Category: Blog

Wasting time vs quality time

Lately I’ve read quite a few books but I haven’t found time to review them, partly because I’ve been prioritising other things in my evenings and weekends. (Partly because I have been exhausted from working a lot of hours.) And reflecting on that has got me thinking about the choices I make.

I know that the ways that I spend most of my leisure time – watching TV, hanging out in pubs, doing crosswords, playing computer games, reading books – might be considered time-wasting, particularly the TV. But another way to look at is it that most of that time is spent with Tim and he’s my partner, my family, so surely that’s quality time. Yes, even watching TV together. Perhaps especially that – we laugh together, discuss plot points, get annoyed or scared or sad together.

This weekend we had intended to go to on a couple of day trips but I was tired, so instead we have mostly been playing games, or rather one specific game: Civilization VI. Civ has been part of our relationship since the start, in its various iterations. When I was a student we would lose days on end to playing it but it has been several years since we last did this. We are effectively telling a story together, making decisions that are both life-or-death and completely meaningless. It’s really a lot of fun.

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Reading round-up May 2018

Teenage girls are our future

Oof. I have not read much this month. Or at least, I haven’t finished many books. I have started at least three books I haven’t finished and possibly won’t ever finish. Maybe I’ll blog about those another time.

We had two fab weekends away in London, enjoying sunshine, music, art, time with friends and some spectacular thunder and lightning. This month’s highlight was seeing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs perform last Friday. I love them so much and they were on top form.

We also visited the South Bank Book Fair under Waterloo Bridge for the first time in years. I used to go there fairly often. It was always pricey and skewed towards maps and antiquities, but books! Tim found a collection of SF short stories edited by Harry Harrison. I found a novel by Yukio Mishima. We went to a bar on a balcony over the Thames and cracked open those books over a drink and a snack. It was beautiful.

Roll on June.

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Run, stop, lupus

Adam, Mum and me

Once again this year, my Mum talked me into running the Bristol 10k, so I have been training since mid-January. It did not go smoothly. There was snow and ice, injury, busy periods at work tiring me out and then before I knew it my old enemy reared its head: summer.

There is a good reason that May is Lupus Awareness Month in the USA. These long hours of daylight and higher UV levels can come as a surprise, especially on cloudy or wet days. I always have a lupus flare-up in May. Which made me wary of the Bristol 10k’s date of 13 May.

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Reading round-up April 2018

CC0 Thought Catalog

I ended my month by going to a friend’s book launch. I am very proud, and impressed, by Lizzie’s dedication to becoming a poet. So I’m going to start my April round-up by recommending that you all go out and buy In Her Shambles by Elizabeth Parker. Look out for my review of it soon.

This month I also went to the Bristol Old Vic production of A Streetcar Named Desire. I had never seen a stage production of this play before, only the Vivien Leigh film, and it was terrific. Funny, disturbing, full of heat in every sense. Many thanks to my friend T for inviting me along.

As always happens with those first glimmers of summer, my lupus is flaring a little, so I am watching a lot of films and TV and not reading many books. But it will pass. And the month’s reading started off strong.

How was your April?

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Reading round-up March 2018

photo of The Gurugu Pledge and a chocolate egg

I am currently halfway through my Easter read-a-thon and bang on schedule: I’ve finished three of the six books I’m hoping to read before the end of Monday. But I am also full of cold and feeling a little rubbish, so the Netflix and Youtube breaks have been getting longer…

Much like this bank holiday weekend, March as a whole has been a mixed bag. It snowed twice, which was pretty but the one time we went out in it further than the local park I twisted my ankle. And that meant I didn’t run for almost a whole month, which makes me worry a little bit about that pesky 10k race in six weeks’ time.

On the plus side we did an awesome gyoza cooking class arranged by a local cafe called Eatchu last weekend and now our freezer is full of tofu, mushroom and spinach dumplings. Surprisingly it seems to be the cooking them part that is defeating us so far but that might be because they require a 100% non-stick pan, not ones where not only the non-stick but all the materials appear to be peeling off in places. I think we need new frying pans.

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Sunday Salon: Bristol in the snow

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It’s almost gone already, but we had a couple of proper snow days here for the first time in years. For those of us who don’t need to drive and can work from home, it wasn’t especially disruptive, and was fun and beautiful. I particularly enjoyed walking around our local park and seeing it packed with people having fun sledging, building snowmen, generally enjoying the holiday atmosphere.

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Reading round-up February 2018

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book fanned open
CC0 Pixabay/Cocoparisienne

Brrr. Storm Emma has well and truly hit Bristol and I am cold, even huddled on the sofa under a blanket. The snow has been falling non-stop all day and is expected to keep it up all through tomorrow as well. We’ve changed our weekend plans from going away and seeing to art to hunkering down and maybe venturing out to take some photos – making our own art.

February was a pretty good reading month for me. I finished Anna Karenina and followed that up with a few short books to give myself a refresh. And then I read one of the best books I’ve found in a few years: My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal. I loved that book so much. Eventually I will write a proper review, but you can see my initial thoughts below.

Thankfully our local chippy is still open so we have loaded up on fat and carbs to see us through the frozen night. Any excuse gladly taken!

Stay safe and warm, folks.

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Do you Zooniverse?

I’ve spent years hearing about Zooniverse, right back to its origin in the Galaxy Zoo project, but it occurred to me that outside of academia and science journalism, maybe it’s not so well known. Zooniverse is a citizen-science platform, where anyone can register and help to sort through the types of data that are easier for humans to classify than computers.

That might sound dull, but most projects involve looking at photos and ticking a box for each one. You can choose between dozens of projects to find something that you will enjoy looking at photos of. There’s Cheetahs of Central Namibia, where the photos are from a camera trap in a Namibian national park. There’s the Weddell Seal Count, where the images are from a satellite pointed at sections of ice in the Antarctic. There’s the Milky Way Project, with images from the Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE satellite observatory.

One I got a little obsessed with last year is Penguin Watch, where you click on every penguin in each photo. I love penguins and it’s reassuring to see photos of hundreds of them just getting on with their quiet little lives.

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Sunday Salon: Tackling the TBR

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The Sunday Salon

I would like to cut down my TBR without it feeling like a chore. I currently have 133 books that I have bought and not yet read, which is massive. And I know I’m never going to get it down to 20 or 30 books, neither do I want to, but under 100 would feel more manageable, maybe even under 80.

Then again, that would mean almost a year of reading without buying new books. It seems unlikely. And new books always seem more exciting than ones that have been sitting around for a while. (See, for instance, the fact that I started reading my new copy of Anna Karenina as soon as we got back from holiday. Not that I regret finally embarking on this classic, but 822 pages of one book means not tackling four normal-sized books.)

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