kayray.org

Excellent day. Drove Chloe to the airport in the mid-morning. Didn’t need GPS to tell me how to get there and back. Easy drive, no traffic.

DF came over in the afternoon and we had lunch at our regular place, Falafel Corner. He likes the gyros wrap; I get the Greek salad or dolmas. Super-fresh, tasty, reasonable prices, friendly staff, 2 minutes from home. And they have Martinelli’s sparkling apple juice!

After lunch we just lay around and talked and laughed for the rest of the day. I was very tired from my drive to the airport but he is incredibly understanding and perfectly happy to do nothing with me. *heart eyes*

View post on imgur.com

Lots of pain today. Ouch. There’s always some, but occasionally it hits hard in multiple places. Knees, hips, feet today. Have iced, taken Tylenol, rubbed on Aspercreme. Just took 2.5mg THC to see if that will help — I usually eat my THC gummy at bedtime but I’m fine with getting sleepy earlier today if it will dull the pain.

Watched some Sewing Bee with Chloe. So sweet, friendly, and soothing. And she reminded me that Bake Off will probably start again in a month or two, along with season 3 of Succession and the first new Survivor season since Covid!

When Henry was a wee boy, so, like, 20 years ago, we used to get these great audio CDs from the library. They were themed folk music interspersed with narration about the relevant historical era/situation, performed by a husband-and-wife team, Keith and Rusty McNeil (plus some extra musicians). We loved them! Many years later I went looking for them online but all I could find were CDs. Awkward.

A few days ago we were talking about one of their songs (The Work of the Weavers) in our Discord channel so Henry went looking again and found them ALL on Bandcamp! HOORAY!!! Thank you, Keith and Rusty, for joining the digital age and letting us stream your music!! https://wemrecords.bandcamp.com/

The collections we’re familiar with are “Colonial and Revolution Songs”, “Working and Union Songs”, and “Moving West Songs”, but my goodness there’s a wealth of others. I highly recommend them, especially for homeschoolers and other permanently curious people! Stylistically they are pleasantly rough and folky — not slick and polished like “Peter, Paul, and Mary” or other commercial “folk” groups. Just right.

Chloe is here! She’s my favorite cousin and dear friend. She has the week off work so she flew up for a short visit. YAY!

Still recovering from the 4th. I managed to go to Trader Joe’s for groceries this morning but I forgot to buy goat cheese! So I rested for a bit and then went back out to Sprouts. Their goat cheese logs are smaller and more expensive, but a lot creamier so it’s all good.

The word “their” is looking really strange to me. Is that how you spell it? Their their their. I guess so but it doesn’t even look like English.

So anyway! Played some WoW, finished a library audiobook (Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford), watched some Taskmaster. Now it’s 6:30 and not long till bedtime yay!

Wiped out. Did nothing all day.

It’s the Fourth of July! In our city we’re allowed to have small fireworks! And we have a bunch of friends over — maybe 20 people: K&M’s friends, Em’s friends, my wonderful boyfriend Dave. We’ve all been hanging out in the front yard for hours, waiting for it to get dark. Big barbecue feast, chat, margaritas mixed by Bunny Bill the Bartender. The kids are running around shrieking and playing with sparklers. It’s after 8 so it’ll be dark enough for fireworks any minute now! BOOM!

Tired and headachey today. Took my little walk and made cauliflower cheese in the morning, watched a couple of murder shows, played Words With Friends with DF all day <3

I reinstalled Words With Friends (classic) to play with DF. So much fun! But wow, it has changed a lot since we all started playing in 2009. Remember that? It was so popular that the servers were constantly overloaded. I guess I bought it back then because it’s not shoving ads in my face after every turn like it does for DF. So many ads. So many OFFERS.

Ah well. Gameplay is still the same and still tons of fun!

Reminded me of We Rule, another early and incredibly popular iPhone game that had a lot of issues. We played and played and played (when the servers were up). Pity that one hasn’t followed Words With Friends into the future.

Oh MAN have I been having fun with Discord! Henry and I listen to music or podcasts together most mornings, and watch some youtube or whatever later on. He discovers wonderful things on YouTube to share with me — Baumgartner Restoration, of course — I’ve shared a couple of those videos here. Today we watched two from Technology Connections about how hurricane lamps work. Fascinating. Jenny Nicholson critiques pop culture in an intelligent and entertaining way. We watched her episode about possibly the worst book ever written: Trigger Warning. We were howling. Also watched her ep about The Greatest Showman, a movie I loathed. It’s easy to say something sucks but a lot harder to say exactly why it sucks!