Website I found out about today.

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angelofthenorth's new flat is really nice! I can see why she's so excited about it.

Moving is happening gently: she and Mr. Smith are still here for a couple more days, which is good; it'd be weird to lose them all at once!

After sleeping like shit, making it to the first transgym lift club in a month, then helping her move in and eating a whole pizza that I usually get two or three meals out of, I have been ready for bed ever since I ate dinner; it's still not even eight o'clock.

angelofthenorth hadn't seen Glass Onion, so we're watching it tonight.

Turns out she hadn't thought of roasting cabbage until I served it -- along with roasted mushrooms and carrots and Christmasy things I'd stashed in the freezer: salmon wellington for those two and veggie pastry parcels for me -- tonight.

I am delighted to have been able to share such wonderful things.

It was my turn to select a book club book, after the very good and very extensively researched literary fiction which was also very long so we didn't actually have a meeting to chat about it until well in to December.

And at said meeting, C and I got talking about Alexander Skarsgård for some reason, and she asked me if I'd seen the Murderbot TV show so I said I liked it okay but not as much as I liked the books. She said she hadn't read them, and I was like oh you really should try, I'd love to know what you think of them. And when S said she hadn't read them either, I said "Okay, that's it, I've got my book sorted, I'm gonna make you all read the first Murderbot book."

After the great but lengthy book we'd read (There are Rivers in the Sky; I really recommend it!), and over the break, I thought something quick and light would be good and the first "book," like the next few, is only about four hours long in audio form. So when someone asked if it was worth buying them all at once I explained this, and also emphasized that while I'm not the only audiobook-preferrer in our club, I'd recommend it for this because I think Kevin R. Free adds a lot to the stories -- having originally read them in audio myself, I can't imagine the books, or Murderbot, without him (I thought Mr. Skarsgård did a passable job at sounding right, for this reason).

Now we're back at work, some people like S haven't finished that first one, but C is on to Book 6 -- which I haven't even read yet, heh. I'm delighted to have introduced her to something she loves. (She agrees with me about the narrator, saying he's "great -- I do find myself saying 'stupid humans' quite a lot at the moment.") She said

It has been great company, in particular listening to it during the early hours of Christmas morning, waiting for the perfect opportunity when both of my darling children were actually asleep so I could deliver their stockings, stop pretending to be Santa, and get some sleep myself!

This image made me grin so much.

I do love reading a new Voynich manuscript solved! article every six months or so.

A year and a bit ago, we acquired a weight bench (and the associated barbells, dumbbells and weights) from a transgym acquaintance. His partner was delighted to get it out of their loft and I was delighted to have it during the dark winter months when my ankle still wasn't up to walking to and from -- not if I wanted to actually do anything at the gym once I got there!

It served me well but isn't making good use of the space in my computer room now that it's easier for me to go to the gym. So today I passed it on to another acquaintance from transgym. He's so excited to have it and I'm so excited to have it out of my room! The circle of life.

I'm excited generally to be dealing with things that have been cluttering up the place. angelofthenorth said she'll take the stand mixer that we've never made enough use of.

(I know this sounds horribly middle-class of me, to be so burdened by possessions...and I am, but in my defense both of these were things I got from others, for no money.)

D and I walked Teddy this afternoon. Wintery mix overnight got us our first ice and/or snow this winter, a little of which has now re-frozen into black ice. With hiking shoes and a little of what my dad calls "duck walk" (apparently here it's called "penguin walk"!), D and I were fine. But Sylvia was so grateful that we showed up to walk the dog at all today. Which gave me the rare opportunity to be like "Don't worry ma'am, I'm from Minnesota."