strangers on a journey

Over the last fortnight I completed two items: I went to a new museum (Space Center Houston counts) and we took a trip to Houston, where we did a bunch of fun stuff like visiting with friends, going to museums, going to the pub, eating at favorite places, and going to a baseball game, which was not on this list but maybe should have been because it was a lot of fun.

( List under the cut to preserve your flist. )

I'm starting to get all my weekly items back online, which is a routine I've fallen out of. Political calls are still a bit rough with the state legislature out of session and my congressional district redistricted, which means I'm still in CD24 but I'll be voting in CD5, so both representatives (who are MAGA) feel free to ignore me. On the other hand, my city council member has been giving me a lot to complain about, so.

Also we're planning trips to Austin (for a memorial service) and NOLA (for a wedding) so those will come up soon. And I watched movies! So that was fun. I consider it a good fortnight.

This was the three-month follow-up after the last attempt to get the last bits of the brown thing off my face. One last bit was still there; he froze it off; and now we come back in three months.

I watched a movie for the first time this year.

Books
The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, by Christine E. Webb. This worked well as a companion piece to a number of popular science books I've been reading over the last year or two about animal consciousness and senses. It didn't quite go off the rails at the end where it talked about indigenous ways of knowing as group consciousness but I feel like the author could have made a stronger case there. (I think the case is worth making but I think she could also have made the case strictly on Western science grounds.)
All The Queen's Men, by S.J. Bennett. Second in the series where Queen Elizabeth II and her personal aide solve mysteries, this time featuring a missing painting. I was wondering early on whether conservation of characters dictated a particular character's outcome and was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't wrong, but in a way that didn't make the outcome boring.
Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, by Maggie Smith. This is the poet, not the actress. I moved through it slowly because its writing advice is really aimed at poets, and I'm not one. But I think I want to read through it and read some of the suggested books when I'm not focused on my kitchen falling apart.

Movies & TV
Mysteries of Ancient China. IMAX film accompanying the terracotta warrior exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. A documentary and propaganda piece about the discovery of the warriors in which Avery Brooks does the James Earl Jones narrator role. Enjoyable and interesting but without being a China paranoiac, I noticed the heavy-handedness.