in medias res .

OK, everything is pointed in the right direction, motor is running, gentlemen start your etc, "it's 8:05 it's time to rock," said one of the stupidest songs ever.

First, some shots from around town: I see the below store every time I go to my job in the Pijp, and finally I had to take a picture of it. This is from a couple of weeks ago.

Then yesterday I happened to be walking down that side of the street and they had this heartwarming sign in their window:

Apropos, or not.

Last night I took poor Jo3n kitty to the vet because we've been playing an awful lot of "Poop or Hairball" lately. Always an adventure to try and get a deadly, deadly fanged and clawed creature into a small box where it does not want to go. On the way to the vet I had to put her down (not "put her down", but, you know, stop carrying her) for a moment and take this picture of "normal" urban Amsterdam wildlife:

This was 8 herons (couldn't fit all of them in the shot) waiting outside of the Westerpark frites/shoarma stand for what must have become an expected nightly snack, you never seem to see more than one or two herons together unless people are feeding them. Those beaks must be perfect for stabbing fries.

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The last few days have been full of, what? Work, exercise, kitty maintenance, mostly good things. I binge-watched/listened to two amazing stories of possibly wrongly-imprisoned men, one influenced by the other (the stories/serieseses, not the men): first I listened to Serial while working, which I can only recommend doing if you have time to listen to all four episodes in a row, cause you'll want to desperately; and then I watched/listened to the thing that the people who recommended Serial mentioned during their recommendation, The Staircase.

This does all tie into The Year I Got Old and the very recent preoccupation with memoirs, at least for sure in The Staircase (we still don't know how Serial "ends"): talk about having your life turn out differently than you hoped or expected. The main character is not especially likable at all in the beginning, or indeed through much of The Staircase, but in Episode 10 he says something surprisingly quotable about time and acceptance and regret that I'll mention eventually out of context because if I were to mention it now you'd know too much about what happens, and what ultimately happens (ultimately meaning episodes 9 and 10) is, well, [redacted].

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