Friday Roundup #29

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Red door in a whitewashed brick wall, Lynchburg, Virginia.
A red door I met on a photo walk through Lynchburg, Virginia, a few years ago; I never did find out what was behind it, and I have decided that is the best part.

Thin week, folks, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Some weeks the roundup is a feast; this one is more like whatever was left in the crisper drawer. But there are cherries, there is a monster love story, and there is a gallon of mustard on the horizon, so we’ll manage. Here’s where things stand.

Friday Roundup banner in the karacooks brand style. The words "FRIDAY" and "ROUNDUP" in dark green serif type flank a small circular pepper cross-section mark in the center, with thin horizontal rules and gold dots extending to either side. Cream background.
  • Coming up next week: Carol’s Deviled Eggs on Tuesday (her recipe, built for a July 4 picnic), then on Thursday I’ll explain why I bought a literal gallon of Dijon on purpose. The two are not unrelated.
  • A baseball break: the team is out of town for ten days, so the evenings are quiet around here for a stretch.
  • Garden Update: a sad year, I will be honest. The plants I bought are doing fine; they are just not producing yet, because I got them in the ground so late that they are still figuring out where they are. Any crop at all and I am calling it a win. I have already skipped ahead to next year, when the new (deeper) galvanized raised beds go in and I get to do this properly instead of apologetically.
  • What I’m Reading: a quirky little fantasy romance called Someone You Can Build a Nest In [Bookshop.org* | Amazon], which is exactly as strange and wonderful as the title promises (the protagonist is a shapeshifting monster; the romance is real; so is the body horror). It won the Nebula and the Locus and was a Hugo finalist this year, and I am working my way through that whole ballot like it is a reading challenge nobody assigned me.
  • What I’m Watching: almost nothing, truthfully. The evenings have been cool enough to sit on the deck, so Zach and I take turns pulling playlists off Spotify and running them through the Sonos (expensive, and worth every dollar). Tomorrow I am breaking the streak with a matinee of Obsession, the tiny-budget horror that somehow ate the box office this spring; it hits digital any day now, so I want the big screen while it lasts.
  • What I’m Eating: cherries, and a great many of them. They have been on sale and they are sweet and juicy in a way they usually are not, and we have put away ten pounds, maybe more, maybe a lot more. (A recipe note for later: homemade maraschino-style cherries are coming to the blog soon, and they will ruin the bright-red dyed grocery-store kind for you forever, in the best possible way.)

P.S. Ten pounds of cherries is a remarkable number of pits, and I regret to report that I own no cherry pitter, just a paring knife and some misplaced confidence.

P.P.S. “Someone you can build a nest in” is either the most romantic or the most alarming thing one creature can say to another. Read the book and you will understand why the answer is both.

P.P.P.S. If a magic willow offered to make someone fall in love with me, I would like to think I have watched enough horror to say no thank you. I have not. But I would like to think it.

* Affiliate link. The asterisk is doing transparency work. Details on the disclosure page.