that could have gone better.

There's a phenomenal fiddle+guitar duo out of Boston, called Rakish, and when I saw they have a new album out, I thought I'd see where they're touring. They don't usually come to the West Coast, obviously, but lo and behold, they were at the Bellingham (WA) Celtic Festival, doing a show, and leading a "session," which is an Irish/Scottish thing where musicians gather, usually in a pub, and a leader starts playing a tune, everyone else joins in, they play it for a few minutes, then signals the transition to the next song.

"How can this possibly work?", you ask. For some reason nobody wants to say this out loud, but the way it works, I shit you not, is that the participants know hundreds and thousands of tunes. Musicians do the same for the American offshoots of Irish/Scottish, what are now things like Old-Time and bluegrass. I saw it happen when I was at Fiddle Tunes in 2019. It's really daunting, if you don't know the tunes or you're not able to make it up as you go along. Or, like me, it takes you the entire eight repetitions of the tune just to start remembering the melody.

Rakish were absolutely stunning in concert, everything I could have hoped. And everything else about the week was the worst travel I've had since being in Mexico with The Bad Relationship™ twenty years ago.

It's a long story, but mostly, the Airbnb I rented turned out to have had cats living in it for several weeks. It was a huge place, beautiful woodwork all over, with a million little places cats would just love: for example, the roll-out shelves where I put my clothes. I found out the cat thing after the first night.

(There is a pattern in my family tree of fathers who don't want cats in the house justifying it to the kids by falsely claiming to be allergic to cats. I however, am actually allergic to cats. Not anaphylactic-shock allergic, but it's easy to overwhelm anything an antihistamine can do for me.)

The hosts were super nice about it, and they worked with Airbnb to refund my remaining nights. It's definitely their fault—cats were mentioned briefly in the last line of the listing, and the house is so big it couldn't be de-catted in just the few hours used for cleaning. I moved myself to a hotel.

Unpacking my clothes at the hotel, my ears started to itch again, and I realized I was going to have to wash all my clothes. Bellingham turns out to have the best laundromat I've ever seen, but even so, it sucked up most of a day.

The hotel couldn't extend my stay to my last day, and it was just an ordinary hotel, so rather than fuck around with it, I reserved a different Airbnb for the last few days. I carefully asked the host about cats first. Success!

I went to a workshop about playing in sessions, which I was really hopeful about, because I want to play music with other humans. But it turned out to be a very very very chatty Irish-American, who just went on and on, talking about balancing the various interpersonal and musical dynamics of a group. That is (a) how I make a living, and (b) something I've been doing for 30 years, in theater and music before I was in tech.

On the bright side, there's a lawyer from L.A. who I'd originally talked to when I first wanted to buy a Mats Nordwall cittern, eons ago, and he's generally been down an expert version of my musical path, so it was surprising to discover he was staying on the floor above me. For his part, he and his girlfriend had no idea there was another unit in the basement there, so they had a different surprise.

And finally, one of my least restful vacations ever came to an end, and I got to go home, exhausted and dissatisfied. That didn't last long, since I got laid off a couple weeks after, and had a whole series of other things to think about.

it was a bad week.

It happens a lot that while I meander through all the paths of my life—walk the dog, mess around in my workshop, hang out with the household, teach engineers how to communicate with each other—I'll think of something I don't know about Tim, and that maybe someday I could ask him. But he's gone, so that won't happen.

I wish Tim had found his way through. I wish we had my brother I rarely saw or talked to. I wish his kids had their dad around for their graduations and marriages and kids or whatever. I wish his students had their amazing teacher.

I think about Tim and the rest of my extended family of origin all the time, though I think they don't believe it. I've never really Done Family The Right Way for them, whatever that means in the moment.

All I know is that my heart is full of grief upon grief. A lifetime of loss and isolation, laid like a building, stone on stone. We can mourn things we never had; feel the lack, the voids that intuition tells us should be populated.

My extended family on both sides is remarkable. We have:

• Vast evidence for a biological component to intelligence. It's so bizarrely obvious, and it doesn't matter where any of us grew up, or what our childhoods were like (though mostly bad), or if we went to or finished college. There's even a handful at least as smart as me.

• The magisterial suffering of intergenerational trauma. It's tricky to speculate about where it started, when almost everyone is unable to remember their experiences (which isn't a good sign).

Tim was a casualty, and it sucks. It never stops sucking. I don't even know if I'll get used to it at some point.

cumulonimbus—uh, I mean, it's a horse!

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.

Deep Magic From Before The Dawn Of Time

Maybe a little bit more than most projects, the metal shop has been a yak shave. I knew roughly fuck-all about machine tools, beyond the many YouTube channels which are amazing, but not really aimed at beginners. The smallest lathes and mills are made by Sherline, and while they have been around forever, and I think they make good stuff, they're limited in the size, shape, and material of the parts you can make with them. People often run them happily enough on a table in their house.

I am confident in saying there is no other machine tool that will run happily on a table in your house. My lathe weighs 120 pounds.  

Anyway, it's been a journey, one which involved getting another 120-pound tool (a mill) to make some stuff so I could satisfactorily use the first 120-pound tool (the lathe). And I have some work for the lathe to do so I can use the mill more easily.

This is the thing about machining as a hobby: I don't need to have something in mind that I want to make. It generates its own problems. Need a hammer to tap parts into place? I can make a hammer, out of metal (probably not steel), with knurling and everything. Yes, ideally everyone gets some kind of machined thing for Christmas this year, but the path from here to there involves a lot of very shiny mistakes.

(You want a tiny brass hammer, right?)

One thing I need for the lathe is a thinger to use a cordless drill or driver to drive the different slides that move the cutting tool. (I also need those slides to move more easily, but one thing at a time.) So I go into the shop, confident I know what I want to do.

Well...that turns out not to be true. Sure, I can write down measurements, but how do I write them so they make sense? How do I plan the order of operations so I don't fritter away my precious aluminum stock on failed parts.

(Large hunks of aluminum are expensive!)

I need...a technical drawing. This sucks, because these days, that implies a program like Fusion 360 or TinkerCAD, which are free, and the actual problem is that I really resist using computers for my hobbies. Because I use computers all day. Hobbies are the things I'm not using computers for. (A notable exception is MuseScore, because otherwise music notation is so difficult for me that I simply won't do it.) So I haven't learned a CAD app, and maybe won't until I need to 3-D print something.

This project—just the first of many!—is stalled without the right picture.

Luckily, I know how to do old-school, pencil-and-paper, T-squares and eraser shields, drafting. Amidst the appalling violence and terror of middle school, we had vocational things that I think were more or less randomly assigned. If I remember right, I pulled 2 semesters of cooking, 1 of sewing, and 1 of drafting. I was very good at the paper sort; there was a computer there, a text screen switchable between green, white, and amber, and it had software on it, but I never particularly tried. But paper! Making pictures without needing to be visually creative! Another form of communication. Not that I'm not grateful to have a throw pillow embroidered with far too many lines from Masefield's "Sea-Fever" to be done well, but drafting has always been the exact sort of arcane but interesting skill that is my cognitive catnip.

In college I was good at it again, in my theater tech work: lines, templates, architects' rulers, protractors, more lines. It was always very satisfying, and I'm looking forward to picking it up again.

...and then I'll have a drawing of the thing to make on the mill which will make the lathe better, so I can make stuff for the mill...

the privilege of enjoying a job.

I am having a ton of fun at the "new" job (if that still applies after ten weeks or so). Having a boss hire me to do what I'm best at is just magical. And unlike the last job, I haven't had to convince anyone that we actually should all be communicating and cooperating; I get to skip the much more fun step of interpersonal work. Busy people, and engineers, are rightfully leery of meetings.

I don't enjoy wasteful meetings any more than the next person. For this project, I make small meetings and mark everyone optional; sometimes there's a planned agenda, sometimes not, but right now there's such a communication debt that it almost doesn't matter who shows up, because there will be something that will benefit. And, of course, if it's not useful, we should all ditch it and go for a walk, or refill our coffee.

Since I joined, the Giant Company-Wide Project has gone from "stalled for several months" to "making headway and shipping in the foreseeable future," which I am more than happy to take credit for. An even broader scope beckons, involving more teams and projects and features, and expanding further into the future. My local scope—my team and surrounding environs—so far looks like nobody is trying to do anything demonstrably insane, so I can look up and find the people who would like to do something demonstrably insane, and probably would, if I didn't work there.

I live with a certain amount of anxiety about having to get a "real" job someday, by which I get I mean physical; I'm not sure how well my current skillset of keeping people organized and talking would transfer outside the realm of modern knowledge work.

I'm still working remote, of course, as I have since 2014, and has turned out to be a gift for all of us here, since it's nice to see each other so much, I'm around to pick up some kid-related stuff, and then it turns out I have always loathed offices, finding them acutely anxiety-provoking, and every inch toward open-plan setups has been one more inch of deadened productivity.

pausing

When a company IPOs, those of us who own mere Cattle Class shares pre-IPO get to wait out a 180-day "lockup" period before we can transfer shares to a different owner, whether in exchange for money—what the finance geeks call "selling"—or just because we feel like it. In theory, the intention here is to prevent current and former employees from dumping all our stock the moment we can, so the price doesn't crash. You might think this is a giveaway to privileged investors, who get to cash in at the stock's opening price of $50/share, instead of 6 months later at $20/share, and you would be correct.

I've already mentioned my experience with the Hapless Stock Guys, who bought most of my stock in advance, but fat-fingered their valuation of the company by 100%, thus paying me double what they intended to. As it turns out, they would have lost money on the deal anyway, just...considerably less. And really, I would have done better if I'd just unloaded everything (or more like) at the time, but without knowing when the IPO would be, or anything, I just didn't. Except for needing money to pay taxes, it's all intuited guesswork.

So the lockup just ended. I transferred the stock to them—contractually forgiving 100% of the loan and its interest I borrowed from them last year, which is amusing—so now that deal is concluded, and they can move on past what has probably been among the crappiest of their years. The tightly-wound one of the pair actually apologized for his aggressive behavior back in November, and said he's really taken it as a moment to reflect and learn some life lessons. I didn't inquire further, but emotional responsibility isn't super common among Finance Guys, and I really appreciated it (and told him so).

I don't know what happened to the other guy, the mellow one who went to my private school, and who contacted me initially. He was pretty chill back in November, and I would not be surprised to learn he's backstopped by generational wealth, and/or he's been stoned this whole time.

It's a nice moment to stop, and feel at least one item drop off the long mental list. It's not a long moment, but it's there.

economics of the moment.

The world is a little hinky. There's a nationwide housing...thing, which I was somewhat skeptical about, until I saw that houses in my ancestral village, a New York Rust Belt hamlet which is convenient to absolutely nothing, has seen house prices double in the past couple years. Our house, where we've been for 9 years, is definitely much nicer than when we moved in; is it 170% nicer? Well, to live in, yes, but from a tax appraisal perspective, we haven't changed anything.

(The rat-infested garage is gone and replaced with a gorgeous new concrete pad; the house is surrounded by an alligator-filled moat lovely fencing. All but two windows replaced. Foundation brought up to date. The shed is ≤ 120 square feet and technically movable, and the shop is a trailer, so the official square footage/bedrooms/bathrooms are the same.)

I have struggled to understand the economics of being a landlord. Using a typical example, not even in the Bay Area, you'll see a place, say "Four units, never vacant, $3800/month turnkey," and it's selling for (say) $2,000,000. That's $86,400 of income per year! And...even with maintenance or rent increases, it takes numerous decades to pay off its purchase price. So if the revenue from the asset isn't the point, it must be the value of the asset, either to sell later on, or to borrow against for other financial plans (like buy more properties!). We did see people running a string of leveraged properties as Airbnbs, suddenly having a sort of cascading margin call when local governments decided the law applied to them the way it does with hotels; we saw it again with the pandemic crash, which indicates that, yes, one buys real estate in order to buy more real estate. It looks like a lot of work, although it is nowhere near as much work as having a real job, so there is that to consider.

I'm on a Slack instance with some folks from Rochester, NY, who linked a "10 Cities Where Home Prices Have Started Falling" listicle, and Rochester was #2, but #5 is my sadly post-industrial hometown. Or it was sad, anyway; but it looks like it's far above state and federal rates for violent crime, and only slightly above for property crimes.

(Not much change, I guess: we weren't in a bad neighborhood, but I did wake up one night to hear someone trying to jimmy open the back door under my bedroom. That door, probably solid wood aged from 1914, also had a pretty epic Yale deadbolt, keyed on both sides, so they only got the trim off. The door got deadbolt guards, and eventually we got an alarm system.)

Back when I spent three weeks at San Francisco Zen Center, there was a guy there who was fast approaching his priest/monk ordination—the ambiguity is a long story, but comes from Japanese Zen's histories in both Japan and the West—and he struck me because he was so young to be a professional cleric: somewhere around 22. He'd been at SFZC for a few years, and I don't know if he did college or not, and he didn't chat much with us transient students, but what struck me most was that he'd never lived on his own, only in groups of one kind or another.

I know quite a lot about solitude, and loneliness, and isolation, and so I know that the solitude of meditation (zazen specifically here) is one form of being with your self and your mind; and living by yourself, instead of in community, is quite another. And doing zazen when living by yourself is yet another other thing.

Hopefully I was not condescending at him, but in my head, certainly, thinking about my long road to living alone but mentally healthy, I thought he would at some point find he would need to figure that experience out.

Post-ordination, he left to be the resident priest in a place that needed them—one problem the Bay Area has with Zen clerics is that nobody really wants to leave—and blogged a bit, until he stopped. A few years later, I looked him up, and he's definitely practicing the Buddhist Right Livelihood...as a public defender in my hometown.