§ Since childhood, I’ve always said fall was my favorite season. I love watching the leaves change color, getting a reprieve from the muggy summer heat, and pulling my favorite sweaters out from storage.
However, I’ve noticed that sometime in the last few years spring has taken the top spot. It must be related to gardening. Fall is the season of harvesting, which is certainly great, but spring is the season of planning and possibility—looking through seed catalogs, researching plant varieties at the nursery—I find it all endlessly engaging.
§ On Tuesday, I got 5,000 pounds of iron ore taconite pellets delivered as part of a display for my upcoming exhibition on Cleveland’s steel industry. It was honestly a smaller pile than I anticipated—the stuff is dense.
On Thursday, we received delivery of tiny, fascinating, enthusiast-built steamboat.
§ My Keen finally arrived in the mail, twenty months—twenty months!—after backing it on Kickstarter. The long wait has definitely tinted my perception of the product.
That said, it feels nice to hold and fidget with—it’s larger and heavier than I expected, in a good way. It can be configured to work well for either left or right handed people but it doesn’t work well ambidextrously—i.e. if it’s set up for right handed use, it’s a huge pain to operate with your left hand, and vice versa. I was originally planning to share the Keen with my wife, magnetically attaching it to the fridge so that we could both easily open packages as they arrive. However, her being right handed and me left handed is going to make that tricky.
§ As you can see, this week was really just a bunch of deliveries.
§ With Brother Brontë finished I started Ray Nayler’s new book Where the Axe is Buried. Like Brother Brontë, it is set in a near-future dystopia. It’s much darker, though. Brother Brontë’s spirit of mutual aid in the face of adversity is replaced with fear and hard-nosed authoritarian repression. In general, it’s a heavier read.
My biggest complaint is that it often feels like it’s trying to be too timely, commenting on language models and TikTok feeds. I’ve come to accept that part of what I appreciate about fiction is the opportunity for escapism—to temporarily loose myself in another world. That becomes hard when a book is a little too topical. It’s a big reason why I find it hard to get into Corey Doctorow’s recent fiction.
Looking past the not-so-subtle modern-day references, I have been enjoying the book quite a bit. It has interesting characters and is driven by a very strong plot. I’m excited to see where it goes.
§ The third episode of Last of Us was much better than the second. Less yelling and shooting, more thoughtful character development.
§ Over the weekend I finally undertook spring cleaning of the greenhouse and moved the quails back outside for the season. Like me, they seem to be enjoying the extra sunlight.
I also planted a bunch more seeds: snap peas, asparagus beans, and summer squash. No tomatoes or peppers, as previously discussed, which still feels strange.
§ Yesterday, I took a short muddy trek through our new nature reserve—my first time back since first visiting last September. While it’s nice to see that the land’s original purpose as a floodplain is being fulfilled once again, I’ll have to come back after the world dries off a bit.
