pedanther

. At board game club, we played Cosmic Encounter, which would have gone quite differently if anybody had read the rule book first; most of us were relying on the player who'd proposed the game to remind us how it went, and it turned out his memory of the rules wasn't quite as solid as he'd thought.

. I fell behind on Natural Six back in November, when my long service leave ended and my week was suddenly much less well supplied with opportunities to watch three-hour-long episodes, and what with one thing and another the backlog got significantly larger before I started actively trying to catch up, so I've been trailing behind ever since. I've been making significant progress lately - partly thanks to the series starting a particularly compelling story arc with high stakes and dramatic cliffhangers - and this week I got through four episodes (including the arc finale, which weighed in at nearly five hours), and am finally all caught up. In a way, I'm actually glad I caught up now and not, say, a couple of months ago, so I could get through the whole of that arc pretty quickly and wasn't left waiting two weeks to find out how one of those dramatic cliffhangers turned out.

. Another thing I'm all caught up with is Sesska's Doctor Who reactions - just in time for her to go on a break and not be posting any more for a while.

. I read A Room with a View by E.M. Forster for the Buzzword reading challenge (this month's prompt was "with"). It took me a while to get into it, but by the halfway mark I really wanted to see how things turned out. (I've repeated often enough the saying that no novel can survive the words "I don't care what happens to these people"; the thing that kept me going through this novel is that, once I got to know her, I did care what happened to Lucy.) I enjoyed the flashes of sly humour that I noticed, and suspect that there were more that I missed. I was reading an annotated edition, which had lots of annotations about the things the characters looked at in Italy but were less helpful on the more important matter of the things the characters took for granted at home. (I suspected trouble early on when there was no annotation for an allusion to "Mrs. Grundy"; I know who she is, but I bet there are a fair number of people these days who wouldn't, and would be confused by what seems to be a new character being mentioned out of nowhere and then never being mentioned again.)

. I had brunch in a cafe on Saturday morning, and was hit by not one but two surcharges. One was the usual surcharge when a business chooses to pass on the fee for paying electronically, but the other - which is new since last time I ate at that cafe - was a surcharge for It's Saturday. Okay, it was a Weekends and Public Holidays surcharge, but although I've seen Sunday-and-Public-Holiday surcharges before, this is the first time I've been surcharged for buying something on a Saturday, and it struck me as particularly odd because this cafe has always been open on Saturdays so it's not like having to serve customers on Saturdays is a new or unexpected development. There's a spiteful part of me that keeps suggesting that if it's such a bother to have people accept their offer to be served during the opening hours they chose, perhaps it would be polite of me not to burden them with my custom any further.

. One of the saints' days mentioned in The Hidden Almanac this week was the feast of Saint Caliper, the patron of those who travel the dreadful roads between ebook formats.

. Several times in the past few weeks, when I've popped into the local shop to get bread or whatever, my eye has been caught by a display of large varicolored marshmallows, imported from the US. This week I succumbed to temptation and bought a bag. They tasted terrible.