Grey catbird. The snow has the birds so hungry they don’t wait for me to go inside but let me stand on the porch with the telephoto lens.

I would dearly love to be able to blame a seven-point decline in children’s IQ scores on COVID lockdowns, but a lot of things happened in this country between 2012 and 2020. Ubiquitous smartphones. Social media. A decline in free play that long predates the pandemic. Changes in education itself, including the narrowing and politicizing of curricula and an ever increasing focus on test-taking. Demographic change, which it’s impolite to mention in this context, but if you’re going to talk about change from one generation to the next, you need to make sure you’re comparing children with their own parents, at least in the aggregate.

In any case, if you’re inclined to think that kids these days are a bunch of dumbasses, you now have data to back you up.

Sunflowers do not like to be chip-carved, but I’m getting there. I spent January drawing and carving, working out how to translate various things into carveable forms, how much realism I can incorporate (or want to, or should), and so on. Lots of interesting questions, lots of possible directions.

I am a teensy bit concerned about receiving a confirmation email for an online order the text of which still refers to COVID-era shutdowns in the present tense.

Meant to post this yesterday. Happy lunar new year everyone.

GO PHILLY!

The other night I dreamt that the earth’s atmosphere spontaneously boiled away. Magnificent special effects, the swirls of white carrying the blue sky into the blackness of space, but then we were all still there, standing around, wondering at it, talking about it. Shouldn’t we be dead of asphyxiation? I wondered. And wouldn’t the temperature be swinging wildly from day to night? So I checked my phone, as one does, and indeed Weather Underground predicted a high of 180°F the next day.

Cozy studio, fresh pot of tea, birds at window, snow outside. What could be better? How about all of the above, and also not cutting my finger?

Proper snow at last. Not much, but I’ll take it.

I finally cleaned up and shared the high school environmental science curriculum I developed for home school: The Earth From Home. It opens with Wendell Berry’s NEH lecture “It All Turns On Affection,” relies as much as possible on North Carolina ecosystems and resources, includes lots of field trips, and ends with a 15-page research paper. Or you can just play with the nonlinear population modeler I built.