ice water and ocicats

Knock knock.
( I promise, I like dark humor! Let me see it. )

So for those who aren't local, Be It Known that the vast majority of apartments here have leases beginning on or around September 1. Simultaneously and relatedly, the streets fill with U-Hauls and the sidewalks fill with random boxes and pieces of furniture marked "FREE". This last phenomenon is called "Allston Christmas" after a local suburb, but it happens across many towns in the area. It's like a big, disorganized Everything Swap.

• I picked up two new kitchen pots from the squirrel, and ended up giving him an onion chopper device that he loves... amusingly this was not as a direct swap, but it worked out well.


• Tuesday I spent about four hours helping a distant-ish friend pack stuff intended for a storage unit. I learned how to vaccuum-bag, which was cool, and MacGuyvered some garment-hanger boxes, and then was able to ferry a bag of stuff to the ballerina. And... silently I judged, because there was so much stuff. I came home, and the next day I got rid of a big bag of clothing and put out my own "FREE" stuff on the sidewalk and reorganized my kitchen. LOL.


• Friday I spent nearly 8 hours helping my acro base unpack and organize. Our goal was to get all his boxes open / broken down / gone, and we did it. So satisfying. We took a 2BR place from a giant pile of boxes to a place that looked like he lived there (and had had a messy week). We also got to see a couch left on the sidewalk disappear within an hour, and the same for a few other things that just didn't seem to have a place in the new apartment. He has different hobbies and different stuff than I do, but his attitude about objects is so much more like mine that it made for an interesting contrast with Tuesday.


• You are wondering: well, miss minimalist, did you get any free stuff this Christmas season? Yeah, I did. The two pots (I got rid of one), a pint glass, and a pair of parallettes from R (good for doing pushups without having to warm up my wrists first).
  

Overall a very domestic week. If you count the intended-to-be-final walk-through for my new condo, I put serious time into four different places. Then I went kitchen-feral on Saturday and made both quatre quarts cake and sushi. Workouts did go okay as well, but with less to specifically report.

I groused and griped about the final outcome of the Google-vs-DOJ antitrust case, which of course Google lost. ( If the powerful can be found guilty but then nothing happens to them, what good are the courts? ) The judge could have hurt browsing a bit, and instead he hurt all of tech. Maybe all of the country.

I learned a good new insult from an otherwise so-so book. The insult is "fish drowner", and I am taking it to mean someone who fucks up the apparently unfuckable. The person who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the person who manages to drown a goddamn fish. The person who maybe had one job, and had the power in his hands to break up a known monopolist, and... simply didn't do it.

This last week's theme, if there was a theme, was "staying up until 1AM reading". Also, half-assing my workouts, which is something I'm explicitly working on fixing. (Half-assing my lunches is strongly related; I'm not quite eating enough early in the day.)

Fun thing: playing Öoo from end to end. You play as a cute caterpillar who looks like the game title, and it's just an inventive little puzzle-platformer that doesn't overstay its welcome.

Also fun: reading The Witch Elm with the bug as part of our two-person book club. I am starting to feel a little torn on Tana French; she writes wonderfully about deep friendships but also has a lot of idiotic male main characters, and wanting to wring their necks while I'm reading isn't always pleasant. She also writes smart women, and sure enough, my favorite book of hers so far has the smart woman as the narrator. Looking over her books, I think there's one more of those.

Confusing: spending a few hours pulling black swallow-wort (or sometimes just its pods), on the nicer days and while listening to Alien Clay on audiobook. It's a pleasant enough endeavor, and I'm up for an hour or so when it's nice out, but it's hard to know whether I'm doing any good.

Slow: the buying-a-condo project. I spent time on it last week, measuring windows -- they're all the same -- and ordering window blinds, privacy window film, coat hooks. Also applying for homeowners' insurance for the thing. And informing the closing agents that the way I'm taking title is Sole Ownership, thankyewverymuch... of the options they offered me, all of them were for joint title. Feeling the burn of being a single person in a world designed for couples, I guess, and I'm not even single!

I submitted my second crossword puzzle to the NYT, this one aiming at much earlier in the week. It's easier; the theme is simple but cute. Construction of the puzzles is a little bit dangerous for me, in that it can be very distracting and engaging. In terms of feedback loops, dynamism and discovery, the "fill" part is midway between a video game and programming... both of which are known to bring on flow states, and make people wonder where the last 2-3 hours went. So, while I think this is a fun creative thing and suits my needs in a lot of ways, I also should be careful with it. (With that said, I have a proof of concept complete on my third puzzle. My plan is to take a break from filling to re-score a bunch of words, and give the poor flooded NYT staff a chance to accept or reject the first two puzzles. They have a limit of 3 in the queue per constructor, anyway).

All of this is in the continued context of wanting to wind down the big projects and do a better job with smoothly running my days. In particular, I want to be exercising differently. Lots of things are going great, but some are not. It's been pretty easy, over the last few weeks, to start addressing the various bits of joint jank that had built up in my body -- and this is part of the "going great" -- but it's been less easy to regain some of the strength moves I used to maintain as an absolute minimum a few years ago. So I want to get more regular about those. So far the Turkish Get-Ups are on their way back, just the way I used to do them, and I am LOVING that; but chinups are much slower to return, and I probably will need to get back to 3x/week to get real gains there at this point. Pistol squats too. In general it's always been harder for me to gain than to maintain, and standard strength moves haven't been my #1 fitness priority for the last few years of handstand obsession, but I miss them. I know it might be harder to get them back now that I'm older, but I also let them go for a while, so who can tell? I want to pick them back up. And as mentioned earlier, that means I need to start eating better lunches. Back to basics, as a true priority, is likely to feel really good. So with that, I'm getting on the elliptical machine like I meant to an hour ago. :P

1. PEAK RIPENESS
What’s something that is feeling purely delicious, ripe, messy, and juicy?

My entire extended family-ish situation. I am so happy with it, and there are lots of combinations of humans that can all be fun. The polycule is so great, Birdie being here is awesome and provides all kinds of ideas. Even the 'rents are being pretty okay right now.

2. COMING IN HOT
Your phone overheating. Being told to “simmer down.” How are outside forces communicating that you need to cool off?

I pulled a muscle or something while in contortion class on Thursday, and then I was trying to be super gentle today when I did the same thing again. Weird snapping feeling, no real pain, but some stiffness and soreness afterward. Whatever's happening in there, it's too sudden to be a good thing.

3. HOT HUES
Sun-bleached turquoise. Overripe watermelon. Green grass after a thunderstorm. Roadside wildflowers. Summer makes everything brighter: What color are you craving more of right now?

I don't know that I've ever craved a color!

4. PLUNGE
What’s the last thing you said yes to without hesitation?

Tiny Person's upcoming press handstand miniseries.

5. FEVER DREAM
Admit one thing you probably shouldn’t do, but lowkey want to?

Attend Somergloom alone and in a very altered state, with no preview or research. (What I actually am doing is making a playlist based on all the artists, to see if I like them)

6. BEACH SUB
Summer hunger hits differently. What’s your go-to simple, satisfying, hot weather meal?

Chickpea salad on a bagel, maybe.

7. MELTDOWN
When was the last time you totally lost it?

2021 when I suddenly could not, could not, go back to work as planned after a day or two off.

8. BURNING YOUR TONGUE
Texting your ex. A hot take. Unsolicited advice. When was the last time you took a sip too soon (metaphorically speaking)?

I heard that someone had basically lost their group in a coup at Zillian (and cried in the associated meeting), and reached out to that person before thinking to actually let them save face by asking how they were doing. The person was quite adamant that they'd chosen the new direction (though from what options, I can't say) and were simply emotional about the transition. OK OK, fine...

Only two of this weeks' houseguests have come and gone, but I'll take a little moment out anyway. The top line is that I'm pretty well back on kilter. I thought my condo sale had hit another hiccup, but it turned out to be momentary, so all proceeds smoothly there.

Fun times:

• Brunch with motorcycle-friend turned out to be super fun. He vroomed me out to the middle of nowhere, swearing that there was a good brunch place out there, and... I learned that every little airfield where rich people fly their Cessnas to is the location of a good cafe. Yes! It was an airfield! We chattered about life while watching the baby planes land and take off. I also got to wear a Klim mesh motorcycle jacket that's probably the most badass garment I have ever donned in my life.


• My old acro partner, the Monk, came in on Monday night and we had tons of fun reconnecting and trying some of our old tricks. One of them came right back after just 3 tries even though neither have done it in the meantime and we aren't used to each other anymore. So fun. Also, so very sweaty.


• Superman at the theater with a six-person group (polycule, visiting friend, and apfelsingail) last night was surprisingly feel-good. It's a "no animal left behind" movie -- and for reasons well beyond the squirrel rescue. There's a dog, there are turtles, there are monkeys. They also highlighted the immigrant/refugee aspect of Superman's backstory, which felt very relevant to the present day while also being original canon.

Interesting conversation on the crossword construction discord eventually led to my moving my old Harry Potter and Sandman books from the living room bookshelf to the back room; a small, literal re-platforming.

And... I'm wrapping up this month of my coaches being gone, and I want to get stronger again. I got a bit lazy and soft in July -- no, not a lot, but I miss strength work. Just getting back to doing banded chinups most days in my office has been nice, and doesn't really take any time, but I've realized I'd like to do a lot more.

...sounds like something you'd rather not get stabbed with, doesn't it? Though at least the wound would be freshly scented. At any rate, the bug and I flew and drove to get to the amusement park, rode roller coasters for two entire days, and came back. I had various new experiences:

• First time at Cedar Point, and actually my first time in Ohio. We stayed in Hotel Breakers, which is right on the island about 5 minutes' walk from the amusement park entrance gate.


• First time going to a hibachi grill place! Loud but fun, with the chefs squirting stuff into people's mouths and having fun making fire. We had shrimp and salmon that came out really good.


• First time on a tilt roller coaster, Siren's Curse, which opened just three-ish weeks ago and may have been my favorite. So smooth and sinuous, with great music and gleaming new everything.


• First time going up over 400 feet on a roller coaster, Top Thrill 2, built last year and currently the tallest roller coaster in the world. My extremely honest notes on that one say: Throat hurts from screaming “oh fuck yes”, or maybe some other scream.

There was a bit of physical misery from heat and sun, and iterating on the best thing to wear. I'm pretty sure my dream outfit would consist of capri-length cargo leggings with zip pockets, and a quick-dry sun protective T-shirt with flutter sleeves (for lots of UPF on the shoulders, but ventilation for armpits). But I also did pretty well on the second day with long athletic shorts with no pockets, plus a small waist bag. Minor sunburn, despite running myself out of both the kinds of sunblock I bought. Sore feet each day.

But we rode roller coasters, which I love! We had twelve on our list, and managed to knock off nine of them the first day despite a) wasting most of our early-entry time and b) the park closing down the rides two hours early for rain. The next day we hopped right on the early entry, and used it to get onto the remaining coaster that had always had a huge line (Millenium Force). Listening to others in the line around us, we learned it was only running one of its three trains -- the yellow one, while blue sat on a side line and red lay in pieces somewhere under maintenance. I daydreamed then about having deep deep knowledge of the place, and all the coasters and their cars and the various modes of operation; knowing what a good day and a bad day look like for the park maintainers. And then we rode the yellow train.

That particular ride had a really good drop, and here's the funny part about coasters; the way the train is plummeting toward the ground, yeah, but as that happens there's also a lightness and floating that happens between the rider and the train. Once I'm feeling familiar with the overall sensation of coasters I actually like to relax during the drops and feel the float, before bracing myself for the curve at the bottom. Some coasters give a lot of this same float at the top of hills, where negative G is scary as hell to me but zero G feels cozy and floaty and loving. Some corkscrew rolls / heartline rolls do this too (and loops hardly ever do it, though I also love a good loop). And this is why I only hold on tight for the first big drop or two of the day -- after that, it just wastes a good floating opportunity.

Did I mention that coasters just make me HAPPY? In nearly all the photos from rides I look the same -- hunched forward, sunglasses in place, mouth open in a big smile. After a while we started calling it my "avid turtle" thing. It's a little dorky, and also pretty much the happiest I ever get to see myself... so we bought two of the pictures, and I have brought out my old "racing turtle" icon for this post too.

What else? We had good teamwork, staying in sync for food and bathroom breaks, taking time out when the bug had a back spasm early on the 2nd morning. I did take one ride without him -- Steel Vengeance, which sounds mean, but the line was short and it let me report on how rough the ride was so that he could decide about it. But aside from that hour or so, we were really well matched as park goers. We had food deals built into our tickets and, thus, ate fairly horribly for a couple of days. I even ate a bag of Cheetos, and was reminded how hyper-palatable junk food really can be (must try to forget again... but oh, that crunch). Even so, there were salads and fruit cups, and I don't know about the bug but I don't seem to have gained weight. I guess 13 hours of being outdoors and mostly on one's feet will burn some energy.

I did lots of people watching. It's not often I see so many people of all ages in small groups, being fairly unguarded. So I saw a whole lot of play-fighting among the young males of the species, and a lot of teenage girls getting used to having breasts to display. White girls in Lululemon running shorts or skorts, black girls in yoga pants and assertively false eyelashes. Kids wearing band/album T-shirts from way before they were born. Different accents. Lots of sports teams on T-shirts, but also some serious roller coaster afficionado gear (If it's not Intamin, I don't care). The dad with missing teeth saying to his teenage son, not too unkindly, that you can't be scared forever, it's just a roller coaster. Middle-aged folks like us, quieter, being able to see the young'uns and knowing we're essentially invisible to them. Ah, and we also watched birds -- the pretty ones turned out to be grackles.

It's good to be home with the cats again, typing this on my new monitor. We had minor delays in getting home, but nothing that still matters today. I'm grateful that all the driving of the rental car went smoothly, and that we were able to sync the entire trip with my squirrel's trip to the island he visits every year.

Some interesting (to me) progress on understanding my longstanding spiderweb phobia; not surprisingly, it isn't exactly and only spiderwebs. Back when I went to Norwood's birthday party, the subject came up of random things that gave us heebie-jeebies, and I mentioned spiderwebs as usual. His other ex asked me "Is it a texture thing?" which nobody had ever asked me before. I said maybe, or maybe in part, because the texture of having a web on you is pretty gross. Even though I also remembered trying one time to explain that a strand of web, once clinging to me, isn't exactly doing the web thing anymore... so I said that beyond texture there's also something about an invisible unknown structure in the air, holding stuff up, but whose extent is not known. I'm not particularly scared of cobwebs that are covered in dust or in dew/fog/moisture, or not in the same way -- though I'm still not about to go putting my hand in them, maybe that's the texture part.

So then more thinking. Looking at a dust-covered cobweb in the Esh bathroom, thinking "I could touch that and it would be gross, but I'm not getting much of a fear response." (Maybe I should touch it tomorrow).

Then in someone's backyard, there was some netting over an enclosure, and it looked invisible in some places because of the shade and the angle of the light; I could see leaves caught in the netting, and looking at that made me uncomfortable in a recognizable and related way. As if the leaves, hovering there obviously in a plane and supported by something, were stuck in a giant spiderweb. Weirdly, having become aware of it, I even got a ghost of the same feeling with bubbles in a coffee pod later (there were little bubbles on the surface of a big bubble -- annoyed, I made myself poke it with my finger to pop the bubbles).

Unless I'm surprised by something, or there's a web I have to deal with, this is all more a matter of discomfort than real fear.

I'm not the only one. There's some recent-ish discussion on Reddit lately, sometimes calling it "araneophobia", sometimes talking about things stuck on webs and "floating in the air" as a trigger (I identify with that). There's an article on Medium too, discussing it as a sensory "fear of touching" thing. For me, I think it's useful to realize that the sensory thing exists but is largely separate from the fear thing. And, I guess, nice to realize that I can still learn more about myself at this point in life.

Happenings:

• The bug is back from Oregon; his mom remains in the hospital, or more accurately is back in the hospital, with pneumonia and two small strokes (?) having followed her hip surgery. Prognosis is cautiously optimistic but it may take her a while to get home again. In the meantime, the bug seems to have picked up something on his return travels. We are quiet today.


• I have done rather a lot of circus since last time. Handstands, a semi-private contortion lesson with another Zillian person who is apparently twenty years younger than me, acro practice, more acro practice.


• Finished a drawing lesson. I don't like coffee cups anymore; they are annoying to draw. Screw you, coffee cups. Mushrooms were much better.


• Spent a fair bit of Saturday buying, transporting and installing air conditioner units for tenants. My co-landlords were all having Moments, and it really fit in pretty well around Porchfest, anyway, for me to take care of most of it. Then yes, also the bug played Porchfest, in the backyard of the same house because everything happens at Blue-Green Street now, and I sat between friends and felt relaxed and happy.


• Did I mention Moments? Yeah, Perse and her other boyfriend have broken up, creating a Disturbance in the Polycular Force. (Not very long ago the four of us usually ate Tuesday dinner together, so this does affect me... it kind of sounds far away from me but it really isn't.) Date nights are changing around, and my squirrel-family is losing their nice convenient poly-symmetry. This is gonna be a trip... in the meantime, my Sunday night date moved to Sunday morning and damn, Henrietta's Table is really delicious.


• I played with Cursor and Sonnet on Sunday morning, which means vibe coding, and it was very quick and very infuriating. I'm almost certainly going to do more of it, as my new crossword puzzle hobby drags me further into futzing with word lists.

On the macro level, there's a vicious heat wave here (I'm worried about the squirrels) and uh, the US has attacked Iran nuclear facilities. I'm reading that Iran has (or had?) an underground enrichment facility that only the US had the right plane and the right bomb to knock out, and I get why the world might be better off without an Iranian nuclear state... and this is still queasy-making.

I'm enchanted, at the moment, by thoughts of conscious flexibility and looseness. Twice in the last week I've learned very physically that there can be more (and easier!) motion of one part of the body when there's part that's held firm and part that is loose and able to move freely. And I'm messing around with this as a metaphor, as my schedule loosens and life flows along. This has been my problem with handstands, and handstand jumps, all along -- I actually have to be disconnected through a certain part of my body in order to let my hips rise. Tiny Coach got me to jump onto a yoga block taller than I ever have before by having me hold my arms firm, relax the rest, and jump repeatedly (boing, boing, boing) while allowing my hips to actually move with the momentum of the jump..... after we did that, I went and did hand-to-hands with my base and we had more success, both on Friday and on Sunday, with that too. I'm talking like several jumps to balance in a row on both days. We still seem to need a big pile of safety mats in front of us but they're not actually doing anything, they're just there. So yeah, isolations. Where to hold firm, and where to be chill and adaptable while taking in momentum from the world or from others, currently is a fascinating lens on the puzzle of how to plan a life.

Not to put too fine a point on it but uh... I'm really happy right now. There's burnout in some places within me, but lots of little tendrils growing, and lots of satisfying progress being made in the intermediate zones that aren't new and also aren't overtaxed.

I didn't really tell you about trying to hollow out a tree stump to make a planter; that's been a slow process but I've learned that I really enjoy chiseling. (The rubber mallet is easy on my joints, I have a lovely long bath of a slow-burn horror book that's strangely cozy to listen to, and it hits that sweet spot of "moderately active outdoor time in the shade"). Anyway, I finished a layer of chiseling yesterday, and there was a little spider on a little spiderweb in there. I think that a few years ago I would have grabbed a broom. "Idiot" I said to it yesterday, and started chiseling as far away from it as I could. It crawled around, hid for a while and finally came to its tiny little senses and left the stump! Then I swept its remaining web away with the chisel and finished up, and was happy with all that. Very strange.

Handstand lessons are a whole new experience with a) better focus and b) Tiny Coach. I tend to come back from her lessons a little starry-eyed and saying things like "omg, I felt something in my chest that I've never felt before", leading the bug to wonder whether I've been on a date or at a lesson (snerk). But really though. I really did feel something like a rubber band across my sternum, and I felt a part of my right hamstring relax and lengthen in a way that was really startling. I just let her mess with me, the way a vet does things to a cat, and then later I take notes. Amusingly, and related to the above, we did have a moment where she suggested I visualize a spiderweb wrapping around my ribcage and I was like "this is a great moment to tell you about my phobia, let's do something different." LOL. So all of this is good and it's carrying over into my Spring lessons too. I hope it carries into my hand-to-hands where I'm still working through some mental block, but time will probably help there too.

(Speaking of Spring, he's going to have surgery in a couple of weeks and be out for a while, plus Tiny Coach won't be teaching contortion handstands again next session, so my LCS schedule should ease up soon; maybe just in time for my self-discipline to pick up a little and me to train on my own more?)

Disconnected nice things -- social time out on Tuesday that ended abruptly and left me wandering, alone and buzzed, in Boston in the warm late evening. More drawing exercises, mostly done during video calls with two different friends. And several things went well for the squirrel family this week, big things that advance the plot. And the bug and I made reservations to go ride roller coasters at Cedar Point for two days later in the summer! On Thursday night I was jazzed enough about all these things to have trouble sleeping, which I found pretty funny even while it was happening and I wanted to be asleep.

I fumbled my way toward town/community involvement a bit more, attending a neighborhood council meeting and having lunch with a guy who's very connected to the various do-good movements around town. It sounds like my organizational / group leadership skills are very much in need for pretty much everything I might want to be involved in, but... that's where the burnout still lives, so maybe do-gooding can wait. I still have enough of my own stuff to do.

One final amusement: I had my first garden-related anxiety dream last night. All my plants were dying! In real life, the ginger did have a leaf or two go dry from this week's heat wave. It's funny how any pursuit or any level of caretaking creates a whole new genre of "X going wrong" dreams.

I'll be posting separately about the weekend, but in the meantime here we are.

A friend was discussing some bullshit he's dealing with at work (in those terms), and I realized my life is quite low-bullshit at the moment. I guess I expected this, but it's gratifying. The most likely source of bullshit in my life is now probably... me. Me who is definitely going to use every moment of tomorrow in the best possible way, mmhmmm. Me whose hips are definitely going to go forward over my hands, next time I do a straddle jump. Me.

So anyway, the week:

• Flora: Went with motyl in the pouring rain to buy native plants on Thursday. The rain persisted and the plants sat by the side of my house getting soaked for a while, but now they are all in the ground, and labeled too! I bought a wide, shallow pot at Pemberton to set on the pipe/drain I found under the dirt, so that we can cover it while not totally losing it again, and one more random (non-native) plant to go in that -- at the plant store I found myself surprised that living things can be so cheap, and then I realized that living things are almost the only self-assembling products out there. So maybe the low prices do make sense.


• Fauna: speaking of life in my yard, I had a bit of a Boys Don't Cry moment while feeding my favorite squirrel Wispy. Wispy was eating a nut, sat up while directly facing me, and... Wispy, I don't think you're a girl after all. At least, no squirrel doctor would have said so at your birth. So I've been engaged since then in a slightly creepy quest for firm photographic evidence, but in the meantime I think Wispy is never going to give birth to a litter of adorable black squirrels (sniffle). I will have to wish him well in the mating games if I am to see such babies.


• Finished reading, and writing reviews for, The Poppy War and Abundance and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Two of those were audiobooks! Gardening and house projects both help a lot with getting the hours in. As for Abundance: now I am mildly inspired about infrastructure, know more about what "supply-side" economic discussion is about. I also learned that Ronald Reagan shut down a bunch of solar energy programs that had been started in the 1970s (the 70s, ffs!), and we'd probably be way further along now if that hadn't happened. Sigh.


• House projects included painting over some chips in the bedroom walls, priming/painting over some knots in the stairwell along with cleaning the stairs and baseboards, taking off even more nasty plastic/tape/adhesive from windows, and installing a new bathroom fan with a lot of care for extra noise & rattles. Now it's quieter and doesn't let weird flakes of gunk fall through from the attic.


• One drawing lesson on drawing organic forms. I was supposed to find something mostly based on cylinders, spheres etc but imperfect, and settled on mushrooms, which turn out to be quite fun to draw.

A private lesson with Tiny Coach on Thursday and a group one on Friday just kept blowing my mind.

• I didn't know that one can (and maybe should) do the standard upper-back stretch on the wall with... relaxed traps, just leading from the chest. It's hard to be aware enough to get this right, but it feels great when it works.
  
• And I didn't know that one can hypothetically get a good backbendy stretch sitting in a straddle, with pelvis tilted anterior and arms overhead (holding a weight). My body barely goes there, it's so confused, and its confusion is interesting to me because I have all the pieces.


• She did a very painful massage thing to my right leg that made a knot deflate almost instantly. After she did it I was able to briefly touch my right elbow to toe for the first time in years, though with a calf twinge.

Overall, I've been having a lovely time of it. My human squirrel has been gone for a long weekend away, but I've been happy and engaged around my home. The bug has a birthday tomorrow and I'm looking forward to celebrating with him, plus there'll be acro practice and a chance to do more house things. But if I want to get there it's time to stop writing, wash the dishes (with the next audiobook) and settle down (with the next paper book).