(no subject)

Two minor amusing things from a trip downtown this morning:

I saw (and rode) one of the googly-eyed trolleys for the first time.

And on the way back, an ad in a subway car for some AI thing. The headline is something like "offload the busy work." The steps given below that are "AI drafts brief" and "brief accepted." Almost anything would have been a better example, after repeated news stories about lawyers getting in trouble for submitting impressively flawed AI-drafted legal briefs.

The trip was to try on sandals at the Clark's store. There was one that was slightly two big, so I have ordered a pair in my usual style, to be delivered to the store, so I can try them on there and return them if they don't fit.

I stopped to grab some lunch at the Quincy Market food court, and then wrenched my knee while sitting down on some stairs in order to eat it. The trip home was not fun, but I came home, sat down for a couple of minutes, then got out last fall's cane and went into the kitchen to make tea.

semi-recent reading

Since my last reading post:

Nobody Cares, by H. J. Breedlove. This one is good, but dark: it's dedicated this to Black Lives Matter, and fairly early on I got to the first mention of Missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. It's also book 3 in the Talkeetna series, with further developments in the friendship-turning-romance of Dace and Paul.

The Disappearing Spoon, by Dan Kean: a history of the periodic table, with a bit about each of the currently-known elements and the people, or groups of people who discovered them. Someone recommended this after I mentioned liking Consider the Fork, but the two books have almost nothing in common.

The Electricity of Every Living Thing, by Katherine May: a memoir, about walking and what happens after the writer hears a radio program about Asperger's and thinks "but that's me." (I don't remember where I saw this recommended

Return to Gone-Away, by Elizabeth Enright: read-aloud, and a reread of a book I read years ago. Sweet, a family's low-key adventures in an obscure corner of upstate New York. As the title implies, this is a sequel; read Gone-Away Lake first.

Beautiful Yetta, the Yiddish Chicken, by Daniel Pinkwater, a short picture book that we read aloud after Adrian and I realized Cattitude hadn't read it before. Conversation in three languages, with translations (and transliterations) for the Yiddish and Spanish. Not Pinkwater's best, but fun.

Thimble Summer, by Elizabeth Enright, because I enjoyed rereading the Gone-Away Lake books. Several months of a girl's life with her family on a farm. The plot and adventures are relatively low-key. I liked it, and am glad I got it from the library.

Also, it looks as though I didn't post about the summer reading thing here. It started June 1, and the bingo card has a mix of kinds of books, like books in translation, published this year, or with an indigenous author; some squares with things like "read outside" and "recommend a book"; and some that go further afield, like "learn a word in a new language" and "try a new recipe." Plus the ever-popular "book with a green cover." (OK, last year it was "book with a red cover.") I do a lot of my reading on a black-and-white kindle, so I don't know what color the covers might be. Therefore, I walked into a library yesterday, looked at their summer reading suggestions, and grabbed a book with a green cover.