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This was the biggest dopamine hit of nostalgia I’ve gotten since I looked up the 1983 My Little Pony Movie on YouTube: A recreation of The Print Shop software from 1988. We had the MS-DOS version and I would spend hours making cards for random reasons–I still remember one I made with the greeting, “MOM, CAN I GET UP EARLY AND DRINK COFFEE WITH YOU?”

Anyway, someone has put a version of it online and you can relive all your childhood card-making adventures, down to what (now) feels like an extraordinarily long lag time between steps. Give it a try here. (I did, of course.)

Well, that week off turned out to be less relaxing than I hoped: Doc isn’t feeling 100% and we’re still trying to figure out why, so a lot of worry and tests and appointments and worry. About mid week we went up Millcreek for a drive, just to get out of the house, and even a quick stroll in some nature really helped.

Nature! Suitable for all humans.

We’ve fallen out of our habit of Sunday hikes (granted, now we do Sunday lake times or river hangs) but we were on the Grandeur Peak trail for the first time since winter and the trees! had leaves! and it was still green!

(Post title from Andrew Marvell, circa 1681)

As I write this, water is falling from the sky and we’re getting the first rain we’ve seen in…maybe 8 weeks?

If you’re a certain age, you’ll remember this from Sesame Street–the pigs are an entire mood and I’m right there with them.

Maybe unsurprisingly, taking a long weekend off work did not actually make me more willing to go back to work today. I’ve been reading (and posting) a lot about burnout and the effects of the pandemic, so this Charlie Warzel newsletter, in which he argues for companies enacting a lighter workload for the summer seems like a brilliant idea. From It’s Time for a Summer Slowdown:

All of us are emerging from the darkest days of the pandemic with a good deal of unprocessed trauma and a bone deep fatigue. It’s been described as burnout or hitting the pandemic wall. Some of it is the result of existential depression, and some of it is a sense of isolation or languishing. Organizations have tried to acknowledge the difficulty of the moment — while also expecting their employees to continue working, with little to no fluctuation in actual productivity.

…The last year of remote work has required a concerted effort to ignore the giant Covid-shaped elephant in the room. There were very, very few formalized HR policies to address the dull ennui of extended quarantine or the particular type of anxiety that accompanies a year of worrying a grocery store run could leave you or a loved one in the ICU. And so privileged remote workers labored (safely) on, through exposure scares and terrifying push notifications and attempted coups and insurrections. There was work to do — and very little else.

But for those who’ve been vaccinated, components of pre-pandemic life are returning: hugs, extended family, indoor dining, and all kinds of glorious, time-wasting bullshit. In other words, perfect excuses, after 15 months of isolation, to not be productive.

He is 80 today and, while I haven’t listened to much of his stuff past Time Out of Mind, I still remember hearing “Desolation Row” on the local radio station in my late teens and thinking, “Wait, what is this?”

Here’s part of it synced to a live recording and here’s all 11 minutes of its glorious weirdness.

I got my second vaccine dose yesterday morning and at about 6 that night the body aches and chills hit…and wow they are no joke. I haven’t been sick in over a year (thanks, masks and avoiding crowds) so I don’t know if I’m not used to this or if it’s really bad.

Either way, though, it’s worth it. Thanks, science, for getting us a vaccine so quickly!

I ended up at the Red Butte plant sale as a pair of hands for my friend–but then I saw the houseplant/tropical section and WUT. The visitors center at the garden has these Christmas-cactus-on-steroids looking plants blooming indoors so when I saw some for sale, I bought one. Turns out they’re in the Epiphyllum family, also known as “orchid cactus.” From what I’ve read, I think if I treat it more like an orchid than a cactus, it’ll do great.

I had to buckle it into the backseat to get it home:

Dining room table for scale:

In a planter for now (we’ll see how it does with the the light in the living room):

I have an in-person work lunch today with the creative team and there’s a strong chance I’m just going to be a toad in a muumuu. But the other part of me is thinking: I can wear an outfit! I can have witty conversation with people outside my household! I can order FRIES and eat them HOT!  Which will it be?

I had to think of this piece by Lydia Kiesling in The Cut about the end of the pandemic, and whether it’s going to be great or terrible:

I’m talking when I have the kids in the van and we are going to go do some activity that is finally open and safe and we’ve wanted to do for more than a year and when we get there it’s a million people and it’s so sweaty and there’s kinetic sand on the floor and pee on the toilet seats and it takes a fucking hour to get a hot dog which is 14 dollars

Which will it be, indeed.

This Emily Flake cartoon from The New Yorker is the most accurate depiction of trying to get back to “normal” I’ve seen yet.

This advice is spot on, though:

Toad people, unite!