Life is certainly enhanced with the improvement of available captioning in real time through various browsers and software. I want to have virtual tea with so many different people! I can see what they are saying! And it doesn't leave me exhausted the way lip-reading so often does. Maybe making a whole bunch of virtual tea dates will be another set of birthday presents. Things to look forward to. Always good.

Also there needs to be some storytelling. Some virtual storytelling gatherings, I mean. Even more things to look forward to.  In the meantime, I plan to continue enjoying the next few days as we approach Friday, which is the birthday actual.

If anybody wants to do a kind thing, letting people know about my Birthday Month Sale is a very kind thing indeed, and maximizes the amount of good stuff like bill-paying and bead-acquiring that this Lioness is able to do. <3 <3 <3

LionessElise's Birthday Month Sale:
Sale goes all through the month of August. 
As usual, there will be special birthday markdowns on the 22nd.
There will be more markdowns as the month goes on.
Expect the last days to be lively. And the last hours to be very bouncy indeed.
When it's done, anything left goes back to full price.
www.etsy.com/shop/LionessElise

[Content Notes: this is a discussion of food and eating, and diabetes and new experiences, and I am a recovering eating disorder person. If that's not what you want to read about right now, please skip with my good wishes.]

Since it's that time of the year, I have been ordering a few things, telling myself that I might as well try them for this birthday rather than wait, because the possibilities of various tariffs may put them out of reach in the future.  When I say that the indecision platter is often my favorite thing on the menu, I'm talking about those meals that have samplers of several sort of dish. They are very good for learning about the range of foods sometimes. Also they can be a dopamine hit jackpot, at least for me. (If it's the dopamine that's providing the fun in here, as people who know the recent hypotheses tell me.)

They also save time if I can't make up my mind, which can be handy.

When looking at an unfamiliar menu, do you usually first make note of what you've never had before? Is it even more intriguing if you'd never heard of it before? 

The ordering has been proceeding with perhaps too much vigor, but hey. I have so few wild indulgences left on my to-do list these days, or should I say the can-do list? Probably. But I am doing my best to be sensible. I took the canned haggis off the list because I already know I love haggis. I did not take the little durian cakes off the list because although I already know I love durian, they were just a few dollars and MUST HAVE. (Note to self: ask brother-in-law to scope out CostCo's supply again. A year or two ago they had multipacks of durian mooncakes for ridiculously good prices. Om nom nom.) Some of my favorite drinks are coming (Milkis and San Pellegrino pomegranate/orange drink) because I fully expect tariffs to play hob with their prices. Even now they are a bunch higher than they were, but a person sufficiently motivated can make a melograno/arancia drink be the long-lasting slowly savored high point of their day, which is how I'll be approaching those. 

There are some garlic sable cookies coming. Garlic sable cookies! I have never! I must!  Those are an excellent example of the treasured WTF category. If it makes me immediately ask "Can you DO that??" it's a WTF delight and I want to know what it's like. Or to put it another way, my ignorance has provided endless opportunities for learning, and learning is so often so much fun -- and very tasty.

Part of the reason I'll be savoring things slowly is that I'm adapting to living with type 2 diabetes, which I've been dealing with for a year now. I got really, really lucky and got two excellent things from becoming a Metformin taker. One is an effect, and the other is, I think, a side effect. The effect is that it apparently went and repaired whatever sensor in me has to do with satiation, and tweaked the setting some, so I turn out to be done having food now,, thank you very much, earlier than I historically have been. A lot of this is because -- OK, I don't know if anybody else has this, but I used to do comfort eating, where certain things are very soothing. And that's different now. There is no soothing from food. It was pretty startling when I realized it. It's so weird when suddenly it does not work. I mean, at ALL. So that's one thing, and I think it's an effect.  The other thing is a side effect, but I do not mind it. It is this:  everything tastes wonderful. No, I mean WONDERFUL.  Plastic packet ramen might as well be gourmet. But the effect mentioned earlier holds: I don't feel like overeating. No matter how wonderful. I can go "Oh, that was so good," mean it entirely, and then go do the next thing. 

It is all so very weird. But it's kind of fun. (I appear to have also lost the ability to fret about food or weight or whatever.) We shall see where it leads.

Right now where it's leading is to ordering some birthday treats and then wondering how long they will last under the new schedule of savoring things. (The only thing I have found that I nom more than I want of is Swedish Bubs in pomegranate/strawberry flavor. Well, and those jelly snails. But those are both texture craving things, and that's a different issue.) Neurodiversity and food stuff is complicated even before getting to the land of Metformin. So far, though, it's better rather than not, even the uncomfortable bits where a coping mechanism isn't any more and needs to change. In the meantime, though, I have durian cakes and garlic sables and fruit-juice-filled gumme koi coming, and life is good that way.

Is there a new-to-you thing you have tasted that was a learning experience? Was it a delight? Was it tasty? Do you have texture cravings? Other cravings? Did you ever do comfort eating and then have it stop working for you? What then? (I find myself going to the workbench more. Which is not a bad result, really. Art is also comfort. Still comfort, I guess I should say. Do you have anything like that?)