I use voice-activated Siri for an obnoxious number of things now. Siri: set a timer for 20 minutes. Siri: look up when the new Congress gets sworn in. Siri: open the Rover app.
You get the idea. But! A new trick is thrilling me to bits. You can ask Siri to read something to you. Yes!
So today while walking Finn I asked Siri to look up an article on peony care. And then, so as not to become like all those dog people who look at their phones and miss canine clues in the environment, I asked Siri to read it to me.
Dead head spent blooms / cut off diseased leaves
Two kinds of fungus. Got it! Bleach clippers if cut diseased leaves. Ok! Don’t cut to the ground til after the first frost. Questions answered!
Not much left after removing diseased leaves
More cool iPhone tricks in Wirecutter article here.
Why would I make a solution of one part bleach and ten parts water when I have this in the house?
We went to Wellesley College on Sunday to see the daffodils but it was too early or too cold or both. What a wind was afoot!
It was so cold, we abbreviated our walk.
Hellebores were putting on a good show, even if the daffodils weren’t.
A surprise package from Holland came last week. Inside — “Ink Woman,” a collage by the talented Saskia. Totally unexpected!
I just love Saskia’s work. She’s a visual artist with a real knack for storytelling. I don’t know how, but she manages to be both serious and whimsical and her creatures are particularly delightful. I’ve watched her work evolve over the last many years and it’s exciting because she is so very original and keeps taking risks. There’s a fearlessness at work that I admire.
This is a shitty photo but it will have to do for now because she left her post on the windowsill and is hiding from me right now!
The photo above is a little deceptive. It’s shot across the top of my zoom screen toward the window.
PS I got my hair cut this afternoon. It looks very “Karen of the PTA” to me now but I’ll get used to it. I really needed a change. Maybe I’ll post a picture tomorrow. Pretty wiped at the moment.
1/8 HAIKU A salt shard turns Finn into a tripod — hop! hop! — ‘til I can remove.
Three writing workshops start back up this week, two I run, one attend. The structure is good, the connections, friendships. The break was really nice too. It was one week longer than planned on account of losing the internet right before going to California.
I didn’t make soup yesterday but did today. The addition of fennel and a dollop of freshly-made pesto made this batch a little differentfrom my usual bean/tomato concoctions. Plenty by Ottolenghi the source.
His didn’t include sausage while mine used up some ancient andouille. Have no fear! I’ll survive. And if I don’t, Finn’s going down too!
Painting by Ginny Mallon (so love it!) and just received this week — two of her incredible cigar-box portraits. That’s Herman Melville on the left (with a whale inside) and Mark Helprin on the right (cats inside). I have read almost all of Helprin’s novels but never managed (shame on me!) to get through Moby Dick.
If you don’t already follow Ginny on Instagram, you should (@ virginiamallon).
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.
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.
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.
