I feel the colours fill the room beneath the patter of the rain
Aug. 30th, 2026 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I'm about a day-and-a-half into a three-day weekend, and so far it's been great. After months of drought and heatwaves, it would be the August long weekend that was filled with rain, but I was so sick of this new climate change normal summer that I greeted the rain with absolute delight. Matthias and I spent most of yesterday out on a day-trip to Bury St Edmund's, and managed to time things well, so that the rain only fell when we were under shelter.
We were there for a beer festival in the cathedral, where we scored the perfect table in the cloisters, and spent a fun few hours chatting, eating food truck food, and people watching. We followed that up with a great meal in this place, then caught the train home beneath dramatic sheets of black clouds, beating the rain again.
Today, I greeted the morning with a fantastic yoga class, taking advantage of our newly-empty spare room (the old furniture is gone, the new laminate flooring has been laid, but the new furniture hasn't arrived yet) to move and stretch with a gorgeous view of the rising sun and the birds and squirrels frolicking in the treetops and hedgerow surrounding the field across the road. Then it's mostly been cleaning and journalling, interspersed with reading (Four Aunties and A Wedding, Jesse Sutanto's fun sequel to her earlier comedic family drama Dial A For Aunties). I think the rest of the weekend will be more of the same, plus some swimming and slow cooking. All in all, it's been perfect so far.
( Further reading, plus a link )
We were there for a beer festival in the cathedral, where we scored the perfect table in the cloisters, and spent a fun few hours chatting, eating food truck food, and people watching. We followed that up with a great meal in this place, then caught the train home beneath dramatic sheets of black clouds, beating the rain again.
Today, I greeted the morning with a fantastic yoga class, taking advantage of our newly-empty spare room (the old furniture is gone, the new laminate flooring has been laid, but the new furniture hasn't arrived yet) to move and stretch with a gorgeous view of the rising sun and the birds and squirrels frolicking in the treetops and hedgerow surrounding the field across the road. Then it's mostly been cleaning and journalling, interspersed with reading (Four Aunties and A Wedding, Jesse Sutanto's fun sequel to her earlier comedic family drama Dial A For Aunties). I think the rest of the weekend will be more of the same, plus some swimming and slow cooking. All in all, it's been perfect so far.
( Further reading, plus a link )
Summer TV shows
Aug. 30th, 2026 11:09 amdolorosa_12My TV watching declined in the summer, which is not such a bad thing — I was out and about, travelling, doing things outdoors, and just away from the house in general. For this reason, I've skipped a couple of monthly TV round-ups, as I didn't feel the numbers justified a full post. Here, therefore, is everything I've finished watching in June, July and August of this year:
Widow's Bay, a fantastic comedy-horror miniseries in which Matthew Rhys is the mayor of a picturesque New England island village which hides some very strange secrets. His desire to transform the town into a tourist destination wars with all the various supernatural shenanigans bubbling up at inopportune moments, with each episode a pastiche of a different horror genre (slasher films, folk horror, and so on). I really enjoyed this.
The final season of Lidia Poët, an Italian series inspired by a real nineteenth-century figure who attempted to become Italy's first female lawyer. She was almost immediately foiled in the attempt by the authorities and the legal establishment (despite having graduated university with the appropriate credentials), and spent most of her life working as a legal assistant to her brother, before being granted the right to practice law many decades later. The show takes these basic facts, and hangs around them a case-of-the-week legal drama, plus an overarching mystery that unfolds over the course of each season, plus a lot of soap operatic interpersonal drama (I assume the real Lidia Poët was not embroiled in a love triangle with her brother-in-law and the prosecutor who is usually her brother's adversary in each of the cases-of-the-week, for example). Everyone's beautiful to look at, the costumes are incredible, and the whole thing is a lot of fun.
Prisoner, which is not really something I can entirely recommend, but it is absolutely my kind of nonsense. The premise of the show is that a prison transfer officer — on her first day returning to work after maternity leave — is assigned to transport a member of an organised crime gang to court, where he will give evidence that will convict the leader of the whole organisation. Almost immediately, this routine trip is thrown into chaos: they're attacked by members of the gang seeking to silence the prisoner, and the two of them have to go on the run, hunted relentlessly (with threats to both their families) until they can make it to court. Fictional situations in which two people with utterly opposing worldviews, values and motivations are temporarily thrown together and forced to depend on each other for survival are absolute catnip for me (all the better if the experience transforms them both so that they both come away at the end a little bit more like each other), and this one well and truly delivered. The characters even spent three out of six episodes literally handcuffed together, they had to pretend to be a couple holding hands to hide the handcuffs in multiple moments throughout the show — it was that tropey. All that said, there are several plot twists that rely on characters making utterly stupid decisions, and there are ludicrous moments that really strain belief, so take that into account and recognise that I'm somewhat blinded by the fact that the show's core is a specific fictional scenario that I am particularly drawn to. But I enjoyed this so much that I'm seriously considering requesting it for Yuletide!
Interview with the VampireThe Vampire Lestat, about which I don't have much more to say that hasn't already been said, except to add that I definitely enjoyed the continuation of this adaptation of a book series I adored in my late teens. It treats its ridiculous source material seriously, retains its histrionic heart, and weaves into it something new at the same time. It helps that all the actors are clearly having an absolute ball.
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a fantastic miniseries starring Tatiana Maslany as a woman who's found herself using the services of a camboy as something of a crutch to cope with her complicated life, when she witnesses (or does she) said camboy being attacked in his home. Her attempt to uncover the truth of what she saw on screen reveals scams within nesting scams, and throws her already chaotic life (she's in a custody battle with her ex-husband and his new wife, she works as a fact-checker for an online magazine — a profession the show acknowledges is on the way out as part of dying industry, which adds to the sense of precariousness — where she's trying unsuccessfully to obtain a promotion, and the everyday pressures of juggling work and motherhood themselves just add to the burden) into further disarray. Maslany absolutely excels at playing women whose lives are falling apart spectacularly, and she's fantastic here, alongside a great supporting cast. I'm so happy she was given better material to work with after the debacle that was She Hulk.
My Brilliant Career, an adaptation of Miles Franklin's classic Australian novel (which, although it's considered a sort of foundational work of Australian literature, I've never read) in which a young woman — who wants to live independently as a writer — is forced by the poverty of her immediate family to go and live with her wealthy maternal relatives in the hope that she'll make an advantageous marriage and relieve her family of their debts. Well aware of these schemes, and armed with the certainty of youth, she's determined to do nothing of the sort, and to find a way out that will not involve being shackled to a wealthy husband. Not having read the book, I can't speak to whether this is a good adaptation or not, but I found it a whole lot of fun, and a great portrait of a very specific time and place (immediately before and after federation in 1901), with a great cast of characters. I should take this as the inspiration to read Franklin's book at last!
Friday open thread: long weekends
Aug. 28th, 2026 06:37 pmdolorosa_12Just a quick Friday open thread today, in honour of the fact that it's just hit the start of a long weekend here in England (but not UK-wide).
In general, I never take actual holidays (i.e. travelling/staying overnight) during public holiday long weekends, as it tends to be more expensive and crowded. Instead, I tend to treat them as a kind of gift of time — I stick to my usual weekend activities, but they feel stretched out and unrushed, and give me more time to do all the nice stuff in/near home that I enjoy. It's more time for reading, more time for cooking, more time for chatting with people on Dreamwidth, more opportunities to go swimming, more time in the garden, without the sense of constraint and rush that I normally feel on the regular two-day weekends.
I do enjoy day trips on long weekends, and my rule is always that the longest journeys start on the first day of the weekend, and then you stick progressively closer and closer to the home as the days go by. It's always served me very well!
So, that's today's prompt: how do you like to spend your time on three- or four-day weekends, whenever you're lucky enough to get one?
In general, I never take actual holidays (i.e. travelling/staying overnight) during public holiday long weekends, as it tends to be more expensive and crowded. Instead, I tend to treat them as a kind of gift of time — I stick to my usual weekend activities, but they feel stretched out and unrushed, and give me more time to do all the nice stuff in/near home that I enjoy. It's more time for reading, more time for cooking, more time for chatting with people on Dreamwidth, more opportunities to go swimming, more time in the garden, without the sense of constraint and rush that I normally feel on the regular two-day weekends.
I do enjoy day trips on long weekends, and my rule is always that the longest journeys start on the first day of the weekend, and then you stick progressively closer and closer to the home as the days go by. It's always served me very well!
So, that's today's prompt: how do you like to spend your time on three- or four-day weekends, whenever you're lucky enough to get one?
Mind wide, so bright
Aug. 23rd, 2026 06:37 pmdolorosa_12Saturday was filled with the standard activities: gym, coffee, a few hours out under the sky in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar in town, black sesame gelato, elaborately complicated dinner (Iranian stuffed capsicum and two separate Georgian salads, covered with a veritable bouquet of fresh herbs), film night (the extremely forgettable third Enola Holmes film, whose beautiful setting of Malta couldn't make up for the fact that very little happened, and what did happen was hammered home endlessly through characters' exposition, as if in fear that distracted viewers looking at their phone screens might lose the thread of the narrative every five minutes without it being spelt out), etc.
Today, we took ourselves out on another August day trip: on the train into Cambridge, then out by bus to St Ives, and then a walk through the water meadow (which was of course parched and nothing like it looked during this soggy walk three years ago, nor when it was flooded in 2020, which was the last time we left our house/immediate surrounding area before the pandemic lockdown) to the village of Hemingford Grey. This is as picturesque as the name would suggest: thatched cottages, climbing roses and wisteria, and a lovely little village pub that was hosting a beer festival in its garden. We hung out under the trees for a few hours, surrounded by a varied crowd of multigenerational groups, and a cheerful array of dogs of all shapes and sizes. There was live music (the singer worked in the restaurant of the pub), there was food, and it was sunny but not boiling hot, and we had snagged the only table that remained in full shade for the entire time we were there, much to my delight.
The afternoon was aimless and rambly and serendipitous. We ambled back into St Ives to try a coffee/cocktail bar we'd spotted on our way out, which was fairly chill in the outdoor seating area, but was absolutely heaving indoors, with two leathery older men doing a DJ set, and a cacophonous crowd of people dancing — clearly the place to be in St Ives at 4pm on a Sunday! Matthias and I were close to the youngest people there — and we're in our forties. We spent a relaxed hour or so there, stretched our legs along the riverfront, and made it back to the bus stop ten minutes or so before our bus arrived, which connected nicely with our train home. All in all, a nice day out. I've stuck up a scattering of photos and videos on my stories![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
ronnidolorosa which you should be able to see for the next twenty hours or so if you have an Instagram account, but after which point they will vanish; hopefully my words paint enough of a picture either way.
Reading-wise, I've started, but not finished Sense and Sensibility, which for the longest time has been the only Austen I've not read (although of course I saw the film adaptation in the 1990s). I felt it was time to rectify this, and I'm having a fantastic time. It's hilarious and relatable — 250 years may have passed, but the feeling of being trapped in social situations with people with whom you have nothing in common and whose conversational range is lacking remains awkward in exactly the same way (even more relatably, there's even a scene in which Elinor is elated at joining the only counter which has a single customer ahead of her, then being exasperated at being stuck behind this one customer for fifteen minutes as he appears to want to look at every expensive toothpick in the shop in minute detail before making a purchase). But above all, while of course treading ground familiar from Austen's other novels, it's about the excruciating awkwardness of being a teenage girl ('a guy was friendly to me at a social event, so clearly he wants to ask me to marry him'), and I recognise the emotions, and am fervently glad that I have several decades of distance from them.
I'll close with a handful of links. I've really been enjoying Sacha Judd's newsletter, and the latest issue was filled with flashes of recognition in terms of its diagnosis of the problems of the current social internet. That said (and I would need to read the linked article and listen to the linked podcast to make up my mind conclusively), it all felt a little too neat, and I feel that if we're including cafes and video rental stores as 'third spaces,' that's stretching the definition too far. In any case, there's lots I agree with, and lots that made me want to think further on this topic, which is a sign to me of an interesting newsletter.
I also loved this piece on the revival of old folk harvest traditions, and it was a nice look back at the history behind them. It certainly felt timely as we sped home through fields shorn of their wheat sheaves, with only the dusty earth and bare stalks remaining.
Today, we took ourselves out on another August day trip: on the train into Cambridge, then out by bus to St Ives, and then a walk through the water meadow (which was of course parched and nothing like it looked during this soggy walk three years ago, nor when it was flooded in 2020, which was the last time we left our house/immediate surrounding area before the pandemic lockdown) to the village of Hemingford Grey. This is as picturesque as the name would suggest: thatched cottages, climbing roses and wisteria, and a lovely little village pub that was hosting a beer festival in its garden. We hung out under the trees for a few hours, surrounded by a varied crowd of multigenerational groups, and a cheerful array of dogs of all shapes and sizes. There was live music (the singer worked in the restaurant of the pub), there was food, and it was sunny but not boiling hot, and we had snagged the only table that remained in full shade for the entire time we were there, much to my delight.
The afternoon was aimless and rambly and serendipitous. We ambled back into St Ives to try a coffee/cocktail bar we'd spotted on our way out, which was fairly chill in the outdoor seating area, but was absolutely heaving indoors, with two leathery older men doing a DJ set, and a cacophonous crowd of people dancing — clearly the place to be in St Ives at 4pm on a Sunday! Matthias and I were close to the youngest people there — and we're in our forties. We spent a relaxed hour or so there, stretched our legs along the riverfront, and made it back to the bus stop ten minutes or so before our bus arrived, which connected nicely with our train home. All in all, a nice day out. I've stuck up a scattering of photos and videos on my stories
ronnidolorosa which you should be able to see for the next twenty hours or so if you have an Instagram account, but after which point they will vanish; hopefully my words paint enough of a picture either way. Reading-wise, I've started, but not finished Sense and Sensibility, which for the longest time has been the only Austen I've not read (although of course I saw the film adaptation in the 1990s). I felt it was time to rectify this, and I'm having a fantastic time. It's hilarious and relatable — 250 years may have passed, but the feeling of being trapped in social situations with people with whom you have nothing in common and whose conversational range is lacking remains awkward in exactly the same way (even more relatably, there's even a scene in which Elinor is elated at joining the only counter which has a single customer ahead of her, then being exasperated at being stuck behind this one customer for fifteen minutes as he appears to want to look at every expensive toothpick in the shop in minute detail before making a purchase). But above all, while of course treading ground familiar from Austen's other novels, it's about the excruciating awkwardness of being a teenage girl ('a guy was friendly to me at a social event, so clearly he wants to ask me to marry him'), and I recognise the emotions, and am fervently glad that I have several decades of distance from them.
I'll close with a handful of links. I've really been enjoying Sacha Judd's newsletter, and the latest issue was filled with flashes of recognition in terms of its diagnosis of the problems of the current social internet. That said (and I would need to read the linked article and listen to the linked podcast to make up my mind conclusively), it all felt a little too neat, and I feel that if we're including cafes and video rental stores as 'third spaces,' that's stretching the definition too far. In any case, there's lots I agree with, and lots that made me want to think further on this topic, which is a sign to me of an interesting newsletter.
I also loved this piece on the revival of old folk harvest traditions, and it was a nice look back at the history behind them. It certainly felt timely as we sped home through fields shorn of their wheat sheaves, with only the dusty earth and bare stalks remaining.
Friday open thread: local wildlife
Aug. 21st, 2026 01:26 pmdolorosa_12We've finally had some rain, on and off throughout the week, with more on the way! It's a massive relief, and has really cooled things down as well. I haven't had to water my garden by hand since Sunday.
This week's open thread prompt is brought to you by the fox that screamed the place down at around 4am, waking me up abruptly, and continuing in this manner for about twenty minutes:
What is the local wildlife like where you live?
My house is across the road from a large vacant field. As far as I can tell, it gets used by humans twice a year: once when the air ambulance does some test flights and test landings, and once when a farmer comes around with a tractor and turns all the grass in the field into hay. Other than that, it's absent of people, but is a great home for various wild animals.
Over the years, I've seen a family of foxes there, as well as deer, rabbits, and various local cats. No doubt there are rodents of various kinds around, but I haven't seen any since the hoarders next door (whose garden was completely overrun by a midden of discarded rubbish and a jungle of brambles, nettles and other weeds the height of my head) moved out and their garden was cleaned up for the new residents.
The trees in the area are home mainly to wood pigeons, blackbirds, and corvids, but I've also seen pairs of robins (there was one that would follow me around the garden as I dug up plants and eat insects/worms that were exposed by the soil I'd turned over), blue tits, and sparrows. In our previous place in Cambridge, we also used to get frogs and squirrels, but I've not seen the former here at all, and the latter only rarely. Ideally I'd like to get some kind of pond to encourage frogs in the garden, but we'll see.
What about you?
This week's open thread prompt is brought to you by the fox that screamed the place down at around 4am, waking me up abruptly, and continuing in this manner for about twenty minutes:
What is the local wildlife like where you live?
My house is across the road from a large vacant field. As far as I can tell, it gets used by humans twice a year: once when the air ambulance does some test flights and test landings, and once when a farmer comes around with a tractor and turns all the grass in the field into hay. Other than that, it's absent of people, but is a great home for various wild animals.
Over the years, I've seen a family of foxes there, as well as deer, rabbits, and various local cats. No doubt there are rodents of various kinds around, but I haven't seen any since the hoarders next door (whose garden was completely overrun by a midden of discarded rubbish and a jungle of brambles, nettles and other weeds the height of my head) moved out and their garden was cleaned up for the new residents.
The trees in the area are home mainly to wood pigeons, blackbirds, and corvids, but I've also seen pairs of robins (there was one that would follow me around the garden as I dug up plants and eat insects/worms that were exposed by the soil I'd turned over), blue tits, and sparrows. In our previous place in Cambridge, we also used to get frogs and squirrels, but I've not seen the former here at all, and the latter only rarely. Ideally I'd like to get some kind of pond to encourage frogs in the garden, but we'll see.
What about you?
