monday, two august: the magician
The Magician again: action action action, bodies in motion, etc. I don’t know if it suits my day, in which I’m taking Dec for a swimming day with grandparents, much more of a leisure-type day. It might suit the week, though. We have a lot of house/moving things to prep–we don’t have a set date yet for the move but it’s probably not until October. That said, I go back to work in three weeks and it’s nearly impossible to do anything else when school’s in session, so I want to stage as much as I can while it’s still summer. (I’m also not the most resilient right now? We discovered over the weekend that our storage unit, which is a closet under the stairs in our building, took on water at some point. Most things in there are in plastic bins, for just this kind of situation, so it doesn’t seem like anything was permanently damaged, but it’s a lot of water in a space that’s a serious pain to clean out, and I just kind of gave up for the rest of the afternoon.)
This morning, though, the only big tasks are “find the bathing suits” and “do we have enough sunscreen” and “refresh the podcast playlist for the car.” For the last few years, Declan and I have had these long commutes together, and we settled into a routine where it’s my music in the morning and his podcasts in the afternoon. Every few months I toss something new into the podcast rotation to see if it sticks. (It doesn’t always–I liked Eleanor Amplified but Declan thought it was boring, same with Circle Round.) We listen to a lot of Car Talk, and Dec is vocally unhappy every year when the Puzzler goes on summer vacation. We have in the past listened to a lot of Wow in the World but I’ve been pushing them to the bottom of the priority list because they’re getting on my nerves lately. It’s mostly kid-focused stuff (Brains On, But Why, Smash Boom Best) but we do some non-kid-oriented science and science-adjacent podcasts too, like Short Wave and Every Little Thing and Science Versus. (I have to edit those playlists sometimes–I’m okay with the occasional bad word or adult reference, but I didn’t need to sit with my third-grader through a whole episode on the science of orgasms, for instance. I also dropped a lot of the Covid coverage in the last year–both Short Wave and Brains On have had excellent explainer episodes but I was just so exhausted from thinking about Covid the whole rest of my day, I wanted a break.)
Off to find the bathing suits and assess the sunscreen supply.