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I read Belle Burden’s Strangers a few weeks ago. I’m not a big memoir person, but reviews said the book was amazing, and it was. It tells the story of her very abrupt separation and divorce.

About a quarter of the way into the story, she writes:

“And doesn’t it all look different, wouldn’t your own story look different, if you knew how it was going to end.”

When she’s writing her story, she is writing about the time that came before the separation, and when she was living that time, she lived those moments not knowing what would come next. But the way he left forced her to look at everything that came before and see it through that lens.

That line stuck with me since I read the book.

I know there are still many more games to go and anything can happen, but I have a terrible feeling that our beloved Spurs are going to be relegated. Soccer is the only sport I follow, and we decided to go all-in with the Spurs as part of filling our time after the kids have moved away. So this feels like particularly poor planning on our part because it’s painful to watch games, and watching games is what I’m supposed to be doing to take my mind off the fact that it’s painful for the kids to be away.

The Spurs were last relegated in the 1970s, so this didn’t seem like a possibility prior to this week, when they’re so close to the drop zone. But now it IS a possibility, and it is very difficult to watch non-Premier League games in the US. Oh, and did I mention that I literally just renewed my yearly access to the Premier League stream? I don’t want to watch games if my team isn’t in it. Why are they breaking my heart and taking away my weekend activity?

I’m going back to fretting. Please, Spurs, stay in the league.

I try about 3 – 5 new recipes per month, depending on the month. Sometimes I find a recipe that looks interesting, and I try to make it. Other times, I reverse-engineer something we liked at a restaurant. Last month contained three of those types of meals.

The first was a phở chay we liked from a restaurant. I was able to get it pretty close. Josh rated the first attempt an 8, and I know what I need to do to get it to a 9 or 10.

The second was a vegetarian ramen we liked, also from a restaurant. My first attempt was already nearing a 10, but adding shredded pickled ginger and baby bok choy pushed it over the line. We will make this one again and again.

But the final recipe, which I will not link to here because I still shudder thinking about it, wasn’t even rateable. It was that bad. It was a recipe for tofu shawarma.

Wait, Melissa, you’re thinking. Isn’t shawarma meat? Well, yes, it is. But this recipe told me that shaving down the tofu and adding spices would make a close facsimile of the real thing. I made my tehina and salad and got to work.

The end result looked nothing like the photo, and the texture was something akin to a scrambled egg. We had to trash the leftovers because neither of us could face eating it a second time and use the leftover tehina and salad with some falafel.

Tofu shawarma has earned a spot in the top three of my worst recipe fails.

The same article kept getting shared in various places, and I finally clicked over to the Cherwell to read it. Strange posters were seen around Oxford advertising events at Kingswell College. Oxford does not have a Kingswell College, and the dates were set in 2011.

A QR code brought you to a website where you could download the first few chapters of a story, sign up to receive new chapters when released, and an email address.

I love this sort of thing.

I’ve read a few pages, and it’s the sort of story I would decide to buy after sampling a chapter. Would I maybe regret that decision four or five more chapters in? Perhaps. But by then, I would finish it anyway.

If you haven’t read the article or heard about this story, I pass it along to you. It has already brought me at least a half hour of solid wondering time.

The assertion is that people are terrible at remembering colours, but I would argue that people may remember the colour, but are terrible at recreating it. Po-tay-to po-tah-to.

So the game is that you are shown a tile for about 5 seconds. Memorize the colour. Then you go to a randomly-coloured tile with sliders, and you need to recreate the first colour from memory. Like I said, if you’ve never played with sliders, it can be difficult to know how to recreate a shade of brown. But play at least two times, knowing the first time will be a throwaway game while you figure out the sliders.

I scored 41.07 out of 50, which is better than 57% of people. I’m happy with that. I tended to go slightly lighter than the original.

How did you do?