Not to jinx it, but we are having a blessedly mild and smoke-free summer—for once, everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is having a heat wave except us. Not to worry, though, since we still have a megadrought and increasingly unstable or unseasonable weather. It rained one night last week, enough to leave modestly damp pavement behind. My broken-climate strategy was to live "someplace uphill, with rain," but that looks less tenable as everyone's weather becomes, as was promised, less predictable, and consequently more hostile to human life.
I can't overstate how weird that is, by the way. Growing up in Massachusetts, I would see Bert on Sesame Street, saying "It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky!", but there were always clouds somewhere in view. I'd never seen a cloudless sky before moving to California, and I've always hated it, but at least it used to be consistent.
One of the better books I'm in the middle of, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is a pretty stunning and terrifying look at the history of soil and erosion. It turns out productive soil is a thin skin over bare rock, and a lack of basic stewardship, very much tied to enslavement and the manifest destiny of bashing our way across the continent, has left formerly productive land still poor, hundreds of years later. As with aquifers, we can consume in decades what took millions of years to develop. The math is universally extremely bad. But here we are.
I quite like my adorable little drafting surface...except it really needs a table to put it on, and while we technically have a table, we at the Snugglehaus are going through a period of clutter—also, it's our only table. I bought what is basically a 17" W x 11" H clipboard, and I can make drawings on it that are satisfying enough for practical use. For now.
Posts
