little orange raindrops
the weather was all of a sudden very nice (65-70f/18.3-211c) all weekend, it really feels like spring is here. on saturday we had a little cookout (i'm thankful for t's grill skill) with a girl scout cookie tasting (where the s'mores cookie was a revelation to me) and yesterday i went for my first outdoor run of the year (10 miles, 9:09 avg mile). i'm thankful that my weather app's summary of yesterday was the sentence "Sunny conditions will continue all day" which is a beautiful sentence in that weather predictions are usually so contingent (and anyone who has worked in technical support knows the danger of using "will" when all you can guarantee is "should") such that the definitive future tense "will" there feels like a small mountain of certainty. i'm thankful that warm sunny conditions will continue for a couple more days.
last work week started off so bad (thankful to remember starting tuesday morning feeling a weight of dread i hadn't felt in some time, which sucked but also made me think about how much less morning dread i have than i used to have all the time for long periods of time) and then as i continued to plug away over the course of the week got better (though continue to fluctuate). hoping things are generally better (but not confident enough to say "will" be better) and i find ways to continue working against the constraints i am under to do the best that i can and to care for my colleagues and to feel satisfied and proud of what i'm doing. (i'm thankful that even in a "bad week" there are many nice moments, such as when cc used a very resonant analogy to explain how she thinks of an AI feature we developed and i DMed her to say that i loved the analogy (which sounded familiar to me but i couldn't place) and she said that actually when we had been having lunch last year she had used it in conversation and i had said how i loved the analogy and insisted she should write it down to use it later and so she had done exactly that).
the new cardi song "enough (miami)", which i've been playing on repeat and which i think is a wonderful instance of musical edging, like the way she flirts with her invocation of "knuck if you buck" at the edge of the choruses or how in one of the later verses it feels almost certain (to me) that she is going to use "roger federer" as a polysyllabic end rhyme after "better and better-er" and "no competitors' and then she doesn't, instead deploying "regular degular" (which i learned from looking up the lyrics in genius is a shot at nicki).
deborah got a new floor roller head (don't know what the name is for this, don't care enough to look it up) for our dyson vacuum and i mocked her when she tested it out and said in an almost sexual euphoria, "oh yeah it feels so good", and then i got it out when we were cleaning the house before the party and oh yeah it feels so good, so much better than the old one, which had accumulated years worth of stuck cruft and had its tiny wheels worn down to nubs.
finding it difficult to make myself write even though i know it's essential self care (in this way it's not different than the other "essential" self care i also find it difficult to make myself do during low periods). deborah's description of the things in citrus fruit that hold the juice, which i looked up and have found are called either "sacs" or "follicles" but which she described as "little orange raindrops," which is how i will think of them now. they had honey mangoes again at the grocery store.
andrea long chu on rights for trans kids (but really andrea long chu on anything, probably my favorite working critic). sarah hagi interviewed sarah ann from love is blind. (after bailing out on him by geoff ryman, which had some interesting ideas but was much more blah and less mindfuck than the description made it sound), reading after world by debbie urbanski, which is a fresh and interesting take on the post-apocalypse that (intentionally, intriguingly) feels like it's narrated by chatGPT. watching bisan's joy at finding a copy of anne of green gables in the remnants of a destroyed library.
Previously on this day:
- 2016 ("first episode of the new season of my favorite tv show, The Americans")
- 2017 (last morning house sitting, nice experience with dog, excessive jelly filling)
- 2018 (cringe ASMR)
- 2019 (miso enjoying neck and chest and head rubs)
- 2020 (covid culture crankiness, greta gerwig Little Women, sundubu)