Sofa snippets #009
Birds, Izakaya food, birds, work introspection, birds, language-learning via listening to audio books, the ethics of staying in AirBnBs, and some more birds.
Hello and welcome to Sofa Snippets, a weekly roundup of bits and bobs from my life and work.
If you’re reading this in your email inbox, it might be too long and you might be prompted to read it on the website. Sorry!
This section is mostly about what my Morning Ink practice has shown me this week, and sometimes other general sketchbook insights.
This week there have been a lot of birds! A whole 24 of them if I counted right. Though it wasn’t birds every single day, like I thought. There was a manifestation (or just a looking forward to, since it’s already planned) of going off on my travels. A bunch of flowers (drawn from a photo, rather than my head). A grid day (which did have a few birds in it). And patterns. OK, they were birdy patterns. And this morning a little collection of mostly drawn-from-life (aka the coffee table) objects.
The words included a fair bit of angst about my working patterns, with a bit of thinking out loud about the bird illustrations I am working on at the moment and some talk about soup. With momentary thoughts about going away (getting nice and close, but not quite close enough yet).
(Morning Ink is a section of my publication that goes out daily. It is not automatically switched on for you so, if you want to see those posts whenever they are sent out you’ll need to toggle them on, via Manage Subscription.)
This section is what I’ve been doing illustration business wise - drawing, outreach, and so on.
Birds, birds, birds. And getting annoyed that I don’t have the ability to work on them full time, because if I did all my sketches would have been worked up. But I need to remember that those sketches are still useful and valid and can be made it into final pieces at any point.
My time constraints meant that I went down the decorative route. Because decorative is pretty much my comfort zone. I still need to, ideally, make at least one pattern to go with the pieces I made and collate them into a sell sheet before 9pm this evening. (This, on top of writing a super quick Sofa Snippets, doing a bunch more publishing work and having our weekly video call with Chris’s parents.)
This section is about freelancing life, including what I’ve been working on with my educational publishing hat on and just general bits about working from home in a self-employed capacity.
This week has almost entirely been Spanish development editing, with a pleasant interlude of digital course build work. After thinking the week before had gone badly because I was trying to switch between projects too much I moved all my tasks around so that I would be mostly concentrating on one project at a time. And it made no difference. It was kind of necessary, as this project is the closest deadline, but… I am still at (before today’s work which is likely to be something between 5 and 7 hours) at 30 (and a quarter) hours for the week.
I have been tracking how many hours of publishing work I’m doing each week since the end of February. (And I repeatedly tell myself that I need to do the same for illustration work - I’ve logged that on two weeks during that time!) I have averaged 28.5 hours a week. I only had three weeks the whole time that went over 35 hours (one was 50.25 hours!). Which surprises me, to be honest. But it’s also good. I am kind of sad that I haven’t been doing this level of logging for longer, because I’d genuinely love to know if I was doing more hours over the last few years. I know that there have been periods in the past when I have been doing crazy hours, because there were times when I was having to log hours on project management and editorial management jobs and when I had overlapping typesetting or proofreading work and so was spending 5 hours a day on heavy management work and then another 5 hours on typesetting and huge proofreading and typesetting chunks over weekends.
If I can only take the work that pays the higher rates (and is usually more interesting, too, which is a definite bonus), while still keeping away from management work which overloads my anxiety bucket far too much to do at the moment, and sustain something around 25 to 30 hours a week, that would actually be great. And I can stop thinking I need to fill the other hours with more publishing work and use them for illustration work.
This is the culture section - mostly what I’ve been reading, but might also include TV and film and wider culture, too.
I have continued to read James by Percival Everett (which I will surely finish today, as there are only 40 pages left) and listening to Mi Amice Geniale (My Brilliant Friend) in Italian (which I probably won’t finish until the end of the week as there are almost five hours left of it still) and loving both of them. I am understanding more and more of the Italian the more I listen, which is exactly what I was looking for. I am now wondering whether to get a Spanish or French book to listen to next (after I finish Small Island, which is sitting waiting for me to continue after My Brilliant Friend). I am considering seeing if they have Zola’s L’Assommoir and also thinking maybe Laura Esquivel’s Como Agua Para Chocolate. But I’ll leave it until I’ve finished before deciding. I would also like a non-fiction audiobook to have going. I think I also had one day this week of catching up on The Archers.
Are there any Archers fans among my readers? I grew up on The Archers and listened until I was in my twenties, and then didn’t listen for years until getting back to it recently. I think it’s something that brings me closer to my mum, as she listened to it pretty religiously, even from when she was a kid.
For TV, it has almost entirely been This Is Us, while doing my evening drawing, though I am feeling the autumn call to the Gilmore Girls. If I get ill again (which, let’s be fair, is pretty likely this time of the year) I think I’ll probably have to take a diversion to Stars Hollow.
Here’s a cool link that Chris sent me: https://pomological.art/. I love that he knew how much I would love it. I am going to explore it some more once I’m out of this busy(ish) work period.
This is the Substack section - Substack posts or publications that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the past week.
Thankfully the call to Instagram seemed to quiet a bit this last week and I looked at and read more Substack articles than the week before.
Here’s a handful of pieces I particularly enjoyed this week. With no commentary, sorry, as I really need to finish today’s Sofa Snippets soon and get on with work. (Why is Substack no longer giving me the option to choose the type of preview I want to show? I want the thumbnail pics to show up as well, not just the text and publication title.)
This is the food section - meals I cooked, new food I tried, places I ate out, and other food-related bits and pieces.
Food feels like it was entirely minestrone soup, though according to my Morning Ink I only made that on Wednesday, so must have eaten some other things at the start of the week. Oh! I was in diverticular flareup recovery mode. Sunday was very well cooked pasta with a sauce of pureed carrot and sweet potato, flavoured with bouillon powder and with added nutritional yeast. It was actually really delicious and worked perfectly as a low-fibre but reasonably healthy meal. And Monday and Tuesday were creamy leeky linguine.
The minestrone lasted me to Friday evening. I had it for dinner, breakfast and lunch Thursday, Friday and dinner on Wednesday. I also froze two fairly large containers of it, so it’s there for emergencies. I had it with some very nice sourdough toast and ‘Pure’ spread, which isn’t too bad, and was on offer recently on Ocado.
Yesterday, Chris made a delicious selection of Japanese Izakaya food, including soba noodles, potatoes coated in batter and poppy seeds and fried, cabbage pickle, cucumber sesame pickle, braised (I think that’s the right word) daikon, boiled tofu, breaded and fried (and braised first) aubergine, grated daikon and a dipping sauce. Oh, and edamame beans in their pods with a spicy savoury coating that were ridiculously moreish and you can see why they would be served in bars (make you thirsty for beer!), and some miso edamame and some avocado with soy dipping sauce. All of it delicious.
One of my challenges for the next year is to come up with ways of cooking smaller amounts of things. I think this will involve a lot more planning. So that I can do things like use half a courgette in Monday’s meal and the other half in Wednesdays. Or making a couple of salads to go through the week to accompany simpler dishes. Or something. I have a very embedded tendency to make meals that would feed a family of seven, while I am more and more needing to make enough for just me. We should also plan our meals more as a family so that we are eating the same thing more often. That would almost certainly save us a lot of money, and be pleasant sitting at the table more often.
But this level of planning will have to wait until I am back from Strasbourg at the end of the month, because I do not have the bandwidth right now.
This last section is for general other stuff - things you might talk about over a cuppa at the kitchen table.
My head is just far far too full of work right now. I have also been looking for accommodation for our trip to Manchester in November, which would ideally be Friday and Saturday night (we have Lorde tickets), but the prices are looking pretty insane. And I also need to settle on where I will be going for my November trip (literally just after the Lorde weekend) and book the train (Eurostar already booked) and somewhere to stay.
I am having guilt about having booked an AirBnB for Strasbourg. There are so many issues there, and I know that their proliferation causes problems for local people in a lot of areas. But I have always tended toward renting flats or cottages where I can cook for myself, before AirBnB existed, because it’s kind of necessary in a lot of places. And I have not really ever (yet) found an aparthotel that is much good. I especially love getting to stay in people’s homes that they just rent out while they go away themselves (thought these seem to be harder to find on AirBnB lately). Ones that are full of books and art are just amazing. This is something I need to think about more, especially if I get to do what I would like to do, which is to travel five or six times a year!
I hope you enjoy this weekly roundup format. I will still be writing some ‘proper’ posts on individual topics, but I enjoy reading these and it will keep me regularly showing up in your inbox (it has a section of its own, though, so you can untoggle it if you prefer, by going to Manage subscription).
As a thank you for sharing the fruit illustrations link, I’ll share this one for old book illustrations I found: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com :)
Happy to see all these birds! 💚