Category — Uncategorized

Last year, we got a membership to the aquarium because I thought it would make me happy to be back in a space where I took the kids a lot when they were little. That turned out to be a massive mistake. It made me sad to be there but also sad to not use the membership. So Josh and I would go and be sad there, among the fish.

It really wasn’t good.

But we decided not to renew the membership for the time being until I could find happiness in those old spaces, so we went to say goodbye to the animals this month. We walked to each tank, and I told the electric eel and the puffins and the clownfish that we would see them again one day. We said goodbye to the sloth in the rainforest room (whom I’ve privately named Abigail), and she came down low that night so we could fully see her in the trees.

But most of all, I said goodbye to the porcupine fish, who is my favourite fish. The one they have at the aquarium feels larger than most, and ChickieNob and I call him our chonky fish. We spent a lot of time trying to coax him into a space where we could see him, but for the first time ever, he hid behind a barrier and kept peeking out at us. We like to think that he was sad to say goodbye, too. He was really the only reason I wanted to keep coming back.

Goodbye, fish. Hopefully, we will see you again in the future. (Especially you, chonky fish.)

The Paris Olympics begins this Friday. It snuck up on me this time. I don’t think we’ll watch in real time because I’ve never grown accustomed to watching events in the middle of the day. I’ve always been a recap-in-the-evening sort of person.

We will definitely watch women’s gymnastics to see the team, especially Simone Biles. And I’m deeply interested in women’s swimming this year because 15% of the team comes from the same school near me. (Classes of 2015, 2020, and 2023, so not there at the same time.) And, of course, we’ll prioritize the opening ceremony on July 26.

What are you watching? What is your favourite sport? What can you not miss, and what are you okay if you never see?

Wikipedia has a list of the bestselling books according to the New York Times, broken down by year, reaching back to 1931. This means you can look up the bestselling book from your birth week.

Mine was Watership Down by Richard Adams, and… I haven’t read it. I cringe because it seems like the sort of thing I should have read by this point (isn’t it often assigned at school?). I also haven’t read the books from Josh or the twins’ birthdays. Or my parents’ birthdays. Or my sister’s or brother’s birthdays.

Have you read the book that was the number one bestseller from your birthday?

I thought this was a profoundly moving post about grieving miscarriages. If this app had existed years ago, I likely would have tried it out to make AI-generated versions of my children. She writes:

AI baby generators have since become regular fixtures in online pregnancy forums … They also crop up, albeit less often, in the darker, quieter communities where people grieve prenatal and perinatal losses. Such mourners have traditionally lacked the rituals and templates that come with other forms of loss. But their early adoption of these tools gestures at the not-so-distant possibility that AI will one day guide many people through the grieving process.

It’s a story of using “grief tech” to mourn a loss often overlooked by the rest of society. Go over and read the whole thing.

Along with needing a new planner, the company also discontinued the notebooks I use for my bullet journal and work notebook. The work notebook was harder to replace — there isn’t a lot out there exactly like it — so I drove around buying up all of the stock I could find in-store. This amounted to 14 notebooks. I go through one every 1.5 – 2 years. Would I work another 21 to 28 years? Totally possible that I will retire within that window. And if I work beyond that, I could always suck it up and deal with a different kind of notebook for my final years.

The bullet journal was easier to replace — a Moleskine is a similar notebook — but the truth was that replacing it was filling me with anxiety. I didn’t want something different. I wanted my paper strength and stay.

The company was selling the final stock online, and if I ordered 18 notebooks, I would get free shipping. I could have my exact notebook and never have to switch brands. I go through a bullet journal every 1.75 years. That’s 31.5 more years of bullet journaling. And I could probably stretch them out about 2 years at this point because I’m mostly balancing just my schedule vs. also remembering everything for the kids.

It was a lot of money to invest in paper notebooks, but it was also like buying a forever stamp. Yes, it was more money now, but over time, as notebook prices increase, I will likely save money by making this one-time big purchase instead of finding (and paying for) new notebooks one at a time.

But it was also strange to think about my life in notebooks. My work life in notebooks — as I see the stack dwindle down, it’s also my work years dwindling down. My personal life in notebooks — how much longer do I have to live when I’m down to a handful of notebooks? It was a little sobering.

But at least I only have to worry about the planner now.