Hello and welcome back. This is Issue 10 of “a bit of bird words” and it’s basically summer here now. Time for strawberries, swimming in the lake, and succulent barbecue dinners.

Wild to think I used to hate summer, but that’s what being banned from taking time off in the summer ever will do to you I suppose!

(Also: the pines smell great here in the summer.)

Let’s talk games and books now.

Game of the month: Mario no Picross

Nintendo/Jupiter Corporation, 1995 (GameBoy)

So I didn’t actually finish any games this month.

This is actually the first time in over two years where I didn’t finish a game. I did start a bunch, though, and continued playing a few, but … honestly, nothing was really grabbing me.

Even so, my partner and I are working our way through Mario no Picross (Mario’s Picross), which is … basically what it says on the tin! It’s picross! And even when I’m too exhausted to play anything else, I always have a desire to count squares.

It’s quite hard to go back to playing this after playing the Picross S games (D-pad’s a bit unresponsive, no way to mark squares specifically for counting), but I still enjoy the process of solving picross. When the world is complicated in a way that can feel out of control, picross can be complicated … but you can always solve it, given enough time.

Games finished this year: 12 (+0)

Book of the month: When We Were Birds

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, 2022

What a curious little book. I didn’t take too many notes during this, and honestly everything I might think to talk about feels like a spoiler. But this is a book full of beautiful juxtapositions, the most prominent of which is death, both sacred and profane.

Probably the one thing I’d say about this book is that it was too short. I felt there was so much more that could have been plundered here, and it feels like it wants to spend more time with its ideas, but the pace of the love story it wants to tell ultimately washes everything else away. Then again, I suppose we never have enough time to really fully uncover everything about something or someone we love. We just have the time we have.

Books finished this year: 20 (+3)

What else?

This month has been a struggle, y’all. An absolute clusterfuck. I am only grateful that the holidays fall in such a way that I don’t have too many five-day weeks.

I’ve been doing a music league with some forum mates and I’m not doing too hot, but I’m having a good time picking out songs at least.

Other than that and my seemingly endless sinus infection, I’ve been getting the desire to make things again … specifically food. We’ve been making lemonade at home by squeezing our own lemons and making our own fruit syrups, and they’ve been so good. We also made our own pickles (first attempt anyway, we had to sub in lemon juice in a pinch) and dashi for things like miso soup and donburi. I’m dangerously close to buying a Dutch oven so I can start baking bread.

My recommendation for you this month is to learn the sound of one bird near you. When we’re out on a walk, we can pick out a lot of our feathered neighbors from their songs, and it’s truly a delight. Learn their names and voices, and revel in sharing this world with such miraculous, devious creatures (have you SEEN the kinds of things birds get up to???)