If you don’t already follow Caroline Ross at her Uncivil Savant Substack, I encourage you to do so. I spent part of the morning catching up on emails and blogs/Substacks and, as often seems to happen with Caroline’s writing, part of it jumped out as immediately relevant and important to my life:

“No amount of individualised exercise can salve the windburned heart modernity has scorched. It cannot be healed by a life-hack, optimisation or positive-affirmations. We will need to join hands.”

– Caroline Ross, from The Drop, the Splash and the Ripple

“If you don’t fix it, you repeat it. Hence why abused kids are statistically more likely to end up in abusive relationships as adults. Wiring is wiring unless you’re willing to be your own electrician.”

– Gordon White, from All of this has happened before: the power of the reboot

Got the first harvest of green beans and zucchini from the garden today. A few shishito peppers as well. One of the tomato plants has grown out of the top of its cage. I tied a few long stakes to the top of the cage to see how high the plant will grow.

The salad is still doing well, which is surprising for July. It has usually bolted by this time of the summer, but I guess we’ve had a mostly mild month or two. The recent seeding of dill is sprouting, and the green onions are growing, and things are looking ok in the garden today.

Working in the garden today. The leeks are overrun with weeds and the cucumbers need help finding the trellis. Some small green tomatoes have appeared and the zucchini blossoms are beautiful. The bean blossoms are tiny and white and also beautiful, although outshone by the neighboring zucchini. This is the “I hope I hope I hope” time of gardening, the time when things are growing and you watch and hope for signs that things are growing well.

Sometimes it is hard to put in the work today when the effects are in the future. At least with a garden you only have to wait a few weeks or months. For other things it takes years, or a lifetime, or the results occur so far from us that we never know. Yet, we try. And we try to enjoy today, despite our habits of worrying about the future.

And now a few thoughts on things that I have read, heard, and seen:

Recently read: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I read Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in 2012 and it has stayed with me. I suspect that Never Let Me Go will join it and accompany me forward. I’m not going to say anything about the plot or the characters lest I spoil it for someone. But I will say that it left me feeling sad and thoughtful in a similar way to Remains. To paraphrase Gurdjieff, if you don’t realize that you are in prison then no escape is possible.

Hello! For reasons that I don’t yet understand, I am going to start writing here. I think part of it is an itch to scratch (see below) but I’m sensing something deeper. Maybe I’ll find out in the course of doing it.

I had a website about twenty years ago (some of it was archived by the Wayback Machine and is still viewable …). It was hand-coded html with pictures, mostly from my travels. There were links and image maps for navigation and I had a lot of fun creating it. But then I stopped updating it, and I let the web hosting and the domain lapse, and that was that.

Part of the fun was figuring out how to do it. How to write HTML, how does web hosting work, how to do navigation with image maps, etc. I have scratched that itch in other ways over the intervening years. I run a webserver on my home network and use D3 to visualizate my running miles and my weight. I put together a Raspberry Pi temperature sensor to monitor a building at work and check if the furnace has quit. And lots of other small projects, mostly related to computer programming and mostly related to figuring out how to do something and then losing interest once that I figured it out.

And now I’m back to a public webpage. I’m building this with Hugo and trying to work out how to automate the updates with git. So more things to figure out. Let’s see how long I can keep this going after I’ve worked out the technical bits…

And now a few thoughts on things that I have read, heard, and seen:

Recently read: The Journey of Crazy Horse by Joseph M. Marshall III. What actions are worth doing in a time when a world is ending? And what things are worth saving? I went into the book expecting a straightforward biography, but it was a lot more than that. It was a window into a way of life and it gave me historical perspective as well as things to consider about my life in the present.

Recently watched: The Equalizer 3. There is something satisfying in seeing horrible people get their comeuppance. I’m not proud of this feeling and I suspect that it causes a lot of the troubles that we have in the world today… after all, who are the “bad guys”? And why are they on that path? And how should we respond to them? And isn’t restorative justice often a better path?