1. I’ve been kicking tires and shifting things and getting the new Astro installation for this site fully operational. I think it’s pretty close now. I had to fix a million broken links and then knock around a bunch of build stuff, but that works now. I also have a bunch of static pages for books and stuff that are in the process of being moved, so stuff like Atmospheres mostly works now. If you find broken things, let me know, but I’m not investing a ton of time in chasing down broken external links from 2002.

2. Atmospheres rerelease: already posted about that, but check it out if you haven’t already.

3. I talk about the book cover a bit in the Editor’s Notes, but that text got locked down before I actually finished the cover. I’d started the layout with the same graphic from the 2014 edition, which is some clouds and smoke from Maui in 2013. When I started messing with the cover, the art looked way too noisy and weird, and hitting that fictional enhance button in Photoshop wasn’t doing anything. I swapped out a different picture, but totally forgot to mention that in the text. So, addendum to the addendum.

4. The new picture is from my 2022 trip to Denver. I was on a walk before dinner in the abandoned industrial park area of Centennial, and the sky suddenly filled with dark, intricate clouds, the precursor to a massive thunderstorm. I turned around and headed back, but shot away with my Canon 5DS and the 24–70 f/2.8L I’d bought that very day. I only had that 5DS for two trips (this and Sweden), and I was fighting it constantly to get okay shots. So, I’m glad I got a book cover (spoiler alert: or two) out of it.

5. I’m back on editing Atmospheres 2, and I’m maybe 25% through what might be the last draft. I’ve been struggling to get this book out basically since 2014, and I really need to get it done. Going through it right after editing the first one is pretty interesting. I think it has the same feel or spirit to it, but it’s much longer (140,000 words versus 60,000), and probably has more of a structured plot, although it’s still not plotted like a murder mystery or a Pixar movie. Hoping to land this thing by the end of summer.

6. Still riding my bike every day. I also just finished some work on my Cannondale Topstone 4, the gravel bike. I switched the drop handlebars for a carbon fiber straight bar, which might be considered sacrilege to many, but my neck and shoulders could not deal with drop bars. This required changing the gearshift and brake levers, and I ran into cable trouble, but I think everything’s fine now. The bike is now ridiculously light compared to my daily, and will be a lot of fun off-road.

7. The cats had their first vet visit. I thought Zuzu would be trouble, because I can’t even get within ten feet of her most of the time. Four of us were able to get her wrapped, inspected, and injected. Diego was 100% noncompliant and we had to skip him. He also gashed my pretty good in the hand, and it looked like I slashed my palm to take a blood oath with someone. The doctor gave us drugs (for him, not me) and we’ll try again later. We did a dry run last night, giving him Gabapentin in a treat. He ate it, but wasn’t entire into being knocked out. I did at least weigh him, and he’s now 14.5 pounds. So I’m expecting the same diet-and-exercise lecture every single doctor ever gives me, even though my current BMI is probably below normal now.

8. I try not to go to the mall that much anymore, but I went to Stoneridge today and the JC Penney there has closed. This really throws me off, not because I needed to buy some Arizona jeans, but because by default I always park in front of that store. Now I park there but have to walk over to the next entrance, and the whole thing throws me. I think far too much about this, and how I always park at the same exact place at every mall I’ve ever regularly visited. Like at Concord, it was at the Wards by the door closest to the Automotive entrance. At University Park in Bloomington, I always parked by the Sears on the west side. That mall is still there, but the Sears is long gone, razed and replaced with a Fresh Thyme grocery store and a little row of outward-facing shops. University Park Mall in Mishawaka, I always park north of the JC Penney. I don’t know why I always have to park in the same exact spot, and if other more sane people just park at the first place they can find a spot or what. Anyway.

9. I’m now at the part of the trip cycle where I’m clamoring to take another vacation in a few months, but don’t know where. This is a long and multi-dimensional decision. Whatever you were about to suggest, probably not there.

10. There were only nine things. There were three posts this month, though. That’s progress. The last time I had four posts in a month was 2024. August 2023 had seven posts in a month, which is unusual. I remember various times I thought about posting every single day, and I have no idea how I’d ever do that, short of quitting my job and making this my main project.

• I just paid my annual hosting bill for this site. It’s a bit depressing, because when I calculate how many posts I make per year, it averages out to like ten bucks per post, unless I make a whole bunch of entries in the next two months.
• The Apple Airpod Pro release made me think I should make a lengthy post about every pair of headphones I’ve bought in the last few years, and why they ultimately didn’t work out. I have a bit of a problem when it comes to headphones, and can never find something that works perfectly. Then I spend an inordinate amount of time shopping for something that maybe would.
• I’m 100% sure if I did buy Airpods, they would fall right out of my ear and I’d lose them, anyway.
• I am not near the fires, and I haven’t lost power, so let’s not get into that.
• Caviar got bought by DoorDash. This also pisses me off, because DoorDash is a horrible company and Caviar has been great. I realize food delivery is lazy, but I am lazy.
• There is this outdoor mall thing about a mile from my house. (Bay Street in Emeryville). Anyway, they at one time had like a dozen restaurants, and now they have one. In the last couple of weeks, Buckhorn and Fuddrucker’s closed, and Rubio’s closed a bit before that. Now there’s an upper level where every single store is closed except California Pizza Kitchen. I eat at CPK way too much, but when that closes, I’m done.
• There’s also a Barnes and Noble in that mall, and I used to hate B&N and see them as this company that killed indie book stores (I talked about this before, sorry) and anyway, it’s only a matter of time before they shutter that place, too.
• This outdoor mall was literally built on an Indian burial ground. I used to go to Weight Watchers with a retired Archaeology professor who was hired by the builders to dig around and identify graves and whatnot. Maybe that’s why they can’t keep any restaurants going there.
• I think they discontinued the deodorant I have used since like 1993, and I have to switch to another. That kind of thing really pisses me off.
• I hate to sound like an old person when I talk about this stuff closing, but it’s depressing, and makes me think a lot about how everything dies, including all of us, and I can’t process that. When I hit 50 soon, look for this worry train to go completely thermonuclear.
• Speaking of DoorDash, I just placed a Caviar order at a place that’s usually pretty quick to fill deliveries, and got a text now saying the order will be late. The last time I ordered from DoorDash, they did this like three times and then completely no-showed. And so it begins.

1. I was on this stupid thing where I thought I should start carrying a fake phone and wallet in case I was mugged. So I bought an iPhone 3G for $20 on eBay, which is the same exact phone I had nine years ago. It is ridiculously small and uses a different dock connector and has a shit camera and plastic back and is missing about every feature you could imagine. No Siri, no Apple Pay, no Find my Phone, no Facetime, no front camera. The OS is stuck like six or seven versions ago. I think the current Facebook app wouldn’t even fit on this phone. It’s sort of wonderful.

2. My allergies are so insanely bad since I got back from Alaska. I always joke about moving there like the Anthony Edwards character from Northern Exposure, who lived in a geodesic dome to escape his allergies, but I’ll be god damned, that would actually work.

3. My new watch tracks my sleep now with the Sleep++ app, and I don’t have to remember to start the app first - it just figures it out. It’s amazing to see how much I sleep when I take Ambien, and how many times I wake up in the middle of the night when I don’t.

4. For some freak reason, I didn’t drive my car at all this week. When I had to drive somewhere Friday, it was caked with a layer of dirt like I’d left it outside at Mt. St. Helen’s in 1980 or whenever that was.

5. I remember people selling bottles and jars of ashes after M.S.H. blew up. This was all pre-internet, so I’m not sure how I knew about this. Maybe it was in the el-cheapo ads in the very back of Parade magazine, where they normally sold biblical coins that were supposed to be older than Jesus but were actually punched out of sheet metal from Ford Pintos and then artificially aged in vats of Coca-Cola.

6. I’ve been writing the bulk of my next book by hand. No reason, except I write a lot of it in diners. It’s challenging, because I can’t read my own handwriting, and I only get maybe a hundred words per page of these little pocket notebooks.

7. I started reading about the bad effects of cortisol, the stress hormone, and how it stops you from losing fat and makes allergies worse, and now I am convinced that is like the nexus of every problem I have right now. And googling “get rid of cortisol” gives you ten million pages that basically just say to sleep more and be happy about your life, and maybe eat more salad.

8. I subscribed to a Facebook group about people who grew up in my home town, and everyone in the group is functionally illiterate. Like, they don’t know the difference between “to,” “two,” and “too.”

9. I also looked up my home town on TripAdvisor, and the top ten restaurants included Cracker Barrel, Perkin’s, and Texas Roadhouse.

10. I was going to go on a big rant about tenderloin sandwiches and mandala effect, but my dinner is here. (I ordered a salad for some inexplicable reason. Maybe the cortisol thing. I need to stop it with the Joe Rogan Podcast.)

1. Turkey + Cheddar Cracker Stackers
2. Turkey + American Cracker Stackers
3. Pizza with Pepperoni
4. Nachos, Cheese Dip + Salsa
5. Extra Cheesy Pizza
6. Mini Hot Dogs (only if heated)
7. Ham + American Cracker Stackers
8. Chicken Dunks
9. Pizza Kabobbles
10. Turkey + Cheddar Lower Fat Cracker Stackers
11. Mini Burgers
12. Light Bologna + American Cracker Stackers
13. Any of the ones without juice
14. Any of the ones with the bullshit 100% juice instead of Capri Sun

• I hate end-of-year lists. I didn’t even know it was 2014 for half of the year, and I can’t remember what I wrote, read, bought, or otherwise did. I published two books, and worked on two others, but you probably already know that.
• I fell down a brief Jack Kevorkian k-hole the other day, probably because I spent too much time at the airport. I really want a copy of his jazz album. It always fascinates me when someone famous for one thing has a side-passion in something completely different.
• This isn’t a good example, but I always found it interesting how prior to his career in blowing shit up, Ted Kazczynski was a math prodigy, and published several academic papers, mostly about boundary functions.
• Both Kevorkian and Kazczynski went to University of Michigan.  (Not at the same time.)
• I went to the same school as Jim Jones, Meg Cabot, and Joe Buck. (Jones was obviously before my time. Cabot lived in my dorm, I think, but I never knew her. I refuse to discuss Joe Buck.)
• I went to Wisconsin for the holiday. I got sick. It did not snow. I’m still sick.
• I guess a new year’s resolution, even though I hate them, is to not get sick anymore. This would probably involve jogging or something, and maybe not eating at Taco Bell four times a week.
• A k-hole I plan to fall down, when I get off the DayQuil/NyQuil roller coaster, is Oulipo, and Raymond Queneau’s movement on constrained writing. He did this thing called A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, which is like a paper version of those random headline generators, but from 1961. I don’t know any French, and I have no idea what I’m talking about, but it’s a good rabbit hole to fall down, maybe.
• I have some fascination with constrained writing only because I wrote a ton of stuff just like Atmospheres, and then after the audio book and having to re-read it a dozen times, got really sick of that kind of writing, and thought I needed to write another book where the prose was much more simple. I don’t know what rules I would follow, other than to make it less manic, and maybe stop drinking Red Bull.
• I was futzing with this app called Hemingway, which calculates the grade level of your writing and points out passive voice and stuff that’s hard to read. Most of the stuff I wrote in Atmospheres is way above the 12th grade level. I think I should just write books of lists at the 3rd grade level.
• Not to be confused with The Hemingwrite, which is a hipster digital typewriter for about $400, and a kickstarter, which means you probably won’t get it until 2027.
• I am about 4 for 17 on kickstarters, and just got in the mail this stupid pet camera I must have ordered in like 2011. It showed up right after we got back from vacation, so it’s sort of useless.
• In 13 minutes, I get to take another dose of DayQuil. I’m pretty happy about that.
• Other vague resolutions that aren’t are the usual: write more, ignore the news, lose weight, hail satan, etc. You?