So for those who aren't local, Be It Known that the vast majority of apartments here have leases beginning on or around September 1. Simultaneously and relatedly, the streets fill with U-Hauls and the sidewalks fill with random boxes and pieces of furniture marked "FREE". This last phenomenon is called "Allston Christmas" after a local suburb, but it happens across many towns in the area. It's like a big, disorganized Everything Swap.

• I picked up two new kitchen pots from the squirrel, and ended up giving him an onion chopper device that he loves... amusingly this was not as a direct swap, but it worked out well.


• Tuesday I spent about four hours helping a distant-ish friend pack stuff intended for a storage unit. I learned how to vaccuum-bag, which was cool, and MacGuyvered some garment-hanger boxes, and then was able to ferry a bag of stuff to the ballerina. And... silently I judged, because there was so much stuff. I came home, and the next day I got rid of a big bag of clothing and put out my own "FREE" stuff on the sidewalk and reorganized my kitchen. LOL.


• Friday I spent nearly 8 hours helping my acro base unpack and organize. Our goal was to get all his boxes open / broken down / gone, and we did it. So satisfying. We took a 2BR place from a giant pile of boxes to a place that looked like he lived there (and had had a messy week). We also got to see a couch left on the sidewalk disappear within an hour, and the same for a few other things that just didn't seem to have a place in the new apartment. He has different hobbies and different stuff than I do, but his attitude about objects is so much more like mine that it made for an interesting contrast with Tuesday.


• You are wondering: well, miss minimalist, did you get any free stuff this Christmas season? Yeah, I did. The two pots (I got rid of one), a pint glass, and a pair of parallettes from R (good for doing pushups without having to warm up my wrists first).
  

Overall a very domestic week. If you count the intended-to-be-final walk-through for my new condo, I put serious time into four different places. Then I went kitchen-feral on Saturday and made both quatre quarts cake and sushi. Workouts did go okay as well, but with less to specifically report.

I groused and griped about the final outcome of the Google-vs-DOJ antitrust case, which of course Google lost. ( If the powerful can be found guilty but then nothing happens to them, what good are the courts? ) The judge could have hurt browsing a bit, and instead he hurt all of tech. Maybe all of the country.

I learned a good new insult from an otherwise so-so book. The insult is "fish drowner", and I am taking it to mean someone who fucks up the apparently unfuckable. The person who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the person who manages to drown a goddamn fish. The person who maybe had one job, and had the power in his hands to break up a known monopolist, and... simply didn't do it.

Overall, I had a really nice week of focusing on what I wanted to focus on, taking it easy in between energetic bouts of focus, and feeling good about all that. I went back to basics as was foretold by the prophecies my last post; cooked a bunch of chili on Monday and ate it all week for lunch, and did a lot of working out, and created a new tracker sheet for Things I Would Like to Be Maintaining. The day I did that is the first day I really did my desired two sets of pistol squats, so I got to write that down and be happy about it! I'm also flirting with my old straddle pancake program (owww, I can feel that) and trying to think how much cardio to do, and finding motions that really get at the jank in my shoulders. I've invented a sort of weighted chicken flapping action that I like a lot, for that last thing; I also have a backbend semiprivate buddy and a walkover semiprivate buddy, which is wonderful and makes me feel like I have companions for the journey.

I attended my town's condo board meeting, and watched them approve the conversion of my condo-to-be. Apparently one has to declare one's intention on that kind of conversion, and then there's a waiting period of a year before the conversion can happen?

Time was spent with the next generation of humans:

• I hung out with the baby squirrel all day on Friday, and it was pretty nice. We made blue Jell-O with gummy sharks in it (more amusing than delicious, to my adult taste buds), and timed their laps on a bicycle in the small nearby cemetery while also getting to talk with apfelsingail, and hung out snuggling and playing Blue Prince for a lot of the afternoon. I didn't get hooked on Blue Prince last time I played, but this time I think maybe I'm more interested and might buy it for myself?


• Today I took a long walk with Birdie, who's back from two weeks in Italy and more or less prepared for classes to start. We came back to my place and I dug up some baby pictures of her that she'd never seen, from when her parents brought her to visit my apartment in summer 2003, and she gave Caltrop a present of a little bird-shaped cat toy. We found a good spot for outdoor handstand photos over behind the high school, but didn't indulge... this time.

Time also was spent with my partners, of course: watching Wednesday with the bug, and going to the deCordova sculpture museum with the squirrel. The snuggle is real.

I've been listening to Someone You Can Build a Nest In, because it won the Nebula, and it's funnier than I expected but also extravagantly mid-2020s-progressive and full of plot holes; I have no idea how it won the Nebula. Or where the science fiction has gone, really, from the whole list of finalists. Even the Hugo finalists are packed with SF/F hybrids this year (the two SF entries are both by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who seems determined to move the "genre" industry toward SF as a solo effort and through sheer volume). Where's a science fiction fan to get her recommendations? Maybe the Arthur C Clarke award... though that's limited to books that are published first in the UK, maybe that's less restrictive than it sounds.