I can't remember which one

I'm typing this on the pictured device, the Astrohaus Freewrite Smart Typewriter, 3rd Generation (firmware 3.02). Now I've got the whole set: Alpha, Traveler, and Typewriter. Gadget hound victory! Still a wait-and-see if it's a victory for the Random Writer, me.

Mrs. R and I had a lovely low-key Christmas by ourselves with the kitties. We took a hike this afternoon, and that always makes us feel like better human beings. I've driven across town twice to catsit for a friend. And I took a nap—only one! Mrs. R made excellent meals for brunch and dinner. Yes, it's been a good day.

I think I might have too many books going at once. Today a phrase occured to me that I really liked, from a book I've been reading, but I can't remember which one, there are so many. Maybe, just to fill this blog entry out a bit, I'll list some of those books, preceded by some I've recently finished.

Finished:
Educated by Tara Westover
Teaching Photography by Philip Perkis
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
England's Hidden Reverse by David Keenan
Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English by Ben Yagoda
How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors edited by Dan Crowe with Philip Oltermann
More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers by Jonathan Lethem

Now reading:
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Evertype: A Novel by Richard Polt
Wallace Stevens: The Palm at the End of the Mind, Selected Poems and a Play edited by Holly Stevens
Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson
Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading by Brooke Allen
Adam Bede by George Eliot
Airborne by Kenneth Oppel
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams
Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli
Situationist International Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb
Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England by Jordan Kirk
Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski
Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's by Otto Friedrich
The King James Bible by various authors
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville
The New York Game by Kevin Baker
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Deleuze and Futurism by Helen Palmer
... AND MORE!

Yes, it's quite ridiculous, as is my giant and growing list of books to borrow from the library or acquire outright.

Even moreso

Last year I learned about Christmas Adam, which some people call today, December 23, which I've always called Christmas Eve Eve, and which you could also call Christmas Lilith... right? I won't google any of that for you.

It's crazy how after being retired seven years, my days and evenings feel as full as ever, even moreso. I mean, I do religiously take two naps per day, and we sit and sip coffee whilst lightly bantering for the first 30 or 45 minutes of our morning, occupying our seats in the living room, watching the fog slowly morph, below and past our perch, north on College Hill, downtown, the river, and the distant hills. Then our gadgets come out: the customary games, stupid headlines, stock market silliness, more coffee, and eventually breakfast. No hurry except on rare days when there's a cat vet appointment. I guess I wasn't complaining! But there is a mental list of "to do" items that seems to grow in my brain, and I have to expend real effort to get them done, especially if they are truly optional, which most of them are.

Today, we took a walk to a neighborhood bookstore. I had a $25 gift certificate, a Christmas present from two years ago. I'm not used to shopping anymore for p-books in a p-store, but I ended up purchasing three books and three arty postcards, succeeding in totalling exactly the amount of my GC. I got Hollywood by Charles Bukowski, a slim photobook of Man Ray images, and The Palm at the End of the Mind, a mass market paperback of Wallace Stevens' poetry. I'm a Bukowski fan, and I'm pretty sure I don't already have that title for Kindle. Man Ray is a pivotal figure in the company of Surrealists and Dadaists, a bit of a revolutionary in the field of cameraless/lensless photography. But the Stevens book was an odd choice for me. I don't really know anything about him or his poetry. But I do know he's got a big reputation, and the book was only $4. I think Jonathan Lethem mentioned him in glowing terms in the Lethem essay collection I just read, More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers, but I'm not sure. It was a library book that I've already returned.

Last week, before taking all my borrowed books and videos back to EPL, I finished watching the three half-viewed Wes Anderson movies I may have mentioned in a previous blog or in a comment on a previous blog: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Great flicks! I'd just paused each of them at points where I got anxious about the plot. Silly, yes, but I do that. I'm on a bit of an Anderson kick lately. I've also recently watched The Phoenician Scheme and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Actually I think I'm a full-fledged Wes Anderson FAN by now. I've still got a few more to see before I'm fully caught up with his complete (so far) filmography.

Feeling "normal"

Today it is four months since we got the keys to this house and started moving our stuff across town from our old place. We began living here on August 21. Our old house, where we lived for 35 years, sold on October 30. This week, finally, suddenly, I noticed that this house has started feeling "normal" to me: it no longer seems strange and new and exotic. I'm used to it. I mean, it's still an amazing house, and definitely fancier than the old place. But familiarity and new habits are taking hold, and it feels good!

Let's see, in other news. Between today and yesterday I transmitted about eleven hours of Radio Free Random, with good listeners and fun chat. I'm glad I didn't dismantle the station like I was thinking of doing last week. A die roll dissuaded me, luckily. Go to radionot.wordpress.com to catch up on the recordings and tracklists, should you so desire.

I successfully finished my personal NaNoWriMo challenge, logging just over 50,000 written words by the end of November. That feels incredibly satisfying. My Freewrite machines, the Alpha and especially the Traveler, proved very worthy in helping me to complete the task, and I'm glad I spent good gadget fund money to acquire them. The "nonsense" novel project continues. Perhaps "nonsense" isn't quite the right word. "Psychedelic" and "experimental" could also work. But I like saying nonsense. It's provocative and not wrong. But we're not talking gibberish. There is a kind of neural glue that keeps the words from completely flying apart.

I am quickly becoming a Wes Anderson fan. He's a contemporary movie director with a, shall we say, "quirky" vision and style. I've watched Asteroid City three times and it's totally on my all-time list of great films. And last night I saw that The Phoenician Scheme is now free to watch on Prime, so I watched it. And I loved it. Like Asteroid City it's packed with meta-weirdness and stylized dialog and I guess what you could call a certain smart campiness...? Whatever it is, I really dig Anderson's style, at least in those two movies. I am going to eventually catch up with his entire ouvre.

Maybe that's it for this blog entry. Yes. Later, 'gators.