Dehydrating both apples and a handful of red peppers today. The house smells . . . interesting. Autumnal and spicy. The peppers are just about at an end, and I'm contemplating ripping them out to make way for more lettuces.
Still sick, meanwhile, though maybe I coughed fractionally less last night than I did the night before. I think maybe I don't feel as rotten today as I did yesterday. Of course, I'm merrily making plans to turn up at Marly's mother's house in the mountains on Sunday, so I devoutly hope I'll have kicked all this by then. My plan for the day is to lie low and somehow condense my ever-expanding essaylet on Eliot's poem "La Figlia che Piange" (last poem in Prufrock and Other Observations) into a length suitable for introducing the poem as next Monday's Sun Poem of the Day. Then I have to deal with "Rule Britannia," which serves me right for putting it experimentally on the list. I've got to stop thinking, "Well, why not this," because the answer is: because then you'll have to write about it, you idiot.
My husband has been out the last two nights, so for something to do I have been binge-watching Broadchurch. I know, I know, it's really old news --- I remember reading about it when it was actually running, starting in 2013 --- but my goodness, it's good. It's dark and intense, almost unbearably so, but also so beautiful on many levels. The acting is beyond superb. I'm especially fond of the vicar character, who is unbelievably well done for a television vicar: a man with personal struggles but a real, plausibly orthodox faith which he takes seriously, and which his struggles aren't allowed to negate or undermine as gotchas. There's a scene where the David Tennant detective character is being scathing to him in the way that unbelievers can be, mocking his God and his faith because terrible things have happened, and your God let them happen. The vicar says, in essence, "You aren't allowed to belittle my faith. I can't explain these things any more than you can, but I won't let you mock me for believing in God." It's excellently written and excellently played, evidence that it is possible for screenwriters to pay attention to how Christians actually behave and are.
Anyway, been doing that. Tonight we'll probably watch Shetland --- which owes a lot to Broadchurch, actually, though it's not as self-consciously cinematic. For all its smallness as a context, the Shetland of the series feels a lot less claustrophic than the small-town atmosphere of the fictional Broadchurch --- maybe because it's completely surrounded by the open sea, and because its people are that much more worlds unto themselves, tucked into pockets and folds of land instead of all concentrated in the same compressed area. The Donna Killick business doesn't wreak the same community-wide devastation, maybe because nobody liked Donna to begin with, and the Lizzy Kilmuir murder happened a long time ago, so that only a handful of people are still nursing real wounds over it, though obviously it's cast a shadow over the whole story from the early season when it was introduced. Shetland in a lot of ways has become about that murder in the same way that Broadchurch is about the Danny Latimer murder, but unlike Broadchurch, which was created for the purpose of playing out the consequences of a particular event on a whole community, after the manner of a novel or a Shakespearean tragedy, Shetland was just conceived as the televising of a series novels, but found its way into something like the same mode. I like them both, but as a work of art, Broadchurch takes my breath away.
Wearing today (continuing the I Could Care Less Challenge for this week):
Today's high is 90, yay fall. But I'm comfortable in my good old Wool& Sierra. I should be thinking through my travel capsule for next week, but right now I can't be bothered. I know it'll be three wool dresses plus some cardigans and shoes.
I've also started tracking what I eat again. My husband has been tracking calories for the last month or six weeks and has lost ten pounds, which is how it goes with men. My problem, as I have been discovering, is actually eating anything like enough calories daily --- which I suspect is why I have trouble dropping weight. I made myself down four boiled eggs first thing this morning, for a whopping 312 calories, and I'm about to go have a big bowl of whole-milk yogurt with some frozen mango. At least the husband will be home tonight, which means I'll cook dinner, which will make a difference: brats, I think, since we're still in Oktoberfest mode, plus sauerkraut and some baked apples. The last couple of nights, on my own, dinner has been more like Wasa crisps with goat cheese: not really optimal, though it did taste good. I've been making goat-cheese/homegrown tomato sandwiches on Wasa crisps, too. Anyway, looking forward tonight to an actual dinner that I bother to cook.
Better go think about Eliot some more.