weeknotes (august 10-16, 2025)

Life Updates

I’ve been so enjoying my time in Ann Arbor– or at least in this part of A² in particular.

Every morning I wake up around 6, make a cup of coffee and go out to sit in the garden for an hour or two. Then, after feeding the cats, I go walk around the neighborhood for as long as I want, usually 40 minutes, come back and shower and then get to work! I sit at a high desk and watch the garden out the window, and I see all sorts of animals: groundhogs, rabbits, squirrels (three kinds), chipmunks, stray cats, and once even a deer!

The week has fairly raced by! I did make it into town once this week, to check out the farmer’s market and a few shops. I stopped at a used bookstore called Digger’s, where you literally dig around for media (books, DVDs, games, CDs), and managed to find four books for $0.75/each. Now I’m REALLY in trouble, between those and the ones I got from the Little Free Libraries earlier– and did I mention I found an UNLICENSED LFL on a walk the other day? Of course I got a book from there, so now I’m up to (I think) 10 books still waiting to be read.

Media Consumption

🎧 Listened to a really good episode of Because It Was On, a podcast analyzing sitcoms. This episode (their first back after a long break!) focused on womanizer characters and discussed the archetype in history and how it’s changed over time as the culture has changed. Some excellent stuff there and I always enjoy their episodes; they’re focused more on the cultural/societal stuff and not just a rehash of different episode plots or whatever.

📖 I finished reading I Married a Logger and overall enjoyed it! It’s a charming memoir of per-industrialized logging industry, and the author has a great sense of humor. More on the reading log page, if you’re interested. Although if you’re very much a fan of trees and don’t want to read about people cutting down 100+ year old ones to turn into, idk, shelves, then maybe skip it.

📺 Watched two documentaries: The Eye Has to Travel (2011), which is about Diana Vreeland, the intense fashion editor who led magazines into several new eras and Iris (2014), which is about Iris Apfel, a fashion icon who came to prominence with the wider world in her late 80s.

The Eye Has to Travel was very fluffy and I think because it had such a comparatively short run time they couldn’t really dig into her long career much, which was a shame. They did a great job at gathering people for interviews– her family, models, photographers, museum curators, etc. and I liked how they spliced in clips from her TV appearances. She seemed like a very interesting woman, though probably a nightmare to work for!

However, Iris was a much more enjoyable documentary and partly that’s because it was filmed much more interestingly. The Eye Has to Travel is very conventional, with straight-on headshots mostly at medium distance. Iris was directed/shot by Albert Maysles, who has a distinctive style that I love (I didn’t know he did this film at first and then recognized the style from Grey Gardens). It also wasn’t afraid to get more into the emotional side of life (not too much, but a bit) beyond the glamour and glitz.

Food & Dining

I gathered enough tomatoes to make a pasta sauce (using this recipe), and mostly it came out okay. However, there were strings left from one of the tomatoes I used, and it was very sour-tasting. I managed to doctor it with sugar and more spices and just dealt with the strings, but next time I’m going to a) cook it longer so it’s thicker and b) filter out the strings.

One of the other tomato plants has started putting out a bigger kind of cherry tomato than I’ve been picking, and though I do have to fight for them between the chipmunks and the groundhog, I think I can get enough to try making another sauce batch this week. There’s more cucumbers coming in as well, so now I have to deal with that somehow. 🙁

Web Updates

No site updates. 😱

Blog posts:

• 📸 photo: katydid (DW)
• lfl visit log (2) (DW)
• 📖 reading log: i married a logger by julie anderson (DW)
• 📸 photo: ornamental onion (and bee!) (DW)

Looking Forward

I have like 10 posts drafted and I want to get them finish so they aren’t just sitting there– partly because about half are timely, and I want to be able to write about things while I still remember them clearly.

I’d also like to do another fic recs page, probably Sherlock Holmes!

And since I’m going to leave Ann Arbor in only a couple of weeks (😱), I’d like to go to one of the nature reserves for a walk, and to one of the free museums in the downtown area.