madbaker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
madbaker) wrote2025-09-28 02:57 pm
madbaker) wrote2025-09-28 02:57 pm
Entry tags:
Hali Mary
This week's Resolution Recipe: Sesame Halibut Steaks.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
madbaker (madbaker) wrote2025-09-24 10:55 am
madbaker) wrote2025-09-24 10:55 am
Entry tags:
Three Strikes
We didn't finish watching The Gentlemen. What caused us to metaphorically throw the remote against the wall:
- My previous rant about continually enabling trainwreck family members.
- The weed-growing organization is supposedly professional and relatively low-drama. So why is the pothead botanist put in charge of delivering a van-full of product? He's a genius at breeding pot, but a total idiot otherwise. He'd be kept in the grow lab and any other responsibilities would go to someone with baseline competency.
- The pothead botanist brings a prospective girlfriend into said (massive, underground) grow lab. There's no security?
Not so much "deus ex stupida" as lazy script-writing.
hrj (hrj) wrote2025-09-24 09:30 am
hrj) wrote2025-09-24 09:30 amEntry tags:
On Reading in Retirement
Perhaps the odd thing is that my overall reading patterns *haven't* changed that much in retirement, although I do have more time for it. A substantial amount of my reading continues to be non-fiction for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, and that continues. In fact, I have to fight the temptation to spend most of my productive time working on that. But today I wanted to talk more about fiction.
Pre-retirement, my pattern was to have an audiobook going for commuting and my lunchtime bike ride (though bike rides were also for podcasts, since they fit better). If an audiobook really grabbed me, I'd find excuses to do things (like house or yard work) to continue listening. I generally also had one print book in progress at any given time, but they took a long time to finish because I didn't have a fixed context for reading. (Sometimes I'd read them during the break in my weekend bike rides.) Despite doing most of my buying via ebooks, they mostly just piled up because by the time I was done with work and other things, I didn't want to stare at a screen any more.
So what's changed? Well, for one thing, I cancelled my Audible subscription as part of paring down fixed expenses while I get settled into my new budgeting. But I decided it was well past time to actually get a local library card, and now I'm discovering the joys of Libby for audiobooks. I can't necessarily get the instant gratification (and there are plenty of audiobooks they just don't have), but I always have something going. And the borrowing logistics mean that once I've borrowed an audiobook, I make sure to prioritize it.
Print books aren't making any more of a dent on my time than they did previously, in part because my bike ride breaks are pretty much all LHMP all the time. So consumption is about the same.
Ebooks are getting a bit more of my attention. I'm trying to keep the iPad with the books (long story, two iPads for different purposes) charged up so that I can grab it when I'm in the mood. I'm gradually capitulating to the need to track about four different ebook apps, since Apple Books can get weird about showing me non-Apple books that I've side-loaded via the laptop. (It's not all-or-nothing. Some non-Apple books show up on my phone but not the iPad. And some do show up on the iPad.)
That brings us to reading during my recent New Zealand trip. Part of the trip plan was to include lots of relaxation time, and I cued up a bunch of books I'd been wanted to get to. One thing I found (when giving myself time and context for reading) was that I want to be more hard-nosed about DNFing when a book just isn't working for me. And one of the things that more and more doesn't work for me is books with blah prose.
There were several of those during the NZ trip. Stories that had a good premise, and themes that should be appealing to me, but the writing was just...not good. Not bad. Not awful. Just not *good*. Stories where if felt like the author was explaining the story to me rather than telling it. Stories where there were too many WTF moments in the plotting. Stories where the prose was relentlessly pedestrian. And because I started half a dozen novels in quick succession on the trip, it was easy to compare the ones that *did* work for me. Books with singing prose. Books with solid plot and character work. Books where I didn't want to get up from the couch until I'd finished them.
I need to get caught up with my "things I've read" posts, which will have more specifics.
Pre-retirement, my pattern was to have an audiobook going for commuting and my lunchtime bike ride (though bike rides were also for podcasts, since they fit better). If an audiobook really grabbed me, I'd find excuses to do things (like house or yard work) to continue listening. I generally also had one print book in progress at any given time, but they took a long time to finish because I didn't have a fixed context for reading. (Sometimes I'd read them during the break in my weekend bike rides.) Despite doing most of my buying via ebooks, they mostly just piled up because by the time I was done with work and other things, I didn't want to stare at a screen any more.
So what's changed? Well, for one thing, I cancelled my Audible subscription as part of paring down fixed expenses while I get settled into my new budgeting. But I decided it was well past time to actually get a local library card, and now I'm discovering the joys of Libby for audiobooks. I can't necessarily get the instant gratification (and there are plenty of audiobooks they just don't have), but I always have something going. And the borrowing logistics mean that once I've borrowed an audiobook, I make sure to prioritize it.
Print books aren't making any more of a dent on my time than they did previously, in part because my bike ride breaks are pretty much all LHMP all the time. So consumption is about the same.
Ebooks are getting a bit more of my attention. I'm trying to keep the iPad with the books (long story, two iPads for different purposes) charged up so that I can grab it when I'm in the mood. I'm gradually capitulating to the need to track about four different ebook apps, since Apple Books can get weird about showing me non-Apple books that I've side-loaded via the laptop. (It's not all-or-nothing. Some non-Apple books show up on my phone but not the iPad. And some do show up on the iPad.)
That brings us to reading during my recent New Zealand trip. Part of the trip plan was to include lots of relaxation time, and I cued up a bunch of books I'd been wanted to get to. One thing I found (when giving myself time and context for reading) was that I want to be more hard-nosed about DNFing when a book just isn't working for me. And one of the things that more and more doesn't work for me is books with blah prose.
There were several of those during the NZ trip. Stories that had a good premise, and themes that should be appealing to me, but the writing was just...not good. Not bad. Not awful. Just not *good*. Stories where if felt like the author was explaining the story to me rather than telling it. Stories where there were too many WTF moments in the plotting. Stories where the prose was relentlessly pedestrian. And because I started half a dozen novels in quick succession on the trip, it was easy to compare the ones that *did* work for me. Books with singing prose. Books with solid plot and character work. Books where I didn't want to get up from the couch until I'd finished them.
I need to get caught up with my "things I've read" posts, which will have more specifics.
madbaker (madbaker) wrote2025-09-23 08:00 am
madbaker) wrote2025-09-23 08:00 am
Entry tags:
aka Sausage Wellington-oid
This week's Resolution Recipe: Meatloaf Roll.
"This is like meatloaf meets Wellington meets sausage roll. Which can never really be a bad thing."
( Read more... )
"This is like meatloaf meets Wellington meets sausage roll. Which can never really be a bad thing."
( Read more... )
madbaker (madbaker) wrote2025-09-22 06:42 am
madbaker) wrote2025-09-22 06:42 am
Shake shake shake, shake your booty
Around 3 AM we were awakened by an earthquake. Not a big one, but just one sharp jolt - so it felt close. Turns out it was around Berkeley and only a 4.3. The bad news: I did not get back to sleep before my 5 AM alarm. The good news: Miss Bea was unsettled and wanted pets and scritches. She stayed by my side for an hour, much longer than she normally deigns to pay attention to me.
hrj (hrj) wrote2025-09-18 01:39 pm
hrj) wrote2025-09-18 01:39 pmEntry tags:
Birds and Bits
I've posted the birdwatching report from my New Zealand trip on my Alpennia blog (https://alpennia.com/blog/new-zealand-birding). The non-bird parts to come.
Today's rhythm was thrown off by the need to check in at 11:30 on my potential jury duty service. Which also meant that when I went online to set up an optometry appointment, I didn't think I could commit to the "earliest possible" slot next Tuesday, with the next options starting in late October. And then when I checked in and found I was excused from jury duty, that next Tuesday slot had been snapped up.
It became clear to me on the NZ trip that I really needed to update my vision prescriptions, though in part this was because I was doing a lot more close-distance reading than usual and it became clear that one of my eyes has drifted more than the other. Then coincidentally, yesterday I got a note from Kaiser saying that my current glasses prescription was about to expire (it's been two years) and I should make an appointment.
But anyway, since I didn't want to go off on the bike this morning because of the check-in, I wrote up my birding notes. And now I'm thinking that since my routine is already off, I could just go off script entirely for the rest of the day. (Yes, yes, I have a fixed routine in retirement. What can I say?) Maybe I'll do something wild and crazy like pick rose hips. I have three or four bushes that have a lot of hips--enough to do something interesting with, anyway--and it might be fun to try some comparisons.
Today's rhythm was thrown off by the need to check in at 11:30 on my potential jury duty service. Which also meant that when I went online to set up an optometry appointment, I didn't think I could commit to the "earliest possible" slot next Tuesday, with the next options starting in late October. And then when I checked in and found I was excused from jury duty, that next Tuesday slot had been snapped up.
It became clear to me on the NZ trip that I really needed to update my vision prescriptions, though in part this was because I was doing a lot more close-distance reading than usual and it became clear that one of my eyes has drifted more than the other. Then coincidentally, yesterday I got a note from Kaiser saying that my current glasses prescription was about to expire (it's been two years) and I should make an appointment.
But anyway, since I didn't want to go off on the bike this morning because of the check-in, I wrote up my birding notes. And now I'm thinking that since my routine is already off, I could just go off script entirely for the rest of the day. (Yes, yes, I have a fixed routine in retirement. What can I say?) Maybe I'll do something wild and crazy like pick rose hips. I have three or four bushes that have a lot of hips--enough to do something interesting with, anyway--and it might be fun to try some comparisons.