i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

Last night was the last new ep of series 3 of The Chelsea Detective *and* the first new ep of series 11 of Brokenwood Mysteries! An excellent evening of TV watching!

Saturday I went to a potluck. I made bean salad, of course, because what else do you take to a potluck? It was the local PokemonGO group's first potluck and it was being held just down the street, so I decided to go. I already new a lot of those people are *way* into PoGO, but wow. I don't think anyone talked about anything else. I left after 2 hours. They'd broken out Mario Kart on the giant screen and I got an alert on my phone that heavy rain was coming soon, so good time to exit. I'd go again, but wow.

Yesterday I got a survey in the mail - a paper survey - about my visit to the ER. *rolls eyes*

This afternoon is another hour of tabling, followed by visiting my friend N at her library and then PoGO Spotlight Hour meetup. I need to remember to put a snack in my bag. I should go do that right now so I don't forget. Done!

I made it to bed around 3am. Much better than 5am. I have a doctor's appointment at 8am, so I'm going to try for 2am tonight; I won't even try for 1am because that's laughable.

Watched the 2nd episode of Towards Zero tonight. Looking forward to the final one tomorrow! Then I watched the first 3 eps of The Cleaner. I'm not sure how I feel about that one, but they're only a half-hour so it's not a huge time commitment. I didn't get back to Ludwig; maybe tomorrow.

Last year, I made a birthday trip to Ikea (and Jordan's Furniture). I still have one bookcase that I haven't put together, mostly because it's tall and it will be a bigger pain than usual. My therapist was asking about it this afternoon and something she said made me go, "oh, I could hire someone to put it together as a birthday present!" So I'm seriously considering that. Task Rabbit isn't super cheap but it would be really nice to have that bookcase up...

I didn't go to bed until after 5am. ooops. Luckily I didn't need to get up early this morning.

Tonight I watched the first episode of Toward Zero. Can't wait for the next one. Then I went over to PBS and watched 3 episodes of NOVA. I only meant to watch the one about Revolutionary War weapons - there was a submarine??!! - but you know how it goes.

I had hand therapy this afternoon for the first time, for my wrist. She thinks it's the ligament rather than the tendon. But it's all in the same area so it's pretty much the same treatment. The exercises I need to do are so much better than any knee, back, or shoulder exercises I've ever gotten. Will that actually make me do them? We'll see. Unlike the bus routes I take to the audiologist, this bus route is apparently never on time. None of the 3 different transit apps I used - one of them the official app - had accurate "real time" tracking. I spent a lot of time standing around at bus stops. Luckily it was sunny, only a little windy, and not too chilly. And I did get a lot of PokemonGO research tasks done.

What I've recently finished reading:

In eyeball, Against the Tide of Years by S. M. Stirling, the second "Nantucket Trilogy" book. I liked the exploration and expansion of the map, but I really wished there was an actual map in the book, because I only had a vague idea, if any, as to where these various historical/archaic places actually were, and where they were in relation to each other. Even in the exploration across the American continent it wasn't clear where they were, because Stirling used native names (I guess?) for places. (And one of my big beefs with this book is that the exploration across the American continent had pretty much nothing to do with the rest of the book, and it didn't really have a point or a resolution. I assume it will be important next book, but in that case I wish it had been mostly left for the next book.)

I did like the new characters introduced in this one, and most especially I grinned when we met Odikweos son of Laertes of Ithaka, and also Alaksandrus of Wiulusiya, or Vilios, or Ilios. I always love seeing real historical characters show up in historical fiction! (Also I was extremely tickled when Ian quoted Monty Python, hee!)

In audio, Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, which I got from the library because it was one of the fantasy books recommended by Shannon Chakraborty in a NYT article last month. Casiopea Tun is a Cinderella in 1927 Mexico, a poor relation housemaid for her wealthy and unpleasant relatives. She snoops where she shouldn't and, oops, accidentally releases the Mayan death god Hun-Kamé, who was "killed" and imprisoned by his brother Vucub-Kamé. But before the god can take his revenge on his brother and regain his throne, he has to go on a hero's journey to find the missing parts of his body that his brother has scattered across Mexico, and of course Casiopea has to come with him.

I always enjoy stories of asshole gods and the mortals who help them out, and I really enjoyed having a story about gods and mythological traditions I wasn't familiar with. The writing's lovely, and it worked well as an audiobook, although either the reader's voice or the fidelity of the recording didn't play well with my running headphones, and of course I know only some Spanish and no ancient Mayan, so I felt like I missed a lot of names of people and places. I liked Casiopea's defensive sassiness, her desire for adventure finally unleashed, and Hun-Kamé's duality, his godly nature tainted by the vitality he drains from Casiopea to sustain his existence in the "Middle World". And the ending was great - I won't spoil it, but I was worried it would end up in typical YA land, and it did not.

I did not get out for a walk in the sun yesterday. In fact, I didn't get out until 9pm. A little after 8, I was getting ready to go out but my mother called. This won't take long, she says. We solved her Kindle problem in about 5 minutes. She hung up after 36 minutes and only because it was perilously close to dinner time there and my father gets grumpy if dinner is ready on time. *rolls eyes*

I watched the latest ep of The Chelsea Detective while eating dinner. After my walk, I switched over to BritBox and watched the first ep of Ludwig, which conference!roomie had recommended. I wasn't sure I was going to get through the episode, but then it started to get really interesting. So I'll definitely be watching the next one and probably the rest.

New Agatha Christie rendition, Towards Zero, drops tomorrow on BritBox.

Long day today. I started chat at 10am (still on chat...). I've got a webinar at 2pm, then I need to go in to campus to pick up those books and I'm doing tabling at 4. After that, I'm going to go see my friend that I used to work with at a different library. Then there's a PokemonGO meetup. I'd probably not go to the meetup except that it's right there, one building over from my friend's library. I probably won't get home until 7:30pm. I need to remember to take a protein bar of some sort.

Still not 100% but pretty damned close. If only the terrible tinnitus would just go away. At least my head is feeling more normal.

I watched the latest episode of The Chelsea Detective, though I believe the next one is available today. Then watched Ellis, which was a great series and I hope there's a second one. And last night I watched a new(er?) version of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Which I don't think I'd ever seen or read before because I'm quite sure I'd remember just how fucked up that story is; not exactly Poirot or Miss Marple. Perhaps not the greatest choice for before bed viewing, though I don't think I dreamed about it.

The weather has once again warmed up and the sun it out, so I'm going to try to get out for a walk before dark. Lately I've been going out around 8pm, which is still dark at this point. I did go out during the day yesterday, but it was cold and cloudy and the rain was coming.

I do have some books to pick up at the library, but I'm going to campus tomorrow, so I'll probably do that then.

We have recently finished watching all three seasons of Warrior on Netflix!

As I said in my pre-review, it's sort of Peaky Blinders set in the late 19th C San Francisco Chinatown Tong Wars, with a generous helping of Game of Thrones-ish nudity and sex; come to think of it, there is more Game of Thrones feel to it than just that, as a large part of the plot is the rivalry and fights for dominance between two tongs. Also the fight by the Irish immigrants to be hired as laborers, when the Chinese work much more cheaply. "Fight" is a literal term here - every episode has at least one (fistfight, or knife and axe fight, or swordfight, or gunfight - or more usually, someone bringing a gun to a fistfight and having it kicked out of his hands) and two or three is not uncommon. So much fighting! Sometimes gory, though fortunately usually not pushing my limit (though a few times it was UGGGHHH yuck).

I mostly liked it a lot, though I also felt ready to be finished with it as it wrapped up. Most recurring characters were interestingly complex with very mixed motivations, though there were some stock drama bad guys, and the wealthy white men were all terrible human beings. Probably my favorite characters were Ah Toy and Chao, the most mixed-motivation characters of all - Ah Toy is the perhaps mostly lesbian madam of the bordello where the Hop Wei hang out (also an accomplished swordswoman and crafty businesswoman), and Chao is the weapons dealer who is "friend to all" tongs (for a price) and the bland and obsequious face of Chinatown to the police. But there are so many cool characters!

There is both canon m/m and f/f (and plenty of het), but my favorite relationships were the prickly platonic ones, in particular between Father Jun and his son Young Jun, and between Ah Sam (the main character of the show) and his sister Mai Ling.

One thing I particularly liked about the show was the way they handled language. In the first episode there are a few bits where Chinese morphs into English as the camera shifts, so you know that the characters are speaking Chinese, even though they are speaking English. (I think Vikings did something similar.) Some of the Chinese characters speak perfect English, but others, you can tell when they are speaking "Chinese" (fluent and casual English) vs. "English" (accented, with simple grammar). And of course when there are English-speaking whites around, the Chinese characters who "don't speak English" speak Cantonese. (Apparently the actor playing Young Jun spoke fluent Cantonese, everyone else had to learn it, and Cantonese speakers can tell :-) I also liked the slang used by the Chinese, which - I don't know how accurate it is to actual Cantonese idiom, but it added a nice flavor - the white people are "ducks", the white section of San Francisco is "the pond", sex is "sticky" (as a noun), money is "chop", a fight is a "scrap".

Probably my favorite episode was the spaghetti western one in S1, though I also really liked the arc with Rosalita Vega in S2, and the S3 banger with Chao and Lee. Warnings for basically everything, though - violence, rape (mostly implied and attempted), nudity, drugs, racism, sexism, horrible white male politicians, hopeful dreams dashed against reality.

Now we are watching S3 of The Wheel of Time, which we are up to episode 3 tonight. I'm having the problem that I don't really remember S2 because I read the books between then and now, so I'm remembering book events and trying to figure out how they match up with show events. And of course there are the very big changes that have been made in the interest of bringing it to TV.

Oh, one more thing - I was going to post this yesterday but ran out of time writing it, because last night we went to see the Cirque Mechanics show "Pedal Punk", which was amazeballs! The group was founded by two former members of Cirque du Soleil, and the show is a spectacular display of core strength, flexibility, and hand-eye coordination, all framed in an entertaining comic mime play about a bicycle shop, using props that look like bicycle parts (juggling seatposts, a penny-farthing used as an aerial hoop, etc). It's stunning and if the show is near you you should definitely see it! (Looks like from here they are going to Chandler AZ, Albuquerque NM, Alexandria LA, and then Texarkana and Houston.)

I spent much of Tuesday night in the ER. Fun times. Not my first time in the ER, but my first time in an ambulance. I managed to not throw up all day until the effing ambulance. 6 hours and their conclusions was "a virus." In other words, they had no clue. Then I walked home at 3am. Perhaps not the smartest thing to do, but it was cold and it felt good and I went to bed as soon as I got home. Still not feeling usual but I feel much better than I did yesterday and much much better than I did on Tuesday. I may actually manage a shower today - with the shower bench, of course; I'm not tempting fate.

I've been baking my way through Molly Yeh's Sweet Farm all month. I made the One-Bowl Any-Butter Cookie Bars for choir (peanut butter and tahini because those were the jars I was trying to finish off the tail ends of; I also added dinosaur sprinkles on top because DINOSAUR SPRINKLES). I baked up the Potato Chip Chocolate Chip Cookies for a birthday party, and there were zero leftovers to bring home from that.

Saturday night, I was flipping through the book, trying to decide what to make for the picnic my food writing class was having the next day, and the Cherry Mahlab Linzers caught my eye. I randomly had mahlab on hand, because while we were waiting to pick up pizza from a new-to-us place awhile back, I was browsing the halal market next door, and they had little jars of mahlab and mastic at the counter. And we also had a full jar of cherry jam in the cupboard! ... but I did not feel like doing anything fussy like making sandwich cookies.

So I kept flipping, and came across the Jam Bars, Three Ways. Raspberry coconut cinnamon! Plum hazelnut fivespice! Apple marzipan (almond) cardamom! Which all sounded delicious, but I was missing at least one if not both key ingredients for each of the suggested options. But I was still thinking about the cherry mahlab combo, and decided it was time to pull one of my usual moves: smash the two concepts together and end up with:

Cherry Mahlab Jam Bars

1 cup unsalted butter (2 American sticks), room temp
133 g sugar
1t mahlab
1t rosewater - this replaces vanilla in the original jam bar recipe
260g flour - we were out of AP flour, but had bread flour on hand
1/2t kosher salt
40 grams macadamia nuts - somebody ate the almonds I thought we had on hand, so going through the nuts we actually had, I decided the macs were probably going to be the most neutral against the unknown strength of the mahlab taste, especially compared to walnuts and pecans
4 oz (half of an 8 oz container) halva - I modeled my filling off the apple marzipan filling, and used half a container of pistachio halva to supplement the nuts
1/2 cup cherry jam

1. Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a square metal baking pan with parchment so that you have handles to lift the bars out when they're baked. (The original recipe calls for an 8" pan; I used a 9" and it was fine.)
2. Cream the butter, sugar, mahlab, and rosewater in a mixer until fluffy.
3. Add the flour and salt, and mix until combined.
4. Press about 3/4 of the mix into the bottom of the baking pan until evenly covered.
5. Parbake the bottom crust for 15-20 minutes, until you can see a bit of browning around the edges.
6. While the bottom crust is parbaking, chop the nuts, then add them to the remaining crust mix and combine with your hands until you have a coarse crumble. Repeat with the halva, trying not to blend it in too much.
7. Take the bottom crust out of the oven and let it cool for 5 minutes. Once cool, spread your jam onto the crust evenly, leaving a 1/4" border around the sides. Top with the crumble.
8. Bake for an additional 25 minutes, or until browned on top.
9. Cool completely in the pan. Once cool, remove the bars, and slice. (I did 4x6 to make 24 bars; the original recipe calls for 4x4.)