Weekly Notes: July 14–20, 2025

(Posting this one a couple days late and backdating it….)

  • ♿️ My wife’s healing has been going well, so this week I went back to heading into the office to work. Well…in theory. The Seattle area was having a bit of a heat wave (high 80s to mid 90s), which threw things off. Mondays I work from home, Tuesday I went in and the building was really warm, Wednesday I went in but we got sent home at noon because the A/C was out, Thursday we were told to work from home while they worked on the A/C, and we work on a 4-10s schedule during the summer, so I didn’t work on Friday. So my first week back in the office was a day and a half! My wife didn’t mind, though. :)

  • 🕺🏻 Saturday night a friend of my wife’s came over to spend the night so that I could have a night off from caretaking, so I got to head out to the Mercury for the first time in a couple months. It was a rather slow night (competing with the Capitol Hill Block Party and a Stabbing Westward concert), but picked up a bit towards midnight. No worries, though, as the music was good, and I got to hang out with a friend and chat about convention drama.

📸 Photos

A brown dragonfly with clear wings striped with brown, sitting on a fence post with blurry green leaves in the background.
This dragonfly was hunting gnats in our backyard as I was watering our flowers.
A heron sitting on a dead tree branch behind some wetlands grass with trees in the background.
We spotted a heron to the side of the trail as we were off taking my wife on her first walk outside of our neighborhood in several weeks.
Whoah-oh, Black Betty…
A grocery bin sign that says 'rambutan'.
A sticker that says 'trans witches for Palestine' stuck to a building on a Seattle street.
Seattle sticker graffiti doesn’t get much more Seattle than this.
A small collectible card storage box that looks like a classic Star Trek Gorn, sitting next to a small gnome holding a sign that says 'welcome' and standing near a small red door.
When we got home from our walk on Sunday morning, we discovered that the “Welcome gnome” outside our front door was being menaced by a Gorn! Sort of. A nice surprise gift from a friend!

📚 Reading

With Worldcon coming up in just a few weeks, I’m binging my way through the Murderbot series by our guest of honor Martha Wells. This week, I read The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 1 (collecting All Systems Red and Artificial Condition), Compulsory, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 2 (collecting Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy), and Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory.

📺 Watching

🖖🏻 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back with the first two episodes of season three! I enjoyed both episodes…but with reservations (which I posted behind a content warning on Mastodon to protect against spoilers).

🎧 Listening

Two new albums this week:

🔗 Linking