pedanther

1. Shortly after I moved into this house, I noticed that one of the washing lines (there's a set of five, strung in parallel) was looking significantly frayed at the end and was probably going to give way sooner or later. Then I had a look at the other end and realised that each line is on a reel, so that if it breaks you just have to release the tensioner widget and pull some more line out, so I decided to not worry about it until it happened. Well, last week it happened (while I was in the middle of hanging out laundry -- who would have guessed that the time it snapped would be when it was having weight put on it?), so after the laundry had dried and been put away I set about figuring out how to operate the tensioner widget. It took some figuring out (by my count, I unscrewed at least three things that didn't need to be unscrewed at all), but in the end I had restrung the broken line, as well as a couple of others that were beginning to look frayed, and as a bonus had adjusted the tension on all the lines, and it felt like enough of an achievement that I wanted to record it somewhere.


2. At the Rep Club, our big musical for this year is 9 to 5, the musical of the film of the Dolly Parton song. (If you know the song, I'm playing the man from the line "I swear sometimes that man is out to get me".) It's going to be a lot of fun if it comes together; we're currently at the "four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse; three weeks, and it couldn't be worse" stage.


3. Speaking of musicals, the local high school that does a musical every year or two is currently doing The Wizard of Oz (the version that's adapted from the 1939 film). I'm not sure if it's the first musical production they've done since the lockdown, or if I've ignored some in the intervening time because I felt it was too soon to be sitting in a crowded auditorium for several hours, but anyway it's the first one of theirs I've been to since last time I mentioned I'd been to one. There was the usual range of talents on show for a student production, with Dorothy and Scarecrow being the strongest performers, and the kid who played both the Munchkin Coroner ("not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead") and the Winkie Captain standing out among the smaller roles. The guy playing the Wizard did pretty good characterisation, but wasn't so good on the vocal projection (and for some reason, even though all the main players were miked, nothing was done to make his voice more impressive when he was doing the Great and Powerful routine). Their version of the disappearing-reappearing ruby slippers wasn't as slick as the version in the last production I saw of this show, about a decade ago, but it was pretty good. I had a good time.

3a. One thing I used to enjoy doing at these shows, that I didn't get to do this time, was spot the cast members I knew from performances at the annual performing arts festival. The performing arts festival hasn't been held since the lockdown, and I suspect there isn't going to be another one any time soon, because the two most load-bearing members of the organising committee have separately become too occupied with other commitments.


4. I was on the fringes of the solar eclipse last month. Around the time when Exmouth was experiencing totality, I went out into the garden with a pinhole viewer and got a good look at the moon covering about half the sun -- but if you didn't know there was an eclipse on, and were just going about your day, you probably wouldn't have noticed anything. It was a bit less bright than you might expect for a cloudless midday, but that was all.


5. I mentioned back when Dracula Daily was finishing up that I was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to re-read Anno Dracula, Kim Newman's Dracula-meets-Jack-the-Ripper novel, while the details were still fresh, or if that would just lead to me spending a lot of time complaining about things Newman changed or got wrong. In the end, I decided instead to read The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's non-fiction book about what the standard Jack the Ripper myth doesn't tell you about his victims. I have a feeling that this means there are even more parts of Anno Dracula that would make me complain about things Newman changed or got wrong, but I think it was the right choice.

5a. Rapid-fire reading challenge update: November (a book with "ING" in the title) - Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson; December (a book with a number in the title) - The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; January (a book you wanted to read last year and didn't get to) - Deathless Gods by PC Hodgell; February (a book by an author you love) - The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman; March (a historical or epic book) - The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; April (a book about rain or weather) - Winds of Evil by Arthur Upfield; May (a book about emergencies, panics, or escapes) - the first couple of volumes of Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo.

What else?

* The Rep Club's Christmas show will be Nuncrackers, the Christmas-themed edition of the Nunsense series. The club did a production of the original Nunsense a few years ago, and most of the cast will be reprising their roles. In the circumstances, there were only a couple of male actors needed, which made it easy for me to decide that after being in everything else this year it was time to take a break and sit this one out.

* I'm back on track with the monthly reading challenge, having backfilled the months I missed; for June (a book with "All" in the title), I read That's All Folks!, a history of Warner Bros. Animation, and for July (a book with a book-related word in the title), I read Batman/Superman: The Archive of Worlds by Gene Luen Yang. I always find Gene Luen Yang's work rewards the time taken to read it, but I was also reminded of some of the reasons why superhero comics aren't my thing any more. For September (a word associated with light or darkness), I read the novel that Ladies in Black was adapted from, which was a good time in itself and also an interesting study in an episodic narrative being adapted into a more traditional theatrical plot arc. The prompt for October is "an animal or creature in the title", and I am reading Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror.

* Back at the beginning of the year, before I got sidetracked into deciding to re/read all of the Philip Marlowe novels, I'd been meaning to try out a different detective novel: A Few Right-Thinking Men, the first of a series by Sulari Gentill. Having disposed of Marlowe, I finally got around to reading it, and unfortunately didn't find it worth the wait. (One of the problems was that it had a significant dose of first-book-itis, so I read the second book as well, and found it significantly better written but still not what I'd been hoping for.) The description of the series that caught my attention is that it's an interbellum setting with a younger-son-of-the-upper-class amateur detective and his eccentric friends, but written by an Australian author and set in Australia, and tied in to the actual historical events of the 1930s. It was nice having a series like this set in my own country for a change (memo to self: really should try out Kerry Greenwood one of these days), but the historical aspect wasn't what I'd hoped: it's mainly used as a backdrop and a source of colourful supporting characters. The way it uses real people as supporting acts rubbed me the wrong way, and so did the way it threw in bits of history without, it seemed to me, ever really engaging with them. Cozy mysteries have their place, to be sure, but to my mind that place is not "in front of a backdrop depicting the rise of fascism".

* Mumblety years ago, I acquired all of the TV series The Pretender on DVD and set out to watch the whole thing from beginning to end, having originally seen parts of it out of order and missed some key episodes including the series finale. I got through the first two seasons at a good rate, started flagging during the third season, and eventually reached a point where I knew two of my least favourite episodes were coming up, and decided to put it aside for a while. I was inspired to give it another crack this week, and as a reward for pushing through those two episodes I got to go on and watch "PTB", which I missed when it aired and turns out to be a pretty good episode, with a not-yet-famous Bryan Cranston in the main guest role and some important arc stuff including an answer to something I'd been wondering about for years. But now, recalling that the quality of the show continues to trend downward, I need to decide whether I actually want to watch the rest of the series, or if I would be better off setting an October point and moving on to something else.

* Dracula Daily is drawing towards its close. I've learned a lot of interesting things doing it, but keeping up with the conversation has been quite demanding of time and attention at times, and although I don't think I regret it, I also don't think I want to do anything quite like it again in a hurry. Soon I will have a decision to make: when I decided to do Dracula Daily, it was partly with the intention of slingshotting off it to read through Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series (another series I originally experienced somewhat out of order and with bits missing). Now I'm not sure if that's still a good idea; having spent so much time with people analysing the characters in Dracula and discussing issues like the representations of race and mental illness, I think it's likely I'll be sensitive to the places where, if memory serves, Kim Newman doesn't give them as much careful attention.

Our next production is Ladies in Black, an Australian musical that debuted a few years ago (just before covid came along and limited its prospects for becoming more widely known). I wasn't planning to do two musicals back-to-back, but as usual there was a shortage of men willing and able to sing, so I got roped in. I'm playing the male half of the main romantic subplot, which is a change from my usual (character roles and, in Alan Rickman's phrase, "very interesting people"), and has been taking me into new territory. The rehearsal period has been a bit crunched because of the way the Rock of Ages season was extended, but we had our final dress rehearsal/preview last night and were pleased and relieved to discover that, while there are still some rough patches, we do indeed have a show.

At work, I haven't maintained my focus to the same remarkable level, but it's still pretty good. As I got back into things after the covid isolation, what I've been noticing is the way it's affected by how much else I have on my mind (for instance, it's taken a dip just lately because a lot of my spare time and brainpower has been focussed on preparing for the opening of Ladies in Black). That seems kind of obvious, now that I say it, but it's not something I was really consciously aware of before in the same way.

My complaint about not having anyone to share my The Sandman experience with has had a happy epilogue: I was catching up with my brother on the weekend, and he mentioned that he's also watching The Sandman and, as it turned out, was up to exactly the point I'd been up to when I was most miffed about not having anybody to talk to about what it was like to be up to that point. So we got to have a long conversation about what we thought of it so far.

I was all set to say that I think I might be done with this set of monthly reading challenges, having whiffed June, July and August, but then I checked my reading log and discovered that in fact I've completed the August challenge entirely by accident: the challenge was "a book with an object in the title", and I happened across The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and other stories at the library and decided to give it a go without remembering about the challenge. The challenge for September is "a book with LIGHT or DARK in the title", so we'll see how this goes.

The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and other stories is one of a series of collections reprinting the short stories Terry Pratchett wrote very early in his career for the children's section of his local newspaper. They're trifles, but they're amusing and they have their clever moments. It was also fun spotting the first appearance of ideas that he revisited later on: there's a story in this collection that uses a version of the premise of Johnny and the Dead, and another which is unmistakeably a complete miniature version of the plot of Truckers (and even has some of the same jokes).

Fiction books
Carolyn Burns, Tim Finn. Ladies in Black

In progress
James A Michener. Tales of the South Pacific
Bram Stoker. Dracula (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Margaret Scott. A Little More (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Fair Trade (e)

. Rock of Ages is only a few years old, but it's a musical in the classical style -- which is to say that the plot is formulaic and the characters thin, but none of that matters while the songs are happening. After the first read-through of the script, I had a pretty low opinion of it, but after the first vocal rehearsal I was much more kindly disposed.


. I didn't end up reading The High Window in March, deciding instead to focus on finishing off Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and a couple of other books that have been lying about half-read for a while. Now that the decks are cleared, I appear to have started reading The Woman in White instead. I didn't have this much trouble starting The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but then I've read those before and I knew what to expect from them; I haven't read The High Window before and it appears to be getting stuck in the general reluctance to Start New Things.


. It took me a few months to get through Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, but not because I didn't enjoy it; it's a dense read, not to be gulped down too quickly or when the mind is already full of other things. This is a book about the present being built on the bones of the past. The plot has Smilla uncovering a sequence of events stretching back to the second world war, and ultimately caused by something that happened much longer ago. At the same time, the novelist is uncovering, a bit at a time, the events that made Smilla into the person she is. For each of the people she meets along the way, we're given a glimpse of what made them the people they've become. It reminds me of John le Carré's thrillers, which are similarly portraits of people under pressure. (And, like a lot of le Carré's novels, it doesn't tidy everything away neatly and happily at the end. I found that it gave good enough answers to the most important questions, and that I could live with the uncertainties that remained, but this isn't a universal experience.)


. Over the past while, I've been importing my reading log into StoryGraph. Since the first decade of my reading log exists only on paper, this has involved a fair amount of typing, some opportunities to bathe in nostalgia, and occasionally squinting at an entry and muttering, "That's weird, I don't remember that book at all." I've also learned a thing or two about International Standard Book Numbers, including how the typo protection works and how to translate the old 10-digit ISBN into a modern 13-digit ISBN (not to mention an exciting side-trip involving my copy of Tarzan of the Apes, which is so old it only has a 9-digit SBN).


. After a long hiatus occasioned by various life events and scheduling conflicts, our roleplaying group has resumed meeting more-or-less regularly and has got back into the investigation we were in the middle of before things ground to a halt. In our most recent playing session, we started investigating a lighthouse that had been left abandoned(?) after the occupants were attacked in the middle of renovating it. I figured out a way of climbing up the outside of the lighthouse and getting in at the top, a strategy that had served us well for getting past the guards last time we needed to investigate a tower; unfortunately on this occasion it turned out the scenario had been designed to provide an increasing challenge level as the players worked their way up, so going in from the top meant running straight into the most difficult set of opponents in the lighthouse. I was obliged to retreat back down the side of the lighthouse and rejoin the rest of the party, and we used the front door instead.

* I've signed up for the Buzzword Reading Challenge, where each month there's a theme and a list of words and you read at least one book with one of those words in the title, because I thought it might give me an impetus to stretch myself a bit, or at least to get a few books out of the ever-growing to-read pile. The word list for January was "Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How", and the book I picked out of the to-read pile (which would also have done for February, March, August, or November) was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente. The word list for February is "He, His, She, Hers, Me, Mine, You, Yours, We, Ours, etc.", and I'm having a second crack at Our Mutual Friend; so far it's going much better than the first attempt, which ran out of steam a few chapters in. (I saw bits of the TV version that featured Paul McGann and Keeley Hawes, just enough to have an inkling of the troubles that await the protagonists but not enough to know whether any of them get happy endings. Or, in the case of some of them, to have a clear idea whether I should want them to have happy endings.)


* Our production of All Together Now! went really well. After that I took a break and didn't do anything for the Christmas Show except come and watch one performance. We're currently in rehearsals for the first show of the new year, which is called Female Transport and is a drama set on a convict ship bound for Australia. I'm playing the ship's captain (which, come to think of it, is also what I did last time we had a play set on a convict ship bound for Australia).


* My walking routine has fallen in a bit of a hole since I was boasting about how well it was doing. Weirdly, it feels like the onset of summer did it more damage than winter did. You'd think longer days and less chance of rain would make it easier to go for a walk, but my work hours shifted in a way that made it harder to find time in the mornings, and by the time it cooled down in the evenings I often couldn't summon the energy. One thing that has recently given my exercise routine a lift is that I finally got around to digging the bicycle out of storage and getting it serviced, and now I'm riding it pretty regularly. (And yes, that's how the walking routine started too, but the bicycle lets me do more exercise in less time so I'm hoping it'll persist.)


* I signed up for Disney+ a few months ago so I could watch Loki while my friends were still talking about it, and then I watched What If...?, and re-watched Ant-Man (I had remembered it was a fun movie, but not just how much fun it was)... and now I've fallen into the same trap I always seem to fall into with streaming services, where the monthly fees rack up while I don't watch anything because I can't make up my mind what to watch next. I do want to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp, and I'm at least a bit interested in at least some parts of WandaVision and Hawkeye, and I intend to watch The Mandalorian at some point, and that's barely scratching the surface of what's available. But somehow it always seems like something for another day.


* Instead, I've been watching a bunch of stuff on Youtube. One thing I have been watching a lot of recently is the British game show Taskmaster, in which the competitors are given eccentric challenges ranging from the seemingly simple ("Eat this egg. Fastest wins.") to the more elaborate ("Create the most thrilling soap opera cliffhanger. You have one hour."). A lot of the entertainment comes from comparing the different approaches taken by the different competitors (you might not think there could be four wildly distinct ways to "Eat this egg", but there were). Another thing I've been enjoying is a series of reaction videos on medusacascade's channel, where she's watching Babylon 5 for the first time. It's great getting to watch somebody new discover the show, and while it's not quite the same thing as watching the series again myself, it's enough like it that I suspect it's taking up a "this is the show I'm currently watching" slot in my brain and might be part of why I'm not currently getting around to watching any new scripted drama series.

Our season of short plays came and went successfully, playing to surprisingly large audiences for a short play season. The audience sizes might have been because the headlining play had name recognition, but we got a good audience response for the play I was in as well. (And also, because it was an absurdist comedy, a fair number of people professing that although they'd enjoyed it they didn't have a clue what it was actually about. And several people independently mentioning that they'd expected it to end in a particular way that it didn't because that would have made too much sense.)

I got an unexpected bonus out of it. Part of the set for the play was a sofa that was donated to the play by a club member who didn't want it any more, but the club also didn't want to keep it because of having several sofas already and not enough space for another one. Meanwhile, I've been pondering getting a new sofa for a while now, because the one I already had was fine for sitting on but too short to properly lounge on. So now I have a comfortable newish sofa at considerably less expense than if I'd bought an actually new one.

Our next production, which opens next week, is the local instance of All Together Now!, a musical revue show being performed simultaneously in over 2000 theatres worldwide. It's an event intended to help encourage people back into attending live theatre, and particularly small local theatres -- it features numbers from major Broadway musicals that would normally cost a pile to licence, but the licence-holders are allowing participating theatres to perform them, and providing the necessary sheet music, etc., without charge on this one occasion. The programme varies from theatre to theatre, but we're doing numbers from (among others) Les Mis, Rent, Godspell, Little Shop of Horrors, and Matilda. If you're interested, and in a part of the world where attending live theatre is currently a sensible proposition, there's an online map you can use to find out if there's going to be a show near you.

. I recently got an achievement in Duolingo for having been doing the lessons continually for an entire year. At this point, I'm not sure I'll ever have a practical use for having German as a second language, but it gives my brain exercise and I learn fun things from time to time like the existence of a German expression that translates as something like "He's missing a few cups from the cupboard".


. The production of Hello Dolly has concluded successfully; up next is a season of short plays. The one I'm in is an absurdist comedy about a married couple having a very trying day: he's been fired, and she's murdered somebody but can't remember who it was.


. My morning walking routine has become somewhat less regular since winter brought in the cold dark rainy mornings, but it still happens often enough to have a claim to existence. My most common route these days is a lap around the outside of the racecourse, part of it on a nice wooded walking trail dotted with war memorials that I keep telling myself one day I'll actually stop to look at. If I'm feeling ambitious I'll widen the loop a bit and continue on to the north end of the walking trail, at the park with the sound shell where they do concerts in the summer. Most days it's pretty deserted at that time of the morning, but one time there was a car boot sale on, and one morning this week they were setting up for what looked like an inter-school sports day.


. Something else that's been getting less regular and less frequent lately is our roleplaying sessions, due to difficulty getting everyone's schedules lined up. At our most recent session, one of the other players turned out at the last minute to be unable to join in, so we couldn't continue the campaign, but everybody who did turn up had been looking forward to getting some roleplaying in, so I volunteered to run a one-shot session of Lasers and Feelings, a mini RPG whose design features include being able to be run with no preparation whatever. There were some rough patches, but everybody had fun.


. I caved and got Disney+ about halfway through the run of Loki so that I could keep up with what friends were talking about on Tumblr without worrying about spoilers, and I don't regret it. Now that I have it, I'll probably circle back and watch WandaVision at some point; I still don't much care about the MCU versions of Wanda or Vision or especially about the MCU version of their relationship, but apparently it's also got Darcy Lewis and Monica Rambeau in it and I want to find out what they're doing these days. Black Widow I went to see in the cinema, since I'm fortunate enough to have that as an option and even here where cinema tickets aren't cheap it cost literally half as much to see it on the big screen with other people than it would have to watch it on a little screen by myself at home.

. With the WA elections coming up, the ABC has published a summary of the 19 parties running and their major policies. May be useful for telling apart the minor parties who didn't just name themselves after their main policy.


. The brass band has started up again for 2021. We're in a position where we have some rebuilding to do before we're at the level we were around this time last year, not just because of the long pandemic hiatus but also because the new year is the time when people go away to university or leave town for new jobs elsewhere, and this year we've lost our conductor, a couple of key players, and two of the mainstays of the band committee. We have a new conductor and new committee members, but there's going to be a while before we have an idea of the effect on the band's collective personality and goals.


. The Rep Club has also started up again for the year. We have a season of one-act plays going up next month, and then will be the big push toward this year's musical. We're having another run at Hello Dolly!, which we were going to do last year before the pandemic hit. Some of the people who were cast last year have left town or had to withdraw for other reasons, but fortunately most of the losses were down in the supporting cast where the gaps are easier to fill in.


. The roleplaying campaign is progressing. We're beginning to accumulate some of those "your players did what?" anecdotes that every good campaign produces. Our adventuring party has done enough adventuring to pass probation and get officially accredited, which raises the question: What are we going to call ourselves? I've been leaning toward something about dire wolves, on the "if I had a nickel for every time we've been attacked by dire wolves" principle, but only if we can make it clear that "dire" isn't a judgement on our adventuring abilities. When I mentioned this to the rest of the group, somebody suggested that we could call ourselves The DW, and claim it stood for whatever seemed most appropriate depending on who was asking. "When you're in trouble, you call DW," said two players in unison.


. I recently had a go at reading The Barrakee Mystery, an Australian murder mystery novel from 1929 that turned into the first of a series running to 29 novels over three and a half decades. The protagonist of the series, though he's more of a supporting character in the first novel, is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, known as "Bony", a detective with mixed ancestry from an Aboriginal mother and an unknown European father. As such, it's worth noting that the series spans several eventful decades in the history of race relations in Australia. I'd read some of the novels from near the end of the series before, but the beginning is a very different experience. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder why a white author in the 1920s would put a half-Aboriginal detective in his novel, but of course race relations play a big role in the plot and Bony isn't the only half-Aboriginal character in the novel. It's an uncomfortable read at times: Bony and the narrator both have pointed things to say about white Australia's treatment of Aboriginal people, but the novel also seems to take it as given that someone with mixed white and Aboriginal heritage will be dragged down by their inferior blood. (It's the Aboriginal blood that's being posited as inferior, to be clear.) It certainly takes it as given that most of the white characters will be prejudiced against Aboriginal people to a greater or lesser extent, and that this isn't expected to affect how likeable the audience finds them.

I sometimes think about what a modern TV adaptation of the Bony novels might be like. It would probably have to be pretty thoroughly reimagined; even the most recent of the novels is over fifty years old, and The Barrakee Mystery is coming up on its centenary, and the national conversation on race has changed a lot in that time. But sometimes I feel like we kind of owe it to Bony, for the fact that there have already been two TV series inspired by the novels and both of them starred white men. (The 1970s series made at least a token effort to audition Aboriginal actors before casting a white man and investing heavily in brown makeup; the 1990s series just straight-up made the protagonist a handsome white twentysomething, played by one of the several bankable handsome white twentysomethings that were on TV all the time in those days. And those days were the days when Ernie Dingo was also a bankable twentysomething, so it's not like they didn't have options.)

. The Rep Club has begun rehearsals for our annual Christmas show, which this year will be a version of Sleeping Beauty. (The coronavirus is pretty much under control in this part of the world, and theatres are allowed to have audiences although there are still requirements in place for socially distanced seating.) I'm playing the butler/chamberlain/dogsbody, who I would describe as the comic relief except that this is the kind of show where everybody is the comic relief at some point. It's more that most of the other characters are also necessary to the plot in some way, while my character is only there for comic relief and the occasional bit of exposition. I'm enjoying it immensely.


. Our roleplaying campaign has brought us to a town where there's currently an election campaign going on. One of the candidates is a big-spending jerk who's whipping up prejudice against non-humans. (I haven't asked, but I'm pretty sure all of this was actually in the campaign sourcebook.) Despite this, he's been friendly to our adventuring team the couple of times we've encountered him, and even offered us work, even though none of us are human: the cleric is a tabaxi (cat-person), the ranger is a verdan (a goblinoid race specific to this campaign setting), the rogue is a halfling (like a hobbit, but less trademarked), and the fighter is a warforged (a kind of magic-powered robot). During our second conversation with this guy, we figured out why: he's apparently never heard of warforged, and is under the impression that our team is led by a human warrior in an unusually elaborate set of armor.


. I've given up on the discipline of wearing work clothes on work days: I decided to make an exception one time because I was behind on the laundry and didn't have any work clothes to wear, and my everyday clothes were so much more comfortable that I extended the exception indefinitely.


. One of the things I've been doing to pass time this month has been working through back episodes of the Youtube channel Marie Clare's World, where a fan of 21st-century Doctor Who is watching and posting reaction videos to the original series. Part of what makes it interesting to me is that she's managed to go into it not knowing anything except what she's picked up from references in newWho, so she knows roughly how many Doctors and what they look like, but not when or how they enter and leave the series, and that the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Master and Sarah Jane are in there somewhere, but again not exactly when, and basically nothing else. So she's going in knowing that this is the kind of thing she likes, but as unprepared for the plot twists and such as the original audience would have been (or even less, in some cases where the original audience would have seen it splashed over the papers beforehand). She's enjoying it a lot, too; she's appreciating the old special effects on their own merits and finding something good to say about nearly every story, even the ones at which Received Fan Wisdom tends to turn up its nose. And she's been devastated by some of the companion and Doctor departures.


. A little while ago I made toad-in-the-hole for a family gathering, using the old recipe we used to make it all the time when we were children. I think this is the first time I've baked something from scratch basically on my own; the sibling whose house we were gathering in kept an eye on me but didn't intervene except to tell me which cupboard things were in, and the one time when the batter went weird. The trouble was that the recipe starts "For batter, use the pancake recipe with half the milk and twice the eggs", and then the pancake recipe requires the milk to be added in two stages, half before beating and half after -- and then on top of that we were doubling all the quantities to make enough for the whole family -- and I lost track of how many halves that made and ended up with too much milk in the mixture so we had to improvise to get the proportions vaguely right again. In turned out pretty good, and I'm open to the idea of trying this baking thing again at some point.