Current earworm: “Change of the Guard” by Kamasi Washington.

Finished reading Babel by R.F. Kuang, about the translators’ college at Oxford in the 1830s that worked magic based on the tension between imperfectly-translated terms, and thus fueled the British Empire. About empire of course, and appropriation and systemic racism and such. I enjoyed this.

Tonight’s kitchen victory: carbonnade à la flamande with homemade fries! (I used Joël Robuchon’s cold fry technique, which worked great.)

Tonight’s kitchen victory: roast chicken, skillet-roasted potatoes, and charred green beans. Lots of rosemary and garlic. The house smells pretty good.

Got a couple inches of snow overnight, already melting by the time I got up.

Had Mom over for dinner.

Finished reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, about plague, time travel, and the simulation hypothesis. Includes some more-mature forms of her standard tropes, plus links to other parts of the St. John Mandel Literary Universe. Quite good.

Have gotten to the point of fasting where basically any food I think of sounds incredibly delicious.

Finished reading Joan by Katherine J. Chen, historical fiction about Joan of Arc. Chen, properly, wrote her own interpretation of Joan, one who’s less a holy maid with visions and more “the Thomas Edison of handing a dude his ass” (note: not a quote from the book). The final part of the book was difficult to read — it’s a tragedy after all — but at least we don’t get to her being (spoiler for approx. six-century-old history) burnt at the stake.

Side note / content warning / complaint: In the book, Joan’s sister is raped (offscreen, and handled delicately, but). I hope someday we can find a better plot point to motivate the main character.

Walked down the Burke-Gilman trail today: about 3 hours, 21K steps, 11 miles.

My recent anxiety dream was trying to train a chatbot with an inadequate corpus.

Set aside After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC by Steven Mithen. I’m enjoying it, but it’s a big chonk of a book, and I have other library books due back soon. I’ll return to this while I’m between other books.

Brief snow flurry this morning, dusting the streets.

The book referenced several books and authors also referenced in The Old Ways, not entirely surprisingly.

Finished reading Imaginary Peaks by Katie Ives. The core of the book is a mountain climbing hoax, but it extends outwards to cartography and its difficulties, hoaxes more generally, and colonialism, among other things.