Well, that’s the short and sweet of it, I will be going to SYD to do work at my company’s site out there for about two months.

It’s been a real trying last couple of months because this plan has been fomenting since about 3 months ago. It’s possibility has sort of held me in this state of superposition (stolen from popular Quantum Mechanics’ lexicon), neither being go-yes or go-no.

See, I’ve been thinking Buy new car? or Try to buy some property" - but the sensible answers to both these questions change dramatically when one thinks about not being where one wants to live for months at a time.

It’s also held my personal life in this weird stage - it’s this state of living semi-detached from those around one. This is contrary to my rather Dionysian (in the more Classical sense) impulses of experiencing each moment fully – but it’s hard to live the other way - it always feels like you’re being disingenuous insofar as you know the tacit assumption in each relationship (I should be able to see this person the day after, and the day after that) is highly dubitable.

But now that life-on-a-delay-timer is over as the flights have been booked, the hotel reserved, and my project plan put to ink.

I’m a bit worried about leaving SF – I like my apartment OK and moving all my belongings (that don’t get sold first) into storage hardly thrills me - but we can’t live life hoping not to experience changes. Change is critical to making us become what we need to be.

As you doubtless noticed I will be in Sydney through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I think that this will definitely be an interesting experience. The last time I was in a foreign land for a holdiay was in 1997/1998 when I was in Prague and Munich (Christmas, Sylvester, respectively).

So there you have it.

For the first time in many years, I find myself sleeping within the boundaries of the City of San Jose.

In the words of The Old Man from A Christmas Story:

<narrator voice="Darren McGavin">
  O Ralphie, what has brought you to this low, low state?  Tell us, son.
</narrator>

Instead of being felled by the eyesight-stealing Lifebouy, it is the demon of home-un-havingness. Home-un-havingness is different than being homeless on account of home-un-havingness in not a political issue where Homelessness is. I am clearly not the latter.

Now added! Here are the pictures of the Chang / Chen wedding.

My sister is soon to have her wedding day in downtown Austin.

Pursuant to such goings-on, a shower was held by my mother in her town on the 11^th of this month and Lauren and I went up with my Dad to attend. On Friday my dad drove up and picked Lauren and I up and we proceeded to head to Eastern New Mexico in his big, green, Excursion. It was a drive up 183 towards Abilene and we really had a great chance to talk and socialize.

Yes, it’s the day, the real day.

You can see pictures from the party we had for her over the weekend.

I recently read Joshua Foer’s excellent book, Moonwalking with Einstein. The book, very much in Gay Talese fashion, relates the story of a resporter who goes to investigate the goings on of an international fellowship of “mnemnostists;” that is, professional rememberers. I’ve long had an interest bordering on obsession as pertains to memory. I’ve always wanted to remember more, in more clarity and to assemble the world’s languages with Mentat-like skill. But alas, I appear to be wired with commodity hardware (like most of us).

Foer, very much a mortal, suggests that astounding levels of memory retention can be attained by embracing the wisdom of the ancients and using the memory technique known as a “mind palace” or, as it was known to the Romans, memoria loci (contra memoriam verborum, for verbatim text).

All of my college and post-college friends are married and have children. I will go so far as to note that none of them have babies (which was a cute and novel phase) anymore, all of them have real-deal children, small humans with free will who have some semblance of the capability to reason and to express themselves: children. The kind of whom is said “We took X hiking for the first time” or “Can now ride his bike without training wheels.”

So when our busy schedules line up such that we can catch up, their stories and lives largely revolve around these small humans: kindergarten choices, the “strip off all your clothes and run around the neighborhood” incident etc. I love these stories, they make me laugh, they make me cry. They’re great stories told by wonderful people about amazing small beings becoming wonderful people.

But then, reciprocally, I’m asked “What’s been up with you?” or “What are you doing tomorrow?” and I feel incredibly awkward. Because the truth is, my day-to-day is, to be honest, kind of the envy of the weary, responsibility-laden parent.

So there you are, in the lovely home, decorated with lovely finger-painted pictures, near folded bibs and pajamas and made ready for loading up in to small, sticker-covered dressers in adorable purple rooms bedecked with stuffed animals and they ask you this and, if you reply honestly, you will sound like a complete jerk or someone who’s “rubbing it in.”

“Well I was planning on sleeping until I woke up, then grabbing some pancakes at this brunch place up the street, then maybe reading a book I got from the library that’s due back next week, then a nap, and then going grocery shopping before it gets crowded.”

Jerk

As part of my ongoing unwinding of my Twitter history, I found a number of posts where I shared music from Spotify. I aggregated all these songs into a playlist that’s embedded below. Or, you can play them in-browser if you follow the jump.

In October 2016, right before our trip to Paris, where we would get engaged, I bought a new Hugo Boss winter coat from Bloomingdale’s in SoHo. One of the things I like most about Bloomingdale’s in NYC is their customer-centric attitude. I was rather dismayed when, at the end of 2017, the coat had developed giant rips along the seams of the lining. Below is my story of trying, and failing, to get help in repairing it.

I’m nearing my first year anniversary at the Flatiron School and was thinking about the projects I’ve undertaken and what I’ve learned in the last year. While doing so, it struck me that I had never written about how I came into education from a career in corporate IT and full-stack programming. This is, after all, my second go at being a manager of a curriculum-producing team. When did doing this become my life’s work more than a career of pursuing code?

But moving into education wasn’t a new move as much as it was a return to a fork that I’d opted not to take as I graduated in 2000. In my last year at university, I’d faced the question of whether to pursue the academic life or a life working in business. I had been planning on an academic life, but I chose the other path at the last moment.

But now I realize that the fork I chose gave me lessons that I was able to add to the lessons that my most-fondly remembered teachers gave me. And now, in my role, I get to bear those golden fruits of the dollar and the philosopher to a new generation at a scale hitherto unimaginable.

Here is the story of my trajectory toward an educational path, how I came to delay traveling it, a recollection of some of the most important lessons I learned and people I met along the way, and how I hope to honor them and their teachings as I work in this new model of education.

In other posts, I’ve written about my connection to that scary mountain music of Appalachian South. I’ve also written about how, when art connected to those themes reappears, I find it immediately connects with me. But the most personal connection I had with this material was my father’s mother.

Born and raised in Tennessee with frequent trips to North Texas (and back), she survived the lean times of the Great Depression with her two siblings, went on to marry a Brooklyn-born GI, was a stenographer, and was a loving — and gently eccentric — grandmother.

That said, there were a number of times during her visits to my safe, suburban home where she related some of the viscera, gore, and makeshift tourniquets required by farm life in the early 20th century. I recall her recounting her own grandmother telling her to “hide her eyes” as the field workers helped in the home exsanguination of a dead relative and poured the bowls of blood into the fields. In the days before refrigeration, this, in addition to wrapping the body in ice from the ice-house, was necessary to make sure the body was sufficiently undamaged so that the undertaker could do his work. In fact, this bloody work had a piece of furniture associated with it: the “cooling board,” which, in my memory, she called a “cooling chair.”

As I recall, my parents were out with my grandmother once looking at antiques and someone has mislabeled a piece as a “chaise lounge” which required my grandmother’s correction: “Oh, child, that’s a coolin’ chay-uh.”

January to October 2020 have been the most historically significant years of my life and seem likely to stay there. In 2001, it seemed certain that the terror attacks of September 11^th would be the most world-historical moments in my lifetime, as Kennedy’s assassination was for my mother.

But 2020 saw multiple memory-searing events:

• The bungled coronavirus response of the Trump administration (80 September 11^th death tolls and counting; nearly a quarter of a million Americans dead)
• The near-contemporaneous killings of Black Americans (George Floyd, Breonna Taylor) while interacting with police and associated protest
• Trump’s cosseting of domestic terrorism, white nationalism, and conspiracy theory movements
• Trump’s refusal to publicly wear a mask; his subsequent infection with coronavirus; his reversion to haughtily patronizing rhetoric that he was somehow of superior immunological stock despite the fact that he had received the best care money could buy — more accurately care that money could not even buy as a fast-tracked remedy was given to him before entering general approval
• A looming election in which Trump himself has telegraphed that he expects the election to be illegitimate if he loses

Amidst all that, both Lauren and I felt the touch of history. This Spring we fell ill with a respiratory illness that felt like hot fiberglass threads being threaded through our lungs. We wheezed and burned with fever (thankfully, briefly) and emerged alive. In those sweaty, scary nights when emergency service sirens were the only sounds in the canyons of the buildings in Manhattan, we wondered whether ambulances would still service us if we needed them. We wondered whether a hospital bed or a ventilator would be available if we could make it to care.

Given the scale and gravity of these events, I’ve wanted to put down some thoughts. Yet, since March, the incessant chaos, denial, and misinformation blared by the Trump administration has kept me off-balance. On top of the misery of the facts, their campaign of public distraction and enervation has raged so loudly, so irrationally, and so incessantly that I’ve not known where to start. So let me try to start this chronicle with this beginning:

In 2020, a pandemic began in China and slowly, but surely spread across the world. The disease stopped commerce. It changed how humans worldwide appeared in public. It eventually, it seems, came to my household. While the citizenry wrestled with how to live in such times, we did so alone. The US government, under the Trump administration, failed to marshal resources, provide leadership, or offer comfort. In many cases it, and President Trump personally, fought data-backed scientific best practice. This was done in a cynical bit of theatre designed to support the president’s favorability ratings in a craven, politically-rotten bit of responsibility-shirking theatre. And while Trump himself and his administration continued to play games, to distract and deflect, America’s competitors organized and prepared to seize markets and influence as the Trump cancer eats away at the prestige of the American ideal.

To be continued…

As is our custom, we took a mid-October travel break this year. Thanks to the pandemic this, as has been everything this year, was a little bit different. Due to New England’s strict quarantine regime (good for them), we decided to stay in the Empire state so that we could honor the best health practices.

On the other hand, we really wanted to see some pretty foliage. I found the leaf peeper map on and realized that the upper-right corner of the state near Lake Placid was most ideal, and so we made reservations in Lake Placid.

Complicating all this was that a week ago my viking of a wife underwent surgery and had spent a week resting and recuperating on bed. At the prospect of canceling, she wasn’t having any of it and she insisted we go on. We both had the suspicion fresh air, movement, and nature were an important part of her healing, and we were right.

In many ways COVID19 was as bad as a pandemic could get without being really bad. It doesn’t have the virulence of measles combined with the mortality of bubonic plague. This, however, makes it all the more galling that Donald Trump and his cadre of sycophants failed to guide the nation through these straits effectively.

Unlike 9/11, which literally exploded across the nation, we knew this was coming with weeks of lead time and Trump’s team failed to act. Here’s the story of how we got the signals of the threats ahead, how Lauren and I experienced it, and how Trump spread disinformation ahead of it.

Prelude to a Season of Death

In February of 2020, I was due to start a new job. Ahead of it, and knowing that new work tends to dominate life for a little while, Lauren and I planned to take a trip to the beautiful Netherlands. I had long hoped to share the wonders of the Mauritshuis, Zuid Holland, and Amsterdam with her. While we were there, though, the European media, forever ahead of US media in terms of international reporting, was running stories about a highly infectious illness sweeping the Wuhan province of China.

While Trump and his cabal of misinforming hacks were proclaiming that COVID would “just go away” or it was “well under control,” the virus began boring through the communities of New York City in mid-February. By March 6^th my new employer had sent us all home to work from home until further notice.

In the weeks leading up to the permanent work-from-home order, my colleague had emphasized that she did not believe the statistics presented by the Chinese government were trustworthy. She urged us to stock up on basic items at home. We did: snacks, food, frozen goods, toilet paper, etc. Her tip off was about to become vital. In early March, Lauren (the 10^th), and then I (the 12^th), fell ill with a strange respiratory illness characterized by cough, burning lungs, and a fever.

I say “strange respiratory illness” because we could not get medical care in this time as the city’s medical capabilities were being overwhelmed. According to the New York Times, there were 121 deaths on March 26, and 486 on April 1. New Yorkers were urged to stay at home unless their ability to breathe became compromised. Lauren and I fell shy of that mark so we complied so that the most vulnerable could receive care. By the time we were able to get a test (several months later) we were told that antibodies could not be confirmed. Were we not ill enough to produce antibodies? Were the tests ineffective. We do not know to this day. Nevertheless our symptoms were consistent with COVID-19.

During the first days of our onset, it was near-impossible to get telemedicine appointments due to demand. Doctors from other less-impacted areas were, generously, making themselves available to help in the effort. We wound up getting a consultation with a doctor from North Carolina who reported that he’d been on phone calls all day with individuals displaying the sickness’ symptoms — our symptoms.

As a lifelong asthmatic, I had learned the tricks of shallow breathing and had an albuterol inhaler handy. I never thought I’d be teaching my blessed-by-Californian-sunshine, baseball-playing, rough-and-tumble wife such miserable tricks of asthmatic existence, but such was her discomfort.

I’d spend miserable nervous hours wheezing while working (as a distraction) or while playing video games. Ironically the “plague conquers mankind” themed game The Last of Us felt both relatable and like an escape. In between it and work, Lauren and I would watch movies and take showers to keep our sanity and hygiene.

Watching the Graphs

While Lauren and I spent early March ailing from a mysterious respiratory illness, the rest of the city sat transfixed by the growing spike in COVID-19 infections — watching the statistics that we were part of.

By late-March, it was clear that something massive was afoot. The soundscape was profoundly altered. Previously, we had heard the children of PS75 coming and (raucously) going at the beginning and end of school days. We were (grudgingly) familiar with the horn leanings-on as impatient commuters tried to cross this most famous of islands along 96^th street. By the end of our acute phase, the soundscape was muffled and still like during a snowstorm — save for the intermittent punctuating screams of ambulances.

New York’s trusted sources of information were Dr. Fauci and Governor Cuomo. The ridiculous clowns of nonsense and non-reality that were ignored bore the surname Trump or carried water for that odious patriarch of perfidy. At that time, we had no certainty whether the rising slope would ever plateau, or if it would continue growing until it overwhelmed the health care systems of the city, if not the entire state, if not the country.

March to April: Our Fortunate Recovery, Social Changes, and…Groceries

After our acute phase had finished, Lauren and I remained quarantined in our apartment for 14 long days. We hung a sign on our door with a COVID-19 spiked ball illustration as a warning to neighbors and food delivery services.

We were left alone.

During our convalescence from mid-March through mid-April 2020, our imaginations feasted on the grim details that were emerging. Refrigerated trucks were brought to hospitals in Brooklyn and Queens to account for the exploding number of deaths.¹ Governor Cuomo warned of demand outstripping supply of ventilators.². Field hospital tents were pitched in Central Park to create more-spaced triage capabilities for the Upper East Side’s hospitals.

My colleagues had generations of co-congregants of certain generations vanish at church and temple . Lauren had friends whose parents entered hospitals where they were to stay weeks. During early-to-mid April we remained sequestered in our home with the brief errands recounted in the previous installment. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that we didn’t leave home (outside of A-to-B trips for necessities) until the last of April, 2020.

And when we emerged from our month of sickness, quarantine, and extreme caution, we found death everywhere. Here’s one death that shows how the magnificent tapestry of New York City is held together by knots of single individuals.

His name was “Steve the Bookman.”

Headline Pic Credit: “West Side Rag.”

My posts recounting 2020 have all, thus far, centered on the initial outbreak and “first wave” of the COVID virus, in particular from a New York City point of view. But the virus, as science and other nations warned us, would not remain pinned to one location. While New York state slowly clawed its way to a position of stability, the virus made inroads in places like New Orleans, Atlanta, and Chicago.

In NYC, the warming days didn’t herald their customary change in number of pedestrians. The sidewalks remained still and many of the shops along Broadway shuttered their doors one final time. The storefronts that had remained vacant as speculating landlords held their breaths for new corporate tenants remained vacant and were joined by other formerly-lively storefronts. Local haunts like Cleopatra’s Needle (jazz and Dinner: music pouring from the windows on Summer nights…) suddenly vanished overnight. The quiet grew to deafening.

New York and those who had survived the first tsunami shouted admonitions and advice to other states. But unfortunately our nation was in a time of profound political polarization. To follow the advice of “liberal” New York was seen as a vote in favor for “liberal” stances and the “liberal” Democratic party. For the opposing party, in thrall inside a personality cult to the failing Trump, to follow advice or cultural rituals was to act against “their guy.”

A good leader, a kind leader, an empathetic leader, a leader of vision and backbone would have counseled that this was not the case. New York, leader in abolition and ingenuity could have been an example of how to pull together in a time of vast unknown unknowns. A good leader could have taken what was learned and fused it to the pandemic playbook innovated by the Obama administration to help as many people as possible. A good administration, a good president could have done those things.

America, at this time, had an inept, morally bankrupt, game show host instead.

Instead of seeing an opportunity to help, he saw an opportunity to rally his base and lock in prospects for re-election. Trump, a ghoul who never met a wedge issue he didn’t like and who never found a distraction from his failings that he wouldn’t deploy saw a chance to distract from his dismal performance.

And, as if this period couldn’t be more fraught, as citizens came to grips with the monotony and the frustration that quarantine and distancing entailed, the long-festering sore of American race relations popped (again).

This was the Spring / Summer of 2020.

To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy.

We are not enemies. We are Americans.

The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal.

This is the time to heal in America.

In my chronicle of 2020, which is only half done, a key theme is the bitter and rancorous rhetoric, the executional incompetence, the antagonism, and the bullying of the 45^th president, Donald J. Trump. Facing him in an election on the 3^rd was former vice-president Joe Biden. Despite having mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic to the tune of nearly one quarter of a million deaths, continuing a display of manifest bankruptcy of character, and corroding the honor, norms and decency of the office, Trump’s brand remained surprisingly strong — far stronger than polls predicted. The day after the election, the key states were too close to call and an anxious nation waited for the declaration of the winner.

In the days after the 3^rd, we refreshed news media constantly looking for an update. While early returns seemed to favor the president, so much so that he announced his victory on the 4^th, slowly but surely an edge emerged for Biden in several battleground states as mail-in ballots were counted. We hoped the edge would endure and grow. As Biden’s edges endured, the possibility of denying Trump the electoral votes needed to win inched painstakingly to become reality.

On the 7^th, I stood cleaning out my Bialetti pot over the kitchen sink. Lauren was about to run errands in the hollowed-out, plague-ravaged shops along Broadway. It was the most quotidian of moments. Suddenly from the streets, we heard screams of joy and the clanking of metal pans and spoons.

The streets of New York City were telling us to check our news outlets.

The election had been called by cnn.com. It seemed too good to be true so we set to reloading other news sources to wait for confirmation. The jubilant sounds from the street continued growing louder. That Trump, the odious, repellent, authoritarian-leaning, lying, narcissist could soon become an irrelevant, orange, one-term memory hung thick in the household. Nothing that good could happen in this plague-riddled year of 2020.

Several tense, skepticism-laden moments later, the right-wing outlet, Fox News, and The New York Times announced the same and we knew it was really real. Biden had taken Pennsylvania to lock in both a popular win and an electoral victory.

There’s only one thing a New Yorker could do on a day like that: head to our streets. We grabbed Byron, our masks, and spilled out to share our joy and to see others’ in the streets.

Here's what happened next...and what our glorious city looked and felt like.

October marked the passing of one of the greatest guitar players ever, a true innovator to the form, Edward Van Halen. As I pondered his death, I realized how much he had been a part of my life, first as an 80’s icon, then as an aspirational goal for a suburban strummer, and, ultimately, as a craftsman and fellow hacker.

Van Halen (the Band)

There was a day in 1984 when I went over to my cousin’s house in Houston, Texas. Some eight years or so older than me, she was that perfect 80’s “I want my MTV” generation child: she took me to see “E.T.” (and took us to the bathroom during the sad part), drank Mr. Pibb, gave me a “Star Wars” poster, and had a banana-yellow skateboard. In fact, she even bears the most-common girl’s name of the year she was born. At any point you needed a cute extra or a best friend to play opposite Molly Ringwald, you could have swapped in my cousin.

While not born to it, I have come to love winter. First, in Northern California, when I would make the run from the Bay up to the Sierras, I loved the smell of the snow, the way it crunched underfoot. Now, in New York, I love those snowy days here in the city and really love those days when we can get up the Hudson River Valley to feel the wildness of the Catskills or the Adirondacks.

Here are some pictures from my walk on Saturday.

Yesterday we gave notice to our landlords of intention to vacate. While it’s hard to believe, New York is the longest city Lauren and I have lived in and this apartment is the most enduring apartment we’ve been in.

• We moved here two jobs ago for me, one for her
• We decorated and even hung wallpaper
• We bought blinds and storage
• We had a one-year old dog, he’ll be seven tomorrow
• We were unmarried when we moved in, we got engaged and married in the time we were here
• We survived a year of a pandemic here
• We survived the misrule of a prevaricating, orange would-be strongman

For all the flaws of dealing with NYC landlords, it’s been a good decent Manhattan apartment and I’ll miss the giant picture frame window in the bedroom that looks out across West End Avenue and Riverside Drive into the Hudson. That view has seen fog and snow and rain and sunshine and the Hudson’s watery systole and diastole has made me feel rooted in this island.

Well it’s the 7^th birthday of our hairy little buddy, Byron. Here he is playing in some of the remaining snow from the snowstorms of early February in Central Park.

Foxes are such adorable creatures.

Recent posts striking a note of hope were greatly encouraged by the fact that I made plans, out, with someone to whom I’m not married, for the first time in a year. We were able to make these plans because New York’s COVID protocols are now tolerating indoor dining for reduced guest populations which register in a contact tracing regime. My friend Chris suggested that he get a break from our shutdown routines, and he made a reservation for a Pappy van Winkle bourbon tasting flight at Fraunces Tavern, the oldest bar in the city. I headed down to Wall Street last Friday night where we met up.

As per every Spring since I’ve been in New York, the Spring heralds my new Chuck Taylor’s. I never had them growing up. I think that my parents associated it with impecunity and preferred us to be shod in leather or some strange petroleum byproduct.

But since I moved to the city, I’ve come to pretty much wear dress shoes most of the time with Chucks stepping in for what sandals used to do in California and Texas (bare feet on the subway platform, or getting caught in a flooded gutter during a surprise Hudson downpour? Ew.)

Anyway, when Spring comes I get a new pair and take last year’s pair and save it for tubing or adventuring. There wasn’t much of that last year owing to COVID-19, but I’m hoping for a different Spring and Summer this year.

It’s been a complex couple of weeks around here, but we did take the 21^st off to celebrate our anniversary. Three years ago we were happily wed in The Big Easy and it was amazing.

Jump to the pictures

Here are some photos from the process of moving down the street. As of time of writing, we’ve manged to work through all the Gorilla Bins (see below) and get to a functional, but cluttered space with a few wardrobe boxes full of stuff left over. We have some new storage coming but, thanks to the pandemic, it’s on delay so we’re going to have to live with the clutter for a few weeks. I’ll post a final “all done” picture when the time is right.

A real pro tip of moving only a few blocks away is that we were able to pre-move by hand. If you have the option to do this, I highly recommend it. We took tenancy of the new apartment on the 15^th and started “camping” in it on the 22^nd. This is huge because it mentally projects a goal into your future and helps you start seeing every act at “the old place” as step toward that goal. Also, you don’t have to sleep in a dusty old box-laden place.

We bade adieu to scores of books, two bookshelves, two storage units and are working to live in , as Twitter personality and neighbor George Hahn calls it, a more “edited” space.

An Unintended Redecoration

We also discovered that some of our furniture literally could not fit through the front door! So that meant giving our blue sofa (pictured below) away. Also our large brass chair (the bastard that broke one of my toes) doesn’t fit. We’re storing it in the building basement (or new super is great) and are going to find some means to help it collapse a bit in order to shed the inches needed to fit, but we might have to bit it farewell as well.

We also discovered that, after a few years in the Manhattan air, our ACs were beyond cleaning. As a result, we wound up ditching them as well. Open up the piggy bank.

We also, also discovered that none of our blinds were portable to this new place. Open up the piggy bank Fetch the Visa.

So it looks like we’re going to be on the hook for some sigh unplanned expenses on top of the planned expenses of some new, more uniform storage units. Nevertheless, we’re starting from a more-considered, better-“edited” origin and I’m confident that that will lead to a better result.

This past Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control announced, unexpectedly, that fully-vaccinated individuals could intermix freely without a mask without presenting a hazard to themselves of the community. By coincidence, that very morning Lauren and I had crossed our two-week waiting period and had crossed into the realm of fully-vaccinated status. To put things mildly, it was a time for jubilation.

For those of us who survived the long plague year in the city hardest-hit by the virus, it was a strange sort of announcement. Could we actually go back out, without our hot breaths being re-routed back up our nostrils? That first afternoon that we dared it. We left the apartment and took Byron to the 87^th street dog run. The air was clear and warm. It smelled incredible. Pollen and warm sunshine mixed in a delightful way reminding us of what we had lived without for so long: the dust of the dog park, the smell of a stranger dog greeting me, the smell of freshly-mown grass. The smells of New York’s electric and vibrant summer were returned to us after a year-long absence.

At the run, many who had not yet reached full vaccination or were still wary were still masked. After the initial elation and a fun playtime in the run, we headed back to our building, masked up (per building rules), and came back home. That evening we ate out, maskless, indoors, and it was again a novelty. But over the next several hours Lauren and I found ourselves wearing masks again, perhaps out of custom, and perhaps out of laziness as we drifted in and out of establishments requiring their usage. Their wear had become habit and I was surprised to find that I couldn’t just stop.

Noticing this phenomenon, and reading others’ experience of it, suggested that there might be two groups for whom giving up mask wearing might be a little less attractive to cease doing:

• those whose appearance is outside the mean and occasions unsought scrutiny
• the pandemic “shell-shocked” for whom the mask is a psychological support in uncertain times

I love typewriters. They’re amazing machines. They do something amazing (put letters together) in a consistent way (great for people with poor handwriting) and they’re shockingly simple to reason about. Make no doubt, typewriter repair technicians are a gifted sort of artisan that has been slowly disappearing from the world, but the idea that “it’s a piano, but for the alphabet” has a simple resonance that is oddly seductive.

Here’s my Underwood:

But, like their musical cousins, typewriters were for most of their existence, effectively furniture, resident on desks or in offices. As early at 1892, patents were being issued for a portable typewriter models. Throughout the wars and the rise of the industrial age, multiple other “portable” typewriters came into existence, but they were still on the heavy end. I suppose I was thinking about how “a lighter, more fun, fashionable” typewriter might have been a time-period fellow-traveler for the “lighter, more versatile, solo woman wield-able” cameras (e.g. Leicas) that I saw in the “New Woman Behind the Camera” show.

Olivetti famously created a typewriter that was both light and fashion in 1969 when they shipped their gorgeous Valentine designed by Ettore Sotsass and Perry King. I love this device (as I’ve said before), and I did some examination of its presence in pop culture and how it tried to express a different idea of the relationship we could have with the device.

Last week I celebrated a birthday in high style.

After a leisurely morning where I got to spend time in the beautiful late summer day with my favorite four-legged buddy, I returned to a lovely stack of birthday presents. Lauren got me:

• a new sleeve for my laptop
• some awesome Fox racing biking shorts
• a SUPER-AWESOME tote bag with an Olivetti Valentine typewriter on it