Phantoms in the Dark

I complain sometimes about time and the surreality of the passage thereof and whatnot, but this morning I had several minutes of genuinely wondering if the way the year is barreling toward its end meant the first Sunday of Advent had already passed without my even noticing. I'm not sure if something about the timing of US Thanksgiving threw me off, or if it's as simple as my not having put "Advent begins" on my calendar, which I think I usually note in advance. (In practical terms it'd be fine; as it happens, I'm planning to use a "burn a bit every day of December" Advent candle, which probably means not breaking out the wreath for the four Sundays. But still.)

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I often have weird dreams and don't usually remember much about them, but until today I'm not sure I'd ever before woken up from a dream where I was watching a movie? In the case of this dream, I was at the theatre watching what was officially a Newsflesh film adaptation, but in the sense that (from what I know of it, never having seen it) the World War Z movie is based on that book, which is to say, really not at all. ("Lead" characters who were supposed to be Georgia and Shaun, yes, but nothing to do with [*checks notes*] characters-as-people, zombies, viruses, or politics, and possibly not journalism, either. I think there was some sort of lab creating humanoid/animal mixes of some sort, possibly giving them guns.) It went on for quite some time.

My dream-self was appalled, of course, but at least glad to think Seanan had presumably gotten a decent chunk of money for the rights. She's got cats to feed!

Reading: I finished August Clarke's Metal from Heaven (really good, with gorgeous writing) and read Into the Broken Lands, which was my first Tanya Huff book in...probably a couple of decades, honestly. Also really good. (I have a bonus soft spot for her because she was GoH at the local SFF con one year when I went in high school.)

Currently reading: Rebecca Mahoney's The Memory Eater.

And scruloose and I are close enough to the end of Network Effect that we could probably finish it tonight if we really tried; annoyingly, it's due back at something like 6 PM today, and we can't get it finished by then, so we're gonna have to renew it. >.<

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Cooking/Baking: I mentioned having apples we needed to bake with early in the month, and what we wound up going with was the Easiest Ever MOIST Apple Cake from RecipeTin eats, chosen in large part based on our available springform pans. It's tasty (we took the last pieces out to thaw for this evening), but I can't say "moist" is one of the first words it brings to mind. (It's not dry or anything, just...a perfectly pleasantly-textured cake.)

Tonight's dinner plan is Smitten Kitchen's Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Cabbage. (It calls for a green cabbage and we have a Savoy, but hopefully that'll be okay.) Last weekend when we were out erranding we bought said cabbage, some carrots, and some broccoli (all still in the fridge), and some spring mix (fortunately not still in the fridge), but then we had a HelloFresh box to get through.

Buying vegetables is presumably the first step to actually cooking them, and I made sure to at least mostly choose some that would last a while. >.> The Bee Wilson book I mentioned recently has a section specifically on learning/practicing different cooking techniques with carrots, so I'm hoping to actually make use of the bag of carrots with my own hands. We'll see how that goes.

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Householding: The upright freezer in the garage has been making unhappy noises and needing to be poked at periodically to keep it running. Time to get a new one, I guess. >.< Everyone loves appliance shopping!

Reading: Recently finished: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Schwab, V.E.), Confidence (Frumkin, Rafael), and Hemlock & Silver (Kingfisher, T.).

Currently reading: Still working through Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (Lamott, Anne) and most of the way through Metal from Heaven (Clarke, August). scruloose and I have passed the halfway mark on listening to Network Effect, and haven't watched anything since that's occupying our "watch/listen to something together" time.

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Weathering: Well, the weather sure has noticed it's November! This is not the first gray wet day we've had, and while yesterday kindly didn't rain on us when we went out erranding, it was down near the freezing mark (and had gone below overnight).

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Eating: scruloose and I have a delicious go-to Indian place, but both it and our fallback spot too universally have onions in everything for them to be good choices for Ginny, so periodically when she and Kas are over we gamble on an Indian spot that none of us have tried. ( butter chicken sadness )