Pertinent to my Interests

Documentary reviews, body neutrality, parenting, Jupiter, piano, cats, European history, ghosts, rodents, the collapse of civilization, and if this goes on long enough I'll probably end up cataloguing my entire smushed penny collection.

Month: February 2024

  • The radical messaging of Ted Lasso

    Spoiler warning for Ted Lasso season one. Just stop here if you haven’t watched it yet. I watched the last episode of Ted Lasso season one today while doing my workout in the basement. Here is a list of all the scenes that brought tears to my eyes:1. Nate getting promoted2. Ted’s pre-game speech about…

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  • Pertinent to my Interests: Cemetery Iconography

    I just finished reading Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism by Douglas Keister. Despite my deep appreciation for cemeteries–and my habit of dragging my grumpy kids through them–I didn’t know much about the symbolism on gravestones. If you had asked me a week ago to type out a list of everything I…

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  • 22 years of mocking the Midwestern landscape

    The first time I set foot in Minnesota was in February of 2002. Math tells me that this was 22 years ago, but my heart tells me it was about sixteen lifetimes ago. My mom and I flew into town for the weekend to visit colleges. We were staying with old church friends in Minneapolis…

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  • Odds & Ends

    We went to our cabin this weekend, just for one night. It was the first time since October that the whole family was up together. The kids spent some quality time making a hole through the ice on the lake and tending the fire and playing Wii Sports Resort. I spent some quality time reading…

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  • Cats & Cadbury Creme Eggs & Contemplation

    I did a meditation on positivity this morning. The guide instructed me to think of something that was going well for me right at that moment. The basement doesn’t smell like cat litter right now. After pondering this for a few minutes I was then instructed to think of something that might go well for…

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  • Homemaker

    I was registering for an account on a website yesterday and they asked me for information about my occupation. There was an entire page of dropdown menus for filling in clarifying details about your job. I picked “homemaker” from the first dropdown and immediately every other question on the page vanished. Huh. No further questions,…

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  • Mondays

    I tend to get a lot of tidying done on Mondays, mostly because Monday is grocery shopping day and grocery shopping is the worst. I would rather clean multiple toilets every day for the rest of my life than have to be in charge of meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking. So I will spend…

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  • People Who Enjoy Cooking

    People who enjoy cooking: would you consider yourself a morning person or a night person? I think part of my issue with cooking dinner every night is the timing. My energy level drops at about 4 PM every day. I get a slight boost around 7 PM but after that I am just DONE. I…

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  • Trying to stay rooted in the real world on this here blog.

    I’m a little frustrated with how maudlin this blog has become, but I guess that’s where my mind is at these days. I’ve also been struggling to keep my posts rooted in the real world. I was going to write a whole post about my kid’s birthday sleepover and it was becoming a meditation on…

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  • Brave

    My youngest and I have been going roller skating lately. I loved roller skating when I was a kid. I had my own pair of white roller skates with pink wheels, and I think my eighth or ninth birthday party was at a roller rink. I am incredibly unathletic, but I remember zooming around the…

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