Working for the weekend

What a week. Spouse started his new job on Monday. He’s working in a town ~35 minutes away, and his daily schedule is 8-5. This has implications for the second new thing this week… Nuala started daycare on Tuesday. I’m on pick-up and drop-off duty for the foreseeable future, excepting those days on which Spouse [...]

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Building project #2

In the mornings, Nuala calls out from her crib not so we can pick her up out of it, but so we can bring her stacks of books that she can then peruse at her leisure. We thought it would be nice if she could wake up, retrieve her own books, and spend that first [...]

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It ain’t Hall and Oates, but the Dora music player will do in a pinch.

We created a bit of a monster. One night, Spouse and I fell prey to nostalgia and created a Hall & Oates station on Pandora. It was awesome for the first few hours of play, during which Nuala developed a taste for the best of 80s white-man pop-R&B. Now, she won’t listen to anything else, [...]

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Plus ça change

This is a nineteenth-century illustration of a tread wheel that was used in British workhouses and prisons to grind grain or pump water into the institution. Much of the official sources speak of the tread wheel as a particularly suitable deterrent for “vagrants,” a term that encompassed an incredible variety of people including drunks, prostitutes, [...]

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10.78

There are more things to report than “I ran 10.78 miles on Saturday,” but let’s start there. I ran 10.78 miles on Saturday. It felt exactly as long as it sounds. Around mile 6, my hip started whining at me. Then my left ankle. Then the ball of my right foot, which was weird because [...]

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Quantification is the devil

After months and months and maybe even years of going on and on about how I don’t mind what I eat, I just run more when I want to eat more, I began doing something truly stupid: counting calories. It appeals to that part of me–is it the T? Or the J?–that swoons over certainty [...]

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