the color of storms, shadows, and rain

um. It is remotely possible that some of you may remember that I am pretty sure I once voiced (well. in text) a question about whether a type of val dal that is not a lima is in fact the dry bean of Dolichos lablab Lablab purpureus, known fresh or ornamentally as hyacinth bean.

well, a few days ago while looking up what varieties of refried bean Goya (much as I disagree with them about certain powerful people...) makes, I happened to click over onto their varieties of ordinary canned beans, and lo and behold, what happened to catch my eye but something called "Green Rock Beans"? aka Feijão Pedra... which I thought was also the phrasing on a package of dried beans in the Portuguese section (ish. technically it may have been the Spain section but I could tell it was labeled in Portuguese) that I noted resembled the val dal in question.

What do these look like? Well, behold a blog post that informed me that Cape Verde, in Africa, has a feijoada, which is made with rock beans(!!!!!) You can see pictures of the dry beans being soaked there if you scroll down a bit.

Inspired by this, albeit obliquely, I tracked down the Portuguese Wikipedia page on the Lablab botanical genus and, YES, it says there that they are known as feijão pedra!

...not to mention that the English language article has I think improved from when I posed that question, and its note that hyacinth bean is known as val papdi in Maharashtra is probably suggestive in itself. (this is directly beside the article's mention of the name "surti papdi" in Gujarat, and I believe that is a name I've seen on frozen pods at the Indian grocery)

eurgh I can't tell how much not feeling good is ...physical and how much is depression creeping on (nor how much of that is ...seasonal? well, how much is attributable to day length in particular, mostly. There are definitely bad memories for me about this season.)

Mind, last week I was in my almost-inverted schedule state, but that usually results in somewhat insufficient sleep even when I am not grasping at the straw of "just staying up through it" to try to readjust it, so I may also be experiencing accumulated tiredness. :/

Went for a walk ~yesterday (well. Sunday. it's technically Tuesday as I write this but I'm still in Monday's wakefulness), which was nice, but a) I think I may have gotten slightly too much sun to my face or something, as there was very little shade, and... I scratched some of it and now it... kind of hurts, and b) [I've been struggling to get up the courage to go in for a significant dental issue which in the meantime has the side effect that] I've been having trouble eating and haven't been walking a lot which combination I think caused the otherwise moderate walk to deplete my energy and that also made me feel blah.

other minor slightly gross issue

And I think I have a small boil, again, near where a bra band would normally sit... which isn't quite where it's been the couple times before when this has happened, but pretty close, and is also slightly painful :P

Tonight we made tomato-based beef-vegetable soup again and it tasted pretty good... I have been very grateful for soup in recent times due to the teeth issue.

I've watched a few somewhat older movies I had never seen in the past few weeks (Mean Girls, Labyrinth), although they are... not new favorites. I may have gotten distracted from the latter by the thought that a certain terf may have used a line (someone messing up Hoggle's name) to name a major thing...

( project details )

And I don't think I've really mentioned here but I'm taking a few online classes via the local community college and they're ...sort of going well (one has finished thanks to being an eight week session but I haven't managed to get signed up for the following class as I had meant to...), although I have my annoyances (one instructor hasn't posted any grades for over a month 😐) and I am running up against the gauntlet of mid-semester bureaucracy, due to things I need to do (including that following class) that are not going as smoothly as I would've liked. 🙃

tbqh the prospect of trying to get back and finish my bachelor's degree at the four year university has felt scary the past few days

I was listening to The Cereal Bowl podcast (with Justin McElroy) last night in hopes of it sending me off to sleep but uh... I ended up reading the co-host, Dan Goubert's Cerealously blog instead.

It's very interesting reading, but I am pretty certain from scattered references to familiar cereals which I do enjoy that our tastes in cereal differ. Like, I like soggy cereal in at least some cases.

( (incomplete) cereal rankings )