Cranky. Old. Man?

Reading: I am still slowly working through Braiding Sweetgrass, which is well suited to a gradual reading of one chapter at a time. I've also started in on The Vegetable Gardener's Container Bible. And I started reading Diary of a Keen Gardener (Mary Keen), but I think I'm bouncing off it after a chapter; no slight to the book itself, but so far I don't think it's my thing.

I finished reading To Ride a Rising Storm and now have to wait for however long for the next book. (Ah, for that window of childhood when I was quite young and ransacking the adult SFF section of the library and thus completed series were in epic supply. OTOH, it was all by definition books from the '80s or earlier, so.) I'm currently reading Eden Robins' Remember You Will Die, which is really neat so far.

And my copy of the new Yotsuba&! (vol. 16) arrived and I devoured it almost immediately. It remains the one manga series that gets read AT ONCE whenever there's a new release. It remains impossibly charming. It's also not a series I would ever have imagined making me rear back in surprise--the scope of the story is incredibly small! It's a slice-of-life about a five-year-old!--but this volume did that. Amazing.

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Watching: A bit more Justice in the Dark (we're now one episode shy of halfway through) and a bit more Witch Hat Atelier. (I have now confirmed via Goodreads that I only ever read vol. 1 of the Witch Hat Atelier manga, back in 2020. The timing may explain why I remembered essentially nothing about it.)

I have an excuse to use my lychee icon! On Monday we were downtown during the daytime (not a frequent occurrence anymore) and the large Asian grocer with the expensive-but-good fruit selection had lychee. (Alarmingly expensive lychee, frankly, so I'm extra glad the package we got was delicious. Last year we didn't make it down there at all.)

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I also have an excuse for a Yotsuba&! icon, but what can you do. There's a new volume coming out (in English) this month!!! Who knew? (Which is to say when I found out from seangaffney the other day, he was surprised too, and he has his finger on the pulse of the industry, unlike me.) The last volume (15) came out in fall 2021, which is actually more recent than I was thinking. (And vol. 14 was back in 2018.)

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A few days ago we cleaned out the fridge's freezer, which had been...let's say "a while" and managed to free up some space. I think that was what reminded me that late last summer we'd pre-weighed some frozen blueberries into amounts for a couple of specific recipes that we'd made and really liked last year. Whoops. Fall distracted us a little with apple baking, although we didn't really do much of that, either.

So I went rummaging through the terrifying piles of printed-out recipes, trying to ID what we'd made, and came up not emptyhanded but not triumphant, either; I was very confident that the cake I was thinking of wasn't there. Dreamwidth posts to the rescue! A journal search for "blueberry" reminded me that I was thinking of the Smitten Kitchen Strawberry Summer Sheet Cake, just with blueberries.

We made plans to make the cake! On Tuesday we ate a quick supper and I had had eggs out of the fridge for a while when I realized that not only had I not taken butter out to warm up, we didn't have the right butter in the fridge. In the freezer, yes. Awkward. scruloose deemed the eggs still cool enough to just go back into the fridge, and baking was put off. Maybe tonight? (A box of butter sticks did also make it into the fridge on Tuesday.)

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When we were out watering the planter last night, we found the tiniest beginnings of lettuce seedlings! (Not of all the varieties, but maybe all but one?) Seeds in the ground Saturday and visible beginnings Wednesday seems kinda amazing, although I did know lettuce grows quickly. It's almost infinitely too soon to declare lettuce-growing victory, obviously, but still pleasing. ^_^