Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I hesitate to call it traumatised, because it's not quite that personal; I'm fine, my family are fine, it's the shadow of living with Unprecedented Times.

Sounds like I'm talking about COVID-19, and maybe I will be in a few years, but right now that's a weird sort of normal. It's gone on so long and taken up far more of my life in Bern than was pandemic-free that it's just part of the furniture now. Australia's apocalypse summer, though, I flew out in the middle of it. I didn't realise how much it would haunt me. It's possible that part of the reason I've been less shaken by the pandemic, by being abroad in a pandemic, than many is that it hit just after the fire danger passed (literally: the fire crisis response headquarters in NSW was handed over to the multi-agency COVID response team, one crisis handing over to another). This Australian summer is cooler and humid in the east; Perth is having a mini-apocalypse right now, but it's not been a whole summer of it. I remember tensing myself in spring for a combined apocalypse, an Australian-intensity rerun of the western US's fire season with plague related shelter-in-place orders clashing with fire evacuations, and somehow, somehow, the apocalypse did not double down.

Today, I looked out the window and the sky was, sort of, still grey, but the houses across from me looked to yellow. It unnerved me. 'If I was in Sydney,' I said to my Australian partner, 'I'd be saying it was bushfire weather.' It wasn't. 'A couple of times in Geneva we had Sahara dust storms,' I said. 'I don't think they come this far north.' Turns out, they do. All this afternoon Swiss twitter has been sharing pictures of the yellow-filtered sky. It's eerie, my friends say. Creepy. I remember thinking that in Geneva. In Canberra, when we had dust storms there. I'd photograph it, keen to show people the weird-ass sky.

Despite the swiss news assuring us there is no risk to health in the cloud, the particles are too small, I couldn't convince myself to go outside. I couldn't must the 'hey isn't this weird, document it for posterity' energy. My brain was reaching for 'this is weird THIS IS APOCALYPTIC oh glod document it to try to get some sense of enormity oh glod', but of course... it's not. It's just the weather here. It's not even a climate-change driven extraordinary feature (q: why aren't there literary references to this phenomeon? Am I reading the wrong literature I've never even seen a 'lo in that year there was an orange sky' medieval chronicle type thing quoted in this context!).

My eyes and instincts were telling me something unthinkable, dangerous, literally deadly was happening, and yet... well, it is, but not because of the sand. That's the pandemic, the background noise.

Is this trauma? I suppose it is. The Journal of Traumatic Stress already have a COVID issue. People are talking about a generation-defining traumatic experience akin to the Great Depression. The Apocalypse Summer (what are we calling it? I've seen it called Black Summer, having outstrippped both Black Friday and Black Saturday) must surely be the same, and yet. It's disappeared into the recesses of our minds as the pandemic rolls on, and this present Australian summer has been cool and humid.

I'm reading the Winter (Aus) issue of Meanjin. Slow, I'm behind on issues, having trouble consuming content away from the screen. I'm reading articles written in (australian) autumn, when the fires were barely passed and the pandemic just manifesting itself. I feel disoriented in time. Lucy Treloar writes of 'Writing the Apocalypse':

I’m so angry with politicians that I take beta-blockers to calm my racing heart before going to sleep. Geoff Goldrick writes: ‘2019 may go down in history as Year Zero of the climate apocalypse. The tsunami of extreme events has been so relentless that each is quickly forgotten in favour of its successor.’

He lists the events. I had forgotten the Menindee fish kills and the immolation of Tasmanian forests dating to the last ice age. I had forgotten.

There are two more months of summer to go, but news broadcasts have stopped mentioning the word. Effortlessly, the boundaries of that old season blur and disappear. We have ‘bushfire season’ now. There is no ‘summerness’ this year. As a matter of course the weather report now includes fire alerts, the status of existing fires, the winds that will exacerbate them, fire probability and fire bans. Also the temperature.

I had forgotten the first summer of 2019, too. I wasn't there, of course, but it was a constant background to my winter and spring, via the social media. The fish kills, in particular, shook me. And I had forgotten. That won't be Year Zero: Year Zero will be 2020, with the second half of the 2019-20 fires, and then floods, and then pandemic, and then storms and more pandemic. All those other horrors of 2019 will be relegated, in our story-telling brains, to 'ominous build-up'.

I'm reading work written in Australia as I was settling in here in Bern, work that grapples with the reality of the fires and says: surely, now we must do something. Work that looks at the early stages of COVID-19 and says: our economic system is bankrupt, surely, now, we must do something. I feel cruel, like I have to let these essays down and say: oh, you sweet summer children. You underestimate our clinging to the old. You underestimate our collective ability to cope: faced with two crises at once, we can deny both.

I'm reading essays about the bushfire crisis and I'm homesick. Homesickness smells like smoke, now. I left Australia over 12 months ago. I was only home for four months, but that was the longest time in seven years, and most of it pervaded with the smell of smoke. I miss the smell of smoke. I look outside to the sepia-toned sky, and it doesn't smell of smoke, and my hindbrain is afraid because it looks like apocalyptic danger; and yet, I miss the smell of smoke.

I am not quite shaking, writing this. And I miss the smell of smoke.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for fun: Everina Maxwell's 'Winter's Orbit', which I bought even though I have a huge TBR, because I was in a Mood and wanted to binge-read. Did I succeed? No. Reading in fits and starts, still. I'm overall liking the improvements on plot and intrigue in comparison to the 'online draft' version as we are calling it now.
Poetry: Nothing more with Paradise Lost since the Listening Post update.
Lit Mag: As you may have gathered, Winter 2020 Meanjin.
Non Fiction for Personal Interest: A great many things at once. Tillie Walden's 'Spinning', still. bell hooks and foucault, both of which I dipped into for the book proposal but am determined to actually read properly this time.
For work: Also a great many things. Annotating the Jost collection 'Chaucer's Humor', which continues to be stodgy but useful. 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works', in fits and starts. Angie Abdou's A Canterbury Trail, which I am starting to realise will not actually involve a story-telling competition, and thus is less useful than I had hoped.

Recently Finished: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING hard copy since last update. Ooops.

Online Fiction:

Re-read The Archivist by Eris Young (Selkie Magazine). Read it aloud to my partner this morning, which I really enjoyed. One day I should read them a story that doesn't involve violence and emotional manipulation, but today is not that day.

Sunny Moraine (Lightspeed Magazine), Note to Self: in the form of an unpublished essay with marginal notes to self, concerning the 'quantum mirror'.

Up Next: The work related TBR continues to be far bigger than i can feasibly read, despite having taken a 'Reading Week' this week. Ugh.

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Some links:

Carolyn Holbrook (Australian Policy and History), Managing the Federation During a Pandemic: Spanish Influenza and COVID-19. How the premier of WA got locked out of his own state in 1919.

Amal Awad (Meanjin Winter 2020), Sage Tea, Spices and Spaces: short memoir piece on cookery and heritage.

Lisa Morrow (Meanjin Winter 2020), Unpacking home: thoughts of a displaced traveller. I see my future in this and I'm not sure I like it.

Ginger Gorman (Meanjin Winter 2020), Breaking the Compassion Drought. Two things here: when Gorman started talking about 'radical empathy' and its long history I was Extremely Me and astonished to find her sources only went back as far as the 1950s, and not to 'caritas' via medieval mysticism. Honestly. And more significantly, Gorman's Troll Hunting has been on my radar for a long time; I have thought of it as a good thing based on what I heard of it, but it is VERY hard to have confidence in her perspective about change through radical empathy in this year of 'ffs don't platform Nazis'.

Angela Smith (Meanjin Winter 2020), Shattering the neoliberal fairytale. I liked the structure of this - Smith was in Paris in January for the taxi strike - but her confidence that the initial injection of Aus govt financial support for individuals in the early COVID phase presaged a rethink of the capitalist system... oh sweet summer child.

Sophie Cunningham (Meanjin Winter 2020), If you choose to stay we may not be able to save you. Again, the ... forward-lookingness if not exactly optimism. Cunningham felt, with fire season at her back, that there was finally urgency for action on climate change. That seems to have slid off the agenda, and the people who ought to be holding both parties to account in Aus are all busy trying to hold them to account over welfare issues, Australians stranded abroad, police violence, and and and and.

Lucy Treloar (Meanjin Winter 2020), Writing the apocalypse. This essay poses a fascinating question: when will we start to see climate change in realist fiction? Treloar argues that incorporating environmental destruction and awareness thereof into realist fiction gets you shunted to the genre of 'cli-fi', but at some point that has to give way. I'm going to quote, again. It's SUCH a good essay:

Of course realist fiction, any fiction, has always depicted a curated reality: the cast of characters culled to avoid confusion, conversations condensed, action compressed, and the plot shaped around thematic or genre concerns. They present a constructed ‘seeming’ truth with a satisfying plot arc, which in the confines of the text the reader accepts as reality. In some ways novels are strong. They can hold worlds, universes, multitudes of feeling, thinking, understanding, wondering. But throw a diamond on a beach and fail to answer the question it raises and the novel’s foundations tremble. It’s not so much a loose end as a loose start. An uncanny weather event or a strange sight—a toxic algal bloom, a drowned landscape, or thousands of cuttlefish washed onto a shore—present a similar problem. Mention them and they catch the readers’ attention and threaten to pull the novel out of shape. It is the particularity of an event that presents problems. How then do you depict climate change when its effects are so variously weird?

Joanna Hershon (Guernica), Family Man. 'I never knew my uncle. But it's the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.'

Caitlin Welsh (Mashable), How online advice columns teach us to tell our own stories. Hey, I resemble that remark. Before online advice, I had Margaret Clark's 'Secret Girls Stuff' books.

Olivier Pauchard (SwissInfo), Salt: A Raw Material. This isn't an article so much as a... webbook? Idek, it doesn't work well on mobile though. This thingy, whatever it is, is an introduction to the Swiss salt industry. I have now learned there is part of the old 'Via Salina' which ran from Arc-en-Senans in France to Bern, for the transport of French Jura salt, still paved and hikeable near Yverdon Les Bains. I desire to go at once. There's also a Swiss Salt Museum, which I would go to asap if all museums weren't closed.

Kirsta A Murchison (History Today), Medieval Minims: The hidden meaning of a medieval pen-twister. Yes good.

I could talk about work, or socials, or family, but let's not.

1. Fruit cake, or, My Best Work This Millenium: Two loaf tin fruit cakes made, iced with almond and fondant, given ribbons, wrapped in paper and then tea towels and then put in cardboard cradles and dispatched to boss and phd-student-colleague. Boss sent a photo of her son cradling it reverentially: looks like one end got slightly dinged in transit but contrary to my mother's horrified predictions, it was not ruined by being wrapped in paper.

1.a. Fruit Cake 2: Gluten Free Boogaloo: I made two loaf tins of gluten free cake. My intended victim turns out not to like cake, so I was planning to freeze one for later work purposes. However, I cut one open in an attack of cravings the other day. I had thoughts of icing HALF of it, but it didn't make a clean cut. Perhaps I will just eat two fruit cakes all by mineself.

2. Rum cake balls: the offcuts from the tops of said cakes (levelled, and then turned over, so the baking bottom becomes the flat top surface for icing) got whizzed in the food processor, then mixed with brandy and cream and made into balls last night. This morning I dipped their tops in white chocolate and nestled them in patty pans. Two sets have been dispatched in cute tins to friends in Geneva already. I have three more tins and some more victims to come.

3. Project: vegan coconut ice. Not all of my intended victims like cake, so I set about making vegan-ised versions of "traditional" (to me. Note the high incidence of cold fridge treats for Australian summer) Christmas treats. This recipe including making one's own coconut condensed milk seems to have worked out pretty well, but we shall see tomorrow.

4. Project: vegan white Christmas. I have learned an important lesson about not melting vegan white chocolate in the microwave. I ended up with separated fats, some bits of crispy caramel, and chunky other bits. However, I had some leftover coconut condensed milk, and had found 'kokosfett', which seems fairly similar to copha, and first tried whipping it (only half was soft enough), then melted some, mixed in the chocolate mix, added coconut and some icing sugar, and then proceeded from there. Remains to be seen if this turns out to be food or not. I added some melted margarine at the last minute because it ended up too dry.

Based on these experiments I THINK, if I keep the kokosfett at room temperature and then maybe slightly heat it in the oven, I can make Toni's cake using a mix of a solid margarine block designed for baking and kokosfett. The trick is creaming the "butter" and sugar: I found a recipe for buttercream icing made on copha, so it seems it can be done.

Also I have stock in the slow cooker again, plans for a casserole type thing tomorrow, and assorted possibilities for xmas.

Grindlewald and surrounds, 3-6 August

Day 1: dragged self, Tom Binh pack, and wheely trolley of foodstuffs, to Chalet-Hotel Bodenwald, which is also the 'Camping Eigernordwand' site. In non-corona times they have a kiosk, a restaurant, and a bar, quite a nicely contained set-up: about ten min on foot from Grindlewald Grund station. My route took me to Interlaken, where I changed to the regional line - owned by the Jungfrau Railways company, who also operate the tourist rack railways in that area. Train splits about twenty minutes from Interlaken, taking you to either Lauterbrunnen or Grindelwald. Then there's a wishbone-shaped rack railway from either of those places (opposite sides of a mountain) to Kleine Scheidigg, and from there the train up through the Jungfrau to the glacier. I did not take these routes, because although there's a super good value 'coronapass' for swiss residents this summer, a lot of time in tunnels (both the train tunnel and the glacier tourist tunnels) with half of switzerland taking advantage of that pass didn't strike me as Coronasafe TM. Grund IS, however, the first stop on the Grindelwald arm of the Wengernalp route, so I did get to go on its steep rack-rail down from the village to the river.

Hotel operator had misread the booking.com form and thought I had booked two rooms instead of one; I spent some time trying to get on to booking.com help centre to resolve this.

Discovered hotel room had a huge bath, so I trooped off (on foot, the long way around, in the rain) to the village to buy cheap shower gel, desserts, and perishable food supplies. Given the rain, I wanted fondue, but crowded restaurants with closed terrasses also didn't sound wise. Instead I ate chocolate mousse in a bubble bath, and made pilaf. Listened to some of Unwell, started reading A House In The Country.

Day 2: cold, rainy. Called Shiny; stayed in. This counts as a relaxing holiday because the hotel wasn't plagued by landscaping noises, unlike my flat. Read, listened to podcasts.

Day 3: Made myself two servings of wombok salad for two day's worth of picnic lunch. Set off into town, obtaining coffee and a trekking pole on the way to my destination. Took the First cable gondola up to First; hiked from there out to Bachalpsee. The route is a mountain bike trail most of the way, so graded and very easy going, but it still took me longer than the signposts said, and I was glad of the trekking pole. Backalpsee, which is is quintessentially Alpine it's in the Google 'alpine' backdrop theme set, was very pretty: some people were swimming, while there was me in jeans, a compression vest, t-shirt and light jumper. I did push the sleeves up, and got quite a sunburn. Saw many cows; particularly enjoyed the live commentary offered by a group of middle aged English women on the persistent efforts of one young bull to press his suit upon uninterested lady cows.

The cable car broke down on my way down and we were evacuated at Bort. Choice of walking down (about an hour) or waiting for a bus. They HAD a mini-bus branded with the cable car company brand, but didn't seem to be putting passengers from the orderly queue in it (some people, yes, but not people from the queue). There was a lot of waiting for a municipal minibus to come, and be dangerously over-filled with people. I rode down the mountain standing, balancing myself on the roof with my arms, and balancing a little old lady -who was making distressed whimpers and sliding sideways - with my thigh. This was not very Corona safe, but also just... not very safe???

I picked up sugar in town, in order to sweeten the pancake mix I had pre-made and forgotten to sweeten. Pancakes and ice cream were consumed, by me. Dinner I had in town, as it was sunny and the terrasses were open. I was hoping for fondue, but the place I found that still had terrasse space wasn't doing fondue in summer (fair). A delicious steak was an acceptable consolation.

Day 4: Packed up my stuff, checked out without having to dispute my booking again, and proceeded down to Interlaken. Put my luggage in the lockers, and then had a picnic lunch by the Aare canal. From there back up the line to Wilderswil, where I changed to the Schynigeplattebahn, a rack-railway that goes to, well, Schynige Platte. A nice long ridge with great views of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau. More hiking around here, too, but I was tired, so I limited myself to ambling around the alpine botanic garden they have up there, before coming back down.

On return home I scrubbed the fridge, and tore a nail so far back it bled while unpacking, and then went crash.

Friday, Sat Sun... ugh I'll update you later. Holiday was worth it, but the tail end where I keep trying to re-energise myself for being a Productive Adult is less fun.

Probably because I didn't see anyone, and didn't go anywhere except around my neighbourhood looking for naminals. Admittedly today that was a 2hr mini-hike, but hey. I did call Shiny TWICE, and K once. Shiny has sewn masks. K has new feline housemates, and videos of said nosy ginger boys trying to get into Stellacat's food tray are a great amusement to me.

Work: Listened to MF's segment on BBC Word Service 'The Forum' last night while making dinner. She did very well, but I know some stuff she wanted to get in didn't make the final cut.

Language: I've now had two more lessons on acc/dat prepositions, and I now *understand* the difference when I read and can use the correct w-question words. Producing the correct case and indeed gender when speaking is still a bit hit and miss. I was trying to figure out why this is so HARD, when it was a cakewalk in OE and fairly easy in Latin, and then I realised: in OE I never had to do production exercises, and in Latin, only fill-in-the-gap written ones and i think some tiny 'write a sentence' exercises later on. That's wildly different from having to assemble all the moving parts of a sentence.

Fortuitously, I have been doing these wo/wohin lessons, and the topic is moving house. Fortuitous, for I am to go help J move house next weekend, and while I think her partner speaks English, her flatmates do not (they speak Russian, Arabic, some French and some German). Anyway, I will have an amusing story to tell come mid-august when I have a private lesson booked for the speaking-wrap-up of the 'moving house' unit.

I have a Dr appt this week with a doctor who speaks EITHER english or french but I don't know which. I don't have German class tomorrow, but i shall be doing language work: prepping speaking notes for My Medical History in French, with a rudimentary gloss in German (in case the doctor speaks on English and German). Do I go as far as trying to explain The Family Genetic Bag of Doom, I wonder? I haven't before, in Switzerland, but I might need to for the psych evaluation the week AFTER so perhaps I might as well prep it anyway.

Foods: I made a gratin yesterday and it was disappointing. The potatoes didn't cook through, and I put too much stock in so it was sloppy, and a lot of cheese stuck to the tinfoil.

Once again I have Too Many Leftovers and need to embark on several days of eating down the leftovers. This despite the fact that I still have fresh veg. At least I've eaten up all the peaches and only one had gone too manky to eat before I got to it.

Garten: I repotted the lavender; it has responded by drooping. Silly lavender. I have... faded the daisies? They WERE a rich red and now they're a dusty umber. Actually colour faded, not 'faded blooms' faded, which (I assume?) means wilted. I've hacked at the herbs to cut them back a bit; there are now boquets of herbs in my house. Also hacked back some of the little orange flowers to give the yellow possibly-lantana more space. All fairly tedious, but absorbing. Although I did not know when I took up flower gardening that I would spend so much time giving haircuts to plants.

Naminals: Yesterday I went on a short walk to look for goats (I had heard them on Firday); it turned out they were sheep (video evidence of sheep). I then meandered back to the Baumgarten complex, tried to read more of the signs about the Roman villa, and observed the chickens. I also met a very self-possessed tuxedo cat, who was staring down a poodle and winning. I believe this cat is the genius locorum.

Today I set off over the hills to Oberbottigen, via Niederbottigen and Buch. I did not see any farm cats, but I did see the emus from a distance. I tramped along a path through sugarbeet, which was helpfully so labelled by a big placard advertising the benefits of pesticide in sugarbeet production (I guess someone is proposing an anti-pesticide bill, because this farm had signs on its fields and its piggery explaining why a law against pesticide would be bad). Thence across some grassy fields of unknown purpose, and into a cornfield, where I excelled myself by falling flat on my face three times in 200 metres of grassed and rutted track. Eventually I made it into the wood, where I found a Good Stick. I came out above a tiny village called Buch, and turned for Oberbottigen on the road, and then home along the main road. I have kept the Good Stick, though; I intend to wash it down, dry it, and then sand it back, and take it with me on further expotitions, to reduce the number of times I fall flat on my face on even slightly uneven surfaces.

All up this took about two hours. As well as the emus I saw some cows, the pigs in the piggery, some horsies in the equestrian stables, and a llama in someone's side yard.

Internets: Instagram has locked both my accounts from liking or commenting or even putting captions on my own photos - but it seems like only when I use the mobile app? Turning on VPN on the phone didn't help, but switching to my desktop browser EVEN THOUGH IT'S USING MOBILE DATA did. Extremely weird.

I assume, since this isn't IP linked, it has something to do with my IFTTT scripts, which are all playing up anyway because gmail changed its rules again. Given the latest tumblr update ate some xkit functionalities I rely on AND since about a week before the latest update tumblr no longer recognises the 'show this photo in portrait' metadata from my camera, I have decided that my photo tumblr is now a dead blog. Spent some time twiddling email posting settings and speculumannorum will now be getting direct posts, via email. Annoyingly, one can't schedule emails when composing in gmail on one's phone, but one CAN at least post more than one photo at a time. And the weird line breaks that used to happen with gmail post-by-email seem to have gone away.

I've got a fair bit of instagram crossposting to catch up, which might take a while, but there's photos from the camera scheduled for every day of this week.

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This has been a mundane update.

So it goes. My mood profile is up, my work productivity is up, but I feel like I'm struggling to stay on top of things all the same.

Work: Had a productive mentoring meeting with MF on Thursday: sketched an outline of the first chapter I will write (which, I discovered in verbally sketching it, should be the second chapter of the book) and a more vague sense of the book as a whole. Book of PhD is not coming along as fast as it ought but I AM working on it in small but steady chunks, and have found new ways to be interested in it.

This week MF and I have a series of 'advisor chats' with the external project mentors that were part of the project proposal. Today's meeting was with the prof who was her mentor for her Marie Curie, and went I think very well? I liked him a lot, and although his research field is not very related to my specific section of the project he had a lot of cool stuff to say.

Teaching prep for next semester continues to roll. I need to get back to updating the project website. And I have paper proposals - not MANY but enough - for the remote study day, so next task is to organise them and make a schedule.

Health: Physically... better? Guts seem suspiciously non-drastic although by no means ideal. Fewer aches and pains of late - I've been a bit better at regular meditation if I'm not running, and the new mattress (memory foam) clearly agrees with me.

Psych wants me to see a different specialist (a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, so i think I won't be covered - that's a supplementary insurance thing and I can't get supplementary insurance because I have A Preexisting Mentals - but I can cope with that). Today I called the person she recommended; he got back to me via text with a different recommendation of someone taking new patients who can work in English. So far, so good. Tomorrow I try THAT guy, I guess.

I have figured out the confusion with filling my scrips in Bern: when my psych writes in fr. 'valable 6 mois' i'm pretty sure in geneva they used that for six month-packets, but in bern they mean they will only dish out during that period - so the first one was 3 months and, due to finding some of my Aus supply, I didn't refill it, and that's that. Also the Bernese pharmacists have real trouble with my pysch's handwriting. But that's fine, now I understand HOW it works I can put that in my to-do-list app.

Today I achieved Going Running, and using music as my interval, 4 running-interval-songs instead of my usual 3. Next week I guess I'll switch back to... actually maybe it wasn't C25k i used last time, I think i gave up around the same point I did this time, and switched to Runkeeper, which just tells you timed intervals and distance. Switch over to 3 minutes but two-on one-off.

Social: Yesterday I attended a remote birthday party for a cat. The cat in question did not seem to care about his celebrity, but he did enjoy his birthday tuna cake. Also called R.F., who had useful perspectives on psych situation. Also I've never been in the habit of calling them and perhaps I ought to be, I miss them!

Called Shiny on Saturday, and Saturday afternoon was zoom playreading. Oscar Wilde's 'The Duchess of Padua' sure was an experience.

Did not call my parents, have been avoiding that for some weeks. I had been calling them during the week, when procrastinating, but between having Some Shit To Process and doing less procrastinating, I have not done so. Dad sends me occasional screencaps of the Linux fortune cookie cow.

Tomorrow a mission to the office, and coffee with the medieval junior assistant (the professor's lackey - quite literally fetches and carries. It's... odd, but hey, at least someone gets paid and it's not dumped on the phd students).

Crafts: Sewed another hem on the tablecloth. No I don't know why this is taking me so damn long, it's very simple. Continuing to crochet A Square, have not started the new coaster patterns I want to try (for making coaster/doilies to go under vases).

Other: The house is not as messy as it was, but I have also not assembled even the easiest of the furniture that arrived last week. Or COMPLETELY unpacked the trolley I brought from Geneva. So it goes.

I did repot the petunias, and put the fern into a proper pot, and the i don't know what or why I bought it exactly into a bigger plastic container (a tomato punnet, I think). The petunias, I hope, will be happier and better able to defend against bugs in a bigger pot with smaller drainage holes - they were constantly very thirsty, and some bugs specifically target thirsty plants.

The COVID situation here continues to seem... okay? Case rate is up, but still well below the 300-benchmark the health minister described as What We Can Cope With. There was a "super spreader" event in a Zurich nightclub, a great many people are in quarantine. Canton Bern's rate remains low - the highest in the past two weeks has been 5 in one day - so I'm not overly worried. Geneva likewise in recent weeks, despite the initial surge. The weekend's bump seems to have been Zurich (that night club) and a few other cantons with rates between 5 and 10 on the weekend days.

Mostly bizarre-feeling because in French, and because I had to use a lot of google translate (vocab I don't often require!):

( In which I thank Bern station for neutral toilets )


Perhaps, another day, I will message Geneva station a complaint that their gendered toilets are inefficient, especially in the context of social distancing.

Saturday: I didn't do much of substance, other than finishing the Good Omens readthrough organised by wildeabandon. I was a bit zonked after having had a minor emotional WHATEVER on Friday night; I postponed the work I had planned to do that morning, and snuggled on the couch with a blankie and wearing my new, extremely soothing, Underworks compression tank. Made roast tomato pasta in the evening and made some navel-gazing locked posts with a view to sorting out the previous day's Whatever.

Sunday: Spent most of it calling people. Called Mum, family are all doing fine. Called K, got updates on the doings of cat and the progress of family history research. Called Shiny, had a mixture of very banal conversation as they were extremely sleepy and some accidentally quite meaningful and useful stuff. Read some more of The Mercies.

Got out the yellow fabric for a tablecloth, and assessed it; no point measuring it and cutting it down, but I had to cut the top and bottom straight. Started zig-zag stitching around the edges. Stopped with time to make tea and a snackerel before German class, but despite this blood sugar boost had an inexplicable and tedious mood slump. German class went fine, and then I retreated to bed and hide under my stripey crochet rug for a while.

Eventually coaxed self back up again, and made soup for dinner with the leek and celery from the vegetable box, and some leftover aloo gobi and some baby corn. It is neither the best nor the worst soup I have ever made. More process on The Mercies. I should have been able to finish it this weekend, but... guess not. I've got a long train trip the day before book club, so if all else fails that'll do it.

Friday night's bread, which was okay for the first few slices, turns out to be not fully cooked in the middle - while having a HUGE air bubble in the top. Ugh. Call that one a failure, i guess.

Most notable, I guess, for the fact that I now feel like it's okay to 'pop to the shops' for one thing or another.

Done Saturday: I don't really remember the order of events, but it definitely included the following:
- reading a couple of articles in the summer Meanjin (my autumn issue went astray, and the re-send may possibly make it here before the winter one if i'm lucky)
- fussing with plants, including emergency repotting of the rosemary as they blew off their ledge in a rainstorm
- called parents, all is well there. Showed off my FURNITURE.
- pasta with a very minimal accompaniment of sautéed onions, tomato, feta and basil: mainly to have a reason to cut the basil back.
- placed an iHerb order for more spices, since apparently that's how I can get things like 'allspice' in switzerland.
- German lesson
- went for a wander in the rain in the evening to replenish supplies of wine and haribo. Found the service station I had done my first toilet-paper stocking at back in March - I WONDERED where that was. The walk was nice, the purchases unnecessary.
- Installed tinder and promptly deactivated in horror upon discovering that it is an app designed for you to swipe yea or nay based on /photographs/ without detailed bios. In fact I'm not even sure the people it was showing me when I asked it to show me women were interested in women? Because it didn't ask ME who my target audience is.
- Resumed listening to Unwell. Accidentally listened to several episodes i'd already listened to but this time in reverse order. If Magnus was working out for me because each episode is (or was, until recently) its own self-contained plot, Unwell seems to work for the opposite reason: it has a plot, but the plot is so slow that each individual episode might as well have only been lightly fragranced with eau de plot. Some spooky, but very little tension.


Done Sunday:
- Started reading 'The Mercies' for an online book club. Read sixty pages! That makes it the first fiction to actually hold my attention consistently for a very, very long time. It's reminding me of Burial Rites, in a very good way, although not QUITE as impeccable historically (or maybe it's that I know more about the early 17th century than I do the early 19th in northern Europe). It has already passed my personal 'sausage test', with a catching-killing-and-gutting of large seafish sequence.
- started writing a letter to Shiny, because if i send emails of random things I thought of and think they'd find interesting then they'll feel pressure to write proper responses.
- went for a run. Took a different route, found a patch of woodland on a not too steep hilltop with navigable paths. Am still repeating wk 3 of C25k. Considering ditching it for simply one-song-on-one-song-off intervals: as happened last time, the jump from wk 3 to 4 is Daunting.
- Playreading with wildeabandon et al. Alan Bennet's Habeas Corpus, which was... definitely a play. That we read. Very rapid-fire farce. This is only my second encounter with Alan Bennet: do ALL his play's involve what would, in contemporary UK parlance, be called Safeguarding Issues? Is that just his Thing?
- Another episode or two of Unwell.

Done Today:
- listened to half an episode of Carbone14 and then realised I don't know enough about Martinique to keep up.
- called Friend R in Scotland, who is as well as anyone who went into voluntary isolation when Italy shut down and isn't coming out any time soon can be.
- two pomos worth of reading on the RdR, discovered stuff that really SHOULD have been in my PhD, and am suspicious of the translator. But reading in the english first and THEN the french means this time i'm a. noticing the humour and b. not skimming over the stuff that is relevant to my final argument but wasn't relevant to what i THOUGHT i was doing in 2014.
- further progress on the EM stage violence book
- German class. I like the praeterite.
- Payday. Did assorted financial juggling. Found a medical bill I hadn't expected: turns out I get charged a lot extra if in my 'nod and smile' mode in the pharmacy I accidentally said yes I want the brand name med and not the generic.
- More shopping. Placed an Underworks order: one women's compression vest, and since I was there, pettipants and a sports bra. Placed an order to restock my gunpowder tea supplies from the same online store I used last time. Went down to the big shopping centre. In the supermarket-florist picked up a watering can and some spray bottles. Did not get a 24cm pot, annoyingly.
- attempted to refill psych meds but apparently I don't have any more repeats (fortunately I have some from Aus left and an appointment soon). Did fill my cantonally-issued 'in case of nuclear disaster take these' potassium tablets order.
- answered an email, and contacted MF for Advice on how to proceed with the thing about which I have been sending emails
- laundry
- arranged the small floor mats in the reading nook
- Another episode of Unwell. Less of The Mercies than i'd hoped, but some.

Several things on T'Internet At Large have been upsetting me, but ho hum, that's what the internet does.

You may note that sewing is not in this list. It ought to be, but didn't happen.

I have done two significantly non-quarantined things today: FURNITURE and BUYING AN ICE CREAM.

Done Wednesday:
- a bunch of reading, in three different work-related directions
- reached minimum tidying of house in advance of FURNITURE
- talked to Shiny for quite a while
- made a cake. It sank prodigiously. Or they did, I actually made two bar tins worth of cake; should have made one sheet pan.
- went for a run
- as per yesterday's post, back and forth with bookseller. Who ended up refunding me, even though the book is probably en route still! I have accidentally committed a Karen. I forgot American retail is trained to be obsequious.

Done today:
- was up and showered by 7
- did the morning's necessary clearing (stripped bed, moved mattress) and some extra (eg: vaccuumed a lot of dust bunnies)
- sat by for FIVE AND A BIT HOURS while varying numbers of handymen, ranging from one to five over that time, assembled almost all my furniture. There was drilling and banging and many questions in German and more people than i've dealt with for MONTHS and I was in "endless screaming at twitter dot com" mode in my brain the whole time.
- - There were three fuckups: One; i ordered only one doorknob instead of three for the wardrobe doors; two, turns out while I bought the smallest Hemnes bedframe and the smallest double mattress, the smallest Hemnes frame is bigger than the smallest mattress; and three, ikea brought me two of one piece of my desk rather than one of each piece. I have signed off on this error and the correct piece should materialise, and be assembled... at some point.
- when the furniture men left I just wanted to cry, but I did not. I put laundry on, and went and bought an ice cream
- local gelateria only has three kinds of gluten-free ice cream, but dark chocolate mousse with coconut mousse is not a bad combo. Negotiated gluten in german, even if this did mean I asked which 'colours' are gluten-free
- walked through the village centre, patted a cat, and went into two stores in search of a nice flowerpot. I did not find a nice flowerpot. I did end up in the cemetery, which is full of flowers: they mow around the plots but let wildflowers grow in the rest.
- Came home, hung laundry (someone has had what looks like the same load in the tumble dryer for days???), and bit-by-bit put most of my stuff in correct places. Wardrobe is bigger than expected, but yet I fill it, and have spilled over into the chest of drawers. There are more books on my TBR trolley than my actual shelves, but I'm fretting anyway about maybe not having enough space (brain, stop it; most of the books you have at home will go back to the office in september, chill).
- Made risotto, and set up a zoom coworking sesh for tomorrow, and a time to call Shiny again.

That is, I feel, Enough Things.

I have not done anything that marks the deconfinement s2, although i did walk past a local shoe/sports store and noted their first tactic was to do a massive e-bike sale (makes sense: public transport is operating, but many people would prefer not to use it, for obvious reasons).

Done Saturday:
- Talked to Shiny for a bit. They had been to an in-person (permitted) gathering *and* a jitsi party, and were thus in good, if tipsy, spirits.
- Laundry
- ??? Genuinely no idea what else. I had defrosted soup for dinner. I guess the afternoon went on recuperating from the previous two day's conferencing

Done Sunday:
- Made egg and avocado burritos with Jack Monroe's banana ketchup (from vegan-ish)
- Called mum. Mother's day present not yet arrived. Spoke to Ms10 briefly.
- Finished Mask #1, then had to give self a pep talk about perfectionism and skills we are not good at.
- As You Like It readthrough with wildeabandon et al, which was much fun.
- Made roast tomato pasta for dinner.
- Decided to deal with my grump about imperfect mask by planning projects /three stages ahead/. Now I HAVE to do the masks, and the tablecloths, in order to fine-tune the skills necessary to advance to bloomers, and then to bolero jackets. I know from comparable skills that, *unlike*, say, languages, I do not cope well if I just leap in a step or two ahead of my objective level, but the life strategy of strategic over-ambition has merit in many situations.

Done today:
- More laundry
- Made my assigned post at covidcoffeecorner. Stop by, we're talking about stuffed toys.
- Spent some time panicking because NONE of my keytags would swipe me into the building (I could get in by an open cellar door). Called the real estate agent, who determined it was just the front door, and also apparently just me. By 3pm it was working again? Now unsure if I hallucinated it, or if it was something the renovating dudes just happened to be doing, or if - and this is possible but I really think unlikely - I forgot that the door has a little catch and you have to push it a bit. I'm sure I pushed it more than a bit!
- Due to above, did not go for a run
- Finished reading American Chaucers
- some phd>book draft
- signed up for another book review with Parergon
- Instead of running, took trolley and went up to the Other Migros, which turns out to be closer to home than the one I usually go to. Dropped off all my plastic bottles. Bought a small batch of grocery supplies (was out of milk), and then went back around and purchased 20L of potting soil and a pot of petunias. Never had much luck with petunias before, but hope springs eternal.
- On returning home, emailed some colleagues re possibly hosting a works-in-progress seminar for swiss researchers
- made vegetarian stroganoff - StrogaNOT, if you like - from the base recipe in Vegan(ish). Added mushrooms to the eggplant, and put the cream back in (didn't have sour cream, but 250ml of uht cream with a dash of lemon seemed to work). That used up the last of my (very very sad) potatoes, and also reduced the hamster-pile of shelf stable mushrooms a bit.
- Cut out the fabric for Mask #2. Identified somewhere I went wrong cutting the last one, but then made a different mistake this time. Not worth recutting, though, so onward ho. As I said to myself in my pep talk, I will make DIFFERENT mistakes next time! This time involves t-shirt material as well as more slippy satin, I shall be Tested.