• We had a writer in residence this week, so while my wife was off doing cool and fun things I was going full Dad with my daughter, enjoying a couple of pints of ice cream and crushing levels in a new video game¹. I consider this slightly more appropriate than what my dad used to do with me when my mom was out, which was watching 80s action movies on HBO.
• One night the ice cream was accompanied by crying. When I asked Lorelei why she was upset (seemingly out of nowhere) she said she was sad because if she got older, eventually she would die. It took a bit of back and forth to tease out that these ideas had maybe come from a TV show she likes (Last Kids on Earth), but I pointed out that I was much older than her, and still alive, so it was at least not a thing to worry about at the present moment. Certainly it could wait until the ice cream was finished.
• Related, I started reading Four Thousand Weeks (Time Management for Mortals). The 4,000 weeks comes from the average life expectancy in weeks. Rather than calling this post “Weeknotes for the week ending August 15, 2001” I could title it “Week 2038 (out of, hopefully, at least 4000)”. If you want the TL;CRAWB² Burkeman’s last Health & wellbeing column in the Guardian covers the highlights.
• I finished Rainbow In the Dark, Ronnie James Dio’s autobiography. It’s good, but a bit niche. I didn’t get into Dio my first go round with metal; I think someone convinced me Heaven and Hell wasn’t a “real” Sabbath album (in hindsight, fuck them). It was the Killswitch Engage cover of Holy Diver that made me go look up everything he ever did. 🤘🤘🤘 out of five.
• Our kitchen project is entirely done. I got to put the new vent hood through its paces tonight (grits and collard greens). For someone who cooks multiple times per day, the hood and the huge workspace-style sink are the things I like best. It looks good, but oh baby those functional upgrades.
• Spent a lot of time in the yard this weekend. Saturday I got a good outside nap in, today we went out for a walk early. We spotted a praying mantis in the yard.

It seemed annoyed by us. We also walked to the beach. There’s a new rule here, if I have to carry home a pocket of seashells, they have to be used for something.

Footnotes

1. A very cool thing about Moving Out is that you can can adjust a bunch of properties that affect the game difficulty. So we found a setting where we both feel like we’re playing the game but it’s still a little challenging for each of us. ↩

2. Too long; can’t read a whole book. ↩