Tag: admin1 reading

Book read by Admin1

Dinner with the Family

Our family meal today was at Gez and Dave’s house and featured cod loins wrapped in parma ham with green beans and potato gratin with sausage rolls for the fish refusers. Present at the gathering were Dave with a broken foot in a velcro boot, Bob and Lena all the way from Sweden and Ivy visiting Faye.
A2 contributed a Dubai-style chocolate, pistachio and shredded wheat cheesecake but unfortunately dropped it and had to scrape it back together and apply another layer so it did not look as good as the before photo here but it tasted pretty acceptable. And we scored an astonishing 14 on the GSQ, bringing us back above 10 at long last.
A1 is reading The Killer’s Mark by MW Craven. A2 is reading Pinball 1973* by Haruki Murakami.

Ghost of a Pigeon

An unlucky bird must have flown full tilt into our window today. There was no corpse on the ground below so it must have flapped away with an aching head leaving a print of itself on the rain-soaked glass and a feather where its beak should be. Here’s a brief video:

Later: a pile of feathers at the bottom of the garden provides a clue. Most likely the pigeon rammed the window when fleeing in terror from a sparrowhawk but the bird of prey caught up with it and now it is probably a ghost indeed. How sad.A1 is reading The Burning Tide by William Shaw. A2 is reading The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee.

Salad Days

A fabulous family feast featuring green stuff, eggs, potatoes, salmon, tuna, cheeses, cold meats, chicken legs, sausage rolls and a peachy pie pudding, after which we scored a calamitous 8 on the GSQ. Outside, the street party was going on with more people than usual, most of whom seemed to be complete strangers.
A1 is reading The Graveyard of the Hesperides by Lindsay Davis. A2 is reading Buyer Beware by Catherine Ryan Howard; a woman with a dodgy past moves into a house with a dodgy past. What could possibly go wrong?

Busy Mini

Here are a few recent pics from our Dwarf Mini telescope. This is the Dumbbell Nebula, in Vulpecula (The Fox):

The Pac-Man Nebula, in Cassiopeia:
And the Andromeda Galaxy in, er, Andromeda:
Much bigger versions and more details on our ROAST blog.
A1 is reading The Ides of April by Lindsey Davis. A2 is reading Seascraper* by Benjamin Wood, a poignant and atmospheric book about a shrimp catcher which had echoes of Beryl Bainbridge. BW is on record as admiring The Dressmaker.

Spot the Spots

The sun has been very spotty recently, and this was taken this morning during a break in the clouds.
But what’s that greeny-blue dot between the pair of large sunspots? That’s us, that is. The Earth, roughly to scale; you can fit 109 Earths in the diameter of the Sun. Here it is zoomed in:
A1 is reading Quite Ugly One Evening by Chris Brookmyre. Thanks A2! CB’s first published novel was Quite Ugly One Morning (1996), which introduced his journalist protagonist Jack Parlabane, and this novel continues — and possibly wraps up — Parlabane’s (rather doleful) character arc. While CB’s writing no longer provokes LOLs at his wonderful outrageousness (like the abseiling scene in Be My Enemy, or the unfortunate bodily invasion in Boiling  a Frog), he continues to take aim at his bêtes noires — in this case MAGA loonies, influencers, fanboyz, right-wing fanatics with a complete disregard for morality, and rich bastards. All easy targets perhaps, and the tale is complicated by an excess of characters in the family under investigation, who created a 1960s puppet show not a million miles from Thunderbirds. Much is revealed about Parlabane’s background, and he perhaps achieves some kind of redemption. A satisfying read.

Roast Chicken

For our family dinner today we had A1’s lovely roast chicken with halcyon potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, mixed vegetables, stuffing and gravy, followed by tiramisu ice cream (which took a lot longer than the recipe’s stated 5 minutes to thaw), followed by the quiz at which we scored a sadly deficient 8, bringing our average down below 10.
A1 is rereading The Three by Sarah Lotz. A2 is rereading Spook Street by Mick Herron.

Gold at the End of the Rainbow

Woke up this morning, sun shining through the rain. Looked for the rainbow and instead saw, through the rain-blurred glass, what seemed to be a giant black and yellow bee sitting on a cornflower. Got a better look; it was a goldfinch eating the cornflower seeds. The rainbow arrived later. Here it is:
Meanwhile A1 is reading The Third Nero* by Lindsey Davis.

For Fox Sake

A bold fox crossing next door’s garden on its way to meet another fox lurking in the undergrowth in our garden.
A1 is reading Desperate Undertaking* by Lindsey Davies, in which a series of elaborately staged theatrical murders in Ancient Rome are investigated by a well-drawn heroine. Entertainingly written and light-heartedly gruesome, LD’s Rome bears more than a passing resemblance† to Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork (by no means a bad thing), with its eccentric inhabitants and somewhat cynical approach to policing. A fun read.
A2 is reading Ghost-Eye* by Amitav Ghosh, an engrossing saga combining reincarnation, psychic powers and environmentalism.

† It turns out LD is a big fan of TP, and cheerfully acknowledges “tribute plagiarism”.

Happy Birthday Dave

It’s Commonwealth Day and also Dave’s birthday so we ate Swedish meatballs to celebrate his origins and A1 served up a lovely cake with candles, peach slices and sprinkles on top. Afterwards we did the quiz with Ivy as quizmaster and scored a steadying 10.
A1 is reading Death at the Sanatorium* by Ragnar Jonasson. A2 is reading The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler.

First Poppy

Welcome to the first big poppy of spring, fresh out of the bud and attended by bees (NB technically it is the second poppy, but the first was way down beneath the leaves and inaccessible to wildlife or cameras).
A1 is reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, an alternate-history sf novel set in 1952, when a meteorite hits the east coast of the US and wipes out most of the government. The ensuing threat of catastrophic climate change kick-starts the space program, and we follow a female “computer” — as in real life, the maths was done by women, many black — as she attempts to join the program and become an “astronette”. This book won just about every sf award going in 2018, including the usually reliable Sidewise award. But despite the laudable examination of gender and racial issues, the book comes across as … well, rather soppy and girly. It must have been a fallow year for good sf.

Dinner with the Royals

The first Jersey Royals of the season have arrived in the shops and immediately there is an argument about whether they should be cooked starting with cold water or boiling water. The packets were no help; they gave opposite instructions. But anyway they were delicious, served with salmon and creamy cheesy leeks and followed by A1’s scrumptious pineapple upside-down cake.

Sadly Gez and Bob were absent from our gathering so we only scored 7.5 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler. A2 is rereading (though I don’t remember reading it the first time, twenty years ago) The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw.

Healthy Veggie Food

We had brassicas for Africa this week, and Gez is dieting for health, so our food for today was cauliflower cheese with coleslaw and a garden lettuce salad followed by fruit salad, after which we scored 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Edge of Darkness* by Vaseem Khan. A2 is rereading Death at the Sign of the Rook by the ever-enjoyable Kate Atkinson.

Welcome Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS)

Another marvel from the Dwarf Mini; captured by A1 in the wee small hours in a gap between trees.
More info on Roast with a bonus North America Nebula. Update: Here’s a better photo, taken the next morning:
Our bathroom book is The Single Helix 100 short science essays by Steve Jones, which has well-timed chapters: one for a no.1, two for a no.2.

Critter of the Day: Tit

A little bird sitting on the weather station.
A1 is reading The Bells of Westminster* by Leonora Nattrass. A2 is reading Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. I don’t generally like reframings of well-known works of literature but Atwood’s reprise of The Tempest as an avant-garde production in a prison with the producer hell-bent on revenge was a joy and an education.