by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 7/30/23-8/5/23

weeknotes travel family museum books

This Week:

  • My son spent the week in Iowa with his grandparents. I miss him, but I’m delighted for him and for them that they get to have this week together. I’m picking him up in Erie, PA on Saturday and can’t wait to hear all about the week he’s had.
  • On the way back from dropping him off last Saturday, I listened to an audio recording of Shirley Jackson’s “We have always lived in the castle”. I came to Jackson late–unlike seemingly everyone else, we never read “The Lottery” in high school–and am now falling in love with her precise and understated prose, and her masterful ability to build tension and strangeness. “We have always lived in the castle” does this over the course of a short novel, featuring familial murder, sympathetic magic, a menacing community, and the power of commonplace objects. Brilliant.
  • Hazel was feeling a little sad that Dominic was gone (really, all of us were!) so we took a trip to Binghamton to visit the Ross Park Zoo, and the Southern Tier Discovery Center. The zoo requires some comfort with climbing, as much of it is built into a hill, but it’s quite nice. The Discovery Center is a lot of noisy fun.
  • In the Museum, we finished putting up all the labels for “Velocity and Position”. I also finished the designs for the title and abstract panels and sent them to the printer.
  • We had a delightful visit from our Toronto Cousins, who stopped with us on their way back from New York City.
  • This is our last full week with our summer student assistants, so we took them out to lunch. They’ve done amazing work and I’m really proud of all of them.
  • I did some work on getting my student loans in order for when the pause ends, and for getting my passport renewed.