I made it to my fourth crochet row on a non-project (no goal other than getting more comfortable with crochet) before everything got really ugly and went terribly wrong. That’s progress beyond just beyond getting a foundation row more than five loops long. I won’t be crocheting any afghans soon, but it is progress.
(more…)Category: junk drawer
September reads and doings
Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash I’ve been devoting more time to reading books and attempting new hobbies in my effort to reduce the amount of content I consume from the internet.
Since the beginning of September, I have read six novels and abandoned one novel after a record 30 pages (I couldn’t take the convenient miracles any longer, they were that obvious and that poorly written). The month has a few days yet and I am working on two more books. There is always a chance I’ll make it through my seventh, but I wouldn’t count on it.
If you are curious as to what I’ve been reading, check out this “living” page that gets updated as I consume, including planned and current reads.
Six books is not huge, but it is a positive effort away from social media and news that, let’s just say, feels like a low-quality circus right about now.
(more…)Half-penny thoughts — 16sep25
Have you ever started reading a book and find the descriptions of the backdrop to be too rich in the details? While in which the characters seem far too paper-thin and inauthentic?
(more…)Heading to California
For a few days, anyway. I’ll be doing my science-y kind of thing for work and visiting a partner laboratory in Sacramento to assess how they do things in an up close and personal manner to make sure they are doing things with an eye towards getting quality analytical results [spoiler alert: they probably are; this visit is mostly just ticking a box].
While I don’t have a ton of time to do much, let me know if you live in the Sacramento area and want to grab a coffee (or two). I might have time one evening or in the morning before I catch my early afternoon flight home.
(more…)Half-penny thoughts — 12sep25
While I do have other regrets in my life, I think those that cut deepest are those times that I acted cruelly or unjustly to someone as a defense mechanism against all the times that people treated me cruelly or unjustly in my youth.
I was bullied most of my childhood, by extended family as well as by my peers.
By my mid-teens, I was starting to be mean to certain people with the justification was that then I was doing it before they could do it to me, especially when we started drifting apart after being close. Always “as jest”, of course. Plausible deniability…
By my late twenties, I wouldn’t even let most people get closer than superficial interactions with me.
There are people, both living and deceased, that I wish I could apologize to for treating them the way I did. But how to find them? Even social media is useless for finding some of the people most owed an apology. And not everyone wants to hear an apology from me anyway. Those are the kinds of knives I used to stab people.
And while I try to not live in the past or in regrets, I do wish I could at least try to repair as best as I am able those moments where I was unnecessarily mean to another person out of avoidance of risking feeling pain myself.
Instead of avoiding pain, I now carry this poison with me with nowhere to set it down.
You have to laugh at the irony.
