The Tomb Raiders' Guild

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.)

A current very-Canadian thing is that payments for the Loblaws (one of the national grocery giants) bread settlement (the Canadian Packaged Bread Class Actions Settlement) are trickling out to the tune of $49.01 per claimant. I've been seeing mention of it all week on Bluesky. The notification about mine arrived this morning. I doubt Loblaws even feels the settlement amount, and God knows the mainstream chains are wringing every cent out of people that they can, one way or another, but it's still nice to see them actually paying for a wrongdoing. I will take my not-quite-fifty-dollars, thank you.

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I was happy to see this morning that The Vegetable Gardener's Container Bible is on sale in ebook, so I've snagged that to supplement the hard copy of The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.

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On the weekend, scruloose and I decided that we'll take a Friday off to visit the local non-profit's seedling sale, since it's Friday to Sunday for the duration of its run. We were having a few very warm days, so we briefly considered doing it today, but thankfully sense prevailed, given that there was a frost warning last night and there's another tonight. So. Maybe next Friday, but going in two weeks is probably a better idea. (The local standard for "we're FINALLY sure there won't be more frost" is "after the full moon in June", but this year's isn't until June 30th. [There are two this month--May 1st and May 31st.])

(I know lettuce and spinach are very fond of cool weather, so I'm as reasonably sure as possible before going out to look that our seedlings will be okay, but I can't help a bit of reflexive worry.)

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Occasionally I remember that I can just upload images on Dreamwidth. Have a pic of some of our tiny lettuce seedlings on their second day poking up from the soil. (These are the Freckles variety, and yesterday it looked like we had some popping up from all the lettuce types except the Black Seeded Simpson.) The plant marker behind them, despite appearances, is not a popsicle stick; the markers we bought are noticeably larger than that.

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. ^_^

Reading: I thought Sarah Rees Brennan's All Hail Chaos was a very satisfying followup to Long Live Evil, which is always a relief. One more to go! (The third book's title has been announced as Kill Your Darlings; I don't think a release date has been set yet?)

Someday I'll learn to properly make note of whether an ebook is a novella. Fonda Lee's Untethered Sky? A novella. Hopefully I got it on sale, given novella pricing in general, but I did really enjoy it.

Current read: To Ride a Rising Storm (Moniquill Blackgoose), just a few chapters in.

I also read The Vegetable Gardener's Bible (10th anniversary/2nd edition) up to the point where it starts going vegetable by vegetable, and then only read about the ones we're planting. (And I skipped the chapter on compost, because it's about making compost, and WOW do we not have space for that, even if we had the inclination.)

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Watching: Another episode or two each of Justice in the Dark and Witch Hat Atelier.

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Growing: scruloose got the planter assembled last weekend (IIRC) and we put a fair amount of soil in at the time (enough to keep it solidly in place, basically), but today we finally got out and finished filling it with the veggie-friendly soil and compost and actually planted the various lettuce and spinach seeds, leaving room for (we hope) a basil plant and a cabbage to go in. scruloose also got the frame for the planter's covers assembled and installed (the mesh cover is in place now).

We still haven't decided the ultimate fate of the disappointing Bloomerang lilac, but while we were out there scruloose gave it an aggressive pruning back so that it isn't taking up such a large proportion of our very limited space.

I just checked out the window, and as of 3:10 PM, the shade line is riiiiight at the edge of the planter and about to start creeping over it. (Any tomatoes we buy and the other type of cabbage will be going in pots on the other side of it, so hopefully will get at least a bit more sunlight each day.) I don't know yet what time that space starts getting direct sunlight in the morning.

ETA: By 3:40 PM, the planter is completely shaded, and the shade line is hitting the edge of the pot we had the Tiny Tim tomato in last year.