Week In Review 2026-06-06
This weekly update covers Sunday 05-31-26 through Saturday 06-06-26 (an icon Glossary, if needed).
LIFE
- 🈁 A busy week with being on-call at work, and making funeral arrangements for my mother.
- 📕 By the time this entry gets published, I will be driving back from Chicago. Payment will have been made for my mother’s funeral and for half of her new tombstone. The funeral will be on Friday, July 10 at 11:30 AM.
- 📜 My mental energies were consumed by on-call duties and the funeral arrangements, so there aren’t many other stories from this week.
- ❤️🩹 Bloodwork results came back, and nothing alarming was noted. Cholesterol is at 138, thanks to statins and GLP-1.
EXPLORE
- 🎨 I will have picked up the Canon camera and lens mentioned last week while in Chicago. Oh, and somehow I squeezed in enough time to write a Randoming post on Wednesday 06-03.
- 🔬 Installed beta of Aphera 1.0 (macOS), which is a RAW photo editor for the Mac. Unfortunately, time hasn’t allowed me to do more than just get it installed.
- 🪟 I had a “normal” Sunday 05-31 at church, followed by coffee and grocery shopping. Worked remotely on Wednesday 06–03 at Living Room prior to a long-overdue haircut at Idle Hands Grooming. Went to a nearby liquor store on Thursday 06-04 after work for a brief Basque wine tasting, and bought a bottle home for Laura.
MEDIA
- 📰 Dion Jordan was poised for NFL stardom. Now he’s living a life no one could have imagined, The Athletic. Eureka College is one of the few schools I know of smaller than mine (or L.’s, for that matter). It’s obviously famous as the alma mater of our 40th President, but I hope that Dion Jordan can one day rival his notoriety.
- 📰 Foundational Texts: Puzzle Pieces, Dan Sinker/blog. I also had a well-worn copy of The Westing Game at one point, but many of those books never made it with me to STL. It likely got caught up with my siblings and/or was donated when my family moved out of their long-standing house in Elmhurst, IL. A movie version exists, but far too many visuals are ingrained in my head from re-reading this book that I may “reject” what the movie decides to show.
- 📰 O’Keeffe Country was never O’Keeffe’s to begin with, High Country News. A review of my only favorite part of the O’Keeffe Museum. More about the exhibit can be seen here.
- 🎬 We Investigated One of America’s Best Birding Spots (Montrose Point), Badgerland Birding. I doubt that I will have time to visit this birding spot during my brief Chicago trip, but it’s definitely on my list for the future. The Piping Plovers are famous, but there are plenty of other birds to check out here.
- 🎬 10-Hour Overnight Ferry Escape to a Tokyo Island for Supermarket Sushi, Solo Travel Japan. The islands controlled by Tokyo are quite a haul from the actual city, and are literally and metaphorically a world away. Taking a ferry to Hachijō-jima to eat supermarket sushi is such an odd flex of time and money, I can only appreciate and admire the absurdity of it all.
- 🎬 Boards Of Canada, Inferno. Yep, finally listened to it at home. I will have listened to it again on my road trip. It’s a more vivid expression of earlier BoC albums, mixing in a fair amount of later-era gloom and creepiness with earlier-era nostalgic vibes (and creepiness). Part of me thinks this may be a final release from BoC, and if it were, it would be a perfectly appropriate way to go out.
WORK
- 🏥 On-call came and went, and I’m glad it’s over. This week’s highlight included a man who constantly reopened the same trouble ticket because he didn’t like the (correct) answer given to him by several different people, including my supervisor. On a brighter note, the number of tickets has steadily dwindled, and may actually dip under 100 next week if things don’t break elsewhere!
OTHER
- 🗣️ The best time to save money was a long time ago. The second-best time is now.
NEXT
- 🔮 Possible photos from Caira? Yes, as it will come with me during the Chicago trip!
PICTURE
- 📸 A few days after my return from New Mexico, the folks whose house L. & I watched let us know about a bird we weren't able to see during our stay. Their backyard which attracted so many birds also attracted this much larger lady, though at an early morning time much earlier than when we would arise.
