Decorating, brioche stitch, subscriptions.

Jeremy is still not 100% well, but he’s on his indoor bike right now for the first time in about a week and doing an easy ride. Otherwise, everything is just chugging along. I’ve progressed from the major decluttering in the house to rearranging things – furniture, photos, etc to – OMG – decorate! I’m trying to spend zero money again, which is my favorite.

I’m trying to learn a new stitch in knitting – a kind of reversible stitch with two colors called a brioche stitch. It works well sometimes.

And works poorly other times (I have trouble with the transitions, don’t we all?). To me, this is what growing up has meant to me – when I was twenty, I would have stressed so much about those ugly stitches and worried so much about them and not wanted to go on without fixing them, but now, I just stumble through them, knowing that maybe I can figure it out later (and I did in the next few rounds), but also knowing that it can fall apart later (and it did, I messed up more stitches (no photo) after I had a few successful rows). But in the end there will be a hat and there will be many more hats to knit in which I hope to be better, but maybe not. And that will be OK too.

We have totally gone over to the dark side in which the house now feels more smart than dumb. We have many lights on timers (grow light for plant, two sets of Christmas lights, Doris’s office lights). A bunch of other lights which can be turned on/off by voice. All the TVs we can turn on and off by voice now – no need to find the remote to turn off the TV after Edda leaves for the bus or if we want to go to bed after watching Cooking Tree youtube channel. Our doorbell recognizes people and animals and packages left and packages taken.

And after year and years of downsizing our “app” subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Disney+ (Edda) and the NYTimes & WaPo, I feel like now I subscribe to a million things including: New Yorker (read very little) and Atlantic (I read a lot), two to-do list apps, two guitar learning apps, a food tracking app, fitness apps, we also subscribe to YouTube premium (this is quite more expensive than either Netflix or Hulu, but it’s our main source of entertainment for both me and Jeremy) and Spotify and I’m sure the list goes on and on.

For example a Japanese bunny jumping contest – I know people like to go out to concerts and dinners and comedy shows, but my favorite is being in bed with Jeremy and laughing over random things we find on youtube together. And then we yell into the air – “OK Google, turn of the bedroom TV and good night” and the TV goes dark and the lights go dark and then google wishes us a good night.