As a Michigander, I have had an inside seat to the whole Abdul El-Sayed vs. Haley Stevens goat rodeo - as well as to the ways it connects to other progressive-versus-establishment-Democrat goat rodeos. And boy do I have some thoughts. 
 yes he bloody well can beat Mike Rogers 
 The big talking point among pundits right now is that El-Sayed can't beat Republican Mike Rogers (who ran…
August is a week away, which means I'm on the cusp of three distinct yet overlapping seasons: portfolio, primary, and tomato. Meditations ensue. 
 portfolio 
 Like a good Boglehead, I rebalance my portfolio once a year. I do mine in mid-August. 
 I...guess?...you could call my approach to my finances 'barista FIRE,' except I'm not (yet) withdrawing anything from my nest egg. I call it…
I have spent the past several mornings taking 10+ mile bike trips on sections of the local bike trail. Some fragments. 
 everything you need to know about the family tov: a play in one scene 
 One morning, I decided to do the part of the trail that would deposit me at the family homestead (part of which backs up to the trail). I knew my mother was out of town at a conference, having missed…
I used to be a colorguard director. I used to be a very good colorguard director. I've taken kids to Indy and Dayton (iykyk). I've won awards. I've trained champions. 
 Normally, I'd be busy as heck for the next couple weeks, preparing for band camp at the start of August. But I'm not. Because for the first time in over 15 years and over 25 seasons, I do not have a program to direct this fall.…
Remember when Marie Kondo was telling us all to ask if things 'spark joy'? And we all lost our damn minds folding our underwear into perfect rectangles and arguing over whether we were allowed to own more than 35 books? 
 Good times. Anyway, I got a new one for you. 
 I decided to tackle the basement Room Where Stuff Goes When I Don't Want to Deal With It Anymore But Also Feel Like I Can't…
'Garden' never means the same thing to any two people. 
 I don't usually list 'gardening' as one of my hobbies. I don't usually tell people 'I'm a gardener.' Because everyone has varying ideas of what that means, and because even other 'gardeners' and I will have radically different notions of what 'gardening' entails. 
 As I was weeding my weeds (digging the grass and oversized milkweed…
There's a scene in Angeline Boulley's novel Firekeeper's Daughter where the main character, an Ojibwe teenager, describes her coming-of-age 'berry fast.' She loves berries of all kinds, so she committed to not eating any for an entire year. She otherwise lived a normal life - going to events where berries were served, going berry picking, and so on. She describes how her aunt even tested her by…
No, really. 
 I'm sitting here reading about the Bath School disaster: 
 Bath School disaster 
 
 and I discover that the building was rigged with a bunch of dynamite and something called 'pyrotol.' I'd never heard of the latter, so I Wikipedia rabbit holed that too: 
 Pyrotol 
 
 Apparently, the US had so much of this stuff left over from World War I that, for a time,…
At this time last year, I was scrambling so hard to get everything done that I straight up closed the library for the last week and a half of school. This year, I'm better at my job. Better enough that instead of closing the library, I'm mostly sitting here being bored in it. 
 It is a library. It is hard to stay bored in. 
 I've spent the last couple days learning about the US Public…
Since ChatGPT launched, I have had a hypothesis. Since it is a probability-calculating machine trained on the text contents of the Internet, it should return the 'average result' for Web-content-based questions. For example, if I want the average of all blog posts on some common keyword, I should be able to get an LLM to generate it. 
 Yesterday I tried this. I directed ChatGPT to give me…
I am not a historian. I'm sure this is all very simplistic and reductive. 
 BUT I got spicy this morning and searched 'why did the Roman Empire fall?' And this pop-history listicle seems to have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to teach us in the present moment: 
 History dot com: 8 reasons why Rome fell 
 
 I'm sure reviewing these is an exercise in futility. Especially when there are no…
The following exchange popped up in the teacher group chat just now: 
 First Year Teacher: I have several seniors absent. Do I mark them as present? I know today is Senior Skip Day. 
 Principal: You mark them absent. Senior Skip Day is not on the calendar. 
 An unexcused absence? That's it? 
 I went through high school in the mid-late 1990s. It was the era of 'Zero Tolerance' - the…
For those of you in the United States, Canada, or the Bahamas, may I recommend: 
 CoCoRaHS - the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network 
 
 CoCoRaHS is, as the name implies, a community volunteer effort to measure rain, hail, and snow amounts across the member nations. It's also fun as hell. 
 I LOVE WEATHER SO MUCH (and also doing science but not, like...being…
Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the fact that my titanium bones make me a human barometer who detects every change in said weather with screaming bone pain. Maybe it's the end of the school year. Maybe it's a lot of things. 
 But: Today, I have a hefty case of 'what is the use?' when it comes to our AI future. 
 This crap machine has taken over EVERYTHING. I've nearly given up on the…
One of the other librarians emailed this morning asking if the rest of us had gotten an email from an outfit called Librar Labs. 
 We hadn't, but I looked them up. And yeah, this whole webpage can fuck off: 
 Librar Labs 
 
 How can it fuck off specifically? Let us count the ways: 
 'Librar makes it easier to set up and manage a school library even before you find a librarian.'…
Most of my friends pull out their phones even in the middle of the woods. I tend to roll my eyes and tolerate this. Merlin and PlantNet are certainly useful. But I grew up on field guides and conversations with more experienced naturalists. Instant AI-enabled possible-answers feel more like junk food info to me. 
 That said, my favorite 'field guide' recently has been Wikipedia. 
 I don't…
Quackgrass, aka couchgrass, aka Elymus repens: 
 (this little mumbletyswear) 
 
 has long been my sworn foe. Only recently did I learn its roots and grains are edible. 
 i'm sorry, you can eat WHAT 
 
 Close up, quackgrass reminds me of corn: a tough central green stalk with leaf blades that fold away at intervals, sharp and fibrous. 
 (Aside: seriously, go look at a…
My library shelves are organized by genre. There about 14 subdivisions. Within each subdivision, books are arranged alphabetically by author's last name. 
 Each shelf has a tag indicating its range (which authors, alphabetically, are on each shelf). The ranges use the last three letters of the authors' last names, since that's what is also on the spine label. 
 All this creates a lot of…
I grew up tromping around the woods of upper lower Michigan. I am one of the few people I know who would not starve to death if dropped into the middle of said woods. Yet every single year, I learn that something else is edible. 
 Here are three things I learned are edible THIS WEEK. Also a revelation I had on identifying edible wild species. 
 i'm sorry you can eat WHAT now 
 No…
I always have a notebook going. It's always a single-subject, college-ruled spiral notebook. I fill about one a month. I buy them in July during back to school sales, when I can get them in bulk. 
 It's always just one notebook. I use a tab system to keep track of each notebook's contents by broad categories - personal projects, work stuff, etc. Within those broad tabs, though, contents can…