Hello world,

I have come to terms with the fact that climate change will have a real and noticeable impact on my life. Realizations like that are much easier to understand and conceptualize in the extremes. The most immediate and everyday consequences can be harder to anticipate. I was not prepared for how much more money I would wind up spending on food because of climate change. The increased intensity and frequency of extreme heat and severe thunderstorms have contributed to a number of sustained power outages this summer. I am writing this during another one of these power outages. Given the duration of this outage, I will once again empty the contents of the refrigerator and freezer into the trash.

A note on weeknote titles: last week’s note brought me to the end of the alphabet. Instead of choosing idioms alphabetically to title weeknotes, I will choose a single word. This week’s word works in a few different ways: spinning through the alphabet again, more food waste due to power outages this season and another repetition of the seven day cycle.

🔖 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week

All of this week’s links are sunflower-inspired. I have been writing a month-by-month guide to growing sunflowers and these resources have been useful supplements.

🌱 Gardening

The first sunflower blooms arrived this week! The week ended with one full bloom and one partial bloom of unidentified sunflower varieties. The flowers that bloomed are most likely Lemon Queen. Quite a few more sunflowers have stopped moving their heads with the sun so I hope to have more blooms next week.

The Kandy Korn Plus pumpkins started blooming. The male flowers on two of the plants blossomed and I am waiting to see if the pollination process is completed. Unfortunately, I also spotted a cucumber beetle. Although they are cute, they are pests and I want to protect my pumpkins from them.

📘 Books

I am continuing to work my way through Shogun. I keep track of my reading in various places across the Internet. I track every book I read as @bbrie on Hardcover and as brie on Rambling Readers. I also track each IRL Book Club pick.

🎮 Gaming

🕹️ Steam Playtime

Although I am done with Gourdlets, I am not quite done gaming!

ODDADA: 0.8 hours
ISLANDERS: 0.5 hours
Beholder: 0.1 hours

I have been thinking about using music created with ODDADA as background music for videos. This week’s exploration in ODDADA was with that in mind.

🏆 Steam Achievements

I earned a few achievements in Islanders in the very brief time that I played.

🍿 Movies

Minions & Monsters, 2026 (Watched: 2026-07-04)

I saw this movie in theaters and thoroughly enjoyed it. The references to earlier cinematic works were abundant and delightful. Earlier this year, I enjoyed a marathon of the Minions mini movies and the context that provided helped me to appreciate Minions & Monsters even more.

This was the fifteenth feature-length film I’ve watched towards my goal of watching at least 26 movies in 2026.

🎵 Music

I really didn’t listen to much music this week. The integration between Pixel Now Playing and Pano Scrobbler is not working as it did previously. That impacts scrobbling from incidental tunes.

📊 Stats

I listened to 120 tracks this week.

🦄 Unique tracks: 65 | Unique albums: 26 | Unique artists: 22

I posted tiny weeknotes on Mastodon before publishing this.

Thanks!

— Brie

026: Again