Elusive Butterfly

First peacock butterfly of spring, photographed at a distance in some other person’s garden.
Admin1 is reading What You Pay For by Claire Askew and Admin2 is reading 84K by another Claire, Claire North, which has been languishing on our shelves, unintentionally unopened, for the last five years and now, with its corporate-capture government dystopia, seems even more prescient.

Critter of the Day: Pigeon

Looking over its shoulder.
Admin1 is reading The Ottoman Secret by Raymond Khoury. Admin2 is rereading We Can Build You by Philip K Dick, which abandons the storyline of plucky robotics startup versus bald American hypercapitalist halfway through to segue into a mass of psychobabble about a love-hate relationship between two mentally challenged characters.

Cubist Collage

Outside is shrouded in clouds and sodden with rain, so here is a view from inside.
Admin1 is reading The Last Astronaut by David Wellington, a highly derivative cross between Rendezvous with Rama and Alien, complete with chestburster scene. How this awful, badly characterised and idiot-plotted novel got on the Clarke Award shortlist is one of the great cosmic mysteries.
Admin2 is rereading Time out of Joint by Philip K Dick. Nothing is real.

Pie Day

Actually Pi Day was yesterday but we were unable to entertain the family due to fears of exposure to covid. Today, though, covid was confirmed so all those lovely pies were bisected and transported. We had our family meal on Zoom and scored 10 on the quiz with points for vague answers in the right ballpark.
Admin1 is reading Right to Kill by John Barlow. Admin2 is rereading A Maze of Death by Philip K Dick.

Food of the Day: Veggie Pasta

An extra family meal unaccompanied by quiz but including some strong brandy in honour of of the father-in-law, father, grandfather and great grandfather of those present.
Admin1 is reading The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier, in which a plane and all its passengers are duplicated. Being French, the novel uses philosophers and logicians to try to solve the puzzle — there’s much theorising about the simulation hypothesis, and the consequences of the passengers meeting identical copies of themselves. Sounds, er, high-flown 😉 , but it’s also full of jokes, and is a terrific read. Shame about the US-centric translation, though.
Admin2 is reading Cabin Fever by Alex Dahl, the antithesis of a Girl book but just as rubbish.

Tweet Tweet

A robin flying through the ivy. Merry Women’s Day Eve everybody!
Admin1 is reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, a wonderful and engrossing novel about books, libraries, and hope in dark times. Admin2 is reading The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez Reverte, an overblown Eco-esque conspiracy thriller linking The Three Musketeers with a manual for summoning the devil.

Critter of the Day: Blue Tit

A little bird tells us that today is an auspicious and wonderful day in a specific and limited way!
Meanwhile, on the preferred pronouns front, Admin1 is rereading It by Stephen King and Admin2 is reading The This by Adam Roberts; a Hegelian riposte to the Kantian The Thing Itself, but also a rollicking skiffy adventure.

After the Flood

A day without a storm when there was enough rain for a couple of rainbows and the solar panels served up >2kWh for the first time this year.
And it’s Twosday: 22/2/22 and it’s 22.22 too.
Admin2 is reading The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut; a gloomy book about a failing hospital in the South African bundu; no wonder it was on the Booker shortlist.

Storm Franklin

Oh no, not another one!
It was a dark and stormy night and the morning saw broken branches everywhere and two trees up the road felled. Our sheltered weather station recorded a gust of 34 mph (there might have been worse ones — it is only working intermittently) and we are well on track for our rainiest month ever.
The wind died away and Orion shone down on us. Our family meal was a magnificent cheese pithivier and we scored a sad 8.5 on the GSQ.
Admin2 is reading Snap by Belinda Bauer, a light read about a thieving orphan searching for his mother’s murderer.

Critters of the Day: Starlings

Welcome to these two representatives of a great and greedy flock, dull at a distance but spangled with iridescent sequins in close-up.
Admin2 is rereading Next to Nature, Art by Penelope Fitzgerald; arty people arrive for a course at a country house before the age of social media.
We scored FOURTEEN  on the GSQ; 14.5 if you count a narrow miss, which we didn’t.