Reading Books By the Sea

I’ve come home from Taipei, and headed straight back into the library.

By total happenstance, I picked up two books by two of my favourite authors that are so completely different and yet entwined together. In entirely different contexts (the Covid pandemic and an asylum-seeker arriving in England) both books are about the ocean of water of the past, and the strange familiarity of someone from your past helping you come up for air when you least expect it. How bizarre and lovely that these two books have so much in common. History and stories.

I love the library!

It is fall and I hope you are all enjoying this glorious, gloomy season. Perhaps I am appreciating it more than usual after returning home from baking and steaming and roasting in the summer of Taipei, but the stationery nerd in me is coming alive at the crunch of leaves underfoot, children also underfoot.

We recently had dinner with someone who was describing how they were using AI in their business, and it was very successful and also wild. I can’t really get into it because I had no idea what was going on for the entire duration of that conversation, but Jon seemed really impressed. Could I use AI to write my newsletter? I sat at my computer and thought about it until my brain started hurting. It seemed a little too Klara and the Sun, so instead I wrote about painting my toenails at midnight and getting chided by my six-year-old.

And then just this morning I got an email from the BDC (despite receiving their emails for the last decade, I had to look up what it stands for, and it seems like it stands for the Business Development Bank of Canada according to their footer info, but that also seems not quite right according to the number of letters in that acronym—but in any case) and the email started off with: Can you afford not to use AI? Tell me, Klara! What is the answer??

Lots of things are happening, goblins are outgrowing their violins, other goblins are trying to collect Marvel cards now that we’ve returned and all the grocery stores have stopped giving them out, I caught the smallest goblin trying to tip the entire whipped cream canister into her mouth.

A strange nipple in this strange new world, but tastier.