Day 179: With this cold snap hitting the Seattle area, it was the perfect morning to build our first fire of the season and relax with books while listening to the crackle and pop of the logs as the living room warms up.
Photos
Photos, usually taken by me. May be mirrored or imported from other services.
📚 House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
58/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I first read this just a few years after it came out, when it was very much a “thing”. A few years ago I picked up another copy and it’s been waiting for the right time for a re-read; apparently this October was the right time. I really enjoyed diving back into this. It’s definitely not something everyone will enjoy, with its multiple narrators, footnotes-within-footnotes, pseudo-academic tone for one through line, and experimental layout. But it has an incredibly effective sense of eerie, creeping dread, and the unusual structure brings the labyrinthine nature of the house into the experience of reading the story. Fascinating and perfect for the Halloween season.
Year 50 Day 178
Day 178: My final week-before-Halloween work shirt has Jack-o-lanterns, some wearing witch’s hats. The skeletons and skulls from earlier in the week are shirts that I wear year-round, this one is one that I’ll likely only wear close to Halloween.
Year 50 Day 177
Day 177: Back at the hospital again, but for entirely mundane reasons: time for my annual physical. I continue to be medically unremarkable. Everything looks good, all tests in normal range, nothing to report, you’re healthy, go home, come back in a year. Sounds good to me! Also, today’s pre-Halloween week work shirt: big cute (and sometimes beribboned or beflowered) skulls.
Year 50 Day 176
Day 176: Work shirt number two for pre-Halloween week – skulls and crossbones.
Year 50 Day 175
Day 175: Work shirt number one (not counting yesterday, since I worked from home and wore a t-shirt) for pre-Halloween week – dancing skeletons.
Year 50 Day 174
Day 174: Throughout the unpleasant adventures of the past few years, we’ve been very good about ordering our free COVID-19 home tests. We’ve also been good about avoiding risky situations, and so have so rarely felt ill that we’ve not used very many of them. So today, even after double-checking against the FDA’s list of updated expiration dates, I pulled out a pile of test kits that have expired. Glad we had them, glad we didn’t need (many of) them, and glad that we still have some that are good just in case we do need to test.
Year 50 Day 173
Day 173: Trying another one of the treats we brought back from England. We actually got two flavors; orange for me and mint for my wife. The orange was a nice strong orange flavor that we both liked. The mint was also very strong (“imagine an Altoid wrapped in dark chocolate”), which my wife liked but I didn’t even bother trying (I don’t like mint).
Year 50 Day 172
Day 172: We went by IKEA this morning, and discovered that there’s currently a space theme in the kid’s sections, with lots of cute goodies. All we came home with was one of the little green aliens (visible at the top right of the photo), but I thought some of my friends might be interested.
We were disappointed to discover that since the last time we were at IKEA, they’ve joined the realm of stores that are almost entirely self-checkout. That’s going to reduce how likely we are to shop there in person.
Year 50 Day 171
Day 171: Almost two years in, and today’s all-staff training/community development event was the first time I set foot in the school’s gym. Partly this is because I have very little interest in most sports stuff. Partly it’s because last year sometime in a presentation about plans for upcoming capital projects (big expensive things like new buildings), the need for a new gym space was stressed in part because this building is in such poor shape it could spontaneously collapse at any moment. That’s paraphrased, and probably wasn’t put quite so starkly, but I wasn’t the only person who came away from that presentation with that impression, so it was darkly amusing that this was the chosen location to gather all of the college’s staff for this event.