Reading. ( Allie Brosh, Stuart Adlington, Liam D'Arcy + Grace Hall, Rosie Reynolds, Helena Attlee, Jeannie Di Bon, Mary Jane Paterson + Jo Thompson, Raymond Blanc )

Cooking. One more thing from East (kimchi pancakes, mildly disappointing) plus a gooseberry oat crisp I have been meaning to get to since I started picking the pink gooseberries [mumble] ago.

Eating. Ruby Violet (hazelnut + hazelnut brittle, blueberry + lemon curd). buns from home (cardamom, cinnamon, garlic + rosemary focaccia).

My first granadilla, courtesy of a whim in a supermarket!

Allotment apples and tomatoes.

Exploring. Spent a chunk of Monday afternoon poking around the Camley Street Natural Park!

Growing. There are TOMATOES. There are BEANS. I harvested some PEPPERS. I'm still not doing great at, like, efficiency or yield, but hey, I'm eating some things from the plot, which is better than none.

Just, you know, For My Own Reference: a list of the exercises included in Hypermobility Without Tears. I am going to come back through and add links to Pilates and physio explainers for all of these.

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Jeannie Di Bon is a "Movement Therapist" who "specialis[es] in Hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Chronic Pain." In the introduction, she talks about her own experiences in a way I find very sympathetic:

I've lost count of the number of times a doctor has told me it's all down to IBS and instructed me to eat more fibre and try Pilates or yoga to relax. Dismissive in its nature and kind of ironic now, as I trained to become a Pilates teacher in 2008.

And, you know, the actual core (yes I did that) of her Integrated Movement Method is sound: she's giving advice about fostering body awareness, of when and where you're tense and when you're not, working through a pretty standard sequence of breathing exercises and gentle movements. All the exercises in this book are the kind of thing that show up pretty early on in any full-body physiotherapy programme, that have loads of progressions available (particularly within the Pilates model), and they're absolutely fine and probably useful to folk who've not been able to access care covering this kind of topic.

If it were just the exercise programme, it would be ... fine. More or less. I think a bunch of the ways she explains movements are unclear and counterintuitive, but hey, presumably they work for at least some people.

Unfortunately, there are all of the bits in between.

Chapter 4 is where they went from "okay, you're simplifying to the point of lies-to-children but you are also explaining why" to "... either you're deliberately misrepresenting things for personal gain or you're wildly incompetent", and I'm still not sure which of those it actually is. (I am trying not to think too hard about the possibility that the answer is "both".)

( Read more... )

tl;dr there is nothing you will get from the Integral Movement Method that you won't get from competently-taught or -explained Pilates except scaremongering and misdirection... and unlike IMM, you can get decent Pilates resources for free. Don't bother with this one.

(This cultivar is called Blue Fire. I was very late getting my tomatoes started, but I am about to have lots of them and I am excited by this! Rainbow planting didn't quite work partly because none of the Yellow Pear-Shaped made it but largely because I lost track of which were my purple plum tomatoes and which were instead my orange, but -- I'm about to have A Bunch of ridiculous coloured tomatoes, and this is probably the showiest of the lot of 'em!)

Today I have got Somewhat Caught Up on last event's lost property Situation. My GREAT TRIUMPH was, partway through the paperwork, going "... I'm sure that brooch in particular is... Oddly... Familiar..."

-- and indeed upon going back through my records it transpires that I HAD RETURNED IT TO ITS PERSON AT THE FIRST EVENT THIS YEAR.

So my spreadsheet is duly updated and they can have it back again at the last event of the year :)

(Some other victories: cut-price overripe strawberries. More of my mother's birthday cake. Rye and caraway and poppyseed bread. the elderly niter kibbeh in the fridge still being Definitely Food and substantially enlivening dinner. Shitposting in the PD crew Discord. Starting Solutions and Other Problems with A, and the cake, and the strawberries.)

I did not, until a few hours ago, know that diesel was named after Rudolf Diesel, "... who invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel".

(Some cheerful things, in brief: turns out shimmer inks really do work better when you thoroughly scrub the feed of your fountain pen clean at least occasionally; I am excited about tomorrow's bread; I was Greatly Honoured by the Toddler in a truly toddleresque fashion the details of which I shall not go into; I have finally got my act together to order a copy of the Roti King cookbook; glorious comfort reread of a thing I'd totally forgotten was even available for comfort reread, and for bonus points there are new bits!!!)

Today was Lower Limb Class #2, as ongoing follow-up for the most recent ankle reinjury. (On which status is: still a biiiit weaker when I'm pushing to limits, but not really noticeable in day-to-day life, e.g. I'm no longer regularly wincing when I jar it getting off a bike; definitely still feeling the work up the outside of my right leg when doing e.g. isometric holds on double heel raises.)

I am very amused by how "???!!!" the physios got when I tried to faint from things that "shouldn't" have been significant cardio and indeed aren't by my standards for cardio but crucially involved a lot of moving around and position changes while upright: sit-to-stand, lunges, crab-walking with knees bent. Apparently I have carefully selected for exercise done while seated or prone for really solid reasons, i.e. that would be the orthostatic hypotension. Which I apparently hadn't told the physios about as its own thing. ...whoops.

( notes )