I sometimes like to know the general area someone’s from (country or state), so I understand the context of their experience or point of view. It’s not anything I would push if the person felt uncomfortable sharing. That sounds like a red flag.

In case anyone wants cheap canvases, look for them at thrift stores. I just gesso over whatever’s on them.

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first Invent the universe. - Carl Sagan, sounding like Douglas Adams.

The Immune Mind by Dr Marty Lymon, about how the nervous system and Immune system work in concert to keep us healthy.

What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher. Just started, so no opinion yet, but I loved The Hollow Places.

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

And I needed a physical book to read on the beach, so I’ve also just started All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, and I’m really impressed by the prose so far.

Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wanted it to be. But every few nights something—or someone—picks off one of the sheep and sets off a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. But there is also Jake’s past—hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back—a past that threatens to break into the present.

You can at least go to the medium place.

Watching Ted Lasso made me wish I had a sportsball community to be part of.

I’m in Virginia. Don’t have $3k or any clue what I would do with that.