Category: junk drawer

  • sleepwalking

    I think I’ll step out for a spell.

  • Pervasive thought

    10.55: Oh, bother.

  • Well, that’s done

    Photo by Mário Rui André on Unsplash

    As I committed to myself and anyone who bothered actually reading the content of my posts about the matter in either sphere, I killed my Instagram and Facebook accounts tonight. A couple of days earlier than some might expect, but my only commitment to everyone was that the accounts would cease to exist in the waning days and hours of 2025. Reach out if you want to stay in contact, I said.

    If I was expecting a flood of people saying “don’t leave us!” (I wasn’t), I might have been disappointed in the response. I was expecting nothing and got a trickle instead, so I count those few blessings.

    I am left with the overall opinion: Good riddance.

    (more…)

  • Drama

    And then there is that dire exasperation when you realize that you did not, in fact, manage to escape family manufactured drama for the first year in forever when your mother refuses to accept the word “No” as a valid answer when someone else cancels a function that nobody wants to go to and she demands you accommodate the new schedule that the other party demands be met even though there is no one particularly interested in said event.

    “But the girls need this meeting with second cousins they haven’t played with in four years and they have nothing in common with while their father drinks himself stupid and you are forced to put up with his antics for four hours. What do you mean that the girls return to school the next morning after a break where they’ve both been sick and they should really rest up beforehand and not have a late night?”

    Yes, everyone talks in run on sentences in this family when operating on high drama…

    Of course they are still invited to her house so my mother can turn on the Catholic guilt trip for my benefit at the last minute… You know, because it’s happening anyway.

    And people wonder why I hate family gatherings. Huh.

  • Using AI

    Using AI

    I recently updated my mobile phone and part of the package included a free year of Google’s Gemini Pro. I’ve been using more AI assistance at my workplace to help my research efficiency and improve my work throughput, and thought I would take advantage of the advanced Gemini access to do the same for my own personal research.

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  • hello

    my one burning desire
    is for someone to
    smile hello

  • A close hit

    Photo by Warren Umoh on Unsplash

    Chatting with my mother last night, she mentioned that she had seen a new close relative that she didn’t know on a DNA service we both have used in the past. Color me intrigued, mostly because my mother knows distant relatives intimately, so it seems impossible that a close match could avoid her knowledge.

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  • Bookhaunting and a little flirter

    Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

    Yesterday, I took the twins out shopping for used books. Even if they don’t find something that captures their fancy, they still enjoy the act of seeking for hidden treasures. And, while I try to keep engaged with these young tween women, there are very few activities that we can agree on being exclusively in the realm of “fun” to do together. Treasure hunting for books is one of them.

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  • Foxes — a Ji Yun quote

    Photo by Freezer on Unsplash

    Humans and beasts are different species, but foxes are between humans and beasts. The dead and the living walk different roads, but foxes are between the dead and the living. Transcendents and monsters travel different paths, but foxes are between transcendents and monsters. Therefore one could say to meet a fox is strange; one could also say it is ordinary.

    Human beings and physical objects belong to two different categories; fox-spirits stand somewhere between the two. The paths of light and darkness never converge: fox-spirits stand somewhere between the two. Immortals and demons go different ways; fox-spirits stand somewhere between the two.

    ~ Ji Yun, 1789, in Notebook from the Thatched Cottage of Close Scrutiny

  • Ray Bradbury Quote

    Photo by Sasha Matveeva on Unsplash

    “First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.”

    ~ Something Wicked This Way Comes, Prologue