Just A Peck 0066 // Autumn, Egan, Stairs

Just A Peck

Welcome to the latest issue of Just A Peck. I’m glad you’re here!

JOURNAL

October is my favorite month, and thanks to Jody’s coaxing, we got out a couple of times this week to hike through two of our gorgeous city parks and enjoy the fall colors.

A selfie of Justin and Jody, who is holding up a bright red maple leaf, in front of a hillside of orange and gold trees
A leaf-covered trail winding through tall, dark tree trunks under a canopy of yellow and orange leaves
Jody walking a trail alongside a rocky creek bed, fall colors overhead
Red and orange maples above a dark creek, its rocks scattered with fallen red leaves
A selfie of Justin and Jody at an overlook above a rocky creek gorge, framed by evergreens
A wide view of a forested hillside ablaze with orange, red, and gold leaves under a cloudy sky
A selfie of Justin and Jody on a wooden footbridge, a towering rock wall and golden fall trees behind them
Justin standing on a broad rock outcrop surrounded by yellow and orange trees

We got together with our friends Tom and Brandy on Friday to hang out and play games. We made it through another level of Bomb Busters and then failed twice on the subsequent level before switching to Cascadia. I won Cascadia, and since it was our only competitive game of the evening, I took home First Purr-ize!

Jody, Tom, and Brandy around a table covered in Cascadia tiles, an upright piano behind them
Justin cradling the First Purr-ize trophy, a little black cat statue, against his cheek

After months of disruptions and unexpected roadblocks, I finally finished the stairs! I tore out all the old, rotten treads and risers (and the decking on the top platform) and replaced them with composite boards. I did not replace the stringers, which I discovered halfway through were not square, so the end result is a little funky. But it looks acceptable, and no one is going to break their neck because a rotten tread broke off as they were descending! This was the project I had to finish before allowing myself to return to my workshop effort, so I’m excited to get back to that.

Justin with a drill, working on the top platform of the exterior stairs on the side of the house
The finished stairs, with new gray composite treads and risers climbing alongside the house
Justin on the repaired stairs, with Lake Superior behind him

Jody and I went to Spirit of the Times on Saturday. SOTT is the annual fundraiser for Zeitgeist, one of our favorite Duluth organizations. We saw so many good friends and won an auction for a pair of fancy-pants Loll chairs!

A selfie of Justin and Jody in front of a screen reading Spirit of the Times in swirling neon green and yellow
Justin and Jody lounging in a pair of gray Loll chairs on a patch of artificial turf beside a metal fire ring

Our book group was this week. We discussed The Candy House WITH ITS BRILLIANT, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR JENNIFER EGAN!! I reread Goon Squad in preparation, and both books are so freaking good, y’all. The discussion was great, and Jennifer Egan couldn’t have been more gracious, thoughtful, or eloquent. I used some generative tools to make this interactive character atlas to help visualize the relationships between the (many) characters across both books.

A Zoom grid of the book group, with Jennifer Egan smiling in the top left square

Today was our rescheduled family movie discussion day. We discussed Sing Sing, which was Spencer’s pick. I wrote about the movie a bit last week. It was a powerful film, and everyone had insightful things to say about it. Again, recommended if you get the chance to see it.

A Zoom grid of the family movie discussion, with Justin and Jody sharing one square, Alex and Kelsie on a couch, Kaylee, Corey, and Spencer

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK

Finished:

The cover of Scene: A Memoir by Abel Ferrara
Scene: A Memoir, by Abel Ferrara (audiobook). I was inspired to listen to Ferrara's fascinating memoir by the recent Criterion Channel collection of his work. A complex guy who was more thoughtful and reflective than I would have expected about his compulsion to sabotage himself over the course of his life and career. I suspect that has much to do with his getting sober and becoming a Buddhist.
Holding up a hardcover copy of The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, its title over a glitchy rainbow of horizontal stripes
The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan. Oh my god, this book is so good. I might have even loved it more than A Visit From the Goon Squad, and I adore that book. I would happily follow Egan into the world of these characters for a hundred more of these books.
The cover of Among Others by Jo Walton
Among Others, by Jo Walton (audiobook). The more I learn about Jo Walton, and the more I read her reviews and recommendations, the more I want to know about her. This pseudo-memoir about a young Welsh girl who has a dead twin, a witch for a mother, the ability to see fairies and work magic, and strong opinions about science fiction was a delight.

Finished Plays:

In Progress:

BOOKS I PURCHASED

MEMORIES

Okay, not a “memory” exactly, but 100 years ago this week, A.A. Milne’s original collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories was published. If you’ve never read it or the follow-up, The House at Pooh Corner, you should. (Even though Dorothy Parker hated them.)

A green clothbound first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne, with gilt lettering and a small gold illustration of Christopher Robin and Pooh

MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite! Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.”

— Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

That’s it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!

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