I recently finished playing a lovely puzzle game: The Gardens Between. It’s a sweet, wordless game about friendship and memory, available on a bunch of different platforms, including iOS and Steam. The game starts with two kids who are friends (and next-door neighbors), Arina and Frendt (I read them as being a white girl and […]
I don’t seem to be posting anything other than family letters here lately. September 23, 1969 (postcard) In which we move again. “[Jed is] fully weaned & very happy, got his own trike this weekend, but can’t quite reach the pedals yet.” December 29, 1969 In which Peter is really interested in the idea of […]
I knew that we had moved around a fair bit when I was a kid, but until I looked at these family letters, I hadn’t realized quite how often: We moved at least five times before I was 18 months old. (And to a different town/city each time.) I’ve started mapping our moves; so far […]
This week in my family history project: Three letters from my father to his parents from early 1969, in which my parents become members of a Japanese church. But before I link to those letters, I feel like I should give some context that I left out last time. (Content warning for parental death.) Those […]
As I mentioned in a recent post, my brother Jay gave me an amazing cache of family history earlier this week. A bin full of all sorts of stuff about our father, Peter, and some stuff about our grandparents, George and Helen, and various other family items. A bunch of photos; I already have copies […]
My return to work has taken up most of my brain and energy and time for the past three weeks, but I’m gradually getting back to a state of being able to do and think about other stuff too. Some assorted updates: I joined the Alphabet Workers Union. I haven’t done anything as a union […]
I loved Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale when I read it circa 1990, so I was disappointed to later learn that he’s a conservative commentator. His 1996 short book A City in Winter has been sitting on my bookcase for a couple of decades now; part of my delay in reading it has been hesitancy […]
I’ve been having problems with notifications in various computer contexts for a while now. For example, notifications that I missed were a contributing factor to the awfulness at work that ate up half of my year last year. More recently, I’ve been getting lots of iOS notifications from Mary Anne’s calendars despite having turned off […]
The Mac task management app Things 3 came out in 2017 or so, but it removed an important feature that I relied on heavily in Things 2. (The ability to sort the Today task list by date.) So I kept on using Things 2 at work all this time. But Things 2 recently stopped working, and I decided to […]
I’ve now finished the “Pre-Advanced I” course in the Simply Piano app—but I felt like that particular course was too easy, which is to say I felt like it came too late in the sequence. (Whereas the last two or three courses that I did were hard enough to be right at the edge of […]
I watched about 65 movies in 2021, including rewatching about 15 that I had seen before. Of the ones that I hadn’t seen before, here were my favorites, in approximate descending order: 1. The Milagro Beanfield War (1988). Lovely, funny, charming movie full of great character details. Liked it a lot. 2. In the Heights […]
Here are the organizations I’m donating to in 2021. Most of this list is repeated from 2020 (and earlier years), but since that last post I’ve removed a couple of organizations and added a couple of others. (In 2020, I apparently failed to add a couple of new organizations, so I’m marking those as new […]