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Month: March 2025
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Decolonizing my garden
Gardens are colonized spaces: think of the quintessential American garden with its close-hewn evenly-green lawn of invasive grass, some matching cherubic flowers along the front of the house, maybe one tree or a couple flowering shrubs, lined by a manicured hedge or wall of arborvitae. This is a landscape in service to human desires — a dream of bucolic, idyllic playtimes — a taking of the land from ecosystems to become a signal of both compliance (with the HOA / expectations) and mastery (of nature). The landscape becomes a projected self-image of perfection.
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Read Only One Bed
Abbie Walker can’t wait to spend two weeks alone in a remote cabin. No overbearing mother. No nagging sister. Just one grumpy cat, a carload of snacks, and a heart full of cheer. It’s going to be the best holiday ever.
Then, in the middle of a blizzard, he shows up.
Not Santa, unfortunately. Instead an injured Reed Knowles stumbles into Abbie’s cabin, ruining her perfect holiday. Abbie has good reason to hate him—and Reed doesn’t like her any better.
But they’re stuck together. And there’s only one bed. So until the snow thaws, they’ve got to bite their tongues, keep each other warm…and maybe, during those cold winter nights, discover their worst enemy is the one person they’ve needed all along.
This mixed humorous elements with emotionally taxing conversations. Some of the convos felt a little info dumpy (and sometimes author insert) but overall it felt mostly like people getting heavy things off their chest for the first time. I liked both characters and they suited each other well. Although this is built on tropes it didn’t feel perfunctory, I thought it worked well. I’d have liked to see them spend a little more time with each other that wasn’t focused on excavating themselves from emotional trauma, though they were so interbound it made sense for them to work through it together. Pretty spicy.
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Read Soviet Bus Stops
Photographer Christopher Herwig first noticed the unusual architecture of Soviet-era bus stops during a 2002 long-distance bike ride from London to St. Petersburg. Challenging himself to take one good photograph every hour, Herwig began to notice surprisingly designed bus stops on otherwise deserted stretches of road. Twelve years later, Herwig had covered more than 18,000 miles in 14 countries of the former Soviet Union, traveling by car, bike, bus and taxi to hunt down and document these bus stops.
The local bus stop proved to be fertile ground for local artistic experimentation in the Soviet period, and was built seemingly without design restrictions or budgetary concerns. The result is an astonishing variety of styles and types across the region, from the strictest Brutalism to exuberant whimsy.
Soviet Bus Stops is the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled, including examples from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Abkhazia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Estonia.
A wide range of shapes and materials, bold colors, and patterned mosaics. The shapes are playful, often asymmetrical, an interesting mix of Brutalist and organic forms, some almost Googie-esque. Some are impractical, others unrecognizable as bus stops to my eye. Very brief text introduction then gets right to the photography, which is my preference.
Bane should have been king…
But he was born four minutes too late. Though it was Bane who’d led armies to victory against the scourge of the undying, now he must watch as his undeserving twin claims yet another throne through marriage to a princess of a neighboring kingdom. A kingdom that Bane had saved.
That throne should be his. So he’ll take it.
All Bane must do is deceive his twin’s innocent bride. He’ll trick her into his bed, and once he’s planted his seed, the bride—and her kingdom—will be his. With such a prize in hand, he won’t care if she ever forgives him for his deception. It hardly matters if she does, because his evil plan doesn’t include falling in love.
But his bride has a few plans of her own…
This was ridiculous and funny, B-movie over-the-top goofiness. They were perfect for each other. A fun way to spend a couple hours.
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Weeknotes: March 1-7, 2025
The coup and the ravaging destruction of our government and the world order is getting to me… I’m antsy, so concentrating on reading a book is hard, and I’m noticing all these little signs of stress popping up in my body, like a canker sore and eczema flare-ups. What an annoyance on top of all the bullshit. I’ve been gardening a little almost every day to touch grass.
Win of the week: so this is a little embarrassing but I took the faceplates off my plugs in my kitchen several years ago when I was going to paint, then my husband balked at the color I’d picked (to be fair it was fire engine red), but I’d somehow already lost the faceplates — so I finally gave up on finding them and ordered replacements from Home Depot — and I already put them on! (except for the two plugs behind the toaster oven 😂)
Looking forward to: reading Black Hellebore by Grace Draven this weekend
Stuff I did:
- 6.75 hours consulting
- 3.5 hours writing — I’ve been experimenting with filling out worksheets that I’d normally print on the Supernote — seems like using a Word file as template isn’t ideal because it retains line breaks when it turns the handwriting into text, but since I don’t actually need my notes as text, instead I’m annotating a PDF document and leaving it as handwriting
- took my cat back in to the vet to have her teeth removed — then she was super high and bouncing off the walls all night 😺
- ported over my playlists from my laptop to my desktop — I’ve been avoiding doing it for a couple months, but finally faced the file path remapping annoyance
- sorted all the PDFs on my phone into my library on my desktop, and copied them over to the new tablet
- cleared out my Microsoft data and turned off targeted ads on Amazon (prompted by Cory, thanks!)
- trying out Vivaldi browser as an alternative to Firefox on desktop — looks like it has some neat features, and I appreciate their transparency about their business model
- 2.5 hours of weeding and yard cleanup — grubbing up blackberry roots, cleaning up weed piles, pulling the slew of euphorbia volunteers in my front yard — made myself a garden to-do list because things are going to start growing fast
- pruned some of the overgrown branches from the espalier apples… if I’d realized how much maintenance espaliers would take I wouldn’t have planted them 🍎 Especially since, every year for the past decade, the deer eat the flowers so we don’t get fruit 🙄
- made overnight sourdough pancakes (with greek yogurt and milk because my buttermilk went gross)
- re-watched Stardust
- one virtual appointment
- walked with a couple friends
- voted against REI’s board candidates per the REI union request — sick of supposedly progressive companies union busting 😠
The Disbeliever’s Guide to Authenticity by Toby Shorin
[I]rony is a natural stance to take when constantly making judgments between “real” and “fake,” authentic and inauthentic. It’s a coping mechanism for preserving one’s commitment to authenticity in the midst of a commodified and commoditized society.
Irony is a way of shirking responsibility. It reifies the logic of authenticity while desperately asserting moral superiority.
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Isn’t it ironic? by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick
Somehow our ironic cynicism transformed into this profound laziness, this shrugging “Whatever.” that has become our response to everything. Excited about nothing, apathetic about everything, awe in short supply because we’re simultaneously too calloused to show up as humans and too bothered to believe that what happens in the world really actually affects you.
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