leave a message and beep
It's been a week since I stopped taking my phone with me to The Shed. Usually took it not out of some need to check in on socials or things like that (though I did let a search for new music distract me into countless little rabbit holes; I've since stopped listening to music while I work – hence the decided lack of EarBliss)) but because I was worried about missing allegedly essential texts or calls regarding absolutely urgent lifethings. But not only have those texts and calls, with the deaths of my mother and maternal grandfather (12 years of various stages of caretaking take their toll), ceased – but I realized that (most) people contact me these days only when they need or want something from me. They can wait. Living my life on my terms can't – not after 20+ years of facilitating the lives of others.
(A bit of) The Collection, currently
Been awhile since I’ve shared anything from The Collection, but now that Paintshop reconstruction is nearing its end, several pieces have found their new shelf-home. So…
solar prioritization
Winter has settled in but at least it's December now thus making it a little less ungodly though a little slower descent into it would've been nice. Alas, into the deep-end / through the ring of fire seems to be my usual way, and it's no different this year, learning the ins and outs of how to keep The Shed at least somewhat heated in its empty, sunless hours without draining my battery stack – though it has, somewhat, been easier the last couple days as there's finally, after a week of clouds, some sun to charge up the solar panels so I only have to plug into the grid once a day instead of (at least) twice.
(Still waiting on installation of four more panels but the Apple Creek Sun Gods bow to no schedule but their own: it’s “a week from now” on some universe, right?)
While I'm still considering closing off the vaulted ceiling for the season, I've settled on a solid all-around heater, a Dreo Electric wall heater that I've at 55-60 throughout (45 at night) that really does a nice job, even with the expanse of stained shiplap overhead. I keep a Dreo tower fan heater at my feet, the same one I used in The Paintshop, and it does make the floors a little less frigid.
But hey, if there's one thing the deep-end solar winter temperature exams have provided, it's project clarity: is what I'm going to work on worth working on in the comfy chill of The (winter) Shed? Whittled things down to three and a half projects from a nebulous six, the three point five (the half being AA Void cartoons) being those that give me the most creative pleasure and let me forget the extremities that are freezing off.
P.S. No newsletter today: there were things I wanted to do with it that I didn't get around to so I'm taking the month off and returning in January with a new form.
SILVERVIEW
Finished the final John le Carré novel written by David this morning, first written by Nick buried, somewhere, on the to-read stack. While it read as a coda to a 60+-year career and never reached the heights of his greatest – THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY, and THE CONSTANT GARDENER – it wasn't lacking in the character-driven pleasure of even the most middling le Carré efforts and was an enjoyable interlude between longer reads.
That said, one passage in particular packed a punch, a goodbye – not just from a character, but from a literary voice to his reader (or to his son, carrying on his tradition?):
