Just A Peck 0024 // Family, Holidays, Construction
Happy Solstice, friends! Welcome to the latest issue of Just A Peck. I’m glad you’re here! New issues come out most Sundays. Unsubscribe at any time.
WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT THIS WEEK
QUICK LINKS
- TCM Remembers 2025
- Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Christmas
- Infinite Ball Drop
- The Goriest Fight Scenes From The Iliad (Part 1)
- The Rise of Computer Games, Part 1: Adventure
- Nikon's Comedy Wildlife Photo Award finalists
- Jane Austen's use of correspondence
- Relax...It's Only the Climate Crisis
- The Best Science Images of 2025
- 30 authors on the books they give to everyone
JOURNAL
Jody and I tried the new SOL Cafe in Lakeside this week. Definitely recommended.
I work from home, so Ninja and I spend a lot of time together. I would say that our feelings about each other’s company could be characterized as “mildly irritated resignation”. But over the past couple of weeks, he has been jumping (uninvited) into my lap while I’m reading almost every morning. I suspect it’s the warm blanket rather than my company that he’s after.
Construction on our east wall began this week. I thought it was going to be wrapped up in a few days, but apparently this huge interior Tyvek enclosure and the half-constructed wall will be a part of our lives through the holidays. (The construction crew has been great.)
Spencer and Corey are home! Alex and Kelsie will join us later today.
What I watched:
- Wake Up Dead man (2025). Rian Johnson's new Benoit Blanc movie with Josh O'Connor as a priest and strong ensemble including Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner, Jeffrey Wright, Thomas Haden Church, and Mila Kunis. An entertaining murder mystery with some gentle commentary about what's become absent in the loudest corners of American Christianity these days.
What I’m reading:
- The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus
- Mythago Wood, Holdstock
- Invisible Cities, Calvino
MEMORIES
Twenty Years Ago:
Twenty years ago, the addition to our Spooner house was complete, and the kids all had their own rooms for the first time. They were able to pick their own room colors and helped with the painting.
MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing."
-- Italo Calvino
That’s it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!