Hello dear readers,

I write to you from my office, an incredibly large coffee on the desk in front of me. This week was a large coffee kind of week for a number of reasons, mainly because it was so tumultuous. But here I am at Sunday morning, with the entire day stretching out before me and no tasks to do.

In true Catherine fashion, today’s post will be a list, in order to best capture the haphazard sort of week that I had.

• First and foremost, an announcement: I’m not going to be posting on Substack for the foreseeable future. There are a number of reasons for this, one being that I dislike what the platform has become¹, but more so because I really do want my writing-related activities to be gathered in one place. I like to think of this blog as an archive of sorts, a single building where my thoughts and words live—something I can look back on in five, ten, twenty years and reminisce on what my life was. 
• This leads me to my next point, which is that I’m starting a new endeavor on this blog: micro short stories based around photographs that have been wasting away in my camera roll. The other night, I had been looking through old photos there, and realized how many photos I had that I had done nothing with. The stories themselves will have a word limit of 500, though I’ll try to get them less than that, because I love to make things hard for myself. For now², I am calling this new journey The Reverie, though that name may shift in the coming weeks. You’ll see the first installation this Saturday. 
• I’m caught in the work/grad school/survival shuffle, and so much of the fun crafts and house things I’ve been wanting to do have been on the back burner. But I am slowly working toward my next task: repainting our entryway. Right now, it’s a beautiful deep blue, and while I don’t hate it, I am ready for a change. I have multiple paint chips taped there now, all in shades of purple, waiting for me to make a decision.
• I pulled all the radishes from our garden yesterday and quick pickled them; they await me in the fridge. I have no idea whether they’ll be any good or not, but I am looking forward to trying them.
• I bought something recently that came with three mini perfume samples, and unfortunately I’ve fallen in love with the most expensive of them all³. I have such a hard time justifying expensive purchases, but I may treat myself at the end of June for getting through work & my grad school course.
• I’ve been looking for some ‘90s khaki shorts for ages, and finally found a pair Friday after work. The waist is too big, and so I’ll need to adjust the darts, but otherwise they’re perfect.
• I am this close to finishing the final draft of my mystery novel, and then all I need to do is get my submission materials in order. I hadn’t thought I’d get it all done before the end of June, but here we are! 
• Sadly, one of our dogs passed away early Wednesday morning. He was fourteen years old, so it wasn’t a total surprise, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting. He’s being cremated, and I get to be the one to keep the urn, and my coworkers are angels who brought me flowers the next day.

That’s all from me today. I hope your week is going well, and that you’re finding some time to relax.

—Catherine

FOOTNOTES

¹ I have many gripes, but one is that my feed is made up entirely of people I don’t follow. What’s the point of following people on Substack if it only shows me people I’m not following!! That, and I felt like a lot of the posts were carbon copies of others—just like trends on Instagram. I could go on and on, so I’m going to stop here. We don’t need an entire essay in the footnotes.

² I only came up with this idea this morning, and so the name is relatively new. Something that fits better may arise as I write.. We’ll see.

³ It’s Carolina Herrera’s La Bomba Eau de Parfum. I don’t know what it is about it.. Maybe that it smells a bit like cherry pie. But I’m obsessed and already lamenting my mini running out.

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