Finished reading Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer. This is a history of the Italian Renaissance, and something of a history of a history of it, and shifts at the end to address “progress” and what that means. Casual in tone, but rigorous in structure and argument; quite readable, but long, and I needed to break it up with a couple other books.

A neighbor — thankfully far enough away — has a rooster.

Visited Mom and saw the dude today.

Today I took the day off, loafed around a bit, and took a short(-ish) walk to Kenmore.

This past weekend’s kitchen victory was a hat trick of grilling: bratwurst, huli huli chicken, and steak fajitas.

Walked for a bit less than two hours, from Loyal Heights past Golden Gardens to the Ballard Locks.

Dug up my 15+-year-old digital camera.

Last night, Mom and Meghan’s mom came to see the bambina’s final band performance of the year.

Finished reading Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod, which I attended an event for the other night. The book is partly about a walk around Japan’s Kii peninsula, but more a memoir about Mod’s childhood in a similarly economically depressed area. Very well-written and heartfelt.

Last Friday I went to Third Place in Ravenna to see Craig Mod talk about his new book, Things Become Other Things.

Meghan and I spent this past weekend in Victoria — a great time — while the dude came over to stay with the bambina.

I have a pretty tall (conceptual) stack of books to read, but I’m starting to think I need to insert rereads of Le Guin’s Always Coming Home and her version of the Tao Te Ching, up towards the top. It won’t do anything to keep the world from curdling, but maybe I can help my little corner.

On Sunday, the four of us went over to visit Meghan’s mom, for lunch and strolling.

I’ve been walking much more frequently these past couple weeks, as the weather has shifted — the most since the plaguetimes started, at least so far.

Finished reading A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, follow-up to The Tainted Cup. Another fantasy-set murder mystery, this one with a clear anti-autocratic subtext. Bennett makes the subtext explicit in an afterword, laying into the fantasy genre, and A Song of Ice and Fire and its derivatives in particular, for their love of autocracies.