You're Doing It Wrong

I made it through 1 week of posts. We’ll see if I can continue.

This is my “before” picture of the shop — this is like a garage annex where nothing shop-like happens.

Generally, it accumulates junk and crap and then we do a half-assed job of tidying it up and then the cycle repeats.

This is my garden area and I am always hoping to get it organized. But for one large chunk of the year it’s too hot out there and the other chunk it’s too cold. And it’s just one more chore I’m trying to fit in with everything else.

It actually looks worse now because of the muddy gardening incident I posted about earlier this week.

Maybe someday I will have an “after” picture to show you how well I got everything organized.

Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Internet Archive / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

I know I’ve written a lot about subscribing to the New Yorker. I have a love/hate relationship with it. It’s relentless. It comes every week. And it’s an undertaking to read.

My system is to read it as soon as possible when it arrives. If I’m not interested in an article, I skip. If I’m semi-interested I read parts and skim parts. If it’s good, I read it. You can’t save it for later. You can’t let them stack up.

A number of years ago, someone started a weekly newsletter that did a sort of review of the issue. They would tell you which articles not to miss and which articles to skip without guilt. The newsletter disappeared.

Until, fairly recently someone different started the same basic deal. I immediately subscribed. Except that those newsletters were weighty, too. And that person seemed to feel that since there were paying subscribers, more content needed to be produced so there was a secondary newsletter or something with the cartoons? I can’t remember.

What I do remember is realizing that now the newsletter felt like a chore, too. [Oh me and how my head works.]

Anyway, I unsubscribed but somehow they reset or something and now I’m getting it again.

Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / MKG Collection Online

This is something I think about a lot but not sure I have the time and energy to write about it properly.

What does success look like?

My thinking on this often comes from watching NCAA gymnastics. There are 2 main competitive levels in the U.S. – elite, which is the international level and then collegiate. There aren’t a lot of elite spots and the competition is tight. There are a lot of amazing NCAA gymnasts who excelled at the top level but couldn’t quite crack the top of the elite ranks.

Then in NCAA there are various levels and something like 80 teams. You still need to be ridiculously good at gymnastics to get on a college team but you might be 2nd in the lineup on the 22nd ranked team — do you feel like you’re a success?

Same when I was regularly watching soccer. How tough it was to get on a MLS team and then tough to make it to the starting lineup. And MLS isn’t even the best league in the world.

And then looking at acting — have you ever seen an actor who looks kind-of familiar and you check them in IMDB and you see they have 50 credits and have done 1 or 2 episodes in all kinds of shows over the years and maybe bit parts in movies — but you don’t even know their name? Then there are actors that you recognize but never get the staring role. They’re always the friend or the school principal. Do they feel successful?

I don’t know what my point is other than some bland platitude about being grateful for what we have or something. I’m always the one who says only one team can win. Only one athlete wins the gold. Only one actor wins the award. But still, the runner-ups worked really hard, too.

This summer I finished the final book in an epic fantasy series called Realms of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb.

(Typing this makes me think back: I wonder how often Elderlings actually appeared on page.)

Most people would refer to these books as Fitz and the Fool and they are a huge commitment and very, very much worth it.

There are 3 Fitz trilogies, plus a trilogy of liveship books and a quadrilogy of dragon books. These are in the same world with overlapping characters and story points.

I haven’t read the dragon ones yet.

These are big fat books. I listened to most of them and these were 30 hour books. The final volume was 39!

This is one of those series where often people did things you didn’t want them to do. Lots of terrible things happened. But also amazing relationships, well-developed real characters, and such vivid world building.

The story ending was satisfying in a bittersweet but perfectly wonderful way.

The real mourning is that am done. I can’t believe I’m not going to hear new stories about Fitz. I do want to read the dragon ones but it’s not a priority.

A tiny corner of our local giant Halloween house.

I am actually writing this on Halloween night. We have had maybe 30 kids and it is raining.

I think I have shared that the garden pumpkin situation is bad. Last year I learned I had something called squash bugs. I didn’t get a single pumpkin.

This year since I had the brand new raised beds with only dirt from the landscaping place I thought I was okay. I was not.

And squash bugs are creepy. There are tons of them. I tried to manage them by picking them (scraping them by the handful) and tossing into a bucket of sudsy water and it was so icky.

Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Yale University Art Gallery

I bought an eating pumpkin from the grocery store. I want to say it was a sugar pumpkin but I’m not positive.

I cooked it the way I cook all my pumpkins and I made pumpkin soup.

It was not delicious.

Since then, I bought a red kuri and a blue kuri and a cinderella pumpkin and I’m going to process those for pies and soup (and hope they taste better!). We also eat a lot of pumpkin chili although it’s mostly because in the past I grew so many pumpkins we had tons in the freezer.