Black is this years pink

Pandemic life
I've been reckless about unmasking lately. Needs must.

Previous poll review
In the Parsimony and thoroughness poll, 60.5% of respondents go to reasonable lengths to get some of the remaining product out of a nearly empty tube or pump bottle, and 39.5% will not rest until they're extracted as much product as possible.

Hugs won the poll with 65.1%, followed by doodling in the margins with 55.8%. Thank you for your votes! ♥!

Reading
Still on Mirror Dance by Bujold. I'm thawing towards Mark now that Elena has softened, but he wears his messed-uppedness too much on his sleeve to be my type. Maybe I'll feel differently by the end. (No spoilers, please!)

A bunch more Chinese graded reading in DuChinese, and I just read my first Mandarin Companion graded reader, Just Friends? I have a bunch of others on order in paper, but they won't be here for a month.

Cdramas/Kdramas
We finished Reset, the Groundhog Day-meets-Speed Chinese action drama, and it was excellent. Lots of strategising and thoughtfulness on the part of the protags, and everyone was at least a tiny bit sympathetic. I enjoyed it all round and would recommend it even to people who aren't Asian-drama aficionados, who like the genre.

Still going with my The First Frost rewatch. I reached the get-together and then went back and watched that episode again. So good to see them happy! (It's not surprising, though, that the Chinese title of this show translates to "Hard to Coax". ;-) Now I'm getting into the darker stuff in the second half, and I've started fast-forwarding here and there.

I have a few things lined up to try next (in particular, Never Too Late, which centres around an age-gap friendship between two women and has Bai Jingting as the love interest), and ha, a couple of nights ago Andrew and I started Live Up to Your Youth (mostly for Zhang Ruonan, the female lead in The First Frost. Apparently I can handle seeing Zhao Yunlan here, since he looks so different? I'm half telling myself it's a distant cousin with similar mannerisms. ;-p) (No actor talk, please!) The setting is 1990s Beijing, which is interesting to see, and it's about a bunch of aspiring artistic types crammed into a cheap hostel. So nice to see Zhang Ruonan playing someone who smiles easily.

Other TV
Finished Widow's Bay, which was fine, but I didn't quite click with it. I wanted more of the background characters to be rounded out, more moments of connection. Of the leads, Patricia was by far my favourite.

Watched all of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed with Tatiana Maslany, in which a divorced mother gets tangled up in the murder of a camboy and becomes the murderer's next target. I'm declaring it an AU/alternate history, because anytime anyone googled, they got useful search results. Anyway, it was a good romp with a great cast of characters, even if the ending was a bit of a mess, with a couple of overly convenient developments and a lot of dangling threads. Presumably they're hoping for another season.

The first couple of episodes of the latest season of Shrinking. And the first episode of Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy vehicle, feat. Timothy Olyphant, who is ageing well) -- mostly a string of action scenes with her getting chased, attacked, beaten up, and escaping. I'll give it one more episode, but if I'm still not feeling it, I'll pass.

Obviously we're trying to get our money's worth out of our Apple subscription.

Online life
guardian_wishlist sign-ups are closed, and there are eighteen wishlists open for gifting!! Mine is here - I was going to paste it into this post, but it's a bit long. I'll post it separately.

Writing/making things
Occasional snippets of Da Qing and Zhao Yunlan's pre-canon first meeting, in beginner/practice Chinese, but otherwise, no, not a thing. I've sat down to write Wishlist treats a couple of times, but I'm having trouble settling, and nothing much is coming together. I do mean to try switching POVs on one thing -- maybe once the oven stuff is resolved? *fingers crossed*

Life/health/mental state things
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Local (national) elections freak-out. Also, I'm sleeping poorly.

House
The oven is here, as of two or three hours ago! We were hoping to get the old gas one out and the new one installed today, but best laid plans, etc. Delivery was several hours later than we hoped, so the electrician had already been and gone, and meanwhile the builder is home with a cold. (I'm so grateful he didn't bring his germs over.) So we're eating takeaways all weekend and/or using the microwave/slow-cooker/tiny-air-fryer/BBQ.

Meanwhile, I've been channelling my change resistance into over-thinking my choice of replacement toilet. ( Cut for length and ranting. )

In sad news, my previously thriving lemon tree up and died a week or two ago. Not sure if it was the cold snap or the wet feet. I'm hoping it will sulk for a while and then make a comeback, but it's not looking good.

Language Learning
Chinese study continues apace. ( Rambling. )

Food
Just think of all the things I'll be able to roast, bake, etc, once the oven is wired in!!

Goals
Oven: in progress! Mandarin Companion reader: done! I should go check the various goal lists I've made and see what else to tackle in the next three months.

Good things
No more gas oven! New oven soon! The final episode of fandom-adjacent m/m fake-dating audiodrama Keep It Steady just dropped! Chinese study and the absolute wealth of resources available. I've learned 200 common characters (well, probably more like 180 of them). Still being able to muddle through in Korean. Watching Cdramas with Andrew. Flowers and imminent spring and biking weather. Now the plumber has been and gone, there is zero urgency about replacing the toilet (it was stressing me out because I was going to get everything done at once; but I've been living with the existing cracked and badly stained one since 2001, and it can probably go another decade).