§ I’ve never seen Lake Erie as frozen as it is now. Just about every day I’ve noticed people stepping out onto the ice, exploring, setting up lawn chairs and ice fishing for god knows what out of the frozen harbor.
If I’ve grown to appreciate winter as “the last benign unifying event” it is the retreat of nature that has started bothering me the most. On Monday I noticed a strange sounding car alarm off in the distance. It took me a beat before realizing it was actually a Tufted Titmouse, the first bird call I’ve heard in at least a month.
§ I was inspired to start carrying around a Field Notes notebook again after reading about the 20th anniversary of their original ‘Kraft’ line. I carried one in my back pocket for my entire time in college and for a while afterwards. I’m not sure what made me stop.
In the intervening years Obsidian has mostly taken its place but there is something I miss about being able to flip back through old notebooks. It is the best way to instantly travel back to my headspace from years back. Markdown files can’t do that.
§ I stumbled across Thomas James' A-Z Every Street project where he, over the course of a few months in 2021, embarked to walk and photograph every street in his hometown of Bath, England. It inspired me to dig up an alphabetized list of all of the streets in my town. Now, my particular Cleveland suburb isn’t quite as interesting as Bath but who knows, maybe it will turn out to be more interesting than I thought. That is kind of the point of this whole exercise, isn’t it?
§ On Friday I watched the first episode of the new season of Severance, of course. I can already tell Miss Huang is going to be a new favorite character. Something about her feels particularly Lynchian—what timing. The set design and props are as good as ever. I particularly love the bizarre Lumon projector.
§ My department at work has been without a direct supervisor since early September. This week was the first full week of our new vice president. A big adjustment but so far, so good.
§ On Friday I gave a talk about my job to a visiting class of high schoolers. It’s an activity I’m basically predisposed to dread. In the past I would have spent the proceeding month stressing about it.
In this case I had a couple of things in my favor. First, I didn’t know about it until Monday which put an upper cap on the length of time I could possibly spend overthinking the whole thing. More importantly, though, I’m feeling more confident about my job than I’ve felt in quite a while.
In the end, it was completely fine. Even something I would consider doing again.
