§ Last Sunday was 85°f and sunny. The forecast for the coming week was all rain and low-70s temperatures so I thought I should take full advantage of the nice weather while it lasted. I hiked for almost five miles along the creek at a local park, looking for pawpaws. I found a surprising number of trees but no fruit. It was a nice time nonetheless.
Back home in the evening I baked a loaf of pumpkin bread. Just as it came out of the oven a huge rainstorm descended onto the city which persisted all week, off and on. As was foretold.
§ I’ve obviously been talking about pawpaws enough that word made its way to my dad’s coworker’s mom who runs a small farm with a number of pawpaw trees. On Tuesday I picked up a jar of their homemade pawpaw butter. Heavenly.
§ Both you, dear reader, and everyone else in my day-to-day life must be thankful that pawpaw season is so short. Rest assured I’ll stop talking about this particular topic soon enough.
On the other hand, at least it’s pawpaw fruit in rambling on about and not Liquid Glass?
§ One by one, our figs are beginning to ripen. This is much later than 2023 where we harvested a bevy of ripe figs right around Labor Day but exactly in line with last year where fruit started ripening during the last week of September.
Most importantly, this year the plant is producing way more fruit than any previous year by a wide margin. It might be time to learn how to make a proper fig jam.
§ I’m often pretty awful about procrastination. It was impossible to overlook this fact during my school years but nowadays it can be easy to forget about this affliction. This week I finally mailed off a letter that has been sitting on my desk for more than a month. One of these days I’ll refill my windshield wiper fluid which has been empty for the majority of 2025.
§ Following up on a couple of weeks ago, I started reading On the Calculation of Volume. It’s a short book. The first quarter started out pretty strong but I started loosing steam around the halfway mark. Honestly, it started feeling too repetitive. I realize that this almost seems like invalid criticism for a book literally about a woman stuck repeating a single day over and over again. Maybe I’ll try reading it again later.
For now, I started back in on the first of Knausgaard’s six-book autobiographical series. At least if I get drawn into it I’ll be set for quite awhile—the entire series is something like 3,600 pages in total.
§ On the advice of Phil I watched The Settlers. The story was grim and the cinematography was great. The 3:2 aspect ratio felt like a breath of fresh air.
§ Yesterday I finally broke down and signed up for a Costco membership. Next to buying a lawn mower earlier this year, it feels like a whole new level of suburban adulthood.
