the rest of it

 Lots to be grateful for this week: It's the end of my leave, so I'm grateful for having had it. I'm glad that Celeste and I are back to coaching each other. Progress continues to be made on the house and Phil continues to manage it well. Oreo ice cream sandwiches are back at the corner shop! The weather has finally changed! Roberta hosted a lovely party for our finalists—it was great to see them and especially my lovely colleagues... ...who were extra lovely and gave me these flowers.  

I think I'll stop counting the weeks one month from now, when I'll be two weeks past my second vaccination. Then perhaps I can give these notes more interesting titles. Lots to be grateful for today: A partial kitchen! Though we don't have countertops, we've got fridge, ovens, washers, and enough odd things over top of the cupboards to hold the hotplate and the kettle, etc.  The light! The space! Really happy with the decisions we've made about the shape of the room, the skylight, the back door, etc. A slightly usable dining room! It's so nice to not have to go upstairs to eat. A very good plasterer. So neat. Phil's tireless work unpacking, cleaning, shopping. Actually, I guess it's not so tireless, since he felt the need to go to bed two hours ago. My WriteSpace session tonight.  Not getting rained on. first meal from the oven: Macaroni (and) cheese  

Killing a bit of time while the hamster is having his exercise. He's been waking me up the last few nights, so I hope he gets tired out.  I'm getting too distracted from things I need to do. I find it impossible to work at home these days, and my concentration through the day is not ideal. One of my distractions was my decision yesterday that I should not just keep track of books I've read; I should keep track of books I've acquired and try to keep myself reading faster than I'm acquiring. It's pretty easy to keep track of what I've acquired since nothing that's come in since the building works started can disappear into a bookcase. But I've also included Christmas gifts in my acquisition count for 2021, because I figure they're close enough to the new year. At this point, I've acquired 9 books (four of them I bought) and I've read 9 books in 2021 so far, which has me behind my pace for last year. (I've read three of the 2021 acquisit...

I started a gratitude list some days ago, so now I'm just going to incorporate it here, skipping week 59 altogether.  But I wanted to pause in my work right now because I've just read a very upcheering article (item 1 below) which argues that the reason older adults use more pronouns and fewer names is not because they are in cognitive decline. Older people are more accurate in some verbal tests (indicating no cognitive decline), but are slower because they have more vocabulary to sift through. They call this the Ecclesiastes Principle after Eccl. 1:18: For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. In other words, it's a pain to know this much. The lifespan effect is compared to changes in English across time: bursts in vocab size go along with bursts in pronoun use. As personal names have become more varied and less predictable, we get more he s and she s (especially more she s because of other progress in the world). The other up...

G's cold was just a cold; we're not replacing the dining room radiator after all; I didn't use my Bank Holiday Monday very well. We're expecting a quiet week on the kitchen front as plaster dries. The kitchen units show up next week. That's the update. Here's the gratitude.  T hat I'm not outside in that horrid wind and rain.  For Dick Johnson is Dead. What a film.   3. For Phil's idea to put peanuts on our salted caramel ice cream. 4. For G's laughter at some old Whose Line is it Anyway?s.