- I think my exam on Monday went okay. Certainly I did the best I could, and I am grateful to myself for all the effort.
- My dad bought a ridiculous and huge array of snacks and treats to cheer me up during exam time.
- I am really enjoying being active on Litsy again. It’s nice when I have enough energy for that kind of thing.
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- My dad relentlessly making me lunch and being all proud about making my graph go up.
- New house seems almost totally settled? Pending the landlord doing some stuff.
- Still in the mood to reaaaaaaaaad. When I don’t feel like reading it’s very weird, so I continue being grateful for this.
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- My new fancier coffee grinder arrived! I’m very excited to start dialing in my espresso, hopefully with a more consistent grind, starting tomorrow morning.
- I made reasonable progress on an important work problem today!
- …totally unproductive, but today I got to watch a great youtube video (of someone playing my favourite Magic: The Gathering deck lol)
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- The end of my degree is so close now. The last work I will have to do for it on Tuesday. I’ve found it interesting, but I’m ready for the stress to end now!
- Four hours of reading yesterday, on a work day! I have no idea how I fit that in, but go me.
- Learning fascinating facts that I didn’t already know from my book about dinosaurs. (The book is The Future of Dinosaurs by David Hone; the fact was that ancient crocodilians actually walked upright. This article is old but has an image of how it might’ve looked.)
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- Boooooks. Yeah, I have a one-track mind right now. I’ll have to finish this murder mystery over the weekend or I won’t pay proper attention in my exam, ahaha.
- Everyone supporting me through the exams, whether it’s by taking my slots in the inbox (thanks Clive!) or relentlessly feeding me (Dad) or listening to my complaining (Lisa) or countless other things (everyone).
- Past self for buying some stuff that I want now!
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- I can get myself out of my recliner now.
- Soooo many compliments on my strawberry witch hat!
- Got a recommendation for somewhere to get my ears re-pierced.
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- I made some tea-infused vodka today, and it turned out fantastic! (The procedure, and the cocktail I made with it, are from the book Liquid Intelligence. Here is a reasonable online source.)
- I worked a bit today to finally finish a project, and did it! Hurray!
- My new coffee grinder (see previous post) indeed works great!
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- New bean-to-cup coffee machine arrived, and it’s great! (I’m not quite at @poisson 's level of hand-grinding the beans, I’m afraid
) - Finished a fascinating book about the huge variety of animal senses, and how their lived experience - their Umwelt - might be as a consequence
- Managed to gather the pieces of my shredded ego back up, stick a few of them together with duck tape, and restart my chess journey after a terrible couple of weeks
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- Our library’s summer reading program is quite adaptable to my children’s very different needs.
- Weather was nice over the weekend, so I was able to go to the car show with my sister.
- The garden is producing green beans, spinach, and radishes in good amounts, so plenty of tasty salad.
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Ooh, which was this? I’ve read at least one which discusses “Umwelt” a lot, but can’t remember which of the books on animal senses I’m thinking of. And it is theoretically possible it would also be a new-to-me book, which is also always nice. 
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- I got approved for an ARC of the sequel to the mystery I mentioned enjoying over the weekend. (A Case of Mice and Murder, by Sally Smith; I found it very charming.)
- Should be back to a full 8/8 for my static in FFXIV, whew. I hate trying to find replacements in party finder.
- Exams all finished! And, practically speaking, so is my fourth degree. I refuse to take any bets on when I’ll start a fifth.
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- self-gratitude: grateful I forced myself to wake up and have a good morning routine
- cheap sushi
- my health improving
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- My dad letting me know he is happy to have me here.
- Maybe the new house thing is close to being sorted out.
- Amazing lemon and lime cake.
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@shanaqui the book is “An Immense World”, by Ed Yong. I knew vaguely about most of the stuff he introduced, but he had a lot of up-to-date detail and really did push me to think about the umwelt of my cats or the swifts they love to watch or the insects the swifts are darting around catch!
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Ahh, it is the one I knew! I loved that one.
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- I really like the new belts I bought! (Vegan too!)
- I’ve been re-reading Practical Ethics, an old favourite, and enjoying it.
- It started pouring when I was out for a walk, but I was almost back when it started and narrowly avoided getting soaked!
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- Choir concert with my kids (all spectating for a change, normally I spectate them).
- Cantor being surprised that most people don’t know the term “pareto dominate” and being impressed when I told him my blog post comes up when you google it.
- A friend sent me two books he’s excited about. I’m about to beemind reading them, of course.
Also I was very pleased to see you all talking about Yong’s An Immense World. I talked about that last year in my “Thankful Thursdays” aka thursgiving sequence. Excerpts:
thursgiving 51: on having a fiftieth of a nose
Happy Thursday! Let’s do a two-for-one about our noses. Today we can be thankful that…
…we have only have five types of chemoreceptors on our tongues but 400 in our noses, meaning if you eat some raw potato while smelling an apple it may taste like apple, so am I crazy or shouldn’t we be able to simulate any flavor by combining a few base ingredients and presenting the appropriate chemicals to the nose?
I’ve tried this and it didn’t seem to work. So maybe this one doesn’t count. Moving along, we can be thankful that…
…dogs have around 50× more chemoreceptors than humans and also many more types of chemoreceptors—exactly how many is debated—and also breathe with one-way air flow over the receptors and also have brains better adapted to process the signals, meaning they experience gorgeous mountain vistas of smells that we can’t imagine, another indication that our lived “reality” is a very contingent thing.
Throwback to thursgiving #20 there. For more on this, see An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. We have a hard copy of this thanks to Judy Soule. <3 The first chapter is all about smell and taste and includes charming dog stories.
thursgiving 20: what birds, shrimp, and anne mccaffrey protagonists have in common
Today we can be thankful that…
…other animals have more cone cells than humans, e.g. birds with four and shrimp with up to 16, and so probably see colors we can’t even conceive of which, yeah, that limitation of our minds is frustrating, but it also hints that there are huge unseen dark continents of qualia lurking out there which someday we might find a way to visit.
Also this is kind of a plot point in the Crystal Singer trilogy, which I liked as a teenager.
But of course this isn’t the greatest gratitude entry (unless you’re a bird or a shrimp, or have been infected by the symbiont of planet Ballybran) so let’s glass-half-full this. We can be thankful for the amazing superpowers that are our Senses. Especially Vision and Hearing. And I guess mostly Vision. I like to imagine an alternate universe where humans didn’t evolve vision and then you teleport in with your absolutely magical ability to instantly create a mental map of everything around you without so much as touching anything. 
It would be a power-up on the level of being able to pause time for everything but you.
Honestly it would seem like over-the-top sci-fi. Yet here we are living it.
We’re actually so overpowered with this Vision thing that we’ve let our other senses atrophy. Consider the pale shadow of smelling we do compared to dogs, or how much further bats have taken hearing. Seems worth it though; solid gratitude entry here.
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- New books again! Lisa got me a couple to celebrate the end of my exams. I do get spoiled!
- Bit more productive/back in my usual rhythm today.
- Totally free weekend ahead.
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- The Beeminder community, still being there alive and kicking after years
- My girlfriend hugging me
- Canned pears (my favorite fruit)
- Being able to eat most food again. We’re blessed to be able to eat whatever we want, truly. To the person reading this: consider eating your favorite food today! Life is too short to not indulge from time to time (sorry to the people trying to keep their weight under control)
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- My gf’s brother buying me carrot juice
- Animal Crossing music on YouTube
- Cheap online sushis (god bless)
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