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Tuesday: walks, but no piano lessons
Sep. 24th, 2019 08:43 pmI walked with J. Yay! She shampooed all her carpets. Along with everything else on her plate! I am so impressed! Also, wow, did not know that Stop and Shop rents those. Cool!
I walked with M.
I had a really long phone convo with J.
Piano lessons did not happen. The instructor tried to reach me to reschedule earlier, when his 5:30 canceled, but it did not matter that I did not see that message because then he was rear ended. Oh dear! He seems okay; we will see him next week.
I am about halfway through Naomi Oreskes’ _The Rejection of Continental Drift_. It is really, really good (altho I suspect I will end up with very different ideas about why it took until the late 60s / early 70s for plate tectonics to prevails, and high on that list are container shipping rendering older boats much cheaper to people funding geological surveys, and petroleum companies funding geological research in South America leading to geologists with good Spanish. But I will return to that later). I had thought this was sitting on the shelf for the last 20 years, but actually, it has only been about 15 years — I bought it in 2004. I do not love reading paper books, especially scientific monograph type paper books. They are heavy, and I have aging eyes. The combination is annoying. But the book is really detailed, well researched and incredibly insightful in a ton of different ways.
I read two kindle samples last night. One was for _Everything That Remains_, a memoir by The Minimalists, which was so harrowing I was really struck by how on earth a sample like that sells a book. Presumably, it is aimed at an audience other than me. I also read a sample for Daniel H. Pink’s _When_, which came *this close* to convincing me to buy the book, but ultimately, I decided to poke around and see what other samples I had and what else I had lying about that I had not yet read. I also read (skimmed?) Len Babauta’s _Ultralight_, which was ... okay. It reads like his blog, I guess. Mostly, I get really frustrated by a lot of books that might be interesting, except they are on a topic (traveling light) that is implemented in a way that seems hyper-irrelevant to me (no kids). But in this case, there _are_ kids! They are mentioned later in the book — but not in the travel section. Wha? I do not understand. But, you know, life is complicated and maybe he has kids in his life but never travels with them? *shrug* Basically, there are two major categories of problems with packing when kids are involved. First, the clothing calculation is just weird with kids. With adults, you can rely most of the time that they will get dirty / sweaty at a pretty predictable rate. With kids? Ha ha ha ha. Which is to say, going through 3 changes of clothes in a single day is definitely not out of the realm of expectable on a trip. Reducing the number of changes of clothes as low with a kid as one could with an adult is really asking for trouble. IMO. The non-clothing problem revolves around a question of paraphernalia required to keep the kid healthy / entertained. That is VERY kid variable, and I wish I could get any kind of meaningful sample of what people who travel with kids have tried. I have read a few books specifically on the topic, but the sample size is still really small, so my bag of tricks is still fairly sparse.
It is nice to be in a headspace and to have a cleared enough schedule to actually have time to do things like read a monograph. It has been a little while.
ETA: We will be putting away A.’s birthday presents some time soon, so I am trying to create some space on the toy / book shelves in her room and the upstairs hall. I decided to pull all the fiction (which she really does not like) that is also looking a little young for her (not by reading level, necessarily, but for example she seems to have mostly gotten past My Little Pony. Which is slightly sad). It is in a box, and I am thinking of what else I could pull of the shelves. Possibly the ponies.
I walked with M.
I had a really long phone convo with J.
Piano lessons did not happen. The instructor tried to reach me to reschedule earlier, when his 5:30 canceled, but it did not matter that I did not see that message because then he was rear ended. Oh dear! He seems okay; we will see him next week.
I am about halfway through Naomi Oreskes’ _The Rejection of Continental Drift_. It is really, really good (altho I suspect I will end up with very different ideas about why it took until the late 60s / early 70s for plate tectonics to prevails, and high on that list are container shipping rendering older boats much cheaper to people funding geological surveys, and petroleum companies funding geological research in South America leading to geologists with good Spanish. But I will return to that later). I had thought this was sitting on the shelf for the last 20 years, but actually, it has only been about 15 years — I bought it in 2004. I do not love reading paper books, especially scientific monograph type paper books. They are heavy, and I have aging eyes. The combination is annoying. But the book is really detailed, well researched and incredibly insightful in a ton of different ways.
I read two kindle samples last night. One was for _Everything That Remains_, a memoir by The Minimalists, which was so harrowing I was really struck by how on earth a sample like that sells a book. Presumably, it is aimed at an audience other than me. I also read a sample for Daniel H. Pink’s _When_, which came *this close* to convincing me to buy the book, but ultimately, I decided to poke around and see what other samples I had and what else I had lying about that I had not yet read. I also read (skimmed?) Len Babauta’s _Ultralight_, which was ... okay. It reads like his blog, I guess. Mostly, I get really frustrated by a lot of books that might be interesting, except they are on a topic (traveling light) that is implemented in a way that seems hyper-irrelevant to me (no kids). But in this case, there _are_ kids! They are mentioned later in the book — but not in the travel section. Wha? I do not understand. But, you know, life is complicated and maybe he has kids in his life but never travels with them? *shrug* Basically, there are two major categories of problems with packing when kids are involved. First, the clothing calculation is just weird with kids. With adults, you can rely most of the time that they will get dirty / sweaty at a pretty predictable rate. With kids? Ha ha ha ha. Which is to say, going through 3 changes of clothes in a single day is definitely not out of the realm of expectable on a trip. Reducing the number of changes of clothes as low with a kid as one could with an adult is really asking for trouble. IMO. The non-clothing problem revolves around a question of paraphernalia required to keep the kid healthy / entertained. That is VERY kid variable, and I wish I could get any kind of meaningful sample of what people who travel with kids have tried. I have read a few books specifically on the topic, but the sample size is still really small, so my bag of tricks is still fairly sparse.
It is nice to be in a headspace and to have a cleared enough schedule to actually have time to do things like read a monograph. It has been a little while.
ETA: We will be putting away A.’s birthday presents some time soon, so I am trying to create some space on the toy / book shelves in her room and the upstairs hall. I decided to pull all the fiction (which she really does not like) that is also looking a little young for her (not by reading level, necessarily, but for example she seems to have mostly gotten past My Little Pony. Which is slightly sad). It is in a box, and I am thinking of what else I could pull of the shelves. Possibly the ponies.