My Kindle has been increasingly sluggish, so in a desire to untether myself where I can from the Amazon ecosystem, I bought a Kobo to replace it. We’ll see how I like it, but so far, so good. I appreciate the Overdrive integration on the Kobo itself, vs. having to go through the Libby app followed by the Amazon app followed by the Kindle; 99% of my e-book reading is library loans, so the…
Finished watching: Gone Girl 🎥 Better than the book (not all that high of a bar).
Case Study House #8, aka the Eames House 📚 Case Study Houses by Elizabeth A.T. Smith
Slowly outfitting the new house with furniture, mostly sourced secondhand. Trying to find the balance between “we need somewhere to sit right now” and not buying something disposable that doesn’t actually suit our needs/style. It’s a slow process, but an enjoyable one.
Exploring our new neighborhood by bike tonight - I love that in the space of a couple miles we can bike through forest, prairie, and around lakes.
A good mail day today
Best room in the house (Fern agrees).
My daughter is at an intensive “pre-college art lab” for high schoolers right now, and I am loving seeing all the work she texts me photos of. Here are some samples of some screenprint work she’s done the past couple days!
Past me (an idiot), blithely: “We can definitely paint every wall/ceiling/baseboard in our house ourselves (plus the prerequisite plaster repair) before listing it for sale!” 🙃
Sure, your refrigerator may be from this millennium, but does it have a POWER MISER??
Exciting things happening over at our new house . . .
My (9 and 12 yr old) sons were just in the backyard playing a game they call “lawyer karate,” the rules of which are somewhat opaque to me, but involve hand-to-hand combat while wearing suit jackets and ties, and yelling at each other about taxes. When they came inside, I asked if they were done, and the elder replied, “Yep. We ran out of lawsuits.”
Finished reading: The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry 📚 “Don’t you want to go in there and watch the TV?” Mrs. Hendrick asks. He shakes his head. “No,” he thinks. “God Amighty, no.” For the cost of living beyond his time is in putting up with the various noises and contraptions of these new times, this modern ignorance, as he has come to call it in his mind. The modern ignorance is in…
Our family stayed at a hotel last week, and as usual, the children were delighted by the novelty of live television. After flipping around for awhile, they discovered the “PBS Retro” channel, and that was that; all three of them (ages 9.5, 12.5, 16) sat spellbound for hours (across three days) of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood . (We even caught one black-and-white episode from the…
Just now: Andrew and I are discussing A Pattern Language , and our 9 year old sighs to himself, “Not this again.”
Finished reading: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans 📚 - I very much enjoyed this, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was the equivalent of taking the character of Joyce from Thursday Murder Club and running her through a literary fiction filter.
A number of people working at hunger relief organizations and in education, who asked not to be identified for the record for fear of retribution, said the food instability and lack of access to social services are not simply a byproduct of the ICE crackdown but rather part of the agency’s strategy, essentially weaponizing food . Among other tactics, they said, the agency is tracking food delivery…
“While groceries and household supplies are an ongoing need for the families being terrorized by ICE in Minnesota, what is becoming an ever-more urgent and pressing need as the 1st of the month approaches is rent money. Many people have not been able to work for the past month or more, either because they are personally afraid to leave their homes, or their workplaces have closed (out of…
Living in the Twin Cities, and feeling the need to monitor The Situation daily––not to mention keep abreast of our 16-block-radius hyper-local neighborhood chat–which puts all personal rules about online news and smartphone usage in shambles, I’m having to be even more intentional in seeking out sources beyond the noise to try to make sense of things… from A Taste For Signs
I don’t know what to write here. Things in Minnesota are bad. A friend who lives across the country said to me a few days ago, “Maybe they exaggerate in the reports.” I’m telling you: They don’t exaggerate. If anything, the reported news understates the scope, scale, and level of fear, violence, and lawbreaking being visited on residents of the Twin Cities (and…
7p - 7:30 am - Go to work at the hospital, caring for a lovely, sweet, critically ill little one. ( Change diapers, monitor all the vents/lines/tubes/meds/vital signs/etc, give meds/stop meds/titrate meds, tell baby how stinking cute it is, troubleshoot lines deciding not to work, talk with the medical team, break a light sweat trying to switch out pressor syringes like Indiana Jones fast enough…
From the Star Tribune : “Fraud investigation and immigration enforcement in Minnesota have become a pretext for a sweeping federal show of force that bears little relationship to the problem it claims to address. It is indiscriminate. Noncitizen immigrants without legal status make up roughly 1.5% of Minnesota’s population — less than half the national average. Nothing about that figure…
I’ve been trying to think of what to say about how it feels living in St. Paul right now, but Bill Lendeke did a pretty good job of summing it up . The only meaningful pushback against the terror campaign comes in the form of my neighbors, regular people doing extraordinary and difficult work. They are coordinating themselves from the bottom up, grassroots, using phone chat apps. They are…
Random Twin Cities sociological thought: You can take a decent guess at someone’s politics by what terminology they use about the events in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd – e.g., “riot,” “protest,” “unrest,” “uprising,” etc.
I hate how every volleyball commentator on TV feels the need to explain basic rules of the game. It’s really condescending to the viewers. Do they explain the concept of first downs during every football game? Remind the viewers of every basketball game how the shot clock works? No? Then stop telling us during every single volleyball match that the teams have to win the set by 2 points.