This week was a little less heavily scheduled. I've fallen out of the habit of recording daily snippets, and I wonder if that's part of why I had meaner voices in my head this week. The voices are adaptive and can keep up with whatever I do or don't do. Lately they are super harping on the idea that I can't work a corporate job anymore -- which, if that's even true, is true because I don't want to anymore, and obviously wanting to is a pretty solid precondition for doing it. As someone kindly said to me, Michael Phelps can't do another Olympics either, and so what? But I'm no Phelps, I'm just another crispy critter from the burnout zone that is tech. Sometimes that's scary, and sometimes I think recovery/pivots are going just fine.

Satisfying continuations on last week's stuff: I used the serger to make a cover for the serger, out of scrap denim, which felt right and proper. One thread still has a tension issue I haven't solved. And we bought a new dining table, a very beautiful refurbished teak table that will take weeks to get to us but which will probably be Our Table for the rest of our table-owning lives. I fed the new squirrel tenants every morning.

I had two catch-ups with old friends, outside of my usuals: one helping to unpack a new kitchen, and the other one playing in the friend's home gym. The friend has an aerial point with some straps, and spoke temptingly enough of straps as cross-training for handstands that I tried to sign up for straps 101 at circus school next session. Failed, but I just confirmed I can do the one cool exercise she taught me on my monkey bars in my home gym. Shrug.

Words I looked up: AIXI, philippic, sapid, abreactive, Blahaj, colliery.

Things I learned about: population axiology (not that I've finished the whole paper), gooners and gooning (those wankers are just the kind of bizarre subculture I love to read about), environmental causes of Parkinson's disease. Money quote from that last one: “The Human Genome Project was a $3 billion investment, and what did we find out? Five percent of all disease is purely genetic. Less than 40 percent of diseases even have a genetic component.” Oooof.

And just because it is the season, we now have a tree in our living room. Not decorated yet, but it smells nice.