Category: Alphabet Magic

Earlier in the year, I waited eight weeks for the local Ikea to finally get a shipment of Billy bookcases.

The particle board smell was so strong that we started with two book cases and let the rest air out in the garage. This start was enough to handle a third of my books.

A few weeks later, we raised the final three and finally emptied our boxes of books after eleven years!

,
 

,
 

 ,
 

 ,
 

 ,
 

 ,
 

 ,
 

Social media is dangerous. Our puny individual ape brains were not evolved to survive hordes of corporate psychologists. However, there is great value buried in those sites.

After being on on Instagram for #inktober for two weeks, I am all the more certain that the best way handle a social media website is to decide upon a real-world analogy (to limit your use) and never let it slip out of its prison.

Here are my personal metaphors for various social media sites.

• Twitter—Newspaper opinion pages (lurk only—no comments, no hearts)
• Facebook—Telephone gossip among old friends
• Linkedin—Awkward business networking event
• Instagram—Mall of private galleries (I’ve had a rotation of interests, but my current selections are calligraphy, illustration, and airports).
• Reddit—Collection of old school special interest web-forums (ignore the all-in-one feed on the main page).
• Substack—The collected newsletters make an Arts and Poetry Magazine, with Notes as an attached web-forum (I avoid hot button topics like politics).
• Youtube—A giant Fry’s Electronics wall of TV’s. Even though I only lurk the site, this is by far the hardest place to keep in check. I might institute a personal rule to write a sentence about each video I watch (h/t James Hart).
• Tiktok—Just Say No.

In these battles against the algorithm, you will be constantly presented with intriguing morsels creeping outside of your proscribed boundaries. Don’t take the bait. You must constantly ignore, mute, and cull your feeds. Big Social is a fine servant but a cruel master.

.

The husband of local architect collects Pokémon cards. When I asked her where to buy a big box of cheap commons, she handed me a pile that I passed onto the kids.

That became a giant mess on the floor, way past bedtime!

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

I’m learning that cleaning up is a slow necklace of focused moments.

Each attempt at organizing takes way longer than planned. But if you tackle each clean-up endeavor as a focused chip off a giant boulder, you’ll make a dent over time.

Last Saturday we finally put up shelves in the garage. Sunday, I threw the mess up on the wall. Admittedly this just made a vertical wreck, but it was nice to see the concrete slab again.

This morning, I sorted through the stuff, consolidated the boxes, and we now enjoy a tidy garage.

Onto the house (a small corner at a time)!

.

In winter, we played in the snow as the sun set over the girl’s last afternoon as a 9 year old. With the rains of that week, our usual spot at Mount Charleston (in the valley below the visitor center) was in fresh deep fluff.

Coincidentally, this week, I’ve been listening to the Fred Frith soundtrack to Rivers and Tides which includes a few scenes of Andy Goldsworthy working in the winter cold. My memory of the sounds from that afternoon have blended with the sounds of that lovely film.

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

After four and a half years, COVID finally found us.

I got the symptoms first so I rushed off to my in-law’s empty rental house. Too late, the family all came down soon after.

But inertia took over and I stayed there for a couple of weeks as we recuperated separately.

One can get a lot done without family responsibilities. I cleaned up the place thoroughly, finally finished T-Zero (fine book, but still a sequel) and The Conference of the Birds (a glorious Sufi poem that I can barely comprehend), created AutoCAD templates for my calligraphy practice, and ate a lot of TV dinners.

Without kids, the place stayed remarkably clean. Entropy moves slower in the absence of little people. But still, nice to be home again, mess and all.

.

Three weeks ago, we moved to our new house. Here are three last shots from the old place.
  

The kids made a car on their penultimate night at this home. They filled the trunk with stuffies, turned off the lights, and drove the dark roads following the sat-nav until they found a motel.
 

Here are the last two pieces of bread that I baked in the building. The gods gave me a run of good loaves for the past few weeks. (If you want a great sourdough info, check out Chapin‘s newsletter).
 

Finally, the last morning routine in this bedroom with a quick gesture sketch, continuous line drawing, and tiny poem. Shoutouts to ashlyn, Citlaflor, Hazel Burgess Art, Beth Kempton, Wendy MacNaughton, and Nadia Gerassimenko for helping mold this regular morning jaunt…which has unfortunately become irregular after I was coincidentally dragged back into the office after four years of working from home after this same weekend.

So in both ways this was the end of an era. Four years ago, we were living with my in-laws. Their tenant left this rental house a few months in late 2019 and they had not found a replacement before the before the pandemic hit. Given the parents’ age, I exiled myself to this place for a several long months—which included my first grind through the brutish biennial budgeting season as a state worker.

After things settled down the family joined me here. The kids were 6 and 2. They kept growing. I guess we did too. At the end of 2023, we bought our own place. The kids are now 10 and almost 6.

The “real Vegas” is not the spectacle of the Strip. It’s our quiet lives in these beige stucco boxes carpeting the Valley. Like most of suburban America, it’s a splendorous existence that we barely appreciate.

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,

It’s been three weeks at the office. It’s a treat to regularly hang out with my coworkers in person. But that marginal benefit is far outweighed by the cost of commuting every day.

There are so many things I’d rather do than piloting a metal box across the town to accomplish tasks that I’ve done at home for four years. But I’ve also heard horror stories about workers who have taken ill advantage of remote work. So I get why my massive organization settled on this brute solution.

I can’t complain too much. Commuting is a mere annoyance, even if the unnecessary nature of this blanket directive makes it particularly irksome.

So I thought up a new project to redeem the time. I’m going to march through my collection of CD’s in alphabetical order by performer.

I will listen to each disc at least once through. After that, I can re-listen and skip tracks before I move on to the next album. If I buy any new CD’s, I’ll listen to them once and then slot them in line.

This project popped into my noggin while listening to an ambiance album featuring the didgeridoo. I was underwhelmed, but I thought about the artist. I presume he thought it was a great piece of art, at least the best he could do at the time he published it. At that moment, I decided to give each of my musicians at least one generous, full hearing.

For three decades I’ve been listening to the spoken word—sermons on tape, talk radio, and podcasts. As I get older, I’m being overwhelmed by the verbal clutter. Let’s fill that metal box with music.

!

The kids insisted on reading Grumpy Monkey Oh No It’s Christmas before leaving while Mama checked out of the supermarket.

Mama was not amused as she waited outside. Her ire disappeared when I rushed out with blood soaking through his mask, dripping down his throat.

He didn’t complain about a bloody nose until the book was done!

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

Apple Vision Pro has finally entered the conversation, on Youtube and in my podcasts. “Spatial computing” will be the future!

Great! I’m doing nothing.

The iPhone didn’t hit its stride until the 4—why spend hard cash on alpha technology?

More importantly, I want the six year old to remember a world without VR.

Growing up in the early 80’s, I was among the first cohort who always had a computer at home, but we didn’t connect to the internet until college. I’m grateful that my youth was disconnected from the world wide web.

I’m not so stubborn to skip the ubiquitous internet of today’s reality, but I feel no rush to interjaculate our children’s world with digital light knifed through their pupils.

That future can wait.

,
 

Happy New Year!

Here’s to Dragoning for the next lunar cycle.
 

 
.

I accidentally caught stunning clouds while the wife recorded the kids riding bikes in the park.

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 
We moved this week. From our in-law’s place to our own house. And I moved from working at home back into the office.

The latter move was unnecessary except someone decided it was important. Such is the nature of work. Fortunately I enjoy the company of my coworkers. The commute is annoying¹, but the time at work is still enjoyable in its own way.

The former move was also unnecessary, except that it’s nice to have a home of one’s own. We’ve been living with her parents for a decade. This autumn, we finally found a place that we liked more than the possibility of buying a better indeterminate place.

Life rarely gives perfect choices. It’s a blessing to be presented with good options—many folks don’t get such moves.

,

1. In spite of my complaints, I experienced a sublime moment driving east on 215 pressing towards the orange glow of a rising sun, immersed in Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. Epic way to start a Wednesday. ↩︎

.

My former intern in private practice joined the State Public Works Division half a year ago. He finally passed his last architectural exam.

At the time I was working from home, but I snuck into the office with party hats and poppers to properly celebrate at the Monday morning staff meeting.

Nothing like the smell of gunpowder in the morning.

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

,
 

Getting your license is hard. 2010 was my year of misery, a slogging through seven tests. Never a moment of peace with the enormity always under the pillow.

And I was lucky, working only 30 hours a week. Those great recession paychecks were ugly, but I had “free” time to study.

Unfortunately, my guy’s celebration was short lived. In the past couple of weeks, we had a shakeup at our agency. He got picked to run our most public project, a room with our administrator, right before we head into the nasty budget season and the birth of his first child.

I’ll be there for him, just like I have all these years, cheering him on.

,
 

Now that he’s been transferred out of our main office, I’ve been called back in from working remote.

A space just opened up.

.