I consider it the mark of a good adaptation when the movie makes me want to read the book. For example, we saw The Odyssey. It was good. It was so good that I went out and bought a copy of the translation that looked best for me. Now I’m reading the book. First, however, I have to get through the 81 page introduction (because, academics). But the movie energized me so much that I don’t mind reading the scholarly density before I hit the story itself.

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• I get a lot of my book recommendations from Culture Study. Recently, Anne Helen Petersen interviewed the author of My Parents Are Dead: What Now? - A Panic-Free Guide to the Practicalities of Death for her podcast. I think I was one question into the episode when I went ahead and added this to my TBR list. No one likes to think about death, but I’d rather be prepared than surprised. Plus, anything I can do to make future me’s life easier would be a sound life choice.

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Tonight, I will start reading Making Memories by Amy Tangerine. I love a good, crafty book that adds a little something extra.

• Enjoy some gorgeous astrophotography. [Peta Pixel]

• There’s a mismatch in the labor force. [WaPo - gift link]

• Sugar in space! [NYT - gift link]

• How rosé is made. [Wine Folly]

• We all have some “bad” values that influence the choices we make. [A Cup of Ambition]

• Which global threats should we lose sleep over? [Up First]

• Must listen! The conversations we should all be having around end of life planning. [Culture Study]

• What makes this butterfly live so long? [Short Wave]

• The highway with a theme song. [Throughline]

• How they made the World Cup pitches. [Short Wave]

• While nothing will compare to seeing Project Hail Mary on the big screen, we rewatched it this week, and it’s still a phenomenal movie. This one is going on my list of pantheon movies. [Amazon Prime]

• We’re still watching the Tour de France every night. While the racing on flat stages is (usually) not very exciting, I’m loving the interviews and travel aspects of the coverage. This is what makes the Tour so great! It’s more than just a bike race. [Peacock]

• Dinner is so much easier now that the kiddo’s palette is expanding. Still, I always try to make at least one aspect of the meal relatable. For example, I made fish tacos using a frozen, breaded haddock. (Very close to the fish sticks she already knows.) I topped it with a slaw. I took her portion out before adding the “spicy” flavors. It was yummy! No recipe for this one, mostly just winged it.

• Stuffed pepper skillet is all the wonderful flavors of stuffed peppers with a lot less work and cook time. The recipe I made even used a pouch of microwavable rice. I have issues getting raw rice to cook in skillet dishes, so this was a great hack. I didn’t drain the canned tomatoes so our dish was a touch “soupier” but the flavors were fantastic. [Eating Well]

• For my lunch meal prep, I was inspired by lemony cucumber couscous salad. I subbed the couscous for farro. It had a nice meaty bite. I also tossed in the remains of a bag of arugula we had in our veggie drawer. The addition worked really well with the other flavors. [Budget Bytes]

I was not up early enough to see this amazing sight, and that makes me a little sad. [Capital Weather]

Feels like a good time to reshare AirNow.gov. A monitor that shows you the air quality in your area. (If you prefer a non-governmental resource - for… reasons - you can try IQAir.)

Cue the jokes from my husband and bestie…

I’ve got one more day of work left before I roll into my summer staycation week. I decided I want to do one big productive thing each day. The rest of the day will be spent toodling about however I feel like in the moment. My goal is to finish the productive task by Noon so I can enjoy my lunch and afternoon. (Here’s hoping washing our walls doesn’t take that long!) Most of my get-it-done energy is in the morning anyway.

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• Joan of Arc is one of those historical figures I find myself drawn to. She was a woman - girl, really - beyond her era. We know a surprising amount about her life, but I’m fascinated by what fiction authors choose to do with the facts. Joan: A Novel by Katherine J. Chen is one of the more recent takes on her story. I can’t wait to read it. Chen’s take seems to lean more into the warrior ethos.

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• Before you start, do some prep work

  • Make a list or spreadsheet of what you have

  • Identify other stakeholders - family members, friends, local libraries, historical societies

  • Write down your goals and any constraints (time, space, money) to keep you focused

• Ask some key questions about each item

  • Is it irreplaceable?

  • Does it tell a story?

  • Is it in usable condition?

  • Who would care about it?

  • What would it take to preserve it?

• Some things are almost always worth keeping

  • Vital records - if you need it to prove identity, ownership, or connection, keep it

  • One-of-a-kind photographs of people or places that no longer exist

  • Personal correspondence documenting significant relationships or events

• Some things are often safe to let go

  • Duplicates (You don’t need every photo from every vacation)

  • Items kept out of obligation rather than genuine value

  • Digital files with no context or identifying information (Random screenshots, anyone?)

• For the maybes...

  • It’s okay to keep things for now and decide later

  • Ask yourself: am I keeping the object or the memory? A photo or scan can preserve the memory without keeping the item

  • Ask others - sometimes you need permission to let something go or find a reason to keep it

• Prioritize what’s at risk

  • Old photos, obsolete media, and fragile materials should move to the top of your list

  • Your phone camera is a perfectly good digitization tool

  • Store physical items in cool, dry, dark conditions using acid-free materials

• Bonus tips to make the work easier

  • Record yourself talking through what you find - your voice is part of the archive

  • Download your social media content before platforms change or disappear

  • Bring in a family member - the conversations are as valuable as what you find

  • Start with one box, one folder, one album and go from there

Curious enough to learn more? The recording is available on my library’s YouTube page. I hope it helps you take one step toward preserving your own story.

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I’m back to creeping my way through You Are Here by Hiawatha Bray. I'm still not in the mood for non-fiction, but I find this look at how we figure out where we are interesting. The book isn't strictly chronological. It follows one development and goes back and follows another, but each of the chapters is laid out in a way that shows you how advances in technology are both parallel and build on one another.

• Punctuation matters. [Experimental Living - reader submission]

• Is potato salad quintessentially American? [NYT]

• There is irony in this long read about people not reading. [The Atlantic - gift link]

• What we call women when they refuse to submit. [Men Yell at Me]

• Old tech is making a comeback. [The Atlantic - gift link]

• Want to fix the literacy and reading crisis? Hire more school librarians. [The AI School Librarians]

• The Onion is doing a good thing for the right reasons. [The Daily]

• When life becomes a scoreboard. [99% Invisible]

• Catch a falling satellite? [Short Wave]

• Does shopping in bulk save you money? [Booming]

• When running is not a side quest. [Atlas Obscura]

• We are all Tour de France all the time. The race is in the morning and early afternoon, but we watch the replay at the end of the day. If you told me two years ago I’d be this into cycling, I would have laughed at you. While most of the strategy still goes over my head, watching each stage is fascinating. Also, I know he won’t podium, but I am rooting for Quinn Simmons. Stache power! [Peacock]

• For our meatless Monday pick, I went with fancy tomato sandwiches. (I love a no cook dish on hot weather days!) The kiddo found the baguette we used a bit chewy and needed to deconstruct hers a bit. Don’t skip the crispy fried onions. They are a critical part of the flavor. I do think, however, that you could make chive mayo instead of chive butter if you want a creamier spread. I served these with a side of shoestring fries. [Real Simple]

• I’ve been trying to make at least two of our meals vegetarian each week. For our second vegetarian meal, I stirred together cheesy rigatoni skillet with mushrooms and spinach. This turned into a sort of use it up dish as I tossed in a diced up tomato we had and sorta winged it with the cheese. Still tasty. [Budget Bytes]

• I used the sous vide to help me make barbecue chicken quesadillas. It’s so much easier to cook the chicken this way. Also, I stirred some of the BBQ sauce into sour cream to make a dipping sauce. It was pretty good but I wanted something with a bit more acid. [WaPo - may be paywalled]

This look at a heat wave looks like something out of noir film. [The Atlantic - gift link]

Overly descriptive color palettes is both a bit of a joke and useful. The names are a joke, but it is useful to see which colors work well together.

I need to start working on banking some video content for the fall semester.

I wore a new dress to work on Tuesday. It was the first item I’ve acquired in the slow process to revamp my wardrobe. The first person to see me in it was the kiddo. She said, “Is that new? It’s pretty!” The design and style are not that much different from my usual wardrobe. But, I so very rarely get myself new things. Tuesday was a good reminder that it’s okay to spend money on yourself. I’ve since purchased a few more new items to try. I expect several will be returned (I’m only keeping what I love), but I’m looking forward to seeing what I end up liking enough to add to my closet.

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• Our kiddo is on a quest to befriend all animals. Ever since I told her that you could, actually, make friends with crows, she’s loved the idea of trying to be buddies with this avian. So, when “Are Crows Really Our Friends?” showed up in a recent curated link round up, I had to add it to my reading list. I hope everything I’ve heard isn’t wrong!

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This week, I got to co-teach a few classes of high schoolers who were on campus for an engineering summer camp. Working with them is quite different than our usual student population. But, they gave me some good ideas of activities to add to my regular work. Namely, more peer-to-peer discussions and less Q&A. Time to update my teaching materials!

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• While I definitely have a political tilt in my life, I’m not opposed to reading contrary things. For example, I am fully behind the work of the 1619 Project, but I understand there was disagreement about the work. As an academic, I want to know more about that disagreement. “I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me.” is an article from a fact-checker that will help me learn where the discrepancies come from.

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Kiddo is nearing the end of her first week of summer camp. On the first day, she was so excited that she tried to run onto the bus without her backpack. It always takes us a few days to get into the swing our summer routine. We’re nearly there. As long as the kiddo keeps coming home happy and tired, we’ll be able to manage the next seven weeks.

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• Linguistics is one of those topics I forget I’m into until something catches my eye. “New Mexico Is Losing a Form of Spanish Spoken Nowhere Else on Earth” looks at how we’re losing a dialect. Languages can go extinct just like species. But how we speak is also an inherent part of how we experience our culture and history. What happens when we no long have the words to share the nuances of a group?

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Yesterday, I finally got around to tackling a major project: deep cleaning my kitchen and bathroom cabinets. Everything came out, everything - inside and out - got scrubbed, and only what we need was put back in place. It took me almost five hours to get it all done. But it meant a bag of garbage to toss plus a few items to donate. It’s amazing what you find when you ignore things you just toss behind closed doors. Now I need to get my foyer, living room, dining room, and the bedrooms done. Hopefully that project won’t take as long. The cabinets themselves will certainly be less sticky.

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• I gave my dad the book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves as a gift. He recently finished and found it quite informative. So, obviously, I took him up on his offer to hold onto it for me. Author Nicola Twilly is a host of a podcast I love. I have a feeling I will be reading this with her voice in my head.

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• Cooking bare foot. I’m one dropped knife away from losin…

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We've hit that point in the school year where learning is, I think, just a suggestion. I'm surprised our kiddo still has homework in her bag each night, given just how many end-of-year and summer birthday events are happening. But her excitement for these fun days is infectious. It's giving me nostalgia for those last few days of school when you knew freedom was right around the corner.

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• I want to read “The Most Honest Out-of-Office Message” before I take a week off this summer. What if we didn’t care about what happened while we were out? I’m intrigued by the idea that some people just hit delete on all the messages that land in their inbox while they’re gone. I could never. But what if I did…

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This week, I started a bunch of new things over on my Content Prompt newsletter. I’m adding a few new issues and a new daily writing prompt. I smartly remembered to schedule all of these items in my calendar. I did not, however, remember to remake the associated graphics. (D’oh!) I’ll be scrambling to make the rest of those as I start releasing new material.

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• My FitBit app recently transformed into the Google Health app. Since I paid for the premium service, there’s a lot of new features I need to figure out. I can track so many things! “The Case for Tracking Everything” looks at the pros and cons of tracking our health data. I want to see if this piece helps me walk the line of knowing enough without tipping into the data deep end.

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Our kiddo’s school sent out an email on Monday reminding us there are only four weeks left on the academic calendar. How? How is this school year coming to a close already? I am unprepared for the mad dash that is the final few weeks of the year. At least I can thank past me for putting three days of vacation on my calendar to make the last week of school easier.

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• Only once in my adult life have I managed to read over 100 books in a year. (It was 103 and being in a juvenile lit class in library school certainly helped.) “What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers?” looks at how some people routinely read that many books - or more! I don’t need to read over 100 books in a year, but I certainly wouldn’t oppose making some changes to read a bit more.

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You know it’s hot when you kiddo slowly hauls themself off the playground, dragging their water bottle, asking if you drove to school that day. DC just had its first heat wave and none of us were ready for it. I’m curious how everyone else's summer is kicking off. If the El Nino predictions come true, the next few months are going to be brutal.

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• In the bottom of our pots and pans cabinet sits a large, well-seasoned cast iron skillet. I don’t use it that often. I think the last time I busted it out was to make a chocolate chip cookie cake. It’s not that I don’t like cooking with this skillet, it’s just that it’s so darn heavy. My lack of use was laziness, but “Was Cast Iron Almost Canceled?” looks at the broader backlash to this once beloved cooking tool.

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