April 16, 2018

Traditional Observations

It's the middle of April, when it appears I traditionally make a post organized around the weather and/or my birthday. I do enjoy observing both the weather and my birthday, not to mention my many personal traditions, so here we go.

When I woke up this morning, it was so dark out that I doubted I was actually hearing my alarm, but it really was daytime, just raining heavily. I heard some truck activity outside that I later discovered was probably thunder, which we don't get around here too often. I was lazily starting my morning when another nonexistent truck knocked into our house, a sensation that I know by now to recognize as an earthquake. That brief but unmistakeable jolt woke me all the way up. I checked Twitter for quake tweets and learned about the thunder, plus hail in some places, a combo that left Silicon Valley expecting the apocalypse. Within an hour, the sun was aggressively shining. Now it's raining again. Happy spring!

Tomorrow I turn 43. I've already done some celebrating, with food and drink and baking and book-buying. I have more of the same scheduled for tomorrow, and I intend to continue the festivities for at least another week.

Life in our new house continues to be wonderful. I've mostly adjusted all my habits to living here, though I do sometimes still take the wrong exit when driving home. We've had lots of family and friends come to visit, with more on the horizon, and that's been great. It's a relief to be done with the most time-consuming and stressful aspects of house-buying and -selling so we can focus on more fun items, like finally picking out some bookshelves.

I can't end this update post without mentioning the novel. Traditionally when I mention the novel, I say that revision is coming along, though more slowly than I'd like. I certainly wouldn't want to break from tradition, so there we go.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ I'm not entirely sure if Alanna Okun's essay, On The Fine Art Of Unraveling, is intended as a knitting/writing metaphor, but it's the best one I've read: "The first row you knit after the cast-on is always difficult. Maybe you started too tightly and have to force your needles through the stubborn stitches, or maybe too loose and now you have to tug each strand of yarn so you don't leave any holes. The beginning is a slog. But then, ten minutes or twenty or sometimes a week later, you look down and realize that what you have is a thing. Nothing yet identifiable as a hat or scarf, but no longer just the anemic start."