Today was a good day for taking photos.
Contrails cross in the sky over our farm.
Hiking the rim of the Snake River Canyon in Washington State.
Kessie finds the bone of a lifetime on our hike.
Finished listening to: Pale Demon by Kim Harrison 📚🎧
Finished listening to: Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows, #8) by Kim Harrison 📚🎧
Finished reading: The Portable Door by Tom Holt 📚
Finished listening to: White Witch, Black Curse (The Hollows, #7) by Kim Harrison 📚🎧
Finished listening to: The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison 📚🎧
Finished reading: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub 📚
Simple jig for hand sawing
Yesterday, I was hand-sawing some plywood panels when I had an idea for stabilizing the task. I started the cut and then clamped a scrap of wood across the cut. This stabilized the board, made it easier to cut straight , and there is no splintering at the end of the cut. I’m sure this is not an original idea, but I’m happy to have discovered it. 🪚🔨
Finished listening to: For a Few Demons More (The Hollows, #5) by Kim Harrison 📚🎧. I’m enjoying this series. On to #6.
I received the vintage rabbet plane I purchased on eBay today. I just had to sharpen the iron. I spent the afternoon teaching myself how to use it.🪚🔨
Finished reading: Starter Villain by John Scalzi 📚. This is a fun read. John Scalzi writes the best dialog.
Finished reading: Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor 📚. I don’t normally like care for time travel stories, but this one is alright. I don’t think I will follow up with the rest of the series, however.
Finished listening to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna 📚🔊 This is one of the coziest books I’ve happened upon in a long time. I recommend it. Samara MacLaren’s narration was a treat.
Finished reading: The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis 📚 This is a nice piece of historical fiction about books and libraries.
Finished listening to: A Fistful of Charms (The Hollows, #4) by Kim Harrison 📚. I give up on most book series after two or three installments, but this urban fantasy series still has my interest. It helps that my library has the entire series via Libby.
Red-winged blackbirds returned to our feeders today. I’d better stock up on sunflower seeds.
It took three separate parts orders and some creative modifications, but our thirty-year-old clothes dryer no longer sounds like an elementary school heavy metal band.
Finished reading: I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong 📚 This is an excellent book by one of the best science journalists around. It concerns the closer than intimate relationship of plants and animals with their microorganisms. Bacteria are not just in us and on us; in a lot of respects they are us.
Stories
My wife and I had dinner this past week with a couple who we had met recently. This was something that we hadn’t done for several years.
Why is it unusual? One reason is we are introverts. We do enjoy meeting people in small gatherings, but you will rarely find us in settings where there are lots of folks. We don’t have the opportunity to meet many new people, and we don’t make much of an effort to do so. We also live in a rural setting. It is easy for us to go several days without speaking with anyone other than each other. We’re not hermits. We have children, grandchildren, and close friends who we see often. We volunteer in nearby communities and attend a local exercise class where we met our new friends.
It was good to spend an evening with some genuinely nice people who we knew nothing about. We shared our story and listened with interest to theirs. We are all at a point in our lives where there are more milestones behind us than ahead. The stories were much more complete than when we met people in our younger days, and this made them more satisfying to me.
It is one of those gray winter mornings where I can’t tell where the earth ends and the sky begins.