I read some books!

What Fresh Hell Is This? by Heather Corinna (2021)
About perimenopause and menopause. Well, I guess I learned things? It did all feel like a huge and intimidating list of possible symptoms to get, and I don't know yet how it'll shake out for me. But I guess one advantage of knowing what's possible is that it will help me connect the dots when/if various things do happen.

A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by K J Charles (2023)
Hmm, hm. Meh. I thought I'd try something that's supposed to be self-indulgent, and this was certainly page-turney enough, but did not really zing for me. I can't tell if it's just that my reading is still far from my previous baseline, or whether this would not have been my favorite Charles in any case. Somehow I could not keep from comparing this to others of her books and seeing commonalities in the types of characters and relationships she often writes, and thus not being entirely able to see the characters as people of their own.

Not a book, but I thought the blog series Life, Work, Death, and the Peasant by the historian Bret Deveraux was interesting. It models the life and labor of pre-modern peasants, using sources from ancient Rome and medieval Europe. And I do mean modeling, trying to estimate such things as the number of pregnancies a woman would have on average, and the number of hours worked on various tasks. It really hammers home that while yes, I do live on a farm now, and I do over time want to try to produce more of the food we eat, there is so much labor pre-modern peasants did that I don't have to do. The amount of time women spent on textile production (mostly spinning) is unbelievable. And I didn't know the medieval spinning wheel is about three times more productive than the spindle of antiquity! Carrying water (back-breaking work!), washing by hand, etc. Obviously I knew people did these things by hand, but it's so interesting seeing estimates of the time it took.

I do think modern civilization is hugely wasteful of energy and materials, but can we not find some appropriate level of energy use and technology? Pumping water for household use, and spinning thread with machines: yes, great use of energy and technology. \o/ Mining bitcoins: nope, terrible use of energy and technology. /o\