• Our vacation didn’t quite go as planned, we ended up back and home after the long weekend, but still took the week off. Instead of going to one beach we went to a different, closer beach. Lessons were learned, let’s leave it at that.
• Speaking of the beach, my daughter is now at the age where other kids just show up and they start making plans / coming up with games on the fly, so while we were at the beach a gang of children started building a pit of “eww-goo”, their name for sand + water, and then one of the children went to get more water but noticed a dead (what appeared to be an) eel on the way, and felt the need to pick it up and drape it over their arms and parade it around the beach.
• Finished The 7 1/2 Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle. Recommended if you’re a fan of Dark or Knives Out or Inception (or maybe even Shutter Island). There was one part of the plot I didn’t think was explored enough but it’s a definite page turner.
• Read One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball. I miss bowling.
• As a New Englander my instinct when taking a break from one type of work is to do a different type of work, so I finally started doing something about our backyard situation. It started as:

… and now it looks like:

and all of the materials have been sourced, cobblestones (from here) for edging and pea gravel (from here) for the inside. We debated pea gravel or something else since we moved here, but then our neighbors did pea gravel and it looked really nice so we went for it.

• Sourcing yard material is always wild. If anyone wants to make a claim about video games being fantasy they should point at Minecraft. This is like a 20 cube patio in Minecraft and literally 5+ tons of rocks IRL.
• Ideally the patio phase of the project will be done by the end of next weekend, but the weather this week is peak high temps for this area and more grass pollen than my face can handle. Really hoping a cold front moves in mid week and… all the grass dies?