My team (the Padres) is annoying me, but baseball remains a soothing balm for me. Running YouTube videos of Ichiro Suzuki highlights and full games (the 2007 All-Star Game and the Japan-Korea WBC final from 2009) while I work.
Spending my afternoon avoiding news and reading this graphic novelized biography of artist Yayoi Kusama. Fascinating figure in the pop art movement of the late 20th century who faced mental illness and moved into a psychiatric hospital in the 1970s to do her work. At 95, she’s still there today.
I threw a “Twin Peaks” party when I was working at my first newspaper job in Fresno back in 1990. I was proud to host as the Viking hostess from Episode 5, though it took forever to find a Viking helmet in those pre-Amazon days.
It may be time to introduce my teenager to “Twin Peaks.”
Based on my experience today slogging through my work day in a foggy stupor, I’m destined to be an early sleeper for as long as I have to continue working. I guess my night owl life is officially over until I retire or win the lottery. 😐
Will Leitch on R.E.M.: “There is something very Generation X about this most Generation X of bands refusing to take a payday just for the sake of reminiscence.” (Washington Post [gift link])
Happiness is a dog that snores.
Props to the guy on LaGrange Road wearing a beanie and driving his Miata with the top down in 30-degree weather #MidwestLiving
Quietly being judged in the comfort of my own home office.
I just mowed down an entire bag of Doritos. I mean, a 9-ounce bag. So much for the health resolutions I wrote out this afternoon. 😐
Well, crap. This is the kind of thing I’m trying to overcome in 2025.
In my happy place tonight, on J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday, with “The Two Towers.”
I just made peanut butter and strawberry preserve sandwiches using leftover pancakes. And they were good. Please clap.
The Changing of the Planner is complete; 2025 looms in all its charcoal gray glory. Looking forward to leaving 2024 behind.
Trying to decide if I want to take a chance on the game News Tower. My nostalgia for the news business has largely dissipated in the nearly 15 years since I left it, but I’m intrigued by the idea of a video game where I play the editor of a 1930s-era New York newspaper.
I got an Apple Watch for Christmas and am trying to breathe and hydrate when it tells me to every hour. It kind of helps, but then I worry about how my life is so far gone that it takes an electronic doodad to get me to inhale and drink water.
Took the day off w/post-Christmas slowness. I could spend this early weekend start cleaning out my office, but that means spending more time in my office than I’d like.
It was a good day for an impromptu Indian lunch with the husband and the best masala chai I’ve had in ages. It’s the small things.
A colleague just turned me on to “A.P. Bio.” I need the laughs. It had me at Paula Pell flashing a photo before a classroom of students and screaming, “This is my cervix! Who can tell me the five things wrong with it?”
Funny how I watch much more TV since cutting the cable cord years ago.
Working on this Boxing Day. I do have random Grateful Dead sets keeping me company, and at least I can wear the blanket hoodie and slippers that F picked out me for Christmas.
My brain feels as foggy and drizzly as the weather. But that’s honestly nothing new these days.
On my second viewing of “Fellowship of the Ring” with the family on this Christmas Day. Extended version this time.
I very much want to be a hobbit when I grow up.
So much lack of seasonal joy this year on social media. Not quite despair. Much grief, sadness, ennui. This is perhaps nothing new, really, but people seem much more open about it this year. And so many face the New Year with dread, myself among them.
All that said, I’m still wishing us all peace.
Just watched the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to the Grateful Dead wind down. Will never get used to Bob Weir looking like he should be on a box of frozen fish sticks.
Starting my second viewing of “Somebody Somewhere.” I know I keep going on about it, but I’ve really needed this show.
Grief, loneliness, feeling like an outsider, finding one’s tribe. There’s a lot there. And I love it all.
Almost all of my Christmas shopping has been online. Finally got out for a few analog retail errands and it was surprisingly not insane.
Grateful to not have to get out much until Christmas Eve Mass on Tuesday. Fingers crossed that I can log out a little early from work that day.
Happy seasonal Caturday.
Husband found the weighted blanket I feared had ended up into a Goodwill pile.
I am never leaving my recliner again.