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Life: Biking, Driving, Moving Forward, and... Robots!
Usually this week would be a week for an access-locked update, since I've been alternating locked and unlocked, but I actually... Don't really want to talk about anything private enough to merit an access lock. That's, nice, actually. My stress levels are pretty directly proportionate to the amount of private shit I want to complain about and not needing to complain is Very Good for my mood.
Since this is just the usual blathering, maybe I'll even be able to be brief! Wouldn't that be neat.
Socializing: I made plans to see Ciry this past Saturday! She came over in the evening and we picked up Japanese food for dinner and just hung out at my house watching anime for several hours. It was a very good and chill time which also included Ciry explaining the plot of Final Fantasy 15 for like ninety straight minutes, which was A Wild Ride. I miss seeing Ciry more often but now that she's back in Baltimore and on night shift it's harder to coordinate and we need to pre-plan more. But we're gonna go dancing at Glen Echo in April!!
Regarding other social plans... I seem to have nailed down all my Boston outings. I will see Dani on Thursday daytime, Cassie for dinner Thursday night, Eric on Friday, June on Saturday, on Sunday, Yrin and I will be doing a girl scouts thing and then on Monday we are doing NOTHING, we will just lie on our faces (probably watch anime tbh) until I have to go catch my flight. I am Very Excited for lots of Yrin time and also, a lot of seeing my Boston friends!
Social Media: I talked about this on twitter a little but, now that the weather is getting warmer and nicer and I'm feeling more motivated and less depressed, I miss being on twitter a lot more? It's like, when I wasn't doing very much and was feeling stressed and down all the time, one day of social media per week was plenty. But now that I'm actually DOING STUFF and HAVE less time for social media, I'm itching to be on it and two days of twitter time per week is not scratching the itch.
I'm thinking that maybe, if I still feel this way after March, I'll do Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings as designated twitter times, plus all day Saturday. I just really want at least one full weekend day where I stay off social media, because I do waste sooooo much time on it and I NEED to force myself to be off my phone and get shit done. It's... A balancing act. And I am still working on it.
Self Care: Ah, a perfect segue from my social media ~looking out for my best interests~ update! I'm really terrible about executive dysfunction and just, taking care of myself as a human animal who requires certain gentle care and upkeep. I know that big changes are hard and are less likely to stick (for me, anyway), so in February I started building a new and more consistent evening and morning routine, adding things to it one at a time as I got more into the habit. And it was working nicely and I was doing well and was hopeful about actually keeping my bedtime consistent... And then these past two weekends I just totally fucked it up, whoops.
I am a creature of habit who really likes routines so you'd think I'd be better at keeping one, but I'm also super lazy so I do have to really work at it. Being in Boston is going to throw me off anyway so I figure... I will accept that I got lazy, be lazy in Boston because half my routine doesn't apply when I'm not at home or going to work anyway, and begin anew with increased determination next week when I get home.
Tangentially related to that, I've been soooo bad about cooking during the winter. I know I'm happier and less stressed and cranky if I do meal planning and eat enough every day but, it's hard. I got sick of all of the things I usually make in batches to eat for a week but I'm trying to come up with new large-batch meals and just, get back in the habit of cooking more. If anyone has not-too-complicated recipe recommendations for meals that will last one person several days, hit me. Meat, poultry, and seafood are all good, any sort of ~hearty food~ would serve me well.
Exercise: It was 75F out on Friday and so I got to ride my bike properly!! There were also winds of 12 to 20 MPH (supposedly it was steadily 14 MPH while I was actively biking) though so it sure did put me through the wringer. I was determined to bike down to the waterfront even though there's this one straightaway which pretty much becomes a wind tunnel when the wind picks up and that was HELLISH but on the way back I really did have a tailwind and got to bike SO QUICKLY AND EASILY, totally worth it. There and back and once around the lake is thirteen miles, which really isn't too bad when I've only biked one other time in the past six months.
Driving: After stressing out about it for five million years because of the debacle with the first driving school, I paid a new driving school for Maryland's mandatory six hours of professional driving instruction and scheduled my three two-hour sessions. I have completed two of them, one this past Sunday and one on Monday. And it was? Good? The instructor is genuinely a good teacher, which is all I really hoped for.
After driving with me twice, he told me that if I drive like I did with him on the test, I should be fine. I've felt that I'm proficient at everything you need to do for DRIVING and that it was just PARKING (in the way the MD test requires) that I cannot do for shit. Hilariously, he taught me how to parallel park and that made perfect sense to me and I did that proficiently on the first try. Then he told me to do the two-point turn reversing into a parking space thing the MD test does instead of parallel parking and I fucked it the hell up, lol. That was day one.
For day two we spent the entire time working on maneuvering. The thing I have trouble with isn't so much the reversing itself, it's consistently judging distance and angle because if I misjudge, it just does not compute in my brain how to correct the error and get the car where I want it to be. So the instructor set out cones at varying distances and had me zigzag around them, in reverse, multiple times. Which was genuinely really helpful because it's the same skill as the two-point turn but with the need to correct and account for varying distances between you and objects around you, so it kinda, forced my brain to learn a little of this specific spatial awareness I've never had to use, lol.
And then I did the two-point turn needed for the test without error, in under sixty seconds (you get three minutes), twice in a row. So I probably! Can! Pass a fucking driving test now!! Breathes in deep, we're almost free.
Writing: So, I decided to prioritize writing for vlockers and resume working on original stuff when gifts are done. Lockers were supposed to open on the 15th. I was hoping for an extension just over the weekend but for unspecified reasons, Kay delayed reveals until the end of the month. So on the one hand... More time to meet my writing goal! On the other, this is too much time and so deadline panic released me and I've lost 90% of my motivation to write things.
I am truly the worst. On the upside, last week I didn't have very clear concepts for most of the people I would potentially write for. I'd chosen a fandom and a ship and maybe had a nebulous idea at best; now I've nailed down several of my concepts and it's just a matter of Doing It. And for the people where I was always planning to make something other than a fic, I've finished those gifts! So I have five posted not-fic gifts and one posted fic-gift. I have five concrete fic concepts I hope to write; I am holding myself to finishing at least two. We will see how it goes!
Crochet: Work on the lapras blanket continues apace! As mentioned, I finished the entire 45 x 45 inch big lapras square and have moved on to making other motifs for the overall blanket. Those will include six-inch squares, ten-inch squares, and long rectangular strips (exact length to be determined based on some layout decisions I'm still finalizing). I settled on the patterns and colorways for all of the varieties of ten-inch square, which was Very Satisfying. But for the six-inch squares and the rectangles, I'm still playing with a couple of different possibilities.
It feels very satisfying to have made a number of decisions — decisions I'm happy with — which I wasn't set on before I picked the project back up. I just really want to nail down the remaining design and color choices so I can mindlessly throw myself into the construction itself and not have to think so much about experimenting, lol.
Games: Throwing myself back into Show by Rock also continues apace! I feel like I've reached a moment of breathing space with the game, because the event that began when I started playing ended early this morning and I've received all of the various log-in bonuses that were going on during this time. Between the two URs I received as event rewards, various UR tickets, and a 10-roll + guaranteed UR ticket, I now have six URs — technically I pulled seven but one was a dupe so among those, one is a UR+.
The thing I've both enjoyed but also questioned liking with the game is: I don't feel pressured to play constantly and spend all of my AP every day. When the event ended, I still had ~15,000 event tickets. I was playing 6* songs; that many tickets would have let me play event songs ONE HUNDRED times more. But there was no reason to do that. My rank in the event was already high enough. Short of clawing into the top ten, I wasn't going to get better rewards if I played more. Anything I would have gotten from milestone rewards or getting more bingos wasn't worth it.
It's the funny circumstance of knowing I have a lot of cards that aren't maxed yet but also knowing that it's not worth rushing and playing more than is fun just to get a FEW more game resources. It's funny feeling like the game is telling me that it's better to take my time, because that's really NICE from a mobile game, but too MUCH of that makes me feel like I don't have goals and like the things I'm doing don't actually serve a purpose. I like when games give me goals and make me feel productive, so I need that sense that I'm working toward something big.
I think I felt a little directionless after the event because I've only just started playing the game again and event grinding is the only thing I really know how to do. But I poked around over lunch and read the info for the four-day item-collection mini-event and apparently if I grind out enough pieces of film and create the right items from the mini-event store, I'll be rewarded with a UR — a red UR, the one color where I don't currently have a card that good. So I guess now I know what I'm doing for the next four days!
If you look at the types of games I play and the WAY I play games, it absolutely says a lot about my personality, lmao.
Literature: I've been spending all my free time on crochet and playing SB69 and so I haven't been reading very much, again. But I formatted and posted my intended reading list for the year, so it would be pretty cool if friends are interested in reading any of those same books on my list! There are a handful of other books I started reading or think I might read this year but I didn't list them because I can tell they aren't books I'll want to TALK about with people. Also: read Ninefox Gambit. Ohhhhhh my god please read Ninefox Gambit and its sequels, more than anything else I want to yell about this book excitedly for a million years, I can't wait to read it again. But... Maybe after I finish my 2019 reading list.
Television: Oh my god I have been watching so much television, I'm actually getting burnt out on TV but I like to have something to listen to while I crochet and podcasts/audiobooks/anything audio only isn't quite enough mental stimulation.
I watched the rest of the Criminal Minds episodes which are on neflix, which takes me through the end of season twelve. Then I started watching season thirteen on an online source of dubious repute because I already pay for netflix and am not paying for CBS' streaming service on top of that. I'm going to be caught up soon?? I found out that Criminal Minds was renewed for "its fifteenth and final season" and I'm actually REALLY EXCITED that the show is ending. I've watched it literally since the pilot episode and it's had a good run; it feels good, to follow a series all the way to its final conclusion.
With Ciry, I watched the first five or six episodes of an anime called My Roommate is a Cat which is, predictably enough, about a shut-in novelist who adopts a stray and how taking care of a cat forces him to broaden his world a little bit. It's cute and heartwarming and mindless and I really enjoyed what we saw of it.
And then I watched the Love, Death, and Robots compilation of animated shorts on netflix. I was very excited about the premise until someone pointed out that not one short in eighteen was produced(/written/directed?) by a woman and those odds sure did bum me out. A few of them are VERY "oh this ABSOLUTELY was made by a dude and it suffers from the limited vision of its creator" but for the most part, I enjoyed what I watched. It felt a lot like when I go to the international short film festival in DC; not everything is to my taste and some of it is VERY "this was made by a man who is trying too hard to be Artistic and the result is just excruciating" but the overall experience is good.
My absolute favorite was "Lucky 13" and if you pay the series no other attention than this: please watch "Lucky 13." It's about a black female pilot and her spaceship, who everyone thought was cursed but who she chose to believe in and her spaceship clearly loves her Very Much and it just, made me cry about spaceship, I loved it so much. My other favorites were "Beyond the Aquila Rift" and "Good Hunting" and I'm not sure whether they're OBJECTIVELY great but they sure are laser-targeted to my taste. The first appeals to my love for truly bizarre aliens and mindfuck, the second appeals to my broader tastes with the way it combines the supernatural with the mechanical.
If anyone else chooses to watch it, I think I would recommend the overall series of shorts. I feel like the creators were a bit short-sighted in their interpretation of the themes, because so many of the people who focused on "death" immediately jumped to "war" and so many of the people who focused on "love" made it more about sex, but. Overall I think it's a really cool concept to launch this sort of multi-animator project and I'd love to see more of this kinda thing. Especially if the next run brings in more People Who Are Not Cishet (White) Men.
But yeah, that's how things are going! I'm glad to be feeling better lately and I just... Hope I can hold onto that, I'm accomplishing stuff I wanted to work on with my physical health and getting my driver's license and just, taking care of myself in general. It's kind of nice to treat myself a little bit like a mobage, where you have to accept that you're not going to achieve everything all at once, you have to take it a day at a time and accomplish your little daily goals and be diligent and eventually, when you work hard, it pays off. We live in a capitalist hellscape so I am Very Bitter about the idea of applying this to employment but to care of MYSELF, it still applies.
Since this is just the usual blathering, maybe I'll even be able to be brief! Wouldn't that be neat.
Socializing: I made plans to see Ciry this past Saturday! She came over in the evening and we picked up Japanese food for dinner and just hung out at my house watching anime for several hours. It was a very good and chill time which also included Ciry explaining the plot of Final Fantasy 15 for like ninety straight minutes, which was A Wild Ride. I miss seeing Ciry more often but now that she's back in Baltimore and on night shift it's harder to coordinate and we need to pre-plan more. But we're gonna go dancing at Glen Echo in April!!
Regarding other social plans... I seem to have nailed down all my Boston outings. I will see Dani on Thursday daytime, Cassie for dinner Thursday night, Eric on Friday, June on Saturday, on Sunday, Yrin and I will be doing a girl scouts thing and then on Monday we are doing NOTHING, we will just lie on our faces (probably watch anime tbh) until I have to go catch my flight. I am Very Excited for lots of Yrin time and also, a lot of seeing my Boston friends!
Social Media: I talked about this on twitter a little but, now that the weather is getting warmer and nicer and I'm feeling more motivated and less depressed, I miss being on twitter a lot more? It's like, when I wasn't doing very much and was feeling stressed and down all the time, one day of social media per week was plenty. But now that I'm actually DOING STUFF and HAVE less time for social media, I'm itching to be on it and two days of twitter time per week is not scratching the itch.
I'm thinking that maybe, if I still feel this way after March, I'll do Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings as designated twitter times, plus all day Saturday. I just really want at least one full weekend day where I stay off social media, because I do waste sooooo much time on it and I NEED to force myself to be off my phone and get shit done. It's... A balancing act. And I am still working on it.
Self Care: Ah, a perfect segue from my social media ~looking out for my best interests~ update! I'm really terrible about executive dysfunction and just, taking care of myself as a human animal who requires certain gentle care and upkeep. I know that big changes are hard and are less likely to stick (for me, anyway), so in February I started building a new and more consistent evening and morning routine, adding things to it one at a time as I got more into the habit. And it was working nicely and I was doing well and was hopeful about actually keeping my bedtime consistent... And then these past two weekends I just totally fucked it up, whoops.
I am a creature of habit who really likes routines so you'd think I'd be better at keeping one, but I'm also super lazy so I do have to really work at it. Being in Boston is going to throw me off anyway so I figure... I will accept that I got lazy, be lazy in Boston because half my routine doesn't apply when I'm not at home or going to work anyway, and begin anew with increased determination next week when I get home.
Tangentially related to that, I've been soooo bad about cooking during the winter. I know I'm happier and less stressed and cranky if I do meal planning and eat enough every day but, it's hard. I got sick of all of the things I usually make in batches to eat for a week but I'm trying to come up with new large-batch meals and just, get back in the habit of cooking more. If anyone has not-too-complicated recipe recommendations for meals that will last one person several days, hit me. Meat, poultry, and seafood are all good, any sort of ~hearty food~ would serve me well.
Exercise: It was 75F out on Friday and so I got to ride my bike properly!! There were also winds of 12 to 20 MPH (supposedly it was steadily 14 MPH while I was actively biking) though so it sure did put me through the wringer. I was determined to bike down to the waterfront even though there's this one straightaway which pretty much becomes a wind tunnel when the wind picks up and that was HELLISH but on the way back I really did have a tailwind and got to bike SO QUICKLY AND EASILY, totally worth it. There and back and once around the lake is thirteen miles, which really isn't too bad when I've only biked one other time in the past six months.
Driving: After stressing out about it for five million years because of the debacle with the first driving school, I paid a new driving school for Maryland's mandatory six hours of professional driving instruction and scheduled my three two-hour sessions. I have completed two of them, one this past Sunday and one on Monday. And it was? Good? The instructor is genuinely a good teacher, which is all I really hoped for.
After driving with me twice, he told me that if I drive like I did with him on the test, I should be fine. I've felt that I'm proficient at everything you need to do for DRIVING and that it was just PARKING (in the way the MD test requires) that I cannot do for shit. Hilariously, he taught me how to parallel park and that made perfect sense to me and I did that proficiently on the first try. Then he told me to do the two-point turn reversing into a parking space thing the MD test does instead of parallel parking and I fucked it the hell up, lol. That was day one.
For day two we spent the entire time working on maneuvering. The thing I have trouble with isn't so much the reversing itself, it's consistently judging distance and angle because if I misjudge, it just does not compute in my brain how to correct the error and get the car where I want it to be. So the instructor set out cones at varying distances and had me zigzag around them, in reverse, multiple times. Which was genuinely really helpful because it's the same skill as the two-point turn but with the need to correct and account for varying distances between you and objects around you, so it kinda, forced my brain to learn a little of this specific spatial awareness I've never had to use, lol.
And then I did the two-point turn needed for the test without error, in under sixty seconds (you get three minutes), twice in a row. So I probably! Can! Pass a fucking driving test now!! Breathes in deep, we're almost free.
Writing: So, I decided to prioritize writing for vlockers and resume working on original stuff when gifts are done. Lockers were supposed to open on the 15th. I was hoping for an extension just over the weekend but for unspecified reasons, Kay delayed reveals until the end of the month. So on the one hand... More time to meet my writing goal! On the other, this is too much time and so deadline panic released me and I've lost 90% of my motivation to write things.
I am truly the worst. On the upside, last week I didn't have very clear concepts for most of the people I would potentially write for. I'd chosen a fandom and a ship and maybe had a nebulous idea at best; now I've nailed down several of my concepts and it's just a matter of Doing It. And for the people where I was always planning to make something other than a fic, I've finished those gifts! So I have five posted not-fic gifts and one posted fic-gift. I have five concrete fic concepts I hope to write; I am holding myself to finishing at least two. We will see how it goes!
Crochet: Work on the lapras blanket continues apace! As mentioned, I finished the entire 45 x 45 inch big lapras square and have moved on to making other motifs for the overall blanket. Those will include six-inch squares, ten-inch squares, and long rectangular strips (exact length to be determined based on some layout decisions I'm still finalizing). I settled on the patterns and colorways for all of the varieties of ten-inch square, which was Very Satisfying. But for the six-inch squares and the rectangles, I'm still playing with a couple of different possibilities.
It feels very satisfying to have made a number of decisions — decisions I'm happy with — which I wasn't set on before I picked the project back up. I just really want to nail down the remaining design and color choices so I can mindlessly throw myself into the construction itself and not have to think so much about experimenting, lol.
Games: Throwing myself back into Show by Rock also continues apace! I feel like I've reached a moment of breathing space with the game, because the event that began when I started playing ended early this morning and I've received all of the various log-in bonuses that were going on during this time. Between the two URs I received as event rewards, various UR tickets, and a 10-roll + guaranteed UR ticket, I now have six URs — technically I pulled seven but one was a dupe so among those, one is a UR+.
The thing I've both enjoyed but also questioned liking with the game is: I don't feel pressured to play constantly and spend all of my AP every day. When the event ended, I still had ~15,000 event tickets. I was playing 6* songs; that many tickets would have let me play event songs ONE HUNDRED times more. But there was no reason to do that. My rank in the event was already high enough. Short of clawing into the top ten, I wasn't going to get better rewards if I played more. Anything I would have gotten from milestone rewards or getting more bingos wasn't worth it.
It's the funny circumstance of knowing I have a lot of cards that aren't maxed yet but also knowing that it's not worth rushing and playing more than is fun just to get a FEW more game resources. It's funny feeling like the game is telling me that it's better to take my time, because that's really NICE from a mobile game, but too MUCH of that makes me feel like I don't have goals and like the things I'm doing don't actually serve a purpose. I like when games give me goals and make me feel productive, so I need that sense that I'm working toward something big.
I think I felt a little directionless after the event because I've only just started playing the game again and event grinding is the only thing I really know how to do. But I poked around over lunch and read the info for the four-day item-collection mini-event and apparently if I grind out enough pieces of film and create the right items from the mini-event store, I'll be rewarded with a UR — a red UR, the one color where I don't currently have a card that good. So I guess now I know what I'm doing for the next four days!
If you look at the types of games I play and the WAY I play games, it absolutely says a lot about my personality, lmao.
Literature: I've been spending all my free time on crochet and playing SB69 and so I haven't been reading very much, again. But I formatted and posted my intended reading list for the year, so it would be pretty cool if friends are interested in reading any of those same books on my list! There are a handful of other books I started reading or think I might read this year but I didn't list them because I can tell they aren't books I'll want to TALK about with people. Also: read Ninefox Gambit. Ohhhhhh my god please read Ninefox Gambit and its sequels, more than anything else I want to yell about this book excitedly for a million years, I can't wait to read it again. But... Maybe after I finish my 2019 reading list.
Television: Oh my god I have been watching so much television, I'm actually getting burnt out on TV but I like to have something to listen to while I crochet and podcasts/audiobooks/anything audio only isn't quite enough mental stimulation.
I watched the rest of the Criminal Minds episodes which are on neflix, which takes me through the end of season twelve. Then I started watching season thirteen on an online source of dubious repute because I already pay for netflix and am not paying for CBS' streaming service on top of that. I'm going to be caught up soon?? I found out that Criminal Minds was renewed for "its fifteenth and final season" and I'm actually REALLY EXCITED that the show is ending. I've watched it literally since the pilot episode and it's had a good run; it feels good, to follow a series all the way to its final conclusion.
With Ciry, I watched the first five or six episodes of an anime called My Roommate is a Cat which is, predictably enough, about a shut-in novelist who adopts a stray and how taking care of a cat forces him to broaden his world a little bit. It's cute and heartwarming and mindless and I really enjoyed what we saw of it.
And then I watched the Love, Death, and Robots compilation of animated shorts on netflix. I was very excited about the premise until someone pointed out that not one short in eighteen was produced(/written/directed?) by a woman and those odds sure did bum me out. A few of them are VERY "oh this ABSOLUTELY was made by a dude and it suffers from the limited vision of its creator" but for the most part, I enjoyed what I watched. It felt a lot like when I go to the international short film festival in DC; not everything is to my taste and some of it is VERY "this was made by a man who is trying too hard to be Artistic and the result is just excruciating" but the overall experience is good.
My absolute favorite was "Lucky 13" and if you pay the series no other attention than this: please watch "Lucky 13." It's about a black female pilot and her spaceship, who everyone thought was cursed but who she chose to believe in and her spaceship clearly loves her Very Much and it just, made me cry about spaceship, I loved it so much. My other favorites were "Beyond the Aquila Rift" and "Good Hunting" and I'm not sure whether they're OBJECTIVELY great but they sure are laser-targeted to my taste. The first appeals to my love for truly bizarre aliens and mindfuck, the second appeals to my broader tastes with the way it combines the supernatural with the mechanical.
If anyone else chooses to watch it, I think I would recommend the overall series of shorts. I feel like the creators were a bit short-sighted in their interpretation of the themes, because so many of the people who focused on "death" immediately jumped to "war" and so many of the people who focused on "love" made it more about sex, but. Overall I think it's a really cool concept to launch this sort of multi-animator project and I'd love to see more of this kinda thing. Especially if the next run brings in more People Who Are Not Cishet (White) Men.
But yeah, that's how things are going! I'm glad to be feeling better lately and I just... Hope I can hold onto that, I'm accomplishing stuff I wanted to work on with my physical health and getting my driver's license and just, taking care of myself in general. It's kind of nice to treat myself a little bit like a mobage, where you have to accept that you're not going to achieve everything all at once, you have to take it a day at a time and accomplish your little daily goals and be diligent and eventually, when you work hard, it pays off. We live in a capitalist hellscape so I am Very Bitter about the idea of applying this to employment but to care of MYSELF, it still applies.
no subject
Hello, relatable problem. Motivating yourself to cook is so hard, and managing to find new recipes for batch-cooking before you get sick of eating the old ones is even harder. :(
For recs, I like these two baked beef stews a lot, which both basically just involve putting a bunch of stuff in a dish and then slow-roasting it. That said, the recipes recommend cooking for two-three hours, but I personally find I need around four in the oven + thirty or so minutes on the stove to cook off most of the excess liquid and get the beef really tender, so it's sort of an all-day affair .... But on days when I'm at home anyway, I just have them cooking in the background while I do other things. The former is more tomato-y while the latter is very umami-y. And they both freeze well, though freezing does make the texture of the potatoes sort of funky.
no subject
Man I've just, been having such a mental disconnect about cooking, full stop. It's weird and hard because it feels like some recipes are "okay" to cook whereas with others, my brain will immediately nope out on the entire idea of preparing them. It's not for any rational reason like "this recipe is complicated," it's just, brains I guess!! I have not been a fan but I sure am doing my best to feed myself. ;;
no subject
And ahh, I feel you about mental blocks re: cooking. In my case I think it's just a basic executive dysfunction issue where anything that requires too many steps (e.g. making a marinade) just makes my brain mentally bluescreen, such that I find myself stalling out midway through the process and going on the internet for six hours instead of actually finishing the recipe, but if your block isn't even tied to recipe difficulty then that sounds even more frustrating and unpredictable. I hope your feeding-yourself project is going okay! (I need to find some more spring/summer recipes, myself.)