It has been an interesting summer. The actual weather has been on the cool and rainy side; the political weather has been … words fail. What I’m seeing — the apparent final death knell of the original American Dream — makes me speechless. A deeper question, did we lose our way or hit our ceiling, tasks me.
Regardless, there is a looming deadline in November that overhangs my thoughts and makes it hard to find much interest in anything else.
Regardless of that, Friday Notes marches on.
I’ll be dog-sitting my little pal Bentley for a couple of weeks starting Tuesday, so I thought I should get this month’s edition of Friday Notes done early. By the time Bentley leaves, I’ll have only one Friday left in June.
Of course, big news at the end of last month. Guilty on all 34 felony counts. A whole new level of strangeness in politics. Even bigger news comes next month with sentencing. Will a President serve while serving time?
That it’s even a question we need to ask is astonishing.
It’s Friday, and I have Notes, but they’re all Science Notes, so while this post (and any others of similar ilk that may follow) is in the spirit of Friday Notes, it comes from a different direction. Science from right field, so to speak, rather than the usual oddities from left field.
These Notes were originally meant as reminders to mention some cool science things to friends over burgers and beers (or whatever). But rather than tasty morsels for the few, why not for the many? (Or at least for a few more.)
So today, Science Notes (and some reactions):
I’ve been a semi-surreal mood lately. From a combination of things. It’s an election year. Politics these days is bad enough, but the last few Presidential elections seem to have written a weird new normal. Now, one candidate is in a criminal trial and potentially could be jailed before the election.
I spent winter wondering if I’d have wasps in the house again come summer. I’ve found three so far. Still no clue how they get in. Looks like I need an exterminator. Another surreal bullet point: this past winter kinda… wasn’t. Oddly, I missed it.
The surreal aside, however, Friday Notes marches on.
Often, the hardest part of Friday Notes (and, in fact, most) posts is writing the lede. Very soon after I began back in 2011, I settled on a three-part opening structure consisting of (as my template puts it): Intro… More… Punchline… followed by the page break that divides the lede from the body of the post.
That page break comes into play when WordPress lists a bunch of posts as well as in the notification emails (except in the double-damned WordPress Reader, which corrupts everything in the name of sameness). And while I’m on the topic of WordPress, I’m getting really fed up with it.
But that’s a post for another day. For now, I’ve got Notes…
The last two weeks have been (by my lazy easy-going retirement standards) unusually productive. Two big and long-standing items off my TODO list — a huge relief. As a good friend said, getting stuff done feels so good you have to wonder why we let things go so long.
For me, a lot of it is sheer laziness. Often, something needs to break through to Urgent Level before I’ll get around to dealing with it. (I’d rather read and doing stuff cuts into my reading time.) There is also the subliminal fear things won’t go well, or will be a pain or, as has often been the case, a disappointment.
But regardless, time for another edition of Friday Notes.
The weather has been so weirdly warm this month that I never got around to a Friday Notes for February, so I’m extending the month. Call it a leap year “plus one”. Truth is, I’m at long last finally starting to reach the bottom of my pile. A lot of what’s left is trivial, silly, or outdated, and I may end up doing a thorough spring cleaning on them.
The ultimate goal is for the Notes to be about contemporaneous things rather than from old notes that have been fermenting in the pile.
But for a bit longer, it’ll be a combination of both, so off we go.
The first Friday Notes of 2024. (The title nicely caps the 2024, 2023, 2024, 2023 series from the titles of the previous four posts.) We’re well past the glut of holidays, and it’s back to business. There is also the fresh-start sense of the new year. I’m already thinking about all the stuff I want to throw away this coming Spring Cleaning.
My various piles of notes grow smaller and smaller! In some cases, because I deleted notes that seemed to have aged beyond their lifetime. But these Notes posts have been instrumental. In some areas, I’m actually scraping the bottom of the barrel.
But I still have notes, so here we go again…
Tonight, to celebrate the long-awaited Solstice, I’ll crack open the first of the three bottles of champagne I plan to drink before the end of the year. The Eves of Christmas and New Year’s account for the other two.
Of the three, the Solstice is the more important to me, the most looked forward to. The end of the calendar year is an arbitrary marker, and Christmas is a whole other tin of Lumbricina. Solstice, however, is a baggage-free party. (An ancient one at that.)
Speaking of parties, here is the last Friday Notes of 2023.
The implied image in my last post — of a sea creature returning to the surface — turned out to be more apt than intended. I descended again to finish my project and my burn-out. Spent a few days on the couch reading to recuperate (the library was nagging me about people waiting for books I borrowed and wasn’t reading).
So, let’s try this resurfacing thing again. I have more than books to catch up on. And two posts that should have come before this, but here we are on the penultimate Friday in November.
I have plans next weekend, so it’s Friday Notes now or never (in November).
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