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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 …

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: Governor Newsom, addressing not only the L.A. protests, but also the situation the U.S. finds itself in: 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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

More progress on the kitchen renovation—We now have countertops! The new lighting has also been installed. At this point, we’re just waiting for our dishwasher to be delivered, and that’ll be a wrap for this project!

Our cabinets arrived a little over a week ago, and are in the process of being installed. The room is finally starting to look like a kitchen again! Tomorrow the countertop installers will be taking measurements, so we can get that process started too.

We finished painting the walls and ceiling and then installing the new floors in our kitchen. It’s incredible what a difference these two small changes make to the look of the room. In a couple of weeks the new cabinets should get delivered!

The kitchen begins to take shape: The kitchen renovation project has come a long way since my last post about it. After we removed the old cabinets and backsplash, not only did a lot of the plaster come off the walls, but we also discovered that the sink’s drainage pipe was cutting one of the corners, getting in the way of where we …

Another couple days of kitchen demoing down. We cleaned up since this photo was taken, but I forgot to get a newer one. The walls may be 3 layer plaster, or something similar, which I guess wasn’t uncommon in the 1940s. Next step will be figuring out how to address the exposed parts so we can paint.

Today we started demoing the kitchen in our new house. Excited to be starting the renovation process, and to see it all come together. Some of the cabinets we’re removing have been there since the house was built in the 1940s. The space is small but our design will make it a lot more functional.

A recent visit to one of my favorite places, Cornell’s Botanic Gardens.

We went camping in Maine this past weekend, not far from Acadia. What a beautiful place! It was the furthest up the east coast I’ve been. Maybe next year we’ll go all the way to Nova Scotia.

I feel so lucky to be living in the finger lakes again.

Happy half-birthday to this sweet pup!

William Finnegan at The New Yorker: 'The Fight Over Penn Station and Madison Square Garden': I’ve always been interested by rail travel in general, but particularly in the history of rail in New York City. In many ways, that history is tied to the names of the neighboroods and institutions, dating back to the wealthy families that once ruled the city. This article is a fascinating account …

Foggy Wallkill, November 2014.

Square Louise Michel in Paris, France. June 2016.

Tree limbs, January 2015.

Wallkill River, August 2014.

My new home on the internet: Long story short, I’ve moved my website to Micro.blog. The path I took to get here, however, was a long one. For a long time, I’d wanted a section of my website where I could quickly and easily add short thoughts as they came to me. The process I had for adding posts just wasn’t quick though: My …

Autumn in the Mohonk foothills, Hudson Valley, November 2014.

These cold nights ain’t so bad

Winter 2021 Playlist: I made this playlist a little over a year ago. At the time I was getting ready to move back east, selling most of my posessions, and trying to find the job that ultimately became the one I have now. Today, I’m trying to buy a house, so I guess I’m yet again in a mode of transience. I …