§ The mornings are steadily getting brighter and the birds are back. The heavy winter silence is now punctuated by black-capped chickadee songs. I even heard my favorite pileated woodpecker once or twice.
§ On Tuesday, I took a day trip up to Toledo. The locals found it unacceptable that I had never been to Tony Packo’s, a restaurant famous for its frequent mentions in M*A*S*H, a TV show that finished airing -before I was born. It happened to be $2 hot dog Tuesday so of course I went. My favorite part was their big wall of autographed hot dog buns.
§ It has been a month since I started using a standing desk at work. The reason I got it was to test my theory was that staying standing would help me maintain inertia as I transition between tasks throughout the day. I was noticing that I would sit down at my desk to write an email or whatever but then inevitably stay there for a while afterwards, procrastinating getting up and leaving my office to start on the next task.
So here I am, a month later, maybe that theory has sort of panned out? More than anything else, I would attribute the bulk of any progress here to being more mindful of the pattern, not necessarily the desk itself.
§ As I’ve chronicled here over the past few years, raising quails for eggs has been a lot of trouble. However, if you consistently do something silly for long enough, there is always a chance you eventually end up looking prescient and that is exactly what has happened now that grocery store eggs are expensive and in short supply.
§ I’ve been digging through and digitizing old Great Lakes steel industry pamphlets for an upcoming project at work. My favorite so far is from the early-1960s: “flow map and location of iron ore pelletizing plants"—I truly love the graphic design. A close runner-up are these adorable line drawings detailing the mining process.
§ Matt Webb—one of the most consistently inspiring writers on speculative technology, art, and design—is celebrating his blog’s 25th anniversary:
…over time, I realized that keeping this open, interlinked notebook, accreted over the years, has its own value.
Indeed.
§ A few days after I posted the last update, my new sourdough starter finally sprang to life. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because I started using whole wheat flour but also maybe an early period of inactivity is just part of the process. Who knows?
On Friday, I finally baked some bread with it. It’s probably at least a bit better than the basic, non-sourdough, bread I’ve been making but it was easily at least twice as hard. Worth it? Probably not. But at least now I have the starter, which was the most time consuming part. So what else can I make with it? On Saturday I made sourdough pancakes. Now those were good.
§ Hey remember when my water heater failed two weeks ago and I specifically mentioned that I hoped it wasn’t an omen for future appliance failures?
Well…
I woke up to a suspiciously cold house on Saturday, finding that my furnace had stopped working sometime around midnight. I spent the better part of the day sitting on the basement floor, with the panel off of the furnace, staring pensively at the circuitry, really convinced it might be a project I could fix myself. Finally by mid-afternoon I accepted the inevitable and called an HVAC company. The technician identified a dead inducer fan in less than a minute.
Ok, this has to be the last home appliance problem for a while. Please? Please?
§ I still think Yellowjackets fell off the rails after the first season. Still, I’m glad that it’s back and I’ve been enjoying the new season enough, even if it feels a bit directionless.
As an aside, Yellowjackets is one of the best example of a recent-ish movie and television trend that has become a pet peeve of mine: substituting emotionally affecting writing with long, slick, often slow-motion, dialogue-free scenes set to pop music. I like “Cherry-coloured Funk” too but it’s not a substitute for good filmmaking.
