Walked for about 12 miles today.

Watched fireworks at Mom’s last night with Greg and Jocelyn and the kids.

Pulled a bunch of volunteer trees from the front yard — an ash, a madrona, and at least a dozen cherries.

Tonight’s kitchen victory: quiche with chard from Meghan’s garden and garlic scapes from Amy’s farm. Plus the crust was perhaps the least troublesome I’ve ever made.

That was yesterday. Today, without warning, a different tech shows up, disappears for an hour, and then returns announcing the new fiber line has been strung and everything should be working. So far, so good. Still awful service, but I guess I’m supposed to be grateful the outage was only 13 days and not 19?

The ISP’s tech guy figured out that our fiber line was cut, so needed to run a new one, but he couldn’t get the access to a neighbor’s yard that he needed. After some wrangling with support, they promised that somebody would be out next Wednesday again. I have never experienced such awful customer service as this outage with CenturyLink; they have taken the crown from Comcast.

Nathan came over for beers and dinner on Tuesday, and we met with some of his friends to talk about starting up an RPG.

Had Mom over for dinner (grilled salmon) last night.

Drove down to Portland yesterday to spend time with Phil and Wendy and their daughter after Phil’s mother passed away.

The ISP never sent a technician, and didn’t even have any record of our outage, so we won’t get somebody here to look at the outage until next Wednesday.

Finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a pre-COVID “most people in the world die of a plague” novel. The story starts during a performance of King Lear at the start of the plague, and then follows two people — the actor playing Lear, through the before-times to that point, and a young girl also in the production, through the after-times in a traveling company performing Shakespeare plays. I read Last One at the Party about a year ago, and think this one is so much better it’s almost unfair to compare them. If you can stomach the premise, read this.

Finished rereading The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian, book 16 of the Aubrey/Maturin series, and the fourth and final book of their circumnavigation. Neither Aubrey nor Maturin has great success in this book; oddly, this felt satisfying enough that even a deus ex machina ending wasn’t a disappointment.

Finished reading The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison, a followup to last year’s Witness for the Dead. I enjoyed this as much as the previous. Addison draws her fundamentally-decent but painfully-introverted protagonist with compassion, through grim events of murders, child pornography (handled as tastefully as possible), and a malevolent spirit.

Meghan and the bambina and I came down with a cold, probably from the dude. Meghan seems less severely hit that the rest of us. (Covid tests are negative.)

Fixed the typography of some abbreviations and acronyms in older posts here.