Hello! As you can see from the post dates, I took a week off from blogging. Just wasn't feeling it last week but I'm back.
Did you see the eclipse? Was it exciting? In my area we only had about 63% totality. I had to work that day but I brought my solar binoculars because I thought I could slip out and see it. Of course, even though I tried to time my work, I was in the middle of something when it happened. Grrr. I got out to see it after our maximum totality and it was pretty underwhelming.
I went out to afternoon tea with a friend of mine this past Friday. For a long time most of the tea places were across town from us but over the past few years there have finally been some opening up on our end of town! We are so excited to be able to go to tea closer to home.
Have you ever been to afternoon tea? You should try it sometime! Every place is a little bit different - some places let you choose your teacups, some let you each have a pot of tea, some have one pot of tea for the table. Some places have extras you can add on to the tea, like soup or salad. We get pretty filled up on tea goodies so we don't do that. All the teas involve a three plate stand that hold one plate of scones (always with jelly and cream, sometimes lemon curd), one plate of sandwiches (every place has something different but I think every place we've been to has had the thinly sliced cucumber sandwiches which are my absolute favorites) and a plate of sweets. Check out our beautiful selection!
Our sandwiches were: goat cheese filling with carrot topping on puff pastry (it's in the back, you can't really see it in this picture); blueberry jam and cheese (something white and mild and the sandwich had been heated so it was delightfully melty); thin sliced cucumber in cream cheese with mint on whole wheat bread; and goat cheese with herbs on toasted rounds. Oh my, it was *so* good. The scones were served with mascarpone and house made strawberry jam. And the sweets on the top plate were: chocolate mousse cup topped with whipped cream; blueberry compote with graham cracker crumble and cream; strawberry cake; chocolate chip cookie.
Everything was so delicious and we are definitely going back there again!
Reading
I've read 2 books since the last blog post. The first one, Whalefall, billed itself as The Martian but in a whale instead of on Mars. I have mixed feelings about it. The author did do research to figure out if it would be possible to be both swallowed by a whale and get back out. It would all involve some pretty exacting circumstances but it seems to be theoretically possible. In the book, the whale never intended to eat the diver - he was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time and next to a delicious squid which is what the whale was actually going after. Anyway, it was OK, I guess. There was a lot of the main character working out parental issues while working his way out of the whale and some odd communing with the whale.
The second book I read was The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. She also wrote The Daevabad Trilogy which starts with The City of Brass and I loved that series. This was just as good and hopefully more adventures follow. It was a rollicking good time - pirates, magic, battles, an absolutely useless ships' cat. All the thumbs up on this book!
I was given an anthology of stories set in Valdemar, a world created by Mercedes Lackey. I remember reading those books back in the early 90s. I'm almost done with that book. It's been so long since I last read one of her books that I felt a little blind going in but I've been slowly remembering some details.
Not sure what I'll read after that. I was going to read The Alice Network - even borrowed it from the library and loaded it on my Kindle. I kept having the worse sense of déjà vu and I finally realized by looking through my Amazon library that I had read this book back in 2017. I didn't really want to read it again so I'm looking for my next read.
Watching
I'm in the last season of The Durrells in Corfu. I'm going to be sad when that ends! I have a couple of series starting up again soon-ish. On Acorn, Harry Wild (with Jane Seymour as the main character/sleuth) and My Life is Murder (with Lucy Lawless aka Xena Warrior Princess in the lead) are going to be starting back up in May and June.
I found a new person to watch on YouTube. I wasn't looking for something new but the algorithm handed it to me and I'm hooked. This delightful young woman, who works in the circus, bought an old house sight unseen in Nova Scotia. It is a 120 year old Victorian duplex and it is a hot mess because it ran out of oil and all the pipes burst over the winter. She puts out a video weekly about what they are doing to rehab the house and it's just been an exciting ride. The house came with an attic full of all sorts of cool old stuff (also lots of junk) but it also has a lot of issues (flooded basement, so many trees growing right up against the house, windows that had been painted shut, odd decisions by former home owners). This is her channel in case you want to come along on the adventure.
So I know there are probably a few other things I wanted to mention but my Sunday is ticking away and there are some other things I want to get done before my weekend is officially over, so if I remember what they are, I'll put them in the next post!