flemmings | Reading

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This post covers the weekend.

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FRIDAY

Up early to do laundry. I found a Dirt Devil in the guest bedroom and vacuumed the carpet, and generally tidied up. Breakfast, folding the laundry, working on Foodie Finds. Kinda chillin. Running around yesterday to try and rescue my packages was a bit stressful, and a slow morning was appreciated.

In fact it turned into a splat day. Aside from walking to H-E-B for nonfat creamer for the Aunt and rushing downstairs to catch USPS when tracking showed my other package was being delivered (I caught them this time, yay!), I didn't do much else tried to nap, talked with the front desk about where to park my rental car, chatted with Jameson who is currently working on the Snowball Express event. I'm so proud of him, every day! This event is very heartfelt, and everyone at Disney is putting in their best to make it extra special.

Anyway, carpool to the theater, and a lovely normal show.

Afterward the band had a hang at a bar close to the hotel. Unfortunately on a Friday night in Austin with the huge University of Texas student population out to blow off steam, it was rather crowded! Tim (trumpet) found a pizza place that had good cocktails and beer and was being ignored by the students so we moved there.

The reason we had this hang is because soon it'll be the Christmas layoff for half the band (Dallas is another Rule 24 city). Gary (drummer) is taking his vacation at that time as well, and on Sunday we'll have a substitute flutist because Dane will be out getting Lasik surgery. Today and tomorrow are pretty much the only days where the whole band is together until the new year.

DAR (our MD) gave a lovely speech about how he enjoys working with us and appreciates us...he is the BEST boss I tell you! And not just because he showers us with compliments, but because of his actions. He advocates for us, listens to us, and supports us..and believe it or not, not all MDs do that! I think I truly can speak for all of us when I say that we all very much love having DAR as our MD!

Tim (trumpet) also gave a little speech thanking DAR for all of the above. We had drinks and pizza (I had a hot toddy, yum!) and companionship and good convos around the table. Best of all I didn't have to scream over music or extroverts to be heard :) It was a really great band hang, and I'm so glad that Dane (flute) organized it for us.

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SATURDAY

I was up early and my throat was sore, I am hoping that it's just from the acid/alcohol in the hot toddy because come ON, I have already been sick like 3x this year, and my Aunt is coming to visit!! Geez!! But it's easy to get run down when you live this lifestyle. It's been very cold in the pit, hard to sleep because of street noise at the hotel, and topping that off with a late night and alcohol probably wasn't the best life choice.

Anyway, at this point I've tried all of my Asian goodies, so here are the reviews for those!

Roasted Plain Yogurt: 9/10 This was delicious, just slightly sweet with a caramelized sugar flavor and extremely smooth creme brulee-like texture. I did a little research and found out that this yogurt is "roasted" by putting it in wooden barrels which are heated in a charcoal fire, and that caramelizes the sugars and gives it that lovely golden color. Absolutely would buy this again.

Mushroom Black Pepper Crackers: 8/10 Savory, earthy, peppery crackers. The only comparison I can think of right now is those Chicken in a Biskit crackers, though the flavor was different. The crackers were very light, crispy, and delicate. Enjoyed these a lot and would buy again.

Strawberry Sandwich Crackers: 4/10 These were the bummer, lol. They are pretty much as-seen on the package, just saltines with strawberry creme inside. But the "creme" was very grainy and not very strongly flavored, and the crackers didn't even have salt or anything. There are better Chinese tea cookies out there, I'd skip these.

Butter Flavored Peanuts: 7/10 These had a weird vanilla-like aftertaste, and have little or no salt, so they didn't evoke "butter" like I thought they would. They are still tasty, but just kinda bland and not as standout/unique as I'd hoped. Good but probably wouldn't buy again. (No pic, they're just peanuts :p )

I'm always grateful to get to try new things whether I end up liking them or not!

--- --- --- --- --- ---

On to Saturday. Took it easy in the morning and hydrated (I only had one drink last night but the sore throat freaked me out) and took care of some adulting tasks online until it was time to carpool to the theater. Two shows, and since traffic is so hideous here I packed dinner and opted to stay at the theater during the break.

The first show was good, and in this 2,900-seat house we were nearly sold out! Between shows I walked around the campus a bit (which I remember having done last time I was here too) as the sun was out and the weather was less-chilly. Then dinner and researching potential places to take my Aunt here in Austin.

The second show was also good, and for Broadway Cares afterward they had an actual prop for sale! One of the mugs from the "Gaston" number, signed by the entire cast! It was going for $750. I wonder if anyone bought it!

Harry-Francis-as-Lefou-and-Stephen-Mark-Lukas-as-Gaston.-Disneys-Beauty-and-the-Beast.-Photo-by-Matthew-Murphy.-c-Disney-1024x683.jpg

(Press image courtesy Disney)

The best part of MY night, personally, was when a middle school-aged girl came to the pit edge during intermission to excitedly tell me that she'd started playing the trombone in August, and loved it!! You go girl!! :D

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SUNDAY

I was up early to have breakfast before walking about a mile to fetch the rental car. That was easy, was back at the hotel within 30 minutes. Time to relax, get dressed for work, make sure that everything was ready for my Aunt, and eat lunch before carpool to the theater.

The afternoon show was fine and seemed well-attended. I'd planned to stay at the theater between shows and had brought my computer. DAR sent us some conductor cam footage (useful to give to subs and also for personal practice) so I busied myself downloading that and typed this post up in the meantime. After the night show I'll meet up with my Aunt and probably won't have time to write before we fall asleep. Hopefully the evening show goes well. Monday is a golden day, and I'm looking forward to spending the day with my favorite relative!

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Monday: Golden Day. Hanging out with my Aunt!

Tuesday: More time with my Aunt and one evening show.

oursin

This week's bread: Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), a bit dense and rough-textured - the recipe says medium oatmeal, which has seemed hard to come by for months now (I actually physically popped into a Holland and Barrett when I was out and about the other day and boy, they are all about the Supplements these days and a lot less about the nice organic grains and pulses, sigh, no oatmeal, no cornmeal, etc etc wo wo deth of siv etc). Bread tasty though.

Friday night supper: groceries arrived sufficiently early in the pm for me to have time to make up the dough and put the filling to simmer for sardegnera with pepperoni.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, 4:1 strong white/buckwheat flour, dried blueberries, Rayner's Barley Malt Extracxt, turned out very nicely.

Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Exotic Mushroom Mix (shiitake + 3 sorts of oyster mushroom) and garlic, served with baby (adolescent) rainbow carrots roasted in sunflower and sesame oil, tossed with a little sugar and mirin at the end, and sweetstem cauliflower (some of which was PURPLE) roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.

mallorys_camera

If I'm braindead, so be it!

I'll spend the rest of my life watching movies.

###

Last night, I watched something called The Friend, in which Naomi Watts inherits a massive Great Dane from Bill Murray after he commits suicide, and it was the saddest movie ever because even though Naomi Watts eventually comes to love the dog, at the beginning of the movie she doesn't, she's just stuck with him because nobody else will take him, so the movie made me think of the fragility and ultimate unenforceability of the compacts we form with companion animals.
This hit home for me because I don't love the two cats currently my companion animals as much as I've loved companion animals in the past.

Molly & Mabel are not cuddly cats.

They don't sit on laps. They don't like to be picked up and... packaged, enfolded with affection. They will struggle if I try to do this. They are wary & guarded with everyone but me: Gus reported he did not see them once while I was away in Ithaca over Thanksgiving, and Icky reported that while Molly kiska would sit at the head of the stairs and stare down at him, she would never come down.

Sometimes, they are even wary & guarded with me.

Mabel will still hiss at me occasionally—not because she is an aggressive cat but because she is a very frightened cat. She has a scar on her head swooping down from her ear to her left eye, and I suspect she was badly used as a kitten, poor little girl.

Clearly, they love me in their own way.

Molly always trails me downstairs whenever I cook and at night, crawls into bed alongside me and kneads on blankets there; Mabel is forever flopping down on my feet and exposing her plump belly: Pet me please!

It's so odd the way both of them adore having their bellies rubbed but can hardly bear to be touched on any other part of their anatomy! Most cats of my acquaintance have been the other way around.

They are quite the most talkative cats I have ever been around. Molly will meow to me for 15 minutes straight if I keep asking her, "What, Molly? What?"

"It's good that you have the two cats," Brian told me. "They're like your little family. You need a little family."

###

But I am disloyal. I keep thinking, It would be easier to move if I didn't have the two cats. It would be easier to travel.

And I feel bad for thinking that because I take the animal/human compact very seriously. These kiskas are so eccentric and idiosyncratic that no one would ever want them except me—and I only half want them.

They trust me.

They hardly trust anything else outside their own bodies and instincts.

But they trust me.

Betraying that trust would be like betraying the universe somehow.

But I'm tempted to sometimes.

Watch on YouTube

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-tunisia/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64422

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tunisia.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Salammbô	Gustave Flaubert	6,550	2,059
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization	Richard Miles	4,664	938
The Ardent Swarm	Yamen Manai	8,352	315
The Tremor of Forgery	Patricia Highsmith	2,833	622
Benny and Omar	Eoin Colfer	895	301
The African Quest	Lyn Hamilton	475	204
The Italian	Shukrī Mabkhoūt	2,737	26
The Pillar of Salt	Albert Memmi	459	155

Well, there are a couple of names on that list who I did not expect to see. But it’s a fair cop; both Patricia Highsmith and Eoin Colfer have put their protagonists in Tunisia for the whole book.

There is a real schism between LibraryThing and Goodreads here. Normally the ratio between the two is somewhere around ten or twenty GR raters for every LT user. But the books above by non-Tunisian writers score surprisingly well on LT – the ratio varies from 2.3 (The African Quest) to 5.0 (Carthage Must Be Destroyed). And a phenomenon I had previously observed, that Goodreads scores very well among Arabic speakers and LibraryThing very poorly, is dramatically illustrated here: The Italian, by Shukrī Mabkhoūt, has over a hundred times as many raters on GR as owners on LT.

This week’s winner is Salammbô, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert set around 140 BCE.during one of the wars between Rome and Carthage. It was his next novel after Madame Bovary and was followed by Sentimental Education. It sounds a bit melodramatic but was clearly popular enough at the time, and indeed now.

This week’s Goodreads winner is a 2017 novel, The Ardent Swarm (originally L’Amas ardent), by Yamen Manai, a Tunisian writer based in Paris. It is about a rural bee-keeper who goes to the city looking for answers to what is happening to his hives, and finds revolution in full flow when he gets there. It is only 174 pages and may well be worth a look.

I hesitated a bit about the eligibility of Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles, as it clearly covers the whole Carthaginian Empire, which at its peak covered all of North Africa apart from Egypt and chunks of Spain, Corsica, Sicily and Malta. But I decided in the end that it probably focuses enough on the territory which is now in Tunisia to be eligible.

I disqualified fourteen books for various reasons, too many to list them all. The only one I’m going to call attention to is The Muqaddimah, by the fourteenth-century writer Ibn Khaldūn, full name Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami, the introduction to his seventeen-volume history of the world, which is pioneering in its approach to historical verification and to sociology.

Next up is South Sudan, the last African country for a while, and also the first country that I have actually visited since the Netherlands back in September. After that will come Haiti, lovely Belgium and then Jordan.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-tunisia/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64422

james_davis_nicoll

Who killed the empire? More importantly, what does it take to get men to process their emotions?

Space Skimmer by David Gerrold

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/12/07/maria-de-buenos-aires/

heleninwales

49/52 for the group 2025 Weekly Alphabet Challenge

This week's theme was: W is for Wire

I recently bought some wireless bluetooth earbuds, but they don't work with some things, so these are still useful. The bluetooth earbuds are great with the tablet for listening to audiobooks. I can wander further away without losing the sound. They even work if I'm upstairs and the tablet is on the kitchen table. However, they didn't work properly with the laptop, so I still use the old earbuds for Zoom.

This was something of a desperation shot. I had had vague ideas about photographing some barbed wire, but the weather had been so bad this week that I didn't get out for a proper walk. However, this photo did give me a chance to try the new phone's camera on something close up.

Also I'd wanted to post this yesterday, but there was something wrong with Flickr's login so I couldn't upload the photo. All seems well today though.

Finally, I've just noticed that the 2025 Weekly Alphabet photo group has been created, so I'll be taking alphabet photos for another year. :-)

smokingboot

I woke thinking of it, half in a dream where the world or at least my part of it had flooded, and the problem was not just navigating rivers full of bodies but finding potable water. This tarot was a kickstarter (https://kahnselesnick.biz/tarot-of-the-drowning-world/1f9fbidm8k6otcxzg9xb6qv72vwl35) the minor arcana are interesting, though they don't necessarily say much, the major arcana become inevitably samey; they just hang there with symbols around them to be picked out and turned into patterns. But if the Pope doesn't bless and the Priestess doesn't read, if the Empress isn't pregnant and the Chariot isn't driving, what is this? The above link doesn't have a High Priestess, so I looked around the web and found it, a hopeless clutter. The deck is often pretty and haunting, but that may be all it is. I don't know why it turned up in my head.

This morning feels like I'm waiting for something. Most peculiar.

Edited to add: And here it is. News via mum, a cousin's daughter has been having difficulties with her thyroid, turns out there are malignant cells present. Hopefully early caught, early sorted, but still... she's in her teens. The family are beside themselves.

Gosh, why does the world feel so inimical right now? Not on my account, things are fine at this end, no reason to complain. But for so many - and I noticed this at the excellent party a couple of weeks back - there's been loss, redundancy, bereavement, divorce, disease,etc. Where did the good times go?

dine

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

sovay

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with

rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went immediately to fact-check this assertion because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

Current Music: Annie Bartholomew, "Mountain Dove Song"

ismo

I slept for 7 1/2 hours last night, which is quite unusual for me. The night before, I also slept late. I am cautiously optimistic that this means that going off the medication was a good choice. I still am having a lot of throat irritation, which troubles me. It's not as bad as it was, so I will give it a few more days and see if it gets better. Overall, I'm feeling better. The night before last, I dreamed that I was working for Giannis Antetokounmpo, the gigantic Greek-Nigerian basketball player. I was arranging social events for him and doing advance prep work for when he was traveling somewhere. I even knew how to spell his name in my sleep. This is impressive, because when I woke up, I had a lot of trouble remembering how to do that.

Today we had to go to the farmers market, to pick up another meat order from the farm ladies. They had turkeys left over from Thanksgiving, and we decided to get one. I can cook it and break it down, and then have ready-cooked meat to use over Christmas, and lots of nice broth to make Tron's favorite soup. I'm worried that she won't feel well enough to come for Christmas. If she comes, I will feed her soothing soup, and if she doesn't, I will visit her after Christmas and bring her some soup to stash in her freezer. While we were there, we also bought apple cider and pasties and a dozen eggs and some mushrooms and brussels sprouts, and a gift for one of the grandkids. As one does.

I cut up a lot of chicken for the potluck tomorrow and put the spice mix on it, and put it in the refrigerator. I can't proceed further without some ingredients I didn't have, so I had to put that off until tomorrow. And now I must go to bed and see if I can get another large helping of sleep.

mallorys_camera

When Ichabod called, I had this strong impulse not to answer the phone.

Because if I stop answering the phone when Ichabod calls, then I can pretend that nothing that happened to me last week when Ichabod was around actually happened!

I can reinvent myself as someone to whom embarrassing, humiliating things do not happen simply by cutting off every single person in my life who was around when the Embarrassing, Humiliating Thing did happen.

Easy peasy!

A simple & elegant solution!

Alas, I am not quite that crazy.

###

Honestly, I could not ask for a better son. I could not ask for two better sons. I should be on my knees thanking the Universe that my kids are so supportive and patient and protective.

But instead, I am filled with gall because the things that I like about myself are not the things my kids like about me, and thus, they will never know me as I want to be known. They will never see me as an artist. They will never see my life as a hero's adventure.

They will never see me.

So it goes.

###

Before Ichabod called, I forced myself to write 500 words on the Work in Progress. I hated every fucking word I wrote—Well. Not altogether true. The indefinite articles were okay—but that's all right because first draft, first draft, first draft, and the important things are momentum and consistency.

After Ichabod called, I hied over to New Paltz and spent a happy hour or so wafting from unspeakably adorable boutiquey shop to unspeakably adorable boutiquey shop, gift harvesting. It was a sunny afternoon, and I have acclimatized sufficiently to the colder temperatures to find 37° quite balmy.

###

Last night, I watched Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, a film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

When I was 14, I lied my way into a job as a candy girl at the Thalia movie house, and it was here I got my basic education in foreign films. Truffaut, Godard, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, the Brit kitchen sink auteurs, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger—I loved them all passionately.

I wouldn't say Nouvelle Vague is a particularly entertaining movie, but it did make me nostalgic. Once upon a time, people were more passionate about creating art than they were about enhancing their brand.

In the post-Warhol world, of course, there is no such thing as art—only marketing categories and money-laundering schemes. (When a Van Gogh painting sells for millions & millions of dollars, that's a form of money-laundering.)

I've seen Breathless at least a dozen times, but it's not my favorite Godard film by a long shot. My favorite is Bande à part for purely egoistical reasons: As an 18-year-old, I bore a striking resemblance to Anna Karena:

Watch on YouTube

skygiants

I am home! with my own cats! and my own computer!! This is very exciting because I have spent most of the last two weeks traveling, including last Monday when I spent about 24 hours total stumbling through different airports getting rerouted onto different flights before finally getting to achieve my dearest wish at that point, Be Horizontal.

In the course of that extremely long day I watched two French movies on planes:

( Au revoir là-haut/See You Up There )

( La venue de l'avenir/Colors of Time )

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/12/06/disappointing-dido-and-aeneas-from-versailles/

oursin

What is this that this thing is, when, okay, one is aware of all the woozing and grumbling about the various delivery services, but here is the ROYAL MAIL being pretty bad.

Yesterday I had an email saying they had delivered a parcel.

There was no parcel.

I looked at the proof of delivery and behold, that was Not Our Front Door they were sticking it through, it was the wrong colour and one could see the corner of a glass panel (ours is solid wood).

So I went on to their site to try and delve a bit further and, my dears, it is HORRENDOUS, one suspects it is designed to make people Just Give Up.

For example, the 'contact us' link, that actually goes to a 'Help and Support' page that lists a whole range of possible contingencies that one has to sort through to discover one that matches the occasion.

And once I had come across the Advice relating to item (presumably) misdelivered to wrong address, advice was, to contact the sender.

I have no bloody idea who the sender was being as how I was not even expecting a Royal Mail delivery, have been back over my emails and texts and no, I did not receive any previous message involving that particular tracking code.

There is a passing allusion to possible scanning errors.

The only means of contacting them is by phone, and when I tried, and had made my way through the menu options, the wait to speak to a person was 50 minutes.

I am leaving all this pro tem in case a) it was misdelivered and gets put back into the system b) it never actually existed in the first place.

But, really.

And in other, perhaps more minor (?) annoyances of Modern Life, what is this thing that this thing is of 'Cooking Instructions on Back of Label'? that you then have to detach, in the hope that it will actually come off in one piece that one can actually decipher....

ETA Parcel has now turned up, either in today's post or popped through letter box by neighbour to whom it was delivered in error.... Is friend's book I was in anticipation of.

fromtheheartofeurope_feed

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/cetinje/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64494

I went to Montenegro last weekend, maybe for the tenth time in my life; I was attending a conference of the European Movement, and indeed moderated the last panel of the day. On Friday evening I was settling into the pre-drinks for the conference dinner when a discreet cough alerted me to the arrival of President Milatović, less formally dressed than I was.

I realise that unfortunately it looks like there is a straw flask coming out of my head, but that’s life.

The first time I went to Montenegro was in January 2002, where I got invited to the Economics Faculty‘s Christmas party (Christmas is in January in Montenegro). The entire international diplomatic community of Podgorica was there, I think all three or four of them. I also attended the first independence day celebration for about ninety years at the presidential palace in July 2006. At last week’s conference, the opening dinner on Thursday was attended by at least a dozen full ambassadors. Times change.

On the Saturday, I had a late-ish departure and decided that it was about time that I visited the ancient capital of Cetinje (pronounced TSET-in-yeh, [t͡sětiɲe]), where the Prince-Bishops ruled during Montenegro’s independence. Unfortunately it turns out that all the museums except one are closed at weekends, so I mostly took pictures of the outsides of buildings and other public art. Next time I’ll try and come on a weekday.

Court Church in Ćipur, founded 1480, rebuilt 1890

Cetinje Monastery, founded 1482, rebuilt 1704, also formerly the centre of government

The government building built by Prince-Bishop Petar II Petrović-Njegoš in 1838 and named ‘Biljarda’ after his favourite game. Unfortunately not all that photogenic as it is wide and low.

The Blue Palace, built in 1884 as a residence for the heir to the throne, now one of the President’s official residences.

The 1910 Government House, now the National Museum

The former French embassy, built 1909-10, now part of the Central National Library. There is a vicious rumour that the architect Paul Guadet actually intended the plan for the French embassy in Cairo and there was a postal confusion, Research indicates that this is not actually true.

The old British Embassy, built 1912, now the town music academy. When Montenegro eventually became independent again in 2005, the UK’s initial representative in Podgorica was a local hire, a friend of mine who is now the Governor of the Central Bank.

Coincidentally, the only museum that was open on a Saturday was the one run by the Central Bank, the Museum of Currency which records the many denominations that have been used in Montenegro over the millennia. Montenegro now uses the euro.

Statues of a woman and a man in traditional costume outside the Ministry of Culture headquarters. I was not able to find the date or artist.

1983 monument to Ivan Crnojević, founder of the city (sculptor Anto Gržetić)

2013 monument by Dimitrije Popović, “To the Glory of Njegoš’ Thought”, commemorating Petar II Petrović-Njegoš

2022 statue of Princess Xenia Petrović-Njegoš, also by Dimitrije Popović

As you can tell, it was also a rather grey day, and I think Cetinje will reward a longer visit on a weekday when the sun is shining. But as I wove back down the mountains in my taxi back to Podgorica, the views were pretty stunning.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/cetinje/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64494

james_davis_nicoll

Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968; aged 21), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967; aged 22), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968; aged 21), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960; aged 29), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964; aged 25), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966; aged 23), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967; aged 22), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961; aged 28), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968; aged 21), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966; aged 23), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969; aged 20), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958; aged 31), nursing student

wychwood

My boss gave me a Christmas present, which is very nice of her! It's... a coffee mug (I only drink cold water) with snowy London landmarks on it (why).

In other puzzling news, I haven't had to wade through two inches of water to get to the station since last spring! I was assuming it was just because we'd had such a dry summer, but there have been several downpours which 100% would have flooded the station entrance last year now. We had a whole thing where the back of our site kept flooding and our management company spent months arguing with the water company about whose fault it was, and eventually the water company admitted it was them and did a bunch of work on the main road to fix it; I'm thinking the flooding by the station must have been part of the same problem, since it's the parallel road downslope. Who knew it was actually fixable without completely reconstructing the whole rear station entrance area! My wet boots thank them from the bottom of their soles.

I've been experimenting again with the automation software at work; at this stage it's a process of continuous failure - you create a process, you run it, it falls over, you spend ten minutes working out why, you fix that, it falls over at the next step, you spend fifteen minutes and call a colleague to fix that, rinse and repeat. On the other hand, the buzz from getting anything to work (I would say "a process" but I haven't actually got a complete flow for anything yet!!) is pretty good. And if I can get the flow I was working on yesterday up and running, it'll save me a couple of hours of extremely tedious manual checks every fortnight, and I'm all in favour of that.

oursin

Happy birthday,

gillo and

laughingrat!

sovay

Realizing last night that I have for decades thought of myself as a full year older than I chronologically can have been for my first real job—I was fifteen—led into a crumble-to-dust reminiscence about the number of bookstores once to be found in Lexington Center, which gave me some serious future shock when we walked into Maxima while waiting to collect our order from Il Casale and it occupied the exact same storefront as my second job, also as a bookseller; it was perhaps the one form of retail to which I was natively suited. My third job was assistant-teaching Latin, but my fourth I accidentally talked my way into by recommending some titles to a fellow browser.

spatch's anniversary gift to me was a paperback of Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023). It was teeth-shockingly cold and we all but ran with our spoils back to the car.

( Twenty-four hours every day. )

We had set out in search of resplendent food and found it in polpette that reminded us of the North End, a richly smoky rigatoni with ragù of deep-braised lamb, and a basil-decorated, fanciest eggplant parmesan I have encountered in my life, capped with panna cotta in a tumble of wintrily apt pomegranate seeds. Hestia investigated delicately but dangerously. After we had recovered, Rob showed me Powwow Highway (1989) right before it expired from the unreliable buffer of TCM because he thought and was right that I would love its anger and gentleness and hereness, plus its '64 Buick which has already gone on beyond Bluesmobile by the time it is discovered in a field of clunkers and a vision of ponies. It has no budget and so much of the world. As long as we're in it, we might as well be real.

Current Music: David Byrne, "What Is the Reason for It? (feat. Hayley Williams)"

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Off the Cliff

The rodents are running hurrah! hurrah!

Reading

Austin, TX 2025 part 3: Band Hang, Little Treats, Aunt Prep

Culinary

Molly & Mabel

The best known books set in each country: Tunisia

Space Skimmer by David Gerrold

María de Buenos Aires

Wired Earbuds

The Tarot of the Drowning World

we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto

Sure as the morning light when frigid love and fallen doves take flight

WhiteTailedDoe of Ember

New Wave

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Disappointing Dido

Deth of Siv, etc

Cetinje

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resisting entropy

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What does it do when we're asleep?

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