Carefully Random

• My house is freshly painted and the painters are gone. I spent most of the week missing and worrying about my favorite backyard squirrel, but she showed up again as soon as we had a morning with no rain and no painters. Good squirrel.


• I've been out of Zillian for six weeks now. I finally took the chores from my "Generic Weekend To-Do List" and distributed them into the weekdays as calendared tasks; there's really no reason to spend time on laundry when my friends might be available to hang out. I also notice in myself a slithery bad feeling when I think of my time off as "half a quarter" rather than "six weeks"; is it FOMO? Or -- I think this is more likely -- some residual reflexive concern that maybe I haven't done enough in that span of time, once it's expressed in a corporate way? It's like those jolts of panic I used to get right after the semester ended in college, but slower and more grown-up.


• I did a ton of random follow-ups on stuff from my financial advisor, preparing rollovers and the reversal of various money flows and sending more money off to the HYSA. Setting up a shift.


• Toured a chocolate factory (Taza) and it's surprising how small it really is.


• Got a local library card and set up Libby with it. I'm not loving how I lived a few blocks from a library branch for fourteen years without getting a card -- who even was I, there for a while in corporation-land?


• The black swallow-wort is up everywhere and I kind of wish I'd never learned to see it, because now I see it everywhere and its spread seems inexorable. I do feel like a hypocrite as I pull it up -- after all, it's just trying to live, like everyone, and like me -- but it's bad for butterflies and the city has asked people to pull it, so I do.


• My bio-kid is probably moving to my city this fall, to get a Master's of Public Health at a college just across the river! Whoa! I like her, and it will hopefully be really cool and special to hang out more often for a couple of years. I'm not sure how final the plan is, but I hope it's finalizing.


• I read a five-star book, Julia by Sandra Newman. I've been on a streak of satisfying four-star reads, but this retelling of 1984 with Julia as the main character was AWESOME. Winston is an everyman, while Julia is a well-rounded and specific character. Furthermore, the author sticks so assiduously to the canonical events of 1984, while providing more context for many of them, that the book is endorsed by Orwell's estate. Naturally, by dint of following the main character, it goes deeper into the lives and daily concerns of women in the authoritarian context of that world. And what happens with the rat scene is fucking brilliant! I only wish I hadn't read the other reviews on Goodreads, because there are a lot of one- and two-star reviews, all of which seem to have been written by... men. The reasons are not ones I agree with.

I was going to talk about handstands and acro, and the hilariously on-pause (because difficult!) gardening project that was supposed to be small, and events/updates related to the polycule, but this has gotten long enough for now.