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Things on my mind #2

  • Apparently I binge blog.
  • It is good to be part of a family. (I especially felt that with my aunt’s funeral and road trip it took to get there.)
  • While I’ve been saying “saith” with two syllables all my life, the reason for one syllable suddenly made sense to me the other day.
  • Remember that ebook of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker? It was too good to be true. It’s a woefully bad digitization, with full pages missing, lots of OCR gunk, and page breaks in the middle of paragraphs. Back to the print edition.
  • Favorite ice cream flavors: Umpqua’s Chocolate Brownie Thunder, Ben & Jerry’s Tonight Dough, Dreyer’s Cookie Cobblestone, and an ube flavor I had at Handel’s one time.
  • Back pain is something I think about all day, every day. I’m conscious of it almost all the time (like, I think about it every few minutes). I wonder if the cognitive hit here — taking up mental RAM — has diminished my ability to work on projects.
  • I’m trying to find the right balance between pushing through and resting when my back is flared up. (As it has now been for a few days.) Yesterday, though, my physical therapist recommended generally being more active when my back isn’t flared up and more specifically recommended weightlifting, which has always been a no-no with my spondylolisthesis, but I think there’s something to it.
  • Landscaping our backyard has turned into a nice opportunity to take texture photos for my art. (Well-used industrial machinery has lots of delicious scrapes and scuffs.)
  • Reading history and how I know what’s written is only the merest sliver of the totality of what actually happened, even when the history is of something relatively short (a few days as opposed to seven thousand years, for example). I wish I could see more of all the little mundane bits in between. (But do I really?)
  • Lately I’ve been thinking about how there’s a lot of power in iteration — coming back to the same project over and over again in tiny increments. (Eating an elephant, etc.)