading: Mostly non-fiction last week, oddly. Still slowly reading through An Everlasting Meal, as well as flipping through a couple of new cookbooks in hard copy*. I also started reading Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.

As for fiction, I started--brace yourself--listening to an audiobook. I don't really do audio formats at all! But scruloose has never read Murderbot, and the audiobooks seem to be WIDELY beloved, so I thought maybe we could follow Kas and Ginny's example and listen to one or more of those together. So I borrowed All Systems Red from Hoopla (another first for me), and yesterday we listened to the first three chapters or so. (I highly doubt I'm going to take up non-music audio media in any meaningful way, but who knows? Three chapters was definitely not enough to make it stop feeling weird, though.)

*A small order from Book Outlet contained What Goes with What: 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities (Julia Turshen); Half the Sugar, All the Love: 100 Easy, Low-Sugar Recipes for Every Meal of the Day (Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel), which crossed my radar early on in the "must keep an eye on blood sugar" process and stuck because it doesn't use any artificial sweeteners (since I've never met one I didn't hate); Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; and the first and third installments of the Murderbot Diaries consolidated editions, which means I now own books 1, 2, 6, and 7 in hard copy.

Not sure if I'll just keep an eye out for the second volume to turn up there too or if I'll cave and just buy it. I'm glad there's a release that combines novellas! But I'm also eyeing the hard copy option for Network Effect and wondering if there's going to be a release of it that matches this set. I like all the original covers, but I also like my physical books to match. (Does anyone know if there's any plan for a matching rerelease?)

(Am I still grumpy that--unless something's changed?--it seems like the first three of Wells' Raksura books got released in mass market paperbacks, which I pounced on because that's my preferred format, but the fourth and fifth didn't? YES.)

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Cooking/Baking: Mid-week, scruloose picked up some strawberries that tasted and looked fine but had a slightly odd texture (kind of...mushy? But nothing was visibly wrong?), so we turned most of them into this Buttermilk Blueberry Strawberry Breakfast Cake. It was tasty enough, but not so tasty that I immediately understood why it's one of the two most popular recipes on the site; that said, in addition to swapping the berries, we didn't have fresh lemon zest on hand and used the granulated peel from Silk Road (and also, my impression is that while blueberry and lemon are an iconic flavor pairing, that's not true of strawberry and lemon) and did the vinegar-in-milk substitution for buttermilk. So who knows.

Yesterday scruloose had to go downtown to one of the large markets because that's the only place our usual meat guy vends and we'd placed a fairly large order (sadly, to replace one from a few weeks ago that met a tragic end by not getting put into the freezer soon enough). But en route, they stopped at the little corner market and got two containers each of raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries, plus some new potatoes. So now we are SWIMMING in berries, which is a wonderful state of affairs. I imagine there's no way we'll make it through all of them by just eating them straight, so we'll see what we wind up doing.

On Bluesky, Wenella reports that "Dongjj Rescue, starring Zhu Yilong, Ni Ni, and Leo Wu, will be released in the US on Aug 22, 2025. The film will be released in mainland China on Aug 8." Time to start haunting the Cineplex site in hopes of Canadian showtimes!

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I took today off in hopes of getting a bit more sleep (done, although not an impressive amount) and actually starting in on my next manga rewrite. I have just over a couple of hours before I need to venture out, so...we'll see how the latter goes in practice.

I can't remember if I've mentioned here that almost two months ago, I concluded that I'm going to sell my poor basically-unused etrike. ( In case I haven't, here's the gist )

Anyway, this comes to mind because for once I have a little venture that would, in fact, be perfect for taking the trike if I were at all in the habit of/comfortable with using it. Ah, well.

In related news, at least we're not under a heat warning anymore, unlike the last few days. (It's still currently 22°C and humid as hell, resulting in a 30°C humidex, and it's supposed to be a couple degrees warmer later this afternoon. But it's still an improvement.)