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First! Farmshare, week ten: peaches, lettuce, salad greens, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, two small cabbages (one red, one green--another tender-something, IIRC). We now have three cabbages in the fridge. Hmm.

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Reading: On the DCC front, I've read The Eye of the Bedlam Bride and am now almost finished This Inevitable Ruin, which I believe will leave me with just the newest installment to go. I'm kinda hoping one of the library systems will have that last book with just a couple of holds on the ebook so I can get into a short queue and then hold my place in line when I'm at the top; I usually don't try to read anything of any length during Dayjob crunches, but there's so much going on in these books that I'm trying not to lose too much momentum. (I'm in that awkward position where I'm still not very emotionally engaged but still want to know what happens. >.<)

In between those two, I read Naomi Kritzer's new novella, Obstetrix, which is...a very, very, very different read. Very well done. Deeply horrifying.

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Watching: Speaking of momentum, I have trouble keeping it going for more than one on-my-own story at a time these days, so while I've been making progress on Zhan Zhao Adventures, it's been slow when I've had a DCC book from the library.

scruloose and I have finished Journal with Witch (is there any hope of a second season?) and are a few episodes behind on the current season of Silo, which I think just finished? Maybe we can get caught up before the next time the AppleTV subscription bills us (and hopefully I'll remember to cancel the service).

We've also now seen most of season 1 of Reacher, thanks to a spate of threads about it on Bluesky enthusing about it in entertaining ways. For reference (and hopefully one or both of these are visible to non-users), have "a thread about why you should watch What If A Man Was Large, The Show, in the form of a Q&A" and a thread about the novels having (and why they have) a significant female fanbase. (In comments on the latter, Bree of Kit Rocha said "if bluesky hadn't told me to watch this with the correct combination of bizarre keywords I would have continued avoiding it because the trailers I saw just kinda looked like Another Male Vigilante Power Fantasy and in this day & age I would rather chew glass. lol".)

I don't know if we'll keep going with it once we finish this season, but everything mentioned in those threads is proving to be accurate. (Except that I'd formed the impression that it was pretty episodic, sort of a "What if the Littlest Hobo was a Giant Man who PUNCHED HORRIBLE MEN IN THE FACE [and worse; there's a lot of violence in here]???" thing, and instead season 1, at least, is all one storyline and I have no reason to think that won't remain true of each season.)

(At this time I feel no impulse to try the novels, and a very strong impulse to never go anywhere the movie, AKA "What if a notably short actor decided he wanted to play a character whose defining characteristic is being FUCKING HUGE?" I mean, I wouldn't be opposed to watching it if there were any reason to think it was good, but no one has made it sound every halfway passable.)

I very much think of the solstices and equinoxes as marking the starts and ends of seasons, but I clearly also think of September as basically autumn. It's like it's all a gradual cycle or something! Go figure!

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Farmshare, week nine (last week--we may be getting this week's in an hour or so)/produce in general: cherry tomatoes, lettuce, peaches, cilantro, potatoes, and cone cabbage. (The cabbage is still in the fridge, and I don't know what's "cone" about it; it looks like a standard green cabbage to me.) We also got a small local watermelon, which was sadly underwhelming, and a couple of hefty portobello mushrooms for Smitten Kitchen's Tangy Braised Chickpeas with Carrots and Mushrooms.

But then on the weekend at the produce stand we got the last late-summer strawberries of the season and some yellow corn. I never remember how much I like corn, and then locals on Bluesky were talking about how much better yellow is than peaches and cream, but the latter is mostly what's in the actual grocery stores...so we kept an eye out and pounced when we saw some yellow corn. Yum!

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Last night we tore out what was left of the lettuce in the raised planter, which was a bit sad to do, but the original planting had all bolted and the second planting never really amounted to anything. We sort of meant to take another stab at it with the weather cooling, but haven't yet. (The soil in the planter has gotten rather mossy. I do not know how that might or might not affect veggie growing.) But there are still a couple (? it looks like two plants, but they look connected at the root) of savoy cabbages in there that might yet turn into more than just the outer leaves, and they're looking decent.

A couple of smaller tomatoes have been found to be overripe, but scruloose picked some of the Black Cherry cherry tomatoes yesterday and reports that they're not terribly remarkable but are tasty. The couple of large Brandywine fruits (one per plant) continue to redden, despite one of them having the broken stem with our attempt at mending it. (Last week a couple of people suggested bringing green or insufficiently ripe tomatoes in to ripen on a windowsill, but alas, we don't have great light in any useful places, and also no potential tomato-ripening surfaces that aren't wholly accessible to the cats. The tomatoes are taking their chances.)

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And now we're just about at the long September long weekend already, and I theoretically have outdoor plans (seeing some theatre!) Saturday, but it sounds like we're about to get hit with a lot of rain over the next several days (albeit more so on the other side of the province, I think). We'll see how things look in the garden on the other side of that, and there's a rain date for the theatre, so hopefully that'll work out one way or another.

I'm not having a great brain week, friends, and I feel very behind on everything even though things have been quiet on both work fronts. I have just given up on the prospect of commenting on rather a lot of posts that I had open in tabs for the purpose, although I'm at least caught up on reading here.

A thing that is Not Helping: it's Thursday morning and I'm still waiting for a phone call I was told to expect on Monday or Tuesday.

A few semi-random things:

--Farmshare, week eight (last week): lettuce, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic scapes, young ginger. Of those, I know we haven't made it to processing the scapes yet; here's hoping they're still in decent shape. >.< Definitely a week or so where I'm reminding myself that the farmshare membership is as much about supporting the local farm(s) as anything else.

--I'm still behind on booking a handful of medical things that I've been meaning to deal with for...uh...a while, but we did at least just book all three cats for their annual checkup. (A couple months late, but not horrendously late. Did we wind up getting an appointment for the exact day that the fall crunch starts at Dayjob? Sure did. But it's first thing in the morning, at least.)

--Our cucumber plant has produced a second cuke that should be actually worth picking (there've been a couple of them that grew to half the size of a pencil at most and then withered). As for the tomatoes, some of the Romas are starting to turn red, and at least a few of the Black Cherry tomatoes look like they're ripening.

And the two Brandywine plants (the large slicer tomatoes)? ( not long, but entirely about tomatoes )