LIMINAL LIVING #117: 23 MARCH TO 29 MARCH 2026

Birds, Books, Community, Death & Grief, Food & Drink, Garden Planning, Geology & Rocks, Health & Medicine, Language/Etymology, Liminal Life, Slow Gardening & Living, Today I Learned, Water, Weather & Climate

LIMINAL LIVING #117: 23 MARCH TO 29 MARCH 2026

March 29, 2026

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

Weather

The average high temperature this week was 42.8°F, ranging from 57.9°F to 30.9°F, and the average low temp was 23.6°F, with a range from 13.3°F to 33.6°F. We had light snow most of Monday and slightly more than a half-inch of rain this week, most of it on Thursday. We are still in a severe drought, even with the snow melt (we’ve had a pretty typical snow amount this winter), and we need about four inches of rain per week to emerge from it.

Beginnings/Firsts

Saw my first woolly bear (Isabella tiger moth caterpillar, Pyrrharctia isabella) of the year on a sidewalk while walking with a friend in town on Friday.

Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

TOP row: fox; raccoon. 2nd row: tufted titmouse; hairy woodpecker. 3rd row: American goldfinch; red-bellied woodpecker. 4th row: both red-bellied woodpecker. 5th row: both white-breasted nuthatch. BOTTOM row: male house finch.

Wandering

I walked outside every day this week, including in Hanover, NH, where we went on Wednesday afternoon. We also ventured to Concord, NH, on Tuesday, for our meeting with our financial advisor plus lunch and a few other errands.

in-town

Hanover NH

In Concord, we chose to eat at Olive Garden®, which we hadn’t done since late Sept. 2019, almost exactly 6-1/2 years ago.😮

Curiosity & Discoveries

We watched a webinar (casting it to the TV) from the Shelburne Museum (Shelburne, VT) on Thursday night, highlighting some items that will be showcased when the museum opens in May, including a lengthy portion of the webinar devoted to discussing and showing bed rugs, something we had not known about before. You can watch the webinar here — scroll down past the Upcoming section to the “Varied and Alive” recording; the bed rug section starts around 13:20. (Wikipedia’s entry on bed rugs.)

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There were two flies on the back door/siding on Sunday (high of 45.3°F, both identified on iNaturalist as Calyptrate Flies (in the zoosubsection Calyptratae), which could be house flies, dung flies, or many other possible genera.

Creating

Nothing tangible, all in my head/imagination.

Repairing and Maintaining the human(s), the cat, and the cars

Humans: I worked out three times (3 hours) this week and walked more than 10,000 steps on six days (and more than 12,000 steps on four days). I participated in Dharma Sunday via Zoom for 1.5 hours with Lama Gursam leading meditation and speaking on “Motivation for Meditation.” We ping-ponged for 1 hour 40 mins this week.

Cars: My husband changed the oil in one vehicle and also removed its snow tires, on Thursday.

Nesting

Cleaning/Maintenance: I did clothes laundry on Monday and Sunday. I vacuumed and cleaned the carpet in the family room on Wed. and also did some dusting in there. I cleaned both downstairs toilets. I watered the houseplants on Wed., too. My husband spent most of Monday cleaning his office and the upstairs loft area. He took trash and recycling to the dump on Wed.

Yard: I ordered bare-rooted plants from a local native plant grower/supplier this week, for pick up at the end of April or start of May. (It was a buy 5, get one free sale, so all my bluebells were free.)

And here are a few photos of the yard this week.

Admin/Financial: On Monday evening I spent an hour or so collecting inputs (info on money our advisor doesn’t manage) for our annual visit with our financial advisor on Tuesday. We spent 1.25 hours going over our accounts and talking about the economy, our asset allocation (which we changed), and the future. I backed up my laptop on Wednesday.

Supplies: The cat’s Chewy delivery (dry food, wet food, litter) and my pair of socks from Darn Tough arrived on Monday. On Friday I ordered (with free shipping) several soap refills, some napkins (gifts), and a food gift from Stonewall Kitchen.

Food: I made the trusty and always fresh penne-asparagus-pine nut dish on Monday, which my husband had with the addition of turkey. I enjoyed the same penne-asparagus-pine nut dish on Tuesday and Wednesday, and he had turkey soup and homemade sourdough bread on Tuesday, and on Wed. he had leftovers from our Tuesday lunch, and we both had sautéed local fresh spinach and garlic + raw veggies and tapenade-humus with our entrees. On Thursday I made spinach-leek risotto (both the spinach and the leeks are from the local farmstand), which we had with raw veggies with the tapenade humus, and the same again (with husband’s addition of turkey) on Friday. It was the risotto again on Sat., this time featuring Old Bay shrimp, with roasted asparagus as our side dish. Sunday I made cavatappi pasta with tuna, tomatoes, garlic (I have used almost all my garden-grown garlic from last year!), capers, and kalamatas (pretty much this recipe but I omitted anchovies and made other minor changes), along with a green lettuce salad with roasted asparagus, carrots, and radishes.

you’ve seen it before and will probably see it again, the penne-asparagus-pine nut dish

Sleeping & Dreaming

Pretty good week, so much dreaming. Overall I slept an average of 7 hours 39 mins per night, with a Samsung Fit 3 average score of 90.6. REM sleep accounted for 13 hours 21 mins of sleep this week and deep sleep for 9 hours 9 mins, which is more than usual for me.

Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching

Reading

BOOKS: This week I finished Honored Guest (2004) by Joy Williams, which is a collection of twelve disturbing, surreal, uncanny short stories, most (all?) of which contain intimations of threat or actual death/deadness of animals. “Congress” was one of the least disturbing to me, though it’s about a woman, Miriam, and her judgmental forensic anthropologist husband Jack who takes up bowhunting (“hobbies are healthy”) with his student Carl and falls asleep in his stand, “critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passes through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent’s coat.” So the three of them (Carl is now in love with disabled Jack), plus a lamp Jack had made of four deer legs with polished black hooves, which Miriam treats as a beloved interactive companion, decide to tour the southwest U.S. in Carl’s pickup, and on this trip Miriam meets an unusual taxidermist. I also enjoyed “Hammer,” involving Angela, whose tiresome 16-yr-old daughter Darleen despises her and brings home with her a strange young man, Deke, who matter-of-factly criticises everything in Angela’s home while slurping through several bottles of wine. Most (all?) of the stories are acute and fragmented observations of domestic horror. Motifs that run throughout include, besides danger and damage to animals, illness, medical procedures, torturous rituals; people who aggressively but subtly blur and override boundaries; masked marital discord; troublesome parent-child relationships and interactions; poetic descriptions of a barren, indifferent (or alternately, malignant) southwestern landscape. If reality isn’t creepy, mystifying, and death-imbued enough for you, read this! I liked it, overall, and I quite admired the writing.

OTHER

A couple of articles:

“So You Want To Be A Crisis Manager? Here’s What I Would Recommend” (Dan McGinn/The Future You Already Know) Interesting read about a job I’d never want: “High stress is constant. Criticism and second-guessing can be unrelenting. The threat of becoming part of the story and being dragged into expensive and risky litigation is an ever-present danger. Careers and the fate of major businesses can rise or fall on your advice. If just reading this description makes you anxious, you should probably consider another career path.”

“Sepsis rates are up. Here’s what might explain it. Spoiler: It’s not Covid-19.” (Jeremy Faust/Inside Medicine). Another spoiler: he doesn’t really get to the bottom of the increase in rates but it’s an eye-opening ride not getting there. I particularly appreciated what he says about “diluting the denominator” (which is one thing that’s not happening with the increase in sepsis rates) as well as the hypothetical case study he uses to discuss whether medical advances might lead to sepsis.

Some other things:

maybe useful, for people who care for cats?

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I love to move around.

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New Word

From our permaculture group read, Your Natural Garden by Kelly Norris, karst, and this is AI’s take on it.

Watching

This week we watched a Poirot, a Death in Paradise, some House Hunters/International House Hunters, a couple Waiting for God episodes, and the first in the Wallander series (on BritBox).

Listening

Some Shazam’d songs this week.

Connections & Community

Local Support: Is LL Bean considered local? I bought two shirts at their outlet store on Tuesday (and used our Bean points earned by using their credit card). I shopped at the regional co-op on Wednesday. I shopped at the local farmstand on Friday (2 bags of their spinach, a dozen local eggs). We had lunch at a local bakery/café on Sunday and I also bought a treat there on Friday. I ordered bare-rooted plants for pickup (late April or early May) from a local native plant grower on Thursday.

Relationships: On Saturday we attended two memorial services, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, for good friends who died recently (CA, TD), and at both we sat with friends (TC; RL, ED, BF, MBW, LM) and talked with other friends (CF, JC, LW, AS; LL, W&RD). Both services were worthy of the people they memorialised. I mailed a sympathy card to ND on Saturday too.

On Monday we walked a sourdough boule that my husband had made over to a friend’s (ND) and stayed for lunch for almost two hours with her and her (adult) daughter SW. On Thurs. we ran into our catsitter (DO) on a walk and chatted with her for a bit (she’s a new great-grandmother!) I hosted the 1-hour permaculture meeting on Zoom on Thursday with six of us, finishing our discussion of Your Natural Garden. Salon met on Friday for two hours with six of us; another member and I walked there and back together.