I was very excited to go to an internet friend's wedding in early April, but life/health intervened. Having a lot of FOMO, an emotion I'm not usually susceptible to, especially for big to-dos.

Best thing I saw this week (courtesy of Melissa Lyttle's great substack) is this riff on NPR's Tiny Desk concert, but at a hispanic grocery store in New Castle, Delaware.

I have for years been both a technical artist and a designer of tools for my discipline. On the software side my main methods of communication have been drawings and use cases. With the advent of coding agents, I’m now able to brainstorm and communicate intent with software itself - software that emerges almost as quickly as I can imagine it. The entire software industry has been organized around the fact that creating useful software takes time. A lot of that time is spent translating intent into code. I’m trying to imagine what software means in five years. To the user does it disappear entirely and simply become a response to intent? Do we have purpose built apps any more? Are they emergent? Curious how the designers and engineers who follow this blog are thinking about this.

My seven year old broke her collarbone last week going down a big spiral tube slide at a kids play center. Those places are misleadingly treacherous. It's heartbreaking to see her tiny arm in that tiny sling, but she's taking it like a champ.

In happier news, I'm working with an established film producer to adapt one of my writings into a motion picture (vagueness intended, I'm not permitted to share details yet). We're expecting to have the first draft of the screenplay done next week. Here's hoping it works out.

I write satire and humor on the side. Last year I set out to get at least one article professionally published, per month, and recently completed that goal. It's been a double-edged sword however, as much of it is satire critical of current events. Nevertheless, a kind of a mental health catharsis for me, in a way. I **think** it's helping.

Today, I'm officiating an impromptu wedding that's been planned in the last week. I've written the introduction, a small speech, the blessing, and something to close — but I am looking for a brief 1–3 paragraph piece of writing on love.

Do you have a favorite piece of writing on love? Maybe a poem or verse?

The service is this evening, so please make suggestions if you have a favorite. I'm very open!

Currently, I'm planning to read this small section from Ulysses where a woman is compared to the moon:

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

Thanks in advance for any help you might have!

This week I read The Great Gatsby for the first time in 30 years, officially to help get my kid through his quizzes but secretly to see what I thought about the theory that Jay Gatsby is bi-racial and passing as white. My head cracked open and I think it’s possible that all the main characters except Tom Buchanan may be passing to some degree. Wrote “a paper” on the topic (four pages, single spaced) just to see if I still remembered how. What a nice distracting rabbit hole to dive into.

I’m 10 months into fertility treatments and it has taken a toll on my mental and physical health (not to mention my bank account).

Still, the return of light and some warmer temperatures are making me feel more like myself. While nearly everything in the world and in my life feels so uncertain right now, I know that the days will keep getting longer and spring will eventually arrive.

I've reached the end of my viability (tiny violins) as a graphic/ux/handyman designer and am working now on opening a stationery store in our little town on the Hudson, north of NYC. It's an overwhelming change to manage sometimes, and it's been difficult to find a workable storefront, but it's also been nice to develop an outlet for making creative projects into saleable goods. The store is named, aptly I think, Busman's Holiday.
(ps thank you Jason for always evolving this site!)

A friend recently shared some of her Canadian pickle-flavored hummus with me and I really liked it (rare for me — not a hummus fan exactly). Inspired, I went to the store and got some lemon dill hummus (not as delicious as the pickle stuff but still good) and some caramelized onion hummus (also good) and now I'm a hummus guy?

I work in healthcare and don’t necessarily love how much it can train you to be a one trick pony when it comes to life outside of healthcare. This site is one of my refuges to broaden my horizons and expose myself to other worlds and ways of thinking.

I moved to Fairbanks, AK in September just in time to experience the 10th coldest winter on record. Thus far, I’ve really enjoyed it, but I’m definitely working hard to adapt my hobbies and lifestyle to a new environment. But, as an astronomy dork, the active solar weather cycle of late has been awesome.

Watching The Secret Agent. Wow, what an unsettling movie, both the content, but also how it's filmed. It's great so far, though.

Spring Break! Flying from New York, where we had a few days of false spring this week, to Los Angeles, where it is supposed to be unseasonably hot.

Trying to decide between Highest 2 Lowest (which isn't supposed to be great but I love High and Low), Whiplash (which I've never seen and one of my students said was their favorite movie), or Train Dreams.

Wondering whether, if only one person 👍🏻s a movie it shows up atop Top Rated Movies, or if lots of passengers 👍🏻'd Rocketman.

And joining the Kottke mile-high comment club…

I collect antique cookbooks with a preference for 19th century French books. I just recently acquired a manual on pig farming (which includes some recipes for sausage and terrines) from 1869 that I'm working my way through. I also have one book that is fun to look at because it has about 10 fonts revealing itself to be an amalgum of other books. I'm about to hire someone to help me catalogue them all for insurance purposes in case my time on this planet comes to an unexpected end and I can make sure they're properly taken care of. I have a couple of editions of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook ranging from 1890, 1920, 1940, 1962 and 2002. I'm planning on doing a comparison of recipes to show how cooking has changed in the US over the last 150 years or so.

Has anyone listened to Media Club Plus or Side Story from the Friends at the Table podcast crew? One discusses tv and movies, the other video games. It's very much up the alley of KDO folks - the perspective they bring to the world is probably widely shared here. For example, the recent Side Story podcast covered why people might like handheld devices and the ethics and design of them.

Right now I guess my main "hobby" is figuring out how to live with Long Covid which for me is chronic fatigue syndrome / ME. This involves re-learning how to do all the things I used to enjoy doing but which now cause a massive crash. Physical things are still mostly out of bounds but I am slowly learning how to write again. I used to just sit at the keyboard and bash away for hours but brain fog mean I can only manage 10-20 minutes at a time on a good day. So I've been making notes through the day, responding to stuff online, and by 10pm I usually have something I'm happy to post. Been doing it daily for 5 months now which is not something I would have foreseen a year or two ago.

https://notes.peteashton.com/

We're in the process of moving our kid from our family home in Michigan to Chicago, and in the gap between jobs she invited me to walk a section of the Camino de Santiago next week. I am so stoked that she's caught the walking bug (I love both wilderness backpacking and walking around cities) and can't wait for the trip. Also found out there is a sister pilgrimage in Japan, and if the Camino goes well, will the kid want to do that one next year? Then again, next year is also a solar eclipse, and as we had a blast catching the last one in Mazatlán, would she be up for Tunisia next year? Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself...

Unfortunately, when we get back, my wife and I will have to adjust to the empty nest (we'll lose both the kid and her dog --- so it'll be significantly quieter.)

I'm working on a tin whistle number for the upcoming holiday, but I don't think it'll be ready...

I'm almost done with my second reading of Project Hail Mary ahead of the movie's release next week. I'm a sucker for media where people come together to solve problems (The Pitt, Andy Weir's other works, Chernobyl). It brings me to tears to see people acting selflessly. What other recommendations do people have in that vein?

Also, I'm very much looking forward to baseball returning. Last summer was my first season paying attention to the sport since middle school, but my son is now playing, I'm coaching his team, and we have 5 games already on the books. We are hitting two over spring break in new cities. When thinking about summer vacations now, we look at a map of ballparks to see new stadiums we can add to our list.

The best things I've seen very recently came to me by an amazing website I came across https://agoodmovietowatch.com/ and The Guilty a Danish film, was really incredible and quite different, it all took place in police emergency call room and focused on one officer. Intense and quick moving, I highly recommend. And then, from the Tubi app (free streaming!)

The Moustache... a French movie from 2005, I can't stop telling people about it. A man takes off his moustache he's had forever, and now his wife, and friends don't notice, they deny he's ever had a moustache! Really fun watch.

Trying to decide whether the conditions will be worth taking my daughter to ski at Stowe next weekend. It’s not a small trip from DC, and it seems to be getting warmer…

Going through weird transitional time as the job I've done for the last seven years is being wound down over the course of this year. Not that fun to dismantle things I've worked hard to build in that time. But this too shall pass.

Looking to build on community energy generated here in Minneapolis over the last few months to do what I can to help build a better world. Maybe this is a path to a new career or at maybe doing good in the world that is not commerce related.

I saw the German film 'Sound of Falling' and loved it. One of those films I'm glad I saw in the cinema because it was often very slow and I know my attention would have wandered if I'd been watching at home.

We are in our sixth year of making wine as a hobby, and I have come to associate March with malolactic fermentation. Wine goes through two fermentations over the fall and winter months: the first converts the sugar in the grapes into alcohol; the second, lesser-known fermentation — malolactic, happening right now — converts malic acid, which has a tart and often harsh taste, into lactic acid, a calm, milky taste. It's almost painfully obvious, especially this winter in New England, as a metaphor for the transition from winter into spring. Cheers, KDOers!

I have done NYT crosswords for a few years, but only recently started playing with cryptics, thanks to MinuteCryptic.com as a gateway.

I'm doing two things right now.

1) Planning for a PotatoFest potluck dinner party. It's exactly what it sounds like - a dinner party where every dish and drink must include potatoes. Currently boiling shredded Yukon Golds to make potato simple syrup for cocktails, and simmering Russets to finely mash to use as a base for potato chocolate cake, potato ranch dip, potato chipotle dip, and others.

2) Working on neighborhood lighting. This is a big one. Right after the pandemic, several neighborhoods (including mine) spruced things up by hanging festival-style lighting between trees and poles on our commercial strips. Five years later, the lights are coming to the end of their useful lives, and our community budget for maintenance is stretched thin. I'm contacting and working with other neighborhoods who have these lights, with the idea of banding together to help with contractors, fees, maintenance, and (hopefully) city-wide funding. This is a long play, but lights at night bring joy.

Even though my kids are teenagers (13, 15 and 16), bedtime is a challenge. I am ready to be in bed by 9 p.m., 10 p.m. at the latest - and they are not tired at that time. I also want them to put away their phones at a reasonable hour which they don't reliably do on their own (phones sleep in the hallway in my home, but they need to get there). Also, I would love to say goodnight to them just before they fall asleep. It's a constant struggle between my own tiredness, phone control and quality time with them which they prefer at around 11 p.m. How do other people handle this?

Tonight my daughter is having her theatrical debut at her school, with a bit part in "Beetlejuice: The Musical" at Arts Off 3rd here in Brooklyn. What a terrific school this is; it's mostly art & theater nerds. Last year's production of "Peter Pan" floored me. They had a Broadway wire technician flying the lead around the stage. While I wish I lived somewhere with more space, and I dreamt of moving out, I can't imagine a better middle school to attend. And it's 5 minutes away from our apartment.

The best thing I have seen recently is the film Nirvanna the Band, the Show, the Movie. I can't recommend it enough. It's unique, silly, exciting, ridiculous, and in the end kind of profound.

Lately feeling drained by the most fulfilling and most challenging project of my career. Ups and downs. Returning to meditation and prayer habits this year has helped. Being very careful about burnout.

Also mentally wrestling to reconcile AI alarm shared by the most thoughtful, respectful people I know with the energy AI tools give me and the instruction at work to adopt them in a concerted way.

My company brought in a motivational speaker a few months ago. He was perfectly nice, spoke for about an hour and used a lot of words, just none that were particularly actionable or applicable to anything I actually do. I left the room weirdly energized in the wrong direction and went home and started writing the opposite of everything he represented. That turned into a whole persona, Desmond Vance, and a philosophy, Master the Minimum, which I've been posting on social media as the voice for everyone who has quietly mastered the art of doing exactly what's expected of them and nothing more. Basically everything you can't say on Teams.

For Christmas 2024, my wife gave me a stylus for my iPad and I love it. I started drawing with it using iPad’s native Freeform and Keynote apps. A year and a bit later I have a collection of drawings that I’m going to have printed and will try to sell at a local arts festival in May. I started with portraits of friends and family but have since moved into abstract art territory. Responses so far have ranged from “I never knew you were an artist too” to “Wow!” (twice!).
Who’d have guessed that at the age of 78 I’d be on a new career path.

I've been extremely busy at work, trying to bring a big writing / design project (a 72-page alumni magazine) to a close and to the printers on deadline. It's an annual project, and this is my fifth time doing it, and still every year it's amazing how much energy—life force, really—it takes to finish something with this many moving parts. Greetings from deep in the crunch.

struggling with war and how terrible it is no matter where it is in the world. always enjoying cross country skiing and bicycling! lucky to be able to do so!

Living a semi-nomadic existence - we bought a 2nd home near our son, my stepson, because my wife's family is tiny and he's the "end of the line" so she'd like to see him often. So, a we pack up, drive two days, stay for 3 weeks, then return home - about 3 times a year, maybe 4. It's been challenging - but also fun