Of useful work and community: Some thoughts on a barn raising managed by my great-grandfather.

View of my workshop, by my daughter Ivy, sometime last year. If you look closely it appears that I was assembling a chair on the workbench.

Please tell me they see the irony in this.

The Arch Mission Foundation sent its first archive to space in 2018 in the glove compartment of Elon Musk’s Tesla, which is now in a 30-million-year orbit around the sun. That archive contains Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy…

Anybody else ever seen a dog purse his lips? I have always had basset hounds, who would require plastic surgery to purse their lips. Dashiell does this when he is trying to look cute (or to scam snacks, which comes to the same thing).

Kitchen counter stool is finished. Bit of an odd design but I think the shape of the stretchers and the slightly rounded top make it work. It may still be evolving.

Moment of truth for the kitchen counter stool: all the parts fit; it doesn’t look like a drunken donkey. Time for semifinal sanding and glue-up.

I know this is crazy talk to people up north but when spring comes this early I feel cheated out of a few weeks’ pleasurable anticipation.

This is Dashiell, my new canine overlord. He enjoys listening to Peter and the Wolf and is a fearless destroyer of welcome mats.

I would love to have a way to avoid gas stations where a screen flashes and yaps at me while I pump my gas. Or, I guess, to find gas stations that don’t have them. But that would require an app, and then I’m back to staring at a screen. Seriously considering just buying a mule.