I thought “fall back” was the less disruptive time change, but this one was rough for me! 🥱

**Win of the week: **Mamdani and Dems won big 🙌 most people hate fascism, actually (still biting my nails over my city’s council races, two of which are within 500 votes but currently the NIMBY candidate is winning both… 🥺)

**Looking forward to: **scheduled some house upgrades for the next couple weeks 🏠

Stuff I did:

• 1.75 hours consulting
• 2 hours (writing) market research + 4.25 hours outlining
• coordinated with the insulation company to add on mold treatment and rodent sealing our garage attic at the same time — install Thanksgiving week!
• got a quote for a tubular skylight over our dark staircase (going after the energy efficiency tax credit that expires at the end of the year) — booked for next week!
• open enrollment — scoped out the state healthcare marketplace and the cheapest option was more than twice what I could get through my husband’s work, so I’m sticking with that
• evaluated adjustments to retirement savings and upped husband’s 401(k) contributions to make up for a few paychecks that didn’t have contributions during the job transition
• went in to do my labs for my annual wellness visit and the nurse somehow failed to order them 🤦‍♀️ stopped at the good donut place on the way home to assuage my annoyance at waking up two hours early for no reason 🍩 went back and actually did the blood draw the next day
• annual wellness visit — and now I have a bunch of follow-up appointments to schedule… got my first mammogram booked yay
• hung out with a friend for the first time in a while!
• walked with my friend on a beautiful sunny day ☀️

Dinners:

• farro squash salad (wrote up my version) + apple cider
• boxed mac and cheese
• breakfast burritos
• Lebanese takeout — cauliflower wrap + fries
• Mexican takeout — veggie burrito + chips and salsa
• another Seattle Restaurant Week meal, this time we tried Pomegranate Bistro in Redmond — I got a rice cake topped with mushrooms, salmon with romesco sauce, and cinnamon roll bread pudding (!) — appetizer and dessert were both delish — unfortunately a toddler was literally shrieking every five minutes at the next table, two feet away 🫠
• black bean burgers (Actual Veggies) + curly fries + Coke

Reading:

• Read Cinder House by Freya Marske 👍, The Elf Tangent by Lindsay Buroker, Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, and The Smart Approach to Design: Bathrooms by Creative Homeowner 👍
• Finished reading Vexations by Annelyse Gelman
• Started reading Children of the Mind by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Sweep in Peace by Ilona Andrews, and What Art Is by Arthur C. Danto
• Continued reading Astronaut II by Scott Listfield
• Ordered used copies of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class by Ben Davis, and The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents by Laura Frost
• Bought The Dialectics of Art by John Molyneux through Haymarket’s $2 ebook sale
• Received Context Window by Scott Boms

Pretty stuff I saw:

• very pretty and outrageously expensive cordless lamp (via)
• crocheted ombre round rug 🤩 I don’t usually like crochet but this is a perfect use for it
• Tyler Hobbs – Fidenza #545 (via) – I am more receptive to graphics generated through programming one’s own algorithm, though whether the rendering or the code is the art seems debatable

New music I listened to:

(via)

(via) this one kinda got stuck in my head all week 😂

• Hourglass by Antibalas (via) — especially liked the track ‘La Ceiba’
• Aesop Rock – Crystals and Herbs (via)
• CIEL – Won’t Obey (via)
• Hibou – A Sweet Thought (via)
• Doomed by The Toxic Avenger (via)
• R.L. Burnside feat. Lyrics Born – Someday Baby (via) — fun! — whole album on Bandcamp

Website changes:

• set up a CSS style for an editor’s note, which I sometimes use towards the top of longer posts
• updated my yearly color palette that I use to make timeline bars (see at bottom of this page), inspired by the 12-bit rainbow palette

I’ve been researching new web hosts… I have to pick one this weekend before my current hosting renews on the 11th — if you like your shared web hosting I’d love real human recs! I’m looking for hosting with cPanel and decent support, that keeps their shared servers up to date (my current webhost HostGator does not do a good job here) — I saw Nixihost and Setrahost recommended on Reddit if you have experience with either 😉

Nature notes:

• second crop of figs getting close to ripe

• crows did a big flyover — apparently some of the main flock have split off to a location in Redmond (10,000+ of Seattle’s crows roost together at a UW campus north of me 🐦‍⬛) seems late in the year for this wasp! (guessing Ichneumon parasitoid wasp)

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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.

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