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Not only is the world as it is at the moment, but personally it has been a complicated, stressful couple of months and it’s about to get more stressful, so I’ve been trying my best to stop scrolling and enjoy things when I can to mixed success.
I’ve been trying to not spend all my time on my phone partially for obvious reasons and partially because I am literally fighting a repeptitive motion injury in my wrist from scrolling for [redacted reason to be revealed later maybe] and it hurts, so I have been doodling in one of these KingArt sketchbooks. I’m not an artist and I’m not using a medium more complex than Sharpies, but the paper has a pleasant enough texture and it fits in my bag with my Moleskin journal and Leuchtturm planner without screwing up the careful balance of garbage I carry with me at all times. And they were cheap!
The only book I’ve finished so far is Pokko and the Drum by Matthew Forsythe, which I do highly recommend! Such a fun story and such sweet illustrations. We’ve been watching Murderbot, which is not as good as the books (Adaptations rarely are! Life sucks!) but is really fun on its own.
My coworker got us some blind boxes to open together–it’s funny that this has become a big trend again when they were so big in the late 00s (We have a pretty big collection of Vinylmation from Disneyland from that era!) and I wonder if it’s like… a comfort in uncertainty kind of thing–and that’s been extremely fun and now I will always have a cute little Space Molly reminder of it!
What else… Oh we tried the Tate’s Bake Shop chocolate chip cookies and those are pretty bomb. I really like the Walmart brand bettergoods creamy oat milk (especially with Frosted Flakes) which is a nice find. We also recently housed a package of the Keebler original EL Fudge cookies which were bomb. (Lots of sweets in our house right now… Stress? What’s that?!) Crystal used Biotone starter fertilizer to plant all her annual containers this year and they look fantastic, so I highly recommend that too, which feels weird at the end of a bunch of food, but whatever.
Okay, that’s it! This month we made donations to CHIRLA, Jail Support LA, Clue Justice, and eSims for Gaza and I hope you’ll join us if you’re able! If you have any particular charity you’d like to recommend, shoot me an email: ashrocketship[at]gmail, please!
I have been deeply preoccupied this month so let’s do a rapidfire recap of stuff I have been into recently:
– Mother’s Original Circus Animal Cookies (Not the mythical creatures ones! Only the regular ones!)
– Roasted chicken and veg loosely following this recipe with added parsnips (Fast, cheap-ish, delicious!)
– Who Gives a Crap bamboo toilet paper (Cheap, feels less environmentally evil, nice branding/packaging)
– Little Caesar’s Pepperoni Crazy Puffs
– Lipton Fusions (Both flavors are bangers!)
– Phlur Strawberry Letter (Because I woke up one morning and was like, “Why the hell don’t I have any strawberry perfumes?” and this one is great.)
– Uni-ball Signo 0.5 (With the cap, not the click!)
– Ooly Color Layers markers
– The Accountant (Genuinely!)
– DoorDash Arnold and his rainbow finger
This month we made donations to help feed people in Gaza and Sudan and I hope you’ll join me if you’re able! If you have any particular charity you’d like to recommend, shoot me an email: ashrocketship[at]gmail, please!
Okay, that’s it! We had several days in the 80s-90s and then dropped back down to endless rain and below freezing temps at night, which I prefer because summer is the devil, but wow, what a mercurial-ass May. Is this what this part of the midwest is like without weather modification? Or is it the new extremes of climate change? Who knows! I hope you’re well wherever you are and getting to do something you enjoy in the face of it all.
The last month has… certainly been about thirty days and though I have been chugging along through it all, I have very little to say about anything, which sucks because I love saying stuff. I, in fact, live for saying stuff. And yet!
Books I’ve read lately: Joe Posnanski’s Why We Love Baseball (Fine to good), Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (Bad to embarrasingly bad), Natalie Sue’s I Hope This Finds You Well (Great). Yaffa As’ Blood Orange (Desperately wanted this to not be Good but it was Bad), Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (Almost Very Good, but disappointing instead), Lexi LaFleur Brown’s Shoot Your Shot (So Bad I DNFed at 25%).
I watched What’s Up, Doc? and reviewd it glowingly but truly, my god what a movie! Movies used to be fun! We used to believe in laughs! Shirtless men used to have chest hair and not look like they were dying of dehydration! We used to get to fall in love with Barbra Streisand!
This month’s donation went to the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance which is a North Dakota based charity working to close the news gap for Indigenous communities in the Great Plains.
Okay, spring is here! We’ve had snow and rain and sunshine and (already) too warm weather all in a couple weeks but the world is still turning and there are buds on the trees and though things may be no less fraught, I have felt a cool breeze on my face and the sun will rise again, etc etc. We must keep on truckin’.
As a kid, instead of being normal and hanging out in the toy aisle at the grocery store while my parents shopped, I would camp out in the school/office supplies ogling all the pens and markers (and usually managing to go home with something new). As an adult, nothing has changed! Though I guess I do it mostly virtually now. I love stationery and I am always convinced that this new pen will be the perfect one, the one I’ll buy over and over again for the rest of my life. It never is, but I have a ball with the process anyway. On the eternal search for highlighters that won’t bleed through my Moleskine planner pages, I recently grabbed these Sharpie S-Note markers and I like them a lot! They work in my planner great and they’re saturated enough to write with and they’re also excellent in the one coloring book I own and use maybe once a quarter. Highly recommend.
My Spotify wrapped was atrocious so I won’t bother you with any of that (This is what happens when you fire all your people! You need human people to make things that are worth human time!) but it was nice to see that I listened to the Decemberists as much as I thought I did and I’ve been listening to my top songs for the year a lot despite the lackluster wrap-up. Anyway! Other stuff I’ve been listening to a lot: Boys Go To Jupiter’s “Virginia,” All Saints, “Never Ever,” Beach Weather, “Seth Cohen,” and a lot of Daft Punk.
I haven’t read anything I loved in fooooooooreeeeeeeeeeverrrrrrrrr which sucks, but I’m having an okay time with Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, so fingers crossed!
Okay, that’s it! Happy holidays! I hope you have exactly as much fun as you can handle and an excellent new year. We can make it through this (and that and the next thing) together. <3
September 2024 will not be going down in the books as one of the best I have ever lived, but it hath brought me FALLOWEEN as it always does and some pretty alright stuff, so let’s talk about that and forget that I am Mentally Unwell.
I made a kind of middle of the night unhinged Amazon order because I was out of flossers and every single different kind of flosser I tried is just absolutely garbage? I grew up using Plackers because my dad always had them in the car for tooth emergencies and they were the go-to for years, but now they’re awful? The quality is so bad and if I am going to do something I hate for the environment I would at least like them to successfully floss my teeth. All the Oral-B ones are bad too? Like either they shred or they have that weird plastic tape floss that I promise your hygienest does not want you to be using because it’s useless. But! A year or two ago, we were in the Cities and Crystal placed a Target delivery order for drinks etc, and I was like, “oh I forgot flossers, can you grab some?” and she bought me these baby child infant flossers and while initially I didn’t like them, I now love them because the floss is thick and makes it easy to work between my teeth without shredding but then after like two years of being able to get them reliably they’ve been discontinued or something? ANYWAY, I found a seller on Amazon who had four 90 packs for what was actually what I paid at Target per flosser and I ordered five four packs. Which is basically five years worth of flossers so I guess I have to stay alive that long now? Which is a little stressful but not the worst reason I guess.
We bought some expensive fans earlier this year that we’ve now been using long enough to have an opinion about. This one is great, suuuuuper quiet but also really moves air around a space, and this one is also great though not better enough that I would buy it instead of the slightly cheaper again. This one is my biggest disappointment — the fan itself is quiet and it moves air great and it’s not the ugliest thing in the world, but just long enough after buying it that we couldn’t return it it started making a real weird noise when it oscillates and I know I should reach out to the company but like… Do you know how hard that stuff is? Like, man. I’ll probably stop being a lazy piece of shit about it eventually, but sheesh. ANYWAY, they’re some of the nicest looking fans I’ve seen in a while and the remotes are nice and I’m sure it would be great to use the wifi also actually, but since the app’s TOS is basically like, “We will give your information to cops no questions asked :)
” I will simply not ever be learning anything about that.
We also, finally, after eight years of suffering our old, poorly hung, drafty, shitty front and back doors, bit the bullet and bought new ones and had a professional hang them and they’re incredible. Not only are they not drafty! They also open and close without me having to push, pull, or bang my arm into them (depending on the season)! And also they’re very beautiful because I have great taste! I feel bad because our back door used to have a full length window and Bruno would spend his days standing there trying to see out (which he could not as we put light refracting film AND a dark curtain on it as soon as we moved in because the sun was UNBEARABLE in the afternoons) and now it only has a half window because I am cheap and also because I didn’t actually want him to spend his whole day there barking, but that’s not going to stop me from feeling bad, babey! We were also finally able to get a storm door with a retractable screen put in and I cannot wait to actually open it and have air moving around the back of the house for the first time since we moved in! What a time to be alive!
Alright, I guess that’s it? What a weird old person list of things I liked… I also watched Stop Making Sense which I have not seen recently enough to have a strong feeling about whether the restoration/transfer is good, but GOSH what a fucking movie. What a concert! What a band! What an experience! Also the tribute album is pretty good! Or at least has a few bangers!
Oh and I also liked Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves! What a fun movie! What a great bunch of characters! What an incredible bunch of creatures! Everyone in this was so charming and so fun to watch, I wish I’d been able to see it in theaters which I don’t often think anymore even though we used to go to the movies like twice a week but can’t because our theater here isn’t usable for fat people and also because I think if someone whipped their phone out during a movie I would rip it out of their hand and throw it all the way to hell. What the fuck happened to the world, man?
Okay, that’s it! I’m old! Happy Falloween! Better days are coming! Unless you’re a summer person and then well I guess I am very sorry and I hope you find peace anyway.
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