There were very light flurries yesterday morning but no accumulation.
However, I got an email with the link to pay the balance on my K-Accumulator pre-order, and that should be shipping next Friday. Super excited…!
Also my Walk 4 (“Quad Brownian Accumulator”) arrived yesterday and I spent some time playing with it. I was inspired to record something, using offsets into the Value inputs to generate chords, giving it some rhythmic texture by sending rapid triggers to Reset, and mixing/reverbing/rotating the outputs through Silhouette.
I’ve mostly been feeling good and happy over the past few days. I’ve got a nosebleed this morning — the air in the office yesterday was super dry and I felt dehydrated — and kind of a headache to go with it, and that’s not great, but I’m still fairly happy.
We made a Thai curry with kobocha squash last night. The lemongrass and basil smelled amazing during the process, the sauce was super flavorful and right on the edge of too spicy but not quite over it. I wasn’t a fan of the skin on the squash, and it was a lot of work, but we can adjust how we do things when we decide to do this agin.
I finished Fully Present. Mainly it comes down to (A) why mindfulness is good (and where more research is needed) and (B) advice on mindfulness meditiation. The latter ends up being a little bit scattered through the chapters, due to the organization of the book. The first exercise has you doing things a specific way, but then later you’re shown other ways and told why you might want to choose one kind of meditation over another. Still, it was a useful book to have read.
One of my favorite quotes from the book: meditation is simple but not easy. (Some of the mind’s major functions include making connections, analyzing the past, preparing for the future, finding connections, telling stories. This is all great… except when you’re trying to just observe your own breath, sensations, emotions or thoughts in the present moment in a non-attached way.)
I’m currently in the middle of The Heartbeat of Trees. Written by the author of The Hidden Life of Trees (not to be confused with The Secret Life of Trees…!), a German forester, it’s mainly about humanity’s relationship with forests and trees. Through several short chapters we learn lots of cool stuff about trees and ourselves, and both known and speculated connections between us. At times it does get a little woo-ish, even while the author talks of his love for science and disinclination toward religion — and I say that as a person who definitely gets woo-ish themself, in a different way. But it’s neat stuff overall.