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It’s April! It’s halfway through April! Did you know that? Isn’t that crazy? I understand why time seems to go faster as we get older and also why most of us are living with a newly skewed sense of time, but it’ll still never stop shocking me tbqh.
Anyway! Some stuff I’ve been liking!
Crystal’s always encouraging me to buy and play any video game that I seem even vaguely interested in because I don’t really like them at all, but she thinks it’s a thing that can like, be unlocked in me, so when I said Pokopia seemed interesting, she bought it for me immediately and, like most games, I played it for a little bit and then basically got bored, but I do have fun while I’m doing it! I think! Mostly I do some stuff and then suddenly shake my head and go, “What the hell am I even doing,” and save and quit as though I’ve loaned someone else my body for an hour or so and took a vaguely unsatisfying nap.
That said, Crystal’s having a great time playing it and I do like that my little Ditto guy is wearing a sailor suit and in general that’s enough for me to consider something a win.
Mostly while she’s been playing Pokopia, I’ve been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. A month ago I didn’t know what they were and three weeks ago I was calling it Dungeon Master Steve and now they’re my absolute favorite way to be spending my time. Like the Captive Prince series did for me a handful+ of years ago, they have become a nice escape from my incredibly stressful real life (Selling a house! HVAC out in our car! Furnace died in our house! Unexpected vet visit! Health issues for me! Work problems for everyone! Beloved cousin had a heart attack! Everyone is okay — KNOCK ON WOOD — but good lord!) and are generally a good time! They’re too long and I know they’re only going to get longer, but what can you do? This is simply the cost of reading something in a genre where everyone thinks they’re Brandon Sanderson and doesn’t realize that most of us don’t want to read Brandon Sanderson at all.
TV wise we’ve successfully watched two episodes of The Pitt and enjoyed them, a handful of season two Abbot Elementary eps to mixed success — one of the episodes (with the juice and the bathrooms?) agitated us both so much we ended up yelling at our coworker about it lmao — and most of Masters of the Air for the third or fourth time. Look! Sometimes life is hard and what you have to do is rewatch something pretty depressing about World War II to get by, I don’t make the rules.
We donated to Bridge of Solidarity, Liberation Twin Cities, and the Center for Victims of Torture.
As always let me know if you have somewhere you think I should donate! Or if you want to recommend me some pop culture! Or if you just have something you really need to say! ashrocketship [at] gmail is always open.
I hope you’re doing well wherever you are. Love you!
Since we moved, Crystal has become obsessed with a Japanese stationery store nearby-ish and in turn has gotten me hooked on the Uni-Ball One gel pen in both the .38 and the .5 because it is a smooth, quick-drying, and easy writing delight as all pens should be tbqh.
We have also gotten hooked on Tous Les Jours because their iced tiramisu latte is bomb and also who can resist cases full of very beautiful fresh pastries? I love the strawberry croissant because I am basic and fine with that and also anything that has a sausage in it because they are making hot dog experiences I had never previously considered. Oh and the milk cream/cream cheese bread/danish type thing. And their milk bread loaf. Cloud cake also great… I actually don’t think we’ve had anything we haven’t liked except the egg tarts but that’s because I am not that much of an egg person and Crystal thinks she is, but actually isn’t.
I just re-read (well, listened and boy did I think that narrator was goofy) Heated Rivalry because I have been having a hard time reading in general and Spotify offered it up to me at the start of November (probably because I was listening to a lesbian hockey book that I ended up DNFing boo) and it was nice to revisit the story again because it is very soothing and very charming. I had kind of forgotten that the show was coming out, which we are now also watching and mostly enjoying (I would enjoy it much more if I never had to see/hear anyone else talk about it, but what can you do!!) and as I made acquaintance with Rachel Reid waybackwhen (She told me I should write a book!) I am absolutely thrilled for her so will continue to overlook the most annoying people in the world and their opinions.
Also I cut all my hair off! I have been experiencing insane emotional distress around my hair for like, I don’t know, five or six years at this point that I am sure is connected to all kinds of things, but I also developed an insane… not fear, but aversion to getting a professional haircut, so it’s mostly amounted to Crystal hacking off between four and ten inches of my ponytail every six to twelve months and calling it good, but as soon as we moved, I knew I needed to just suck it up and cut it and I went in and I did it even though I was freaking out and it was totally fine (Thank you, Hope!) and I got a pretty cute cut that even looks fine when I don’t style it and I am sleeping better because my hair isn’t driving me crazy and I don’t have a headache from pulling it back and I cannot believe that I lived with it for so long for no real reason. Feel free to take this as your sign to do something you’ve been putting off! Your life will probably get better!
Alright, I think that’s it! This month we donated to Anti-War Committee MN and to help our friend Tabby get back on the road, which, if you happen to have some extra cash and donate, I would appreciate with my whole heart! As always, please let me know if you have a charity you’d like to share: ashrocketship [at] gmail.
I hope your holidays are as busy as you want and as bright as you can manage. I know it’s rough out there, but I believe in us and if you need to take a break from believing for a bit, I’ll save your spot. ♥
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’.
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