Salsa!

It looks like the tomatoes are being kind this year and not all ripening at once, at least so far.  But they are ripening in batches large enough that we were able to make a shakshuka (about 2 2/3 lbs.) for dinner for the weekend and still have at least 6 lbs. to make a batch of salsa today.  I had a mix of Roma, Early Girl, Big Boy, and Beefmaster to work with.

 

I use Ball's Spicy Tomato Salsa recipe, which is in the Blue Book but which I can't find online to link.  It uses 6 lbs. of tomatoes, 9 dried hot chili peppers (I use chipotles), 3 cups diced red onion, 1 1/2 cups chopped cilantro, 15 minced garlic cloves, 6 jalapenos seeded and diced, 1 tbsp. canning salt, 3/4 tsp dried red chili flakes (I skip these), and 3/4 cup red wine vinegar.  The tomatoes get peeled, seeded, and diced; the dried chilis get seeded and reconstituted for 15 minutes before pureeing.  Then you put everything in a big pot, bring it to a boil, and simmer for 10 minutes (or more, if you want it thicker).  The recipe expects you to get 6 pints out of it, and I usually do.  You can it with 1/2 headspace for 15 minutes, not at pressure.  I've made this recipe a lot; start to finish it takes me about 3 hours.

If you haven't done water bath canning before, one of the steps is, after you have finished your processing time, you turn off the heat, take off the lid, and let the jars stand in the water for 5 minutes.  I have messed this step up before (forgot to turn off the heat when I took off the lid), and that's the only batch I've had go bad: it had flat sour, which is a generally not harmful but definitely not tasty bacterial thing that can happen if you don't follow the steps correctly.  It affected every jar in the batch.  Luckily that year I had a tomato bonanza and made four batches of salsa instead of my usual three, but I also pay more attention now when I'm doing the water bath steps.

If you don't want a smoky chipotle salsa, you can use others; I made my first year's batches with ancho chilis because they were what I could find.  The next year I couldn't find them and substituted chipotles, which my husband loved, so I've kept using them.

We go through 12-15 jars of salsa a year most years, so this generally works for us.  We probably aren't saving money, but we're generally getting a lower-sodium salsa this way, and in a flavor we like.

Jelly

One of my favorite things to make and can is jelly (or jam).  Most recipes can be finished in two hours or less, and they're easy gifts.  I had a bunch of frozen blueberries, and I know several people who really like it, so I figured I would free up freezer space and knock out some Christmas gifts at the same time.

Except I didn't have as many blueberries in the freezer as I thought, whoops!  The basic blueberry jam is 9 cups of crushed berries and 6 cups of sugar.  I had about six cups.  Rather than try to math a smaller recipes (not recommended! Bad for food safety!), I found a different recipe.  I've got the Ball Blue Book, but for this I pulled out Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving.

The recipe I used was the jam with liquid pectin; it used 4 1/2 cups of crushed berries, 7 cups of sugar, 4 tablespoons of lemon juice, and 2 pouches of liquid pectin. The benefit of this recipe was I didn't have to figure out if it was gelled enough; I am not great at it because I mostly do liquid pectin recipes. 

Blueberry jam comes out super sweet with either method, while keeping a strong blueberry flavor.

If you haven't made a jam or jelly before, they are a very easy entry into canning.  They generally aren't much more plus fruit/juice plus sugar plus maybe some extra acid (usually lemon/lime juice or vinegar) plus some pectin, depending on the fruit.  You cook it, put it in hot jars, and process according to the recipe.  They're usually a water bath process, so if pressure intimidates you, you aren't dealing with that.  You don't even need a fancy canner - just a pot deep enough to cover the jars with water and some way to elevate the jars off the bottom to get good heat circulation around the whole jar.

This blueberry jelly recipe made me 8 jars plus a little extra; if you eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly, this can be a great way to get jelly flavors you can't find anywhere else.  I have done pina colada flavor, kiwi daiquiri, and (my hands-down favorite jelly) jalapeno.  If you're looking for a new cooking skill to pick up, I definitely recommend it.

Nature Writing

I've been taking nature writing classes for a couple years at the arboretum.  I signed up initially because it's been hard to make time to write the past few years, and this would get me to do a little.

Well, next week's topic is rocks, and I've had so much to say about rock-related stuff that it's sucked all my other writing energy; I look at my list of possible Blaugust posts, and my brain can't process any of the topics into thoughts.

I've been enjoying the classes; I hadn't taken a writing class of any sort since college, and nature writing is a genre I hadn't really engaged with before.  The main side effect is that somehow I have been writing poetry sporadically for the past year, which is also not my usual form, and it's been a bit confusing, but at least some writing is happening.

It may be like when I got the new piano and I was playing so much initially that I also ended up writing three or four new pieces: music begets music, writing begets writing.

I didn't realize just how much I like rocks until this week, although the gallon pickle jar full of them probably should have been a clue. 

New bookshelves!

Right, right, so the hubris of painlessly shifting the periodicals at work has been paid for.  The new bookshelves (Billy, from Ikea) are heavier than the old ones, and assembly, placing, moving the filing cabinet because they're also an inch wider, and moving stuff where the filing cabinet had to go, and shelving all the books was... a bit much for one day.  One of the height extensions was missing a pin, so that will be remedied when it gets here, but they're otherwise done, and things are back (mostly) in LC order.  I've been getting through today on ibuprofen.

Bookshelf preparations

The new bookshelves should arrive tomorrow, so I have spent much of the evening preparing as best I can.  I don't have room to just pull everything off and leave it on the floor or a bed right now, so I've pulled off all the fiction and done so with that.  That was relatively quick; I didn't finish the LP I was listening to before I had that done.  Then I put the rest of the books in rough LCC order.  Since everything will be moving again tomorrow, I focused on getting it by the primary letter rather than anything more granular; I can do that when I reshelve tomorrow.

I used to shelve in Dewey, but I've worked in an LCC library for twenty years, and after a while, it became more intuitive to switch.  I do the fiction alphabetical by author, in publication order, but I'm considering splitting out the juvenile books into their own section.  There are some exceptions to shelving in LCC order: oversized books, TTRPG books (they are too heavy and need to go on a bottom shelf), knitting and sewing books, cookbooks, the Zane Grey books, and The Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature.

With the new shelves, I will have six additional shelves' worth of space, and I should be able to mostly avoid shelving items two deep.  I'll still need to keep the oversized and TTRPG books on a bottom shelf for weight considerations, and I'll probably put the Zane Grey books on a bottom shelf, as well.

I've also discovered that I can use TinyCat for free as a personal library, so once the bookshelf project is done, I can try to reconcile my Goodreads (1190 books tagged as owned) and the import into LibraryThing (1188 books tagged as own) and the actual collection, since I keep finding things on the shelf that aren't in either.  (I have been told we had a CueCat barcode scanner at some point, but it is either gone or buried in the attic.)

Hopefully once the bookshelves have all been swapped, I can find things more easily again, since everything won't be buried behind other books.  I'm apparently up to two full shelves of foreign language learning books, and that's one thing I'd like to get back into. 

Garden 2025

In some ways, the garden this year is scaled back from what I've tried the past few years.  Other than the lima beans (which are doing... not much), I didn't try anything particularly new.  Sure, I've got 36 tomato plants, but that's getting to be normal for me.

Half the garden is in wildflowers this year again, and I'm still getting new things appearing as we get through the summer, since I just threw down a bunch of mixed wildflower seeds in the fall. I was delighted to see that the blanket flowers had come up, because I love the colors.  I also got larkspur (amazing color) and candytuft from the seed mix.  The California poppies came back strong, and I've got vetch that I'm debating leaving or pulling up.  The borage came back but is not drought tolerant, so if I don't water, it gets very sad.  I've been letting the milkweed go (hoping to get more pupating monarchs), and in early summer while it's blooming, it smells just like lilacs.  The cosmos have just started coming in, so we'll see if I get more of those, or just a few.  The flowers I'd love to have that I've had no luck getting to come in are goldenrod and New England asters, which would give me some great purple and gold in the late summer and fall.

 

The vegetable patch is doing much better than last year; I'm not struggling with the crab grass, probably due to the heavy mulch.  Besides 36 tomatoes, I've got zucchini and yellow squash (super productive), cantaloupe (refusing to trellis itself, but with four melons on the vine), broccoli, cabbage, jalapeno (have already made a batch of jelly), bell peppers (in progress), cucumbers (have made 3 different kinds of pickles/relish), butternut squash, watermelon, and sweet corn (lagging, probably needs another hit of nitrogen). 

 

 

The blackberries have been productive, but I've been neglecting them.  Maybe this weekend I can get out there and pick some.  The grape vine looks less full than last year, but that's fine, since it makes way more than I can use for jelly in a year.  The honeycrisp is setting fruit this year (unlike last year, where it hardly bloomed), but we'll see how it turns out since I haven't sprayed it (with kaolin clay, to dissuade the bugs).

Cat foibles

We have, as my bio most places usually mentions, two cats.  The cats have changed over the years, but they have always been indoor cats.

Zane, the younger cat

Right now our younger cat is in disagreement with us about being 100% indoor.  We don't mind taking him out on a leash, but he is definitely the kind of cat that wants to say hello to all the birds and critters with his claws (or maybe his stomach), and he also wants to taste all the plants.  All. The. Plants.  Thanks to the landscaping decisions of the previous owners of our house, there are at least three things in our yard that will probably sicken or kill him if he nibbles them, despite my efforts at eradicating two of them.  (The third, a clump of day lilies, I can probably just dig up, but they're over our gas line, so I've been shy about prodding that bed with a shovel too much.)

Jack, the elder cat

 

The elder cat, who is glaring at me as I type this, is only mildly outdoor curious, in that he likes to look out the windows, sometimes.  If nobody is observing him.  We put the harness on him once, and he crouch-walked backwards the entire length of the house trying to get out of it.  He does not want walks; he does not want to visit the yard; he doesn't want to be seen too directly to be looking out the window at the birds.  I'm pretty sure he would also want to say hello to them with his claws, if he weren't too terrified of actually being outside to do so.

Anyway, the younger cat snuck out again today when we brought in a package and got to spend 40 glorious minutes unsupervised in the yard until my husband noticed he had made himself scarce and went out and found him under the deck.  The first time he snuck out, he was out for about four hours before we realized he'd gotten out, and that's why, in addition to being chipped, he's got a collar with our phone number and a Tile tracker.  Luckily so far the Tile has just been used to find the collar when he kicks it off, but we recently updated it to a silicon case that holds it in such a way that he stops drowning it in the water dish and killing the batteries.

Despite the younger cat being the spicier of the two, the elder one is the one that consistently tries to get me up early to give them breakfast on his schedule.  He generally does this by meowing in my face, but if I ignore him, he not infrequently enlists the younger cat to jump up on my nightstand and start knocking things down.  (The elder cat is entirely capable of jumping up and doing this himself; I think they just have different understandings of the process of waking up a human.)  If it's earlier than five a.m. or later than six a.m., I am likely, at this point, to shut the bedroom door, sans cats.  In between that point, I'm probably going to have to go to the bathroom to fall back asleep (I don't know why there's a later than cutoff that my bladder doesn't care about), so they will likely get food.  I don't think they've figured out the time frame.  They were walking it back an hour every night for a while, and now the elder cat is trying about thirty minutes before my alarm goes off.  That is generally just a nope and roll over to go back to sleep from me.

The younger one is super food motivated (he was feral for a while at some point before we got him), but not food aggressive.  The elder cat will steal treats from him.  The younger cat will take treats from the elder one, but generally it's because I have tried to sneak in a calming treat, and elder cat deemed it not food.  (I'm not sure about the efficacy of the calming treats, because the younger cat seems more hyper on them, but the younger cat also ignores 4 gabapentin before vet visits and has to be sedated for them to feel his belly and do most of the checkup.) (They're really nice! He loves them until they try to make him do something.)

Anyway, it's bedtime, which means it's time for bedtime treats, so I will wrap up here before they get too insistent that I am late in providing said treats. 

Strength training

Back in 2023, I kept seeing things about strength training or resistance training being especially important for women over 40 to help maintain bone density.  Someone on one of the menopause forums I was lurking on recommended Strong Women Stay Young by Miriam E. Nelson, so I borrowed it from the public library.  The first half of the book is devoted to convincing women that strength training will be beneficial for them and won't make them bulk up, which I didn't care about, because I already knew I wanted to start doing some strength training.  So I skimmed ahead to the actual how-to.

The book covers several basic exercises one can do with free weights or ankle weights to help with maintaining strength and balance, and I found them easy to get into.  The only thing I found difficult was finding sufficient ankle weights that were both comfortable and able to scale up enough as I progressed; it's been almost 30 years since the book was originally published, and the equipment brands she recommends aren't still readily available.  At this point I've given up on the ankle weights and substituted other exercises for leg work.

At the moment, I'm doing:

• Biceps curls
• Triceps... I don't know what it's called, but I lift my arms overhead and then bend at the elbow to dip the weight behind me
• Upward rows
• Floor press
• Glute bridges
• Goblet squats
• Romanian deadlifts
• Kneeling wood chop
• Single-arm rows

I'm mostly using 8-lb. weights for everything at this point (including, as of last week, triceps, which had been plateaued at 5 lb. for over a year).  I like this routine because it's something I can do at home with not a lot of equipment that doesn't take up a lot of space.  At the time I was pricing out dumbbells, it was cheaper to buy each weight individually than to buy the set that lets you adjust the weight on a single pair of handles.  I've got 3, 5, 8, 10, and 12 lb. weights right now.

In November 2023, I got tendonitis in my right shoulder, and I thought it was because I'd gone up in weight too fast on the upward rows.  Spoiler: it was not.  Anyway, it took four months for my shoulder to get better.  Then in November 2024, it started up again!  That was when I figured it out: apparently putting a 2nd blanket on the bed for the winter made the blanket too heavy to pull up regularly when it would inevitably start sliding off the bed, probably partly because I have a woven cotton blanket as the bottom layer, and it created too much friction.  (Physics!)

So I've been doing my weights routine since then, twice a week, and this summer I got the first real payoff: I moved the bulk of our print serials at work, and nothing hurt.  I shifted or moved 1,250 linear feet of materials, over the course of about two weeks, and while it was gross and sweaty because our air conditioning wasn't on yet for a lot of it, I came out of it with nothing sore.  This means that none of the muscles I needed to do the work were getting neglected in my weights routine, and even though I'm only using 8-lb. dumbbells, that's enough.

If you're looking to get started, Strong Women Stay Young is a great introduction, and once you get comfortable with that, it's easy to change up some of the exercises either to keep things interesting or to find alternate ways to work muscle groups that you like better. 

Computer maintenance

Every Sunday, I do maintenance on my personal devices: desktop, laptop, tablet, e-reader, phone. I use the desktop and the phone every day, so regular OS and browser updates and the like happen for those as they come out, but my other devices are, at this point in my life, on an as-needed basis, so they may not get used in a particular week.  The impetus for the weekly maintenance was partly to keep my email from eating up all my Google storage space, partly to avoid data loss by incorporating regular backups (thanks, records management class), and partly to avoid my husband asking when I last updated my drivers when something is being wonky.

So what does this look like in practice?

1. I update my video card drivers, if there's been an update since the previous Sunday. I do not like the GeForce software that would do it automatically, so I just check.
2. I run a MalwareBytes scan on both the desktop and laptop computers.  My internet browsing habits are pretty boring, I don't download much of anything, and I'm running NoScript and uBlock Origin in Firefox, so not a lot sneaks in, so I'm just using the free version of MalwareBytes on my computers.  My phone has the paid version because it is harder to get by without, being tied in to logging in to so many things.
3. I use SMS Backup & Restore to back up my texts and calls to Google Drive automatically once a week, and then I delete the previous week's backup to free up space.  It's not perfect; there's some file bloat in the texts backup that I haven't bothered to troubleshoot.  But it does let me import all my texts and calls on a new phone if they don't come over automatically.
4. I back up any new pictures on my phone to my desktop.  I know two people who, in the past year, have lost all the pictures on their phone to some kind of phone error, and they had no backups.  A lot of my pictures aren't important in the long run, but we do take them for a reason.  With so many of our pictures being digital now, we don't have to worry about losing them to a natural disaster or the inherent vice of physical media, but only if we're avoiding the inherent vices of digital media and doing regular backups and maintenance. 
5. I reboot my phone.  I only recently started doing this, but my phone and my Fitbit have an on-again/off-again relationship, and regular reboots seems to help.
6. I back up all my Google Keep content to Drive.  This is pretty easy to do on the desktop browser version; you can use CTRL+A to select all, and if you do any selection, the top menu changes, including a 3-dots menu in the top right which includes copy to Google Drive.  It puts it all in one document in Drive, which I can then download to my desktop computer.  I do this for both the archived and unarchived notes, and then delete the previous week's files in Drive to save up space.  (You may have sensed a theme regarding Drive space, since I'm living within the free 15 GB for my account.)
7. I update all my tablet and e-reader apps.  Since both are off when I'm not using them, they don't just pull down real time updates.  Depending where their batteries are at, I may also charge them.
8. I update my laptop's OS and browsers, if needed.  At this point in my life, my laptop mostly gets used when I travel, but I also will pull it out if I need to do anything personal over lunch at work, or if I'm doing a lot of calendar reconciliation between my work calendar and my Google calendar.  (Other things I learned during my archives certificate: keep your work devices and personal devices separate so your personal devices don't run the risk of being pulled into discovery if your employer has to provide information/documents. I also avoid logging into my Google account on work computers.)
9. I export my Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file.  I don't have a log-in to sync Firefox; I just import my bookmarks as needed (and use a bookmark de-duplicator).
10. I delete all my email in Gmail that's tagged with my delete weekly tag (delw) if it's older than one week, and once a month delete all the delete monthly (delm) email from the previous month.  Anything that I get regularly that I want to get but that I'm not going to want to keep (basically, ad flyers, professional mailing lists, news alerts, etc.), I set up to label with either delw or delm, and then I do.  I also regularly evaluate (about once a year) what comes into those tags and unsubscribe from stuff I no longer want to get.  I don't bother backing up my Gmail much since it's also getting pulled into Outlook on my desktop (but I do delete stuff out of Outlook more often).
11. I use Microsoft SyncToy to back up my Documents folder from my desktop to a USB drive.  I've got a RAID array that it lives on in my computer already, and I think my husband has some kind of NAS backup set up, but the USB drive leaves the house with me, so if the house burns down while we're not home, I don't lose all my digital stuff.  I realize eventually SyncToy is going to break (it already will no longer back up my Documents to my laptop, but that's not really necessary while the backup to the USB is working), and I'll have to figure out a different file synchronization option.  I used to more regularly write while not home and used it to keep my writing synchronized between the USB drive and my desktop, but now it's more of a backup tool for me.

Anyway, that sounds like a lot, but it doesn't really take that long - maybe 15-30 minutes depending on how much needs to be done.  It's nice to not have to worry too much about a drive failing or the phone deleting all my pictures.

Another round of weeding

I'm getting new bookshelves next week, which means everything is going to have to come off the old ones so they can be removed.  In preparation for this, I've been taking another pass at thinning out the collection, and I'm still finding books that somehow aren't on my list of books we own.  I took about 80 books off the list of books owned, dropping us down to about 1200, but give how many knitting books I put in the donation pile that weren't on the list, I don't even know if 1200 is accurate.

I have one bag full of knitting books and one bag full of cookbooks.  I haven't thinned out either in a while, and they were both fairly easy to once I actually looked at them.  The cookbook criteria was basically do we actually cook anything out of it, and are we likely to?  Knitting books took more looking through, but if the patterns weren't written a size I could wear, they were easy picks to go.  Most of the remaining books are patterns I want to make that will fit, some planned gifts, and some aspirational crocheted doilies.  (I'm not really sure what I'll do with doilies, but they look interesting to make.)

Overall I think I've freed up about two and a half shelves' worth of space.  I've scheduled myself to empty and sort the books on Friday (probably back into LC since I should have the room), and the new bookshelves will arrive sometime Saturday.  I've got some miscellaneous tchotchkes to redistribute, as well, but since I moved the collectable tins into the living room, I've got some room for the stragglers there.

Hopefully when this is all done, I will actually be able to access all the TTRPG books without doing minor excavation to get to them.  And now that I've thinned out the knitting books, maybe I'll finally learn to make socks.

Hello again, Blaugust!

It's Blaugust again, so I'm going to try to post more regularly and see how it goes!  I will probably focus on the myriad hobby collection, but at the end of the month we're back to the academic year grind, so I may veer into some library- or work-related topics at that point, depending where my head's at.

Regardless, if you're also participating, happy blogging! 

Bread

So I'm making bread again.  I have a bread machine, so I can really do this any time I want with set-it-and-forget-it convenience, but it makes 1.5 or 2 pound loaves, and I can't realistically eat it fast enough to get through that much bread.  (I mean, I probably could, but it's not my habit.)  I have a great bread machine recipe book, too.  Most of the loaves turn out too soft for sandwich bread, though.

Instead I'm making Diane Duane and Peter Morwood's bread recipe, in a Pullman pan, because I want sandwich bread that fits in my sandwich containers.  (The Pullman style pan was an adventure in itself; I got it on sale from Amazon, and they initially shipped me a bag of dog treats. ???  I got the pan on the second try.)  Now as I'm writing this, I realize I'm doing the simplified version that was on Tumblr.

Anyway, the first time I made it, my little mixer could not handle the kneading.  It tried, but I ended up kneading it by hand.  The second time I made it was after my husband got me a KitchenAid mixer for an early birthday present, and that's what I've got going right now in the kitchen, kneading the modified version I'm doing.

Modified how?  I mathed it down to an actual 1 pound loaf, since I want it to fit in the pan I've got without overflowing.  That makes it 16 ounces of bread flour, about a quarter ounce each of yeast and salt, 15 1/3 tablespoons of water (just under a cup), and about 2 tablespoons of oil.  That came out fine the first time I made it.

The second loaf I made with the 1 pound recipe was mostly all-purpose flour (I ran out of bread flour), and I added an egg and swapped in milk instead of water; it tasted fine and had a nice texture for sandwiches, but it did not rise well.  (My yeast is getting older, so that may be part of the problem... or I needed more because of the other substitutions.)

This time I've mostly used the base 1 pound recipe, but substituted 1/4 cup of flax meal for 1/4 of flour, and I added an egg again since I think it does well for the sandwich texture.  I did end up adding about a half a cup of flour to get it to come together, so either it's really humid today (probably; we're expecting rain) or I can just add the flax meal without taking out any flour.  I'll find out how that turns out in a couple hours.  Hopefully well, because I made blueberry jam yesterday that is amazing (thank you, Ball Preserving book), and I'm kind of planning on that for lunch several days this week.

Anyway, here's the mixer that's saving me from kneading dough by hand.  It's a KitchenAid Professional 600 series, and he found it very on sale.  I wasn't sure I was going to like the bowl lift, but it's been fine.  It's also like, 25 pounds, so it is living on the kitchen counter now so I don't have to move it much.

So far I've used it once to make meatball mix (I hate touching raw meat and this plus the new cookie scoop were great for meatballs), bread 3 times, and sweet roll dough once.  I think next weekend I might make cookies again to see if the smaller cookie scoop turns out better.  I've kept the old mixer because it's fine for things like buttercream frosting and cake mixes and whatnot, and it's a smaller bowl, so that's less room in the dishwasher when I'm making something smaller.  When it eventually dies (it's about 14 years old), I won't bother replacing it, but it's fine while we've still got it.

Joy and Music

So I've been reflecting on joy again recently.  The keynote by Naila Ansari at the SUNYLA conference in June was, in part, about joy (as well as archives and archival silences and community), and the word has been floating around again the past week or so.  And then I'm driving to work this morning, and I've got my energy playlist up because it is not below the fold, so to speak, on the screen like my current vibes playlist is, and I never remember to switch VLC on my phone off my sleep playlist until I get into the car and backed out of the driveway, and I don't like to fiddle with the screen too much while I'm driving.

Anyway, I'm driving to work, and Holst's Jupiter comes up as I get to campus, and I'm thinking about the anecdotes about The Planets and how the cleaning ladies were dancing in the aisles during the rehearsal for Jupiter.  I turn the volume up for Jupiter; my husband got us tickets to see The Planets live in New York City at the Lincoln Center years ago, and live music that I like affects me pretty strongly.  (I was similarly thrilled to go see a Vince Guaraldi Christmas music tribute.)  So I'm a bit verklempt by the time I get to work, and it was kind of good that there was no parking (due to some event that took up all the close parking) and I had to drive around to the other side of campus for parking so I could emotionally settle again.

And so I'm thinking: I need to make a playlist for joy.  With Jupiter and I don't know what else yet, because I haven't had a chance to actually put it together.  "An die Freude" and the Flying Theme from E.T. and "Joy to the World/Jeremiah was a bullfrog" and??? 

There is some music for me that the joy is in the listening, and some that's in the playing/singing, so Moonlight Sonata is not likely to be on it (because that's a playing one, and I... critique the recordings of it I have).  And it's not the same as my energy playlist: that has music chosen because it works well for either exercising or staying pepped up while working, similar to how my mom would put on the Mike Post TV themes album or Queen's greatest hits or Harry sometimes for big cleaning days.  The joy playlist would be more like the feeling I get from a fireworks show, where I want to be close enough to feel the concussion of the blasts. (I recommend going to fireworks at the Empire State Plaza for this.)

In some regards this has been a longer introspection than just going back to June; I read Marie Kondo's book several years ago, and as someone who collects hobbies, reflecting on why I am doing them and what purpose they serve in my life has been useful.  It's why I got a new piano and play regularly again after years of not.  It's why I'm trying to find time in my life again to write regularly (still a work in progress).  It's why I've tried to be more intentional with my time and do pros and cons evaluations (and time audits) rather than just taking on every opportunity/committee/hobby that looks interesting.  (Somehow I am inadvertently on the governing boards for three professional organizations anyway for the next two years, but I have acknowledged that I am At Capacity and am not accepting additional responsibilities at the moment.)

A joy playlist, at least, shouldn't require anything new; I have access to a good-sized music collection (I have been buying CDs for 30 years now).  And since I deleted my music folder on my phone and redid it, VLC has stopped wiping my playlists every time it rescans for media. (If you are having this problem, I fixed it by not having all the music files in one folder, but having them in folders by artist/album.)  So I can safely make playlists without having to redo them every couple of days.  Preferably it will not all be stuff that makes me happy-cry, because that's not particularly helpful while driving.

Anyway, that will probably take me all weekend.  Scrolling through 6000+ songs in VLC takes a while.  And then my morning commute can, until I feel like I need a new playlist for something I'm writing, focus on joy.  Maybe we can sustain that feeling through November, and my NaNoWriMo story won't get derailed by some new panic this year.

World of Warcraft 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition

I didn't plan to make a post about this, partly because I had thought it was not happening.  Fedex delivered my package somewhere else (with a photo confirming it had not been at our house) and couldn't find it again.  Luckily it turned up at the house of neighbors who were out of town at the time of delivery.

The War Within part of the collector's edition is pretty stripped down compared to past collector's editions: you get an art book and a pin, but there's no soundtrack (physical or download code) and no mouse pad.  The game key (which, in-game, does have a goodly amount of bonuses) does not come in the CE box itself, but is in a little envelope in the packing foam, so if you buy one of these third-party in the future, even if the package is still in the plastic, you may not get the game key

 

 

The CE box is a pretty sturdy clam-shell style with some subtle holographic effects that I couldn't get to photograph, and the art book is similar to previous editions.  The pin also seems to be of decent quality and has been added to the bookshelf next to the Shadowlands and Dragonflight pins.  (I should probably pull the art books out sometime and put them on the bookshelf, too.)

The gryphon rider, like Ragnaros before him, comes with some assembly required, but while Rags was just a couple pieces, the gryphon rider is six.  The tail boops out kind of easily, so if you have cats, be aware.

I need to rearrange the shelves over the piano to get this pair next to Ragnaros still and make it slightly less cat accessible. I can get behind the piano to retrieve the tail if needed, but it is a pain.

The lack of a soundtrack in both this and the Dragonflight CE is disappointing; that was my favorite thing in all the previous boxed sets.  I'm still not sure if I feel this was worth $180 (and while it was in shipping limbo I was debating if I would even bother repurchasing it), but compared to the digital epic edition, you're basically paying $90 for the statue, art book, and pin, so it doesn't seem too out of line.

Hello, Blaugust!

So I signed up for Blaugust this year.  This is a new-to-me event; I already have a bunch of unfinished drafts I wanted to finish, so it seemed serendipitous that I saw the event mentioned on Bluesky around when I was trying to decide when/how frequently I wanted to get them done.

I have no grand plans for the month - I just want to work through the backlog of unfinished posts and briefly review some of the books I have read thus far this year. Maybe I will post some garden updates (spoiler: crabgrass) and other hobby-related stuff, as well.