Reading

So for those who aren't local, Be It Known that the vast majority of apartments here have leases beginning on or around September 1. Simultaneously and relatedly, the streets fill with U-Hauls and the sidewalks fill with random boxes and pieces of furniture marked "FREE". This last phenomenon is called "Allston Christmas" after a local suburb, but it happens across many towns in the area. It's like a big, disorganized Everything Swap.

I picked up two new kitchen pots from the squirrel, and ended up giving him an onion chopper device that he loves... amusingly this was not as a direct swap, but it worked out well.

Tuesday I spent about four hours helping a distant-ish friend pack stuff intended for a storage unit. I learned how to vaccuum-bag, which was cool, and MacGuyvered some garment-hanger boxes, and then was able to ferry a bag of stuff to the ballerina. And... silently I judged, because there was so much stuff. I came home, and the next day I got rid of a big bag of clothing and put out my own "FREE" stuff on the sidewalk and reorganized my kitchen. LOL.

Friday I spent nearly 8 hours helping my acro base unpack and organize. Our goal was to get all his boxes open / broken down / gone, and we did it. So satisfying. We took a 2BR place from a giant pile of boxes to a place that looked like he lived there (and had had a messy week). We also got to see a couch left on the sidewalk disappear within an hour, and the same for a few other things that just didn't seem to have a place in the new apartment. He has different hobbies and different stuff than I do, but his attitude about objects is so much more like mine that it made for an interesting contrast with Tuesday.

You are wondering: well, miss minimalist, did you get any free stuff this Christmas season? Yeah, I did. The two pots (I got rid of one), a pint glass, and a pair of parallettes from R (good for doing pushups without having to warm up my wrists first).

Overall a very domestic week. If you count the intended-to-be-final walk-through for my new condo, I put serious time into four different places. Then I went kitchen-feral on Saturday and made both quatre quarts cake and sushi. Workouts did go okay as well, but with less to specifically report.

I groused and griped about the final outcome of the Google-vs-DOJ antitrust case, which of course Google lost. ( If the powerful can be found guilty but then nothing happens to them, what good are the courts? ) The judge could have hurt browsing a bit, and instead he hurt all of tech. Maybe all of the country.

I learned a good new insult from an otherwise so-so book. The insult is "fish drowner", and I am taking it to mean someone who fucks up the apparently unfuckable. The person who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the person who manages to drown a goddamn fish. The person who maybe had one job, and had the power in his hands to break up a known monopolist, and... simply didn't do it.

Overall, I had a really nice week of focusing on what I wanted to focus on, taking it easy in between energetic bouts of focus, and feeling good about all that. I went back to basics as was foretold by ~~the prophecies~~ my last post; cooked a bunch of chili on Monday and ate it all week for lunch, and did a lot of working out, and created a new tracker sheet for Things I Would Like to Be Maintaining. The day I did that is the first day I really did my desired two sets of pistol squats, so I got to write that down and be happy about it! I'm also flirting with my old straddle pancake program (owww, I can feel that) and trying to think how much cardio to do, and finding motions that really get at the jank in my shoulders. I've invented a sort of weighted chicken flapping action that I like a lot, for that last thing; I also have a backbend semiprivate buddy and a walkover semiprivate buddy, which is wonderful and makes me feel like I have companions for the journey.

I attended my town's condo board meeting, and watched them approve the conversion of my condo-to-be. Apparently one has to declare one's intention on that kind of conversion, and then there's a waiting period of a year before the conversion can happen?

Time was spent with the next generation of humans:

I hung out with the baby squirrel all day on Friday, and it was pretty nice. We made blue Jell-O with gummy sharks in it (more amusing than delicious, to my adult taste buds), and timed their laps on a bicycle in the small nearby cemetery while also getting to talk with apfelsingail, and hung out snuggling and playing Blue Prince for a lot of the afternoon. I didn't get hooked on Blue Prince last time I played, but this time I think maybe I'm more interested and might buy it for myself?

Today I took a long walk with Birdie, who's back from two weeks in Italy and more or less prepared for classes to start. We came back to my place and I dug up some baby pictures of her that she'd never seen, from when her parents brought her to visit my apartment in summer 2003, and she gave Caltrop a present of a little bird-shaped cat toy. We found a good spot for outdoor handstand photos over behind the high school, but didn't indulge... this time.

Time also was spent with my partners, of course: watching Wednesday with the bug, and going to the deCordova sculpture museum with the squirrel. The snuggle is real.

I've been listening to Someone You Can Build a Nest In, because it won the Nebula, and it's funnier than I expected but also extravagantly mid-2020s-progressive and full of plot holes; I have no idea how it won the Nebula. Or where the science fiction has gone, really, from the whole list of finalists. Even the Hugo finalists are packed with SF/F hybrids this year (the two SF entries are both by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who seems determined to move the "genre" industry toward SF as a solo effort and through sheer volume). Where's a science fiction fan to get her recommendations? Maybe the Arthur C Clarke award... though that's limited to books that are published first in the UK, maybe that's less restrictive than it sounds.

Allston Christmas, and fish drowners

Feels good to be physical