No man is an island

The LEGO bricks are still on the floor this morning. This is a compliance failure and an enforcement failure. I fetched the child’s first yogurt of the morning and issued a warning. “LEGO that doesn’t get picked up gets sucked up into the vacuum cleaner!” It just happens. I’m not trying to do it. I just can’t guarantee that if you don’t put your LEGO back that we can get all of your LEGO back.

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Coffee rings and Google

I have forgotten, if I ever knew, about how coffee rings form. And Google sucks. Nearly every morning I pour myself a cup of coffee. Hot, iced, whatever — into a clean vessel, a mug or glass, often straight from the dishwasher having been run the night before. Every time (or every time I think to look) there is instantly a small ring puddle, a footprint of the vessel, on the counter.

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Far up the river, 22 years ago, daydreaming and looking out the window “that’s not how you land at Albany,” or a thought to that effect.

Well that is not where it landed.

I will not forget that, and all the hell that ensued that day and for decades to come. It isn’t over.


Semper fuck you

Or “Can there be closure for a wound carved by systemic failure?" I’ve visited on or close to the anniversary more years than not since I’ve been an adult in the region with access to a car. This time felt like a little bigger deal—a big round number. It is 30 years to the day since we lost my uncle. This time it was more explicitly acknowledged that my going was on behalf of the whole family.

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Adobe to discontinue Creative Cloud syncing — this is probably the push I need to ditch Lightroom and move to a different cataloging tool (on top of my other cloud and local storage) and a different editor/“darkroom” tool. I do miss Aperture.

A millipede crawling across the stone wall of an overlook on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah's National Park

Molly Holzschlag

I never met her but I was touched by her work. I knew of her as an open web advocate, as the creator of valuable resources (I own(ed) two of her books as I taught myself into something like the early stages of a career). I saw the fight she, Zeldman, and others were leading as a fundamental underpinning to my (and any) more overtly political fights. And aren’t we all (re)learning that lesson now.

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"Beef guzzlers: 12% of Americans eat half of the country’s cow meat"

A single cow can belch up to 264 pounds of methane in a year, the equivalent of burning almost 4,000 pounds of coal or driving a gas-powered car about 9,000 miles. That’s why climate advocates say people should eat less beef if they want to help ease climate change. … Who, exactly, comprises that group? “There’s some of everybody,” Rose said, but men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 are most likely to be big beef eaters, the study found.

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First day of school blues

Today is the first day of school in Washington, D.C. Every year this heralds a spike in traffic across our neighborhoods: School zones have an active impact on traffic flow again, more people walking and in crosswalks at intersections, parents who use cars to drop off kids and commute are suddenly out on the road at the same time, the few school buses D.C. uses for specific purposes are now on the road, etc.

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I couldn’t take much of the Republican debate (there was already bile pooling in my mouth just after it began) after I heard the sui-eco-cidal answers to the climate crisis question.


Watching the Republican debate… I don’t know for how long. DeSantis looks like he’s hanging on for dear life lest he fall over from on top of those lifts.