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It's my birthday!

3 min read

Hi y'all,

Ha! I'm back - you thought you could get rid of me sending lists of five things every Friday just because I went on vacation for a little bit. Think again. The only way out is to get brave and hit that unsubscribe button.

  • On a real note, hope everyone's been having a nice August. It's a bit of an in-between time - the best of summer is over and the fall has yet to begin. The heat drags, and these weeks can be either too long or too short (painful in each direction) depending on how your summer is going. My birthday is today, and I've always felt this part of the year is as much or more of a time of turning the page than even New Year's is. That's personal for sure, it's my own private page turn, but I don't think it's only me. The end of summer closes a book. Some of that is school, probably - September ran the calendar for the first eighteen years of most of our lives and nobody ever really loses that. But there's something about this stretch that feels like the beginning of the year to me.
  • The Onion is having fun with my favorite baseball team again. Headline: Rockies Fan Opens Private Tab To Check Score. This after last year's quite devastating 'Scalpers Jack Up Price Of Colorado Rockies Ticket To $11' and the one I'm still not over from 2007, 'Adorable Colorado Rockies Attempting To Win World Series.' I'm beginning to suspect that, unfortunately, the Colorado Rockies are also the Onion's favorite team, and I long for a day when we may be just boringly inept instead of such an easy target for satire.
  • A few people asked where Macy and I went for our Maine vacation last week, so here's the best of it: the ferry out to Vinalhaven and a picnic in the nature preserve on Lane's Island, a couple of nights at the Lindsey Hotel in Rockland, and dinner at Twelve in Portland, which is run by a chef who came home to Maine after years at Eleven Madison Park. It was also just a lot of fun driving around and exploring with Macy. One great find was the impossibly charming little hamlet of Head Tide and its lovely antique store, Little Village.
  • Our due date is in October, and every week that gets closer we get more excited. This is going to upend our lives and we cannot wait. There's plenty left to do before our new roommate arrives, starting with finishing the nursery. A perspective I liked early on in this process, and reread this week: Nat Eliason on having kids. His framing is the one that stuck with me: known challenges, unknowable joys. You can picture many costs of becoming a parent in detail - the lost sleep, the interrupted routines, the added expenses. What you cannot picture, he says, is the good part, because none of it has happened to you yet. He is emphatic that the unknowable part dwarfs the known part. Excited to find out myself.
  • You get two songs this week, both backing tracks this August trip spent close to water. One for each coast: Shangri-La by YACHT, and Brooklyn Bridge by Tween.
  • I took this photo a few days ago and found it compelling. Was excited to share with you here today.

Til next time,

Joey

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