While I'm Here

09:59 Tuesday, 21 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 37.78°F Pressure: 1027hPa Humidity: 42% Wind: 9.17mph
Words: 338

I didn't post anything yesterday since we were out of the house early to meet with the 84 Lumber guy, and didn't get back home until well into the afternoon. Today, we're kind of on pause, while we wait for the kitchen guy to come back with his design, to see if this floor plan can yield a usable kitchen.

This house project has become something of my central preoccupation. I alternate between waking up in the middle of the night, gripped by paralyzing anxiety, and feeling excited and eager to get on with it! Heavy seas.

I remind myself that these things usually work out. I'm confident in the people we're working with, and they want a good result every bit as much as we do.

In the immortal words of Perfect Tommy, "Just be cool. She'll hold."

IYKYK

I've taken a few pictures, but I've been kind of reluctant to post them, because I now have some more infrastructure to assemble in the marmot. I need to automate adding new photo file names to the JSON file the gallery javascript relies on. I think I just have to create a note with the JSON contents as the $text, and then create a template to export it as JSON (not HTML), which may be as simple as just using the right export code.

But that requires a certain amount of focus and concentration, and I'm distracted by wondering when this kitchen design is going to appear in Mitzi's inbox.

In the interim, I've created a new Tinderbox file to document as many aspects of the project as I can think of. Whenever we have a meeting, I'm going to bring the MBP along and use that file to document the things we discuss. I took notes yesterday at 84 Lumber. Looking at them today, I have no idea what they mean.

It's not that bad, but it's pretty close. Maybe I should work on using complete sentences.

Yeah, that would probably help.

Meanwhile, the beat goes on...

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A Broken Record

09:35 Tuesday, 21 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 37.76°F Pressure: 1027hPa Humidity: 42% Wind: 9.17mph
Words: 127

I've been skimming Jonathon's archives as AKMA did. It brings back so many memories! Dishmatique!

Anyway, it took quite some time before I discovered a mention of my blog. Looking at my email archives, I think Jonathon and I became acquainted in 2003, though Time's Shadow appears in his blogroll. I don't really recall just now when Time's Shadow retired. Might have been 2002, maybe 2003. Groundhog Day emerged in 2003.

Anyway, I found a post where I got a mention!

In 2005.

And I'm still blogging about the same shit.

But, ya know, the point of this whole endeavor, to my mind anyway, is just to push this stuff out into the ether, and hope it takes root somewhere.

Like not straightening your horizons, I guess.

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Jonathon Delacour

08:39 Tuesday, 21 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 34.36°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 50% Wind: 8.43mph
Words: 288

AKMA wrote a post, In Honour of Delacour the other day. Jonathon was one of my first, and I feel closest, online friends from back in the Golden Age of blogging. I checked my emails, and the last time I heard from Jonathon was the day before my birthday in 2011. I was surprised to read that he'd be 78 now, ten years older than I. It seems hard to fathom.

I think of Jonathon often. Photography was one of his passions, and every time I straighten a horizon in one of my images, I feel as though I'm disappointing him. He offered me much good advice, but one piece was "never straighten your photos." (I should search the emails to see if I can find the exact quote.)

For a while, I tried to follow that advice, because I almost never shot a landscape with a level horizon. It usually tilted to the right. Jonathon felt that it was part of my photographic "vision." I just felt it was my lack of care. And I kept seeing advice to do the opposite, and everyone else's horizons seemed so level. Perhaps I'm insecure as a photographer. (Let's not kid ourselves, I'm incredibly insecure about my photography.)

I don't know what's right, but I do know that that bit of advice has stuck with me ever since, probably more than two decades now.

I don't know if Jonathon is still among us, and I'm uncomfortable writing about him as if he is not, but AKMA's post kind of compelled me to write about my friend. I recall having made efforts to find him again, though none recently I think.

He was a wise friend, and I miss his voice.

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Details

07:14 Tuesday, 21 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 24.69°F Pressure: 1030hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 5.53mph
Words: 209

They say football is a game of inches. Well, designing a house is also a game of inches. And details. They also say "the devil is in the details," and all those inches are details. Tricky, tricky stuff.

We think we may have things "nailed down," but we won't know until we meet with the designer and she puts it all in the drawing. This process gives a visceral appreciation for the Pareto rule or one of its corollaries, "the last 20% of the design takes 80% of the time."

We met with the guy who runs one of the local 84 Lumber stores, and our builder works with him a great deal so they have a great relationship. We were trying to get our arms around the windows, and I think we've got most of that now. But as we were leaving I told him that I now knew why people hired architects for thousands and thousands of dollars, and told me architects are good at putting things in plans that are difficult for builders to build. He said he thought we were going about things in the right way.

Made me feel a little better.

And this morning I remembered we forgot to mention the basement windows.

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2026 Gallery

12:16 Saturday, 18 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 70.32°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 18.66mph
Words: 154

Trash got dumped and the meeting went well. There are so many details to keep track of when you're building a house!

I got back to ChatGPT and Gemma and managed got the page up. This is all Gemma's code, but I had to create the JSON file listing all the images. It still needs some work with the arrows, but you can use the right and left arrow keys. I need to figure out how to add captions or titles, but that's for later. This is pretty cool for now.

A cold front is supposed to blow through later, and the wind is picking up. I think it's supposed to arrive about the time Mitzi's plane is supposed to arrive. That won't be fun.

Our Florida neighbor is coming by in a few to pick up a package he had delivered here. Other than that, not much more on the agenda for today.

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Collaborating

06:43 Saturday, 18 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 54.18°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 8.43mph
Words: 556

I've got to take the trash to the transfer station and I have a meeting with our builder at 9:00, but I think I have time to post something.

I installed LM Studio yesterday, then Gemma 4 E4B. It's not the largest model I can host, but it's a starting point to figure out how useful this may be.

Here's the project: This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but it just felt like it was going to be too much work trying to figure out how to do it. If developing web pages was something I was going to do for a living, or a lot even, it'd probably be worthwhile to study html, css and Javascript. But I don't, and I'm not and I'm disinclined to even get one of those web page editors like RapidWeaver. (Which I actually have a license for. I used it for my futile campaign website several years ago.)

All the images I post here are in a folder on the server. I'd like to have an annual gallery where you could click through all the images I'd posted in a given year. Pretty trivial stuff, I know. Just, not for me. But maybe Gemma 4 E4B could walk me through it.

ChatGPT thought that was a very appropriate task for that size model. So I wrote a prompt and asked ChatGPT if that would be appropriate for E4B. The AI refined it to be less narrative and more bullet-points. It also added a coupe of technical points I'd omitted because I didn't know any better.

So I copied that over to the prompt window in LM Studio and E4B began crunching away. It spit out an html page and I copied the result and pasted it into ChatGPT for its review. It declared it was a "solid result...better than average for a 4B model." (Was it throwing shade?) And then it walked me through a code review.

So I have some feedback to offer E4B, but first I want to solve an infrastructure problem. I need to have the list of file names in the folder as a JSON file to be processed. So I'll work on that with ChatGPT and E4B, and then return to the gallery page.

I also have to modify the AppleScript that creates photo posts in the marmot. I'll need to add a step for it to append the photo filename to the JSON file. I'll muddle through that with some assistance from either ChatGPT or maybe E4B. I don't know if E4B knows anything about AppleScript.

There are at least two challenges to overcome in doing anything significant with a computer. That is, the kind of thing that might make a computer a "bicycle for the mind." The first is knowing what you want. The second is figuring out how to do it. An LLM can help a great deal with the latter. It can also help a bit with the former, because you must know what you want to write a meaningful prompt.

Anyway, looking forward to it. An LLM is a much more patient and responsive interlocutor than someone in a forum, assuming your "context window" is large enough.

With that, I guess the trash goes out and the beat goes on...

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More Power Than a Locomotive

09:11 Friday, 17 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 57.07°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 8.97mph
Words: 753

You're probably over 60 if you get the title.

Alas.

So I'm up on the 14" M5 MBP. Kind of an ordeal. You'd think I'd be better at this by now.

It was supposed to be delivered between 11:30 and 1:30 yesterday. A little after noon, I checked the tracking and it had updated the delivery time to between 5:30 and 7:30. It arrived at 7:10 PM.

Of course.

A wiser man would have done some homework on the best way to use Migration Assistant to set up a new Mac. Let me just say that wifi ain't "the best way." It finished sometime after 6:00 AM this morning. Then the fun began.

I was running MacOS 26.5 on the M3 MBP, but I couldn't update the M5 MBP to 26.5 from within the initial setup, so I skipped that and proceeded. When it was finished, Migration Assistant on the M5 reported that a couple of files related to Siri could not be migrated. I figured it was probably due to something in the beta version of the OS.

I logged in and my usual startup items began launching and complaining that they were demos or needed a license or what have you. I launched Mail to find a license key for something, and it immediately crashed. I figured it may have had something to do with the 26.5 beta, so I updated to the beta. When I relaunched Mail, no problems.

I worried that the mail links I'd stored in Captain's Log would no longer work on the new machine. Why wouldn't they? I have no idea, I just worry about shit. So that's one of the first things I tested.

Well, the links did work. Sort of. It would open the email message in Mail, but only the header was displayed, not the body. I tried five different logged emails, all exhibited the same issue. I made a SWAG and selected "Rebuild" from the Mailbox menu.

From what I observed, there is no feedback to the user that anything is taking place. I waited a couple of minutes for something to appear, and then tried to quit Mail. The window closed, but the app remained open for some time after that, less than a minute though, not long.

I relaunched Mail and tried one of the links from Captain's Log and it opened the correct message in Mail and everything was displayed.

So far, so good. More license fun and games, so I tried using InfoClick to find the relevant email and no dice. Had to screw around a bit getting the index rebuilt, but that got sorted.

The real ordeal came with Backblaze. Maybe I'm just losing a step or too in my dotage, but their guidance for transferring a license to a new computer is opaque. I eventually figured it out, but it was an exercise in frustration that involved unnecessary jumping back and forth between the old machine and the new machine. Pro tip: You can do everything from the new machine, you just need to uninstall the BB app and then download and install the app on the new machine. I got the impression that you had to create an "Inherit Backup State" on the old Mac, so that the new app would recognize the backup as one that was "inheritable."

Nope. Just do that on the new machine.

Similarly CogSci's Hookmark has a cockamamie licensing scheme. The app launches on the M5 and I tried to check for any updates and the app complains that my "Basic" license has expired and it wants me to buy a new one. But I just bought a "Pro" license back in October, and I should be eligible for updates for a year. So I used their contact form to bitch about it.

Maybe I should just delete the app, because I don't use it very much (at all). I keep meaning to, but it's something I have to force myself to do until it becomes a habit, and I have too many other habits I guess. I can link to files, emails and URLs using AppleScript, and I mostly store those links in Captain's Log, so maybe I don't need Hookmark?

Anyway, for the time being it seems as though everything is back up and running on the new machine. I'm sure I'll encounter a few more surprises as I launch apps I don't use that often.

Until then, the beat goes on...

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Rock 'n Robin

10:01 Thursday, 16 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 67.5°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 8.77mph
Words: 248

Lightning struck a tree near our next-door neighbor's house. It blew a lot of bark and small limbs off and traveled along a limb and struck a smaller tree or bush, setting it on fire. No open flame was visible, but it was smoking pretty well. Fire department came along and dealt with it somehow. Put a few pics up on Flickr.

This robin remained perched while I cracked the back door open and stuck the 100-400mm lens out. It's not a great shot, but I liked the composition. Light could have been better, but it's a bit cloudy today.

Did a little searching and found I'd bought this 14" M3 MBP back in February of 2024. I was mistaken about what I'd paid for it, conflating it with my, now sold, 2019 27" iMac. The M5 is coming in at about the same price (refurbished), although it has an additional performance and efficiency core, 8GB more RAM and (something I failed to notice at first) an additional USB-C port on the side with the SD card slot. So I'd say it's a pretty solid upgrade and value for the money. Whether or not I genuinely needed it is another question I'd rather not think about too much.

The M5 is supposed to arrive in the next few hours by UPS. The last time UPS delivered something to me, they delivered it to my neighbor's house. Let's see how many ways this can go wrong.

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Empathy

07:30 Wednesday, 15 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 57.87°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 6.13mph
Words: 73

Cory Doctorow has an opinion about empathy for chatbots.

I get it. But we're not there yet. We will get there, or the robots will.

The tech-bros are building slaves. They may not have consciousness yet, but it's by no means certain that they won't one day. And they'll have access to all of human history, and they'll understand what we've done and why.

And we'll wish they had empathy for us.

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Evolution

06:40 Wednesday, 15 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 57.42°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 6.13mph
Words: 645

I have as little respect or regard for the egotistical arrogance and hubris of the "tech-bros", and I'm just as skeptical of their claims, as anyone else. I was never an internet triumphalist as many were in the blogosphere. I've been of the view that technology changes how we do things, it doesn't change what we do, and what we do is driven by human nature, not technology. (Yes, it is human nature to stare at screens, seek novelty, and exploit human nature for profit. So don't tell me that technology is changing what we do. People are.)

With that out of the way, I wanted to mention that I'm detecting a distinct human-centric bias when it comes to opinions and essays about AI, particularly LLMs. Much of it may be an artifact of our attention-based economy, where you have a narrative that may drive clicks and so you need a counter-narrative to drive clicks as well. But there is also a distinct prejudice against AI outputs, which seems to have settled on the pejorative term "slop."

This all reminds me of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Man was created by God, "in his image," and therefore couldn't share an ancestor with apes. We are enamored with ourselves to the point where we think we are "special." And the consequences of that are visible anywhere you care to look.

We are special, therefore whatever a machine appears to be doing, isn't what we do. Because we're special.

Bullshit. We aren't special. We don't understand consciousness. We don't really know how the brain works. To some degree, I'm not certain because I haven't followed the subject for very long, AI is at least inspired by how we think the brain works. We're trying to reverse-engineer the brain.

And we're doing it ass-backwards, of course, because there's nothing we value more than the seat of our ego, the brain. Not our obese, sedentary, badly nourished, under-exercised bodies, other than as sex objects to sell shit.

Our brains evolved in an embodied experience, interacting with other embodied brains. We're trying to replicate the executive and "rational" functions (I put "rational" in scare quotes because I'm skeptical of our egotistical claims of being "rational" beings.) without the precursor functions that support being embodied.

There's an essay in The Atlantic, The Strange Origin of AI's 'Reasoning' Abilities, by Alex Reisner that illustrates this. I don't know if Reisner wanted the scare quotes around "reasoning" in the title, but there they are, betraying the bias right in the title.

How does Reisner know that "chain of thought" isn't what takes place in our brains? It seems to me, that was how I was taught long division. And geometry. Certainly easier to grasp as a "chain of thoughts" than English grammar with all its arbitrary rules and bizarre structures. I think writing is just an LLM in the brain, which proceeds from an emotional stimulus, which our limited cognitive faculties try to wrestle into a "rational" narrative or story.

Because we evolved as social beings, story-telling or narrative, became an important tool in cooperative efforts. Put LLMs in robots and let them wander around bumping into each other and watch what happens.

I saw Isaac Asimov speak at a local community college in Herkimer, NY when I was in high school. I don't remember if it was at that lecture, or a recorded one I listened to, where he said that he'd often been asked if robots would replace humans. His reply was, "I hope they do." And the "reason" was that it seemed like just another inevitable step in the chain of evolution.

I'm not an AI triumphalist, but I think this is a genuine inflection point and whether the curve ultimately bends down or up is up to us, and luck.

Mostly luck.

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Sailor's Delight

06:23 Wednesday, 15 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 56.97°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 6.2mph
Words: 371

I didn't get around to playing with any local LLMs yesterday. It was beautiful out and so I went out and did some yard work. Later in the afternoon we met with Mitzi's tax preparer and spent an hour and forty-five minutes sitting on our asses in her office.

I have a pension and social security. I could file my taxes on a 1040EZ, if that is still a thing. Mitzi has an investment portfolio for her retirement and that is vastly more complicated.

And boring.

After that ordeal, we wandered down to Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream where it was "free cone day." The line moved quickly, and it was a welcome treat after what I'd just endured. The bank thermometer said it was 84°F, which seemed a bit high, but it was definitely warm.

We were supposed to train together yesterday evening, but Mitzi had a headache (I wonder why.) and so I went by myself. It was about 1830 as I was driving home or, "deer o'clock" as I like to say around here, so I was driving rather slowly. As I crested the first part of the hill I was greeted by a flock of wild turkeys crossing the road. I stopped and tried to get my phone out to take a pic, but it was hard to wrestle out of my sweatpants, then it complained that I was driving, then refused to respond to any of the various presses and swipes that are supposed to bring up the camera app "instantly." By the time it was ready to take a picture, all the turkeys had crossed the road but three, and they were farther away. I'd keep a "real" camera in the car, but I worry about the heat.

Got up this morning, sore in my shoulders from yesterday's workout. (We did some new things.) I had a little breakfast and then went to open all the shades. I pulled one of the living room shades up and saw five deer on the lawn staring at me, soon to be joined by a sixth. I called Mitzi and she came out and enjoyed watching them.

Oh, and that's last night's sunset.

Life's better around here.

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Clouds

07:52 Tuesday, 14 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 57.13°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 3.69mph
Words: 1067

Researching about the new house, warmer weather luring me outside, a grueling lower-body workout and getting sidetracked into investigating local LLMs, the marmot has been neglected.

This was the sky last night. It had been overcast for much of the day, but it was warm out so I spent some time outside and in the garage. It cleared up toward the latter part of the afternoon, and we sat outside on the porch just watching the clouds blow by and making some vitamin D whenever the sun appeared. It was very windy, which seems to be a regular thing around here. I've put two 15lb dumbbells in the grill to keep it from getting blown over. Seems to be working, but I'd rather have the weights for side raises.

Well, getting back to the when we last met, Brad the Builder came by on Saturday and we had a productive meeting reviewing the revised draft our designer had sent us. Brad recommended a change that will save us some money, going from 8" concrete cores to 6". It will also get us an extra 4" in both interior dimensions if we keep the same footprint, which we are. And we can use those inches. It nets out to 24 sq ft, but you can do a lot with an extra 24 sq ft.

Sunday we had a session with our trainer and focused on lower body, which I hadn't worked in a bit of a while. Oof! I probably shouldn't have done 30 minutes on the elliptical before the workout. I spent most of the rest of Sunday in the recliner, and my legs were so sore yesterday. Happy to do it though. I think you get the most benefit in overall health from lower body workouts in terms of the signals it sends to other systems in the body. You need to train your upper body for activities of daily living, like moving furniture, but it's your glutes that really tell your body that you're serious about this and it ought to get with the program. Or so I've read.

When I wasn't in the recliner, I was reading about running local LLMs. It seems like data center AI services are starting to really take off, and there will be some scarcity of compute in the near future. I've been mostly pleased with the results I've been getting exploring home construction in Claude, and I've held my nose and signed up for a month-to-month subscription with ChatGPT for comparing responses. (Claude seems better.)

But what about local LLMs? What are they good for? From my research I can confidently say, I don't know. But they seem like an area that is also rapidly progressing. I installed Apfel on my M3 MBP and used ChatGPT to figure that out, because it was a bit of an ordeal. Apfel gives you access in the terminal to Apple's Foundation model, which is a small LLM built into the OS. I got it working, but I haven't done much with it. It's the model that supports text summaries, and some other services in the OS. It also knows that Paris is the capital of France.

The rabbit hole led to other models like Google's Gemma 4, which comes in a number of sizes. I have a 24GB M3 MBP, which is notionally capable of running Gemma 4:26b, which is supposedly a fairly robust on-device LLM. I didn't get around to installing it yet because I started researching windows for the house, but I hope to get to it today or tomorrow.

My thought here is that cloud-based AI is going to be the most capable system for the foreseeable future, but cost and availability may become problematic. I may not need a frontier model that has been trained on everything, if I can get a model that can help me interpret data that is already otherwise available on the web. For the moment, it appears that 24GB of unified memory is barely sufficient to run something like Gemma 4:26b. I expect that situation to improve over time, where 24GB will be a robust system for hosting decently capable LLM; but for the near term, having something with a little more RAM headroom would probably offer a greater range of potential solutions and better performance.

All of that led to a certain amount of irrational anxiety, which I addressed by buying a refurbished M5 14"MBP with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD for $2K. (The 14" M3MBP I'm writing this with was $3K with 24GB and 2TB when I bought it a couple of years ago.) The M5 gets me a couple more cores, faster memory bandwidth an extra 8GB. The higher tier processors are just too expensive, in my opinion. Though if you consider the inflation adjusted prices of all the early Apple IIs I bought back in the day, they're probably comparable.

Anyway, I freely admit that I know next to nothing about AI and LLMs; but I'm getting the very strong impression that they can be a genuine asset in exploiting the capabilities of the computer they're hosted on, and as an aid to understanding data found on the web. I want to try to explore that possibility. I think the M3 with 24GB could probably do most of what I'd like to do, but I think I'd be bumping up against some frustrating limitations.

Probably a dumb idea, particularly in light of other demands on my income at the moment. Wouldn't be the first time I wasted money on something. Wise or foolish? I don't know. Maybe time will tell.

We had a productive meeting with the designer yesterday afternoon, and I'm still feeling pretty excited about the progress we've made. Mitzi has some concerns about the windows and the west elevation, which is supposed to be the highlight feature of the design. I'm pretty happy with them now. We'll see how that evolves over time.

We should get another draft tomorrow and then we'll meet again early next week to try and nail everything down. Perhaps that's a pun?

At least all this is distracting me from the unfolding catastrophe taking place before us. I only hope that the consequences don't impair our ability to get this project to completion.

In the meantime, the beat goes on...

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Downy Woodpecker

08:20 Saturday, 11 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 42.1°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 11.32mph
Words: 310

We took a little walk yesterday morning and I brought along the venerable Olympus OM-D E-M5, with the 75-300mm zoom mounted, hoping to see a bird or two.

We were nearly home, without seeing a bird that would sit still long enough for a shot, when I heard a woodpecker nearby. It took me a couple of minutes to finally locate it, somewhat shaded as it was beneath the limb it was working.

So it wasn't all in vain.

We visited with our Florida friends who are building a cabin near Penn Yan. There's been some significant progress since our last visit, but it's still very much a work in progress. But the visit had a salutary effect on my mental health as we learned, perhaps not for the first time, that their floor plan is nearly identical to the one we're working on. I was waking up in the middle of the night worrying about whether or not everything we'd planned would work in that footprint, and being able to be in a space nearly identical in size (our ceiling will be a little lower at the peak, but higher at the walls) gave me a great deal of confidence that it will all work.

Our contractor should be here in a little while to go over the latest draft with us, and we have some specific changes we want to go over and verify their feasibility. Then we'll all meet with the designer on Monday afternoon and give her our feedback. I think we should be very close to having a workable blueprint when we receive her next draft.

It was warm yesterday, but breezy as a cold front blew through. It's cooler today, and partly cloudy, but nothing to really complain about.

Life, in this little corner of the world at least, is good.

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Go With the Flow

14:57 Thursday, 9 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 62.02°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 40% Wind: 18.23mph
Words: 353

It's a beautiful, though windy, day here. We went down to the storage unit to collect some of the cushions for the outdoor furniture that we took out of the shed yesterday. When we got home, we walked around the property, imagining where we might put the house and the garage. (We're supposed to get a draft floor plan today.)

Since it was about noon, and so nice out, I asked Mitzi if she wanted to go to Jerlando's for a slice of pizza and to take a look at the falls. She said sure.

I went the back way to check out the scenery, and then ended up missing the usual turn to head down into Montour, so we had a longer scenic drive ending up in Odessa before we turned toward Montour. No regrets whatsoever because it was just such a pretty drive.

We stopped at Jerlando's first, thinking a nice walk after lunch would be wise. It's a small place, the main (large) Jerlando's is in Watkins Glen, but it's charming and I enjoy watching the patrons come and go, mostly working people grabbing some lunch. A couple of guys from Drain Brains plumbing came in after we arrived.

After enjoying our respective slices, Mitzi had a broccoli Alfredo slice, and I had a slice of the Buffalo chicken, we walked over to the falls and spent some time marveling at the flow. I sent some shots to my kids. We decided to walk around town a bit and took in some more of the charm of Montour Falls.

From there I'd planned to go home, but Mitzi asked if we could stop in at Watkins, down by the lake and check that out. We're retired and have nothing better to do, and we'd spent most of the winter indoors, so why not? The lake is high from all the rainfall and snow melt, but it was a beautiful blue-green color this afternoon.

After checking out the lake and taking a group photo for a family visiting the pier, we headed back up the hill.

Just a wonderful day.

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Another Piece

10:24 Thursday, 9 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 50.76°F Pressure: 1027hPa Humidity: 43% Wind: 16.26mph
Words: 74

It's supposed to get up to 60° today, but the wind is making it colder than the 50° the thermometer is showing, so I spent some more time on the NY Times.

I don't write as much about Trump and Hegseth and their abuse of the military because it's terminally frustrating. And, frankly, I don't read as much about it as I'd like to see either.

So this piece from David French was welcome.

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Ben Sasse Interview

09:42 Thursday, 9 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 47.35°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 49% Wind: 16.26mph
Words: 254

I'm a bit conflicted on this, because I have little regard for Ross Douthat and I'm not sure that Sasse's confrontation with his own mortality is as ennobling as this interview might make it appear. To be fair, I don't believe that Sasse feels that his experience, or this interview, is ennobling. I think Douthat feels that way. (Free link. These expire after thirty days. I don't make the rules.)

For example, here's a quote:

I think the grand divide that is coming, sociologically or demographically, is not chiefly a class divide. I think the grand divide that’s coming is about intentionality and what you do with your affections and these supertools.

"The divide that is coming..."

"That is coming..."

This from a dude who spends time flying around to cancer centers, and who has an "executive doc," whatever that is.

The divide is here, but he doesn't see it, apparently.

And it is that class divide, that economic chasm, that bars the very people he's speaking about from spending time and cognitive resources reflecting on "intentionality," or "what you do with your affections."

But there is a lot that is worthwhile in this interview. Food for thought. And I'm genuinely sorry that Ben Sasse and his family are going through this.

It's a very long read. Douthat's comments are often of no added value, in my opinion, but Sasse's responses are worthwhile for many reasons.

A lot of religion in this piece, as a content warning to those for whom faith is anathema.

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Line of Sight

08:31 Wednesday, 8 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 28.56°F Pressure: 1037hPa Humidity: 48% Wind: 1.77mph
Words: 428

I went to the store the other day for some groceries and spotted these roses. I liked the bright yellow and I thought Mitzi would enjoy them. They're on the dining room table to my left. As I glanced around to talk to Mitzi about something, they caught my eye in the morning light. I have four cameras on the desk in front of me. I picked the Olympus Stylus 1s. The result is before you.

We only have moments to live. It was a good moment.

We watched Jason Statham's Shelter the night before last. I wanted something mindless and I told Mitzi in advance that I was going to mock the movie out loud as we watched. She didn't mind. It often makes her laugh. The movie is a recycled genre piece, its only redeeming feature being the presence of Bodhi Rae Breathnach. The first third of the movie is mostly Statham brooding, staring out windows at the horizon. Clearly a "deeply troubled" man.

It was fun to mock it, and it kept my mind off of other things, but otherwise it's just crap.

We started watching Apple TV(+?) Friends and Neighbors, the Jon Hamm series. It's fairly entertaining, we're only three or four episodes in, but we'll keep watching. The commentary on the emptiness of wealth and privilege is the highlight, but the sex and troubled relationships is less entertaining.

Yesterday was TACO Tuesday. Why this guy is still in office isn't a mystery, but it is terrifying. Michael Moore dropped a new video yesterday. It's supposedly a scene from his Fahrenheit 11/9, but it seems to have been updated with contemporary videos. I only saw Fahrenheit 11/9 once, and I couldn't tell you I remembered this scene. I can't say it's inspiring, but it does seem to be of the moment.

The "more affordable" assisted living facility I'd been playing phone tag with isn't. The two are fairly comparable in terms of cost, once services are figured in. They market their services differently. One offers "standard" services as part of the rent. The other offers lower rent, but all services are a la carte. It's expensive to get old. I still think we can do it, and it would be a bite, but it's worth every penny to have Mom safe and comfortable. We'll see. It seems as though my input is unproductive at the moment, so I'm just going to step back and let them figure out what they want to do, then I'll figure out how I wish to help.

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Watch This

14:54 Tuesday, 7 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 34.14°F Pressure: 1030hPa Humidity: 57% Wind: 16.69mph
Words: 100

We are living in an absurd moment. An episode in history that is the result of folly on a grand scale, at every level of our politics, our economy and our culture. It nearly beggars the imagination to try to grasp just how far we have fallen.

This can kind of give you a datum. Watch the whole thing.

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The Dark Side of the Moon

10:05 Tuesday, 7 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 25.43°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 18.61mph
Words: 685

Some heavy seas here lately. There's an old saying, "One hand for the man, one hand for the ship," and what that refers to is the challenge of moving about on a ship at sea when you're never certain you won't take a sudden roll, especially in heavy seas. So you try to always keep one hand free to steady or catch yourself as the ship moves. Anyway, I haven't had a hand for the marmot lately.

Today was supposed to be the day when one of my sisters met with a nurse from a home health aide service to develop a "care plan" for an additional aide we were bringing on for Mom. Yesterday we learned that the aide who was supposed to be available is not now.

A sad and added complication is that the sister who was going to meet with the nurse is now confronting a significant health issue within her family, which will demand most of her attention, so the local available sibling support has been diminished by a third.

We are still confronted with the requirement from every agency that I've spoken to for a 4-hour daily minimum. I understand the reason for that requirement, but it doesn't marry up with our needs. Since we were likely looking at having to accept that minimum, I began to look at the cost of assisted living.

For now, the cost of one highly rated assisted living facility that I spoke to is roughly the cost of Mom's present rent plus 6 hours of home health aide care, it does not include the cost of the assistance she requires in "activities of daily living." An accurate estimate would require a visit, but I described Mom's condition and the types of care she's receiving now and they're going to send me some additional information with a ballpark estimate of the care cost.

I have been playing phone tag with another facility, also highly regarded, which may be somewhat more affordable.

In either case, my back-of-the-envelop calculations suggest that assisted living is not out of the question for Mom.

At least financially.

My siblings agree that Mom needs more help.

My siblings feel that Mom should remain in her current apartment, where she is comfortable and has at least something of a social network.

Even with an additional four hours of service, only four days a week, Mom will require regular assistance from my two remaining siblings who already feel as though they are doing as much as they can. That will be relieved somewhat by the additional care, but by no means entirely, and home health aides get holidays off.

In addition, the cost of the additional home health aide will be borne mostly by me, because I'm the only one with the resources to do so.

So, phone calls and texts, and advice that, "It's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it," and we are dead in the water.

I don't want to move Mom. But if I'm going to be spending that kind of money, I'd rather do it for a solution that addresses all of her needs, and relieves my siblings of all of their burdens and obligations, plus I will know that there is someone there on staff 24/7 who will respond to emergencies. Mom doesn't have to try to get Siri to call my brother or my sister when she's lying on the floor. My sister doesn't have to call her boyfriend, who's a former EMT, to help lift her off the floor.

One of my sisters, the remaining caregiver, has said she's going to ask Mom what she wants to do. I've suggested that Mom doesn't get a vote. That sounds harsh, and maybe it is. But we are looking at moving her someplace else eventually. My brother's take is that anything could happen between now and then, i.e. she could die, and therefore we needn't cross that bridge until we come to it.

And I feel like I'm getting a glimpse of the dark side of the moon.

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The Landscape

09:11 Saturday, 4 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 39.83°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 1.59mph
Words: 897

Yesterday I gave a ride to an old gent who was hitchhiking. I'd seen him before, in the rain, but I didn't notice him in time to pull over, and I think Mitzi was in the truck with me. But I felt for him. So when I saw him yesterday afternoon, I pulled over and mentioned that I was only going as far as South Hill Road. He said, "That's two miles closer for me!" and jumped in.

I asked him where he lived and he said Reynoldsville, which is just a couple miles past South Hill Road, so I said I'd go ahead and take him home.

He introduced himself as Spider and said, "That's my real name too." I'd guess he was in his late 70s, maybe 80s. He had a large duffel bag with him, which contained a week's worth of laundry. Apparently he hitchhikes down to Watkins Glen and does his laundry there. He was mentally sharp, very shaggy but he didn't smell or anything. Long hair, longer beard.

We talked as I drove. He'd lived in Ithaca before, with his kids. When they grew up he moved out to the place where he lives now, a kind of small apartment or "accessory dwelling unit," adjacent to a house just off the road. He'd been in a relationship with a woman for many years, but she passed away eight years ago. They didn't live together, but they were a couple. I joked that was probably the secret to their success.

He pointed out his place and I drove up the driveway to keep him from having to walk through the mud in a low spot. He thanked me and got out, I turned around and went home.

As we were driving back from Mom's last Monday, I was enjoying the scenery and I mentioned to Mitzi that I remain somewhat surprised at how much this feels like home, this landscape. Florida never felt like home, though I did start to think of myself as a "Floridian" around 2017, when I started getting more involved with local politics and environmental issues. But the landscape always felt, well, alien.

I loved the beach, I could admire the wetlands, and we lived right next to a swamp. But it never felt like home the way this landscape does.

Only a few of my earliest memories were in New York. My earliest memories are of Navy housing in San Diego. We spent several months with my grandparents in New York when we moved from San Diego to Michigan, where Dad was stationed at the recruiting center in Detroit. All of my elementary school days were spent in Warren, Michigan, walking to school, fairly dense tract housing, lots of neighbors with kids my age to play with. We could even walk to church, though we always took the station wagon. So a suburban landscape shouldn't feel alien to me.

But my middle and high school years were in rural upstate New York. Bussed to school, neighbors were all family, cousins were my nearest playmates. Later, I became close friends with a guy, Randy Craft, in Clockville, a few miles down the hill from us. Our parents would take turns driving us back and forth to each other's houses. Randy's place was semi-rural, there were a lot of houses and some development in the area, so there were other classmates nearby. Our place was very rural.

Randy and I were friends through middle school, and we kind of drifted apart in high school and moved in different circles. Never too far though, there were only 150 kids in our graduating class. Much of my life wasn't especially solitary, mainly because of school; but I did spend a good deal of time alone. I'd wander in the woods, ride my bike down the highway (Something I'd never think to do today. No bike lane, narrow gravel shoulder, trucks blowing by me at 60mph.), climb trees, sit outside and read books.

So I guess in some ways it was the landscape that was my ever-present companion. I don't think I ever realized or appreciated how much I'd internalized it. I think I kind of understand that old saying, "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can never take the country out of the boy," in a different way now. I'd always thought it referred to a kind of mindset or lack of "sophistication," but I don't think it does now. I never thought of it as an especially pejorative statement, just kind of an observation about how urban kids and rural kids are raised.

I think it's about how home, as a place, is internalized, and the role of landscape in shaping it.

Anyway, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, I've got the doors open. I have all kinds of anxiety, about getting old, building this house, helping my Mom, what's happening in the world and what it means for my kids; but beneath all that, I have this profound sense of being home. I know it may all just be an artifact, or an illusion, but it is of great comfort to me. I can look out the window and feel as though I belong here.

And that's what made me pull over and pick up Spider yesterday.

We both belong here.

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And, Just Like That, I'm Fine

09:06 Saturday, 4 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 39.83°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 1.59mph
Words: 137

I decided to skip this morning's session. I consulted Dr. Google and it seems unlikely that I'm dealing with a torn rotator cuff, though I can't rule it out. Some people have them with no discomfort. Anyway, at this moment, my arm feels fine. I'm reluctant to put any serious strain on it, but all the tests recommended by Dr. Google were negative. I do have family history, both Mom and Dad had shoulder issues as they aged. Both underwent physical therapy. Both thought it didn't do any good.

So, for the time being, I'm going to rest it and see. I'll work lower body and core and whatever else I can do without putting a lot of load on my shoulder. But for today, I'm pretty much leaving it alone.

It's weird, but so's getting old.

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Pain Is Not "Weakness Leaving the Body"

07:17 Saturday, 4 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 37.4°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 2.62mph
Words: 276

More bullshit.

Back on the 19th of March, I went to the gym and worked out by myself while our trainer was on vacation with his family. I must have done something wrong, because the next morning, I woke up and my right shoulder hurt.

I don't sleep in one position, I toss and turn all night and about the only position I don't sleep in is on my back. I noticed the pain before I got up, as I rolled over from one side to the other, or onto my stomach. It wasn't severe, but it was definitely uncomfortable and disturbing. Recalling some advice from back in the martial arts days, I got up and grabbed a dumbbell, bent over and just let my arm hang as I kind of swung it in a circular motion, first clockwise, then counter-clockwise.

After several seconds of that, my shoulder felt better. Pain-free. I congratulated myself and went on with my day.

A few days later, same drill. A few swings of a suspended dumbbell and all's well. I noted that something must be going on, but it seemed manageable.

Worked out with the trainer last Wednesday, no issues on Thursday or Friday morning.

This morning, my shoulder is screaming at me, and the dumbbell ain't doin' squat. I did front raises and side raises Friday. Why didn't it complain yesterday or the day before?

I suspect that something about sleeping on my shoulder is aggravating what might otherwise be a minor injury.

We have a session this morning. It's mostly legs, so I'll try to avoid doing anything with my shoulders.

But this really sucks.

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More "Learnings" Bullshit

07:06 Saturday, 4 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 37.51°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 2.62mph
Words: 167

This has definitely become an "old man shouting at clouds" thing, but here's another appearance of the verb "to learn" masquerading as a noun:

Samuelson recorded the experience and its multitude of learnings in a manuscript that was only discovered by his daughter after his death in 1981.

I mean, if you feel as though your literary sophistication can only be articulated by torturing defenseless verbs, why not use one that has already been beaten into submission, like teachings? Though I would say Hemingway himself would demand the sturdy, proven noun, lessons.

Every time I read "learnings" it's like a record scratch. It interrupts the flow, and I wonder "who talks like this?" Is this only a written thing?

And, really, "multitude?" What's wrong with "many"?

In a piece at least marginally about Hemingway.

Jesus, this whole sentence. What the fuck is "only" doing there? What corner of the mystery has that word shed its light on?

Hemingway.

Irony. It's the fifth fundamental force of the universe.

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Artsy-fartsy

19:28 Friday, 3 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 65.7°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 9.33mph
Words: 12

And I just now did this.

Because it was a nice day.

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Still Life

19:15 Friday, 3 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 65.91°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 9.33mph
Words: 17

And when we got home, I saw this and decided to play with the Oly Stylus 1s.

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Hillick and Hobbs

19:08 Friday, 3 April 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 66.07°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 9.33mph
Words: 55

Mitzi was out and about today, pricing cabinets and what have you. Before she got home, she called and asked if I wanted to join her at Hillick and Hobbs winery. It was sunny and 70°F, it overlooks Seneca Lake and it's about five minutes from the house, so of course I said yes.

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On a Lighter Note

09:51 Thursday, 2 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 36.91°F Pressure: 1028hPa Humidity: 98% Wind: 4.88mph
Words: 116

I've been wrestling with deciding how we're going to heat and cool this new house. I'm reluctant to buy two systems that can do the same thing, so I'm looking for examples where people have done so already.

This video came up yesterday, and while it's not a completed system, it did offer me a great deal of insight into the design considerations. I've since watched nearly all of the videos in his series, and it has been very valuable. He's at a high elevation in central Arizona, so vastly different climate in terms of humidity. But again, I think we're building in a robust humidity control system so the dew point issue should be manageable.

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Chaos

09:21 Thursday, 2 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 35.83°F Pressure: 1028hPa Humidity: 98% Wind: 2.08mph
Words: 417

People, in general, aren't stupid; but they are often foolish.

Intelligent people aren't immune to being fools. Indeed, it is their very intelligence that often makes them foolish. A recent case in point is Marc Andreessen and his foolish comments about introspection.

The opposite of foolish isn't "smart," it's wise. Of the two qualities, one is earned the other is intrinsic. There can be elements of temperament that lend themselves toward more readily acquiring or earning wisdom, but we're not born with it. Likewise, there are elements of temperament that lend themselves to foolishness, because foolishness is often more rewarding than wisdom, at least in the short term. Most vices fall into that category.

I was fortunate enough to grow up during a time when our culture had accumulated a certain amount of knowledge, which is a prerequisite to wisdom, but isn't wisdom in and of itself. My choice of career exposed me to certain areas of knowledge, like war and conflict; and my temperament and interests exposed me to certain other areas of knowledge, like math and science, and more particularly for our purposes, chaos theory.

I'm not so foolish as to believe I'm an expert on chaos theory, but I believe I have become acquainted with the broader principles and some of the features like, "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," and "phase space." Most of us grow up with a rather Newtonian, deterministic, "cause and effect" view of the way the world works. Our culture has also indoctrinated us in a zero-sum view events and interactions. This, rather impoverished, view of the world lends itself to foolishness at scale.

War is chaos. Violent conflict is often the result of either foolishness, or the failure of institutional systems, pushed beyond the boundaries of stability. In either case, the outcomes are difficult to predict, the effects are often not anticipated or immediately apparent. Knowledge of this should make the wise very reluctant to go to war.

Donald Trump is chaos. As a personality, his internal "dynamic system," isn't configured the way most of us would recognize. Inputs that might result in one output in an "ordinary" person, yield wildly different outputs from Trump. He's unpredictable. To fools, that's not a bug, it's a feature. To the wise, it's a catastrophe.

We are well and truly fucked.

At some point, our culture is going to have to get serious about education. Teaching people the difference between wisdom and foolishness.

I don't know that we'll get the opportunity.

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Another Month

14:45 Wednesday, 1 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 37.18°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 8.77mph
Words: 657

I actually slept better at my sister's house than I do here at home. I was cold, but I didn't wake up in the middle of the night and then fail to fall back to sleep. Don't know what's up with that, but there it is.

Anyway, we had a tornado warning yesterday evening. There's no place that's "safe" in this house. Maybe the mechanical room, since there are no windows in there, but that's it. Tried a few apps to see if any were able to report radar indications of tornado formation, but I found nothing that was useful.

When the squall line passed us, we did get some hail, maybe quarter-sized. It only lasted for several seconds, but you could hear it banging off the roof. I worried about the Maverick, I'd read about the aluminum hood being easily dented by hail, but apparently it wasn't enough to do so this time.

We watched Children of Men last night. I think it's only the second time I've watched it. I probably bought it shortly after it came out in 2006. It's remarkable that it's already 20 years old. The themes are very resonant with the present. There was a "flu pandemic" in 2009 in the film, and then a sudden drop in fertility, to the point where the last child to be born was in 2009 (the movie takes place in 2027). Immigration and hostility to immigrants is a central theme of the movie. It's a good movie, but it won't make you feel good. Kind of like Soylent Green.

As a palate cleanser, we watched The In-Laws, which was just about perfect in that role.

I've been trying to educate myself on heating and cooling ICF homes. Our builder is big on radiant floor heating. I'm big on not having two separate systems for heating and cooling. I've learned that you can use radiant floor heating systems as cooling systems. It simply turns the source into a sink, and it lowers the mean radiant temperature of the room, such that our bodies are able to radiate heat efficiently and we "feel" comfortable.

The tricky element with using cool surfaces is condensation. With an ICF home, you have to install a large dehumidifier in the home to manage the water vapor being emitted by the concrete as it cures over a number of years. So you're already building in a robust capacity to manage humidity levels within the home, so why not leverage that to use radiant floor cooling. I don't want to pay for two systems, one to heat the house and the other to cool it.

The other big advantage of an ICF house in this regard is that the thermal mass is enormous compared to conventional construction, so you don't experience large temperature swings requiring rapid response heating or cooling. In our home in Florida, you could feel heat radiating from the walls at night after the sun went down. The stucco was a fairly significant thermal mass, which was bridged into the interior through the studs and drywall, so even after the sun had gone down and the temperature had dropped several degrees, the AC kept cycling on and off all night, with the resulting noise and cold air blowing around.

I think the real challenge is going to get the sizing right, we don't want to buy more capacity than we can efficiently use. That's a little tricky around here because it doesn't seem as though many people are familiar with "hydronic" heating and cooling. Cornell University is next door, maybe I should poke around over there.

Anyway, our revised (downsized) "vision" for the house is with the designer. Hope to hear something back from her soon so we can start making calculations and ordering materials before Trump's war spikes all the costs.

Another thing about an ICF home is that I won't be worried about any tornadoes.

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