Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)
Weather
High temperatures this week ranged from 47.8°F to 28.8°F, averaging 38.9°F; lows ranged narrowly from 22.6°F to 29.3°F. On Monday we got about five inches of snow, and from Friday night through Sunday we had wintry mix (sleet, snow, freezing rain) falling most of the time, causing many downed tree boughs, downed wires, and power outages over the region. There was a coating of about half an inch on the shepherd’s hook that holds two of our birdfeeders. On Saturday morning we tried to walk to breakfast in town but couldn’t get down our own driveway.
Beginnings/Firsts
This weekend I signed up for Social Security; we’ll see how that goes. On Wed., I could get the turner/aerator completely through the compost for the first time in months. I harvested the first chives of the year on Thursday!
Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post (click on any to enlarge)
red squirrel (by husband)grey squirrelrobinAmerican tree sparrowAmerican tree sparrowgoldfinchfox sparrowsong sparrowwhite-breasted nuthatchwhite-breasted nuthatchblack-capped chickadeetufted titmousedowny woodpeckerdowny woodpeckerhairy woodpeckermourning dovemourning dovedark-eyed junco (by husband)
Wandering
I walked on only three days: Tues. in town, Wednesday at the bog, and Friday in town again, quite a bit that day, before the ice storm began. Walking would have been treacherous on Saturday and Sunday with so much ice on surfaces and tree boughs and wires falling.
in-town
daffsseeds heads under glass
bog – walking was a bit dangerous where the boardwalk was covered
bogspringtailsemerging marsh marigoldspider!cattailthere’s boardwalk under there snow-patterned boardwalkwoods trail snow-covered
Curiosity & Discoveries
On Friday my husband and I visited the same art gallery I’d gone to with a friend a couple of weeks ago and I noticed a photo of a dog I hadn’t really noticed before. Also some shadows.
photo by Sota Morishitashadows in gallery
These snow fleas/springtails in the snow at the bog are always so interesting to watch, en masse. (Click link for close-up.)
Creating
I’m working on some new bits for this blog. Could take a while to see final results.
Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)
Body/Mind: I worked out four times (4 hours) this week and walked the treadmill twice, totalling 58 minutes and four miles. I walked more than 9,000 steps on five days, including three over 12,000. I made an appt. with the dermatologist on Tuesday to get something checked next week. My husband was prepping for a colonoscopy from Thurs. through Sunday.
Cat: I cleaned Bumble’s main litterbox while he was at the vet getting his nails cut on Thursday.
cat luxuriating in warm sunroom on Friday
Gardening/Yard
My husband snowblowed the driveway on Monday after the snow stopped. A small Japanese maple tree that we needed to remove took itself out of the ground during the ice storm this weekend.
the yard this week
chives pre-wintry mixhellebore emergingicy shrubssnow and icepeach trees in ice
Cleaning/Maintenance: I cleaned out the utensil drawer entirely on Monday (got rid of a lot of corks, straws, caps, some chopsticks, et al.). I vacuumed the family room, hallway, and primary bedroom on Wed., and did some spot-cleaning of the carpet. On Thursday, I vacuumed the kitchen area rug. My husband sewed up a throw pillow (30+ years old) that had split its seam on Friday. I did a load of clothes laundry on Friday.
Supplies: I set up a second Chewy Autoship for Bumble’s two kinds of food on Tuesday and on Wednesday it arrived! I ordered a bunch of my hair product from Grow Gorgeous during a 60%-off sale of about half of it (with free shipping), on Sunday. The inverse of ordering, my husband made a charming post about a small TV we want to give away on Freecycle on Wed. (no takers yet).
Financial/Admin: As mentioned, I applied for social security online on Sat. after a friend (ChN) sent an email reminding me about it and after talking the pros and cons over with our financial advisor. I venmo’d our accountant his fee for doing our taxes on Tuesday (the first time I thought to ask whether we could do that in lieu of writing a check). We deposited an actual check in our bank on Wed., a rare occasion these days.
Food: A very unimaginative food week: canned soups and homemade grilled cheese Monday; out to dinner with a friend on Tues., and leftovers from that dinner on Wed. And then the rest of the week I kept making and adding to the penne with roasted asparagus dish (with pine nuts, scallions/garlic/chives/arugula, lemon juice, broth, and Pecorino) for me, while my husband ate a rotisserie chicken we bought from the grocery, along with white jasmine rice and sautéed summer squash as part of his low-fiber prep for Monday’s colonoscopy, and on Sunday he just had liquids and jello.
cooking my penne dish one night
a little beta-carotene platter with olive tapenade
eating out
Boulevardier cocktailRoasted Brussels sprouts under there! Crème brûlée
Sleeping & Dreaming
My sleep was quite variable this week, with three Fitbit sleep scores in the low 90s, three in the low 80s, and one 79. Time asleep varied by about two hours, from 6 hours 31 mins to 8 hours 24 mins. Over all, I slept an average of 7 hours 32 mins per night, for an average sleep score of 85.7. I got 12.45 hours of REM sleep (felt like I dreamed heavily most nights) and 9 hours 24 mins of deep sleep this week.
Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching
Reading
BOOKS: I finished Valérie Perrin’s magnificent book Three (2022) this week. Really loved it, really recommend it. It’s long and engrossing, set in France in the 1980s-1990s and in 2017, following three friends who meet in 5th grade and become inseparable. Next up are There’s No Turning Back by Alba De Céspedes — she wrote Forbidden Notebook (1952/2023) that I really liked — and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023), which won the 2024 Booker Prize.
OTHER
Watching
We watched the fourth episode of “Vera” on Monday (BritBox) and then started watching Season 9 of “Shetland” (also BritBox) after that, which we’ll finish next week. I got “Last Year at Marienbad” through interlibrary loan and am looking forward to rewatching that (3rd time?) soon. Wikipedia summarises it as “1961 French New Wave avant-garde psychological drama film directed by Alain Resnais and written by Alain Robbe-Grillet,” and just reading that has me revving.
Also, I watched some dvr’d “House Hunters” while treadmilling Monday evening and this made me laugh (it made her mother, one of these three women shown, say “Ooooh”). The prospective buyer was not a fan of the kitchen.
Listening
My Shazam’d songs this week.
Connections & Community
Local Support: We took a friend celebrating his 89th birthday out for dinner at a local restaurant on Tuesday evening and we had lunch at a local bakery/café on Friday. We also dropped off some clothes and shoes at the local consignment store on Wed.
Relationships: A fairly social week for me. On Monday I venmo’d my nephew birthday money and had flowers delivered to my sister’s friend (STM) for her birthday. Tuesday we took our friend (LD) out for a birthday dinner here in town and said hi to some other folks we know (DO’H & CO’H, LS & MM) who were also dining there. Friday I attended Salon in person (only 3 of us, but we talked for over two hours), then had a 1.5-hour phone call with my sister later that afternoon, then after dinner had a 2.5-hour Zoom call with college friends. And the usual texts and emails.
the friend we had dinner out with makes his own maple syrup and gave us some
Endings
I could say winter might be ending but the forecast for next week shows more ice and maybe snow coming our way.
All This Useless Beauty
This wavelength of mating male goldfinch colour seems over the top.
“Essenhigh sees with uncommon alertness. She notices things we don’t. Some of these things she notices are actual (wild patterns in bark, for example, in Forest Light) but some of what she’s ‘noticing’ isn’t actual at all.
“In Ghost Pipes, those two little units off to the right appear to be human. Or, let’s say, they are human-adjacent, they remind us of the human form. But they also seem pretty darn plantlike. We note that they appear to be growing out of (I’d say ‘standing on’) what appear to be rocks, the two of them, while admiring that Ghost Pipe off to the left. Their ‘bodies’ seem to be made of flower stuff. So, those two strike me as living beings, out for a stroll, who’ve wandered over from some nearby flower kingdom, to see what things are like over here.
“My mind struggles a bit with this, and for me this is the essential Essenhigh moment.
“The thing I’m seeing is so beautiful, so overwhelmingly itself, so convincing, so intense, so confident, that I find myself transported to the border between ‘real” and “unreal,’ and, standing there, believing in this gorgeous-though-unlikely place Essenhigh has made for me, I find myself rethinking those terms.
“What’s more ‘unreal’ than reality, closely observed? What’s more ‘real’ than the abstract patterns we find in every single thing, if only we could abide with that thing long enough?
“I don’t know what these paintings ‘mean’ exactly, and I don’t want to: the little celebratory ripple they make in my consciousness is enough. That alteration is their meaning: I experience a brief liberation from the domination of the habitual.”
“Even as that beautiful madness in [Red] Poppies resolves itself, into, yes, poppies, it threatens to explode into pure form. Which is what ‘real’ poppies are doing all the time, which is what everything ‘real’ is threatening to do at every moment: revert to pure form. Every formed thing will, in fact, revert, eventually, into pure form; will die, decay, lose its current shape, be remade, reborn, repurposed. These paintings, for me, expand out into an extra dimension, the dimension of time. These are poppies, yes, but they are also stylized poppies and flawless poppies and poppies on their best day ever, poppies so full of life you can feel the imminent death in them.”
“I am, simultaneously, more than my perceptions and beautifully, permanently bounded by them.”
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