Week of July 21, 2025

Mostly photos with a little bit of commentary this week.

Trying to get outside when we can, though it has been a week of heat, humidity, and haze. More of all three on the way this coming week, too.

Daddy, I’m having fun playing catch!

Quotes like that, unprompted, will melt your heart.

Sometimes I wonder in the spring whether or not to go through the effort of putting in a garden that year, but later that year I’m always glad I did. Going out to pick tomatoes for our salads each night is so nourishing.

We gave up planting sunflowers a couple years ago because the groundhogs and rabbits ate every single one for multiple years in a row. This year, we got some surprise volunteer sunflowers, probably from birdseed, and nothing has bothered them!

Charlie cooked one of our favorite summer dishes, Corn, Tomato, and Basil Salad with Old Bay almost entirely by himself. Amanda cut the corn, he ripped the basil and cut the tomatoes, put everything in the pan, and stirred it while it cooked. He was pretty proud of it.

Nasturtiums are perfect for garnishing negronis.

Our veggie box finally started up! Lots of good stuff in here from a farm over in Orange county. They also included some great stonefruit (plums—my favorite!, and peaches).

I’m surprised at how often framing something as a race will get an otherwise reluctant 4yo to commit wholeheartedly to the thing. I know this one will eventually wear out, but we are getting a lot of mileage out of it right now.

I revisited some Black Sabbath this week after I heard about Ozzy passing away. Black Sabbath was formative for my musical interests and probably started my anti-authoritarian and anti-war inclinations, both of which persist today.

Of course, the next morning the gym was blasting various Ozzy hits and covers during the main workout. Must have been on the daily mix, because this particular trainer didn’t strike me as an Ozzy fan.

So I’ve listened to more Ozzy this week than I have in the last ten years. Sabotage came out in 1975, and I first listened to it in 2002, 27 years after it came out. Must have been a strange experience for my parents, seeing me listen to something that came out when they were 15. I wonder what Charlie will listen to in ~25 years that came out when I was a teen? Maybe Sum 41 or Blink 182? Green Day? Foo Fighters? System of a Down?

On a related but unrelated note, I think I’ve finally come to terms with Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned being my Prodigy album, despite wanting it to be Music for the Jilted Generation for a long time.

Trying to model kindness and empathy to raise a kind and empathetic child while not getting completely swept up and overwhelmed by awful things going on right now (ICE, Gaza, etc) is like walking a tight rope without any padding on the ground to break your fall.

I finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation this week and started Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

Where I’m currently at with social media:

Twitter is a dumpster fire and the “For You” tab recommends burning trash optimized for getting engagement for blue check payouts. I mostly avoid it now. Bluesky is my Twitter clone of choice. I occasionally log in to Mastodon, almost never Threads. I’m not even sure I know how to log in to Nostr anymore, and whenever I succeed it gives off a weird vibe.

So easy to scroll forever on Instagram, so I’ve kept it off my phone for a while.

Facebook proper has been dead to me for years.

Reddit is too easy to scroll, so I blocked it at my router level for my computer and phone. Hard enough to undo that I need a specific reason, which I probably won’t encounter.

My current take on Twitter and Reddit is that I think it is a mistake to have easy access to the opinions of millions of people that have almost no cost to sharing them. If I wouldn’t talk to these people in person, why am I reading their bullshit online?

Reading blogs is better—more curated, costly to post, bloggers for the most part use their real name. I would, and do, hang out with bloggers AFK!

I haven’t made much progress on doing any hobby projects. I underestimated what it takes to start a workout and stretching routine (lots of energy and soreness), and we’ve been focused on getting ready for Charlie’s upcoming birthday party. We’ll see what August holds on that front.

On my What I’m Reading page, I decided to add who recommended a book to me, if someone recommended it.