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 😠

Dinners:

• baked feta pasta
• fake chicken burgers
• sourdough breakfast wrap using discard — not the most exciting but SO easy I’ll probably make again — I sprinkled red onion and jalapenos/ red bell pepper in the middle and used cheddar and cotija — needed a dipping sauce for sure — husband suggests a slice of ham on his
• Indian takeout — tandoori paneer + parota (good but a lot less bread for the same price as naan) + aloo kulcha (too spicy for me! 😿)
• Burger takeout — impossible burger with onions + fries
• eggplant curry from Greenfeast: Autumn, Winter (second time making and I think no need for a third) + rice + naan
• baked potato + creamed leeks + gravy from a cube (accidentally bought it instead of bouillon, it was fine 🤷‍♀️)

Reading:

• Read Only One Bed 👍and Evil Twin by Kati Wilde and Soviet Bus Stops by Christopher Herwig
• Started reading Mercenary Courage by Ruby Lionsdrake and Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell
• DNF’d And Then He Kissed Me by C.M. Daniels
• Bought Black Hellebore by Grace Draven and acquired The Baron Without Blame by Katherine Grant (free on Amazon)

Words I looked up:

• usufruct
• occlude

Choice phrase:

All there is, while things perpetually fall apart, is the possibility of acting from where we are.

— Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity

Pretty stuff I saw:

• this peaceful illustration of a field of flowers by Evan M. Cohen
• this video of a cool light installation in South Seattle
• Stevie Shao’s library card design for KCLS

New music I listened to:

• Acts of Rebellion by Ela Minus 👍 — bought this (actually remembered Bandcamp Friday for once!)
• Open the Fucking Fantasy – Black Moth Super Rainbow

Website maintenance:

Got on support chat with my webhost to resolve my IndieAuth Mod_Security error… again. They tried to tell me the problem wasn’t on their end, but it was 😉 (For future reference, they said if it happens again to tell them “something is blocking the request from the server end for Mod Security itself — ask the admins to clear anything that is blocking the request from server end”)

Nature notes:

• heard two flickers calling, one from a tree in the backyard and the other a light post in the front yard — heard one of them pounding on wood — better that than my gutter like they usually do 😉
• that hummingbird is Staking Its Claim on our yard man — saw one half a block away and wasn’t sure if it was the same one… what’s a hummingbird’s territory? (also see this old school website written in Comic Sans that actually might have legitimate information because they band hummingbirds 🤷‍♀️)
• daffodils are blooming