/reader

 It’s been two months since my surgery! My physical stamina is still a little low but my mental capacity seems pretty much restored.

Highlight of the week: we went to the rhodie garden!

Looking forward to: baking something with all the blueberries I have in the fridge… trying to decide between coffee cake and cobbler 🤔😋

Stuff I did:

• worked on my consulting website — I’m bringing my portfolio in from Behance and making a bunch of case study pages — made a template and got two projects updated
• headed down to the Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden and took so many pictures 😂 dipped into the adjacent Bonsai Museum for a quick peek, too
• lunch date with my husband — brought sandwiches from my favorite joint to a park overlooking downtown Seattle — also lemonade from a boba place, I tried wintermelon
• worked on consolidating financial accounts — set up a rollover and moved some funds around
• researched fee-only financial advisors and 😬 I get it, it’s not worth a professional’s time to sell me just a few hours of advice, but still, the cheapest starting rate I found locally was $3-5k — I’m going to list out all my questions and see if I can find answers in the Bogleheads forum
• baked banana bread
• one online appointment
• met my friend for a sunny walk on the trail
• watched the pilot episode of Fallout

Dinners:

• roasted corn quesadilla + coke + refried beans
• Thai takeout — eggplant with tofu + spring rolls + rice
• Indian takeout — Tikka salmon + naan + rice
• breakfast egg sandwiches
• Mexican fusion takeout — potato quesadilla + chips and salsa
• pappardelle pasta + jarred sauce + fresh basil + Caesar salad in a bag
• refried beans with melted cheddar cheese + chips + sour cream

Reading:

Haven’t been in much of a reading mood this week.

• Continued reading Come Together by Amelia Nagoski
• Started reading Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
• DNF’d Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang, Unbound by Christy Healy, The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed, and Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

Words I looked up / concepts I learned:

• Ergodic literature
• dreich
• spalling
• sere
• novogamy
• fulsome

New music I listened to:

• “I Told You So” by Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio (recommended by Anthony) 👍

Nature notes:

• Three deer — two males and a female — came and browsed the backyard one afternoon — one had stub antlers and the other just had dots
• MY DOVE TREE FINALLY BLOOMED!!! (Okay, so there are four bracts, but that is more than zero 😄) I don’t remember what year we planted it but before COVID — it was probably 2-3 years old already then, and dove trees can take up to a decade to flower
• I successfully used my binoculars (!) to spot a dove in the back 40 that I’m voting was a banded pigeon — I’m generally terrible at finding the bird I want to look at through them before it flies off but I caught a solid glimpse 😂
• I installed the Merlin app and learned the really loud bird in my backyard is a house finch 🐦 (it was the only bird the app could discern over the freeway noise 😢 worst part of my house)
• Heard a woodpecker in the front yard (probably the resident sapsucker since I saw fresh holes in the tree it likes? though we’ve seen pileated before too)

I’m not a birder*, but I endorse this perspective that doing things that enliven you is important, even if no one else sees them as productive.

Further reading:

Devoted to wholeness instead of pursuing success by Nela Dunato

Rest is What Makes You a Person

The work is not enough

Adult Hobbies

My approach to scent descriptions is to choose honesty over accuracy.

— Tracy Wan

See also:

5-4-3-2-1 Sensory Details to Enrich Settings

Read The Museum of Scent

Obsession with scent

 

We first visited the Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden in June 2021, mostly missing the rhodies — but today we caught them! Even a week earlier, there would have been more — but there were still plenty to see, and cool foliage too. There was a super high pollen count today so I masked up but still got a headache 😕 I’m out of the habit of excursions so I was wiped by the time we got home 😄 But I’m glad we went anyway.

(Data warning: lots of photos! Also, lots of squeeing about plants! It’s my blog, not Instagram, so I’m not limited to ten photos, bwahaha)

 

A few weeks back, I did a print swap with Joe and now have finally gotten a frame for his cool riso print! I went with pink 😃 I’ve added it to my rotating bookcase gallery to start, and in a few months I’ll find it a more permanent home. It’s fun to showcase different art on my bookcase depending what I’m feeling — it’s a good spot for small art like some postcards I’ve framed, and I have a few seasonal prints I don’t want up year-round.

(The other two prints I have up currently are by Casey Weldon and Bao Pham.)

I lol’d at the “bookshelf wealth” home decor trend earlier this year because while I feel like I have a wealth of books I love or am excited to read, my comics probably aren’t impressing my professional contacts (this is in my Zoom background) and my bookcase is strained to (beyond 😅) capacity. Ironically, I think displaying art in front of some of the books might mellow it out by making some bigger visual blocks.

Haven’t thought of this song in decades probably but it popped into my head at dinner. Wild how lyrics become etched into the subconscious.

When I was a kid I usually paired this with Galileo by the Indigo Girls, (which I see also came out in 1992), but today I’m going literal and matching with Suzanne Vega, who I didn’t discover till college. An older friend from art history class thought if I made an album it would be like Vega’s Solitude Standing. I like its stark darkness but prefer the coy playfulness of Nine Objects of Desire 😉

Colvin’s Fat City album art feels extremely 90s to me, and also reminds me of Mark Knopfler’s Golden Heart cover art, which is exceedingly cringe (though I did actually like the album a lot). That’s another album I hadn’t thought of in ages till recently — every time I hear a reference to Imelda Marcos I think of the song 😂 (Funnily enough, both Golden Heart and Nine Objects are from 1996.)

Wandering these mental links, I’m wondering how much of our modern dissociation from music comes from a lack of visual anchor that album art provided. Having a visual made the song into something more tangible, provided a symbolic reference — and I built those visual associations through the tactile handling of the CD’s jewel case every time I put it on. Albums still have art today, but I’m much less likely to look at it while it’s playing as it’s jumbled in a mix and playing in the background. I might tab over to my music software and check the artist’s name periodically, but for me at least that doesn’t seem to stick the way it did when I had to pick up the jewel case to look at the track listing. My mental container for a song is no longer its album, but the software I use to play it. Or… maybe there’s no connection and I just found it easier to remember stuff when I was 10 and didn’t have 40 years of cruft clogging up my neurons 😂

When capability increases so substantially, the activity under discussion is not “the same thing, only faster”. It is a different activity altogether. Phase change.

Emphasis mine.

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How a Virtual Assistant Taught Me to Appreciate Busywork by Amanda Hess (NYT) – archive link

But when I gave [personal assistant app] Yohana a spin, I found that I did not want to do the things she can manage, and that she cannot manage the things I want to do. She made me start to believe that the busywork I might delegate to a machine is actually more human, and valuable, than I realized.

The apps transform parents from workers into consumers, translating our to-do lists into shopping lists. Somebody is still performing our “joy-stealing” tasks, and it may be a call center worker or one of the many other invisible laborers who make artificial intelligence systems seem to run automatically.

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Traveling At The Speed Of The Soul by Nick Hunt (Noema Mag)

“I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”

— Rebecca Solnit

At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.

(via Dense Discovery)

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the rhythm of processing: daily life vs. travel by Kening Zhu

travel is like a sudden flood of intake for the mind/body to digest — fast.

what causes discomfort is not the sudden inflow; it’s the backlog of things to process.

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Sarah Taber sharing about how there are ag solutions that don’t pit workers and farm owners against each other (start of quote in thread):

If you’re picking fruit in an orchard, you can spend a LOT of your time just climbing up & down ladders. With a basket of fruit strapped to your chest that can weigh up to 50lbs…

All that ladderwork is hazardous- it’s easy to miss a hand or foothold & drop off the ladder when you’re carrying a big weight that’s strapped to you.

But it’s also a bad use of time! The goal is to spend our time getting fruit into bins, not climbing ladders!

An orchardist in Australia did the math. He found that for every hectare (~2.5 acres) of orchard, fruit pickers go up & down ladders so many times that they climb the equivalent of 1.2 Mount Everests.

https://apal.org.au/https-apal-org-au-pedestrian-orchards-keep-workers-safely-on-the-ground/

… So Australian growers came up with a solution: just use shorter trees. No ladders needed.

These so-called pedestrian orchards save a whole lot of time. They can be picked faster, so the fruit gets to market in better shape. You don’t need to hire as many people to do the picking. And it’s way less dangerous for workers.

Everybody wins.

See also:

Human Scale

Time is a Tool of Capitalism

Starving out strikers

In the minds of millions, opposing the violence of the police justifies any violence the police might do against any of us.

This is the seventh and final lesson of war in our war-oriented society. Killing is the only thing that will keep us safe from killing. Therefore, anyone who opposes killing represents a threat justifying further killing.

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In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.

— Hannah Arendt

(via)

This ethos applies far beyond the Labor movement, if we dare ask for more: at a personal and societal level.

See also:

Flipping perspectives on time

Dreaming, and Choosing, a Better Future

Being a citizen means taking ownership

We need our politicians to commit to change if we’re gonna get through climate change