**Highlight of the week: **husband surprised me with weekend morning donuts! 🍩 the benefits of a partner who wakes up two hours earlier 😂
**Looking forward to: **reading a ton of fun books over the next week of vacation 📚
Stuff I did:
Between wrapping up client work at the start of the month, putting my fiction project on hold, and taking it easy on my hamstring, this week has pretty much just been reading, working on some long blog posts, and putzing about on errands and tidying. Very chill but I may go stir crazy after a second week like this 😅
- a pair of pants I got for my husband came with a security tag on them, so I had to call and do an exchange
- we had an attic follow-up check scheduled but the…
**Highlight of the week: **husband surprised me with weekend morning donuts! 🍩 the benefits of a partner who wakes up two hours earlier 😂
**Looking forward to: **reading a ton of fun books over the next week of vacation 📚
Stuff I did:
Between wrapping up client work at the start of the month, putting my fiction project on hold, and taking it easy on my hamstring, this week has pretty much just been reading, working on some long blog posts, and putzing about on errands and tidying. Very chill but I may go stir crazy after a second week like this 😅
- a pair of pants I got for my husband came with a security tag on them, so I had to call and do an exchange
- we had an attic follow-up check scheduled but the technician got tied up on the job before us, so we rescheduled a couple weeks out — welp, got a tidy house out of it I guess 🤷♀️
- pancake breakfast (plus fried eggs and fake sausage for some protein) for Christmas (we don’t celebrate but it’s a bonus day off)
- cleaned out my nightstand drawer and found my missing Pixel 3a 🙌 charging it up so I can try rooting it, and maybe make it my daily reader / media access point (potential vacation project? but might piss me off 🤔)
- made these poached pears again, yup still tasty
Dinners:
- Morningstar veggie burger (upset my stomach) + tater tots + ginger beer
- Italian takeout — eggplant spaghetti parmesan
- sourdough soda bread + roasted sweet potato, golden beets and carrots with za’atar and feta + braised cabbage (meh) + apple cider (too strong for these flavors)
- pan-fried rockfish (guy at the fish counter recommended this for tacos… then I forgot to buy corn tortillas 🤦♀️) + mango pico de gallo + leftover refried beans + avocado + apple cider
- Lentil sloppy joes + Coke
- fake chicken burgers + curly fries + apple cider
- Taco Time frozen bean taquito things + sour cream + avocado (had a plan to cook but felt like lounging instead, and it’s vacation 😄)
Tried out meal planning on Monday instead of Sunday, potentially an improvement… if I remember to do it.
Reading:
- Read Shadow of the Swan by Nicola M. Cameron, Keeper of Enchanted Rooms by Charlie N. Holmberg 👍, and Uncommon Kitchens by Sophie Donelson
- Finished reading Cover by Peter Mendelsund 👍 and Cult of the Machine
- Re-read One Fine Duke by Lenora Bell
- Looked through Phaidon’s The Red Thread (lol they featured a tea trolley that I found on DWR for $3800! I feel like that undercuts the argument of the book about practical tastes a bit 🙄)
- Started reading The Dialectics of Art by John Molyneux and The Maze of Transparencies by Karen An-hwei Lee
- DNF’d Chromophobia by David Batchelor
Words I looked up / concepts I learned:
- vitrine
- diegetic
- puling
- dysthymia
- exarchate
- iridology
- mazuma
- noumenal
- zeroization
- refulgence
- apodictically
- fisking
- doxa
Choice phrase:
“a propaganda of incoherence” — from Erin Kissane’s Landslide
Pretty stuff I saw:
- this physical website talismen is fun (if there’s ever another IndieWebCamp San Francisco they should totally host this workshop)
- I dig the flag of Ingushetia
- cool wooden Chinese Window Panel
- fun blue 1980s bamboo and wicker room divider
- kinda wacky but cool chiffon floral dress
New music I listened to:
(via) I like the opening part best (never heard the original version)
(via) Both songs are fine on their own but seem a little odd together? My preference of the two is Seein’ Stars.
I don’t understand music videos.
Website changes:
- discovered <mark> and set it up as highlighting… I have usually just bolded the parts of quotes I want to emphasize but using semantic markup is good, will attempt to remember this exists
- adapted some other stylistic formatting for a blog post I’m working on
Nature notes:
-
pretty sure I saw two hummingbirds zip out of the tall Oregon grape then one flew back in! makes sense they’d be fighting over it since it’s the only thing in flower right now, and for the next month or two (the new Oregon grape I planted in the backyard last fall only has one bunch of flowers and they’re not open yet)
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By Tracy Durnell
Writer and designer in the Seattle area. Reach me at tracy@tracydurnell.com or @tracy@notes.tracydurnell.com. She/her.