On minds, in my neck of the woods, are how a group of adults could completely fail at their jobs running a school district and a city. I live in Philly. The mayor appointed school board voted to close amazing schools that were working. It took years of collective parent effort my wife and I were involved in just to get the school board to mandate recess not be used as collective punishment and that after lunch kids were ALLOWED to go to the bathroom. For 3 years we knew there would be a massive budget shortfall but no one did anything so now they're cutting teachers even though city council (who also could see the shortfall coming) waited to the last minute to pass extra funding for a single year. Failure from top to bottom.

My little town has this cool container village of businesses and restaurants at the waterfront with a few rentable shipping containers for temporary pop up shops. So for the second year I'm getting my own little shop & gallery to show off my work for a couple of weeks this month.

It's fun to play shopkeeper for these days, chat with people, and just have a space outside of my home to work. It's also the perfect time of year where it's not too hot, yet the crowds are busy enough to make the whole effort worth it. I'm really looking forward to it!

I'm heading off to see my son for a few days; we haven't spent any one-on-one time together since last summer, so I'm really looking forward to it.

I watched Vertigo last night for the first time and I liked it but also don't fully understand why it is considered one of the two or three best films ever made. 🤷‍♂️ I also recently watched Hoppers with my daughter, which was better than I expected.

Last year I launched a daily word puzzle that's been finding some traction (I'm resisting the urge to name the game, to avoid accusations of self-promotion), and today I've been receiving some guff via email about one of the words in the solution (I'm resisting the urge to name the word, to avoid spoilers). I think it's a perfectly cromulent word.

I'm finally reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance after having it on my list for 30+ years. So far so good.

Oh and I meant to ask in the post: did anyone end up making something from this fantastic recipe thread? How did it go? (I made the focaccia.)

I took my daughter on our annual just-us night away camping trip last night. We started doing this when she was three, she's now nine. We hopped across the bay, checked out a lighthouse, set up camp, read, ate hot dogs, and played Yahtzee and Go Fish.

Then she made up a combo card/dice game. The idea is you roll dice, combine like dice, and then pick a card. If the card matches any number of single or combined dice, you get to keep the card. If not, discard. Most card points when you're done with the deck wins. We talked through ways to make it not only luck on the way home on a beautiful Golden Gate morning.

The last couple weeks of the school year are always such a liminal time; half of the activities that structure my week are over but the kids are still in school. It feels luxurious to have a little more breathing room in my schedule.

My eldest is twelve and a half now and something has shifted in his brain. He is actually responsible now! We are fortunate to live in an area where he can bike himself to school and to the Y, and he can walk to a pharmacy (to buy candy), the library, and a trading card shop on his own, too. Gotta love urban living!

We bought him a dumbphone for his birthday to help enable this kind of independence (no small feat; the first attempt still had a youtube app on it!). He called me from the library to ask when he should be come for dinner. He never would have thought of that until like two weeks ago! It's incredible. He's basically a person now. He used to just be a hungry, crying little lump that wanted nothing more than to be back in the womb where life was simple.

Also, having a twelve-year-old is great because you can leave fart sounds on their voicemail and be unanimously elected mother of the year.

Yesterday I hauled ass to Sonoma after work to meet a friend to watch the Sonoma Stompers play the Petaluma Leghorns and it was just the absolutely perfect early summer evening, complete with hot dog, beer, and a passel of little kids tearing through the parking lot to shag foul balls which they exchange at the snack bar for a small bag of candy per ball. Those kids were HOPPED up on sugar by the 5th inning! (Oh, and the Stompers won, 6-3.)

First time posting here. I recently got back from a trip to Colombia and took a lot of photos I'm really proud of. https://www.aregularphoto.com/a-regular-photo/colombia-2026