Robert Hutchinson

Had a moment of spiraling today, not fully recovered, of uncertain origin. I suspect it's a combination of overscheduling (planning for multiple trips in the near future) and a drop of sociality. I'm definitely starting to feel the lack of theater rehearsal/performances, compounded with seeing a bunch of familiar faces of years past. I need to get out of the stasis of longing for those connections and do some work to maintain them, but the time! The time! Where does it go!?

Maybe I should have taken more time tonight to reestablish those connections, but at least I got one thank you letter out to one of the reunion organizers, and I'll try to get more this week. But some of the priorities of the evening also felt good. I didn't let my emotions dissuade me from cooking dinner, and it turned out okay. The only mistake was not preparing some pasta with what I thought was a dish that could stand on its own. And it kind of did, but would have been better with some farfalle. I also took a long shower and watched a great episode of Crowd Control.

Listened to an episode of Pseudopod while walking the dog, and though I'd hoped for a real banger to mark my return to the series, #1046(!) "Annie's Heart Is a Haunted House" (by Todd Keisling) didn't really do it for me. I don't think it was a great choice of narrator, and the story felt like it traded a bit too much in cliches. Still, I might spend more time getting back into the podcast during "Spooky Season."

Generally the only podcast mainstay has been Shelved by Genre, whose "Lord of the Year" project has reached The Silmarillion. I've chosen not to read along, even though I'd never read it before, and I feel like this might be a good choice. It's fun to try to get by with only knowledge of Catholocism.

The vaccine slump hit today, with strange dreams and wildly fluctuating energy. A few times today I just . . . stopped for a bit. I lay on the floor with a cordless drill after moving a low shelf and stayed there with Barklee for maybe a half hour before resuming. But now I can accumulate some more books in the office, with a focus on the zines and Enigmas that have been hanging around the desk.

Psyche went out for the See's candy sale on nougat. We exported her data from Facebook. Watched Taskmaster 22.1 and Shrinking 3.7. Then, I was inspired by the LearnedLeague Gen X Movie Trivia samples to watch Over the Top on Tubi, and because she also got vaccines yesterday, Psyche decided not to bail on it. It's got it's charms, but that's a long ninety-three minutes.

We have our Covid/flu boosters, and we planned for a quiet day. Psyche got hit with a bonus nap (after getting a TDAP I didn't have to deal with), but I seem to have mostly escaped. The rest of the day was mostly household computer maintenance: transferring Bandcamp purchases into my music library, continuing to set up non-Google calendars and emails.

I have to say that routing email addresses through aliases using SimpleLogin is a lot of fun for me, and I hope Psyche enjoys it too.

Beyond Fest blitz went pretty well. Got The Devils at the Aero, not the Egyptian, but that's not so bad. I also missed tickets for Wicker, but I got first on a waitlist, so that's promising, as long as I can get my Discord notifications working (I had an issue with them crapping out on me earlier this year for Bleak Week).

We started planning out a longer week of vacation, too, and added Campeón Gabacho, with plans to pick up some more of the free Mubi screenings on Thursday and Friday.

Still too hot, but not too, too hot. I grilled some chicken and mushrooms and served them with cool-ranch doritos for dinner. Then I spent the evening fixing up Psyche's Proton accounts, to get her moved further away from Google.