Weeknotes: October 28 - November 1, 2024
Monday, October 28
I had a good hair day yesterday. Even better, I was at a party and friends witnessed it. You hate to waste a good hair day. Today, my second cup of coffee tastes like spring, though it's not even November yet. A lot of seasons still to cycle through. On WCBN it's clearly spooky season. Shriekback, Bauhaus, 45 Grave. It's a nice little commute and I pull into campus with Peter Murphy hurling Latin incantations out my windows.
Later I light a fire and start triaging which potted plants will come inside for the winter. Wearing leather work gloves, I use tweezers to carefully extract dead leaves that have blown into my mess of cacti. I like winterizing a yard, it's satisfying work. I say goodbye to RR who moves out Apt. 2 tomorrow, taking Pretzel with her. I've become very fond of that little three-legged cat.
Weeknotes: September 30 - October 4, 2024
Monday, September 30
On Saturday I sent Islay to spend the night with my parents while I took a day trip to Grand Rapids. When I got home to my empty house, I felt so distraught without her. Today I make sure she gets plenty of attention. Pets take up such emotional volume. I sit on the couch with her binge-watching the Americans while working on a magazine layout project for my design class.
Weeknotes: April 1-5, 2024
April Fool's Day. One of those weird holidays that has never really registered with me. I love to laugh, but pranks aren’t really my brand. Instead, I'm thinking about my uncle who died on this day, four years ago. It was amid the first big wave of lockdowns and hospitals were completely shut off to all non-essentials. He'd been complaining of respiratory problems for several weeks and was admitted to his local hospital in Mississippi in late March. He never tested positive for COVID-19, but ultimately died of what the doctor claimed was double pneumonia. It was a heartbreaking, miserable mess, all dealt with from afar, like so many other deaths in 2020. I was saddest for my dad who couldn't be with his only sibling when he passed and for my cousin, locked down far away in Honolulu mourning his father. Like my dad, Uncle Dick was a woodworker. Years before when I was working at the violin shop, he gave me a brass Sweetheart block plane, a tool I used frequently and continue to treasure. The Christmas before he died, he gave my brother and me each a pair of knives he'd crafted. Thanking him over the phone that afternoon was the last time I spoke with him. After getting the dreaded call from my dad on the afternoon of April 1, I went out to the garage and spent some time sharpening all the tools Dick had given me. I couldn't even gather with my family the day he died.