Category Archives: dog love

What and who do you love

Don’t get too excited by this post’s title. It is a fairly ordinary ramble.

We usually walk the Wellesley campus on a Sunday, so on the way home I was confused. Glad it’s Saturday. That means I have the NYTimes crossword to look forward to (it comes online at 6 pm).

The campus is not big enough to get lost per se, but somehow we managed to end up in sections we’d never seen before. The place seemed weirdly quiet.

The ducks, which are usually plentiful at this spot, have cleared out. The swans overwinter though. They were too far across the lake to count, but there were way more than the usual three couples — maybe as many as two dozen.

We watched the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher. Succession meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Dopesick? I was distracted and need to watch it over before moving on. There are a lot of characters. It somehow felt slow, though, which is probably why I got distracted.

I can’t tell you how giddy Powell and Chesebro’s guilty pleas make me.

The overwhelm of news out of the Middle East and the onslaught of commentary (often a shit show) mean you probably don’t need any recommendations. But if you subscribe to the NYTimes, this is a good article.

So is the one titled,

On Israel, Progressive Jews Feel Abandoned by Their Left-Wing Allies

The link below should be available to all but I’m new to gifting so let me know if it isn’t.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/us/politics/progressive-jews-united-states.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4Uw.fG_w.TYszp1SlIsnM&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

To my Jewish friends and readers, let me say, I see you and I love you.

I’ll end with this illustration (below) from the Times. Shoshana Schultz. I really like what she’s done here.

Well one more thing. This was a really great thread. A son of Holocaust survivors being called Anti-Semitic because he criticizes Israel. I learned from his critique.

https://x.com/djrothkopf/status/1715753541334081827?s=46&t=Fn4WNI8sqJpHyyHqNwJK4w

Triple jack

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You’re not gonna believe this. Before the excavator-mounted jackhammer could finish clearing out the new basement hole four doors up, a crew at their neighbors across the street started foundation work with a hand-held jackhammer. And tomorrow, a site that was cleared today (bye, bye Fortune Panda!) will begin jackhammering. It is five doors down in the other direction. That hole is gonna have to be deep enough to accommodate parking for the twelve-apartments that they’ll be building on top of it.

Seven a.m. is when the percussive banging started every day this week. The throatier, more intermittent hand-held jackhammering started at around one and went til five.

We might need to leave. It’s really possible.

Finn and I escaped briefly in some nearby woods. It was otherwise a spectacularly beautiful day.

The stone being jackhammered, I may have mentioned, is Roxbury Puddingstone (or conglomerate). This morning I looked it up. Among other things I learned that Roxbury was once called “Rocksbury.”

This is nerdy of me, I know, but I found the geology interesting — or rather, I liked the feel of these words in my mouth. Such a wholly other vocabulary. Even though the words don’t mean all that much to me, I’ll bet this Wikipedia excerpt would make a great writing prompt.

Because of the noise, I was once again relegated to the basement for a zoom session. My chair sits near a bureau piled high with magazine pages and collage supplies and so while waiting for class to begin I found myself gluing shit down, playing. The first one is another Two of Pentacles, I think.

The second one (above) is commentary about the climate crisis, which I also ended up writing about.

The Loop and Haiku

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I “got” three haiku on my walk with Finn this morning. Because it isn’t raining or blisteringly hot, we could make the full loop. More time to hear my thoughts.

Rather than save these for month’s end, I’ll share today. And BTW, I had the wrong link for Robert Hubbell yesterday. Fixed it.

Moss adorned stone walls,
dressed as royally as a
queen in purple silk.

Often prickly, I
sometimes push people away.
But really, so what?

Tear-downs signal wealth.
This one released a stink that
lingers still, weeks on.

Woods, words, and stitch

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Discovered a new park. Less than two miles away!

Reading my book again. Primary take away: it’s really good and I shouldn’t give up (good thing that’s my takeaway because I checked Query Tracker this morning and there it was in red : 49 queries, 100% rejected). It’s also good to reread to catch more typos or content questions.

Mixing cowries and pawpaws? Must research a little more and then fix.

Still life. I’m gonna make a heart for myself. What do you think of that?

I continue to populate this one with windows and roof outlines. With all the dire climate news this and last week, part of me wants to either : fill in all blank areas with scarlet red stitches or surround the piece as is with some of the Global Warming sections I have downstairs. They’re full of hot colors, swirls for storm maps, out-of-control vegetation — all overstitched with words like “hoax” and “try raking the forest.”