9/27 Reading Hannah Arendt and realizing I have, not in theory but in fact, been dismissing the early twentieth century. As if because everyone saw it we would now be forever immune to it.

9/26 Regular afternoon run, while the rain had stopped, although I wouldn’t have minded if it had rained again. I never mind rain during runs. I did not care to set the title of my run to something other than Afternoon Run, the default, in Strava, and I did not care to check whether the more regular runs in recent weeks had, in fact, made me the Local Legend again of the segment Climbing Out Of The River, the almost last stretch of every run, the insane climb from the Hudson Promenade to Riverside Drive, which a scooter can only do if your body weight is in order, the battery is full and you steer carefully, and which my son, on his bike, always took as a challenge, and won, many times.

9/25 I was not willing to believe that handwriting was better for memory retention than typing, until I got myself a digital handwriting device, which I now use even in circumstances when I could also type.

9/24 I am not willing to protect myself from technology. Such as using a deliberately dumb phone to protect myself from the distractions of a smarter phone. I want all the possibilities, all of the time, and I want to find it entirely within myself to navigate them.

9/23 Flight back to New York via Frankfurt. One of the most awkward wheelchair handling procedures. We got asked the same questions at least ten times, and nobody seemed to understand what we wanted or how to do it. Not even Lufthansa, usually the best airline when it comes to wheelchairs, got it right this time. – The flight was tortuous. We both had enough sleep debt that we could have slept the entire flight, yet finding a position to actually sleep in was impossible. We dozed on and off for five to six hours with no real sleep.

9/22 Getting better even in difficult situations. Learned to launch my son’s space shuttle in KSP, for which he had made a very detailed tutorial. In the last ten minutes before going to bed, carried the telescope to the sidewalk and looked at the rising moon, still orange from its low position.

9/21 At the car rental the attendant – who is always the same each time we come here – asked whether we needed a booster seat. No, that’s over, an indication that these in many ways terrible times are actually passing.

9/20 I have given stars to all in the family now, and I’m recording it here for durability: Delta Cygni to my older son, Altair to my daughter, Epsilon Cygni to my younger son, and Rasalhague to J.

9/19 Tonight Sweden.

9/18 I should mention that I can never remember what J is like. After the two or three days we spend apart in our weekly schedules, I’m always surprised when I meet her again. This fills me with a little concern, because what if she dies some day, and I will be the one who is supposedly most able to remember her, and I won’t. I hope that until then, I become a little more able to remember what she is like, but maybe I shouldn’t.