I see the GOP finished robbing the American public just in time to leave for their holiday break 👍🇺🇸
Change
Recently one of my favorite restaurants changed ownership and made some capricious (read: bad) changes to their menu. I felt pretty upset about it, which sounds silly given the things that are actually wrong in the world, but I’d been going to that restaurant for nearly two decades and had grown pretty attached to it being there in the specific way that it existed up until now.
Upon moving back to the city I grew up in a couple years ago, I noticed that a lot of the people who’d never left liked to complain about how much everything here has changed over the years. I’ve always appreciated the balance of old vs. new that exists here—If nothing had changed over the years, it would likely feel stale and I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to live here again. Instead, despite having lived here for the better part of the first twenty years of my life, I have a long list of new places to check out that I’m nowhere near completing. In fact, it seems to be more often the case that I’m adding things to that list than removing them.
I started thinking about some of the new places I’d been to recently, which didn’t exist before I moved back here. A brewery with delicious wood-fired pizza. An orchard & cider distillery where on a summer evening one can sit outside and look at rolling green hills, and feel a cool breeze embrace them as an accordion inhales and exhales the melody to a song played by a local band.
I still love the used book sales, affordable bagel sandwiches, and botanic gardens of old. I really do, however, appreciate the importance of the dynamism of where I live. I suppose it’s a good lesson in embracing change and learning to love new things.
Now if only I could find a new place to get a good burrito.
Finished reading: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle 📚Being the first Sherlock Holmes story, I was surprised that nearly half of it ended up being about Mormons in Utah. Coincidentally there were many parallels with Riders of the Purple Sage, which I happened to have read earlier this year.
Finished reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond 📚In college I minored in anthropology, so naturally I enjoyed this one. I found the discussion of oligarchy and big man theory in this context to be especially interesting.
It's happening here
California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.
There are no longer any checks and balances. Congress is nowhere to be found. Speaker Johnson has completely abdicated that responsibility. The rule of law has increasingly been given way to the rule of Don.
The founding fathers didn’t live and die to see this kind of moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up.
Along with comments I seem to remember Governor Pritzker making a month or so back, by my count this is now two Governors speaking frankly and honestly about the United State’s decline into authoritarianism. I’d like to hear others in positions of power do the same.
The clip of Joanna Stern’s interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak was a bit hard to watch. I agree with their points about the reductiveness of associating ML solely with chatbots, but their defensiveness around aggressively marketing what has so far amounted to vaporware was palpable.
After weeks of rain it finally feels like spring.
What time is it?
Tony (or possibly his brother Dan) Gilroy, writing for the character Mon Mothma on Andor:
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
In an interview, Gilroy notes that across human history, times of peace are the exception and sentiments like these could be equally relatable to people in virtually any time period. It sure does feel relatable to this moment though.
The series this quote comes from is, obviously, a work of fiction. But its prescience is a testament to how fiction often acts as a mirror for reality. The resonance of the quote instructs us that the hour is later than is easy to admit, and that the loud, hungry, greedy, malevolent monster is here, now.
Carl Sagan, in Cosmos:
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
I continue to struggle with prioritizing what books to read. My list is longer than I care to count, and I’m always trying to balance the tension between reading things that I feel I “should” read vs. reading what I want to read. I certainly read more, and more quickly, if I’m reading a book that I’m genuinely compelled toward. Maybe as long as I’m working in little bits of the stuff that’s good for me, like vegetables, then whatever else keeps me reading is good enough.
Happy 4th birthday to this pup! It was too cold to go to the dog park, but he at least got a sheep toy, the stuffing from which is now spread all through the house.
My favorite part of Porchfest 2024 (oh, sure, the music was good too). Ithaca’s is the original, and probably the best.
New door day! Which is also my way of saying, after all the work we’ve done for the last several months, we finally moved into our new house three weeks ago! Big projects are done (for now), but there will still be plenty of small ones.
New fence, same dog.
We’re done finishing our floors. Now we’re just reattaching (and in some cases repairing) the trim, painting some smaller spots, and cleaning up before we finally start moving in!
While we’ve started finishing our floors, the fence builders we hired removed our old chain link fence and have begun installing a new wooden one. The old fence was 2.5 feet high, and our dog has jumped it to chase rabbits. The new one will keep him in and help make our side yard feel like an oasis.
The walls are all painted and we’ve nearly finished sanding the floors. The lighter look of the wood brings a greater sense of light and spaciousness to the rooms in our house that was lacking before, so we’re going to forgo staining and get right on to finishing once we clean everything up.
We’ve primed all the walls in the house, next comes a couple coats of paint to finish things. For the rest of the house, we picked the same shade of white as the kitchen, since it worked out so well. We’ve started to zero in on some accent color choices for a few spots too.
The old vent hole has been patched, a recessed light was installed, and the walls and ceiling have their first coat of primer on them. The room will need at least one more coat of primer. We’ll be repeating this process throughout the rest of the house, then finally repainting.
With the kitchen work mostly done, we’ll be repainting the rest of the house next. But before we do that, we need to spackle areas where the old paint has chipped. The hole in the ceiling is one of a few old vents that are no longer used. We took them down and will be filling the holes with drywall.
With the installation of our new dishwasher, the kitchen project is more or less complete. We still have to install hardware on the cabinets, but we’ll be holding off on that to first prioritize some other projects throughout the house.
