For your Saturday reading — I dare not say enjoyment as there are, alas, few joys in the story — a monograph on Serbia covering 14 centuries of dense history in mere 30 pages, written by Lily Lynch, the one American who knows more about the Balkans than the Balkanites themselves.

It is a cool, rainy spring morning in D.C. and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D dur sits just right.

• Pack your own things, but unless you live in a studio and have only an IKEA futon and a twin bed to contend with, you are better off hiring someone to load, drive, and unload.
• The nice people who will help you move can also wrap your closed shelves and drawer chests in plastic, and move them with all the contents still inside, so unless you have the contents carefully stacked and/or have fragile things inside, do not bother boxing those.
• Do not attempt to move a 50" plasma screen from one place to the next all by yourself. You will break it.
• That said, 2023 is not the worst time in the world to buy a new screen, now that decently prices OLEDs are widely available.
• You may find, while packing, at the bottom of a never-used drawer, hidden under a decade-old abstract book and the 2011 ASH guidelines on idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, some medical instruments you used a few times during medical school and internship for a full neurologic exam and never again after that, said instruments being a brilliant white in you memory, or at the very worst a dull gray from all the lint collected in your white coat back when you still wore one, but now appearing old and yellow, like something you’d find in your dad’s office that looked like it was from the 1960s but was actually just a few years old only everyone back then smoked so the thing had no choice but to look and smell like it was made of nicotine, which now — the look, not the smell — come to mind when looking at that medical instrument of yours, only it couldn’t be nicotine because it’s not the 1990s and you are not in Serbia, so did something else go terribly wrong with the plastic? No, it did not; you are getting old.
• The first objects to enter the new household, once you confirm there is running water and electricity, are a modem and one or more routers. Place them on the floor and arrange furniture around them.

Belatedly reading a wonderful post from David Smith on that strange feeling you get right after completing a big project, not-really-tired and not-really-empty. It was guaranteed for me after every big exam back in medical school, nowadays comes on not more than once per year. I could identify it even back then but didn’t know what to call it, and stretched — thank you, J. R. R. Tolkien for coming up with it — is a good descriptor.

How many more gems are hidden in The Lord of the Rings, I wonder. After 20+ years, it is due for a re-read.

Finished reading: Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton 📚

Not much has changed in how people think about religion since Chesterton wrote this more than a century ago. Alas, the way people write about it has gotten much worse.

Apps and/or services I have tried and dropped so far this year:

• Arc
• Ulysses
• Rewind
• Wavelength

The one that stuck:

• Microsoft Edge

Yet again, Microsoft is eating everyone’s lunch. Back to the 1990s it is.

The 20th day of the 4th month is a special day for everyone, most of all lovers of murder mysteries and fine art. This year, it is also the end of Ramadan.

But was it all worthy of the most expensive fireworks display to date?

He’s a Firefox user.